Posts by billdehaan

AI use among UK teachers doubles, but working hours still don't come down

Working hours never come down

If you look back at historical predictions of the future, there is invariably one about how in the future, with improved technology, productivity will improve, and the 40 hour work week will be thing of the past. Some predict a ten hour work week, others predict a five hour work week.

Productivity has improved, and in many disciplines workers do produce as much in ten, or even five hours as previous generations did in forty. But the work week doesn't go down, it just means that more is produced.

I knew a family with four generations of architects. The grandfather used to talk about how, even with slide rules and good drafting tables, it took days to do some of the more complex calculations, and a day or two to make the drawings compliant on a drafting table. Today, his grandson has spreadsheets with tens of thousands of numbers, and he can enter a modified value, and have all of the calculations - hundreds of them, if not thousands - done automatically within seconds. And the system will produce graphs showing the impact of the changes in all those calculations just as quickly.

And CAD systems have the same productivity increase compared to drafting table layouts, if not more.

As the grandfather says, his grandson can do with a keypress what took his office of three people more than a week to do back in the 1950s. And his father told him how much more efficient the architectural tools of the 1950s were compared to that were available in the 1920s.

The grandson can do more in ten hours, and in many cases in ten minutes, than his grandfather did in forty hours. But while shows like the Jetsons postulated that meant that the work day would be two hours long, he still works forty hour weeks, he just produces four (or forty, or four hundred) times as much as his grandfather did.

So, yeah, AI use isn't likely to cut down on working hours, it will just move the bar of productivity expectations.

Passwords stored in public Google Doc then showed up in search results

Re: In an ideal world ...

I worked with a dual ported system room at a bank. One side was the traders, some of whom (mostly chief traders) had swipe card access on their side in order to be able to reset confidential servers with their credentials that IT workers didn't have. The other side was the IT group that had swipe card access on their side so that they could feed and burp the servers as needed.

A few people (myself included) had access to both sides, but most could only use their own side. Traders couldn't get into the IT side, and vice versa.

A few vendors had servers co-located in the room, and a couple of their reps had IT access. One vendor's rep was going on maternity leave, and was showing her replacement (an intern) the ropes. They were in the system room doing some procedure together, when she got a call and left him alone. He finished the backup and went to leave, but went to the wrong side. His swipe card only gave him IT side access, not trading floor side access.

When he tried to swipe out of the server room and it didn't work, he assumed that his card just hadn't been enabled yet. He needed to go to the bathroom, so he was in a bit of a hurry. Fortunately, there was a big red button next to the door, which he assumed was an emergency door release and/or help button, so he pressed it.

It was not a door open or an help alarm button. It was, in fact, the halon system button that you were supposed to hit on your way out as a fire was starting.

The good news, for the intern, was that the system failed.

The bad news for everyone else was that the system failed. If there had been an actual fire, it would have been catastrophic. The entire system was checked and overhauled, at great expense.

Training procedures were also reviewed. Everyone with swipe access had to take a safety refresher (it was under an hour), and new procedures regarding unescorted access were instituted for staff and especially for vendors and other visitors. Dignitaries and VIPs were often shown the system room, god knows what would have happened if one of them had been left alone in the room.

I did notice, the day after the event, that the BRB (big red button) was now under a plexiglass safety shield that had to be lifted to press it. There was also a new large sign above it, like this one one, only with "oxygen" being spelled properly.

Re: In an ideal world ...

It may seem silly to give WHMIS training to office workers, but if they work in buildings that have labs, they may end up going into one even if it's not part of their regular duties. Even if they only go into a lab once, they should be aware of the hazards. Giving every employee in the building annual refresher training (or introductory, for new hires) absolutely makes sense.

Giving every office worker in the company annual training because there's a lab in another building does not. Toronto office workers don't need to spend two hours a year on containment procedures used in the Winnipeg lab. If they make a site visit, it should be part of the site training procedure. Making 600 finance office workers spend two hours in training of lab procedures for a lab in another province that they will never see is wasteful and stupid, but far too common.

Headteacher had the most guessable username-password combo you could imagine

We don’t need to worry about cybersecurity. They're only a primary school.

Memories of "We don’t need to worry about cybersecurity. It's only a fish tank" come to mind...

Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data

This had to be DOS 1.0 or 1.1

As of DOS 2.0, "del *.*" added an "Are you sure (Y/N)?" confirmation prompt specifically because of user errors like this.

I remember this because a co-worker accidentally did delete his day's work once by mistake, because he mistakenly did confirm it, and he promptly went on a tirade about how it really should have asked him twice.

He wasn't big on personal responsibility, as you can imagine.

I do remember this happening on a Control Data 6400, however. Their were two operating systems for it at the time, SCOPE and NOS, with NOS being newer and shinier. Both had a purge command to delete files, and a purgall command to purge all. The purgall command was intended for scripts, so it didn't prompt for confirmation.The designers explicitly named it purgall rather than purgeall so that typing errors due to muscle memory wouldn't destroy the user's work by mistake.

The administrator was logged into a user's account to help him with something, and joked that he'd made a mistake, so he'd restart. He type "purgal, type=a" (type of files=all), as the horrified account owner thought all his files would be deleted. The admin was joking, because he left out the final letter of the purgall command, which meant the command would be rejected.

As it would have. On SCOPE. However, the system had been upgraded to NOS the previous week, and NOS's upgraded shell had a neat feature of auto completing incomplete user commands if they were unique enough to be recognized. Which purgal was.

So instead of seeing the expected "Format error on control card" error message that he expected to see, the admin was horrified when his joking command echoed back "Purge complete".

Needless to say, the admin had to explain to the user's boss that the user's "the dog ate my homework" excuse was actually true, with the admin being the dog in question. Which was appropriate, because he was in the doghouse for quite a while after that.

Re: Oops

That was OS/2 when they introduced the "killer feature" (IBM's term, not mine) of VTD (voice type detection) that would finally allow OS/2 to overtake Windows.

There were only three problems with that.

First, the VTD in OS/2 sucked, being discrete. That mean you had to speak. every. single. word. as. it's. own. sentence., with a discrete (hence the term) pause after each world. William Shatner not withstanding, that's difficult for most people.

Second, third party VTD packages for Windows appeared, and they weren't discrete. Sure, they cost $50-$80, but having your "killer feature" be overtaken by your competitor is not a good look.

And finally, after the initial curiosity, no one really used it. OS/2 was mostly using in corporate environments, where there's already enough background noise. Now imagine having your 50 software developers all talking to their PCs, and the resultant chaos from one developer's overhearing his cube neighbour's verbal commands.

The "FORMAT C colon yes yes" joke is, sadly, an urban legend. It was routinely shouted out by audience members at IBM demos of OS/2, but it didn't do anything.

Linux kernel team publishes 432 CVEs in two days

This makes me glad I recommended Mint

I've helped a number of people (non-technical) switch from Windows to Linux over the past few years. Mint is the most common destination, and one of the reasons is the mintupdate-cli utility. It supports a -s, or --only-security, option, specifically so that security patches can be installed and nothing else.

I played with CachyOS for a while, and their update tool has no such equivalent. Asking the community resulted in the sadly far too common tirade of "Just look at list of updates, and guess which ones are necessary. If you're too f***ing stupid to know what's security related, you should go back to Windows" that many new users get blasted with.

Adding a mintupdate-cli -s upgrade line in the user's daily cron job allows them at least some level of security without them worrying about having their applications changing on them unexpectedly.

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

Caveat implementor

When I started work, a senior coder on my team explained that you should always "code and comment as if your code will be maintained by a psychopath who knows where you live". It was a good rule to live by.

Sometimes I'd return to the scene of the crime (a customer that I'd written something for five years earlier) and be responsible to maintain or update things. I quickly learned that my memory would not save me, so I'd damned well better document my assumptions.

I've lost count of the number of developers who told me I was being ridiculous, and we didn't need to document things to that level, because they were obvious. Years later, those same developers also invariably ended up spending days, or weeks, trying to reverse engineer their own undocumented code. They often not only had no idea what it was doing, they had no idea what it was supposed to be doing, because they didn't remember, it was polymorphic, multiply inherited, reflected, replicated, and god knows what else, and the only comment would be something like "// I am not sure if we need this, but too scared to delete.".

Here's a collection of comments I've found in production code bases over the years:

//When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing

//Now, God only knows

/* This is O(scary), but seems quick enough in practice. */

//Dear future me. Please forgive me.

//I can't even begin to express how sorry I am.

// TODO: Fix this. Fix what?

// If you're reading this, that means you have been put in charge of my previous project.

// I am so, so sorry for you. God speed.

// no comments for you

// it was hard to write

// so it should be hard to read

And, my favourite, a 13,000 line C++ source file that was rejected by a checkin validation script because there were no header comments to any of the hundred or so functions in the file. The code added the following header comment to every one of the hundreds of functions to get it past the validation script:

// As you can see, I comment the code

Torvalds challenged the haters to fork Linux. Someone said 'hold my beer'

Re: What? No Justin Beiber Linux non AI fork?

You do realize that there are already forks, like Devuan, that forked Devian despite that, right?

What? No Justin Beiber Linux non AI fork?

A friend refers to a number of Linux versions as "protest distros", because it look likes the only reason they were created was to change a specific design decision (AI/no AI, Rust/no Rust, system D/no system D, etc.).

Eventually, the stars will align, and there will be an AI generated, Rust based, system d free version of Linux based on either Justin Bieber or Hannah Montana Linux (or possibly both). It's pretty much inevitable at this point.

Windows 10 refuses to die, and the security bill is coming due

Re: Which 16.9%?

I don't know any business that's running unpatched internet connected Windows 10 machines. The majority have migrated to Windows 11 already. A few places are running ESU, either for budgetary reasons or because they're in the process of migrating those processes away from Windows.

A lot of lab PCs in lab environments and the like were already air gapped away for security reasons anyway. Hell, some of those labs PCs are still running NT 3.1 and even OS/2 v2.1. Companies that are doing that already have processes in place for isolating obsolete machines.

The overwhelming Windows 10 user base is consumers. Not every consumer can financially afford to replace their functional machines simply because they don't have TPM 2.0. Yes, there are hack workarounds to install Windows 11, but nontechnical people lack the technical savvy to install, let alone maintain, hacked versions of Windows. That's assuming they are even if they were interested in doing so, which most aren't.

Add to that Windows 11's avalanche of bad press, with almost weekly catastrophes being reported, and a lot of Windows 10 users aren't interested in upgrading, even if their machines can.

I've shown a lot of people how to enroll in the ESU, but that expires eventually. There's also https://0patch.com/, which is better than nothing, but (a) isn't free, and (b) is questionable as to whether it's really able to properly address all security issues.

I've helped migrate a number of people to Linux, but that's not suitable for everyone. People who use their PCs for email, web browsing, and office tasks can usually migrate easily. But there are lots of people who run Windows software that doesn't run in Wine, or a VM, and it doesn't have equivalent Linux software.

I was surprised when some mundane (ie. notechnical) friends actually told me that they knew about the Windows 10 security problems, so they do all their banking on their phones now. I hadn't considered that, but it's possible that the security issues might be mitigated somewhat by the younger generation who use their phones as the primary interface to the net, and see the PC as essentially just as gaming machine that shows Netflix.

Software bloat? This elevator needs an 8 GB Core i5

Needs an I5? Or has an I5?

I've done a lot of embedded work on control systems, and for systems that use COTS (commercial off the shelf) systems, it's very common to see overpowered hardware like this.

I've built systems that needed 12GB of disk space, including OS, application, and swapper, that shipped on PCs with a 512GB SSD. People would ask why on earth we needed half a terabyte of storage for the task, and the answer was we didn't, that's what the PC came with. Trying to get a PC with only 32GB of SSD could actually end up costing more, because it was special order.

When you're rolling your own, everything is built to requirements. When using COTS, you're picking from what's currently available. In situations like that, it can actually cost more to get a less powerful machine, because of economics of scale.

I had one project that required an RS-232 connection running at 2400 baud. The only vendors that sold PCs with serial ports cost hundreds of dollars more than those that didn't. We purchased a fifteen dollar USB to serial converter and plugged it into a 5 gigabit USB 3 port on a cheaper machine that didn't have a serial port. This article could be written about that project with the title "Software Bloat? This project needs a 5 gigabit network connection to talk at 2400 baud", and it would be just as valid.

The main deciding factors are usually things like power consumption, form factor, service accessibility for maintenance, warranty, MTBF, and of course cost. The PC has to be powerful enough, certainly. But the purchasing department isn't worried about buying a computer that's too powerful for the job.

Since the purchasers are often buying in quantity, they're often getting consignments from vendors of dead stock, ie. things that didn't sell and are filling up warehouse space. With I9s and I7s being the standard now, there's a lot of unsalable I5 stock available on the cheap.

I don't know when this elevator system was implemented (obviously after 2019), but I wouldn't be surprised if they got the controller PC cheap. I personally have two SFF I5 8GB systems with 240GB SSDs that I picked up around 2023 for Cdn$150. At that price point, the only question the purchasing department asks the engineers is whether it will do the job. If it's overkill, they don't care.

Hands off our VPNs, privacy groups tell UK ministers

Re: Last year's paranoid conspiracy is this year's policy

Why would you give such a gift to your opponents?

One of the checks on authority of elected officials is that eventually, their position will be held by someone with views opposing theirs, and that will have the same powers of office. Logically, that would mean that office holders would not want to add to their powers. Sure, you can be trusted not to misuse it, but what about your successors from the other party?

Sadly, few seem to know, or care. Either they are short sighted enough not to be thinking of the future, or they take it as a given that they, or their party, will remain in power forever.

Last year's paranoid conspiracy is this year's policy

I have Russian friends and British friends (all expats), and the two groups are always arguing about politics.

The Russians have been able to predict ahead of time, quite accurately, what steps they expected the UK government to take, and the justifications that the government would use for it, because they've seen it before.

The UK is increasingly being seen in lists that used to only include places like Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China.

1. Require age verification ✅

2. Demand social media sites promote government news over citizen posts, age verification ✅

3. Ban VPNs because they "endanger social cohesion" - work in progress

4. Social credit scores - still at the paranoid conspiracy stage

Restricting, or outright banning VPNs isn't a technical issue, it's a political one. No one seriously believes that VPNs endanger children. What it does is endanger the government's ability to control things it shouldn't be controlling in the first place.

David Potter, the man who put Psion in the palm of your hand, logs off at 82

One of my first PDAs

Rus in vrede, Mr. Potter.

I had (and probably still have in a box somewhere) a Psion 3a in 1994. I convinced my company at the time that portable computing was going to be a big thing in our industry, and we should get ahead of it, so I got them to send me to a conference which gave attendees their choice of a number of devices. I forget what the others were, but I picked up the Psion 3a while everyone else was deciding. It retailed for about Cdn$600 at the time, so I definitely go my (company's) money's worth out of the conference. The only complaint was that it didn't include the optional PC data cable, which I paid Cdn$100 myself, but it was well worth it.

A year later, my company got me an Apple Newton for free, too. Although the Newton was fun to tinker with, after about a month, it went into a drawer, and only ever came out to show it to people. Meanwhile, I was doing actual work on the Psion, every day.

I used it daily until 1999, when the Revo 5a came out and superceded it. Even though I had a Palm Pilot by then, the Psion (either one) was always in my briefcase. It beat the Pilot for note taking, and its' built in spreadsheet was great for logging timesheet hours as a contractor. Also, the game that was included in the Revo was annoyingly addictive, too.

Although I (and the market) went to soft keyboard devices like the Palm Pilot or Windows CE, and then eventually to smart phones, I still have a soft spot for the Psion. It was the gateway drug to portable computing, and it deserves a lot more recognition than it got.

AI search could kill the web without new quality signals and revenue models

Re: It will kill content creators, not the web

No, I don't think I am.

Lots of organizations have sued Google and others for scraping their sites. And then when the scraper stopped, many of them then complained that their traffic dried up. But the sites don't disappear because search engines stop directing traffic to them.

And saying "Cloudflare already offers this, it just doesn't work" doesn't mean much. It is going to take years for this to shake out, but a new dynamic will form.

It will kill content creators, not the web

As hard as it is for many to believe, the internet, and the web, existed before Google.

Certainly, the loss of Google ad revenue is going to hit a lot of niche content creators hard, and many won't make it. But the web isn't going to disappear, people aren't going to stop reading the NYT online, visiting El Reg, or stop buying things from Amazon.

The problem is that the content creators that AI is going to divert attention from are the same content creators that the AI uses to train itself. It's going to destroy its' own seed corn.

Eventually, someone will provide, or market, a barrier to block AI training, and the content that can't be scraped by AI will need to be accessed directly. It'll take a few years to shake out, but just as brick and mortar stores adapted to the competition of the internet, content creators will adapt to AI.

Smartphone market to shrink 15 percent this year due to memory crisis

Re: Re:eventually, the LTE and etc. standards will be discontinued

I still have every mobile phone I've ever bought or been given, dating back to around 1998.

Out of 14 phones, only 3 broke (one broken screen, one broken speaker, one charging circuit - not the battery itself) and can't be used. The other 11 still technically work. Of those 14, only 3 of them will connect to a cell tower in Canada in 2026. That's why I temper my statements about keep using my S8 "forever". As a phone, I loved my 2012 Nokia C3 and Nokia 5130, but the cameras sucked, and they could only take something like 1GB or 2GB of microSD, and they had no GPS, so I switched to my Lumia 520 in 2013.

There isn't really much in today's phones that wasn't in that Lumia. Oh, the cameras are much better, of course. The audio DAC in the S8 is better, and it takes a 256GB microSD, compared to the Lumia's 64GB maximum. But if I could still use it, I probably still would be. I expect the S8 will be the same; eventually, I won't be able to use it as a phone, and I'll be forced to get something newer.

Well, it's lasted nine years so far

I'm still using a Samsung S8 that was gifted to me by a friend who was dumping it to replace with a newer S9, or maybe an S10, whatever was current in 2020.

He'd had it for almost three years, and I've had it for another six and a half since then.

Yes, I know it's not secure. It's a talk and text device, a camera, an offline GPS, an MP3 and FLAC music player, and the like. Although it technically has a data plan, I've used under 300MB this calendar year. I occasionally run an offline virus scan for amusement, but it's never found anything. And if it was compromised, there's nothing of value on it. I use it as a PDA, not a computer. There's certainly no banking information or the like on it.

Even prior to the AIpocalyptic price increases, I had no interest in a new phone. I have a 5" phone that fits in my hand, takes great photos, has a headphone jack and a microSD card. If it dies, all of the new phones are bigger than I want, don't have the microSD I want, and don't have the headphone jack I want. If I did decide to upgrade my phone, I'd be buying a new battery for the S8, not a mini-tablet for a thousand bucks.

A second friend gifted me his unwanted S7 Edge that was sitting in a drawer, which I use as a dedicated dashcam. So even if the S8 gets smoked, I'm good.

Of course, eventually, the LTE and etc. standards will be discontinued, and these phones won't connect to cell towers any more and I'll have to get a new phone, but I'm hoping that's a decade or more out.

France's digital sovereignty push is struggling to escape the Microsoft gravity well

Two issues rolled into one

There are two major issues here. The first is big tech (Microsoft, IBM, Google, Apple, etc.). The second is governmental (US government).

While France is casting this as an issue of the libertarian France and Europe versus the authoritarian USA, it's not as if European governments are squeaky clean. Proton is already sourcing servers in Norway in anticipation of Swiss legal issues, and the UK is currently as censorious as Russia.

This issue isn't going to go away when there's a change in government in the White House. Microsoft will still be Microsoft, and Google will still be Google regardless of who's president.

It's great that the FOSS movement is mature enough that it offers alternatives to big tech, and people should absolutely embrace it over proprietary tech where possible. But if the EU really wants to be independent of the US, they have to start designing and building their own infrastructure, not just skin a Linux distro and call it innovation.

As many point out, a lot of the tech companies in the US were founded by, and/or are run by, Europeans or Asians. But that raises the questions of why those Europeans and Asians aren't founding those tech companies in Europe or Asia in the first place. If it wants to be truly independent, Europe has to become a place where Europeans feel comfortable building their tech at home, and not moving to the US.

Here in Canada, the country boasts that the University of Waterloo is one of the most world-renowned universities for computer science. There's a lot of prestige associated with it, and the government brags constantly about its' graduates. But over 70% of graduates move over the border to the US the minute they graduate, rather than work in Canada. We can't complain about US tech making our decisions for us if we're not able to build our own, and we can't build our own when our own people feel that their contributions are valued in the USA more than at home.

Arch Linux locks down AUR signups amid wave of malicious commits

As many Arch users will tell you, AUR is essentially a rest home for abandoned, untrusted, and insecure packages. They'll tell you that it makes Ubuntu's Universe and Debian's PPAs look like Fort Knox, and they're not entirely wrong.

However, it's not as if the AUR is arcane or rarely-used. Mint/Zorin users have to manually PPAs to the software updater, but Arch derivatives like Cachy make integrating AUR into their updater a one-click operations. So a corrupted AUR is a lot more damaging than a bad PPA.

That's especially true as a lot of Windows refugees are being pointed to CachyOS as a high performance option for gaming, so a lot of inexperienced users are switching to it without understanding the intricacies of package management, and the potential dangers.

Things like the AUR and PPAs are great because they allow users to install and update packages that aren't in the package management system, but they come with risks that new users may not understand, or appreciate.

Every employee’s password was stored in a single Excel file

You want insecure, I'll given you insecure

You consider a mere spreadsheet with email passwords to be insecure? Pfah.

I worked with a company who'd had their web site designed by a "boutique" web firm. The word boutique appeared to mean "friend or relative of the CEO".

We'd done their shop floor system, and they asked us if we wanted to help "extend" their web based ordering system. Since we'd seen their inventory database, and we hadn't seen any hooks to a web server, I was confused, and made the mistake of looking into what the web developers had done.

This thing had more red flags than the Beijing airport.

I immediately noticed the site was http, not https. The order entry was basically just entry field boxes and a Purchase button. You entered name, email, phone number, address, Visa number, quantity, etc. and hit Purchse. The Purchase button was mapped to a script that just appended all of the input fields to "D:\SQL\Orders.csv" and printed out a "Order Accepted" message. That was it.

The CEO explained that a couple of times a day, one of the clerical staff would open the CSV file, scroll to the bottom, and look for new lines that didn't have a PROCESSED field at the end. They would then manually enter in those orders as if they were talking to a person over the phone. They'd append PROCESSED to the end, so other staff members wouldn't duplicate the order. Then they'd email the customer saying the order had been processed, and give the details that the actual order system provided - invoice number, taxes, shipping charges, any customs charges, expected delivery date, etc.

I opened "file://D:/SQL/Orders.csv" in a browser, and sure enough, I had over 300 clear text Visa accounts, with phone numbers, home addresses, the works.

The CEO was nonplussed. The "boutique" web developers had assured him this was industry practice.

No, I told the CEO, thanks for the offer, but we would not be interested in working with this system, web integration wasn't really our skill set. Which it actually was, but it was more polite than saying "you're going to be bankrupt in a year when your customers sue you for exposing their credit card information to the wild".

It was a simpler time.

Consultant mistakenly deleted a ton of data – but reported it as a bug

Re: It's not just consultants, in house employees do it to

In the early 2000s, at the height of the outsourcing craze, it was common for executives to outsource huge swaths of the engineering departments to India, fire the local engineers, and save the company a ton of money on salaries. They would pocket a huge bonus, and the more of the company they gutted, the bigger the bonus. Then they'd leave for greener pastures at other companies.

It usually took between 18 and 36 months before the company realized it had given away its' core competence. Sometimes it was to incompetents who didn't understand the business, but sometimes, it was worse, as all the work went to competent engineers who'd soak up all the knowledge, then cross the street and work for, or start up, a competitor using all the engineering knowledge that they'd been given, and then compete against their former employers. And because the original company had hollowed out its' own engineers, there was no way for them to compete.

It became so common that many of companies instituted clawback clauses in their bonuses, making the executives legally pay back their bonuses if the their cost cutting damaged the company, even if they'd left to greener pastures. Oddly enough, there was a significant slowdown in outsourcing after that.

Re: It's not just consultants, in house employees do it to

There's a phrase for it, failing upwards.

I've seen numerous examples of it over the years. The longer it goes on, the more invincible the person feels, and the more obnoxious they become.

Some keep it up forever. Others trip up when a new manager comes in from a different division or company where such behaviour was unheard of, and demands a justification. When the usual deflections fail to impress the new manager, there's often a re-org, and the offending employee is either shuffled off to the side where he can't do any more damage, or put on a tight leash with realistic expectations which he or she inevitably fails to meet.

Often, the offender will decide "on their own" to leave for greener pastures as soon as a code audit or the like is announced, because they want to get out while they can still get a recommendation.

Coders sometimes do this, but to do real damage, you need to be an architect or an IT administrator. A bad coder can mess up his project, but an architect or IT admin can screw up the entire company.

It's not just consultants, in house employees do it to

In the 1980s, I contracted at a major defence contractor. It was originally a VAX based shop, but the system manager (known as the "system mangler" within the company) was so shockingly, jaw-droppingly, breathtakingly incompetent that engineering teams were buying PCs in self defence in order to get work done.

This was in the days when 80286s were the most common machines. 80386s were just coming out, but quantities were limited. When developers would rather use DOS-based 80286 machines rather than a microVax running VMS to do graphics development, because the PC development was faster, something's wrong.

The system mangler was legendary. Stories about him were numerous, and ubiquitous. Everyone had a tale about how they'd come to work one day to find that their home directory on the Vax had been erased by accident by him, and there weren't any backups, so all the work they'd done for the past week/month/half a year was gone, and you'd just have to redo it, sorry.

Not everyone could get a PC, though. Management fought tooth and nail to stop them from them from "infesting" the company, at the SM's insistence. They were uncontrolled, and he wasn't able to back them up. That was the idea, of course.

While management was demanding that PC developers upload work to the Vax so it could be backed up, the reality was that Vax developers were asking PC developers to download their source to a PC so it was safe from the SM.

And then, one day, the company discovered Unix. Specifically Apollo workstations. It wasn't actually Unix, but it was close. It ran sh and csh shells. We had a few, and a few Unix capable devs working on it. They set up a generic account with a public download directory so anyone could remote in via kermit and download files to their PC.

The SM was livid about this, and demanded administration rights. The team resisted, but the management ordered it, so he was given it. It took him less than two days to discover "rm -rf /", running as system root, to completely destroy the entire project history. They had to order master tapes from the vendor to reinstall the OS.

We thought for sure that SM would finally be put on a leash, but sadly, no. Management issued a memo a week later lamenting the "fragility of the Apollo system", and mandated subsequent work be done on the "underutilized" Vax.

I saw several admins like that during my career, although thankfully none were as bad as the OG system mangler. But if anyone believes consultants are the only ones who pull these stunts, they are absolutely not.

'Please do not vibe f--- up this software': Broken backups spark AI coding row in rsync project

New bathwater test suite throws out working baby

As the saying goes, when your only tool is a hammer every problem looks like a nail.

The problem is that AI isn't the only tool. It's a new tool. But many are treating it like it's the only tool.

I don't see any justification for this. AI is just a symptom. The problem is the process.

You never replace a proven test suite with a new one until the new one has been equally proven.

It's fine to add new tests, and it's fine to run both the legacy and the new tests. But tossing away proven legacy code with new, untested code is a failure at the project process level; it has nothing to do with AI.

AI is a new tool, and it is a great tool to discover test scenarios that previous test coverage missed, because no one thought of them.

Adding new AI designed tests would be a good thing. That's especially true in safety critical scenarios where AI is terrific at finding failures based on arcane interactions and scenarios that humans didn't anticipate could happen under any circumstances. The more testing, the better.

Replacing existing tests with an AI driven one is borderline insane. The fact that the new framework has tests that pass known failure conditions just highlights how crazy it was.

You can't say on one hand that your commits weren't AI slop and you did the work yourself, and then place the blame for the resulting disaster at the foot of AI.

Putin sends submarines to survey Britain's subsea cables. UK deploys Royal Navy, mobilizes parliamentary draftsmen

Fail, Brittania

A century ago, British civilian fishing vessels could legitimately brag that they were able to fight the Russian Navy to a draw (October 1904, at Dogger Bank). Today, Britain can't get a ship out of harbour because the unionized workforce can't be arsed to work overtime, and the ships they do get into the water need the help of their hereditary enemies the French to help them.

There's an old joke about British bobbies' threat against criminal was to yell "Stop! Stop, or I shall yell stop again!". The joke was that British police of the time didn't need firearms (as their American counterparts did) because they had a high trust society. Brits saw that joke as an indication of the UK being a higher trust society than the yanks; Americans saw it as an indication of British police's impotence.

Today, the UK government is threatening Russia with telling them that if they don't behave, the UK shall be very cross with them. and yell stop again. Unfortunately, Russia is not a high trust society, and the UK's willingness to go unarmed is no longer seen as high minded principle, but suicidal weakness.

California may let Linux bypass age check

Don't fall for it

Yes, California is relenting, and exempting Linux and open source projects from their inane proposed age verification law.

For now.

Just like their proposed billionaire's tax, which is a one time thing, they pinky swear, once the law is on the books, it stays on the books. And while it takes either a governor's signature or a referendum to pass a law, it does not require the same scrutiny to amend one.

Newsom can say that he's exempting FOSS forever all he wants. He may even mean it. But once it's the law, petty bureaucrats (and boy are they petty) can "interpret" the law to defeat the exemptions if and when they feel like it.

Right now, the spotlight is on them, so they're trying to be, or at least appear to be conciliatory, in order to get their law passed. Once it is, and the spotlight goes away, in 12-18 months, don't be surprised if those exemptions suddenly expire, or are otherwise deemed not applicable.

Microsoft lets users exile floating Copilot button after interface rage

"Was not universally welcomed"

I have always admired the English's ability for understatement. Being Canadian, I've often had to be the middleman between Americans and the UK, and often had to translate British English and American English to the other side. If I didn't, Americans would interpret phrases like "this is perhaps not a small amount of work" as being a relatively mid sized effort, as opposed to it actually being a gargantuan amount of work.

And don't get me started on what "table" means as a verb.

But saying that CoPilot was not universally welcomed makes Emperor Hirohito’s radio announcement after the Americans dropped the atom bombs that "developments had taken place that were not necessarily to Japan’s advantage" seem brutally frank.

Plex appeal fades as Lifetime Pass jumps to $750

Re: Procrastination pays

The only real criticisms I've had with Jellyfin are pretty minor. It doesn't have a very usable Xbox app (it's a web app, relying on a non-existent mouse for proper navigation), its' Linux desktop app doesn't have integrated subtitle downloads like Plex does, it only allows 100 files in a group, so a movie folder of 650 movies has to be paged through six times, and the way it handles collections is not as sophisticated as Plex's.

Pretty minor stuff, honestly.

In terms of playback, organization (other than collections), tagging, and support for external subtitles, it's just as usable as Plex. I just wish there was a Kodi plugin for it the way there is for Plex.

To gain root access at this company, all an intruder had to do was ask nicely

Re: Forty years of horror stories

If you're old enough to remember the IBM 327x terminal series, some of them had little drawers below the space bar which had flip charts of key mappings for various business applications. It was the first place to look to find the user's login ID and password.

The second place to look was engineer's notebook, on the back page. Security conscious engineers would put their password on a sticky note rather than in the book itself, possibly for plausible deniability.

Forty years of horror stories

I worked doing software development in the defence, finance, energy, and medical fields. Every one of them has horror stories galore.

I've broken the security of three schedule A banks, multiple trading floors, and more DND/DOD regulations than I can count. I've broken access security to a supposedly secure military grade network. And it wasn't because I was intentionally doing penetration testing. I've called up banks and changed the email address on friends' accounts to be mine, to show them that I could do it (with their permission, of course).

Whenever I took a security seminar and they'd give us exercises to see if our organization was vulnerable, the answer was always yes, it was. And usually 80% or more of the attendees were able to penetrate their corporate security, as well.

Once I actually tried to break security, I was appalled at just how lax most of it really is. I've had secretaries give me CxO passwords over the phone. I've had janitors let me into "eyes only" secure buildings because I "forgot my badge". I've tailgated into high security installations without being challenged. I've walked into buildings as a visitor and walked out with a classified laptop.

I once was visiting [redacted] and when I went to the bathroom, I saw a laptop on the table outside, where [famous name you'd recognize] had left it, logged in, whilst he was in the loo. I had access to his emails, financials, the works. I turned it off, put a yellow sticky on it, and handed it to the security desk. I could just as easily have thrown it in my briefcase, left the building, and cloned the drive, containing the financials and patent records worth billions of dollars.

The really sad thing has been the reactions I've received.

When I've reported tailgaters who didn't have a security badge to security, I've had indignant executives demand I be disciplined, even fired, because I "should have known" that they were important, out of town visitors. Mid level management, even mid level security management, has reprimanded me for exposing a security flaw, saying I "shouldn't have done that".

Richard Fenyman famously showed that he could pick the locks of supposedly secure filing cabinets at Los Alamos. Instead of addressing the flaw in the cabinets, the security response was to have security not allow him near any of the cabinets, as if he was the problem, not the insecure cabinets. I've had the same happen to me.

It's not all bad, of course. I've also been thanked for exposing issues. When I challenged one visitor and took him to security, it turned out he was the second highest ranking person in the company, visiting Canada from Europe for the first time. When my management apologized to him, and said I'd be disciplined for this, he told them that not only were they not going to do that, he said I was to be given a reward, because he should have been challenged, and he expected to be. It turned out he was doing his own pen testing of the Canadian facility, and he'd violated something like 18 different rules without being challenged until he ran into me.

I took one security seminar where the presenter told us it was common to get depressed after his class, but that we shouldn't let it get to us. Everyone joked, but after 6 hours of him listing the security exposures he'd made, and showing us tricks which we found worked 80% of the time, most of us wanted to go home, turn off the lights, and spend the night in the fetal position whimpering.

No matter how preposterous a security breach may seem, I'm a lot more credulous of them than most people, because I've seen far too many "oh come one, that couldn't possibly work" penetration attempts actually work.

Linux gains more critical Windows apps: 3D Movie Maker and Space Cadet Pinball

Re: What I'd really love to see on Linux are proper native ports of:

I loved the VoidTools "Everything" tool on Windows, but given that the real-time NTFS updates depend on some registry/metadata on Windows that doesn't exist in Linux, a port is unlikely. The nearest approximation I've found is FSearch. While not a direct clone, I've found it perfectly usable.

What I miss, oddly enough, is MS Paint. Yes, I've tried Krita, and Pinta, and MyPaint, and all the others listed at AlternativeTo.net, but sadly, none of them match the lightweight ability to load a screenshot, mark it up and save it all in 30 seconds. Gradia is good, but most of the alternatives keep adding features, defeating the purpose of using it as an ultra lightweight touchup tool.

Google launches line of Android laptops festooned with Gemini AI

Festooned with?

I think you misspelled "infested" there, el Reg.

festoon ~ verb very rare

1. decorate with strings of flowers

infest ~ verb uncommon

1. invade in great numbers "the roaches infested our kitchen"

2. occupy in large numbers or live on a host "the Kudzu plant infests much of the South and is spreading to the North"

3. live on or in a host, as of parasites ""fleas infest dogs and cats; a sea infested with pirates."

I think most people would compare AI with fleas than with flowers.

Custom PC worked in the lab, failed on site – and so did the angry client

Re: No network card, no ISP, what's the diff

I'm not sure if the Bell commercial ISDN service handed out web space the way the home service did at the time.

Even if they did, it was bad enough that the president of "Met Fab Limited" (not the real company name, of course) was [e-mail] and the salesman was [e-mail]. The salesman, at least, had enough savvy to put the company name in his email. But they didn't want a web site name like www.sympatico.ca/~joesmith/index.html, they wanted www.metfabsales.com, and Bell didn't support names, so far as I know.

Around 2004, I had a friend who registered a domain name, and used the redirect to point to her Sympatico personal account, and Bell got very pissy about not supporting domain names that didn't include the Sympatico name, for some reason.

No network card, no ISP, what's the diff

I worked at a shop that did custom web hosting back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The commercial internet was in its' infancy, and most companies only new about it from Superbowl ads, or what their kids at university told them.

One company, a small firm that did custom metalwork, really only used the internet for email to their suppliers and customers. They hired a web designer to set up a simple web site, basically a brochure. They were nowhere near ready to do online sales, credit card processing or the like. This was basically a simple "here's our address, price list, phone number, and email... give us a call" site that was common in 1990s. After the web designer (one of the executive's kids, or a friend of the kids) finished up, he contacted us to host the thing. He registered the domain, set up the records, pointed to our IP. All we did was set aside a dedicated IP address, and gave him an SSH account to admin the site.

The Monday after it went live, we started getting phone calls from the company. They were livid that the site was down. No one in the company could reach it. I checked, and the site was fine, but they insisted that not one person in the office could reach it, and they were able to see the beta site last week, so obviously it was our fault.

I asked them to email me a couple of details, like their gateway IP, so I could see if they appeared in the logs. The exec indignantly replied me that he had just told me that the site was down, so obviously he couldn't send email. What, were were stupid?

We had nothing to do with his email, and I told him that. Since all of the emails we had from them were Hotmail addresses, I didn't even know what his ISP was, so I asked.

"What's an ISP?", he asked.

Well, there are dozens to choose from, but for tech illiterates (and boy, were these guys tech illiterate) there were two major players in the Toronto region: Bell Canada and Rogers Communications. Which one is your office with?

"Well, we were with Bell, but we cancelled that when we switched over to you".

Their web designer hadn't explained the difference between web hosting and service providers. So far as they were concerned, they had switched "internet providers". And given that our monthly fee to host a one page banner add web site was a lot less than Bell charged for a dedicated ISDN line, they thought they were saving money by "switching" to us. They were quick shocked, and offended, to discover that web hosting didn't include ISP services, and they'd have to sign back up with Bell at a new, higher rate.

This is but one of the reasons I got out of customer-facing positions and went back to development.

Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

Re: Hoist by their own petard

Ironic? Not at all.

Business 101 - find a need, and fill it.

Business 201 - if no need exists, create one.

Companies selling fixes for problems that they themselves created is a long standing business model, believe me.

Hope your holiday was horrid: You botched the last thing you did before leaving

Re: Rogue DHCP server? Ban the operating system!

implies that the organisation did not employ anyone else who could fix the issue, or had the knowledge or technical skills

Actually, the organization had people who could fix it. Many, in fact. Pretty much any one of them would have been an improvement over the administrator we had.

However.

The organization in question was a defence contractor, and it was a secure building. And given their Kafka-esque security policies, that meant approving another person for system access would be required, and that took months, literally. By the time that approval was completed, the original administrator would have returned months ago.

Now, why didn't they approve a backup anyway? Because that would have to be approved by the CEO. Who... was friends with the current administrator.

As for risk, the company did "cost plus" R&D work for various military and three letter acronym organizations. That meant that for every dollar the company spent, it recouped something like $1.15 from the customers. The customers, being funded by taxes, were not terribly concerned with cost overruns, they were expected. The company didn't lose money by having the Vax offline for a month, they just charged it to the customer. So there was no incentive at all to fix things.

If you remember back to the 1980s and 1990s when everyone was talking about the Pentagon paying thousands of dollars for hammers and toilet seats, this is one of the reasons why.

Rogue DHCP server? Ban the operating system!

I worked for a multinational which was mostly Windows based, although some there was some Linux development (I was one of them), and a few remote site deployment types had Linux laptops for certain data analytics, as well.

One day, one of those site people came to home base for some training, and while there, he plugged his laptop into a network port. It turned out his laptop was running a DHCP server because his was the gateway machine when in the field. In a properly secured environment, a node running an unapproved server like that would be blocked, but this company was not like that. Once they found the offending laptop and identified it as being a Linux machine, a VP sprung into action. In classic shoot the messenger fashion, he declared that Linux was the culprit, and that the downtime caused by Linux was in the tens of thousands of dollars. Invoking his authority as VP of Procurement, he formally declared that Linux was officially banned from the company, henceforth.

For those of us working on Linux applications there at the time, we just shrugged, and told our management that we wouldn't be able to deliver, what with this new edict. It was most amusing watching horrified executives discover that a VP had ordered put a stop to three major projects a week before delivery. They tried to tell people to ignore it, but everyone was in malicious compliance mode, and no way were they refusing a direct edict written by a senior VP.

"If he's stupid enough to ban Linux without knowing what he's talking about, what's he going to do to people who disobey him?" was the thinking. Management spent almost three weeks before they were able to get Linux usage formally removed from the list of termination offences.

As for "the last thing before leaving for vacation" events, I have two. Both were a site administrator. And yes, the same guy.

The first was an upgrade of VMS for the Vax. He got the tapes just before he went on vacation and decided to upgrade it before leaving. He finished the job around 4:30pm on the Friday. He logged in, things looked good, and went away for three weeks. Although he'd restored the data disk with all the projects, he'd unfortunately, neglected to re-enable user logins. He could log in, as administrator, but no one else could. The company came in to work on Monday morning and discovered their Vax was effectively offline, and would be for the next month.

The second was two years later, where he made some upgrade to the hardware rack configuration. Naturally, you install new hardware before going away for a month, right? It was some classified overclocked imaging system that ran hot. As in really, really hot. It came with a secondary unit, basically a refrigerator. However, the refrigerator made a hell of a lot of noise, and the administrator thought the heat wasn't that much, so he turned it off. Then he locked the system room, and went on vacation.

At 4am, alarms went off, and security staff went to the system room. They couldn't get in, and the doorknob was hot. They had to call a locksmith in to drill through the door so they could get into the room. Supposedly the room temperature was 42C. One of the flimsy plastic chairs in the room was apparently warped by the heat already. I don't know if they turned off the imaging system, turned on the refrigerator, or brought in buckets of ice, but they got the room down to bearable levels in about an hour.

No, I don't know how that administrator managed to not get fired, but I suspect that being a drinking buddy of the CEO may have been a factor.

Who needs ghost train scares when Windows is such a fright?

Doctor's offices

We've all seen Windows popups, or worse, BSODs, on ATM machines, train and airport arrival/departure displays, advertising banners, and the like. Amusing, sometimes annoying, but not frightening.

Being in a ophthalmologist's office as the retinologist is shining the bright light into your eye, seeing the results of his probe on the huge 32" LED disable as he moves it can be disturbing enough. When the display of your optic nerve on the display is blocked by a Windows popup, that can be frightening.

Fortunately, it was only a test, not a surgery or anything invasive, but it wasn't exactly the ideal way to calm a patient's nerves...

Microsoft's turned Windows into a cesspool, but it wants to do better

Not the user base you're looking for

In the 1980s and 1990s, Windows, and later Windows with Office, was 85% of Microsoft's revenues.

Today, it's closer to 15%. The money is in Azure, cloud services, and subscription revenues.

The $35 Microsoft gets from a user for a site licence copy of Windows on his computer pales compared to the revenue they get for him subscribing to Office 365, or OneDrive, and any of the corporate cloud services.

The home user isn't the revenue driver for Microsoft any more, it's the corporate desktop. And the corporate desktop is largely insulated from the garbage that affects home users. Corporate users don't do their own updates, the IT department does, and that's after they're tested. Corporate PCs don't get Candy Crush and other nonsense, they can remove it. They don't need Outlook accounts. They do suffer the CoPilot nonsense, but even some of that can be mitigated.

Microsoft didn't decide to fix Windows because they care. They decided to do it because PC vendors (Asus, Lenovo, and others) have had so much negative feedback from users that they have stopped making Windows a default component for their PCs now, and downgraded them to an optional one, allowing users to buy OS-free computers, or ones with Linux installed.

That made the Microsoft accountants take notice. And they asked questions that senior management couldn't answer, or didn't want to. And that's why there's a PR push to fix Windows, after years of denials that there was any problem.

Phone users know when to hold ’em, delay upgrades amid inflation

Re: I've been delaying for almost a decade now, and in no rush

Hence my putting the word "free" in quotes.

The last time I had a phone contract was around 2003, and that was because I was doing WAP/WLM work (ugh), and the only phones available with it were not available anywhere else. Besides, it was a business expense, so I wasn't the one paying for it.

Other than that, I've been prepaid/PAYGO all the way. I'm astounded at the number of people who don't understand that "free" just means "included". I've seen people seriously sign up for a two year plan to get some absurdly (for the time) expensive phone that was $900 unlocked for "only" $199, then try to cancel their contract and be shocked that they have to pay the full price of the phone (and then some) in termination fees.

I once had an argument with a co-worker who was shocked I was using a cheap entry level phone (an LG Optimus). When he asked why I didn't get a better phone, I said I didn't want to spend the money, and he just snorted, pulled out his shiny new Android, and said "what are you talking about? I got this for free!". When I said that was great, could he pick up another one for me, since it was free, he said "well, of course you have to sign up for a plan, but everyone is on a plan".

No, not really.

My free S8 phone is on a prepaid plan that's Cdn$129 a year. That's a significant increase from the Cdn$25 a year plan I used to have, but that was discontinued when 3G was cut off. Although to be fair, that plan cost 25¢ a minute for talk, either 5¢ or 10¢ per text, and had zero data, while the one I have now is unlimited talk/text, and 20GB data for the year, of which I've used... 230MB, or 1.15% of my annual data allotment, in four months.

I know people who spend more than $129 a month on their phones. They can't believe that I get by with a decade old phone on an $11 a month plan; I can't believe they spend over $1,000 on a phone that they only use for two years, and often more than that just to use the thing.

Re: I've been delaying for almost a decade now, and in no rush

Wow. I didn't even know there was a 2021 Android one with the same name.

Yes, I meant this one. It may have been officially released in 2010, but I got mine in Canada at the beginning of 2012, because a local box store was dumping them, unlocked for under a hundred dollars. Of course, if it was two years old, that would probably explain why they were being dumped on the cheap.

Re: I've been delaying for almost a decade now, and in no rush

My C3 from 2021

Typo. My C3 from 2012.

I've been delaying for almost a decade now, and in no rush

I think the most I've ever paid for a phone was something like Cdn$325, and that's because in the late 1990s, that's what a cheap phone cost, and there wasn't a used market to speak of. Since then, outside of a brief dalliance with the late, and very much lamented C$99 Nokia Lumia 520, all of my phones were bought used for under C$250, with the last being a Samsung S7 in 2017.

Honestly, if the Canadian carriers hadn't discontinued the 2G and 3G networks, I'd probably still be using my Nokia 520, or maybe even my C3 from 2021.

I'm currently running a Samsung S8 I was gifted in 2020 when a friend renewed his three year plan and got a "free" upgrade to either an S9 or S10, whatever was current. And a year ago, another friend gave me an S7 Edge he didn't want because it was sitting in a drawer collecting dust. That one's been remissioned as a dedicate in-car dashcam and offline GPS, and hey, if the S8 dies, if moves up to first place.

Although the S7 Edge and the S8 are both around a decade old, I not only don't see anything compelling in newer phones to justify one, it seems that progress has actually been retrograde, with the microSD card slot and headphone jacks having been removed from newer phones.

Sure, my phones are potentially insecure. But since they're used for talk and text and PDA functions (camera, offline GPS, offline media player, calendar, calculator), and they don't have my real email, or any applications with personal data, there's nothing in there worth stealing, honestly. Sure, a hacker could get my activity tracker's step count and heart rate data, but that's about it.

At least in the past, when I saw new phones, I'd sometimes be tempted with a new feature I didn't have. It wouldn't justify the cost of a new phone, and I wouldn't get it, but I'd at least think about it. The phones today are not only not interesting, they actually seem like steps backward from what I currently have.

If I'm going to spend money on a phone in 2026, it will be to replace the 9 year old battery in the S8, and maybe replace the battered up protective case. But a new phone? Nah. And a new phone that costs $1,000 or more? Hell no.

That old phone in the kitchen drawer could save an industry

The problem is carrier support

I still have every cell phone I've ever bought, going back to 1999. That's fourteen phones in total.

Out of fourteen phones, three are DOA because of the phone. The 2004 Nokia 6585's speaker broke, making it useless. The 2005 Nokia 6275i's screen broke, and the 2017 Samsung Note 4's battery died. Although I replaced the battery, it turned out to be a problem with the phone's charting circuitry, and I was quoted 70% the cost of a new phone to replace a phone that I'd been gifted in the first place.

Out of the fourteen phones, eleven remain 100% functional. However, only three can connect to a cell tower in Canada in 2026. No one expects the analogue network that the 1999 Nokia 282 used to still be maintained, but with the termination of 2G and 3G networks, anything not capable of 4G or later is unusable. So that old flip phone from 2000, or 2010, or even 2015, may no longer work.

Microsoft releases first big update after Nadella's vow to 'win back fans'

Re: Too little, too late

I'm largely the same. I ran Unix as far back as 1983. My personal desktop was DOS in 1980, DesqView (remember that?) in the late 1980s, OS/2 from 1992 to 1996 or so, and Windows NT 4 from 1996 onwards. I often used Solaris, or HP-UX, or some other Unix at work, and around 1997, many companies used Linux (Yggdrasil, Red Hat, Mandrake...). I was familiar with Linux, and it made a great OS for my secondary machines (firewalls, backup servers, FTP and NNTP machines, etc.), but my primary machine was always Windows.

Whether I was running NT4, or 2000, or XP, or Win7, or Win10, there simply wasn't any impetus to switch. Even if Linux was "as good" (and with software availability, it wasn't), there was no compelling reason. It was certainly better as a server OS, but the desktop was, at best, only as good as Windows, so why switch?

That was, until Windows 10. It became increasingly obnoxious and intrusive. Although the annoyances could be worked around, it was obvious that Microsoft's vision of the desktop and mine were not the same.

In my case, the straw that broke the camel's back came in 2023. The Win10 HTPC in the living room was unable to execute Windows updates. It was a 32GB MMC machine that was originally Windows 7, and while it could easily install security fixes, Windows Update's "everything or nothing" design demanded I download 104GB of nonsense in order to get 200MB of security updates.

The PC had a 1TB disk (since replaced with a 256GB SSD), so I could solve the problem by re-imaging the OS, but if I was going to do that, since the machine was not TPM 2.0 compliant, I'd just have to do it again in 2025 anyway. I played with a few distros (Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Zorin, Debian, Pop!_OS, etc.), settled on Mint, and had my HTPC up and running within a day. It not only matched the Win10 performance and functionality, it exceeded it.

Since my primary machine was facing Win10 obsolescence in 18 months as well, I switched it, too.

I keep an air-gapped Windows 10 machine for the few apps (Gentibus) that won't run in Wine, or properly under VMs, but other than that, I see no need to dip my toes in the world of Windows any longer.

Microsoft boss tells investors the company is working to 'win back fans'

Re: Trying to win 'fans', not end users

A huge percentage of the new Linux user community is switching to it explicitly to get away from Microsoft's policies.

I know a number of people who've been using Linux for years that use Office365, Outlook, and OneDrive; a couple pay for the 1TB of OneDrive space. They chose Linux organically, for technical reasons, not ideological ones. People like that can potentially be convinced to use Microsoft Azure services. Users that leave Windows because of Microsoft's strongarm tactics are essentially unreachable, as far as Microsoft is concerned. Even if they did clean up their act, reverse course, and address the privacy issues, those users are disinclined to believe them, and since they're not using Windows, they won't actually see any improvements, even if they do get implemented.

Trying to win 'fans', not end users

In the 1980s and 1990s, Windows accounted for roughly 85% of Microsoft's revenue. Once Office took off, it became huge, and shared the stage with Windows, while helping drive its' growth even higher.

Today, Windows accounts for only about 15% of revenue. Microsoft is pushing everything to the cloud/Azure services, including Office. Windows is no longer seen as a core product, but simply as an on ramp to the services they want to sell.

Nadella's not worried about home users. While he'd obvious prefer they run Windows, if they use Linux to access their Outlook accounts and Office 365, that's fine. He'd much rather have a Linux user paying a monthly subscription for Azure services than a Windows user who just runs local apps. Microsoft make $25 off of the one time Windows licence, but recoups more than that per year for Azure users, regardless of what OS they run on their desktop.

While he can ignore home users, institutions and governments are another story. Linux migrations aren't just happening to disaffected gamers discovering CachyOS and Bazzite. Governments like France are investigating disassociating themselves from Windows and Microsoft services, too. Those are the customers Natella has to woo.

Microsoft's stone-faced dismissal of any and all criticism over the past several years, in the midst of a tsunami of incompetence and customers screaming at them has resulted in enough big players finally getting fed up enough to leave has finally got their attention. I suspect it will probably be too little, too late.

BOFH: Arrr, I smell piracy ... and it's comin' from a machine with executive privileges

Re: the overwhelming majority of the usage was in the alt.sex groups

I think my first post was in 1982 or 1983. I was there when the lore was written, before the Great Renaming in 1987, and long before the web existed. Those were the days of Gopher, Archie, and even Veronica.

Also, what was being distributed varied significantly based on peering agreements. I graduated from one university, did work with another, and had contracts with two large corporations around that time. I They were all on usenet, but they all had completely different peering setups, so their content was wildly different. They all had the core groups, but as you branched out, what was carried varied significantly. I remember a few ISPs back then actually public email addresses for their usenet admins for people who wanted to request specific groups.

And yeah, it had megabytes of copyright violations, but it was insignificant to what it is today. But unless you were at a university, you didn't have the bandwidth to download a half dozen installation CDs. Once cable and DSL become common, that changed, but I don't think that really happened until about 1998 or so.