Posts by Doctor Syntax

Ready for a newbie-friendly Linux? Mint team officially releases v 22.3, 'Zena'

When you get to my age 18 months is "shortly after"!

As far as I could make out - and remember - both attempted to look like mobile phone UIs and Unity had a thing about not being able to place files on the desktop,

I'm still running Plama 6.3.6 over X11.

Re: great option for experienced users too

As a matter of curiosity, what does an OS designed by a committee of grey-beards look like?

Re: Thank you mint for LMDE 32 Bits. Welcome AntiX 25 32 Bits.

"Ugly and small start button on the bottom left corner, ugly and small pinned Icons, ugly and huge icons for runnig applications, icons do not resemble Windows in the slightless, bunch of confusing extras in the task bar."

If KDE is an option you could try that. There's a lot of downloadable themes, icon sets etc. for all manner of of Windows UIs.

"When Canonical switched Ubuntu's default desktop to Unity in 2011, many people found the new Mac-like desktop strange and unfamiliar. Mint offered a Windows-like alternative"

You need to specify which Windows because IIRC Unity was more akin to W8 which came out shortly afterwards.

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk

Re: the Board members says. "That's from Hitchhiker's Guide."

"You can do things in radio that you cant on video."

Bluebottle: Eccles, stand on my shoulders and pull me up.

Misc. grunting sounds.

Eccles: I'd like to see them try this on TV

Micron breaks ground on humungous NY DRAM fab after beating bats and tree huggers

"Lot of nasty chemicals are used to make PCBs and chips."

And you don't want people to see that.

Trump wants big tech to pay for big beautiful power plants

Re: Ah, a new way to fill his pockets

Elections are on the way.

Coming soon: We interrupt this ChatGPT session with a very special message from our sponsors

Re: A chatbot with a container is a happy efficient chatbot

Are you sure you're in the right forum?

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

Re: issue

Surely they weren't glueing the batteries in in 2018, were they?

Re: Suggestions?

"shutdown.bat"

If that fails, remove the full stop.

Re: Suggestions?

Doesn't pressing the power switch for 5 seconds or so work on current H/W?

Re: Suggestions?

"You might also wave a Linux installation USB stick ominously in the direction of your computer."

That will make it resist more firmly. It knows you have to reboot to install it.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

"Instead, Meta is betting on AI as bulky headsets become things of the past."

So AI is the new VR. Or did I misread this?

Hyperscalers, vendors funding trillion dollar AI spree, but users will have to pay up long term

"they may not even be paying [extra] for it,"

Oh yes they will.

"I have another 20 years to monetize that customer,"

Assume much?

Just a thought. We keep saying Europe needs its sovereign data centres and the nay-sayers saying it would be impossible to compete with the US incumbents. If they have tied themselves up with the expense of AI it should make it easier to compete simply by just keeping the operation clean. Even better if there's a fire sale of facilities to clear debts.

Over half of AI projects are shelved due to complex infrastructure

Re: So basically....

"It's already being used very successfully for many purposes."

Replacing disempowered, untrained staff in many customer disservice centres with equally useless but cheaper website chat apps.

Cobbling up justifications to ban fans atending football matches by hallucinating incidents that didn't happen.

Inventing case citations in court pleadings.

Re: I don’t think so

Educating board and top manglement would be best.

"there's just enormous enthusiasm to deploy AI"

Engendered by believing the salesman.

That word "just" is interesting. Is it being used in the sense of "is that all there is?"?

Bankrupt scooter startup left one private key to rule them all

Re: First law of IoT

I think the word they'd like would be "concealed". They'd like it applied to the OP's comment.

"did what any determined engineer might do"

I suppose it's the "determined" bit that persuaded him it would be OK to buy the thing in the first place, being well aware, as an engineer, that the thing's basic depended on the presence of a cloud server whose continued existence.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: Well this works .... for me

You might find your pressure washer is very effective for the keyboards.

Re: Unbelievable stupidity

Or a reprographics shop with toner about. It was the floppy drive that suffered rather than the tape drive.

Re: BS

At rather more than 45 rpm?

Re: BS

Back in the early 1950s TVs were the new domestic technology and few people had one. An aunt and uncle had one of the first in the area. My aunt looked in the back of it one day and found a lot of dust so she cleaned it out with the vacuum cleaner. They were given a loaner whilst it was under repair but it never got returned.

Contagious Claude Code bug Anthropic ignored promptly spreads to Cowork

It sounds as if the whole thing is being run by script kiddies and amateurs.

Bond, debt bond: Investors shaken, not stirred by Oracle’s borrowing spree sue Big Red

BT has been shedding staff for the last 40 years.

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

"If you really need MS Office, you should probably pay for a license and a licensed copy of Windows."

I think for many it would be extra issues that Windows presents that would be the sticking point: the slurping, the intrusions of AI, the system breaking updates....

Raspberry Pi 5 gets LLM smarts with AI HAT+ 2

"you often have to install packages which depend on Wayland and/or SystemD"

This is obviously the choice of whoever wrote the packages and having the Pi Foundation mandate otherwise is very much contrary to the idea of free software.

Having said that Devuan puts a directory in /var that a number of applications expect and which seems to keep them happy. If that's insufficient you could check to see if there are Devuan variants of the libraries.

Likewise, it's worth checking to see if there are X11 variants of packages that expect Wayland. For instance on Trixie/Excalibur Pipewire kept logging error messages on an X11 session until I discovered that there was a library for Pipewire under X11 that wasn't installed by default.

No interest in that. Somewhere at the back of the queue is the idea of using one to replace the existing optics/processing in a slide convertor.

I run NextCloud over Devuan on a Pi. Headless - no Wayland, X11 or desktop. No systemd. OS on NVME, data on HDD mirrored with LVM2. Perfectly doable.

Woman bailed as cops probe doctor's surgery data breach

Re: What for?

Apart from anything else a consultation with a GP is supposed to be private and this breaks privacy. It puts the practice itself in an embarrassing position and even more so if the culprit were to go and gossip about patients on a local FB page.

Stolen USB drive or SD card? Or an entire PC?

Maybe there's scope for a new el Reg category: "Who? Him?". It would be for people who submit slop in serious documents or leave printouts of, say, their planned resignation letter lying around.

I'd expected the Copilot issue to appear here yesterday.

UK backtracks on digital ID requirement for right to work

Re: non-Brit perspective

Perhaps "different traditions" is the expression.

Re: non-Brit perspective

This goes to the issue I raised earlier. What's identity?

In a lot of cases it's producing a utility bill in the name and address you're claiming (getting harder in the case of paperless billing). I had a couple of clients. One had a long history of personalised security printing and took secure waste* destruction very seriously. The other got into that line as well. One of their contracts was to produce my water bills. I visited them one day and noticed blank water bill stationery trailing out of a waste container in the yard. No need to mock up a bill in the graphics S/W of yur choice, just nick a bit of that and print a bill on the genuine article.

* That included unused base print stationery which might have been run through as a header or trailer.

Re: Quite surprising...

These days? They tried it last time as well.

Re: We already have National Insurance numbers.

"There are people that can't retrieve their NI number after losing it because they can't prove who they are"

To be pedantic, they can't prove they're the person to whom the NI number was issued.

Visitors who have word visas and citizens of the Republic of Ireland are also allowed to work in the UK. Do they get issued with NI numbers? Checks for eligibility would be the visa or the Irish passport so NI numbers wouldn't be needed for that but would they be needed for taxation?

Re: Sometimes U-Turns are an improvement

"When Labour disconnected the Bank of England from government control they gave up the last actual power the government had."

Independent central banks are all too often the means of saving governments from their own folly. In this case they didn't quite achieve that. BoE was tied to aiming at a fallacious inflation index; fallacious partly because it ignored housing costs and partly because the non-housing element included the effects of off-shoring a lot of consumer good production to cheaper areas such as China.

Governments retain the power to set tax rates.

Re: Sometimes U-Turns are an improvement

"Ironic that by and large they have gone on to do more or less what the Tories would have done in a lot of regards."

Not ironic. Whoever won would have been constrained by the same realities which have been a quarter of a century in the making.

1. Brown* decided that the future could pay for present bribes to the voters and we are that future.

2. John Major's "bastards" then persuaded enough of the public that we'd be better off by cutting the surviving industry's home market to a fraction of what it was.

Between them that left us extremely vulnerable to external factors.

* Aided by low consumer goods price inflation due to shifting manufacture to China. And look where that got us.

AI may be everywhere, but it's nowhere in recent productivity statistics

Re: "jobs eaten by bots don't come back"

" who was the idiot who decided that investors had the right to sue the company they invested in ?"

That wasn't the idiot in the case. It would be the lawyers involved and will do quite nicely out of it. The idiots are those who believed them.

Re: Don't follow the IBM route if you care about productivity

"1) enjoy life for 34 years; 2) work productively for 20 years"

Not quite that. The 34 years is spent learning to be at peak productivity for the 20 years.

Re: Don't follow the IBM route if you care about productivity

"If a country's economic model is reliant upon a growing population, then it's a Ponzi scheme really, isn't it?"

Of course it is. I don't know about other countries but the UK state pension schemes and Civil Service pension schemes are exactly that.

Dell wants £10m+ from VMware if Tesco case goes against it

Re: Bad analogy

But always check what a court has said about the legality of that smallprint definition and, if a court hasn't pronounced on something you're prepared to accept as similar circumstances, check what a court will say. That's why things are as TFA describes them.

AWS flips switch on Euro cloud as customers fret about digital sovereignty

As per my comments above, it would be possible to have a European company subject solely to European law but TFA doesn't seem very reassuring about that.

As to the Airbus aspect, if you follow the link back to the earlier article you wil find that Catherine Jestin, is not only "executive vice president of digital at Airbus" she is also "chairwoman at GAIA-X" and GAIA-X is a "European Commission-backed initiative was conceived in 2019". There's no mention anywhere as to whether Airbus use public cloud or not.

Re: The problem with the EU version of AWS...

Not necessarily. A name can be licenced to a franchisee along with other aspects. It's the least of the problems. The real criteria are the legal and technical ones that permit independence for the duration of the contract - a contract thatcan't be arbitrarily cut short.

Re: Sovereign political‑legal concept in “The Cloud”

Not by technical architecture alone but both aspects are needed.