Posts by Doctor Syntax 32961 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"You'd think they'd glance over at Gnome and see a big opportunity"
The opportunity you see by glancing over at Gnome is to head in a completely opposite direction. Those who want to use something like Gnome will use Gnome, The entire point of having different desktops is to suit oneself, not to be herded into a single option that doesn't work well for a given use case.
I don't know why you might have thought it looked like W10 unless someone had played a few customisation tricks. It's true there are a lot of W10-like themes that can be downloaded so as not to frighten refugees from the Microsoft world but to make it really like W10 would require some menu customisation. Quite easy to do, if a little laborious, but it would be rather sadistic.
Driving SWMBO's today. It has forward pointing cameras looking for white lines & so forth. Country road with no foortpath but no traffic. A dog walker on the left verge. Pull over to giver them a wide berth. Flashing warnings on the dash. At least it wasn't "smart" enough to try to take over the steering.
Apart from the fact that the "computer is always right" presumption is likely to get a good kicking any time now in the light of the Post Office scandal it belongs to criminal law. It puts the onus on the defence to prove that it was wrong. Even if statute law isn't amended quickly the defence is going to remind any jury of the fallacy of that whatever the judge might direct them about the law. In reality I doubt a judge would now give any strong directions about it. In a jury trial the jury, ot the judge, is the tribunal of fact. In a non-jury trial the judge, unlike the jury, has to give a reasoned verdict.
Civil law - people being sued - works on balance of evidence. The situation would be very different as it would be what one one computer said in the form of a website vs what the other computer said in the form of a chatbot.
It does raise the possibility that the attributions and payments go to real copyright holders even if the alleged quote is an hallucination. That could raise the possibility of even more court cases down the line when the alleged copyright holder gets sued for something they'd never actually said.
You couldn't make it up if you tried.
Look on it as a regular test to find out which of those who entered the job market in the last four years should never have been sat in front of a keyboard, at leas, not one connected to anything. Wasn't it 1988 when a lot of Sun systems crashed? And before it even got to February I think. And my then manager's multi-page "Is it Friday yet" function couldn't tell when it was Friday.
They're not going to stop working but they're not going to get any updates either. Whether or not that's a good thing depends on whether there are any bad bugs discovered in it now. Either way, it's going to be a fair while yet befre KDE 6 shows up in Debian.
BTW KDE6 is out today. It looks like they're continuing to suffer from Microsoftitis in regard to settings which has been changed again. There's something about the return of the Cube which is to do with swapping between worktops so KDE can look cool. Heaven preserve us from desktops where looking cool is a feature.
Personally there are very few things I'd want them to fix:
Reinstate the feature lost at KDE 4 whereby you could set the hot-spot for unhiding the panel to be a corner instead of all the way along the panel.
Fix the bug whereby if I introduce my own file suffix and set up my own program as the default for it after some random number of days it forgets all about it and Ark pops up complaining it doesn't know how to open what it, in fact, a text file.
And that's about it. They could put some effort into getting Discover to work without some undocumented and undiscoverable library or whatever it's missing being installed but as Synaptic works perfectly well I can live without it.
The relevant issue here is that ChatGPT is providing a service which is based on what is essentially a database which is derivative of the training materials. The regurgitation is simply a means of providing proof of that. The value of ChatGPT and hence of OpenAI depends in part on their software for which they've (presumably) paid their developers but also on the training material for which they might or might not have paid but the use of which will exceed the T&Cs attached to it.
"When did people forget that the stock market is effectively gambling?"
What's more when you buy a share you're becoming part of the company. The company is called that because "company" is a collective noun, in this case the collection of people who each own a share of the company. The clues are all there in the name. So if you're a shareholder the company's funds are your collective funds. If you are a shreholder and sue the company you're suing yourself along with all the other shareholders. If you think the C-suite or directors are gypping you, sue them, not yourself. If you're prompted to sue yourself by a lawyer remember it's the guaranteed winner who's prompting you and if you want to find out who's the loser, look in the mirror.
If you look closely at it it mounts to /boot/efi but I'd expect at boot time UEFI is able to locate it directly. It has to be mounted when the system's running because it needs to be accessible for upgrades.. It contains one directory called EFI - upper case because we're in VFAT-land. Then it gets really weird. It has directories called BOOT, debian, devuan and ubuntu. Fair enough, if we're in VFAT country it looks like BOOT is going to be the one read by UEFI. Devuan, obviously because we're running Devuan, debian because devuan's largely based on on Debian. But ubuntu?!? They all have a BOOTX64.CSV file which is data, not a CSV (actually it's alternating ASCII and null bytes) and several stripped Windows executables.
Why Windows executables and file names that look as itf they come from DOS? Because whatever you run on your UEFI enabled box, Microsoft has it's sticky fingers in there. If the competition regulators really take a look at Microsoft UEFI should be on the agenda.
But the reason you shouldn't be modifying it it that you'll very likely render your box unbootable pending a re-install.
When small companies have few or one product it's quite likely that they were designed by enthusiasts who actually understand what's needed because it's something they actually want themselves. When they get bought out by big companies the products are specified by marketing who believe they know what the market wants with no interest in using the product themselves..
So they can be sold to telcos to remotely manage them.
When PlusNet decided to remote manage mine to the point where I was unable to get in to make changes to my DHCP allocations it was time to pull it and install my own. Do I want to join the manufacturer's remote management scheme? No I do not. Turn off remote management.
"If it was even a little bit important, nobody would have gone down the Intel / 80x86 branch, but would have stuck with the "cleaner" addressing modes of the 68000. Yay! let's revive the architecture battles of 40 years ago."
The early SMB-scale Unix computers I used were either Z8000 or 68000 based. That wasn't, at least directly, because of cleanliness of addressing modes, it's because, at system integrator level, it's what was available to buy.
But because IBM chose Intel for their PC and the economies of scale prevailed all that stuff became a dead end. So much for not throwing away backwards compatibiliy.
Whether you call something a directory or a folder it's still an abstraction of a place in which to store other things, some of which may also be files or folders depending on the vocabulary you choose to use. You're confusing the abstraction with its implementation.
"the cost of making the poor decisions"
The poor decisions are usually made for the sake of operational convenience rather than security. Let's not bother with the inconvenience of a separate privileged user ID with a separate password, let's not enforce complex passwords, let's not fence of different bits of the network, etc.
The hardware and languages will support better but better costs some user effort and a few seconds of time here and there and time is money...
AIRI the first Mac was little more than a toy. It required a few upgrades to become useful. Jobs had fought the developers to design it to a price. He also did his best to make it non-upgradeable, Somebody sneaked in an ability to solder in a link to enable it to take higher capacity memory without having to buy the bigger version next year or whenever it was. I wonder to what extent Jobs planned it as a bait and switch.
Over the years I've seen a few would-be memory technologies come and go (bubble memory is one that comes to mind - what was it again?). The few that have stood up to reality and their predecessors are the few we have today. Reality includes the cost of completely revising the way things are done to take advantage or having a commercially viable, if niche, use case. Mobile would appear to provide a suitable use case for PRAM. If it can't make an inroad there it doesn't seem likely to succeed elsewhere.
"there's always been an engineering trade-off between speed and capacity"
Between speed and price and it's price - including the price in terms of power consumption - that determines capacity. Can it achieve the speed of DRAM at the price of DRAM or close enough to lower the overall cost of the system?
You have a grid of icons and you can't directly see your "documents". Open an app and it picks up where it was. Turn off the fondleslab and when you turn it on it's right where it was, although some things will be slower to open at first.
That may work for a piddling little mobile. On a laptop or bigger my documents are primarily what I need to see. "Open recent" will bring up more than one document for me to pick but not many. If I've had to hunt through a few recent documents to check on something that may well have been enough to have squeezed what I was actually working on yesterday out of the list.
The advantage of the files and folders way of thinking is that the organisation can be structured so that I can navigate through them to find that document i last opened 5 years ago but need to check up right now.
OTOH while Okular will open a read-only PDF where I left it 5 years ago LO Writer will only re-open a document it was writing 2 minutes ago at the beginning. I could do with that being changed.
There's another long term problem for term If they may think they're losing the small fry they don't care about but among those are the not-yet big fish who they'd want eventually. Of course if you think in quarterly figures that's not an issue but that in itself should be enough to ensure their competitors outgrow them.
I wonder how many of those who saw it coming were already making their plans or actually migrated well before the announcement.
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