Posts by Doctor Syntax

Revenge of the nerds: Teachers, professors sue to undo Trump science funding cuts

Re: POTUS

"it may not be long before the US will start alienating itself from almost everyone else"

This already sounds like a message from the past. Surely it's government policy to do just that.

Whoever thought the law would be such an obstacle to a good chainsaw?

Jeff Bezos can now taunt Elon Musk: I'm building a moon rover for NASA, when can Tesla do that?

Re: The lesser of two evils

Musk has already turned his nose up at the Moon and thinks we should ignore it and go to Mars instead. OTOH Amazon delivery might also miss the Moon and deliver to Mars's wheelie bin instead.

VMware sues Siemens for allegedly using unlicensed software

Given a large enough corporation some unlicensed installations would not be beyond belief.

OTOH some licencing systems are so convoluted one might almost imagine they were designed to create non-compliances - is VMware one of those?

Re: They’ll have to pay for software they can’t use

"The other is, companies that use the software may not want to donate / be associated with the software that they use for free. So their options are not to pay them, or to go via a 3rd party (support agreements) and hope that they actually contribute to the development via commits or contributions."

A few examples:

There are a number of Linux distros for which you can buy support or buy as supported from their maintainers, from Red Hat ans Suse down to Zorin. No problem there.

LibreOffice you can buy commercial support from the project website.

PostgresSQL's main site lists companies from whom you can obtain commercial support. A simple search through their lists includes many who state that they are contributors to the project. Some individual contributors are named.

This does not deny that there are individual developers who are unpaid but this situation now seems to be receiving attention.

It's all far removed from paying for a subscription for support and wondering if that support is going to break you system on the second Tuesday of the month.

Re: Burning it down

And those small businesses, by the time they get to the size Broadcom wants to deal with, will have been using something else and are not going to want to migrate.

Where do Broadcom expect to get new customers?

OTF, which backs Tor, Let's Encrypt and more, sues to save its funding from Trump cuts

Re: Idiocracy was a documentary

Prove it. I'm sure it was done anonymously.

Re: Open Source has a USGov achilles heel

"I am native to a small foggy island off the main European continent"

In which case you may well recognise the significance of the phrase "mostly harmless".

Re: Idiocracy was a documentary

The way it works is that you point out to somebody that they said something wrong. If they can accept that, they say "Oh, yeah" and move one. Some can't. Their only response is to downvote all your postings. Those downvotes mean that something you posted hit home because you were right and they were wrong. Cherish your downvotes.

Farming at a level which can be wiped out by murrains and rust (the mycological sort).

Re: Not hurting the right people?

"Yes, I've read 1984"

But are you the same A/C? How would we know?

"None of this is the fucking tax payers job to fund!"

The tragedy of the commons in one sentence.

Re: Open Source has a USGov achilles heel

"the biggest harm that would do is to take leadership and soft power away from the US."

Harm?

Re: Not hurting the right people?

'inflation will pop up a little and go back down again'

Isn't that what Trump said not long ago when he went from threatening tariffs to imposing them? I suppose he's contradicted it since as he says a lot of self-contradictory things.

Basic reality?

Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title. No wonder it was in episode 1 of series 1, it's so fundamental.

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Re: mutt -- it sucks less.

Which just goes to show that it sucks less.

EU OS drafts a locked-down Linux blueprint for Eurocrats

You think so?

Synaptic lists 65,741 packages available of which I have 4,429 installed. The Devuan team may have modified some, but "most" would be beyond them. That includes KDE, various graphics editors including Gimp and Inkscape. There's QGIS there as well I ran apt upgrade to update Firefox only a few minutes ago.

It also includes the current LibreOffice which is not from any repository but the same .deb packages you can download for any distro that uses Debian packaging.

Then there are a few applications downloaded and installed by unpacking tarballs or running other, non-Debian install methods ranging from Seamonkey to the Informix database engine and tools.

There are a few which are compiled from source including Falkon and Pinta. The latter requires DotNet runtime and AFAIK that's not modified for Devuan.

Good try but I call bullshit.

Re: Why even have a local disk?

"Unfortunately it was swallowed by IBM and disappeared."

The fate of many good things that get swallowed by IBM, Microsoft of other large corporations.

Re: Perfect for running the Laundy

My preference would for data on desk/laptop, sync with server at base. That leaves scope for data on device or a data-less device which will connect securely to the server when away from base according to use case. The latter has the option of being able to connect to alternative servers (unlike ChromeOS) so that if, for instance, the user were to be challenged at a border crossing it could be connected to a server which does not contain all the business's confidential data.

The back end should allow for versioning. Ideally the protocol between should be very selective to allow only the correct formats of data to be handled*. A network that allows executables to be handled as if they were data allows for transmission of malware through the network, particularly onto the server, and, of course, a network which allows files to be overwritten with anything is open to ransomware trashing them.

* I'm influenced partly by years of working with an RDBMS where, although we didn't take advantage of it, it would have been perfectly possible to have the server talk to the network via just the port that was assigned to the server and the server understanding nothing other than its own protocol. The other inspiration is using XML. A server designed to provide versioned storage of XML would be able to reject anything that wasn't well-formed and validated according to the schemas it was meant to handle - such as, say, the flat file versions of the Open Document files.

From their page footer: "Devuan is a registered trademark of the Dyne.org foundation" and Dyne are based in Amsterdam.

In so far as any FOSS product with a wide community of contributors can be said to have a nationality, surely KDE is German. And if we're looking for an underlying distro with an EU connection, why not Devuan?

Judge halts DOGE's union personal data grab at OPM, Treasury, Education

Re: I'm not sure that the "judicial" branch really understands that the data has long flown the

Not an alternative but an additional step. If the law has been broken prosecute those who did so. Having made examples of a few making it clear that anyone subsequently found in possession of the data will not only be prosecuted under the original offence, they will also be in contempt of court.

Unfortunately it's not likely to happen for the next 4 years.

Alibaba exec warns of overheating AI infrastructure market

Just the infrastructure?

Pentagon kills off HR IT project after 780% budget overrun, years of delays

Re: Birmingham (England) Council says...

I wonder if this will ever get stabilised to the point where BOP (Birmingham Oracle Project) can be used as a measure for project overruns.

4-day work-week pilot due in tech land by early summer

Are those 4 days all to be in the office? It would be instructive to compare with a 4 or 5 day working from home.

London's poor 5G blamed on spectrum, investment, and timing of Huawei ban

Re: Pointless

Punters are sick of being told "99% coverage of UK" when it's clearly not

It's exactly the same as FTTP being pushed when there are still areas with crap FTTC (and very likely some still stuck on ADSL).

The supply side is intent on producing and pushing newer tech while the delivery side is failing to complete roll-out of the previous generation and regulators are failing to hold delivery to the universal provision requirement.

Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data

A common "OS" for government data may well be a good idea. Palantir certainly wouldn't be.

Top Trump officials text secret Yemen airstrike plans to journo in Signal SNAFU

Re: Oops

"the absolute power of the king"

This is one of the odd things I find about the US. By the time the US broke with Britain the absolute power of monarchs was long gone and yet they seem to have gone as far as possible to recreate it.

I'm not sure about "this alone". I think it comes under the heading of "yet another".

Re: Signal endorsement

I've said a number of times that the reason politicians don't see problems with backdoored communications is that they don't believe security is possible. They don't believe it because given a technically secure channel for a group of them to use one of them will leak the contents anyway. QED.

Re: According to Pete Hegseth...

Are you sure? There seems to be strong competition. Perhaps "joint first" would be a better way of putting it.

its what we call in the US "SOP"

It's not uniquely yours.

"My assumption is that an intern was tasked with setting up a secret group chat"

That's right. An intern called Mike Waltz.

Fedora 42 beta has so many spins, it'll make your head whirl

Re: About maintenance using SSH....................

If you're using the command line to start a GUI application then a remote desktop client would do the same thing. I tend to use ssh to just run oredenary shell commands on the remotes. Most frequently top to find and kill an errant muthbackend on an ancient Mythbuntu.

Re: About maintenance using SSH....................

$ ssh -l username 192.168.1.XXX

Or one of the remote desktop alternatives?

23andMe's genes not strong enough to avoid Chapter 11

Re: The court will now oversee the sale of 23andMe's assets

How do they "know" you are 12.7% Norse?

It used to be said that particle physics is like hitting a watch with a hammer and gathering up the bits to find out how it worked. This is more like hitting several watches with a hammer and working out which bits came from which watch.

Is Washington losing its grip on crypto, or is it a calculated pivot to digital dominance?

Re: Is Washington losing its grip...?

I'm pretty sure the tossers in charge are seeking to get a grip on as much of everything as possible. It's what was the actual government that's losing. I've said a few times here that the US was looking like a failed state. That's now becoming the reality.

Perhaps Canada will offer states the chance to become Canadian provinces.

A site that would enable a kleptocracy gets sanctions lifted. What does this tell us?

2 in 5 techies quit over inflexible workplace policies

Re: Reducing Headcount

It seems like the staff need to get together and use the desk shortage to weaponis RTO on their own account.

One thing which seems to be missing: the proportions of the 40% who quit with a better job lined up and those who just quit.

Bearing in mind that FOSS projects work as online communities it seems a very reasonable statement.

Microsoft tastes the unexpected consequences of tariffs on time

Slightly disappointed. I hoped to find a link to a video demonstrating one of Microsoft's own systems being pwned as proof. Now that would really get their attention.

Re: Computers have screen recorders you know?

A spoken commentary with by people who do not have English as their first lanquage will not help. Screenshots do not need to be animated into a video.

Mobsters now overlap with cybercrime gangs and use AI for evil, Europol warns

"The very DNA of organised crime is changing,"

I doubt it. It would make forensic science a bit harder if it did. At least she's not quoted as including "literally".

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

My take on all this

Some of us see "GIMP" and immediately think of an image editing program, some of us think of an ableist insult and some of us think of something relating to BDSM.

What does that tell us about each other?

It seems akin to Dr Johnson: "So you looked for them, then?"

Now seems to be OK. Perhaps it was the additional drop of libraries that came in later wot dunnit. Interestingly, it opened a .ora file.

Oracle Cloud says it's not true someone broke into its login servers and stole data

Re: Encrypted passwords?

"Why on earth are passwords being encrypted rather than hashed?"

The two are close enough in meaning for PR speak.

Maybe it wasn't pilfered from Aoracle. Maybe an LLM just hallucinated it all.

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: The spinning wheel lies.

(I don't deny that you've seen situations where somebody put the progress indicator in a separate thread. I'm just saying that they did something pointless and stupid.)

Yes, but most of us are thinking about Microsoft progress indicators.

Re: Schrödinger's firmware situation

The last 10% takes up 80%. And the last 10% of the last 10% takes up 80% of the whole.