Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"it's a fairly uncluttered version of Android 14 with little bloat. There are preinstalled launchers for Facebook, LinkedIn, FitBit, a handful other apps,"
From my PoV those count as bloat.
It would be useful if they knew how to - or cared to - write a website which is browser neutral. A whole-screen cookie preference chooser followed by a blank white screen is not a useful way to communicate to potential customers.
This is a tech news site. Obituaries are an accepted part of news media. There have been occasional obits here of people prominent in tech, some rich, many not. If you'd read the actual text you might have realised that he deserved to be remembered for his technical achievements which makes it on-topic, unlike what other media sites have to say about this or about the Middle East.
So there's a lot to be said for Windows patches failing.
Dragged out the only laptop that has W10 on it the other day. It hadn't been used since before June's patch Tuesday. Booted the Linux partition first. It had booted and checked for updates within about 3 minutes (it's old and slow) and finished all updates and autodeleted an old kernel in about 20 minutes. If it had been used daily, of course, it would have distributed the updates through the course of the 3 months.
Next try Windows. Unlike Linux, after 20 minutes it was still checking for updates - it have another 15 minutes to go. Downloaded updates and started to install the first one. After a few minutes it stopped and claimed a download error - this on an update that had already been labelled with download 100% complete. Click retry and it goes back into the 35 minutes of checking for updates, not retrying the broken install. I eventually left it to its own devices after the first update had failed again. Some time later I found it had gone to sleep. Woke it up again and it continued, retrying the checking. In the course of this some updates disappeared, apparently installed but then reappeared on rechecking. After about 5 hours I shutt down, still with no updates successfully installed. So little chance of it borking the Linux boot, even if I'd had secure boot enabled.
If this is typical of a consumer installation of Windows there much be millions of them out there unpatched because Microsoft don't care enough to make a bog-standard Windows instance reliably install its updates. It may well relate to the failed update of a few months ago, the one where Microsoft issued an update that wouldn't work with the default installation recovery partition size. I suppsoe I could fix it by booting a live Linux distro and using it to shrink the Linux partition that sits above the Windows partition but frankly, if Microsoft can't be arsed to do their job properly I can't be arsed to do it for them.
It's times like this I remember the first chapter of TMMM. That's where Brookes explains the difference between software written by a couple of blokes "in a remodelled garage" and a professional development team. The latter is what he terms a product - can be run by anyone, anywhere, reliably. Under Brookes's definition Windows fails to make the grade as a product. FOSS, written in the modern equivalent of the remodelled garage - laptops and a Github A/C - on the other hand...
I've worked as a freelance contractor to a sub-contractor on a number of public sector contracts. Delivered to spec and on time. I had no visibility as to budget but certainly heard no complaints. Modularity for the most part meant that new functionality was added easily and cost-effectively. (The exception was one where my client's IT director, decided to specify how the the database should be designed which made it a bit less easily extensible. They should have shifted it over to the 2nd version we did for later contracts.)
Of course you never see any headlines about that. And then, being public sector, everything had to be re tendered after a few years... Not one of the ones I was involved with but one of the clients lost their flagship contract and from one I heard there were some serious shenanigans involved in that.
I've often thought that the way to fix this would be to have the council manglement on a basic salary with a bonus to be voted on by the electorate for delivering, to the electorate's satisfaction, verious services or projects.
"Few software companies or consultants will stand up to them"
It's very likely the salesmen. There's a commission to earn, a target to meet and a bonus at the end of the month/quarter/year.
I've managed to walk away from one employer whose salesman assured a customer that the product would be a straightforward replacement for the existing S/W. I knew what the two databases were like & could see the one was going to work very differently from the other. I had enough trouble trying to graft some very basic security into ours in terms of restricting visibility according to user roles. I had no desire to be the man in the middle between the salesman and the customer on that one.
Demanding stuff like that and then losing control at scale is something that should attract mandatory fines and damages (with the latter taking priority) sufficient to wipe out the company. Shareholders can sue the manglement - but not, as seems to be normal practice, themselves, to try to get some money back.
"the big enterprise distros -- SLE, RHEL, Ubuntu LTS versions -- come only with GNOME and nothing but GNOME"
By and large they're aiming at the server market. If they even run a desktop at all it will be for management. A derivative aimed at the desktop only offering GNOME does look a bit odd.
It's a matter of having appropriate rules. e.g. the comment about most archaeologists wearing floppy hats as opposed to hard-hats on sites that don't require it. On most archaeological sites the major risk in the long term would be skin cancer (assuming one can find enough sun to be exposed to).
A few days ago I mentioned installing S/W in a factory. I was told before flying out that I would need a white coat - no problem, I had an old lab coat somewhere - & metal toe-capped shoes. A pair of suitable Doc Martens were obtained for the latter. They did sterling service as gardening shoes until comparatively recently but were invariable referred to as the ice-cream factory shoes.
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