Posts by Doctor Syntax

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

Re: The problem is ...

"There are far fewer of us than we think that know anything about how all this works."

From what I regularly see here that would apply to a lot of people in the IT industry. I think Microsoft is banking on that.

Re: They really don't care.

"you're not shareholders that matter"

Once upon a time people also talked about "stakeholders". I suppose they stopped doing that when they remembered what could be done with a stake and hammer.

Re: The Masses Will Get An Agentic OS And Will Not Complain

It will come as quite a shock to my cousin-in-law, long retired hairdresser and 90 in a few days time, to discover that she's a techno-geek. She's been using Zorin since some (fortunately incompetent) ransomware in an email she thought was from someone she knew hit her W7 computer years ago.

OTOH a friend of mine, almost the same age, runs W11 and has some sort of support arrangement with a Windows specialising techno-geek to sort out her problems.

Your "brutal truth" is BS.

I wonder if it starts out like this:

Kid is enthusiastic user of Spectrum, BBC, Atari or whatever.

Goes off to do CS degree

Emerges with all enthusiasm and curiosity knocked out of them

Goes into industry

There's one person on this planet who may actually be changing this. Government and boards alike, outside of the US, seem to have grasped the idea of digital sovereignty and are slowly coming to realise that it might have to be taken seriously.

Odd how things turn out, isn't it?

Re: Pennies

I've already said this once in this thread: frog boiling is Microsoft's key competence.

Re: The problem is ...

It always seems to me that the live version isn't as performant as it could be. YMMV.

Re: The problem is ...

Forget the experimental and enthusiast distros. There are a small handful of desktop distros and a small handful of server distros.

If you want to experiment with a desktop Linux distro for a couple fo days, do you know how much it will cost you? A couple of days of your time. You don't even need another computer to test it on providing you've got one with enough disk to spare to install it dual boot.

You could even try a couple of distros. See what the differences are and realise how similar they are. Discover that it's not so much a matter of vast differences, more a question of finding where you feel most comfortable, rather like deciding on your favourite pub.

Try it. It doesn't hurt. You can keep it a secret if you don't want anybody to know that you have.

What amazes me is the number of people who call themselves IT professionals who haven't even tried, as professional development, something that won't cost them money.

Re: Why are people complaining?

"Payrolls, Stock, CRM etc."

Back in my time we were doing those things on Unix servers. Before that they were on mainframes. Windows is not the only platform.

Re: The Masses Will Get An Agentic OS And Will Not Complain

"So people will just put up with the changes, and learn to live with it."

Frog boiling. That's MS's core competence.

Re: New features! New Features!! PUMP THAT STOCK PRICE!!!

We keep hearing this bit about applications. Yes, of course we run an OS to run applications. I certainly d. But do you really want applications where the vendor is persistently trying to inveigle you into subscriptions for what you're already running, or run them on their servers with your data a their mercy, or busy shoehorning AI into all those applcations?

When is enough enough?

"His follow-up at least suggests Microsoft knows users are unhappy"

But does it care?

Researchers claim 'largest leak ever' after uncovering WhatsApp enumeration flaw

Re: University of Vain-a

"behaving exactly as designed"

There's a basic assumption in there - that anything approaching design was even considered.

Microsoft spins up Azure HorizonDB to take on distributed Postgres rivals

Once upon a time people would complain if a FOSS database wasn't compatible with SQL Server. Now Microsoft is having to produce databases compatible with FOSS. Interesting times.

Ignite awash with agents as Microsoft triples down on AI

I suppose by now there must be agents to manage the agents but are there any agents to manage the agents managing the agents?

Yes, it's agents all the way down.

Anthropic is at the heart of the latest billion-dollar circular AI investment bonanza

Re: Hot air (and water)

When you measure any process only in terms of its inputs it means you don't have a measure of the outputs. You don't even know if there are any outputs worth counting.

"MS ... are spending real money, but also building real AI barns they get real money for renting out."

What's missing in this argument is that when the music stops tso does the demand for AI barns. They might not get the returns for the money they spent.

Musical chairs - with a difference. When the music stops it will be a case of who's not holding an unsustainable load of debt. It might be none of them.

Cloudflare broke itself – and a big chunk of the Internet – with a bad database query

Something goes wrong and the reaction is "We're under attack" and not "Oops, was that me?" from someone who just changed something.

SAP's migration narrative suddenly looks messy as Kingfisher goes off-script

"Earlier this year, German-speaking user group DSAG said that if users eventually wanted to get back on the upgrade path with SAP, they would find that they had lost commercial leverage."

Really? Do SAP not employ salesdroids who will offer just about anything to get a sale? If not they must be very unusual.

FCC looks to torch Biden-era cyber rules sparked by Salt Typhoon mess

Not so much a matter of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, more a case of arguing that it isn't even letting in water.

Brussels eyes AWS, Azure for gatekeeper tag in cloud clampdown

I wonder if they've considered treating CLoudflare as a gatekeeper.

Linus Torvalds is OK with vibe coding as long as it's not used for anything that matters

Re: Boring is good

The applications need to be boring as well.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: Single point of failure

If half of the Internet is in the same boat no-one half the internet is in trouble.

FTFY

Zoomers are officially worse at passwords than 80-year-olds

Re: "They can probably set up a printer faster"..?

Every week SWMBO sends out a PDF handout for her patchwork class. The class members need to print it out, or at least the last sheet. Why? Because the templates are on the last sheet (sometimes on the last several sheets) and they need to cut those out. Not everything can be just read.

Brits to help foot power bill for datacenters under government AI plans

Re: Burst bubble clause

Or a discount based on inverse of average employee commuting distance.

"There are sometimes mismatches between the amount of electricity generated in a certain region and the electricity grid's ability to transmit that electricity from that region to another,"

Meanwhile, the data centre, whose effectiveness is being measured in inputs rather than outputs, is steadily eating a fixed amount of the generation which is then not available for transmission to the rest of the customer base, even if the generation falls below transmission capacity. At the extreme we'll hear about DCs unable to operate at low generation levels because transmission capacity isn't adequate to suck in power from the rest of the grid.

AI music has finally beaten hat-act humans, but sounds nothing like victory

"I remember as a kid watching TOTP waiting to see if they put a decent track on (and week after week failing), ditto the Alan Freeman show"

AKA the triumph of hope over experience.

Re: Pop Will Eat Itself

An opportunity for PDQ Bach

Re: What happens if you play AI country music backwards?

Not entirely.

Re: Stock, Aitkin and Waterman

"Their back catalogue consists of repetetive crap by such diverse talent as Kylie Minogue and a bunch of Kylie Minogue clones."

As does the back catalogue of their contemporaries.

Canonical pushes Ubuntu LTS support even further - if you pay

Re: Ridiculous

I'd guess it works like this:

If upstream issues a patch for a version in the repo it gets passed on.

If a user hits a problem in a package which by now has been in production for years without having problems, it gets looked at.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it

Re: the kernel

"if you've got a working thing that is staying just as it is, why isn't it sitting in a VM"

You started off by answering your own question.

Image this: You have an application that was written for and being run on Python 2. It does what it was intended to do and that s something which is critical to your business.

Why would you want the risk of trying to run it on anything later?

Re: the kernel

You're looking at it from the wrong end og the telescope. The people who are interested in this are not those looking to install the newest shiny. They are people who need to run something developed for that platform and which is performing a critical function not easily replaced. Are they going to take the risk of asking will it run on the latest version of libxml2, let alone the latest version of Python?

They probably don't even want any patches or for it to be "slightly" upgraded. They're paying the money because some fiat says the platform must be "supported" and the reality is that it has to stay just as it is, doing just the job it was installed to do, no more and certainly no less.

Re: Kicking the can down the road

What about some very expensive piece of equipment, something so expensive it was scheduled to be amortised over a couple of decades? Something whose drivers were written over a decade ago by a vendor long closed down. In tha sort of environment issues are not going to be solved by new versions of the OS, they're going to be created by them.

Now imagine you're about to purchase s new piece of equipment of that nature. Would you want its controlling S/W to run on an OS whose vendor is not only promising such longevity but visibly delivering it on their earlier versions or would you want it to run on Windows?

Re: Confused Old Person Here....Again!

"if it's a regulated environment"

This is surely the key to it. Regulated environments that require applications to be certified and the applications themselves are only certified to run on a specific platform. Just the sort of environment that doesn't sit well with forced upgrades.

Microsoft's first Windows 10 ESU Patch Tuesday release fails for some

Re: evolving into an agentic OS

You're describing evolution by natural selection, survival of the fittest. What they're proposing is evolution by artificial selection, survival of the profitable.

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

Re: Hmm

1. $Topic was introduced (too long to go into detail here)

2. $Topic was explained (too long to go into detail here)

3. Explanation was summarised (too long to go into detail here)

The bits in parentheses are only added if doing without them is looked on as being sarcastic.

If the training course didn't go like that it was badly designed.

Re: "The biggest help with writing a "$SUBJECT for dummies" guide"

"It's certainly the case that idiot-proofing a guide to your area of expertise benefits from having an idiot around"

What if the only idiot around is the boss who will have to sign off the document?

Re: One place I used to go

Aren't they a bit syrupy?

Re: I used to own a sports bar/restaurant

"thick testy sauce"

That would be something that didn't agree with you.

Re: I used to own a sports bar/restaurant

My first thought was what about a circular motion around the speaker. However the greater problem is with a sentence such as "He always took his dog with him on his meanderings."

"Meander" suggests that some of the movement will be towards and some away from the speaker while the dog would complicate things even further running back and forth, So should it be "take" half the time and "bring" the other half?

Re: I used to own a sports bar/restaurant

A word can be short and pithy but still wrong.

There is a verb "give". Derived from that is a noun "gift" - that which is given. There is no need whatsoever to use the noun as a verb because the verb already exists and yet that is done if the giving is to be presented as something particularly significant.

The simple test there would be to use the fancy verb "donate" with that donated as "donation" and ask oneself would one say that it had ben donationed? If not, don't say it had been gifted.

/rant

Re: The person who writes documentation

Brookes comment on manuals: the first thing to be started and the last to be finished.

Re: First time user

I suppose it could be applied to manuals too but my scheme for reviewing a UI, in particular a web site, would be a team of:

1. Such a first time user. one familiar with the domain but not the application.

2. A developer responsible for the application.

3. An invigilator

The ostensible purpose of the test is to determine how many steps the user takes to accomplish a set of tasks compared with the minimum number as established by the developer.

The user is only permitted to ask and the developer to answer questions of the form "where does it tell me how to ...". The declared role of the invigilator is to enforce this rule but the real role is to prevent violence between the other two. The real purpose of the test is to demonstrate to the developer just how awful the UI really is.

On occasion I've felt that this could have applications outside S/W development. Arrangements of signposting would be one when a destination signposted for several junctions suddenly ceases to be listed.

The Steam Machine rises again as Valve readies 2026 hardware trifecta

Re: Desktop Linux?

As someone who runs native Linux applications on the desklaptop that's the way it strikes me too but as Microsoft pushes so many users into the remote versions of their S/W it's hard to see how a Chromebook would differ in those terms.

Meanwhile a Linux OS running MS Office & other Windows S/W locally is going to confuse a number of commentards here but I suppose they can bleat about it being inconsistent with whatever UI MS currently imposes and other Windows users are complaining about.

ERP carnage continues as orgs jump in unprepared

"How can I learn new stuff if the acronyms are opaque to me?"

Search engine. It's a great learning experience to discover the - shall we say "diversity" - of meanings for any given set of initials. Some are very "diverse" indeed.

Re: Lack of committent / involvement from the whole org

"Yes I know I am seeing unicorns for the last paragraph"

Not a council system* but a former client of mine used an ERP system from a small supplier. They had a number of quite different scenarios for various parts of the business ranging from the main logistics business to a few maintenance contracts. They had enough knowledge within the business to handle most of the customisation in-house. That was an important success factor. It probably stemmed from a realisation at the top that the ERP was essential to the business which made it worth having that expertise in-house

The other, which makes the OP's paragraph less of a unicorn, is that, because the ERP supplier was small, where stuff couldn't be handled in-house by the customer it was possible to go to the supplier and negotiate acceptable prices for mods or new functionality some of which was rolled out to all the customer base. That again was made possible by in-house expertise. There was a penalty in that we had a few weekend shutdowns for table reorganisations.

* For very good bad reasons any discussion of \ERP here is going to end up discussing councils.

Britain's first small modular reactors to be built in Wales

Re: @Doctor Syntax

No, it can be marked as it being too late to keep ignoring. Neither party has a record to be proud of.