Posts by Doctor Syntax

Reminder: Infostealer malware is coming for your ChatGPT credentials

It looks like it's going to be another of those gifts that keeps on giving.

LinkedIn's turn to fall over: Outage hits thinkfluencer hub

"An error has occurred."

Surely the house style is "Something went wrong".

Boffins propose fiber-optic network for the Moon

Re: ... then trundles off, spooling out fibre behind it.

I don't think it's going to get nicked even if cable thieves can't work out it's not copper.

OpenReach in Spaaace!

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

Re: No thanks MS. Free at last.

Doors would be worse.

Re: "you'll start seeing a new user interface on eligible Windows 10 devices soon"

Don't forget what seems to be the intended insult of "legacy", quite ignoring the fact that those legacy applications are usually the ones that are being used in the actual working part of the business that brings in the money to keep the roof over the heads of the dev teams.

Re: "you'll start seeing a new user interface on eligible Windows 10 devices soon"

"I have an irrational dislike of Apple, not because the technology is bad, I just dislike their business model so I stay away from it"

So you'll appreciate our point when some of us say we also dislike Microsoft's business model.

Re: can stick your AI where the sun doesn't shine!

You have misunderstood the idea of an operating system. An operating system is one that operates you for the convenience, amusement and profit of the vendor.

Re: Windows 11 is never getting installed

"if you want to run full-on passthrough graphics"

For a brief moment I read that as pissthrough graphics. Alarmingly, it made sense.

Re: We only just got Windows 10 settled....

"Seriously consider whether you belong in this industry."

Which industry are you thinking of? The industry the OP is in, whatever that might be, which pays the IT industry to support its operations or the rent-seeking arm of the IT industry which thinks all the other industries exist only to support it?

Re: "you'll start seeing a new user interface on eligible Windows 10 devices soon"

"I can't for the life of me understand why dumping users on a continuous learning curve is considered good practice "

It might be a career necessity. If a developer, manager or team doesn't have something like this to show and justify their existence they might be at risk of getting dumped in the next round of reorganisations or other euphemisms.

Useful stuff such as bug fixes is much less attention grabbing.

Alternatively it could just be a sign marketing is running the business.

Re: Bring back 3.11

"I think the names are the thing I hate most about other OSs."

Even more than on OS versions, I hate them about CPU versions.

'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

"We came up with a non-Oracle based architecture for development and we implemented a policy that pointed towards the other development platform and we evaluated methods to discourage or prevent the download of Java software,"

Never give a customer reason to review the market.

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

Re: Who are their lawyers?

Does it apply to EU citizens or anyone in the EU? GDPR applies to the latter.

What Apple seems to have lost sight of is that they're going to end up pissing off some of their EU customers. It's not unknown for individuals in the EU to take on US companies who try to play fast and loose with EU rules. Paging Max Schrems?

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

Re: It is the UI

So it really is the H/W replacement that's preventing new sales?

Re: Repeat after me:

These days I've finally succumbed to using the equivalent calendar in SeaMonkey. Works fine and syncs to the Nextcloud Pi which then syncs to the phone. It would be a good idea to have a built-in WebDAV server for those who don't have Nextcloud.

Re: It is the UI

"and nearly ONLY the UI which prevents good sales."

Nothing to do with the cost of replacing perfectly serviceable H/W every time Microsoft says "jump!"? And they've fixed the buggy updates?

Re: Linux Mint

"The major benefit is that it comes on the device"

On the device? That's a hand-held gaming console. Somebody looking for a laptop or desktop won't see that as a benefit.

Yes, I know it can be downloaded and installed like any other distro but to those whith no interest in gaming its add-ons are going to be regarded as bloat.

Mint or Zorin are probably the best options for Windows refugees at present. I've said before, there really should be an opening for a distro designed to install on a Windows PC by shuffling things around to make space and then use some combination of Wine, virtualisation and or mounting the user's directory on the C: drive as the home directory to use the user's old files and such applications as can't be easily replaced with FOSS alternatives.

Re: Would love to, but...

Or use a VM or dual boot on the existing Windows machine.

Re: "Statcounter says"

How representative are the most popular websites of overall website usage? If the OP is saying that any website counter is not a counter of installed base that's fair enough. A measure of installed base would need to include stuff that doesn't go near any web sites.

OTOH we have a measure that's being taken as some sort of proxy for installed base and if that makes what appears to be a significant change month-on-month it needs more than a claim of unquantifiable bias to impugn that result. It may, of course, be that the overall numbers are that statcounter has are so small that their increase isn't statistically significant. Otherwise you'd need to understand the nature of the bias sufficiently well to show that a change there is what's underlying the apparent change in the overall share.

Re: Repeat after me:

Politics of the "How would it be if we set up a regional office here?" sort.

Re: Repeat after me:

You haven't costed replacing all your W10 only PCs with W11-supporting and then replacing them again when AI-specific requirements become essential and W11 support is discontinued, just to make sure you get the message.

Re: It is the UI

Some of them just plain will: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/

Although you then have to spec it yourself which, again, isn't going to help most prospective customers.

Re: "Statcounter says"

In what way does this bias the results?

"For all we know, Linux's market share amongst PC OSes could be 10% or 0.1%"

So "we" don't know what way it biases them but "we" know it does.

"We suspect that, sooner or later, someone will hit a magic combination of some near-bulletproof immutable OS and transactional packaging system that makes Linux conclusively easier than any Microsoft offering, even for your grandparents."

I can't remember when the last of my grandparents. !960s, probably. Will a retired hair-dresser cousin-in-law aged about 90 do instead? Zorin with plain old-fashioned dpkg-based updates works perfectly well. All this transactional-stuff sounds over complicated for something that Just Works.

Although a couple of weeks ago, after she had problems with an ATM and the bank's help line (what sort of bank's help-line tells a 90-year-old to clear her cache?*) I went over to take a look. I think she simply got confused about entering 2FA data but as Firefox was on v113 I thought I'd update it just in case.

Hmmm. Zorin's software management system has 3 entries for Firefox. It has Snap and Flatpak as well as the normal repository. All this helpful stuff just confuses things. Just run apt update and apt upgrade occasionally.

KISS

* Answer: a Spanish-owned one.

OpenAI goes public with Musk emails, claiming he backed for-profit plans

They should have known that Musk emails at best only mean what he says when sending them and should not be taken to mean what he might want to say at some future time.

What a surprise! Apple found a way to deliver browser engine and app store choice

Re: I'm looking at this from the perspective of having to keep people safe.

Which makes it a Good Thing that on Android there's an alternative to the Play Store.

Re: I see the blind fanboys are out already

Aren't we fortunate here in the UK that Brexit has saved us from having the big, bad EU force a choice on the poor Apple users.

Re: re: it appears we have the less intelligent people

"The one's who think they can go AC and post made up shit?"

Don't you just hate it when ACs start to slag each other off.

Re: My phone, my life.

"Before my life was controlled by my phone"

I think I can see where your problem lies.

Re: I'm looking at this from the perspective of having to keep people safe.

In fact, let's take that a step further:

And trusting a single any corporation with all your photos, messages and historic internet use is keeping them safe is it?

Juno fly-by detects lower levels of oxygen on Europa than expected

"there seems to be the potential for us to pass through vast collections of other life particles"

Where would these have come from and how would they survive in the interstellar medium?

Re: But when life got going on earth ...

"Early life on Earth did produce O2 as a waste product"

O2 is a waste product of photosynthesis but in terms of duration I don't think it counts as particularly early. There's no good reason to expect life on another planetary body to have developed along the same lines as on Earth. There's not even a good reason to expect that something as improbable as life would even have developed on another body in the same planetary system. It's just an artefact of observational bias that makes it appear as inevitable.

Fidelity customers' financial info feared stolen in suspected ransomware attack

Re: Blames Infosys, hah!!!

"nfosys (et al) supposedly have such awful reputations in the IT industry, customers should already know better than to employ them."

It's not likely to be a decision made at IT department pay grades.

Change Healthcare attack latest: ALPHV bags $22M in Bitcoin amid affiliate drama

So the data is in the hands of the crooks who exfiltrated it and are now miffed that they didn't get paid. It raises the question of just what UnintedHealth Group got of its (alleged) ransom payment.

US and Europe try to tame surveillance capitalism

I suppose the issue can be avoided by the various businesses offering the relevant government's agencies mates' rates.

Re: An elephant in the middle

Re your last paragraph: If the principals were actually held responsible for the activities for their agents it would kill the various attempts to enable EU & UK businesses to avoid any consequences of offloading stuff to foreign, mostly US, based service providers. As things stand they claim requirements are satisfied if the injured party can claim in the US against the US provider.

I find it surprising that the obvious corollary hasn't appeared and wiped out that entire loophole: class actions in the US.

Re: Just ban tracking/targeting

The online tracking/targeting is an attempt to be charge advertisers more by claiming to make it even more accurate

FTFY Just remember, the advertising industry only sells one thing, advertising, and it only sells it to one group of people, advertisers.

Spam crusade lands charity in hot water with data watchdog

"Penny Appeal remains committed to continuous improvement in seeking to foster the highest standards of governance."

Really? Fine the trustees and they'll be very committed indeed.

Re: Imagine donating to a charity

Very simple answer to that. The trustees of a charity are responsible for its actions. Fine them.

Measuring efficiency

The Samaritans came out very badly on this sort of rating. To achieve their aims what they needed was to provide phones for volunteers to answer and rooms to locate them all in. Phones and office spaces ere apt to be classed as administration.

Measurement is hard, aspecially when you want to do it properly.

Brit chip industry wonders if UK budget will put its money where its silicon is

Re: “lack of funding to support later stage growth … to scale up and become globally competitive”

"This is essentially a managed decline."

Mangled.

Copilot pane as annoying as Clippy may pop up in Windows 11

Could it be that somehow they've put a lot of money into this and are now desperate to get the sort of usage figures for it that will stop shareholders asking questions about it? Questions that a chatbot won't be able to answer?

Class action claims Snowflake is an overhyped sales blizzard

Translation: Snowflake shareholders hand some of their money to lawyers, get nothing or some of their own money back in return.

Ahead of Super Tuesday, US elections face existential and homegrown threats

I propose a new design of polling station. It's constructed along the lines of a maze. Once inside the would-be voter is confronted with varisous misleading guides to dummy (sic) voting booths. Only the votes from those who find the genuine voting booth are counted.

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

Re: Obviously I’m missing something

With people like that your written agreement is only your ticket to get to court. It'll cost you a fortune in lawyers fees and he's just as likely to start a new company and fold the old one to wriggle out of it.

Re: Tout au contraire.

You don't actually say that, especially you don't look smug. You simply tell them you're not currently free (assuming this to be the case) but if you're able to assist in the future you will. After all, it wasn't the client management that was the problem here.

Lightweight Windows-like desktop LXQt makes leap to Qt 6 with version 2.0

Re: Can someone man'splain this to me?

"I think this was the OP's point was, can we just fix the bugs and stop mucking around with the UI?"

Be careful what you ask for. If KDE hadn't made changes to the UI we wouldn't for instance, have had multiple desktops. It may well be that you don't want or need them but I frequently find myself with windows open on all of the four I have configured and can switch between them quickly. I prefer the classic cascading menus - possibly you may prefer one of the alternatives that wouldn't be there had they not been added.

In general adding things to interfaces in general, not just UI is good. Removing things (other than bugs!) is not good.

"I wish there had been a similar fork for Qt-related things like KDE and now LXQt where you are NOT locked into a 2D FLATSO TIFKAM clone theme."

I'm a little confused about this. Are you asking for a Qt-fork so KDE isn't locked into 2D with the implication that it currently is so locked?

Running KDE5 here:

Scroll bars are definitely 3D effect on the packaged stuff such as Kate, locally compiled Qt e.g. Kalkon browser.

So are buttons on dialog boxes.

Toolbars are a bit of a compromise. Flat in appearance until you mouse-over a button at which point it becomes raised - and depressed if clicked - as 3D.

When running Gtk stuff you are in the hands of the application developer. Firefox is strictly Gtk kool-aid. Seamonkey makes the effort to do what KDE does as described about as does LibreOffice (it appears it uses a single library to provide interfaces to Gtk and Qt environments using, I think, Gtk tooling underneath that. An application developed under Lazarus, again using Gtk tooling, is full 3D toolbar.

To some extent this is due to choices made Settinfs>Appearance>Application style including Configure GNOME/GTK .

Meta kills Facebook News in the US and Australia

"That includes links posted by users."

Links or snippets? Whichever, if Meta simply redacts them the media can't complain about not getting paid. They might complain about lost traffic if simple links are redacted but it just a consequence of not having thought things out in the first place.