Posts by Doctor Syntax 40432 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
How do you go about registering a FOSS product in a country? His complaints about Nginx and Angle was that they were owned by companies which did have a geographical location. Some products are overseen by foundations and there might be an issue with where the foundation is registered but otherwise FOSS is a citizen of the world. I grant you that may irk some people and governments.
"so there isn't room for the entire department to be back on site"
Arrange for everyone to go in on the same time and hound senior manglement for more space: "I can't find a desk. Can I use your office for an hour or two?" "Bill say's he's having problems as well. Can he come and join us?". Then the killer, "I know it's hard for you with all of us in here. Why don't you work from home? we'll be OK here if you do."
Draw up and implement your set of new ideas. What happens when a new new idea emerges? The test of the quality of your design is how well it gets accommodated.
The original Unix ideas were few and flexible so that networking and GUIs could be built on top. They didn't have to be built in as first-class clients (whatever that means).
If you start out be saying "this needs to be built in and that needs to be built in as special cases" then you're making assumptions about what belongs in there. Assumptions have a habit of becoming limitations.
If the new new idea violates the assumptions, you have to take the back off the system and build in another extra case. That way lies bloat.
The original ideas of extensible simplicity have lasted for decades and been scaled from some controller based on a Pi to supercomputers. That seems a good indication that they got things right.
If there's a case for a new Unix it has to be for removing cruft and getting back to the minimalism.
"The sticking point would be libraries and support programs that came with Windows, and couldn't- at least legitimately- be run on top of some other foundation OS."
Wine can run Windows applications without Windows being present so it must be (not!) emulating them already. What I'm pondering is whether it would pick up applications already installed in Windows as if it had installed them itself. If so then, at least at first sight, there should be no difference between Windows being there and not being there except for the paths where it finds them.
On the other hand the original installation might be directing the executables to use the installed Windows libraries. S do the "libraries and support programs" come with Windows or are they part of it? There would still be a registered* copy of Windows installed. If the libraries are part of that then while they're executing Windows would be executing. And how would that differ from running the original installation in a VM, which would be an alternative way of going about it?
Much the same applies to any support programs from the original installation although there would be a greatly reduced dependency on them as the Linux installation would largely take over their roles.
* Assuming it was legit in the first place unless Microsoft were to actually cancel licences when a version goes out of support.
It's like saying that OS/2 or Windows "is A Unix" by virtue of their compatibility layer.
I was wondering about the reverse of that prompted by the end of W10.
It would be possible, if there were sufficiently free space available, for a Linux installer to compact and shrink an NTFS partition and create a new partition into which to install a bootable Linux. The user's data files could be linked in to the new home directory.
But would it be possible to retain in place any Windows applications that couldn't be substituted, run them via Wine and reassure them that they were still on the same Windows machine on which they'd been registered?
My point is that I put the watch on when I get up and it stays there, weighting the square root of damn-all on my wrist, until I go to bed - and even then it's on the bedside table. And I don't think it's had a battery changed since I got it several years ago.
But the phone is, comparatively, a big lump to carry about, quite often with a flat battery when I need it. And I locate it, assuming it still has a charge and is within earshot, not from the watch but by ringing it from one of the DECT landline extensions.
I've got a stop and alarm watch right here on my wrist - don't need to scrabble in the back of a drawer for one. I can't remember exactly what it cost. It must have been more than a tenner but it's a cheap Casio.
The media could stamp on it by simply refusing to publish such statements without further questions being answered - such as "Well you didn't that time, did you?". Or "But you said that last time and the time before, didn't you?" to serial offenders.
"Because you have something very wrong with your computer. Mine goes from powered off to Windows login screen in roughly 1 minute."
I just switched mine off and restarted. 26 seconds to login screen. A few seconds extra to KeePass prompting for its password with the full desktop displayed a second or so later, WiFi being established in the background. Admittedly no VPN to start. A minute would be about the time from switch-on to getting KeePass and email logged in.
8 × Intel® Core™ i5-1035G1 CPU @ 1.00GHz, 16Gb
"Show me a press release, sent out by the company's official channels, that makes this claim. Is there any official statement on the MS website that claims Windows 10 would be the final version ever?"
Where are the press releases or official statements contradicting the statement that one of their employees.made. Perhaps he was being over-enthusiastic. Maybe he hadn't got the message that marketing might find that concept embarrassing. Maybe it there was an intent to make it a subscription service but he hadn't been told not to blab about it. Whatever, MS seem to have beenhappy to let it stand uncontradicted when it was widely reported.
"It still is Windows 10. The 11 designation is just a marketing name."
And thus utterly cynical, especially the inflated H/W requirement.
Learning new things helps prevent things like dementia in old age and is vastly better and more interesting than wasting time having to re-learn old things because some misanthropic martetroids decide that everything has to be changed in their new version because otherwise they wouldn't have a new version to sell.
If Microsoft want to learn how to make a good start menu they should look at KDE. The menu choices can be ordered by the user into whatever sub-menus make best sense to them and their use case and there are three options for how to present them. Nobody needs to be unhappy.
1. My last W2K lives on as a VM for the rare occasions when I need something from it. In fact I had it briefly running this morning looking for an old file. It looks a lot better than any of its successors.
2. I remember the 1950s. I was there. It would take a long time to do a detailed comparison so I won't. It was a time of hopes and promises to a large extent unfulfilled despite a lot of unexpected goodies that emerged later.
3. I've not only lived to reach 70, I'll soon be leaving my 70s behind. I don't fell anything like 100.
3. If, like me, you became a jazz fan you PDQ acquired a lot of black* musical heroes
4. There's one -ism that seems to be not only acceptable but almost compulsory today and that's ageism.
* Apologies to any professional offence-takers out there. I can't be arsed to keep up with you and I doubt any of you ever listen to Louis, the Duke, the Count, Ella, Sassy or the rest. On second thoughts, no apologies.
We know what it's trained on. Everything that can be scraped uncritically from the internet and the contents of every account on cloud services run but the usual suspects. Given that will already include its own output, and increasingly so as time goes on it's clearly going to develop by eating its own dog-shit.
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