Posts by Doctor Syntax

The Land Before Linux: Let's talk about the Unix desktops

I'm not sure who you're replying to as I said FlatPak & Snap were solutions to a problem that didn't exist.

However let's consider your first two questions.

Firstly the whole idea of both those systems is that the basic package, Flatpak or Snap is to provide a set of prerequisite libraries for the applications packaged for those platforms. I'd expect any application that requires any additional libraries to have them included in the application package itself.

So we then have to ask can the base FlatPak and/or Snap packages be installed without manually downloading any pre-requisites. The packaging approach in both the RH and Debian based worlds has been for the system to automatically identify any addition packages in their repositories and include those, including pre-requisites of the pre-requisites. So let's see how I would do that on Devuan (which in practice means Debian for snything not systemd related) with the KDE desktop:

I can click to open my main KDE menu, select and click Synaptic, click Search, enter Flatpak and be presented with a list of Flatpak related options (that includes stuff for builders as well as installers, how many of your preferred non-twiddly options provide that), mark it for installation see a couple of required packages needed, click on Apply and have Flatpak and the prerequisites installed all without any use of terminals - should I so desire. I can do the same for Snap. No command line in sight.

One thing that might be slightly different from Windows, and, indeed, Ubuntu, is that on opening Synaptic I'm prompted for a root password. This is because Debian, like many Linux distros, follows Unix in being in principle a multi-user system and has appropriate security built in. Ubuntu differs in that it would request the user's own password as some measure of security. But even in Windows the system provides you with a warning dialog and asks you to click to approve, again as a sort of security measure. (I don't know what macOS does in this respect).

So in Debian/Devuan-land the answers to your first two questions is manifestly YES:

I doubt that things are essentially different in the RH/Suse world to what I've described above and I'm quite sure they're not different in the Ubuntu world. Again I would expect the answers there to be manifestly YES.

You can indeed go through the rigmarole of installing stuff from the command line. You may have read installation instructions on various how-to sites but for things which are in the big distro's voluminous repositories you don't have to.

The fact that you aren't aware of this makes it glaringly obvious that if you have any experience at all of the Linux world it must be a couple of decades out of date. It's always easy to spot those whose professed knowledge of such things is based on reading comments of others who are similarly out of touch.

You may well know what you're talking about for Windows and/or Mac. For Linux you don't.

Re: Standards

Thanks, bazza. That raises the possibility of a Mil-Std for distros to meet, including SysV Init and X-Open with RedHat/IBM locking themselves out of it. Lovely!

Re: No, FreeBSD lost out due to the legal issues, not the GPL

"No-one likes doing free work for other companies to take."

So no-one developed BSD? Or did somebody develop it and then have an "Oh shit!" moment when they got round to reading the licence? Or is it possible that those developing BSD knew exactly what the licence implied and were not only OK with the implications but welcomed them? Should they have gone to some random A/C on the internet for instruction on what licence they should have used?

Re: Proprietary

There's Linus's kernel, then there are the various LTS kernels which are managed by Greg K-H. Then there are the kernels which might or night not have additional tweaks. And, as I pointed out, your own kernel if you want one. But where is the non-MS Windows kernel?

I've pointed out elsewhere that the maintainer system which FOSS projects have adapted is a good solution to the problem posed in TMMM of how to coordinate multiple developers while maintaining clarity of vision. It doesn't put the maintainer in the position of a proprietor because anyone can fork it and become a maintainer without reference to the original maintainer or anyone else. It's an important aspect. Let's not obscure that, even tongue in cheek.

Re: Flatpak and Disk Space

" the packages you want to download are current in Flathub and literally years out of date from the distro"

If the packages in the distro being old upsets you, pick a different distro.

Re: Proprietary

You can download the entire source code of the Linux kernel. You can tweak any bit of it you think needs tweaking to make your very own version, not Linus's, not anyone else's. Yours. You can compile your tweaked version (assuming it's still syntactically correct after your tweaks). When/if you've compiled it you can run in (assuming your tweaks didn't make it crash).

Try to repeat that for the Windows kernel.

Now do you understand what proprietary means?

SCO on the laptop was my choice partly because I could run development versions of Informix products on it I could support clients running Informix on SCO servers. I never met Interactive as a desktop product but as Onix it provided my first Unix server; I believe they also ported the original Aix.

But let's look at "Does that [the Unix wars and need to compile multiple versions of applications*] sound familiar? That kind of thing is still a problem for the Linux desktop, and it's why I'm a big fan of Linux containerized desktop applications, such as Red Hat's Flatpak and Canonical's Snap."

Go and look at the download page for LibreOffice. At any time LO offers two versions for any platform, the leading edge and trailing edge versions. Check either of them. What options are offered for each version? For Linux there's 64-bit RPM and Deb. For Windows there's 64 and 32 bit. For Mac there's Intel and Apple silicon. That's right, there are no more versions offered for Linux than for Windows or Mac. Why is Linux considered to present more of a problem?

Now let's look at another staple on my desktop, Seamonkey. We have a choice of 64 and 32 bit Linux, 64 & 32 bit Windows and just x64 Mac with a choice of languages (it looks like macOS is the difficult one here, not Linux). They've even removed the RPM vs Deb choice because all that has to be done (and it's all the LO options automate for you) is copy the download over to /opt and extract it. The same method has been used for years for installing non-distro applications. What Flatpak and Snap are ostensibly solving is a non-problem, something that's never been a problem, a straw man. What they are very clearly doing is creating their own little walled gardens. What sounds familiar about them is that they're reviving the Unix wars for exactly the same reason the original wars were conducted - to conquer territory.

* In part the need to recompile was driven by multiple H/W architectures: DEC, HP, IBM, Intel, MIPS, SPARC, Zilog and various others. The only H/W choice at present is between 64 and, where it survives, 32 bit Intel** and Apple.

** And that itself is really an OS rather than a H/W choice.

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

Re: Not sure his plans to fix it are realistic

"Dorothy Parker's offering when challenged to use horticulture in a sentence"

You learn something here every day. That was today's. Thanks.

Re: Does old Cory know what he's talking about?

Microsoft of Google. What a choice.

Re: Eternal Growth

Rapidly growing companies may not turn a profit for years but are valued for their potential when they stop growing. I'd expect anyone with a handle of Big_Boomer to have reached a point in life where continuing profits are very desirable as they pay the pension. The problem shareholders are the activists who want to take a short-term, damaging profit and get out.

Re: It's everywhere

On the whole things get better if there's a profit in it for someone and stay better only if the profits continue to grow or if regulation keeps them better. The nature of things is that growth can't be indefinite so at some point profits will only continue to grow by cutting costs and letting standards slip. That's were regulation comes in to protect things. A saner world, which would need much less regulation, would be one where companies could be valued by their prospects for growth or their ability to earn steady profits and expected to move from one to the other.

Re: It's everywhere

"Fish have returned to rivers that were basically open sewers less than 40 years ago."

It will need some pressure to maintain that and stop enshittification literally returning.

Re: Deliberation

I can't remember Altavista being that bad at all.

So we started out with a few big incumbents. They had controlled innovation to take place where they chose. That left them vulnerable so disruption. The disruptors came along and now they have become incumbents. They are now controlling innovation to take place where they choose. What does history suggest happens next?

Re: Root Cause

"How to fix it? Dunno."

Better education about the fact that exponential growth and the early stages of sigmoidal growth are indistinguishable but the first is a construct of pure mathematics and the second is all that reality can provide. Learn to be content when you reach the top of the S.

Re: Bog Zech?????

"All too often, once they taste the power that they have they devolve into an organization whose main aim is to increase the power and wealth of their leaders, while demanding ever larger pay packets for ever less work for their dues-paying members"

I think they come to regard the second part as optional if not an encumbrance to pursuing the first. That at least was my experience.

AI is changing search, for better or for worse

This might be a revolutionary idea but how about a search engine that doesn't try to double-guess what the searcher wants but just implements the search, respecting any logical operators such as "and", "not", etc? One that just returns valid results, including nothing when nothing is the correct answer? And doesn't push sponsored results? And isn't easily gamed? One that doesn't prioritise hotels and estate agents' sites when asked about a geographical location?

Elon Musk's brain-computer interface outfit Neuralink tests its tech on a human

Re: I notice he's not put it in his own brain.

But a thin skin.

No heroic leading from the front like Barry Marshall? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall )

Microsoft's vision for the future of work is you trusting Redmond to get AI right

As I read this, if you run a business and buy into the Microsoft Kool-Aid you'll be letting Microsoft tell you how to run your business. In whose interestes do you think it will be run?

Re: " the future of work after miscreants use AI to publish garbage"

"But the greatest hazard we face is decline of human capacities to recognise garbage as garbage as reliance on the unreliable becomes automatic."

AFAIKS social media have already made great strides in achieving this before LLMs came into the picture.

Leaked email: Unit4 ERP system leaves some school staff with 'nil pay'

Spokespeak translation

The Council has apologized for "any inconvenience to employees and schools."

apologized: couldn't help acknowledging it happened

inconvenience: the complete havoc we wreaked

Competition is decreasing in enterprise IT – and you’ll be poorer and dumber for it

Re: IT and Services both....

7 and 8 can be no-ops. Target is just as likely to be public sector.

"But with on-prem enterprise IT now a shrinking market, investors and innovators alike will be wary."

It's only a shrinking market until customers realise they might be better off on-prem. What's described here is not dissimilar to the days of mainframe dominance. Those days were ripe for disruption which happened when PCs were invented. Now we don't even need the invention step, the PCs are already here.

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

Re: Why is toplevel query to "zghjccbob3n0"?

As generally applicable a statement as I've ever come across.

Re: .woosh

The packets would get sent but never received.

GPS interference now a major flight safety concern for airline industry

Nobody suggested a few missiles locked onto the spoof/jammers?

Re: Is it naive to suggest ...

Navigating the dronw could get tricky.

Re: Any mention of GPS spoofing .....

But how do you know they're genuine OS maps?

X hiring 100 content cops in bid to tame Wild West of online safety

How many original moderators are these 100 replacing?

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

There was the thing about depending on their filling to have buffers flush frequently. And then memory got cheaper and bigger and consequently so did buffers ... I believe the quote was "What moron put that in there?"

Re: If the didn't insist on sticking with a monolithic kernel they wouldn't have these arguments...

Having a lot of stuff in modules, loaded as needed, achieves a lot of what you're thinking of. But even with a microkernel you still need the bits to talk with each other and present an agreed interface to userland - even if your drivers are in userland. AFAIKS this is what the argument is about here and presumably microkernels have the same scope for arguments.

Re: Here’s a bigger issue….

"What if this “emperor” jackass gets run over by a truck one day? What then?"

AFAIK that's all agreed, Greg steps up.

In the meantime, if you think he's a jackass, try to outsmart him. Fork your own kernel and see how many contributors you can get.

Re: Here’s a bigger issue….

I fear that might be a whoosh.

Re: Linus being shouty is not really news

"I also stand by my comment that shouting in the workplace is completely unprofessional and counterproductive."

The situation is not a workplace as you understand it. You might, in a normal workplace, take the person concerned aside and have a quiet word. In the context of Linux kernel development stuff happens on the mailing list under public scrutiny. The equivalent to your quiet word in private would be to email outside the mailing list.

Once that starts it's likely to be repeated next time a similar circumstance comes up. And again. What now has happened to development on the mailing list under public scrutiny?

Re: One of these virtual ones

Thanks.

Re: Linus being shouty is not really news

"Linus should reconsider the value he places on those unpaid volunteers."

Someone who works for Google is unlikely to be an unpaid volunteer. Most kernel contributions come from companies who want something in the kernel for their own purposes in the first place. Although such contributors are such as employees of someone none of them are Linus's employees, nor is he their line manager. As a maintainer he has no ultimate sanction except to insist that stuff he doesn't think belongs is either fixed to fit or kept out. Very occasionally - and it always was AFAIK, very occasionally, that is going ot lead to a heated situation with someone who won't back down.

OTOH, what's happening with inodes?

The real significance of Apple's Macintosh

Reading some of the linked stories it's amazing that the Mac survived Jobs' interference. No wonder it took them a couple of revisions to get it useable.

The pen is mightier than the keyboard for turbocharging your noggin

Re: Connectivity

This is modern academia. Getting the paper out is what matters. Evidence is whatever you can scrape together.

Re: Why aren't you taking notes?

"Reading it back later, it wouldn't be retained in the same way either."

Even if the scrawl could be read - which in my case it usually couldn't.

If you use AI to teach you how to code, remember you still need to think for yourself

Perhaps it was easier learning programming in Fortran. OTOH it didn't mind if you introduced a new variable halfway through the program with a small typing error...

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

"Around 25% of people are over sensitive to bitter ...

Also roughly 25% of people are under sensitive to bitter ..."

That''s normal distributions, for you.

As to sprouts, plant breeding has made great strides over the years. They're not like they used to be when I hated them.

I think I can spot two problems in your experimental method at step 3. First you're adding milk. This ruins it. Secondly you mention weird floaty brown stuff. This indicates you're using hard water. If you have the misfortune to be in a hard water area you should try a water softener although this may wll put sodium ions into the tea anyway.

As to Franci's argument for salt, it rests on the assumption that the bitter receptors need to be blocked. Why?

Apple redecorates its iPhone prison to appease Europe

While the article mostly mentions the EU or European Union ot also, at one point, just says Europe as does the earlier linked article. So just what is the scope of these changes Apple is making? Do they just apply within the EU or also to other parts of Europe? Has Brexit once again protected UK iFans from the dangers unleashed across the Channel by those dastardly EU bureaucrats?

TSMC finds its green chips are highly sought after... the edible ones

Re: Where do you get the newspaper?

That's why they no longer taste like they used to. Just like everything else.

Snow day in corporate world thanks to another frustrating Microsoft Teams outage

This isn't just Cloud, it's MS Cloud.

As NSA buys up Americans' browser records, Uncle Sam is asked to simply knock it off

The problem isn't that it can be bought with or without a record. The problem isn't even that it's for sale. The problem is that it exists.

What is Model Collapse and how to avoid it

Re: Already the case ?

Maybe not but it's already leaning a bit.

"if you then take all of this and you train a model on top of ... all of this distribution of data that exists out there that humans have produced ... including facts as themselves – and then you ask a model to model the whole thing and start generating data – which is statistically indistinguishable from this distribution of data – the model inherently is going to make mistakes.

And it always will make mistakes. It's infeasible to assume that in some hypothetical future, we'll build perfect models. It's impossible. "

But let's carry on anyway because we can make money out of it.

(Somewhat abridged and my emphasis.)

Guess the company: Takes your DNA, blames you when criminals steal it, can’t spot a cyberattack for 5 months

It's the old trade-off between convenience and security. In reality, of course, it's more a matter of trading short-term inconvenience for considerably worse long-term inconvenience.

The best simple solution for the individual is to at least use a password manager to generate per-site complex passwords. Even better is to double it up with having generating individual email addresses for each site as well. If the site's won't protect you against password-stuffing you just have to protect yourself.