Posts by Doctor Syntax

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: I watched the video. He's basically describing Linux.

"GNU made substantial improvements over 40+ year old Unix, which was full of arbitrary size limitations and crashes "

Arbitrary size limits. Do you mean ulimit? Unix was designed to be used as a multiuser system. System managers might need to use it to ration limited resources. Maybe you don't remember when 1.6Gb was a big, BIG disk. It's still in Linux but there's a reason you've never seen it used. Do you mean the default 10 process limit? I remember seeing that once in 1986. Generally the stuff that was there to make it possible to run Edition 7 or the like on 3/4 Mb memory ad tiny disks faded away.

Crashes? Application core dumps - of course. That's down to the application developer. Kernel panics, not so much. The one really crashy system I remember back in 1999 was down to a dodgy memory module*. I drove a lot of Unix variants back in the day. After SCO decided** to divert their efforts into litigation instead of development Linux was the alternative to running a Unix-like environment of PC H/W. I'm sorry to say that with gimmicks like systemd GNU are working to enshittify it.

* A bit traumatic. I was installing S/W on a cliant's client's system in Italy. The client's client didn't want be to leave until we had a clear run and I was due to fly back. I think it likely that the extra S/W was pushing up the memory requirement ant it was the first time the dodgy module had come into play. Fortunately it ran once & I managed to get away. The client had to sort out the H/W later.

** I often wonder how far they were being deliberately led on by Microsoft. SCO had been a great server OS for SMBs. If it wasn't deliberate it was extremely serendipitous to accidentally get SCO to take their eye off the ball while MS moved into the server market.

Re: I watched the video. He's basically describing Linux.

"You left out the endless room of GUI toolkits…"

One of the strengths, of course.

Re: Thumbs up

"Like setting up automatic backups to my Linux servers, file-sharing with our home cloud, "

Nextcloud server in a Pi (or whatever server you're already running) and the deskop client which can be set to copy contents of selected directories automatically. The copies are versioned so if that edit accidentally deleted half the file content you can go back to the last good one. Likewise if the laptop should get hit by ransomware the last backup should still be good.

Re: If only there was an alternative OS

"Linux coud become an alternative to Windows when it starts to offer a common, standard GUI system that dosn't look designed by small children."

Classic marketing ploy. Pick the competition's feature that you're most afraid of - choice of UI - and disparage it as if it's something bad. Pick your own weakness - UI looks like it was designed by small children - and attribute it to the competition.

Completely transparent, of course, once you recognise it.

"And that's [adds] corrosive in a way that telemetry will never be."

It's more corrosive because it's more noticeable. AKA What the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Re: You want

"because us victims cannot make the change to get away for windows"

Mostly you could. But because Microsoft are skilled at frog-boiling you won't.

How bad are you going to let it get?

It's easier to not ask forgiveness because it's already too late. and hence irrelevant

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

"Ms has been able to provide solid software with MS-DOS."

And that was originally bought in.

Re: Program / Programme

"the other day and was surprised to find them talking of 'flashlights' rather than torches"

Maybe it's a regional thing or even a class thing but we used to call them "flashlights", not "torches". (Damn spill chucker wants to hyphenate it!)

Re: Program / Programme

"tires" means "exhausts"

So your car has twin tires sticking out of the back.

Re: Well, it compiles!

Mostly.

(Scripts and config files don't even need to compile.)

Google's Gemini Deep Research can now read your Gmail and rummage through Google Drive

They're quite welcome to any spam that lands on my long-abandoned gmail address. I wonder if they'll put give any work to the "companies" that will build/improve my website, build webapps, mobile apps or whatever is the fashion today.

Bank of England says JLR's cyberattack contributed to UK's unexpectedly slower GDP growth

Re: So now we know that cyberattacks cost ...

"When will it change?"

By now it should be dawning on boards and, I hope, fund managers, that insurance isn't really going to cover the reputational damage and general chaos that they've seen the Co-op, M&S & JLR experiencing. They should be asking their IT depts what they're going to do about hardening systems, building in resilience etc. (BTW have any commentards been on the receiving end of such questions?). I do fear, however, that some are going to simply reply "More Microsoft" if comments here are anything to go by.

Microsoft's data sovereignty: Now with extra sovereignty!

Re: 21th century colonialism

"But this will never happen"

Never is a long time.

Meanwhile, as TFA points out, the message is starting to get through.

Malware-pwned laptop gifts cybercriminals Nikkei's Slack

Re: There's a lot of it going around

" Put the bulk of the signed firmware on a replaceable microSD card"

Alternatively, and this might be very old-fashioned, have some form of physical write-protection for the mobo flash so that user has to enable it.

UK space sector 'lacks strategic direction,' Lords warn

"The UK is the only country to have developed an orbital-class rocket and then cancelled it."

Developing technology and cancelling it is our national speciality. I put it down to having a political class that doesn't realise that the expense comes upfront which means that the first built appears very, very expensive and they take fright.

Azure stumbles in Western Europe, Microsoft blames 'thermal event'

Did the thermal invent produce smoke?

Microsoft apologizes for not explaining cheaper no-AI M365 plans, and all it took was a government lawsuit

The missing word is "avoiding".

Re: Microsoft apologises for getting caught attempting to rip off its customers

" “In hindsight, we could have been clearer " .... but we thought we could get away with it.

When Debian won't do, Devuan 6 'Excalibur' Linux makes the grade

"In other words, rather than provide a hyperlink, the author of the page expects the reader to copy the text, work out the abbreviation for their desired architecture, edit the URL to insert the abbreviation in place of the part delimited with a dollar sign, and proceed from there."

Errm - no. Copy and paste "https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan/dists/excalibur/main/" like wot I just did, scan down the index with Mk 1 eyeball and click on the appropriate link. No editing involved.

BTW it's not directly named after King Arthur's sword. It's named after a minor planet with a name starting with "E" and a minor planet named after King Arthur's sword was chosen. Releases are named in alphabetical order.

Snap out of it: Canonical on Flatpak friction, Core Desktop, and the future of Ubuntu

Re: Just do it

It sounds as if the opacity really is your problem.

Re: All very interesting.

AFAICS it looks very much like emulating the Windows experience.

Current Linux practice is along the following lines:

libwhatever is used by a lot of executables - low level stuff such as the command line shell and the graphical shell, the command line and graphical file managers and higher level stuff such as a browser, a couple of graphics applications, an office suite and others*. Some vulnerability in it is fixed or maybe some clamoured for extra functionality is developed. The new version is placed in the repository and a user's regular update process discovers it, downloads it, either automatically or by user approval, and everything that needs it just uses it on the next invocation. It's very quick and the only things I've ever seen need a reboot are a new kernel and, on one occasion, a very low level service. In practice a few small updates might pass through every week, a larger batch of programs that work together every few weeks and a new kernel every few months.

As I understand it the immutable version of doing things is that in order to do this an entire snapshot of the core OS has to be created, installed and booted. I doubt this is going to happen just because libwhatever has been changed because it will be disruptive so it will only happen at intervals (monthly? every 2nd Tuesday?). If libwhatever has security issues the core is going to have to live with it unless an out of schedule update is issued. This becomes very Windows-like AFAICS. Maybe this is the intention - make it familiar with a lengthy, disruptive update happening every month. There's also the added detail that AIUI those higher level applications, the browsers etc, aren't going to use the libwhatever in the immutable core, they're going to have their own version in a snap, flatpak or wherever which is a bit of a lottery because they might get the newer version faster than the core if it's released more quicker** or never if the packager never gets round to it.

* In a few cases applications might have their own version for some reason and the launch process has to arrange to use it. It will be stored somewhere out of the way - an application-specific directory tree under /opt is the accepted place or /usr/local if it was locally compiled from source, Like snaps etc it might get updated on a different schedule to the main system implementation. If you're Ubuntu or whatever this suffers from NIH syndrome.

** What would be the schedule for releasing these? As and when ready as per current practice or alongside the immutable core?

Re: Just do it

It's not so much looking for a degree of customisation, more a case of not liking the growing opacity.

"people who assume you'll read the manual"

Much worse are people who won't write a manual.

Power crunch threatens to derail AI datacenter construction

Do those responsible for these projects never stop to wonder if all these delays are a hint that they're doing it wrong?

Google imagines out of this world AI - running on orbital datacenters

Re: …er, all of this on EARTH ORBIT?

"You're going to select or design components with energy- and mass-efficiency as a top priority"

You're also going to select for radiation hardness as a top priority. Is it going to be another of those triangles: energy efficiency, mass efficiency, radiation hardness, choose any two?

Re: …er, all of this on EARTH ORBIT?

"The problem is finding investors dumb enough to fund it."

The existing AI bubble seems to have no problem finding them.

Invasion of the message body snatchers! Teams flaw allowed crims to impersonate the boss

Re: Read the terms and shiver

Employers should certainly have their legal advisers read the T&Cs of anything significant irrespective of the supplier.

OTOH I wouldn't be surprised if their advisers have already signed up without reading the T&Cs.

MIT Sloan quietly shelves AI ransomware study after researcher calls BS

Too many (in)significant figures in a statistic is always a strong warning signal.

AN0M, the backdoored ‘secure’ messaging app for criminals, is still producing arrests after four years

"The AFP and FBI stopped using AN0M because it produced more evidence than they could comfortably handle. The AFP, however, still wants access to encrypted communications"

When it's solid intelligence they can't cope but they still want haystacks in which there might be needles. It's just data fetishism.

Google Cloud suspended customer's account three times, for three different reasons

Consider the size discrepancy between your own company and those you're choosing as suppliers. If they're sufficiently bigger than yours that your custom is insignificant to them then expect to receive bad service.

Gullible bots struggle to distinguish between facts and beliefs

Re: Somebody believes the "Intelligence" part?

The difference between an LLM or any other sort of alleged AI, general or otherwise, and you and I is that they cannot experience reality and we have spent years doing so. We have an internal model of the outside world that we spent a few years getting up to scratch and the rest of our lives keeping that way. It gets regularly checked against what we experience. We interact with that outside world. We know - from experience - that it can hurt us sometimes, that it can please us and that it is essential to our ongoing lives. When we look at things increasingly distant from our everyday experience we are less likely to add them accurately to our internal model although it helps if we have learned critical thinking skills.

There are three words I've used there that are critical to the difference between a human - or animal - intelligence and AI: "reality", "experience" and "life". Their only internal model is a set of relationships between words. A LLM trained in French will have different words between which to establish relationships than an English one. Monoglot English and French speakers have the same understanding of, say, a motor vehicle. A program existing in a computer has never ridden in one, driven one or shelled out hard-earned cash to buy one; it has no understanding beyond linking the outer forms, the words together. It is not further forward - more likely many steps behind - than the cargo cultists in Feynman's lecture who thought that, by clearing runways and imitating air traffic controllers, they could get planes to land and unload cargoes.

"It's going to be in your car, in your toaster, and in every streaming service,”

Not while it's me spending my money it isn't. Difficult to avoid some algorithmic crap in modern cars but at my age I've probably bought my last car so I'm unlikely to buy anything worse.

Network operator ponders building a new submarine cable – on land

And don't rule out private enterprise either.

Re: Political instability nixes it

I remember one lot nicking aluminium beer kegs, melting them down to cast ingots and then having the cheek to send them to the Industrial half of the Department of Industrial and Forensic Science for certificates of analysis.

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

Re: Why?

I can't say I've ever checked but I'd expect the temps to go away when the connection's closed so maybe no need to drop explicitly if you're worried about that. But give the temp tables clear names so you're aware that that's what you're dropping.

Re: Nah

Email? Require it in writing. Signed. Allow ink as a concession after making clear you'd have preferred blood.

VodafoneThree to offshore UK network jobs to India

Re: Isnt this what people want?

"On the other hand wasnt offshoring call centres to India tried and then they relocated back because customers didnt like it?"

Usual business cycle.

REPEAT

Cut costs, get bonus, move on.

Repair damage, regain customer base, get bonus, move on.

UNTIL THE COWS COME HOME

I've always reckoned an effective strategy would be cut advertising and marketing costs and deploy the saving into good products and customer service and just gain market share from the others' customer churn.

Linux vendors are getting into Ubuntu – and Snap

Re: Oh, look, another systemd moment

It's not so much "refusenik", more a case of "systemd isn't what I came here for".

Re: It's not snap that bothers me...

"The issue I have with Snap and Flatpack is that they are the wrong solution to a problem"

They're a solution to an already solved problem.

If you want to know how it's solved download LibreOffice from the project's download site and run the installer on it. Look at where and how it's installed. (Disclaimer - I'm only familiar with the .deb version but expect the .rpm will behave similarly.) That's been a solution for years but doesn't come with a trendy name.

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

"A non-profit is just an org that isn't allowed to post a profit"

It can make a surplus.

England's local government shake-up promises to be a massive tech headache

Re: Painful to implement, but necessary

"It's really not hard to find out who does what."

Unitary authorities make that much simpler to understand: nobody does anything.

Re: "More than 200 existing councils are likely to be abolished"

"The government's idea is that everywhere in England will move towards the unitaries and combined authorities structure."

And the consequence will be that areas with relatively little in common will be squashed together so that decisions will be taken by officials with zero local knowledge.

International Criminal Court kicks Microsoft Office to the curb

"Microsoft's admission it cannot guarantee European data sovereignty under the US Cloud Act"

Anyone who was taking notice should have realised that without needing an admission from Microsoft.

NHS left with sick PCs as suppliers resist Windows 11 treatment

Re: Not at all surprising

"other issues there that make life difficult such as the fact that the user base are all Windows people"

The users should be using the device's application UI, not the OS's.

Re: Only themselves to blame

It should also say a lot of bad things about the suppliers' ability to sell things in the future.

Re: Question is

It's a long, long time since I saw a kernel panic happen.

Re: Oh please

Largely because it's not one massive organisation. It's a series of trusts, and independent GP, dental and other practices.

AI investment is the only thing keeping the US out of recession

"OpenAI chief Sam Altman himself acknowledged the AI industry is in a bubble, but seemed relaxed about potential consequences"

Of course he's relaxed. The consequences aren't likley to include him having to repay his salary.

Re: They have a Plan B.

It never had allies, only interests.