Posts by Doctor Syntax 42272 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
There are several distos which are based in Germany plus Devuan just over the border in the Netherlands. Also, as posted elsewhere, the Document Foundation (LibreOffice) and NextCloud, two components of their strategy are based in Germany as is KDE which could well be their desktop choice. There always would have been a home team.
I have calendar on SeaMonkey (same code base as Thunderbird) syncing to NextCloud and that in turn syncs to my phone. NC is also set up to sync a lot of directories. One of the folders on NC is shared with my wife so work I do for her ends up on her laptop a few seconds later. I have no use for the mail aspects of NextCloud so can't comment about that.
The number of times that I've read comments here about "our build" referring to Windows. ISTM that corporate IT departments blow the default install image (which was vendor customised anyway) to install their own and then we get comments like this about "which distro?".
The IT department decides on which distro. Fortunately they know a bit more about it that a Windows-only user or administrator who comes out with this junk. They may even have their own corporate build of it tailored to their own specific needs (in this case starting with everything defaulting to German locale and keyboard rather than US English). They may even have specific builds tailored to the needs of specific groups of users. It's called being professional.
What might have worked in simpler times would have been a franchise arrangement but these days there would be the risk of an "upgrade" that could do a bit of rummaging without involving the franchise. I suppose you could also check the source of all the upgrades....Oh, you can't; it's all closed source.
It wouldn't be surprising if, at the conclusion of a migration like this, 1. at least one person turns out to have been producing a product which wasn't needed; 2. at least one person is producing management figures which are being used but which are wrong because of a spreadsheet error.
The underlying issue here isn't "Microsoft is bad" but "Microsoft can't meet data sovereignty requirements". Presumably Microsoft has the option of proposing a solution to that, one sufficiently robust that it can't be broken by having the "don't phone home" version actually replaced in the course of a routine upgrade.
OK, the short answer. It's high level policy based on major political concerns: it's going to happen.
Longer answer.
Part 1. spreadsheets. Excel under Wine might be an answer but very likely short term while individual cases are looked at.
If they're dealing with spread-sheet experts with analytical skills doing ad hoc analysis then they're likely going to have to cross-train. Excel specifics are only going to be part of their skill set. Very likely the project is going to have LO consultants on board, preferably someone who's a contributor or who knows the contributors. If the Excel users and consultants jointly identify some showstopper in LibreOffice, get some enhancements made and incorporated upstream - this is FOSS, not some closed source unfixable stuff.
If they're just using some unchanging spreadsheets to gather data and generate reports do what should have been done anyway: use the spreadsheets as prototypes to generate programs to do the same thing. If they're just extracting data from a single database it might just be a simple report. Simplify the workflow. In any case it's not unknown for someone to sit there, producing some figures until the day they retire when it turns out they don't need to be replaced because nobody was using the data.
Part 2. Computer haters. If somebody has no aptitude for using computers then either they're in the wrong job or the job's badly structured. This would be an ongoing error which isn't the consequence of a change of systems although it might be an opportunity to fix things. If their people skills are valuable either switch them to a role which uses those without making further demands or restructure things so that somebody else can handle the IT for them. Businesses can be pretty stupid about having somebody whose talents are in X and wanting them to do Y as well irrespective of whether they have any interest or talent at Y. The inevitable result is that they spend less time doing what they're good at while wasting time on the other or they get so pissed off you lose them entirely. Been there, got the scars. But it's a red herring in this particular case.
First 3 - make them redundant.
Second 3 - move them to roles where they don't have to use computers - which ought o have been done already. If there are no such roles tell them the computer is just like the big mobile phone to which they're probably addicted. Failing that, make them redundant too.
"Our judiciary won't let defence contest expert testimony."
Since when? Over a period of 14 years or so I gave expert testimony many times and it was open to the defence to cross-examine me.
The problems I've heard of were dubious defence experts. An example would be a quality control technician making statements about comparing glass fragments based on their practice of measuring RI and not knowing that techniques existed to measure to a couple more significant figures so that what they saw as identical could be differentiated; and the prosecution not taking advice from his own experts on how to cross-examine.
"However, the judiciary themselves are not adequately testing expert testimony."
That's not the judge's role.
OTOH there may indeed be problems with rogue prosecution witnesses. The counter for that would be proper defence experts to be called to counter it.
"maths + languages first, humanities next, arts and crafts way down"
Languages not part of the humanities? And, although I'm not a mathematician it's quite clear to me that real mathematicians are creative. But even more than creative, children are curious. I very much doubt that schools are against curiosity although plenty of people outside school will be.
I'm convinced that real intelligence comes from the fact that we are physical entities interacting with the physical environment around us. We start out, newly born with millions of sensory receptors - rods and cones, taste buds, olfactory receptors, those cells in the cochlea, touch, heat, pain receptors, proprioceptors all feeding into a growing brain and spend the first months correlating those inputs to start building a mental model of the world around us, the perceived world. We have a sense of self stemming from our connection to the world.
As we refine it we can use it to understand that external world, plan and carry out our interactions with it to do and get what we need and want. Most o our vertebrate brethren do the same. That's the core of our intelligence.
What we humans have evolved is the extra capacity to communicate symbolically with language so that we can add to our model by listening or reading to others telling us about things they have encountered and we haven't and also to add more from our imagination and to reason more elaborately about our mental model. But that mental model of the environment is the core of our intelligence. The symbolic layer is just an add-on.
What ML and attempts at AGI are targetting is just that add-on layer. Without the perceived world underpinning it they're not going to get there. You and I can read a description of a room, a landscape, a person or experience, fictional or otherwise and add it to our mental model because we have seen and experienced these things directly during our training of our brains in those early years and beyond. A notional disembodied AGI can't have that connection to give a sense of self or an understanding of anything that's communicated to it. No amount of description can give it the sense of what a drink is because it's never felt the weight of the vessel and contents, never tasted it, never sensed the tempperature and never swallowed it. It is and must remain deficient in kind, not just in degree from a real intelligence.
"Not honouring the licences."
The licences don't actually require you to contribute back. What the GPL does is require you to provide the source to anyone to whom you've provided a binary* and to allow sharing of that source under the same terms on which you receive that.
Who do we find avoiding that to the maximum extent they can manage? That distinctly non-Chinese business Red Hat/IBM.
* Permissive licences don't even require that.
Let's see. If you ask it to make economic predictions it's not too bad* taking into account training information plus information about an event that happened since the training data.
Now extend that to the real world with training data available up to present. In that case the equivalent of the invasion of Ukraine is a future event that hasn't yet happened, may or may not happen and can only be taken into account if you can predict what's going to happen. So if you can predict what's going to happen in the future then the model can predict what's going to happen in the future. There must be a flaw in there somewhere.
* Ask n economists for a prediction you'll get at least n + 1 so "not too bad" is a low bar.
How come they limit the case to just Apple what about all the other "stores" ?
Let's say we have Apple store and ANOther store. We now have 3 groups of developers: 1 Apple only 2 Apple & ANOther, 3) ANOther only
So we now have, in the one trial 1 & 2 vs Apple and 2 & 3 vs ANOther. Group 2's lawyers are fighting two different adveraries at the same time. Jury are trying to keep rack of who's suing whom. 1 & 3 are sitting wondering what's going on when the adversary that's not theirs is being argued about. Add further combinatorial explosion if more stores are being sued at the same time.
No, can't imagine why it's just Apple being sued in this case.
Unless you come from the Spen valley part of the textile industry specialising in using recycled woollen fibres - not necessarily from old clothes, but also from waste generated within the textile and tailoring industries. It had the reputation of being hard-wearing but down-market.
