Posts by Doctor Syntax

BOFH: Are you a druid? Legally, you have to tell me if you're a druid

Keyboard as a Subscription needed.

Google's Alphabet sticks a pin in its Loon internet broadband service

Re: Why am I not surprised?

RFC 2549 for vultures.

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

Re: Not for noobs

The installers I find particularly unfriendly are those which offer to do everything and then set up a partitioning arrangement that's not suitable for long term use, not even a separate partition for /home.

"You can get the source package and view/patch/compile it yourself"

Have you tried that?

Don't forget that many of us who adopted Linux was because it was Unixy. Why do you think we should appreciate having something non-Unixy foisted on us in such a crucial role?

Edit wars coat-trailing ignored.

Re: I wonder how old this complainant is...

A compact netinst image still isn't much use if the netinst doesn't because it won't talk to the net. I have to admit that I'm used to that so if I'm using a netinst image I take the precaution of plugging in cable.

And let there be a special curse on distros which provide an install-from-live image where the live image is all singing-dancing but only includes OSS drivers in the installation.

Re: "Drivers" me mad...

"What you should provide though is an easy link to drivers."

Of course if it's a networking device and you need the network to follow the link...

The most ridiculous thing I've found so far is a motherboard that just hangs if a DVD drive is plugged into its SATA connectors, less so if the drive is in an external USB connected housing or connected via a SATA daughter board but even then it won't work. Try installing a DVD image if the MB won't handle a DVD drive.

Re: Free means somebody is not getting paid

It depends on who you mean by complainant but I take it to be the one who just wanted to install and go. His complaint wasn't that the driver didn't exist. It did. His complaint was that the DVD with the proprietary drivers was well hidden.

If by complainant you mean someone who thought the driver should be OS you have a point but I find it difficult to see such a person as being the complainant.

Debian long since accepted shipping large, obscure blobs as start of the standard distribution when they adopted systemd. There's no reason why they shouldn't feature the maximally working version alongside one specifically labelled "Hair Shirt".

And just like that, Amazon Web Services forked Elasticsearch, Kibana. Was that part of the plan, Elastic?

"CHOOSE YOUR LICENCES CAREFULLY"

More or less what I was going to say. They should have understood the implications of the licence they used. No doubt they saw OSS as a trendy way to get into the market and maybe pick up some contributions and fixes but it had long term consequences that they should have anticipated.

As the world turns to big names in cloud and IT to get through the pandemic, IBM still manages to shrink

For the last paragraph--->

Nothing new since the microwave: Let's get those home tech inventors cooking

The kitchenware industry is notorious for a steady stream of new gadgets that get used a few times & them put in the drawer.

Technological advances are rare. It took tens of thousands of years to get from knapped flint to any form of metal and a few more thousand to get to stainless steel. Again, tens of thousands of years to get from the open fire to the gas oven. A year of lockdown isn't going to have much impact there, especially when there's good money to be made in the much simpler task of flogging new attachments to the mixer.

Judge denies Parler an injunction to force AWS to host the antisocial network for internet outcasts

Re: Another snowflake

"you are either (A) incredibly badly thought through, or (B) just a bit too thin skinned to be allowed out on your own."

You think it's Trump posting?

Re: Another snowflake

"before you make yourself look silly"

Too late.

Re: Seems like Parler don't know how private companies work

"unless the lawyers for the site find new legal arguments"

As long as they have the money their lawyers will keep finding new legal arguments.

Laptops given to British schools came preloaded with remote-access worm

Re: "We are aware of an issue with a small number of devices"

Not needed. Unless they're able to prefix every statement with that and/or "Your security is important to us." as appropriate nobody is allowed into the PR profession.

Loser Trump's last financial disclosure docs reveal Tim Cook gave him $5,999 Mac Pro, the 'first' made in Texas

Re: To understand Apple prices ...

"The unique selling point of Apple is their customers can boast that they can afford to spend silly money for ordinary tech."

The appropriate response to "Sent from my iPad" sigs is "Are you boasting, complaining or apologising?" The response to "Sent from Windows 10 Mail" is shorter, of course.

Microsoft SolarWinds analysis: Attackers hid inside Windows systems by wearing the skins of legit processes

Re: What?

If you want your machine to do as you wish why run anything more recent than, say W2K?

Windows Product Activation – or just how many numbers we could get a user to tell us down the telephone

Re: It's evil and malicious

If you don't want to pay fight the DRM then find an opensource, free or and cheaper alternative.

Re: A bit off topic

The average punter who wants to buy a PC 'cause these things are too complicated to build yourself doesn't know about the likes of you and all those here who can build them themselves.

Re: The whole activation scheme for a lot of stuff drives me nuts.

I don't think the late John Sullivan would have counted as "Yoof of today" and what he invented wrote ranged from funny to hilarious and always brilliant.

A token to him---->

Fonts?

apt-get ttf-mscorefonts-installer fonts-arkpandora

Or just install whatever fonts your business's crayon dept decided on.

Main problem with fonts - waaay too many of them.

Styles?

Set up whatever styles to match what your business's crayon dept. decided on. They're configurable.

But basically, if you're a business that finds buying Office 2019 a problem because MS made it too hard, then why would you worry about compatibility?

"as long as that hardware hash didn't change too much"

Surely the essence of a hash is that even a small change in the underlying data probably yields a big change in the hash. A small change in the hash probably signifies a large change in the data.

"This is why they make it hard to find and buy a copy of Office 2019"

Why bother? Just use LibreOfffice or OpenOffice.

With depressing predictability, FCC boss leaves office with a list of his deeds... and a giant middle finger to America

Good for him. Leaving behind a useful list of stuff to be undone.

Re: Off Topic

"Let's not discuss the recent resignation of the whole cabinet and the PM over child welfare."

Where else would even the minister responsible resign after screwing up let alone an entire government?

To plug gap left by CentOS, Red Hat amends RHEL dev subscription to allow up to 16 systems in production

The purpose of the alternative builds mentioned in the text is to minimise this effort.

Re: Meh,

Or same flavour, other builds.

This is something that usually escapes top management. And yet the same top management will insult staff's intelligence by "motivational" posters saying how important it is to keep existing customers and how hard to get new ones.

"Doesn't apply to us."

Over long US weekend, GitHub HR boss quit after firing Jewish staffer who warned Nazis were at the Capitol

Re: I'm confused

Well spotted. And, yes, it's good, plain English. It looks as if it's Sceptic who's being the snowflake here.

AnyVan confirms digital break-in, says customer names, emails and hashed passwords exposed

Re: The only way

"relying on code whose origins are indeterminate, whose accuracy he hasn't personally attempted to verify and for which no-one else is prepared to accept responsibility"

The open source code the GP mentions certainly makes the first two possible. It also makes it possible for respected 3rd parties to verify.

Proprietary code, of course, is likely to fail on all three counts.

"we have ... put additional security measures in place"

This immediately raises the question of why they weren't there in the first place.

Re: The only way

"Do we prosecute victims of burglary and accuse them of allowing it to happen?"

Nobody's blaming the victims here. The victims are those whose data was copied, not the company that was supposed to have been safeguarding them.

Re: The only way

"50% of the previous year's profits"

Any competent accountant will be able to ensure you didn't have any for the year in question.

Scottish Environment Protection Agency refuses to pay ransomware crooks over 1.2GB of stolen data

Re: Danegeld

Kipling's history wasn't too brilliant. Geld = taxation. It's the geld we never got rid of.

Just 1.2Gb? That much is likely to be laid around as duplicate copies somewhere. Did someone get their figures out be a few orders of magnitude?

The hour grows late, the enemy are at the gates... but could Intel's exiled heir apparent ride to the rescue?

Re: But there would have been no Intel success if Don Estridge had not decided to cut some corners..

Kudos to your skills but you're in a minority in a world that thinks half a dozen different sources of JavaScript is quite lightweight for a web page.

150,000 lost UK police records looking more like 400,000 as Home Office continues to blame 'human error'

Re: Always with the backups....

Yup. What was anticipated can have a pre-planned and possibly tested process working. What wasn't anticipated is where you earn your money.

Where what wasn't anticipate was the need to have somebody around to sort it out is where somebody gets to earn even more money.

Re: I heard...

Let me quote something with a little emphasis:

That is a basic principle of the English justice system (no "not proven" stuff here)

Re: Always with the backups....

"What's probably taking the time is restoring the data to a test system"

And if they don't have a DR contract by which they've tested their restore finding that system and doing the restore are going to take quite a lot of time. That's before they manually start picking the records out. And that's before they graft the records back into the live data in a way that retains consistency.

Back to the office with you: 'Perhaps 5 days is too much family time' – Workday CEO

Re: Let me fix that title for you

I rather think his idea of inspiration would be similar to that which finally inspired me out of regular employment and into freelance.

"The problem with Aneel's view and similar from other senior execs, is that it overlooks how modern work, well, works"

He probably belongs in the class of people who find it difficult to understand something when their livelihood depends on not understanding it. He's also selling to others of that class.

Re: Salary adjustments for WFH

Yup. Providing high priced accommodation addresses and VPN locations is going to be a nice little niche business.

Re: He's right

"when some of us now know there's no need for it"

And some of the "some of us" will include their shareholders who'll be looking to see savings on property costs.

Re: GUI vs CLI

I do have a 17" laptop on order to make it easier on the eyes and I suppose at a pinch I could have gone upstairs & connected a second monitor but it's pretty chilly up there. However simply flipping between multiple desktops works fine. At one point I did have three on the go but really two was enough.

"There are plenty of coding heavy companies who work remotely all the time"

Not to mention the entire open source world.

But you smoked out the recipient with a poor grasp of technical jargon.

Re: It's the other way around

e.g.Poe's law.

If the Black Death pandemic is anything to go by it could take a few centuries to sort out although things will probably happen faster this time and, in Western Europe, the plague was followed a generation or so earlier by a famine lasting several years which also caused substantial mortality. The consequence was to hasten - after some delay - restructuring of the economy including the end of feudal servitude and to lead to a long period during which population growth didn't restart as might have been expected.

"become reasonably resistant to Covid despite its mutations"

More likely because of them. Vaccines (and natural immunity) are largely targeted at the surface structures that enable the virus to gain access to cells. This should result in selection for mutations that change those structure. Mutations that substantially change the shape of those proteins are likely to be less efficient, especially if vaccines are re-engineered to track changes that make the virus more virulent.

Bye bye, said Trump admin to Huawei: You give a cheque-ie to our techies, but there's no licence to ply

What happens when Huawei retaliates by revoking the licencing of all their 5G patents?