Posts by Doctor Syntax

S/4HANA was once the future for SAP – but now it's in the clouds

Re: "SAP said [..] customers need to be in the cloud"

"Especially since there is no such thing as a completed SAP migration . . ."

Maybe they were worried that might actually happen.

If a business expects customers to rely on it as a base for their long term strategy they need to have a reputation for having a reputation for a consistent very long term strategy themselves.

NASA's ice-hunting cubesat lunar mission is over, thanks to a stuck valve

Reminders that space really is difficult emphasise just how good the engineering of the Voyagers etc. really is.

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

Re: They'll try

"They can't even get locale customisation right for a country like South Africa that has a case for mass adoption."

I find it difficult to believe that there are no Linux developers in South Africa who can't generate a suitable locale and push it upstream - apart from the 8 which KDE lists for me under "Formats".

Re: Windows 2025

"Something has messed with the file associations. Normal Windows 10 will open that PDF in Edge by default."

Of course something has. Probably the H/W vendor who wants their commission selling the extra application. W10 is a great selling platform.

In fact it subsequently did open in Edge. I wonder how many modes Edge offers for presentation and copying compared to a real PDF viewer.

Re: Windows 2025

And therein lies the difference between a typical Linux distro and the OS Windows. The Linux distro will provide you out of the box with a lot of stuff the bare OS will try to sell you. You don't need to buy this Windows compatible application if there's already something there with the functionality you need. Note I said I'd have to remove some stuff - it would need to look like a credibly bare cupboard.

Re: re: ""This computer is broken"

"I don't like Windows 11 but have installed it to use knowing at some point family, friends or even strangers in the village who neighbours have told them will come and ask me about it and as a free source of help."

My response would be simply "Sorry, I don't know anything about Windows 11." Firstly I know that if it's any variety of Windows there'll be too much going wrong and secondly why on Earth would I want to learn something I don't know about to help those who know even less?" As with Jake, I know that if people who are having problems with Windows move over to any suitable Linux distro they will make far fewer demands on my time asking for help.

Re: functionality

Linux is never going to be the primary OS of choice because people are told, by people who haven't used it but have themselves been told, that for the average user it is too complicated.

And yet, those of us here who have switched very non-technical people from Windows to Linux for various reasons know that those people do not find it too complicated at all, nor do they find it that different from Windows.

Re: functionality

Translation: "We don't have time to deal with any compatibility issues, so just don't go there, okay?"

I think the real translation is "We work for a cheap employer who will only employ people who 'know a bit about IT'. Windows and Office are all we know."

Re: functionality

I'm afraid she is. However having had somebody from Microsoft phone her up a good while ago (followed by her calling me) she is pretty careful.

Ideally I'd like to get her running Linux. I have a cousin in law who years back got an email apparently from someone she new (I never explored the ins and outs of that) with a rather primitive ransomware on it. All the ransomware did was to write out the encrypted versions and delete the old ones. Photorec recovered everything. In fact it recovered far too much including all the little gifs etc from the browser cache. I just repartitioned the disk, installed Zorin with the old C drive available as another partition. She's perfectly happy with that.

The only real issues since are that Thunderbird updated its address book format to sqlite without automatically migrating the data and she sometimes gets the Epson printer offline.

Re: functionality

"it's what the users know"

It's probably all the IT departments know as well.

Re: functionality

I suspect a Microsoft Reputation Manager at work

FTFY

Re: functionality

"If you don't have a recovery partition (as you wouldn't when installing from scratch), all of the various drivers and what not you need to operate things will be missing."

Even reinstalling W10 from a restore image isn't a bundle of fun either.

Re: Personal Computers were aways only a niche product

That's a pretty big niche.

I seriously doubt Microsoft care whether they're in PCs, games or the cloud so long as it's where the money is. Long term they're utterly dependent on where the market goes and even they can't steer it as much as they'd like to.

The mainstream business market has swung about between centralised on-prem, centralised off-prem (or bureaux as they used to be) and, once the technology arrived, personal. It's worth looking at some of the more recent changes and try to work out what will happen next and how Microsoft will respond.

Early PCs - 8-bit Z80 & 6502. Microsoft were into OEM BASIC interpreters (they also did a nice FORTRAN compiler for CP/M, I know because I used it). The business inroads, however, were really made with the Apple II. Microsoft tried to get into that with a plug-in Z80 board to run CP/M. What drove this stage in business would have been small business individual managerial wants or maybe needs.

The IBM PC and its descendants. Due to a bizarre sequence of events Microsoft got their foot in the door with MS-DOS. They missed the main original 8-bit opportunity but finally got the message. What drove this initially was small business and departments. In the corporate world departments who were dissatisfied with their IT departments would be able to buy a few PCs to do what corporate wasn't supplying.

The GUI. Apple had the revelation ar Parc and came out with the Mac. Microsoft followed on with Windows.

The server. A lot of manufacturers got in the act with Unix - products such as the NCR tower. PC technology then allowed other products such as Netware to come along. Microsoft first did their own Unix port, again to PC architecture but then sold it to their distributor, SCO and switched to Windows for the server. Arguably at this time SCO had the best product in the PC architecture server until the management changed to one which thought it was in the litigation business, not the S/W business and fired the foot-gun. Linux mopped up that business; the large server business on proprietary architecture has thinned out as several players dropped out. Again Microsoft lagged in both the Unix and non-Unix servers. Initially this was driven by small to medium businesses and departments of big business but it eventually allowed IT to wrest control of the PCs.

The Internet. Very famously Microsoft ignored this one passing them by and had to do an about turn when it became too big to ignore.

The cloud. Initially this again seems to have been driven by user departments unhappy with corporate IT and able to buy some capacity from their own budget to do what they wanted. Yet again Microsoft was a follower and yet again corporate IT wrestled back control.

What happens next?

If history is any guide users will be unhappy with what IT is providing by the cloud and will likely look for something back on the desktop or possible a departmental server that they can buy out of their own budget. If Microsoft are still going full tilt on trying to drag everyone into the cloud and corporate IT are keeping firm hold of the existing desktop Windows and shoving into the cloud then it's not going to be Microsoft based, at least not until Microsoft do another about turn. It could, of course, be Macs but there could be a possibility of Linux moving in there.

Re: 3 Percent now and forever IMO.

You haven't used Linux since the time of W7? But you still know all about it?

Re: No way

Before retiring I had a laptop dual boot Windows and SCO.

Re: Wunnerful was never the point

"Perhaps even, with the overt co-operation of Microsoft, as thin-client gateway machines to the MS cloud."

It's not difficult to visualise the rise of the Windowsbook, the equivalent of the Chromebook. The security-conscious version, especially for those who regularly pass through border controls, would one completely agnostic about the service it connects to, including the company VPN and a completely bland alternative, and not preserving any trace of what it connected to last.

Have you looked at the price?

Windows 2025

The discussion here has prompted me to ponder the following.

Take a KDE-based Linux. Set application style to MS Windows 9x, window decorations to Reactionary and colours to Windows2000 and plasma style to Arc Oxygen or Arc Color. This gives a passable overall appearance to W2K except for the icon set*. Now rummage round the KDE store for a W10-like icon set and install that (some of the other things suggested will also come from the store). Also rummage for some Windows-like splash screens, SDDM login screens etc - there's even one which says "Windows Starting". Tag Dolphin as Files Explorer, Kate as Notepad etc. Strip back a lot of the functionality that might give the game away that it's rather more than Windows but leave basic stuff like Okular**, Gwenview and, of course, an Office package.

Now show it to Windows users with a spiel along the lines of Microsoft deciding to bring out a new edition to celebrate the 25th anniversary of W2K and also trial a reversion to simpler times. I wonder how many would realise it wasn't Windows and how many would look on it as a distinctly better than current Windows.

* This, along with the Oxygen icon set, is essentially my desktop. It's conserved my desktop appearance from my last Windows through a couple of decades or so of Linux use.

** Linux lulls one into assuming that a desktop OS will just open a PDF on demand. Trying to open one on the W10 laptop mentioned elsewhere tries to sell me Foxit. W10 is really just a selling platform.

Re: functionality

My sister-in-law has a laptop running W7 which keeps nagging her to upgrade. Despite having a degree in physics long ago she's quite technology-timid I have a laptop which came with W10 which I'd converted to Linux only but when I retired it as the daily driver I restored W10* and set it up as dual boot. So a couple of weeks or so ago I took it along for her to look at what she might get if we ran the 7>10 upgrade. She decided against it. W10 was too unfamiliar to this W7 user.

* Always make a restore drive when you convert a Windows machine to Linux. If it develops a non-fatal H/W fault it might be best to have it running Windows when you take it back to the sop.

Re: functionality

" I spent 20 minutes trying to get it to do something then gave up."

Rather vague. What were you trying to get it to do?

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - They'll try

Since those days people have learned that there's more than one GUI - including Android on Linux.

"I don't know how it all ended"

Not well if they were on the receiving end of an audit.

Re: functionality

Use KDE. Put some Microsoft-style artwork on the splash screen. Tell the user it's W12. They might get a bit suspicious noticing that the menu layout is more logical and it's not trying to sell stuff all the time but it won't be any more unfamiliar than any new Windows version. Familiarity? How do you explain W8? How does anyone explain W8?

Re: I find your lack of evidence…. disturbing

The number of people who just run stuff on Linux on the desktop also dwarfs the number of people who like to fiddle with it.

Re: They'll try

"Why would they wish to maintain a unique bare metal operating system?"

Fear that punters would discover they neither need the cloud facilities nor the proprietary bare metal OS.

Re: functionality

"You missed my point but made it with your discussion, which is correct: it IS about functionality."

I think you missed mine.

You don't need MS Office to provide the office functionality that users want.

Let me repeat that in case you missed it.

You don't need MS Office to provide the office functionality that users want.

People are discovering this. Having paid (via their H/W purchase) for Windows which doesn't provide the functionality itself they find that Microsoft are demanding either a very expensive four-year-old product or rent to add that functionality. They then discover they can actually get the functionality they want for free elsewhere. What's the value proposition of Windows?

Re: The Wheel of Reincarnation turns

"or head in the future"

I think this could be Microsoft's head in the clouds moment.

Re: This might be a good thing...

Is this Poe's law at work?

Re: They'll try

"It's the APPS people care about"

Read your first part again. Those people using Chromebooks and Google online services are not caring about using Microsoft's apps.

The home users I know with W10 are also not paying Microsoft whatever it is a year to run Office 365, they're using one of the several alternatives.

When it comes to having to fork out money it's not APPS people care about it's FUNCTIONALITY. They're discovering they don't need MS Office to provide that functionality. By your own argument if they don't need Microsoft for the functionality they don't need it to provide the OS because those alternative apps all run on Linux as does much else. Why should their next desktop OS not be Zorin, Mint or whatever? It doesn't need to be Windows any more.

Zoom updates its legalese explicitly promising not to feed vidchats to AIs

"Zoom has insisted it never intended to give the impression"

Translation: "You weren't supposed to notice"

Cops cuff pregnant woman for carjacking after facial recog gets it wrong, again

Re: "Facial Recognition" is no worse than any other kind.

"It's a blue-collar job: they aren't lawyers or social workers: they arrest people."

Police officers will generally tell you that in reality a lot of their job is social work. I don't know if it's still the case but senior station officers would be responsible for prosecuting some offences in the magistrates' courts. They'll certainly have received some training in the law. I think you may be underestimating blue collar workers.

Having said that you have to remember that they're human like everyone else and that means that for some being offered a supposedly wonderful technique that will revolutionise their job they'll believe the hype and believe the results.

Re: We needs laws governing the use of facial recognition

"Dumb cops don't understand its limitations"

It would be interesting to see how the Detroit police's training budget compares with other forces and whether some extra money could be found for it, say from the facial recognition spending.

Scientists strangely unable to follow recipe for holy grail room-temp superconductor

"Till they do it's a bit like Schroedinger's cat"

What would you expect from a Quantum Energy Resear Centre? Maybe it does and doesn't have a mouse problem.

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

Re: "some staff are resisting"

Very likely a dead market.

Re: Accommodation on site....

It depedns. I'm sure it computes for Google.

We'd pay good money to see... oh dear, Elon Musk 'needs an MRI scan'

Is he wanting crowdfunding for this MRI scan?

Techie's quick cure for a curious conflict caused a huge headache

"the chances are still so slim"

But we all know those million to one chances happen every time.

Canada's Telus to shed 6K workers as profits plunge 61%

Re: 'Nuff said

They certainly don't sound like they're running a telecommunications business nor any other form of communication in fact.

Re: From The Department Of The Bleeding Obvious!

Even better if they're offering voluntary leaving packages. Their best staff will be those at the front of the queue.

Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons

Re: Showing my age

Is that because it's the only time they made them?

The one where your phone rings Friday lunchtime (when you're in the pub, of course) and you're told the week's invoicing has fallen over. The second week it happened, after sorting out the mess, the rest of the afternoon was spend going through the source code - 3rd party application but not quite enough source to compile provided - to find out just what they'd done to make the database engine blow its memory allocation.

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Re: Not a lift but…..

"They got some planks and laid them from the truck to the ground so about a 20 degree angle and then somehow got the rack onto these bits of wood"

We ended up doing that with a new liquid scintillation counter for the Balfast Carbon Dating Lab. The final step of delivery saw it arriving in the back of a van with no tail list. They must have used a fork lift to load it but never thought to ask how it could be unloaded.

It was about the same height as a rack, maybe a tad wider and a tad slimmer. The driver's idea was just to drop it off the back. That idea went down as if it had been dropped off the back and he went very quiet when we stripped the packing case off it and so the item. A good part of it was a complex paternoster sample handling mechanism.

Once it had been slid off the van it still had to be squeezed through a narrow door and along an only slightly less narrow passage way. Knowing the people involved I'm pretty sure it would all have been measured up before hand so no surprises about actually fitting through.

You'd think delivery firms must have had enough problems to make enquiries routine, but no, they keep doing these things.

Re: Getting stuck in a lift is no fun

The most dangerous apart from other humns.

Re: We had some

Gerard Hoffnung would have loved it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZUJLO6lMhI

Re: Lift emergency panels

Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines.

https://www.plymouthmeh.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Those-magnificent-men-LYRICS.pdf

Re: Getting stuck in a lift is no fun

Upvote for the well done. You don't want them getting up off the plate.

"Every time I have asked why they didn't just walk to the destination floor and call the lift"

And while they're walking somebody on some other floor calls the lift and finds it full of furniture when i arrives.

Big Tech's going to love India's new personal data protection bill

"the most damaging one yet in terms of the unrestricted powers it grants to the government"

HMG's hubris won't let them resist a challenge like that.

Blue Origin tells staff to catch next rocket back to their desks

"desk occupancy rates need to improve."

Translation: We can't renegotiate our leases and it's embarrassing.