Posts by Doctor Syntax

Elon Musk orders Tesla execs back to the office

Re: Time sheets

"Recordable Chargeable time is an illusion dreamt up by lawyers and consultants."

And their accountants.

IBM's self-sailing Mayflower suffers another fault in Atlantic crossing bid

Re: Its a hardware problem...

I'm not entirely sure Marketers is the exact term. Do they have any talents other than climbing corporate political hierarchies?

Re: Interesting in context...

It actually sailed from S America to Easter Island. The latter might be one of the most isolated inhabited islands but it wasn't a halfway round the world voyage. It's a very long time since I read the book but as I recall the argument was that because it was possible to construct a raft with materials and pre-Columbian technology that could sail to Easter Island then that was how it was populated ignoring the fact that its population was Polynesian.

Re: harry up. drug dealers are waiting

The Chinese think so: launching unmanned drones. https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/29/unmanned_dronecarrying_research_ship_launches

But the US doesn't like China getting US technology so IBM will have been shut out from that contract.

Re: Have you tried …

First bit easy. Second...not so much.

The original Mayflower would have been crammed with humanity. A better name for this one would have been Marie Celeste.

Researchers claim quantum device performs 9,000-year calculation in microseconds

As far as I can make out from the brief summary they performed a particular quantum experiment chosen to be very difficult to emulate numerically and predicted it would take a supercomputer 9,000 years to emulate and present the result as a triumph of quantum computing. Could they use this technique to show that a quantum computer would be better at weather forecasting than a conventional computer or than the atmosphere itself.

US ran offensive cyber ops to support Ukraine, says general

Maybe they read the old WWII slogan "Loose lips sink ships" and misunderstood it.

Quantum computing startup probed in report, securities suit

Shudder.

"the maturity (and even existence of) its quantum device,"

They'll have to open the box to find out.

Scribble to app: Microsoft's Power Apps VP talks us through 'Express design'

Re: As a developer, I'm all for this...

You might find 10 people in the lunch queue, each with something that Bob lashed up. Bring in a packed lunch instead.

One worry I'd have would be manglement saying "If I can put this together so quickly how come it takes you months to write something?".

Re: Automating everything but the logic

So basically you've automated nothing.

Until I realised that I was worried about this quote

"Before this point, you could train a form recognition model to recognize forms that ... came into an email inbox and automate processes based on the stream."

which sounded like a whole newway to implement malware. Maybe it still is but possibly not.

"Popping in screenshots of an old Visual Basic form was more successful."

I'm reminded of a job where I was asked to review a proposed development. The team working on it had bought a copy of VB so that they could mock up the interface for the design document and then implement it in something else.

"We can take care of making sure the record gets written into the database for you, but you need to then decide what happens next."

It's that something else, starting with deciding just which columns are indexed which are the primary and foreign keys, which is the tricky part.

"if you're reminded of Visual Basic or Delphi from the 1990s, you're on the right track"

So essentially we're reimplementing RAD ideas but rejecting their drag and drop GUI design parts - which were the easiest part of the task - with something that doesn't work quite as well and still leaving the user with the technically more demanding part.

Why?

Ah, I've got it. The RAD form designer looks too technical for the target audience.

Just what happens next? Do these designs, which have had the bar for technical nous lowered as far as possible, get turned over to some despairing technical team to implement?

Linux Lite 6.0: It's quite pretty, but 'lite' it is not

WPS seems to be a freemium offering. PDF editing looks interesting until you see it's not in the free veersion which is presumably the one being shipped.

Smart homes are hackable homes if not equipped with updated, supported tech

Anything equipped with the latest tech not hackable now will be next week. Its previous generation won't work because the servers have been turned off. In due course there'll be a new generation and it will have become the previous generation in its turn unless the data that's being slurped pays more than they expect to make from the next generation sales.

Salesforce staff back an end to its relationship with NRA

Re: "How do we protect our 2nd amendment & our kids at the same time? "

"crime colleagues"

That I could go along with. The more the better, just arrest the last man standing.

Re: "How do we protect our 2nd amendment & our kids at the same time? "

"We don't need to get rid of guns, we need to keep a handle on nutcases."

It's the combination of both is the problem.

Here's one idea to think about. Make it illegal to own a gun if not carrying unlimited public liability insurance for gun ownership. Require issuers of such insurance to be licensed to do so. It then becomes up to the insurers to vet their customers for nutjobness. They have a better incentive to do it properly rather than some rubber-stamping public official. The requirement for the insurer to be licensed is to prevent someone setting up a shell company which can go bankrupt if anyone makes a claim.

For avoidance of doubt the real purpose of this is not to make shooting someone a commercial transaction but to ensure that gun owners receive substantially more than a cursory check and to impose financial deterrents (the annual premium for an assault rigle might be more than the value of your house).

Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

Re: What's missing

" Is it really an worse than the subs you pay for Netflix, cable, Broadband, Mobile or any other service that is provided to you?"

Well, I don't subscribe to Neflix and cable (nor to Prime, Disney or any of the others) so that might answer that question as far as I'm concerned.

As to your last paragraph, some distros started commercial, some not and mostly they have stuck that way. To take examples RedHat is still commercial, Debian and more recently Devuan are still free but then the latter two aren't running businesses anyway.

Re: If only it were that easy...

Mint other then LDME. Zorin. Kubuntu.

Avoid the very latest H/W because there may be drivers that haven't made their way into the distro yet - usually WiFi IME - but those options will get the drivers before, say, Debian.

Other than that, if you can't get it to work, either you have very strange H/W or it really is you.

One hint - if you have the option in the install choices, go for automatic partitioning that gives you a separate /home partition.

Re: Free Software support

If family want IT support from me they need to be running Linux. It's easier.

Re: What sickens me the most...

Buy from PC Specialist (in the UK) or similar. You can order it without Windows. Oddly enough, although you're not billed for Windows it's on the disk but not activated; just blow it away.

Re: Desktop Linux in Workplaces

I'm retired so the laptop, currently a 17.5" job from PC Specialist is provided by me. NVME for system, 2Tb drive for data. OS is Devuan/KDE and the amount of stuff on the desktop is reminiscent of physical desktops in the old days (I strongly believe that an empty desk is the sign of an empty mind).

Apart from spending far too much time here I spend a lot of time on local history research. One of the requirements was for a screen that could legibly (and eyes aren't getting younger) have a PDF of some source document (there's a big collection of stuff downloaded from archive.org) on one side and a WP or spreadsheet on the other. When things get hairy there may be several workspaces in use. Several articles for the local history group website, prepared in LibreOffice. Maintain the website and deal with messages from the contacts form.

I've prepared several of our local history group's out of print books for posting online as PDFs. It gives an insight into those people who complain about lack of MS Office which is where those texts came from. The first cuts were far too large to put online. A bit of poking about in LibreOffice revealed that the "cropped" images were actually just full size images masked; one was embedded twice just to present two postage-stamp sized excerpts. Gwenview cropped them. Buildings photographed on the tilt were straightened up with Gimp. Comic Sans replaced...

Mash-ups of old maps, mostly with Gimp. Old maps tend to be confined to local borders so putting together bits of adjacent counties or townships requires some scaling, rotation and even distortion to match up. I generally use Pinta if I have to draw on maps - I'm not a good draughtsman and I find that easiest - together with a graphics tablet.

My wife runs a patchwork class. She prepares weekly hand written notes which are scanned to PDF. I photograph the work she'd prepared which usually gets a bit of tweaking with Gimp's rotate tool (patchwork squares are rarely square) and cropped in Gimp or Gwenview, put onto the cover sheet (LibreOffice) experted as PDF and the final PDF assembled with pdfunite. All the patchwork stuff is in a directory which NextCloud saves in an area which we share so she can pick it up on her laptop (also PC Specialist running Devuan/KDE) to email to the class.

And lots more including some odds & ends in Lazarus/Pascal.

There's also a tiny MSI nettop, usually on Mint, for taking into archives, etc.

Re: choose how the OS will annoy you

"Not to mention that Microsoft generally used (and familiar by my user base)."

This is, in fact, a circular argument and even then not entirely a correct one. Microsoft products become unfamiliar to your user base at frequent intervals.

Re: I now have a smooth running small server

Great straw man.

Reading through this I was thinking "What would be the ideal installer?" It should really be able to install separate a /home without getting into the whole manual creating partitions bit. Ideally it would also install under LVM - it really does make things easier.

Checking through Debian install options* I see that there is, in fact, an option to use the entire disk, entire disk with /home or entire disk with /home and LVM. On closer examination the separate /home option extends to separate /var and /tmp as well, all with automatic partitioning. The live disk offers the choice of installing alongside an existing OS and shrinking a partition to make space if need be. Maybe the hardest bit of installing Debian is navigating the choice of images to download. That and the additional labour of choosing and entering a root password as well as the initial user's.

* It's a while since I looked at anything but full manual partitioning.

Re: Linux since 2002!

"A bit too conservative for a desktop, but if you want ultimate solidity, you can't go wrong with it."

Kernels:

Debian (well, Devuan) : 5.10.

Mint : 5.4

That's a newly installed Mint. Yes, it surprised me.

"If Mint has stuffed this up (I don't use it so I'm just going by your statement) than they've done something seriously wrong."

Allegedly it works, Maybe it didn't like being a KDE box! For Zorin reinstall seems to be standard.

Re: choose how the OS will annoy you

And yet if their vendor changes the way those apps work they'll just get on with re-learning them.

OK, here's a suggestion.

Take this list: Mint, Zorin, Kubuntu. Try running each as a "live disk", i.e. running from a DVD, thumb drive or SD card. If you don't like any of these options try some of the other Ubuntu variants or MX, Mandriva or whatever. Try all 3 Mint edistions, Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce.

You can download isos of each of them. I know from recent personal experience the first two offer live disk functionality and have no reason to doubt Kubuntu does. Unless you're looking to install onto something ancient you should take the 64 bit option.

Burn each one in turn to whatever drive suits you and your device. There will be enough instructions on the net as o how to do this under the OS you're currently using.

Boot from the drive and select live if it offers live and install options (Zorin offers a choice, Mint boots to a live session with install as an option from that). Running like this will be slower than running from a real install; for one thing you'll probably be running from a compressed image of the real OS and/or an in-memory image which will cut down on the available memory.

Get to know the S/W. Find out how to connect to your network. There'll be introductory videos online to suggest things you might try. Find out if you can tweak any settings to your liking.

Decide which one you get on with best. Only you can decide that for yourself, I can't do it for you, nobody here can. Install that.

You're right but most of the 'currently popular' no-brainer distros favour the Gnome camp - in practice Xfce, Cinnamon or Mate. However you can just install KDE afterwards.

Re: "Ubuntu is an ancient African word that means I can't configure Debian.*"

I don't know. Why haven't you seen this before?

Re: Now Do an Article About the Top Ten Linux Apps

But...but...but you can't buy a subscription to those.

Re: My 1st attempt

"medium sized HD for Home and the big HD for general stuff"

Just curious - what sort of stuff goes under the category of "general stuff" as opposed to /home?

Re: "overly cautious approaches to updates and upgrades"

"so that I can understand what friends are saying when they send an email containing a new emoji."

I would take the view that if they need Unicode emojis they're probably not saying anything worth understanding.

Re: Humorously Scare People Away

"Linux is for people who like to break things."

As opposed to people who want things broken for them and therefore choose Windows?

No thanks. I want an OS that enables me to do things without breakage and that's Linux.

"ChromeOS excluded. All our older family members should run ChromeOS on ChromeBooks so that nothing ever breaks."

If all you want to do is use somebody else's computer via a browser, that's fine to do a limited number of things. However as one of the older family members that wouldn't suit me (neither does your blatent ageism). Self & wife run Devuan (an old MSI is on Mint + KDE). A couple of cousins-in-law are on Zorin.

Rather than an "interesting" system, Popl_OS I'd have included Zorin.

One thing about Mint and Zorin (maybe also Ubuntu but it's a long time since I looked at that) is that both really need a reinstall to update from one major version number to another so it's best to install with a separate /home partition. I wish this was the default install option.

By contrast IME Debian and Devuan have succeeded in making major version upgrade in place work for some time now. It does require manual juggling of repositories however.

Distrobox 1.3.0: Run (pretty much) any Linux distro under almost any other

Re: Multiple distros

"Consider changing the way you work, and use one. You will save yourself duplication of effort."

Different products for different use cases.

Devuan for most family laptops.

Devuan also for the NextCloud Pi,

Mythbuntu for the MythTV box.

OSMC/Kodi for the Pis bolted on the back of the TVs.

Mint for the old laptop for which full-size Devuan is getting too big.

Zorin for cousins and anyone else moving from Windows.

Android for the phone.

One size does not fit all.

Qualcomm among queue of suitors chasing a stake in Arm

Given the position of Arm in the industry control by any one business or any consortium in the industry would be problematic. I'd think it would face regulatory scrutiny in the same way that the proposed sale to Nvidia did.

Re: No foresight required

So unprofitable, according to TFA, that if it were floated in London it would only be the 9th biggest.

Supermicro CEO would like it if you could all build new, greener datacenters

Supermicro CEO would like it if you could all build new, greener datacenters

I think that's what he actually meant.

Fusion won't avert need for climate change 'sacrifice', says nuclear energy expert

Beware of false dichotomy.

Re: Fusion quite possibly will never work but there are alternatives

"The current government is mostly blind to storage and incentivising it, because in a free market, storage reduces the ability of wholesalers to profiteer off price spikes."

Governments are largely blind to anything that takes longer than the life of a Parliament.

Re: Fusion quite possibly will never work but there are alternatives

The only viable places for that "at a single node" in the UK would be a Severn barrage

A Severn barrage would have adverse environmental impact.

Zero-day vuln in Microsoft Office: 'Follina' will work even when macros are disabled

Somebody publicised this on before notifying MS or possibly after notifying them but before it was patched? Or have I misunderstood?

"Sorry but in which reality is it a good idea"

In Microsoft's obviously.

Keeping your head as an entire database goes pear-shaped

Re: What could go wrong?

"My home backups take place ad hoc, since the backup server doesn't run 24/7. I power up the latter and run the script when I think of it."

I recommend a Pi, a large USB drive and NextCloud with the NC client software set up to sync all the directories where you might put things. The server has an area shared with SWMBO so that when I put together her class notes PDFs she can see them to email out to the class.

I still recommend backing up your /home partition or whatever other location your OS keeps your data on before doing anything drastic.

VMware customers have watched Broadcom's acquisitions and don't like what they see

Re: EMC, Dell and Broadcom - one of these does not go with the rest

"Oh well, someone else will come along and create a new virtual management landscape. Some day."

Fairly soon, I'd guess. There'll be a good few ex VMware developers on the job market. It's a pity that it corresponds with a downturn in tech share prices so it might be harder to get investment. However they can point to a burgeoning POBB market: Pissed Off By Broadcom.

Broadcom's stated strategy ignores most VMware customers

Re: But it's a winning strategy.

The IT departments might also have ideas and those might not align in the long term.

From an investment PoV I can see the attraction of a business that simply turns in regular income without too much fuss - I'm a pensioner after all. But for a reliable income I'd want that business to be able to be reliable in the long term and in a tech environment the risk of losing place must be considerable.

They're going to cut down on R&D. What good news to competitors. Not only do they now have a chance to leap-frog the market leader they have access to market-leader's ex-staff who might have a few ideas they weren't able to follow up. Some of those ex-staff might be even have been senior staff pissed off at seeing their budgets cut.

Also those 600 customers aren't in a vacuum. There will be other customers. potentially equivalent to those 600 they're ignoring which is a loss of profits in itself. They'll be going to competitors. Then a senior management at one of the 600 leaves and his replacement comes from outside that magic 600. The products he's familiar with are different and they'll be what he gradually moves his department to. Suddenly the business whose products are those you'd never be fired for buying becomes one that's circling the drain. Does it sound familiar?

Re: But it's a winning strategy.

Why would the profits be rising? OK, they make a one off cut of costs. Profits rise as a corresponding one-off. Then they don't. They've defined their market and are limiting any revenue increases to what that market wants to buy.

I suppose from top management's PoV it's Phase 1 of what will be a good strategy if they can pull it off. Phase 2, of course, is to become heroes a second time around by breaking out of the corner they deliberately painted themselves into with Phase 1.