Posts by Doctor Syntax

30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat

Didn't Google buy Android in?

Re: Linux Desktop - Already tried and failed

ITYF local politics had more to do with that.

Re: @cornetman - Cheer up!

"Microsoft didn't just vanished after Bill Gates left the company. Same thing for Apple, HP and many others"

HP has made several determined attempts...

Re: Linux on the desktop - what about on the server?

"RHCE is a course which demonstrates how to pass an exam."

This is what manglement call training.

Re: people understanding

In a word: trapped.

Re: Linux on the desktop

A few months ago I replaced a previous laptop with a new one as my daily driver. The old one have been bought with W10 but replaced with Linux. New I've shunted back in its original hard drive and reinstalled W10 from the reinstall medium.

My what a mess.

It was restored to - I think - autumn 2017. It repeatedly failed to run updates to what was effectively a virgin W10 install. And it persistently complains about a bad exe for one of the many cloud services it keeps trying to flog to me. Searching tells me that these are common afflictions and none of the advice given works for me nor, it seems, for many if not most of those who enquired in the past.

The UI is tamed a bit by unpinning every single live tile so I'm left with a menu that looks fairly sane except that it's strictly alphabetically rather than functionally organised. Even previous Windows versions were functional alhough memory is hazy as to the extent that they could be entirely customised in the way that KDE menus can be.

Updating by the expedient of downloading and installing what amounts to a rolled up service pack got over the stalled updates and left a few duplicated menu items and a few others I'd like to get rid of as well. Some can be uninstalled from the menu but others take me to the general purpose install/uninstall app of yesteryear that used to list all the installed programs so that I can use that to uninstall them - except that none of the non-unistallable programs are listed.

My what a mess. And people are prepared to pay for this.

Re: Linux is not an OS

"even the most radical GPL-Taliban want a good FPS-game from time to time"

Good to know I'm not a GPL-Taliban then because I couldn't give a stuff for games.

And it comes as a surprise to discover that an OS can't thrive on FOSS end-user applications alone. The one set of non-FOSS applications I do use - occasionally - is as much for nostalgia and familiarity from Unix days than anything else as most Linux users do actually use FOSS equivalents.

Adding AI to everything won't make sense until we can use it for anything

"the industry kind of needs it to clear out the charlatans"

History says it won't happen. At best they'll just move onto something else.

SCO v. IBM settlement deal is done, but zombie case shuffles on elsewhere

Re: "the winner has a chance to claim partial ownership of Linux"

"In fact, they tend to get all waffley when asked to produce that evidence."

Or even when asked exactly what bits are theirs.

'Apps for GNOME' site aims to improve discovery of the project's best applications

Re: "Apps for GNOME"? I feel inclined to call that worse than "Apps for Windows"...

The fact that a KDE developer responded to her shows that it's not a matter of divisiveness, more a matter of what I'd call multiplicity. I view the multiplicity of Linux DEs as a strength, not as fragility. In fact many (?all) Gnome applications seem to work on KDE; the Gnome calculator is the one sitting on my KDE task bar. But it does seem to be a solution in search of a problem given that there's an existing site for Gnome apps.

Thanks to Tim and the article for links to the KDE site, BTW.

Fix five days of server failure with this one weird trick

Re: Takes me back...

Must be my age or something. Swap L & R.

Re: Takes me back...

"I also recall being shown a very big laser printer that could eat reams of fanfold paper per minute"

The machines that printed the cheques were like at as well. And the MICR line was placed WRT the bottom LH corner, just for fun when the positioning of the print engine worked from the RH edge, requiring much wielding of a cheque gauge and micro-positioning.

Re: Power supply on the floor?

"Though I have to admit I was expecting the tale to end with everything having been replaced except the SCSI cable"

I was thinking more on the lines of the SCSI termination.

When everyone else is on vacation, it's time to whip out the tiny screwdrivers

Re: Scrap yards - the good old days

In an abandoned car next to an MoD depot? You were lucky it was an electric screwdriver, not something that just looked like one.

Re: Two observations:

Wowstick.

From Amazon: "Cordless Lithium-ion Charge"

There's the problem right there. At some point you're going to have to take it apart and then once more you're in the odd parts problem. I tell you, it's missing/extra small parts all the way down.

BTW on the subject of magnetic and LED lit gadgets there's loose screw picking up gadget. The LED shies through a little window which is built into the magnet. It picks up iron filings which cover the window and block the light. Nice idea in principle but once the it gets blocked it stays block. No way is the magnet going to release those filings.

Re: Haynes Manuals

The MGB has quite a long bonnet. Why, then, is the radiator so close to the block that it has to be removed in order to change the water pump?

Re: Haynes Manuals

In my case it brings back memories of my Subarus. Two in succession, allegedly same model as the manual but not quite.

Re: Practice makes Almost Perfect

"an increasingly geriatric BSA Bantam, ultimately stripping the engine for a gearshaft replacement"

Ours (dad's and eventually mine) were stripped and rebuilt more or less annually. We even had a small paint tin, carefully preserved, which was exactly the right size for compressing the clutch to get the cir-clip out. Dad was long-sighted and resisted getting specs for many years so never believed the rest of us could quite easily read the colours noted on the wiring diagram for the switch.

Years later, taking my MGB's head in to get the valve seats re-cut (the backfire through the carps eventually set the paper air-filter on fire, complicated by the fact my father-in-law was the passenger at the time) I noticed a bike propped up against the workshop wall. It looked familiar - a Banty - but unfamiliar. It took a little time to recognise it as one of the very early ones without a rear suspension.

"there's always a screw left over after reassembly"

This is not strictly true. The Universe conserves screws but as screws are quantum objects they don't always materialise in the place you expect. Your surplus screw is someone else's "Why are there not enough screws left?".

It's possible to argue, of course that that it's the holes which are affected - the reason you have a screw going spare is because the hole it should have fitted has reappeared in my laptop case. I'm not persuaded of this because the other consequence of this phenomenon is that the screws available for reassembly can be of correct number but not the same selection of lengths as the depths of holes. This is because the number of screws overall has been conserved but some of them have been exchanged with those from someone else's disassembled laptop.

Brit says sorry after waving around nonce patent and leaning on sites to cough up

TFA cites a blog post about 6 years earlier than the patent filing therefore obvious to someone else and made public knowledge.

Happy birthday, Linux: From a bedroom project to billions of devices in 30 years

Re: I've got a suggestion...

"How about a case-insensitive file system?"

This is just a guess but I wonder if you know that was one of many things that Linux inherited by way of being Unix-like.

It's one of those things that's part of your way of thinking. For many of us case-insensitive file systems are a strange anomoly - why would you add the extra load onto all the file handling software to say nothing of remembering that Fred, fred and FRED are all the same when quite obviously they look different?

A man spent a year in jail on a murder charge involving disputed AI evidence. Now the case has been dropped

Why do I keep thinking "perjury"?

There should certainly be some prosecutions to follow plus the civil suit of course.

Apple's bright idea for CSAM scanning could start 'persecution on a global basis' – 90+ civil rights groups

Re: Naked babies

"As will many, probably almost all, parents. It's normal and one could argue that not having such photos would be abnormal."

Based on a sample of how many?

We certainly didn't take any photos of ours like that. I'm not aware of any other parents I know having done so. Maybe it's a generational thing.

Re: There's two big angles to this

"My choice is to either accept this awful practice, or render my phone insecure and unfit for purpose."

Are you sure those are the only alternatives?

Re: Finally

AIUI the proposed system is that if there are sufficient hits TPTB are notified. Nobody in Apple gets to look. It avoids the risk of being accused of being in possession. They are passing on suspicion, not knowledge.

Re: Don’t forget

"Every image which goes into an MS Office document/note/presentation is subject to the same kind of checks because the image is uploaded to Microsoft’s cloud"

Even if the PC is off-line?

Not that I wouldn't put it past them if they got the chance. As I recall from the early days of W10 their T&Cs were artfully worded so as not to exclude them from almost anything.

Re: Naked babies

"The content warning is between child and parent,"

The announcement at https://www.apple.com/child-safety/ does indeed mention warning parents but it also says

CSAM detection will help Apple provide valuable information to law enforcement on collections of CSAM in iCloud Photos.

Re: Naked babies

Many years ago a TV newsreader became part of the news because the photo-processing company - or maybe just somebody who worked there - informed the police because of such a set of photos. This is Apple trying to reproduce that situation for the digital age.

It's inherently not secure, not because of the implementation, whatever faults it might or might not have, but because the capability itself is neutral and can be turned to any form of surveillance Apple might choose or be pressured to choose.

Brits of a certain age will remember the Gary Glitter incident. And those with any form of legitimate but confidential information on their PC would immediately have realised where not to take it for repair should that become necessary.

Re: Apple has learned a lot from China

The guilty will already have got the message. Don't buy Apple.

UK's competition regulator fires red flare over Nvidia's $40bn Arm takeover deal

Re: Far to late

"if the government might intervene when it comes time to try and get your money out, by selling an asset."

Inadvertently you've put your finger on the problem. It's investors wanting to come in and make a big capital killing. If all investors think like that why should anyone want to buy the company to get their money out? The only ways to keep playing that game is the pyramid scheme - you borrow more money, load the company up with debt and sell on to someone who'll do the same and hope that you're not the one left holding it when the debt burden makes it collapse or, alternatively, strip the assets.

The only thing that makes it worth buying successfully is take ongoing income from trading profits - but in that case the sort of investment a government should encourage is one that creates the business to do just that in the first place. It may well be that that's what they actually do want to encourage. It generates employment - always something that helps get them re-elected. It contributes to GDP. It contributes to tax income. It's just that over the years governments of all colours have just let anything worthwhile be bought out, stripped and closed down.

Re: Far to late

"Japan and the US are allies"

The Afghan government probably thought the US was an ally.

First Ultra, now Arm

Is somebody finally waking up?

LibreOffice 7.2 brings improved but still imperfect Microsoft Office compatibility

Libre Office 7.1 released for routine use

Fixed the headline for you.

Time to download it.

Re: Standards?

"And, FWIW, the feedback from ISO is that ODF, while probably the better format, has largely been left to languish."

You say that like it's a bad thing. The alternative word for "languish" is "reliable".

Re: Choices

" the licence costs are less of a problem than potential retraining costs"

Why do you think MS introduced the ribbon UI? No skin off their nose that it dumped a whole lot of retraining costs on their users but it built a wall round their product that they'd lost when they were obliged to turn their formats into a sort of open sort of standard.

Re: Does "compatibility" mean having the same issues?

"added a space at the end"

You probably didn't need to do that. Opening and re-saving can be enough.

Re: Does "compatibility" mean having the same issues?

My sister-in-law found she could no longer open a couple of Office docs. She emailed them to me. I opened them in LO, saved them back in MS format, emailed them back and she can now open them again. No updates to her Office suite that she's aware of.

Buyout of British defence supplier Ultra Electronics paused by UK.gov over competition concerns

Re: Danger of private equity takeovers

It'll probably end up like Maplin.

Microsoft slips out Windows Server 2022 with extended support for 10 years

Re: Is TPM 2.0 Required?

And wasn't W10 supposed to be the final number of Windows with everything else just upgrades?

Re: Subscription

OTOH you'll find beancounters deciding to cut subs without checking.

Microsoft, flush with cash, raises cloud office suite prices for businesses

Re: My CD-ROM copy of Office 2013 still installs and works fine

So Word isn't fully compatible with LibreOffice. Not entirely unexpected as I never found to to be fully compatible between versions of itself.

So the data centre's 'getting a little hot' – at 57°C, that's quite the understatement

"We can but hope that whatever the eventual repair was, the engineers took the opportunity to move on from just water in the DC."

Halon? Could have been even worse for Chris & colleague if not for the servers.

Eight-year-old bug in Microsoft's 64-bit VBA prompts complaints of neglect

Re: "[Microsoft felt] the 32-bit version a safer choice for most users"

But shouldn't they both just work properly?

UK's National Data Guardian warned about GP data grab being perceived as going 'under the radar'

As I posted here just recently, for the title "Guardian" to be meaningful the role must have a statutory veto and must be informed of any relevant projects whilst they're still at the planning stage. For an official to ignore this should be a sackable offence.

Senators urge US trade watchdog to look into whether Tesla may just be over-egging its Autopilot, FSD pudding

Re: I am kind of surprised...

There is, at least in theory, an existing way that needs no infrastructure on the roads themselves and that's by linking a database of speed limits to GPS. There are issues such as the GPS being sufficiently precise to distinguish between two adjacent roads with different speed limits. There are also issues such as temporary limits for road works or variable speed limits.

There are also issues of working out just what the limit is supposed to be in some areas. I'm pretty sure the road where I live is at 30mph limit. It branches, a short distance away, from a 3 mile stretch of main road with speed limit signs at each and and, like the main road it has street lighting. But it also branches somewhat further away from another stretch of main road which is clearly indicated as national speed limit and there are no speed limit signs anywhere in between those stretches of road, not even where the street lights stop (or start) depending on the direction of travel. Or stop and start again depending on the route taken through the network of lanes. If TPTB can't be bothered to sort out existing signage they're certainly not going to add more machine readable signage and, presumably, whoever drew up the database the SatNav devices use has had to guess where the exact limits are just like any other driver.

Apple didn't engage with the infosec world on CSAM scanning – so get used to a slow drip feed of revelations

Re: Notice how quite Samsung is?

"The fact that Samsung is using a Microsoft Cloud product does not make it responsible for what Microsoft does."

But they do have responsibility for their choice to use it.

Re: Not the problem

Yes. Apple. And probably a few others are salivating. Even now either Google have had something similar in the works for a good while or somebody has had a bollocking for not doing it. And then there are all the security agencies. And more.

You meant users? Of course not, but they don't count; they're the product.

If you haven't updated your ThroughTek DVR since 2018 do so now, warns Mandiant as critical vuln surfaces

The better null hypothesis for IoT devices would be to assume it's vulnerable and wait for a new item that it isn't.