Posts by Doctor Syntax

Privacy activist Max Schrems claims Google Advertising ID on Android is unlawful, files complaint in France

Personally, I don't trust banks trusting a mobile OS.

Re: Worth noting

There's an entirely different way of looking at this.

An OS is simply a part of a computing device. Without one the device is incomplete. A vendor can develop their own, buy it in or, as a middle way, develop one in collaboration with other vendors. Developing their own was, of course, the original way of doing things.

The OS can be supplied to the purchaser by various means. It could be licences as a one-off payment as part of the original package. It could be leased. It could be a mixture of initial payment with an optional support contract. It could be ad-supported. And, of course, the collaborative development approach* has enabled the free download of Linux and the BSDs inter alia.

It would have been feasible for smartphone manufacturers to have got together to develop a Linux distro which could have been provided to their customers as part of the one-off payment for the device. However Google has managed to divide and conquer them with its own Linux distro at the ongoing expense to their customers of eternal slurping.

*If you look carefully you'll find that H/W makers such as Intel contribute a lot of Linux development so in fact one-off payment as part of the the H/W applies even if you run some other OS. We Linux users thank you Windows users for your contributions.

Re: "We may see a market for paid mobile OSes start to develop."

How about we make that paying for a specific service such as email? In that case, yes. I pay for a domain and for someone to provide an email service for that domain. It gives me the freedom to choose not to use an ISP email address and hence to change ISP if I wish and also freedom from having my activity tracked by "free" email providers.

I need to have a gmail address as the system ID for my Android phone. It's actually a garbage address with no meaningful personal ID attached - and now Google seem to want me to provide its profile with a date of birth on "legal" grounds. The legality of that demand seems to be negative under GDPR.

Re: That's what you get when software has to cost nothing

"an old spare tower PC I had at the time, I ended up with a very expensive doorstop"

Almost by definition something that's old and spare is no longer expensive as you'd already written off its value. And if you'd kept the Windows distribution disk (or did you transfer the licence to another machine) you'd have been able to reinstall it.

Re: That's what you get when software has to cost nothing

"They are just people who need a tool to accomplish a job and use the best one they can find or afford."

I seem to spend a lot of time these days putting together various PDFs including the weekly one for my wife's patchwork group* and the more occasional but bigger ones from our history group's out of print books**. I've no idea what Windows & Mac software would be would do or cost but in all cases final assembly is done by the simple pdfunite, image manipulation by Gwenview, Gimp, Pinta and Kolorpaint as required, OCR of scanned pages*** with ocrmypdf****. Vi is the tool of preferences for sorting out the OCR artefacts although sed would be an alternative. QGIS handles occasional mapping work. LibreOffice, of course does the word processing and spreadsheets and conversion to PDF. I seriously doubt that I could find a more useful set of tools for any amount of money whether I could afford it or not.

* SWMBO does her illustrated notes by hand, rather like that old book on BASIC, I do the photography. NextCloud syncs the results between our laptops, both of course, running Linux.

** The PDFs produced for the printers with whatever tools were used there are far too big. I discovered that Word lies when it "crops" images. The .docs were bloated by masked by uncropped images, in one case multiple copies. From LibreOffice it was a case of Edit with external program using Gwenview to crop and reduce the resolution.

*** The scanner on my Brother AIO saves PDFs to an ancient Buffalo NAS which I assume runs an ancient Linux, otherwise I'd point it at the Pi running NextCloud on a more recent Linux.

****The inevitable OCR layout curdling resulting from the image not being precisely aligned for scanning is dealt with by a tool I knocked up years ago using Lazarus to deal with the same problem in downloads from archive.org. I could have used Delphi for that. I last used Delphi about the same time as I last used MS Office - about 14 or 15 years ago.

Re: That's what you get when software has to cost nothing

"Tell, what I am missing out at?"

All the BSODs. Surely you miss those (like a hole in the head).

Re: That's what you get when software has to cost nothing

You don't get the phone that runs Android for free. The phones might cost a bit more without the Google contribution but the underlying co-operative development model of Linux would still minimise that.

UK reseller sues Microsoft for £270m in damages claiming prohibitive contracts choke off surplus Office licence supplies

Somehow I can't work up much sympathy about someone not being able to make enough money out of selling Office licences.

Greenland's elections just bolstered China's tech world domination plan

Re: Nothing rare about rare earths

Wine. Mmm.

"But keeping the chinese out of the loop would probably be a good idea."

I don't doubt they'd want to keep the US out as well.

The consequence of not mining something today is that it's still there to be mined tomorrow.

DoorDash delivery drivers try to manipulate the food biz's payment algorithm to earn a living wage in gig economy

Re: Workers, unite!

The C19th introduced the large scale waged economy, replacing the self-employment industrial* economy of previous centuries.

* Agriculture was a different matter.

Re: Pimping 2.0

"traditional employment models"

It depends on what you mean by "traditional".

A tradition hereabouts was that of the domestic textile industry which was essentially that of self-employment. In fact my father was the only one I can trace in my male line who spent his entire working life in what you probably consider a traditional employment model.

Ex-Geeks staff lose legal bid to claw back withheld training costs from final paycheques

I wonder if Geeks Ltd employs many experienced staff who didn't have to pay for training.

British gambling giant Betfred told to pay stiffed winner £1.7m jackpot after claiming 'software problem'

I suppose rigorous testing was dismissed as an unnecessary expense.

Cybercrooks targeting UK organisations started 2020 strong only for attacks to wither away by Christmas

Maybe they'd made their annual quota early.

Are these numbers of all attacks or just the ones that succeeded? If the latter it could be that at last some businesses are starting to take security seriously.

Yahoo! Answers! will! be! wiped! from! the! internet! next! month!

Re: Acronym

You forgot to ! the !s.

Re: "since it was getting less and less eyeballs"

It helped if you squinted at the answers.

IBM creates a COBOL compiler – for Linux on x86

Re: COBOL

I once got a handed a system to work on of which the C component was obviously somebody's "My first C program". "Somebody" was the boss and he'd been a COBOL programmer. He'd discovered macros and introduced a few - MOVE was one - to make it a bit more COBOL like. As I worked on it I realised that some of the code I needed to modify was wrapped up in some of the instances of the macros so eventually (fairly quickly, in fact) I just ran the whole thing through cpp. This was actually the distant 2nd or, as I discovered some months later, 3rd biggest problem that the system had.

LG Electronics finally gives up cellphone business

Re: Damn

"Have had it for four or five years."

That's LG's problem - people forgetting they're supposed to keep sending their phones for landfill.

Their 'next job could be in cyber': UK Cyber Security Council launches itself by pointing world+dog to domain it doesn't own

Re: Why?

"If the answer to the above is yes then can someone please tell me (us!) what the reason is?"

Because no govt dept. wants to be left without one.

Re: ballet dancers

They spent too much time at the barre.

"Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport"

A good example of why I prefer to leave the second comma out of their name.

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

Re: Universal Ergonomics

I usually explain that they're specially designed to be equally incomprehensible in all languages.

Re: (Can't...stop...the... voices....)

NextCloud on a Pi as the NAS. Nextcloud client on the laptop just has a look round on start-up, syncs if it finds a network with the server on it, shrugs & waits until next time if it doesn't. As the server has a shared folder sor stuff that I have to work on for SWMBO it quietly syncs the two laptops.

Re: (Can't...stop...the... voices....)

"I am NOT spending the rest of my life being blamed for the fact that she lost all of her photos for the fifth, sixth, and seventh time."

When my cousin's wife lost all her photos and everything else for the first and only time - Windows & ransomware - it was a live Linux CD that got them back (early ransomware wasn't that clever, it didn't actually overwrite the original files) and installation of Linux that has stopped it happening again.

Re: (Can't...stop...the... voices....)

Having to open a terminal to get something to work is rare. Choosing to open a terminal because it's easier and/or less opaque than the GUI alternative is less so.

A more frequent use of a terminal session is do stuff like whois or ping because I like to see who and what might be lurking behind some link somebody's trying to interest me in. The most frequent, of course, is to use a Real Editor if I've got some big chunk of text to operate on.

Re: When turn off/turn on fails

"Was browsing in a jewelry store with the wife one time"

You like to live dangerously!

I used to be short-sighted like that. I still am except that with age my range of accommodation has shrunk. back in the day something had to be quite small before I had to reach for a lens. I miss that.

Re: When turn off/turn on fails

As vengeance I'd have recommended the all-black HP that my daughter's previous employer supplied for home office use. It was built long after HP was a force to be reckoned with in printer manufacture.

This was an all-in-one so you'd have needed to spray the scanner glass with black paint, of course.

Yep, the 'Who owns Linux?' case is back from the dead

Re: Does the verdict on Oracle vs Google

SCO, as was, did not come from any sewer. SCO were a perfectly respectable company selling a good small-system Unix*. It was the basis of a lot of SME on-prem business systems in the '80s, '90s & early 00s.

However their pricing reflected a near-monopoly situation. When Linix came along they didn't have sufficient commercial nous to recognise viable competitor when they saw it. They should have adjusted their price. Not to zero but to one which reflected their quality advantage over early Linux but recognising that they were competing with free-as-in-beer in terms of functionality.

After the ensuing debacle resulting from Linux becoming a suitable platform for running the likes of Oracle & Informix they were bought out by a business that decided that litigation was their only salvation. That's when things got awry.

*Originally they were a reseller of Xenix but then took over development of the next generation.

Binraider:"The case has already been tested in court at length; denied."

TFA:"SCO Group mostly lost"

The key is in that word "mostly".

Re: @FIA - A real cancer

"There are not many Linux users in the world"

I take it you're an iPhone user.

Re: The question of who?

Oracle hoping to get us useful precedent or two to quote in the Java case?

Did you read the article?

Re: What?

As this quote is normally attributed to Einstein my guess would be that it was intended as a disparagement of quantum mechanics.

Subaru parks plans to make 58,000 cars due to brakes on silicon supply chain

At some point you have to get from the (allegedly) unreliable mechanical/analogue domain to the (allegedly) reliable electronic/digital domain. Something that sensors handle. So far my not very automated car has had two wheel rotation sensors fail.

Re: a more basic and less expensive car.

"How will the punters tell our car from any other maker's?"

Because it does what its driver tells it and not something of its own volition? Sounds like a win to me - I like the car I drive to behave predictably.

Over a decade on, and millions in legal fees, Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle in Java API legal war

Re: Dictionary definition required

I suppose there are no mirrors to be found on Oracle premises.

Re: "Code"

"they copied the 11k LOC directly"

And any time you stick in include at the top of a program file you do they same thing (give or take the actual number). Aren't you glad Google won?

Re: Libel? Slander?

"sn't that illegal?"

It might be contempt of court.

Re: Classifying them like utilies....

"Phone companies aren't allowed to kick people off their networks for saying things they disagree with"

But they don't broadcast it either.

Re: Unbelievable

"Too many of the Justices make me look young "

Which means that they've had a lot more time than you not only working with the law but also seeing a huge variety of issues pass through the courts. So many people think law courts are remote. Spend time there and you discover just the opposite.

Re: Minions Finally Lose

I'm sure Oracle will be relieved to discover an expert that knows US law better than the US supreme court. However your value to them will be a bit limited because they've nowhere else to go.

Australian ponders requiring multiple IDs to sign up for social media, plus more crypto-busting backdoors

Re: It's the same documents...

I doubt FB got enough publicity to reach the attention of its product.

Sometimes you have to think whoever named dopamine knew what he was doing.

Re: Australia

Given the proximity of the two headlines on the front page Myanmar was the comparison that sprang to my mind. Neither puts them in a good light.

A floppy filled with software worth thousands of francs: Techie can't take it, customs won't keep it. What to do?

Re: re: Welcome to the information age!

You mean you can transport them by smartphone? Who knew?

"sorry, not possible to pay money to England without proof of import'"

"OK, we'll switch it all off."

Not impossible to arrange payment when that happens.

Easily distracted by too many apps, too many meetings, and too much asparagus

Re: black-and-white television into a colour set using nylon stockings.

After going up a ladder to fix the aerial.