Posts by Doctor Syntax

helloSystem: Pre-alpha FreeBSD project chases simplicity and elegance by taking cues from macOS

Re: Well...

"people with stopwatches have actual evidence that a single menu works best"

It probably depends on what you're doing. What works well for one sort of task doesn't necessarily work for another.

virtual desktops provide "good enough" functionality

It depends what you're doing. If you need a couple of documents open side-by-side, such as something you're working on and something you're referring to swapping workspaces doesn't cut it.

Yesterday, for instance, I was extracting dates from a PDF of medieval records to convert to conventional dates, tabulated in a spreadsheet. Workspace 1 had the PDF occupying the left half of the screen. The lower right had my own program for cleaning up rubbish OCR text from the PDF to paste into the spreadsheet. The dates there were along the lines of "Friday after the feast of St Barnabas[June 11]"*. The spreadsheet was in the top right, set to all workspaces.

Flip to WS 2 & I had not only the spreadsheet but a terminal open to run cal for the year concerned to find out what day June 11 was in 1309 or whenever. Also a jotting pad for working out some of the more complicated logic round the variable feasts (Easter etc).

Multiple desktops help but an essential part of the mix is being able to maximise use of the desktop to display the document being worked on alongside so much other stuff. Even the task bar is set to autohide to allow maximum use of the space.

* The original editor had provided most of the fixed feast days which cut out a lot of searching.

"Now a Windows NT 4.0 UI clone."

KDE, set the menu system to the original cascading menu style. Use the Windows 9x application style and some of the various downloadable styles for GTK apps. Download Reactionary decorations. Job done plus the options for multiple workspaces and the like. I have a desktop appearance that's changed scarcely at all in the last couple of decades end then only subtly and mostly for the better (except where KDE managed to screw up, especially on auto-hide).

Re: Global menu bars?

Tricky quiz as it assumes experience of both Mac and Windows and even as far as Windows goes I haven't really used it in an age and even then a W2K instance in a VM for one application is about it. However question 4 is spot on as far as KDE is concerned. The unhide location could be set to a corner up to and including V3, then it just became the entire edge and, exactly as he describes, it's too easy to hit unintentionally. It's a design choice that should be rolled back.

No, that big panel sitting at the bottom of the screen is straight HP VUE/CDE. Thank goodness KDE went with the slimmer panel that actually autohides (if you don't have one of the broken versions).

Re: Further simplicity and ease of use...

"Dia, which is a diagramming application. Trying to search for anything related to that is a waste of time."

The only place I needed to search was in symaptic.

O2 UK overcharged exiting customers by £40.7m over 7+ years: Ofcom slams senior managers, fines it £10.5m

Re: What about credit records?

With the push to do everything paperless there's less incentive - and quite possibly no mechanism - for customers to notify changes of address to suppliers. If the only contact detail for a customer is the mobile number then unless that's ported over to the new network the old supplier has no way to reach them. And that's apart from any impacts of successive DPAs on retaining records or, as the article mentions, the likelihood of any attempt at communication being ignored as spam.

In fact, it's surprising how many do get reimbursed.

Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep

Re: I really don't see what all the fuss is about

There is a stereotype here. Some big name in the industry takes a misstep, attracts a lot of opprobrium here and then a new commentard appears to praise them.

Some guy down on his quarter. Or maybe a newly recruited ex-double-glazing salesman.

Re: That's it moving to Linux Mint Debian Edition

Devuan. You forgot Devuan.

ATM I'm having to use Mint on my new laptop until the new versions of Devuan lands with the latest drivers.

"These contact details are held in Canonical’s CRM in accordance with privacy rules."

Spot the vague to meaningless statement.

Re: I really don't see what all the fuss is about

"stop acting like a tinfoil-hat-wearing parade of grumbling grandparents."

First post, I see. Maybe we're just not your sort of people.

Re: WTF?

I don't think any salesman in any industry in the entire history of the world has ever thought that.

"So how's that cloud thing working for ya?"

For me? NextCloud runs on a Pi, Apart from being a backup it also shares stuff between my laptop & SWMBO's. Aso in this case it's on my computer.

And it needs to keep being said because so many people don't realise it until something like this story happens.

Ah yes, The Cloud. Somebody else's computer. Their rules but your choice.

Microsoft issues emergency fix for Wi-Fi foul-up delivered hot and fresh on Patch Tuesday

For the less capable migrating from Windows I recommend Zorin.

So younger guys - and gals of all ages - are going to have no problem?

I was wondering if this might be part of a wider wireless networking problem. A security update for wpasupplicant arrived yesterday.

Forget about an AI stealing your job, even pigs can be trained to use computers

Re: Results not unexpected

"Fat" and "useless" are not words to put in the same sentence when describing pigs. Teenagers, yes. Pigs, no.

Re: There'll be Pigs flying drones next

But nobody told the pigeons why.

Re: Hamlet and Omelet were terminated from the experiment because they had grown too large

Yes, just plain terminated I suspect. Hamlet and Omelet as names? Is that a Freudian slip on the part of the psychologists?

Phishing awareness gone wrong: Facebook tries to seize websites set up for staff security training

Re: Clickable links

"One month I got one such email from them within days of receiving one from their security dept, warning all customers never to click links in emails to log in!"

I'm pretty sure I've had such security emails that actually contained links themselves. My building society has a leaflet listing the domains they'll genuinely use. This hasn't penetrated as far as their marketing department who have used others. The links which appear to be genuine are actually sub-domains that resolve to marketing companies. I've even raised this at their AGM., not least because they're training their customers to be phished.

What should really concern security departments is that if marketroids expect customers to click on random links in random emails it's because they themselves see no issue in doing so. I strongly suspect that most successful phishing attacks are through marketing departments.

Re: Where is human decision making?

Common sense will probably be above the pay grade of those responsible.

Nominet vows to freeze wages and prices, boost donations, and be more open. For many members, it’s too little, too late

Re: Irrelevant in the longer term?

"by which time the Isle of Wight will probably have declared independence too."

.vectis

Re: nominet dot fail

That site's a fail. No content gets through NoScript.

Re: They only had one thing to do...

" a non-profit or under extreme regulation"

Wrong choice of logical operator. Paying staff massive amounts does not count as a profit in company law so the staff can profit in an personal sense. It needs to be a regulated non-profit.

It seems that they need far more than simply replacing the board. They need to change the articles of association to limit the ability to do anything outside run a registry without a vote by the majority of the membership, not just the turnout. They also need to ensure that the board publishes a full account of what it does.

A quick search shows that a Nominet Charitable Trust is a registered charity but I can find no such registration for this alleged non-profit itself. If it's really a non-profit then maybe the entire outfit should be registered so that the whole of its activities come under the scrutiny of the Charity Commissioners.

Better buckle up: Volkswagen puts Microsoft in driver's seat to deliver 'automated' platform

Re: Morris Marina

Not entirely. It was while doing a brake adjustment on a Marina estate that I first put my back out & it's been affecting me for about 40 years.

Re: Automotive Clippy

"Nobody was in the car!"

More's thee pity - it had been stolen.

Re: So will be now need to press the "Start" button

My wife's key-less car has a button that both starts and stops it.

Re: Microsoft

But it'll probably stop in the middle of the M1 to do an update and reboot.

Re: VW. Not.

As far as I'm concerned that's both VW and Ford off the list if I ever buy another car. However what I've got might well see my driving days out.

Euro privacy watchdog calls for end of targeted advertising plus a squeeze on the processing of personal info

Re: Show me as many ads for cheap women's clothing as you like!

How many cheap women do you have to buy clothes for?

After first trying to use federal COVID-19 relief aid, State of Iowa comes up with funds to pay for Workday project

It all raises the question of whether they'd allocated money to pay for it when they signed the contract and if they had what happened to the money that the Covid grant was supposed to replace.

Many people find HR quite atrocious too.

What the heck is FinOps? It's controlling cloud spend – and new report says it ain't easy

Re: on-demand pricing is bullshit

Where does the data live and what happens to it if you have a run of bad months of cash-flow (say in a pandemic) and can't meet the bills?

Facebook and Google’s Australian pay-for-news nightmare finds a European admirer

I certainly wouldn't follow a link to our local newspaper's site. Unless they've changed they have an opt out to over 100 other sites, their site is crap and any other stories they offer usually turn out to be from some of their other "local" titles. I would probably still be reading the print edition if they'd put more effort into getting it delivered but that stopped years ago. It wouldn't surprise me, BTW, if they and Rupert's Oz organs used an image from Streetview whenever they need a picture of somewhere an incident happened.

Re: We are the Google Warriors!

Please tell me you didn't need it.

Waaay too technical.

Re: All has changed

But didn't Germany try the same tactic until the newspapers realised that they were losing traffic because Google stopped indexing them?

No phish for the likes of you, thank you very much! Google finds email villains are picky about demographics, country

Google...

...they should know. After all, most of the spam comes from gmail addresses.

Re: I don't find Google blocks too well

But there's not a lot of point in sending emails from Microsoft telling you they're going to close your account to a gmail address.

Harmed by a decision made by a poorly trained AI? You should be able to sue for damages, says law prof

Does an ML system get trained once and then continue operating on the basis of that one training set? If you think of human medics, as an example, they will be trained once, albeit over a period of years but once in practice they will continue learning by experience.

Re: Running short on software patent infringements?

I doubt a sample should be statistically representative but it would need to represent the range of what it might encounter.

Re: Theory and Reality

"It's very much an issue for the developer to deal with, because it is they that should carry liability when their creation starts causing harm."

I mostly agree but it shouldn't really be on the developer but on whoever's responsible for deploying it. It's up to them to determine whether it's fit for purpose. The developer might not even be aware of the purpose to which it was put, nor would they necessarily endorse it for that purpose if they were.

Faced with the sack, Nominet CEO half-apologizes for taking the 'wrong tone,' asks angry members to hear him out

What regulation applies to them apart from Companies House?. Are they under Ofcom and if not why not? As a non-profit are they under the Charities Commission? If they can win the vote then they would probably be clear as far Companies House are concerned but otherwise if one of the others has authority then they should be taking an interest. Maybe the Ministry of Fun, AKA the Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport should also be taking an interest.

Re: What a load of 'blocks

"Should have all resigned quite some time ago."

Should hang on for the vote.

Web prank horror: Man shot dead while pretending to rob someone at knife-point for a YouTube video

Re: Pretty much had to happen some day

I think the reality, were it not a prank, would have been either he fired or got stabbed with no intermediate options.

Re: On the contrary

Her parents think the council should do something to prevent this happening. They did. They built railings. Sometimes I despair.