Posts by Doctor Syntax

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

Re: Willful Attempt To Access Pron

"If people (kids and adults) are using a VPN, then they are ACTIVELY seeking out pron."

No. Sorry to be offensive but you're thinking like a government minister.

If people are using a VPN they're seeking a private internet connection. That's what the 'P' stands for. What they're using it for is not known - that;s the whole point of a VPN. Given that an awful lot of day-to-day commerce depends on the use of VPNs assuming otherwise is going to deliver yet another hit to the British economy.

Re: Idiots

And the capacity of the Home Office to house train their ministers.

Governments come and go, the Civil Service stays. In this case the Home Office. Destroying privacy has been their policy for decades. Do not expect a change until we get a minister with technical nous prepared to resist their house training - and house training ministers is what they do best.

If you expected anything else you haven't been paying attention for the whole of the current century.

Workday warns of CRM breach after social engineers make off with business contact details

Re: Sophisticated attack?

It was too sophisticated for Workday which is all it needed to be.

Should UK.gov save money by looking for open source alternatives to Microsoft? You decide

Re: Not

I don't see the OP as painting as bad a picture as MS, rather as saying it can be done if the effort is put in.

The Gendarmerie's real win would have been to have moved forward and used their team to roll out a similar approach over other French govt agencies. Did they do that?

Re: The MS problem is the easiest to solve...

Netscape the software lives on. The original all-in-one is Seamonkey, the split up version is Firefox + Thunderbird.

Re: Myth of Free

The suggestion that op-front costs are all there are for subscription services is even more insulting.

Re: Good idea...but

"I fear it's too late to start switching."

Right up until the time Trump tells Microsoft to pull the plug on some European country and then it will suddenly become not only possible but panic-driven in case we're next.

Re: Mix because...

"But again, most users learnt the ribbon at home outside work time so didn't need to be trained up by the time it was eventually deployed in the office."

(A) That only applied to workers recruited sometime after the switch. Anyone in post when their Office installation was updated would either have to struggle or be properly retrained.

(B) If they have a home computer it will cost them exactly nothing, zero, zilch to download their own copy of LO to train themselves at home like you expect them to. So here's an idea. Pay a percentage of the licence fees saved to all those who use LO as a bonus and see how many find training a problem.

Re: Mix because...

If they are then they'll find the LO, out of the box, looks familiar. If they're not a couple of clicks to switch to the tabbed interface will shut them up.

Re: Mix because...

"How did that compare with the annual costs of running the bespoke training (always needed for new staff), the extra helpdesk resource needed to cover issues normally self-helped by people ....etc" (never heard of full stops?)

Take into account the cost of all the balls-ups, CCed data sharing email addresses far and wide, data losses dues to Excel row limits, etc. The occasional break-in taking down an entire operation for weeks. All the stuff that happens because of not training staff because "everybody knows Microsoft". When these things are investigated does anyone really set those costs against the money "saved" by skimping on training?

Re: What do they mean by "more ambient"?

I wonder what he means by "ambient". It smacks of "sounds impressive, I'll decide what it means later" although it probably means "in your face, all the time">

Re: They should, but

Which particular demonstration did you have in mind?

Re: Mix because...

"how come he gets real Office and I only get Mickey Mouse Office?"

Take advantage of it. Pay a small bonus to those using the non-MS option. Call it "sharing the savings with the users" which is what it would be. Watch those Excel and Access applications get migrated.

Re: Extra option?

"Realistically, a high-FOSS mix for the public sector would inevitably mean - sooner rather than later - an absolutely huge team of software engineers employed by the taxpayer to do their maintenance."

Evidence?

AWS pricing for Kiro dev tool dubbed 'a wallet-wrecking tragedy'

Bubble finally bursting?

I thinks it's just starting to dawn how much money they've spent (where "they" applies to all the players) and they're now panicking trying to show some returns for it. What a shame if it's too expensive for the market to accept.

From PAYE to P45: HMRC staff fired for prying into taxpayer data

Re: No criminal charges?

I agree double standards but I think the most serious charge would be misfeasance in public office and not a police matter so no door would be harmed in the prosecution of these offences.

Generative AI isn't just a matter of life and death. It's far more important than that

"Personal behavioral data is already harvested like Iowa corn"

Knocking that on the head would be a good start.

As to using some sort of generative self as an executor, that might well fail on the grounds of being impossible to prove a third party hadn't tampered with it.

A Linux alternative? Debian/Hurd shows microkernel Unix dream is alive

Many in the GNU/FSF world seem to view the BSD unencumbered licence as anything between misguided and evil for allowing code licenced with it to be used in the way Intel has used it. How ironical, then, that code from BSD itself is used in Hurd. I'm sure there's a lesson there for the zealots. It's called pragmatism. Of course, being zealots, they won't learn it.

In Otter news, transcription app accused of illegally recording users’ voices

Re: "In Otter news ...."

Perhaps they thought nobody would mink.

It would completely und-ermine trust in the system.

Someone's poking the bear with infostealers targeting Russian crypto developers

"or who use the SOL token for legitimate purposes."

Cryptocurrency used for legitimate purposes? Does not compute.

Nabiha Syed remakes Mozilla Foundation in the era of Trump and AI

"Just make an effing good browser and mail client"

And make it look like it belongs on whatever desktop it's on. Seamonkey does this. So does PaleMoon. Firefox and Thunderbird no longer do.

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Re: Pretty much all software

That might be true of the sofware you're using. Much better to start with a product that doesn't do that so you don't have to turn anything off.

Re: What's he smoking?

"No-one is going to wait 5 years unless forced to."

I don't think he's planning to make them better. For those stuck on Windows, make the most of those five years.

Re: A couple of things

Windows is so much simpler than Linux, isn't it.

Timekettle T1 AI translator helps you scale the Tower of Babel

Sounds fishy to me.

Codeberg beset by AI bots that now bypass Anubis tarpit

Detect the crawlers quickly, block the IPs for a random amount of time.

Reckon you can put a nuclear reactor on the Moon?

Re: Hang on ....

Locate them at the poles.

Minority Report: Now with more spreadsheets and guesswork

Bring back the village bobby who could work all that out with Real Intelligence.

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

Re: Justice for bcachefs!

Ext4 is far from excluded, it's most people's default. ZFS has been explained above - the reasons aren't technical, they're legal. XFS? dunno.

Re: Justice for bcachefs!

The future of Linux does not depend on a non-default FS.

Re: Anecdotally... No To BTRFS Too

Speed is good but reliability is essential. The file system's function is to save your data and return it as required. If it fails to return it it doesn't matter how quickly it fails.

Are you willing to pay $100k a year per developer on AI?

"Funny. GPT-5 will confidently tell you that Willian H. Brusen is a former US president. For those of you not from the States, there's no such person, never mind a former president."

I'm sure in no time at all search engines will all agree that there was such a person and that he was US president.

If Prokofiev were still around he'd write an orchestral suite about him.

Voice, vision, pen: Oh dear. Windows boss says Microsoft is again reshaping OS

In that case, bearing in mind they employ Apgent P, it would be time to move to BSD.

Re: Consumers vs Creators

"One day, and I'm not hopeful, M$ should come to the understanding that if they don't have an OS that serves business, business will go looking elsewhere"

One day, and I'm equally not hopeful, businesses will come to the understanding that if they want an OS that truly serves them, they'll have to look elsewhere.

Don't blame Microsoft for doing what makes money, blame businesses for not getting off the treadmill.

Re: Sigh

And if anyone was dithering about that , this should help them decide.

Re: More Shite being flung against the wall

"Why are MS finding it so hard to even get these basics right?"

They got basics sorted long ago. Marketing requires something new every few years to get users to buy new versions. The trouble is that means fixing what wasn't broken. They could usefully put W2K in front of developers every 3rd release and say "replicate that".

Shout's in loud voice in open plan office: "FORMAT C DRIVE".

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

Re: Can someone remind me ...

Start by converting green screens to http and web pages ,so you can have named fields whole new categories of bugs and vulnerabilities that weren't there before.

Re: 'Legacy' does not = 'obsolete' or 'bad'

Not training people to maintain it is only half the problem. The other half is the ongoing political creation of ever more complex piles of requirements as politicians thrash around trying to make reality fit their ideas. Thatt's what introduces the need for "maintenance" in the first place.

Government IT has special problems. It has a change of policy with every change of government - say every decade at the most and possibly more often than that- and a change of strategy with every change of minister - say every couple of years or more often than that. It also has to work all the time doing stuff that's been done for decades.

In an ideal world the keeping on doing stuff really shouldn't need maintenance at all. In the real world it's the changes of policy and strategy and general tinkering by everyone down to junior ministers that introduces the need for "maintenance"

The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn’t one

Re: a more heterogeneous environment might be good

"Perhaps even a non ‘ix one as well."

Interesting thought. Of course Unix was an excellent model. What would a non=Unix-style OS be like? Would it take the lead from something else? Be totally new?

Re: May I suggest ...

People wondering about that might lead to buses being hi-jacked.

Desktop-as-a-service now often cheaper to run than laptops - even after thin client costs

Re: It'll be cheap until it doesn't work

I had a gig testing migration of S/W from one application server to another. This was back in the days when character terminals were still a thing although their "character" terminals were, in fact, thin clients with the terminals sitting on a shared desktop server. My last day there was the go-live day and everything was fine for an hour or two. Then the front-end server suddenly slowed down. We eventually tracked it down to a few users having turned on the GUI wrapper for the application which just hit everyone's shared desktops. The bigger server they needed to run that was still awaiting delivery.

Re: "Desktop as a service"

The mini-computer came about as an escape from centralised computing.

The PC cme about as an escape from centralised computing

Cloud got its foot in the door as an escape from centralised computing.

I really don't see either of the forces - local and central control permanently gaining the upper hand.

Re: "Desktop as a service"

"they are basically trying to reinvent the X windowing system."

As did Wayland although they missed the whole point of it.

Re: Cost Effective?

Just wait for "Daas 2.0 will require DaaS-client 2.0. It will only run on hardware based on TPM 4." where TPM 4 is newer than most of the client fleet.

The £9 billion question: To Microsoft or not to Microsoft?

"... moving away from Microsoft is possible — but it requires careful planning, skills investment, and strong governance to succeed."

If you stop to ask what is CCS doing with that £30 million you might come to the conclusion that it could spend it on just what's needed to move away from Microsoft.