Posts by Doctor Syntax

BOFH: The Christmas spirit has run dry – time to show some chiller instinct

With 43 gallons of isopropanol on fire the halon must be about to be released. The questions is, is this Boss's standing with BOFH good enough to survive that?

Re: Hot Cross Buns Here

Should have mentioned that the chat partly arose from the Christmas Chocolate Reindeer bearing a remarkable resemblance to Chocolate Easter Bunnies.

Re: Hot Cross Buns Here

Warburtrons make hot cross buns all the year round. All the local supermarkets have them and I doubt they bake them for one local area. Chatting to one of the Morrisons staff before Christmas (wondering why, in their wisdom, the buyers seem to have completely neglected to supply any panettone) he said one of the other supermarkets already had Easter eggs on sale so Sunderland are a bit slow off the mark.

Humanoid robots are still novelty acts, but investment is surging to make them real tomorrow

Re: Events may be overtaking us

"a live situation in a battery factory where the robots replace humans for high voltage testing of battery packs. This task is potentially hazardous but it also involves plugging in and unplugging cables."

This does not need to be humanoid.

"answering the same dumb questions from never ending lines of people"

Neither does this. This is already deployed on web sties where you can experience it yourself being unable to answer slightly differently phrased dumb questions where it will cope about as badly as a human whose first language is not that of the site's users or humans of any linguistic ability stuck in a non-enabled, script driven environment. The resort of enshittified companies everywhere competing to reach the bottom of the barrel.

"patrolling areas looking for people and things that are out of place."

This is where Real People have a distinct advantage.

"Humanoid robots are ready for marketing and experimentation. In promotional videos, they perform impressive, potentially useful feats. But commercial deployment at scale will take decades, even if persistent technical challenges like manual dexterity may be solved sooner.

The technology isn't yet good enough, the cost remains too high, and organizations need to figure out how to use them. More work needs to be done on safety, and people aren't yet ready to accept them."

You could replace the first two words with "AI" and it would still ring as true. That must raise the question - is it another bubble?

You don't need Linux to run free and open source software

Re: Amazingly title happens to be correct;

"what happened to him?"

Good question. Made his last post the day before Eric 9001 made his first.

"UI design is certainly a different discipline; it may be a slog for you but it's bread and butter for those who like doing it. "

And I just wish they'd stop doing it an leave well alone.

Back in about the 1980s we had the CUI guidelines which a lot of early GUI S/W more ore less followed (I know Liam has complaints about the less aspects) but it resulted in a fairly standard design language. Then the UI and UX designers got busy. On the one hand it might have simply been gratuitous busy-work for idle hands.

On the other, I strongly suspect Microsoft threw its weight about to impose the ribbon interface on its victims so that after a few years new users wouldn't understand the FOSS competition's UI which continued to follow the same lines as older versions of Microsoft applications. I also suspect them of having made top-posting the norm for similar reasons whereas we oldies always saw it as an indication of newcomers who lacked the wit or manners to see and adopt netiquette norms.

In consequence what was regarded as good practice and still followed by some FOSS developers (Mozilla fell from grace a long time ago) is seen as "difficult" or "hair-shirt".

There are also instances where FOSS just does its thing for very good functional reasons. The vi editor is one, of course and regular users would not swap it for an editor hampered by a "conventional" but less functional UI. Another instance is the Gimp save functionality discussed about. Pinta is more conventional and all too easy to make the sort of mistakes avoided by having a choice between "Overwirte", "Export" and "Export as" options as well as "Save" depending on the use case.

Re: AoL

Games? Not interested. But from the Unix/Linux world:

1. /home, /opt, /usr/local and /srv (if you use i) have their own partitions. You can blow away the rest with a new installation and keep what's special safe.

1.1 About /srv. Debian and followers have a habit of putting stuff that really should be there into /var including Mariadb databases and Apache webstes. I only tried a reinstall without formatting /var once and it didn't go well. So put those sort of files in /srv and set up symlinks to hide that fact from the OS

2. Use logical volumes, then you don't have to worry about sizes until you really need a bigger/second drive. Set up with unused space and check occasionally. If a volume gets to about 2/3 to 3/4 full add more space to bring it down to about 1/3 to 1/2 full.

"GIMP is pretty much the only program I still use since MS-DOS days that does not offer to save unsaved changes when you quit."

But the way it works that doesn't matter too much because I'm more likely to export than save. I might have opened a jpeg end exported a png or opened a PDF and exported a jpeg.

I find this safer than the Save in Pinta. There I might open a .png, do some work on it, add another layer, do some work on that, intending to save it as a .ora but click Save and overwrite the original .png which I'd indented to keep in its original state.

Sometimes Save can be a bit too easy. Dangerously easy It might be hard to get your head round but I think Gimp gets it rights.

nvi

First impressions last. My first encounter with vim was trying to do one specific thing - find and remove the Control-Ms in a text file. I found it had been set up to hide them. If it hid stuff from me I wasn't to be trusted.

Replacing vim by nvi is one of the first things I do when I install Linux.

Re: Music typesetting

A quick search shows that there are some multiplatform alternatives so you could try one of them on whatever it is you use at present.

And a merry Christmas to you too, Liam!

Let's explore that "unpleasant to use" bit. Which? In what way unpleasant?

Gimp is often berated. I use it. I probably only use a fraction of it but I get there by my usual approach of stumbling along which, given the vast amount of functions, takes time because a vast amount of functions means a complex UI. In consequence I'm repeatedly impressed by what it can achieve. However I have one advantage: I've never used Photoshop. I don't have to unlearn another UI. I would undoubtedly find Photoshop just as unpleasant.

OTOH. years ago I occasionally used MS Office up to 97 on employer's and subsequently clients' PCs. Switching to LibreIffice was no problem. It looked more or less the same and worked more or less the same as I could make out. The stumbling around approach certainly worked. Modern MS Office I do find unpleasant when faced with it. This,of course, was exactly the reaction of all regular MS Office users to the ribbon interface when it came out. MS had mad their own product unpleasant to all their regular users*. Now, of course, those users who started with the ribbon find the older UI, as found on LibreOffice as well as they would older versions of MS Office.

Unpleasantness is an impression resulting from unfamiliarity.

* They have a habit of doing this to all their products every few years.

Keeping Windows and macOS alive past their sell-by date

I think the kick-backs from all the bloatware trials probably helped lower the price in the old-days.

Re: You don't need a "part 2"

Ordinary users can sort things out when Windows goes wrong?

"where"?!!

wear!

"If the machine has a spinning hard disk drive, get an SSD, and put the old disk into an external USB caddy as a backup drive."

I'd suggest that even if it's an SSD you do this. If the machine's that old a bigger SSD will cost less than the old one did and who doesn't need more storage? Also you start without whatever where the old one had accumulated.

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

This story has also been told here previously but worth repeating because there's a moral in it.

Client had 2 Sparc based systems running their accounting. One was new enough to have run the Y2K prepared version of the application, the other, a warm standby wasn't. (In the course of testing I discovered that the warm standby not only wasn't new enough, it also wasn't a warm standby because the overnight copy was failing due to lack of time. As this was previously unknown it wasn't a factor in the decision making.)

They decided to replace them with a pair of SCO boxes running the latest version. My job was to set these up and look after user testing. The bean-counters ran their acceptance tests and pronounced them OK. The planned cut-over was between Christmas & New Year when the plant was shut down.

At the last minute, despite dire warnings, bean-counters completely forbade any replacement before they'd completed their year-end bean-juggling on the old system which would take them up to mid-January. If we'd had a bit more warning we could have insisted on their testing the year-end on the new boxes but, of course, they hadn't done that.

Inevitably there were problems which required the A/C package vendors dialling in, sometimes multiple times a day, to sort out the mess until we were allowed to switch over.

The moral of the story: for those who insisted that all preparation was just unnecessary freeloading and panicking, those who chose to deliberately run on a nonY2K-proofed system suffered real on-going consequences.

That doesn't prevent something unprepared for and hence unpredictable happening at zero. The clue in the story that this happened was that the PCs running crashed.

Re: "in December 199 he worked in the IT department"

That would be the abacus department worrying about whether they had enough beads for CC.

One real reason AI isn't delivering: Meatbags in manglement

Re: Stopping treating it like a replacement for human Labour would be a start...

"That's the thing, those rubbing their hands with glee over an AI bubble burst may be somewhat pissed when it rocks the global economy at the worst possible time for them."

The longer it goes on, the more investment it eats up. The more investment it's eaten up the worse it will rock the economy. There's no point in hoping that there'll be a safe time somewhere in the future.

There's no time like the present.

"it must be that particular AI, so we try a few other flavors and they soon realize how bad it can be"

The risk here is that they decide you're the common factor so it must be your fault. TThen they decide to get rid of you.

"They think they have a smart system, but what they really have is a stateless algorithm that never improves."

And what were they sold as by the sales-snakes? A smart system that could learn.

Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech

Re: Feel-good bull-sh

AFAICS what prompted the CLOUD Act was various US law enforcement net using the existing legal routes because their fishing expeditions couldn't meet* the standards needed for a warrant in Europe. Those scare quotes protections are real enough if law enforcement don't have a good enough case.

* For whatever reason not enough evidence for a warrant, not prepared to disclose the evidence they had or just plain couldn't be arsed.

Re: Lovely

It requires things such as servers and operational skills. Companies used to provide those for themselves. Even quite small copanies would run a small tower server, sufficient for their needs and were able to engage someone to provide the skills as and when needed. There are also UK and EU businesses which will run NC as a service for those who don't want to run things internally. UK and EU users do not need to go to US companies for those.

"Europe will strongly favour legislation over innovation"

Useful innovation meets requirements. Legislation sets the requirements. They're complementary.

Re: Shout It From The Rooftops

"Britain is too small on its own to create an independent hyperscale cloud service."

That word "hyperscale". What does it mean apart from "big"? Big enough for the likes of AWS, Azure and Google.

The issue here is that AWS, Azure & Google are the problem, not the solution. They're the problem because they're running shared infrastructure that sucks in nationally critical operations and exposes them to a foreign power.

What's needed, be it Britain or EU, is capacity to provide services at a sufficient scale for a given application. We used to do that. Then the snake oil grafters sold the beancounters on the economy of scale at - unspoken - the cost of security. Now security has raised its head again.

That word "hyperscale". It needs to be seen as a warning. That's what it means.

The game has changed.* Now it's not just little people's data any more. It's governmental an supra-governmental systems at risk. It's economically critical local businesses at risk. It's infrastructure that's at risk.

* Not really, it's just that governments are finally realising what it always was.

Re: You can't have a sovereign digital cloud

Who runs Windows? Too many.

Re: Nextcloud??

Citation needed but unfortunately A/C can't remember. How convincing.

Re: Subeditor: don't lie

We've already had articles about others. Others including Denmark and if Denmark has had any inclination to slack off a bit (not suggesting they had) they've just had a further nudge and no doubt other countries will have taken note of that.

The nay-sayer A/Cs (how many are there in reality?) get so tiring.

Re: You can't have a sovereign digital cloud

"an open source solutions can be moved to any of the vast number of European bit barns, which will soon be available at knock down prices once the AI bubble bursts."

If they're optimised for LLM processing they're going to be sub-optimal for real work.

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

Re: "It's new and shiny - it must be better!"

".but I don't get the hate for Rust here."

I don't see any. What I see is extreme scepticism in Microsoft's belief in it as a magic bullet.

Re: this used to be my bag..

"Are you suggestion Microsoft code actually has core {cough} logic {cough}?"

Let alone planning and testing.

Re: Why use AI to convert from c/c++ to rust?

"Given the maturity of much of Microsoft's code, the number of errors liable to cause significant problems will be relatively low (many of the more recent howlers are to do with code that has been gratuitously rewritten)."

If that were indeed the case the best approach would be to go back to an earlier version as the starting point, reimplement that in Rust and then roll forward adding the intended functionality of the later versions. Or just leave it there without all the slurping and user hostility.

Re: Not the holy grail

"warts 'n all?"

Warts especially. That bit will be assured.

21K Nissan customers' data stolen in Red Hat raid

Re: “[NAME] takes this incident very seriously“

"a third party server"

Statistically likely. The longer the supply chain the bigger the attack surface.

Re: “[NAME] takes this incident very seriously“

Lessons are best learned from other people's mistakes.

US punishes China’s ‘dominance’ of legacy chips with zero percent tariffs

Re: The result of an investigation into China’s semiconductor industry

"if enough of us just laugh in the face of marketers and salesdroids when they try it, maybe we can get them to stop"

No chance. They wouldn't realise why you were laughing, let alone adjust their behaviour in response unless they thought it was a negotiating ploy in which case they'd just offer some non-concession.

"increasingly aggressive and sweeping non-market policies and practices in pursuing dominance of the sector.”

I think that translates "not abandoning them in pursuit of latests shiny".

SoftBank scrambling to come up with $22.5B in OpenAI funding before New Year

It's getting closer. Do I need to explain what "it" is? Probably not.

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

Re: Yawn "Too many Linux DEs is bad"

"why Microsoft is predominantly chosen for these organizations"

Decisions are made by those who only know Microsoft (although they might use iStuff themselves because they're special).

Re: What Linux needs to be pre-installed on PCs

You then create a Windows Mk II situation. You're in the hands of the vendors and their chosen distro. I appreciate what you say but you end up with the situation where the vendors say "Jump!" and you jump.

Re: Devuan user here

"our if you include raspberry Pi - although that's a bit limited in performance."

It runs my home NextCloud just fine and will run either MythTv backend or TV HeadEnd when I get round to sorting that out.

Are you suggesting I should get pushed into your selection of Mate or Xfce for the desktop? That's not why I use Linux.

Having the choice is far, far more important that having Linux or some other Unix variant take over the world. Having Linux take over the world on those terms would be little better than having Windows everywhere. The whole point of having a modular, layered approach to system design is to enable the user to select their choice.

KDE also isn't "better" than XFCE or Cinnamon. It's just what the user is comfortable with. Isn't it nice being able to make a choice like that?

A quick look at Waterfox suggests the Linux install is a tarball. Not ideal.

However I can't see LibreWolf drinking the AI KoolAid either and you can add it's repository and install it and get updates along with everything else in the apt world. It's a little more security conscious then FF and out of the box it has a few quirks to stop fingerprinting.

"Users should not have to be tech-literate to use a computer"

How did you learn to become expert at using Windows? My guess is that you just clicked around. Right click on this and that and see what the menus offer? Well, stand back and prepared to be flabbergasted.

That's the exact way we learned to use Linux desktops.

Re: The reason is Office

"To create a desktop shortcut, the process is you spend a while Googling"

That's your problem right there.

You have a GUI. Use it. How would you do something unfamiliar on Windows? My guess is that you'd experiment with clicking around. This is what you'd find on KDE desktop but I doubt others would differ in more than detail:

What did you want to create a desktop short cut for?

1. An application in the applications menu? Right click on the item in the menu. Select Add to Desktop. Done.

2. A file or directory in some directory that you have open? Select the item, drag it to the desktop and drop it. When the dialog opens to ask if you want to move, copy or create a link select create a link. Done.

3. Anything? Right click on the desktop. From the menu select link to file or directory or Link to application. Type in the name and, for the former, navigate to select the file or directory. For the latter, navigate to the executable, select that and then use the tabs to set the properties you want rather than typing them in as Google told you. You can also select an icon for it. It's a bit trickier than exporting it from the menu but you only do that if it's something that's not already installed on the menu.

But no doubt your post will be quoted by other A/Cs who'll repeat it without checking for themselves. But how come you didn't discover it for yourself? I can see why you posted A/C, after all it doesn't show up your desktop skills in a good light.

What you seem to be describing from Google is something you only need for something with very special requirements, not your average run-of-the-mill application. For instance I run an Informix server* which has a lot of environment settings etc. If I were to set up a shortcut for a terminal session to run Informix clients it I might go through that routine although, in fact, I just set it up in the system profile so that any terminal session has access. This, however, is real sysadmin stuff because it's what I used to do for a living on Unix servers. I repeat, it is not what you'd be doing to set up a typical productivity app.

* I have some genealogical data on it.

Re: I suspect a commercial entity may end up with "the win" for Linux on the Desktop...

"Microsoft’s real win was owning the enterprise.

...

Microsoft made its money from every PC sold"

You've got them the wrong way round. By all sorts of leverage they got OEM installs so that's what people knew and that's how they got into the enterprise. They managed to distract SCO by offering to hold their coat while they had a fight with Linux. By the time that settled they'd got an arguably inferior server OS into the enterprise.