Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Agreed there is no magic bullet. But TFA's point was about control and something that offers multiple choices provides a degree of control. Why do the monopolists generate so much FUD about choice - choice of distro, choice of UI, choice between Linux and the BSDs? Because choice is the the enemy of the control they exert over their customers. There may be no magic bullet but choice is the closest thing.
"After 6pm. At least by 1994 line time (the 'sole phone line occupied for the several hours') was the bottleneck for residential dial-up, not the cost."
The bottleneck was how long before a call-waiting bleep cut the connection when a double-glazing salesman called.
What do you mean by "too damn technical"?
Anything that demands holding things up every month for a massive update requiring a reboot or two* and hangs itself up the rest of the time because the multiple anti-virus crapackages the PC vendor prei-installed are fighting each other it too technical for my liking. Especially when at least one of the crapackages keeps reinstalling itself after it had been supposedly removed.
And, when plugging in something as simple as a USB stick, it pops up a menu that witters on about installing drivers rather than just asking for permission to mount it and open it also seems unduly technical.
* That, of course, assumes that the update actually works and doesn't require low level command line stuff to shuffle about storage and a few other incantations to fix - or even a complete reinstall.
A microcosm of how the *nix mindset has studiously avoided actually looking at what the noddy user *wants*.
Give that TBird does both email and calendars on the one screen and more (it still does Usenet and RSS doesn't it?) this is hardly a a matter of not giving the noddy user what it wants, it's a matter of the noddy user being unable to see what's in front of their nose. You should have put an entry for it onto the menu and called it Outlook.
On the other hand if the UI is made to resemble whatever Microsoft are currently offering too closely we get Liam complaining they lack originality (it looks too much like W95) or, when I've suggested easing users into Linux by Windows-like KDE themes, commentards demanding why would one do that.
And, of course, I find my W11 using friends complaining about what MS are doing to Outlook.
There are two reasons for all those vi clones:
1. Vi is a damn good text editor
2. It used some AT&T proprietary code so it couldn't be open-sourced in its original version
Because of those two factors there were a lot of people who wanted the vi goodness so, independently, decided to write their own clone. It wasn't a matter of people writing their own clone just for the sake of writing a vi clone, it was people writing a vi clone because it was the only way they could have the vi goodness.
Some were better than others. I remember - vaguely - having vi for either DOS or Windows which even came with its own terminfo which lived in \etc, of course.
The AT&T code was eventually freed so now there's no need for clones. Just use nvi.
Have I understood you correctly?
1. There is no such thing as a Home edition for private individuals.
2. If private individuals were do get their data slurped that would be a bad thing but as there's no such thing as a Home version for individual users they really shouldn't be using it.
3. Either
3.1 Enterprises for whom Windows is solely intended don't have any information that is regarded as confidential so there's nothing to slurp
or
3.2 It doesn't matter if confidential information gets slurped
"GNU made substantial improvements over 40+ year old Unix, which was full of arbitrary size limitations and crashes "
Arbitrary size limits. Do you mean ulimit? Unix was designed to be used as a multiuser system. System managers might need to use it to ration limited resources. Maybe you don't remember when 1.6Gb was a big, BIG disk. It's still in Linux but there's a reason you've never seen it used. Do you mean the default 10 process limit? I remember seeing that once in 1986. Generally the stuff that was there to make it possible to run Edition 7 or the like on 3/4 Mb memory ad tiny disks faded away.
Crashes? Application core dumps - of course. That's down to the application developer. Kernel panics, not so much. The one really crashy system I remember back in 1999 was down to a dodgy memory module*. I drove a lot of Unix variants back in the day. After SCO decided** to divert their efforts into litigation instead of development Linux was the alternative to running a Unix-like environment of PC H/W. I'm sorry to say that with gimmicks like systemd GNU are working to enshittify it.
* A bit traumatic. I was installing S/W on a cliant's client's system in Italy. The client's client didn't want be to leave until we had a clear run and I was due to fly back. I think it likely that the extra S/W was pushing up the memory requirement ant it was the first time the dodgy module had come into play. Fortunately it ran once & I managed to get away. The client had to sort out the H/W later.
** I often wonder how far they were being deliberately led on by Microsoft. SCO had been a great server OS for SMBs. If it wasn't deliberate it was extremely serendipitous to accidentally get SCO to take their eye off the ball while MS moved into the server market.
"Like setting up automatic backups to my Linux servers, file-sharing with our home cloud, "
Nextcloud server in a Pi (or whatever server you're already running) and the deskop client which can be set to copy contents of selected directories automatically. The copies are versioned so if that edit accidentally deleted half the file content you can go back to the last good one. Likewise if the laptop should get hit by ransomware the last backup should still be good.
"Linux coud become an alternative to Windows when it starts to offer a common, standard GUI system that dosn't look designed by small children."
Classic marketing ploy. Pick the competition's feature that you're most afraid of - choice of UI - and disparage it as if it's something bad. Pick your own weakness - UI looks like it was designed by small children - and attribute it to the competition.
Completely transparent, of course, once you recognise it.
"When will it change?"
By now it should be dawning on boards and, I hope, fund managers, that insurance isn't really going to cover the reputational damage and general chaos that they've seen the Co-op, M&S & JLR experiencing. They should be asking their IT depts what they're going to do about hardening systems, building in resilience etc. (BTW have any commentards been on the receiving end of such questions?). I do fear, however, that some are going to simply reply "More Microsoft" if comments here are anything to go by.
"The UK is the only country to have developed an orbital-class rocket and then cancelled it."
Developing technology and cancelling it is our national speciality. I put it down to having a political class that doesn't realise that the expense comes upfront which means that the first built appears very, very expensive and they take fright.
"In other words, rather than provide a hyperlink, the author of the page expects the reader to copy the text, work out the abbreviation for their desired architecture, edit the URL to insert the abbreviation in place of the part delimited with a dollar sign, and proceed from there."
Errm - no. Copy and paste "https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan/dists/excalibur/main/" like wot I just did, scan down the index with Mk 1 eyeball and click on the appropriate link. No editing involved.
BTW it's not directly named after King Arthur's sword. It's named after a minor planet with a name starting with "E" and a minor planet named after King Arthur's sword was chosen. Releases are named in alphabetical order.
AFAICS it looks very much like emulating the Windows experience.
Current Linux practice is along the following lines:
libwhatever is used by a lot of executables - low level stuff such as the command line shell and the graphical shell, the command line and graphical file managers and higher level stuff such as a browser, a couple of graphics applications, an office suite and others*. Some vulnerability in it is fixed or maybe some clamoured for extra functionality is developed. The new version is placed in the repository and a user's regular update process discovers it, downloads it, either automatically or by user approval, and everything that needs it just uses it on the next invocation. It's very quick and the only things I've ever seen need a reboot are a new kernel and, on one occasion, a very low level service. In practice a few small updates might pass through every week, a larger batch of programs that work together every few weeks and a new kernel every few months.
As I understand it the immutable version of doing things is that in order to do this an entire snapshot of the core OS has to be created, installed and booted. I doubt this is going to happen just because libwhatever has been changed because it will be disruptive so it will only happen at intervals (monthly? every 2nd Tuesday?). If libwhatever has security issues the core is going to have to live with it unless an out of schedule update is issued. This becomes very Windows-like AFAICS. Maybe this is the intention - make it familiar with a lengthy, disruptive update happening every month. There's also the added detail that AIUI those higher level applications, the browsers etc, aren't going to use the libwhatever in the immutable core, they're going to have their own version in a snap, flatpak or wherever which is a bit of a lottery because they might get the newer version faster than the core if it's released more quicker** or never if the packager never gets round to it.
* In a few cases applications might have their own version for some reason and the launch process has to arrange to use it. It will be stored somewhere out of the way - an application-specific directory tree under /opt is the accepted place or /usr/local if it was locally compiled from source, Like snaps etc it might get updated on a different schedule to the main system implementation. If you're Ubuntu or whatever this suffers from NIH syndrome.
** What would be the schedule for releasing these? As and when ready as per current practice or alongside the immutable core?
"You're going to select or design components with energy- and mass-efficiency as a top priority"
You're also going to select for radiation hardness as a top priority. Is it going to be another of those triangles: energy efficiency, mass efficiency, radiation hardness, choose any two?
"The AFP and FBI stopped using AN0M because it produced more evidence than they could comfortably handle. The AFP, however, still wants access to encrypted communications"
When it's solid intelligence they can't cope but they still want haystacks in which there might be needles. It's just data fetishism.
The difference between an LLM or any other sort of alleged AI, general or otherwise, and you and I is that they cannot experience reality and we have spent years doing so. We have an internal model of the outside world that we spent a few years getting up to scratch and the rest of our lives keeping that way. It gets regularly checked against what we experience. We interact with that outside world. We know - from experience - that it can hurt us sometimes, that it can please us and that it is essential to our ongoing lives. When we look at things increasingly distant from our everyday experience we are less likely to add them accurately to our internal model although it helps if we have learned critical thinking skills.
There are three words I've used there that are critical to the difference between a human - or animal - intelligence and AI: "reality", "experience" and "life". Their only internal model is a set of relationships between words. A LLM trained in French will have different words between which to establish relationships than an English one. Monoglot English and French speakers have the same understanding of, say, a motor vehicle. A program existing in a computer has never ridden in one, driven one or shelled out hard-earned cash to buy one; it has no understanding beyond linking the outer forms, the words together. It is not further forward - more likely many steps behind - than the cargo cultists in Feynman's lecture who thought that, by clearing runways and imitating air traffic controllers, they could get planes to land and unload cargoes.
"On the other hand wasnt offshoring call centres to India tried and then they relocated back because customers didnt like it?"
Usual business cycle.
REPEAT
Cut costs, get bonus, move on.
Repair damage, regain customer base, get bonus, move on.
UNTIL THE COWS COME HOME
I've always reckoned an effective strategy would be cut advertising and marketing costs and deploy the saving into good products and customer service and just gain market share from the others' customer churn.
"The issue I have with Snap and Flatpack is that they are the wrong solution to a problem"
They're a solution to an already solved problem.
If you want to know how it's solved download LibreOffice from the project's download site and run the installer on it. Look at where and how it's installed. (Disclaimer - I'm only familiar with the .deb version but expect the .rpm will behave similarly.) That's been a solution for years but doesn't come with a trendy name.
