Posts by Doctor Syntax

Empire of office workers strikes back against RTO mandates

Re: Survey responses v. reality.

"And companies are folding."

Save overheads. Let those who can and wish to work at home do so and close some offices if that's possible.

Three ways to run Windows apps on a Linux box

Re: Some Of This Sounds Like Heavy Lifting!

in the UK - PC Specialist

Alternatively look at the wikipedia list of Clevo vendors for your country.

From Russia with chokehold: Putin says foreign IT firms still in Russia should be 'strangled'

Good to see Putin assisting Western sanctions. Or is the owner of the company doing the complaining another of his mates?

Re: We can learn from their successes

For "legacy" read "lock-in". The company's MO for decades.

Arc put on ice as The Browser Company bets big on AI-powered Dia

Re: Arc - I barely even got to know ya.

And Driving Instructors' Association, Drug Information Association & doubtless many more.

Also Arc includes Arena Racing Company, Application Registration Card, Association for Real Change and again many more.

It sounds like a company that needs a decent browser to check the web when it's selecting its names.

Re: Never heard of them before...

Also the name of long-establisehd FOSS drawing S/W. It would be confusing if I installed a second application with this name on my computers so I won't.

Unhappy with the cloud costs? You're not alone

yet there is a direct correlation with improper execution of "upfront strategic activities" in many cases.

Would this in turn correlate with cloud somebody else's computer being sold by by-passing IT and going direct to CEOs and boards?

ASUS to chase business PC market with free AI, or no AI - because nobody knows what to do with it

"He’ll happily omit AI from machines sold to larger buyers, due to concerns about data security and privacy."

At extra cost?

Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz

The corollary seems to be that as copyright law is well established the AI industry shouldn't exist. I'm with Nick.

AI's enormous energy appetite can be curbed, but only through lateral thinking

Re: Shadow currency

True, but one has to start somewhere and discouraging consumption may be as good a discouragement to burn peat as anything else we've got.

The elusive goal of Unix – or Linux – simplicity

Re: "Advocacy..."

With Android having to conform to the limits of a phone CUA wouldn't fit well. OTOH scarcely anyone seems to have found anything beyond the home screen that does - at least not that I've seen. That's no excuse to have dumped elements of phone interfaces on the desktop nor to have abandoned CUA and the consistency it brings.

I have NextCloud running on PHP on Devuan - it's ancient Beowulf and the initial installation was a bit odd as it insisted on installing X which I had to remove. I can't remember any undue issues with installation except that configuring web servers with or without PHP was never my thing. Whatever - it's been working for years.

One thing I've noticed about Devuan - I don't know if it's inherited from Debian - is that it does seem insistent on installing a GUI desktop. Leaving everything unticked at Tasksel it will install XFCE anyway. If it is inherited from Debian I can understand the author of the article to which Liam links disliking it. It appears that his business is providing bare platforms, not desktops.

Likewise a two typewriter household. I'm not sure where they are, probably in a packing case in the garage, the packing case they've been in for several house moves. Mine's an ancient Remington portable, SWMBO's something sleeker and plastic cased. Last time I saw mine it had signs of woodworm.

Techies thought outside the box. Then the boss decided to take the box away

Respiratory test subjects' pre-conditioning room.

'Close to impossible' for Europe to escape clutches of US hyperscalers

Re: Really ?

Who are you and what did you do with fg_swe?

You would now need to allow for fail-over to different jurisdictions.

Re: Brown envelopes

OTOH they can't become unavailable because some thin-skinned numpty decides to sanction the EU or just your company. the way he did the ICC.

Trump threatens to add formal Apple Tax on top of the 'Apple tax'

Re: Perhaps ...

You think there will be donations of all the components, material, plant, factories, the land on which the factories are built and the services supplied to them?

Re: Perhaps ...

You're forgetting the cost of building the factory, equipping it and recruiting and training the workers.

Re: "National Emergency"

The real emergency is that the US now has a constitutional crisis, whether it realises it yet or not.

China approves rules for national ‘online number’ ID scheme

Re: Terrible China!

OTOH it's useful to have a bogey man to point to when HMG comes up with this idea.

Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold in Redmond

Re: It makes me happy

"there's not a chance in hell I'd ever want to switch her to Linux and make her learn all over again"

There's no need for you to make her learn all over again. Microsoft will do it for you. Unless this is her first computer it has done so in the past, possibly several times, and will do so again next time H/W replacement comes along.

Re: Shocked by the number of users here

In many cases, because they have to.. We can feel sorry for them.

Re: Command Line Editor

Command line editor - something used from the command line. In the non-FOSS past it would have been vi. Now it's nvi.

Re: Maybe I’m old fashioned

"on Linux take your choice"

On a GUI, whatever the desktop manager provides - they're all written by people who know what they want from a basic text editor. It's that simple.

What was the question?

Is there anything more we can do to screw the users for fun and profit?

Re: Just more evidence (as if we needed it)

"MS Has lost the Plot (Again)"

This is predicated on the assumption that they rediscovered it after their previous loss, an assumption which is open to doubt.

Re: It makes me happy

"They did the same for 98, ME, 7 and 8 and have the same plans for windows 10."

I doubt it's any secret to anyone here that I'm not a fan of Microsoft or its works later than their Fortran for CP/M. OTOH I seriously question this in that my sister-in-law is a a heavy user of her W7 laptop and if it had been so easily compromised not only would it have happened long ago, I'd undoubtedly have heard of it given that she only lives a few hundred yards away.

Provided it doesn't get into vi (nvi) I'll be OK.

Forgotten Turing treasure trove rescued from attic goes under the hammer

Re: available to all

Agreed. They might be of historical interest if they were annotated or accompanied by letters adding commentary, otherwise straight off-prints don't add o what's in the full journals.

Re: Amazing

It's not 100% clear from this but AFAICS the Forster letters are to ROutledge: "The sale will additionally include a collection of signed letters from E. M. Forster – another of Norman’s close friends – as well as Norman’s unpublished memoirs, in which he talks about Turing and Forster."

https://rarebookauctions.co.uk/attic-discovery-turns-out-to-be-1930s-origins-of-computer-science-by-alan-turing-expected-to-fetch-thousands-after-almost-being-shredded/

The sale catalogue would be more informative but doesn't appear to be online yet.

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Re: Have you fixed tech with an unlikely tool? Have I ever

"An ingenious vendor came up with something called a HardCard, which was basically a low power hard disk on the card, so it didn't need either a bay or an upgraded power supply."

AFAICR it needed two slots because of the size of the disk rather like GPU cards today (nothing new under the sun). Maybe it also included some other interface functionality so it could replace and existing card.

Re: Not Exactly Computer Tech...

Driving an Anglia to Dublin from Belfast, two of us to visit TCD and the a third going to a job interview I heard a distinct click and the engine died. I'm not sure why the first thing I checked was the distributor but I lifted the cap to see a contact. Just the one. The moveable contact had broken off and moved itself into the depths of the distributor where it stayed for good. The interviewee got a lift to Dublin and I trudged to a garage and back or possibly got a lifts (depths of time and all that) to get a replacement set. Eventful trip but useful, years later the specimen we collected from TCD was one of the cover illustrations on my friend's book.

Re: Slightly before my time.

A pity the lead wasn't carrying mains, then he could have found out about effing safety.

Re: Once had IT support ask me if I knew where a PC had been moved to

Ah, the innocence of youth.

Back then the only alternative was cable the thickness of a hose pipe with a bend resistance closer to mild steel with a minimum bend radius of, IIRC, 2 metres com=connected with vampire taps, a drop cable and a 15 pin connector. 10Base2 was a vast improvement. Networking with Cat 3 (yes 3) was still in the future.

You admitted it instead of telling them that that's what you'd have to do now?

But yes, facilities. Deciding that the assembly point for bomb threats was the opposite side from the door so we were expected to walk round the end of an all-glass building that had an alleged bomb in it.

Re: "The usual one was a USB A cable in the RJ45 socket"

A determined user can fit almost any plug into almost any wrong socket. It just depends on the size of hammer available.

Trouble-ticket system's AI summary.

I thought that was "Something went wrong."

Re: fixed a keyboard related 'fail to boot' remotely

This thread is getting very worrying.

Re: In denial

Same here, - distance & computer glasses but reading print with neither. I'm not sure the last is unusual, it's just a function of the underlying condition, long or short-sighted combined with reduced range of accommodation with age.

Cybercrime is 'orders of magnitude' larger than state-backed ops, says ex-White House advisor

"we've got to be able to do the equivalent of walk and chew gum at the same time"

No chance.

Datacenter biz wants to turn heat and carbon waste into biomass for sale

Re: Instead, it looked for new ways of reusing the heat...

Seaweed in their feed is supposed to result in ruminants producing less methane. If that applied to the algae grown in this system it could be a useable animal food additive.

Re: Instead, it looked for new ways of reusing the heat...

If it's substituted for a fossil fuel it's a win by avoiding adding extra CO2. Alternatively if it were charred part would be returned to the atmosphere but the remainder would be stable and if stored (e.g. bumped in landfill) would be more or less permanently removed.

Re: Ick

I think the objective is to use it as some sort of chemical feedstock, maybe for biodiesel or the like.

BOFH: The Boss meets the unbearable weight of innovation

Damn sans-serif fonts

Al Gore

AI Gore

Which has AI in it?

What would a Microsoft engineer do to Ubuntu? AnduinOS is the answer

Re: Wrong approach

"none of the managers could accept it."

Obvious reply: OK, you can keep it but you'll have to fund it out of your own budget.

Re: Doesn't need to be done

"So who is left that hasn't already made the switch."

All those who've heard about the end of W10 and have a box that won't downgrade to 11 and which they can't afford to replace. There must be a lot of them. Add to that those of us with non-tech relatives whom we wish to ease off to something better.

Re: Doesn't need to be done

"Or W2000 (in which case there's, e.g., Mint/Xfce)."

Any distro with KDE with Reactionary for window decorations and any of the various early Windows application style, colour and icon themes. It's very easy to do with KDE, especially as the panel and menu button are in the right place by default unless the distro developers have chosen to apply some NIH sauce.

Lenovo thought it could surf geopolitics, until Trump's sudden tariff changes

That wouldn't have worked. Tariff is applied when it's imported, not when it's ordered. The best that can be done is say "Here's the sales price, you'll have to pay a tariff surcharge when you get it but we can't tell you what it will be because it could change between ordering and delivery; it's not under our control."

I can't see why Trump objects. He says tariffs are beautiful so why should they be hidden. He's not lying about them, is he?