Posts by Doctor Syntax

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

Re: The problem is ...

It always seems to me that the live version isn't as performant as it could be. YMMV.

Re: The problem is ...

Forget the experimental and enthusiast distros. There are a small handful of desktop distros and a small handful of server distros.

If you want to experiment with a desktop Linux distro for a couple fo days, do you know how much it will cost you? A couple of days of your time. You don't even need another computer to test it on providing you've got one with enough disk to spare to install it dual boot.

You could even try a couple of distros. See what the differences are and realise how similar they are. Discover that it's not so much a matter of vast differences, more a question of finding where you feel most comfortable, rather like deciding on your favourite pub.

Try it. It doesn't hurt. You can keep it a secret if you don't want anybody to know that you have.

What amazes me is the number of people who call themselves IT professionals who haven't even tried, as professional development, something that won't cost them money.

Re: Why are people complaining?

"Payrolls, Stock, CRM etc."

Back in my time we were doing those things on Unix servers. Before that they were on mainframes. Windows is not the only platform.

Re: The Masses Will Get An Agentic OS And Will Not Complain

"So people will just put up with the changes, and learn to live with it."

Frog boiling. That's MS's core competence.

Re: New features! New Features!! PUMP THAT STOCK PRICE!!!

We keep hearing this bit about applications. Yes, of course we run an OS to run applications. I certainly d. But do you really want applications where the vendor is persistently trying to inveigle you into subscriptions for what you're already running, or run them on their servers with your data a their mercy, or busy shoehorning AI into all those applcations?

When is enough enough?

"His follow-up at least suggests Microsoft knows users are unhappy"

But does it care?

Brits to help foot power bill for datacenters under government AI plans

"There are sometimes mismatches between the amount of electricity generated in a certain region and the electricity grid's ability to transmit that electricity from that region to another,"

Meanwhile, the data centre, whose effectiveness is being measured in inputs rather than outputs, is steadily eating a fixed amount of the generation which is then not available for transmission to the rest of the customer base, even if the generation falls below transmission capacity. At the extreme we'll hear about DCs unable to operate at low generation levels because transmission capacity isn't adequate to suck in power from the rest of the grid.

AI music has finally beaten hat-act humans, but sounds nothing like victory

"I remember as a kid watching TOTP waiting to see if they put a decent track on (and week after week failing), ditto the Alan Freeman show"

AKA the triumph of hope over experience.

Re: Pop Will Eat Itself

An opportunity for PDQ Bach

Re: What happens if you play AI country music backwards?

Not entirely.

Re: Stock, Aitkin and Waterman

"Their back catalogue consists of repetetive crap by such diverse talent as Kylie Minogue and a bunch of Kylie Minogue clones."

As does the back catalogue of their contemporaries.

Canonical pushes Ubuntu LTS support even further - if you pay

Re: Ridiculous

I'd guess it works like this:

If upstream issues a patch for a version in the repo it gets passed on.

If a user hits a problem in a package which by now has been in production for years without having problems, it gets looked at.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it

Re: the kernel

"if you've got a working thing that is staying just as it is, why isn't it sitting in a VM"

You started off by answering your own question.

Image this: You have an application that was written for and being run on Python 2. It does what it was intended to do and that s something which is critical to your business.

Why would you want the risk of trying to run it on anything later?

Re: the kernel

You're looking at it from the wrong end og the telescope. The people who are interested in this are not those looking to install the newest shiny. They are people who need to run something developed for that platform and which is performing a critical function not easily replaced. Are they going to take the risk of asking will it run on the latest version of libxml2, let alone the latest version of Python?

They probably don't even want any patches or for it to be "slightly" upgraded. They're paying the money because some fiat says the platform must be "supported" and the reality is that it has to stay just as it is, doing just the job it was installed to do, no more and certainly no less.

Re: Kicking the can down the road

What about some very expensive piece of equipment, something so expensive it was scheduled to be amortised over a couple of decades? Something whose drivers were written over a decade ago by a vendor long closed down. In tha sort of environment issues are not going to be solved by new versions of the OS, they're going to be created by them.

Now imagine you're about to purchase s new piece of equipment of that nature. Would you want its controlling S/W to run on an OS whose vendor is not only promising such longevity but visibly delivering it on their earlier versions or would you want it to run on Windows?

Re: Confused Old Person Here....Again!

"if it's a regulated environment"

This is surely the key to it. Regulated environments that require applications to be certified and the applications themselves are only certified to run on a specific platform. Just the sort of environment that doesn't sit well with forced upgrades.

Microsoft's first Windows 10 ESU Patch Tuesday release fails for some

Re: evolving into an agentic OS

You're describing evolution by natural selection, survival of the fittest. What they're proposing is evolution by artificial selection, survival of the profitable.

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

Re: Hmm

1. $Topic was introduced (too long to go into detail here)

2. $Topic was explained (too long to go into detail here)

3. Explanation was summarised (too long to go into detail here)

The bits in parentheses are only added if doing without them is looked on as being sarcastic.

If the training course didn't go like that it was badly designed.

Re: "The biggest help with writing a "$SUBJECT for dummies" guide"

"It's certainly the case that idiot-proofing a guide to your area of expertise benefits from having an idiot around"

What if the only idiot around is the boss who will have to sign off the document?

Re: One place I used to go

Aren't they a bit syrupy?

Re: I used to own a sports bar/restaurant

"thick testy sauce"

That would be something that didn't agree with you.

Re: I used to own a sports bar/restaurant

My first thought was what about a circular motion around the speaker. However the greater problem is with a sentence such as "He always took his dog with him on his meanderings."

"Meander" suggests that some of the movement will be towards and some away from the speaker while the dog would complicate things even further running back and forth, So should it be "take" half the time and "bring" the other half?

Re: I used to own a sports bar/restaurant

A word can be short and pithy but still wrong.

There is a verb "give". Derived from that is a noun "gift" - that which is given. There is no need whatsoever to use the noun as a verb because the verb already exists and yet that is done if the giving is to be presented as something particularly significant.

The simple test there would be to use the fancy verb "donate" with that donated as "donation" and ask oneself would one say that it had ben donationed? If not, don't say it had been gifted.

/rant

Re: The person who writes documentation

Brookes comment on manuals: the first thing to be started and the last to be finished.

Re: First time user

I suppose it could be applied to manuals too but my scheme for reviewing a UI, in particular a web site, would be a team of:

1. Such a first time user. one familiar with the domain but not the application.

2. A developer responsible for the application.

3. An invigilator

The ostensible purpose of the test is to determine how many steps the user takes to accomplish a set of tasks compared with the minimum number as established by the developer.

The user is only permitted to ask and the developer to answer questions of the form "where does it tell me how to ...". The declared role of the invigilator is to enforce this rule but the real role is to prevent violence between the other two. The real purpose of the test is to demonstrate to the developer just how awful the UI really is.

On occasion I've felt that this could have applications outside S/W development. Arrangements of signposting would be one when a destination signposted for several junctions suddenly ceases to be listed.

The Steam Machine rises again as Valve readies 2026 hardware trifecta

Re: Desktop Linux?

As someone who runs native Linux applications on the desklaptop that's the way it strikes me too but as Microsoft pushes so many users into the remote versions of their S/W it's hard to see how a Chromebook would differ in those terms.

Meanwhile a Linux OS running MS Office & other Windows S/W locally is going to confuse a number of commentards here but I suppose they can bleat about it being inconsistent with whatever UI MS currently imposes and other Windows users are complaining about.

ERP carnage continues as orgs jump in unprepared

"How can I learn new stuff if the acronyms are opaque to me?"

Search engine. It's a great learning experience to discover the - shall we say "diversity" - of meanings for any given set of initials. Some are very "diverse" indeed.

Re: Lack of committent / involvement from the whole org

"Yes I know I am seeing unicorns for the last paragraph"

Not a council system* but a former client of mine used an ERP system from a small supplier. They had a number of quite different scenarios for various parts of the business ranging from the main logistics business to a few maintenance contracts. They had enough knowledge within the business to handle most of the customisation in-house. That was an important success factor. It probably stemmed from a realisation at the top that the ERP was essential to the business which made it worth having that expertise in-house

The other, which makes the OP's paragraph less of a unicorn, is that, because the ERP supplier was small, where stuff couldn't be handled in-house by the customer it was possible to go to the supplier and negotiate acceptable prices for mods or new functionality some of which was rolled out to all the customer base. That again was made possible by in-house expertise. There was a penalty in that we had a few weekend shutdowns for table reorganisations.

* For very good bad reasons any discussion of \ERP here is going to end up discussing councils.

ERP has been around for a long time. I suppose there have always been failures but if these had been so big, so frequent and so well publicised it might never have become mainstream.

So what's going wrong now? My guess would be that in the past it's been driven by the business wanting a given set of facilities and possibly adopting them piecemeal so that adjustments are made - to the business itself or to the application configuration to bed everything in. Possibly even applications were modified on the base of early adopters' feedback. Because it was the managers on the business side who wanted the project they were naturally engaged with it.

Now we're seeing projects forced by vendors pushing customers to update and preferably update into their (vendors') own clouds. Customers aren't "jumping in", they're being pushed. Vendors are sufficiently bigger than their customers to not care and to be able to dictate. The business isn't really engaged any more; those who were have moved on, those in place now have no knowledge of how it was dome and expect it to be all turnkey.

Britain's first small modular reactors to be built in Wales

Re: @Doctor Syntax

No, it can be marked as it being too late to keep ignoring. Neither party has a record to be proud of.

Re: Omdia not Very Omniscent - SMRs are currently under construction in Canada

"press releases .... Or they're buying options on the power generated by the hypothetical initial reactors - with a highly optimistic intial date on it"

But then, you're repeating yourself.

"The timing problem is critical."

And HMGs of various colours have been faffing about for decades.

Ubuntu 25.10's Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut

Re: sendmail.cf

I think I may also have looked at sendmail.cf a very long time ago but the memory has been blocked.

Re: ninjed me!!!

My view of sudo is that, irrespective of the age of the version or the language in which it's written, it has a basic flaw. If a user's ID is known then root access is only one password away, even if it has to be used twice.

It's there to solve a problem that doesn't need to exist. In 1981 subsystems such as printing had their own admin IDs such as lpadmin.

"this is quite common behavior in packages that ship replacements for older, more complex tools"

There's the quandary. If an application had been stable for a long time is there justification in rewriting it? Are there more undiscovered issues in the original version that outweigh the new ones which will be, at least initially, introduced?

Geopolitics push European CIOs to think local on cloud

Re: More misdirection

And someone concerned with that - the name "Brad" something sticks in my mind - welcomed the CLOUD Act after that saying it would give them certainty.

Re: More misdirection

Agreed. The follow-up question should have been "Would you have been allowed to admit it if they were?".

Superintelligence probably not happening, but AI will still reshape society, expert panel says

Re: Starts off with a false assumption

"Line always goes up ... until it doesn't."

Optimists see an exponential. Realists see a sigmoidal - qualified by "at best".

To 'Infinity' ... and beyond: MX Linux 25 has arrived

To get back to your original question, I'd say go Devuan, but being a Devuan user anyway Rice-Davies applies.

IME the Devuan installer is pretty well the same as the Debian installer. and I have, in the past, not selected any GUI at the tasksel stage of installation intending to install KDE from the command line and found it just installed Xfce anyway.

Also IME if you install one DE and try to replace it by another you can spend ages picking bits of the original DE's fluff out of your navel. The worst was in the early days of the great GNOME 2 re-creation & I tried all of them in turn. It might just have been overload and MATE happened to have been the last but I ended up having to do a clean reinstall of the OS after it.

"Excalibur 6 is the current stable release."

And, of course, it has KDE.

Re: What was that about APPLICATIONS???

It's based on Debian so it's going to have all the usual Debian and 3rd party applications which aren't news and aren't going to find a place in a news article.

Nice try, though.

London left buffering as Hyperoptic backup link refuses to boot

Maybe the backup fibre was in the same trench.

Russia’s first autonomous humanoid robot staggers and falls on debut

"you might want to install in a public place so it can interact with humans"

But will the humans want to interact with it?

Aviation watchdog says organized drone attacks will shut UK airports 'sooner or later'

Re: Trouble is brewing

As I keep saying, you do not inhibit people intent on breaking laws by providing them with more laws to break.

Re: Fight fire with fire?

Wrong question: Try "What is the cost of these small teams NOT sitting there doing nothing 24/7/365 at umpteen airports?"

Retail giant Kingfisher rejects SAP ERP upgrade plan

When we realised it wasn't really at all common.

"The only exception are smaller companies who frankly received a bargain"

Let me guess: those were early adopters who put up with early versions, whose feedback shaped the product, whose enthusiastic recommendation helped sell it and whose money was immensely more valuable to a fledgling vendor than a "reasonable" rate would be today.

MS Task Manager turns 30: Creator reveals how a 'very Unixy impulse' endured in Windows

Re: It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work

Maybe someday soon your desktop will be just like the mobile "experience"

Mine won't. Neither will yours if you choose to take control.

US taxpayers being kept in the dark over datacenter subsidies

Re: Dark?

Literally "literally" seems to have lost its literal meaning these days.