Posts by Doctor Syntax

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.

ERP carnage continues as orgs jump in unprepared

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.

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.

"Yet the retailer says it has still developed AI, personalization and recommendation engines"

Thanks for the warning. I'll be careful when using B&Q or Screwfix sites.

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.

"Kept in the dark" literally, if they're unlucky.

Tablet market stalls because there’s not much new worth buying

Re: No Great Loss ... 100% Correct.

"The signature has no use if it is NOT recognisable"

You haven't seen my "usual" signature.

Intel CTO and AI boss quits to join OpenAI after just six months in the job

Do Intel have any former executives with the right technical knowledge who could be persuaded* to step into the role at short notice?

* This might not be easy.

UK asks cyberspies to probe whether Chinese buses can be switched off remotely

"Cyber security risk is a core element of our procurement process for new electric buses. Ruter's work in Norway is helpful for wider industry learning, and it's really encouraging that they are carrying out tests and exploring how security systems can be improved even further."

It's at the core of their procurement process how come they hadn't done such tests already?

Re: Keep licking the American boot, Britons

Cisco make buses? Who knew?

Can we have a whataboutism icon?

Ironclad OS project popping out Unix-like kernel in a unique mix of languages

Re: Why does this

"Who will use this if the defense industry doesn't?"

If it has the backing to ensure it keeps going (and that might need defence use) then all those capital equipment makers that are currently leaving users stranded on obsolete versions of Windows ought to turn to it.

Not at all Unix-like but the UCSD pSystem (the original Apple Pascal) was written in Pascal. The OS, application and P-code interpreter all had to live in a small address space, enabling it to run on a 6502 or Z80. (As a L1 cache any self-respecting modern core would turn its nose up at the size of the memory available on the box I had it running on.)

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

"The main problem with top 40 pop stations is the lack of variety."

It ties with DJ drivel.

Re: A mindless and repetitive task where error checking has never been an issue

Or the writing.

AI companies keep publishing private API keys to GitHub

Re: move fast and break often

Shhh.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

"Windows has not required drivers for USB devices since XP"

W11 on a friend's laptop, last week offered some wierd pop-up along those lines. I eventually fond the not too obvious option to open it. (It was also throwing up frequent reminders about wear or trimming of her SSD but I wasn't getting into that. All I wanted was the file of pseudo-random characters that's the admin password for a hosted Nextcloud so I could get her logged on.)

"And if a monthly update fails (extremely rare in my years) I just wait for the following month, and the next one will take care of it."

My no 2 laptop has Q10 on it. There was a notorious, AIRC from successive reports here, update that failed every month. Eventually I did a reinstall which was the only thing to fix it. There were all sorts of instructions online to download this, that or the other from MS, run the sort of commands that Windows boosters say is a problem with Linux and none of them worked. I think the only improvement from days of yore was that Windows could be reinstalled without trampling all over other partitions.

What other gems did this throw up? Ah, yes, I remember. Back in the day I'd made a restore image in the way they used to say to do before blowing away the original W10 to make it my no 1 laptop. When it was relegated I thought I'd restore it. After that, every time it was booted into Windows it complained that the OneDrive was incompatible with a DLL, or maybe the other way around, for a year or two. Not that I wanted OneDrive but it was just another thing that made it look like a bag of spanners.

Re: Keep dreaming

"The non-techie users, which will always outumber the techie ones, will want consistency."

Is this the consistency that ran through W7, W8, W10 to W11? That ran from Office 95 to Office 21 or whatever it currently is? The consistency that has experienced Windows users here bitching about this, that or other aspect of the Windows UI.

Like I said in another thread, a marketing playbook is to take whatever it is you fear most in your competition and disparage it as if it's bad.

"My KDE desktop does not have a start button at all, nor a panel at the bottom. I do have something like a start button on my desktop, but it does not open a Windows like hierarchical menu but a full screen searchable grid of icons"

Mine, OTOH does have a start button and it does raise a hierarchical menu which is not quite Windows-like in that I can edit the hierarchy as I please.

That's what choice and flexibility are for. We each get a UI we prefer, working as we prefer.

Maybe they should get together and form something like https://www.freedesktop.org

Re: A design that originated in Window?

Also. IIRC, Alto didn't have overlapping windows either. That might have risked them being sued by Apple although they might have got away with in on account of not having round corners.

Re: "Imagine if instead of Vim, we had 23 different Vi clones"

I'm not sure it's correct to say, as the link does, 'nvi is the "official" Berkeley clone of vi, and it is included in FreeBSD and the other BSD variants.' given that Berkeley is where vi was written. Before Berkeley there was no vi.

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

There's also Outlook the current name for the email service that was formerly Hotmail and, in between, Live. This, of course, is the MS way of doing things - wrap as many different products as possible in the same name to persuade the gullible that they're all the same thing and you have to take the lot of them.

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

"did not respond quite as slickly"

As slickly as what? As slickly as having to click multiple times to use W11 without a MS account?

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

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.

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

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.

Re: Elvis has left the building

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.

Allianz UK joins growing list of Clop’s Oracle E-Business Suite victims

Re: "Unfortunately, large-scale zero-day campaigns like this"

The bonus becomes payable for recovery from the attack. The longer it takes the more difficult it must be so a bigger bonus is justified.

SpaceX and Musk called on to rescue China's Shenzhou-20 crew

Re: Try it on earth.

ISTR there were a few things hastily put together to get Apollo 13 back which had not been previously tested.

Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart

Re: As irrational as it sounds...

"Willful ignorance is humanity's Achilles' Heel. Once people decide they no longer have to learn then they stop learning altogether. You can't teach them after that. Sadly, they must come to realize the truth on their own and that only happens when things go wrong for them."

Experience is a dear teacher but there are those who will learn by no other.

Re: Open source is not a magic bullet.

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.

Re: "Open source is the ticket out of here." Etc

"doubly so in N.America"

For the Rest of the World it's North America (or a large part of it) that's the problem and the paradigm shift that's the answer.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

Re: Implausible to say the least.

"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.

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: Ah ha! my dear engineer

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