Posts by Doctor Syntax

Tech tariff turmoil continues as Trump admin exempts some electronics, then promises to bring taxes back

Re: The longer view and risk management

Even the best run companies are entitled to expect well-run governments that don't want to move ast and break things. They are entitled to expect that their currency, interest rates and taxation wil be pretty close next quarter to this quarter and, more importantly,pretty predictable next year. If that's not the case they'll be very reluctant to invest at home because they might have to write off that investment if there's a big change enforced entirely by an erratic government policy.

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

Re: I confidently predict

I suppose in Turkey the Turkish language keyboard will expire and revert to Spanish. Or Faeroese. Or something.

The local sheep farmers just use crushes and showers these days. Actually, one shower as the kit goes round from farm to farm.

Global datacenter electricity use to double by 2030, say policy wonks. Yup, it's AI

"AI to more than double global datacenter electricity use by 2030"

Not if they're stopped. And they need to be stopped. Preferably not by a global financial crisis but quite possibly Trump might do something useful by mistake.

LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything

If AI asked to prepare a legal brief cites non-existent cases why expect AI to write code to do any better?

Re: Bankrupts all round

You'd need the precaution of having accoutns with two banks and enough in each to survive a few months outage before you start wishing for things like that. You never know, you might get what you wish for.

Re: Feedback?

So you get your program to compile. Then what?

Re: well duh.

Based on TFA it sounds like a job for life.

The most important experimental distro you've never heard of gets new project lead

Re: Point of order

I'm afraid too many Windows enthusiasts have never out-grown Belloc's children's verse:

"And always keep a-hold of Nurse

For fear of finding something worse."

Let's just decide that Linux is for grown-ups.

Re: Point of order

Linux, of course, is an implementation of the Unix design approach and Unix was a grown-up OS before even PC-DOS was a rather naughty twinkle in Bill Gates' eye.

Re: Home directory

I think 'tis you who are missing the point. Corporate use cases are not everything nor is corporate funding applicable everywhere. Many home users and education users don't have the money to buy everyone a PC. Users have to share and in those situations there'll be multiple logins with multiple directories under /home.

"Your home directory which is where everything, by default, saves your Documents. In - in /home/doctorsyntax/Documents, which, if you're following the corporate security standards I've seen, is encrypted to the user login. So you have to save your presentation somewhere else."

And where would that be if there's only a single not-home directory containing all that lot and encrypted for security? Something half-arsed like having a tied-down laptop with the actual task in hand run from a USB stick? What do corporate security standards say about data on USB?

I get that your experience is restricted to a use case of one PC, one user (or vice versa) imposed by corporate policy and which, by your admission, are mostly not Linux. However I think it's a bad approach to base a design on the assumption of satisfying a single use case. Ultimately that assumption becomes the product's limitation.

Don't let's give Agent P ideas.

Re: everyone's doing it

And too bad if you get caught without a full distro to hand. Of course you could always download one from this PC here.... Oh, it's the one that's not booting properly.

FWIW Debian is making the merged layout obligatory for the next current version - due June. A quick check on my test Devuan version shows /usr/sbin is a distinct directory, not a symbolic link.

Re: Pathetic

It is, of course, possible that Arthur C Clarke was wrong.

Wasn't there something about some game relied on use-after-free so Microsoft remained deliberately backwards compatible with that? If so, that's not a good idea for binary compatibility.

One of Linus's mantras is "don't break userland. Of course that doesn't preclude excessive pottering about in userland to break things but such problems can be avoided.

Re: Home directory

"No-one else is going to use my laptop."

This may come as a surprise but laptop distros need to cater for more than just your way of doing things. Mine, for instance, has a second user installed because sometimes it's taken to events such as family history fairs to run presentations and in those situations I don't want it running out of my own home directory. SWMBO's laptop is currently an old one of mine and includes a home directory of mine with a lot of stuff on there that never got transferred anywhere else. Other people, I'm sure, have a single laptop for several family members - not every family can afford one each.

One size does not fit all.

Re: everyone's doing it

"In Fedora 42, /usr/sbin is a symlink to /usr/bin . So /sbin , /bin , /usr/sbin and /usr/bin are all the same directory."

From his comment above Gene Cash isn't going to like this and I agree with him. /sbin was there to help bring up a badly hosed system. Things were done for reason beyond that's the way they've always been done. It was more a case of things being done the way they've always been done was because they were originally done that way for reasons. If nothing else conservatism keeps you doing things right iven if you don't know why. It's a bad move to change for the sake of change rather than by going back to first principles, find out what objectives were being met and providing a better way of meeting them.

"because you can install stuff without root access"

Presumably this would be in the user's home directory. The idea of a ~/bin goes back a long way.

Re: But.....can you use it for real work????

One of the things that Linux and the BSDs enable is a way to experiment with different ways of doing things. Developments like this might at some future point influence systems that you can and do use.

OTOH I'm not sure these ideas achieve what's not possible with simply installing the application and a directory tree for its resources under /opt. Installation can be as simple as un-tarring the application - which is how I install Seamonkey - or letting an installer do it - LibreOffice. The latter may be helpful and put an entry or two in the menu instead of having you do it yourself.

What's the penalty in disk usage for providing every application's private copy of, say libc - which, if I've understood the description, it must do. Or are the applications statically compiled which amounts to much the same thing? And what happens if you need to compile something from source?

I can appreciate the advantages of this (not least ./configures which assume some unnecessarily recent version of a library and barf if they don't find it) but there's a cost to it in extra storage and extra complexity.

Microsoft total recalls Recall totally to Copilot+ PCs

Re: BTDTGTTS

With the US energetically alienating its friends it's a distinct possibility that the EU will have decided to look elsewhere PDQ at the level of the actual EU institutions with, very likely national governments following on. What if they then strt mandating Linux & FOSS applications in education? Too many Windows-only applications? If it looks like there might be a tipping point FOMO will do the rest.

Re: Alleged Use Case

"India, the capital of scammers"

That may need revision. I think the competition overwhelmed it.

Re: Alleged Use Case

Automatic opt-out? Non-opt-out more likely.

"shift back to LMDE 6"

You'd be letting Agent P back into your life. There are better choices.

Re: Resistance is futile

But no infosec awards?

Pentagon celebrates snipping 0.58% from defense budget in IT, DEI cuts

Who's to say it isn't already?

Were it not for your posting history I'd have invoked Poe's law. But no, it seems you mean it:

MAGA

Make America Grade Ashes. As meaningless as the original but somehosw seems to capture the essence of it.

China ups tariffs on US goods to 125%, calls Trump's war a 'joke'

Beijing had shown "little respect"

Respect is earned. If you htink you're not being respected, ask yourself why.

PIRG's 'Electronic Waste Graveyard' lists 100+ gadgets dumped after support vanished

Re: Why do we still buy smart things?

Don't buy anything that's tethered to somebody else's computer. That way ownership can become real, not a pretence.

Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft. Readers say it's all been downhill since Clippy

Re: Ah, ya know what?

Oops. "we feel no need to genuflect etc.

Reflecting on Muffin's declared 30 years experience. It doesn't really impress anyone who was running real-world applications on Unix systems about the same time as Bill Gates was doing the deals that put PC-DOS on the first PCs, using CP/M on Z80s, also on real-world applications before that and cut their FORTRAN teeth about 25 years before Windows sprouted a Start button. 20 years ago I was developing applications on W2K so it's not as if I don't have a basis for comparison.

Given that I can run KDE desktop on a net-top powered by an Atom with 3GB it's not that bloated. I wonder if W10 would have run on it.

Re: Ah, ya know what?

"It became obvious a long while ago that the main thing driving the hatred from the non-Windows people is envy--they cannot stand that their pride and joy, whatever version of Linux or BSD or who-knows-what they use, does not rule the desktop and does not earn the billions of dollars a year that Microsoft does."

Completely and utterly arse-about face. The reason many of us prefer Linux or BSD as a desktop is that we're not being bled by corporations earning* billions of dollars a year to produce ever crappier versions of opaque S/W.

We feel a need to genuflect whenever Microsoft pulls out another turkey of a UI. We don't fear every patch Tuesday nor wait ages for updates to download and then reboot and wait for an update to complete. We feel no need to have to submit our PCs to whatever inspection Microsoft demands with the next version of its EULA. We are emphatically not gradually boiled frogs.

* I'm repeating your choice of verb but it is open to dispute.

Re: Microsoft isn't Windows anymore

"Peak Linux depends on the distro; Ubuntu is well past its peak, to name one."

Anything with systemd is well past its peak. Welcome to the world of ensittification.

Re: Microsoft isn't Windows anymore

"They have basically given up on desktop computing even as the corporate world firmly has not."

I doubt it. It's the teat through which users are expected to suck all those expensive services. What's more, they're not prepared to give it away which is why the 10->11 upgrade is restricted. Those who expect it on old H/W are looking at it from the wrong ange. The only reason it was allowed on recent H/W would have been to block class actions.

Re: From a home-user perspective, Windows 7 remains the best overall OS

AFAICR SP was the first to want to call home to register. That was the star of the slippery slope which has brought Windows users to software by subscription and excessive dependence on somebody else's computer.

"Windows 11 has yet to set the world alight"

The energy demands of all that AI training might yet do so.

Billions pour into AI as emissions rise, returns stay pitiful, say Stanford boffins

I'd like to think there'll be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth before much longer. I doubt, however, it's going to be CEOs and CTOs, "chief scientists" etc. of the outfits who are burning the money who willbe wailing. I'm sure they have been more than adequately - excessively even - paid.* It's those who have put money in.

* No, not "compansated". Those who might possibly deserve compensation are those whose money has been burned. Even those who committed money to it don't deserve it. If pension fund managers have put small investors' money in then those investors should be compensated - by the pension fund managers.

Self-driving car maker Musk's DOGE rocks up at self-driving car watchdog, cuts staff

There are going to be some interesting prosecutions being fired up in 4 years' time.

Re: Sell, Sell, Sell

Depending on who he borrowed from he might lose more than his wealth.

Ransomware crims hammering UK more than ever as British techies complain the board just doesn't get it

"We need to have a constant dialogue of this is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it,"

This is why paying a ransom should be illegal ad directors held responsible. The dialogue would be much easier if IT could answer "If it goes wrong you could end up in gaol."

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

US: "But aren't all you guys British?"

UK: "You mean with both speak English?"

US; "Yes."

UK: "So do you, near enough. You go, you're closer."

Re: Fake tickets raised in malice?

People hate change when imposed for no reason

In the case in TFA the change actually made things much worse. A tethered PC would require the engineer to remember all the details on what might have been a complex drawing while what was needed was something that could be carried by hand. The PCs needed to be able to provide some sort of paper output.

This was a crap system design because the designer failed to understand how it would be used.

Apps-from-prompts Firebase Studio is a great example – of why AI can't replace devs

"Agentic AI uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex, multi-step problems."

First define your problem. The skills for this seem to have fallen by the wayside, partly, it seems, through a lack of asking "what happens if.....". perhaps those who've been in the business more recently than I can explain how this comes about.

My car's S/W is full of examples like this (so many that the handbook has pages describing some of the oddities resulting from this as if that excuses them) but here's a simple supermarket checkout example.

The scenario for customer providing their own bags, which the customer is expected to follow although without being told, is:

Customer arrives at checkout with shopping and bags and deposits basket of shopping on shelf provided. (Critical reading will note that there's something missing from this description).

Customer taps whatever prompt is on screen to start the ritual

Customer is prompted to place bags in bagging area and tap "continue" (where have bags been until then?)

[Loops of scanning barcodes and adding items to bagging area.]

Customer taps screen to indicate all items transferred

[Payment by whatever means completed]

Customer told to remove shopping.

-----

Real life:

Customer arrives at checkout with shopping basket in one hand and bags in other.

Customer deposits basket on shelf and, fairly naturally, bags in bagging area - the bit that was missing above.

Program has no instructions about arrival of extra mass in bagging area prior to issuing prompt to customer to place bags there

Program retains state from previous cycle which is that anything in bagging area is (previous) customer's paid-for shopping

Customer told to remove shopping

-----

What happens now if customer takes this literally, picks up back of shopping and walks out with it? The checkout told him to "take your shopping" even if he hadn't paid for it so could he then be prosecuted for shoplifting?

Why was there nothing in the design process which provided for someone to think through, maybe play act what people might do when approaching a checkout with basket and bags? Was there nothing in the process for anyone coding the system to flag up the issue if they spotted it? Did nobody try this in user testing and if they did why was the result dismissed as expected behaviour?

None of this is anything that AI will help with but until the preliminaries of what a system can do are worked out the best quality of coding is still going to lead to a buggy system. I'm tempted to say a system that's buggy be design but it's really buggy by lack of design.

M365 Family users wake up to notice 'Your subscription expired'

Re: And that's why...

But remember off-site does not mean somebody else's computer.

Re: And that's why...

Directories where I'm doing work are synced to NextCloud which not only has a backup of the last version but the version before that and before that.... Which has been handy from time to time.

Actually I don't keep local systems up 100% of the time. Laptops are switched off when not in use ant not even NextCloud is up all the time, thanks to the local electricity supply. It helps that updates aren't a monthly source of angst. They Just Work. The doffing of your hat is only occasioned by making sensible choices in the first place and those choices are also open to you.

Re: We need a new naming scheme

Office <365.

Re: Fixed now?

Not needing to blame someone is better than having someone to blame. As soon as some remote server enters into the mix there's a whole extra universe of things that can do wrong and give rise for reason to blame. Is taking a one-off effort to learn something new better than having frequent failures to work at all?

And how often does the commercial version require new ways that have to be learned? Genuine question since the last version of Office I used was not noticeably different to Libre Office - at least I moved from one to the other with no sense of effort. The big issues I did find with use of previous versions of Office was that being given a file from a slightly newer version would be unopenable by the older.

OK great, UK is building loads of AI datacenters. How are we going to power that?

Re: Nice work for some

The AI Energy Council (an oxymoron if ever there was one) are goingto be among the last people to admit that.

Re: Hmm

"Or we dig it up here and the journey is shorter."

But if we dig it up here people will see it being dug up and get freaked out. What he eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over.

Fear of tariffs made the PC market great again in Q1 as vendors emptied factories to dodge price future hikes

Re: What about Q2/3

I'd guess the factories have been prioritising US deliveries for Q1 kowing they have the rest of the world to sell to for thethe other quarters.

Trump thinks we can make iPhones in the US just like China. Yeah, right

"will there be anyone left in the US who can afford an iPhone anyway?"

They can make them to sell to China.