Posts by Doctor Syntax

In Otter news, transcription app accused of illegally recording users’ voices

It would completely und-ermine trust in the system.

Someone's poking the bear with infostealers targeting Russian crypto developers

"or who use the SOL token for legitimate purposes."

Cryptocurrency used for legitimate purposes? Does not compute.

Nabiha Syed remakes Mozilla Foundation in the era of Trump and AI

"Just make an effing good browser and mail client"

And make it look like it belongs on whatever desktop it's on. Seamonkey does this. So does PaleMoon. Firefox and Thunderbird no longer do.

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Re: Pretty much all software

That might be true of the sofware you're using. Much better to start with a product that doesn't do that so you don't have to turn anything off.

Re: What's he smoking?

"No-one is going to wait 5 years unless forced to."

I don't think he's planning to make them better. For those stuck on Windows, make the most of those five years.

Re: A couple of things

Windows is so much simpler than Linux, isn't it.

Timekettle T1 AI translator helps you scale the Tower of Babel

Sounds fishy to me.

Should UK.gov save money by looking for open source alternatives to Microsoft? You decide

Re: What do they mean by "more ambient"?

I wonder what he means by "ambient". It smacks of "sounds impressive, I'll decide what it means later" although it probably means "in your face, all the time">

Re: They should, but

Which particular demonstration did you have in mind?

Re: Mix because...

"how come he gets real Office and I only get Mickey Mouse Office?"

Take advantage of it. Pay a small bonus to those using the non-MS option. Call it "sharing the savings with the users" which is what it would be. Watch those Excel and Access applications get migrated.

Re: Extra option?

"Realistically, a high-FOSS mix for the public sector would inevitably mean - sooner rather than later - an absolutely huge team of software engineers employed by the taxpayer to do their maintenance."

Evidence?

Codeberg beset by AI bots that now bypass Anubis tarpit

Detect the crawlers quickly, block the IPs for a random amount of time.

Reckon you can put a nuclear reactor on the Moon?

Re: Hang on ....

Locate them at the poles.

Minority Report: Now with more spreadsheets and guesswork

Bring back the village bobby who could work all that out with Real Intelligence.

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

Re: Justice for bcachefs!

Ext4 is far from excluded, it's most people's default. ZFS has been explained above - the reasons aren't technical, they're legal. XFS? dunno.

Re: Justice for bcachefs!

The future of Linux does not depend on a non-default FS.

Re: Anecdotally... No To BTRFS Too

Speed is good but reliability is essential. The file system's function is to save your data and return it as required. If it fails to return it it doesn't matter how quickly it fails.

Are you willing to pay $100k a year per developer on AI?

"Funny. GPT-5 will confidently tell you that Willian H. Brusen is a former US president. For those of you not from the States, there's no such person, never mind a former president."

I'm sure in no time at all search engines will all agree that there was such a person and that he was US president.

If Prokofiev were still around he'd write an orchestral suite about him.

Voice, vision, pen: Oh dear. Windows boss says Microsoft is again reshaping OS

In that case, bearing in mind they employ Apgent P, it would be time to move to BSD.

Re: Consumers vs Creators

"One day, and I'm not hopeful, M$ should come to the understanding that if they don't have an OS that serves business, business will go looking elsewhere"

One day, and I'm equally not hopeful, businesses will come to the understanding that if they want an OS that truly serves them, they'll have to look elsewhere.

Don't blame Microsoft for doing what makes money, blame businesses for not getting off the treadmill.

Re: Sigh

And if anyone was dithering about that , this should help them decide.

Re: More Shite being flung against the wall

"Why are MS finding it so hard to even get these basics right?"

They got basics sorted long ago. Marketing requires something new every few years to get users to buy new versions. The trouble is that means fixing what wasn't broken. They could usefully put W2K in front of developers every 3rd release and say "replicate that".

Shout's in loud voice in open plan office: "FORMAT C DRIVE".

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

Re: Can someone remind me ...

Start by converting green screens to http and web pages ,so you can have named fields whole new categories of bugs and vulnerabilities that weren't there before.

Re: 'Legacy' does not = 'obsolete' or 'bad'

Not training people to maintain it is only half the problem. The other half is the ongoing political creation of ever more complex piles of requirements as politicians thrash around trying to make reality fit their ideas. Thatt's what introduces the need for "maintenance" in the first place.

Government IT has special problems. It has a change of policy with every change of government - say every decade at the most and possibly more often than that- and a change of strategy with every change of minister - say every couple of years or more often than that. It also has to work all the time doing stuff that's been done for decades.

In an ideal world the keeping on doing stuff really shouldn't need maintenance at all. In the real world it's the changes of policy and strategy and general tinkering by everyone down to junior ministers that introduces the need for "maintenance"

The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn’t one

Re: a more heterogeneous environment might be good

"Perhaps even a non ‘ix one as well."

Interesting thought. Of course Unix was an excellent model. What would a non=Unix-style OS be like? Would it take the lead from something else? Be totally new?

Re: May I suggest ...

People wondering about that might lead to buses being hi-jacked.

That makes a nice change from you telling us it's all put together by amateurs.

If you can just get over the notion implicit in the last line that that's what the rest of us were thinking...

When I got to that line I knew I didn't need to read any further.

Desktop-as-a-service now often cheaper to run than laptops - even after thin client costs

Re: It'll be cheap until it doesn't work

I had a gig testing migration of S/W from one application server to another. This was back in the days when character terminals were still a thing although their "character" terminals were, in fact, thin clients with the terminals sitting on a shared desktop server. My last day there was the go-live day and everything was fine for an hour or two. Then the front-end server suddenly slowed down. We eventually tracked it down to a few users having turned on the GUI wrapper for the application which just hit everyone's shared desktops. The bigger server they needed to run that was still awaiting delivery.

Re: "Desktop as a service"

The mini-computer came about as an escape from centralised computing.

The PC cme about as an escape from centralised computing

Cloud got its foot in the door as an escape from centralised computing.

I really don't see either of the forces - local and central control permanently gaining the upper hand.

Re: "Desktop as a service"

"they are basically trying to reinvent the X windowing system."

As did Wayland although they missed the whole point of it.

Re: Cost Effective?

Just wait for "Daas 2.0 will require DaaS-client 2.0. It will only run on hardware based on TPM 4." where TPM 4 is newer than most of the client fleet.

The £9 billion question: To Microsoft or not to Microsoft?

"... moving away from Microsoft is possible — but it requires careful planning, skills investment, and strong governance to succeed."

If you stop to ask what is CCS doing with that £30 million you might come to the conclusion that it could spend it on just what's needed to move away from Microsoft.

Microsoft wares may be UK public sector's only viable option

Re: For f*--sake

"These idiots of all parties will bankrupt this country becaus they really don't understand the details."

If we were at that stage we'd be making progress. Right now they don't seem to understand the basics.

You're near retirement. So if the top team at wherever you work, public or private, look what happened to organisations as diverse as the BL and M&S start asking what alternatives you have, will that be your answer?

Re: Knocking the government for doing the same as everyone else

400-500 people constitute a herd, following each other. In fact the basic argument seems to be that if everyone else is going along the same route it must be right. In fact it puts everyone into a dangerous situation, not particularly because it's Microsoft, Oracle or whatever but simply because of a monoculture.

Even with simple things such as so-ans-so's cloud going TITSUP for a few hours that's maybe entire organisations - and many organisations - with staff sitting idle or trying to revert to manual operations. How many organisations were temporarily flattened by Crowdstrike and that was only an add-on to the main platform.

If there is a vulnerability that gets exploited the damage isn't going to be a few hours, it's going to be months.

That applies whether it's proprietary S/W or FOSS. It's the over-dependence on a single platform that's the risk. Proprietary does, however, carry the additional risk that we now realise proprietary software coming from a single country could carry a political risk.

Even if the latter is improbably it's likely to be the one tat actually wake politicians up. There are an awful lot of Creese's "public sector business leaders" who are going to be left floundering if their political masters start asking about their plan B as are a lot of their private sector equivalents if their boards start to look around. And where that question gets passed onto them there are quite a few folks here who would be equally flummoxed.

Re: I read this as propaganda

Stockholm syndrome at its finest.

"But it should be limited and controlled, not led by the technologists, but by public sector business leaders, accountable for and able to demonstrate return on investment, benefits realization, and UK public value for money."

Good idea. When are they going to be recruited. Actually, maybe not even a good idea because the usual complaint about business leaders in general is that they're likely to be technologically clueless and apt to believe anything the salesman tells them.

Re: Don't forget UK-specific training benefits

"*their* engineers tend to be in Redmond."

Are they? Not in India?

"Open source also comes with a range of less measurable costs – training, over-engineering, reliability, security maintenance, data interchange and interface complexity."

As opposed to assuming staff will just "know" Office etc* and be able to stumble along with Microsoft's next changes, under-engineering, MS <365, patch Tuesdays, proprietary "standards" and complexity**.

I think you make a convincing case for preferring FOSS to Microsoft.

If this Microsoft is the only viable option for public sector it is an excoriating condemnation of the public sector.

* Training costs saved here will become evident in CCed confidential data, Excel misused as a database with row limits overlooked and numerous other public sector ballsups traced back to lack of training.

** See stumbling along with Microsoft's next changes.

MS confidence in Windows 11: Pay us to host VMs for when your desktop inevitably dies

"MS confidence in Windows 11: Pay us"

The headline could have stopped right there. That's Microsoft's entire interest in the matter.

Chap found chunks of an asteroid older than Earth in his suburban living room

Re: Just curious

If it is it seems to be an odd use of "literal" by today's standards..

The White House could end UK's decade-long fight to bust encryption

They'd have their own E2EE. MP's wouldn't but, because at least one of their number in a chat group would always end up blabbing to a journalist if not posting direct on their own website, they probably don't realise confidential communication is a thing.

Re: What common sense could not achieve

Right outcome, wrong reasoning. I suppose by law of averages he's going to get something right given the number of attempts he makes.

Re: CSS

Any successful TLA must have at least two meanings.

That was the point. If they can't eve get to commission a PoC they might possibly start to wonder if it's really feasible.

Debian 13 'Trixie' arrives: x86-32 and MIPS out, RISC-V in

"Trixie complained about missing firmware, but even so, successfully brought up a Wi-Fi connection and installed fine."

It's done this for at least one and possibly more previous releases.

Colo operators flock to emerging markets to build DCs

"Earlier this year, The Register reported that the North American colocation market was struggling with unprecedented occupancy rates and difficulties in building new facilities, which might explain some of the growth in less-crowded regions."

And then there's imported duty on what they need to kit them out. Isn't North Virginia within easy foot-shooting range of Washington?