Posts by Doctor Syntax

Windows 11 is a minefield of micro-aggressions in the shipping lane of progress

Re: Big Fizzle

Until the hype bubble burst and all references to AI will be removed in a panic.

Re: Sure, Linux could make a truly usable desktop system....

kmorwath might be surprised to discover that I personally rate W2K as a very good desktop UI. Since then it's been downhill for Windows. KDE, OTOH has built on the W2K getting such things as multiple workspaces before Wondows. The divergence between the two has left us with the situation that the free UI is what the Windows UI could have been if, in kmorwath's own words "Microsoft had someome far more clever than Nadella at the helm" and W10/11 is what it is.

Similarly LibreOffice retains the UI that Office 97 had achieved before Mircorosft produced the brainfart that is the ribbon interface.

Between them KDE and LO have conserved the UI the Microsoft had achieved before they embarked on quarter of a century of enshittification.

Re: Sure, Linux could make a truly usable desktop system....

"resource are needed to write truly good UIs"

But who judges what's a truly good UI? Is it going to be ISO Good UI standard? And what then happens to users who don't like the standard? Who find it unuseable?

Who's the best judge of the UI I, personally, find most useable? Have a go at working out the answer to that one. I'll give you a hint: it's not you.

NASA faces brain drain as thousands exit under voluntary resignation scheme

"employees who accepted early exit offers tended "to be the most senior people with the most knowledge."

Of course.

UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act

Re: Labour just love legislation...

They're both equally short-sighted. When one of these "verification services" gets pwned - as seems inevitable - they might find it's time to go to Specsavers (local independent opticians are also available).

"You don't think that it's a brilliant piece of 'nudge' thinking by the government to get people to think seriously about online security?"

No. It's a piece of unuerpassed government stupidity of people who think they think about online security the children. When the whole thing blows up in their face it will be the political class as a whole that gets a much needed nudge.

This thing started with the previous government. Blame the real eejits here. The Home Office.

Not sure about your "older generation" remark as I'm sure the "digital natives" will be quite blase about the whole thing. I suppose the inevitable porn to pwn hitting the headlines in a few months' time will finally make governments start tinking a bit more about the consequences in dabbling in this sort of legislation.

Well, who could have foreseen that?

Aeroflot aeroflops over 'IT issues' after attackers claim year-long compromise

Re: .. and there is that other problem.

It's arguable that previous dictators were also commuist. Idealistic egalitarian philosphy does tend to get in the way of personal aggrandisment.

Intel cutting cutting-edge node funds would mean no more Moore's Law

Managed (or maybe not) decline.

US spy satellite agency breached, but insists no classified secrets spilled

"later released on bail. But he continued offering support for the phishing kits via Telegram"

There really needs to be a double tariff on offences committed while on bail.

'It looks sexy but it's wrong' – the problem with AI in biology and medicine

Re: It's worse when AI Slop pretends to have medical knowledge

"From what I see, it won't be long before the first class action will come along..."

It'll more likley be the first malpractice cases that eventually put the brakes on.

First release candidate of systemd 258 is here

Re: Its a kitchen sink feature

"WHY does anything have any reason, means or motivation to even be able to break `sudo` in the first place"

That's an easy one: because it breaks Salzer and Shroeder's Separation of privilege principle: "Where feasible, a protection mechanism that requires two keys to unlock it is more robust and flexible than one that allows access to the presenter of only a single key." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protection_of_Information_in_Computer_Systems

I doubt they made such an improvement deliberately and in any case the whole thing breaks the Economy of mechanism principle: Keep the design as simple and small as possible.

Re: hold on there

"Devuan a bit on its way out (as per this discussion)?"

No. As ususal its tracking Debian so whenever Trixie becomes the current Debian Excalibur will follow it as Devuan current a few weeks later as usual and it's OK to use now, in fact. The usual bits of enshittification in UI due to devs everywhere not being able to leave well alone - one of them seems to be KDE playing games with default window opening behaviour. I suppose they thought it was time the swindow system menu has some more work to do. Still, it could be a lot, lot worse. It could be Windows.

Re: hold on there

It was a bit touch and go for me when I tried an X session instead of Wayland. It kept dumping a load of X errors into the log every few seconds. I discovered that there is a Pipewire package for X that hadn't been installed.

Re: Risky here....

Yes. Calling out and resisting enshittification always matters.

Re: I'm gonna get mega-downvoted

"f all of the people who object to systemd were to get together and design an init system they liked, they might come up with something good"

That's not necessary. It already exists. It's Syvinit. Systemd is exactly the sort of thing you get when you lose sight of "good enough".

Re: Agent P and his employer

"It's a shame good (bad) old Bill Gates has moved on"

It looks like he'd effectively moved on long before the stuff in the link. If he hadn't he'd never have let it get so bad.

"had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history"

There's an interesting point here. The biggest impact any organism had was the first photosynthetic one. It and its decendents released an extremly reactive molecule into the environment that totally changed the environment of the planet. Whether this was adverse or not could be debated as an abstract point: we have a vested interest in it but all the obligate anaerobes descended from pre-photosynthetic life have been driven into restricted niches.

Re: What?

Not really a problem. Your storage is really a patchwork of blocks of data. The file system is an abstraction layer to present that as a coherent structure of directories and files (with links added to give a bit of fleximility. A GUI interface is another layer of abastraction layer on top of that and folders are part of that. You think "abstraction layers" are just fancy talk? If so, ask yourself if you really want to deal with your computer as the mass of ones and noughts it really is because everyithing that makes it easier and less confusing than that is an apstraction layer and they're piled one on top of another from ragiststers counters and ISAs upwards.

Re: What?

Not a bad thing at all. Just a logical alternative.

Re: Its a kitchen sink feature

vi view ex will be the most familiar to many people.

Re: Its a kitchen sink feature

I think it's one particular person's employer and a financial backer or two to assist their cloud offerings. Follow the money.

Re: Its a kitchen sink feature

So when they said the entire source bundle was neede to compile one of these separate commands they were telling porhies?

I think the guys at Bell Labs were even smarter. Certainly collectively so.

Re: What?

"Unix was always a better solution for everything but gaming"

Unix was invented because Ken Thompson could play his Space Travel game.

Re: Its a kitchen sink feature

"it's a lot of little commands that have well defined purposes that you are not required to use if your use case does not require you to run them"

There's one small difference between that at Unix. With Unix they were separate commands, not bits sticking out of a hairball.

Re: hold on there

This is the bit that surprised me: "it now needs at least Linux kernel 5.4"

It doesn't have its own already?

Re: hold on there

"Devuan (and derivatives) is still holding on but who knows for how long this will be so."

At that point it will be BSD for me

Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty

Re: Schwarz Digits building EU cloud services

Interesting parallel with Amazon & AWS.

Re: The part about the injunction is unclear to me

"What then should the penalties be?"

What should the penalties be eventually? I could imagine that running through the courts to decide who had jurisdiction. In fact MS's declared approach would be to challenge it so they'd probably have the legal situation sorted out by the time they did or didn't hand it over.

Re: Seriously?

The only way to be anywhere convincing is to have made the investment in establishing a presence well before you start posting the propaganda. Creating a new account for the job just stands out. And we'll probably spot the propaganda anyway but we won't be able to call you out so easily.

You DO see Windows 11 as an AI PC opportunity, say Dell and Intel

Re: Decision Makers: The Ones who Authorize Payments

You may have a database full of company contacts, but, if they are Decision Makers, you are golden a pest to every one of them.

Re: Lack of a killer app

It could be the killer app in itself. Killing the PC market.

Re: "upgrading their PC fleet is a virtue"

Your post downvoted for not reading carefully. The complaint was about the ambulance chasing variety. Earlier in my career I spent a lot of time in the courts. As with any other profession there were good and, shall we say, not so good. I found the episodes where they shunted the jury (if there was one) out of earshot fascinating while they debated points of law. Particular respect for Dessie Boal for, amongst other things, getting FIB 1 as his number plate although it sounds like you'd disapprove of his doing that.

Re: If this is aimed at the UK market

Sons of Wayland won't be running Windows.

Re: "upgrading their PC fleet is a virtue"

But you know what that's about, don't you? Money.

If they hadn't let recent purchasors upgrade they'd have had the ambulance chasing lawyers gearing up for action. Nothing to do with limited generousity.

If they let everybody upgrade they wouldn't get the licence sales from new hardware.

"a survey of 1,000 IT decision makers"

Surveys say that 82% of people in surveys will give random answeres just to get whoever's doing the survey out of the way.

Surveys also say that 100% or marketroids will believe the result if it says what they want to hear..

Debian isn't waiting for 2038 to blow up, switches to 64-bit time for everything

All this has made me realise just how old I'll be in 2038. Oh dear.

Please don't remind me about accounts departments and Y2K

Re: Best of luck

"having to make"

Already a done deal as far as I can see,. Trixie is Debian Next and also the basis for Devuan Excalibur which I've been running as test for several weeks and is currently my daily driver because the no 1 laptop has suffered a bit of a knock & is in for repair.

Not sure about LMDE.

Blame a leak for Microsoft SharePoint attacks, researcher insists

Just thinking about the timing. If they suspect a leak two weeks before public release on the 8th why did the attacks only start on the 7th? Did it take that long for the leak to work through?

I'm not familiar with the way these things are due but are the PT releases simultaneous world-wide ot locally timed because there a places in the world where it's July 8th while at other places it's still july 7th?

Microsoft CEO feels weighed down by job cuts

"a software factory, unconstrained by any single product or category"

"an intelligence engine empowering every person and organization to build whatever they need to achieve."

Two alernatives. Which has sufficient meaning to be used to assess what's been achieved?

Nothing to see here: Brave browser blocks privacy-busting Microsoft Recall

Re: searching what you've seen..

Mozilla based browser

From the main meu bar: Go>History

Maybe not a complete search but a good start. Local. Delate as required.

Britain's AI datacenter plans face energy, planning, investment challenges

"You don't become a 'superpower' overnight"

We know, ut who's going to tell them?

AI data-suckers would have to ask permission first under new bill

Re: AI like humans

"I can only imagine that the vast majority of humans would not be fooled into giving away their Windows product keys just because someone asked them to play a guessing game."

True but only because the vast majority of humans wouldn't be able to find their Windows product keys. Something easier - no problem.

Are they still buddies? It's hard to keep up sho's siding with whom in a bunch of squabbling toddlers.

"Did I make it sound like I was happy about it?"

I don't know? Are you the original A/C, the 2nd A/C's sock puppet or a 3rd A/C?

Trying to conduct a conversation as A/C doesn't work.

EU cloud gang challenges Broadcom's $61B VMWare buy in court

Re: That ship has sailed

"Broadcom has its hooks too deeply into VMware to be prised loose at this point."

Their problem if the court rules against them.