Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I used to work with a Sequent which had a LOT* of huge (4Gb I think) disks. Folk lore was that if they were shut down they wouldn't start up again. That was left running for a years. Eventually it had to be moved & they started up without problems.
* Part of the reason for the number was that they were mirrored at disk controller level and pairs of mirorred pairs were mirrored at database level. Whoever set it up wasn't taking chances.
Yes, commonly used applications certainly get put in the tesk bar. But then there's only so much room on there so a logically organised menu is essential. And app tiles? Those weird things compensating for the fact that some utter dweeb decided that, contrary to all previous experience, alphabetical was the best way to arrange a menu?
"jump distros (wiping the drive in the process)"
Who on Earth wipes a drive to install a new distro? Drives have these things called partitions. If you have to reinstall the OS you leave the partition that will be mounted on /home untouched. It really goes to show how little you understand things.
"Shortcuts in the taskbar and customized app tiles should remove 90% of your Start menu deep-dives. If it's a "common", often-used setting it's in the new Win10 Control panel; more intrinsic settings remain in the old panel (it's that simple, really)."
Ah, yes. Windows is so starightforward. Nothing arcane about it.
"I think maybe because Linux is chasing the users it doesn't have rather than making the system suit the users it does have.
Hence a focus on design and shiny over pure functionality."
You did miss the irony tag didn't you?
Or did you just parrot something you read somewhere posted by somebody who's never used Linux based on something written by a Microsoft shill?
Because those uf us who use Linux do so because it suits us exactly (it has the flexibility to so that) while W11 is the result of 25 years focusing on design style and shiny over functionality.
"most Linux desktops still look like something from the early noughties"
And what's the difference between WIndows from then and Windows now?
Quarter of a century of enshitification, that's what.
Quarter of a century of releases that expected ttheir users to go along with whatever changes Microsoft expected them to adapt to.
Quarter of a century of changes imposed simply because Microsoft needed to force purchase of new H/W for the latest Windows because that meant new licences being sold.
What have you gained from it? And what have you lost?
"The problem is that amateurs are unwilling, sometimes unable, to agree to standardize the OS."
What standard is this? It can't be Microsoft's because that's been shifting with every release. Would W2K have been a good standard? A lot of people seem to tink so. If so why didn't MS stick with it? Why did they come up with Windows for Teletubbies? W8? All the rest?
Is macOS the standard? If so why doesn't Wny version of Windows look like it.
The closest thing we've ever had to as standard is CUA. AFAICS the closest adherents to that standard are KDE and LibreOffice. The "professionals" have dirfted further and further away because their marketing departments and they crayon departments told them to. The "professionals" aren't allowed to follow standards. I also wonder how many of the "professional" coders have worked on UI design as compared to the "amateurs".
Question: Who's the best judge of the UI I, personally, find most useable?
Answer: Users.
Maybe a lack of reading skills. Look at the question again:
Note thetwo words "I, personally".
Why should a mass of undefined people "users" be able to make a judgement on my preferences. Why? How? It's an answer beyond reason.
The only person who can judge that is me. Not you. Not "users". Sure, some users might come to the same conclusion. Some might come to different conclusions.
You find Gnome ittitating. So do I. So I don;t use it. I have choices and, FWIW, my choice would also exclude Apple's UI which I think weird
W8 which is exactly the opposite of what I want from a UI. I think a lot of people agreed about that and yet I assume it wasn't coded by amateurs.
I'm not sure you intended your last paragraph to say what it di but as far as KDE is concerned you are correct.
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.
"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.
"pumped hydro is the only at scale solution"
For some values of "at scale". In order to achieve that you need suitable sites with an upper and lower reservoirs. Reservoirs involve drownin existing landscapes which isn't exactly environmentally firendly, nor is it firendly to those who lived there if the valleys were inhabited.
It's a useful technology but niche.
I'm sure there are a few suitable phrases on the playbook: only a few.etc., no longer doing it (right out of Sir Humphrey's stock excuses), mistake by a junior/former employee ...
No problem. The emollient words flow smoothly, not so much lies, more a case of not having any meaning to any PR person.
"The threat actor was able to obtain personally identifiable data related to the majority of Allianz Life's customers, ... third-party, cloud-based CRM system...Based on our investigation to date, there is no evidence the Allianz Life network or other company systems were accessed, including our policy administration system."
I take it from this that the systems which ran the actual business where the data belonged were OK. So why was some 3rd party CRM also holding the data if it wasn't essenital for running the business? I think we all know that one - marketing. The people who send out "click here" emails to customers, training the customers to be phished and clearly expecting customers to click on them because that's what they'd do themselves; the most easily phished staff in the business.
"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.
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.
