Posts by Doctor Syntax 42407 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"The government said it intends to follow Australia's model by targeting user-to-user platforms whose primary purpose is social interaction and user-generated content. That would include services such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X."
That definition also includes email. Is he targetting that?
Also, banishing disappearing messages isn't going to go down well with all the other politicians. How would they be able to plot against each other if that happened?
"the hiring surge appears to be concentrated in a surprisingly old-fashioned category: people who know what they're doing."
I can't escape the feeling that it would be simpler to hire people who know what they're doing to do the work rather than hire them to fix the mess made by the LLM that doesn't know what it's doing but has been used to do the work.
If the EU and EU countries* are serious about sovereignty they'll be mandating genuine open standards. In that case anyone wanting to use some other document format will be the ones out of step and it will be they who have to solve their own problems. Existing material will be seen as "legacy" with all the opprobrium that implies.
* 'd like to include the UK as well but getting any sense from any possible government is going to be impossible for years.
Microsoft had a long history of making new versions of Office that produced documents that previous versions couldn't open. They only came up with OOXML and a tame ISO committee whenthey were cornered by US procurement requirements saying office S/W must follow an allegedly open standard. About the same time as they produced something that made a relatively fixed target for others to implement they then changed the UI. Existing users had to adapt but it then meant that new users trained on the new UI (say with educational licences) found the older, saner and also standards-based (even if it was an IBM standard originally) UI of LO to be difficult. Odd, that timing, don't you think?
"I think EuroOffice's creation was a plan to pitch themselves as the sovereign choice to get funding, whether they would then use that funding well or not."
Liam has documented various manoeuvrings in the last few months around office shites, such as LO reviving their own cloud-based version which had been shelved (sent to the attic in their terminology) in favour of Collabora's version.
Everyone who's been paying attention can see that the sovereignty movement is resulting in opportunities for office suites and they all want to grab a share - or, more likely, I suspect, the entire thing. A share would be fine is the products are to be in ODF and hence interchangeable. Somebody grabbing the whole market would a frying pan into fire move.
And what does the recipient's email client C do with it? Does it have something that makes sense of the audio clip? If so will it auto play? Does the recipient want to open an email and have it play audio? And what happens if somebody sends malware which appears to be an audio clip but in true Windows fashion, depends on the .exe extension being hidden from the recipient?
"Most home users are not like us, they don't want to cobble together a collection of different apps."
My friends who've been forced to my new W11 laptops are not using MS Office as far as I can see. They're using either LibreOffice or one of the other free suites. Unfortunately for them Windows comes with some sort of cobbled together email client so at least some of them are using that - not necessarily happily but I'm not really doing support for them or else I'd install T-bird. I've recommended it so some of them may be using it. It's not a good situation for them. My SiL is suddenly getting messages about her storage being full. Several of them are paying for local support. As Windows isn't my thing at all I'm not getting into that so I'm quite happy to let someone have the income stream.
The president of our Civic Soc seemed so overwhelmed at a meeting on Thursday night that I made an exception and went round yesterday to show him how to embed documents in email; apart from anything else LO seems to be saving documents on OneDrive or whatever it is and they're not visible in the file managerl.
libre office doesn't have an equivalent to outlook or any kind of email client.
It's debatable as to whether this is the best approach (after all, it enables people like yourself to make comments like that) but AIUI their position is that it enables users to make a choice. There was some discussion about taking Thunderbird under their wing when its position under Mozilla looked shaky. Personally I wish they'd taken over SeaMonkey and wrapped in an entire browser/email/RSS readerUsenet reader/calendar package.
As it is, users can add TBird or something else as they choose.
Back in the days when you took a film to a shop to get developed a& printed (D & P) the company actually did this. As the mother was a well-known BBC newsreader the company and police got enough attention to make them wish they'd engaged their brains before taking it further.
When deterrence fails there's always preventative detention. The reality is that there'll always be criminality. You can't take a blanket approach and say "creating this new criminal offence will deal with it". That's the legislator's approach and at best it doesn't work and at worst it has bad side effects that should have been obvious. The sad fact is that you have to deal with individual cases, detect them, try them and then work out what's the best - rehabilitation, some form of punishment that should be a deterrent or simply removing from society for a long period to protect that society.
As it's not a controlled experiment we have no evidence as to the extent that earlier extreme punishment acted as deterrence or not. The contrary factor influencing behaviour was extreme poverty.
What's wrong here is that you - and Starmer, and many more - are seeking to treat the symptoms. The images are a symptom of the harm done to the victims. Simply attempting to hide them is closing the eyes to the original harm and thus letting it continue. What should be done is to identify those responsible, charge them, try them and, if convicted, give them deterrent sentences.
It's not specifically Starmer. The digital ID thing has been a Labour aspiration for the last 3 decades or so. Cameron's government celebrated the 800th anniversary year of the signing of Magna Carta by a new Investigatory Powers Act to further screw down on the presumption of innocence.
"will it run on Windows?"
In this case the appropriate question "will it run on MacOS?"
Let's look at T'bird:
Email client
Address book*
Calendar*
RSS reader
Usenet reader
Follows open standards
What's missing?
Obedience to Microsoft lock-in with their closed standards but if you're looking to break out of Microsoft lock-in why would you want it?
* Both these use open standards to sync with servers
The reason I suggested individual claims via the small claims court is that they would have to send someone to court to argue this - and argue it against the fact that it was their deliberate choice to brick it. That's going to cost more than simply making a refund.
From TFA "Avoiding overinflated expectations? Even a politician could do that."
I know it's an ironic and rhetorical question but it's worth looking at the politicians involved.
Again from TFA:
"Peter Kyle, the then Technology Secretary" Geography, International Development, and Environmental, doctorate in Community Development. Succeeded by Liz Kendall, 1st in history.
"the Minister for Digital Government and Data confirmed that internal pilots of in-house productivity tools had been paused after they had been 'superseded by more modern, widely available platforms,' without specifying which ones." That's Ian Murray, Social Policy and Law. "joini[ed] an arts-based internet TV station as the Operations Director." That sounds better. "Following the collapse of the company" Oops.
