Posts by Doctor Syntax

Windows 11 stages a comeback – still miles behind older sibling

Re: Don't panic

And there, folks, is the Birmingham City Council situation nailed in one post.

ISTR someone suggesting in December that the explanation for the W10 gain in December was that with the holidays the number of accesses from home (W10) had cone up and those from work (W11) had gone down simply because users were at home instead of at work. In that case a reversal in January was to be expected.

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

Re: Mildly off topic

Noting your el Reg handle I wonder if he gave you the cold shoulder because you couldn't think of any.

Re: Seamonkey

With the current fad for only bothering to write websites for a limited number of browsers it gets more and more difficult for a lot of sites. Even my own NextCloud needs Firefox which is stupid given that SM is built on FF. Just download the file, untar it in /opt and add an entry for /opt/seamonkey/seamonkey to your menu.

Re: changed the look on XP to 'classic'

I tried it. It half works. It displays the basic form, finds the date, loads this weeks event list but does not respond to any controls. Maybe I'll poke about at it some more and see if I can get it working properly. Currently on 2.53.20 SM, It's encouraging to know it still does work, thanks for that Jou.

Re: On the other hand...

"His surname was Nelson, so you can guess why he didn't like being called by his full name"

Or his half name.

Re: changed the look on XP to 'classic'

The closest to "dark theme" is still "Metal Lion"

Default theme is to use the system theme which is what Mage wanted. Presumably if your desktop theme is a dark theme (anathema to me but we all have our preferences) it would automatically follow.

A recent annoyance is that for the last few releases Lighting (calendar) has become a tab rather than a separate window and I can't see a way to change that.

Re: Nuns!

"That caused some problems."

For whom?

Re: Nuns!

"a nun in full regalia"

I don't think "regalia" is the correct expression. Please don't make a habit of it.

Re: Cotton Tail

And now I have the Ellington piece of that name running through my head. Much appreciated.

Re: changed the look on XP to 'classic'

"Thunderbird 91.13.1 was the last that could do OS theme and that needed massive configuration editing."

Seamonkey still does.

You're going to do what to the feature? Microsoft defines what it means by 'deprecation'

Re: But it isn't end of support for Windows 10

"Whether you TRUST whoever is doing that is another matter"

Good point. That's Microsoft.

Re: almost everything people do on their PC now works just fine under Linux

Friends of Linux users who come looking for help with their borked Windows stuff because we "know something about computers".

Re: Status quo.

name brand 300mm/12")

As your eyes get older you'll find this is a synonym for "unusable junk" whether it's a tablet or a notebook.

Re: Status quo.

"MS's market share is held up by the number of dodgy users who didn't quite find their way to buying a licenced copy."

The only market share they care about is the number of purchased licences. They're in the marketplace to sell. What wasn't bought wasn't sold.

What they were hoping for was that everyone would run out to buy new H/W to replace the old and with it a new Windows licence. A potential problem was people who'd recently bought W10 and might get rounded up into a class action to fatten lawyers at Microsoft's expense. That was bought off with a free upgrade provided the H/W was "modern enough" ("ooh, look, TPM2's just what we need").

But if somebody isn't buying W11 accompanied by new H/W it's much the same whether they stay on W10 or migrate to Linux, as least in the short to medium term. Unless, of course, they can be sold a subscription extended support. That's an even better wheeze than a perpetual licence and opens the door nicely to W12 being subscription only.

Re: I don't mind what they mean by it...

redmondii?

That's one of the approaches we biologists use in Linnean binomials. Redmondensis might be an alternative.

Re: I don't mind what they mean by it...

Things may also depreciate once they've been deprecated. They're deprecated because they're no longer appreciated.

You'd think that but they don't seem to realise that. They seem to think that if it's a paid-for product they'll somehow be able to get actual support rather than a stream of patches.

I remember the times when we (a) bought a licence for server S/W and (b) paid for support, usually at 15% of licence fee. Support not only included updates but also a phone number with someone knowledgeable to answer it (promptly AFAICR) with escalation to even more knowledgeable people.

For commercial use free as in beer isn't necessarily a stumbling block and there are a number of companies who will support free as in speech S/W - and it's the free as in speech that enables that to happen.

"The company is fervently hoping that users are listening."

Are they?

I'm sure somebody there has been working out how much money they can make by selling extended support o an ongoing basis to those who won't buy a "perpetual" licence for W11 as part of a hardware replacement.

I'm also sure that there must be plenty of customers who have been working out how much they can save by subscribing to extended support instead of replacing H/W.

And someone else at Microsoft noting how easy it is to get customers to slip into thinking of the whole of Windows a subscription service rather than a perpetual licence and that by doing so they free themselves of dependence on H/W refresh cycles.

Trump’s tariffs, cuts may well put tech in a chokehold, say analysts

Re: Europe-US trade imbalance

"All these things take time, but ultimately Europe is going to have to on-shore its tech services "

Building up tech services is likely to happen much more quickly than building up manufacturing, especially if the manufacturing has to be bootstrapped as a result of shooting oneself in the foot with tariffs (pauses to fret over mixed metaphor). Building up tech services will be even easier if there's a glut of H/W because of the footgun.

Good point.

Perhaps it needs to be men in white coats.

Re: Shaking

"The president has now been set for the demise of the petrodollar."

Freudian slip?

After Trump 1.0 it's been difficult for the rest of the world to take the US seriously.

Re: Shaking

Well spotted. So how many?

The sensible thing to do would be just sit tight for a while, watch what it does to consumer inflation in the US and how the public react to that.

I wonder if the Republicans have an equivalent to what used to be termed the men in grey suits by the UK Conservative party.

Re: Shaking

I wonder how his voters will react when they finally get to experience the reality of what his policies mean. I suggest a new vulture unit: the Truss.

Dell ends hybrid work policy, demands return-to-office despite remote work pledge

Re: Well, it's Dell.

"Nobody should be doing timely things in email"

I've successfully conducted a conversation in near real time between myself in UK & someone in California discussing a piece of genealogical evidence that had just come to light. Near real time because it would involve pauses to thing about something or look something up. But we used the evidence to resolve a problem by email in under an hour. It was as effective as standing in front of a board brainstorming.

Re: blah blah

Short organisational memories. They see others doing it and join on the bandwagon.

Re: Nonsense

Or that the Dell office has space for them.

If you are spread out over different time zones who gets to join the meeting at their local 3am?

"That email chain could have been a 30-second chit-chat"

And the next day everyone who took part in the chit-chat has a different recollection of what was decided. And the chit-chat was probably a break in the 3 hour meeting.

Asked whether Dell has any financial data that suggests working from the office leads to better productivity or results, a spokesperson said, "We continually evolve our business so we're set up to deliver the best innovation, value and service to our customers and partners. That includes more in-person connections to drive market leadership."

That's a really long-winded way to say "No."

Trump admin's purge of US cyber advisory boards was 'foolish,' says ex-Navy admiral

Re: So long, & thanks for the fish.

"The US is a relic of its origins, the people that moved across the ocean rather than evolve with the reformation of the church."

Actually they were the people who quit because the church wasn't evolving in the direction they wanted.

Re: Is 'learnings' a word?

You could also include

Invaders come over here, settle, eventually say "everything's your problem now" and leave to continue their quarrelling back where they cam from.

What did the Romans do for us?

Re: Is 'learnings' a word?

I fail to understand why people so often need to envision things that could easily be envisaged. And, of course, a gift is a noun, that which is given so there is no need for it to serve dual purpose as a verb.

Welsh woman fined for flatulence-fueled cyber harassment

Re: Even after the police warning?

The police usually avoid getting involved in family disputes despite a large proportion of murders occurring within families. The fact that they have taken an interest here suggests that there may well be a more serious background than usual.

'Abandoned' astro takes recordbreaking ninth spacewalk

It's getting so crowded up there they have to take it in turns to go and stand outside. All Biden's fault. Something woke. Did anybody see my hamburger? I can't have eaten it already, can I?

DeepSeek means companies need to consider AI investment more carefully

"Historically, the AI industry has relied on scaling models, increasing data volume, and enhancing hardware performance for growth"

Don't forget the disdain for other people's copyright.

Another banner year for ransomware gangs despite takedowns by the cops

Re: Kill it stone dead

Agreed. But need to ensure that the ban is followed. Fines at corporate level may well be an accepted cost of doing business. There needs to be personal criminal liability for directors. Directors because it's a role defined in company law, otherwise either it gets difficult to define the responsibility in a way that doesn't leave loopholes or the liability gets pushed down onto somebody who did not make the decision and lacked the authority to countermand it.

And, of course, it's easy to explain risk in non-technical terms to the board "You could all go to jail for up to five years and be disbarred from holding directorships."

Want Intel in your Surface? That’ll be $400 extra, says Microsoft

Re: Why would anyone want any Microsoft Surface?

"At this stage, no-one in their right mind should be buying into a new MS technology until- and if- it's shown itself to be a proven and established success that won't be ditched six months or a year down the line."

Which is close to a self-fulfilling prophecy of dooe.

Intel sinks $19B into the red, kills Falcon Shores GPUs, delays Clearwater Forest Xeons

Board listen, nod heads, mutter "She seems to know all the right words.."

Re: crypto ASIC ?

"There are still people doing crypto mining, right?"

That is just so last year.

European Space Agency picks Thales Alenia Space to build lunar lander

"overtaken by more modern technology before a flight is attempted"

This is the usual situation when development takes a long time. Of course if you wait for the new technology to arrive before starting development you run into the same situation.

BT fiber rollout passes 17 million homes, altnet challenge grows

Re: Its a bit rich..

Yup. AFAICS FTTC was being implemented in the areas where it was easiest - higher density of housing meaning few cabinets serving many houses. Then with the push to FTTP they're reworking exactly those same areas because every 100m of fibre laid passes many houses instead of one or two. It was obvious that they'd do this instead of continuing the FTTC roll-out. If FTTC hadn't got as far as a given village before it wasn't going to once the priority had been switched and neither was FTTP. So much for universal provision. Naturally the altnets would see the opportunity.

"before moving to fiber"

They'll move to the US?

So two thirds of people aren't choosing to pay extra for performance for which they don't see the need and receive a product lacking resilience in the face of power failure? Who could have seen that coming.

They might have got better uptake by running fibre out to those places where FTTC is inadequate but then it would have cost a lot more for each house passed.

Asteroid as wide as 886 cans of spam may hit Earth in 2032

Are you sending it up?

Googlers asked if they'd like to bury themselves next to Stadia, Chromecast, DropCam

insisting it was about keeping "the best" on board

Does this mean they'll refuse some of the volunteers? Otherwise it's the exact converse of what will happen.

Even Windows 10 cannot escape the new Outlook

Not entirely.

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

Re: Optimist prime

People: "We like being scammed."

There's the problem.

Re: Sigh.

"remember when Musk claimed he was the greatest expert in manufacturing in the world?"

Oh, but I'm sure he still is - unless he defers to his boss who may not have manufactured anything more than a great deal of ill-feeling but is still the greatest expert in - what was it again?

"I expect that it's news to the mayor of the city and the state legislature"

It's always news when you hear something for the first time. They'd have to be told anyway and he's a busy man now so he can't afford to have to do everything twice/