Posts by Doctor Syntax

Eurocops take down 'secure' criminal chat system known as Matrix

"This has nothing to do with the Matrix protocol; it's just an unfortunate naming coincidence."

Not so much coincidence as lack of originality.

Musk and Trump to fall out in 2025, predicts analyst

Re: Value for money

"I'm pretty sure Musk is expecting some favour"

Right not he'll be looking to get Delaware judges overruled.

"putting Tesla's ability to execute on full self-driving vehicles at risk"

I neve saw falling out with Trump as a possible excuse for that.

Windows 11 market share falls despite Microsoft ad blitz

Re: Remove the

"hardware requirements and watch win 11 take off"

That wouldn't achieve Microsoft's aims. What you're supposed to do is replace it with a shiny, new PC which comes with a shiny new W11 licence for which you'll have given them money. The only reason for the free upgrades on newer stuff would have been to avoid any class actions along the lies of "I just bought a new machine and Microsoft have made it obsolete" and maybe to get a few examples in front of the public.

Re: Getting better all the time

I think the official lins that "we" never said that, it was just an employee. And nobody bothered to contradict it.

Re: Mine goes up to 11

Rebooted every 3 days? Why not save electricity by switching it off when you're not using it? Or maybe you're running a server on it?

Re: Maybe Microsoft should go back to making just an O.S.

Or keep with making a privacy-raping piece of crap but let someone else get on with making an OS.

Who had Pat Gelsinger retires from Intel on their bingo card?

They could try to bring him back again to sort out their woes when the bean-counters fail a bit more. If that happens he'd need to insist on a bit more commitment.

Re: in a move intended to restore investor confidence

How many really did survive?

OpenAI denies it is building ad biz model into its platform

Re: OpenAI adds ads to it's business model

Quite: "OpenAI has ruled out running adverts on its platforms, for now at least" but how long is "now".

Russia arrests one of its own – a cybercrime suspect on FBI's most wanted list

So either

(a) he targetted a Russian interest, possibly in Russia or one owned by some friendly oligarch outside it;

(b) he hasn't paid big enough bribes to law enforcement or

(c) once imprisoned (the minor formality of a trial can be taken as read) he can be released under the scheme for prisoners to be released to join the army although in this case he'll be deployed to something suited to his talents rather than sent to the front.

Telco security is a dumpster fire and everyone's getting burned

"Whether it's due to Stone Age telco thinking or political cognitive dissonance"

On the political side it's down to the belief that if you want something enough it can't be impossible.

Broadcom loses another big VMware customer: UK fintech cloud Beeks Group, and most of its 20,000 VMs

Re: So, Broadcom, how's that new billing working out for you ?

"Remind me again why the hell you bought VMware in the first place ?"

To suck it dry on the premise that it would show an over-all profit before the last customer quits.

NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't

Re: Remember the Watergate Scandal?

If Security were about they should be able to arrange access. Of course, if they're about and haven't been told about the work it would be another complication.

Interpol nabs thousands, seizes millions in global cybercrime-busting op

"There should be hope for sanity yet ..."

But not for the next four years.

"This time around, the attack involves a CVSS 9.8 vulnerability in Firefox (CVE-2024-9680) that exists in Firefox, Firefox ESR, Thunderbird, and even the Tor Browser"

Presumably this will also affect SeaMonkey, Palemoon etc. as well.

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

Why choose xfce?

Re: RedHat Dominance

Check out the number of people commenting on el Reg who say something along the lines of "I used to use Gnome but..." go on to detail how Gnome changed and end up telling you they went to MATE or Cinnamon.

Re: KDE FTW

"If 2+ apps or applets have non-overlapping functionality then it would be preferable to combine them into one."

It may well be that these reflect different ideas users may have about how to do things. For instance I never used the Commander-style TUI file managers on MSDOS so have no interest in having that sort of thing ported to the GUI world. Others do and want one. Hence we have Dolphin, which I use and Krusader which I don't even have installed. It doesn't bother me in the least that there's an alternative file manager but it's very likely that some users or potential users might see its absence as an issue.

Likewise I have no problem in there being two ways to display the start menu that I don't use (in fact, I've just noticed that "Show alternatives..." doesn't find them for some reason) but I'd be very unhappy if my preference wasn't there and I have no doubt users of the others would feel the same about theirs going missing. It's considerably better than getting presented with a different version with each new version of Windows on a take it or take it version and having to find some third party product to fix it.

I suppose that, to put it into trendy jargon, I can kurate curate my own experience.

Re: KDE FTW

Falkon doesn't seem to have found its way into distributions. It can be compiled fro source. Once it's there it looks as if it belongs, which is what you'd expect, while so many browsers look as if they don't.

Re: daily-drivable general purpose OS.

"Starting from the 16:9 aspect ratio we seem stuck with."

You can have any aspect ratio you want, just mask off whatever bits of the 16:9 hardware you don't want. Why 16:9 in hardware? That's easy. It's the TV format so display makers are going to have to produce displays in that format. For laptop makers it also folds nicely over a keyboard with a numeric keypad*. If you want them to produce a second (second, that's the key word) format you're going to have to persuade them to make all the necessary investments and that will put up the price even if you can find a sufficient market that agrees on any given alternative - 4:3 landscape? portrait?

* In the past I've had laptops with 4:3 aspect ratio but they didn't have a numeric keypad. Sure you could build one with 4:3 and a numeric keypad but you'd then have blank space beside the screen. It would look silly and everyone would wonder why they couldn't just make the screen wider.

What was the last Linux you used and when? Or have you just read things written about Linux by other people who've read things written about Linux by other people who...

For reference I have an Asus laptop which came with W10 on it and is now dual boot with Linux. The Linux part Just Works. The W10 Just Doesn't Really Work; it hasn't succeeded in a clean update for about a year. Even before that debacle there was a display update -as far as the can be told from the number the same updae - that installed itself every month. When it boots up it's extremely sluggish, partly because its trying and failing to update but I can hear the disk chiuntering away doing something which I presume is what's eating up the entire throughput of the beast.

I have another, even more ancient MSI net-top era device dual boot with W7. That, of course has now stopped updating so that as much as can be done with W7 Home (bugger all) plus an Office 97 found in a cupboard somewhere can be done with it. That also is dual boot and comes with all the goodies you - or rather I - would expect to find an a good Linux distro. W10, of course, wanted to sell me a whole lot of stuf to do something useful. When it was in support, of course, updates took and age and many reboots, as does W10 when it's not falling over.

BTW, Boring is good. It's the eye-rattling look-at-me GUI stuff which is a pain in the arse. And on the occasions that I drop down to the CLI it's do do stuff that you probably wouldn't know enough to even dream about.

Linux doesn't have this mammoth monthly update-fest. If you saw a typical Linux update happening you'd probably thing it had failed because of the speed and the absence of reboots; even a new kernel just sits there until you reboot in the normal course of events while update services are just restarted on the fly.

So to re-write your contention, Linux desktop experience doesn't even match Windows 7 (let alone 10!) THANK GOODNESS.

Re: KDE

"opening up the network settings dialog the pane with the actual network settings in is always cut off to some degree and when you expand the window, instead of making that pane bigger, the window pops in a side bar"

I don't see that at all. If I left click the Wifi connection icon in the system tray I get a view of the visible access points and a few buttons to disable it altogether or switch airplaine mode (I don't have a wired connection) I also have an option to configure network connections which is also available, along with airplane mode, by right-clicking.

Either configuration option brings up KSettings>Network>Connections>Wi-Fi>current access point with the pane for the access point showing the name and below it General configuration Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Security, IPv4 and Ipv6 tabs showing, the second bing selected. Nothing seems to be cut off.

The alternative KSettings>Network>Settings has a secondary menu for Proxy, Connection prefereces, SSL Preferences, Cookies and Windows Shares, each bringing up various panes which don't seem to be cut off. This is KSetings 5.27.5 on Devuan The network-manager package is installed but none of the other module packages are. I wonder if you've got something else installed that's conflicting because what you describe just doesn't sound like KDE at all.

Re: RedHat Dominance

AFAICS Gnome has been leaving its users behind for a long time. They've largely gone to Cinnamon or MATE as continuity Gnome 2 or XFCE. If they make it messy for other distros to use it Gnome will be in danger of becoming a complete irrelevance.

Re: daily-drivable general purpose OS.

In general I agree but I've been having second thoughts about hamburger menus. It depends on aspect ratio. A hamburger menu works well, for instance, on a smartphone held, as it usually is, in portrait format where a CUA-inspired* menu would be useless. I'm pretty sure there are situations were a side-bar would be greatly improved by replacing whatever it uses for options with a hamburger menu.

So I have a radical suggestion: implement the menu structure - text and actions - as a separate entity and provide a number of display options and - the really radical bit - let the user choose. It could be CUA-style, hamburger, ribbon, single line of text as in UCSD Pascal or whatever. To some extent Firefox does this in that you can turn the CUA-style menu on although you can't, as far as I've been able to discover, turn the hamburger off.

* Pace Liam, I know they don't conform in sufficient detail for your liking but in absence of anything better it's a useful handle.

Re: "text editor", you'll find three

Digging a little deeper into that list in TFA, one each of the text editors, file managers and browsers are intended to be cross-platform for mobile and desktop/laptop devices. In practice I think that could read as being intended for mobile but you can use it elsewhere if you want consistency, where "elsewhere" includes Windows and Mac as well as FOSS. I think approach that fits your "small side-trek".

Of the remaining two browsers and three file managers one program, the venerable Konqueror is both. It dates from the days before there were separate applications*. This isn't Google so it hasn't been killed off and presumably there are a few users who like an all-in-one application. It definitely fits your small side-trek leaving Falkon as the main browser although Debian and Devuan don't include it.

That leaves two file managers, Dolphin and Kommander. Dolphin is what you might consider as the equivalent of the Windows file manager in the sense that i understand Windows to have finally caught up with Dolphin although the former still looks like a confused mess in the UI department. As to Kommander, the klue clue is in the name. There are users who simply want a clone of the original (was it Norton?) Commander. A quick DDG tells me there's still a cottage industry in developing those for Windows - there are even listicles of the things. So that's a side-trek for that particular audience - I don't grok it myself but it's a phenomenon to be recognised.

Where does that leave us? Ah, yes, the two text editors, KWrite and Kate. AIUI KWrite was the original simple text editor and KA(advanced)T(ext)E(ditor) was the development with all the bells and whistles. Fire them up and the only obvious difference, if you look for it, is that Kate has a tab. I believe Kate also has a lot of other stuff such as plug-ins although they're built on the same editing engine. I agree, I don't see the point in having two. That sort of thing would never happen in the Windows world, would it, with a basic Notepad and somebody producing a Notepad++ with all the bells and whistles?

What I miss is an integrated PIM that includes a Usenet client like Thunderbird does. It just goes to show you can't have everything.

* Strictly speaking it replaced a file-manager.

Re: El Reg existentialism

I've been using System V init since the late '80s & not seen a need for a replacement so personally I stumble at the 'original "stated" purpose'.

Re: For a good example of what such a KDE OS might look like ...

"immutable, and with two root partitions that update each other"

Surely that's not what Slackware's like these days, is it?

"Project Banana."

I hope it isn't going to cost $6.2m & get eaten.

Cryptocurrency policy under Trump: Lots of promises, few concrete plans

Given that it's a profligate consumer of energy for no discernible purpose except to provide a means of exchange for criminal enterprises what would anyone expect a Trump administration to do?

Microsoft preps big guns to shift Copilot software and PCs

Re: Noooooo.....

Back when W10 first cam out and there were all the rows about telemetry and the humongous privacy statement or whatever it was I read through that. It was interest for what it didn't say. It gave instances of what it might record but didn't say they were the only things. It included something about transactions; many people reading that would have thought "that's reasonable, if I have transactions with Microsoft they'll need to know about them." but there was no such limitation so if Microsoft wanted to snaffle transactions with your bank that was covered. IOW it didn't say your data could be shared with the world, it just failed to say it couldn't.

Re: It doesn't really help....

"This has had the effect of informing the public"

You might have an over-optimistic view of the public.

Re: Noooooo.....

"a contract that doesn't say their data can be shared with the whole world"

If I were one of your customers I'd reject that contract. It has two holes in it. I'd want it to say explicitly that it can't be shared with anyone.

RansomHub claims to net data hat-trick against Bologna FC

Would there be any information there that players and managers haven't already put on social media?

Cloudy with a chance of GPU bills: AI's energy appetite has CIOs sweating

It doesn't say "everyone". It implies there are enough people to cause problems and problems get reported. If it infuriates you don't read it.

Make sure cost are charged to departments. If marketing, for example, wants to use AI which runs up a big power bill ensure it comes out of marketing's budget. If that then have less to splurge on ads or events, tough - they should have thought about that first. If they then have to explain the cost-benefits of the expenditure, so much the better.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

"Yes, like software should only be designed and written by people with CITP or similar qualification and documented continuing professional development."

Given that the entire S/W profession is younger than I am I can see the obvious flaw with this. Who had a similar qualification to set up and assess the original training and qualification scheme?

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

"I mean, it's not like they let just anybody run for a parliamentary seat."

Or POTUS, After all, there's a required qualification - being native born.

Chinese boffins find way to use diamonds as super-dense and durable storage medium

The problem with storage media with life of longer than a few decades is that even if the hardware to read it is still available the file formats will be long deprecated.

I think it was in the course of organising a replacement for the damaged die that my colleague was on the phone to the states - a rare thing in those days - talking to what he took to be a very small company producing such a specialized piece of laboratory kit. Given that USians aren't renowned for appreciating irony let alone Belfast humour making a joke about supposing he worked for de Beers in his other job wasn't a good idea.

Pen plotters. Mesmerising to watch.

"leave the user a little bit of free space to store some files of his/her own"

I'm not sure that's allowed any more. Surely the correct version would be "leave the user a little bit of free space in which to donate some files to be used in whatever way the vendor wishes".

Brits are scrolling away from X and aren't that interested in AI

Re: "Dip me in chocolate and call me a Mars bar"

Once upon a time this comment thread could have become a Marathon. Now we just have to snicker at it.

Would you also say fewer than 18%? If so, would you also say fewer than 1.8 in 10? Or fewer than 18.0%?

Re: RE: glorified

That sounds like a story worth telling in more detail.

Re: What are they smoking?

"I don't know anyone who's been using it seriously for years"

Maybe that's just because you have good judgement in your choice of acquaintances.

Quite. It looks as if we found one of those 18%.

Google earns fresh competition scrutiny from two nations on a single day

Re: A bad day for Google

I can't blame Google for shying away from a game with cash prizes. It would expect to find itself fighting charges under gambling regulations in multiple jurisdictions for multiple games.

Ransom gang claims attack on NHS Alder Hey Children's Hospital

"Line them up against a wall and shoot."

First get your hands on them.

Serious rewards for information leading to arrest might help. If it happened that a necessary preliminary were abduction from somewhere where arrest is not feasible to somewhere where it is, so be it.