Posts by Handy Plough

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: Open Source

That's right, attack me not the argument. The rhetorical equivalent of missing the target and congratulating yourself on the noise.

No one here is “proselytising.” I’m not knocking on doors, handing out pamphlets, or threatening anyone with post-mortem real estate decisions. If that feels like an “attack,” that says more about the armour than the arrow.

As for “Dios los cría”… charming. But equivalence only works when the things being equated actually share properties. One side asserts invisible cosmic authorities and legislates from them. The other side says “prove it.” These are not mirror images. One is a claim, the other is a filter.

And yes -- the sanctimonious arse is, in fact, sanctimonious. That isn’t insecurity. That’s taxonomy. How is the ivory tower, by the way? Still got a good view of everyone else’s supposed moral failings from up there? Gravity works down here. And it’s wonderfully non-metaphorical.

Re: Finale

In typical GNU fashion, it alienates the majority of musicians straight way by being an interpreted language that needs compiling.

Re: Open Source

Rubbish. The only thing more robust than your sanctimony is your confidence that it counts as wisdom.

“Faith is strictly personal,” you say - which is a fascinating defence for a worldview that has historically involved door-knocking campaigns, compulsory schooling, compulsory worship, compulsory morality, compulsory taxes, and the occasional compulsory burning. Nothing screams strictly personal like a cathedral, an inquisition, and a voting bloc.

Faith isn’t “orthogonal to science.” It’s orthogonal to evidence. Which is not a coordinate system so much as a polite way of saying “immune to correction.” Children also operate on that model. They just have better excuses. Kids believe in Father Christmas. Adults believe in invisible sky executives who require weekly meetings, cash donations, and opinions about everyone else’s sex life. The only real difference is branding. Ironically, the bible gives the best advice here: “When I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Religion is not “a vague term.” It has a definition. A very ordinary, very boring, very dictionary-shaped definition. It does not mean “code of law,” “articles of incorporation,” or - and I’m still checking - “README.txt.” If your README file starts demanding worship and threatening eternal punishment, that’s not documentation, that’s malware.

And then there’s this: “I guarantee you haven’t seen your life flash before your eyes.”

I was clinically dead for six minutes on my living room floor.

Six.

Minutes.

That’s not a metaphor, a parable, or a vibes-based anecdote. That’s a medical timer. So perhaps before issuing guarantees about other people’s experiences, the sanctimony could be gently lowered from ivory tower to something more desk-lamp height. There's a good chap.

You don't need Linux to run free and open source software

Re: Amazingly title happens to be correct;

It isn't. For a start it alienate people that are likely to **fund and supported** efforts. The GPLv3 asshattery certainly put paid to funding with its Tivotisation FUD.

Re: Amazingly title happens to be correct;

Nobody **needs** GNU. Ever.

> “If I want a better shell experience, I use Linux. It has a more pleasant CLI than macOS or any of the BSDs, because unlike them, it is PC-native and supports PC-style keyboard shortcuts, not hateful 1970s junk like vi which in a wiser, saner world would be as forgotten as ed.”

Ha - see my previous comment. Is Ctrl-X/C/V really that sensible in a terminal, where the Ctrl key already has a defined meaning? Long before the IBM PC existed, Ctrl was used to generate control characters (BEL, CAN, ETX, SYN, EOT, etc.)* for teletypes and video terminals. That is what the key is *for*.

IBM didn’t invent Ctrl - they just inherited it, then skipped providing a proper Meta key on early PC keyboards, which forced Microsoft to squat on top of terminal control sequences when "inheriting" Apple's GUI shortcuts in Windows 3.0.

I get, and agree with, mostly, your point about third party package managers. But, for convenience when using the Mac, if what you actually prefer is the GNU userland over the BSD one, a lot of people use Homebrew to graft those tools onto macOS. I get the frustration with Homebrew’s “latest-only” worldview, so MacPorts is worth a look: it supports back at least four macOS releases. It’s less “complete” than Homebrew, but the core tooling is there, and it feels more like a traditional UNIX environment.

I'm sure there's a whole article in there somewhere, if you haven't already written one!

*Eagle eyed UNIX beards that suffered with VT-100s and their ilk will spot the relative ones in that list.

You’re thinking of CUA, which IBM introduced in the 1980s because PC software was a keyboard anarchist commune. Published in 1987 as part of Systems Application Architecture (SAA) and primarily aimed at OS/2, CUA was a full behavioural contract for how applications were supposed to work. Microsoft promptly “borrowed” it - Microsoft’s corporate diet consists mostly of copying other people’s homework - and large parts of it still fossilise Windows today.

CUA defined menus, dialogs, focus rules, navigation, help invocation and editing behaviour. F1 summons Help. Alt wakes up the menu bar. Cut, Copy and Paste were Shift-Delete, Ctrl-Insert and Shift-Insert - because this was a keyboard standard, not a cutesy desktop metaphor.

Linux desktops then inherited Ctrl-X/C/V from Windows, which inherited them from Apple - but, much like Windows, neither KDE or Gnome inherited Apple’s interaction model that made those shortcuts make sense. Apple’s bindings were part of an object-centric GUI idea. KDE and Gnome developers just copied the keystrokes and called it a day without doing any of the hard stuff, like thinking.

The result is a familiar but conceptually mismatched keyboard layer glued onto a keyboard-first operating system. CUA’s bindings were designed for application-agnostic, keyboard-driven environments - y'know, the world Linux desktops actually live in - but KDE and then Gnome devs chose nostalgia and familiarity over something more coherent.

CUA had nothing to do with how GUIs looked and everything to do with how they behaved. Almost none of it works on macOS because Apple had already written its own Human Interface Guidelines three years earlier, and macOS still largely follows those rules.

Re: IrfanView

To be fair, Windows was shockingly bad with image file formats, and frankly, it still is - another reason why the Mac is so prevalent in design and video. To the point in the article, there isn't really need for Irfanview on macOS as the OS handles it. I've been working with EXR file most recently, and for both Window 11 and Linux I need extra software to view these files.

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

Linux use in VFX/Hollyworrd is a happy accident of timing. Silicon Graphics, and by extension IRIX were the default. When x86 became powerful enough, which roughly coincided with the collapse of SGI, an alternative *NIX environment was sought. Linux even then had better driver support than BSD and a few vendors who presumably has seen the writing on SGI's particular wall either started development or were coerced by the VFX industry to port software over. The OSS aspect isn't really here nor their, though it does have the benefits that you mention. In short, no idealist or doughy-eyes over software freedoms. Just pure pragmatism.

Most VFX companies contribute to OSS stuff - usually around the production stack/pipeline. A few also contribute projects. Pixar's OpenUSD and Dreamworks MoonRay are notable recent examples.

The reason that VFX software exist for Linux is that studios were predominantly SGI/IRIX based to begin with. Windows and Macs at the time just didn't have competent or powerful enough graphics hardware. Once SCO and Microsoft started the UNIX shenanigans, and in part because cheaper hardware for graphics emerged, VFX pipelines moved toward Linux. That hasn't prevented the OSS extremists trying to footman an industry where Linux is dominant - see the whole NVIDIA drivers silliness with Binary Blobs.

"An engineer using CAD or a BIM designer typically just fires up their personal desktop/laptop and does everything locally." And *that's* where they're doing it wrong. BIM is supposed to be collaborative, and yet Autodesk - and let's be honest, Engineers and Architects have stupidly allowed Autodesk to take over here, then complained about - haven't really offered a cogent solution. Probably not int in their interest to - keep nickel and timing idiot architects.

And that's where VFX differs. They have extremely good - and often times, better - alternatives to Autodesk's offerings. So they tell Autodesk, and everyone else for that matter, what the industry minimus support requirements are. And vendors better support them, or they're dropped quickly! Architects could take a look at https://vfxplatform.com - but they're too blindly arrogant as a group to ever admit other people do thing better than them. Overpaid cretins that they are...

WTF are you dribbling about? Yes, you can install gui apps with Homebrew, but it's really only there for "Power Users" (yuck), y'know, people that like to LARP on a command line and can't actually compile software themselves.

Re: Audio

You best tell my inkjet that. It's happily printing from macOS 26 using CUPS. And, yep, cupsd.conf is still there in /etc. Of course, the AirPrint capable laser printer uses that protocol, but that goes through CUPS too. Have a look at https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/cups/tree/2716564fcd1f5bf4cd4082279e97625a8f98204e/cups to see that yes, it's still very much part of macOS, with reasonably regular updates for a venerable subsystem.

As for CoreAudio - I missed that is was causing some users issues in the initial release of Tahoe. Not experienced it myself mind, my 10 yer keyboard just works. Over USB no less. CoreAudio's track record over the last 21 years is still considerably better than that of the similarly aged PulseAudio, and has lower latency and better stability than PipeWire. And Linux still has less available audio software than macOS.

Re: I suspect a commercial entity may end up with "the win" for Linux on the Desktop...

I think the truth actually lies somewhere in the middle. Put it this way, Windows was ubiquitous in the workplace with Windows 3.x before the consumer market really went boom with the release of Windows 95, but arguably, Windows in the home was already on an upwards trajectory because it was cheap due to the aforementioned shady shenanigans. I'm not disagreeing with you, just don't down play the importance of Windows 3.x and the enterprise take up of it in the rise to the dominant position that Windows has. Of course, distracting SCO, first with BSD, then Linux didn't hurt, but even then the tools for managing Windows in a business environment made it just as much an easy choice.

Re: I suspect a commercial entity may end up with "the win" for Linux on the Desktop...

Microsoft’s real win was owning the enterprise. They achieved this with reasonably simple admin panes (or pains, if your UNIX beard is as long as mine) that average Joes who wanted to “work in IT” could actually operate**. From there, the SMB/SME and mid-market followed quickly. When it came to buying for home, people bought what they already knew.

Microsoft made its money from every PC sold — which, in a market that for most of its existence has been a race to the bottom, is no small achievement. Linux still has nothing as simple as Active Directory. Yes, you can build something equally robust (or better), but that’s precisely the problem: it needs building. In Windows, it’s a radio button.

Add the success and relative simplicity of M365, and it’s hard to see Windows losing its grip on the enterprise anytime soon. iPads and Galaxy Tabs* are the closest we’ve come to denting Microsoft’s dominance in the home.

*Yes, there are other android tablets, but in my experience, unless it's a discussion between tech nerds, it isn't iOS vs Android, it's iOS vs Galaxy, or whatever Samsung are calling their Android flavour this week.

**EDIT: With a little bit of collusion and dodgy contracts, and treating those partner engaged in the race to the bottom like shit.

Re: What's the Best Bigger Picture?

Vaughan-Nichols! You've made me agree with bazza! I'm off for a shower now...

Beer for bazza

Re: Audio

Hey, numb-nuts, take a look at who develops CUPS. Macs rarely, if ever, have problems with printers.

Also key word is *almost*. Where macOS kicks Linux's aris' is the range of audio software and DAWs available - that and midi "just works".

I'm guessing you mean AutoCAD or Revit or some-such, though SolidWorks does suggest Inventor. Autodesk can do it. Maya, Arnold, Golaem MotionBuilder and Flame run on Linux - but to my point in another thread - that is a specific distro AFAIK.

Trouble is, they're all poor copies of Apple's app package, which does "just work"(tm) - and limited stores or a multitude of them (ask gamers how many launchers they have to install). Apple's system works because it's so stupidly simple. The pkg install er is also relatively simple - no worse than an MSI(X). The Applications folder - which AFAICR has been around since the very early days - is also blindingly obvious. The way it hands app settings etc is farcical (which Library folder? Which library sub-folder?!), though still better than a registry. Reverting to package managers essentially has the same problem as stores, and for the average user it's a complex solution to a simple problem.

This, along with software availability, is always going to be the weak link in Linux on the desktops success - along with waaay too many distros/cooks in the kitchen. Blah, blah, blah, but Choice!, I hear you cry. At a given point, it becomes a hindrance and causes the end user fatigue. In theory Linux desktops are similar enough that for techies, it shouldn't be a problem, but for people who just want to get on with things, those small differences are irritating at best. Most learn to use computers by a pattern of clicks.There's also the myriad vocal asshats in the community that not only scoff at your choice of distro for {$insertGrevience}, they are prepared for all out war over a fucking text editor (no emacs is shit. It always has been;) )! It just doesn't add up to a happy path for most people. Simples.

In short, instead of blindly copying Microsoft (ctrl as modifier key on a system that uses terminal shells - which genius thought that was a good idea?!), grit your teeth, admit that Apple got something close to right and start up your photocopiers, as Redmond was once mockingly told to do.

Window Maker Live 13.2 brings 32-bit life to Debian 13

Re: Impressive

NeXTSTEP was the pinnacle of desktop computing.

Rebuilding VisiCorp's Visi On UI reveals how Apple defined the GUI era

Re: We all owe Xerox

Xerox didn't invent the mouse. They stole it along with several staff members, from SRI. Much like apple did to them. What's that you say about karma?

Re: Multitouch

Blah blah blah. Same shit different day. Apple didn't innovate anything. It was everyone else. That's what you want to hear. Utter contemptible fuckwit. You always have been and always will be.

On that note, I must get my prescription refilled. There's yearly outburst need better containment on my part.

FreeBSD 15 trims legacy fat and revamps how OS is built

Re: Should have been drowned at birth ...

Thing is you're *very* wrong to the point of coming across as an ignorant acolyte of the dogma of St iGNUsius himself. You live in a bubble. The bitter irony here is that you're accusing folk here, including the author of TFA, of "rewriting history", the you and your ilk have been doing just that since the late 80's. It's such a shame that SCO happened to BSD as I believe firmly that had it not, Linux and GNU especially;;y would be a long forgotten footnote. Alas, the world is full of poor choices; windows server and desktop, Android, VHS, Brexit, etc...

An awful lot of FOSS should thank the Academy

Re: bit hypocritical?

I know this is over a year old but I have chime in here. Linux in the VFX pipeline is a happy accident. The reason is that the hardware and typical desktop OS in the early days simply weren't powerful enough. DEC and Silicon Graphics ruled the roost. As a result, CDE and IRIX were used by everyone. Eventually x86 got to a point where it could work well enough and was *a whole lot* cheaper than SGI machines. Windows, was still hot garbage where graphics were concerned. Since VFX artist were used to UNIX environments, Linux based workstations - specifically Redhat - provided 2 principle benefits. At the time they were free and the graphics stack was better. At the time, Microsoft even bought SoftImage - the leading 3D software at the time - to try and derail this. They failed. Same story was true for high end CAD/CAM software like Unigraphics (now Siemens NX), however, Microsoft and the considerably worse Autodesk won early there.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

For the sake of fuck!!! Webmail has been a thing since the mid 1990's. Christ, CEARN had a webmail system running 2 years after Sir Tim had unleashed HTTP and HTML. Hotmail (which was outlook.com before the rebrand) was originally styled HoTMaiL (get it) was released in 1997 and in high use before the turn of the millennium. Milleniels seem to think that the internet, and computing generally, only really happened in the 2010. So, LionelB's response of "In your browser" was perfectly feasible 15 years ago (wasn't the world and their neighbour using Gmail at that point?), but it is a classic Linux-user-does-exactly-what-they-accuse-big-tech-of and tell the user that they're holding it wrong.

Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul

Almost...

...makes Apple's RAM upgrade pricing seem reasonable.

Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech

Re: Thank fuck . . .

At this stage, it's no different. The Yanks aren't our friends and haven't been for a long time, especially with Trumpism so rife.

Dash to Panel maintainer quits after donations drive becomes dash to disaster

> Wrong on at least 3 counts.

Liam, you need to stop hanging around on the Orange Site so much.

On point 1, since IGnatius T Foobar ! referred to 'Mac', I'm counting from Mac OS X Beta only, not (NeXT|OPEN)STEP, which while a direct ancestor of the Mac OS X|OS X|macOS dock, and having used NeXTSTEP in anger, it's not quite the same app (for others, yes, it's an app, see /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app). Since you're clearly wearing your OS name pedant hat, it's NeXTSTEP, not "NeXTstep".

On point 2, OK, so it's a fork of a plugin that was originally designed to replicate the ([Mm]ac)? ?OS X? dock. FFS.

On point 3, never mentioned or intimated anything about the positioning of the dock. Liam, you're not "quibbling", you're clutching at straws.

I'll half concede to you on point 2, but the rest is just without merit, especially for you.

Freetards complain that people don't donate to projects, and in the next breath are scandalised when someone does something to solicit donations. They also tell you that if you need to fix or extend features or remove feature that you don't like, you can fork the project, or at least access the source code so as to fix it yourself. So why the beef? The community constantly self-sabotages...

> "We want our computer to look like a computer, not like a phone or a Mac."

macOS has had an unremovable dock for 25 years, which this plugin precisely aims to imitate.

Essential FOSS tools to make macOS suck less

Re: There's one feature I miss, and it was ruined by Apple

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/1172/

Apple's alleged UK encryption battle sparks political and privacy backlash

Re: US trying to push other countries around?

Ordinarily, I'd agree. However, they are bang to rights here. This law, as has been pointed out since its inception, is not only harmful, it is arrogantly foolish and impossible to implement securely. The UK government has been told this many times, but have their heads up their assholes,

Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code, says its rise is inevitable

> I am enough of a Reg reader to know that the kernel has not migrated to GPL3 because it would be Hard.

Linus Torvalds has publicly stated that he doesn't like the GPLv3, let alone the politics that surround it and those of the FSF. It has little to do with how theoretically hard it would be, and more to do with the opinion of Linus that the GPLv3 is a bad license.

Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks

Somebody, much like Jeff Johnson, doesn't understand what homomorphic encryption is...

Apple shrugs off BBC complaint with promise to 'further clarify' AI content

Re: It must not be forgotten..

HA HA HA HA! BBC and CNN interested in "the Truth"? Bollocks. Utter, complete bollocks.

Jury spares Qualcomm's AI PC ambitions, but Arm eyes a retrial

That about sums up the FSF philosophy.

Apple called on to ditch AI headline summaries after BBC debacle

They're using ChatGTP...

Hang on. Has it occurred to anyone that a 'bad' summary might just be a reflection on a poorly written article? I mean, this is BBC News - just another example of sensationalist churnalism that is a result of 24 hour news...

Apple Intelligence summary botches a headline, causing jitters in BBC newsroom

Re: Apple's response :

In all seriousness, for nearly all AI products, that's a good answer to the fuckwits that are using it inappropriately. Seriously, there are only a handful of people in the world I'd trust with a feature phone, let alone modern computers and

LLMs...

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Re: Pictures, pictures, pictures

That whooshing sound you're hearing is the point of this device rushing past you at great speed...

M4 MacBook Pro shows Apple is still glued to the idea of unfixable laptops

Re: MacBook Pro

Bullshit - both you and your colleague are clearly just too thick to install software.

Apple throws shade on pokey AI PCs, claims its maxed out M4 chips are 4x faster

YAAAAWWWWWWNNNNNNN.

That is, to quote the great sage Vyvyan Basterd, the single most predictable and BORING thing that anyone could ever say whilst commenting on a thread about Apple.

San Francisco billboards call out tech firms for not paying for open source

Re: This is a bit confused.

Came here to say something similar. Surely employing people to work on the FOSS projects that the company uses is a good thing? I'm sure there are plenty of those die-hard fossers that will complain about "special interests" or something, but isn't this one of the models that was first proposed?

Keir Starmer tells regulators to chill as Microsoft exec takes wheel of advisory council

Don't want to bring up the "B" word, but I tried explaining the notion that "unelected officials" is exactly how government works in the UK. It seems a large portion of the country is under the assumption that governments make laws and decisions. The Civil Service is very good at perpetuating that myth, to be fair...

Apple macOS 15 Sequoia is officially UNIX. If anyone cares...

Re: But is it though?

Well, it clearly passed the Open Groups test suite and met their requirements, so yeah, it is.

They (Apple) used the name UNIX in marketing for Tiger(?). The Open Group were displeased and sued. Apple decided to certify as it was cheaper than litigation or buying The Open Group, and they've certified ever since. It means that Apple can bid on contracts with organisations that require UNIX certification. It's also why Solaris, HP-UX and AIX are all still a thing, even though FOSS alternatives exist. That said, I'm surprised at this stage that SLES, Red Hat and Canonical haven't certified their products yet.

Re: I always thought Mac OS was a skin over BSD

If you look into the design of NeXTSTEP, it's was extremely advanced for its time. To be fair, even by modern standards, it still stands up. As Liam points out, the kernel is a hybrid of MACH and 386BSD, and the networking stack is BSD, much like Windows and Linux too (happy to be stood corrected on that on). Most of what was NeXTSTEP can still be found in modern macOS. Avie Tevanian and Bertrand Serlet are very clever chaps indeed...

Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

Re: FreeBSD predates Mac OS X

Then NeXT/OpenSTEP/Mac OS X/macOS are essentially *the same* as they stem from the same branch of Unix.

Re: Don't forget 386BSD!

The Berkeley Software Distribution go back to the 1970’s! It literally predates Linux by over a decade. What we have today are in essence forks of the original BSD. Nearly all the BSDs and commercial UNIX OSs (including Darwin) can trace direct lineage in some way back to the Unix of Ritchie and Thompson.

Epic accuses Apple of foul play over iOS access, wants EU to show DMA red card

Re: STF Non apple fan boys

The problem here is that Epic is an immoral org whose sole existence is to nickel and dime kids. Yes, yes, “won’t somebody think of the children?!” Though in this case, it about death by a thousand paper cuts for parents. Micropayments, and abused by cunts like Tim Sweeney are vile, and it would be great to see the EU hammering these shiesters hard. By supporting them, they are implicitly supporting the notion that constant micropayments for shitty games is fine. Be under no illusion, Tim Sweeney want to lock you in to his store to charge you what he wants, and that’s fine, just don’t tell me that this is about frEeDhUM!!1! - this is a late stage capitalist complaining that he can’t fleece you the way he wants to.

Microsoft hits go on Windows 11 24H2: Fresh features, bugs, and a whole lotta AI

But will it continue to convert my corporate issued Thinkpad into an overspecced hot plate?