Posts by JohnFen 5648 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Feb 2015
"I can't help thinking there's a certain amount "who's moved my cheese" in these statements"
I think that's a valid suspicion if we were talking about recent changes, but in this case, the cheese was moved a long time ago and everyone has gotten over any issues resulting from change resistance. Once you've grown used to a user interface and you still find it lacking, it's no longer about "who moved my cheese". It's about usability.
I can see people wanting to avoid politically sensitive jokes, but this...
"O'Donnell recommended avoiding jokes altogether, a position supported by many of those weighing in on the issue."
...is hard to interpret as anything but another indication of the ongoing decline of the software industry.
"But then you run two separate OSs with no integration"
That's not really true. What is true is that the integration isn't automatic -- which is a good thing, not a bad thing.
"The Windows 10 Linux emulation solution is far neater."
I suppose this is a point on which reasonable people can disagree. I don't find the Linux emulation neater at all.
"And in an enterprise environment, running Linux on bare metal is not often an option for managed desktops."
This is true, and is the only use case for this that makes any kind of sense to me. However, I'm not sure how it matters much. If you're developing for Linux, then at some point you'll need to test your stuff on a real Linux box anyway. If you're not developing for Linux, then why do you need Linux integration with Windows in the enterprise?
" I know lots of people (myself included) who are still using phones from the Galaxy S6 / iPhone 6s era or older."
I'm still using a Galaxy S4 that I bought, what, five years ago?
It still works great, and newer models do not offer any substantial improvement on it (and they tend to offer a few substantial downsides).
But after looking at the current smartphone offerings and the direction that the industry is clearly trying to go, I've decided that when I replace my current smartphone, it won't be with anything on the market or likely to be on the market in the foreseeable future.
"It's not "just' for that, though."
In the context of the comment I was replying to, it is "just" for that. Notepad++ does have other features, and if you want to have those, then install it! But if you are just trying to address the line ending issue, there is a solution that's already installed with Windows.
"So restaurants will need portable readers they can hand to the customer to do their thing, and if the customer wants a printed receipt either a portable printer or walking back to a POS terminal to print it."
Lots of restaurants that I go to here in the US have been using these machines for years now.
"- very limited control over what you allow/block"
I can blacklist based on number, but yes, it could be better. Not a problem with the SMS protocol, but a problem with the software.
"- phone insists on beeping to alert me of sms.""
There is about a 99% chance that your phone has settings that can resolve this.
" Deliberately reduce reliability (randomly don't forward around one in fifty SMS"
I think they do this already -- I think that I don't receive about 1 out of 50 SMS messages that are sent. Or, even more infuriatingly, I sometimes receive the text four or five days after it was sent.
"In the Silicon Valley era, '“I will give you a service and you will give me money for it” … is a quaint and unusual notion' – but, just maybe, people are reconsidering the trade-off"
I prefer paying over "free" (if the "free" comes with tracking as a condition, and paying doesn't). However, this article makes it sound like RCS is primarily a means by which companies would communicate with me. There's exactly no chance that I'll pay for that. I'll stick with plain old SMS, thanks.
"But have you ever tried to use a really complex random password, one that's also hard to type, and have it shown on your mode while you try to input it into another device? "
Yes, I do this every single day, since I use a password manager that is not connected with the machines I browse on. It's not that big of a deal.
"Also, with a password manage you become totally reliant on it."
All of my passwords are long, randomly generated strings that I change regularly. In practice, it's only a matter of a couple of days before my muscles have memorized the passwords that use on a daily basis, so I really only end up needing to look up more rarely used passwords.
I also keep an encrypted backup of those passwords, so should (for some reason) I am unable to use my password manager, I can still get access to my passwords. It's a bit of a hassle, but I won't get locked out (and I've never needed to use the backup in the years that I've been doing this).
I disagree with those who are advocating things like death. That said...
"as if CA was staffed by actual demons in human form rather than living, breathing fellow humans."
More like as if actual humans were assisting an organization that engages in clearly immoral and illegal conduct.
"For a mere FB information mining operation that Facebook apparently felt was okay?"
No, for a whole lot more than that.
"Seems to me there'd be fewer extreme remedies suggested here were I to mention that Barrack Obama himself benefited from a similar Facebook privacy invasion back in 2012"
Probably not, but that's pure speculation, since the Obama campaign did not engage in behavior similar to CA's.
I switched away from Slackware years ago, because distros were doing a decent job and saving me a ton of work. But over the past couple of years, distros have also been exacting a price for that in the form of reduced ability to stray from Their Preferred Builds, and I've been seriously considering moving back to Slackware.
"If you're really free, you're free to release your code as you like, and install any application you like."
True. And you are, as is Fedora. I'm unaware of anyone who was trying to forcibly prevent them from releasing a distro that's exactly as they want it to be.
However, freedom is a multi-way street. You are free to make any sort of distro you want, and others are equally free to criticize the decisions you've made.
"the laws of mathematics being what they are, almost the entire population of the world has below average intelligence"
Umm, according to the mathematical definition of "average", it's literally impossible for almost the entire population of the world to have below-average intelligence. To accomplish that would take at least a few tens of thousands of people who have intelligence levels never before observed in man.
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