Posts by P.B. Lecavalier 123 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Aug 2015
I just use the firefox-bin package from the distribution (Gentoo) without any problem. I've also used Firefox Nightly (pre alpha release), binary issued from Mozilla, for over 10 years now.
Mozilla wants to participate directly to the packaging effort? Fine. But somehow that's a problem for you? You obviously have no idea what you are taking about.
Looks like to me another unnecessary distraction, just like the totality of this abominable application of theirs called Teams: We were told as they recently installed it on our machines it will usher in a new era of "collaboration". All I get is an authentication popup 15 times a day and one of the dumbest UI design I've ever seen.
Aren't you supposed to have at least 10 years experience for this "entry level job"? How come you need AI to help you with every keystroke?
At first, reading people went to jail, this is impressive!
Wait, that was a mistake? And nobody in charge is going to jail? Seen that in Canada with the Phenix payroll system, at the federal government. Criminal recklessness, zero consequences.
This is what happens when you have your technology stack entirely made of proprietary solutions. You "buy" a product which you never truly own. You can't hire someone else to do anything about it, it's not their secret sauce.
A free software mandate across government is a necessary condition to break such self imposed corporate capture. Long lived systems meant to last generations should never be subject to the whims of a single provider.
As a Gentoo user, I have the ultimate flexibility in choice, and here's the filesystem I select:
ext4
Yep. It does the job, and I need not learn about a bunch of stuff I'll never use to get it working. Of course, we speak of an humble single user installation, no NAS, cloud, container or whatever over engineered hype to make you feel important.
Remember when you purchased a license for M$ Office, pay it once, and then keep using it for ages? PHBs drank the subscription kool-aid with such enthusiasm.
"But sir, you are not getting the latest and greatest features!"
Which interest, like, no one.
"But sir, you are vulnerable to security threats without constant updates!"
If a word processor is so darn dangerous, then we should switch to something more innocuous. Also, if we find a bug, does that mean they commit to fix it or give us a full refund? (You already know the answer.)
I completely agree for the "new languages" in UI, it would be really interesting to see some long overdue developments there. Why is is not happening?
First, there are way fewer people involved in "desktop GUI": Remember late 90s-2010 period, when there was some free application with a GUI for just about everything you could think of? That was a golden age. Easy to find web or mobile UI developers, but people knowledgeable to make software with a GUI for productive use? It seems to me there's a lot fewer of these.
Second, bindings: In the free software realm, either you do GUI development in their native language (C or C++), or you use some bindings. Often the way it's done in some target language will just mimic the idioms from the original, unless you do a lot of reinvention. Originality at this point is unlikely, as GUI frameworks grew in size, scope and complexity. And then many existing bindings have not so great documentation, meaning if you don't know how to do it in C/C++, then you are out of luck (so what's the point?).
pytq/pyside is a good example of mature bindings for python/qt, but it comes with a tradeoff as you can't just compile. You must bundle the interpreter or have it as dependency.
It's about time, given that this OS is an absolute destroyer of anything SSD. To this day you still are forced to enable the astonishingly stupidly designed pagefile on Windows for any usability (made sense with 32 MB ram), even if you have 64 GB of ram!! (On Linux, swap is used only if running out of memory, just saying, been that way forever.) I've never tried Windows on an SSD, and part of the reason is that I want my drive to last a long time.
"complete with full autonomous driving mode"
Anyone who believes this needs to get checked. That same guy promised in 2019 that in 2021 they would start making cars without a steering wheel. What happened to this? The news cycle is crazy and peddlers have it their way.
Why not use PGP? I would be open to it, but never managed to get any encrypted exchanges. There are practical obstacles in terms of requirements on the recipient:
1. Must know a thing or two or be willing to learn.
2. Must be willing to bother setting that up.
3. Must be using compatible application/process. If using Gmail application on phone, it won't work.
At that point most people would ask you to get in touch with them through Facebook (shudders). It's already hard enough to get people to simply reply to your messages, if they even read it.
"but never quite made a definitive statement on what is considered core technology"
Whatever they can salvage through "technology transfers" (thanks to short-sighted Western companies) and espionage.
What I infer from this speech: The global pandemy has slowed down "operations". Oh I'm sure they are quite capable at this point to develop solid home-grown technologies, but do you seriously think that something that begins and ends with a governmental committee will work?
I'm sorry for those who lost stuff, but hopefully a few people will learn from this: If you rely on cloud services for anything that is not of a transient nature, you are a fool. And we are not even talking about security issues. Only the mere existence of your data.
There is a long history of online services to store "stuff", which are then shut down (i.e. Yahoo! Briefcase, Yahoo! Photos), and often you would find out only when it's too late and your data can't be retrieved anymore. How hard is it to buy an external HDD? "Yes but the online service is free." You really don't get it, eh?
Sorry but no, I don't see write life growing. SSDs became much cheaper and the reason is that rewrite capacity was sacrificed (though can be compensated by larger size). That Samsung SSD that I bought in 2015 (EVO 850 Pro, I think) has a higher relative endurance than the new crop (MLC vs. QLC).
A lot of data centers are accumulating data incrementally, which then sits there forever, hardly ever modified (think selfies: ugly, stupid, nobody asked for those, keeps accumulating). For this, SMR hard drives are ideal. They are lamentable for rewrite purposes, but the tradeoff is you gain a huge cheap capacity, and anyway rewrite is not quite necessary anyway in this scenario.
You really don't want an SMR drive for your personal enjoyment in most cases. I heard for years that people had the surprise, completely unannounced. That is a very effective way to kill hard drives: Just scare people by dropping shit on them.
I had no idea that it became cross-platform/open-source. Here's the totality of my knowledge on powershell:
- It exists.
- A bit more unix-y and less pitiful than standard "cmd" on Windows, but if you know bash and aren't stuck on Windows, why??
- Unlike bash, it features object-oriented programming, but if you are looking for something "powerful", uh there are so many other far more compelling tools out there...
- There seems to be a command history feature, but you got to figure it out and configure it prior to using it, so that thing is junk for my purpose.
"As a non-profit open-source operation, Mozilla spends as much as it receives; its 2018 staffing bill was $286m with a headcount of about 1,000, or about $286,000 per person, on average."
I see what you did here, El Reg, elegantly echoing what has been abundantly said in comments about Mozilla. As a stubborn Firefox user, that hurts even more.
If you don't have enough resources for Servo project (future tech) or MDN (vendor-neutral documentation), WHAT are you doing with the rest of your staff???
So unfortunate there is no more consumer spin of POWER. This is the only thing that beats consistently x86, and presumably with a fraction of the development resources of Intel. Legendary because many hear of it and would like to wield it's power (pardon the pun), but few ever come across one.
Meanwhile my internet access speed is well below the limits of wireless-N, so no salivation on my part.
Also, questionable name in "802.11be".
Is it n, ac or ax?
It's "be"!
Wow, you are on wireless-b??? Good on you to be so patient.
No, it's "bee EEE!"
Ok you got to have a certain age to have known 802.11b... which was even before I had any such device.
Reminds me of the install process of King's Quest VI: "Insert disk 2 out of 12."
Now you just casually download a 30-50 GB thing in the background. You lose the building tension of maybe not finding a disk! Actually that wasn't a thing. At the speed it went, you had a lot of time on hand to nicely order your stack of disks.
> Develop the pipeline of female talent by partnering
> with schools and colleges to "educate and inspire"
> young women with the delights of a career in IT
Well I'm pretty sure we have something that would turn off many women in this: People talking like a pimp, with terms like "pipeline of females" and "educate and inspire young women with the delights of a career". You just need to change one or two words and you got human-trafficking right there.
We all knew that HP was just wrapping up parts made by others for PCs.
I thought there was something original in their printer business... How I was wrong.
Remember when Michael Scott explains to kids that all they do is get the paper from the mill then sell it with a markup?
Some people are asking M$ to switch their UI framework to something cross-platform?
Then why not just use something that is reputed to be pretty good for cross-platform support, namely Qt? There, problem solved. But I can understand it's not a solution in many, far too many shops. Is it a technology from Microsoft? No. Then I'm sorry we can't use it, and there cannot be any discussion on this matter.
By the way, what good is a cross-platform UI if the involved software requires three different versions of .NET and five different versions of Visual C++ runtime? Yes, such things exist...
> Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa said.. switch to AMD-based kit, but she said it is "time consuming for business users, especially large companies where a large number of PCs are deployed."
This is so dumb! But then he reports the mindset of CIOs, so that should not be surprising. What's a CIO? Someone who is paid a fortune to do one job: Repeat all day long "You must install Windows and you must do so using a processor from Intel". Either Windows or Linux (and many others) are very oblivious to AMD/Intel. This is not like, once upon a time, having say SPARC workstations around. Now that's a whole other beast.
Recently I attended a talk given by John Cleese (of Monty Python fame), and one thing he said is that people who have a job and are actually knowledgeable about it (know what they are doing, know what they are talking about) are a surprisingly small minority, about 1 in 6 people. Well here's some additional evidence!
The CIA is running their operations on the cloud. If the CIA can do it, I'm sure a bank can do it.
Are we talking about the very credible agency that claimed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction?
I'm skeptical on the wisdom of outsourcing the heart, lungs and spine of a company. Once you commit to a particular provider, you might become their slave, forever. On the other hand I'm also very (very!) skeptical on their ability to successfully overhaul their systems internally. After decades of "it's ok do nothing" they would have all of a sudden a revelation? That would mean getting to know who does what, who can do what, who should do what, and have skills development on a continuing basis. Yikes... I'll get my coat!
Excel is a strategic application for Microsoft, being one of the elements that keep businesses hooked on Windows.
Excel fanbois have no choice but to keep it that way. Bring in someone with just a little bit of R or python know-how, and you realize that this one person can do the job of an army of "analysts" in no time. As a matter of fact, people are often scared of me, because they know if I looked into how they get work done, I may be able to put them out of their misery.
You may now continue to reinvent the wheel with your puny VBA.
So, another big company bought some kool-aid with unobtainium flavor, and now they are complaining that it did not taste what they expected?
Have you noticed the number of big companies (publicly traded ones, because we see them) these days that are sitting on huge piles of cash, don't have a clue what to do with it, and then they either: a) buy some unicorn (can't do in-house development anymore??); b) share buybacks (let's burn through cash while that accomplishes nothing except marginally benefiting us, the wealthiest). In any case, what we have is a corporate breed that claim non-stop to be "creating shareholder value". Thank goodness they say that, because they are absolutely not creating value as such. Even if they wanted, how could they? Most of them don't seriously know what the company does! But they will go on talk about earnings per share being up and how much they boosted the dividend...
Boeing was led for many years by an Harvard MBA (what a useless degree) with experience at... Proctor and Gamble (!?!?!), and obviously no clue on how to make airplanes. Now take a good like at that company. Single best example of shareholder value created by actively plundering the underlying value.
Exactly. I heard that git is a convoluted mixture of perl, bash and C. Happy debugging! Some people at Facebook were looking to migrate from svn to git, but as they required customization, it was easier for them to learn mercurial from scratch and then write extensions rather than get git to do their bidding.
I think the number is correct, in that nowadays the vast majority of opened emails are consumed like newsletters or a friend's message "see ya in a bit" to which there is nothing to reply to, and that often is on some mobile platform.
A more meaningful indicator: Share of emails that were opened, replied to, and with a reply that has at least a few sentences. This way, you rule out pretty much all of mobile (emails that just don't get a reply).
I am a strong advocate of free software, but on that one, unless the FSF made this as a joke (like that petition to actually build a Death Star), it doesn't make any sense.
As others said above, asking DOS/win3.1 and win95 would be far more realistic. Everyone knows that these were quick-and-dirty insecure hunk of junk and just won't work on modern hardware without a boatload of emulation. Mostly retro gamers would stand to benefit, among other technology archeologists. If I recall correctly, no USB support on the first release of win95, so it's not like it would compete against their current crop.
Security. Can you imagine if people could nose around the source of Windows 7 and actually inspect whether it's safe? Lawsuits!!! A cottage industry of consultants and lawyers mulling whether the design was inherently insecure and if the company knew it all along. "My client was exposed to untold risks by using this product which was sold as an enterprise-class solution..."
We would get to know why updating Windows 7 takes longer (search for updates, download, install, try again and download again!! because failure) than updating an install of Gentoo with ~1400 packages (where you must compile everything). Yikes, that would be embarrassing.
> He pulled off the Office Ribbon UI
You mean he successfully forced it down people's throat. Stalin also "pulled off" many things, you know.
> and Windows 7 was a triumph
It's all about managing the expectations. When you start from low...
> Windows 8 failed. Sinofsky left Microsoft in November 2012,
> just over three months after its August launch.
I see honor.
> Windows 10 is now well enough liked by business users
I'm sorry, well liked?!?! Business users: People who don't have a say at what's going on, with dumb PHBs deciding on the tech in front of you.
It seems he wasn't a very good CEO before the gay marriage thing blew up
Maybe so. It would not be a surprise that an über-geek does not make a good geek-in-chief. Peter's Principle. Even so, it doesn't seem his successors were much of an improvement.
It [FirefoxOS] still lives on in the form of KaiOS for mobiles, Panasonic's TVs, and custom ROMs.
Yeah, I thought I heard that some necromancers were tinkering with its remains. But upon the initial launch of that thing, it was well known that this space was very crowded, unlike, ahem, email clients. "We are going to succeed where Microsoft and Blackberry failed!!" Yeah sure.
Hey I did not realize that. This simple arithmetic is just stunning. This has a scent of Wikipedia, a.k.a. the beggars with millions in bank. But WORST. At least Wikipedia is not known to s**t the bed all the time.
Take Gentoo and Debian Linux. Those projects are well and alive. I don't know if either has paid staffers (if so, unlikely to be more than a handful). My point? ~99% of the work is done "magically" by the community and it does not cost millions a year. These are examples of relatively well run free software projects.
Firefox? It seems that ~99% of the work is done by staffers. That's a prime example of nominal open source software. You can get the code, sure, but... I don't see anybody touching it!
They adopted the crazy version scheme of Chrome, just to "keep up" (some people clearly have nothing useful to do in that organization). Then eventually they ditched its look to make it look like Chrome, which was heavily decried from the user base (apparently they have people to "think" about version scheme but none to think about users), enough to spur forks. Clearly, arrogant idiots have way too much power over there.
I still use it and have been over the last 15 years, but it's quite sad to see so many stupid decisions were taken by Mozilla. Just a few more I can think of:
* Get rid of their very qualified CEO Brendan Eich for something that had absolutely nothing to do with technology, only due to a totalitarian leftist/emotional/brainless subculture that plagues much of IT (cowards and low-life become brave when hidden behind a monitor).
* Kill development of Thunderbird (which is a thing, had and still has users), in favor of the ridiculous FirefoxOS, something that nobody asked for, never took off and is now dead and buried. One top reason why the Linux desktop is not taking off in enterprise setting is due to the lack of something impeccable to replace Outlook. We are still waiting.
* They had hundred of meeellions from Google in advertising in the past. That was so heavily squandered that it makes me unable to donate to Mozilla, even though I would very much like to support Firefox.
"we manage data, metadata and digital archives"
And is Fujitsu paid to enter the metadata? Isn't that supposed to be handled by employees already on the payroll? Or are digital archive a whole new thing? Surely if you have to scan millions of pages and it's a whole new business sector, hmm, a few millions bucks don't seem excessive.
From where I come from, maybe libraries don't have such a portfolio, but on the other hand it they did not expand into make-believe work, as bureaucracies are wont to do.
"a five-year deal worth £25m in 2013"
How do you justify such a price tag for... libraries IT? Did they move from index cards and everything on paper???
What could be possibly involved: a website, a catalogue database, some software and terminals for checkout, a few public terminals in each library, and that's it. That's nothing really new, you know... I mean it's the stuff of high school projects.
What's the population of Northern Ireland? Slightly below 2 million. With that money, you could build or expand several libraries.
We have reasons to believe that this procurement was rigged, and now that it is quietly extended means one of two things: incompetence or corruption.
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