Posts by bofh1961

Cinnamon 6.8 will support Wayland – if you want it

Re: No rush...

I did update to 22.3 but had odd behaviour and stability issues in the file manager so I reverted to the previous version.

No rush...

Version 22.2 is supported until April 2029, so I'm not going to hurry to put Wayland on my daily driver. It will go on the spare laptop as soon as it's in beta though. I've got a gut feeling that any non-critical bugs in the X11 version won't get much attention after Wayland comes in.

GCHQ dangles up to £130K for a CISO to fight the world's most capable adversaries

A poisoned chalice

Supremo of information security for a nation that is almost completely dependent on foreign suppliers for virtually everything IT and telecoms related.

British Airways fears a future where AI agents pick flights and brands get ghosted

It'll always be about the people

It's been quite a while since I last flew anywhere but I once chose* cattle class with Virgin over business class with BA because BA's staff were uncaring whereas the Virgin employees couldn't have been more helpful and friendly. This may have changed over the years for all I know.

*That choice came about because the firm I worked for got a discount for BA but not Virgin.

As Xi and Putin chase immortality, let's talk about digital presidents-for-life

Reminiscent of "The Solarians" by Norman Spinrad

Where an entire alien race, the Duglaari, are bred to resemble the long-dead dear leader and are ruled by a computer programmed with his personality. Not Spinrad's greatest work but very memorable.

Should UK.gov save money by looking for open source alternatives to Microsoft? You decide

Does it matter?

Given the track record of both parties, whatever platform they use will be the basis for severely over-budget and overdue projects that deliver unusable end product. I have no belief whatsoever that Birmingham could have avoided bankruptcy by going FOSS, it just would've got screwed up differently. Oh, and the usual big consultancy firms would have a field day...

Ebuyer website bought by Fraser Group plc

Never had a problem with them before

But I do now. I'll never buy anything from Ashley after what he did for Newcastle United... and I'm a City fan!

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

The only good thing about Gnome

Is that there are plenty of alternatives.

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

A poor start and cost

Admittedly, the first two major releases were both costly and crap but Warp was a far better piece of software than any DOS-based version of Windows. Basically, customers expected an OS that was free (or its cost was covered by the inclusive deal). OS/2 was always a costly extra and, by the time it was any good, customers had bought big time into Windows 3.x The insistence on loading the registry into already restricted RAM made Windows 95 inferior to 3.x in my opinion but Microsoft's huge marketing effort made folks want the shiny and new. Luckily for me I was able to go from 3.1 to 2000 via Warp 3 and 4. Before anybody asks, yes, I had lots of compatibility issues with 2000 but not one that couldn't be solved.

Abstract, theoretical computing qualifications are turning teens off

Computers? In schools?

Would it even be legal to teach kids about big tech slurping all their data?

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

Ghastly...

Reputedly the first piece of software to have a larger budget for marketing than it had for development, which I always found very believable. It also introduced us to the memory-hungry registry database and the joys of regedit. I had the joy of acting as third-line support for this nonsense, luckily without ever having to actually use it myself. OS/2 Warp was far from perfect but it did have an incredibly fast NetWare client and the NetWare and OS/2 servers were my primary responsibility at that time.

WinAmp's woes will pass, but its wonders will be here forever

Winamp?

I think it was one of a few that I tried a couple of decades back. Nowadays alsaplayer is fine for me as I don't use playlists and couldn't give two hoots about skins. Asunder for ripping and audacity to give the flac files more warmth. Pipewire for the middleware.

Recall the Recall recall? Microsoft thinks it can make that Windows feature palatable

Re: Bye-bye Microsoft.

I suspect that altogether too many businesses will see Recall as a good thing. You know, all those corporates that like to lock down their users as completely as possible with group policies will now have built-in spyware at their disposal too. The hardware manufacturers will love it because they'll be hoping it's the killer app for local AI that they really need to sell that shit.

Intel has officially entered the grin and bear it phase of its recovery

Deeply intertwined with American national security policy...

Basically, how much is Uncle Sam and the American taxpayer prepared to subsidise the foundry operation and at what point will they consider it just throwing good money after bad? Encouraging TSMC and Samsung to build leading edge fabs in the US may be a better long-term investment.

Linux Mint 22 beta sprinkles Cinnamon desktop on Ubuntu

The further Cinnamon moves away from Gnome the better

I'll be sticking with LMDE 6 for the time being, hopefully we'll get the Cinnamon updates soon.

AI smartphones must balance promise against hype and privacy concerns

AI? I haven't even tried the camera in my phone yet!

C'mon, AI is little more than just another name for predictive text at the moment.

KDE Plasma 6.0 brings the same old charm and confusion

I was hoping they'd finally come up with the goods

Last time I checked out Plasma I thought it roughly on a par with the Windows 10 UI, it doesn't sound like it's changed much. You'd think they'd glance over at Gnome and see a big opportunity but that doesn't seem to have happened. I'll give it a test drive on the spare laptop anyway, you never know, I might like it this time around. Cinnamon will be staying on the main machine for the time being.

Apple redecorates its iPhone prison to appease Europe

If was really a computer...

I could just wipe it and install Linux like I did with my laptop. Apple and Google can both fuck off and die as far as I'm concerned.

New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft over 'millions of articles' used to train ChatGPT

It's all about profit

There's no point in copyright except to protect profit. If you don't want to make a profit from your writing, you don't copyright it. I must get ChatGPT to see if it's slurped my website... I hope so! Bollocks, it hasn't...

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

Thanks for a very useful article

I particularly like eBay for getting old CDs, DVDs and books. Bookfinder is very good too. I don't like anything about the streaming model from either the business or technical point of view. It's designed to screw the consumer and kill the secondhand market.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Razors and razorblades...

The low initial outlay is very tempting but ongoing costs are extortionate. I've owned a couple of inkjets from different manufacturers, the difference in build quality was very noticeable between the earlier and later one. I gave up on printing when the second one died with only light use just after the warranty expired. Photos look better on screen anyway, in the same way that projected slides always looked better than prints.

Wayland takes the wheel as Red Hat bids farewell to X.org

Wayland itself is getting old now...

What's the betting that someone starts developing a replacement for Wayland sometime soon?

AI threatens to automate away the clergy

From a meatsack's POV

I'm a meatsack working on a variety of production lines for a manufacturing company. We all know that we'd be replaced with robots if the firm could afford the CapEx to actually do it. Robots tend to cost a wee bit more than chatbots.

Leader of pro-Russia DDoS crew Killnet 'unmasked' by Russian state media

Re: Killmilk

I suspect that if his name has been put out in the open and he has been attacking Russian targets, he's already dead or soon will be.

AI chip outfit Graphcore's sales to China hit by US export rules

Collateral damage?

I'm starting to wonder how much America's trade war against China is damaging its allies' economies and why they're going along with it. I know the UK hasn't had an independent foreign policy since the Suez crisis but I thought the rest of Europe did.

Ex-GCHQ software dev jailed for stabbing NSA staffer

Irrelevances

The criminal and the victim's employers are irrelevant. The choice of weapon is irrelevant. What is relevant is that a criminal who has intricately planned and then attempted murder hasn't been given a whole life sentence when it's obvious that he's a psychopath who should never be allowed to return to society.

Bad Vibrations: Music publishers sue Anthropic AI for using copyrighted lyrics

ROTM

Progress towards the utopian Culture of Iain M Banks appears to be being derailed by the greed of capitalists. What a surprise.

GNOME developer proposes removing the X11 session

The sheer f**king arrogance is breathtaking

Why do these developers insist on removing functionality? Do they ever stoop so low as to talk to us mere users? Gnome only works okay with extensions, Wayland is obviously never going to have the missing functionality mentioned in this article and Nautilus has been crippled. I opted for Cinnamon a few years ago, first on Ubuntu, then LM, then Fedora and now LMDE 6. Other desktops seem less versatile and less refined.

When is a PC an AI PC? Nobody seems to know or wants to tell

Re: Uptick in fruitful work.

The AI generated text would be too easily detected because the syntax, grammar and spelling would be perfect... semantically they'd be identical - completely meaningless no matter how many times you reread them.

Google doubles minimum RAM and disk in 'Chromebook Plus' spec

An unattractive option becomes even less attractive

I'll stick with Linux on my 4th gen i5 Latitude.

Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh

Where's Bond?

Musk is pure SPECTRE, he has every attribute a Bond villain needs. We'll get Bond to deal with Musk while Q fixes X...

US military F-35 readiness problems highlighted in aptly timed report

Too many cooks spoil the broth

Multinational designs usually fail. The Panavia Tornado being a good example*. The F-14 or F-15 could have performed the same missions just as well, at a lower cost and an earlier arrival in service. However, those US aircraft wouldn't have provided much profit or employment to the aerospace industries of Britain, Germany and Italy.

* Early variants of the Tornado were vulnerable to ground fire when attacking at low level - ancient Blackburn Buccaneers had to be hurriedly taken out of retirement and sent to the gulf to mark targets so the Tornadoes could bomb from altitude.

There have been projects where two nations have cooperated that have been successful, notably the P-51, the Alpha Jet and the Jaguar.

The clock is ticking and Korea wants to know if its chipmakers will get their export license extension

America's trade war

China's economy didn't become the second largest in the world by competing in the technology sector, it did it by flooding the Western world with cheap, basic goods. How many of us in the West can afford to clothe ourselves in garments made locally? How many of us always opt for the cheapest product that'll do the job? Many, if not most, people have no choice but the cheapest. Now America is fighting a trade war to protect its tech sector in the name of "national security" and coerced the rest of the West into joining it - it's questionable if it can be sustained though. Let's face it, whoever you buy your network kit from there's a good chance it'll have undisclosed vulnerabilities that the manufacturer built in at the behest of its government.

Beneath Microsoft's Surface event, AI spreads everywhere

Smoke and mirrors

Until AI achieves sentience it's just another bunch of algorithms. Right now it can't drive a car. It can't tell fact from fiction. It can't write anything original. It can't reliably recognise a face. It's just the latest buzzword being used to hoodwink people into buying stuff...

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

Many people live in places where they can't charge the vehicle at home. Without off-street parking it's not going to be feasible. Nobody will want to chance a journey knowing that, at best, they'll face a long wait at one of the few public charging points before they get to twiddle their thumbs for at least half an hour before they can continue their journey. At worst they'll arrive at their chosen charging point to find it's out of order and they'll have to call a breakdown service. Which will, of course, recharge their car from an ICE generator. Did I mention that public charging points will be far more expensive to use than overnight charging at home?

GNOME 45 formalizes extensions module system

Perhaps GNOME could...

Consider the option of creating a desktop that doesn't need extensions to make it usable for human beings?

Tesla hedges Dojo supercomputer bet with 10K Nvidia H100 GPU cluster

AI?

If this level of hardware can't enable AI to drive a car it'll look like the developers are missing a trick somewhere.

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Email like a pro?

As a former systems engineer, I realised a long time ago that many developers experience difficulty communicating with the rest of humanity. This article really brought it home to me though just how differently their brains are wired. Ii it safe to assume that Gnome developers write their emails in Klingon?

Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff

Re: The best

Windows still has a big hold on the business desktop because of all their legacy apps and the corporate world's love of locking machines down and micro-managing them with AD. In the consumer market, the bestselling games are all for Windows or consoles and Nvidia graphics adapters are much better supported than they are in Linux.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Snap, crackle and pop...

Can easily be recreated in the digital world by using a cheap external sound card that doesn't have any shielding, placed close to a laptop/phone charger. Replicating the warmth of vinyl is even cheaper with a FOSS sound editor.

Microsoft signs 1.5 million seat contract for Office 365 and more

Windows?

Do you have to have a Windows device to use Orifice 365?

The challenges Intel faces to compete with TSMC, Samsung

Flogging a dead horse

It's a big gamble with public money, at some point the US government may realise that propping up Intel is just throwing good money after bad. If Intel can pull off the near-miracle of producing competitive nodes at a decent price, the strategic value of an indigenous subsidised processor source may just keep it going. If it can't then it's only a matter of time before Uncle Sam pulls the plug.

AI menaces superbug by identifying potent antibiotic

AI to save the world!

Finally, proof that AI is the benevolent, omniscient and omnipotent saviour that mankind has been waiting for!

UK's GDPR replacement could wipe out oversight of live facial recognition

What's the problem?

Most of the population is already quite happy to carry a listening device around with them all the time. A device they have little or no control over. The state merely wants to have as much of a surveillance capability as Google already does. Big business and the state already have far more control over us than most of realise and technology will only exacerbate that. So-called democracy is just window dressing for state control, as it always has been.

Samsung's Galaxy S23 Ultra is a worthy heir to the Note

What's it like for making actual phone calls?

The main purpose for a phone seems to have been completely overlooked. I bought my smartphone in 2014, I'll never buy another one.

Microsoft Azure CTO believes confidential computing is the future of targeted advertising

I kinda like the idea of better targeted ads but on the other hand...

Currently, I only ever seem to be shown ads for stuff I'm not remotely interested in. However, this is very obviously just a workaround for existing data protection legislation. Rather like a tax haven but for data instead of money. Microsoft et al being as trustworthy as ever.

When you try to hire a freelancer to write SQL and all you get is incorrect AI garbage

The need for speed

Leaving aside the frauds, coders using AI is just one example of how the ever-increasing pressure to both respond and deliver quickly leads to the adoption of shortcuts. It's as much the fault of those looking to hire people as it is the applicants or websites. Let's face it, if AI-generated code was any good, the employers would already be hiring people (on minimum wage) to do it.

Russia tops national leagues in open source downloads

General Motors is a non-tech company?

As in, anything outside of the IT sector is non-tech?

The end of Microsoft-brand peripherals is only Surface deep

I'm no friend of MS

I've always found they've always worked well under Linux too.

Techie called out to customer ASAP, then: Do nothing

SLAs are just targets by another name

As the fiasco in Scotland with the emergency call centre assigning calls to a fake call sign shows, give people a target and they'll find a way to ensure they always hit it.