Posts by bofh1961 144 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2017
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The very nature of FOSS makes it universal, anyone can pick it up and use it, without charge, for whatever they want. Corporations monetise it but secretly wish they could own it. Governments make free use of it but secretly wish they controlled it. FOSS occupies a strange space that neither maths nor physics can describe, a space which bypasses geographical boundaries and economic models. It can be used for almost any purpose that involves information. Profit can be made from it but it can't be owned. It can be used but it can't be controlled. The growth and development of AI will only make this more so.
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