Posts by bofh1961

Reg FOSS desk test drive: First beta of Fedora 38 drops

I don't care how good it seems...

It's still going on the spare laptop first!

Linux app depot Flathub may offer paid-for software

Attempting to milk the world's smallest herd of cattle...

isn't going to be as easy as fleecing the sheep that flock to Apple and Microsoft. If it was, they'd already be doing it.

Don't lock the datacenter door, said the boss. The builders need access and what could possibly go wrong?

Even accountants can surprise us occasionally

This chap showed unusual thinking in gaining access to the machine room and then followed it up with unusual common sense by following instructions and not pressing the big red button. Frankly, he doesn't sound ideally suited to the profession, I imagine he didn't progress very far in that career.

Five British companies fined for making half a million nuisance calls

Fined?

Jail would be more appropriate.

Fancy some fresh Linux Mint? 21.1 enters beta, should be here by Christmas

I wonder

How quickly Cinnamon 5.6 will make it to the Fedora spin that I prefer. The changes to Nemo are welcome.

Qualcomm vs Arm: The bizarro quotient just went off the scale

Softbank still owns Arm...

...and is known to be wanting to squeeze as much out of the company as possible without having any real understanding of the industry or Arm's place in it. While Arm's management almost certainly wouldn't want to go down this alleged route, Softbank might think it a very good idea.

Xiaomi reveals bonkers phone with bolted-on Leica lens that will make you look like a dork

There's an issue with device lifetime

A smartphone is almost always out of support in 5 years or less whereas a Leica lens will last forever. If it did go into production and was successful enough then the phone might be superseded by a compatible model but I can't see many prospective buyers taking a gamble on that so I see it as unlikely to happen. I doubt it'll go into production anyway.

Porsche wants to sell you a rusty tailpipe soundbar for $12k

Perhaps

Prospective buyers might donate the cash to the nearest food bank instead... if they want to feel good about themselves. An ancient laptop, amp and pair of speakers would do a better job than this tat and look better too.

Russia says Starlink satellites could become military targets

Russia is bluffing

Russia's economy can afford to knock out maybe a couple of dozen satellites. The ones over Ukraine would be the obvious target but Starlink could replace them quicker than Russia can replace the missiles used to destroy them. Putin would be running the risk of being very publicly humiliated by Elon Musk.

IBM withholds healthcare subsidies from some retirees

Murder for money

IBM's Advantage plans will withhold the optimal treatment for some retirees, effectively shortening their lives. The more the company's attitude towards its staff, former staff and customers is exposed, the more good staff will go elsewhere. Short-term greed from the bosses causes long-term financial issues for everyone else, including the company itself. Red Hat is the only good thing IBM has going for it, no doubt they'll slowly strangle that golden goose.

Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop

Re: Is it "Linux _on_ the desktop" or should it be "KDE _for_ the desktop"?

I'm using Cinnamon on Fedora 37 for the better Bluetooth experience more than anything. I wouldn't expect anyone who isn't tech savvy to use it though. My biggest beef with LM and Ubuntu is that the automatic updates get frozen when the updater package itself requires an update. The average end user would never know that the updates aren't happening.

Don't say Pentium or Celeron anymore, it's just Processor now, says Intel

Intel's future looks pretty bleak

If they can't come up with a better choice of name that that. It's right up there with Ford's Ka. It makes OS/2 seem imaginative.

US school year opens with reading, writing, and ransomware

Security and business continuity aren't worth even thinking about until organisations suffer.

Here's the fundamental issue... if the organisation isn't hit by malware or suffer some other IT disaster, it makes security and business continuity look like a waste of time and money to folks outside of the industry. The mere fact that these things didn't happen because of the time and money spent on guarding against them is completely ignored. Even to this day people think that the Y2K issue wasn't worth worrying about because nothing actually happened. The years spent mitigating, testing and patching were what prevented anything happening but the vast majority of people out there still think it wasn't worth doing because it obviously wasn't such a big issue anyway. Malware is even less visible than the Y2K bug was.

Nichelle Nichols' ashes set for trek to the stars

Uhura?

It's Lieutenant Uhura to you, Ensign!

There's no place like GNOME: Project hits 25, going on 43

Gnomes true purpose

Sometimes appears to be making desktop Linux unusable... dunno who would be interested in funding that effort.

Elon Musk 'buying Manchester United' football club

"performed modestly for years"

This is absolute mastery of the art of understatement!

PC store told it can't claim full cyber-crime insurance after social-engineering attack

Closer to being insurance fraud

Changing a claim when you find out it pays out better under a different clause and thinking up, er, "creative" grounds for doing so seems pretty fraudulent to me.

Like Ubuntu, just a bit less hassle: Linux Mint 21 'Vanessa'

Bluetooth?

Fedora Cinnamon is a better bet if you're into hi-fi audio or want to use Bluetooth audio devices - LM won't be getting PipeWire as default for another two years minimum.

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Physical media is still the best

LPs, CDs, cassettes, whatever. Personally I prefer files on an SSD backed up to spinning rust but it's all the same thing really. I avoid streaming and subscriptions except... EMAIL. That most basic of digital services. Perhaps I should download everything in Hotmail before Microsoft decide I didn't really want it anyway.

Glad to hear you found a real copy of Britannia, Ali.

Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds

The leap second has been around for fifty years

There's no excuse for the IT industry not being able to cope with it. Meta's programmers could deal with it quite easily but their employer doesn't want to pay them to.

China seems to have figured out how to make 7nm chips despite US sanctions

No honour among thieves

All property is theft! I doubt very much that the West's spies would hesitate to steal intellectual property, infringe patents and so on... even from each other. No corporation hesitates to steal IP either if they think they can get away with it. The Chinese may or may not be particularly good at it but the practice is universal.

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

FOSS is a cash cow

Microsoft, like all the others, is trying to milk FOSS for all it's worth while investing as little as possible into it. Google's use of it to underpin the proprietary Android being possibly the most bare-faced cheek I've ever come across. No corporation is in the slightest bit trustworthy, although some are more pervasively evil than MS these days.

Now-frozen crypto-lending biz Celsius accused of devolving into a Ponzi scheme

A strange business model anyway

Putting existing crypto investments into a pooled fund, which is then invested in more crypto? The whole point of crypto is that it's a gamble - the investors in this scheme are basically paying someone else to go to the casino on their behalf. I really don't understand this one.

Gtk 5 might drop X11 support, says GNOME dev

Re: Gnome being Gnome...

A decision to dump X for Wayland would be just Gnome's style, they'll ditch some of the essential functionality but still call it progress.

Gnome puts people off desktop Linux.

Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus

Unity

I preferred Unity to Gnome but I'd much rather move away from GTK and anything else Gnome-related if possible. KDE Plasma looks like a better way to go.

2050 carbon emission goals need nuclear to succeed, says International Energy Agency

The Holy Grail...

...of fusion power seems to still be a long way off and fission reactors, unpopular as they are, are available now. If hydroelectric power is regarded as a renewable energy source then one or two smaller nations will have a big economic advantage as well as the environmentally moral high ground.

Apple's guy in charge of stopping insider trading guilty of … insider trading

Looking at the more general background

It's not as if the company he worked for has a great reputation for ethical standards, is it?

Re: He's a lawyer

Like every other manager anywhere.

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

Re: Numerical approximation

I had to do that for my Maths A-level because I'd forgotten my slide rule.

They'd get a shock...

If they found that the last few trillion digits were all zeroes!

Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go 2: $599 for 11th gen Intel CPU

Re: 4GB???

Perfect for a lightweight Linux distro then? Just goes to show how Linux-friendly Microsoft is these days...

IBM ordered to pay $1.6b to BMC

There's nothing appealing about IBM

But going through the process will get the compensation reduced to an amount they regard as acceptable.

Who had money on Samsung and Red Hat joining forces on next-gen memory software?

Guess this'll be hitting Fedora first then...

Grrreat!

New audio server Pipewire coming to next version of Ubuntu

I switched to Fedora with Pipewire a year ago and it's solved both the bluetooth codec issues I was having and the denigrated sound quality I used to get when using the laptop as a sound source for the hi-fi. It sounds pretty much as good as going straight to ALSA. As far as I know, Poettering has nothing to do with Pipewire...

Re: Try it!

I found switching to Fedora with pipewire cured the bluetooth issues I had. I did try installing pipewire on Mint first but it was just as bad as it had been with pulseaudio.

Previously I also used to temporarily disable pulseaudio to play music through a usb dac into the hi-fi - pulseaudio gets in the way of good audio quality at the best of times.

Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed

Heresy!

Steve Jobs was the Messiah* and Tin Cook is the first Bishop of Cupertino. Android is Protestantism. For Apple fanbois their entire belief system is under threat!

*Or possibly a serpent, given his ability to make people want apples.

The entire smartphone ecosystem is rotten to the, er, core.

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

Thought provoking

I think the majority of us just want a desktop that resembles Windows somewhat but works better for us. At the moment, for me, it's Cinnamon. You want desktop icons? Easy. You want a Start menu? Sorted. You want just a big picture with a panel that only appears when you pull the mouse down? Done. The only concerns I have about it are its dependence on Gnome's GTK and its reluctance to go anywhere near Wayland.

Did you know Twitter has an open-source arm? This is what it's been up to

"An account which can survive the disappearance of the server, or service, that it originated from"

I agree - if there was money to be made from such a service, Google would've been touting it some time ago.

Mozilla browser Firefox hits the big 100

Web browsers are like televisions

They've all improved enormously over recent decades but the content they deliver is more important and, unfortunately, that content hasn't improved as much.

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

Shades of The Lone Jedi...

For those of us of a certain age!

You've stolen the antiglare shield on that monitor you've fixed – they say the screen is completely unreadable now

Re: HAZMAT suit please, nurse, gloves please!

Surprisingly it looked exactly the same when it came out as it had when we put it in.

Re: HAZMAT suit please, nurse, gloves please!

Believe it or not, we did try water before resorting to acetone.

Re: HAZMAT suit please, nurse, gloves please!

We once picked up a keyboard that had been the victim of Ribena. Even two days in an ultrasonic bath full of acetone failed to clean it. We gave up at that point!

Pretty routine back then...

...as was having to "repair" keyboards that were full of fag ash. There was always something under the centre of the spacebar that looked exactly like earwax too. If anyone knows what it really was, please enlighten me!

The Filth Filter is part of the chipset, honest. Goes between the TPM and SEP. No, really

Pure genius!

"Les", I tip my hat to you.

UK Treasury and Bank of England starting to sound serious about 'Britcoin'

Re: National Infrastructure

HMG will cock it up on a scale never seen before - test & trace will look cheap before they've even finished a feasibility study for this one.

Re: No

It'd be a major step towards the cashless economy that the government has wanted for so long. Every transaction recorded and tracked without any way of avoiding it.

User locked out of Microsoft account by MFA bug, complains of customer-hostile support

Nothing has changed

My first experience with MS support was in 1990, they were unhelpful, they told me that what I was trying to do couldn't be done. They were wrong. My second experience was earlier this year, their response was exactly the same as before and just as inaccurate. It's not a bug fix that's needed - it's a complete rewrite of the corporate culture.

If you're Intel, self-driving cars look an awful lot like PCs

Trickle-down effect?

The regulatory system will also have to specify how long manufacturers support software updates. If the support lifetime resembles that of most Android phones then the autonomous capability will be useless, dangerous or both within five years. It also needs to regulated what happens once updates cease so that it's impossible to drive the vehicle in autonomous mode.

Council culture: Software test leads to absurd local planning SNAFU

Approving development without being bribed?

I'm not surprised the councillors are upset, it sets a dangerous precedent.