Posts by IGnatius T Foobar ! 302 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2018
I'll switch back to GNOME when they make one SIMPLE change: provide an easy, non-crashy way to put the Dash and the Dock in a SINGLE PANEL at the bottom of the screen. KDE can do this, GNOME cannot. There are extensions, but I found all of them make my Ubuntu desktop fail in one way or another. Come on guys, it's simple. We want our computer to look like a computer, not like a phone or a Mac.
The biggest thing keeping GNOME off my desktop is their stubborn refusal to combine the dash and dock in a single panel. There are extensions which attempt to do it, but they always seem to crash and make things stop working. All I want is everything in one panel on the bottom of the screen -- launchers, notifications, everything. A computer should look like a computer, not like a phone or a Mac.
Google can't lock down the web using Chrome if there are still lots of people not using Chrome. That means all the Apple folks with Safari and all the Windows folks with Edge are helping to prevent Google from changing all of its web properties to say "sorry, you need our secure browser to access this site." The days of "best viewed with" are thankfully behind us.
And that's good. At home I use Brave; at work I use "ungoogled chromium" (corporate policy doesn't allow Brave because it's got a Tor client in it). Google removes the ability to use ad blockers in their browser, the correct response is to not use their browser.
I briefly used Edge but it became so difficult to avoid having it display the MSN propaganda site that they blew their chance to have me as a user.
Try a browser extension called "XBrowserSync". It lets you sync your bookmarks between all browsers, both Chromium-based and Mozilla-based, and it uses a third party (and client side encrypted) server, which could be a public instance they provide, or your own.
This lets you both back up your bookmarks, sync them between browsers, and do so in a way that doesn't tie you to one vendor's sync source.
It's already a bad idea to rely on third party cookies because lots of people have them turned off in their browsers. Privacy-focused browsers such as Brave turn them off by default. And over the last year or so I've seen sites which open up a small redirect window to flow you over to an authentication provider and then back to the site, knowing that the third party cookies won't work a lot of the time.
Of course, the easiest thing to do is just block Alphabet and Meta at the network level. Meta is easy to block because they provide zero legitimate services. Alphabet, not so much.
The Clown was supposed to reduce costs -- it didn't. The Clown was supposed to reduce headcount -- it didn't. The Clown was supposed to reduce complexity -- it didn't. The Clown was supposed to get you off the IT treadmill -- it didn't.
Why are these customers paying to rent someone else's computer for, exactly?
We've once again arrived at an era where Microsoft is more interested in using Windows as a vehicle to force-feed its users other products and services (their search engine, their "AI", their web properties, etc.) than in simply providing an operating system that works. People liked Windows 7 and 10 because they didn't do that.
The job of an operating system is to load your programs and then get out of the way. That's why people liked Windows 7 and 10. It's also the reason more people flee to Linux when Microsoft doesn't get out of the way.
The "four-letter desktops" – Xfce, LXDE, and LXQt – all more or less stick to the classic Windows 95-style design,
Hold on there, partner. The "Windows 95 design" (taskbar on the bottom, maximized windows don't cover the taskbar) is actually the "Acorn RISC OS" design, from which it was copied. Please do not give attribution to Microsoft for something they did not create.
That having been said, it IS a great design and I greatly prefer it. A computer desktop should look like a computer, not like a phone or a Mac.
I've got a ten year old laptop that can competently do everything a Chromebook can do, and at roughly the same speed. For the same price as a Chromebook you can get an old laptop. Yes, I'm running Linux on it. The OS is your choice. It's the same thing as netbooks of old -- didn't el reg call them "weaktops" for a reason?
And Microsoft's hoped-for dominance? History has shown us that the OS titan missed an emerging trend. Chen explained: "Today, the leading 64-bit operating system is neither Solaris nor Windows. It's Android.
You mean LINUX, Ray. All of Android plus all of the cloud. Linux denied Windows a monopoly in 64-bit computing.
This sounds less than feasible to me. It's clear that IBM does not want Blue Hat Linux clones to exist, and when IBM decides they're going to screw something up, they put the full force of their bureaucracy behind screwing it up.
I for one am ready for the world to retire the RPM ecosystem.
Pretty much everyone wants a machine that uses UEFI that boots straight into 64-bit long mode, and then runs an operating system with a 64-bit kernel. As long as 32-bit software can run once the operating system has booted, no one is going to lose any sleep over it. Linux users moved on a long time ago, no one is running MS-DOS on bare metal anymore, and even Windows stopped being able to run Win16 binaries quite some time ago.
It's time to face the fact that the 8086 architecture simply wasn't elegant enough to maintain compatibility throughout the ages in the way that, for example, the IBM 360 architecture was. Let it go.
There is no such thing as "artificial intelligence" and there never will be.
There, I said it.
The GPT programs that the less intelligent portion of the tech world are clamoring breathlessly about are impressive, but call them what they are: a natural language interface to whatever body of data they have been given. They are not "thinking".
I have some reservations about Internet Archive, even though I am a personal friend of Jason Scott.
And this isn't really Jason's fault, but IA has a habit of easily rolling over and obeying any authority that wants something taken down. This happens if it's a copyright holder, or if it's someone of wealth and/or power who wants something "inconvenient" scrubbed from the record.
archive.org is useful to preserve things that might otherwise fall into the bit bucket. To keep things from being "erased from history" use archive.today or archive.is instead.
Microsoft always follows IBM, with a 10-20 year delay. To know what happens to Microsoft next, one need only study IBM history. Gates and Ballmer learned how to be cutthroat monopolists by watching IBM, and everything Microsoft has done was built from that playbook. Lock-in tactics, treating the rest of the industry like garbage, lying cheating stealing, the whole nine yards.
Microsoft is only relevant now because their cloud has permitted them to turn into a "services company". Just like IBM did.
Now, Microsoft is following in Big Blue's footsteps by mass-sacking employees on their home turf. Those jobs will magically re-appear in India and other dirt-cheap labor markets.
Yes, we know that Linux doesn't use the original kernel, and isn't part of the Open Group or whatever, but it is the spiritual successor to AT&T's original offering. Linux won. Linux won everything. AIX is dead. Solaris is dead. HPUX (pronounced "H Pukes") is, thankfully, dead. SCO is dead but they'll zombie up every couple of years to sue someone.
Unix won. Thanks to Linux. Do you remember who had the early lead during the Unix Wars? It was Microsoft, with Windows NT. Go back to the late 1990's and hearing about "moving to NT" was as common as hearing about "moving to the cloud" is today. It was Linux that saved us from the dystopia of a Windows monoculture. Not IBM, not Sun, not HP.
Linux has become what Brian Valentine told us Windows would become: "The fabric of standard computing."
The fate that has befallen AIX, Solaris, and HPUX will also strike Windows Server in due time. The writing is on the wall. No one runs Windows Server anymore except to run Microsoft's own server software, and most of that they'd rather have you run on their cloud. Azure networking runs on Linux. Azure Cloud Shell runs on Linux! There is no future for Windows Server, any more than there is a future for AIX. It's merely a matter of time.
God bless the Linux Operating System, the new holder of the Unix crown.
UKI is short for "Unified Kernel Image" and combines the Linux kernel and initrd into a single file, along with some other smaller components, allowing the whole thing to be cryptographically signed.
Great. Now how about storing the resultant UKI in the EFI System Partition, eliminating the need for a boot loader?
The problem with a cloud-hosted Windows desktop... is that it then becomes very easy to have several of them. One for work, one for home, one for some special project ... and the next thing you know, some of those users begin migrating to "no desktop" (basically Chrome OS or something equivalent) or even a cloud-hosted Linux desktop ... in addition to the Linux that's running their thin client.
In other words, "dual boot" becomes something you do by just signing your thin client on to a different account, instead of messing with your computer's boot settings and potentially wrecking the existing OS if you get it wrong.
That's a "vulnerability" to Windows dominance that Microsoft would have fought with everything it had twenty years ago. Today, they don't care as much, because the bulk of their revenue now comes from cloud services. Their desktop monopoly is a sideshow now, and with desktop revenue decreasing it will eventually change from an asset to a liability.
So if Linux can give me an alternative to AD that I can use in small SMB environment, then maybe I can deploy it and save some money for my clients by using Linux.
I assume you've looked at FreeIPA? It's feature equivalent to AD and can set up two-way trusts and replication if you're trying to supplant AD in an existing environment.
Extracting electricity from the flow of water in pipes will reduce the flow of water to where it needs to go. That'll be great when the fire department can't pump it high enough.
By the way, if the water was in a water tower (which most towns have), it is pumped INTO the tower USING ELECTRICITY. You're not saving anything.
And in an urban setting, high rise buildings often need their own water towers (look at a photo of NYC rooftops) which require filling from the water mains USING ELECTRICITY.
Even Microsoft knows that proprietary software is obsolete. That's why they've switched over to being a cloud provider, so you can pay them forever for *access* to software instead of for the software itself. I daresay it's a better business model, and even ESR said so in his final blog article before he gave up on the blog actually working [ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764 ].
Locking customers into a cloud is more lucrative than locking them into low-quality proprietary software.
Please stop using Windows. It is obsolete.
The only appropriate path for the Internet is LESS governance, not MORE. The Internet works best when it is the Wild West. Governance leads to choke points and censorship. There are already too many of "those people" trying to turn the West into another China. They'll ruin the Internet given even a slight opportunity. We must not let them.
...the news will be... BT has announced record losses as they continue to be unable to keep up with technology advances and consumer demands. This news follows the ongoing mass exodus of talent from BT after their CEO ordered all employees back into the office last year.
(Sorry dude, the modern workplace is remote; you can't put the genie back into the bottle.)
As revealed this week, Microsoft chose to port eBPF into Windows rather than try to duplicate its functionality with its own program. io_uring may become the next Swiss-Army tool for Linux developers.
Windows is obsolete. It carries on as a majority desktop operating system, for the time being, only because of the momentum of its massive installed base. Everywhere else, it is in decline and everyone everywhere agrees that it is a developmental dead end. The cloud runs on Linux. Mobile runs on Linux (Apple variants notwithstanding). Containers run on Linux. Software-defined storage/networking/etc. runs on Linux.
In the data center and in the cloud, no one chooses Windows Server anymore, except to run legacy software. Windows Mobile is dead. Windows Embedded is dead.
Microsoft would do well to continue porting Linux technologies to Windows, but at the same time working to phase out Windows entirely.
Generation IV reactors are literally incapable of melting down, and some designs are even capable of consuming previous generation reactors' waste as fuel.
Regardless of how you feel about "global warming" (I'm a skeptic) we ABSOLUTELY NEED nuclear energy as part of the mix. It is abundant, scalable, produces zero emissions, and when produced by Gen IV reactors, completely safe.
The obstacles to nuclear power are political, not scientific.
(And no I am not a NIMBY ... I live within glow-in-the-dark range of a nuclear station and it's never been a concern for me.)
Yes, on the Microsoft timeline, perfection was achieved with the Windows 95 user interface. But of course that was mostly stolen from RISC OS, the idea of a fixed taskbar and a window manager that did not maximize windows on top of it. Combined with the rest of what PARC and later Apple put together ... we never needed to go anywhere else.
The job of an operating system is to run the selected programs and then GET OUT OF THE WAY.
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