* Posts by IGnatius T Foobar !

314 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2018

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Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

IGnatius T Foobar !

Windows users are in an abusive relationship.

Anyone who continues to use Windows, year after year, while it becomes more and more abusive, needs some serious help. You're supposed to get OUT of abusive relationships. Windows is not going to get less abusive if you just try harder to be a good little user. It's going to get worse and worse. You're being harmed. Get out.

France offers US scientists a safe haven from Trump's war on woke

IGnatius T Foobar !

It isn't too much to ask, to have a team built on merit alone. We real people know that a great engineer is a great engineer regardless of their identity.

Google begs owners of crippled Chromecasts not to hit factory reset

IGnatius T Foobar !

For a device to be considered authentic forever, it should assert its identity on the blockchain instead of through a certificate authority with an expiration date.

Dash to Panel maintainer quits after donations drive becomes dash to disaster

IGnatius T Foobar !

It doesn't help that the extension is unstable. And I don't even blame the extension. They make changes to GNOME so frequently that it just breaks the extension. Frankly, the functionality it provides ought to be built in to the environment itself. Most users prefer a single dock/dash/panel at the bottom of the screen. We want our computer to look like a computer, not like a phone or a Mac. This is what always sends me back to KDE when I try a machine with GNOME.

iRobot may be iDead in iYear

IGnatius T Foobar !

Commoditization is a fierce foe.

Robot vacuum cleaners are a commodity. You can't lock your customers in the way Microsoft and Apple do. Once the patents are expired, there's no competing with cheap chinese knockoffs.

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

IGnatius T Foobar !

Excellent

Cutting government waste is a good thing. It may not be pleasant, but it has to happen. You can't run trillion-dollar deficits forever.

Microsoft eggheads say AI can never be made secure – after testing Redmond's own products

IGnatius T Foobar !

Inevitable

Build a technology that depends 100% on plaigiarism to operate, and you're going to get this kind of outcome ... guaranteed.

Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month

IGnatius T Foobar !

That's refreshing.

Given how hard Microsoft has been trying to force-feed copilot to everyone, one would think that they'd charge extra NOT to have it.

Google reports halving code migration time with AI help

IGnatius T Foobar !

How much time saved?

I wonder how much time they had to spend teaching the LLM how to do the job. That time certainly wasn't figured in to the calculation. In the end, LLM-written code is about as good as would be produced by some third world outsourcing shop, and you probably paid more for the LLM than you would have paid for the outsource.

Geez ... the next AI Winter can't possibly come soon enough.

China's Salt Typhoon spies spotted on US govt networks before telcos, CISA boss says

IGnatius T Foobar !

Re: Ha....."The Other"......"The Big Lie"......

Funny that this two pronged approach to public relations was invented long ago in Berlin........

Goebbels and Godwin, party of two ... your table is ready

Enterprises in for a shock when they realize power and cooling demands of AI

IGnatius T Foobar !

Winter is coming

You heard it here first: the AI crash will be as spectacular as the dot com crash.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

IGnatius T Foobar !

The end of pr0n in UK

Proving your age requires proving your identity. There is no other way. This is basically the end of pr0n in the UK. More importantly, it's the end of anonymity. In the end, however, the internet always finds a way. Sites which are best viewed with anonymity are going to have to move to a friendlier hosting country ... or even onto a darknet. There are more people going on darknets now for just that reason.

Ubuntu turns 20: 'Oracular Oriole' shows this old bird's still got plenty of flight

IGnatius T Foobar !

Dash to Dork

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.

Cards Against Humanity campaigns to encourage voting, expose personal data abuse

IGnatius T Foobar !

TDS is so 2016

I guess after the antics CAH has pulled before, they've already lost all the customers they were going to lose. It really cheapens the product.

GNOME 47 brings back some customization options, but let's not go crazy

IGnatius T Foobar !

Dash to dork

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.

Virginia's datacenters guzzle water like there's no tomorrow, says FOI-based report

IGnatius T Foobar !

Michael Lesniak of water systems company Aquatech claimed that most datacenters in Loudoun County use recycled sewage water that would otherwise be dumped in the Chesapeake Bay.

Funny that ... "sewage" accurately describes what comes out of most "clouds" anyway.

GM axes 1,000+ jobs in software and service division, majority in US

IGnatius T Foobar !

Unworkable

US manufacturing needs to be deregulated and deunionized in order to be competitive again. In a global economy, the manufacturing will simply go to where it is the cheapest. This is not rocket science.

California trims AI safety bill to stop tech heads from freaking out

IGnatius T Foobar !

This isn't an isolated incident.

This isn't an isolated incident. California's over-regulated environment spans thousands of unnecessary regulations, taxes, and other government meddling. There's an awful lot to unwind to make California hospitable again.

Gentoo Linux to drop Itanium support as Funtoo fork enters 'Hobby Mode'

IGnatius T Foobar !

Now end Windows

Itanium got the end it deserved. Now please rid the world of Microsoft Windows. It's far worse than Itanium.

Chrome Web Store warns end is nigh for uBlock Origin

IGnatius T Foobar !

The answer is simple: don't use Chrome.

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.

IGnatius T Foobar !

Re: Be Brave

Correct. There's nothing Google can do to block Brave's adblocker because it's built into the browser. And wresting control of that away from Google by using another browser is the right idea.

IGnatius T Foobar !

Re: Firefox anyone?

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.

W3C says Google's cookie climbdown 'undermines' a lot of work

IGnatius T Foobar !

Third party cookies are already unreliable

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.

Big Music reprises classic hit 'ISPs need to stop their customers torrenting or we'll sue'

IGnatius T Foobar !

Re: Only an idiot would torrent without VPN

And if the boot comes down, everyone will move from running torrent on the clearnet to running torrent on darknets. I2P is particularly nice.

Porting the Windows 95 Start Menu to NT

IGnatius T Foobar !

The RISC OS menu

The Windows 95 user interface was cribbed from RISC OS. And it was good. Until Microsoft started messing with it later.

Xen Project in a pickle as colo provider housing test platform closes

IGnatius T Foobar !

Whither AWS?

Considering that AWS built a zillion-dollar clown computing empire on Xen, they ought to host the project for life. Even if they don't use it themselves anymore.

Microsoft shows venerable and vulnerable NTLM security protocol the door

IGnatius T Foobar !

About time!

NTLM has always been janky. It's about time they deprecated it. along with NBT (or for that matter, all the NetBIOS stuff) and a raft of other things that need to be put out to pasture.

Google Cloud shows it can break things for lots of customers – not just one at a time

IGnatius T Foobar !

The Clown

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?

The end is nigh for Windows 10 21H2

IGnatius T Foobar !

Back to their bad old tricks

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.

Linux 6.9 arrives, plus Torvalds indicates Arm64 will get a bit more love

IGnatius T Foobar !

In-kernel dedupe?

I am experiencing "pure" joy, if you know what I mean. :)

Microsoft really does not want Windows 11 running on ancient PCs

IGnatius T Foobar !

Linux is fine

Good heavens, who is still running Windows and thinking it's the only option? The number of Linux end user devices absolutely dwarfs Windows these days. Yes I am including Android because the point is you do everything through a browser now.

Lightweight LXQt 2.0.0 updates to same toolkit as KDE Plasma 6

IGnatius T Foobar !

"Windows 95" design?

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.

Chromebooks are problematic for profits and planet, says Lenovo exec

IGnatius T Foobar !

For the same price...

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?

Microsoft's code name for 64-bit Windows was also a dig at rival Sun

IGnatius T Foobar !

FTFY

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.

HP TV ads claim its printers are 'made to be less hated'

IGnatius T Foobar !

H What?

Glancing over at my Brother printer which cost US$150, uses cheap toner, and doesn't have obnoxious drivers...

Oh, HP? I remember them. Sad, sad days.

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

IGnatius T Foobar !

obv

Clearly there was a Strategically Placed Hole in the lab's security perimeter.

OctoX is a radical Rust implementation of a very old OS for RISC-V

IGnatius T Foobar !

C will never be replaced.

The world is littered with the bones of languages that tried to replace C. Many have come and gone. Many will continue to come and go. C is the perennial king for a reason. Long live the king.

Rocky Linux details the loopholes that will help its RHEL rebuild live on

IGnatius T Foobar !

Sounds less than feasible

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.

Intel mulls cutting ties to 16 and 32-bit support

IGnatius T Foobar !

It's about time.

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.

Microsoft finally gets around to supporting rar, gz and tar files in Windows

IGnatius T Foobar !

The best development environment for Windows...

...is a virtual machine running Linux.

Developers everywhere agree.

Google's claims of super-human AI chip layout back under the microscope

IGnatius T Foobar !

There is no such thing as "artificial intelligence"

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".

Publishers land killer punch on Internet Archive in book copyright court battle

IGnatius T Foobar !

History

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.

Chinese web giant Baidu backs RISC-V for the datacenter

IGnatius T Foobar !

Take your pick...

Take your pick ... a chip that is bugged by the Chinese government, or a chip that is bugged by the Chinese *and* US governments?

Microsoft axes 10,000, already breaking bad news to staff

IGnatius T Foobar !

Microsoft always follows IBM, with a 10-20 year delay.

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.

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

IGnatius T Foobar !

Yes, Linux is unix.

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.

C++ zooms past Java in programming popularity contest

IGnatius T Foobar !

"widely used" is not the same as "popular"

Java is the new COBOL -- the lingua franca of business logic. If that makes it "popular" then I'll take a hard pass. thank you very much.

C forever!

Version 252 of systemd, as expected, locks down the Linux boot process

IGnatius T Foobar !

UKI in EFI System Partition

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?

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

IGnatius T Foobar !

Re: No. Stop it.

Linux, STILL, does not have the end-user application support necessary to win the desktop. PERIOD. END OF DISCUSSION.

Ooh I see, you're playing the 1990s Slashdot argument game. I'll play the other side?

HOW MUCH DID MICROSOFT PAY YOU TO SAY THAT?

IGnatius T Foobar !

The problem with a cloud-hosted Windows desktop...

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.

IGnatius T Foobar !

Re: Not sure I agree about that...

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.

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