* Posts by gerryg

787 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Aug 2009

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The DMA hasn't changed Big Tech's anticompetitive DNA, says Free Software Foundation Europe

gerryg

Still there after all these years

Got to admire FSFE still plugging away

The task for government is quite easy. Open standards and interoperability.

One can only assume all those highly paid economists and lawyers working in the competition authorities don't want to vote for Christmas

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

gerryg

Re: Familiarity and compatibility

"A long time ago someone at Microsoft demoed Open Office against Microsoft's standard internal expenses spreadsheet. As it opened, the existing data was corrupted"

Of course it did. Why else would someone from Microsoft run the demonstration?

c.f. MS-DOS/WordPerfect

c.f. ISO 29500 "transitional"

Infosys co-founder doubles down on call for 70-hour work weeks

gerryg

Re: Only 168 hours in a week

The topic was workaholism. I wasn't disrespecting people life choices.

gerryg

Only 168 hours in a week

If they both work the same 35 hours, say 40 after commute, then there is a large hole in the day requiring childcare and other stuff. So a third salary is required, neither of them are cleaning the bathroom and one of them is working for almost no money.

If they don't work the same 35 hours and do not have childcare they will barely see each other.

So no paradigm shift but nice try.

gerryg

Workaholic espouses workaholism

However, I did wonder if the author has a side-hustle with the Grauniad, thus undermining the thrust of their argument.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

gerryg

Re: ""the system and licenses are not readily interchangeable or interoperable"

Others have been saying this for years. See the file format wars of the early 2010s. Cabinet Office produced some half decent guidelines which were mysteriously withdrawn and nothing has happend since. At the time someone said "it would be nice not to be here in 10 years time" and now the CMA has opened an inquiry into the problems of lock-in with cloud.

It's always been about interoperability and for some reason (I think we can guess) government of any persuasion has always listened to those with a vested interest in avoiding it.

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

gerryg

Obsession with colour printing is the problem

May I just put a word in for the Brother HL 1110? B&W laser printer for about £80 with good enough graphics for QR etc. Mine is about 8 years old. It has to think a bit before it prints the first page but with crisp type. A new no chip toner cartridge costs about £20. No dried ink no half empty problems and has never let me down.

On the rare occasions I need a colour photo I get one in the high street for a couple of quid

What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it

gerryg

No crisis, nothing to see

There are alternatives to Redhat.

This reminds of Bruce Perkins circa 1998, no #chickenlittle but *if* a solution is needed than parasites such as me need to work out whether they are part of the problem or part of the solution.

Too many of the "community" spend hours screaming by forum but perhaps rather than demanding they could find other ways of contributing.

I fund some projects that are of particular importance to me, nothing that would cause them to gasp, but a few quid every now and again.

Linux, the kernel, is too important to too many people, that is safe. Other projects needs to be cared about more.

LibreOffice complains fairly regularly that too many corporate users don't support the project. But according to Wikipedia only a few percent of all users see enough value to support it.

I look at the list of corporate sponsors for openSUSE, that looks fairly healthy but for reasons that escape me, it continues to be treated as the runt while others spend their time respinning Debian derivatives, freedom of choice n'all but if they think there is a problem possibly respins are not the answer.

Linux Kernel of the Beast 6.6.6 exorcised by angelic 6.6.7 update

gerryg

It's all about class

As Nancy Mitford put it "u and non-u"

Trinity desktop's latest release snaps into action on Q4OS 5.3

gerryg

Re: The main point is being missed

> My choice is: can I please not have so many choices?

Then don't look. If whatever you are happy with is what you are happy with, then lucky you.

It's not always necessary to have an opinion

For example I have no idea how many distros there are - I don't look and I don't care - 25 years ago I picked what is now Tumbleweed.

> but it's not OK to say "you should like this because it's so customisable" when it's not customisation that I want.

Who was saying that?

gerryg

just installed it

Frighteningly it takes over the log-in from SDDM but it plays very nicely on Tumbleweed. Wave of nostalgia and props to the team but I'm not sure I'll be using it much.

gerryg

The main point is being missed

It doesn't really matter if "this vulture" doesn't get on with the KDE philosophy. This is all about the power of choice.

Back in the day Timothy Pearson thought KDE 3 was where it was at (and given the travails with KDE 4 it was possible to see his point).

I recall he had certain complaints about the changes to the underlying infrastructure too.

So is plugging away at TDE and here we are. Yours for the using. Or not. That's the point.

Microsoft CEO Nadella's compensation drops... to $48M

gerryg

How effective is any CEO?

I'd be curious to know how long a company could tick along without a CEO. Are the divisions unable to walk talk or chew gum without the CEO telling them to breathe in and breathe out?

What size of decision reaches the CEO.and how many?

Similarly whether breaking up large company into smaller units would give better or worse shareholder value.

And why $50 million and not $100 million or $25 million.

Is he going to leave?

Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11

gerryg

Re: PC is good enough for now.

On the specific issue of power efficiency, with a decent graphics card, say 300W for a desktop, 12 hours day.

3.6kWh about 70p/day

How efficient would the new PC have to be to justify the expenditure?

What about all the energy used to make the existing PC?

Or the cost of disposal?

City council Oracle megaproject got a code red – and they went live anyway

gerryg

Theory of the firm, bear with me

In the private sector eventually the internal transaction costs exceed the external transaction costs, limiting the size of the organisation, (Ronald Coase). That's one reason why there's more than one supermarket.

Enterprise software is a sales pitch designed to convince large organisations they can lower internal transaction costs. In the private sector a firm has to cope with the decision or die. In the public sector they just keep spending and put it on the tax bill.

gerryg

Re: Product not suitable

Here's a quantum of advice "If you can't explain to a five yr old you don't understand it" Richard Feynman

If the Linux Foundation was a software company, it'd be the biggest in the world

gerryg

Re: Wrong

I'm curious as to your definition of obsolete. As I suppose would be the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, CERN, the London Stock exchange and anyone with a supercomputer

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

gerryg

Re: Self-reinforcing

I have never not used Firefox except when I used to use Konqueror and to date have not experienced any problems.

Save me posting twice, WebKit is derived from and reintegrated into KHTML.

So Konqueror is the other browser.

Teardown reveals iPhone 15 to be series of questionable design decisions

gerryg

Re: They want how much for one?

Bought mainly by oxymorons?

Long-term support for Linux kernels is about to get a lot shorter

gerryg

Enterprise vendors

Back in the day SUSE kernels used to have specific patches applied.

But AFAIK SUSE just use the stable versions. (I think there was some sort of announcement about 15 years ago) So really it's the usual suspect.

Randomly I've just watched a doc about Gary Kildall and as a result wonder if the usual suspects had played nicer if there would ever have been a demand for Linux.

Electoral Commission had internet-facing server with unpatched vuln

gerryg

Don't blame Microsoft

They are just selling what they have always sold. The real problem is the over promoted tossers trapped in the headlights vaguely recalling that "no-one ever got sacked for buying IBM" and making a false read across.

There is no doubt that a Linux based is less convenient but as Obama said about something else, that's the point.

On the record: Apple bags patent for iDevice to play LPs

gerryg

Ceramic cartridges only

I don't recall if the Garrard SP25 was ever available with a ceramic cartridges (and flippable styii) but the upmarket 86 and 100 ("SB"?) were only MC/MM. However the distortion from a ceramic cartridge was around 10% IIRC somewhat limiting other benefits.

gerryg

Re: Had to have been filed 2021-04-01?

The RIAA playback curve has got nothing to do with "distortion intrinsic in the mechanical pickup" but is an attempt to flatten the RIAA encoding curve without which the bass would require more room (wider grooves) so reducing playback time.

While I broadly agree with your view of CDs versus mechanical recoding and rejoice at the ability to listen to Electric Ladyland in its entirety without a stacking mechanism and the LPs being sides 1-4 and 2-3, I do occasionally muse whether the loss of ritual and artifact associated with a 12" disc has contributed to the demise in the perceived value of "the album".

Twitter rate-limits itself into a weekend of chaos

gerryg

Re: AI training must be stopped from scraping Twitter - pretty please?

Unfortunately the OED now equates "literally" to "actually" undermining https://xkcd.com/725/

Mars helicopter phones home after 63 days of silence

gerryg

obligatory

xkcd

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

gerryg

Re: If RH can't do this...

https://www.suse.com/c/navigating-changes-in-the-open-source-landscape/

You might find this interesting

gerryg

You can get the source code for SEL

https://www.suse.com/download/sles/

Free support for 60 days

https://www.suse.com/source-code/

Typically, the source code is distributed along with the binaries. You can also send us a written request to provide the source code for a SUSE product by addressing your written request to:

SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH

c/o IP & Privacy Counsel

Maxfeldstrasse 5 , 90409

Nuremberg, Germany

Five Eyes and Microsoft accuse China of attacking US infrastructure again

gerryg

Re: Meanwhile

https://fsfe.org/news/2023/news-20230323-01.en.html

gerryg

Meanwhile

The EU is making it harder/potentially illegal to deploy Linux based systems, perhaps that is also a "living off the land" exploit?

Red Hat releases RHEL 9.2 to customers, with buffet of rebuilds for the rest of us

gerryg

At risk of...

...the SUSE Linux Enterprise version has always been downloadable without any argybargy. The idea that a version of Linux is downloadable "free to existing customers" has always struck me as being a bit odd.

Similarly regarding the general absence of comments about such practice.

Another cloud provider runs to shelter from Microsoft's licensing practices

gerryg

Re: Good

Or insist on truly open standards and let the market operate by preventing lock-in.

Central UK govt awards £12M+ contract to leave Google Workspace for Microsoft 365

gerryg

Re: Why did it split into two in the first place? Answer enclosed

That is a restatement of the problem not a solution.

Last time I checked the Internet is pretty big and no-one needs a specific piece of equipment.

Once people promoted beyond their level of competence started choosing walled gardens for solutions it's only a matter of time before the wall become a problem.

gerryg

Leading from behind

Given that the solution was never going to focus on interoperability and open standards it's just further evidence that the national centre for cyber security advises the use of chocolate teapots.

If the only way central government can play buzzword bingo with words such as integration, efficiency, cross-departmental collaboration, synergy is by using software from the same organisation (and it really doesn't matter which one) then someone somewhere is missing the point.

Why does the bingo card never include: lock-in, resilience, independence, innovation (let alone reliability or security)?

Fujitsu bags £142M UK government work since Horizon probe announced

gerryg

Re: "We can't undo the damage that has been done."

The government seems to have created a new compensation scheme, recognising the shortcomings of the original scheme

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-compensation-scheme-opens-for-postmasters-who-exposed-horizon-scandal

gerryg

Re: Shares anyone?

While I'm sure the "right" answer is important to you these contract are awarded by civil servants and the Post Office is a private company.

I doubt it is possible to for a government to ban Fujitsu but without a doubt the real difficulty is that once any organisation fails to (a) consider the importance of interoperability and (b) fail to ask the question "and how do I get rid of you lot?" (to reframe Tony Benn's quote about democratic processes) the only way forward is carry ob with who you have got or a clone. The case study of d'addario strings' decison to rip out (in this case) Microsoft and go FOSS is as rare as it is instructive. They were stung by a licensing audit for software they were not even using and wanted at any cost to be rid of the shackle.

Horizon, as Private Eye reported for many years, was shameful. Failure to consider (a) and (b) above makes the disruption caused by ripping it out inconceivable. That's the real cost of these projects. It's true of all these deeply embedded outsourcers, especially once they have sold in their various secret sauces.

You should direct your ire and vitriol towards those at the operational level who took the decisions back in the day, after suitable technical visits to nice parts of the world provided by any of the usual suspects and other soft (or less soft) corruption.

It's time to stop fearing CPU power management

gerryg

Is computing wasteful?

In large scale manufacturing there is or used to be a cost engineering department. Back in the days of discrete components can we use cheaper 10% tolerance resistors, are we paying too much for plastic ties, can this product be re-engineered and so on. Doesn't seem yet to.apply to data processing.

Will data centre operations ever reach the stage of people questioning whether they need a Porsche to nip out to buy the groceries?

Just musing as I read articles suggesting that computing is consuming 110% of the world's electricity consumption and comments on other articles here decrying re-using data centre heat generation to heat swimming pools.

Tupperware looking less airtight than you'd think

gerryg

That's put the lid on things

I set such store in Tupperware

Microsoft ditches plans for 500,000 sq ft London office

gerryg

Re: Enfield

Also, to be fair, London is the capital of the United Kingdom

Microsoft Defender shoots down legit URLs as malicious

gerryg

They all do it

Defender seems to be no different from the other options. Periodically we have to re-white list our website in order to avoid triggering warnings.

I've forgotten which one as it hasn't happened for a few months but trust me if it were possible to have an undiluted rant at Microsoft I wouldn't miss the opportunity.

Germany sours on Microsoft again, launches antitrust review

gerryg

Interoperability

Interoperability and genuine open standards. Perhaps unbundling too.

If for example governments were to notice that Microsoft uses transitional rather than strict ISO 29500 despite all the rhetoric at the time and so insist on ISO 26300, a genuine open standard then over time it would cause something to change.

It's cheaper and more effective to enable interoperability and as a consequence prevent lock-in and enable choice.

Anti trust takes years and achieves nothing fundamental, it does provide a living for lawyers and economists.

Oh, Snap. openSUSE downloads increasing, and Leap 15.5 is coming soon

gerryg

Unfortunately

I might be coming across as a fanboi, but what looks a bit Windows 98?

I've always supposed SLE only has GNOME as it offers the user fewest options on the desktop, but that looks nothing like 98.

I have been using what is now Tumbleweed for 25 years now, and KDE can look fairly much however you want, including a right to left desktop for lefties (unfortunately not every application is lefthand aware, so it's not as useful as it could be).

I use YaST about once every six months and don't care what it looks like.

gerryg

Re: The heck it does!

Out of curiousity can you provide examples of things it doesn't do and config files it overwrites?

I haven't not used YaST for years but I do recall warnings in some config files not to update manually as YaST will overwrite them.

RIP Gordon Moore: Intel co-founder dies, aged 94

gerryg

Re: And I had just bought some more Xeons, too…

In early 1990 a laptop computer with a VGA monochrome LCD screen, running whatever at a few MHz with around 1Mb RAM and a tiddy HD cost £2,500.

Red Hat veteran will head up SUSE from May as Di Donato steps down

gerryg

Chameleon?

Red changing to Green?

Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

gerryg

£1250? Why?

I suppose the 24-36 hours battery life might be useful but both my laptops must be around 8-10 years old, one's a second hand show pony but still more than adequate, the other, the workhorse, is a second hand X230 updated with an SSD, bought with a surprisingly good condition battery for about £150 with none of the limitations regarding USB (A), monitor, Ethernet. Both are on full fat Tumbleweed and are doing fine.

I suppose I need people to want to own these things so they sell their old stuff to bottom feeders like me but I do find myself wondering if these devices go alongside a £3,500 carbon framed push-bike and £15,000 turntable.

UK.gov bans TikTok from its devices as a 'precaution' over spying fears

gerryg

Re: 冰山一角

Part of a large crowd. I had a conversation with a journalist recently and she opined that she found the idea of AI rather worrying. As I said to her, she was possibly justified but what about all the other stuff which she should be worried about.

Cloud upstart offers free heat if you host its edge servers

gerryg

Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing

Even if the system only works part of the year it seems as if energy usage will be reduced. Not sure what your point was.

At least one crematorium has used a similar system for about a decade

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-23104502.amp

IDC gets even more pessimistic about PC sales

gerryg

Re: I, for one...

https://linux-hardware.org/

https://bsd-hardware.info/

gerryg

Re: Innovation

I'm curious to know what "next level" actually means in practice.

I have an ASUS laptop which must be getting on for 10 years old, it is fanless with an Intel something or other running at 900Mhz, 8GB RAM, It does have seriously good I/O and was probably one of the first to use an SSD. It's in a nice slim line aluminium case, so slim, the Ethernet port is via a USB plug-in. Its screen is something like 5200xforgotten.

When I got it I hoofed out the 128GB SSD complete with Windows something and put in a 256GB SSD then shoved openSUSE on it. The high resolution screen was a PITA but over time KDE has got there.

No, I don't do video processing nor finite element analysis with it, but for general use it is still snappy. Battery life remains at around 7 hours (though I use it on mains when possible)

It looks the DBs and when the screen eventually dies unless I can find a cheap pin compatible lower resolution screen (IMHO no-one needs 5200xforgotten on a 13" laptop) the laptop will die as replacement high resolution screens remain bonkers expensive.

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