Posts by nematoad 1857 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Sep 2009
"You Brits wanting to comment..."
Oh? is that a covert way of suppressing free speech? I thought that the "conservative" voters in the US were all for people holding and expressing their opinion.
Or is it the case that unless you agree with the sentiments expressed they are somehow "fake news"?
"Trying to change this reality in a comment here on ElReg only makes you look silly."
Saying that makes you look censorious.
"From Google's PoV anything that isn't Chrome is a security hole."
No, from Google's view anything that is not Chrome is danger to its bottom line.
Money is the be all and end all as far as Google is concerned and it will do anything and everything to prevent the tiniest amounts slipping out of its clammy grasp.
I wonder how much money is too much or is it just a way of keeping score when you have more money than you know what to do with?
Even without knowing which government department this was it would be plain that said department was run by accountants.
In this case they seem to have confused capital expenditure with operating expenditure and from vague memories of the numerous accountancy courses I was forced to attend that would seem to be a real schoolboy type of howler.
There is an old saying that "An accountant knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." or alternatively "Penny wise and pound foolish."
Idiots the lot of them, and to think that they are in charge of forcefully parting us from our money to give to another bunch of fools, the Government.
"Not all Debian developers agreed."
Ah, and there is the problem. Two different viewpoints. One for the devs who have the skills and opportunity to shape Debian and the ordinary user who does not.
Purity is fine but comes at a cost. Everyone using Linux owes a lot to Richard Stallman but not many people can go along with his strict interpretation of "Free" software.
When I was a SysAdmin my main concern was to allow the users to get on with their jobs. They had no interest or need to know the ins and outs of the systems they were using. Shortcuts were taken at times and workarounds put in place to ensure that the primary business of the company was allowed to continue. My view of the system was not the same as theirs. For me it was a job. For them it was a tool.
So for devs to say that the way you can use the system has to be the one they favour is, in my opinion, short-sighted.
As the old saying goes "Give me the tools and I will finish the job."
"You think it's Trump posting?"
No:
1) There is a limited use of upper case.
2) The spelling is reasonable.
3) The word SAD is lacking.
Not Trump but someone with a belief that the only valid viewpoint is the one they hold and who cannot accept that there are people who do not agree with them.
Oh, one last thing. I do not think that Trump would ever post as an AC. He is too fond of seeing his name splashed all over the place.
" WFH is unsustainable."
For who? The companies? The like of Fujitsu and Dell don't think so. The employees? Judging by the responses on this thread a lot of people seem to enjoy it and there are not many stories of workers clamouring to get back in to the office.
Ah! I know who this is pissing off. Middle management. Who see that their very existence is threatened. Maybe the day of the PHB is coming to an end after all
"If you're not loyal to your provider, there are currently some top deals elsewhere..."
What happens, if like me, you have no choice in provider?
Where I live we only have one provider. In this case EE. Which to be fair does seem to have a better coverage than the others, but if we are dissatisfied with them what alternative is there?
No, sometimes it seems you just have to put up with what you can get. And just pay the price.
" Or have people become so inured to them that they simply don't notice them any more?"
I don't think that people have become more inured to adverts but that the human brains amazing ability to filter out unwanted information and random noise allows people to blank out stuff that they have no use for. A good example of this is when you are in a noisy party having a conversation with someone you generally have no difficulty in making out what they are saying despite all the other things vying for your attention.
Personally adverts whether online or not have no hold on my attention and much like the internet of old I treat them as damage and route around them. I still use ad and script blockers though and delete cookies from Google if they happen to sneak onto my PC.
You are right, this is a payback for the UK leaving the EU.
That said, the UK did vote to leave and now it is reaping what it has sown. Most Leave voters did so on the promise that "we would be able to have our cake and eat it too." Pure lies of course and in reality those persuaded to vote for one of the most stupid acts of national self-harm actually bought a pig in a poke.
Personally I don't blame our friends in the EU rubbing the UK's nose in it. We left under a false prospectus and now we are going to have to deal with the consequences.
Some of us saw through all the bullshit and realised what was going to happen, and it's only just started.
Most Remainers are too polite and won't say but "We told you so!"
Yes, as chronicled on this illustrious site I have had God's own job of shaking off Amazon's "free" Prime trial. There you don't even have to apply, you are automatically enrolled, or rather trapped, and it is hard to get out again.
I'm free now, I think, but to me it felt more like what our American friends call "Bait and switch."
"...a manual (stick shift) with no synchromesh so double declutching required, no servo assisted anti-lock brakes and no power steering."
You know, you have just described my Mini Cooper S!
Driving it is still the best fun you can have in a car on your own.
I think you are misreading AMBxx's question.
By my reading they are asking how to move away from the RH/Centos world and move to a totally new distro.
From my limited experience of running different distros I would say that it can make a lot of difference. The use of .deb or .rpm for a start. Then there are the various inits available. Do you want systemd, SysVinit, OpenRC and so on? Add in a difference in file systems not to mention the Xorg/Wayland choice and you can soon find yourself struggling to make sense of it all.
A lot of due diligence and research would be needed to make sure that the transitions is as painless as possible.
This is not something to be undertaken lightly.
With this little beauty crawling out of the woodwork I wonder what other flaws, bugs and other defects are incorporated in Boeings products. I read with some amazement about FOD being found in fuel tanks due to sloppy QA so it's not just the software that is suspect but the whole attitude and approach to manufacturing.
I sincerely hope that airlines will inform potential customers of the aircraft they will be flying on. To be honest I don't want to have to take a chance on a shonky bit of Boeing equipment failing. That's too much like Russian Roulette for my liking.
"Until then, it's not a problem."
It is if, like me, you live close to an area where ships in trouble are taken, i.e. tankers leaking oil or on fire, crews holed up in secure areas because of suspected piracy and so on.
Just because you live away from any potential damage does not make it of no consequence which is what you are asserting.
"I'm alright Jack!"
"At its heart, Apple is a luxury goods manufacturer."
No, at heart they are a bunch of greedy control freaks who consider that when they offer something for sale they are doing you a favour.
On the topic of price being a guide to quality I once had a Rolex Submariner that cost me over £3500 and when I wanted to have it serviced cost me £200. The bloody thing never did keep good time and I was glad to sell it on for £50 more than I paid for it.
The true price of something is what the punter will pay and in Apple's case there are a lot of people with more money than sense.
"Just what the world needs, another Forked Linux Distro"
Oh, so you are happy to be locked in to a walled garden with no escape route? You would feel more at home with the offerings from Apple I think.
Look, forking a project is the option of last resort. No one takes on forking a project without good reason. Setting up the back-end, repos, recruiting maintainers etc. are not something to be undertaken lightly. Luckily for people using Linux there is an alternative and people dedicated enough to give us the choice. Your example of the OpenOffice LibreOffice is a prime example, LibreOffice has thrived and is present in most distros. It's updated regularly and has a good community. OpenOffice on the other hand...
If you can't beat 'em, don't join 'em, start one of your own.
Yes, because we await the fallout from the decision in 2016. So far nothing has changed,
Britain may have a thriving ad industry but that has nothing to do with the clout that a solitary country can use in trying to rein in these giant corporations. Twenty seven countries large and small working as one will inevitably have more influence that one middle sized country acting alone.
I replied to MrMerrymaker's post in which he asked if the Digital Markets Unit had teeth. They may well have but there would have been a lot more and sharper too if they were backed up by the EU.
"Compared to the US, China, and mainland Europe, the UK is a small market..."
Aye, there's the rub. By needlessly leaving the EU we have put ourselves in a very weak position vis-a-vis the likes of Apple, Google or Microsoft. "Take back control" may have been a useful tool in persuading people to vote Leave but when the country is told that we are no longer important or big enough for these companies and others to care about, it may start to ring a bit hollow.
Johnson and his cronies may currently be kings of all they survey but if no-one can be bothered to take us seriously due to our self-imposed isolation and weakness, then what they survey may not amount to much.
I didn't think that my opinion of Amazon could sink any lower.
It just has with this little stunt. Amazon seems to have the belief that whatever they decide to do is for your benefit and that you have to accept their benevolence whether you want it or not,
Demanding that you opt-out of a creepy system that is appropriating your bandwidth? Enrolling you in that bloody Prime con and making it difficult to free yourself from their clammy grasp?
This is not the behaviour of an ethical company and they should be avoided at all costs.
Oh, and if anyone can recall, I posted about them signing me up for Prime and my efforts to escape. I am pleased to report that after a call to their customer helpline over another matter it has been confirmed that I am permanently out of their clutches. :-)
"...allowing civil servants to create legally binding codes of practice without Parliamentary oversight. "
Hmm, do I detect the thin end of a wedge?
What's the point of having an expensive Parliament if the government can side-step it to avoid accountability and rule by diktat?
There might be good reasons for introducing such Draconian powers, but then there always are. No, like them or loath them, we need MPs to keep government honest. Just like Joanna Cherry MP and others did last year with the illegal proroguing of parliament.
Yes there probably was when we launched our first rocket. In the 1960s.
It would seem that the powers that be have forgotten Black Arrow which did successfully launch the Prospero satellite in 1971. So to claim that we will be "capable of launching our first rocket in 2022." is over 50 years too late.
It seems that: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana
"...along with better passenger comfort."
I would prefer to arrive safely than die in comfort.
Unfortunately for your argument it was the "computer in the middle" that caused these crashes. And the failure of Boeing and the FAA to catch the problem before it even got off the ground.
I do feel that the FAA patting itself on the back for a job well done in supposedly fixing these problems is in poor taste. After all it was their laxity which allowed it to happen in the first place
"...putting a stop to this madness by firing the loser right now."
As yes, you are thinking of the 25th Amendment to the US constitution. It's a bit late for that now as Trump will be out of office before the process had run its course. Instead we find that the citizens of the United States have done the job themselves and voted him out.
It may be flawed but democracy is the least worst option.
Yes Hitler crouched in his bunker in 1945 moving divisions that no longer existed and when the truth finally dawned on him his attempts at destroying what was left of Germany.
Luckily there were people around Der Fuehrer with a bit more sense and did all they could to save what they could of the people and the country.
Trump on the other hand is surrounded by sycophants and yes-men and there is no one with the moral fibre to tell him that it is over.
One aspect of Trump and his behaviour echoes another of the Axis dictators. His posturing and pouting have always put me in mind of Mussolini and his appearance on the balcony of the White House after his discharge from hospital was straight out of the Mussolini handbook.
We know that it appears that Trump has a bee in his bonnet with "antifa". Could it be that he takes their actions as being a personal attack on him? Mind you in Trump World everything is about him.
I think that fedoraman has it correctly. A desktop or if you like a GUI should be as invisible as possible, It is a means to an end not, as the devs working on KDE 4 or Gnome 3 seem to have thought, an end in itself. Change for changes sake is never a good starting place.
Where I do agree with you is trying to work with an inconsistent environment does nothing for your workflow, and that was the thing that drove me away from KDE. I had work to do and things that had to be done. I did not need the challenge of wrestling with something that was supposed to help me but kept getting in the way. Sure, computing was both my career and a hobby but to have to fight the environment was not something I was prepared to put up with.
It was a long time ago now but I seem to recall one of the head devs on KDE 4 coming out with something like " You will find that you will have to adjust the way that you work with our new desktop." That is sheer arrogance, and is in effect the tail wagging the dog, The desktop environment should be the servant not the master.
I feel no need to.
After struggling, unsuccessfully with KDE4 I looked elsewhere. I found MATE. It suits me and I have stuck with it.
It takes a long time to build up trust and reputation. It doesn't take much to destroy them and that is what KDE did to me. I think that a lot of Gnome users felt the same when Gnome changed from 2 to 3.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
If a desktop does what it is supposed to do i.e. launch things and then get out of the way then to me the fact that the cursor is just right is a secondary consideration. Now your aesthetic sensibilities may be offended but don't forget the GUI is a tool, nothing more. If you want something pretty to look at set your wallpaper to something of your choice.
Oh, and whilst I'm here this quote:
“If you tried Plasma four or five years ago, and had an opinion, you should try it again.”
made me laugh. I did, once bitten, twice shy. I've never looked at KDE, pretty though it may be, after the shock of moving from KDE3 to 4.
Oh, did they ever get rid of that bloody cashew?
"...write their own exceptions to implement measures for security and public policy reasons."
With that little clause this treaty is not worth the paper it is written on. Can you really expect the likes of China, Vietnam and Burma to mention only a few authoritarian countries on this list to allow data to flow without hindrance?
When supping with the devil it is best to use a long spoon. I think that Australia and NZ, if indeed they have signed up, might come to regret it when all their data is housed in China.
"A printer's for life, not just for Christmas."
Not if my experience of recent HP printers is anything to go by. As others above have said the old Laserjets were the business and I still wish I had my LJ3, though I do not miss having to lug it about as I did.
God, that thing was built like a tank.
Now I'm not in the market for a mobile 'phone but if I was this might just convince me.
Gael Duval knows what he is doing. I was a very happy user of Mandrake and then Mandriva, hell I even paid for the Powerpack versions. So if any one can pull this of he can.
A breath of fresh air in what is to me a very claustrophobic and controlled area of technology.
“More recently I started to wonder about privacy issues and the domination of Google,”
Yeah, me too.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
