Posts by Oh Homer

Re: Forced to support forever

@johnfbw: Well, your license is only "perpetual" in the sense that Microsoft will not sue you for attempting to continue using it long past the point where it ceases to be useful.

Like it or not, proprietary software is a service, not a product. Once the vendor drops support for that service (and subsequently the entire ecosystem surrounding it), the utility of the thing you paid for rapidly drops to zero.

"Perpetual licensing" is like a bus pass for service that stopped running years ago. Yes, you have the contractual right to take that bus, in theory, if it ever runs again. Which it won't.

@ac: "maintained independently" doesn't have to mean you, it can be a contactor you outsource work to, or (more likely in the case of open source) a community of volunteers. The idea that open source is only useful if you personally are a programmer is ill-considered. At the very least you have more flexibility than you do with some vendor's proprietary solution, which he can and will eventually terminate. Surely some option is better than none.

The point is that those at the NHS (and anyone else with such expectations) are incredibly naive if they think they can pay once and play forever. One way or another they will be forced to face the responsibility of maintaining a currently working solution, whether it's paying Microsoft once every few years for a platform upgrade, or paying a service company to maintain a constantly updated open source solution, or even paying in-house engineers to develop and maintain their own system.

That's just Admin 101, and yet strangely it seems to be a concept totally beyond the grasp of the NHS (and other organisations still using archaic software).

Re: "FLAC file vs vinyl"

Even better: the 24-bit FLAC recording of vinyl, to demonstrate the "superiority" of analogue audio ... by digitising it. o_O

Re: "demand honesty and ethical companies"

Sadly the demographic that is even aware of this (or any other) corporate malfeasance is probably contained entirely within this forum, unless they've read about it in the Daily Mail, where they had a brief moment of outrage before moving on to more pressing matters, such as Kate Wright's "eye popping cleavage".

Re: "declare harddrives with bad sectors fit for work"

Haha! Comment of the year!

Re: Perfect timing

Origin Broadband (I have no affiliation with them).

Actually I would happily have paid A&A more for a better service than I currently pay BT, but sadly they don't serve my area. So this wasn't just about saving money, it was the principle of being ripped off by a multi-billion pound corporation, providing a token service to rural customers for exorbitant prices.

If I'm only deemed worthy of 1990s internet speeds, I don't see why I should pay more than 1990s prices. Simple.

Re: "Get rid of the unions"

Unions provide the collective bargaining power required to defend otherwise powerless individual members of the working class majority against exactly the sort of unaccountable tyrants the EPO typifies.

Conflating the two is highly disingenuous, since the former actually redistributes power to resolve social injustice, whereas the latter abuses power to cause it.

Copyright terrorism

I'm firmly in the "copyright is a scam" camp, but since Content® recyclers "creators" are unlikely to concede the utter moral indefensibility of their plagiaristic business model any time soon, I propose that the solution is quite simply to apply the same rules and punishments to fraudulent copyright claims as are currently applied to supposed "infringement", which is to say that, at the very least, there ought to be some, which currently there aren't.

So copyright terrorists carpet-bombing the internet with opportunistic take-downs should be criminally prosecuted, fined and imprisoned for every false claim, even (or in fact especially) if it's generated by some bot without verification and justification. Moreover, this should be fast-tracked with little or no due process (shoot first), since that is also how supposed "infringers" are treated.

Fair enough?

"not be allowed to introduce true end-to-end encryption"

Sorry, totalitarian rulers, but unless you plan on using technical measures to physically block access to foreign (as in beyond your jurisdictional powers) VPN privacy services, what you plan to "allow" is of no consequence.

Although I fully expect that such services will in fact eventually end up being deemed "illegal", in principle, even if it's beyond their power to actually stop us using them.

'rigid, unbending enforcement of "the rules"'

It's not so much the rigidness as the rule itself that's so appalling.

Suggesting a better traffic lights timing algorithm is a criminal offence?

America is off-the-charts insane.

Re: The PC is dead

Yup, not only is this just a tiny blip, but it's not even this year's blip, it's last year's back-orders due to component shortages.

And yes, Brexit is worth mentioning. Sales were already in the toilet due to the bankster heist known as "austerity", a general lack of interest in all things not mobile, and that malware masquerading as the next version of Windows. Brexflation has merely compounded an already dire situation.

The PC isn't just dead, it was brutally murdered in its sleep.

Re: if you want a different init system

That choice is rapidly disappearing, not so much because distro maintainers actually want to standardise on Systemd, but mostly because more and more of the upstream stuff those distros depend on is becoming increasingly hard wired to it, starting with Gnome itself. It's the Poettering Effect: a self-fulfilling prophesy in which the monolithic and exclusionary nature of Systemd makes it "necessary".

Systemd is not only an overreaching abomination that is an affront to the Unix philosophy, but it's also single-handedly destroying the freedom and diversity of the Linux ecosystem, to the point that eventually there simply won't be any point in there being more than one distro, more than one Desktop Environment, or more than one anything. The anti-choice brigade applaud this development as a great victory, like a bunch of cloth-cap-wearing nationalists applauding the deportation of foreigners.

The last bastion of "real Linux" is down to just Devuan, and possibly Gentoo (for now). The rest, or at least any not based on the above, are destined to be assimilated by the Poettering Collective, if they haven't already.

Re: Until the battery dies

Surely a replacement battery is cheaper than a new phone.

I tend to keep stuff long past the "until it dies" point. With me it's more like "until its fossilised remains are unearthed by a team of archaeologists and sent to the natural history museum's research department for further analysis", and even then I usually steal it back from the museum and renovate it to full working condition, and will stubbornly cling to it until it's prised from my cold, dead hands.

I'm not kidding, either. Literally just this week I bought a new battery for my SGS1. I'm buying seven candles and a cake on the 4th of June.

"Until it's no longer supported" just makes me laugh, and a little angry. As a point of principle I refuse to have my property arbitrarily terminated by the vendors. I'd happily spend ten times the cost of a replacement just to deny them the satisfaction, although in practice I rarely have to spend anything at all, especially when the thing being "terminated" is just proprietary software that can easily be replaced with Free Software, and in my case usually is on day one.

Not that I don't buy new stuff, but the old stuff would literally have to vaporise in a puff of blue smoke first. I think that's happened maybe once in my life. I was in therapy for months afterwards.

"Swapping liberty"?

What an odd characterisation of labour.

An equitable exchange of labour for money or goods is not a loss of liberty, it's the voluntary utilisation of one's liberty for personal gain.

I am not somehow "less free" because I choose to work for someone else, to earn a wage so I can buy goods, rather than work for myself to make or grow those goods directly.

Either way I still have to work. To characterise such work as a loss of liberty is like saying that merely being born is comparable to slavery, as if the only true "freedom" is being strapped to a couch for 75 years, being spoon fed jelly by a nurse.

Re: "e·lec·tro·cu·tion"

You need a better dictionary.

electrocute (v.)

"execute by electricity," 1889, American English, from electro- + back half of execute.

Misapplication of methodology

This is what happens when the person designated as most qualified to figure out how to win the America's Cup is the accountant, and he chooses the Caterham.

Agile? Yes, but not on water.

Generally it's probably better if engineering decisions are left to actual engineers.

Re: nobody uses bitcoin

A few points:

• First, April Fool!
• Second, had it actually been real, I'd rather contribute to El Reg with CPU cycles than bandwidth-eating spam
• Third, however I fear that might fall foul of the Computer Misuse Act and friends. especially without an opt-in/out disclaimer
• Fourth, did I mention April Fool?

I wonder how...

... our totalitarian rulers propose to ban, circumvent or backdoor open source communication tools like Bitmessage and ChatSecure?

The problem with such Draconian measures is, as with DRM, that they just inconvenience the law-abiding masses, while the actual criminals/terrorists carry on regardless.

Re: Bit confused

I think what Trev is saying is that Microsoft's adoption will drive open standardisation that unintentionally benefits its competitors, who will further benefit from Microsoft's litany of recent failures.

Microsoft has always been hideously inept at nearly everything, but managed to maintain its monopoly by the circular dependency of proprietary standards, and legacy software locked into those standards. However, it wasn't prepared for this mass migration to new architectures, and now it's playing catchup, and losing, because it has little choice but to abandon its own legacy, and thus break the chain of dependency that kept an entire industry tied to Microsoft for decades.

Microsoft is still a big player, but it will become increasingly irrelevant over the coming years, and is inevitably destined for obscurity, if not extinction.

Personally I won't miss it, in fact I suspect most people won't even notice, as we head into an ever more abstracted Cloud environment.

The consequence of forcing US companies to violate international law

Would be either economic (and subsequently political) isolation or the "normalisation" of international law.

I suspect the prevailing climate of ultra-nationalism favours the former, however both outcomes have potentially dire consequences, depending on whose laws we "normalise" toward.

Impulsively I wish for the former, even though I despise nationalism, purely out of the selfish hope that this will spare the rest of us the continued horrors of American hegemony.

But then I remember what happened the last time an ultra-nationalist superpower alienated itself...

Plz fx ths ggl

I nd bttr spm flterz 4 \/a1gra spm n ubfskat3d urlz.

"routine maintenance"

I.e. one of Google's cubicle monkeys hit the wrong button.

Re: "why should I pay for freeloaders"

Funny, but that's exactly what I was thinking about the TVL thugs who steal money via fraudulent legal threats and criminal harassment, from people who do not actually watch the BBC, just so a handful of cultural elitists can enjoy a state-protected relic that apparently is not good enough to survive in the free market.

Big Bang 2.0

Alexa, reboot the universe!

The government's policies are ambivalent

I'm not in the "send them home" camp, but equally there's no point in letting people into this country if we're then going to prohibit them from earning a living.

Re: The few programs worth watching in the US of A

I'm not opposed to public funding of public services, including public service broadcasting, but that isn't what the BBC is, and the fact that it sells commercial material to the US only further demonstrates that fact. Most of its programmes are not even produced by the BBC, they're made by third-parties in the private sector, for profit, even if the BBC itself doesn't make any profit (or so it claims). Its board of quangos certainly make a profit, though, to the tune of up to half a million each.

The quality of "BBC" (actually BBC third-party) programmes may be subjectively "better" than other more obviously commercial offerings (although the third parties who actually produce all the content for the BBC are very much commercial), but personally I don't really believe that stealing my money, then syphoning off this "license" tax to outsourced entertainment companies against my will, genuinely represents "a pretty good deal". Maybe it does compared to the mindless tripe on US television, but actually the more honestly commercial stuff we get in the UK is at least as good as anything on the BBC, especially ITV drama.

Ultimately what it boils down to is this: In a socially responsible society it's only right and proper that no one should be allowed to starve, or die of neglect, or suffer untreated illness, and that public provision should be made to prevent those social injustices, but it is not somehow my social responsibility to ensure that you get to watch EastEnders. That should purely be a matter of consumer choice, where each individual gets to choose to pay for their own entertainment, not other people's, and moreover they should get to choose which specific entertainment they want to pay for, and reject that which they don't.