Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: Bring back 3.11

"I think the names are the thing I hate most about other OSs."

Even more than on OS versions, I hate them about CPU versions.

Re: Tout au contraire.

You don't actually say that, especially you don't look smug. You simply tell them you're not currently free (assuming this to be the case) but if you're able to assist in the future you will. After all, it wasn't the client management that was the problem here.

"I wish there had been a similar fork for Qt-related things like KDE and now LXQt where you are NOT locked into a 2D FLATSO TIFKAM clone theme."

I'm a little confused about this. Are you asking for a Qt-fork so KDE isn't locked into 2D with the implication that it currently is so locked?

Running KDE5 here:

Scroll bars are definitely 3D effect on the packaged stuff such as Kate, locally compiled Qt e.g. Kalkon browser.

So are buttons on dialog boxes.

Toolbars are a bit of a compromise. Flat in appearance until you mouse-over a button at which point it becomes raised - and depressed if clicked - as 3D.

When running Gtk stuff you are in the hands of the application developer. Firefox is strictly Gtk kool-aid. Seamonkey makes the effort to do what KDE does as described about as does LibreOffice (it appears it uses a single library to provide interfaces to Gtk and Qt environments using, I think, Gtk tooling underneath that. An application developed under Lazarus, again using Gtk tooling, is full 3D toolbar.

To some extent this is due to choices made Settinfs>Appearance>Application style including Configure GNOME/GTK .

Re: Can someone man'splain this to me?

They're not going to stop working but they're not going to get any updates either. Whether or not that's a good thing depends on whether there are any bad bugs discovered in it now. Either way, it's going to be a fair while yet befre KDE 6 shows up in Debian.

BTW KDE6 is out today. It looks like they're continuing to suffer from Microsoftitis in regard to settings which has been changed again. There's something about the return of the Cube which is to do with swapping between worktops so KDE can look cool. Heaven preserve us from desktops where looking cool is a feature.

Personally there are very few things I'd want them to fix:

Reinstate the feature lost at KDE 4 whereby you could set the hot-spot for unhiding the panel to be a corner instead of all the way along the panel.

Fix the bug whereby if I introduce my own file suffix and set up my own program as the default for it after some random number of days it forgets all about it and Ark pops up complaining it doesn't know how to open what it, in fact, a text file.

And that's about it. They could put some effort into getting Discover to work without some undocumented and undiscoverable library or whatever it's missing being installed but as Synaptic works perfectly well I can live without it.

Re: According to Portage...

If you were unlucky you got to 7 before finding the unreadable one.

Maybe I'm mixing them up with Cinnamon. AFAICR they both wanted to keep the Gnome 2 desktop, one by reimplementing on Gtk3 & the other by forking Gtk2. OTOH it was a long time ago & I was never a Gnome fan, even at Gnome 2.

Re: Embrace the verbatim

Apart from the fact that the "computer is always right" presumption is likely to get a good kicking any time now in the light of the Post Office scandal it belongs to criminal law. It puts the onus on the defence to prove that it was wrong. Even if statute law isn't amended quickly the defence is going to remind any jury of the fallacy of that whatever the judge might direct them about the law. In reality I doubt a judge would now give any strong directions about it. In a jury trial the jury, ot the judge, is the tribunal of fact. In a non-jury trial the judge, unlike the jury, has to give a reasoned verdict.

Civil law - people being sued - works on balance of evidence. The situation would be very different as it would be what one one computer said in the form of a website vs what the other computer said in the form of a chatbot.

Re: Embrace the verbatim

It does raise the possibility that the attributions and payments go to real copyright holders even if the alleged quote is an hallucination. That could raise the possibility of even more court cases down the line when the alleged copyright holder gets sued for something they'd never actually said.

You couldn't make it up if you tried.

Re: Sweating assets

Maybe you should buy another to help HP's sales.

Re: A Ghastly Thought

"It just came to me in a burst of insight that AI could replace ... lawyers."

Unsuccessfully so far.

Re: In summary....

The relevant issue here is that ChatGPT is providing a service which is based on what is essentially a database which is derivative of the training materials. The regurgitation is simply a means of providing proof of that. The value of ChatGPT and hence of OpenAI depends in part on their software for which they've (presumably) paid their developers but also on the training material for which they might or might not have paid but the use of which will exceed the T&Cs attached to it.

Companies 101

"When did people forget that the stock market is effectively gambling?"

What's more when you buy a share you're becoming part of the company. The company is called that because "company" is a collective noun, in this case the collection of people who each own a share of the company. The clues are all there in the name. So if you're a shareholder the company's funds are your collective funds. If you are a shreholder and sue the company you're suing yourself along with all the other shareholders. If you think the C-suite or directors are gypping you, sue them, not yourself. If you're prompted to sue yourself by a lawyer remember it's the guaranteed winner who's prompting you and if you want to find out who's the loser, look in the mirror.

When small companies have few or one product it's quite likely that they were designed by enthusiasts who actually understand what's needed because it's something they actually want themselves. When they get bought out by big companies the products are specified by marketing who believe they know what the market wants with no interest in using the product themselves..

Re: Wtf?

So they can be sold to telcos to remotely manage them.

When PlusNet decided to remote manage mine to the point where I was unable to get in to make changes to my DHCP allocations it was time to pull it and install my own. Do I want to join the manufacturer's remote management scheme? No I do not. Turn off remote management.

Do you mean Microsoft?

Re: I don't get it

Best to come to a patent deal if you want to build a car with rounded corners.

Prior art? Never heard of it.

Re: Y2K times a million

"If it was even a little bit important, nobody would have gone down the Intel / 80x86 branch, but would have stuck with the "cleaner" addressing modes of the 68000. Yay! let's revive the architecture battles of 40 years ago."

The early SMB-scale Unix computers I used were either Z8000 or 68000 based. That wasn't, at least directly, because of cleanliness of addressing modes, it's because, at system integrator level, it's what was available to buy.

But because IBM chose Intel for their PC and the economies of scale prevailed all that stuff became a dead end. So much for not throwing away backwards compatibiliy.

Re: In the absence of files...

Whether you call something a directory or a folder it's still an abstraction of a place in which to store other things, some of which may also be files or folders depending on the vocabulary you choose to use. You're confusing the abstraction with its implementation.

Re: Well

"the cost of making the poor decisions"

The poor decisions are usually made for the sake of operational convenience rather than security. Let's not bother with the inconvenience of a separate privileged user ID with a separate password, let's not enforce complex passwords, let's not fence of different bits of the network, etc.

The hardware and languages will support better but better costs some user effort and a few seconds of time here and there and time is money...

Re: Costs and Benefits......

AIRI the first Mac was little more than a toy. It required a few upgrades to become useful. Jobs had fought the developers to design it to a price. He also did his best to make it non-upgradeable, Somebody sneaked in an ability to solder in a link to enable it to take higher capacity memory without having to buy the bigger version next year or whenever it was. I wonder to what extent Jobs planned it as a bait and switch.

Re: NV RAM never entirely went away & predates Optane

Over the years I've seen a few would-be memory technologies come and go (bubble memory is one that comes to mind - what was it again?). The few that have stood up to reality and their predecessors are the few we have today. Reality includes the cost of completely revising the way things are done to take advantage or having a commercially viable, if niche, use case. Mobile would appear to provide a suitable use case for PRAM. If it can't make an inroad there it doesn't seem likely to succeed elsewhere.

Re: Costs and Benefits......

Wasn't Lisa's real problem that it didn't get the Jobs fairy dust* sprinkled on it? Macs were also pretty expensive for a good deal less functionality.

* Decisions about relative pricing might have been a fairy dust ingredient.

Re: Technology moves in circles

"there's always been an engineering trade-off between speed and capacity"

Between speed and price and it's price - including the price in terms of power consumption - that determines capacity. Can it achieve the speed of DRAM at the price of DRAM or close enough to lower the overall cost of the system?

Re: from Apollo days there wasn't one mission that went absolutely perfectly

On Mars, or course, the NASA copter had a rotor failure and still ended up standing on its feet.