Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: I think I have the problem

The great debate aeons ago was whether the next language would be D or P. It depends on which character sequence you're using in which C follows B.

Re: Not a Language?

"You can say the same about Welsh"

Even the bit about integers?

Re: Aria Beingessner

"is you more than one person?"

Fair question as we don't use 2nd person singular pronouns any more.

Re: Nothing new, kinda pathetic really

"it isn't that long since I was using the college Vax"

It is, but only when you stop to think about it. Welcome to the club.

"I wouldn't give him more than a kopek"

You wouldn't need to. He & his cronies would steal the rest. This is part of the problem. They've run out of things to seal in Russia so now they're trying to steal a whole country.

Re: What to do?

No problem. Start bankruptcy proceedings in the country where the assets are. Watch the value of the CEO's shareholding start to slide. Accept the cheque.

Re: What's the fallback mechanism?

"and it's very *easy* for commentards to laze around on comment threads poking holes."

We don't actually get advantage from poking holes. Others do. You shouldn't assume they aren't doing.

Re: What's the fallback mechanism?

A PIN contains very much less entropy than a strong password. Biometrics have their own set of issues some of which have been mentioned in this thread.

Re: Microsoft already nailed this

"I keep sole control of my mobile device"

You intend to. People generally intend to keep control of all their possessions and yet things do get stolen.

"I don't even get that much in the way of spam on my landline"

In my case I think it was a result of getting them to "hold the line a minute" until they realised they'd been had and hung up. I must be blacklisted. To my great sorrow I missed the only call I think might have been from Microsoft.

Re: Who are these people?

"TOTP is a standard and works. It has no dependency on any particular organization."

It still has the disadvantage that as it's sent to your phone (or more accurately your phone number) whoever has the phone with that number is you.

Re: Who are these people?

Very simply put, you create an account with SomeOrg and agree with SomeOrg that "this magic token" is associated with that account. The token itself doesn't identify you

It's normal practice when you create an account to use an identity to do that. These days banks are very careful about establishing identity to cope with money-laundering legislation (unless, of course, you're handling sufficient funds to make money laundering worthwhile if not the object of the operation in which case the bank will be delighted to give you an account in the name of any off-shre shell company you choose).

Where was I? Ah, yes. Account. Identity. No, the token itself doesn't identify you. But the token is associated with account so we have Token > Account > Identity. That's what I'd call indirect addressing. For some purposes it might be enough or, depending on the purpose, too much.

Re: What's the fallback mechanism?

"That's a lot of usable phones lying around in drawers just as identity backups"

Apart from any other consideration that's also a lot of phones identities lying about to be nicked if you're burgled. Plus when you really need them you'll find that the battery life has decayed to 2 seconds and nobody local stocks that odd battery size any more.

Re: The way I read this...

"You're understanding it wrong, because this is not about protecting you"

So far so good but moving on from there, it's to benefit the usual suspects' grip on everybody's data. Any benefit to the man in the street is incidental.

Re: It is a company culture test!

This is very often true of recruitment but not deliberately so. Sometimes there may be an attempt to hide the company culture. These are the ones to worry about but you're not likely to find out until too late.

Re: This process is widespread at Canonical

Example by someone to a similar grammatical wrangle a little while ago: "See who's at the door and ask what they want." I don't think it's assumed the reply to the first half would be "Jehovah's Witnesses".

Having said that it can still be jarring.

The cynic says there's a third - they have a task that needs expertise they don't have but they reckon can be done in 3 months.

Re: "worth the extra security risk they inherently present"

Never underestimate the way things can change in the IT world and how fast irrespective of how entrenched things seem to be.

When I started in IT we were the upstarts in a DEC dominated world by using Unix and RDBMS. I think the latter was even looked on as the more radical. We were always going to be taken under the VMS wing in about six months' time.

Re: "worth the extra security risk they inherently present"

"Like all businesses with captive markets, they're primarily interested in their balance sheets."

But is that market capture guaranteed? It consists largely of businesses that have their own bottom line to tend to. How much more intrusion into their affairs will it take for those customers to start to review the market? Anyone not firmly wedded to Windowsland knows very well that other desktop environments can be re-skinned to like more or less any version of Windows that takes your fancy. It's quite easy to envisage a PC vendor pre-installing Linux or BSD with a first run menu for a new user which offers a choice of any Windows UI from W2K to present.

In this context the spoiler of "It doesn't run my gamez" won't get far; this is a work machine. The other spoiler, the user with a massive investment in Excel macros, might end up finding themselves the corporate odd man out, just like the user who must have a Mac. There might even be a market in tools to convert those spreadsheets into one-off applications.

Re: Irritation and security flaws are an intentional feature

"You are obviously a time traveller who has come back from 5 years in the future."

From my PoV, just somebody who can see the way Microsoft would like to take things. The only questions for the likes of yourself seem to be how much of it will you let happen and how quickly and you seem to have answered the second already.

Re: Weak Profitability

It might be worth looking at any payments they might be making to SoftBank under the headings of IP or Services.

Re: Just use freeflowing documentation.

My wife runs patchwork classes. Her handouts include templates for marking out fabric. Pray tell how free-flowing documentation using HTML gets transferred to the fabric without printing.

Re: So the moral of the story is...

Or a subscription service in general.

Re: Imagine how much time is wasted...

As I keep saying, you can always tell someone who hasn't used Linux but you can't tell them much.

Re: Imagine how much time is wasted...

"The strength and weakness (imao more the latter than the former) of open source software is the freedom to go off and roll your own if you don't like the current version(s)."

Most people don't. When they do it's usually because someone has screwed up really badly. The exemplar of that would be OpenOffice suffering from the influence of Oracle. Even there is was mostly the OpenOffice devs who went off to found LibreOffice. Strength or weakness? Entirely the latter, I think.

Perhaps you could give us an example of your A>B>C>D process which actually turned out to be a in real life.

In the meantime, enjoy your adverts in your file manager - you're not going to be able to fork it.

Being able to fork something isn't only a menas of recovering from screw-ups, it's a disincentive to screw up in the first place.

Re: quis procurat ipsos procurates?

Where does your setup.exe come from? Which setup.exe is it? Did your setup.exe include a few dlls you may have already got from elsewhere just in case you didn't? If so how do you keep track of the different ones? You're dealing with a multi-step rpocess - first find your setup.exe. Download it. Keep it separate from all your other setup.exes so you know what's what. Then run it. That's not the easy way.

For sheer laziness apt install some-package wins hands down, especially if there are other dependencies which are needed.

Re: Hmm

Agreed up to the point of Flatpack. Yes, bay all means put nails in Snaps coffin. Then build another one for Flatpack.