Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: Err

That's what I was thinking. It's not exclusively military.

Re: Can I sue the EU

Did this involve a misuse of your personal information?

Re: Not everything hurtful counts.

Not so easy if your entire business plan is to breach GDPR.

Oh, goody.

Re: What is the only way to take advantage of Brexit ?

Can we agree on median?

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

I think this is true. Many voted as a protest vote without looking at the real-world consequences until it was too late. They now have the same share of a smaller pot.

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

"But this swing minority is enough to keep the politicians from talking about moving back toward the EU"

I think the reason is simpler: it's not a practical possibility.

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

"Yes, the EU will have us back in a flash, they want our money."

What money? Have you seen how we're sliding down the list of major economies?

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

In a normal election you get to change your mind and your vote after you've had a chance to see how it works out. With Brexit you can still change your mind after a few years but you don't get another vote.

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

You may be surprised to discover that I agree with you on this. It's what I thought at the time and still do.

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

"Referendums across Europe to approve (or not) the EU becoming a a political entity during the 1990s would have rendered all of this unnecessary."

I quite agree. The Maastricht and Lisbon treaties should have been subject to referenda in all EU countries.

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

They still get to experience the consequences. I wonder how many of them wish they'd voted. IIRC when the result was announced it was reported that there was a peak of Google searches about the consequences. I wondered how many were from the non-voters and how many were from those who'd voted Leave as a protest vote against the government without thinking too much about what might happen.

Then there was the MP who'd campaigned for leave suddenly demanding that HMG replace all the EU funding his constituency had been receiving up until then.

Re: What is the only way to take advantage of Brexit ?

If, and it's a very big if, that were possible the terms we'd rejoin with would be less advantageous than those we had previously. And as to money - with a faltering economy there isn't any.

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

"now that we are in CPTPP"

I expect the CRG - the CPTPP Reseach Group - to emerge soon.

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

The fact that there is no mechanism to enact the renewed "will of the people" is the lack of democracy.

This!!

Tomorrow a lot of us get a chance to change our minds about votes cast a few years ago.

A one-off, irreversible decision shouldn't be treated as binding when it was presented as advisory and should require a good deal more than a simple majority.

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

In fact the referendum was "advisory". Having got the result he didn't expect and obviously hadn't even planned for he panicked. It would have been quite reasonable - although unprecedented in government terms - to treat it as reason to undertake an impact assessment. That should have been his plan B. His emergence plan B was B for Bolt.

Is it a peer-reviewed journal? I suppose it may count itself as such in which case you have to worry about the peers.

"They probably have it under control."

it, maybe but definitely not IT.

Re: Software vendors weren’t interested, so giving it away became the best option

"Amazing that none of them saw what it was going to be, and how rich it would have made them."

But would it have made then rich? I think its success was because it wasn't one company's private property. I think the likelihood is that any single company would have screwed it up with a whole stack of dick moves.

Re: Snap/Flatpack

If you check LibreOffice as an example there are just two Linux options, DEB & RPM (just like there are two macOS options, Apple or Intel and two Windows options, 32-bit or 64). A number of other products manage things similarly.

I think the means of achieving this is two-fold. First they don't get anal about most system libraries. If they compile against an old version they should be OK if the OS supplies something newer. Secondly, they install in their own sub-directory in /opt and provide their own versions of system libraries where they might have concerns about the OS's version.

Re: Year of the Linux Desktop

"The problem is choice. Windows and macOS have one "distribution" each. If a user wants to use either, without hacking, they have one choice."

Yes, that's the problem with WIndows and macOS. Actually I'm not sure about macOS but the situation with Windows is the UI isn't stable, it keeps changing to whatever marketing and/or the crayon department decide to impose on the next release.

Re: work around or move on

It's always easy to spot somebody who's only read about Linux written by people who haven't used it and hasn't used it themselves.

Re: work around or move on

You're right up to a point - a distro for beginners shouldn't have these problems and that shouldn't be tolerated. The sort of distro that's been forked for some reason by someone who's prepared to work round its problems isn't a mainline distro and shouldn't be a first-time distro - in fact it shouldn't be a regular distro for experienced users either.

It might be difficult for Windows users to grasp but the diversity of Linux distros is a Good Thing. There are really three classes of them:

One is where the experimentation that breaks stuff gets tried out. They're where ideas originate, ideas that may eventually be incorporated into the mainline distros. Even the mainline distros have variants which might be one or even two generations ahead of the current production release to try stuff out.

The next group are the current or production versions of a number of mainline distros. The fact that there are several means that a user can choose the one they prefer. As a Unix old-timer, for instance, I prefer the systemd-free option of Devuan to Debian which I used to use. There are also a variety of UIs to suit different ways of working. Liam, for instance prefers Ubuntu's Unity interface. That would be unworkable for me, in fact it's what drove me from Ubuntu to Debian. The Linux user certainly doesn't have to put up with whatever changes of UI Microsoft chooses to impose.

Finally there are distros such as Zorin, based on the mainline production distros but with the UI tweaked so as not to frighten refugees from Windows.

But this continual refinement has lead to very reliable distros. My occasional clashes with Windows remind me of the value of that. With Windows there's no option to move on to something else and of course there's no option to fix it. I just use Devuan as a daily driver and am grateful I don't have to depend on Windows for anything.

Re: Easy choice

I have a W10 partition on an old laptop. A couple of days ago I decided to bring it up to date as it hadn't been used since the start of the year.

First the Linux partition (Devuan). The usual few minutes whilst it installed a few updates, mostly a new kernel etc. Reboot into the new kernel, run apt autoremove to get rid of the last kernel but one (it normally boots into the current kernel but keeps the last one as an option.

Then the W10. Looking at the history there were several intel patches, all with the same ID, one or two had installed previously followed by a couple of failed installs. Odd - maybe they're all different.

After a looooooong "checking" it finally listed a few to download & started in on them. Sloooooooow downloads, Slooooooow installs. One or two went through, leaving a pending reboot. Then one stuck. It decided to do the reboot, came back, did the checking bit again which had a few more patches to the list. Going online to try to find a cure for the stuck patch suggested a few things, some involved going into safe mode, there was a suggesting of deleting the update cache (really? never had to do that on Linux). One was to go into services, stop Winodws Update and reboot; it turned out that it was already stopped! Restarting helped. Then finally a reboot or two later the update which had been allegedly stuck at 20% was suddenly complete.

This process on W10 took several hours. Even if it had worked without a hitch it would have take at least an order of magnitude longer than the Linux equivalent. This would simply not be considered tolerable on Linux. IME Linux updates almost inevitabley Just Work,* Windows updates Only Just Work except when they don't. And, of course, it then tries to sign me up to sll sorts of things I don't want such as <=365. Somewhere along the line a news applet** had invited itself onto the task bar and kept offering me such garbage as GBP to AUS exchange rates.

I really don't see how this can even be considered of merchantable quality and yet it's being foisted on the general public.

* A long time ago this might not have been true. One of the aspects of all those multiple distros is that there is that competition and natural selection ensured that the mainline distros evolved to become reliable.

** That's what it would be called in KDE-land

Re: Easy choice

Definitely to avoided when certain people are about. Even if they're not, check catches and hinges and particularly avoid those with skips parked beneath therm.

Re: ?

Because you can.

Maybe he has to support a crayon department.