Posts by anonymous boring coward 3259 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jan 2015
"Based on an ad hoc survey of customers at the SUSE Expert Forum, SUSE reckons that around half of users will likely make the jump to the new version over the next 12 months."
So they aren't planning to have it install automatically if you close an obscure dialogue window by hitting the "X" then?
"The first GUI driven desktop operating system? Nope. Not in-house. Licensed from Xerox."
It wasn't licensed. It was loosely copied based on what they could see at a Xerox tour. They may have poached some Xerox people later. Xerox, stupidly, went after Apple when Apple sued MS for copying Apple (at a much later stage). Xerox wasn't in the OS arena, and didn't really know what to do with it's ground breaking GUI tech.
Xerox themselves created their system inspired by Douglas Engelbart's NLS (from 1968!).
"The much loved OSX. Nope. Re-written on top of the Open Source operating system, BSD."
OS X is a UNIX-type system based on Next STEP, which was indeed partly based on BSD but with a Mach OS kernel. There are many such BSD derived systems. It has had extensive changes, and the graphics subsystem is unrelated to other Unix systems.
" The result would be a better version of the original."
Not entirely true.
Often hardware requirements increased for no apparent reason.
And the XP update system went from fast and slim to exceptionally slow and fat.
And even now in Win 10 it's just as slow and fat.
Windows update is major fail and embarrassment for MS. How can people (companies) keep coping with it?
"The people who devised IPv6 were NOT engineers - any sensible engineer knows the KISS principle"
I have to agree. Anyone familiar with v4 looking at v6 initially goes, "wtf is this?"
That's not normal with properly engineered stuff building on previous things.
And why is UN involved of all entities?
"NASA and the Russkis aren't stupid - they could and would have done it years ago if it made economic sense."
No, because they are used to dipping into that bottomless public purse.
You don't think a private company is re-using rockets because it's economically advantageous? What other possible reason could there be?
"The big auto makers have had over a century of experience at fine tuning manufacturing, production processes and logistics, you don't just replicate that overnight."
Defeatism. Why not? Poach the right people.
"More recently have you forgotten the fake chemical weapons attacks in Sryia? Or how about the Sailsbury incident, where the mainstream media were able to tell us who did it, with what within 24 hours? "
I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories just because MSM is lazy.
About BBC though, they are certainly not a balanced observer regarding Brexit. The don't do any thinking at all on the subject, and basically is hushing it down and sweeping all the massive issues under the carpet. Worst kind of government stoogees. Useless.
Musk has a point.
Media is mainly moaning, and complaining. Not doing anything much constructive. Sometimes it's a good thing, and sometimes not.
But I think Musk also is overly sensitive and protective of his babies (car especially). An overworked genius, in a hurry to get to Mars before he is too old.
He is not unlike Jobs, who had rather killed off the income bringing Apple II, than having it around representing the past, and put all effort into developing better things. These genii expect people to invest in them getting it right, and not worry about current finances too much.
"But at least you can choose to use one of the popular non bloated distros."
Yes, of course. It's just a bit sad that the most popular distro has become so bloated.
Mint seems a bit better, and is apparently based on Debian, so should provide similar levels of hardware compatibility.
"“Many of them make money off ads and they have used that as kind of a leverage point,” he said of user data. “At Microsoft, we don’t believe in that.”"
Someone (a big Chairman, no less) at MS said that in 2018? That's quite funny! Can't be very up to speed with what MS is up to.
"This is not something you can lobby your MP about. It's a simple market choice. If you do not like what the software does, go elsewhere."
Obviously, the lobbying bit is about the state trying to get off their MS dependency. And in so doing, making MS change their ways, or go away.
Waiting 5 hours for a simple OS update, when a complete reinstall from scratch would take a fraction of that time, hurt quite a lot.
I almost expected MS to get their act together now when they cram updates down peoples throats. But my deepest suspicions about MS's ineptitude (or lack or care?) unfortunately turned out to be true.
"I think that rather then losing x% performance by disabling speculative execution etc. we should ask ourselves why on earth we allow javascript and similar technologies"
Well, yes, but Google, MS etc don't care about you. They care about what information they can monetise. Running stuff, and letting advertisers run stuff, on your computer, using your electricity and CPU time, is what gives them more money.
"It is a standard approach because resetting a system in an unknown state to a consistent starting configuration is a logical and efficient way to start."
It's the standard conditioned approach we use since we have been forced to use fragile systems where various components are allowed to affect each other in unpredictable ways.
It's a sad state of affairs, that I mainly blame "ctrl-alt-del MicroSoft" for.
"Are you serious? And, by the by, who is this "we"?"
It was a generalisation, of course.
Obviously people have been tricked into running bad stuff on their machines for a very long time. Thanks MS for helping facilitating this.. Why not just run emailed stuff when people click on it? Brilliant!
With "we" I meant your average home PC user, which, by the way, wouldn't even have had email facilities back in the pre-WWW era. (Yes, I know that _some_ would have had that.)
It's a fact that the WWW has opened up the possibilities for trojans and viruses massively.
"No HTC on the Google list, neither are Samsung"
I wonder if Google has a crystal ball? I wouldn't trust that list very much.
Besides, the aim is pretty low. Buy a second hand phone that was out a year before being purchased, has been owned for a year or so, and after you had it for a year, it has no more support. And that's a best case scenario.
And updates being made available no later than 90 days after Google provides them? Well, that's not very impressive either.
Basically, the phone industry is a bit sh*t, isn't it?
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