Posts by Dan 55

Re: Remind me

The TikTok video linked in the article (probably best to open in private mode) is also fun, the guy walks up to his Cybertruck holding half the accelerator pedal and you can see the body starting to rust.

What a heap of junk.

I think we'll see Half Life 3 finished before Star Citizen is finished.

I've no problem with those keys, after all they were they same keys on other computers. But pressing what is usually the copy hotkey to stop it pasting into an MS-DOS window (which IIRC was done by injecting each keypress) is not an obvious choice. Or I never found it. It might have even exited your program if you accidently did it twice (once to stop pasting, another time to exit). Esc would have been better.

I don't know... First why was Ctrl-C chosen to abort an active paste session in MS-DOS if it's the copy hotkey?

And secondly shouldn't full-screen software be able have a way of saying to the OS that it's not interested in hotkeys being messed about with in the first place?

You can see the cruft piling up in Windows in the mid-90s...

Visual Studio Express or Visual Studio Community Edition or MinGW on Windows: Total cost £0.00.

gcc on RHEL 9 with Individual Developer Subscription: Total cost £0.00.

Re: If people want to side load crap onto their phone, they can buy an Android

It's not penalising success, it's about ensuring market leaders don't lock out competitors so that they too can succeed and therefore ensuring customers have a choice.

Saying that Apple only has 28% of the market therefore shouldn't be regulated as the other poster argued is missing the point. Obviously coming first will get you gatekeeper status, that doesn't mean everyone else will not get gatekeeper status, it applies to any corporation which is big enough to meet the gatekeeper definition and is therefore potentially big enough to use their market position to lock out competitors.

Re: If people want to side load crap onto their phone, they can buy an Android

It does make you a gatekeeper though.

Re: If people want to side load crap onto their phone, they can buy an Android

It's entirely relevant as they are first. But I think you can Google it for yourself just like I did.

Re: If people want to side load crap onto their phone, they can buy an Android

In less than the time it takes for you to spend the rest of day trying to make some kind of contrarian libertarian point, you could have summoned up a ranked table of market share by smartphone manufacturer and seen the answer for yourself.

Plus the Core Technology Danegeld.

There's no way a app "store" like F-Droid could exist on iPhone, the fees prohibit it.

Re: If people want to side load crap onto their phone, they can buy an Android

Apple's share of the mobile phone market as of Mar 24, is 28.46%

Now compare against other manufacturers.

Re: Bad timing for Musk...

Isn't Tesla still at the "putting someone in a suit" stage of Optimus or have they managed to progress to moving it around with strings?

Re: Good old Boston Dynamics

Their robot dogs sort of have a friggin' head, and can even talk. Who wouldn't want a robot dog which talks like KITT?

All they need to do now is put eyes on it so when they change colour to red we know when they've switched to evil mode.

Re: Unconnected streaming devices

People never connect their smart TV to the Internet, which is different. The streaming device is connected to the HDMI port.

It can't. There is no way for Microsoft, Amazon, or Google to get round it.

Re: The bigger question:

For those home users where the January update puts their computer into a boot loop and they have no choice but to faff around (or the similar mid-2023 update which could do the same), they might install a noob-friendly Linux distro for their aged clunky desktop or someone they asked to fix their computer might suggest that to them.

I'm not saying 2024 is the year of Linux on the desktop, but Linux is now at 4% of desktop share (6.34% if you include ChromeOS), and the number is creeping up as Windows reliability goes down. Also the ads in Windows can't help either.

Re: The bigger question:

So your average home user goes down to Currys to get a new laptop. How many Linux options does he/she see (excluding ChromeOS). Almost certainly, that will be none.

That wasn't what I said. I said Linux is fine for most home use now. Now you're talking about Currys. I know you can't walk into Currys and buy it because there isn't a big corporation pushing it.

As you originally said "This is a thread about a patching issue with Windows" - and over three months later there is still no fix for the home user. The official mitigation is for the home user to fuck about with diskpart - madness, that's enough to make me blanch. What happens when it gets stuck in a boot loop because the recovery install is b0rked? If MS can't or won't sort this out then alternatives like a well-known Linux distro or ChromeOS Flex are completely viable.

Ask the average user have they even heard of Linux. A few will, but most won't (or at most will have vaguely heard the name). So they ask what is Linux? What does it look like on a computer? To which of course there is no single answer. Start trying to explain about different distros, a common kernel with various shells available, etc, and watch them glaze over.

It looks like Mint, PopOS, or Zorin. Which one do you like the look of the most, that's the one I'll install.

Hence we are not going to see any sudden increase in home Linux desktop use, outside of the world of IT enthusiasts (plus a few of their relatives who they maintain computers for). Most users will just buy something they've heard of - probably Windows, sometimes a Chromebook or Macbook.

When the computer disappears up its own wazoo again and it's out of action until they can find someone to fix it or pay money to get it fixed, they're going to be more receptive to an OS which doesn't blow up when it updates. When the computer starts bugging everyone to throw it away and get a new one for no reason, they're also going to be more receptive.

As for your latest criteria - is it going to be commercially successful? No, apart from ChromeOS and Steam Desk. But is it fine for most home use? Absolutely.

And the same applies in a large number of businesses when it comes to the client devices. They (as in those at the top) want something which they and their users will be familiar with, and which they know will run their business software (including Microsoft Office, which they and their users will all be familiar with). That's mostly going to mean Windows (or Chromebooks in education, Macs in design and communications businesses).

Compare the new Outlook with the old one or look at features coming and going in Word and Excel. Microsoft Office is what MS wants it to look like this year, consistency has gone out the window. So the main reason for sticking with MS has disappeared.

A lot of businesses use the PC as a thin client now and Linux is also fine for that.

A lot of businesses are software houses and Linux is also fine for that.

It's not sold in Currys though, as if that were any measure of quality.

Re: The bigger question:

If we're talking about home users who browse, edit office documents, and don't want to run the risk that their computer disappears up its own wazoo on the first Tuesday of every month, as the parent poster was, then Linux is fine now.

Perl's documentation flagged it as a problem at least four years ago (earliest record in archive.org).

Nobody knows how to split arguments on Windows. Apart from C because it's been around the block and had the bugs knocked out of it but reimplementing all the bugs back in again in other languages appears to be the way to go.

Re: Ha! Rust Is The Answer To All Our C Programming Security Issues?

No memory was harmed while arguments were improperly split, so I'm sure we should all be thankful for that.