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Comment Re:It's hard to take someone seriously when... (Score 1) 79

I get your point, but you're talking about technical things where correctness matters. At least use the proper name for something and then tell me in a clear and concise fashion exactly why it's no good.

If you're not confused about what company they're talking about, then what's the problem? A lot of nerds were talking like that back when these products were new. Before it was most commonly written into Micro$oft, people were putting a dollar sign into Compu$erve, to the point where I'd see it written that way more often than not, e.g. on Fidonet threads. Then I got into UUCP (first with UUPC, then Waffle, then SCO UUCP, then AmigaUUCP...) and I would see it written that way on USENET. It's tradition.

There were Unix nerds that looked down on Windows. There were Mac nerds that looked down on Windows. There were Amiga and Atari nerds that looked down on Windows. Back then there were still active VMS nerds who looked down on Windows. And they were all correct, and it's still correct. You can obviously do real work on Windows, but it's not worth the pain. Sadly, it became the de facto standard for working with government, and you needed to run it in order to interface with it as smoothly as possible. Its popularity is like the dollar, it's just too inconvenient to do anything else. Except, "suddenly" (decades of fighting/figuring out how to go around it later) it isn't.

Comment Re:Linux on the desktop will happen when (Score 1) 79

Wine and derivatives run a lot of software very well, but indeed run a minority of it very poorly or not at all. Microsoft and Adobe software are the primary candidates for not running even slightly, and if they do, they definitely do not work right. If you need that software, there is no particular sign that Wine will run it well any time soon, though it will run some of it sort of okay. I've tried quite a bit of it. If you need that software, then you will need Windows, at least in a VM.

Specialized software either works great or fails pathetically with little in between IME. Drivers can be a big problem though, because the software can be looking for the drivers very specifically. If you have Windows software to go with hardware whose interface dongle is not mostly just a ch340 or something, you are probably gonna have a bad time.

Practically everything works great with Linux these days, though. Standards have mostly won and Linux is taken seriously. OSS is now also generally taken seriously and even preferred in solutions large and small. The dependency on closed standards and platforms is waning, and while that's no comfort to anyone forced to run Windows for some compatibility reason now, at least it's becoming less of a problem. Even people who think Windows is fine now recognize that they don't want to be stuck with a dependency on a specific version of it.

Comment Re:Just say no to snap (Score 1) 22

Even worse, most of the dynamic loaders the major distros don't support looking up a hash of the needed lib.so instead of a hardcoded file name. (Despite the ELF format supporting it.)

What loader is needed to take advantage of this? Is there a ready solution that can reasonably be built and installed on a typical system?

Comment Re:Halloween (Score 1) 79

Microsoft's telemetry is different from some app's telemetry, since it can be spying on everything you do on your computer and the app's reach is comparatively limited. It's also different from most in that you cannot actually turn it off. Even when you think you have turned it off, the system is still phoning home more than can be adequately explained by update checks and the like. You have to take extraordinary measures to disable it, and then Microsoft will just turn it on again when you update. So yes, the telemetry really is part of it, and no, it's not the same as what "every app" has in it (which isn't even true.)

Comment Re:In other news.... [But no solutions?] (Score 1) 23

Mostly thanks for the relatively good FP, and it deserved the Interesting mod, but... Insight would have called for deeper consideration of the problem and Slashdot has no mod to encourage solution-oriented thinking. My anecdote below might qualify for interesting, but first a word about the solution approach I still favor...

I think someone (perhaps the police) should be collecting targeting data and trying to find the money. Cutting off the money would stop a lot of the scamming. Many examples, but I'm going to use email because it's the easiest one. In this story's scenario the victim probably has an email message from the criminals. I imagine a website where the email (preferably the full source with headers) would be submitted into a webform and then analyzed (presumably with AI these days) and the donwannabe (don't-want-to-be (but perhaps-already-a)) victim would confirm the details. Might involve several iterations of analysis and confirmations and the victim might even have to check into some details. For example, maybe the victim has forgotten about an earlier phishing email that triggered the attack, but could dig it up with a bit of guidance? Adding that email to the report might provide more clues for the investigation. However the important thing is that such a website could collect lots of data and direct targeting at the biggest criminals and focus on cutting the criminals' money flows.

Now the anecdote. Already a couple of months old, but I'm sure it was an AI GAIvator of a famous person. The email was beautifully written and really had me fooled, even after a couple of exchanges. The style was that good, but the only suspicious part was how quickly the responses came back. Not instantly, because that would have been too obvious, but within a day or two, and I became suspicious that our discussion could have such a high priority for such a busy person. So I checked via the celebrity's website and got confirmation that it was a scam.

Meanwhile the cops are chasing their tails and the criminals continue laughing all the way to the bank. Except when there are crooked cops who are wetting their beaks--but I better not cite that book I'm currently reading. I've already got enough enemies, thank you.

Comment Re:Every military that cares about homeland securi (Score 1) 158

Right, the economist refer to this as "externality". Fossil fuels aren't cheap, if you factor in the costs that people using them transfer to third parties. Theoretically, if the true cost of using fossil fuels were factored into every pound of coal or gallon of gasoline consumed, then we would use *exactly the right amount* of fossil fuels. Probably not zero, but not as much as we do when we pretend pollution isn't a cost.

Comment Re:Trump said this war would be done. (Score 1) 130

The "he's a liar" stuff is just part of the celebrity contest. That its somehow important how attractive Trump's personal character is. Its not except to the extent it effects what he does.

It's relevant in that you cannot trust anything he says, and anyone who does is a big dumbfuck, and their opinion should never be considered valuable on any subject ever again without exemplary evidence to go with it because they have proven that they are willing to believe stupid shit that nobody should believe.

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