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Comment It is actually a Windows bug, not an Outlook one (Score 1) 38

It can be reproduced with Qt apps, Microsoft Edge and many other pieces of software. It is not an Outlook bug but a Windows bug, where the hardware cursor vanishes during typing and doesnâ(TM)t come back when it is meant to. If you turn on cursor trails, which are software rendered, the problem goes away.

You can work around this with editing HKCU\Control Panel\Mouse: MouseTrails to be -1 to get a software rendered cursor, without any visible trails, to make everything work as expected again.

Just one of many tricks I am forced to roll out everywhere to work around developer incompetence.

Comment A reminder (Score 1) 55

What users are talking about differs from what the developers are talking about.

From a user standpoint, network transparency is possible with waypipe with all the same caveats and limitations of using it with modern X11-compatible software. People right now can directly compare the two and see they are both equally hobbled for anything built in the last decade. If all you want to run is a bunch of GTK+ or early GTK2 software standalone over an SSH session, then X11 will still have an advantage, but that still works, and will remain working over XWayland using X11 forwarding just as it did with Xorg anyway!

From the developer standpoint, modern X11-compatible software uses 3D acceleration via OpenGL, EGL or Vulkan to draw everything client-side, merely handing over the completed result to Xorg for it to then display. This means that modern applications are no longer technically network transparent under X11, as there is no sending of the draw commands over the network as the protocol intends, as everything has already been drawn before X11 is involved. Developers are thus right to claim nobody uses X11 network transparency any more as modern software is all developed in a manner which prevents the software from benefitting from it.

The same also became true on Windows with RDP when developers stopped using GDI objects as the mainstay of their applications. Microsoft inherited the same problem with modern software as Linux did and was forced to invent custom codecs and methods to efficiently separate said text from images, sending the rest as glorified H264/H265 video with some cached tiles thrown in where they make sense instead. Despite a lack of network transparency, nobody seems to have much of an issue with RDSes utilizing RemoteApp in this manner either.

Comment IRC is easy to make immune (Score 1) 33

The IRC network operators need only claim that NSFW chats are against the rules, which means no age checks needed, as it is not social media. As users do not have profiles and nobody is inherently identifiable, this means it only falls under the purview of OSA, and even then, assessments are only against what facilities the server can provide, not what clients can do on top of it.

This means people can use GPG to prove their own pseudonyms combined with OTR plugins to send encrypted comms which IRCOPs cannot observe. Private chats, file or image sharing can flow via obfuscated DCC, bypassing the server entirely without any legal comeback for network operators.

The law was written to enforce restrictions for web slop, and that is all it can really be enforced for.

Comment Re: Virtue signaling morons with no sense of prior (Score 1) 111

One side teaches you to blame the immigrants while the other tells you that they are economically beneficial because diversity is our strength.

Both are wrong. Both spread propaganda and lies.

The real problem is that most cabinet politicians are useless at governing anything, and should probably be replaced by actual subject matter experts who actually understand the domain they are responsible for.

Good luck with that though, as actual experts are often too boring and uncharismatic to be voted in.

Comment Re:Well, they could demand Douyin.... (Score 1) 36

Uh huh...I totally didn't see a portrayal of senseless violence on the homepage without being logged in, no sir. There totally isn't a glut of entertainers shilling addictive F2P games and cleverly disguised lewdness either, not at all.

Sure, people couch some of the content with commentary and explanations, but this is done to allow people to be entertained by it without it being banned. The Chinese manipulate algorithms the same way we do, and the end result is no better.

Comment Re: His stance is perfectly consistent (Score 1) 205

We would have a fully usable Windows XP from the leaked source code as a base for both Wine and ReactOS instead, no reverse engineering needed. That is not the only example of decent leaks either. Also, the reason reverse engineering takes as long as it does is because to make it legal we have to do it in a clean room manner, take that away and people can straight up decompile a lot of software for a head start.

Comment His stance is perfectly consistent (Score 1) 205

He only uses copyright law to enforce that people cannot share binaries without also offering to provide the source code because of copyright. If copyright laws did not exist, most proprietary software would be but one source code leak away from becoming free software, and even if it never leaked, reverse engineering would see to it that everything gets freed anyway.

Comment Re:Doctorow says legalize theft (Score 5, Informative) 90

reverse engineering is not a hurdle (let alone "the" hurdle) to have a proper it infrastructure and tools

It actually is in a lot of cases. It's pot luck if anything we buy will last long term, and companies see fit to dick us around as/when they feel like it. It's only because people are willing to violate the law that joe public is able to somewhat even the playing field. Even then, we've still created a society which produces rampant amounts of e-waste and abandons perfectly usable hardware because the barrier of entry is too high for anyone but rich billionaires to take over support or offer alternative ways to use said hardware.

People used to reverse engineer everything to make it more usable and it was considered normal to do so even as little as 25 years ago. For example, nobody in the know used the official, vanilla clients for AIM, MSN, ICQ. Instead, people would write programs to hook into them or replace them out with compatible clients entirely, and developers would even charge money for these things. These days, if you try to do that, you'll be sued or users will have accounts banned. People would modify routers, smartphones, televisions, DVD players and even games consoles (you think Action Replay was officially licenced?) irrespective of what the intellectual property owners wanted to give people better control over what they paid good money for. Nowadays, we're seeing products being artificially crippled post-purchase and the abuse of intellectual property legislation to prevent people from properly using what they paid for.

The truth is that we need both reverse engineering and free/open source software (with open hardware) to undo the damage.

Comment Re: What Does It Mean (Score 2) 197

It's not FUD. Just to name a few common pitfalls affecting a lot of Linux desktop and laptop users:

* Audio stack still lacks fully-featured DSP drivers, crippling laptop speakers in some of the most commonly sold computers
* GPU drivers all have poor VRAM management for discrete graphics cards (yes, even AMD and Intel dGPUs suck)
* Hybrid graphics still has mostly broken power management (mixed Intel/AMD and Intel/NVIDIA) for a lot of laptops
* Some WLAN cards will advertise support, except they only officially support one specific kernel version (e.g. Realtek)

Comment GenAI not included (Score 1) 50

NPUs can do things we have already been doing on the CPU for a long time, just a bit more efficiently. Noise cancellation, object recognition, basic subject analysis, text prediction, grammar checking and many other things which are genuinely useful. Yes, it can probably accelerate some GEGL-like operations too, as you would want for aesthetics in photographs. What it cannot do is handle all the generative nonsense people hate working with. If it could, NVIDIA would be cooked.

Comment Re: Something didn't immediately happen (Score 1) 40

If it was ever determined that a bank bailout would be a worse option than letting them crash, it would almost certainly be cheaper for the government to demand the write off of all remaining consumer mortgage debts of those who could pay up until the bankruptcy of the affected bank than it would be to chase people for the rest of the money. The rich would each do a Trump-style negotiation akin to what happened with Deutsche Bank, while the poor would do what happened in China, and everything would become worthless to repossess.

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