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Comment Actually pretty good (Score 3, Interesting) 9

There's a brand-new Animations page in System Settings that groups all the settings for purely visual animated effects into one place, making them easier to find and configure. Aurorae, a newly added SVG vector graphics theme engine, enhances KWin window decorations.

Oh, good, that makes it easier to turn all of them frelling off.

Now, don't get me wrong, I enjoy using KDE. It has been remarkably rock solid for my use cases. There are some settings that are always hard to find, but it mostly just works. Given that I can ignore some of the features that they try to push and have had better solutions for years (like Activities, which is better managed by having just a fixed number of desktops with simple keyboard shortcuts, which I've been doing for, literally, 30 years now, or KDE Wallet, or Dolphin, or ...) and still have things work just fine, that says a lot. The idea of building a useful set of tools an not forcing one particular path through them ... that idea resonates deeply for me.

The one aspect of KDE that drives me nuts, however, is that when a process opens a new window, the default should be to open that window on the desktop that the process has been assigned to rather than the current desktop (who, in their right mind, thinks that latter behavior is the right choice?). That, and there's no setting for focus that matches what I want, and the descriptions, despite multiple revisions, remain opaque.

Comment Re:same same. (Score 1) 210

Old software generally still works too, i have stuff that was written for VAX systems that can still successfully compile and run on today's linux machines.

The Linux kernel is pretty good at keeping userland compatibility. In some cases the old libraries will be missing from newer distributions but there's nothing stopping you from bundling old libraries up with your old apps if that's what you need to do.
For anything with source code it's often not much more than a recompile.

Comment Re:same same. (Score 4, Insightful) 210

Support for the OS version may only be 5 years, but support for the underlying hardware will last a LOT longer and the new version is free, so you can update to the new version without having to buy new hardware.

Plus Linux distros generally aren't designed to tie you in to other services provided only by the distributor.

Comment Re:How would this even work? (Score 4, Insightful) 28

Not only that but both launch and re-entry are physically taxing, as long as there are rockets involved. For someone who has cancer, that's probably not a good idea.

All-in-all, someone wasn't thinking through the details. Cancer drugs don't dissolve in water well, and so microgravity is the answer, rather than finding chemical agents that solve that problem in normal gravity? ... Really? ... Really? ... Really?

Comment Re: The end is nigh (Score 1) 90

Plus the mere existence of this promise means that one of the motivations for having kids (ie someone to support you as you age) goes away.

Then you have improvements in medical treatments which keep increasing the number of elderly.

There are lots of other factors in developed countries discouraging kids too - like high costs of childcare, negative career impact and costs thereof, increased housing costs for a larger family etc.

Comment Re:Countries do this every few years (Score 1) 276

The "training costs" are usually an excuse. Shifting between different versions of the same software also incurs significant changes, and yet training is very rarely provided for this - users are expected to just suck it up.

You'll get a few delays, complaints and additional support calls at first as people get used to the new version. Eventually people adapt, and discover workarounds for the inevitable new set of bugs.

Comment Re:Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Teams (Score 2) 276

Teams is nothing special, you have slack (which is better but still controlled by a foreign corporation) as well as several self hostable options like rocketchat and mattermost.
The only reason people use teams is because it got bundled with other MS services they were already paying for. As an actual product it's not very good.

Comment Re:If only it were just AI-generated spam (Score 1) 17

If you control a subdomain of a known organisation there are a LOT of malicious things you can do. People will assume it's an authoritative site for that organisation and are far more likely to follow instructions or run software presented there. Take the nvidia subdomain, someone could put malware there purporting to be an important driver update and a lot of people would trust it.

Comment Re:Something fishy... (Score 2) 17

Cloud providers are not subnet based...
Legacy IPv4 addresses are in a shared pool behind a NAT gateway, and are then forwarded to customer instances on demand. There are APIs so although the addresses you get are random you can very quickly cycle through them until you hit on the one you want.

IPv6 with AWS at least works in the traditional way - each customer gets their own routed block(s), so if you kill a single instance the block is still yours and the address of the instance just goes dead.

Comment Re:Something fishy... (Score 5, Interesting) 17

Traditionally you'd have your own block of IP addresses so people were lazy about deleting subdomains, as they would still point to your block even if the actual server had been shut off, rendering the stray subdomains harmless.
And with IPv6, AWS still works this way - you get a block.

With legacy IPv4 AWS and other providers have a severe shortage, so they don't allocate blocks to customers. You get a single address allocated from a random pool. And when you stop using that address it goes back into the pool ready to be allocated to another customer. So someone malicious can spin up cloud instances until they hit upon one that has a stray A record pointing to it.

This is just one of the dangerous side effects from the kludges used to keep legacy IPv4 limping along. People are not aware of the extra risk involved, and how something that was previously harmless is now highly dangerous.

Comment Re:215 billion reasons to fix awful copyright leng (Score 2) 53

On top of the renewal costs, it should be mandatory to keep the work available at the same cost or lower (which is trivial with digital distribution since you don't need to maintain physical stock). No more taking stuff off sale so noone can get hold of it.

Also should make stuff available worldwide under the same terms.

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