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Comment Re:Don't they realize? (Score 1) 27

And this is why patents and copyrights are for a limited time, after which they enter the public domain and are free for anybody to use. Yes, the Bern Convention extends copyrights to an unreasonable duration, but even they eventually end. You may or may not agree that morally what the AI companies are doing when they use copyrighted material without permission and without paying royalties is theft, but that's what the law says, and that law should be enforced.

Comment Re:Wrong Starting Point (Score 1) 53

Yeah, I think they need to answer some basic questions first, like what do they see people using these phones for? If its goal is just to be able to play youtube, spotfy, etc, then whats the real point? Those are free either. Their approach with free operating systems made more sense, by focusing on free applications to replace the proprietary unix ones and someone came along and gave them a great kernel. Thats a thousand times more difficult now with phones. but ultimately phones or computers are a means to an end for most people. What is the end here?

Comment Re:We're now free (Score 2) 66

Linux desktop environments (DEs) are generally fairly easy to configure the way you want. And, if you find it hard to get it looking the way you want, or there are things you don't like about it, there's nothing to stop you from trying a different one. My suggestion is to find out which DE the Linux diistro you're considering using ahead of time to avoid any sudden surprises after installation.

Comment Re:At least it's not SELinux. (Score 1) 74

Its trying to implement secure storage of passwords, but in an obnoxious way. I don't want to store my passwords in kdewallet. but by default it wants to. You can disable that somehow, but the next time you update your pc it will forget it and you'll have to do it again. Worse of all, depending on your set up it can lock you out of your pc and domain controller if you don't disable it.

Comment Re:At least it's not SELinux. (Score 1) 74

Sorry posted the answer in my comment, but you have to make an easy way for developers who don't care about selinux to do the easiest thing possible to support it. Only once devs care about it will it be possible to use by most end users who care about security and don't have endless free time to reconfigure their security posture at each update.

Comment Re:At least it's not SELinux. (Score 1) 74

Because it was designed by NSA for use by people of similar intelligence, rather than Joe ubuntu user. That makes it awesomely powerful and kind of a pain for someone without the time and resources to properly configure it. Its been a while but I had it super locked down then I really really needed a stupid utility that was only available for snap and tried to lock it down. That was a huge pain in the ass, I did it and thought myself very smart, then an update came in and... whoosh I had another round of absolute bullshit to deal with because some devs can't freaking stick to a pattern. I saw what caused the reconfigure and just opted instead for a dedicated ubuntu pc that would deal with that bullshit on a pc I didn't give a crap about and had nothing of value in it.

So in summary Selinux is great, but not enough people care about it to keep everything working well with it. No nice utilities have been written to help app developers understand the impact of their changes.

Comment Re:Investing not vendor financing (Score 0) 46

Also people seem to assume this is true

not actually supported by real consumer demand

I work at one of the big companies involved in this situation. All I know is, we cannot deploy solutions fast enough for the number of customers we have much less the rate at which demand is growing.

Many are startups and many are big companies still doing pilot projects. It all could go away. But it is not just VC dollars and George Forman AI Grills; at least for the Fortune500 types, there is an awful lot of actual business efficiency being realized or they would not keep sending us money and requests for more capacity/lower latency

Comment Re:Public hygiene also went up (Score 1) 49

At this point, we know how important proper hygiene is to our health, but we don't know, yet, what the results are of having all that microplastic inside our bodies. It's probably not good for us, and getting rid of as much of it as possible is certainly a Good Idea on the basis of better safe than sorry. Still, it's probably too soon to assume that it's dangerous.

Comment Re:Greaseweazle (Score 2) 57

Yes, there was a time that the 5.25 floppy, DSDD, was king, storing a whole 360K. However, not everybody used that storage format. I had a TI 99/4A that used an external 5.25 drive and formatted its floppies to 390K. Good luck using some sort of PC to read those if you don't know about the oddball formatting!

Comment Re:Enlighten me (Score -1) 10

I own, but do not operate, a few IT companies that manage corporations in the $600MM-$1B receivables range.

Based on our own help desk ticket software, our clients have opened 40% fewer tickets since ChatGPT was rolled out to every desk and phone. 40%. I expect another 40% drop (total 80%) by next year as end users just manage things themselves.

I won't downsize as the tickets aren't really generating revenue as much as headaches. One of my engineers had a broken PDF file that took her 6 hours to fix, and the end user spent 6 days trying to fix it themselves with Ai.

But -- the basic stuff? Reboot your computer stuff? Email rejected because you mistyped a domain name stuff?

You don't need a human, and we would probably have outsource that stuff to India anyway next year if not for ChatGPT etc.

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