Posts by fuzzie

Re: The Linux Desktop needs a Sugar Daddy

Well, it did/does... Mark Shuttleworth used the money he made from selling Thawte to start Canonical and create Ubuntu.

The mission at the time was to make Linux useable by "ordinary" people. And I'd argue he was immensely successful. Ubuntu built it reputation on being the JustWorkst(tm) distribution.

This comes from the days of "ndis_wrapper" and other arcane incantations to get Wifi, full-disk encryption, later, discrete GPUs, and ZFS to work. No more `cabextract` or other firmware sourcery.

Ubuntu also spent a bunch of money doing usability studies, etc. though, at the time, that fed into the development of the Unity desktop shell. That didn't quite make it.

Mark's pocket/generosity only went so far and then bills have to be paid. These things are expensive and, unless you happen to be the main heft or force behind a given desktop, are bound to flounder.

Several anecdotes showed that pushing against the Gnome desktop team's "singular vision" is going to end in tears.

KDE, as good as it is, lacks a single view/look to tie together all core apps into a holistic offering.

It seems that PopOS! is the latest attempt at a curated desktop experience aimed at the general population.

Maybe it needs an annual/regular desktop beauty/usability/efficiency/whatever competition/benchmark with some bounties.

Have someone, e.g. Linux Foundation or such, sponsor a benchmarking event where every contender supplies their version of a "perfect" desk, e.g. KDE Neon, Fedora Gnome and those get put through their paces for aesthetics, usability, accessibility, etc. and a "Nutrition" label produced for each with varying dimensions. It could serve as "shopping guide" for new users and, as side-effect, be a gap analysis for the various development communities.

All opinion and 2c +VAT

Ahh, but calling it EUnix would Just Work(tm)

PS: Or split hairs between EU as "You" or "Euww" :)

> then -- as far as I can tell -- basically got a bit bored and decided to do a freebie distro

As I recall the reasoning was something long the lines of he'd built Thawte all on open source and score big from that. Ubuntu was his project to give back to the open source world by making it accessible to anyone and everyone, hence "Linux for Humans" and the "Ubuntu" name

Re: Gonegle? Googone? McGonegoogle?

Gooprecation?

Re: And have these idiots...

Also consider that you only get the OLED switched off benefit with true black, i.e. #000000. And even dark mode hardly ever uses truck black, because its uncomfortable or too harsh. It's typically just a very dark grey. For those on OLED you're not going to get the pixel-off benefits. Sure, you might still score _some_ power savings, because it has to omit less light than full brightness.

Aside: A problem with most dark themes is that they're simply colour palette based, i.e. swaps whiter colours for blacker ones. And the poster about mention, vision is far from linear. It's harder to read light text on a dark background vs dark text on a white background unless you also adjust the text size, weight and spacing. Because, with the dark background (and presumably matching low ambient light) your pupils will dilate. When dilated, they don't track as well, i.e. smaller things become harder to focus on, i.e. text need to be larger/weightier and spacer more generous. I've yet to see a dark mode that does things close to that well.

Re: *makes bitter face*

The core part for me was that Ubuntu took a much more pragmatic approach to solving their customers's real world problems. The major headaches at the time, not non-hacker types, were X configuration/drivers, dual boot, Wifi and codecs. Most other distros were either philosophically against anything non-F/OSS/proprietary that users had to do command line "magic" to get the basics working.

The combination of these made a basic installation competitive with Windows 9x/2k/XP

* dual boot/FAT/(later NTFS), so people could low risk test drive Ubuntu and share files

* Wifi drivers, even with `ndis_wrapper`

* proprietary/third-party video drivers so X could stand on first boot without terminal deep dives, and

* mp3/audio/video codecs, flash

* availability through free CDs, CD toasters, etc, like AOL's carpet-bomb discs got everyday people onto the "Information Super Highway"

These were the Microsoft's "Linux is a cancer" sabre rattling days.

Canonical took a chance. Having deep(er) pockets helped (a lot).

I believe they were the first distro to indemnify users against patent suits, specifically with Microsoft in mind. With that, the business community starts paying more attention.

Re: "The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

Maemo/Meego also suffered from the "partnership" with Intel. Intel got involved, because they wanted desperately to get into the mobile platform market.

At the time, Texas Instruments, owned most of the non-bottom of the market with their OMAP platform/SoC. Those were the days when Intel wanted to get x86 mobile to complete with ever-growing ARM.

Aside: if I understand correctly, OMAP was created for Nokia by TI, because Nokia needed a standard, more integrated platform for cheaper and more reliable phones and to more easily spin out new design at multiple price/performance points.

So Intel and Nokia parted ways and Maemo become MeeGo. And, in the fullness of time, of the grudge release of the Noke N9, MeeGo went open source and SailishOS grew from the ashes of that.

Maemo/MeeGo, apart from a much more modern gesture-based UI, also addressed the painful C++-ish programming model Symbian had.

Nokia had bought Trolltech to get Qt and, under Nokia's stewardship QML came to be. A lot of the mode moden Symbian apps were written with Qt/QML. There was even a Python runtime. Qt/QML was the preferred development programming environment for both modern Symbian and the Maemo/MeeGo/SailfishOS (and even for Ubuntu Touch with Mir/Unity and KDE). So there definitely was a software development path forward from Symbian.

Aside: Symbian Anna/Belle got pretty close to the then-current Android experience and might have been able to tide them over during the switch to Maemon/MeeGo. Save for Elop's "Burning Platform" memo which essentially Osborne'd there entire product line

Aside: Symbian was also (successfully) kept out of the US market by the mobile operators. They crapped themselves when they realised Symbian supported VoIP natively. That could cannibalise their voice revenue streams. It also supported Bluetooth tethering which allowed customers to use their phones as mobile data gateways. Wifi hotspots became the stock workaround for that operator block.

Re: Some Gaps

You can be a happy and productive Firefox user without ever running into the above. Even the developer tools inside every Firefox are likely seldom used by the average browser user.

The gaps are not about Firefox, the browser, but prevents Firefox/Servo/Spidermonkey/etc, i.e. Mozilla's technologies, from participating in the larger eco system built around browser technologies. It's behind-the-scenes, below-the-water-line stuff mostly and support all sort of developers. Without Firefox/Mozilla tech, the default (often only option) is Chrome. It's become entrenched, cfip. Electron which is the "Chrome run-time". Slack and VSCode are both Electron. It further cements Chrome's rendering engine and the V8 JavaScript engine as _standards_.

Having Firefox be a first class platform for developers is really just about JavaScript in the browser, It's about the development tools connecting to the browser's debug and tracing APIs, code hot reload code and more. Chrome has that solidly sown up and one cannot substitute Firefox for that. It means the developers use Chrome and take it as the gospel standard.

The Firefox browser should be a flagship/demo implementation of Mozilla web technologies, not the one and only use case.

Re: Safari Is An Albatross Around The Necks Of Web Developers

From on perspective Safari is the new IE6. It's the laggard unloved browser everyone "has" to support to be universal.

On the other side we have Chrome which everyone has to support because it's the new IE6, because Google mandates it on Android. Two "monopolies" and I'd also hate to just swap one for another. One could imagine this to be a gap for Gecko/Firefox/etc to get a toe in the door, but the realistic result is that people are likely to the same browser on iOS as they are using on their desktop/laptop. If for no other reason than automatic account syncing and/or familiarity

Since iPadOS is left out of this discussion, that might also mean people won't bother switching from Safari, because it would break their one-stop-account save/sync. Which is often how Apple maintains their walled gardens. They make the experience of stepping outside it, even slightly, hugely unpleasant. I suspect we're going to see a similar passive aggressive/sulking/half-hearted implementation of RCS when it arrives.

Re: interest, shminterest

I have a split opinion on this. I'm pondering whether we're actually heading for a world where people stop caring as much about cars as to-be-owned. ICE vehicles have a certain visceral quality to them that appeal to out primal/mechanical natures. EV's are much more "civilised", quieter and less ostentatious. Does that mean people are less likely to want to own and just fall back to their pure functional uitlity and change to a pat-per-use model, i.e. ZipCar, e-hauling, weekend rental or Robotaxis?

Has anyone seen stats on how many first-mover Tesla buyers became second buyers, i.e. did those first generation buyers replace their cars with a newer version of the same? Did they upgrade/crossgrade/downgrade to a newer/different, also Tesla, model? What happened/is happening to Teslas in the aftersales market? Is there demand or has Tesla ended up in the Apple space, i.e. it's an aspirational/brand product and everyone who wants one, now already had one. And other people aren't interested in secondhand/hand-me-down ones, because secondhand doesn't have the same cache?

Software updates will only get you so far when, after a few years, iffy build quality results in rattles, shakes and leaks.

Re: Efficiency

Same as the issue I have with companies which stop sending out monthly/quarterly/etc statements and expect you to do download it from their web site. While this might be fun for the one or two exceptions, I really don't want to spend the end of every month hopping around umpteen site downloading PDFs. And, then I have to put them somewhere. Now I also have to have some additional storage, because some of those I need to keep for legal/tax/etc purposes. And I need them for like ten year and I have no guarantee the provider/site will exist then. Or, shock and horror, I have email rules to automatically file/archive/forward/process/etc them. All while I sleep. None of that's possible when every Tom, Dick and Harry believe their WebUI is their one special gift to humankind.

PS: I'm not even mentioning the copious tracking typically employed by said sites.

To be honest, my reading is that GNOME is very much modelling themselves as the FLOSS implementation of MacOS. They've "justified" a bunch of unpopular decisions by saying "But Apple already did this" which is not winning them any/more friends, cf. client-side decoration, sub-pixel anti-aliasing, and more.

That's why a lot of research is refocusing on what they call "Healthspan", not "Lifespan", i.e. extending the period of healthy life. Several surveys have confirmed that people aren't too fussed specially with living (much) longer, but they'd rather be healthier, active and alert during the time they do have,

So researchers surmised that keeping people alive when they're in bad health, suffering, immobile or dependent on others for daily functioning, is counter productive or even "torture".

It's better to work towards improving quality of life. A side-effect might well be that whatever we do to remain healthy and alert, also feeds into us living longer. Bonus.

All this also up-ends a lot of social contracts around age of retirement. We're close to where our "retired" life time matches our economic productive life time. There's only so much compound interest can do to build retirement/pension funds.

Re: Soldered

That said, memory is just the one single item that post-sale, can significantly extend the lifetime of a laptop.

I'm not convinced they can't maintain the slim line profile and offer socketed DIMMs.

My 2015 X1 Carbon is still in very good shape, but 8GB is just not cutting it any more.

I've sourced a 16GB motherboard (a later SKU of the same model) from ebay, but that's pretty excessive just for a "memory upgrade"

Re: North American Charging Standard

Indeed, I came around to say much the same, i.e. there's already a wide-agree upon standard.

In Elon's case, I suspect it's much more a case of the tail wagging the dog. If he can make his standard the official North American one, he doesn't have to update his entire charging network to become compliant. Electrify America, the charging network built by Volkswagen as penance for #dieselgate, already support the ISO "Plug and Charge" standard. It seems Tesla's network has a proprietary version thereof.

Forking the standard much?

Re: possibility

Here's my angle on it: I have a sneaky suspicion that, as part of the swing to e-mobility, combined with ride hailing, people started to realise they don't _actually_ need to own a car. Mix in the GenZ/Alpha who, due to study debt or just slow erosion of disposable income, a) can't afford them, b) don't have their own houses/garages to park them, or c) prefer spending on experiences, not stuff. With many life services going on-demand, pay-as-you-go cf. video, music, rides, shopping.

Now, in Europe, for the most part, e-mobility seems to be focussing on the right things, i.e. for mass transit, public transport, city commutes. That's where robo-taxies, robo-buses or truck platoons are also more practical.

tl;dr: The petrol heads aren't going to switch quickly. The well-heeled tech enthusiasts may already all have Teslas. The remainder of the market who actually want to _own_ a car, can be very well served by those dyed-in-the-wool Big Auto crowd, i.e. VW, GM, Ford, etc. They don't need/want 0-100km/h in 2s or 700km range bragging rights

Re: What, no technical data?

There's some more details in this article, esp some yummy bandwidth numbers

> https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-12-05-blue-ska-thinking-construction-begins-on-square-kilometre-array/

And MeerKAT, which SKA will further extend

> https://www.sarao.ac.za/science/meerkat/about-meerkat/

And more of an overview of the entire SKA

> https://www.skao.int/en/explore/telescopes

Re: Twitter not asking for $1B at all

Someone else opined that Musk's Twitter deal provided Musk a convenient excuse to sell a large number of Tesla shares. Without that excuse such sales might be viewed as him de-risking or having otherwise lost some faith in Tesla's growth and the share price might then have taken a knock. But selling to fund the deal, it looks much more benign.

He probably never bargained on Twitter insisting on the deal going through. Even if it goes through, I can't see how Musk and the board could have any productive relationship after all this acrimony.

Re: WTF?

WhatsApp will happily ensure that end-to-end encryption works properly. You can likely be sure of that, barring the occasional arm-twisting from a government and/or agency. The value for them is not in the content of your messages, but in to whom you're talking

Imagine the insane mountains of meta-data. Given "sufficient" uptake,this is like being plugged straight into the backbone of the economy, especially the more informal economy. The type of thing which revenue and economic activity agencies.

They're also aggressively onboarding small and large businesses to their hosted platform, i.e. they provide a WhatsApp phone number, chat bots, etc. and the business only pays per message sent/received. Again, that's a treasure trove of meta data.

Re: How can be…

Or VoIP, or a Google Talk or Skype or even a landline number. The number needs to be capable of receiving either an SMS or a voice call during the minute or two of registration so that you can get the activation code. After that, despatch of it in your favourite manner. You won't need it again.

Yes, there are oodles of other wannabe options, but at least, compared to others, Signal have gone to great lengths to have their technology and architecture independently reviewed and evaluated. That doesn't mean it's perfect, but at least they're trying harder than most.

The XMPP crowd also had it audited before they decided to adopt it

> https://conversations.im/omemo/audit.pdf

Re: RCS

Indeed MMS was fundamentally push email. The message format was limited to a very simple structure, but re-used the fundamentals of MIME and email. And then they used the same SMS channel to serve as notification with a link to retrieve the full message.

You could argue push email made Blackberry. They just did slicker, with more conviction, a better user experience and support stock email by routing the "fetch" parts through their secure Blackberry server.

tl;dr: MMS wasn't a horrible idea, maybe a bit ahead of its time and lacking operator commitment/roaming.

> Blinker/wiper controls on the left? Check

Actually there's a split there. Some manufacturers don't swap them around when doing right-hand drive models, e.g. on German brands, the indicator stalk is on the left, but on Japanese cars it's on the right.

Ubet has the same habit in South Africa and probably elsewhere. If their drivers are fined for operating without a proper public drivers licence or have their cars impounded for being suitably licensed, Uber pays all the fines and release monies. It means eery Tom, Dick, and Harriet who wants to make a quick buck shuttling people around, can do so with impunity.

It's just part of the cost of flooding the local market, suffocating the local taxi industry (though they've needed a wake-up call or a while) and slowing the expansion of proper public transport options

Re: Sounds a tad behind

If you're in areas of weak coverage or spotty charging options, e.g. music festivals, it's well worth turning your phone into a "feature phone". Switch it to 2G-only and you still get calls, SMS, MMS and avoid the battery-draining signal strength hunting that goes along with spotty 3G/4G coverage.

And, because 2G is a long-solved chipset and power problem, you get retro style stand-by times like a week or more. Sure, not an option where 2G has/is being discontinued, but sill widely useful.

Re: Don't touch my session cookies!

You do call out a good point that's often lost in the noise. The regulations does not require the cookie consent banner if you use any cookies, only if you use cookies which could be viewed as tracking and/or storing personally identifiable information. Simply session cookies or retaining your cookie preferances are perfectly fine and doesn't need a pop-up.

Of course, many companies are acting very passive aggressive about this and making the experience worse for the users, presumably in order to "show them how bad these laws are".

Re: I'm starting to believe that we need some regulation

My underlying assumption with fair-access data sets is that they are suitably anonymised. We have pretty clever ways to do that already, be it cryptographic envelopes or homomorphic encryption. That, of course, still requires someone to set the standards, enforce their application and hunt down and slap the inevitable violators. And all for the sake of a very elusive and hard-to-quantify ideal. We already know how well politicians and the electorate handle abstract notions.

These might be a good places to start

> https://www.skatelescope.org/newsandmedia/outreachandeducation/skawow/hpc/

> https://www.sarao.ac.za/vacancies/