Posts by keithpeter 2406 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jul 2007
Alternative view to the AC post a few branches up:
The news is mostly short term noise. The trick is to filter out the fluctuations and try to see the long term trajectory. Science fiction authors can help with that to an extent as we meat bags tend to make new thoughts and connect disparate concepts by analogies and half formed intuitions, and we need some input to feed those intuitions.
Icon: nearest I can find for Ross Ashby.
https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#html-blocks
The thing about markdown (in all its manifestations) is that it can include HTML blocks. In the original use-case for this simple markup format, those HTML blocks were simply passed through to the HTML output. I'm going to have to have a play with this version of LO to see what it does with arbitrary HTML (remember that (in)famous StackOverflow answer?). At least CommonMark seems to specify and list the HTML tags it will process.
Icon: nearest I can get
I imagine the family members you describe are exactly the market segment this laptop was aimed at. Offspring will qualify for the student price of course. I think that they will sell very well (I've just spent the morning fighting a classroom full of Windows 11 desktop PCs so students can actually log into a Web site and interact with it).
The A18 and its locked bootloader means no Linux after-life once MacOS support ends. It will be interesting to see how system updates go on these low end machines, perhaps MacOS will get snappier with a large installed base of basic devices like this?
"I had an old discarded nVidia card from a mate driving two 21" CRTs so a honking great desktop"
That's basically a dual beam particle accelerator lol.
Seriously add in the actual desktop and thats about 4 to 6 KWh of electricity each working day. The heat would keep the Irish Sea damp at bay though I imagine.
Icon: I'll close the door as I leave. I enjoyed my G4 iBook (aka IKEA computer) for a couple of years just after the millennium.
@Nyle
The post above yours was on about OnlyOffice not OpenOffice (aka parrot, deceased*).
(*) I still use Apache OpenOffice 4.1.x under Linux on an ancient core duo Thinkpad with a nice keyboard and a relatively bright if low resolution screen. Needs less resources, especially graphics card related stuff, than LibreOffice local install. I also know where the bugs are.
The article mentioned a $200 million contract I think. Plus history suggests that new technologies benefit from government investment in early development until commercial applications become apparent (ARPANET, BBN and all that stuff). So if this banning of a company actually happens (TACO) then it might have consequences.
"The open community needs to stand behind Firefox"
[ I'm going to do my broken record thing again. I'll keep it down to once every 6 months or so. ]
Where is this open community and how does it make policies and enforce them?
What we have is thousands of independent projects with different structures and internal processes working how they can with the resources they can find and making decisions each day/week/month/year based on the environment as they understand it.
Kind of amazing really. But not very tidy.
"Sometimes MS does things that are good for MS and good for its specific products, even if those things are harmful to others."
Well of course. It is a company that is owned by shareholders and exists to make profits. Why would you expect it to do anything else?
The usual way of dealing with external effects is regulation, but that is hard to do with multinationals.
Icon: the rest of this discussion is interesting but way over my head.
"The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code."
The Ken Thompson who won the Turing Award and made a speech?
I enjoyed a full install of Endless OS (45Gb on the disk) for a month or so just to see what the built-in reference material is like. (TDLR: US-centric plus a lot of Spanish language material which is fine given the aims of the Endless Foundation.)
I'm also waiting patiently for this commodity OS the KDE project is developing. A desktop that I can just blam onto an landfill laptop (~10 years old or newer) and have everything just work and install a range of software on. Even better if that system can be supplied on reasonably priced hardware.
But there are other things that people want to do with their computers, and there is a huge heritage of software that is still entirely useable.
It has been some years since I used Debian or Ubuntu or any apt based system, so take this with a pinch of salt.
It used to be possible to mark packages as 'manually installed' as opposed to 'automatic'. And there was apt-pinning, and --without-recommends &c. So read around apt documentation and the Wiki,
A combination of those used to allow me to update or remove 'desktop' session dependencies such as OpenOffice/LibreOffice and Evolution without jolly japes including removing most of the graphical system. This kind of tinkering is not recommended by the Debian developers! It might be that Zorin are using their own repos and layers of configuration already.
Someone who knows more will come along in a bit and tell me I'm talking rubbish, see icon.
"I have a copy of Slackware 1.1 on Floppy that you are welcome to."
And I'm typing this on a laptop running Slackware64 15.0 and its fine thank you very much.
I'm glad you are having success with your large systems (really, not sarcasm) but Linux and free software generally is a space of freedom and people will seek alternatives.
I can never understand this need to control or mandate what other people decide to use.
See icon.
@Taliesinawen
"I hadn't realized one had to subscribe to a political philosophy in order to use a computer."
You don't. AntiX is gpl licenced including the tools and scripts. It is free software. There are also plenty of other Linux distributions to choose from and some BSD* derived operating systems with different licencing.
@williamyf
Thanks for an interesting post and best of luck with it all
Replying to whole chain
There have been cases of people with access to databases of local residents looking up e.g. past partner, or possible future partner to check. Some years ago there was a report on the number of police officers and police civilian employees who had been disciplined for that kind of activity. Now thinking about the medical angle other kinds of information spring to mind e.g. pregnancy status, access to abortion services and so on. We don't know and won't until this comes to court if it does.
So could just be one or two records being accessed inappropriately and presumably copied in some way. Not a large scale data exfiltration.
I think, if I have understood karlkarl's comment correctly, that the page below from Mycophobia's Web site might help clarify her modifications to Caja to enhance its spatial mode inherited from Gnome 2.0's nautilus.
https://mycophobia.org/spatial_nautilus/index.html
I think that Mycophobia is reaching back to before MacOS X to the original system finder.
Choice is good.
My introduction to small computers was the Acorn Archimedes and then an iBook running system 8 something. This looks interesting. I'm especially interested in the extent to which I can iconise windows to the desktop.
Quote from DCS web site
"In the default Icon view mode, you can place files within a folder anywhere within that folder; no sortation is mandatory."
Wondering if a grid alignment is forced or if you can group icons by task. One way to find out I suppose.
...at some point there may be an opportunity for wider adoption of a desktop/endpoint OS in large organisations as Windows and Microsoft generally may be seen as either too expensive(*), unnecessary, or a possible risk.
Checklists will be produced to govern acceptance. Accessibility as defined by various legal standards will figure in the checklists. A desktop environment hoping for wide acceptance will need to have their accessibility story in order.
(*) on a TCO basis including hardware purchase
Most of the systems that current $EMPLOYER uses are accessible via Chromium from Linux.
Only the client for the finance/wages portal is a native Windows program, and that has to be run from a box on the organisation's network so one of their computers inside one of their buildings. Which seems sensible for money stuff.
Yes, ArcticFox is a very old fork and I'm guessing mainly provided on NetBSD for people running ancient hardware. I used it on a 32bit Intel based T42 laptop (one processor, 1Gb RAM). Within those limits it actually works well. Mainly on text based or old-school Web sites.
Written GCSE papers are scanned and then imported page by page into the marking software. Markers can work remotely on standard computers (I'm guessing with a large external monitor). Decisions about each marking point are recorded, and there are facilities to 'flag' particular answers to a more senior examiner for final decision.
I imagine paper is kept for a bit in case of need to examine the actual scripts but I'm not sure about that.
Quote from (well written) sourceforge download page notes
"...the 32-bit variant of wmlive for i686 class CPU's is provided as an experimental hybrid of the older bookworm installer and backported 6.10.11 kernel, combined with the current trixie/i386 package pool."
I'm downloading the default iso now. If it includes the OpenSTEP textedit then I will be most impressed.
"As an example, the GNU groff typesetting tool is part of the base image, and few people need that in 2025."
Unless I'm misunderstanding something here, don't you need a basic install of groff with the man macros to be able to render a man page? Unless you have OpenBSD's mandoc installed.
Linux: Debian and downstream distros tend to install a cut-down groff with just what you need to display a man page, so we are talking 10s of Mbytes. I imagine some lean embedded system type application or a bare bones server could do without.
Icon: useful review.
@Lazlo Woodbine
I have eaten the efforts of your work over the years (although I am a lump in a pack geezer rather than sliced cheese) so see icon.
Seriously local largeish ASDA seems to have most stuff in usually. There was a serious shortage of cherry pies some months ago but now resolved.
@elsergiovolador and all
That post gave me big 'L 99 99 99 99 99...' vibes as from a broken Slackware bootloader.
As I tend to post on these occasions, Jack Welch is waving. It is all shareholder value stuff. At the end of the day does Microsoft actually need consumer users? Is Windows on laptops you buy from a high street shop or off Dell or some other retail supplier actually an important part of their revenue?
Actual long-time vegans and veggies I'm guessing prefer to cook from fresh and avoid heavily processed food.
I'm old school(*) veggie and we do cook from actual fresh ingredients most of the time. I'm up for a Quorn sausage now and again though.
(*) https://the-good-earth.uk-restaurants.com/menu
No connection other than eating there whenever I'm in Leicester.
Campbell's seem to have decided that the recording was plausible. The senior manager in question looks to have gone quietly. This is a non-criminal issue so balance of probabilities and the idea of a remedy applies rather than guilt beyond reasonable doubt as in a criminal trial, at least here in UK which is a common law country.
Steering back towards a vaguely technical angle. Not sure if anyone in the US keeps mains frequency records...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_network_frequency_analysis
Icon: off out as it isn't raining.
"If the practice is not illegal"
I think the issue is what country the legality test is based on.
EU and UK have different views to USA on contracts, competition and so forth. Hence as mentioned in OA vmware/Broadcom trying to keep the Siemens case within US.
Food for thought: Maximising shareholder value over a short timescale without regard to medium to long term prospects isn't really a great basis for building a new industrial sector is it?
Yes, I think we have reached a point in the western industrial countries where anyone who wants a PC/laptop has got one, so it is a replacement market.
So I think new growth is probably China and India and perhaps parts of Africa? And.... tariffs encouraging import substitution in China and to a lesser extent India.
Am I wrong? Corrections welcome, post evidence so I can learn.
"Oh, and have a coffee and a chat with the customer - something that often leads to additional work."
As we scour the earth to 'drive out costs' and 'double down on lean processes' and 'leverage AI(*)' as much as possible, this is the dimension that tends to get squeezed out. I bet there was no data capture process for recording your conversations and estimating their impact. Humans are basically chimpanzees with a software upgrade. The MBA types tend to forget this.
Icon: good luck with the retirement.
(*) AI has a long and tortuous history from the perceptron onwards. The acronym these days refers to LLM technology, producing plausible prose from sampling the interwebs. Other versions are available.
"It's very difficult to see the truth when your head is worried about your assets!."
Modified your pithy statement a little.
MS has invested $lots on this and perhaps the directors of the corporation think that they need to encourage adoption so as to demonstrate their wisdom to shareholders. Sort of like the directors of railway companies did in late Victorian times here in the UK.
The difference is that when the railway bubble burst, we were left with tangible assets that we are still using (and expensively maintaining of course).
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