Posts by keithpeter

Re: Not knowing what words mean

"...accuracy vs precision"

I used to teach that lesson to workshop based vocational students and lab technicians early in the term. Along with Precision's little friend Resolution. And the Error cousins Systematic and Random.

I had a small selection of 'modified' verniers and micrometers. And a slightly distressed top-pan balance. Early in the term because reading scales exposes any perceptual/eyesight/dyslexia issues fairly promptly. And they used the ideas in later practical work.

Went well that one. A lot of concepts in 3 hours.

Re: Meet the New War....same as the Old War

"Well, you have to right click your App Image program icon in order to select "RUN" in order to lauch the program."

@Jumbotron64

I just downloaded the Inkscape 1.3 appimage. One time only I had to right-click, select Properties and the Permissions tab, and tick the little box that said 'Allow this file to run as a program'. Then I can double-click the icon(*) and start Inkscape forever after.

Strikes me that some kind of user intervention should be needed before running a random downloaded file, but I think perhaps a popup 'set permission' box might be a good idea like on Winders.

* I prefer to make a simple inkscape.desktop file and stick it in ~/.local/share/applications/ myself so that the application appears in the menu and I can add a launcher - but that is probably too much 'twiddly twiddly' by your definition.

Re: Older hardware.

There was discussion on the Slackware forum about building the older CIP versions of Linux 4.4.x some years ago. The context was in adapting Patrick Volkerding's build scripts though. The final outcome was a build script. The discussion was a bit noisy.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/civil-infrastructure-platform-kernel-slackbuild-4175723704/page3.html#post6423285

I got the impression that the CIP kernels are buildable by mortals but may have configs that are unusual and may need work for normal desktop type applications.

Re: First time I have heard of the CUA for decades

"Now I open Firefox or Thunderbird. Where is that familiar menu bar? "

Press ALT.

If you want to keep the menu bar displayed then right click over it and tick the box.

But I take your main point. Chrome / Chromium is a good example of the absence of a menu bar.

Re: "Burnout"

@elsergiovolador

dominated: this word choice implies something about the decision making process in projects that requires some evidence I think.

A more general point: In the last half century or so I've noticed a huge change in access to information about what we might describe as IT. It was quite hard to get information in (say) the mid-80s unless you were associated with a university department or you were working for a large organisation, a company or the military or the communications utilities.

Now any kid with a hand-me-down laptop can run powerful software similar to the systems used by the largest corporations and can access full information about the software, often several layers of information even down to the source code.

Seems likely to increase equality in some sense by removing barriers.

Re: In a previous life

"[...] and I can make sure you are not burning out"

Well done that manager

Re: Survival characteristics

"There's plenty of evidence that PCs did not make managers more productive — quite the opposite, in fact, since dictating correspondence to experienced secretaries and having it produced by a dedicated typing pool is almost always going to be quite a lot faster than writing it in something like Outlook or Word, for example."

I'm just old enough to have worked as a messenger boy in an office where managers would often simply ask the secretary to send a 'hurry up' letter or a 'very sorry' letter for routine communications. These letters were so standard that the secretary just bashed one out on her Selectric and the manager signed it. So yes I take your point for written stuff.

I was more on about the spreadsheet allowing data based challenges to the centralised MIS systems of the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps because my later working life included that.

I also take your point about productivity decline. I have a feeling that we now measure and attempt to interpret a much larger volume of numerical data than previously simply because we can. I also have a feeling a lot of that data is quite noisy so people are trying to control random fluctuations and that does not work.

Icon: Happy new year all, I'm off out on a slightly less rainy day.

Re: Customers are the security liability

Which was my point.

Unless the original email's subject line said something like 'don't open this email' you can't really extract any moral from the statistics supplied by the post to which I replied.

Re: This is why I abandoned Windows.

"...GIMP is the only program I think I've ever encountered that doesn't let you save a modified file on exit..."

But the unsaved state is caught and I can cancel the exit. Same idea just upside down logic? Sort of like ed with the ? when you q with unsaved changes.

But I agree doing what t'other programs do would help consistency.

@sketharaman

"I haven't seen any sensational improvement in their functionality in the last 30 years."

Perhaps not a sensational improvement, but you can have more than 256 columns and 16384 rows in Excel these days. Handy for quick and dirty monte carlo simulations.

"[...]giving something a bit of thought."

Agreed.

As to staying on an older version of TeX/LaTeX the thinking has to include the extent to which other people being able to process the .tex files on other systems with different versions(*) is important.

It may not be important to that particular author. I can imagine that an academic working on, say, a 5 or 10 year book project may wish to standardise on an environment, but that would require cooperation from the publisher.

(*) TeX itself is standardised but the various packages (and package availability) change with each release of distributions such as texlive.

Re: radio ntp

Anthorn in Cumbria

Re: Applications

Not your downvoter but your second sentence sets up a dichotomy that itself constitutes a number of assumptions about the contributors to 9front, not least that there is a collective view of any kind about what the purpose of the project is.

POSIWID might be the safest view.

@Andy Nom and all

Might encourage mobs of security testers to pile on and start searching for vulns.

Just to see who can provoke the rudest and most ignorant response.

See icon.

Re: Mmmmm

Routine use of old fashioned 'ai' algos is causing some issues already. One example I found recently...

https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-warning-for-europe-over-risks-of-using-algorithms/#

So Horizon writ large and hitting people with low resources.

It strikes me that the 'new' ai might simply allow people to create messes more quickly and more effectively. Especially when some new 'ai' facilities are available from within Microsoft Office. I mean, what could possibly go wrong when Kevin in the Corner with the two monitors turbocharges his wicked spreadsheet model with 'ai'?

Re: ssh?

[snip] "find[ing] new applications that are pure Wayland is going to be a pain (try finding a Wayland native terminal emulation, for example. It's there but IIRC the naming convention is rather obscure)"

@Peter and all

Slackware 'pure' wayland KDE works fine on 2011 and later hardware. Gnome of course works ok in its own special way in Debian and all.

What of lighter / smaller WIMP environments?

I'd need something like a window manager with overlapping windows, a panel with menu, notifications and application launchers, a terminal emulator, a graphical text editor, a graphical file manager with ability to mount external drives together with LibreOffice and Firefox / Thunderbird at minimum. What am I looking at here?

Re: One does wonder...

If you liked those then I'd recommend the British Army Recruitment Battery (BARB) tests, especially the symbol rotation test.

There used to be a free sample test which could be accessed without any form of registration. I had good mileage out of that one used on an interactive whiteboard or tablets and with half a dozen teenagers trying to work out the questions. Alas, all the samples seem to be registration only now which is a loss.

Icon: Calculator? [raises eyebrow]

Re: SUSE's marketing capitulation

My (limited) understanding is that SUSE provide support for Enterprise Linux shops under the Liberty Linux brand.

Runs in parallel with their own SLES and similar products.

Happy to be corrected.

"The devices that run this sort of thing can easily last decades, and so does software support. Currently, I have to keep a copy of VS 2005 around just for that."

I'm interested in the idea of 20+ year hardware and software.

It seems to me that for many applications there is no need for instant updates every day.

Perhaps we need to block things off from the public internet more often?

Re: time just flys past

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67269549

Mr Musk is attending(*) a conference in the UK and doing a live discussion with our PM.

Could be an opportunity for a sparkler or two if not actual fireworks.

(I shall wait for the edited highlights myself)

(*) Not sure if actual appearance or video link

Re: Good Grief Charlie Brown!

"ads in Linux, like asking for donations"

Can you provide a specific example of such an advert? I'd like to have a look.

Icon: to all starting new jobs or marriages

@Headley

Not your downvoter, but, yes, I think the senior managers may actually be concerned about this and the resulting actions.

Don't underestimate the soft power of the Royal Colleges.