Posts by keithpeter 2068 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jul 2007
"The problem I find with LibreOffice is not so much functionality, which is adequate, but performance, which is absolutely pitiful!"
1 million row Monte Carlo simulation in LO Calc 4.x, re-calculation time around 25 sec, same in MS Excel 2010, around 10 sec (core-duo/3Gb ram) so yes slower on bulk arithmetic I'll grant you.
What kind of stuff are you doing? Are we talking factors of 2, 10 or 100 here? Does the time scale as O^2 or higher?
Not trolling just actually interested...
"Tell us about it. I'm an openSUSE user whose "upgrade" path skips from version 13.2 to 42.1!"
I think blag linux won the version number game some years ago.
Clueless civilian here: how would I package up a harmless little application (planisphere app) written in Java so it had its own limited run-time? Is there a button I click in Eclipse?
"Lights are best controlled with the obvious switch on the wall (unless you are controlling stage lighting)."
I've actually gone back to incandescents in the Man Cave. They are still sold for 'industrial use' in the UK. Might get a Variac for lutz with the desk lamp.
It is winter, so central heating is on a thermostat, which means that the extra few tens of watts of heat energy being dumped into the house by the tungsten filaments will just lengthen the pauses between the combi-boiler kicking in by a few seconds.
Was getting headaches with the energy saving bulbs. We have one LED based luminaire that pulses different colours a bit like a lava lamp. Gets used now and again. Fun thing.
"After one of the girls went to the police, the IP address of Ford's emails was traced to the US embassy in London."
Detection is the first thing - arguments about sentencing and jurisdiction can come later.
Bottle of champers and a truckload of roses to the young woman who went to the police, and to those who (may have) provided support in reaching that decision.
UK student pricing seems to be £15+ per month for the CS (a small percentage of the students I teach Maths to use Illustrator as part of their main course). That is OK for University students I suspect (Beer token use much higher) but seems kind of large for a 16 year old on a College course. We all know that to become *fluent* with a package you need to spend time with it.
Any views on the runability of an older offline version of CS/Illustrator under Win 7/Win10? Can these still be (legally) bought? We are talking about basic fluency with the interface here not the latest bleeding edge effects or industrial grade workflows.
Bundling: if I've read the UK adobe page correctly, it seems that you either get Photoshop OR the whole CS. You can't just have Illustrator.
Domestic user incident report...
Damaged on Arrival: Consumer HP PC with a CD-ROM drive that had broken in transit and spread pieces over the rest of the case but no damage to other parts. Not obvious from sound so signed for but then repaired onsite by HP techy which probably cost most of the profit. Pre millennium.
Laptop failure: Apple G4 iBook (white plastic). DVD drive failed twice in first year, last one took logic board with it, repaired under guarantee. Battery changed through a recall programme. Then a good 5 to 6 years of faultless performance. Finally hard drive failed (sounds like food mixer) but laptop still boots from Mac OS DVD. Might do the iFixit change a hard drive process for this thing as a nerd challenge (quite the procedure). Note the pattern: failures in first year, then plain sailing.
Hard drive failure: One in the days of 5+ inch ones plus the iBook.
Darwinian selection: I now use recycled corporate laptops as they are cheap and I can get decent performance on Linux out of them. Most recent is a X220 Thinkpad. Perhaps those of us who use *recycled* Thinkpads benefit from the removing of duff units from the herd?
Plastic networking equipment: Both my humble netgear adsl modem/routers doing fine, 8 years in.
Capacitor survival: HP xw series workstation (2003) PC bought refurbished in 2009 chugs away quietly, now donated to a charity and has Ubuntu on it as Web kiosk type thing. Nice quality case - best made computer thing I've seen.
Pint: for all the corporate customers who have kindly stress tested my Thinkpads.
@Suricou Raven
"It might be adhered to, but how long will that take? I imagine quite a few years."
Depends on representations made to local politicians by the wider population on the island, and the economic impact of a reduction in astronomical activity. I predict a modest increase in ground rent and an expedited hearing.
But then I can be quite cynical.
My reading of the article suggests that the reason for the halt to building was the lack of due process - i.e. building starting before the relevant court hearing.
I suspect that the required legal process will now be adhered to scrupulously and a decision reached. When the economic impact of the possible run-down of astronomy activity on the site becomes apparent, I suspect there will be a wider debate amongst the residents of the island, which may result in representations to local politicians &c.
"The resultant block to be deep fried to form a solid ingot of saturated fat batter, sold under the brand of "Ledswinger's Drinker's Friend"."
It will be snapped up by the bodybuilder/arctic explorer/heavy labourer contingents. Pemmican for the lazy I guess.
Here's one: I'm losing weight in a controlled kind of way to try to lower BP and offset a family history of type 2 diabetes.
Decided not to have any alcohol this month as a sort of Movember thing. Symptoms: none (we are moderate drinkers, well below max units except now and again when a session erupts) except having more money left when we do the weekly shop.
Tried no tea/coffee for a week a couple of months ago. Symptoms: raging headache and thirst for 24 hours, then amazing desire for salty snacks next day. OK on Day 3 and for the rest of the week.
Makes you think...
"Give us ad-masking instead."
I used noscript for quite a long time mainly to speed the performance of Firefox (Linux/Core Duo laptop from 2007 with 2Gb RAM).
Now I'm experimenting with a hosts file that redirects most of the adbots to localhost while allowing 'organic' ads through. Similar performance gain while still 'playing the game' to some extent, full javascript page 'enhancement' and less overhead in Firefox from noscript itself.
Ad-masking would still hit performance on lower powered devices (both cheapo tablet and older kit).
I'm using a dongle for Internet access as an experiment this month before cancelling the adsl 'broadband' and the landline.
"Not only a silver surfer, but reluctant to upgrade as well!"
@Peter Gathercole
We upgraded them certainly (A310s) by popping the ROMs in when they arrived, and I recollect sending the Arthur ROMs back for some reason. And we added those huge Rodime 20Mb (yes Mb) hard drives later on.
I was reaching back to my earliest memories of each, not meaning to imply stasis.
Hello All
Google the Korora Project. They do a themed Fedora .iso with all the codecs installed ready to go. There is a beta version that is tracking Fedora 23.
Works like the Stella Linux remix for Centos and the microlinux-desktop for Slackware. You get the stock repositories, codec repositories, and a small amount of theme/artwork tweaking.
More of a remix than an original composition.
Icon: people like to play music, watch tubes and even now and again a DVD.
"...they don't know what the browser's address bar is for..."
@SecretSonOfHG and all
I teach Maths to adults in evening classes in UK. I usually book an IT room early in the year and show people where the good GCSE Maths videos are (Corbettmaths/Hegartymaths &c) and how to connect to the College VLE so they can get notes and links.
Yes, the session does turn into a basic IT demo quite quickly.
About one third of most classes haven't a clue, another third have a clue but use Google as a universal interface to Web sites and the remaining third (give or take) are up with it all. We adopt a peer tutoring approach. We get there...
The middle third actually have a point: try navigating an exam board Web site to find a GCSE Maths past paper as a .pdf file. Then try googling with a phrase like "$exam_board Maths Foundation Paper" where $exam_board=[AQA|Edexcel|OCR] and see the difference. "Information Architects" take note.
@Chika: For a trouble free TDE have a look at exegnulinux (http://exegnulinux.net/). Based on Debian stable. Curated by one chap. Worked fine when I tried it but I'm not into TDE.
Back on topic: The staff PC at one place I work in is an atom based small form factor PC with 2Gb RAM. Was freezing so techies reimaged and decided to try Windows 10 for Education. Seems OK once they found a graphics driver that would make it to the native resolution of the panel. No big drama. Sort of zzzzzz...
"They may be tech savvy professionals I suppose but in the real world of real work that kind of jump is bonkers - having helped people move from Macs to Windows I've seen it first hand."
Younger people seem to jump between different GUIs on different devices fine. Android phone to iPad to Windows (7) desktop PC to MacOS laptop more or less fluidly in the case of a younger colleague. They seem to use a given device for one kind of work-flow, e.g. phone for messaging, so the cognitive switch cost isn't so high. Each task has its own device with a suitable GUI. 'The computer' isn't a single beige box in the corner now.
Coat: I don't use Windows at home, and the Minty Penguins are out in force, so I'm off.
"1900's "forget that windows 3.11 stuff, Linux is the great desktop OS, MS will be gone and forgotten in a few years"
Servers. That Internet thingy. HPC for people with budgets that precluded the purchase of IBM mainframes. That's what got Linux (and *.BSDs) a start, a window(sic) of opportunity, in the mid to late 90s. The then new markets Not the desktop, then a pretty saturated old market. Same story now isn't it?
Seriously, I can remember a conversation with an IT manager in mid 90s or so about running my then College's Web site on the Microsoft Web server. He was worried about licensing costs because we didn't know how many 'users' there would be. So the network techie moved the Web site to a Linux box. Then they moved the College firewall over to another Linux box. Then later people started using Web Course in a Box and Moodle...
The Tramp: I use Windows at work (they pay me to do stuff and provide me with a computer to do some of the stuff on). We have half a dozen Windows 10 machines in one area of my current College. I quite like the look and they seem quite responsive on not the highest end hardware. They authenticate to a domain &c so none of the consumer rubbish.
"My Linux customers (around 30 at present) are a joy to visit when they need something upgraded or added, very rarely fixed."
Do they have the root password/sudo?
Do your customers tend to be individuals with a laptop or small companies with a bit of a network including backup/printing/shared drives?
Just interested. Happy retirement.
Coat: this is mainly a Windows topic so I'm sort of off.
"Mucking about in the registry is not something I like doing and it scares the bejeesus out of me when some of my friends and family have to do. It means a full reinstall after attempting to salvage their data. Good way to destroy a weekend."
@ a_yank_lurker
How about taking a clonezilla image of each of the relatives' hard drive as a precaution? Just leave the external hard drive with them for data security? Then you have a point of return given eventual upgrade Armageddon.
Coat: I'm not actually a windows user at home usually. I leave it to the techs at work to keep the wheels turning.
"A happy team that feels respected is a team that will be productive."
@Passive
I have the honour to belong to such a team. It is a pleasure to work with our students to the extent that a recently retired colleague has come back as a volunteer to keep his brain active. But teaching is a recurring task - Eternal September &c, praxis makes perfect (in-joke in the profession, possibly UK specific).
D. Connor himself up the screen mentions what appears from the outside to be a movie project staffed by freelancers. Do the gig, write the code, have the wrap party, leave the script with the PostIt notes in, and move onto the next project. That seems a viable way of working provided the compensation is commensurate.
The OA is on about people hired to do a recurrent job being shafted to save costs. Not so good. Bad karma.
"If you look at any sort of business where they get the money up front, the level of service you get is rather less good than when we pay after we get it. Same with ITPros,"
@Dominic Connor, Quant Headhunter
In my (non IT) business it is half before, half after depending on agreed criteria.
When you are building houses, it is 'retention' type scenario: regular [weekly|monthly] payments based on sign-off by clerk of works.
Both strategies depend on the capacity in the org to *evaluate* the quality of work. That is why I pay a Clerk of Works a percentage of the contract value when I let contracts. The point made by other (IT relevant posters) is that the necessity for this clause sort of suggests that the competence may not be available in the org.
Coat: I find this fascinating but I'm not an IT professional so I'm out of here.
"...and a serious amount of math work to get your position within a couple of miles"
Nothing you can't put on a programmable scientific calculator. There are power series on the orbital elements for the positions of the Sun and Moon up to navigational accuracy for a couple of years either side of now that can be downloaded into a modest calculator along with positions of the navigational stars. Coordinate transformations are relatively routine.
Coat: Mine's the one with the Ebco emergency sextant in the (large) pocket.
"Now these will be people who use our software all day long as part of their job so you'd think they were fairly familiar with a computer."
@AndrueC: Nope, I'd expect them to know how to access your software and carry out the most frequent transactions they need to do with it. General knowledge of the PC itself and the vagaries of the operating system in use may not be something they need to know. I've found with Windows users telling them to 'start the Internet' actually works better than talking about Web browsers when providing informal support to students.
As we move into an era where most people use consumer devices (phones, tablets) to do most of what they want to do, and as the services people want to access on those devices increasingly use native applications that have the work-flow for the service baked into them, you may find you actually need to run training programmes for new staff on desktop basics - or do the IBM/Apple thing and go with the 'app' model. It will be interesting to see how this all pans out over the next 10 years or so.
"But after a generation it is still happening. Staff would turn off the monitors at night, but leave the PCs running all weekend or potentially the whole Summer holidays. Often logged in too."
Energy saving mode? Automatic log off after some hours of no activity? The PCs at both my work places do that. We have 'home drives' that follow us around as well as we use different PCs. A touch on the power switch and the PCs log off and close down in an orderly fashion after confirming the intention.
At home: I haven't actually rebooted my big-laptop-that-stays-in-the-man-cave for about 6 weeks but that is obviously only used by me.
@Avatar of They
The use of the left-hand part of the screen for an always-visible program launcher/manager struck me as a sensible use of widescreen format monitors. I like the way that Canonical was upfront about the reasons behind their UI design (see the Canonical Design blog and search for 'user testing'). I stopped using it because I moved away from the Ubuntu underpinning.
Slackare and Debian are the oldest remaining linux distributions I believe and they also provide contrasting packaging/design approaches. As an end user with a laptop I find the following...
Debian has its very tightly coupled dependency resolution and metapackages. Debian packagers modify code to fit applications into the framework.Customise at your peril if you want library versions outside the repository for the release of Debian you are using, but stay within the repository and you can create very minimal (or maximal as you choose) installs that work and stay working after updates.
A recommended install for Slackware is 'everything' and it comes in at around 8gb. Very little modification of upstream code in the large 'core', so Slackware looks 'unbranded' in the sense that there is no strong distro flavour. But no automatic dependency resolution out of the box and everything is decoupled (within the limits of dbus/avahi and other daemons).
My Frankenslack has some slackbuilds from 13.37, some from 14.0 and some from 14.1 and the only issue was Shotwell: I had to recompile one obscure library and then the Shotwell executable because of a .so name change. I can also use the GIMP 2.4 binary build (which I prefer for obscure reasons) on the 14.1 platform without major library replacement - not bad for 5 years. Not for minimalists (but see Salix as another commenter suggests) but you can keep it working well easily with polyglot software selections.
1. [systemd suite] breaks one of the main strengths of UNIX - That every component stands by itself and can be managed separately.
I suspect that dbus and policykit/consolekit (aka 'the *kits') were militating against the clean compartmentalised design well before the systemd suite. And those were at least in part developed to provide a 'modern' desktop (going back to the HardyHeron and after era when people were depreciating HAL if memory serves). And lets face it the recycling of subsystems originally inspired by the needs of the 'modern' desktop to support and ease automated container management and configuration isn't unusual in software development. Especially when its a bazaar rather than a cathedral.
Rob Pike made throwaway comment I remembered and just found a reference (paragraph 8) for: "Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl" (you need the context to get the quote).
Just a thought: would a secure phone be one that did not actually store any information on the device?
The device downloads the information needed from a server somewhere when the agent switches it on and authenticates.
If a thief obtains the device, it is just an empty shell. Attempts to authenticate will fail as I assume the agents will have good long pass-phrases. A fingerprint swipe as well perhaps.
Coat: I'm off out in a bit.
"Many copies of The Hut Six Story are available for sale at very reasonable prices in the shop at Bletchley Park :-)"
Interesting to see if a chap called Richard, or possibly Malcolm, turns up and buys a lot of copies.
Does the Museum do mail order I wonder?
The tramp: no-one pays much attention to tramps hanging around.
The mathematics of working out exactly how many straws of what length may distress the camel's spine is notoriously difficult. Especially when the camel is changing weight.
Seriously in terms of feedback theory the loop is both non-linear with thresholds and has hysteresis.
"Yeah with Open/Libre Office, I can open up Word at the same time, type up a book in Word, send it off for proof reading and editing, have some marketing meetings, get the book published, in the shops and then the bargain bin before Writer has even opened."
@jason 7: that's pretty impressive for about 6 seconds (hit Mod4-Space to bring up whisker-menu, type writ.., press enter, wonder why I didn't switch off the splash screen, start typing) on my old core-duo Thinkpad.
At work I have OpenOffice as a network application arriving on a Windows 7 client that is an Atom based little box with 2Gb of ram. Now loading that would give you enough time to file a bit of copy about the length of this post. But I only do that once a day then leave it running.
Coat: its about MS Office...
"Twice a week we go out for lunch to a local Cafe where other 'home workers' meet and we have a good moan about surorisingly similar things despite working in very different areas."
Sensible idea. Perhaps someone should organise 'watercooler' events for home workers on a structured basis. Also brings in the idea of co-working space that you can rent by the day/chair &c.
Eastgate Systems' Tinderbox is a niche application for Mac OS. It is one of the very few applications that I miss having moved to Penguinland more or less permanently.
You buy it for money and your copy carries on working forever. You get free updates for a year. If you want updates after that you buy it again, but often with a discount.
A subscription presented as a purchase essentially. Mind you, this is desktop software. And its sunny. Coat icon therefore.
Hint: The Norrington Room (what appears to be a small town bookshop holds a subterranean secret).
While we are on the subject, turn 180 degrees and enter the Museum for the History of Science in the old Ashmolean building next to the Sheldonian Theatre. In the basement you will find (casually as you do) Fleming's agar plates and testubes, and a couple of the white enamel bedpans filled with wallpaper paste (I'm serious) used to cultivate antibiotics on a semi-industrial scale. On the staircase on the way down is a pastel drawing of the moon by John Russell, RA. This huge pastel was drawn by hand at the telescope (Herschel reflector). A smaller copy is in the Soho House Museum in Birmingham (Boulton was a staunch Methodist). Then you have a gallery full of astrolabes (the iPhone of the first millennium). Amazing.
Round the corner and down the road from the Weston/New Bodleian is the Pitt Rivers' museum (in the back of the Museum of Natural History). Shrunken heads, canoes and Parkas. Ace.
Nice write up, well done...
SOLO perhaps (I say tentatively, as I have been out of the scholarly world for many decades) may need some proof reading.
Try a search for Edmund Neison's The moon and the condition and configurations of its surface, published 1876. Neison basically redrew great chunks of the Born and Madler moon map and added his own annotations and detail.
SOLO has an entry for the book but not available online. A second entry is available as a PDF but when downloaded appears to be a review of Neison's work in German, with many pages scanned blank.
In the first entry for the actual volume, Neison's name is spelled Beison in one bibliographic field, but spelled correctly in another. Neison reverted to the family name of Neville Neville a couple of years later.
As you may have gathered, I'm into 19th Century astronomy. Other semi-retired gentlefolk (the mainstay of Wikipedia) may share other enthusiasms. This could all be crowd sourced and harnessed with a little push.
Now, what we need is a bugzilla or a github issue tracker for this stuff. There is a 'reviews and tags' function. I may set up a login...
Pint: for all involved. In the Lamb and Flag of course.
I'm reading this page on firefox on the FrankenslackTM laptop. Noscript on and cookies requesting permission. The Register is showing me a couple of ads, the banner and a static side ad, along with the jobs listing.
The page is 'quiet'. Nothing is jumping, no garish backgrounds, no flashing animations or modal windows. No continuous bandwidth use. I have no problem with ads of that nature. Its the attention sapping nausea inducing blinkorama I can't cope with.
So Armet may have a point in that 'all or nothing' is not as useful as 'detect horribleness but allow respectful' with the ability to define your particular horrible.
The tramp: I have no money and I don't buy things except food and clothes. OK the odd book and a few CDs as well now and again. And, yes, we are working our way through a rather nice Rioja... but certainly no serious budget.
"seems nearly half of all dells sold in china are loaded with NeoKylin (based on ubuntu)"
@Tom 7: have a look at Deepin Linux. 'Independent' Linux distro from PRC.
Ubuntu core, cusomised UI based on a traditional panel-at-the-bottom approach, lots of codecs & multimedia. Interesting terminal application (think screen/byobu out of box but easier).
Coat: this thread is about an obscure embedded OS for a networking component. Not really desktop issues.
Oh, and let's not forget trackers - those are *definitely* theft as they act without user permission. So those are just *out*.
Just went to Washington Post home page. I use Firefox with noscript, Privacy Badger and https everywhere enabled. 60+ scripts and 17 trackers reported but all editorial text visible. The little images next to each story lead did not render, presumably using javascript based display.
Then lowered the shields (noscript set to allow scripts globally, and Privacy Badger set to Deactivate on this Site). One lone advert top right, and lots of editorial images appear. Site takes *ages* to load fully (my main reason for using noscript - adsl is on the lower end of UK Broadband speeds on a good day). But text is readable before the full page completes loading. Not too bad an 'experience'.
Pity the content is basically crap.
I have been derided for clinging to WinXP far beyond its sell-by date. However, I had no option: my pension didn't stretch to buying Win7.
If in UK contact a local Linux User Group (LUG).
Consider getting either Xubuntu (if your hardware is running XP SP3 ok it can *probably* cope with Xubuntu) or Lubuntu isos put on an old USB stick (2G fine) so they are bootable and run 'live sessions' to become familiar with Linux. A second USB stick can be used to store files &c so will not touch your existing hard drive.
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