Posts by keithpeter

Re: So long...

"Her little Win7 box, custom-built on a budget about 5 years back and running almost bugger-all aside from Chrome and a few lightweight hidden-object games, was running slow and spitting low-disk-space errors."

Xubuntu LTS with xfce4-popup-whiskermenu bound to mod4 and the panel unlocked, dragged to bottom, and locked again. Chrome installs fine. Looks like Win7 ish - my students can use it on my old laptop without further instruction. Would run fine on hardware suggested above.

I'm not sure about the hidden object games but there are plenty of desktop games available.

Or then why not a Chromebook with a minimal account set up?

Re: Thanks for making me feel old...

Those printers used a fair amount of force, so you could use them with stencil based copiers, then a lot cheaper than Xerography (as it was still known).

I used the PCW in late 1980s to make multicoloured handouts for students when I was on teacher training placement by careful use of different coloured spirit copier ink sheets and repeatedly feeding the paper stack through the printer printing the bits I wanted in blue, then the bits in red then finally drawing on the diagrams.

Madness.

Re: So What!

@Lysenko

Debian Jessie has Lazarus 1.4x and the associated free pascal stuff. Yes, you might have to install some -dev libraries to make sure you get the headers for all the free pascal unit files (I used apt-get install fp-units-*), but then this is a spohisticated programming environment you are installing, not a skinnable music player.

Slackware 14.1 allows compiling random stuff from upstream source because of its *lack* of dependency resolution in the apt-get style (although you can bring that in if you want of course). Slackware is forgiving, my workaday frankenslack has all kinds of slackbuilds built on different versions &C which you are not supposed to do. It works.

Using a distribution with tight dependency resolution in which libraries are version matched and then trying to compile some fairly hairbally application with a lot of requirements from upstream source is going to lead to some hassle.

Now I'm going because this is a Windows thread basically...

Re: Ubuntu boot results?

@ Voland's right hand and Revered Reviewer

Penguin Potential Perhaps on that vertebrae friendly Dell Latitude 11, SSD and all.

How bad is the keyboard?

I mean, is it 100% normal key size and does it bend when you type on it?

Re: burn a hard drive?

Quote from OA

"Zoz in his DEF CON talk showcases oxygen, copper, and thermate injection, and custom-made explosives."

UK based participants in these projects had better be careful with this particular suggestion. Try explaining to an SO-13 incident response team (or whoever it is these days) that you are actually practising good data security when they arrive through your windows at 4am. Isn't it Thermite?

Seriously: if a hard drive was encrypted using LUKS as recommended - especially if you take the Debian default setting of writing random numbers to the whole drive during installation so that it is harder to find the section of the drive where your encrypted data resides - is there any need for actual physical destruction?

call quality - Re: good article but

@ Ivan 4

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/why-people-hate-making-phone-calls/401114/

There are inherent limitations stemming from the choices made some time ago about the sampling of the audio. In the days of landlines at both ends and quiet offices I could tell from the pauses if someone was fibbing. Not now.

My old blackberry can set call volume in 25% steps using 'in call options'. You can also pop a bit of treble boost on (I have age related hearing loss but not serious yet) which I find useful in noisy environments like railway stations. The ear-bud hands free thing with the microphone on the lead is good as well as long as you can get out of the wind. Phones like the one reviewed are basically portable televisions so I imagine people tend to use headsets!

Re: There won't be a recovery

@Hmmph

There is a third category filled nicely by the iMac user (and Windows based machines of equivalent spec). This user does photos with a stonking big DSLR and edits 1080p video, and might want to edit 4k soon. Also laying out graphics work/posters &c. Perhaps they knock out some tracks using Logic Pro and Reaktor and a sequencer (or Ableton Live). Possibly this category of user is as numerous as the PC builder/gamer. Perhaps more so.

iMac like object gives you decent welly, nice screen, tidy cables and is fast. If I ever use a desktop again at home it will be that kind of device (although running Linux in my case and doing some large maths models).

Re: Nothing new here...

@JeffyPoooh and all.

Just a thought.

Is it just possible, invoking Hanlon's Razor, that the people releasing the fixes can't explain exactly what the issue is because of layers of complexity and cruft?

(In the open | libre software world the source code is available so people sometimes just provide the text of the actual patch with very little supporting info. MS can't do that of course).

Coat: I'm off out now.

Re: supercomputing....

Excel can do quite large iterative models - like 3 million rows worth - on a modest older laptop. Same laptop and LibreOffice 4.early and oOo 3.sommat are struggling. The OpenCL patch helps restore balance rather than giving [open|libre]office any kind of edge.

Have a look at

Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight by John Foreman for giggles. He gives out a free chapter on his book site. You can work through the chapter using either Excel or Calc (latter v4.5 or later as Pivot Tables look similar)

Re: LTSP

Slackware? Wayland? Good heavens (checks that sky is not falling, wearing good thick overcoat for the freezing over of hell &c).

Best of luck.

teaching

I do the teaching some Maths bit of that. Read a book about the history of mathematics from about 1500 onwards. Find one with a good chapter on the 1930s. Seriously. You'll appreciate the irony.

Save time...

@Mahatma and all

"I really should have been paying more attention because it nuked everything on the HD including Win 8.1, the recovery partition and 38 hours of updates."

Clonezilla. That is all.

Coat: I'm off out.

Re: "And it’s all happening despite Microsoft promising – here – that it wouldn’t."

"I do, however, have a problem with autotune."

It has become used as an *effect* deliberately I gather from younger people I speak to. Like vo-coders in the 80s.

Re: Might take a while

"Poor software development on the other hand is polymorphous stupidity - tricky to define and hard to legislate against."

Civil engineering a better possible model?

Big, complex projects that take a long time to complete and which will have an impact on their surroundings for decades or centuries into the future. Most legislatures have evolved a legal framework and set of contractual relationships that define liability. Civil engineers have professional training and standards of (professional) conduct. That all took a lot of case law and quite a few major business failures and (physical) collapses to get to. A few say the regulation has now gone too far and is stifling innovation.

How would the process get started?

Re: Nein! Nein! Nein!

@Phuq Witt

The phrase "an improved user interface" worried me as well. I shall download and try.

Re: remotes

"To be fair Libre/Open Office isn't as good as MS Office, I've been trying for years to reconcile the issue but it doesn't come out in the wash."

Any more detail?

What use cases?

Is it compatibility with existing MS Office files?

Re: Linux

@ Bloodbeastterror

James 51 makes a sensible and safe suggestion on the choice of *distribution*.

I'd go one step further and suggest the purchase of a refurbished laptop as a throw away machine while experience is gathered. A core-duo class Thinkpad (e.g. x200) can be had for £90 or so on the well known auction site from one of the suppliers who sell ex-corporate machines ('buy it now, 10 or more in stock, 128 sold' or similar). These come with a Windows 7 Home OEM installation targeted at recycled computers so you have a way back. Explore using a 'live' session before installing.

I'd also suggest investigating clonezilla (a bootable linux designed to run from USB stick or CD that can be used to image an entire hard drive to an external hard drive).

Have fun. It is a whole world.

Re: And sharing malware in 5 4 3

"Because it happens all the time with linux distros that do the same thing, right?"

@AC whenever

Which linux distros have peer to peer downloading/seeding of post installation updates set as default? I'd love to have a look at how they do that, could be handy.

Agreed that poster you replied to was trolling. I'm assuming Microsoft will have all the usual checksum arrangements sorted.

Re: But! it's! OK!

Not to mention Pocket (about:config and 'pocket' in search box to have a look-see. Google for how to disable).

But I still like the web dev tools and scratch pad so I stick to the old fox.

Re: Speaking of alternative ways of revenue generation

Subscription to a weekly curated *email*(1) on IT regulations/privacy/copyright legislation with executive summaries (not just a list'o'links). Leveraging your journalistic abilities to give us briefings similar to what the MPs get from their bright PPE/Oxbridge aides.

I'd pop a Starbucks or two a month for that one.

(1) Remember that?

Re: idiotic attitudes all round

"A proven track of creating 'rubbish' that has been the most commonly used desktop operating system in the world for the last 3 decades."

That's better.

I've used Windows in various versions since around 1992-ish(?) [386s where you had to type Win at the prompt to get a desktop] because it was what ran on the computers my employers provided me with. Mostly, it has worked, because the various employers have paid people to make sure it did. Can't say anyone actively made a choice to use it.

Re: Cortana-

@hplasm

Yes, Mr Pott can coin a phrase.

Watch out for the teddy...

http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/chapter_6_the_teddy.html

Re: Just one thing left to make it good

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Windows-7-Search-File-Contents

So its been there all the time, thanks, I'll see if the necessary settings are 'allowed' at work. I was searching on indexing software &stuff.