Posts by keithpeter

Re: Windows isn’t needed for all home use any more

Thanks will try that one. I have an old Thinkpad X220 I keep specifically for work with Zoom/Teams malarkey.

"Linux users believe that because they've never been in retail"

OA was about Android on desktops and laptops for use in hospitality and point of sale locations. Exactly what you are asking for - a defined platform for a limited range of applications mainly 'line of business'. The platform already has development tooling and publishing systems(*). I can see this being quite a popular approach. The approach can probably be extended to customers - most of what I use this laptop for could be done on an Android device (including a bit of sound recording and rough editing of video).

There are many Linux desktops because it is free/libre software and there is absolutely nothing stopping anyone forking existing software and modifying it. That is sort of the point.

How exactly would you try to reduce the number of desktops (i.e. curtail the freedom to fork)? What organisational structures would you use? What sanctions would you apply?

(*) My main concern here is touch screens on actual desktops. The applications need easily discoverable keyboard shortcuts otherwise there will be court cases over strain injuries.

Incredible shrinking future?

I found this article interesting if a little sad.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/elon-musks-incredible-shrinking-future.html

Things generally do look gloomy at present so some people broadcasting ambitions and hopes for the future would be useful.

Mr Musk's ambitions do seem to have shrunk quite considerably from colonies on Mars to chumboxes on X feeds.

Coat: mine's the one with battered copies of Ivan Illich's books because that's how I roll.

Re: Manjaro and Arch?

OK, things changed since (gasp) 9 years ago when I tried it.

Icon: old man here

So four new contracts for Oracle?

And new contracts for employees with four different employers?

Sounds lovely. For consultants. Perhaps best left until the current situation is remedied or at least fully known?

"It's too big to serve residents properly."

Remember the present issues are H&R and IT related. Outrageous incompetence yes, but not automatically linked to failure to serve residents.

PS: I gather that Sheffield council may have similar H&R liabilities (BBC news)

Good Dr S: gas holders are not how gas pressure is retained nowadays alas. I wonder how long the emergency generators for the gas system will function in the event of a major outage.

Icon: old enough to remember the transition from coal gas to natural.

Re: tendency to generate false information – a phenomenon known as "hallucination."

An LLM has no concept of or way of determining 'fact'.

All such a model can do is react to your prompt by looking at what other sources have produced in response to similar prompts.

LLMs are designed to produce plausible sounding language. As such the algorithms have no 'world model' or underlying 'theory of world'.

Best of luck

@rockpile99

Bunch of Thinkpads and Neverware Google Flex any good?

Best of luck.

PS: I would think there is a market generally for a semi-ruggedised laptop design with replaceable batteries, storage, keyboards and ram. One thinks of education, corporate badge-folk and maintenance people. And oldies like me who learned to type on manual typewriters.

Re: Elderly and Vulnerable?

My Blackberry Classic works 'fine' in the commonly accepted usage of that word.

It makes phone calls, especially good on speaker-phone when I'm trying to herd kittens (aka achieve consensus).

It sends and receives SMS messages and email.

The camera is basically crap but it can resolve a page of handwriting if photographed in good light and the 'whiteboard' filter can process the resulting image into something I can print out after emailing to an actual computer.

What else does one need?

Re: Costs ballooned from £20 million to around £100 million @t245t

"Successive governments of all flavours have pushed problems down from central control to local government without the required funding to cover all of their new responsibilities, in the name of local accountabillity, but in reality, to get the cost off the Government [balance] sheets."

Agreed.

We need local government that is sustainable, able to provide continuity, and actually really accountable to local population.

"The council leader may have been Conservative at some point during this time, but they were in a minority, so it is a bit strong to call it a Conservative administration at any time."

Will agree to disagree based on my experience as a minor cog in the wheels at the time. Your experience may have been be different.

Re: Dear Liam,

"...how Clement Lefebvre intended to counter MX-Linux's overtaking Mint for DistroWatch's number-one position when Mint's numbers were seriously dropping after Mint 18 was released..."

@nautica: I have to admit that my own reaction to such an enquiry on a support forum would be along the lines of a Gallic Shrug. A polite shrug mind you, no need for drama, I'm a Brit.

Disclosure: I use Slackware on my more powerful laptops, and tried a LDME Cinnamon live disk just to see how the desktop performed as mentioned in an earlier post. I have absolutely no investment in all of this and hope that you have found a Linux that meets your needs (see icon).

My understanding (which may well be wrong) is that the EU member countries agree to adopt common standards, but the passing of laws and the enforcement of the standards is left to the governments of the member countries.

PS: How do you measure this power per watt of bodyweight I wonder? I'm going to have to investigate...

"...adequately skilled and trained public servants..."

Those kinds of people cost money and don't take kindly to 10 year pay freezes.

Re: So Musk has blood on his hands

"And the sheer absurdity of random industrialists being able to conduct their own foreign policy without reference to their own government."

I seem to recollect that a couple of nascent multi-nationals did just that in the lead up to ww2.

Now, what happened to commandeering?

Re: "another issue it said has now been corrected"

"...but its handling feels good reasonably competent"

FTFY

"...though for many years I've wondered why WordPad existed."

1) Corporate intertia: Windows 3 and previous had Write so Windows 95 needed something like it.

2) As someone suggested up-thread, Wordpad was also a demonstration of the rich text component in the programming api - you could get the code and compile it.

3) And my thought: do you remember the little printed booklet that came with Windows 95 and explained step by step how to use the various features of the OS by producing a small document? It had a basic logo made in paint which was then imported into Wordpad and you added text with various kinds of formatting. Detailed explanations of how to create and save the files and how to use explorer and everything.

The point being that little walk through would work on any Windows 95 computer without additional software. Made training on the new interface much easier.

I suppose MS don't see the need for that now.

Re: Proudly antifascist?

"And most of all: what does that have to do with Linux?"

Nothing.

If you like the technology that antiX is using, you can just go ahead and use it.

If you don't like the branding, you can just remove it.

anticapitalista is just exercising his human right of free speech. Remember that he lives in a country that has been governed by a military dictatorship within living memory (just).

Re: They are all doing it

@ecofeco

Browser fingerprinting?

Re: Only YouTube left with infinite storage?

"...error correction was good enough to allow data to survive being recorded on low resolution analog video tape..."

I'm seeing that as a low pass filter plus noise.

I'm not sure if the new fancy digital lossy compression algorithms for video can be modelled in the same way.

A college I worked in once in the UK many decades ago that had a bit of a bad patch(*).

The interim 'turnaround' Principal drove a beat up Ford estate of some vintage. As I happened to know that he lived in a very nice part of the city and that his wife drove a fancy Chelsea Tractor he did confide that his choice of vehicle was 'perception management'.

Fun times (we got through it). This guy's first move was to mount an aggressive advertising/marketing push and send us into local schools to talk to year 10 and 11s. Net result: 20% more students the next year.

Back on topic: Zoom allowed us to move to online teaching and tutorials very quickly at no cost when MS Teams was unusable. When something approaching normality returned, and when Zoom (quite reasonably in my opinion) started to limit the free option, we had to move to MS Teams as it was already paid for as part of the MS 365 package. There was no way we could pay Zoom for something we already had even if it was crap.

(*)OFSTED unsatisfactory, departure of most of the senior post holders, resignation of the governors, eventually forced merger with another larger college locally. I'm a Brit so I do understatement. This was basically Ground Zero in institutional terms.

Re: Thanks for Vim on a Fish Disk

chased a goose for a feather and harvested some oak apples when the need to scribble became urgent.

Re: They'll try

If I could just chuck an idea into the mix here (and I have absolutely no skin in this game, I could not give a kipper's todger who 'dominates the desktop' as long as I can carry on using my stuff - see icon)

Suppose Microsoft achieves their aim of moving to a cloud based system for most people. Office people, home users, students &c.

Why would they wish to maintain a unique bare metal operating system?

Why not just have a nice lean Linux install with Wine running local apps and a Web browser for most things? Spaff a few million a year to the Wine project - or even just buy Crossover - and increase their existing donations to the Linux Foundation. Hopefully a few bob from down the back of the couch for the likes of the OpenBSD project (ssh and all).

Huge cost savings to keep the shareholders happy, shifting the whole caravanserai to new machine architectures becomes a piece of cake (Apple having done that a couple of times since their Unix adoption), much lower cross-section for anti-trust actions as people always have the option to run Linux applications native. All good.

Just a thought...