* Posts by keithpeter

2057 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jul 2007

PanWriter: Cross-platform writing tool runs on anything and outputs to anything

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Linux: Abiword??

Abiword works fairly well for me on my more ancient Thinkpad. Opens and saves a range of file types but not markdown so does not meet criteria implied in the OA. Abiword can export LaTeX markup and so cross conversion to markdown possible using pandoc including proper quotation marks. Might even be lighter than an electron app. The CherryTree note taking program can edit rich text in a fashion and export to html and pdf.

Windows has Wordpad and Mac OS has TextEdit. Linux graphical layers/toolkits appear not to provide a rich text editor object so I suppose it is harder to provide a basic rich text native program under Linux. Yes, I do know that GNU Step might provide an early version of TextEdit. Not tried that yet.

PS: On Linux at home since 2006 or so. The only MacOS applications I miss are TextEdit and the amazing Preview (i.e. pdf as a display description language being used underneath).

Philippines orders fraud probe after paying MacBook prices for slow Celeron laptops

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Government procurement

OK - given COVID and the need to provide teachers with communications kit quickly what would your alternative be?

The UK model? (some guy we met in the pub)

Pop down to the shop?

Or have some kind of bid process but with people who know which way is up?

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Employer Number 2 has rdp into what looks to me like a Windows desktop. I can run rdp on my linux laptop at home and no issues. Means there is no data leakage from their systems (education, so children, so good the data says on their machines).

I think they just use bog standard Windows servers, noone has mentioned any special operating systems. Same stuff on the learning centre computers (not very powerful ones)

Icon: my knowledge level.

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Re: Have you considered cloning with tar?

@Old Crow

What desktop environment are your scientists using and what application software (R? Octave? Reduce? wxMaxima?)

Just curious. No agenda. Well done if users are happy.

Google sues Sonos yet again, claiming it stole IP and infringed patents

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Castañeda

The Google spokesentity has a name to conjure with.

Things increasingly feel as if I'm inside some sort of Hunter S Thompson book.

(Child of late 60s early 70s)

GitLab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Desperate measures

"Let's hope our local libraries don't decide they can save a fortune by burning all the books which haven't seen updates in years."

There is no cultural critic more ruthless than a librarian, or more populist. The librarian applies a brutally simple criterion: has this book been borrowed in the last year or two? No? Discard. Talis and Heritage both produce reports showing the long tail...

So if you want to keep a repository available, I suppose you will have to open an issue saying simply 'this is useful' once a year. Cron job?

More than $100m in cryptocurrency stolen from blockchain biz

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: What I find odd

If it was a Brinks-Mat / Hatton-Garden replay where actual bags of cash or bullion was stolen in a dramatic way then, yes, I would expect it to make the front pages in at least the country where the theft occurred.

But this is some weird technical thing about funny money which is held on some kind of chain thingy to most people and it is difficult to tie to a specific location and definite time, especially as everyone seems to be using pseudonyms. So no, meeja not picking it up. To slow. No car chases.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Manager and Cashier

Wage packets?

Some bank branches in the 70s, 80s and part of the 90s would pay out wages given the employer cheque - an early form of outsourcing.

Couple of *large* factories locally?

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

"That's the last we ever saw of them - so obviously it wasn't that important and I wasted my time trying to help!"

TBF it *may* have been that the police were able to catch the guilty party red handed (so to speak) and so may no longer have needed the footage.

Still rude not to acknowledge.

Wi-Fi hotspots and Windows on Arm broken by Microsoft's latest patches

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Testing?

Does MS even test this crap before they push it out to their users any more?

Basically, no.

I gather that the brunt of the Softie redundancies some years ago was borne by the QA and testing functions within Redmond.

512 disk drives later, Floppotron computer hardware orchestra hits v3.0

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Jóhann Jóhannsson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9HSofqn0Cw

Starts quietly. Rest of the album is nice as well.

Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Emergency credit?

"[...] took a chance that they could reach the next service station [...]"

How about garage issues an invoice to driver for enough petrol to get to nearest large town on route? Payment guaranteed by some level of government if driver does not pay. Government takes power to recover cost from driver.

Only for emergencies like this. Mitigate what turned out to be a spof.

As OA says Canada is big. It strikes me that things can go wrong with some speed in the middle of nowhere.

Open source 'Office' options keep Microsoft running faster than ever

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Re: MS Office and Alternatives

An upvote is insufficient. May your approach become universal.

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Re: Options are always good

So your document is essentially text(*) but with a lot of unusually short lines so my hypothesis totally bites the dust. Icon: Karl Popper approves.

(*)I'm assuming that the REPL dialogue/code is not placed in floating text objects/frames. Also that you are using a named style to change font, indenting and justification &c for the code samples and not manually changing the font for each sample. I think these are safe assumptions given your presence here.

keithpeter Silver badge
Childcatcher

Re: Options are always good

Who do you think showed me?

This kind of information travels quickly in the work-related underground.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: MS Office and Alternatives

Softmaker Office: 64 bit only on Linux, compiled binaries for major distros, various SKUs at various prices.

30 day preview available (Web site does not say which SKU the preview previews if you see what I mean).

I love testing out 'seamless compatibility' with Microsoft Office claims.

Nostalgia: Some SKUs allow you to pay one off for an actual non-time limited installer.

keithpeter Silver badge

Re: Options are always good

Roughly 200 words per page so either double spaced or a lot of pictures/tables/equations.

I think it is the number of object thingies that slows things down.

Good luck.

keithpeter Silver badge
Joke

Re: Options are always good

[...] moves it into the user's personal time who now has to wait for this crap to finish.

Good joke (see icon).

Press and hold power switch for about 5 seconds then sort out the mess next morning.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Options are always good

@JimboSmith

options...

One of my employers uses Office 365/Outlook/Sharepoint/Teams and all which works fine from Firefox/Debian stable. I quite like the workflow including use of the online documents storage - nothing work related on my client machine(s) and they take responsibility for security of data.

I think the transition to Web apps is encouraging my fellow toilers to basically produce simpler layouts - less of that adding a new table inside a table cell thing that MS Office people seem to like doing. Fingers crossed.

Another employer provides RDP access to an actual Windows desktop with Office and all. Fine on a good internet connection - perhaps one for relatives to ask about?

IBM ordered to hand over ex-CEO emails plotting cuts in older workers

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Seventy-one in six years?!?!?

Slow P&O?(*)

i.e. get rid of people in high cost countries and hire people in lower cost countries. Coupled with a shift away from actual products into 'services'.

Over time, of course, the wage rates in the lower cost countries will rise, so the employees become expensive again, and so another move...

(*)P&O is a UK specific reference to a 'resource action' taken by a ferry company where they sacked the entire UK operational workforce and hired agency staff from countries outwith the UK at below minimum wage rates.

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Not unexpectedly..

@KBeee

Does your nephew realise that he is recapitulating the history of radio broadcasting?

https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co35025/brownie-crystal-receiver-and-pair-of-lissen-headphones-1924-1927-radio-receiver

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Digital transmission?

Norrington's Beethoven symphony cycle is a favourite of mine, so I shall have to go and try the Brahms now you have recommended it. Opera conductors do know how to present the drama don't they?

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Digital transmission?

Yes, I gather that Dr Brandenberg listened to Ms Vega's a capella homage to her local coffee shop and a photographer friend thousands of times while perfecting the psycho-accoustic model used in the compression algorithm. This perseverance obviously paid off!

Personally, I'd have gone with Reich's Tehillim if a digital recording had been available. Very challenging. However these days my hearing is such that I can't tell the difference between a bog standard mp3 and a lossless recording (see icon).

Tech hiring freeze doesn't mean people won't leave

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Does not matter

Outsourcing/Offshoring is a 'slow P&O' as the whole trick is to move work to countries with lower wages. Ultimately, it will dawn on the Government that if everything that can be outsourced/offshored is, the tax base will shrink significantly.

At that point, you can expect a sudden increase in regulation...

Elon Musk orders Tesla execs back to the office

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Ego Musk

@pluraquanta

The OA mentions a very high annual turnover of executives who report directly to Mr Musk. I wonder if the main role of this layer is to insulate the actual production and research functions from the whims of the chief?

Distrobox 1.3.0: Run (pretty much) any Linux distro under almost any other

keithpeter Silver badge

Re: Multiple distros

Thanks for a detailed answer.

keithpeter Silver badge

Re: Multiple distros

Ooops - It is RHEL 6 that karlkerl is using - actual paid extended support?

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Re: Multiple distros

Interesting: how do you keep your Centos 6 host system secure? Are you backporting e.g TLS and stuff?

Icon: good luck, Linux should be a place of freedom.

IBM ends funding for employee retirement clubs

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

"I seem to never meet a boomer not in such a situation (at least 1 spare property)..."

Mine's a pint of Holden's if you are buying the next round.

See icon: no property, no assets really, fixed income. Not complaining in a better situation than many.

Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

@Tom 38 and all

I'm thinking there is something of the Dominic Cummings about Dr Poettering. Often identifies important problems. Proposes and somehow manages to action comically inappropriate solutions.

Slackware, as others have pointed out, should be added to the list of perfectly viable Linux based operating systems currently not consuming systemd. Then there is always OpenBSD.

FreeBSD 13.1 is out for everything from PowerPC to x86-64

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: FreeBSD is the best all round UNIX today

"It is a very clean and tidy OS for people who know what they are doing. "

I'd say FreeBSD makes quite a lot of sense even if you don't already have a ton of experience with the system but have messed with a linux install.

I'm posting this off a 'gonzo install' of FreeBSD i386 on an old Thinkpad X60. Just followed the prompts in the installer. I added Xorg, xpdf and firefox after the installer completed where is asks if you want to alter the system using a prompt. Just 'man pkg' to work out how to add binary packages.

Only had to google a couple of things...

* What on earth is the 'regulatory domain' for the UK?

* How to add my user to the wheel group so I can start Xorg

I'm using a network cable into the router and accepted the dhcp dialog in the installer. The twm window manager has that awful default setup with the huge long xterm window so just installed fluxbox and all good.

Export bans prompt Russia to use Chinese x86 CPU replacement

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Russian? CPUs?

Out of season? Onions? In the UK?

I'd better tell my older relatives with veg gardens.

Seriously: UK onions widely available - root veg can be stored for long periods with care. I grew up near three square miles of market gardens in the 60s that supplied a town of 100k.

keithpeter Silver badge

Re: Russian? CPUs?

@anon

"looking at the worldwide shortages it seems like the best option for all counties in the future is to make their own versions of some common components"

I'm inclined to agree. In fact, sitting here in the UK, I'm inclined to suggest reinvestment in market gardens in the green belt around cities as we had in the 60s. Why am I buying a bag of onions for £1 in Tesco from Egypt? How is that even viable for farmers in the Delta?

@all

Quote from OA

"Habr said the KX-6640MA should still be suitable for a "wide range of office tasks," and at least the processor will be compatible with x86-based software. But its slow nature underlines the issues Russia has created for itself by committing atrocities against a neighboring country."

Should be enough to keep the bureaucrats going. Below is an interesting perspective on the Russian import situation from Branko Milanovic who spends a lot of time thinking about this kind of stuff...

http://glineq.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-novelty-of-technologically.html

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

keithpeter Silver badge

Re: What On "Earth"?

Yup... makes a difference

Elon Musk 'violated' Twitter NDA over bot-check sample size

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Thanks for posting that.

I have the same argument about pass rates in GCSE Maths every August.

Yes, the national pass rate is around 68%. No, that does not mean that in one class of 30 students out of 20 classes we get worried and point fingers at the teacher if less than 20 pass.

Sigh

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: violate ?

"... I am far more concerned that a Tory MP revealed that you can make a meal for 30p without supporting recipes."

That kind of bovine excrement was commented upon by George Orwell back in the 1930s in The Road to Wigan Pier I think.

https://orwellsociety.com/food-for-thought-i/

And remember it was our present government who cut local authority funding for Sure Start Centres for families - centres that provided support for very low income families with young children. Part of that support being information (actionable information, actual practical demonstrations) about nutrition and recipes. Just what that jerk was on about. Actually being done. Happening. In reality. Years ago.

Don't get me started on the short-sighted and self-defeating nature of these savings. I need to watch the blood-pressure these days.

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

keithpeter Silver badge
Childcatcher

Re: College Tales...

...but hasn't ever had any teaching in how a computer "fits together"

Is Petzold's book Code too much detail? Might make good holiday reading this summer.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Full names please.......

30+ years in (college) teaching but I don't feel that I can share some of the more... interesting... names chosen by parents for their offspring because, well, they are out there somewhere. I would just ask parents to stop and think a little if they are going for something out of the ordinary.

It's always amusing when you meet the parents at a parents' evening. Goth rocker mum and dad saddle plump blonde good-natured daughter with ferocious death-metal type name and all.

My family are a tad boring, we stick to names of grand parents and great-grand parents and uncles/aunts. I avoided having the initials of a notorious three letter agency in the East at the last minute apparently.

Brute force: I've had to drill out filing cabinet locks a few times when documents needed in a hurry and keys with people not working late.

Unity and Trinity: New releases for forks of abandoned Linux desktops

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Re: YALD * 2

"I expect to receive down votes from people who don't like my ladle of truth."

Ladle of truth is an interesting metaphor. I'm seeing dinner ladies in my school about half a century ago ladling out luke warm cabbage and mash but that's probably my problem.

I think that perhaps the down votes are arising from your category error (distribution does not determine desktop or vice versa) and also from the implication in your post that 'someone' should limit the freedoms that people or groups of people have to exercise the rights that free/open source software provides them with.

Personally I just continue to use xfce4 (good enough) and do stuff and waste a bit of time replying to posts on forums, but each to his own.

Icon: may everyone find the network client UI of their dreams.

One in five employees at top Indian outsourcers left in the past year

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Median length of service?

Some of the hypotheses put forward by the various executives in the OA could be tested if we knew the median length of service of those leaving.

A rough distribution (even just the median and quartiles) would be better.

Commercially sensitive information I guess.

For example UK teachers in schools: 9% leave teaching each year roughly. 15% leave after first year of teaching. The whole distribution is on the ONS Web site

https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england#dataBlock-7419641d-0360-4cca-ac9a-8d30f527ae8b-tables

Although annoyingly I can't link to the retention table directly

Fedora starts to simplify Linux graphics handling

keithpeter Silver badge

Re: Keep your pants on

The linked LWN article and associated comments gives a flavour of the discussion around one of the proposed changes...

https://lwn.net/Articles/891273/

Seems like a thorough process. As usual it comes down to who does the work to keep things as they are.

Elon Musk set to buy Twitter in $44b deal, promises stuff

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: TL;DR Analysis

Phrases from OA: "authenticating all humans", "expand account verification", "lose a good chunk of its revenue to Musk's loans".

The trajectory to steady state will be interesting even if we can hazard a guess as to where the end point will be.

OpenBSD 7.1 is out, including Apple M1 support

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

apmd

Worth mentioning that OpenBSD 7.1 includes a change in the apmd power management software so that when plugged into the mains, a laptop will tend to run at maximum processor speed. See

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2022-04-21-openbsd-71-fan-noise-temperature.html

for references and a user space daemon to provide sane defaults.

The multi-slice default automatic disk partitioning is apparently something to do with write XOR execute permissions on various slices, see

https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20160527203200

I'm always impressed by the documentation *within* an OpenBSD install. The FAQ and man pages for the base system are also available from openbsd.org. Reading

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq1.html#OtherUnixes

might help with the initial orientation.

The 'learn once' comment above rings true to to me, similar to Slackware in the Linux world.

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Closest I've seen...

I'm slightly confused (quite common these days).

Was the radiator metalwork not earth bonded?

IoT biz Insteon goes silent, smart home gear plays dumb

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Documentation

I hope it is a very long time before all the house automators here need to think about documentation for succession...

https://medium.com/message/deathhacks-b767903b7c15

Tom West was the manager profiled extensively in Tracy Kidder's The soul of a new machine by the way.

IBM ordered to pay $105 million to insurer over tech project's collapse

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Whoa, whoa, whoa ....

I think that the appeal judge decided that

a) The insurance company bought stuff to use with the IBM software that didn't arrive

b) Some of that stuff could not be used with any other system

c) Therefore the cost of the subset of stuff that could not be repurposed could be added to the loss figure as 'wasted expenditure'

d) The clause in the original contract that IBM claimed disallowed 'wasted expenditure' from their liability for non-completion in fact didn't.

PS: Was it IBM that appealed against the original judgement?

An early crack at network management with an unfortunate logfile

keithpeter Silver badge
Joke

Re: At 45RPM, re: documentation.

I'm now searching for the description of the declassified HMGBRD protocol. Big in the 70s.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: And this, kids,

&Tom 7

"I was disappointed not to be called as a witness"

I think you were lucky being well away from the proceedings. Outside any potential blast radius.

Sounds dreadful. One wonders what happened. Marching powder habit out of control or slow decline?

The wild world of non-C operating systems

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Modula 2

Wasn't there an airline booking system written in prolog? I once had to help some travel and tourism teachers get the official training system working on green screen dos boxes decades ago.

Serious manuals and widely used I recollect (FE college)

GNOME 42's inconsistent themes are causing drama

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Windows XP theming...

That wasn't actually what you said in the grandparent post now was it.

(To each his own and good luck if you find what you use now fully cromulent)