Posts by Pompous Git 3087 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2014
Please do NOT tell me there is a historical museum of merkins somewhere, with official historians.
Your wish is my command.
Historians are generally far more interested in textual information than textured objects (furry or otherwise). These latter are generally the province of antiquarians, or curators.
America was so named after Amerigo Vespucci, cartographer.
Richard ap Meryk (Amerike/Ameryk) 1440–1503), a wealthy English merchant, was the owner of the Matthew sailed by John Cabot to North America in 1497. So, do we continue referring to America as Amerika, or start calling it A-merry-go to keep some Merkin historians happy?
I can test and report and I can donate. I can also write emails trying to persuade someone with skill why they might care about a certain feature (okay, usually not with any real effect, but asking politely doesn't hurt anyone) Oddly enough almost all the features I have wanted have turned up eventually, it just took time for someone who had the same goals as me but better skills to turn up.
Which is why I was a beta tester for Adobe FrameMaker on Linux. It never went beyond beta and the beta timed out in December 2000. Adobe advised us that we would need to purchase FrameMaker for Windows or Mac if we wanted to use the documents we had created after that date,
Of course you are correct that I could write my own DTP software for Linux, or just wait. In either case that sounds like decades of waiting.
Microsoft are driving us away from Windows and the Linuxen drive us away from Linux when they tell us if we want the software to write it ourselves. It doesn't seem to occur to them that programming skills are dissimilar to DTP skills, though both require a considerable investment in time. I suspect my next computer will be a Mac.
at the same time we tell Linux developers that clearly their product ISN'T SUPERIOR ENOUGH to make a dent in the market.
You're missing the point. Nothing wrong with Linux OS, rather the contrary. What isn't up to snuff are the applications. I use InDesign from time to time. Linux has Scribus that is almost as good as MS Publisher which the last time I had the misfortune to run it, was a piece of shit.
someone please find me good alternative to Outlook, which works with Exchange just as well.
I don't even need to communicate with Exchange these days, but a decent email (PIM) client is needed. Evolution needs to be uninstalled/reinstalled on a regular basis. Thunderbird doesn't do calendaring.
Under arm bowling.
Roundarm style bowling was introduced in the first half of the 19th century by a woman IIRC. Until that time, bowling was performed in the same way as in bowls (hence the term "bowling"), the ball being delivered with the hand below the waist.
As an example of this, combining date of birth with gender and suburb gets you an average 90% match to one person.
That doesn't surprise me. In late 1970 I was working for the Commonwealth Employment Service in Launceston (Tasmania), a rather small provincial city. We had two clients with the same name and DOB living in the same suburb.
The other problem I have referred to already. My Christian name is Jonathan spelt as it is in the Bible. Almost nobody is capable of spelling it correctly, never mind government departments. Jonathon is the most popular, followed by Johnathon and Johnathan. The Australian Taxation Commissioner has managed to use all three misspellings over the years as well as sometimes managing to spell it correctly.
There seem to be a lot of Linux fans hogging this thread. Many users out here don't really have that option in the sense that they don't even have the concept.
It seems odd to be called a "Linux fan". As a retired MS Professional and partner in a MS Certified Solution provider, I've often enough been called a MS shill by the Linuxen.
You might not have noticed, but most Reg readers are computer professionals. And, shock horror, spend a lot of time with these things called servers and routers that run various flavours of Linux. I've only recently retired a 486 running IPCop, a Linux router product that ran for more years than I can remember.
Linux on the desktop only happened for me a year ago when MS decided to use up all my Internet bandwidth with multiple downloads of sodding w10. I still have software that needs Windows and so my machines variously dual-boot w7 and run w7 in a VM. But, and this was a big surprise to me 12 months ago, I spend nearly all of my time running Cinnamon Mint.
Not having to do daily battle with MS is a great relief. Installing/uninstalling software and applying updates no longer entails interminable waiting. People who still rely on me for computer problems are reporting that becoming freshly Minted is a great relief. Unless there's a cogent reason for not doing so, support from me these days entails letting the user loose after booting their machine from a Mint DVD and then asking if the can live with it. So far, there have been only extremely positive responses. Absolutely no bludgeoning required. I suspect you are nowhere near as knowledgeable as you claim to be.
Win10, once you get past what is left of the Metro interface, performs as well or better than Win7, and basically doesn't look or act much differently.
OK smart-arse. Where's Windows Media Centre then? If the computer spends 95% of its uptime acting as a glorified TV set-top box, what use is it running w10 when there's no software to talk to the TV capture card?
On my desktop machine w10 kept popping up a dialog box every few minutes that told me "you appear to have a graphics problem".* The solution might have been to purchase a replacement video card, but there's no fucking Hardware Compatibility List any more! What are you supposed to do? Keep buying video cards until you find one that works? FFS!
The video card is an ASUS Radeon R7 250 and the box it came in is labelled "Windows 8.1 compatible". It works fine with Cinnamon Mint and a driver from ASUS. Also works fine with W7 when I occasionally need it.
I still haven't met a normal person who has heard of Linux, let alone wanting to switch to it. So desktop Linux is still dead in the water.
Either you don't get out much, or rural Tasmanians are abnormal*. After being fucked over by MS, locals are going to the local computer fixit guy and he's installing Linux Cinnamon Mint on very ordinary users' machines. He has been doing this for a year now and he reports that he gets less support calls from his Linux clients.
For those of you with the fixation that only windoze clicking on buttons, double-clicking icons, scrolling and choosing options works exactly the same on windoze, OS X and Linux. If you're too fucking stupid to do that on a Linux machine, you're too fucking stupid to own a computer.
* Tasmanians are reputed to have pointy heads (two each) and fuck their close relatives. There's a smidgeon of truth to this.
Quicken/Quickbooks, AutoCAD, WordPerfect, Legal Solutions (or any legal forms program for that matter) are just a few examples of applications that my users are depending on and there just isn't an alternative for them.
So Corel Word Perfect for Linux isn't an alternative to Word perfect for Windows. Whoda thunkit?
upgrade versions of Windows had led me into a chain of sequential installs from whatever the last full version had been.
No need for that. Here's how to do a full install of w8 using the upgrade disc.
And here's how to do a full install of W7.
I could be wrong, I don't actually think we're required by law to give our names on the census.
Your name and address will be available to the government if you are on the electoral roll. All that's needed is for the census form collector to note your address on the form if you don't.
Crap service .... high prices
Welcome to the third world of Turnbull's botched NBN
Speaking as someone who took up the NBN when it was still the ALP NBN Plan; welcome to the real world. Prior to the NBN I had a constant 1.5 Mb/s and unlimited downloads -- effectively better than 500 GB per month. On FW NBN I have 50 GB at 10 Mb/s (supposedly 12 Mb/s) and once over the cap get shaped to 256 kb/s, so most of the month streaming video is impossible. On a monthly basis, average speed is way lower and it's less reliable than ADSL was. On Monday I had to resort to mobile wireless for 12 hours.
I bought a Jamie Oliver stove and pan. And NOW I have to buy his recipe boxes. :(
It could be worse. I watched this TV chef once called Nigella Lawson. The recipe she was demonstrating and described as "comfort food" was baked beans on toast. You've got to wonder about people needing a TV chef to teach them how to make baked beans on toast...
There may be something in this. At the time there was a DOS office suite called Smartware.
I don't remember Smartware. The biggies here were Lotus Symphony and Enable with MS Works a very distant third. Between 1990 and 1993 most SMBs using PCs were using them primarily for word processing and spreadsheets. The former was dominated by Word Perfect and Wordstar. A distant third was MS Word. Spreadsheeting was dominated by Lotus 1-2-3 followed by Quattro Pro and a distant third again was MS Multiplan. All running under MS or PC DOS. Networking (when used) was Novell's Netware.
By 1994 WfW had made networking much cheaper and many SMBs made the move mainly for that reason. Another reason was that under DOS, the printer driver had to be made available by the software company. Word Perfect were best at this, but what if you could print from Word Perfect, but not Lotus 1-2-3 because Lotus hadn't bothered to write a printer driver for your printer? WfW handled printing for all your Win applications. Not to mention WYSIWYG word processors were a great step forward.
MS were not only benefiting from Word Perfect, Lotus and Wordstar being late to the party. Apple had hired MS to write Word and Excel for the Mac when it was in development so they already had in-house expertise in writing WYSIWYG applications. I've been told that the level of security surrounding those developers for the Mac was insane. The funny thing was, the only people interested in Apple's IP were inside that room with the prototype Macs.
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