Posts by gerryg 821 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Aug 2009
What I like about analogue clocks is that they provide additional information instantly, such a "how long until". All a digital display does is display time.
Take chess clocks, a quick glance Intuits how your time management is going without further calculation.
Although digital clocks manage Fischer time better (off topic: I use that term because I'm not a chess player and they don't like Fischer even though he invented it)
Taking you at your word it seems unfortunate that accessibility charities are not funding the requirements for open alternatives.
I recall a few years ago one charity promoting a Microsoft app then moaning that the files became unavailable for some reason or other (discretion applied, protecting the guilty)
Curious isn't it. Was it LibreOffice not supporting ISO 29500 or was it Microsoft? I know which one I am betting on.
While for all immediate practical purposes for any user it might not matter but only a few days ago we had this
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/05/document_foundation_excel
with some extended banging on about the wonderful standards compliant Microsoft.
The Document Foundation will have created an open source library, available for anyone to reuse.
They have no direct control over the Open Office project which I believe is owned/controlled by the Apache Foundation.
I should have thought you would be aware of all this so it's difficult to assume you are being even handed in all your subsequent posts.
I was in the middle of the standards wars as a member of the relevant BSI committee representing the FOSS community.
ISO 29500 was railroaded through because of the existence of ISO 26300. The history of the abuse of the standards process is well documented.
All of this could be views through the lens of the drive for digital sovereignty. If there were any evidence of joined up thinking documents would only be released using ISO 26300 regardless of whether Microsoft have stopped using "transitional"
This argument has been used forever by companies with a proprietary fixation, (including some software companies seeking to end interoperability surely a major point of software) since forever but doesn't begin to explain why so many organisations contribute towards, e.g., the Linux kernel and other projects. They share ownership but don't lose control.
That's also why so many pool their IP
All these developers are scratching an itch. I have no insight why they are doing it and they have no obligation to meet my needs or demands.
To call it wasted effort is to attribute motive without evidence and I would suggest denigration. I consider myself lucky to be able to use what others have developed.
Case study Timothy Pearson (TDE) decided that KDE3 was where it was at and forked the code base. His time, his decision.
I quite liked Konqueror being a local file manager (everything is a file, after all) but despite the loss not enough to choose TDE over current KDE. I took a look, it was nostalgic but I'm tagging along as a mostly free rider with the KDE project. (I've also looked at a couple of the other desktops that openSUSE provides but KDE does it for me. My dislike of GNOME is entirely unevidence based.)
Of course all this was under my control (and responsibility) with no-one nagging me to do this or that. That's one of the plus points.
It's just how it is. I don't think diversity of desktop is a problem. The paid for edifice of commercial software might get so unwieldy that even their obscene marketing budgets might fail to stop the collapse (slight evidence that windows 11 might be in the space) leading to a significant search for an alternative but until then just be grateful for what you have got and stop worrying about the year of LOTD.
BTW on datelines KDE was a free evolution of Sun's CDE unfortunately although reassurances were in place at that time Qt was free as in beer not as in speech (now both) So the GNU project started GNOME.
I confess to having to look that one up.
So some moron, somewhere, was looking at something they shouldn't have been looking at and clicked on a malicious link.
Do crapita have any explanation regarding how it happened and why it isn't going to happen again?
I don't use Windows and while I might choose to bring the usual axe, I am curious as I thought executables required admin rights.
Is there a material difference in systemic risk between a usable system based on a macro kernel and a micro kernel?
Everything I read and think I understand suggests micro kernels throw risk over the fence for others to deal with, whereas macro kernels plough on trying to handle everything. But I don't get any idea that a system based on one or the other is less risky.
All explanations gratefully received.
.
It the rich that pay most of the taxes. Please don't attempt to conflate tax avoidance (which anyone with an ISA is doing) with tax evasion which is illegal.
The Laffer curve has got nothing to do with trickle down economics. It is a model that proposes that beyond a certain point the total tax take goes down as tax rates rise.
Did you discount the risk premium of not being made redundant, add in the employers pension contribution, the insurance cost of six months sick pay at 100%, then six months at 50%, six weeks leave? What about the stress of real accountability and delivering customer driven requirements?
...the warmth towards the Linux ecosystem has increased considerably. I have no idea if/when the year of LOTD will arrive but the hostility has declined.
A lot of the reasons for not using Linux are essentially that Microsoft inadvertently or intentionally makes playing nice a bit difficult.
It's got a lot better (though my shiny new laptop has a WiFi dongle because ..) So while someone rants about why Windows and why not Linux just sit quietly and recall that Steve Balmer was on the money when he described Linux as a cancer.
Has everyone forgotten Red Hat's attitude to source code. If you want access to it (and updates, not sure) you need a subscription.
Not only is SuSE European, it doesn't play fast and loose
It there is any age difference between SuSE and Red hat, the first SuSE distro emerged in 1993, I'm not sure but happy to be corrected, I think Red Hat is younger.
The problem was never interoperability and always political. There's a documentary vid knocking about which is painful viewing . FSFE will probably have a link somewhere.
With a change of administration, Microsoft flew in their top sales gurus and made a few promises, local research centre, jobs, etc. Suddenly their Munich centred distro (it had a snappy name Munix?) was heaved out and Windows was back.
Increasingly local administrations are finding that Libre Office is not so awful after all. The German government funded the hardening of some KDE component or other back in the day associated with kmail, kontact etc.
If politicians could only stop accepting the equivalent of Taylor Swift concert tickets and actually focus on the wider needs of the polity... Both CCTA and MoD (GCHQ too IIRC) have long since indicated that Linux based systems are no worse than any other option.
It's all there, we just have to get the CMA (El Reg passim) to do its job on cloud computing, interoperability, open standards (cont p 94)
You can still read the Magna Carta. I'm not sure if it is still true but Acts of Parliament used to be written with similar ink on vellum, specifically because of the problem you parody. Laser discs fell by the wayside not long after the BBC Micro project terminated, so until some geek or other worked out how to access those their longevity was about 1600 years less than the OP.
OpenOffice was at least open source I can't remember if if was free software too. If Oracle hadn't tried to take future releases proprietary there would have been no need for a fork of the project.
So in strict vocabulary terms you are correct but Sun were not the problem.
The part of the story no-one seems to be mentioning is that Sun bought the company (Victor Kiam eat your heart out) because the relicensing deal for Microsoft Office would have been more expensive. Sun initially made Star Office free as in beer and subsequently as in speech.
When something is free as in beer there's not much room for "soft" "marketing". That has always been the dirty little secret of proprietary anything and the millstone attached to Free Software.
No-one seems to get sacked for not choosing the option with the minimum cost function
This plague of proprietary form over function was sort of highlighted by Taylor Swift of all people. When invited to give Apple her music for free she is said to have responded by pointing out she doesn't ask for free iPhones.
Each to their own n'all but the author of the article has previous regarding KDE.
KDE seems to have a relatively happy constituency of users and its got a 30 year pedigree. I was a bit cheesed off with KDE 4 but otherwise I remain happy.
I might be happier with another DE but all that paint that needed to be watched drying prevents me bothering to find out, c f., distro hopping. I started with S.u.S.E 6.0 and I'm now on Tumbleweed. I neither know nor care what I'm missing
But if you really care: https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Deepin/Installation
This is nothing more than open standards redux.
The problem regarding proprietary standards and lock-in is hardly news, Cabinet Office was busy avoiding the problem 15 years ago, not for the first time. Is there any reader who remembers the CCTA writing about all this in about 1995. Cloud is the walled garden problem on steroids. Apparently the Competition and Markets Authority is investigating. That shouldn't take less than 10 years by which time the suppliers will have nimbly skipped on.
And El Reg can report on that
"A long time ago someone at Microsoft demoed Open Office against Microsoft's standard internal expenses spreadsheet. As it opened, the existing data was corrupted"
Of course it did. Why else would someone from Microsoft run the demonstration?
c.f. MS-DOS/WordPerfect
c.f. ISO 29500 "transitional"
If they both work the same 35 hours, say 40 after commute, then there is a large hole in the day requiring childcare and other stuff. So a third salary is required, neither of them are cleaning the bathroom and one of them is working for almost no money.
If they don't work the same 35 hours and do not have childcare they will barely see each other.
So no paradigm shift but nice try.
Others have been saying this for years. See the file format wars of the early 2010s. Cabinet Office produced some half decent guidelines which were mysteriously withdrawn and nothing has happend since. At the time someone said "it would be nice not to be here in 10 years time" and now the CMA has opened an inquiry into the problems of lock-in with cloud.
It's always been about interoperability and for some reason (I think we can guess) government of any persuasion has always listened to those with a vested interest in avoiding it.
May I just put a word in for the Brother HL 1110? B&W laser printer for about £80 with good enough graphics for QR etc. Mine is about 8 years old. It has to think a bit before it prints the first page but with crisp type. A new no chip toner cartridge costs about £20. No dried ink no half empty problems and has never let me down.
On the rare occasions I need a colour photo I get one in the high street for a couple of quid
There are alternatives to Redhat.
This reminds of Bruce Perkins circa 1998, no #chickenlittle but *if* a solution is needed than parasites such as me need to work out whether they are part of the problem or part of the solution.
Too many of the "community" spend hours screaming by forum but perhaps rather than demanding they could find other ways of contributing.
I fund some projects that are of particular importance to me, nothing that would cause them to gasp, but a few quid every now and again.
Linux, the kernel, is too important to too many people, that is safe. Other projects needs to be cared about more.
LibreOffice complains fairly regularly that too many corporate users don't support the project. But according to Wikipedia only a few percent of all users see enough value to support it.
I look at the list of corporate sponsors for openSUSE, that looks fairly healthy but for reasons that escape me, it continues to be treated as the runt while others spend their time respinning Debian derivatives, freedom of choice n'all but if they think there is a problem possibly respins are not the answer.
> My choice is: can I please not have so many choices?
Then don't look. If whatever you are happy with is what you are happy with, then lucky you.
It's not always necessary to have an opinion
For example I have no idea how many distros there are - I don't look and I don't care - 25 years ago I picked what is now Tumbleweed.
> but it's not OK to say "you should like this because it's so customisable" when it's not customisation that I want.
Who was saying that?
It doesn't really matter if "this vulture" doesn't get on with the KDE philosophy. This is all about the power of choice.
Back in the day Timothy Pearson thought KDE 3 was where it was at (and given the travails with KDE 4 it was possible to see his point).
I recall he had certain complaints about the changes to the underlying infrastructure too.
So is plugging away at TDE and here we are. Yours for the using. Or not. That's the point.
I'd be curious to know how long a company could tick along without a CEO. Are the divisions unable to walk talk or chew gum without the CEO telling them to breathe in and breathe out?
What size of decision reaches the CEO.and how many?
Similarly whether breaking up large company into smaller units would give better or worse shareholder value.
And why $50 million and not $100 million or $25 million.
Is he going to leave?
On the specific issue of power efficiency, with a decent graphics card, say 300W for a desktop, 12 hours day.
3.6kWh about 70p/day
How efficient would the new PC have to be to justify the expenditure?
What about all the energy used to make the existing PC?
Or the cost of disposal?
In the private sector eventually the internal transaction costs exceed the external transaction costs, limiting the size of the organisation, (Ronald Coase). That's one reason why there's more than one supermarket.
Enterprise software is a sales pitch designed to convince large organisations they can lower internal transaction costs. In the private sector a firm has to cope with the decision or die. In the public sector they just keep spending and put it on the tax bill.
