* Posts by ovation1357

287 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jan 2012

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Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

ovation1357

Re: Repeat after me:

Thunderbird is outstandingly good as an email client with 'okay' calendaring - sadly they've been doing various evil things to the user interface of late but I would take it 100 times over outlook or i could persuade them to allow it where i work.

Outlook is nothing short of atrocious - the search is almost nonexistent and I find the UI impossible.

I don't think I'll ever quite understand why some people love outlook so much not why others hate thunderbird with such passion.

From my perspective, with outlook I find it extremely hard to keep up with day to day messages and can rarely find emails I need once they've fallen out of my current inbox view. The calendar is really confusing and I often misread times or even the correct day in the way it draws everything.

On thunderbird I can usually find emails in a matter of seconds, even from years ago. The calendar is clear and I never misread the date or time.

Both suck a bit in terms of HTML or rich text message editing.

Willy Wonka event leaves bitter taste with artificially sweetened promises

ovation1357

Re: BS on the cheap

I'm in a few musical performance Facebook groups and there's been a few mentions and gnashings of teeth about some of these movie themed musical concerts.

Best I can come up with right now is this page from Howard Shore warning about knock-off concerts: https://howardshore.com/notice-unofficial-concerts/

I think the musicians were complaining about not getting paid after performing in the bootleg ones (which they didn't necessarily know weren't official until afterwards).

IT consultant fined for daring to expose shoddy security

ovation1357

Re: The problem is law is old and tech is new

"straightforward translation to bricks-and-mortar ethics"

If somebody burgles your house that's a crime regardless of whether they picked the lock or you left the key in the door.

However I suspect in the case bricks and mortar the police wouldn't give you much sympathy if the criminal gained entry through your negligence. Your insurance might also not pay out.

Whereas tech companies who metaphorically leave the key in their door usually get to publicly blame it all on the 'evil' hacker who attacked their reassuringly experience software. Their insurance(s) might even pay out in spite of their gross negligence.

It's hardly a fair comparison

ovation1357

Re: The problem is law is old and tech is new

"the company should be prosecuted for terrible security practice too"

Please name the law which prohibits terrible security practice.

Obviously there's things like GDPR which can result in a company getting fined after a significant data breach but if that goes anywhere at all it's unlikely to result in much more than a financial penalty. What are the chances of anybody responsible for creating or selling software with terrible security actually being charged with a crime?

I think this is half the trouble. There's no law (that I know of) against terrible software and companies continue to pump out stuff with little or no consideration for security.

Yet an individual who finds one of these flaws is at serve risk of getting a criminal record even if they did nothing more than discover the problem and, rightly, report it to the vendor.

Meanwhile organised criminals are remotely hacking these things, exploiting vulnerabilities, stealing data and blackmailing people from various shady corners of the planet and are often very unlikely to be caught.

I definitely think there needs to be much more legal responsibility put on the vendors to ensure their code is secure and kept up to date - ironically to achieve that they'd probably need to hire hackers/pen-testers to prove it

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

ovation1357

One of Mark Moxon's recent contributions to the game was to port the music (Blue Danube) from C64 Version to BBC Micro: https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?p=384503#p384503

Philips recalls 340 MRI machines because they may explode in an emergency

ovation1357

Re: If you aren't full of shrapnel you will probably suffocate

That iconic moment when Sylvester McCoy told Ace they were safe and then the Daleks elevated! :-)

Ubiquiti blunder let some folks view others' security cameras, accounts

ovation1357

What a mess! A product like this needs to be secure by design such that this kind of blunder simply isn't possible.

This is exactly the reason that there's no chance I'll be getting any "cloud" connected cameras or microphones any time soon..

The kids keep asking if we can get an "Alexa" - nope!

It's a real shame this serious breach of trust comes from UniFi because, like several other posters, I have been very impressed with their products and although I'm not considering any cameras (even on-prem ones), I'll be a bit more wary of their security next time I'm looking at their products.

Wayland takes the wheel as Red Hat bids farewell to X.org

ovation1357

Re: I wouldn't care if it worked

Middle click paste from a primary buffer is a core function for me and a total deal-breaker if not available.

ovation1357

Re: Waylan support is coming to the Mate desktop

I'd be up the proverbial creek without a paddle if it weren't for MATE but it drives me mad that RedHat's sabotage of Linux desktops has now leaked into lots of parts of MATE, e.g. the disk manager and "Simple Scan" which are GNOME applications and use client -side decorations and the horrendous buttons and hamburger menus that get embedded into the fat not-quite-a-title-bar

RedHat has wildly trashed a lifetime's worth of UI concepts and forced it onto just about everybody, removing all the flexible and user choice which we once had. So I'm at the point if thinking that even if Wayland offered me anything that X doesn't, it's got RedHat stamped all over it so I'm out.

MATE on the other hand is run by an awesome bunch of amazing people who continue to deliver worthwhile features and improvements. I really hope that a similarly amazing group of people and companies come together soon to stick two fingers up at RedHat and work either to keep X11 alive or implement something like the X12 idea with sufficient backward compatibility.

Meanwhile I'm going to figure out how to obtain the latest release under Ubuntu 20.04 to get new feature to disable mouse scrolling in the window selector and check out whether Pluma has any kind of automatic recovery yet.

Ubuntu Budgie switches its approach to Wayland

ovation1357

Re: "Says who?"

What you call consensus, others may call coercion...

There's a lot more stick than there is carrot in this case. RedHat especially, is being ruthless with it's crusade to push out the one true desktop (theirs: GNOME) on the one true UI library (theirs: GTK) running on the one true graphical platform (somewhat theirs: Wayland)...

By threatening to axe their development of X11 and spreading FUD about how it's essentially dead etc, they're absolutely coercing the smaller players into compliance.

"That's a nice little desktop you're maintaining there.... Would be a shame if something bad happened to it, no?"

ovation1357
Pint

Spot on, sir!

ovation1357

Re: "SSD, for example"

I believe this is correct however the damage is already done. So many libraries, desktop environments and applications have been pushed into switching to CSD under the false claim that Wayland does not and will not support SSD that now it's almost irreversible even thought there is now apparently some SSD support in Wayland

Best you can hope for is a classic title bar and buttons wrapped around an application with a CSD title bar plus embedded buttons and hamburger menus etc.

In their oh-so-infinite wisdom, the GNOME/GTK folks have decided to taint their CSD title bar with critical buttons/menus which cannot be displayed any other way, so the obvious choice of signalling to the application that you've got SSD so it can kindly hide it's CSDs isn't going to work.

It's a mess!

GNOME developer proposes removing the X11 session

ovation1357

Re: Coming to a fork in the road

The difficulty is that this rot is really wide spread throughout the stack.

When you consider a non-graphical server and stripping out things like SystemD there are probably enough alternative and actively maintained components that you can fairly easily swap them out and end up with a sane, stable system.

When you have a graphical application this will typically be based on a graphical toolkit rather than trying to implement its own GUI from scratch. There are various toolkit libraries out there but the most predominant one on Linux/UNIX platforms is GTK which underpins the GNOME desktop, followed by Qt (the main basis of KDE). What happens if RedHat/GNOME decides that the next version of GTK will not support X11?

This is a serious situation because right now all of the major Linux applications are built on one of those two libraries. LibreOffice and GIMP for example. But then the Web Browser market has now boiled down to either Firefox or one-of-many based on Chromium - Yes, there are a number of other browser projects but none of them come close to having full support for modern day webpages; so the sad reality is that if you've chosen a BSD for your desktop, you've managed to find drivers for your hardware and X.org is up and running with no Wayland anywhere to be seen. But then you need a decent web browser and if it turns out FireFox and Chromium/Chrome are based on GUI Libraries which have ditched support for X then you're going to be back to square one unless there's a community that is willing to create and maintain a forked version of the GUI and/or the Browser :-(

I'm not strictly against Wayland itself but I fear that the misguided crusade which is being led by those in the RedHat/GNOME/Weyland camp is going to have some very long-lasting detrimental effects on all Linux/UNIX/POSIX desktops.

ovation1357

Re: Ugh!

"most X-clients already use client-side drawing in their toolkits" - @ilpr - I'm willing to remain relatively neutral in the Wayland vs X argument as I have never used Wayland but also, I have never personally had any first-hand experience of an architectural limitation of X11 in over 20 years of using Solaris and Linux. However I do struggle with this 'modern' idea of client-side drawing.

The predominant GUI toolkits behind Linux applications are either GTK (GNOME) or Qt (KDE), and I believe that GTK has by far the majority share. You state that clients are already using client-side drawing but is this not because it's the way being enforced by GTK?! RedHat is massively invested in Wayland and is pushing GNOME towards Wayland supremacy but GNOME is based on the GTK library and so they have been steering GTK towards client-side drawing/decorations to achieve their own ends. I don't know where Qt stands on this basis but it sounds like it could be following a similar path. Thus I question whether 'most X-Clients' are really making a conscious choice to use client-side drawing or whether (as I suspect) they are being forced into this by the very same people with the Wayland agenda.

My focus is on user choice and particularly 'consistency' - Throughout my career it has always been the case until recent years, that any desktop system works in a consistent way - that is to say that the application menus, titles, buttons, scrollbars, etc typically appear in the same place and in the same style for all applications. Changing the Desktop's theme (be it a Linux environment, Windows or Mac) is reflected throughout all program windows.. Yet with client-side, we now have flat borderless applications which are often hard to distinguish from a neighbouring/overlapping window - there's a big focus on mobile/touch devices to the detriment of mouse+keyboard interface and every app potentially looks inconsistent from every other. The gap between how a 'modern' GNOME GTK application looks vs a modern Qt one could not be wider and now an increasing number of applications completely ignore the system theme. I hate this...

The worst part is that GNOME GTK has decided that their UI should spill out to anything build on the GTK library, which is just about everything - most notably all main stream web browsers. So now there is no escape. I use MATE Desktop but that has been infected with ugly CSD hamburgers and buttons inside grey titlebars which belong only in the GNOME Desktop Environment.... I know that XFCE has ended up embracing this despite being a traditional and minimal desktop.

If Wayland can work reliably without losing any key features from X then I'm going to be pretty agnostic about using it, but it is driving a much more sinister and practically irreversible change to the end user interface and I cannot accept this.

Kaluma squeezes JavaScript onto the Raspberry Pi Pico

ovation1357
Facepalm

Why, $deity, why?!?!

I have terrible difficultly understanding how JavaScript became the defacto standard in web browsers - it's a case of the lowest common denominator IMO.

I have immense difficulty understanding why anybody would want to take the language and adapt it to run server side.

So this just blows my mind.

I suppose it's a bit like Foone (presumably still going on Mastodon since quitting Twitter?) getting Doom to run on a electric toothbrush... Very clever, somewhat entertaining but ultimately not of any practical use.

Ubuntu and Fedora clash in beta race, but who wears GNOME better?

ovation1357

I completely agree... GNOME 2 got to a stage where is was pretty decent and then some egotistical maniac decided sone years ago that the best option was to scrap it, write something half-baked and completely different but still call it GNOME.

Years later it's still a clunky mess with a horrible user interface and barely half the functionality of its predecessor. I genuinely don't get why people like it - unless all you do is live in a web browser all day it's pretty useless.

I've ranted many times in other comments about the abhorrent UI changes in GTK which are universally screwing up everybody else's non-GNOME desktops so I won't get myself started again on that now.

Needless to say I am indebted to the developers who forked GNOME 2 into MATE and continue to maintain it. But I have to credit to the other great desktop environments such as Cinnamon, XFCE and KDE. But GNOME? No thanks.

Beneath Microsoft's Surface event, AI spreads everywhere

ovation1357
Thumb Down

Sounds ghastly!

It is.... ghastly....

Personally I have a loathing of machines which try to speak and a very strong aversion to talking to them as well.

It's alright bad enough with all these voice activated "personal assistants" which misunderstand half your instructions, and sat navs (not forgetting the option of those oh-so-funny novelty/celebrity voices).

Am I imagining it or didn't they pre-install Cortana for a while, which immediately began "speaking" to you on a fresh install?

I hate it all - it's truly ghastly and Adams was spot on about Genuine People Personalities! I turn off all voice recognition and speech synthesis on all my devices as I can't stand it.

I'm not about to start text chatting with GPT either and the last thing I want is for it to be ingesting everything I'm doing and passing comment on it.

It's ironic that this article quotes Sirius Cybernetics because although Douglas Adams probably wrote about this too early for it to be aimed at Microsoft, I always think immediately of Microsoft every time I hear the name "Sirius Cybernetics" as they're the kind of mindless jerks who should be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

ovation1357

Re: If you've seen my posts you'll know I'm not usually moved to crude language

I beg to differ, Sir.... Canonical are no angels, but they are not even a tiny fraction as bad as Microsoft.

Perhaps they would become as bad if they got their hands on a monopoly but a bit of unsolicited telemetry and an ill-judged attempt at bundling Amazon ads into their OS pales into insignificance when compared to Microsoft's crimes against technology.

ovation1357
Devil

How does one ever get into the situation of *returning* to Linux?

I don't understand this as it suggests that you previously used Linux but then went backwards to Windows again.

Why would anyone do that?

Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

ovation1357
Mushroom

Carrot vs Stick

"But this sort of thing feels to us like it's trying to push users towards Wayland, rather than actually attracting anyone."

This is exactly the problem. The folks forcibly pushing Wayland are the same ones forcing hideous, mandatory, touch-centric UI elements upon everybody through GTK, removing any element of user choice through their devout belief that their 'new' way is the only way.

If Wayland as amazing as they say it is then it will stand on its own merit and people will naturally migrate to it as they "wake up" to whatever is apparently so hideously broken in X11. Threats and FUD to try and scare users into switching isn't going to wash.

And for the folks behind Budgie to declare MATE as dead... That's just bollocks. The team behind it is constantly releasing improvements and someone will have to prise it from my cold, dead hands before I stop using it. I don't care whether it's running on X or Wayland so long as Wayland doesn't remove any of the features I use or introduce any instability to my desktop.

I put my money where my mouth it with this one: it's my daily driver and I run my business on it, so I pay a monthly subscription to the project

MATE is an excellent desktop which not only balances functionality and performance but it also gives users huge flexibility with its user interface, which can easily be switched between classic layouts like the original GNOME 2 on which it's based, through to looking and behaving like Windows, Mac and several other desktops.

Sadly, just like XFCE and any desktop either based on GTK or running GTK applications (yes KDE users I'm afraid this affects you too), MATE is now tainted with awful (and probably irreversible) Hamburger Menus and buttons nested inside title bars along with some other UI horrors, which were all forced in by the GTK developers. A major driving reason was because.... at the time, Wayland required "CSD" (Client-Side Decorations) - i.e. the application has to draw its own title bar, scroll bars etc. The sad part is that I'm led to understand that since then Weyland has gained support for Server Side Decorations which basically means that the whole story which led us to our desktop UIs being irreversibly effed up, was actually a lie.

Dear reader, you might be able to tell that I'm a tad miffed about this whole situation. I'd possibly go as far as to say "angry". I'm not angry about "modern" UIs per-se, I'm angry that major players in the desktop Linux ecosystem are carefully stripping away the user choice which has always been one of the biggest selling points of desktop Linux - this could all have been implemented in a way which embraced the spirit of user choice, but instead it has been hard-coded on a wide scale which means folks will be getting these changes whether they like it or not... That's not the spirit of FOSS / Linux, that's the way the likes of Microsoft decides to dump 'TIFKAM' on the world.

If you prefer Unity or KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon, Budgie, XFCE or some other desktop, it's YOUR choice. I'm on my high horse about this because I see this choice being eroded and with the changes being pushed out under the banner of "Wayland is better", don't be surprised if your choice of desktop begins to lose its unique character and features :-(

I hope I'm wrong!

Microsoft may charge different prices for Office with or without Teams

ovation1357

About time

I hope the EU throws the book at them and gives them a hefty fine while they're at it!

Teams sucks and I've been forced to suffer using it for work exactly because of them bundling it "free" and thus being lapped up by organisations which were already fully locked into Windows and Office. It becomes almost impossible to sell the idea of paying another licence for a better product when you're dealing mainly with nontechnical bean counters who consider all similar applications to be equal and this one's "free" (but not as in FOSS because that's "unsupported shareware" in case you didn't know).

Time and again they get away with conning people into mass adoption of the poorest quality product whilst snuffing out the real innovators.

It's just a shame that there seems to be no way to stop them from doing this upfront rather than applying some minor punishment long after the damage has been done.

Potatoes in space: Boffins cook up cosmic concrete for off-world habitats

ovation1357

SpudNik?

I'll get my coat!

Make Linux safer… or die trying

ovation1357

Re: "substantial"

"deals rolled back"

When you, for example, embed the world's worst and least standards-compliant web browser into your OS and call it "The Internet" in an attempt to obliterate the competition, then get legally penalized for doing it. How exactly do you roll that 'deal' back?

Linux Mint 21.2 includes a bit of feature creep from the GNOME world

ovation1357

Re: There are dozens of us!

If you're lucky enough that you can navigate your way around a load of different GUIs without it bothering you then that's great and I'm possibly even a bit jealous!

I can't! I'm very particular about my desktop and get very frustrated on systems which don't work _my_ way.

My standpoint is very much one of use choice. Linux has been a very attractive choice for people who want full control of their computer and the choice to have it look and feel exactly as they want it to.

Take the MATE desktop for example - it actually comes with a utility which allows you to instantly switch your desktop to look and behave like all the current proprietary OSes as well a few popular Linux environments. Select "Redmond" and you've got a taskbar with a "start" menu, choose "Cupertino" and the task bar is gone, replaced with a mac-style dock and top menu bar. If you want something unique that's fine too because you have full control of the desktop layout, keyboard mappings, even the positioning, function and ordering of titlebar buttons.

HOWEVER.... This particular change from GTK is implemented in such a way that it affects all desktop environments and not just the GTK based ones but also the Qt based ones such as KDE and it offers no options whatsoever to configure how it looks or behaves.

So regardless of your choices, if you run a GTK based application such as Chrome or Firefox then it's going to look like it's running on the GNOME desktop (and behave like you're on a mobile touchscreen device) whether you like it or not!

This is a total abuse by the GNOME project of the power it holds through the wide adoption of GTK. It's possible that they were just narrow-minded and simply didn't think about the massive impact their changes would have outside their own environment but I can't help thinking this is very deliberate.

This is not okay and people are absolutely justified in expressing their dismay and anger.

ovation1357

Don't blame MINT

I've been angrily raving about this problem for a couple of years now after getting a big shock when I upgraded to Ubuntu MATE 20.04 - suddenly there were hideous 'Hamburger' menus and other nasty touch-centric obscenities in my desktop UI.

When I read that Xfce was going to switch to this CSD madness I said to myself back then that the users running LTS distros are going to be furious when they upgrade and discover this horror. I believe that time is now arriving :-(

It turns out that this is mainly due to a couple of very arrogant ideologists from the GTK project who have decided for the rest of us that title bars are a waste of pixels and classic application menus the wrong way to do it.... Therefore rather than enabling any kind of user choice, they've deprecated and removed support for 'classic' UI elements and gone round, fairly successfully, pressuring the maintainers of GTK-based applications to remove support for menus and title bars and replace them with hamburgers, embedded titlebar buttons and 'pop-overs'.

This means that regardless of which desktop or distribution you use, even if you use KDE, any application based on GTK3 or above is likely to have all this CSD shit and there's basically nothing anyone can do about it!

So far as I know all the current mainstream web browsers for Linux are using GTK so even though I'm very grateful that the Firefox Devs still implement their own classic menus, I'm stuck with crappy invisible scroll bars and weird mobile-style menus with their own back/forward navigation buttons rather than following mouse focus.

I've been exploring and discussing options to deal with this but my conclusion is that the only way to reverse this would have to firstly involve either persuading GTK to add back support for classic features (unlikely) or to fork/replace GTK but then you'd have convince all application maintainers to re-implement all the stuff that they spent time removing.

I'm seriously pissed off about this and have been unable to find any escape from having my stable and productive desktop being completely shat on except for opting to run outdated OS and applications.

GNOME / GTK, along with its obsession with Weyland can do whatever the hell it wants to with it's desktop user interface but not at the cost of breaking everyone else's!

Thunderbird 102 gets a major facelift, Matrix chat support

ovation1357

Modern == Hamburger Menu?

Like almost every major Linux app I use, Thunderbird is built on GTK.

The GNOME project has thrown away the rulebook on desktop UI design and done some pretty nasty things like deprecating support for proper title and menu bars (replacing the menu with a hamburger plus some buttons embedded in what should be the title bar).

These pretty much no escape from these changes and they affect anything using GTK even if you're using a traditional window manager like XFCE or MATE.

Now, Mozilla have so far done pretty well on this front! Firefox has a hamburger menu as, I believe, does Thunderbird. But they've put in efforts to enable users to have proper menu and title bars (although as I understand it there ain't nothing and no how they can do to get proper scroll bars back)...

I fear it's only a matter of time before GTK makes it so hard for them to support proper desktop UI elements that they are forced to go the way of the rest - do I dare to try this release and find out if this is the one??

Like another poster said, modern doesn't necessarily mean bad but I chose tools such as Thunderbird specifically because of things like stable UI design and, most importantly, user configurable options. I really hope they do continue to be a bastion of user choice! So far as I'm concerned they can change the default user interface to their hearts' content so long as I get the choice to switch to 'classic mode' and get on with some real work.

Oracle creates new form of free Solaris

ovation1357

Re: SRUs

That's one way to tell them where they can stick it!

The inevitability of the Windows 11 UI: New Notepad enters the beta channel

ovation1357

Ditto, and especially for referring to edit. I really missed it when they stopped bundling it with Windows.

Notepad sucks but it's at least better than having nothing at all

Fisher Price's Bluetooth reboot of pre-school play phone has adult privacy flaw

ovation1357

Security problems aside I just find it really sad that children's toys are now almost invariably made of flimsy plastic and are not built to last.

My kids still play with some of my wife's old toys which are almost bomb proof, some of which were already hand-me-downs in the early 80s so they're easily over 40 years old.

I was truly stunned by this Twitter thread https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1454230585933631488?t=26v95n--FxciXetRjMFugg&s=07 recently, where the writer does a tear-down of a new version of the old fisher price record player.. It beggars belief that they have abandoned a really simple Clockwork music box in favour of a crappy little electronic speaker and fake music box sounds coming off a chip, of course immediately requiring batteries to function.

What's truly amazing is the big reveal at the end which shows how they've achieved a clockwork mechanism to make the fake plastic records turn.

I've just wrapped a BBC branded cuddly toy which has a sound box in it and comes with a warning on the box that the batteries have an estimated 6 month lifespan based on occasional use and are not replaceable!

I feel like there should be strict laws about this - if the manufacture really feels it necessary to put risky functionally such as Bluetooth into a child's toy then it should be compliant with a minimum set of safety and security standards (although I can't help thinking that a dumb toy would be a better idea), and non replaceable batteries should be illegal.

Needless to say: Challenge accepted! I may well find myself unstitching the toy and replacing the batteries just to stick two fingers up at them.. A bit like my recent repair job on a Christmas 'robot' biscuit tin from Debenhams which my wife loves. Not only did that practically require a can opener to reach the circuit but the 3x LR44 batteries had been riveted to the board for good measure!

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

ovation1357

Re: vim? Backslider!

I beg to differ, Sir. I cut my teeth on vi but always found it to be a bit basic once I'd got addicted all the sugar added to vim.

Vi had an especially annoying 'feature' whereby if any single 'ex' command failed then it would finally exit with a non-zero status even if the later commands (e.g. :wq ) succeeded... This meant that when I was using it as my email editor within Pine that if I mistyped a command inside vi then it would see the non zero status as an editor failure and discard what I'd typed.

I guess the same would be true using classic vi to edit git commit messages - it would probably just abort.

On the other hand vim exits based on the most recent command status which makes so much more sense.

MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

ovation1357

Re: PHP is somewhat responsible for MySQL’s uptake

The problem with database abstraction layers is that they are forced into offering the lowest common functionally and inevitably end up having to allow raw queries or some other way tto permit the use of propriety commands...

MySQL/Maria's 'GROUP_CONCAT' springs to mind here - immensely useful but specific to the DB.

Oracle introduced something supposed to be an equivalent in 11i but I was not intuitive and it took me a while to get it to work for a simple report.

I believe postgres doesn't even have an equivalent.

ORMs and abstraction layers can seem like a good idea but I find myself fighting the abstraction to get what I want (and having to learn yet-another-ORM with its own syntax and idiosyncrasies) and then having to use some special exceptions which then tie it to one specific backend database again.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate ORMs and I do use them sometimes but so often I find myself thinking I could write a decent SQL query with much less effort, and/or finding that the ORM encourages writing poor/wasteful queries.

Reviving a classic: ThinkPad modder rattles tin to fund new motherboard for 2008's T60 and T61 series of laptops

ovation1357

OMG Why did nobody tell be before!?!

To be fair I'm more pleased with my current P14s than I'd expected and I don't hate the keyboard (which I expected I would), but this is a great idea!

A bit like putting a souped up engine into a crap old car and then leaving the boy racers in the dirt at the red lights! I'd love to have a vintage laptop which flies!

Lenovo ThinkPad T14s: Impressively average, which is how corporate buyers like it

ovation1357

Re: Nice set of options, but Ethernet?

I've got a P14s which is near identical form factor and has a proper Ethernet port on it. I agree with you about the dongles and don't really understand why this model would even need to do that.

Just this evening a friend asked for help with his Dell XPS laptop and had to get a dongle out just to be able to connect a USB-A device - this kind of nonsense was a big driver towards me staying with Lenovo

Nobody cares about DAB radio – so let's force it onto smart speakers, suggests UK govt review

ovation1357

Re: "lots of old folks still love their "wireless""

Yes and let's not forget the news that BT is going to be switching off PSTN and giving everyone a VoIP box with some kind of battery backup.

DAB is technically pretty shit, meanwhile the loss of AM/FM will definitely make our national communications network more fragile and then taking our 'proper' phones away will compound this

I reckon that if we had the zombie apocalypse tomorrow there's a pretty good chance that a combination of analogue radio plus PSTN would survive to keep people in contact.

I really don't fancy our chances with DAB and VoIP.

GNOME 41: Slick with heaps of new features for users and devs – but annoyances remain

ovation1357

Re: Title bar

I'm totally with you Bob. Hamburgers are, at best, for touchscreens only.

I know I'm repeating myself here now, but the only thing I actually want is for this to be a user choice. You and me, we'll clutch to our title bars until the day we shuffle off this planet - some other folks quite like it.

I'm happy for those people to like hamburgers and to use hamburgers if that's their choice. I'm quite happy for some fresh-faced kid to go and invent a 'pizza' menu or whatever... Go ahead and add that to the list of UI options. Heck, make it the default option if you love it that much. But please remember to make it an option!

MATE is especially good in this regard - using the mate tweak tool you can quickly switch between having a desktop which looks like GNOME2, Windows, MacOS and others, and you can freely pick and choose. Want an icon dock but also a Windows-style start menu? No problem!

LibreOffice has taken a similar approach. You want a ribbon? Sure you can have that! You hate the ribbon with all of your being? No worries, have classic menus and several other options instead...

These folks are showing us that personal choice is completely possible and mainly also practical to offer and maintain. Long may those guys keep this up, and maybe they could have a word with the CSD / Hamburger zealots over at GNOME HQ

ovation1357

Re: Title bar

The almighty self-appointed deities of GNOME declare that you are wrong about this puny human! All hail the almighty Wayland, harbinger of client side decorations!

Basically some guy at GNOME has declared that title bars are a waste of space and that allowing them to adopt the theme of your desktop environment or, heaven forbid change colour to highlight the active window, is just plain folly.

Personally I'm with you. I hate it! But more than that I'm pro-choice. There's simply no excuse for this being made into the only option - Linux is all about choice and GNOME gives none whatsoever in this regard :-(

ovation1357

Re: Nice

I hear your pain about choosing a /usr/bin binary for opening file types Bob!

Although it's not at all obvious, you can actually type a file path into the application chooser... You'll see that if you hit the forward slash button then the 'buttons' representing each segment of the path turn into a regular text input and it even auto-completes as you type! I discovered it by accident but you might find it useful next time.

As for the 2D Flatty McFlatFace I couldn't agree more! Plus the abomination of the CSD title bar with embedded buttons and evil hamburger menu.

Sadly, some of this stuff is creeping into MATE and basically anything that runs GTK based applications but I'm hoping that by the time it gets forced on us they'll either have changed their minds or somebody will have come up with a stable fork to avoid it completely.

Why tell the doctor where it hurts, when you could use emoji instead?

ovation1357

This probably highlights the current inconsistency of how they are displayed. In my experience, Windows does not render them very well.

On mobile devices I think they're much clearer although another commenter rightly pointed out that they're not consistently drawn between all applications.

Although surely if a picture paints a thousand words, a tiny emoji still has to be worth perhaps one hundred?

ovation1357

I was a tad surprised by the downvotes on this and then I re-read it.

I've managed (perhaps somewhat ironicly) to miss a really, REALLY important bit of punctuation in my post!

It should say "What the hell is wrong with people!?! Sending monkey emojis as a racial slur.... - not cool"

I absolutely mean what is wrong with the people who do it and think it's somehow okay, and NOT what is wrong with doing it! Sorry to anyone who was offended.

There's no substitute for a properly punctuated sentence.

Peace and good vibes to all!

ovation1357

I personally love emojis, although I believe they are best used in combination with written text in order to disambiguate the meaning and tone of the message.

Back when SMS was pretty new, one of the criticisms of sending text messages (apart from how it might take one longer to type the message than it would to just trying the person and tell them) was that text alone is very easily misinterpreted by the receiver. I've certainly had messages and emails like this, where I manage to read something bad from something neutral or even positive or vice-versa.

By adding emojis it becomes easier to add the equivalent of a facial expression that one might use if one were talking face to face.

In extremis: "You're a dick! :angry_face:" vs "You're a dick! :Laughing:" should hopefully clear up whether this is anger or banter.

Likewise, more subtly, "Great!" In response to something could mean good or it could be a sarcastic expression. Addition of a smiley face it one with rolling eyes should make the intention of the writer much clearer.

I don't use a huge range of emojiis but I do use them all the time (and it irks me that our beloved el-reg comments don't support them!) From happy/sad/silly/angry faces, rolling eyes, grimacing, shrugging and the three wise monkeys (Sidenote: FFS What the hell is wrong with people sending monkey emojis as a racial slur: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-58503093 - not cool!!)

So I'm glad we have these to augment our written language - no doubt there's also countless possibilities for emojis to help where there's a language barrier or learning disability as well.

It will be interesting to see whether they get further adopted into use for professional purposes... Right now on my corporate machine I'm stuck with Outlook covering very limited smiled into characters from the Wingdings font!

ovation1357

Re: Accessibility Fail.

Granted that there could be some ironic meaning which could be lost in a description but as for the emojiis creating silence on a screen reader, I agree that at least for some of them, they could be described by their name.

There seems to be a common expression which I use daily on Slack, Discord and WhatsApp (and also very poorly supported in MS Teams chat). Which is simple text expressions such as :laughing: or :man_shrugging:

I hope that other chat providers and other tools will adopt support for this, especially as it works as a pretty convenient way to input them in a 'real' keyboard.

Internet Explorer 3.0 turns 25. One of its devs recalls how it ended marriages – and launched amazing careers

ovation1357

I'm a little surprised by the apparent love and compliments being eschewed for IE4/5 Vs Netscape.

I absolutely loved Netscape and found IE to be a poor alternative. I guess for starters it was because it lacked mail and Usenet, but I also disliked the typical Microsoft deliberate breaks from convention such as using Favourites when everything else used bookmarks.

For the most part I found Netscape to be pretty stable and it's high degree of configurability was a boon. It wasn't perfect and it did crash from time to time but in the main it made both a decent IMAP mail client (something neither Outlook nor Outlook Express even supported) and was a decent browser too.

I used Netscape on Windows 3.11, Windows 95, macOS 8/9, Solaris and Linux until I switched to Opera, which was by far the superior browser of the time with all its fancy Qt goodness in the form of tabs and Mouse gestures. (I'm a bit surprised it didn't get a mention in this article).

I seem to recall trying the version of IE that got released for Solaris and thinking it was a bit crap and I'm trying to rack my brain to recall whether there was a Mac port as well... Truly IE was only ever a Windows browser, so Netscape was already a clear winner for multi platform support (and Opera also released builds for quite a few platforms - I used it on Solaris for a couple of years)

To me, Internet Explorer has always been the epitome of Microsoft's abuses of its monopoly. Embedding it into the OS and bundling it with every PC and called 'The Internet' was an anticompetitive and rather evil deception.

All these years later we've only just escaped from the Hell of supporting IE with its demented box model, magic runes in IE6 to avoid being in 'quirks mode (not that 'standards mode' actually followed the standards) and its proprietary JavaScript was by far the worst but I've had to handle quirks in later versions too.

Ironically now it seems to be Safari that's most likely to mangle a page that works fine in FF and Chrome, which is an extra nuisance given that Apple only releases it for their devices: I'm not inclined to start paying the idiot tax just to be able to use their wanky browser.

Personally I'm very sad that Opera gave up on it's proprietary rendering engine - it did certainly struggle with some pages but I think it held up pretty well against the bigger players. Now Opera exists only by name as yet another skin around Chromium.

Vivaldi at least tried to get back to the core principals of the legacy Opera but I still found it a bit too 'chromy' for my liking.

I've ended up settling on FireFox, which just about fits my needs but I do lament the true lack of browser choice these days. At least, for the most part, I can write some HTML+CSS and be reasonably confident it will render fine on almost anything (except possibly Safari).

Thunderbird 91 lands: Now native on Apple Silicon, swaps 'master' for 'primary' password, and more

ovation1357

Re: Dated interface

Outlook's user interface is diabolical! I've tried the online version and I hate that even more.

The search is utterly appalling and the complete lack of control over the ultra-low-contrast colour theme and massive areas of wasted white side make it a miserable daily use experience for me.

I'd give anything to use Thunderbird for my work email and did once try it using the old 'exquilla' plugin for Exchange, but in a highly locked down Windows environment it wouldn't work. So I'm stuck being miserable and less productive with Outlook instead.

I really don't understand how Microsoft gets away with charging so much money for this utter shite

I love the 'dated' UI of Thunderbird and will be very sad if they change it significantly without retaining user options to keep it in 'classic mode'... I'm not anti change but I'm also very pro-choice when it comes to UIs.

Microsoft has gone from being 'passable' to 'nil points' for allowing user control over their applications, whereas both Firefox and Thunderbird continue to give a wonderful raft of personalisation options plus mainly sensible defaults for new users.

ovation1357

Re: More like Chunderbird, amirite?

^^^ This, this, THIS ^^^

Firefox 91 introduces cookie clearing, clutter-free printing, Microsoft single sign-on... so where are all the users?

ovation1357

Re: Bold move

The latest UI update (at least on Developer Edition) has changed the tabs from being actual tabs to being rounded edge rectangles, which just looks stupid and I can't find a way to undo it!

E.g instead of the bottom edge of the tab being connected to the panel containing the page, it's detached by a small gap.

They've also done something in dark mode which means the text of my menu bar is black on a dark gray background! Extra annoying given that I loathe the hamburger menu and choose Firefox for the reason it can still use proper title and menu bars.

New GNOME Human Interface Guidelines now official – and obviously some people hate it

ovation1357

Re: More upgrades to avoid!!

XFCE you say? Ahem, sorry my friend but I have some really terrible news I need to break to you...

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/xfce-4-16-client-side-decoration/amp

https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=13689

TL;DR; XFCE is getting client side decorations. Although they might not be putting hamburger menus on apps they distribute, I think you're going to find that lots of 3re party GTK Apps are going to have hamburger menus and other horrors that you can't turn off nor configure :'(

Right to repair shouldn't exist – not because it's wrong but because it's so obviously right

ovation1357

Really interesting product that I'd never heard of and will now be reading about more, but f**k me, that guy on the video is annoying! I just couldn't keep watching him

What I'm especially waiting for is a laptop with the option to have a traditional keyboard again (i.e. non-chiclet), and I'd definitely also want physical buttons on the touchpad... Both things should theoretically be something that a fully modular laptop could offer.

That said, I'm coping better than expected with the chiclet keyboard on my Lenovo P14 although I still miss the keyboard of my T520 and I am _really_ missing the bottom set of physical touchpad buttons (there are still physical buttons above the touchpad which I use although this can be awkward and they're really part of the 'red nipple' track point device embedded in the keyboard).

Right! I'm off to find and explore Framework's website....

I've got a broken combine harvester – but the manufacturer won't give me the software key

ovation1357
Devil

Re: I do wonder how much it would cost

4d experience... What's the four pence experience then? :-P

When free and open source actually means £6k-£8k per package: Atos's £136m contract with NHS England

ovation1357

Re: £1k for a dns change

I'd agree with all of that except that I've dealt with several cases where the reassuringly expensive outsourced contractors have totally failed to keep accurate records or practice change control. They just seem to get away with it when they get caught out.

Hubble’s cosmic science is mind-blowing, but its soul celebrates something surprising about us

ovation1357

Re: Correcting the Corrector?

Wow! I completely missed this. I remember watching a documentary about the servicing mission where COSTAR was installed - I had a physics teacher who was a keen astronomer. It was a mind blowing piece of engineering and a teenage me was seriously impressed

But I had no idea that they'd subsequently managed to remove it. Is the replacement spectrometer the same instrument they originally had to sacrifice in order to fit COSTAR?

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