Posts by keithpeter 2068 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jul 2007
Elmer Phud has hit the nail on the head here.
Assuming someone has bought an external hard drive, what is the backup software like for backing up content (images, music, documents &c) locally?
Anything like MacOS Timemachine built in or available that can be recommended to civilian users?
"For some people it is that hard to remember. You need to try supporting some elderly users. They just tend to save everything wherever they feel like..."
Some (not the majority) teenagers are quite into random saving as well. Always fun sorting them out.
I personally use search to cross reference archived stuff.
I have a folder for each academic year/course/week as the year progresses. File names include topic and level of difficulty.
If I need an extra worksheet/presentation quickly, I can just do a file name search on topic and level. The results show the last few years' worth of resources for level/topic.
Works at work (Win7) and at home (Linux). I always have to click around a bit to get the win7 search to return results but it does work.
Most of my colleagues have a filing system something like this but a surprising number are not familiar with file search or Ctrl-F for long pages/lists.
I'm assuming filename search will be possible/easier in the new Windows?
I'm also assuming there is a content search available in some way as well? Perhaps with local indexing software? Any suggestions?
"Sent from my home built Linux running desktop."
I see what there did you.
Our core-duo laptops cope with everything we need to do. Absolutely no pressing need to upgrade or acquire new kit.
Might get a tablet to try out ebook learning materials and to see if I can write some stuff for the platform. Just PDFs with hyperlinks. Flashcards for the modern era.
"Must mention too the excellent Studio service that lets you build an entire distro to your own requirements."
Looks interesting but you need to know what you want before you make the distro image. The Debian dvd1 and dvd2 just let you install a basic one then install packages subsequently.
"OpenSUSE repositories can be almost anything including CDs, DVDs, Hard drives, local iso images, UBS directories/images/isos as well as lots of networked sources."
Excellent - where do I download a good selection of packages in DVD image form? It would be good to have an alternative to Debian in case they decide to go all cloudy.
"And remember kids, Linux is the only fully-functional piece of software you can install on your hardware without needing an internet connection to "phone home"."
If you have the patience to download* and burn the DVD1 and DVD2 and just possibly DVD3 images of Debian (Jessie/Wheezy/Squeeze) before taking a long trip you can later install a 'fully-functional piece of software' without needing an Internet connection of any kind. The result will be a fully performant desktop (actually a choice of around 5 desktop environments and umpteen window managers) with the ability to subsequently install a huge range of applications from the DVDs after the initial installation.
This includes the Debian 'main' repository only however so you might need to download a proprietary wifi firmware (a single deb package) for a laptop. I accept that support for the more exotic graphics cards using binary drivers could be problematic as a result of the dependencies needed for the kernel modules they require.
To my knowledge, Debian is the only distro that caters for offline installation of a significant selection of desktop software in this way. I'd be delighted to hear of alternatives.
*Or simply buy/borrow a DVD set from somewhere - don't underestimate the bandwidth of a jiffy bag in the post.
PS: doing a DJ live mix on Kali linux does strike me as a little - er - odd but then we are a broad church.
"Take Reg scribe Kieren McCarthy, who has a daughter born after Pluto was declassified. She's become so entranced with the recent news from Pluto that she writes letters to scientists asking for it to be reinstated again, based on how fascinating the place is."
If I have read the article correctly, that puts the little girl around 9 or 10 so this is probably OK - especially if she puts drawings in that can go on the departmental fridge.
I used to get letters from (chronological) adults IN CAPITALS and usually in purple or lilac ink claiming to have unified gravity and quantum mechanics, or to have disproved special relativity. One person that actually turned up at the lab insisted that she was sensitive to electricity and had to work away from power lines and could we 'test' her out and write a letter? The situation became slightly embarrassing when she told us that she had to catch the 3pm *train* back to town (yup - electric trains, 1kV traction power from overhead cables).
Back on thread: its words folks. Read your Karl Popper. What matters is the thinking you do about how Pluto got to be like it is.
Coat icon: mine's the one with a copy of The Logic of Scientific Discovery in one pocket and Medawar's The Art of the Soluble in the other.
"I feel like someone just set up the entire vendor hall from an awful tech conference in my living room."
http://blog.lmorchard.com/2015/07/22/the-verge-web-sucks/
Link via another well known technical forum - the one with orange.
The blog post author's use of web developer tools in Firefox coupled with the lightbeam extension have given me an idea for Maths teaching next year...
The coat: quitting while I'm ahead, thanks all.
@frank ly
Never actually had a *shutdown* on Linux other than thermal runaway when I had a problem with acpi and fan control on Ubuntu 5.10 or something. Might be worth checking the temperature as the computer tries to load the page?
Trying to load my death-test page (linked above) results in Firefox thinking about it for a bit then deciding to quit. With noscript you can actually load the page but the memory use is very high (1Gb RAM in the netbook).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-old-suburban-office-park-is-the-new-american-ghost-town/2015/07/20/b8e7653a-1f6e-11e5-bf41-c23f5d3face1_story.html
It has a number of 7000 pixel wide photos in the page with some javascript stuff resizing the images to suit resolution/dpi of page. Eats around 800Mb on Firefox which then crashes on Linux, spanners MSIE and Chrome on the Atom based 2Gb RAM Windows 7 client I use at work - system becomes unresponsive and hard drive is on all the time. According to comments on another forum, it spanners Android based phones as well. I resorted to links in a terminal to actually read the 1000 words!
PS: lots of moderation happening are we being spammed?
Coat icon: off out in the rain for the lutz
Got told off about papers on desk at a previous employer.
So I binned the lot, and then continued to bin any paper that landed on my desk. I pointed out that I 1) had no filing cabinet space 2) had to comply with 'tidy desk' policy 3) had seen a purchase requisition for a document feed scanner and document management software refused.
They gave in after about a month...
"...buy a CD (do people actually still do that?)"
That would be me.
Usually 'classical' music. Sitting at home not on shonky earbuds on buses.
If format shifting were to become legal I might be bothered to rip each CD as a single track and use an old laptop with a USB audio interface into the stereo. Would it be worth the time it took me to do the ripping, tag correcting, and the cost of the hard drive space that would be needed for backups? Perhaps in return for search-ability and building a concert programme (aka 'playlist').
"The hack and code leak has left companies like Oracle, Adobe and Microsoft scrambling to plug zero-day vulnerabilities that Hacking Team thought it had all to itself."
Tricky this zero day thing.
How many organisations are duplicating effort finding zero day defects?
How many are keeping the results of their trawls confidential?
How much of this activity is tax-payer funded?
Is there an opportunity cost there - could we not make more money just producing new shiny stuff to sell?
Is this whole thing just shadow boxing?
Coat icon: off out for a walk.
@GrumpenKraut and all hammer wielding technicians
Please, please remember your safety specs. Not joking - had a near miss a couple or three decades ago. Plastic breaks in surprising ways.
PS: Those orange plastic hammers with the head filled with lead shot you get with push together rack based shelving are very satisfying to use...
"SAY THIS TO MY FACE IN THE REAL WORLD AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS."
@Destroy...
1) Sit down and have a nice cup of tea
2) Reflect on the fact that the younger people I teach use different computing devices to complete tasks, and that a given task may result in a student switching between three OSes
3) They do not appear to be terribly bothered by the logo on the screen as long as it (sort of) works.
From observations such as these, I conclude that
4) The future of the IT systems used in large organisations may be different to what we know today.
That is all
"Anyone declining updates puts themselves at risk as well as others."
Not declining so much as re-timing.
In the home segment, could be gaming, trying to get a document finished on a slower machine, or could be just a bit cautious given the recent history of borked updates. I'm assuming the update process can tell if you are on battery and not run upgrades then. Perhaps with this new wifi thingy, the update process could tell if you were on a mobile connection and delay updates. Perhaps it should be possible to associate the update process with a named connection (e.g. home wifi) so that it will wait until that named connection is in use before starting.
In general: This sort of looks like Windows becoming Fedora for home users and RHEL for large companies. What could *possibly* go wrong with simultaneous updates of scores of millions of computers in the homes of technically unsophisticated users?
"Free food (not even checking badges), free coffee..."
OK so how much would charging a few dollars a meal bring in as a percentage of turnover?
And what would the resulting PR impact be on the Chocolate Factory Myth as being a whizzo place to work? Impressionable 20+ somethings with sneakers will still be needed in numbers I imagine.
Piet is an interesting toy programming language. The 'code' is coloured pixels in a png. There are direction and colour change based syntactical rules. I have a prime factor program as my wallpaper on t'other computer.
Radiocars: the secret is become a regular. In Brum its seven sevens, a nod, and home after teaching evening class in 10mins.
Off out for the veg off the market now. The bus will do for that.
"... why not run OpenBSD (fvwm2 default)"
A default OpenBSD install comes with an interesting window manager called cwm as well as fvwm2, you have to edit the .xinitrc (I recollect) to use it when starting X. The Calm Window Manager is quite interesting and now in Debian Jessie. Very keyboard-centric non-tiling with search based program launching a la dwm/dmenu.
@Khaptain: Upvoted for the quality of the rant.
My favoured light weight window manager is most unphotogenic. To (mis?)quote an American author, 'there is no there there'.
As others must use the testing laptop now and again, I compromise with an unsung workhorse: IceWM. Ugly as sin as installed, with a decent theme and some configuration you get a bare bones panel-at-the-bottom XP work alike. Throw in PCManFM as mentioned in the OA and the result is quite usable. No notifications, raging calm.
Google "Old-School Desktop" - my fixed gear bicycle for the mind.
"Well I wasn't around then, but in hindsight if I had been and seen how quickly things moved from "first artificial satellite" to "first man in space" to "first man on the Moon" I certainly would have thought we'd be doing bigger and better stuff than flying by Pluto and landing on a comet 46 years after Armstrong..."
Born around the time of Sputnik. I was taken to see 2001 when it came out and I can remember working out how old I would be and thinking it would be fairly OK to be on that space station.
The major thing noone had any idea about was the impact of mobile computing and a ubiquitous world-wide distributed network. Dick Tracy had his watchphone but it was essentially two-way communication. Star Trek people had their communicators but again basically walkie-talkies with sensors. Floyd phones home from a videophone kiosk.
Pint icon: congratulations to the team who ran this especially for the detailed anticipation of possible faults.
"It's just as easy to pipe a Windows app into Citrix Receiver on Linux as it is Citrix Receiver on any other operating system."
Judging by the screen shot the main advantage over running an rdp session into my Windows desktop is the way individual applications can be 'piped' into a graphical session. Am I right?
Disclaimer: civilian end user here
PS: @Khaptain: I suspect that use of the phrase in question has been ironic for at least a decade.
OK so extra code for GPAs &c going in. Most 'stock' compilations of the kernel will simply leave that code out or provide it as a binary module for dynamic loading as others have said.
Anyone have an idea about how much code came out? The x86 changes for instance could be replacing older crufty code with newer code thus eliminating some exploits (and perhaps introducing new ones).
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." -- Ken Thompson
"When the Lisa team was pushing to finalize their software in 1982, project managers started requiring programmers to submit weekly forms reporting on the number of lines of code they had written. Bill Atkinson thought that was silly. For the week in which he had rewritten QuickDraw’s region calculation routines to be six times faster and 2000 lines shorter, he put "-2000" on the form. After a few more weeks the managers stopped asking him to fill out the form, and he gladly complied."
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/103807/what-is-negative-code
@Lee D
Well, good luck with it.
I'm assuming your simulation won't result in any pupils being sent home, as that would get the head sacked pretty sharpish. Remember we fine parents for keeping Jemima/Jeremy off school for a day without reason.
You seem quite confident that none of your colleagues read this peerless journal.
"The moment a hotspot owner notices a traffic spike, they'll suspect a piggybacker, and it's not really expensive to employ a radio sniffer to triangulate and pinpoint the culprit."
@AC
You don't know much about library staff do you?
Seriously: quite sensibly my local public libraries throttle the un-authenticated wifi to around 80Kbytes/sec. You can get full speed (something like 1 to 2 Mbyte/sec but possibly that is just the top speed of my wifi card in this old Thinkpad) by authenticating and buying an access code for a certain period of time. Sounds fine to me - make a bit of money to offset the costs &c. The ones who just want to hop on to do email, update their status, or run an rdp session (latency is fine) can use the slower speed.
@TheVogon
Good point, but I think you should pull the figure down by a fairly large factor to reflect the fact that most of us would find a path like
C:\nvonsoiN/457fkdLvh/NVLSNGHHkbrb/FLLOPba.txt
a bit hard to recognise. I suspect working out which combinations of 256 characters that are significant to humans might be a hard problem though, and langage dependent.
This seems to me to be an analysis, comparison and substitution system albeit of significant complexity. The comparison phase relies on sufficient variation in the software components identified by the system to allow effective substitutions. In nature, variation is guaranteed through mutations and genetic crossing. In software, I gather that the trend is towards standardisation and the use of reusable component libraries.
Good luck with it all - I suspect there will be as many developer-less software houses in 10 years as there are now paperless offices.
"There is no way to reset from the phone. They have to trek to an office sit down log in change pwd then head off again."
Remote desktop in from home PC or local cyber cafe? I can change password in an RDP session when I have to.
Or do you have good enough density of offices in your territory?
If home Windows is like Arch (a Linux rolling distro) then I suspect there will need to be a Manjaro available soon (Arch with a month or so delay on updated packages and a nice installer) to keep support costs sane.
I might just restore Windows 7 on the refurbished Dell laptop and see what happens. I'm behind on the newer Micrsoft things.
As a Brit living in the cloudy North, I too felt the need for a bit of context.
I realise that Australia is big, and that some people (like a retired cousin of mine) live in the middle of nowhere, and I fully understand that those outlying communities may have bandwidth limitations.
I was most interested in the author's first sentence about getting a direct wireless link to a (presumably) very local provider - which implies a line of sight location and a population density high enough to provide enough customers for a wireless link based business.
I also gathered that there are locations with high bandwidth (Universities as always) which raises the possibility of co-working spaces as a possible small business idea.
Would any of the Sunny Southern hemisphere based commentards give us a simple time-line on connectivity? Is there a Web page?
Pint icon: it is Sunday and it is raining (again).
@ Phuq Witt
"Go and work for the college I used to work for."
The moment I read that, I understood.
"Oh —the hours of fun we used to have, trying to shoe-horn text into those [forms], without half of it mysteriously vanishing, or randomly changing size/colour/font/orientation! And, needless to say, being harangued all the while by management wanting it done 'yesterday'."
I was a very juniour PHB for a mercifully short period a few jobs and a decade ago. The most useful thing I did I think was to retype all the forms using a rational layout for filling in at the keyboard. Oh I had fun with that one getting people to explain *why* a given form needed to be laid out the way it was.
I got one form down from 4 nested tables to a single table with a few rows which could re-size when you typed. People had just sort of copied ancient printed 3 part sets as best they could in Word 2 or something and the results had been migrated forward by all the Word generations since sometimes via RTF. A particular favourite was the form where someone had plit a column by just drawing a line down the table with the drawing tools. OK for printing and writing on... not so good for typing into. And I got a monochrome small version of the logo approved for the header that cut file sizes down by about half a meg. Bear in mind that some of these forms were filled in and emailed thousands of times a year...
Tramp Icon: Oh, the power. I miss it for about half an hour every other month or so.
That's 1/128th which seems a bit harsh given the figures in the OA (I've rounded off).
Lumia: 8 million
Non-Lumia Microsoft: 24 million
Total Winphone: 32 million
Android: 255 million
By my arithmetic that says Winphone about 12.5% of Android.
I have no skin in this game, I'm hanging on to my old Blackberry, but a friend of a friend is very happy with her new Lumia (which takes very nice photos - I was surprised).
"Old Thinkpads never die. I know of one venerable X 20-something that is still going strong and getting regular use in a fairly tough outdoor environment."
I can't match an X20 but my X60 is chugging away fine here for piddling about on the Web and writing worksheets. Screen a bit pixelly and dim but I don't work in full sunshine if I can avoid it anyway. New no-name battery gives around 5 hours (Debian). Cheap. Plenty of spares around (e.g. keyboards just above a tenner, standardised hard drive 'caddy' means you can fit any 2.5" Sata drive and swap them round). Same psu as most of the core-duo based thinkpads (T61/X200 &c).
The X200 I got for the missus is newer and has a better screen and stays cooler. She uses Windows for the iPlayer and the Channel 4 player thing. Cheap - probably a better buy than an X60 now given the age of the X60/X61.
It will be interesting to see how this Designer Retro(R) or Brand Heritage(TM) thing goes. The analogy with cars should worry the hopeful. The Fiat 600 is no way the same as the little red tin can I remember from the 60s.
The expansion is over, saturation is here. Lenovo's head of design came up with this one...
http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-time-machine/
Microsoft have some room to expand into mobile devices as end points to their back end systems. And they may have machine learning products to sell.
What else is there? What is the next Big Thing? Anyone any ideas? What itches remain to be scratched in the corporate workaday world?
@Hey Nonny Nonny Mouse and all
I'll try that. Might be worth trying Audacity's low pass filter on the square wave track and progressively reducing the cut off frequency until your (individual) perception of the 'richness' of the square wave changes notecibly. Make a note of the cut off frequency you end up with. It might be lower than you imagine. You can play with pure data (puredata.info) as well to build up waveforms by superimposing harmonics (fourier synthesis).
I've stopped worrying about audio quality above CD or 196kb/s mp3 these days: hypersonic starts around 10 - 12kHz for me.
Random thoughts: visual processing starts in the retina and optic nerve, and our visual model of what is before us is synthesised in a couple of regions of the brain at quite a high level above the raw signal from the rods and cones. Damage to the various components of the visual cortex has subtile effects (Oliver Sacks wrote about aspects of that in one of his books).
Perceptual psychologists (the experimental ones not the boutique ones) have developed a concept of 'categorical hearing' - a musician trained in the Western tradition will tend to bin sine waves into pitch classes even when they are quite a few (hundred) cents off an actual pitch. Non-trained ears can recognise the sine waves as different at a finer level. BUT talk to a pianist who works with a string quartet (e.g. playing a piano quintet) ... the quartet musicians will drift into perfect fifth intervals instead of the equal intonation interval if they rehearse without the pianist for any length of time...
My direction of travel here is that 'music' may actually be made in our minds rather than existing as a sound field in a room, so you only need to produce *enough* of the sound field to trick the mind into making the music... mumble mumble
Coat icon: its time I took a walk. Mine's the one with the penny whistle in the pocket.
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