Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I can only think of one use case: let's run LO in the browser because we can. For any use case involving editing a file on a remote server there are better solutions,
If only port 80 is open on the firewall Own/NextCloud will let you edit locally and manually upload through the browser. You can cut out the browser by using the O/NC desktop client to sync selected local directories with the remote. If you don't want to have the file local at all both LibreOffice and, AFAIK, MS Office have Open Remote available through WebDav. It's a while since I tried this on LO and memory says it was a bit of a faff; that might be because I didn't use it enough but no doubt it would be easier to make it a bit slicker than to get this idea working.
If SSH is also available use X over SSH to run an X-server locally and LO on the remote. An X server was the first use case I had for Windows? Is it still possible to get one?
I think an office suite would be the wrong tool. What happens if two people try to edit the same passage at the same time? You'd need to have locks on selections or on the current location of everyone's cursor (think one one person doing character by character deletions while someone else is trying to type there). It would end up more like a transactional database at the back end with an HTML generating front end....
Hold on there. That's a Wiki. That's what you need. Then you can typeset the result.
" Paramount is the multi-user part, where documents are accessed simultaneously by the users. No need to do too fancy formatting. Final formatting is a one-man job anyway and can be done in a local LO copy."
I wonder how the practicalities of that work out. If two people want to express the same thing differently somebody's going to have to arbitrate.
Maybe an alternative approach would be to save the working text in a flatter format - maybe .fodt or .md - managed with Git so the final (human) editor does the merging and formatting.
"all work-arounds for problems you wouldn't have if you just compiled statically"
If any of the libraries you compile in has a vulnerability that won't be fixed by the user updating the shared version.
A better starting point would be to set the minimum dependencies as the oldest versions of every library that provides all the facilities you use.
Cooing? If that's all they're doing think yourself lucky. They're apt to arrive at first light and start stamping on our roof which isn't thin, blue Welsh slate but sandstone slates the best part of an inch thick. It's amazing how birds which are light enough to fly make a din suggestive of wearing hob-nail boots.
We, the employees, united in giving the union the push; employers are not the only ones who can be self-serving.
Looking after my own interests vis-a-vis the complacent employers was solved by giving them the push. It came as a surprise to them that someone they'd assumed would be safely trapped in a specialised corner of science had alternative skills that were marketable elsewhere. It was amazing how a much over-due promotion was offered immediately, outside the annual review cycle without the formality of a board. I was tempted to try to negotiate it back-dated a couple of years without actually committing to stay but instead took pleasure in explaining exactly why I was turning them down. I still have their replay protesting that it wasn't like that at all. Liars. I suspect that if I'd accepted and turned down the external offer there'd have been a board after all and all sorts of other complications.
I had a lad in my team who ended up spending the night in a telephone box on some station out in Essex.
Not so much Heathrow as the central London terminal* that used to be near Gloucester Rd Underground station. Some of us had been to a British Ecological Society conference in London and rolled up there to find bad weather had stopped all the flights to Belfast until morning. The cross section of society we met there was most of the rest of the QUB Botany department who'd been at some other conference.
*This was before Central Line had been extended out to Heathrow. You checked in there & were taken out West by bus.
In my one and only experience of a union (I don't count the PCG as I regarded it as an industry business association I discovered that it was to maintain the earnings of members of unions for other parts of the Civil Service, not the scientists, and possibly the permanent union officials. Despite sending someone along to face the flack they faced with resignation of most of their members there. Someone challenged that they publish his letter of resignation in their newsletter (a newsletter I never recall even seeing) which they ducked on the grounds that they didn't publish letters from non-members.
No. Never came across a union that had any intentions of doing me anything worth-while.
Back in the '80s I worked for a body shop that had most of its employees out on customer sites (I ended up on site after about 2 days in the office & apart from reviews was never in HQ for the rest of my 2 years.
Once a month they arranged a get-together in a pub in central London. The hazard of that was dozing off on the train home & overshooting the station. Not great getting off the train at Princes Risborough & then discovering after it left that that was the last train of the day in either direction.
"The traditional method is for banks to figure out patterns to your purchase activities, and stop any that are sufficiently shady. "
You mean like HSBC blocking the card every time I tried to buy dial-up access from a hotel phone line because it was in a not-spot and I needed to review another client's logs? Every week for a four week contract. Even after they'd been told.
Yup, works really well, right up to the time when you need to make a change to your spending requirements.
I repeat my comment I made on Monday's article. We shouldn't expect it, we should require it.
As regards a company mailbox the employee might well not expect confidentiality on traffic there. The company, however, will need security against third parties.
We take it for granted that snail mail in a sealed envelope will be delivered unopened other than with the sanction of a court warrant. There is nothing new about the idea of secure communication. It's insecure communication that's a novelty. Mass surveillance comes under the heading of just because you can do something it doesn't necessarily make it a good idea.
"There are plenty of other cases too, such as layered formats such as .tar.gz or formats that package multiple elements in a single .zip. Using magic all you see is the outer container."
This can be dealt with.
.odt, for instance, is such a format. A few bytes into the file are the strings 'mimetypeapplication/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text' and 'content.xml'. Likewise a .deb starts with the string '!<arch>' and then continues a little further in with strings indicating the contents.
The system is capable of using this.
"MS's bone headed idea of hiding the extension but still using it to decide what to run if double clicked."
I'd used KDE's Create New facility to create a LibreOffice text file but not noticed when I renamed it that I'd overwritten the whole of 'LibreOffice Writer.odt' instead of just the first part, leaving it without the extension. LO opened it OK and saved it, the GUI showed the correct icon. Nothing I used needed to see the extension to know what it was. I didn't notice at all until someone I'd emailed it to replied to say she couldn't open it with LO in Windows.
I doubt it's that unlikely that any attempts to work round the issue will get past the EU courts as the stumbling block in the US remains. However, unless the court specifically says it's never going to work they'll just kick the can down the road by bringing out a new scheme to replace the old, more or less like investigative powers in the UK.
"Presumably though, Google hopes that once businesses are paying for Google IDs so their staff can use Chrome OS Flex, they'll decide to save costs by eliminating other web apps."
If you want something that boots into a browser as a thin client why not just use the OS of your choice configured to boot into a browser and have your own choice of web service without having a Google ID if Google isn't your choice? You could even run your own service (e.g.NextCloud) to keep your data under your own control.
"This Linux user would maintain that (a) 4GB is not little, and (b) a 64-bit system ought to be capable of a RAM upgrade to more than 4GB. Otherwise, what was its point?"
This Linux user has an MSI nettop that is 64-bit, cannot theoretically be upgraded beyond 4Gb thanks to an Atom processor and cannot practically be upgraded beyond 3Gb thanks to 1Gb soldered in memory. What's its point? It's small and light and just fine to take into libraries or archives to transcribe documents.
What is this obsession with dark mode on this, that & the other. Even OS News has got into it. Maybe it's time to give UI designers VT100s to let them see what we've been getting away from all these days.
And "simplified menus"? Either the menu was fine as was or should have been fixed long ago. Get it right once and then stop tinkering. It just goes to show these jobs shouldn't even exist - idle hands and all that.
"So during a pandemic and a crumbling health care system the government appointed someone in haste and are now getting into trouble for not doing a proper equality report."
Appointing someone in haste in an emergency is reasonable (even if it has to be on the basis of "someone we know") with one proviso: the someone appointed in haste should be competent to do the job.
Bingham most certainly was.
Harding most certainly wasn't.
If "equality report" means evidence of an effective process, however rapid, to establish competence before making the appointment then that's fair enough. It's essentially saying the job wasn't done right. The really alarming thing is that whoever made the decision to appoint Harding probably didn't even realise how bad a decision it was - they just looked at the job she'd done previously and not how well she did it.
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