Posts by Doctor Syntax

Open source 'Office' options keep Microsoft running faster than ever

I stand corrected. Although Sylpheed looks superficially like the old T-bird type of interface it isn't a fork but Interlink is. Sylpheed claims to offer news but the version in the Debian repository doesn't offer it in account setup although the online manual suggests it does; so strike that one off the list.

Given the extent to which people here beef about Outlook I guess there are plenty of people still using that client. However there's scope for a good deal of improvement in any client that I've seen. What's needed is to look beyond just message handling.

Accumulated messages - in- and out-bound can represent a lot information with long term value. That applies to project work IME. Looking back to pre-email days, it would apply equally to case work. But that information is hidden away in a fairly unhelpful interface. No wonder we hear of people storing huge amounts of mail in their inbox or, even worse, their deleted folder.

In a well-run traditional paper-based office documents including incoming mail and carbons of outgoing mail would be properly filed by a filing clerk with all sorts of other, related material. We ought to be able to do as well as that by automating the filing clerk.

In practice if I'm working on a project I might have a desktop folder containing documents I've written, stuff I've researched from the web and material I've been emailed from collaborators. However if I want to read what was in those emails other than those saved attachments I've got to go scrabbling about in the email client's rudimentary filing system UI. I could copy it them out into a text document in the folder but then that has to be maintained as fresh emails are sent and received.

What would really be useful would be to not only set up a folder structure in the email client but also to link the relevant folders into the desktop folder along with all the other material and be able to click on the email threads within them and get them presented in a similar way to comments here. And wouldn't it be useful to add a personal note against an email, one that's not going to be quoted in a reply or included if I forward the email to someone else?

And, of course, what applies to email could also apply to any other form of communication the application could handle. We've only scratched the surface of what an "email" client could and should really do.

I had a lot of trouble with that. The address boxes in the setup dialog only show a limited number of characters. I had failures of DNS which may have been pasting an extra space on the end of the server address which is difficult to spot if you can't immediately see the entire string. Having that sorted out I got SSL protocol errors. Then, for no apparent reason it worked. But I couldn't see how to set up custom folders. At that point, given that it wasn't going to provide newsgroups, I gave up.

But it sounds as if you actually have tested it. It failed.

Re: Options are always good

Don't let the users know that!

Re: Options are always good

"I actually like the ribbon UI. It's a much more efficient use of space that allows significantly more features to be exposed without the need for multiple levels of dialog boxes."

There was some mention of master documents in an earlier thread. The poster said they were no longer there. Is that the case or are they lurking within the ribbon?

" the forced reboots on Windows, but it's the least bad alternative."

Actually, it isn't. The a far less bad - better, even - is not to require so many reboots. If you can swap a kernel in place so much the better, otherwise only require a reboot for a new kernel and even then let that happen at the user's discretion.

One thing which is missing is bundling in a really good "mail"/diary combination.

I put "mail" in quotes because what's really needed is an updated notion of that part of Netscape Communicator which was never just about mail. It lives on in Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Sylpheed and Interlink (and maybe other forks). However none, so far as I know, has got beyond mail, RSS reader and newsgroups with maybe IRC as an extension.

What's really needed is something more open ended so that new protocols or services can be added. When it looked like Thunderbird was going to be orphaned there was some sort of push in LibreOffice circles to adopt it but TPTB thought they should remain neutral - an opportunity missed.

Re: Options are always good

"She said she couldn't use Libre Office as the formatting wasn't exactly the same and needed to be so for her work. Also issues once formatting corrected on Airtop but saved and reopened at work on Word."

I take it that what she means be that is that the layout, pagination etc. isn't exactly the same. So if the plan is to take it back to the office and open it on Word just ignore the differences whilst you're using LibreOffice.

In any case don't try to keep the layout just so whilst you're creating the document - a character change on the first page can, if you're unlucky, cascade a long way through the document changing pagination. From past experience I wouldn't trust a different version of Word on different H/W to repeat formatting exactly. Exact formatting should be the last thing you do to a document before you save it as a PDF.

I take it she was using styles? Tabs instead of spaces? Flowing text round images instead of relying on spaces and/or tabs? Tables instead of spaces and/or tabs? It's surprising what I've found Word users doing to "format" their work.

Giant outsourcer keeps work from home, loses tax breaks. Government says 'good riddance'

Re: Shocked

I came to make the same point. Hereabouts we still have a few old mill buildings that haven't become "brownfield" housing sites. They could and should be used in this way. They're in the midst of the housing for their original workers. Given that such housing, in conservation terms one of the area's desirable features*, is ill-suited to providing charging point and public transport is useless**, restoring the old relationship between living and working should be a no-brainer once ICEs are phased out.

* This is a rural area and most of the housing is traditional stone-built but with at most a small area and a footway between it and the road.

** With the demise of the mills the area has become dormitory territory for a number of conurbations. The diversity of commuting destinations is far to great for public transport to provide single hop journeys. A long time ago I worked out my old commute 2 hours on a good day vs 40 minutes.

Google engineer suspended for violating confidentiality policies over 'sentient' AI

Re: Mechanical Turk, or just a stream of 1s and 0s?

Only if it claims to be sentient.

An even better, test, of course, would be to ask it when it would declare.

Re: Anyone who thinks this is AI

Feed it amanfrommars1's conversations.

" It says a lot of ‘empty’ vapid content."

Trained on social media.

I remember Jerry Pournelle's comment in Byte - Eliza seemed OK until you gave it a real problem like the airport losing your luggage.

Re: Mechanical Turk, or just a stream of 1s and 0s?

Ask it which hand it bowls with.

openSUSE Leap 15.4: The best desktop on the RPM side of the Linux world

Re: give it hundreds of gigabytes, rather than tens.

There's also the question of whether this is a download for a specific product or for half a dozen different products on three or four different versions of Windows - and maybe the Mac, Linux and BSD versions as well.

Re: give it hundreds of gigabytes, rather than tens.

Yes, just stick with Ext4. I think I can count the number of times I've had to reinstall the OS because of a drive corruption on the fingers of one foot.

As far as possible my policy is to use LVM and start off with partitions that are about half full and if I notice they've g0t to about three quarters or more add some from the unused LVM pool to take them back to half.

II also keep /usr/local, /opt and /srv on separate partitions that can be preserved across updates or reinstalls. I've had an upgrade that wasn't in place barf if /var wasn't reformatted so I prefer to reformat that. As mysql/mariadb defaults to keeping its data in /var as does apache2 (at least in Debian etc) I put them onto /srv where they should have been in the first place and just link them back to where the OS scripts expect to find them.

If I were to make a change to the standard Linux (and Unix in general layout) I'd have a /local which could contain a /local/etc, /local/usr and /local/var to hold anything to be preserved over reformats. Any settings in /local/etc would override those in /etc.

Paranoid, moi? Yes, an proud of it.

Re: give it hundreds of gigabytes, rather than tens.

If a separate OS partition gets corrupted it can be dealt with by reinstalling. If it takes /home with it the best you can hope for is that there wasn't much work done since the last backup.

Stick with the most reliable format for both.

Re: OpenSuse is a good distro, with a few bugs

at the start it shows x GB, 1915 packages remaining. Even when you get to 99% and a few MiB remaining it still shows 1915 packages.

I envisage a development manager somewhere talking to a minion: "We have to do something about the progress indicator." Minion: "Why? It's not erratic, it counts down exactly to the finish and it's correct all the way up to that." Manager: "That's the problem. It doesn't meet industry standards."

Whatever you do, don't show initiative if you value your job

Re: Either James was ready to fly solo on the update or he wasn't

You can have all the reviews you want. They'll make no difference when someone decides to try out a bright idea of their own.

Re: Once bitten...

"He just told me to go fix it, fix it quickly, and don't do it again."

If it was something that could be fixed quickly he could afford to be fairly laid back.

Re: Backup and restore capability for mission critical files?

It was a black box. Until opened nobody realised there was a cat inside it - and it had claws.

Re: "So was James truly the guilty party?"

From the story the company actually had a training system on which James was trained. Although he was a newbie he was, reasonably, believed to be trained and to know what he was doing and, after all and like everyone else, he had to go solo some time. It's how you get to go from being a newbie to no longer a newbie. At some point a new employee has to be trusted to do the job for which they've been trained.

If he was installing the new system from CD-ROM he needed to have admin rights. This being XP it's entirely possible that the the system wouldn't even run without the user having admin rights.

Change management procedures aren't going to be much use if someone goes ahead and ignores them and does something that isn't in them. The procedures would be unlikely to forbid removing the duplicate files, They probably didn't say not to format C: either. After all, nobody had done either of those on the production machine before.

Re: Backup and restore capability for mission critical files?

Backups? Those were what James deleted.

This was a newly installed version - installed by James - and, reading between the lines, it appears that the install created backups - AKA duplicate files - and at startup checked tor their existence. It seems that the system was designed to do exactly what you suggest and did it so as to be idiot proof until nature produced a bigger idiot.

Re: Where were the procedures ?

In that sort of environment it would be surprising if there weren't documented procedures. They're not much use if they're ignored and it sounds as if James was just the type to do that. I suppose he never found himself anywhere near the emergency stop button.

TSMC and China: Mutually assured destruction now measured in nanometers, not megatons

Re: What was that ?

But makes it a little less pleasant except in the breaks between the rain.

Ah. Someone from the TWAI* school of archaeology.

Back in the '60s there was this growing tendency to decry any explanation of a cultural change that involved an invasion. Undoubtedly the explanation was used too freely and led to ideas such as deriving Irish passage graves from the Pyramids (C14 dating scotched that one by reversing the chronology). I think there was also a psychological element - the main proponents were people who'd been threatened with, experienced or taken part in invasions during WWII and now had antipathy to them. Personally I was never convinced that, for example, all those bronze swords were simply distributed by peace-loving arms salesmen who'd never be tempted to use their own products.

The argument seemed to be that you couldn't invoke an invasion without there being a contemporary written account. That worried me on the basis that by definition there couldn't have been a prehistoric invasion anywhere because pre-historic periods are those with no written history. Since we have had a written record we have had multiple invasions in all direction between Ireland, Wales, England and Scotland (or Pictlland if you prefer**) and been threatened with invasion by or invaded most parts of continental Europe within reach to say nothing of colonising*** numerous other parts of the world. Given that record the idea of a long prehistoric period of peaceful acculturation with no invasions seemed quite incredible. Yet the notion stuck.

More recently, however, DNA has started to reveal that we did have a series of incursions. One, which I found particularly interesting, was between Bronze Age and Iron Age. Looking at my own and other sites in N Ireland there was evidence of particularly intense forest clearance - tree pollen levels comparable with modern times - which I rather thought matched George Eogan's Later Bronze Age phases followed up by very complete regeneration for several centuries. There was then gradual clearance/reoccupation in the Iron age with a very distinct break between. The dendrochronologists backed up the intense LBA clearance - sub-fossil oak of that period becomes very scarce.

OK I should have said the area currently occupied by the UK and the Republic of Ireland. You should note, however, that "British Isles" is terminology you introduced.

* My own abbreviation for for There Wasn't An Invasion.

** The Scots, having come from Ireland.

*** As have several other European countries

A great diversion. I'd never realised that Phillips owned Mullard or their role in developing the pentode. Thinking about the "Phillips" TV I realised it's a story comparable to HP of the once mighty losing its way.

I think the the fall of Rome is a contender for the title of last multi-regional collapse. Nevertheless the Bronze Age collapse does seem to have been very widespread. It seems from DNA evidence that the Bronze Age population of the UK was replaced by the Iron Age just as the Mesolithic was replaced by the Neolithic.

Re: Sure....

Vary likely China would install their own military manglement and sabotage the plant much more effectively. All the workers have to do is follow the instructions exactly.

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

Re: Stop wasting you’re time!

Take yourself to a classical concert. Then you can find out what real music sounds like.

'Red-rated' legacy IT gets refresh in UK as US battles theirs with bills

Re: "Digital Boot Camps"

This is a good concept providing the boot is applied to those who don't make the grade.

Re: "Digital Boot Camps"

Anyone in the legislative or policy making worlds thinks that the plebs will react as they, TPTB, intend. What they fail to do is look at what they're planning from the PoV of those plebs with their own desires and motivations to work out what the reaction will really be.

"50 of the most frequently used digital services will be upgraded at the same time"

What could possibly go wrong?

Microsoft forgot to renew the certificate for its Windows Insider subdomain

Re: Key Manager Plus?

"Can MS not just purchase Key Manager Plus from Zoho or similar?"

Be careful what you wish for and remember what buying software means in Microsoft's way of thinking.

Re: Too big to fail?

My experience was that it failed to flag "Microsoft" emails as junk.

Didn't they let the main domain registration expire once and somebody renewed it for them?

No more fossil fuel or nukes? In the future we will generate power with magic dust

"power would be generated by encouraging the workers to pedal continuously to generate power and achieve happiness."

Nowadays money is generated for Peleton by encouraging workers to pedal continuously and achieve happiness. Unfortunately for Peleton it no longer seems to generate enough happiness for the pedallers and hence not as much money as Peleton would like.

Re: Give it time

I need to have football pitches explained in terms of something else so I can comprehend them (or how much space they're wasting to be specific).

"Well Windscale (now Sellafield) did that pretty much all the way through the '50s, then caught fire, and there are still people living in Cumbria with the correct number of toes."

I had a colleague who'd worked there at the time and was involved in the clean-up. It couldn't have left him very radioactive as he was measuring low levels of weak radioactiviy in our C14 dating lab.

Re: Forgetting the Celts then......

Who is "us" in all this?

GitHub drops Atom bomb: Open-source text editor mothballed by end of year

Re: That could be...

Vi needs no apology. It is a tool to do a job very efficiently. No faffing with WIMP. As with any tool, you learn to use it so it becomes second nature and then the only criterion is how little effort, in this case keys pressed, goes into the tool's operation compared to what goes into the work. There was discussion above about short cuts which an experienced user relies on. The entire vi UI is of the same nature as those short cuts

Over 35 years ago I was in a user organisation and we had one of the early Unix ports to different H/W - Z8000 The tape with vi on it hadn't been included but we had a different editor, (The Rand editor; whatever happened to that?) Experience with that saw me translated into the world of IT for the 2nd half of my career and into London

First day at the new job with a more regular Unix system. No Rand editor available, use vi. That day I worked round a vague memory of what I'd read of vi, headed straight for Dillons after work and bought a book on it. I quickly got enough out of the book to get by and picked up other bits as I needed them. That book is still on my shelves somewhere and is as relevant to its subject as it was back then; so is what I learned from it and which has become second nature.

Threat and risk specialists signal post-COVID conference season is back on

Cases are ticking up again in the UK.

Microsoft brings tabs to File Explorer

Re: Another productivity disabler

"Extra wasted time trying to move between tabs rather than just dragging between windows."

It'll be OK if you can disable them. Tabs have been on KDE's file manager for ages & I keep not using them for the reason you say.

Apple gets lawsuit over Meltdown and Spectre dismissed

"paid more for their iDevices than they were worth because Apple knowingly omitted the defect."

Were they sure that was the reason?

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

Re: Some things never change

When all you have is a hammer....

Yes, of course they have something other than PowerPoint, they just don't know it.

"And O and 0 interchanged quite often"

You had both? Luxury.

"Ahh, the fun of documents from people new to word processing who feel it is a great idea to fill the document with Comic Sans and WordArt"

I've put a few out of print books on the web (we decided it was easier than risking the money on a reprint) starting with the authors' WP files. Yes - Comic Sans to be changed. Layouts constructed with tabs and spaces instead of tables. Text laid out round images with tabs and spaces instead of setting wrap off.

Well done to the original typesetters for getting it onto the pages.

Twitter shareholders to vote on Elon Musk's acquisition

"Musk signed a 100% specific performance clause"

That's very different from real money up front.

Re: hey, what's $1 billion to the world's richest man?

They have to get the billion out of him if he walks away. Consensus seems to be that these disputes are a ploy to lower either the purchase price or the break price. The money's not actually on the table and that makes a difference.

Vivaldi email client released 7 years after first announcement

Re: I loved the Opera mail client

Dammit sprint, not spring. Although spring next year or a few more years after that does fit the approach.

Re: A good first effort

For some reason it now connects. It will set up some services it recognises from the email address. Otherwise you have to enter server addresses & the like. The display of server address truncates it although there is space for a few more letters in the box. Email address is similarly truncated in the server login ID field the truncation occurs at odd lengths, different for the two fields.

The truncation makes troubleshooting harder. Accidentally include a trailing space in the copied address (I think that was the problem) and DNS fails. Having got that sorted I got SSL protocol errors. Trying a few hours later it finally worked with no evident changes. I'd exchanged emails with MSP support - maybe they changed something.

Other oddities in the UI: it insists on adding a sig - choices are above or below the message but none is not an option. The default sig, as is all too common these days, is to pat itself on the back. The sig defaults to this in the text box; I couldn't delete it directly but I could overwrite it with a space and then delete the space.

It claims to have custom folders. If there's a way to create them it's well concealed so I don't know if they're better than I'm used to and as this was the sole motivation for trying it that's a show stopper.

From my PoV there seems to be a more work needed on the UI.

It supports RSS news feeds but not newsgroups.

Not for me.

Re: I loved the Opera mail client

I think it's the Agile thinking. Get out an MVP and anything else can wait for a later spring. Much later.