Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I think the Windows situation is that you use it whether you like the changes or not, MS give you no choice. People didn't pay to "upgrade" from 7, they failed to avoid it. Windows users have no choice. Perhaps the take-away from these comments is that Windows is for people who get confused by choice and will put up with all sorts of vendor's abuse to avoid it.
"Converting Unix to a PC platform & updating for security & tech changes would have been fine."
It's been done several times.
The Sys V version was fine but expensive. Not just fine but, in Linux's early days it was streets ahead in terms of quality It was called Xenix and then SCO. Unfortunately instead of competing by lowering the price for desktop users SCO was taken over by someone who had the bright idea of suing IBM for it contributions to Linux. It didn't work out well. In my view SCO could have owned the Unix on desktop market but they blew it.
BSD versions are also fine but fragmented in a different way to Linux. They have lost out to Linux. It's not quite clear why. Maybe Linux was the new shiny. Maybe, despite what's said elsewhere, the community preferred the GPL Maybe it's because there were already several BSD versions against a single Linux kernel lineage.
You have a choice of ways to develop your visually impaired interface for the web.
One is to insist that every website can be accessed text only.
A second is to develop a browser that presents itself to websites as some browser they recognise, tracking that browser's changes but goes straight to voice. You'd also need to develop voice-based equivalents to all the other software that might be needed.
A third is to use an existing browser and only develop a screen to voice layer to sit over it, at the same time gaining access to the massive inventory of other screen-based S/W.
Which gives you more bang per buck?
BTW searching the Debian repository for Braille brings up 45 packages of which 6 are installed by default.
No problem. I have applications on this Linux box which I run at least weekly for which I suspect there are no equivalents on Windows almost all of which are part of the distro's repositories*.
Updates? A negligible issue - the OS checks for updates on a daily basis and if there are any they can be downloaded and installed without fuss, only an OS kernel - infrequent - needs a reboot and even then only when its convenient.
* Personally I use LibreOffice from its own website rather than the older one in the Debian repository so I do have to update that myself. Other distros might use the more recent versions anyway and some Debian users might just be content with the older version.
No, they specifically said they didn't know where to get Linux Mint. There really is no excuse for saying that when all they have to do is type Linux Mint into Google. That will take them to the Mint website and download is a further click away via a prominent link on the home page.
I'm not sure whether you'd want to call me a penguin or whether I'd answer to that but here both SWMBO and myself use Linux daily. Purpose: to get stuff done. Stuff includes researching history, maintaining local history website, including preparing some of our out of print books for PDF download (me), researching material for patchwork class (her) and preparing the class hand-outs from photos and scanned notes (me).
Tools include the usual office suite (LibreOffice), browser and email, various PDF tools, principally Okular, pdfunite and ocrmypdf, various graphics tools, principally Gwenview, Pinta & Gimp, dia, a few tools produced with Lazarus and good old vi is ideal for taking out a lot of OCR artefacts from scanned books so that clean text can be pasted into the word processor. NextCloud handles backups and transfer between the two laptops. Some of those, or equivalents, could be found on Windows but I think I might be struggling to get stuff done equally effectively without some of the others.
Oddly enough there are commentards here slating open source for exactly the opposite reason - too many variations that don't look like anything else.
The problem most of us find is that in both FOSS and proprietary there are too many who have ideas kicking around in their heads for how unbroken UI/UX could be made better. Would that they would keep them in their heads; the the rest of us wouldn't be wishing we had a chance to kick said heads.
"We all saw how Windows 8 was received when it tried something else."
Ubuntu tried a similar monstrosity with the Unity desktop. It was released before W8. Were Microsoft flattering Ubuntu by imitating them?
Actually what both sets of developers were doing was imitating the mobile UI thinking it would be a Good Idea. It wasn't.
That line of thinking was the exception that proves the rule. The rule is that the UI needs to be tuned to the tasks it has to support. No wonder the successful ones have evolved along similar lines. W95 and its successors and the various Unix desktops adapted features from earlier GUIs including CDE and from each other. (Note that in the Unix/Linux world we had multiple workspaces long before Windows and the option of tabbed interfaces in file managers which I saw was recently been touted as something new in W11 Insider builds. Microsoft copying KDE?)
As a biologist I'm quite happy with this. Evolution will often converge on similar designs and mutations - in UI terms, all those variant ideas you complain about - will throw up the good and the bad novelties for selection to promote or dispose of as appropriate.
Where are these half-done projects? Not in the repositories of conservative distros such as Debian. Poor us. That restricts us to a mere 60,000 plus working packages.
If by half-done you mean still being actively developed lets remind ourselves that not only does that apply to an awful lot of non-Linux S/W but also that mobile app stores will treat apps that don't receive frequent updates as being abandoned and will eject them.
"I'd go a bit further: I just want something which works in a way which I'm familiar with."
But what are you familiar with?
LibreOffice, for instance, will be familiar to anyone used to the original MS Office which is something you can't say about later versions of MS Office. (There's an option in LO of switching to something which I think is intended to follow later MS Office but I don't have experience of one & haven't tried the other so can't confirm that.) Cross-platform applications, for instance browsers will usually be as consistent as possible.
The UI changes of Office bring up another point. Proprietary stuff is apt to keep changing the UI. The FOSS world is more split; some want to keep playing with UIs, some realise it's not a good idea so it's actually easier to have a more conservative UI with FOSS. I simply don't grock people saying it's too difficult to switch to FOSS when their proprietary vendors are forcing them to re-adapt every few years.
"A system that can do all that can be packed into virtually no space at all."
You artfully didn't say what applications. A fully featured word processor. A software development system: editor, compiler, debugger etc. Raster graphics editor. Vector graphics editor. PDF creator & viewer. A GIS system. An RDBMS system....
These things aren't feature creep, they're some of the reasons why we might want to buy a computer and I for one do not, repeat NOT, wnat to be dependent on hanging on to somebody else's computer to do them. And you're not going to cram them or even a useful subset of them onto a floppy; let alone choose a subset that would please more than a fraction of potential users.
"the single worst part of UI design is to waste valuable vertical space"
That assumes vertical space is the limiting factor. With a wide spreadsheet or an image in landscape form or even two documents in portrait form side-by-side it's horizontal space that matters. If you need all those interface elements they have to go somewhere and a good many applications enable the user to choose to hide some elements if that's appropriate.
It's surprising the number of times I come across some how-to for some GUI and the user is instructed to start typing a command on the search bar. Discoverability seems to work better when there are few things to discover. When there's a lot of options you have to know what you want.
You're looking at it wrong. All those outlier designs aren't the result of somebody in a team that's supposed to be working to some other plan going off-piste. They're people, or small groups of like-minded people doing their own thing because they want to. Generously, they're making what they do available to you if you want to use it. If you don't, then don't; nobody's making you use it. But why are you taking offence and being rude about their efforts? They're not being rude to you for not using what they make.
"Mint seems popular but I don't even know quite what Mint is, or where to get it"
There's this thing called Google...
Alternatively: https://linuxmint.com/download.php
Depending on the age of the laptop the Lite version here might be better: https://zorin.com/os/download/
Neither of these should be difficult to use. (Must get round to upgrading by cousin-in-law's Zorin. She's in her late eighties or maybe nineties. She's been using Zorin for years, ever since she got hit by ransomware.)
"The documents themselves wouldn't reside in a file and folder architecture, but instead would be more like object-storage; metadata tagging done part manually and part automatically describing the contents and thus retrievable by something like a natural language query."
Forwarding one of those as an email attachment sounds like fun.
"ROX failed for the reason that so many UIs do - not enough support from the app developers."
App developers would probably say not sufficient support for app developers although you go on to make much the same point. Perhaps a GTK and/or Qt compatibility layer would have helped.
I'd also change the emphasis of your last point. Users use the computer do do stuff; don't blame the user base, blame UX designs that get in their way.
I think the reason most desktop implementations follow the W95 - W2K tradition is that Microsoft hit the sweet spot with those designs.
I'd used HP VUE and later CDE on SCO. Their disadvantage was that the task bar with its huge graphics of desk drawers just took up so much screen space. The minimised window icons were also big. The slimmed down W95 approach handled these better. OTOH other aspects of CDE were common to earlier versions of Windows and ran on into W95 and its Microsoft successors and into Unix desktops although misguided UX designers can't resist trying to fix what isn't broken.
Wasn't the original IBM work based on character interfaces? That still lives on in the menus that typically say
File Edit View ... Help
with their drop-down sub-menus. IBM also contributed to CDE but the CDE style of doing things is something I first encountered from HP as VUE.
"We use the arm to scoop the dirt transported over the lander, and we slowly let the dirt fall onto the deck of the lander so that the dirt is carried over by the solar winds across the solar panels, cleaning it."
If only the arm could reach far enough to give the panels a gentle tap...
That's a measure of precision, not the accuracy*. Also, the standard deviation of a Poisson distribution is skewed, not noticeably for a large number but very significantly for a small count so although the figure can't be much less (you can't have a negative count) it can be larger.
This sentence caught my attention: "Still, he claimed the internal estimates for the past four quarters have reported spam users make up less than five per cent of all accounts.". If they have estimates for the past four quarters it suggests more than a one-off sample was taken. Does it mean one sampling per quarter? One per month? One per day? And how do they decide what's a bot? And does it matter is a spammer is a bot or a human?
There's a reason why scientific reports explain how figures are obtained. You'd think that with the amounts of money at stake financial reports would be held to the same standard.
* The difference between accuracy and precision: Imagine you have a 100m surveyor's tape measure. It's marked off in metres, centimetres and millimetre. The last allows you to measure to the nearest mm. That's the precision. But the tape is a cloth tape and it's stretched by 1% so your measurement of 100m to the nearest mm is in fact in error by 1m. That's a failure of accuracy.
It's three sets of requirements. The Good Friday agreement - no hard border in Ireland, the Union - no hard borders within the United Kingdon and Getting Brexit Done, choose any two.
It was pointed out that this was one of the problems with Brexit when the stupid idea was first mooted.
"The NI Protocol was indeed signed in bad faith"
Indeed it was. BoJo was caught between the requirements to keep the Good Friday arrangements going, preserving the Union and his Getting Brexit Done*. So he did what he always does, deals with the immediate most immediate aspect letting something else go until it becomes a problem when he'll back track, bouncing back and forth from one to another. His resolution to that quandary was an arrangement whereby NI was still in the customs union and the rest of the no longer quite as United Kingdom wasn't. It was made quite clear at the time that he'd be prepared to tear up part of the Brexit agreement when the Union issue became a problem. Bad faith.
The Union issue has now become an problem so he's going to take the next step, breaking the Brexit agreement. Clearly he'd prefer to negotiate a fudge with the EU whereby they let goods "for NI only" pass through unchecked. Nobody who remembers** the old days pre-EU membership and the smuggling that took place despite the border checks will believe that "NI only" bit. Why should the EU agree to creating a huge back door?
Then he'll get leaned on by Biden about the Good Friday agreement. Goodness knows what he'll do about that but whatever it is he'll find himself getting hemmed into a tighter and tighter triangle. He probably reckons that with a bit of luck he'll have left office and it'll be somebody else's problem.
* Let's be quite clear about this. The Good Friday Agreement was predicated on both sides of the border being in a customs union. That was needed to avoid the border customs posts and hence a hard border. The only way to Get Brexit Done and avoid a customs border at the Irish border was to create a customs border in the Irish Sea instead so that N Ireland remained in the customs union. That, of course weakens the United Kingdom's Union. It's a choose any two situation.
** I remember one occasion when a whole bus-load of Christmas shoppers from the South descended on Lisburn, they couldn't wait to go the extra 10 miles into Belfast.
"So whether or not the UK retains notional adequacy, it will still have to comply with the GDPR when processing the personal data of persons in the EU (EEA)"
The UK as a whole doesn't process such data. Businesses that want to process personal data will have to comply.
But if adequacy is not maintained will the EU accept that such businesses are complying with GDPR? Remember where Schrems keeps tripping up arrangements with the US: it's the US's surveillance legislation making it impossible to comply. There seems to be every chance that UK changes will make it equally impossible. The difference between the US & the UK is that the EU seems prepared to keep creating fig-leaf arrangements which then take Schrems some time to tear down because it means going to court and I don't see them extending that sort of arrangement to us. Why would they? They have much less need to do so and HMG keeps thumbing its nose at them.
"Still, the UK has generally been willing to try and strengthen DP rules above & beyond those in force in other European countries."
In the past maybe. What they're saying now is that now they don't have to they're not going to do that. This is removing protection from the general public, including you and me and yet the EU, putting that protection in place is called undemocratic.
Their case seems to have been based on the petition clause. A very quick DDG brings up this “Congress shall make no law … abridging … the right of the people … to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
How a right to petition the govt applies to a commercial contract doesn't seem obvious to me. Neither does equating Oracle with "the people". It didn't seem obvious to the Supreme Court either. I doubt it seemed obvious to anyone except Oracle's lawyers.
I'm with you in terms of cyclists needing to take responsibility but in terms of testing it's not just what was called the golden path in another commentary that has to be tested, it's the ability to cope when things aren't has they should be. That should apply to all testing but especially where safety is concerned.
You know it's bleedin' obvious, I know it's bleedin' obvious and the Yank lurker knows it's bleedin' obvious. Now how do we persuade all those pouring money into it and governments offering their citizens as crash test dummies that it's bleedin' obvious. Somebody needs to say it.
As several commentards have already said a figure like that needs a confidence limit unless the sample size was so large as to render the limit negligible. If that were s sample of 100 of which 5 were rated as bots that's not negligible. if it were 100 bots counted in a sample of 20,000 it's looking better and maybe good enough for the purpose in hand.
Actually it's skewed. With a larger population that wouldn't show but 5 minus 3 SDs is less than zero but 5 plus 3 SDs is feasible. The ancient rule of thumb remembered from my student days is that you should look for a quantity of at least 30 so I'd want a sample of about 600 to give 30 or so bots.
But then there's the question of how the 100 (or 600) are chosen. If they're weighted towards the early days bot accounts might be rarer than if they're weighted to more recent times. Ideally the age and geographic distribution should at least resemble that of accounts as a whole. If we don't know something about the sampling process the results don't mean too much but maybe that's too much of a complication for Wall Street.
