Posts by Doctor Syntax

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

Re: Compatibility and elephants

It sounds like you want my Devuan/KDE set-up but with W7 style Windows decorations (there's a whole slew of them to download) instead of my more old-style square ones.

"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.

Re: There's a more fundamental question

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.

Re: Not that unreasonable

"automatics used more fuel than manuals"

And that excess CO2 they put into the atmosphere is still with us.

Re: The curse of overchoice

"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.

Re: Menus

I suppose the hamburger menu has its place on the limited screen real-estate of a mobile. I'm not convinced it earns its place on a laptop or PC screen.

Re: Less is more.

"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.

Re: So what should a a 21st century UI look like?

"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.

Re: You forgot the third ...

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.

Re: Brilliant and exhaustive work of research

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.

Re: The curse of overchoice

The OP said "If anyone can point to an ISO that would work like a Windows install disk would, I'd be very grateful."

Re: The curse of overchoice

"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.)

Re: Concepts

"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.

Re: Compatibility and elephants

"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.

Re: Brilliant and exhaustive work of research

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.

Oracle really does owe HPE $3b after Supreme Court snub

"Oracle aren't a nice bunch, but they aren't stupid, and they were right about Itanium being doomed."

HP's Itanium customers might also have come to that conclusion. Nevertheless is they had an investment in it they might reasonably have expected it to be supported for the life of the H/W.

Re: Happy Days

HPE isn't the screwing-over-of-ink-users company.

"Licensing could also be a lot more expensive to deter the use of it as well."

That doesn't seem a deterrent to Oracle customers in general.

Re: First Amendment

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.

Cars in driver-assist mode hit a third of cyclists, all oncoming cars in tests

Re: Cyclists are road users, too

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.

Re: Pedestrians?

Thanks for mentioning that exception, half the walkers round here aren't aware of that. (The other half aren't aware of any of it.)

Re: "three leading systems" WTF?

The manufacturer's call centre or the ambulance service?

Re: Try Scooters in Madrid

Nobody had a passenger to open the door?

Re: So technology works as intended...

So autonomous cars should only be driven at high speeds to avoid accidents? Or have I missed something?

Re: So technology works as intended...

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.

Elon Musk 'violated' Twitter NDA over bot-check sample size

"what method they use for working out whether an account is a bot or not."

Suspend the accounts and see who or what complains?

Re: What's the endgame?

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.

Re: Wait a second...

It's up to the shareholders to accept it. The board may recommend acceptance but the share's he's offering to buy belong to the shareholders, not the board. There may also be regulators taking an interest. It's not over 'til it''s over.

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.

Re: violate ?

The market is affected as much by who says it as by what was said. If he says something that gets interpreted as an attempt to weasel out of his bid or reduce the price it makes no difference whether it was true or not. Then let's consider your assumption that it was, in fact, true...

"Any sensible random sampling process is fine."

Without knowing how the 100 were selected it's impossible to say whether it was a sensible sampling process.

Lawyers say changes to UK data law will make life harder for international businesses

Re: BREXIT was a massive and expensive lie.

The lie was saying it was a good idea. We will now have to follow rules into which we no longer have an input or suffer the consequences. You might call that taking back control but it doesn't look like it to me.

Re: And nothing much will change for 95% of companies

The problem I see with this is that if the prevailing legislation doesn't meet GDPR requirements and something like the proposed public body data sharing comes into play then it might be impossible to claim GDPR compliance.

Never mind, companies can just set up an EU subsidiary to do what would otherwise have been done in the UK, or even just move the whole business to the EU. In the meantime the UK remains the best place in the whole world for something or other. What was it? Ah, yes: taking back control.

Re: And nothing much will change for 95% of companies

If the EU decides that the new legislation is no longer sufficient to support adequacy then at best companies might have a lot of additional hoops to jump through to do business with EU residents.

A Schrems style situation might even become a Schrems plus. Whilst the consumer rights side of the EU pushes GDPR etc the trading side doesn't really want to avoid doing business with the US and keeps inventing new fig leaves for Schrems to tear down. They might be less inclined to do the same for a country they regard as uncooperative.

Re: And nothing much will change for 95% of companies

GDPR is written into the current UK Data Protection Act, give or take a little wriggle room for HMG to indulge in its data fetish. That means it applies in the UK anyway.

The scope is a little different to what you say, however. The restriction would be on forms of business that involve collecting personal data so business to business transactions might not be affected nor consumer cash transactions. OTOH GDPR applies to EU citizens as a whole, not just Irish citizens.

A specific point about Irish ancestry, however, is that it can grant citizenship to those not born in Ireland so that my grandchildren have dual British and Irish (and hence EU) nationality despite being born in England by virtue of the fact that their mother was born in Belfast (not even in the RoI).

None of this counts when it comes to Team Brexit's opportunities for willy-waving.

How CXL may change the datacenter as we know it

No doubt even now the malware developers are studying the fine details.

Financial giant Santander: 80% of our IT infrastructure in cloud

"$20.8 billion (€20 billion ) modernization programme,,,Readers hoping for a tale of disaster"

Whether or not it's a tale of disaster depends on whether the modernisation process is worth the €20 billion. Nearly half the annual revenue is a pretty big budget even when spread over a few years.

Confirmation dialog Groundhog Day: I click OK and it keeps coming back

Re: Effect and "impacted"

It's well documented that one's own writing is the most difficult to proof-read because what is "read" is what's intended to be there rather than what is actually there. I'll rely on a spell check for words such as accommodate (yes, missed the double m again) and recommend (got it first time!) but the pairs have to be known.

Re: Golden Path Specifications

Why the let off for single quotes?

Re: Cancel

Maybe you should wait to cancel.

Re: Effect and "impacted"

The point at issue is that there are words which have only a minor difference in spelling, stationary and stationery for example, which mean quite different things. The spillchucker won't help with those, you need to make a personal* effort to distinguish between a shop that's the opposite of mobile and one which sells envelopes.

* As opposed to personnel.

September 16, 1992, was not a good day to be overly enthusiastic about your job

Re: my early bird antics cost them over 40k

"Gordon Brown was worried that the same thing would happen before any entry to the Euro"

Had it been Gordon Brown instead of Lamont he'd just have sold off the gold reserves instead of foreign currency.

At the time the UK had had a long-running problem with interest rates. A rate that would avoid inflation in one part of the country would cause depression in another. Brown's solution was to partially wash his hands of the situation by handing it over to the BoE and then specifying that they aim at 2% inflation but carefully eliminating most people's biggest purchase, their house, from counting towards the measure of inflation. No inflation here, just a wildly overheating housing market.

Re: "Everyone had to leave" knee-jerk reaction

You'd still have no revenue. Much better to sell on the business to somebody else.

Re: my early bird antics cost them over 40k

ITYF it's usually the lowliest who gets the role of scapegoat. Right and wrong have nothing to do with it.

Ad-tech firms grab email addresses from forms before they're even submitted

Re: Autocomplete

I'm sure a little research would find a few other email addresses that you could inadvertently enter in error and have to change, such as John Lewis's CEO's.

BOFH: You'll have to really trust me on this team-building exercise

Even free food has its limits as an enticement.

Re: Not Team Building

I remember (very vaguely!) one away week where someone had discovered the previous week's bar bill and was determined to beat it.

Re: Ahh, Team building/break the ice exercises....

A company having two teams working on the same thing without being aware of each other's existence? The company has more problems than needing team building exercises.