Re: I think I understand why ...
Is that a European or an African hummingbird?
56 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2015
I was amused to read that there were supposedly three roundabouts in the US in the 90s. We have three surrounding Prospect Park here in Brooklyn and nothing is that new here. The little one at the south end of the park https://maps.app.goo.gl/B7Byh27bLrs9EaJ78 is a special aggravation. New York, in its neverending quest to bring traffic to a halt, has installed five traffic lights within the circle, with a few more just outside it. If you're lucky you can hit three red lights in one turn around the circle. There are no lane dividers, so the usual direction to drive is diagonally. But it will all be OK, as they are set to further lower speed limits citywide soon.
I splurged on a 2TB Aura X2 SSD for a second-hand 2017 MBA and put Monterey (magenta mountains), High Sierra (golden mountains), and MX 23.1 (no mountains) on it with rEFIt. High Sierra is the oldest version that handles the SSD properly and it runs most of my old software. Monterey was just out of curiosity, as it of course refuses to run almost all the old programs. (Unfortunately, rEFIt gives both MacOS versions the same logo, so I often don't know which I'm booting.)
I do statistical analyses. My main stat workhorse, Stata, now ships with Windows, Mac, and Linux installers. I've used the R stat language occasionally, and I have to prepare text (LibreOffice Writer, SoftMaker TextMaker graphics (GIMP) and presentations (LibreOffice Impress, SoftMaker Presentations) that colleagues can bring up in Microsoft Office. My main three email accounts (it's a long story) are handled by Thunderbird, with Outlook accessed through a browser (Chrome/Chromium/Firefox). Zoom and VMWare Horizon's Linux clients work well. Occasionally I'll fire up an old Windows XP installation in a VirtualBox session for an odd program or two.
I use almost identical setups at the office and at home: Dell and HP workstations with 24 to 32 GB RAM, SSD for the system, RAID HDDs for /home. Dual monitors at work, just one at home, NVidia cards everywhere (and CUDA installed for machine learning experiments). I'm still on Linux Mint 18 but I'm setting up version 20 on another machine and playing with MX Linux. I've been using Linux since kernel 0.99 (the SLS distro on a huge pile of floppies) but I switched most of my work to Linux about 2010. Aside from occasional Caja annoyances on the Mate WM my principal problems are compatibility failures between LibreOffice/SoftMaker Office and the various Microsoft Office versions colleagues use. (I bought SoftMaker to try to remedy this but there are still occasional glitches; in desperation I can bring up MS Office 2007 under Wine -- it's fairly stable.)
> “Creatives” shouldn’t be let near user interfaces until they have been properly designed.
Properly designing "creatives" is a nearly impossible task.
No, seriously, your points are very well taken. After all, if the driver can't manage the car's UI, the result can be a crash. That's true of computers too, I suppose, but the results are usually less dire.
Then again, the Chrome and Firefox maintainers could emulate early Linux kernel numbering. In 1993 it felt like Zeno was numbering the kernels: http://www.oldlinux.org/Linux.old/docs/history/0.99.html . One hundred and five versions, from "0.99" (13 Dec 1992) to "0.99.15j" (2 Mar 1994), separated "0.98.6" from "pre-1.0". Perhaps "Chrome 99.99991" could follow ""Chrome 99.9999" -- or should it be "Chrome 99.99999"?
Inspired by a Hackaday post about Raspberry Pi palmtops I put some batteries in my DOS-based HP handhelds the other day. Sure enough, I soon encountered "Abort, Retry, Fail." And sure enough, I didn't know what to respond. (I think "Abort" got it to stop trying to access the memory card with a dead battery.)
I'm risking going a little off topic here, but I have quite a few Mate desktops on Mint and Ubuntu and I've had no trouble with left-side taskbars. I recall them working well in Cinnamon too, though I went with Mate for the greater choice of widgets (CPU load and temperature, etc.). I keep a much narrower taskbar on the bottom to show running processes.
On my dual-boot-desperation Windows 10 partition I've somehow avoided the updates that broke Classic Shell. Let's hope my luck holds. (Win 11 isn't even on my radar.)
Sometimes the antiques just work. Today a colleague sent a .docx document loaded with recorded changes and comments. I opened it on my increasingly creaky Mint 18.1 system in LibreOffice 5 but just to double-check I brought it up in Word 2003 -- I installed the compatibility add-on for .docx files ages ago -- and it opened without a problem. I checked my Wine version: it's Wine 1.6.2! It's not from CodeWeavers either, just the free release. Word crashes on exit and offers to report the problem to Microsoft, but I doubt they're too concerned about it. Neither am I, as I can open, read, and save documents with no problems.
I'm looking forward to getting Wine 7 running, but I think it will require the Mint 20.3 system I'm setting up now... and my Office 2003 disks, wherever they are.
Yesterday I rerouted some of my internet cables, then helped a neighbor reroute some of her internet cables. A few hours ago the ISS app on my phone excitedly told me a spacewalk was in progress. I tuned in and they were, yes, rerouting internet cables!
A minute ago I checked in on the spacewalk and Pyotr and Oleg were still rerouting the internet cables, and they sound very tired. Working in spacesuits, handling the cables with space-gloves, working in Zero-G, they have my respect for their persistence. Sometimes they have to stop for a minute just to catch their breath. The back of my desk is a cable-bound mess, but my rerouting was nothing compared to that.
Don't know if anyone else caught Piotr's (?) description of the round cable-spool cover, over the disposal of which there was much deliberation. He got it loose, held it up, and said, "What a beautiful object! This is the source of all those UFO rumours!" So now we know.
If only that were true... We have a smattering of old versions of MS Office in various offices and I've seem vertical lines go askew in PowerPoint and no end of variations on mangled text in Word when we exchange documents. I'm not the best at keeping my software up to date, but I've had documents go awry when I brought them up in LibreOffice and SoftMaker Office on my Linux boxes as well. My fallbacks are to open a sent document in Office for Mac or in Office 365 (or whatever that online pain is called). Still, yesterday a friend sent me a multilingual, footnoted .docx that choked his Office for Mac. I opened it in LO 5, added a space at the end, resaved it, and returned it. Today he said it opened perfectly now in Word.
I'll make the leap from LO 5 to LO 7.2 and see how it goes. (I should install that SoftMaker 2021 update I bought, too.)
I've wondered how people keep things straight in Japan. The country uses 100v (not 120v, though the outlets are the same as in the US), but what's worse is that it's 50 Hertz in eastern Japan and 60 Hertz in western Japan. (I think Siemens designed one end of the country and Westinghouse the other.)
Just over a third of a century ago my IBM Portable PC arrived -- a mere 30 lbs. of portability, though I think the keyboard added 7 lbs. more. It came with a postcard with a space for comments, and I mentioned that, though I was in New York, it had arrived with the power switch set to 230 volts. A few days later an IBM representative *telephoned* me to check on this grievous misconfiguration. Customer service and follow-up have changed a little since then...
256 BYTES! We used to program with 8 BITS of RAM! Every time we rewrote the byte we had to scrawl a letter on the cardboard box we lived in, in the middle of the road...
(8 BITS and a cardboard box! We just had ONE BIT! It was a hole in the road and when it filled with water it was 1 until we bailed it out to make it 0 ...)
[Sorry, couldn't resist. Programming in 256 bytes is quite a skill.]
Years ago I realized that much of my hand and wrist pain came from the pronation (wrist rotation analogous to roll of an airplane) required to use my Trackman Marble. I kludged a stand of sorts to tilt the TM by about 45 degrees and I felt much better. Since then there have been a couple of trackballs with this sort of tilt built in -- among others, the Logitech Trackman Ergo has an optional stand -- and recently I've been using a Kensington Pro Fit Ergo Vertical Wireless Trackball (https://www.kensington.com/en-gb/p/products/control/trackballs/pro-fit-ergo-vertical-wireless-trackball/). It tracks well, it's easy to pop the ball to clean out accumulated crud, and my only problem has been its tendency to switch itself from WiFi to Bluetooth once in a while. (I suppose I'm brushing one of its innumerable buttons by mistake, but I now know which button to push to unswitch it.) The Kinesis Advantage has eliminated the pronation pain I had from flat keyboards and the tendonitis that almost kept me from working thirty years ago hasn't come back.
I'll have to look up Cooper a.k.a. Avery. I wonder if implants couldn't improve upon our original design. (They might be biological implants, after all.) An eagle's resolution, a cat's night vision, an insect's UV perception... or are there contradictiory requirements there?
Best wishes re: your joints, ears, and all. I probably made my ailments sound far worse than they are. The arthritis has just started in a couple of joints, and my corrected vision is as good as ever. You'll get used to the omnifocals (or varifocals, I presume they're the same) and the formulae have actually improved in recent years. But do be careful walking, as the distance to the ground can be distorted a bit by them.
Mr IP, you have my sympathies for your nearsightedness, sore joints, and tinnitus. (Mine come from genes, arthritis, and friends in rock bands, respectively.) But I especially share your enthusiasm for widened color perception! I've read of some tetrachromatic women in Denmark and seen some colorful canvases by a tetrachromatic painter trying to convey her vision of the world, but -- alas -- it would take some serious genetic engineering to allow a man to see four primary colors. (Conceivably we could train ourselves to distinguish extra colors with notch-filtered lenses, perhaps a different one on each eye, but I'm sure it wouldn't be the same.) How was Mrs IP's gift discovered? I recall reading that some tetrachromats were unaware until they were tested.
Dr S, there have been some attempts at a KDE respin of MX. I had good luck with mikejade's one, described here: https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php?f=127&t=54469 . My luck with the "Full Monty" respin was not so good. There are others I haven't tried. The KDE page in the MX wiki is very out of date, alas. There's a forum page devoted to KDE respins, though: https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewforum.php?f=127&sid=342539807776f8f77264344969732b9c . There is a list of all respins (not just KDE) here: https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php?p=486469#p486469 .
My great-aunt's family realized too late that "Iva Price" had certain connotations in the late 19th century, so Iva Elizabeth was thereafter known as Beth or, sometimes, Babe (long before Babe Ruth or the famous pig). I've always thought her name was worthy of inclusion in "John Train's Most Remarkable Names" or "Remarkable Names of Real People" (also by John Train).
I can understand designing with Torx screws -- it's a lot easier to keep a screwdriver centered on them and apply torque, hence the name. But I didn't expect to find the bottom of my Toshiba Portege held on with 13 Philips screws and, hidden under a glued-on button in the center, a "security" Torx screw. Those are the ones with a tiny pillar in the middle of the head that prevents a standard Torx driver from even being inserted! (I suppose it would have cost them something to license pentalobe screws from Apple.) As usual, my iFixit screwdriver-bit set came to the rescue.
An error like the one described could wreak havoc with exact calculations, but I wonder if it would make much difference in the machine learning models for which these cards are so widely used. In the early days of neural networks, "graceful degradation" was said to show their similarity to our brains, where the loss of a neuron or two has a negligible effect. A systematic error might throw off calculations of connection weights, but random errors might well have a comparably minor effect.
Corel once provided a version of WordPerfect 8 compiled for Linux, and it was FREE! See http://www.control-escape.com/linux/wp8.html for an overview. Apparently it's still downloadable -- see http://www.tldp.org/FAQ/WordPerfect-Linux-FAQ/downloadwp8.html -- and folks have been downloading and installing it on releases as recent as Mint 17. The site http://www.xwp8users.com/ has advice on the installation. Somewhere in the piles I have a Corel WP8 CD, probably from a trade show, and I was just thinking how nice it would be to get it running on Mint 17 or 18.
Burma Shave! We date ourselves a bit.
I still remember the sequence of little red signs along the road to my grandparents' house in Wisconsin.
"In this world
of toil and sin
your head grows bald
but not your chin.
Burma Shave."
And fifty years later, I've found that they were right.
In 1992 the Linux kernel went from 0.12 or so to 0.95 when it became X-Windows capable. That's only a difference of 0.83 but proportionally it's quite a leap. (The Wikipedia "Linux kernel" article mentions 0.12 and 0.95, but I dimly remember an 0.17, so there may have been some intermediate versions.)
Thomas Buckley-Houston's blog post is a very helpful guide to using a display-challenged laptop. I've found my way around a couple of MacBook Airs with dead backlighting by shining a 1000 lumen LED flashlight (or "torch," if you like; "Rayz" brand) at the screen at an oblique angle. It's hard to find the cursor, but sometimes shining the light through the translucent Apple logo on the back helps with that. It doesn't sound like the backlight was the problem with his Dell XPS 15, though.