Posts by Mike_in_Oz

Payments firm accused of aiding 'contact Microsoft about a virus' scammers must cough $650k

If I have time I like to boot up an Ubuntu VM and then let them try to walk me through the attempt to connect. What does my screen look like (ergh, its kindof purple) etc. My wife gets mad with me, but like others here, I feel that I may be protecting some elderly would-be mark. We can spin this out for a while before I casually mention its Linux...

30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat

Re: people understanding

In my experience the stuff in Delphi can often be brought into Lazarus and recompiled without difficulty. And then you can make executable code fir Win and Linux more or less simultaneously. A game changer for me as I have/had lots of Delph code.

Start or Please Stop? Power users mourn features lost in Windows 11 'simplification'

Re: Eh...

My life changed since I installed the Everything search utility! Instant gratification as opposed to a slow crawl with sometimes mysteriously empty results.

LibreOffice 7.2 brings improved but still imperfect Microsoft Office compatibility

Re: Does "compatibility" mean having the same issues?

errr? no... if you have a very old Microsoft Word document you are better off trying to open it in LibreOffice than Word (the latter does not support its own old formats) Also, when all else fails and Word freezes when scrolling through a large bitmap image that I (or more likely one of my students!) has inserted then opening it in LibreOffice is the standard work-around. Now that I can use EndNote in LibreOffice I cannot see that many reasons to use Word anymore.

Utopia? Echoes of Delphi and Dreamweaver in new visual editor for React

my memory is not THAT bad..

Was coding/designing a neat GUI only yesterday with Lazarus. Fast scientific graphics, user-friendly buttons, check boxes, high res printing, and I even stuck in a seperate thread for the serious number crunching. Not one but 4 best-of-alls, to wit:1. recompile on Win or Linux with no or exceedingly minor changes 2. deploy executable as a single file (yay!) 3. Fast as C on my benchmarks and 4. Its open source and free (oh, and is very well documented....)

Zorin OS 16 beta claims largest built-in app library 'of any open source desktop ever'

Re: Wine?

Yep. Wine works fine for me (legacy scientific software) and Ubuntu. Also run one extremely useful program under Dosbox. Slightly more convenient than than booting a Windows VM.

This'll make you feel old: Uni compsci favourite Pascal hits the big five-oh this year

Lazarus the best kept secret

I use Lazarus Pascal for all my science coding, in gui, graphics and text mode. Drag and drop a breeze. Re-compile exact same code on Windows and Linux (gui included) in a flash. Easy to distribute binary executables. Watched colleagues trying to achieve same result in the snaky language and nearly fall about in mirth.

Microsoft doc formats are the bane of office suites on Linux, SoftMaker's Office 2021 beta may have a solution

Re: Zotero

You can easily export your EndNote to Zotero and then use it on Linux with LO, if you like. I did this as an exercise recently because I am the claustrophobic type and hate being locked in by a vendor. but EndNote is pretty slick. I write a huge amount (am an academic) and prefer LO to Word (less clutter and crap). LO spreadsheet not bad except that it is a bit of a hassle to insert subscripts and superscripts into chart labels.

Delphi RAD tool (remember that?) gets support for Linux desktop apps – again

Re: Embacadero drove me away

Used to program in TurboPascal/Delphi a lot. Scientific applications mostly, usually with graphics. Bought several versions from TP3 onwards. Then discovered Lazarus and Linux. What a pleasure. Same code compiles on both Windows and Linux with few or no tweaks. Drag n drop to build user interface. Develop on Linux, compile on Windows when ready, or vice versa. Fast native binary execution. Distribute simple executable to colleagues and students without requiring hundreds of megabytes of dependencies (Python I'm talking to you...). Still bemused when colleagues struggle for hours to code a simple GUI using Python....

Firefox to feature sponsored content as of next week

There IS a decent alternative browser!

I have been using Brave for a few months now as my primary browser. So far it has handled everything thrown at it. And fast too.