Posts by Tams 122 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Sep 2021
Ultimately, it needs to be less accessible to everyone, with several people who know what they are doing checking what each other is doing.
Bu that costs money, is inconvenient, and would just be loudly complained about in the modern world of everything being instant.
'The pandemic was keenly felt by the company, which is well regarded as a manufacturer of terribly ugly office furniture.'
You missed 'overpriced', which means they should have a nice tidy rainy day fund to tide them over a year or two.
Who am I kidding. Of course it all got given it as bonuses.
Sorry, but as much as you may loathe the ribbon, the fact remains that OneNote is still heads and shoulders above all the other taking programs/apps.
Not the UWP version they sharted and is now being 'integrated' (read: abandoned). Even with few updates to the desktop version it retains its lead.
But apparently that's not popular with the crowd here. If you like making notes with Markdown or what-have-you, well... everyone and their dog has something for you.
While you've put it rather abrasively, you have pointed out a key point and criticism that can get fans of open source software rather worked up.
And that is one of image. The image that many, if not the vast majority, of open source projects present is at best disjointed and often rather visually unappealing. I mean, just look at the Wine website. Or how about LibreOffice?
There are of course exceptions, though most have significant capital actually behind them: Krita, Proton, Blender, etc.
And open source advocates may find that all rather superficial. But the truth is to many people that does matter. It does matter if your website looks like it's from the mid 2000s. It does matter that your UI does too. It does matter that the potential user is presented with a long list of steps to do something rather than a few simple clicks/taps. It does matter if someone has to hunt through a GitHub repository to find the installer.
Care to offer an alternative that doesn't look like amateurs designed the UI?
Apple's programs are the only ones that get close, and Numbers is still a bit of a joke, nor is Keynote that great.
The only open source program that has come a long way in the 'office suite' area is Krita, and that only happened after they left the rest of the office suite.
It doesn't help that the PM is one of the richest people in the country.
That doesn't mean he's completely oblivious and ignorant to how most people live, but his actions so far say that he very much is so.
So now it's like rubbing salt into the wound. Only it's not even preventing infection in this analogy.
You lot always say that, and it's just the same old nonsense.
For the average person, the only thing that has really improved on Linux is that WINE/Crossover/Proton lets you play most games and a fair chunk (but nowhere near all) of software developed for... Windows.
And really at that point... why include a middleman, with the main form of technical support where much of the userbase either belittle you or go off about stuff far above the average person's understanding?
1. While computers can last a long time and increasingly there's less incentive to get a new computer if yours works fine, they do still break and wear out.
2. Only TPM 2.0 is any real hurdle Windows 11 can be easily forced onto an older CPU.
3. You assume people will change to another OS once their computer gets long in the tooth: most will probably just run the last update to Windows that they got. It happens all over the place, from Android to iOS.
That really depends on the course. Though one could argue that where LLMs would would work best will also likely remove many jobs in those areas and make degrees in them a lot less useful (other than personal knowledge enrichment).
LLMs do take a lot of the (tedious) work out the equation. To do well, you'd still need to have knowledge in the area and spend time checking any output, plus adding what you need. You'd also need to craft your responses.
The point is that some (many?) education institutions seem to be taking a rather simplistic approach of 'lets ban it' or something close to a ban. When LLMs aren't going to go away, that's just a waste of energy and money. LLMs could instead be integrated into courses and in the process teaching (haha, universities teaching) how to identify problems with them and the morals of using them. And they could actually assess students properly for a changeb something only really PhD students get the luxury of.
Checking for plagiarism is still necessary even if they also often use abhammer to enforce it.
Turnitin just isn't that great. But if they and the universities just go, 'computer says no', then they can brute force the sense that something is being done.
That there are only so many combinations of words and sentences one can have for a given topic, and there are new university students every year, then increasingly more essays and papers are going to be marked as 'plagiarism'. Some will be plagiarism, some won't.
Now this smells like snake oil. Turnitin and co. are taking education institutions for a ride.
Detecting plagiarism is one thing (and having seen Turnitin results, they aren't even perfect at that). Detecting a language learning model that is designed to sound natural? Yeah good luck without penalising innocent people.
And to avoid it, all someone needs to do is read the output and put in a few edits.
Education institutions do need to adapt to this. The solutions are all available in-house and don't even have to cost extra (so do, but this ain't it). Many of those institutions won't like making the necessary changes (do they ever?), but they will have to. How much they waste on services like Turnitin's is up to them.
You take me as some great advocate of Sailfish, but my comment was really rather scathing of them on several fronts.
The fact remains, if the Indian government did want a different OS for their snooping desires, then Sailfish is really the only option that wouldn't require too much work. Jolla would be more than happy to sell them access to the foundation of Sailfish and then they could add their malware on top of it themselves.
But as another poster has said; they'll likely contract some developers to reskin an existing Android ROM (perhaps fork a new one), watch it flop, relaunch the 'OS' as an app or service and then quietly forget about it.
That's always the problem with your type. 'Let's take the bad parts of x and rewrite y' comments when often it's subjective and you just don't like it.
Maemo was great, especially compared to all the other mobile OSes out there and was very refined by the time it was cancelled (thrn called Meego).
But people like you would rather shoot yourselves in the foot and argue over inconsequential things and end up with a bunch of niche projects that get nowhere, often abandoned.
No mention of Sailfish OS, which has come from Maemo (based on Debian), which became Meego, then after abandoned by Nokia became Mer and Sailfish?
I mean, sure, they haven't exactly been successful, and their major client - the Russian government - were always morally questionable and are currently being sent back to the Stoneage...
But they are still alive and kicking just about. And Sony have put an egg (just the one) in their basket as a hedge against Google going too far (just as Samsung keep Tizen around (also related to Maemo/Meego)).
And there's also QNX still floating around, which like Sailfish also has (or had) decent Android app support. And LG have WebOS still kicking around in TVs.
So, if someone really wanted to and could be bothered to follow through and sustain it, then an alternative OS could come into the mainstream.
Then again, this is about a government wanting to invade privacy and spy on its citizens. India have a bad track record on it. But hey, that wpuld suit Sailfish as they are prepared to work with questionable entities to make custom versions of their OS.
Sorry, but I don't feel sorry for them.
Is it not the point of the journals to check the veracity of work submitted them to them, as in it's their job? Is that not what their obscene fees are for?
I have some sympathy for small journals/publishers that don't rip people off, but thrn again they are often part of close-knit communities that are more likely to catch a fraud. And they can simply keep stuff to people they trust, and make it a vigorous test to be accepted into their circles.
Sigh.
It's not mainly for office bees and C-suits to get around. It's about increasing capacity, which at this time requires a whole new line. We might as well make it high speed at that point as it barely adds to the cost in the grand scheme of things.
They don't.
They want the open source 'community' to be the gatekeepers.
Meanwhile, they'll add on whatever junk they want to their SoCs, while making it so no one else can. And as long as maintain a market lead and so many devices use their SoCs... they'll get away with it.
But most British people find US chat shows to be completely unfunmy (there's a reason we're okay with John Oliver staying with you), and then things like The Office needing to be redone for a US audience.
The humour is very different. Now throw in an actually different langauage (say Japanese, where most 'Western' humour falls face first flat on the floor) and you have a mess at best.
That doesn't change that the UI is ugly and in some parts obtuse. And yes, no one goes to the website often, but I think it shows the lack of care for producing anything aesthetically pleasing in general.
Anyway, I use MS Office because it offers the features I need that LibreOffice and the like don't or don't well. In particular Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, the latter of which frankly no open source program has yet to get even close too.
It lloking nice is just icing on the cake. I don't know why so many have sticks up your arses about that though.
And they are still ugly as sin.
I don't expect much for free nor need an office suite to look great, but they could at least *try*. LibreOffice are the worst, as even their website is bad. Why, yes, a lurid green with web 2.0 styling is just what I want. And to think this was a considered a good redesign just a couple of years ago.
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