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* Posts by Jim 59

2047 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009

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Ten Linux freeware apps to feed your penguin

Jim 59
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Re: I'm a big fan of WPS Office

Just to enlarge on my LibreOffice isn't stable enough for business comment. About 8 months ago, LO trashed my entire Ltd company books through a bug which silently corrupted formulas when saving to .xls format. Eventually my accountants had to rebuild the books from scratch. The whole experience was so blood pressurey that I afterwards swapped to OO and haven't had a problem since. IMO, LibreOffice is unstable. Even the "stable release" branch changes too much, too often, and the devs prefer working on enhancements to fixing bugs. Not appropriate for a serious business application. Stability might be boring, but in business, it is beautiful.

Reading about the bug over at the LO project I found it had been outstanding for some time, through several releases, and the maintainers' attitude was laid back, if not irresponsible. The main comment I remember was them saying "...well not all spreadsheets are critical... so corrupted data isn't really important". Well that's allright then. Only, I hope the next aeroplane you get on wasn't made with parts ordered with a LibreOffice spreadsheet. Hope I don't go to prison for not keeping proper books on my Ltd company. Hope my prison release date is not stored in LibreOffice, hope your pension is not calculated with LO, etc. etc. OK sorry about the rambling rant.

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Jim 59
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Re: @Chris W Haven't we been here before

Evidently some people thought I agreed with Chris W. Quite the opposite. My "excellent troll" comment is just a polite way of saying we note he is trolling, we are thankful for his time, but take no further interest in his remark, as it was carefully crafted bo***cks.

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Jim 59
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Re: I'm a big fan of WPS Office

LibreOffice is not stable enough for business. Use OpenOffice instead.

Any substitute for Visio ? Wanna sketch out my network.

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Jim 59
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Re: @Chris W Haven't we been here before

...get on with life

Lol. Excellent troll post from Chris W.

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One year on, Windows 8.1 hits milestone, nudges past XP

Jim 59
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Epson FX-80

Nice piece of kit at the time. A bit pricey, but good. Noiser than a Who concert.

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Jim 59

Windows 8

I have a forced-purchase Windows 8 sitting on an unused partition in my laptop. It never gets booted. Just like my last laptop had a force-purchase copy of Windows Vista, which never got booted.

Oh for the days when you bought DOS and windows separately, if/when you wanted them. Apart from anything else, it gave you a real DR path.

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systemd row ends with Debian getting forked

Jim 59
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Re: Off to a bad start

do you realize that they are optional? Nothing stops you from telling the journal daemon to store the logs in disk or RAM...

Optional or otherwise. the intention of the systemd project is to replace syslog, otherwise why would they have written the code to enable that ?

binary logs are there because for some systems they are a requirement?

I have never heard of binary format being a requirement for logs or any other data. That doesn't make sense.

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Jim 59

"Devuan"

Small point, but, from the Devuan web page:

Devuan is spelled in Italian and it is pronounced just like "DevOne" in English.

Not in England. Here, it would be pronounced "dev-view-an". They should have chosen a name pronouncable outside of the US. Also, what's with the web page, it has the look of a 1990s gaming forum. I will be contributing anyway, and good look to 'em.

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Jim 59
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Re: What is systemd

They are all, apart from logging(*) optional features of systemd...

Be that as it may, there is clearly an intention in the systemd project to Hoover up these subsystems. Whey else would they have written the code.

This forum has uniformly delivered a pretty good shoeing to systemd. If the Linux/Unix world in general reflects that attitude, it would seem that support for systemd is largely restricted to the developers and their blood relatives. It is still possible for systemd to be a welcome part of Linux, if the project can listen to the users, respond and change accordingly. Are they capable of that ?

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Jim 59

systemd almost appears to be malevolent. It sees other parts of the system not as things to be cleanly interfaced with, or even managed, but as elements to be ignored, replaced, dominated. It even seems to regard systems administrators with contempt. Who is behind systemd ?

In recent years, the Gnome devs' main achievements have been to take the leading Linux desktop and turn it into an irrelevant basket case, and to take the no.1 distro and make it a distant no. 2, and to antagonise the devs in other projects, including Linus, and to acquire a reputation for bad design and bad programming.. Are these the kind of people you want running around in your core OS ?

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Jim 59
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Boot speed

At home I use Linux Mint, which contains systemd. I am happy to have systemd slice 10 seconds off the boot time. But it is a trivial matter, even if you reboot every day, and certainly not worth dragging in > half a million lines of code.

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Jim 59
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Re: What is systemd

@thames Depending on who you talk to, Systemd is either the spawn of Satan, or it's the salvation of software packagers. More specifically, it's a type of "init system".

Systemd is no longer a type of "init" system. As you say, it has forced its tentacles into every part of the OS, and is therefore a putative OS stack. Yes, it was introduced as an "init" system, but calling it that today is not an adequate description, and has misled many.

I agree with the greybeards that systemd breaks many unix design laws. It has grown from a single tool to take over the OS, in the same way that Windows grew from a windowing library to take over the OS. The code quality is also acknowledged to be poor, the size of the project has spiraled to over half a million lines and the functionality is opaque. What could possible go wrong ?

It is the manner of the systemd project which is bad, not systemd itself.

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Jim 59
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Re: Off to a bad start

The “Veteran Unix Admin collective” know what they are talking about IMO. They know bad design when they see it, and have spent decades keeping it well away from Unix. If you want to know what happens when bad design permeates an OS, see Windows. If bad design gets into the core of the OS, forget it.

Systemd is determined to penetrate every part of the OS, for no good reason. If it then wobbles, or the code starts to smell, or it gets too big, or bloats into millions of lines (all of which may already have happened), then any unix containing it will undergo sudden organ failure from which recovery may be impossible. It is therefore reassuring that at least one big distro will not carry that risk.

Unix does not do things for no reason. Why do Gnome developers want it to? They have poured their lives into rotating icons and bringing mobile-phone ephemera to the desktop, and they haven't listened to anybody for years and years. I respect their coding talent, but I don't want that mind set at the heart of Linux.

Leave the OS to the guys who are good at writing operating systems, and leave Gnome development to the Gnome guys.

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VISUALISED: The Golden Vulture Dropping of Excellence

Jim 59

Tard mangling ?

or tard wrangling ?

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The Glorious Resolution: Feast your eyes on 5 HiDPI laptops

Jim 59

Off topic, but I have been lusting after screen real estate ever since my 256x192 Dragon 32. I want mega resolutions and many external monitors. Not retina/dpi, but the ability to display many things at once. Like 5 spreadsheets full size without any overlap. I have a 1920x1080 laptop powering 2 external monitors at similar resolution, but it still isn't enough. Displayport is our only hope.

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ASA raps vloggers over undisclosed ads

Jim 59

Just wondering

Dear Ed., how is the reader meant to know that this headline:

"ASA raps 'F*CK YOU GOOGLE' vlogger + chums over VIDEO LICKFEST"

or this sub headline:

"Paid tongue action nipped by adland watchdog"

refers to a story about the ASA warning Youtube vloggers to clarify their ads ? I now can't fathom what many Reg articles are about from the headlines. Instead, I hover the mouse over the headline and look at the destination URL in Firefox to get a more accurate, less overwrought description. Just sayin'.

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Too 4K-ing expensive? Five full HD laptops for work and play

Jim 59
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Re: what's the point of laptops over 12"?

@joed surfing the web ?

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Jim 59
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That's not correct. These high res laptops, including the one I recommended above, generally have some fancy graphics card *in addition* to on-board graphics.

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Jim 59
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Re: Call me lazy

I can recommend the MSI cx61. 1920x1050 matt, 1 Tb / 8 Gb, VGA+HDMI, quad core i7, DVD, Gigabit, USB3. And it runs Linux very happily, with 2 external monitors. Disk is 7200 rpm too, slightly faster than the norm. About 700 dabs, here http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/MSI-CX61.htm

The only thing I wish it had is displayport, so I could have more external monitors at even higher res.

These days, if you want an all-round laptop with good specs and no missing hardware, what you want is called a "gaming" laptop, whether or not you're a gamer.

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We have a winner! Fresh Linux Mint 17.1 – hands down the best

Jim 59

One more thing

Mint 17 LTS is the first distro I have come across that properly controls fan speeds on my MSI cx61 laptop. Lovely and quiet.

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Jim 59
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Re: Mint, mate

XFCE lighter than MATE ? Surprising. I used XFCE with Fedora long time, but sometimes found XFCE just a little too limited and occasionally unstable. Perhaps that was down to Fedora.

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Jim 59

Mint, mate

I switched from Fedora to Mint 17 LTS 6 months ago for stability reasons, and I can recommend it to anyone. Being a business user, and over the age of 12, I went for MATE, and I have to say it is a great working environment. Reliable, logical, configurable. It does a great job and then gets out of the way. There isn't really much to say about it and that is one of the features of a good windowing environment IMO.

NB My hardware is not old. Quad core i7, if you please. The combination of a fast CPU and fast, minimal desktop is doubly wonderful. The desktop never pauses for anything, ever, not even for a second, even with the encrypted /home. (except for scanning wireless APs).

Anyway I heartily recommend Linux Mint 17. Tip: Replace LibreOffice with OpenOffice for better stability.

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New job in 2015? The Reg guide to getting out and moving on

Jim 59

Jobs

The technology job market may be buoyant, but rates of pay still seem to be in the loo. Most of the advertised jobs are paying less than they paid in 2006, and that is without taking inflation in to account.

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Webcam hacker pervs in MASS HOME INVASION

Jim 59

Nuke your webcam from orbit

It's the only way to be sure.

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GOTCHA: Google caught STRIPPING SSL from BT Wi-Fi users' searches

Jim 59
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By encrypting their searches it now meant that no-one using analytics could now check which keywords people were using to hit their site which was also an incentive to buy adwords for key terms which didn't arrive at your site but you couldn't (didn't want to) SEO in.

I think Google removed referral information long ago, in flagrant breach of internet protocols. Click on a google search term and it doesn't go straight to the page, it first goes to Google's internal harvesting site, then a moment later to the target. You can see it flash up quickly at the bottom of the Firefox window. In summary, they strip the info to prevent web masters from using it, which slows down the search experience for the user, and pressurizes content owners to use Google's own analytic tools.

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Bible THUMP: Good Book beats Darwin to most influential tome title

Jim 59

The Lindesfarne Gospels

Because the North of England is generally superior, while in the south they are still waiting for the missionaries.

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Jim 59
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Re: "most important book"

Those morals and value judgements existed long, long before.

The idea that the world was total chaos before a highly edited compilation of short stories came out is a bit silly.

To be fair, Folio did not say that moral values were non-existent before the Bible, just that the Bible codified them and heavily influenced what we have today. Which is indisputably true, as any law student will tell us.

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Jim 59
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Re: The bible is a book ?

Pedants will say the bible is a collection of books. Ultra-pedants will argue the Magna Carta is a single page book and should be top of the list. Trolls will vouchsafe their dismal political opinions / (lack of) spiritual beliefs, and generally try to appear the cleverest person in the room while also having read non of the listed books in their entirety. And somebody will say "sheeple".

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Jim 59

Important

Talking about "important" books doesn't really make much sense unless you sort them somehow, categories, at least for fiction and non-fiction. For example, there is no Shakespeare in the list, which is absurd, and you can't mention Nineteen-Eighty-Four without also mentioning Brave New World. And you might as well put the Bible in its own category. And what about the first novel ever written - Don Quixote or whatever it was ?

As an engineer, I say Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

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Hacker Hammond's laptop protected by pet password

Jim 59
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Joke

Re: Good Grief

Oh no it isn't !

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Jim 59

Good Grief

Even my Register forum password is better than that.

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Firefox decade: Microsoft's IE humbled by a dogged upstart. Native next?

Jim 59
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Well if you are running Linux, you are used to patching and compiling your own kernels, as well as spending hours on a command line fixing dodgy software.

So you repeated browser crashes (once a day for FF is not uncommon) probably go unnoticed.

Worst. Troll. Ever.

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3D printed guns: This time it's for real! Oh, wait – no, still crap

Jim 59
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Re: How it's Made

Are you suggesting that once someone knows how something is made the urge to make stuff disappears

Obviously not. I think 3D printing will find a valid place in society sooner or later. But the conceptual limitations will make that place a small one. It is the job of strategy boutiques to de-emphasize these limitations in investors' minds, in order to secure more investment. Fair play to them. But I am not a strategist, I am an engineer. And I will not be investing at this point.

Maybe all those here who like tinkering away with a soldering iron should stop as fab labs can print straight to silicon?

Tinkering and hobbyism is great. Any hobbyist should buy and enjoy 3D printers to the fullest extent possible. For recreation and discovery. But not for business. Okay let me rephrase: 3D printing at home might be exciting, in the same way as building a cat's-whisker radio is. I was delighted with my cat's-whisker, and all my bread-board creations. But I never went around saying it is better than an iPhone and people should invest in my cat's whisker company.

I can assume that that you have never at to fork out £25+ for a simple bit of molded plastic that your £1000 power tool won't work without? Assuming the part is still stocked that is, even though spare part availablity is a big factor when buying expensive tools there always seems to be a few bespoke parts that are hard to find 10 years down the line.

I have just forked out £22 for three plastic gazebo joints that prob. cost 10p each to manufacture. 3D printing would have had the tolerance for this, and finish doesn't matter. But it would probably not have had the strength or material properties. And as my gazebo is 10 years old, I was lucky to get the part, let alone a 3D printing data for it. And if I got the data or copied it illegally from another part, why should the owner give me that for free ? The design is valuable property, rightly protected by law. A gazebo joint might be a small, humble part, but somebody, somewhere put alot of engineering thought into it and somebody owns the design.

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Jim 59
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Re: Has WiRED

Show me somebody excited about 3D printing, and I will show a person who has never been on a factory floor and seen things being made. Tell them to watch a few episodes of How it's Made

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Jim 59

Gun

As the "gun" actually blows off the user's arm, you might as well just hold the barrel in your hand and hit it with a small hammer.

One day a printable gun might happen, just like plastic kettles happened. Murderers will then be able to print their own guns, leaving a comprehensive evidence trail all over the internet and their PC.

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Eye laser surgery campaigner burned by Facebook takedown

Jim 59

Campaigning websites

Feel a bit sorry for Rodoy, and I will think twice before having laser surgery now, even without seeing her Facebook page.

The public has been kidded over the years about the nature of "free" internet services. We all thought it was great in the mid 90s when Hotmail gave us free email, and it was. The megacorps rolled out more and more free stuff. We (the techies) got very excited and encouraged everyone to gorge themselves on this wonderful free lunch. We didn't notice the chef subtly changing the ingredients. The public misapprehension about what they are eating is now so massive that even clever people like Rodoy can wander onto Facebook and actually think ...the service offered a "trusted, safe storage medium".. NO. Nobody wants to offer you a "trusted, safe storage medium" for free. Sorry if we (the industry) ever gave the wrong impression.

No. Here is a definition of all free internet sites: they are somebody else's computer. And should be treated as such. That is all you need to know to stay safe. Perhaps Freebook is okay for sharing a few photos you don't care about , with people you don't care about. But I wouldn't even do that.

Campaigners should acquire their own server and self-host it too. I have a server. On a shelf in my bedroom. It depends only on BT and EON electric, and I pay them. However you choose to do it, if you are dissing a megacorp, don't expect free help from other megacorps.

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Why Comrade Cameron went all Russell Brand on the UK’s mobile networks

Jim 59

The country

Isn't poor mobile coverage one of the natural drawbacks of living in the country ? A beautiful view == poor services. It is precisely the lack of cars, shops, masts, people, schools, hospitals, roundabouts etc. that makes Glen Coe so appealing. You want an easy life, move to the scruffy 'burbs like the rest of us.

Ok that is not really my view. Any readers from the USA like to explain how they do it over there ? How's the Grand Canyon for coverage?

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Trolls pop malformed heads above bridge to sling abuse at Tim Cook

Jim 59

Trolls

The tweets pictured are mild compared to the usual Twitter guff (swearing, threats to kill, hateful incantations, etc. etc.). I guess El Reg didn't print the worst.

People get more abuse just from coming on here and making a mild comment about systemd or similar.

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One hard ghoulie: 1985's Ghosts 'n Goblins

Jim 59

hard game

Even jumping on and off that island shown in the last picture was very difficult, thanks to the tough "physics" and collision detection. A challenge keeps people coming back though.

There are some great walk-throughs on Youtube. One guy in particular demonstrating that the ruthless difficulty continues throughout the whole game - screens with no workable exit, weapons that are essentially useless (including the default weapon IIRC), enemies that are virtually immortal etc. etc, puzzles with no answer. This game will chew you up and spit you out. Because it is better than you are. Another 10p...

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Tim Cook: The classic iPod HAD TO DIE, and this is WHY

Jim 59

Sansa/Rockbox

What MartinB105 said about Sansa Clip/Rockbox. Clips have been my choice ever since my Archos obsolesced itself around 2007. Nothing could be easier - the limitless slot keeps up with technology, compatible with everything, doubles as a chunky USB disk. Weighs about a gram. Battery 12 hours. Eventually the jack wears out but you just replace the whole thing for like £20 and swap your SD over.

Rockbox is currently transitioning into a smartphone app, and may not be developed separately as an OS in future.

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Jim 59
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@Johnr

True. The world is slowly learning that touchscreens suck. Or rather, the over-reliance on touchscreens leads to suckage. If a device has both touchscreen and real buttons, the user will go for the buttons, always.

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Jim 59
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Re: @Mark 65

They probably killed it deliberately because the profit margin wasn't as high as other products. Nothing to do necessarily with how good it is or how much people want it. When Google shuttered Reader last year, it was the best product on the market and had a huge following. It just didn't make as much profit as the ad-slinging search engine.

The standalone music player market has not disappeared. Neither has the digital camera market. Both have been reduced by smartphones, but not replaced. Now you have a choice of smartphone, music player, or both. Sansa's latest will outperform any smartphone in every respect for about £40. For most people, organizing their music (or photos) is now the biggest challenge.

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How iPad’s soft SIM lets Apple pit carriers AGAINST each other

Jim 59

SIM

"The SIM card is the most potent instrument of control in the mobile carrier’s hands, controlling the relationship with the customer and giving it unmatched information about how its users behave."

No. The SIM is the most potent instrument of control in the *consumer's* hands. It keeps the mobile sector competitive, and stops the suppliers from simply farming us in the same way the UK utilities* do, for example. Carriers and manufacturers would love to kill the SIM, which has made the consumer king for over 20 years. This isn't Apple's first attempt to break the market by issuing non-standard kit. They can shove it, frankly.

* for those outside the UK: the gas/electric consumer sales here are an apparent cartel, there is no market or competition. Vendors are in complete control, and consumers are simply gouged.

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Sporty in all but name: Peugeot 308 e-THP 110

Jim 59
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" to change the temperature or the fan settings, you need to bring up the relevant display and use the touch controls rather than just turn a big old knob from blue to red o"

If that's true, I never want to see one of these driving behind me, or coming in the opposite direction.

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Consumers start feeling the love as Chromebook sales surge

Jim 59

No stats

Follow the link to the ABI article and there are still no absolute figures. Keep clicking through to the "powerpoint presentation" and you hit a paywall instead. El Reg has just echoed the ABI teaser.

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ARM heads: Our cores still have legs ... as shares tumble amid 'peak smartphone' fears

Jim 59

Home serve

Long term ARM seems pretty safe, not because of the IoT but because all AV devices are becoming smart, ie. contain an arm CPU, eg DVD players, TVs, digital radios (yuk),...

There will also be a trend towards every home having a low power home server in future, again with the ARM SoC and whatnot. When is somebody going to launch pogoplug-type thing one with a ready integrated Owncloud instance ?

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UNIX greybeards threaten Debian fork over systemd plan

Jim 59
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Re: systemd to incorporate a shell too!!!

Not sure systemd is a reflection of Solaris SMF. SMF is text file based, and would please the Debian elders in that regard. In accordance with unix philosophy, SMF is limited in scope, modular, constrained into one role and does that role transparently and (fairly) simply.

systemd is a windows-esque, monolithic, black box solution. ie. the opposite of Unix design. It is also p*sspoor by all accounts.

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'Theoretical' Nobel economics explain WHY the tech industry's such a damned mess

Jim 59
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Becuase capitalization MAKES TEXT harder to read, something EVERY El REG HACK learned in THEIR first week ON THE job. It ALSO "sounds" like THE AUTHOR shouting RANDOMLY. And IT makes me WANT to SURF AWAY to the ENQUIRER, Slashdot, Reddit or ANOTHER news site that FOLLOWS a less annoying STYLE guide.

And! compare! the! way! The! Register! actually! takes! the! mickey! out! of! Yahoo! LIKE! this! just! for! having! an! exclamation! point! At! least! Yahoo! can! write! a! sane! headline!

And stop trolling Steven Fry FFS.

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Martha Lane Fox: Yeuch! The Internet is made by men?!?

Jim 59

Somebody famous for being a bit silly has been a bit silly

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