Posts by elgarak1 200 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Oct 2017
Oh, and before someone asks: NeoOffice has put some spit and polish on the UI to make it look more like a Mac app, but its behind-the-scenes behavior, philosophy and quirks are the same as LibreOffice:Mac. It looks nicer, but my impression was and still is that it's not worth the $30 compared to LibreOffice, if you can accept a bit of non-Mac optics.
"OpenOffice.app cannot be opened because it comes from an unidentified developer."
That's what my Mac says, or something to that effect. Yes, one can still open it. It's a simple thing to go into the security preferences and enter an admin password. That's not the point. The point is: There are many reasons why a developer [or enterprise releasing a software product] is not identified with Apple. For many small companies and freelance developers, it's a simple matter of economics – it costs money to be an identified developer.
But Apache? Why cannot APACHE be bothered to be one? I'm sure Apache IS an identified developer, but they cannot be bothered to add this to what could be a flagship product, or at least an open source PR prestige project? It sure looks they do not care about it. Why should we?
ETA: It looks horrible. It has basic display errors in the UI. I cannot imagine anyone actually using that thing. It looks and feels abandoned before the Alpha stage. LibreOffice:Mac is buggy and quirky in its UI, but it feels like a cared for and finished product (though it still needs a lot of polish).
Nope. The format is actually quite nice. I handle them daily, and have no problems whatsoever.
What IS painful is the most common software combo to handle them – Windows, Office, and Adobe's Acrobat Reader. The irony is that Adobe's free software is one of the worst, given that it was Adobe that developed the format.
Ummm.... Don't have it...
I'm on a Mac, which means everything on my machine can handle PDF without the need to install anything, from Adobe or elsewhere (it has been declared one of the essential file formats by Apple ages ago).
Yeah, sure, Apple's software (in particular Preview, which pretty much acts as Mac's Adobe Reader equivalent) has its own share of problems. I'm still a smug bastard about this in particular. I have a LOT less trouble (practically zero) with PDFs than with, say, .doc/.docx. ;)
That's no excuse for having an ambiguous and sloppy definition just so one has a small list of planets for kids to learn.
How would you extend that definition on exo-planets? Say, in a solar system so young that none of its planets has yet cleared its orbit?
I'm fine with calling Pluto, Charon, Ceres, Juno, Pallas etc. planets. You can then further divide 'planets' into 'major' (our standard eight) and 'minor' (everything else).
It's the other way round: *I* am forced to use Word. I would not, if Microsoft could be bothered to properly support a properly documented file format. Then no one would need to use a single program – everyone could use whatever the hell they wanted. But MS actively sabotages that by not properly supporting such a format, and not fully documenting their own (despite the fact that they managed to get a ISO 9001 certificate on said file format).
Over on the graphics design side it works a helluva lot better. There are properly documented file formats supported by multiple applications that people can choose from, and the workers with those applications know that and where issues can arise and know how to avoid them, and how to deal with them if they are there, on both sides of an exchange.
Here's the problem: *Word is unavoidable.*
If you work as a freelancer in certain type of text-related business (novel writer, translator, editor, proof-reader etc.) you are expected to send and receive Word files.
The receiving end is no problem. If I get a Word file, I'll open it with something. It's usually good enough... there are minor issues, but I can live with them, work with them, or correct them.
The problem are the people on the other side who cannot live with, work with, or correct the minor issues. So I need Word, and only Word, and only as a desktop app, and only to check how the files I _send_ will show up at the other people's end.
There's the stand-alone Word for €135 one time (effectively every three years or so.) The next most expensive word processor for the Mac is Nisus Writer Pro for €80 (about as powerful, but _much_ nicer to use... except for the file sharing issues...) Still, MS does not bother to give you a legalese on the licensing there. They don't even tell you if it's "licensed for commercial use", as they do on the Office 365 subscription. And yes, if you need it for paying work, that _is_ an issue.
That's the point: I am a one-user business. I would only need Word (as a desktop app) to check for compatibility. I do not need or want any of the file sharing or cloud crap. I want my files to be save, and not data mined by the app.
MS sells Word as a stand-alone app, albeit hidden within its online store (you'll have to specifically search for it.) It's €135 as a one-time-payment. That's easily the most expensive general usage word processing app I can get for the Mac, and I still do not know if it data mines or not (Microsoft's web store is notoriously short of information there, and directs you to a Personal Office 365 as alternative which officially data mines. And the stand-alone version _still_ needs a MS account, and I cannot see why I would need to do that.)
Otherwise, I would need an Office 365 Business Plan, which is €106 _per year_. Better yet, an Office 365 Deutschland (yes, that's right. Data kept _in_ Germany, under German law. Removes some components of Office, though. Interesting what Microsoft has to provide...) Last I checked, €135 per year... But they changed the web page, and do not sell or tell prices anymore, as far as I can see. You have to call and talk to a distributor. It still includes crap I really do not want or need.
In short, Microsoft is the crappiest software supplier for my type of business.
I do not need DropBox Plus, nor OneDrive.
Currently, the only thing I would need is Word as a desktop app, and for that it's really way too much cash (besides, the terms and conditions MS has on the Personal, Home, and Student editions of Office are downright horrible.)
Luckily, I'm using a Mac, and there are alternatives like Nisus Writer (€20 for basic, €80 for pro, no subscription) or Mellel (€50, also a one time). On Windows, you are effectively stuck with LO, which really is not an improvement except in price.
It's not so much that it's complicated. It's that there so many things it does slightly different than everything else. Each of these things are, by themselves, merely mild irritations. But in the mass...
Things like that it shows layer boundaries by default (no other graphics program I use does. Affinity Photo shows them context sensitive when needed.), and cannot remember that I turned it off (it remembers all other kinds of shit from last session. Why not this one?). Things like selection fields do not just show the options when I click on the little down arrow – I have to click AND HOLD, contrary to everywhere else on the system. Then there's the file explorer it has for "File Open" it has in it that behaves totally different (not even bad. Just different enough that I loose orientation. I click on the top folder on the sidebar, and it does not show me the contents of said top folder. It goes to a sub folder three layers deep where I was last time.) [These last two are probably connected to the fact that they do not properly port, just cross-compile.]
And so on.
"It can be configured" unfortunately very often translates to "must be configured, as the presets are abysmally bad". A lot of Linux distributions, Linux UIs, and Linux originating apps suffer from it. GIMP is a prime example. (Interestingly enough, the styles in Word are another good example. It's not just on Linux...)
Now, if a user sets out to configure, one realizes that configuring GUIs and GUI elements is actually quite hard work to make it good. Which is why a lot of users flock to somewhere where this hard work has been done by professionals. Which often means having to pay cash.
Oh goody, they recommend the type of alc I CANNOT drink. I'm a allergic. Wine and champagne contains too much histamine for me to consume safely. Beers are hit and miss, depending on the used yeast – typically, I either like it and am allergic, or I frickin' HATE the stuff, but don't get a reaction.
The only alcohol I like to consume is vodka or scotch...
And frankly, the behavioral changes induced by alcohol consumption are rather unpleasant.
At least with the olden .doc (Word 97-2003) format, you can use any old Word installation, and increasingly alternative like LibreOffice, as the file format is unlikely to undergo significant changes.
And to go back to the "1TB vs. 2TB" problem: I barely scratch the 5GB [sic] of the free Apple iCloud service with the stuff I need to put on the cloud.
And, actually, I'm kicked thrice, because I'm a Mac-user, which means I'm not getting the full Office complement of Windows (there's no Publisher or Access – not that I wanted them – and they're even more buggy).
And since I'm in Germany, I would need the GERMAN Business Office Plan – even more expensive (€11 per month for installable apps), even less functions, but keeps the data-mining demon at bay – besides, I'm practically required to get it since I have to handle and keep safe not only MY data, but also of MY customers.
Again, this is pure empty money. It does not help me in any way, shape or form to fulfill my job. There are better ways.
Only because Microsoft kicks from above.
All correct, and this is what I do. Compared to the services and apps I use, Microsoft's Office is overpriced and, frankly, too bad in usage to be acceptable.
The problem is that it is often UNAVOIDABLE. If you are a publishing author, you're required to submit and communicate the details of your manuscript with a Word-file, which means you have to keep at least Word (as the alternatives are not bug-identical, hence you cannot rely on them to accurately predict what will happen if you sent your file over!).
If you are in a business (as a publishing author), you're expected to be available on Skype. And so forth.
I. do. not. want. to. use. Microsoft. products. They're crappy to use, expensive, and data-mine as much as free services like google – despite having to pay. If you pay for the business google plans, they reduce data-mining. Microsoft does, too – on the business plans (or so they say. Don't really trust their assertions...). On the family plans, you still pay, and get data-mined (so they say, and I believe them)! I'm better off, financially, using the free plans from others than using Microsoft's private plans. I get data-mined both ways, but I don't have to pay on top.
But I must. Which means I have to get a Microsoft business plan. For stuff I actually don't want or need. For stuff for which MUCH better alternatives are out there. Because the powers-that-be have been brow-beaten to accept that Microsoft is THE STANDARD.
Sigh.
"We can even have a stab at what they were used for. Sodding big mausoleums. "
That's a good point I haven't realized before: We know why the pyramids were built for because they luckily left documentation in a way that survived thousands of years (reliefs and paintings in/on stone). With, say, Stonhenge, we do not have such a documentation, for a variety of reason. Hence, it's a mystery. That doesn't mean much. Just that we do not have documentation, just speculation.
The same goes for so-called "out of place" artifacts: They're out of place because the tools that put them in this place have not survived the millennia. They rotted away. There's some frickin' big deduction being made from that, except not the that's typically made: Those people were intelligent and could make tools, and use those tools to do amazing things. Because we see the results of their thinking and their tools.
There was a fallacy being made for a long time: The lack of tools was equated with a lack of intelligence. That's wrong. It just means the tools aren't there. Maybe because they were made in such a way that they did not survive.
Microsoft has long ago stopped caring about the end user. They only catered to those who brought in the money, which is enterprise. And in enterprise, the wishes were communicated by relatively high up managers (who do not spend 8hrs per day as Office drones), or the IT department (i.e., developers themselves). End users who just want to get their work done? Forget them.
Hence they forget, or never even learned, how to cater to consumers/end users. For any application that requires me to produce anything beside executables, or games, Microsoft products are not the first choice. Even when I had to do administrative tasks (like fill out an Excel sheet required for purchase requests), I preferred to do it on my Mac, and not with Excel, because on Windows since Vista (granted, Win7 with all the UI bling like Aero turned off, and using an XP scheme it was kinda OK) with Excel it was just a pain.
I have a sneaky suspicion that a lot of politicians know exactly how vulnerable the voting system is, and they actually wanted it that way.
I mean, I see no other way the GOP has been able to win an election the last few years without cheating. They cheat already blatantly with gerrymandering and other voter registration manipulation anyway. No wonder they do not want paper ballots, logs, proper audits...
And I bet there are other car manufacturers out there who do have their own share of crashes with driver assistance systems turned on.
You don't hear about them because they're not Tesla. They're not juicy enough. They didn't advertise their – sometimes better – systems as aggressively. They don't bundle all their assistance system into one big "autopilot", neither in advertising, selling (in fact, while gleaning sales brochures of the big German manufacturers I have hard time decoding what exactly each of the system does, or how it should be compared to Tesla's system, which I understand quite well. They dowse the explanation in so much technobabble that it puts Star Trek dialog to shame) or in use.
That makes them less attractive to report. If the Tesla Autopilot fails, it is a story. If the VW Collision Avoidance System fails, it's a non-story. Because the former is seen by the PRESS (not the majority of Tesla drivers or technical minded people) as a revolutionary type of self-driving future, while the latter comes across to them as just another car part like brakes. Are failing brakes a story? There you go.
My job is to produce things, using th computer as a tool. I get paid to deliver text files, image files etc.
I do NOT get paid to dive into the innards of the OS and waste time to find workarounds to get hardware working or get updates to apply. This is lost income for my freelance business of one person.
Currently, the only economic way to do my work is to use a Mac. Sure there's a high initial investment, and there may be some hardware issue that may take me down a bit, but in the long run it's lightyears better than Windows, because the everyday behavior of the OS does get in my way of doing my paid jobs a LOT less.
Yeah... about the reliability.... There was the top read/write head that had to be levered up and down to get the disk in and out. It was directly connected to the lever on the front. It's "hinge" was the cable bundle to make it work as a read/write head. This cable bundle tended to rip after a few months, whisking the head first out of alignment, and then stopped to work altogether. Happened on both my 1571. I think the second one is still around somewhere...
I also had two 1541s. Ran the second one mostly without top cover for cooling, since it's main problem was the hot power supply in the back.
"A number of companies have recently prohibited Apple purchases because High Sierra is impossible to manage and too buggy to maintain, if it even installs at all."
Please provide a link. Unless I have non-existing google-fu, I cannot confirm this on my own.
That said, I happily run High Sierra, and it does not a single annoying thing of the many I experience on my Mom's Windows 10 laptop. But then, I'm not a corporate user and do not know what kind of weird requirements corporate IT have developed in order to maintain Windows.
Reminds me of the story where a German mobile phone service installed antennae on the village church. Promptly, the villagers complained about headaches, digestive issues, bone pain, you name it. When the local representative was informed of the issue, he exclaimed: "Oh my goodness! How bad will it be when we finally turn those on?"
There's another German company who makes a great living by making and selling radio-transparent roof tiles. So nowadays the churches do a church roof renovation, during which the antennae are placed inside the church tower, invisible to the people outside. No complaints.
"Starship Troopers" (movie) was not based on "Starship Troopers" (novel). It started out as a completely independent project (before Verhoeven was hired as director), until someone pointed out the obvious similarities to the book. Only then did they acquire the rights, and named the movie after the novel, mostly to avoid plagiarism charges.
That said, I find the vehemence of fans of the book to slam the movie disturbing. The book is not very good. It IS boring, I don't think it works, I don't know what Heinlein's point of it was, and has (for a German like me) a creepy fascist undertone, which prevents me to recommend it as YA lit. It's no wonder that Verhoeven pushed the movie to be a satire. And it works.
This is a good place to reminding everyone that Microsoft already offers special business plans of Office 365 for Germany, with all the cloud stuff located on servers located in Germany, with components removed where data transferral outside of Germany cannot be guaranteed, ostensibly all under German law.
Would I trust them that this data is safe from US snooping? Hell, no.
But if were the legal or compliance officer of a German company, or as a German would be forced to get an Office 365 plan, I would as hell get this over the 'normal' Office 365 plans.
The ratio of the original 70-mm NON-anamorphic that was used for 2001 is 2.2:1. That's awfully close to the 4:9=1:2.25 of the largest area side of the monolith. Frankly, most theaters are not that close aspect ratios – projecting film is a rather loosely defined standard.
One of the fascinating aspects are that the visual effects were done with so much technical care that they are still prime examples today. Matting, for instance, was done BY HAND, and repeated as often as needed to get right. They filmed everything multiple times, and use one of the takes for the matting, and kept one copy undeveloped, sometimes for years, to apply the matting to it. Which means that there was no quality degradation of optical elements that happens with using optical printers.
Comparatively, the visuals of the sequel, 2010, do not hold up as well (technically) since they used the industry standard of chroma key for matting (green/blue/red screen), and optical printers, which leads to frequent errors (the mattes are sometimes not lined up properly, and the optical printer leads to quality degradation of some elements. It's not very bad in 2010 since they worked with large area 70-mm film, but it's still there).
That is the general understanding, yes. For 2010, they had to examine the original 2001 footage to re-create the Discovery, since the original model(s) (there were multiple, with obvious visual differences besides scale) were nowhere to be found.
Doesn't mean that everything was actually destroyed. I read a few days ago that the supposedly destroyed model of the moon shuttle (the spherical ship that carries Heywood Floyd from the space station to the moon) had been found. Who knows what else survived.
It is not clear if Kubrick ever intended a composed score. It appears much more likely that he wanted to go with other music (as released), and was pressured to hire a composer by producers. From what I've read, Alex North's treatment by Kubrick was very distant and unusual compared to normal film projects.
All this is probably not a big deal for big companies. They have IT departments that can keep the data leaks in check (if they're competent), and those companies have legal departments and deep pockets to whack Microsoft into compliance.
It is problematic for small business, freelancers (artists, photographers, journalists, writers etc.), and activists.
I am not saying the following out of fanboyism, but after careful consideration of all the facts as they are known to me: If you can afford it, and privacy matters to you, get a Mac. Second best is getting Linux, which has the advantage of being the one that will save you money (privacy protection here is even better as it is on a Mac if you know what you're doing, but it comes with a serious down in terms of comfort). If you cannot leave the Windows/Microsoft ecosystem, get Business/Enterprise Editions and Plans, and hope for the best. Yes, it means spending more money, and it means doing more work maintaining privacy and keep your system the way you want it, as Microsoft has shown it is dabbling with it all the time.
No, I don't trust Apple implicitly and look carefully at what they say and do. However, currently there's no better alternative to them, unless you want to leave digital life behind.
To anyone who focuses on the free speech aspect: That's not the outrageous part at all.
The problem is that MS admits that it can, and will, go through all your data, with the most spurious of triggers. Implicitly, it admits that your data on the private plans is not protected at all. Additionally, it grants itself an extremely wide range of rights of what it can do with that data (I doubt those claims would hold up in US courts, and they are probably void in European jurisdictions – I am sure they are by German contract law – but good luck going through the legal hassles for clearing that up).
The problem is that all this happening on service plans that cost money. In short, it is not worth it to pay this money. You can go with the free offerings from google or whoever. Your privacy and protection is equally bad then, but you save the subscription – and get better software tools anyway.
Ostensibly, if you want protection and encryption, you'll have to buy one of the business plans. They're not that much expensive than the private plans. On paper, the claims with regards to privacy and protection look a lot better. Yeah, I'm not sure I would trust MS that they don't do bad things on those, too. In fact, currently I would trust even google's business plans more than Microsoft's. Sad.
Weeeeellllll....
The current news item only lists online services, like Office 365, Skype, Outlook...
But remember that Microsoft wants to do "Windows as a service", and the current T&C already reflect that something like this will soon happen for anything you do on Windows, even if it is with the non-cloudy version of Office.
At least for the Home Editions. The Enterprise Editions MAY not do it (I wouldn't trust them), but in order to get them you'll have to fork over more money.
There's already an "Office 365 Germany". Costs more than normal Office 365, but supposedly (again, I won't trust them) only uses servers in Germany under review of a German law firm.
I can't help but think that the trial leading to this decision had the wrong export witnesses. There has been a paper some years ago (don't bother me to find it for you) that investigated the stuff. Yes, frying, baking and roasting produces acrylamide. But, in addition, in particular on meat, it also produces enzymes that during digestion prevent the acrylamides to be digested and absorbed by the human body.
In fact, given the recent rules of the EU to not fry fries over a certain temperature: This might reduce the production of acrlamides, but it also reduces the production of said enzymes.
It's entirely unclear whether any of this has an effect on the prevalence of cancer. But it's not enough to just look at the concentration of acrylamides.
Cough,cough... There is a significant difference between tobacco and hemp (pot): Tobacco preferentially absorbs and accumulates a lot of bad substances. Some of those appear in the environment as fallout from in-air nuclear test explosions during the '50s and '60s. In short, modern tobacco has become an alpha-emitter, and smoking tobacco exposes the inside of your lungs to quite a high dosage of alpha-radiation. As far as I am aware, hemp is not particularly radioactive.
Note: One of the big important rules of radiation safety: Never ever let pieces of alpha-emitters enter your body! It's bad, m'kay? OUTSIDE your body they're fine, mostly harmless. But inside, oh boy....
That would be a meaningful statistic, if only the same content were offered on all channels. That is not the case. There are titles which are not on streaming services, others are not on downloads, and there's an awful lot that is ONLY available as physical media (some of those eventually find their way to pirate sites. But I doubt they counted those, and since they are not the big hit titles, they are often even hard to find as pirate downloads). One of the reasons I have not (yet) subscribed to a streaming service is the fact that they do not, and are unlikely to ever will, offer some of the obscure titles I have not yet in my personal collection.
I suspect the same software that was used by VW. The VW cheating software was provided by Bosch, pretty much the only supplier of car electronics for all German manufacturers. Essentially, the Bosch people programmed the cheating version and gave a copy to VW (and, how it looks, everyone else) with a "but only for testing [wink wink nudge nudge]", with the winking and nudging being enough to keep Bosch legally in the clear.
I have looked at some professional publisher – book publishers, novels – and the most common guideline for the file an author submits to them you find everywhere is this: ".doc format, Times New Roman, 12 pt".
Why is the font in there? It's one of the basic functions of modern word processors. Every word processor I know can change the font of the current file, and the publisher should be able to hire a person to check the submitted files and change it. Every word processor I know, even Word, can change just the font without changing any other parameter of the text. I know. I've done it countless times myself.
The thing is, we're talking about Word here. You CAN do it. The problem is, it's not easy. It requires a inordinate amount of discipline of the user doing it. It's buggy. It's error prone. It has the capability to FUBAR the whole file (which it shouldn't, given that is so basic). In short Word is crap. It's so crappy that PROFESSIONALS dealing with it prefer to have others do it rather than themselves.
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