On 2025-01-03 09:06, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 03/01/2025 13:56, Andrzej Matuch wrote:
>> On 2025-01-03 06:28, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>> On 02/01/2025 20:06, Andrzej Matuch wrote:
>>>> On 2025-01-02 14:42, rbowman wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, 2 Jan 2025 08:36:41 -0500, Andrzej Matuch wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I find GNOME rather clunky whereas KDE, at least on Fedora and
>>>>>> Nobara,
>>>>>> is perfect out of the box. I imagine that a lot of people who try out
>>>>>> Linux and face GNOME are going to wonder how to do the basics, and
>>>>>> they
>>>>>> will likely find that the way extensions work is rather clunky,
>>>>>> especially during upgrades. Meanwhile, KDE is very familiar and
>>>>>> offers a
>>>>>> ton of features they could only dream of in Windows like the desktop
>>>>>> effects, theming options and widgets. Unlike Cinnamon too, the
>>>>>> widgets
>>>>>> in KDE actually work as they should.
>>>>>
>>>>> The Ubuntu box has GNOME. I live with it but I'm not a fan. I'd rather
>>>>> have a menu structure rather than the 'Show Applications' button that
>>>>> brings up three or four screens of unsorted stuff.
>>>>
>>>> GNOME was designed with the belief that anyone looking for an
>>>> application will press the Windows key and then type the name of
>>>> what they're looking for rather than select it from a menu. That's
>>>> how I do it whether I use Windows, GNOME or KDE so I would agree
>>>> with their design choice.
>>>>
>>> Odd, since MATE - a superset of GNOME - expects you to use a menu.
>>> Its very XP like.
>>>
>>> And since XP was what I was running when I switched entirely to
>>> Linux, I didn't have to relearn very much at all..
>>
>> We are talking about GNOME _now_ not then.
>>
> Fairy Nuff. I have no idea what it is now, but MATE is still built on
> gnome3  libraries AFAIK
> And was a sort of fork of gnome2 desktop

I always thought that MATE used GTK2. If it indeed uses GTK3, all the
better.

--
Andrzej (Andre) Matuch
Telegram: @AndrzejMatuch
Zephyrus G14 GA401QM on Fedora 41
KDE supporting member

-highhorse wrote:

>Its a tool like anything else, so use the right tool for the job.
>
>Advocates in COLA have historically fight against the wisdom of
>understanding that everything has its own strengths & weaknesses,
>swimming against uses where other solutions are better.

Of course, -highhorse is lying. He's a trolling asshole who gets-off
on attacking decent, reasonable people. His solutions are better, by
gum, and he'll ridicule anyone who thinks otherwise.

According to the -highhorse troll, "Linux is what sloppy cheapskates
who cut corners prefer to use, rather than a quality product."

--
'The only ones who are [using Linux] have found that there's a
compelling reason to tolerate its high level of bullshit.' - lying
asshole "-hh"

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 08:41:35 -0500, Andrzej Matuch wrote:

> I had a similar experience a week or so ago. I was sitting in a
> supermarket parking lot in my new QX60 when the daughter of the guy who
> parked to the left of me decided to open her car door wide and smack my
> vehicle.

That's something I have to watch very carefully. I've got a 2 door
hatchback and the doors are wide enough to allow a hypothetical person to
get in the back seat. I folded the back seats forward the day I took
delivery of the car so that's a moot point but sometimes to avoid contact
I have to slither out through a partially open door. When they layout
parking lots for maximum volume they ignore about 50% of the vehicles will
be oversized pickups that really makes the situation worse.

On 1/3/25 3:16 PM, chrisv wrote:
> -highhorse wrote:
>
>> Its a tool like anything else, so use the right tool for the job.
>>
>> Advocates in COLA have historically fight against the wisdom of
>> understanding that everything has its own strengths & weaknesses,
>> swimming against uses where other solutions are better.
>
> Of course, -highhorse is lying. He's a trolling asshole who gets-off
> on attacking decent, reasonable people. His solutions are better, by
> gum, and he'll ridicule anyone who thinks otherwise.
>
> According to the -highhorse troll, "Linux is what sloppy cheapskates
> who cut corners prefer to use, rather than a quality product."
>

Context: OP source article:

"Help! My fridge is full of spam and so is my router, set-top box and
console

Security company says it discovered spam and phishing campaign run over
Christmas, which involved internet fridge"

<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/21/fridge-spam-security-phishing-campaign>

It was a COLA thread on how Linux appliances were getting malware, and
the fanboys trying to deny it: they couldn't address a key question:

"So then why is it that a primary premise of Open Source - - security
through many eyes - - so utterly failed here?"

Likewise, they tried to save face, by saying "there are no linux viruses
in the wild." - - but that's another irrelevant red herring dodge,
because the exploit wasn't via a 'virus', but an open port.

My summary which chrisv tried to warp was:

[quote]
....it was (past tense) a 3rd party vector via a Trojan: absolutely no OS
platform is immune from Social Engineering, nor really to 3rd party
add-ons affecting stuff, either. As such, your claim falls way short,
particularly the same revision of Java on Linux OS had the same
susceptibility: the only bitch point you can try to have is how Apple
controlled their Java revision - but that was fixed due to this
occurrence, so it is now a 2 year old moot point.

Bottom line is that there are appliances being sold which didn't have
the flaw that these Linux appliances did - and trying to defend badly
done work is problematic, because it too screams that Linux is what
sloppy cheapskates who cut corners prefer to use, rather than a quality
product.
[/quote]

Allegations of dishonesty .. is up to the reader to decide for themself.

-hh

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 11:28:27 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> Odd, since MATE - a superset of GNOME - expects you to use a menu. Its
> very XP like.
>
> And since XP was what I was running when I switched entirely to Linux, I
> didn't have to relearn very much at all..

My first Windows box was 3.1 with the Program Manager. That was a little
primitive. Windows 95 introduced the Start Menu and for better or worse
became what I thought the desktop should look like.

I forget all the managers I tried on Linux in the early days. mwm, tmw,
FVWM, IceWM, Sawfish, etc but I preferred the ones that looked like
Windows.

rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
>On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 11:28:27 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>> Odd, since MATE - a superset of GNOME - expects you to use a menu. Its
>> very XP like.
>>
>> And since XP was what I was running when I switched entirely to Linux, I
>> didn't have to relearn very much at all..
>
>My first Windows box was 3.1 with the Program Manager. That was a little
>primitive. Windows 95 introduced the Start Menu and for better or worse
>became what I thought the desktop should look like.
>
>I forget all the managers I tried on Linux in the early days. mwm, tmw,
>FVWM, IceWM, Sawfish, etc but I preferred the ones that looked like
>Windows.

Cinnamon really does a good job, I would almost go for Xfce instead
but since Debian offered Cinnamon, it was an obvious choice, a bonus
great feature. But something roughly like Win95 is necessary, yes,
GNOME3 is OK but just not smooth enough to work with.

--
Joel W. Crump

Amendment XIV
Section 1.

[...] No state shall make or enforce any law which shall
abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of
life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.

Dobbs rewrites this, it is invalid precedent. States are
liable for denying needed abortions, e.g. TX.

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 11:43:48 +0100, Carlos E.R. wrote:

> What if you are new and don't know the name of the applications?

I just tried typing “photo” into the KDE Plasma Launcher, and it offered
four candidate matches: “GIMP” (of course), “Document Scanner”, “Cheese”
(webcam) and “Gwenview” (image viewer).

So this is a common function across Linux GUIs. And the information used
to implement the matching is not specific to any particular GUI
environment.

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 11:26:24 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 02/01/2025 20:04, rbowman wrote:
>> What isn't 'woke' these days? The language is over the top but does the
>> end result really differ from civilized behavior in the workplace?
>
> Yes. Absolutely it does.
>
> Civilised behaviour is a culture of tolerance. Woke is a culture of
> vicious intolerance towards anyone who challenges a narrow definition of
> a modern Puritanism.
>
> Civilised behaviour doesn't get you fired. Civilised behaviour doesn't
> get you blacklisted.
>
> Woke is part of the reason Trump will be president. People don't like
> being told what to think. This isn't Putin's Russia.

I understand your point but I've self-censored myself for a very long
time. My unfiltered thoughts probably would get me fired or blacklisted.

What does bother me about woke is, while I wouldn't refer to someone as a
fat, black, lesbian asshole in most conversations, not the fat, black,
lesbian asshole wants a pat on the head.

I think some of it is épater le bourgeois but I'm from the wrong
generation to be shocked by a pierced, rainbow-haired blob. I do regret
that they have achieved any political power.

I don't like musicals but I'm reminded of 'Cabaret' and what happened when
the music stopped at the Kit Kat Klub.

On 2025-01-03 11:43, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 03/01/2025 16:31, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
>> The Natural Philosopher wrote this post while blinking in Morse code:
>>
>>> On 03/01/2025 13:32, -hh wrote:
>>>> Sea levels have already risen by 4 inches since 1993, and hard science
>>>> has found the primary energy imbalance reason why:  its anthropometric.
>>>
>>> Sea level rise has been 3mm/yr for the last 4000 years. Nothing has
>>> changed
>>
>> This source disagrees:
>>
>>      https://ocean.si.edu/through-time/ancient-seas/sea-level-rise
>>
>> Also, sea level is *not* the same all over the world. The article
>> mentions that
>> as well.
>>
>> It's an interesting read.
>>
> Well I will merely quote from the Wiki:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_sea_level
>
> "Sea level has changed over geologic time. As the graph shows, sea level
> today is very near the *lowest level ever attained*  (the lowest level
> occurred at the Permian-Triassic boundary about 250 million years ago)."
>
> "Recently, it has become widely accepted that late Holocene, 3,000
> calendar years ago to present, sea level was nearly stable prior to an
> acceleration of rate of rise that is variously dated between 1850 and
> 1900 AD."
>
> *Long before any CO2 excess was present*.

Regardless of the facts, we must throw money at the sky until all of it
stops!

--
Andrzej (Andre) Matuch
Telegram: @AndrzejMatuch
Zephyrus G14 GA401QM on Fedora 41
KDE supporting member

"Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
>On 2025-01-03 12:16, D wrote:
>> On Thu, 2 Jan 2025, rbowman wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2 Jan 2025 08:36:41 -0500, Andrzej Matuch wrote:
>>>
>>>> I find GNOME rather clunky whereas KDE, at least on Fedora and Nobara,
>>>> is perfect out of the box. I imagine that a lot of people who try out
>>>> Linux and face GNOME are going to wonder how to do the basics, and they
>>>> will likely find that the way extensions work is rather clunky,
>>>> especially during upgrades. Meanwhile, KDE is very familiar and offers a
>>>> ton of features they could only dream of in Windows like the desktop
>>>> effects, theming options and widgets. Unlike Cinnamon too, the widgets
>>>> in KDE actually work as they should.
>>>
>>> The Ubuntu box has GNOME. I live with it but I'm not a fan. I'd rather
>>> have a menu structure rather than the 'Show Applications' button that
>>> brings up three or four screens of unsorted stuff.
>>
>> I've been running XFCE for at least a decade and I for me it is a nice
>> sweet spot of a more comprehensive desktop environment that is also
>> fairly light on resources.
>>
>> I do not use the menu system, but only a keyboard launcher instead.
>
>I switched to XFCE when Gnome went into version 3. Not sure it is 3, but
>when they changed the paradigm and killed the menu.

Xfce is a slammin' DE.

--
Joel W. Crump

Amendment XIV
Section 1.

[...] No state shall make or enforce any law which shall
abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of
life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.

Dobbs rewrites this, it is invalid precedent. States are
liable for denying needed abortions, e.g. TX.

On 2025-01-03 15:16, chrisv wrote:
> -highhorse wrote:
>
>> Its a tool like anything else, so use the right tool for the job.
>>
>> Advocates in COLA have historically fight against the wisdom of
>> understanding that everything has its own strengths & weaknesses,
>> swimming against uses where other solutions are better.
>
> Of course, -highhorse is lying. He's a trolling asshole who gets-off
> on attacking decent, reasonable people. His solutions are better, by
> gum, and he'll ridicule anyone who thinks otherwise.
>
> According to the -highhorse troll, "Linux is what sloppy cheapskates
> who cut corners prefer to use, rather than a quality product."

I am tempted to agree with this assessment.

--
Andrzej (Andre) Matuch
Telegram: @AndrzejMatuch
Zephyrus G14 GA401QM on Fedora 41
KDE supporting member

On 2025-01-03 15:49, rbowman wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 08:41:35 -0500, Andrzej Matuch wrote:
>
>> I had a similar experience a week or so ago. I was sitting in a
>> supermarket parking lot in my new QX60 when the daughter of the guy who
>> parked to the left of me decided to open her car door wide and smack my
>> vehicle.
>
> That's something I have to watch very carefully. I've got a 2 door
> hatchback and the doors are wide enough to allow a hypothetical person to
> get in the back seat. I folded the back seats forward the day I took
> delivery of the car so that's a moot point but sometimes to avoid contact
> I have to slither out through a partially open door. When they layout
> parking lots for maximum volume they ignore about 50% of the vehicles will
> be oversized pickups that really makes the situation worse.

I always try to be considerate of the people who parked next to me but
there is a serious problem with people not returning the favour here in
Quebec. The Laurentian area where this incident happened already has a
reputation for such things. However, the least considerate thing I've
ever had happen to me was when I parked my old car close to a metro a
few years ago. For whatever reason, a person decided to park his car an
inch or two away from the driver side door, preventing me from getting
in my car. I'm sure he thought it was hilarious, but so did I when I
keyed the heck out of his car on both sides.

--
Andrzej (Andre) Matuch
Telegram: @AndrzejMatuch
Zephyrus G14 GA401QM on Fedora 41
KDE supporting member

John Ames wrote:

> D wrote:
>>
>> OpenAI are good at marketing. They will probably crash the second
>> their models do no longer improve.
>
>Sooner than that, possibly. They're absolutely *hemorrhaging* money,
>every iteration of the product takes longer and costs more to develop/
>"train,"

And, just when conserving energy and water or near the top of
society's concerns, the "data centers" use massive amounts of both.

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 12:15:18 +0100, D wrote:

> I think this was common knowledge, but maybe this serves to prove it
> more fully? I always wonder how much DNA I have from eastern europe
> since my ancestors travelled east down to turkey. On the other hand, on
> my mothers side, my ancestors fled norway to iceland, and those guys
> were travelling more in southwestern europe. Could probably be some DNA
> from there as well.

I take much of it with a grain of salt but DNA has changed the game. I
thumbed through Mallory's 'In Search of the Indo-Europeans' last night.
It's from 1989 so he was examining linguistic and archaeological evidence
with the classic Cordedware, Funnel Beaker, Battle-Axe divisions based on
artifacts. In an amusing summary, after describing problems with the
theories of the day he admits he doesn't really have anything better to
offer.

Skeletal remains with usable DNA can help sort it out or modern
distributions. For example Jordanes' claim that the Goths originated in
Scandinavia was written off with many of his other inaccuracies. However
if you draw a heat map of the I-M253 Y haplogroup the epicenter is Västra
Götaland County, with over 50% of the males carrying it and spreads from
there. I1 hit some sort of bottleneck but then took off during the Nordic
Bronze Age. That puts a twist on the older theories Mallory looked at. The
DNA evidence is running against Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis while
supporting Gimbutas Pontic hypothesis as far as Indo-Europeans go but
that's mainly R1b and some R1a and not I.

Gimbutas also had the theory that Neolithic Europe was a peaceful
matriarchal paradise worshiping goddesses before those damn Indo-European
males showed up.

Then you have the Migration Period to really mix things up.

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 12:30:44 +0100, D wrote:

> Reminds me of old Saabs. Those had what you could call a bumper!

What era? The only Saab I drove was a girlfriend's. It was a 92 or maybe a
93, I forget which. It did have a bumper of sorts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagmar_bumper

Those were bumpers!

Trivia: The Dagmar the bumpers were named after was an actress's stage
name that went back to a TV show we alwayes watched, 'Mama', aobut an
extended Norwegian family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_(American_TV_series)

-hh wrote:

> chrisv wrote:
>>
>> -highhorse wrote:
>>>
>>> Its a tool like anything else, so use the right tool for the job.
>>>
>>> Advocates in COLA have historically fight against the wisdom of
>>> understanding that everything has its own strengths & weaknesses,
>>> swimming against uses where other solutions are better.
>>
>> Of course, -highhorse is lying. He's a trolling asshole who gets-off
>> on attacking decent, reasonable people. His solutions are better, by
>> gum, and he'll ridicule anyone who thinks otherwise.
>>
>> According to the -highhorse troll, "Linux is what sloppy cheapskates
>> who cut corners prefer to use, rather than a quality product."
>
> (snipped, unread)

Let me guess: Quotes from cola advocates proving that, yes, they do
consider value when making a choice! How terrible!

That must mean that they would rather use Windows or Mac! Not.

-highhorse doesn't understand the importance of software freedom, so
he takes it out on his moral and intellectual superiors. He thinks
it's about being a "cheapskate" or a "freeloader". -highhorse claims
that "the open source nature of Linux tends to attractthe type of
persona who somehow believes that all avenues are one-way streets set
up to benefit him (and only him) as the true & deserving holy center
of the universe."

-highhorse is a stupid person and an asshole.

--
"Way to miss the point, which was that the FOSS model is at risk of a
catastrophic failure because the 'center cannot hold' when the status
quo is that there's far too many freeloaders who never pay" - lying
asshole "-hh"

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 11:43:48 +0100, Carlos E.R. wrote:

> What if you are new and don't know the name of the applications?

What if you're old and don't remember the name of the application? What
was that remote desktop thingie again?

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 11:32:57 +0100, Carlos E.R. wrote:

> I have a friend that got a new, very well paying, job at some job with
> IBM hardware and doing new things with it (including buying more
> hardware). Financial or bank sector.
>
> They need hardware that is immensely capable and runs full time in some
> sectors.

Interesting, because there is a document about timekeeping on IBM
mainframes that I got from Bitsavers, dated about 1986, which recommends
rebooting if you want to turn daylight saving on or off.

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 11:52:55 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> Linux is good all by itself. Doesn't need advocacy.

That’s a naïve attitude, let’s face it.

The proprietary companies can afford multi-million-dollar advertising
campaigns to tell everyone how wonderful they are. No Open Source project
can compete with that.

All we have is word of mouth, from actual customers using the product in
real-world applications. You’d think that would count for more, but it
doesn’t.

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 16:09:35 -0500, -hh wrote:

> "So then why is it that a primary premise of Open Source - - security
> through many eyes - - so utterly failed here?"

For the usual reason: the companies repurposing the Open Source software
didn’t keep it up to date.

The essence of Open Source is that the developers who create the code have
no control over how it is reused and redistributed -- just so long as the
licences are observed, they have no other leverage, no control over QA,
nothing.

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 07:42:48 -0500, -hh wrote:

> A lot of the sophistication (& differentiation) in PS was through its
> use of Layers, particularly for making selective exposure adjustments.

All very well if you have a dozen or two dozen images to deal with, but
what if you have a thousand?

This is where command-line/scriptable tools like ImageMagick/
GraphicsMagick come into their own. Also the Python scriptability of GIMP,
Inkscape etc can be helpful.

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 12:19:27 +0100, D wrote:

> Interesting! Clearly I live in a corner of the IT space that is way, way
> too fashionable. I am of course aware of postgres, but have not
> encountered it for many years.

It's come a long way and is also popular in the cloud. Do you want to pay
for SQL Server, DB2, or Oracle when there is a very capable free database?
If you don't want to get your hands dirty Amazon will do the heavy lifting
for a small hourly fee.

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025, chrisv wrote:

> John Ames wrote:
>
>> D wrote:
>>>
>>> OpenAI are good at marketing. They will probably crash the second
>>> their models do no longer improve.
>>
>> Sooner than that, possibly. They're absolutely *hemorrhaging* money,
>> every iteration of the product takes longer and costs more to develop/
>> "train,"
>
> And, just when conserving energy and water or near the top of
> society's concerns, the "data centers" use massive amounts of both.

I am surprised that eco-fascists are not protesting against the big IT
corporations. But most likely that would not result in higher taxes and
more power to socialist politicians, so that is probably why they are
ignored.

I would think that eco-fascists would also demonstrate against
crypto-mining, but no, airplanes, who release ridiculously small amounts
of CO2, that's apparently the problem.

On Sat, 3 Jan 2025, rbowman wrote:

> On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 12:30:44 +0100, D wrote:
>
>> Reminds me of old Saabs. Those had what you could call a bumper!
>
> What era? The only Saab I drove was a girlfriend's. It was a 92 or maybe a
> 93, I forget which. It did have a bumper of sorts.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagmar_bumper
>
> Those were bumpers!
>
> Trivia: The Dagmar the bumpers were named after was an actress's stage
> name that went back to a TV show we alwayes watched, 'Mama', aobut an
> extended Norwegian family.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_(American_TV_series)

This is a beautiful bumper:

https://www.startpage.com/av/proxy-image?piurl=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fe%2Fe5%2FSaab_900_GLE_%282%29_%28crop%29.jpg&sp=1735951735T1b8aa114fd353d88b4d34fd3554f5b9455c5317dadea52d972489e1e4be614a0
..

I think there's a sabb with an even wider one, but cannot find it. I saw
it in a garage many decades ago.

On Sat, 3 Jan 2025, rbowman wrote:

> On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 12:19:27 +0100, D wrote:
>
>> Interesting! Clearly I live in a corner of the IT space that is way, way
>> too fashionable. I am of course aware of postgres, but have not
>> encountered it for many years.
>
> It's come a long way and is also popular in the cloud. Do you want to pay
> for SQL Server, DB2, or Oracle when there is a very capable free database?
> If you don't want to get your hands dirty Amazon will do the heavy lifting
> for a small hourly fee.
>
> https://aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/
>

I think all the ones that use traditional databases I encountered are
using either mysql, mariadb or sql server for linux which I think was free
for a while. Sql server for linux was a joke. The company was offered help
to migrate to mysql or mariadb, refused, since they were microsoft
loyalists, and continued to live with downtime every month, rather than
switching.