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I think Natural Philosopher is like visiting a computer history museum :D

It's Sunday and some jokes and entertainment is appreciated :D

Reply to
Deloptes
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I did may be a shortcut here. Of course it is not a desktop, however the desktop itself must be stable and provides the framework for GUI apps to run. The GUI apps enhance productivity. Without productivity you are less competitive. OF course you could write the documents in bits or bytes, but it does not make any sense. Otherwise the punch cards would be still in use. Productivity and efficiency makes the difference and sadly in the desktop market Linux performs bad. Perhaps there should be a company like RHEL to provide support and warranty, but still there should be a usable product to promote at the end. And again a mere desktop without useful applications still provides no advantage. I criticized not only the unstable desktops showing up recently, but also the lack of competitive and stable products.

While I wrote my thesis in LaTeX (using Lyx editor), in the business world, one should be able to produce excellent quality documents. I know OpenOffice very well, but compared to M$ Office it is still a baby. I need

3x more time (at least) to do the same work. Just for the record the editors I usually use to produce PDFs.

Well, you do not have to be a car mechanic to drive the car - right?

And what what is wrong with that? I go to the shop and buy a vacuum cleaner. I do not buy it in parts and assemble it at home - right? I can not imagine you do the same. Another example - you go to the pharmacy and buy some drugs. You do not buy the ingredients and mix the drugs yourself in the kitchen - right?

I am sorry to say this, but what you state is a fallacy.

I doubt you have seen SailfishOS anyway. I wonder what kind of phone, especially mobile phone you use. I have not seen a mobile with a terminal :D

I have repsect to elderly people and I find it amusing writing with you, but perhaps we should take it offline, unless people are amused too and insist that we continue.

regards

Reply to
Deloptes

If it is egotism to think that I am the best judge of what tools suit me then yes. It is an egotism shared by just about every craftsman that ever lived.

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Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
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Reply to
Ahem A Rivet's Shot

Yep but it was a piece of crap (IMHO) compared to WordPerfect 5 using a keyboard with function keys on the left and control next to A.

I find sc perfectly acceptable for my spreadsheet needs, to be fair it hasn't been updated/needed fixing in the last six years so perhaps it isn't modern.

Hell yes.

Q: "What's the best unix IDE ?" A: "Your favourite shell".

Anyone else remember the visual shell, seen on Altos XENIX kit.

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Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
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Reply to
Ahem A Rivet's Shot

What? Open Office compared to, say, LaTeX? You must be joking. I do use OO, but only for converting junk I'm given into useable formats.

Cars are another excellent example for what it means to use something whithout understand how it actually works. Works fine until something goes wrong. Look at just a little snow. Yes, most people do get from A to B in a new car without actually breaking something at once and when getting a new one every three years or so. Remind you of computers?

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Reply to
Axel Berger

It's funny but doing things my quirky way sometimes has me doing things several years before they catch on elsewhere. I was using a computer as a PVR and video player in the late 1990s (I had to fix bugs in the FreeBSD Brooktree driver to make it work properly). Music had found its way there even earlier.

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Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
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Reply to
Ahem A Rivet's Shot

they way it was always done before GUIS.

Either using a database or a text based spreadsheet

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"When one man dies it's a tragedy. When thousands die it's statistics." 

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

In most cases they do the exact opposite. In a corporate environment.

The most productive people are the touch typists who never touch a mouse but navigate using tab and control keys and know what they need to enter before they do it, working on a straight set of text based forms

Indeed, and thats why cost wen way higher for may companies who out PCs on the desktop.

OF course you could write the documents in bits or bytes, but

This is nothing to do with desktops.

MS WORD is the greatest productivity killer EVER. either you want something much simpler like wordstar or you need something that actually does page layouts properly like Quark Xpress or similar..

MS Word probably costs the world a trillion dollars a year/.

No, and that is why you dont have things like spark advance retard, mixture control, brake balance., and the ability to change the dashboard veneer at the touch of a switch.

In fact my latest car doesn't even have a temperature gauge. The move is to get rid of eye candy and clutter except in nasry cheap little shitboxes like the Toyota Yaris. Which uses them as a selling point on a car that is otherwise probably the worst car I have ever driven. Pontiacs and Chevys excepted.

What is wrong is that we are not talking about fashion accessories - we were talking about usability and productivity.

I go to the shop and buy a vacuum cleaner.

I have never yet bought a vacuum cleakener that didn't need assembling actually.

Exactluy. I do not have a graphical usier interface, I get su[[lied with what I ineed. Not 'select frim 17 diferent colored pills'

I am sorry to say this, but what you state is a fallacy.

I use what I have to use. It doiesn't mean I like it or sing praises about its utility.

If there was ever a user interface worse than a keyboard and mouse, it has to be a touch screen. 4 times out of 5 my phone remains unanswered because the touch screen doesn't work properly. I have a very dry skin, and the alignment of the touchable bits and the icon for phone answering is just off. I wouldn?t have a smart phone at all, but for the fact that people insist on sending texts and I must read them, and where I was living 2 years ago had no mobile coveragee, so I had to use a phone with wifi calling and that meant a smart phone

The only 'apps;' I really use on it are the camera and ebook reader and satnav. These of course need GUI - well the ebooks dont. But the other two do.

It is a cheap piece of shit.

The problem is that you haven't actually been in the position of running a business and gauging how much or how little computers are costing and benefiting that business.

I can assure you that more works was done with less hassle before Windows PCs.

And that the same work is still being done, merely at less efficiency, Having said that, I use a GUI because I have to, but fortunately the desktop I uses is rock solid stable and boring as hell, just like the dashboard of my car and, like the dashboard of my car, its main purpose is to not interfere with the use to which I put the vehicle.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Yepo. I thihk Word Prefect was as good as it got for word processors. After that is was all 'chjrome and tailfins' 'designed to sell but not to work' and performance when downhill fast.

For me Wordstar was always one of the best, in the sweet spot between having almost no functionality at all, like vi, and having so many features that a misclick could delete or reformat an entire document.. Word is a complete abortion. So many features that you spend three days learning how to turn them off.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

In my working life I had to use what te customer provided. Usually 'vi'. I didn't have ten years to spend 'tuning my environment'. Imagine being told to drive a van and refusing because the light switch wasn?t where you wanted it. Computers are just tools. There is no perfect tool and craftsmen - real craftsmen - don't spend time designing new ones, they learn to use the one's available.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I bet you bought betamax and 8 track car tapes.

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?Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of  
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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

We'll have the agree to disagree there. I HATED Wordperfect because:

- the randomly organised collection of function keys scattered over four shifts. I never saw anybody use it without the cheat sheet stuck to the keyboard

Word was much better organised: hit F8 and the current word was selected, F8 again to select the sentence, a third time to select the paragraph. I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but Word for DOS was their one product that I'd regard as first class.

- its still the least helpful piece of software I've ever seen (how can you expect a new or casual user to use something that starts up with with a blank screen with two numbers in the bottom left corner

- its the only piece of software I've used that expected its normal users to use what was effectively a debugging tool (the view that showed all the formatting annotations in the text and let them be edited to fix document

- it couldn't match our system documentation standards until one of our developers wrote a large collection of macros for it. The equivalent Word for DOS style sheet was much simpler to set up and use

- lastly, it was much slower than Word for DOS for common operations such as going to a specific page in a big document.

I think I saw it, but never really used it.

My background was mainframe - I'd been using decent OSen (ICL George 3 and VME/B) for 10 years before I saw my first GUI interface (that was an ICL PERQ in 1980) and was up to speed with SWTPC FLEX (on a 6800) followed by UniFLEX (multi-user/multi-tasking on a 6809) before I ever saw an Apple II or anything running CP/M. My first experience of using a GUI system for actual work was an Apple Lisa in 1984, about the same time that I first met DOS on a PC-AT.

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Gregorie  | gregorie dot org
Reply to
Martin Gregorie

I did mention earlier that for work it is different, I use what I am provided with like everyone else and it is less efficient than my own working environment in many ways but fits better with the company. I put up with or workaround its deficiencies.

I am talking about *my* working environment the one I use for my personal work and hobbies. Where possible (more often than you may think) I am able to configure aspects of my work environment similarly to my home one.

You are thinking about jobbing craftsmen - now go look at a really good carpenter's workshop like this one:

formatting link

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Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
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Reply to
Ahem A Rivet's Shot

A decent 4GL kicks both of those into the long grass and is MUCH faster to use because you don't need to take your hands off the keyboard AND, if the 4GL system is one of the better ones good and the application wasn't designed by numpties, tabbing between data entry boxes follows the logical work flow on screen rather than stupidly stepping across the screen left->right and then down to the next row. This makes 4GL applications very much faster to use than the average GUI or web page where text entry is involved.

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org
Reply to
Martin Gregorie

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote

| > I just did the accounting in kmymoney (I use it since 2006). I wounder how I | > would have done it without GUI :/ | > | they way it was always done before GUIS. | | Either using a database or a text based spreadsheet

These are great ideas. I recently did my taxes in a GUI. I hate it. Ease of use. Flexibility. Functionality... It's enough to make anyone pull their hair out... And I don't have enough hair to spare... Could you point me to a command line PDF form filler? I don't know why I haven't found one. It seems simple enough. I should be able to read the PDF in console mode, line by line, with the option to enter the x,y coordinates of the form input field and then start typing. Social security number? Sure: acmepdf -f -ws -t input 2022 1088 012-34-5678

Easy as pie. I dare anyone to show me how they could accomplish that in a GUI. Sheesh!

Reply to
Mayayana

True but once you had the ones you used regularly in muscle memory it was very fast because they were all left hand chords, anything else was a quick glance away.

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Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
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Reply to
Ahem A Rivet's Shot

you are talking about steam engine and its advantages compared to electric car. I agree ... I don't mind using a Diesel though - I just don't want be enforced using the electric one. Now researching the options to buy hybrid may be next year.

I admire the steam engines ... but still ... somehow old fashioned.

Reply to
Deloptes

yes this is exactly what I mean

Reply to
Deloptes

Yeah. Like the wheel. How quaint. Round wheels. Surely a person as modern and enlightened as you can come up with a better shape for a wheel?

You don't realise just how much a victim of fashion - chrome and tailfins, designed to sell but not to work - you are.,

It all appeals to the ego.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I don't think you know me that well. I love stable environment - like a machinery that works flowless. I want to do my work as a craftsman. I do not want to spend time to solve issues on the machinery that pop up out of nothing.

I just wanted to point out that Windows 10 runs very stable as does the TDE desktop I use. I just find it sad that modern Linux desktops can not offer that stable environment, but I am afraid you did not get the point.

I leave it here.

regards

Reply to
Deloptes

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