7 Best Alternatives To Microsoft Office Suite — 2019 Edition

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Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 10/12/2019 16.18, Dan Purgert wrote:
Mayayana wrote:
"Dan Purgert" wrote

| I've never used Mandrake/Mandriva; but I know that SUSE is ... weird.
| They remind me of like IBM or HP -- "release 1.2.3.1 is to be released
| on January 13, 2020; our standard lifecycle will apply to this release.
| Long-term contract holders can obtain 1.2.3.1.LT on January 20."
|
| I think the whole gimmick with them is that you buy a SUSE support
| contract.
|

I'd never heard of that. I mainly picked those because
they supported KDE and because they seemed to have to
most package support for various software programs.

As this is a bit OT for the *win* groups, should we perhaps move to
email?

There is "alt.comp.freeware" and "alt.computer.workshop". Are they also
Windows groups? :-?

Whoops, missed the alt.computer.workshop in the headers :/



Well, I just read the SUSE page for a few minutes, and the language
reminded me of other "enterprise-y" stuff. I could be somewhat off the
mark there.

You have to read the openSUSE pageS instead.

But Mayayana didn't say "opensuse".

[...]
When I tried SR Iron, which is supposed to be a
clean version of Chromium, even that tried to call
home. When the call failed it tried to call Google.
Yet their whole selling point is no Google spyware!

Dunno about that one. Many browsers nowadays have some form of a DNS
check built in though, which may simply use their site to check that DNS
is working.

Yes, I have seen that. openSUSE network scripts do that since ages. If
the check fails, you get a notice that network is failing. And it is
just that, a check that the network is running. A plain "ping", no data
exchanged.

Same here, after running some traces overnight. A couple pings and
other "no real data" transmissions, but that's it.

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|_|O|_|
|_|_|O| Github: https://github.com/dpurgert
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David G. Stalker from Devon wrote:

On 10/12/2019 00:19, Beauregard T. Shagnasty wrote:
David the Lying Stalker of Devon wrote:
[the same old lying innuendo-infested drivel]

Give it up. You've worn it to death.

Let's talk about THIS then:-

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

You use it on your website.

No. I do not. If you had a clue, you would not have even suggested it. It
is obvious you don't even know what it is for. You didn't even read the
wikipedia page, did you?

See for yourself, doofus:
http://tekrider.net/robots.txt

Why does Webby Enterprises use it too?

I have no idea if they do or do not, and can't be arsed to find out.

https://www.webbytech.net

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/snip_stalking

You keep adding to your disgusting stalking reputation *and* annoy the
owners of that *shared server*. Remember, they are watching you.

--
-bts

On 11/12/2019 15.15, Mayayana wrote:
No, viewing it as HTML makes no difference. Which
makes sense. You didn't post as HTML. Interestingly,
I see the boxes in your post, but once I reply or copy
and paste it's converted to mostly question marks. I
tried to copy and paste it into a webpage with UTF-8
content encoding, then view in New Moon, but the
Clipboard seems to convert it to question marks.

That's the problem I mentioned with your posts. Your client tries to
convert to your local codepage and fails, of course.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 11/12/2019 06.24, Ken Springer wrote:
On 12/10/19 8:01 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Springer" wrote

| I used to know a girl whose first name was Risë.Â* Born in the USA.Â* :-)
|

Â*Â* I don't even know how to enter that. If Risë wrote to me
I'd do what I just did: Copy and paste her name.

In this case, I looked up umlaut in Wikipedia.Â* The article included a
bunch of letters with umlauts.Â* So, I did what you did.Â* Copy and paste.

As I have a Spanish keyboard, I have a dead key that types the two dots,
similar to '"', so I can type 'ë' easily (two dots dead key plus 'e'),
even though that letter does not exist in Spanish. :-D

If I had an USA keyboard, I would use the "International Layout", and
then I would use the quote symbol to get the same result.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 11/12/2019 18:13, Beauregard T. Shagnasty wrote:
David G. Stalker from Devon wrote:

On 10/12/2019 00:19, Beauregard T. Shagnasty wrote:
David the Lying Stalker of Devon wrote:
[the same old lying innuendo-infested drivel]

Give it up. You've worn it to death.

Let's talk about THIS then:-

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

You use it on your website.

No. I do not. If you had a clue, you would not have even suggested it. It
is obvious you don't even know what it is for. You didn't even read the
wikipedia page, did you?

Yes, I did. But a long while ago.

Please explain, for the benefit of my pal Jon, *WHY* you have banned
ANYBODY with BT as their ISP from visiting your website. Don't simply
say it's to keep *ME* out. Jon *KNOWS* that I'm one of life's *GOOD
GUYS*! :-)

See for yourself, doofus:
http://tekrider.net/robots.txt

Lots to read here!

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

Why does Webby Enterprises use it too?

I have no idea if they do or do not, and can't be arsed to find out.

https://www.webbytech.net

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/snip_stalking

You keep adding to your disgusting stalking reputation *and* annoy the
owners of that *shared server*. Remember, they are watching you.

This might help them:-

https://support.google.com/webmaster.../7489871?hl=en

David G. Stalker from Devon wrote:

On 11/12/2019 18:13, Beauregard T. Shagnasty wrote:
David G. Stalker from Devon wrote:
On 10/12/2019 00:19, Beauregard T. Shagnasty wrote:
David the Lying Stalker of Devon wrote:
[the same old lying innuendo-infested drivel]

Give it up. You've worn it to death.

Let's talk about THIS then:-

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

You use it on your website.

No. I do not. If you had a clue, you would not have even suggested it.
It is obvious you don't even know what it is for. You didn't even read
the wikipedia page, did you?

Yes, I did. But a long while ago.

Ah. More than twenty minutes ago. So you've forgotten all about it.

Please explain, for the benefit of my pal Jon, *WHY* you have banned
ANYBODY with BT as their ISP from visiting your website. Don't simply
say it's to keep *ME* out. Jon *KNOWS* that I'm one of life's *GOOD
GUYS*! :-)

There is only a "pal" in your mind, David/Jon. You are not a good guy, you
are a despicable lying stalker.

See for yourself, doofus:
http://tekrider.net/robots.txt

Lots to read here!

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

Yeah. So?

You keep adding to your disgusting stalking reputation *and* annoy the
owners of that *shared server*. Remember, they are watching you.

This might help them:-

https://support.google.com/webmaster.../7489871?hl=en

Totally and completely irrelevant for why you and "Jon" can't find the
page via BT. Suck it up and forget about it; you don't understand a thing
about it.

--
-bts

"Frank Slootweg" wrote

| The problem with switching to UTF-8 is that while it's
| a better solution than unicode-16, it's still a problem.
| It's not easy to sniff a file to tell UTF-8 from ANSI, yet
| headers or BOMs are discouraged. So if I open a UTF-8
| webpage in Notepad I see corrupted characters. If I
| add a BOM for Notepad I have a corrupted ANSI file
| in other programs. And since I'm not using unicode fonts,
| I can't see the characters, anyway, except in a browser.
|
| Yes, it's not an easy problem. That's why - if I need a non-ASCII
| character - I try to stick with ISO 8859-1 ('Latin-1 Western European')
| [1], which is identical to the first 256 characters in UTF-8.
|
It doesn't match. That's the problem. I would need
to switch to UTF-8 in order to accomodate people
like Carlos because I have the English codepage. All
codepages use 128+ for special purposes. UTF-8 uses
128+ to build multibyte characters. If it didn't do that
then UTF-8 couldn't work. So ASCII (1-127) is the
only set that's compatible with all codepages and
with UTF-8.

On 11/12/2019 18:09, Dan Purgert wrote:
Whoops, missed the alt.computer.workshop in the headers :/

You are more than welcome to join us in my Usenet group, Dan! :-)

Especially if you know something about computing!

What do you make of THIS website? www.dogagent.com

Whoa! :-D Mind you don't get bitten!!!

--
*Follow-up set* to alt.computer.workshop

On 11/12/2019 12.29, nospam wrote:
In article , Ken Springer
wrote:

I've wondered how people use curly quotes and long dashes.
I don't know of any easy way to do it.

It may depend on the software you use. Many word processors have an
option to insert the curly quotes. I don't know if it's still the same,
but in Word you intentionally type the wrong key combo, and the en or em
dash would be inserted if AutoCorrect was enabled. Usually, you can add
your own AutoCorrect entries.

curly quotes are often done automatically, so the user doesn't have to
worry about which one to use when.

If I remember correctly, it is optional in LibreOffice. One of several
automatisms that can be enabled or disabled.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

In article , Carlos E.R.
wrote:

I've wondered how people use curly quotes and long dashes.
I don't know of any easy way to do it.

It may depend on the software you use. Many word processors have an
option to insert the curly quotes. I don't know if it's still the same,
but in Word you intentionally type the wrong key combo, and the en or em
dash would be inserted if AutoCorrect was enabled. Usually, you can add
your own AutoCorrect entries.

curly quotes are often done automatically, so the user doesn't have to
worry about which one to use when.

If I remember correctly, it is optional in LibreOffice. One of several
automatisms that can be enabled or disabled.

yep. automatic can be enabled or disabled as needed. when enabled, the
computer takes care of the details so the user can concentrate on the
actual content rather than worry which quote to use when, or it can be
disabled if preferred.

On 11/12/2019 19.09, Dan Purgert wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 10/12/2019 16.18, Dan Purgert wrote:
Mayayana wrote:
"Dan Purgert" wrote

| I've never used Mandrake/Mandriva; but I know that SUSE is ... weird.
| They remind me of like IBM or HP -- "release 1.2.3.1 is to be released
| on January 13, 2020; our standard lifecycle will apply to this release.
| Long-term contract holders can obtain 1.2.3.1.LT on January 20."
|
| I think the whole gimmick with them is that you buy a SUSE support
| contract.
|

I'd never heard of that. I mainly picked those because
they supported KDE and because they seemed to have to
most package support for various software programs.

As this is a bit OT for the *win* groups, should we perhaps move to
email?

There is "alt.comp.freeware" and "alt.computer.workshop". Are they also
Windows groups? :-?

Whoops, missed the alt.computer.workshop in the headers :/



Well, I just read the SUSE page for a few minutes, and the language
reminded me of other "enterprise-y" stuff. I could be somewhat off the
mark there.

You have to read the openSUSE pageS instead.

But Mayayana didn't say "opensuse".

Well, SUSE is the commercial version, it is normal they use "enterprise"
speach. openSUSE is the community version. There is a lot of variation
in the pages depending on who did each of them.

The main page might look a bit "commercial", though (I don't like it
much). It was designed by some professional and not touched again. The
real stuff is in the wikis.

https://www.opensuse.org/
https://en.opensuse.org/Main_Page


[...]
When I tried SR Iron, which is supposed to be a
clean version of Chromium, even that tried to call
home. When the call failed it tried to call Google.
Yet their whole selling point is no Google spyware!

Dunno about that one. Many browsers nowadays have some form of a DNS
check built in though, which may simply use their site to check that DNS
is working.

Yes, I have seen that. openSUSE network scripts do that since ages. If
the check fails, you get a notice that network is failing. And it is
just that, a check that the network is running. A plain "ping", no data
exchanged.

Same here, after running some traces overnight. A couple pings and
other "no real data" transmissions, but that's it.

About Chrome, it is possible they download some database for recognizing
bad pages, for instance. Or they ask on each page you try. That would
not be "phoning home", it would be a feature and can be disabled.
Another usage I know Firefox does is checking for up updates to the
plugins and addons.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 06/12/2019 09.30, Chris wrote:
nospam wrote:
In article , Ken Springer
wrote:

there's no need to print a powerpoint presentation, but if you must,
the background can be disabled to minimize ink usage.

Unfortunately, I've been to many an instructional presentation where the
class notes that are passed out are just the presentation you are
watching. :-(

that does happen, but more commonly, a pdf is available for download
and/or distributed to the students via email.

Which, is just your opinion as to how everyone does it.

no, it's what actually happens in secondary schools, universities and
industry conferences.

Ha ha ha ha ha!!!

What a blinkered life you lead! Not even close to reality. I work at
university and attend many conferences. What you state is not the norm. At
best you can request for the presenter's slides, but there's no guarantee
you'll get them.

it's a *lot* cheaper and a lot less waste versus printing.

True. Teachers and lectures are heavily time pressured, however, so they
either won't make handouts available at all or just make the ppt slides
available. They will not bother exporting them.


Often it is only the slides and not a text, because the text takes time
to write, and they are paid to give the speach. They will not give the
text of the speach.

Also, it is possible they do not want to use their private mail address
or phone number (for whatsap).

--
Cheers, Carlos.

Mayayana wrote:
"Frank Slootweg" wrote

| The problem with switching to UTF-8 is that while it's
| a better solution than unicode-16, it's still a problem.
| It's not easy to sniff a file to tell UTF-8 from ANSI, yet
| headers or BOMs are discouraged. So if I open a UTF-8
| webpage in Notepad I see corrupted characters. If I
| add a BOM for Notepad I have a corrupted ANSI file
| in other programs. And since I'm not using unicode fonts,
| I can't see the characters, anyway, except in a browser.
|
| Yes, it's not an easy problem. That's why - if I need a non-ASCII
| character - I try to stick with ISO 8859-1 ('Latin-1 Western European')
| [1], which is identical to the first 256 characters in UTF-8.
|
It doesn't match. That's the problem. I would need
to switch to UTF-8 in order to accomodate people
like Carlos because I have the English codepage. All
codepages use 128+ for special purposes. UTF-8 uses
128+ to build multibyte characters. If it didn't do that
then UTF-8 couldn't work. So ASCII (1-127) is the
only set that's compatible with all codepages and
with UTF-8.

Oops! You're right! I was misled by a sentence on Wikipedia which I
(mis)interpreted without realizing the full context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859#Relationship_to_Unicode_and_the_UCS

"The first 256 characters in Unicode and the UCS are identical to those
in ISO/IEC-8859-1 (Latin-1)."

Now, after your response, I realize that it says "The first 256
characters", not "The first 256 character encodings".

The actual bit which put me in the right direction was

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Origin_and_development

"The first 256 code points were made identical to the content of
ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text."

Here it says 'code points', not 'character encodings'. The use of the
term 'code points' made me realize that it talks about something else
than I thought it was talking about.

And

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description

"The first 128 characters (US-ASCII) need one byte. The next 1,920
characters need two bytes to encode,"

indeed confirms what you're saying, namely "UTF-8 uses 128+ to build
multibyte characters.".

So thanks for your explanation.

Conclusion: Yes, *I* can try to stick with ISO 8859-1, but no, the
128+ part of ISO 8859-1 is *not* compatible with UTF-8.

Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 11/12/2019 06.24, Ken Springer wrote:
On 12/10/19 8:01 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Springer" wrote

| I used to know a girl whose first name was Risë.* Born in the USA.* :-)

** I don't even know how to enter that. If Risë wrote to me
I'd do what I just did: Copy and paste her name.

In this case, I looked up umlaut in Wikipedia.* The article included a
bunch of letters with umlauts.* So, I did what you did.* Copy and paste.

As I have a Spanish keyboard, I have a dead key that types the two dots,
similar to '"', so I can type 'ë' easily (two dots dead key plus 'e'),
even though that letter does not exist in Spanish. :-D

If I had an USA keyboard, I would use the "International Layout", and
then I would use the quote symbol to get the same result.

Indeed. While I am Dutch, live in The Netherlands and Dutch has
several local-language characters (diacriticals), I have a keyboard with
USA layout, because I prefer to use the English version/setting [1] of
(MS-)Windows.

Software-wise, my Windows keyboard is set to 'English (United States)
/ US' but I have an additional keyboard setting [2] 'United States-
International keyboard / INTL'. When I need to type some Dutch (or
German or ...) characters, I just switch (toggle in the Taskbar) to the
INTL keyboard and type '"e' to get the above mentioned 'ë'.

N.B. To show the point I made earlier to Mayayana:

Carlos' post to which I am replying was posted in UTF-8
('charset=utf-8'), but, if all goes well, this reply goes out in
ISO-8859-1 ('charset=iso-8859-1') and Carlos and most people should be
able to see the 'ë' ('e' with two dots on top) correctly.

For that to work, *their* codepage can be set to anything (including
just (7-bit) ASCII), just their *newsreader* needs to be able to
*decode* ISO-8859-1 and their *font* needs to be able to *display* the
'e' with two dots on top.

Fingers crossed! :-)

[1] 'Windows display language' in Control Panel

[2] 'Input method' in Control Panel.

On 12/12/2019 21.07, Frank Slootweg wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 11/12/2019 06.24, Ken Springer wrote:
On 12/10/19 8:01 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Springer" wrote

| I used to know a girl whose first name was Risë.Â* Born in the USA.Â* :-)

Â*Â* I don't even know how to enter that. If Risë wrote to me
I'd do what I just did: Copy and paste her name.

In this case, I looked up umlaut in Wikipedia.Â* The article included a
bunch of letters with umlauts.Â* So, I did what you did.Â* Copy and paste.

As I have a Spanish keyboard, I have a dead key that types the two dots,
similar to '"', so I can type 'ë' easily (two dots dead key plus 'e'),
even though that letter does not exist in Spanish. :-D

If I had an USA keyboard, I would use the "International Layout", and
then I would use the quote symbol to get the same result.

Indeed. While I am Dutch, live in The Netherlands and Dutch has
several local-language characters (diacriticals), I have a keyboard with
USA layout, because I prefer to use the English version/setting [1] of
(MS-)Windows.

Software-wise, my Windows keyboard is set to 'English (United States)
/ US' but I have an additional keyboard setting [2] 'United States-
International keyboard / INTL'. When I need to type some Dutch (or
German or ...) characters, I just switch (toggle in the Taskbar) to the
INTL keyboard and type '"e' to get the above mentioned 'ë'.

N.B. To show the point I made earlier to Mayayana:

Carlos' post to which I am replying was posted in UTF-8
('charset=utf-8'), but, if all goes well, this reply goes out in
ISO-8859-1 ('charset=iso-8859-1') and Carlos and most people should be
able to see the 'ë' ('e' with two dots on top) correctly.

For that to work, *their* codepage can be set to anything (including
just (7-bit) ASCII), just their *newsreader* needs to be able to
*decode* ISO-8859-1 and their *font* needs to be able to *display* the
'e' with two dots on top.

Fingers crossed! :-)

Right, but things change further at the step of replying with quotes.
That doesn't work with 7 bits.


[1] 'Windows display language' in Control Panel

[2] 'Input method' in Control Panel.



--
Cheers, Carlos.