Questions about the "end of Windows 7"

Ken Blake wrote:
On Sun, 3 Mar 2019 13:47:20 -0500, Stan Brown
wrote:

On Sun, 03 Mar 2019 09:04:46 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:
It's very common for someone to complain about some particular program
being "bloated." What they mean by that, I assume, is that it consumes
a lot of disk space.

Maybe "they" do. :-)

"Bloated" to me means that it has a lot of features that I'll never
use in a million years. A very personal definition, obviously.


OK, we have different definitions.

But almost every program has lots of features and almost nobody uses
them all. We're all different and although I don't use feature A, you
use it all the time. And I use feature B, but you don't.

To me that's good, not bad. Even though our needs are different, we
both get the features we want. I have no problem with a feature that I
don't use being there.

As a single example of what I mean, I use Forte Agent as my
newsreader. Agent also has a built-in e-mail client, but I never use
it. However lots of other Agent users do. That's fine with me. Those
who use it and those of us who don't are both happy. Other than its
taking up a tiny amount of disk space (probably less than a penny's
worth), as far as I'm concerned there's no disadvantage to its being
there.

Can you give the same justification for Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe
Photoshop and Adobe Audition, for *most* users? (N.B.: not talking about
the pros here).
And I think all of them are somewhere around 1 GB in size, just for
starters!

There are some good examples of bloat (at least for many users, I do
believe).

On Sun, 03 Mar 2019 09:41:13 -0800, pyotr filipivich
wrote:

"Mayayana" on Sat, 2 Mar 2019 23:52:36 -0500
typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
"Bill in Co" surly_curmudgeon@earthlink wrote

| Did you ever consider the much leaner Kingston Office (aka WPS Office
now),
| or Softmaker Free Office? They are both a LOT less bloated then either
| OpenOffice or LibreOffice, but may not have everything you need, not sure.
| Just wondering.
|
Sounded interesting but I jut went to check them out.
WPS - website's a mess, mostly embedded in javascript.
Not much to see otherwise. The source code looks like
they require an email address.
Free 2018 - Website not much better. XP not supported.
No sign of older versions. Requires registration.

Was talking with The Wife this morning. If I had the mad skillz,
I'd write a word processor called "My Typewriter." Times Roman or
Courier as default, bold, underline or italics as options. Basic
editing. She said "Typewriters don't have bold and italics!" well,
yes, but ...
Then I got into feeping creatures. Typewriter clicks when you
press the keys, and a Ding! at the edge of the screen, or the Enter
key. an option to have random capital letters entered as bottom half
the capital above and top half of the lower case letter below.
Control H backs up, overstrikes the next key typed.


In another message in this thread, I just mentioned that I used to own
an IBM Selectric typewriter. It was over 30 years ago, so my memory
might be faulty, but I think it did a "carriage return" (it was really
a "golf ball" return) automatically.

Ken Blake wrote:
On Sun, 03 Mar 2019 09:41:13 -0800, pyotr filipivich
wrote:

"Mayayana" on Sat, 2 Mar 2019 23:52:36 -0500
typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
"Bill in Co" surly_curmudgeon@earthlink wrote

Did you ever consider the much leaner Kingston Office (aka WPS Office
now), or Softmaker Free Office? They are both a LOT less bloated then
either OpenOffice or LibreOffice, but may not have everything you
need, not sure. Just wondering.

Sounded interesting but I jut went to check them out.
WPS - website's a mess, mostly embedded in javascript.
Not much to see otherwise. The source code looks like
they require an email address.
Free 2018 - Website not much better. XP not supported.
No sign of older versions. Requires registration.

Was talking with The Wife this morning. If I had the mad skillz,
I'd write a word processor called "My Typewriter." Times Roman or
Courier as default, bold, underline or italics as options. Basic
editing. She said "Typewriters don't have bold and italics!" well,
yes, but ...
Then I got into feeping creatures. Typewriter clicks when you
press the keys, and a Ding! at the edge of the screen, or the Enter
key. an option to have random capital letters entered as bottom half
the capital above and top half of the lower case letter below.
Control H backs up, overstrikes the next key typed.


In another message in this thread, I just mentioned that I used to own
an IBM Selectric typewriter. It was over 30 years ago, so my memory
might be faulty, but I think it did a "carriage return" (it was really
a "golf ball" return) automatically.

Carriage return???? You mean for a horse and buggy??? :-)

On 2019-03-03, Paul wrote:
Freedom from stuff that works :-/

I have not found that to be the case.

If there is ever something which is covered by NDA
or is delivered as a binary blob, "you can't have it".

I have not found that to be the case either. (For example, you
can run an Nvidia or AMD binary blob video driver if desired.
Or not. You have the freedom to choose.)

If you love aggravation, you're going to love Linux.

I have not found it aggravating at all and it has been my
primary OS for over 20 years.

--
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On Sun, 3 Mar 2019 13:52:53 -0700, "Bill in Co"
surly_curmudgeon@earthlink wrote:

Ken Blake wrote:
On Sun, 3 Mar 2019 13:47:20 -0500, Stan Brown
wrote:

On Sun, 03 Mar 2019 09:04:46 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:
It's very common for someone to complain about some particular program
being "bloated." What they mean by that, I assume, is that it consumes
a lot of disk space.

Maybe "they" do. :-)

"Bloated" to me means that it has a lot of features that I'll never
use in a million years. A very personal definition, obviously.


OK, we have different definitions.

But almost every program has lots of features and almost nobody uses
them all. We're all different and although I don't use feature A, you
use it all the time. And I use feature B, but you don't.

To me that's good, not bad. Even though our needs are different, we
both get the features we want. I have no problem with a feature that I
don't use being there.

As a single example of what I mean, I use Forte Agent as my
newsreader. Agent also has a built-in e-mail client, but I never use
it. However lots of other Agent users do. That's fine with me. Those
who use it and those of us who don't are both happy. Other than its
taking up a tiny amount of disk space (probably less than a penny's
worth), as far as I'm concerned there's no disadvantage to its being
there.

Can you give the same justification for Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe
Photoshop and Adobe Audition, for *most* users? (N.B.: not talking about
the pros here).
And I think all of them are somewhere around 1 GB in size, just for
starters!



Sorry, I don't use any Adobe products, and I know very little about
them.

Why don't I use them? Three reasons:

1. They are expensive

2. They have many features that I don't need or want and wouldn't use.

3. Their complexity means that they are difficult to learn how to use
and I'm not willing to invest that amount of time on them.

You might consider that my points 2 and 3 are the same as saying they
are bloated and that makes them undesirable products. I don't see it
that way it all. I think they are very desirable, to people who need
or want their capability, but not to me.

On Sun, 3 Mar 2019 13:54:44 -0700, "Bill in Co"
surly_curmudgeon@earthlink wrote:

Ken Blake wrote:
On Sun, 03 Mar 2019 09:41:13 -0800, pyotr filipivich
wrote:

"Mayayana" on Sat, 2 Mar 2019 23:52:36 -0500
typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
"Bill in Co" surly_curmudgeon@earthlink wrote

Did you ever consider the much leaner Kingston Office (aka WPS Office
now), or Softmaker Free Office? They are both a LOT less bloated then
either OpenOffice or LibreOffice, but may not have everything you
need, not sure. Just wondering.

Sounded interesting but I jut went to check them out.
WPS - website's a mess, mostly embedded in javascript.
Not much to see otherwise. The source code looks like
they require an email address.
Free 2018 - Website not much better. XP not supported.
No sign of older versions. Requires registration.

Was talking with The Wife this morning. If I had the mad skillz,
I'd write a word processor called "My Typewriter." Times Roman or
Courier as default, bold, underline or italics as options. Basic
editing. She said "Typewriters don't have bold and italics!" well,
yes, but ...
Then I got into feeping creatures. Typewriter clicks when you
press the keys, and a Ding! at the edge of the screen, or the Enter
key. an option to have random capital letters entered as bottom half
the capital above and top half of the lower case letter below.
Control H backs up, overstrikes the next key typed.


In another message in this thread, I just mentioned that I used to own
an IBM Selectric typewriter. It was over 30 years ago, so my memory
might be faulty, but I think it did a "carriage return" (it was really
a "golf ball" return) automatically.

Carriage return???? You mean for a horse and buggy??? :-)


Just for the buggy. If you bought it and didn't like it, you could
return it and get your money back. G

On 3/3/2019 7:20 AM, Mayayana wrote:


Vista was damned because it was
the first truly restricted version and MS went
overboard trying to blend lackey user mode with
admin, producing a message-box-infested disaster.
It also got a bad reputation because of the scandal
with the Intel 915 chipset: Microsoft invented a
Vista Basic version with no Aero at the last minute
because Aero was too much a bloated mess of
techno-kitsch to run on older hardware. And Intel
had a vast trove of 915 chipsets that fit into that
category. And Intel wanted to dump them on the
market. So MS betrayed all their other partners
who had dutifully updated all their hardware, and
gave Intel an out. And people got very confused.
They thought they were paying for clever, semi-
transparent window frames and didn't get them.
There were numerous articles about how to tell
crippled Vista from real Vista. It got ugly and Vista
was blackballed.

Vista started out as crap because it was unfinished.
By the time 7 arrived, Vista appeared to be up to that
level. I switched from Vista to 7 only because Media
Center in Vista wouldn't allow more than 2 TV tuners.

For any windows install, the second thing I do after disabling updates
is to go into advanced
system settings and turn off all visual effects except smoothing of
fonts. As long as I can get a video driver that supports 1920x1080,
I'm good to go.

Ken Blake on Sun, 03 Mar 2019 13:48:17 -0700
typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
On Sun, 3 Mar 2019 18:21:46 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

In message , pyotr
filipivich writes:
[]
Was talking with The Wife this morning. If I had the mad skillz,
I'd write a word processor called "My Typewriter." Times Roman or
Courier as default, bold, underline or italics as options. Basic
editing. She said "Typewriters don't have bold and italics!" well,
yes, but ...

I think some fancy ones did - bold by overtyping with slight offset, at
least. Italic would have meant switching in a different
golfball/daisywheel, at least before the ones that weren't really a
dot-matrix printer (basically a word processor for those who "didn't
want a computer" [I _think_ you can still get those]).


I used to own a very fancy typewriter--an IBM Selectric. Soon after I
got my first PC, I gave the typewriter away.

I eventually traded my electric type writer for a manual one. If
there was power, I used the computer.
And the manual was very useful for forms with "carbons". I could
eyeball alignment and fill it out. Really helpful for temp assignment
Time Sheets.
--
pyotr filipivich
Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing?

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" on Sun, 3 Mar 2019
18:21:46 +0000 typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
In message , pyotr
filipivich writes:
[]
Was talking with The Wife this morning. If I had the mad skillz,
I'd write a word processor called "My Typewriter." Times Roman or
Courier as default, bold, underline or italics as options. Basic
editing. She said "Typewriters don't have bold and italics!" well,
yes, but ...

I think some fancy ones did - bold by overtyping with slight offset, at
least. Italic would have meant switching in a different
golfball/daisywheel, at least before the ones that weren't really a
dot-matrix printer (basically a word processor for those who "didn't
want a computer" [I _think_ you can still get those]).

Then I got into feeping creatures. Typewriter clicks when you
press the keys, and a Ding! at the edge of the screen, or the Enter

Not the ding, but the click when you press the keys (with a different
sound for space and enter): I use Leeos's "noisy keyboard". I originally
loaded it just as a novelty, but now find the audible feedback very
useful,

Interesting report, that a company decided to go with "quiet"
keyboards, and the productivity slacked off. Not being able to hear
the _other_ typists wasn't giving the feedback, and "why type so
fast?"
--
pyotr filipivich
Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing?

Stan Brown on Sun, 3 Mar 2019 13:56:01
-0500 typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
On Sun, 03 Mar 2019 09:41:13 -0800, pyotr filipivich wrote:
As I've observed befo most computer users have no idea what is
happening behind the screen. Save to hardrive makes as much sense as
"save to the cloud". ("How can it save tot he cloud when the sky's
are clear?")


In their defense, every new version of Microsoft software, both
Windows and Office, makes it significantly harder to _know_ what is
going on behind the screen. I remember the whole Libraries stuff that
was introduced in Windows 7, so that we could no longer know where
files were being saved.

Yep. And has been pointed out: for most people, it doesn't
matter.
But Win 7 broke the interface, and a lot of "muscle memory"
regarding where to look, what to look for (icon), and what gets
clicked on to accomplish task A, got disrupted.
--
pyotr filipivich
Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing?

"Bill in Co" surly_curmudgeon@earthlink on Sun, 3 Mar 2019 11:26:09
-0700 typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
pyotr filipivich wrote:
Mike on Sat, 2 Mar 2019 19:28:12 -0800 typed in
alt.windows7.general the following:
On 3/2/2019 7:02 PM, Bill in Co wrote:
pyotr filipivich wrote:
Ken Blake on Sat, 02 Mar 2019 18:05:21 -0700
typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
On Sat, 02 Mar 2019 16:39:53 -0800, pyotr filipivich
wrote:

"Mayayana" on Sat, 2 Mar 2019 15:46:24
-0500 typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
In that world it's not your computer and you
have no business doing much of anything other
than writing Word docs and saving them to your
docs folder.

I have been using Wordperfect since it was Wordstar.

WordPerfect was never WordStar. They were two different competing
products.

You're probably correct.

No probably about it, he is correct. And don't forget PC Write, but I
might be dating myself. PC Write was I think written in assembly, and
was lightweight and super fast. Not as full featured as the others, of
course, but infinitely preferable to EDLIN (egads). My students don't
know how good they have it nowadays, by not having to use EDLIN to
write their reports. Or having to use a typewriter.


You ain't lived until you've had to walk 100 yards across the building
to get a printout to see if your text formatting was was you wanted.
Those who popped out of the womb with an iPad in one hand will never
appreciate what they have.

GF would use the punch card machines. Turn in the deck, go to
class, come back with the results. "Beat waiting for a terminal."

In my Fortran class in college, we typed up our program on those punch
cards, and had to wait a *week* to get back the results (due to
adminstrative job use of the mainframe computer for the entire campus).
Your job was just one in a batch to be run on the system mainframe. I'm
talking about the 1960's here.

"Ah, you had punch cards. We had to carve them out of
birchbark..."

This was back in '86.

The most we had daylight was for 12 hours a day.
--
pyotr filipivich
Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing?

"Mayayana" on Sun, 3 Mar 2019 12:48:17 -0500
typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
"pyotr filipivich" wrote

| It's beyond my expertise. I'm more intersted in the prayers.
|
| Shall I add you to my list? 8-) Or were you asking what they
| were? (FYI Pretty much straight out of the Eastern Orthodox Prayer
| books, main change is that where they have "Pray for N[NN]." I
| inserted the names. So I don't have to try and remember who I said I
| would pray for. Lord have mercy the memory isn't what it used to be.)

Just curious. I don't know anything about EO.
My impression was that it's more directly spiritual than
Catholicism, but one doesn't see the books around.
I once read a history of Christianity, partly out of
curiosity about EO, but it turned out to be basically
a backward family tree from Chuch of England. EO
seems to be largely erased from W. European history.

That is has been. Is long story. Short form, the West got
isolated by the fall of Rome / Western Half of the Empire (the Eastern
part held on for another thousand years), the invasion by the Goths
and then the Franks. Differences in Church polity, etc, lead to split
formally in 1054, and irreversibly in 1204. Messy. Main issue was
the "Latins" deciding that ultimate authority resided in one
individual (the Protestant Reformation just expanded the franchise)
instead of the collegial process which had been the practice since The
Beginning (and still is, the fireworks from Council of Crete in 2016
are still going on.)
When I'm being non-confrontational, I point out that for most
people (e.G. Western Europe (England) ) the Orthodox church is not
seen as being in their theological family tree, much as Babylon is not
in "our" cultural heritage.

I got a book recently. The Cloud of Unknowing.
Translated by Carmen Butcher. Not EO, of course,
but a very nice piece of work. I'd describe it as
one of the most profound works on the most profound
meditation that I've ever come across. And in a
pleasant, homey, Christian style.

Will have to check it out.



--
pyotr filipivich
Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing?

"Mayayana" on Sun, 3 Mar 2019 12:52:36 -0500
typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
"pyotr filipivich" wrote

| I was thinking that, too. I used to love exploring
| tweaks. These days I can't be bothered. If I have
| to spend two weeks of intensive work to make the
| product usable then that's just 2 weeks wasted that
| I'm not getting paid for.
|
| Assuming you have the two weeks.

These days I have more time. I'm a semi-retired
building contractor with a sideline of writing
Windows software and doing web design. But I have
projects I get into. I'd prefer to be doing something
useful rather than researching how to shut off
inane messages.

Ayup.

I'm semi-retired, but now with a Wife (yeah!). I had to switch
from Xp to 7 "on the fly" due to classes I was taking. When I got my
first computer, and later the XP box, I'd had a month to "play" with
it before I had to use it. I'd learned how things worked. When I
shifted to 7, I didn't have the time, and the "muscle memory" / eye
had coordination / whatever, got disrupted. Things were not where I
was reaching /looking. Grumble, grumble.

I now have the time, but "I've got a setup I understand."

Sigh, recalling the good old days when I had a couple hundred
lines of batch file which (thanks to Norton Utilities) had color coded
options on a screen, and sub routines to start (and time) various
program. I thought it was neat, anyway. Not sure I want to go all
the way back to windows 2, but... as I said when I saw the sign "No
computer games in the lab", if you need to have someone else write a
program to entertain you on the computer, you're not doing it right.




--
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the
future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation
of coding bums.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5

Roger Blake wrote:
On 2019-03-03, Paul wrote:
Freedom from stuff that works :-/

I have not found that to be the case.

If there is ever something which is covered by NDA
or is delivered as a binary blob, "you can't have it".

I have not found that to be the case either. (For example, you
can run an Nvidia or AMD binary blob video driver if desired.
Or not. You have the freedom to choose.)

If you love aggravation, you're going to love Linux.

I have not found it aggravating at all and it has been my
primary OS for over 20 years.


So you're saying you don't believe that the FFMPEG package
is not using all the NVidia-offered materials for Linux ?

There's more to it than just the binary blob driver. There
are CUDA libraries and the like. The download is around 1GB.
The package manager has a subset of the libraries, which
don't work. But you can install them using NVidia .deb
or .run.

The FFMPEG people removed the headers they were using for
this, from the FFMPEG package itself, and moved them outside
to a separate git repository. There is no effort to sync
everything properly. And so many release numbers are used
by the various parties, you can't tell what version the
software really needs.

I tried my hardest to test a multiplicity of versions
of "stuff" and run the ./configure, make, make install
routing, but no amount of this resulted in a perfectly
working package.

And distributions simply turn those features off. They
don't try to do some sort of dynamic loading solution,
"sniff" whether the right shared libraries are present
or whatever. Instead, the stuff is just dropped on the
floor.

I wasted days on that. It was pretty obvious to me, that
the distros were all just giving me the finger. And it's
because "well, some of those materials come from NVidia,
and the money you spent on that video card ? That's
your problem. You should have bought nothing which
is compatible in this case". Because that's how many
hardware solutions work to encode and decode with
hardware acceleration. Nouveau doesn't know how to
drive that part of the hardware. And the information
to harness it, is available two ways - through the
1GB library kit (available from NVidia, i.e. "tainted")
or via specs under NDA (not gonna happen).

Paul

Mark Lloyd wrote:
On 3/2/19 7:05 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
On Sat, 02 Mar 2019 16:39:53 -0800, pyotr filipivich


[snip]

WordPerfect was never WordStar. They were two different competing
products.

I bought my first personal computer in 1987. I started out using
WordStar on it, but quickly changed to WordPerfect, which I liked much
better.

BTW, I have used the last version of WordStar from when the manufacturer
was still MicroPro. I don't have that software anymore, but I remember
it came with a real manual. Thick one (about 1000 pages), not like the
"institutional toilet paper" (one thin crinkly sheet) one you often get now.

Same with computer games!! I miss those days.
--
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easy. No, revenge is a dish best served cold. I'll bide my time until...
Oh, what the hell, I'll just crush him like an ant." --Mr. Burns, The
Simpsons ("Blood Feud" Episode 7F22)
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