Last question I heard along those lines "Windows presented me with I need to update my Office. So I clicked through all the screens; now all my outlook contacts are gone! Can you help me recover..."
I did similar with my father, transitioning him off Windows and onto a Mac system. This was after observing him playing solitaire, and him telling me that's the only program he can still get to work on the machine. I wanted him to experience what a "good" computer is like, at least once in this life...
My first exposure to Unix was with Unix v7 running on a PDP-11/70 as an undergraduate. We used to joke about how the computer could not echo characters as fast as they were typed. 😉
Ed
They're certainly going after the last shred of comfort, arent they. Just close the lid; we wont listen, promise!
I hate it when I'm logged into some website and I cant find the #$%^& logout button/menu so easily. I see the trend. "Do not turn off your computer".
Learning what the so-called "flatpacks" are for. Used to be space was a premium. Now with cheap 1TB drives, apps get their "dependencies" all packed up in a nice app specific associated container. So should some dependency get upgraded by an update, it doesnt break that app.
Of course, I already installed everything whilst wondering "what's this "flatpack" thing that keeps showing up on a lot of this stuff?
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Years ago my son somehow got one of those "threats". The convincing part was they took his picture, via the laptop camera. I've read of someone conversing with a spammer, who promptly displayed his windows password, from somewhere on the internet. Such tricks can effect peoples beliefs, onto the "Uh, ya got me (if you can do that)" level.
My standard response to this is: back up all data, reinstall windows. This often scares them away.
Back here on W10 to see if shutting it down in the way it really shuts it down, instead of the virtual one, releases write privs to the Mint OS.
Now what was that magic key combo again? [edit...back here on Mint] It Worked!
Now what was that magic key combo again? [edit...back here on Mint] It Worked!
Funny. The EE Dept had 11/70's I think a pair in 77 or 78. The guy that ran the system had just found a fancy full screen text editor from Rand Corp called Ned. It was was nicer than ed, which was what was available. I absolutely loved it. So much nicer than a non-full screen editor. Just one problem. 3 or 4 people running Ned could slow the system to a literal crawl, while the ed editor could support dozens. Then vi came along, also quite efficient and they banned Ned. I would use it late when not many were around. I liked that editor so much a company I worked for later bought the source for me(70 bucks I think) and I used it for decades, porting to new machine architectures as needed. Then when I tried to port it to Linux it was a nogo. Just way too much cruft from the multitude of terminals it supported back then. Ended up rewriting it clean and continue to use it to this day.
PDP11/70.
The entire school used it... well, the admin and the few students that took computer courses then. We were few then, physics, math, some crazy chemists. The Usual Suspects.
I took the DEC assembly course sometime in Spring 79. One of the warnings was to use the "STOP" MACRO, not the actual HALT system call, because otherwise you'd stop the machine.
So, it was in May and everybody was getting their homework done... and the office of the Registrar and Cashier were running their numbers figuring who was paid up and so they could graduate ( it was (is) a small private school ).
I finished my stuff and went home around Friday at 11:30PM or so... time for one last beer party before a whole week of cramming for finals.
Well, sometime around 2AM the machine.. HALTED... they couldn't figure out... wooops... they brought the sysadmins and they figured it out by mid morning so the Cashier got to continue their reports.
The next year they bought us an LSI 11 for the Math Dept to teach assembly. It was awesome, I was taking a year in Numerical Analysis (FORTRAN anyone?) so we had pretty much our own set of spanking new VT100s in the physics and math floors. I took a couple of chemistry courses and I asked the prof if I could solve the problems with the computer. He approved it if I printed out the programs... so the "computer room" was right across the hall.... I waltzed over there, logged in, wrote a few simple FORTRAN programs, got the results, printed the whole thing and turned it in.
The class was astonished. I think it was the first time ever someone had solved the Physical Chemistry problems in a test with a computer... I got an A.
The school also got.. .TADAHH, a VAX that year. And I had this intership that summer taking image analysis code from a PDP11 to a VAX11. From 16 bits to 32 bits. The first thing I had to do was the fix the data sets... you see, the DEC data porting did a left-adjust for all the 16 bit numbers... it was their bug, so I wrote my own and then created waterfall analysis programs for a Tektronics data display terminal (with one of them big plotters).
Today, we just download "an app" to do that... then, we had to do interpolations, Fourier analysis, etc... we didn't "code" then, we did mathematics!
Those were the days...
The entire school used it... well, the admin and the few students that took computer courses then. We were few then, physics, math, some crazy chemists. The Usual Suspects.
I took the DEC assembly course sometime in Spring 79. One of the warnings was to use the "STOP" MACRO, not the actual HALT system call, because otherwise you'd stop the machine.
So, it was in May and everybody was getting their homework done... and the office of the Registrar and Cashier were running their numbers figuring who was paid up and so they could graduate ( it was (is) a small private school ).
I finished my stuff and went home around Friday at 11:30PM or so... time for one last beer party before a whole week of cramming for finals.
Well, sometime around 2AM the machine.. HALTED... they couldn't figure out... wooops... they brought the sysadmins and they figured it out by mid morning so the Cashier got to continue their reports.
The next year they bought us an LSI 11 for the Math Dept to teach assembly. It was awesome, I was taking a year in Numerical Analysis (FORTRAN anyone?) so we had pretty much our own set of spanking new VT100s in the physics and math floors. I took a couple of chemistry courses and I asked the prof if I could solve the problems with the computer. He approved it if I printed out the programs... so the "computer room" was right across the hall.... I waltzed over there, logged in, wrote a few simple FORTRAN programs, got the results, printed the whole thing and turned it in.
The class was astonished. I think it was the first time ever someone had solved the Physical Chemistry problems in a test with a computer... I got an A.
The school also got.. .TADAHH, a VAX that year. And I had this intership that summer taking image analysis code from a PDP11 to a VAX11. From 16 bits to 32 bits. The first thing I had to do was the fix the data sets... you see, the DEC data porting did a left-adjust for all the 16 bit numbers... it was their bug, so I wrote my own and then created waterfall analysis programs for a Tektronics data display terminal (with one of them big plotters).
Today, we just download "an app" to do that... then, we had to do interpolations, Fourier analysis, etc... we didn't "code" then, we did mathematics!
Those were the days...
The PDP-11/70s were soon replaced by VAX-11/750s and 780s. The students were guinea pigs for testing BSD. I remember a VAX 8600 arriving not quite in time for me to use it.
The nicest machines of all were the Sun-1s that I got to use as a grad student. That was the first Unix workstation. It left a lasting impression.
I am typing this post on a HEDT PC running Linux, which is the modern equivalent to the Unix workstation.
Ed
The nicest machines of all were the Sun-1s that I got to use as a grad student. That was the first Unix workstation. It left a lasting impression.
I am typing this post on a HEDT PC running Linux, which is the modern equivalent to the Unix workstation.
Ed
Yes. Fortran. SWAT-V in my case Structured Fortran, University of Waterloo). Punch cards and card readers, boxes of cards. Running through your stack ... and chunk! Now you had to punch a new card 'ause it got chewed. Needless to say your program did not load or run until you tried again. Then there was your box falling. Time to sort the darned things out! Grrr!
By the time I graduated I got into HP1000 machines... remember those? The original real time machines... used to control hardware like a champ.
Interrupt programming.
Interrupt programming.
Never got into cards.... either we figured out how to connect them via some kind of network of our own or we used removable "hard disks"...
The thing about FORTRAN is how good it is, still is, for numerical analysis. You can control the calculation error with abstract variable sizes, unlike with C and C++ which are based on the hardware. Matlab also allows you to do this... but I still prefer the old standby.
Once upon a time we ported a bunch of algorithms across machines to implement a prototype into a production, daily calculation. It was seven phases. The scientist had done it with FORTRAN. So we set up with the first four phases, 0,1, 2 and 3. I took Phase 3. The controlling code was in C as we were using networked Sun workstations. I kept the actual algorithm in FORTRAN, suffering the ordeal of rearranging the indices of the matrices ( my phase was all about matrices ).... needless to say, I got my stuff done pretty quick while the other guys were suffering through errors because they had ported the algorithm into C and lost the required precision. So, I did the rest of the phases while the other guys suffered mightily through their decision.
Matlab is another disaster. I've worked with scientists who decided to port their Matlab code directly into embedded real time. The issue is that Matlab assigns whole variables to things that we deal with a simple register fields. Handled nicely as integral types. I've been in more than a few situations where I was the firmware guy assigned to the R&D science team and I had to rewrite whole swathes of code. Now, most scientists are pretty reasonable (unlike engineers) and they learn quickly.... but in Matlab they are restricted. Also, I'm not quite sure if you have bit fields in FORTRAN. I guess you could use integral masks...
The you got spinlock()..... did you know they use that in SMP vxWorks to synchronize tasks running in different cores? But, of course, it's a different spinlock() than in Linux...
Berkeley was getting rid of the card punches when I arrived. I breathed a sigh of relief. 😉
Ed
Ed
There are a number of good YouTubers who do distro reviews and rankings/tier lists. Some are hardcore users, coders, etc. and others are more focused on the user experience, aesthetics, etc. Decide which ones appeal to your use case and then learn from their experiences and evaluations.
Either by luck or your own discernment, you’ve chosen a solid distro. If distrowatch lead you there then it is a coincidence. 🙂
Some people will take issue with this, but I am going to say it anyway. Flatpacks are not a panacea. They come with their own set of issues, the least of which is disk space usage. Inconsistent look & feel, permissions/security issues, etc. If you fill your system with flatpacks, you will not be optimizing your Linux experience.
They do serve a purpose and I do use them, rarely and as a last resort. I always choose standard packages (.debs, currently) first, which is why I enjoy the fact that Debian has the largest repository of sanitized software. Ubuntu, Mint, and other Debian derivatives benefit from this as well.
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