Last time I used Ubuntu, gigabytes of krapware but not even a terminal or text editor installed by default.

About 30 years ago Niklaus Wirth published an article titled "A Plea for Lean Software" which got summarized as Wirth's Law "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster". Nobody seems to have paid attention.

Luckily nowadays the photos would be uploaded immediately to some social network for them probably to be debunked quickly. Figuring out if they're fake is likely harder now than in the days of negatives, but it at least it wouldn't take decades before some monarchy's antient customs allow them to be made public.

I switched to XFCE a couple of years ago after I couldn't find a terminal or text editor on the default GNOME installation. All I ever really use is a terminal, text editor and web browser, and on the default installation of Ubuntu, I had to restart from scratch with Arch Linux to even get a terminal and shell to continue.

An interesting little detail is "the Record’s editor in 1990, the late Endell Laird, was a member of the MoD’s D notice committee." "We don’t know if the Record was handed a D notice, but Pope has confirmed that the MoD prevented the release of the photographs." If there was any valid security reason to suppress the photos, the military shouldn't have blown the purloined work into posters for all to see at press conferences. Long story short, the "chef" or "poacher" who took the photo, and subsequently mysteriously vanished, had his work stolen with the aid of a newspaper editor who doubled as a state censor, and the military must have broken some laws (even by UK standards) to have used his photo as a poster without permission.

"He forwarded the picture to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), which told him to ask the Record to send the other five photographs and their negatives." I worked as a journalist for a couple of years in the UK, and that sounds exactly what those grovelling peasants living in a monarchy would do.

Time for France to put "Programmation en logique" where it belongs.

The best first book on programing is https://htdp.org/ Its "sequel" is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs which is in Scheme from which Racket was derived. Other languages simply don't have educational material that good.

I've been bing watching Netflix Christams romcoms with my recently widowed mom, and this is way better than any of them.

Integrated Circuits (IC) will still be needed for a while.

Here in South Africa, it's fairly common for financial institutions to email PDF documents which you need to fill in and then include your scanned in signature cut and pasted before emailing it back. As Linux user, I found that impossible. And even using a borrowed Windoze machine, I found the "free version" of Adobe didn't support cutting and pasting graphics. So I had to print all the pages of the document out, fill in the required information by hand and sign the prinouts, scan the paper into now bitmap graphics PDF files before throwing the paper away, then email them back. This made the financial institution happy. I'm guessing it created work since my handwritten info would have been manually entered into their database instead of having me type it in via a website form. Seems a very error prone way of doing business, but what do I know. Also, what possible legal status would a cut and pasted signature have if there was a dispute?

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. -- Alberto Brandolini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Admittedly this is a really boring subject for most people, but I find "comparability" in coding and maths a common problem that I've given quite a bit of though to and find interesting.

The most common comparability trap for coders is that "sets" are usually under the hood memory addresses (aka pointers). I discovered how this confuses nearly every novice programmer years ago when I did a MooC teaching matrices using Python. I think languages like Python which do away with C's &x and *p notation actually confuse novices more than they help because it's not obvious that x = [1,2,3] is a "reference" which will be globally mutated in whatever function it gets changed. I passed course by first converting the "matrices" as in nested arrays to text, and then back which I thought was an awful hack, but later discovered JSON basically makes that technique the norm.

In classical logic, there's equality and "implication" which once I went "aha", found helped improve my database queries a lot. Thinking of logic as "two value algebra", specifically 0 and 1, equality is pretty simple whereas that the truth table for implications (commonly written p => q) actually means p <= q took me some time to figure out. For p and q to be equal, implication has to work both ways, ie p <= and q <= p.

That might not seem useful and required knowing another thing I only grasped fairly late in life: classical logic and set theory are related, and that for lots of ps and qs that means P and Q are equal if P subset Q union Q subset P is not the empty set.

My notes on how to write that in SQL or Prolog for database I've put on the web at https://frontiersoftware.co.za... if there's anyone who shares my weird interest in this.

Personally, I don't care what OS my desktop is running provided it has a web browser. If I need to use a spreadsheet or word processor, I use what Google Drive offers. I occasionally need to do video editing where open-source ffmpeg seems to reign supreme everywhere. The only time I have to deal with Windows is my 80-year-old mom's laptop and some of her friends only use Skype. She agrees web-based facebook's alternative works better, but some of her friends refuse to use social media, so Skype is a must. I tried the Linux version of Skype without success, so she's trapped in Microsoft for now. Every Tuesday, Microsoft's automatic update seems to break something and Skype's permissions to use the speaker or microphone constantly need to be turned on again, so I'm a Microsoft hater who can't understand why anybody would chose to use that amateurish rubbish.

Much of this debate seems to devolve to people dependent on MS Office or Adobe applications which I don't use, so guess Linux is not a good alternative. Ideally, I'd like a device with a browser and via the browser access all the other apps I need. I've tinkered with using https://codemirror.net/ based text editor, but it breaks Bash scripts for starters because the browser and server between them add \n to all newlines which breaks Unix shell scripts and I don't know how to fix. So not in a "browser, browser and nothing but a browser" world yet, but willing to bet that's the ultimate future of the desktop.

"Over the past decade, Google has captured an estimated 90% of South Africa’s digital advertising market. With a digital spend of R14.5 billion in South Africa last year, Google pocketed around R13 billion, leaving a meagre R1.5 billion for local media." https://www.moneyweb.co.za/mon...