TOT as usual: train spotters

"Graham." wrote in message
...
On 14/12/2011 15:46, Bill Wright wrote:
bugbear wrote:
Bill Wright wrote:
They had cheap cameras and notebooks.

Unusual. They normally have very good cameras.

Yes they usually have better ones than I saw in the museum.
But the ones
they use for actual trainspotting are likely to be cheap
copies of big
impressive cameras.

Bill

What would they be?
I had a Practica SLR in the 70s that I referred to as a poor
man's Pentax


--

Graham.

%Profound_observation%



Don't you knock Practikas - they brought many (me included) into
SLR photography and they were built like brick privvies. The
lenses - the Lydith 30mm, and the Pentacon 100mm and 135mm - were
in a class apart. The 100mm was undoubtedly the best portrait
lens I ever used.


--
Woody

harrogate three at ntlworld dot com

On Wednesday, December 14th, 2011 at 19:26:23h +0000, Bill Wright wrote:

Everyone can googel; not everyone can doggerel.

You should be writing scripts for BBC Radio 2 comedy shows!

On Dec 15, 3:51*pm, J G Miller wrote:

You must remember that the poster is from the commercial IT world,
so naturally is accustomed to use marketing terms and is indoctrinated
with the mindset that software is to be bought and sold and only used under
strict licencing terms restricting the purchaser as to what they are allowed
to do with it.


We've never met. Given I spent my career until I went back into
academia advancing open source this is all rather funny, and I think
my first contribution to the GNU project is some code I wrote for GNU
emacs in 1986. But if you have any more straw men to erect, feel
free. I don't think I've ever worked for a company that sold
software, certainly not into the consumer space, and I think there's
been a substantial GPL'd component in everything I worked on from 1988
to 2010.

When one has paid out over the years for overpriced Macintosh
hardware and Apple software, one naturally looks down upon those who
use freely available software as inferior.

No, I simply think that the current state of free software is sub-
optimal. RMS is well aware of that: he regards the moral issues as
more important. ESR attempted to claim in the 1990s that open source
(ie, not free) software would inherently out-perform closed-source
software, as many eyes make all bugs shallow (I think was his
phrase). What he failed to realise is that poor industrial design
isn't a bug, it's more fundamental than that.

ian

On Dec 15, 3:22*pm, wrote:
On Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:48:22 -0800 (PST)

ian batten wrote:
developers too cheap to buy a license for vrtx, psos or whatever. *But
using that as an argument as to why it's a viable ecosystem for any
end-users other than hobbyists and industry insiders is something of a
stretch.

Your average user doesn't need a desktop "ecosystem"


Really? They don't install applications? Not even with apt-get?
They just need a compiler and they write them all themselves? Every
end user requires an ecosystem: it's where the applications come from,
and how they get onto their machine. It's what motivates developers
to write and ship code. It's what ensures that you can get the same
libraries the developer used.

ian

On Thursday, December 15th, 2011, at 15:57:36h +0000, The Real Doctor opined:

The Gnome team have withdrawn the option to to use the Gnome 2
interface. Doesn't sound like much of a choice to me.

Rather like the KDE team removed the option to use KDE3 from
their desktop.

Or Windows Vista no longer supports the Windows 95 look and fee.

That is not the point I was making though, since alternatives exist
aside from the official Gnome or KDE desktops when others offer
those options eg MATE and Trinity.

But why be tied to Gnome or KDE when XFCE and LXDE exist, and other
window managers such as Windowmaker, FVWM, Openbox, Sawfish can
provide perfectly adequate functional and good looking desktops?

And if you want your desktop to look and feel like a cellphone
there is always Unity.

On Dec 15, 4:24*pm, J G Miller wrote:
On Thursday, December 15th, 2011, at 15:57:36h +0000, The Real Doctor opined:

The Gnome team have withdrawn the option to to use the Gnome 2
interface. Doesn't sound like much of a choice to me.

Rather like the KDE team removed the option to use KDE3 from
their desktop.

Or Windows Vista no longer supports the Windows 95 look and fee.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/w...-desktop-theme

HTH.

ian

On Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:20:26 -0800 (PST)
ian batten wrote:
On Dec 15, 3:22=A0pm, wrote:
On Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:48:22 -0800 (PST)

ian batten wrote:
developers too cheap to buy a license for vrtx, psos or whatever. =A0But
using that as an argument as to why it's a viable ecosystem for any
end-users other than hobbyists and industry insiders is something of a
stretch.

Your average user doesn't need a desktop "ecosystem"


Really? They don't install applications? Not even with apt-get?
They just need a compiler and they write them all themselves? Every
end user requires an ecosystem: it's where the applications come from,
and how they get onto their machine. It's what motivates developers

Err no. Applications get installed by an installer like rpm or an unzip
type program such as tar. Thats nothing to do with an "ecosystem". Is that
the latest IT buzzword or something?

to write and ship code. It's what ensures that you can get the same
libraries the developer used.

I haven't noticed the windows "ecosystem" preventing DLL hell. Have you?

B2003

On Dec 15, 4:46*pm, wrote:
On Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:20:26 -0800 (PST)









ian batten wrote:
On Dec 15, 3:22=A0pm, wrote:
On Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:48:22 -0800 (PST)

ian batten wrote:
developers too cheap to buy a license for vrtx, psos or whatever. =A0But
using that as an argument as to why it's a viable ecosystem for any
end-users other than hobbyists and industry insiders is something of a
stretch.

Your average user doesn't need a desktop "ecosystem"

Really? *They don't install applications? *Not even with apt-get?
They just need a compiler and they write them all themselves? *Every
end user requires an ecosystem: it's where the applications come from,
and how they get onto their machine. *It's what motivates developers

Err no. Applications get installed by an installer like rpm or an unzip
type program such as tar. Thats nothing to do with an "ecosystem". Is that
the latest IT buzzword or something?

It's quite tricky to do tar xvf /dev/urandom --- the tar file tends to
need to be produced by someone. That someone needs compilers, and
food on the table, and a means to ship their code to you. That's why
there are a lot of applications for Windows, quite a lot of OSX, quite
a lot for Linux, rather fewer for Solaris and essentially bog all for
anyone wishing to run OpenVMS on their laptop.


to write and ship code. *It's what ensures that you can get the same
libraries the developer used.

I haven't noticed the windows "ecosystem" preventing DLL hell. Have you?


I don't know. I've never used Windows enough to find out.

ian

In article ,
J G Miller wrote:
Your average user doesn't need a desktop "ecosystem" (whatever the hell
that is).

You must remember that the poster is from the commercial IT world, so
naturally is accustomed to use marketing terms and is indoctrinated with
the mindset that software is to be bought and sold and only used under
strict licencing terms restricting the purchaser as to what they are
allowed to do with it.

Or, perhaps, has a computer just for itself rather than a means to an end.
Like so many who work in an industry, but don't actually use the product
as others do.

--
*The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

On 15/12/11 16:18, ian batten wrote:
ESR attempted to claim in the 1990s that open source
(ie, not free) software would inherently out-perform closed-source
software, as many eyes make all bugs shallow (I think was his
phrase). What he failed to realise is that poor industrial design
isn't a bug, it's more fundamental than that.

I think his fundamental problem (well, the fundamental problem in "The
Cathedral and the Bazaar") was in his claim that since support is a cost
to commercial software writers and an income stream to free software
writers, free software will inevitably be better than paid-for.

Ian