'Emacs style' delete line shortcut (CTRL/U) doesn't work correctly in Firefox

[Peter Flynn]

On 16/10/18 14:55, Liam Proven wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Oct 2018 at 22:58, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:
> 
>> Yes to yuck, but no more embedded BLOBs, and at least it's easily
>> accessible to mortals: no more binary formats. Mind you, there are still
>> problems: four different and mutually-incompatible ways to do hyperlinks?
> 
> OK, I defer to your evidently superior knowledge.

Not superior, just bitter experience :-)

> TBH I avoid Office >=2007 as much as possible. 

Wise choice.

> ChromeOS was an experiment to do a cheap Linux laptop. It's *way* more
> successful than any other user-facing Linux distro ever, I think.
> So Google has the #1 and #2 user-facing (i.e. non-server) Linuxes now.

They want to own headspace for the average user, and that's a good way
to do it.

[...]
> Meanwhile Windows is doing very badly indeed, shrinking quite fast:
> http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-201810

If that's a declining % share of a growing market, it may not be as bad
in volume terms as it looks.

> So, yes, the OS market is shifting substantially, and most people
> aren't paying much attention.

"Most people" neither know nor care.

> Google is also sponsoring not one but _two_ Linux-replacement projects
[...]
> Both are new kernels, written in Go.

Interesting choice.

> So the future is definitely not clear, but it is looking cloudy, if
> you will excuse the pun.

It certainly is, and you are excused :-) Fortunately most of the
business I deal with is OS-independent.

> Sadly, the stuff MS does well is stuff FOSS and Unix people don't really want:
> 
> * network-wide directories
> * remote admin of large numbers of user workstations
> * rich groupware that is heedless of open standards

I can only speak wrt my former employer, a university, where the IT
sysadmins are almost all well-experienced in FOSS/Unix/Linux but have
implemented all three of the above from Microsoft because they reduce
the administrative overhead. I would add "for the moment", but mine was
a voice in the wilderness. It all works, even works quite well, but the
only one of interest to me was Word, and so long as that continues to
use XML inside, documents can be re-used in more meaningful systems
without the need to call in external expertise or software.

> I am not aware of any FOSS vendor that's ever seriously addressed
> these things.

Simply too big to tackle, and would require herding cats.

> I find it fascinating that without trying to compete head-on with MS
> or any other office/groupware solution, they have seemingly stumbled
> into the only really viable competition there is.

Users are asking for it because it appears simpler and less restrictive.
It remains to be seen if the dead hand of corporate IT can be animated
into acceptance.

> I find the comparison with Linux itself fascinating. All the 
> proprietary Unices failed: either they ran on expensive proprietary 
> hardware which was too expensive, or they ran on commodity kit but 
> were expensive and even so everything was an expensive optional
> extra.

Not for want of telling: my unit ditched Sun when they started shipping
*without* a C compiler. They eventually went back on that decision, but
by then it was too late.

> Linux just shrugs and gets on with it.

It has to or it would die.

> Google has just ignored the MS ecosystem 

They just spotted that by now, the average user just wants a browser and
a phone that work. Everything else is a bell or whistle.

> I'd never even _heard_ of Hiri before, but I don't operate in the
> Windows world much and I'm much happier for it.

Hiri is a new, cross-platform, Exchange-only client. Completely
different look and feel, very simple (IMHO too simple) but originally
targeted at managers, whose idea of a long message is three lines.

(I have accounts with clients who are Exchange-only, and won't turn on
IMAP just for me, so Hiri is an easy answer. Plus it's written locally
to me.)

> The convenience won me over.

As it will eventually everyone, I suspect.

>>> [...] we've passed the Pareto Principle now. Most people don't
>>> use the famous 20% of Office's functionality. They use 2% or
>>> less.
>> 
>> You wouldn't have a source for that, would you?
> 
> No. I'm afraid it's just based on my own (horrified) observations of 
> just how little of Office people understand.

Bummer. I suspect I will have to eat my own dogfood and actually do some
real research.

> In my last UK job, the staff produced multi-page reports by... 
> copy-and-pasting all the formatting, line by line, from their old 
> reports. They had never even heard of templates or stylesheets. They 
> couldn't understand why it gave me the screaming heebie-jeebies.

Their company (and their managers) have plenty of time and money but
everything except training.

> [...] You _can't_ add local packages. Everything you add must be in a
> container.

If you need central control this is ideal.

>> :-) Moot anyway, now that the W3C has washed its hands of HTML,
>> XML, and CSS.
> 
> Oh?

The charters of a load of working groups and projects have run to
end-of-life and won't be renewed. HTML5 has no schema, and you can add
custom elements as much as you like, so it's ceased to be any kind of
standard, just tag soup. Fortunately it doesn't matter because
absolutely no-one with any serious information stores it in HTML: you
store it in XML, or a triplestore, or in some cloud NoSQL system
somewhere, and you create your web site by sprinkling it with pixie dust
and unicorn poo to generate the HTML-du-jour that browsers support.

>> Serious backends use rather more reliable software than that,
>> fortunately.
> 
> Well yes. But sadly not all of them. FB is PHP, for instance. :-(

I did say "serious" :-)

///Peter