Scribus is the Go-To Libre Desktop Publishing Application.

Scribus is a libre page layout program for almost every operating system

Welcome to Scribus, a page layout program for Linux, Windows, macOS, many current UNIX and *BSD systems, OS/2 Warp 4 and variants, as well as Haiku.

Since its humble beginning in the spring of 2001, Scribus has evolved into one of the premier Open Source desktop applications. Encouraged by professionals and beginners alike, the Scribus Team, with support from a large and growing number of enthusiastic contributors from all over the world, is dedicated to develop and improve “one of the most powerful and useful open-source projects out there” (TechRepublic). The leading German IT website heise.de listed Scribus as one the of the best Open Source programs available.

The end of Microsoft Publisher is near. I've tested the top alternatives, and here's what I recommend for both pro and beginner designers.

From Waterfox to LibreWolf and Pale Moon, there's a browser for almost every Mozilla dissenter

Pale Moon – The Private, Secure and Fully Customizable Open Source Web Browser
If you’re looking for a fully non-commercial alternative to Chrome that respects your privacy, Pale Moon is built for you.
Pale Moon is an Open Source web browser built on its own maintained platform and rendering engine (Goanna™), available for various operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS and Linux (with community-contributed support for other operating systems), focusing on customization, security, privacy and extensibility.

Basilisk is considered stable software. This means it does not change for the sake of change. Updates are made deliberately, with an emphasis on maintaining existing workflows and minimizing unnecessary disruption.

If you want a browser that works consistently and respects established workflows, Basilisk may be a good fit.

If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die.

Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen.

Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly.

They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic.

And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly.

What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations.

The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture. //

Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences.

Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully.

A 2017 review of literature noted that human milk complexity is generated by “individual variations in breast milk composition, which are attributed to the stage of lactation, the degree of breast fullness, infant feeding, the health of the breastfeeding dyad, and other factors” [1]. That means it’s quite literally always changing, in response to all sorts of different factors. Practically, it also means that the milk a mom makes at 2pm on a Tuesday is constitutionally different from the milk she might make 24 hours, 2 weeks, or 6 months later. 

What’s more, the breastmilk a mom makes when her child is sick has more infection-fighting cells than when her child is well. And these changes and adaptations in breastmilk composition continue for as long as the mother breastfeeds. Likewise, breastfeeding remains a vital source of nutrition and immune protection for as long as breastfeeding continues; yes, even after the child is primarily consuming solids! 

Even more fascinating, milk composition follows a circadian rhythm and has more sleep-inducing hormones (primarily melatonin) at night time. And the balance of fat and sugar is always in flux, too. When breasts are very full (like they are upon waking when baby blessedly sleeps a bit longer at night!), milk contains more sugar and less fat, while “emptier” breasts (e.g., towards the end of a good, long feeding) make milk higher in fat content. (This is one of the very reasons that in my work as a lactation consultant, I often tell moms that their breasts are rarely, if ever, empty—even when they feel like they are!) 

iPadOS version by device
Before iPadOS 13, iPadOS was known as iOS.

Research suggests that bilingualism can offer cognitive benefits

According to Abrams' Law, the compressive strength of concrete is inversely proportional to the water-cement ratio, provided the mix is fully compacted. If you add too much water, it creates large spaces or capillary pores inside the concrete when the excess, unreacted water evaporates.

This results in a highly porous, weaker structure that can crack under loads. On the other hand, if you add too little water, the cement particles will not fully react, making the concrete harsh, difficult to place, and prone to internal honeycomb voids. //

Understanding how to calculate water cement ratio helps maintain consistent concrete quality on site. The formula is straightforward:

Water Cement Ratio = Weight of Water ÷ Weight of Cement

For example:

If one bag of cement weighs 50 kg and the required water to cement ratio is 0.5, the water required will be:

Water Required = 0.5 × 50 kg = 25 litres

This means 25 litres of water should be used for one bag of cement to maintain the correct water cement ratio in concrete. //

Testing the Water-Cement Ratio: The Slump Test

The slump test is a simple method used to check the workability of fresh concrete. While it does not directly measure the water-cement ratio, it helps indicate whether the water content is appropriate.

In this test, fresh concrete is placed into a cone-shaped mould. When the mould is lifted, the concrete settles or “slumps.” The amount of slump shows the consistency of the mix. A higher slump usually indicates higher water content, while a lower slump indicates a stiffer mix.

This test helps builders ensure the water ratio for concrete mix remains suitable for proper placement and compaction.

“The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” the AWS update said.

A good design doc can save you years of development time. Writing a design doc forces you to think through important decisions before you waste time on the wrong implementation. It’s also the best way to coordinate design decisions among teammates and partner teams.

I’ve written design docs as a developer at Google, Microsoft, and within my own companies. The specifics vary, but the underlying principles remain the same. A design doc articulates the hard problems you’re solving and helps your teammates give you feedback.

Below, I share my approach to creating effective design docs and explain what belongs in a design doc and what does not.

There is an old AWS quote that has aged in a particularly interesting way.

In 2017, CBS asked AWS executive Matt Wood a rather pointed question:

CBS: “I don’t mean to give anyone ideas, but let’s say I figured out that one of these unmarked buildings was an AWS data center, and I blew it up. Are you saying that it’s so backed up and redundant that you probably wouldn’t notice?”

AWS: “Yeah, you wouldn’t notice. I mean, we might be a bit upset, but you wouldn’t notice!”

Nine years later, somebody effectively ran the experiment, although on a much larger scale than the loss of a single building, and people did, in fact, notice. //

I Guess Maybe Now They’ll Do 3-2-1 Backups

The gold standard for data protection is “3 copies, 2 different kinds of media, 1 of which is offsite”.

I’m all for the cloud, but if it’s important data and you’re limited to keeping all of your cloud data in one set of buildings…then for pity’s sake, have off-site backups. You don’t need to have another failover site ready to light up if Amazon goes down for you, but you shouldn’t lose the data. Replicate it off-site. I mean, forget even acts of war – what if hackers get into your systems? Into Amazon’s systems? What if an employee goes rogue? What if, what if…

A replicated off-site solution with ransomware protection and disk snapshots (or heaven forbid, tape!) doesn’t mean you can restore service quickly, but it means you won’t lose the data. In other words, go ahead and say “if we have to go to that dire situation, we’re not promising a recovery time objective (RTO). But we are promising a Recovery Point Objective (RPO).”

Losing data sucks.

Jonathan Richards 1Silver badge
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Re: Ooh cms
Upvoted. Librarianship 101, or the correct principles for an office filing system which brought myriads of companies successfully through generations of business and progress. The oldest of those companies have curated archives that you can still find documents in. Good luck with that in a hundred years for any of the software solutions kicking around now.

The nightmare began when we stopped filing things in carefully chosen places, or alternatively carefully indexing things placed in a managed store. Some clown thought that having a list of all the words in all the documents would make it easy to find what one was looking for. Repeat after me: the set of words in a document does not tell you what the document is about. cf Manila and manila!

Jason BloombergSilver badge
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Re: the discipline of using COBOL on show
Is it "the discipline of using COBOL" on show here, or simply that COBOL is so well defined and simplistic that it's easy to convert most COBOL programs to some other language?

I have written a number of transpilers to convert from one language to another. They work brilliantly so long as the source is within the transpiler's constraints. Otherwise update the transpiler or simplify the source.

It's been so long since I had to deal with COBOL the only thing I remember about it, which elicits a smile every time, is the classic -

PERFORM X UNTIL EXHAUSTED //

Roland6Silver badge
Reply Icon
Re: the discipline of using COBOL on show
No COBOL conversion was performed here. As the original commentant pointed out: the ability to specify a problem in a form that permits the writing of a COBOL program also permits the creation of a specification that can be I’m-lamented in a different langauge.

Remember an AI prompt is just a specification written in a way an AI code generator can parse. The writing of specifications is something Imsuspect many older programmers did and do, but many code junkies have avoided doing…

Application Guidance Notes

THE CARBON LIES
TRILLIONS STOLEN
MASS PSYCHOSIS

Rising CO2 is NOT caused by fossil fuels.
Rising CO2 is NOT harmful.
Both claims are categorically false.
Both are foreclosed by direct measurement.

Every carbon capture project, every carbon credit scheme, every Net-Zero pledge, every fossil-fuel restriction, every carbon footprint calculation rests on physics that has been falsified.

Trillions of dollars. Two lies. Here's the TRUTH.

LIE #1: Rising atmospheric CO2 is harmful.

There is NO evidence that increasing CO2 at current atmospheric concentrations causes ANY harm to humans, ecosystems, or the planet. NONE.

The harm claim typically routes through "warming." Two problems.

First: there is no physical quantity called "global temperature." What is reported as "global mean surface temperature" is an area-weighted arithmetic mean of intensive-variable surface readings from thermometers of varying kind, siting, and coverage. An arithmetic mean of intensive variables is not itself an intensive variable. It has no physical meaning whatsoever. Units belong to physical quantities. GMST is a number, not a temperature.

Second: even accepting the FALSE temperature framing, the radiative forcing from CO2 is trivially small. Happer and van Wijngaarden's line-by-line calculations from the HITRAN spectroscopic database give clear-sky CO2 forcing of 2.97 W/m² for doubling from 400 to 800 ppm at the top of the atmosphere.

The saturation is direct: doubling CO2 reduces outgoing radiation by only about 1%. Applying any reasonable cloud correction — Earth averages ~67% cloud cover, and clouds absorb strongly in CO2's principal 15 μm band, already blocking most of the outgoing radiation CO2 would absorb — reduces all-sky forcing below 1 W/m², plausibly below 0.5 W/m².

That is undetectable. Solar input at any surface location varies by hundreds of W/m² diurnally, dozens of W/m² seasonally, and dozens of W/m² between adjacent cloudy and clear moments. A signal of 0.5 W/m² does not rise above ordinary variability. There is nothing there to measure.

John Clauser (Nobel Prize in Physics 2022) has emphasized the further point: clouds are Earth's actual thermostat, responding to surface conditions on the scale of hours. No cloud feedback in any general circulation model has been validated against observation. A calculation that omits the dominant regulatory mechanism cannot testify to how the system responds.

Meanwhile, what CO2 does is measured, direct, and life-sustaining.

CO2 is the direct substrate of photosynthesis. Plants are the base of the entire food chain. Every calorie consumed by every animal, humans included, begins as photosynthesis. More atmospheric CO2 means more photosynthesis, more crop yield, more biomass. More CO2 means more life.

Satellite measurements since 1982 show Earth's leaf area has increased substantially, driven primarily by CO2 fertilization. Agricultural yields have risen with atmospheric CO2. Commercial greenhouse operators intentionally maintain CO2 at 1,000-1,500 ppm because plants thrive there.

The geological record: atmospheric CO2 has ranged from 180 ppm (glacial minima) to 7,000 ppm (Cambrian). Life flourished at the high end. The genuine danger threshold is the low end, near 150 ppm, below which C3 photosynthesis fails and terrestrial life largely ends.

LIE #2: Rising atmospheric CO2 is caused by human fossil fuel burning.

The isotopic mass balance forecloses this claim.

Fossil fuel carries δ¹³C = −28‰. The measured signature of the actual net addition to the atmosphere, from six independent records spanning 500-1000 years (four Scripps stations, Cape Grim Air Archive, Law Dome ice core, Caribbean sclerosponge), is δ¹³C = −13.2‰.

Under the physically dictated mass partition equation, the fossil fraction of the net atmospheric addition is approximately ZERO.

For fossil to dominate the atmospheric increase (the IPCC and @CO2Coalition FALSELY claim), non-fossil sources and sinks would need to carry δ¹³C = +46‰ or heavier. No terrestrial reservoir on Earth carries this signature. Not the ocean. Not the biosphere. Not volcanic. Not carbonate weathering. Nothing on this planet. This is two orders of magnitude away from REALITY. Not even close.

Trillions stolen.

Global spending on climate policy exceeded $2 trillion in 2024. McKinsey estimates cumulative spending of $275 trillion through 2050 under the industry-standard Net Zero 2050 scenario, roughly 7.5% of global GDP annually for three decades. Carbon credit markets alone moved over $100 billion in 2023, trading permission slips against a claim the physics forecloses.

Every dollar spent on carbon capture, offset schemes, Net-Zero infrastructure, carbon credits, and fossil-fuel restriction is STOLEN from productive economies on the basis of physics that has been falsified by direct measurement.

This is not waste. It is thievery.

Mass psychosis.

But there may be a price to pay for a quiet Atlantic hurricane season. //

Last week, the Atlantic hurricane season blew through its traditional peak—which comes around September 10—with nary a tropical wave in sight, let alone a storm or hurricane.

This is remarkable. Usually this is the time of year when sea surface temperatures reach their warmest in the tropics, and with a favorable atmosphere it should be smooth skating for tropical systems. But this year, the main region where most tropical systems develop is choked with Saharan dust and wind shear.

A negative sequence current arises when the voltage and current in a power system are unbalanced. This type of current produces a reverse rotating magnetic field in the air gap, which has a synchronous speed but rotates in the opposite direction to the rotor. This reverse rotating field is detected by points on the rotor surface and can cause damage to rotating machinery if left unchecked. It is important to have Negative Sequence Current Ratings for generators as it is expected that they will not be connected 100% Negative-Sequence all the time, with three statements about the power system needing to be true for this to occur. Excessive negative phase sequence current can cause excessive heating, vibration, and bearing wear, leading to long-term damage or even machinery failure.

negative sequence current