Posts by Terry 6 5609 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
It's a good few years, even decades ago, that the in thing was screens on the front of CRT monitors to protect office staff from the harmful rays. These were supposed to protect us from something or other that was bad in some way or other. They just made the screens harder to see.
The policy was never officially rescinded, just that after a short while the screens either got removed because they were annoying, or fell off because they were crap.
Is this just another part of the gneral "enshittification" of IT?
Removing, or not bothering to include, stuff that the customers actually need, cutting corners, just to discretely hive a few pence/cents off the costs of providing the product
You missed the point(s).
"...And I'm pretty techie minded- " I know my way around computers and have spent years helping the general user to generally use their machines. I''m not an engineer or a coder. Any IT skills I used to have are long obsolete. I am ( was) a teacher and teacher trainer.
And the key point was that your article demonstrates why 'Nux is a long way from being what so many 'Nux advocates want it to be, the OS of the desktop*.
A few trivial "gotchas" aren't going to change that.
Because-the actual point- it is is an arcane art that needs considerable persistence and commitment to penetrate. Which is fine by me. But then I don't particularly wish to read 'Nux advocates propose that it should be on the general desktop. as, as I headed that comment "a mainstream option"
*As itself, not lying under another OS- which mostly is what is meant
Author here]
their new fangled 486 machines with two floppy disc drives
TBH this casts some doubt on your account, because the 486 came out in 1989 and went widespread in the early 1990s, which was about a decade after the era of twin-floppy PCs. By the 486 era, any normal business computer had a hard disk.
Doesn't take much to make you doubt, does it. It was a long time ago. Probably mid to late '80s. RM 3 or 480Z And frankly that kind of petty detail from decades ago is too trivial to make any difference.But it was largely and obviously an illustrative point.
Anyway, you complain a lot about this, but really, Bodhi is an option for a DIYer. If you don't have preferred native Linux apps this is not a distro for you.
That's like saying "If you're lost in a forest don't take any notice of the oak trees"
BTW, it's word: Mint, not MINT. So is MATE but they capitalise it because it's a Spanish word not an English one.
Can you get any more trivial?
Which misses the real life point that cars are differentiated mostly by just three factors; reputation/marketing, form factor and price. i.e. What is coolest, how many seats do I need, what can I afford, And once a make is settled on the sales staff will talk buyers through the options.
Not sure what teh "it" refers to there. MINT or 'Nux generally.
If MINT- it doesn't put things there on a plate like like Chrome/MacOs/Windows.Comparable, imho to moving from Twitter to Masto.
But it's the thick forest of 'Nux distros, forks of distros and forks of forks of distros, with concommitent alternative interfaces in some cases*, that is the biggest barrier to wider, general adoption.
*To quote from Wikipaedia, just about MINT alone.... Linux Mint is available with a number of desktop environments to choose from, including the default Cinnamon desktop, MATE and Xfce. Other desktop environments can be installed via APT, Synaptic, or via the custom Mint Software Manager.
The latest version is based on Ubuntu 22.04, with the Moksha desktop, which is a fork of Enlightenment 17. There's a choice of four editions: three 64-bit ones, and a 32-bit edition which is still based on Ubuntu 18.04, the last Ubuntu LTS which supported x86-32. The 64-bit editions differ chiefly in the kernel they use. You can have either the basic Ubuntu "Jammy" 5.15, or the current HWE version with kernel 6.2, or for those with shiny, very new kit, an "s76" edition with the latest kernel 6.4."
All this is just one set of forks, from the many many alternatives.
A bewildering thicket of branches from the many various distros.*
And just getting the best out of MINT so I can use my machine productively was more than enough time and effort for me. And I'm pretty techie minded- (which is why I use a 'nux I could have stayed with Windows 10) I was a trainer for educational IT for a good number of years and taught a borough's technophobe school head teachers and their staff how to use their new fangled 486 machines with two floppy disc drives when I was an educational IT trainer, decades back. And so on.
But when it comes to seeing my way through this forest of Linux trees, bushes and shrubbery. Nah. It'd take far too much effort for a non-techie to even contemplate dropping Windows for 'Nux
*Sorry about the mixed metaphors but the word "fork" just isn't up to the job.
This is the rule with all inspectors/inspections.
It appears that every inspection requires something negative to say, or they feel they haven't done their job.
This still rankles with me a whole career after the first time I got hit by it.
In my first year of teaching, in a tough high school taking most of its kids from a "second line estate" i.e. the families had all been moved out of previous council housing for assorted reasons, I received amazingly good feedback, and was allowed to complete my probationary period early. The inspector mentioned though that my desk was very messy and I needed to keep my resources more organised on it.
That passing comment in the verbal feedback was turned into a whole paragraph in the written report. It was still a really good report, but the offending paragraph made the whole thing turn to ashes.
I've had plenty of "very good but..." reports since then, there's always something, but even so.........
I'm retired now, but that first one still annoys me.
where you have to talk to the same person three times before they'll admit they know something.
I don't know that company. But that factor, which you say they have ceased, is at least part of my problem for me trying to play games. Having to repeat an action x number of times, for no apparent reason, is just not rational.
Having a specific sequence of events or actions, (even if they don't need to be done more than once) but without telling you there's a specific sequence, and with no logic behind the order so that it's purely random chance whether you get to the next step is imho irrational. Whatever the intention of these elements might be it just means that a) I don't procede with them and b) I don't spend anymore of my money on future attempts at new games.
Presumably there are plenty of people who enjoy that kind of thing, and they're the target market. Good luck to them
The game, like all text adventures, is totally unsolvable unless you think very laterally and do something completely non-obvious .
It's the last bit that always gets me. Not just text adventures, but the newer ones with scenes too. At some point you find yourself going around in circles trying all sorts of nonsensical stuff. Which is why I've never been a gamer. My inner voice just says "bugger this for a game of soldiers" long before I find the way to get past that bit.And I quit.
At the time of the eclipse we went to Cornwall. One child was a toddler, the other waiting to be born.
We all waited on the edge of a cliff for The Moment. The sun got darker ( being by the sea was a mistake by the way, but that's another matter)
At which point Mrs 6 shouts "I left the camcorder under the pram". By the time I found where she'd hidden the bloody thing I'd missed most of the eclipse.
Decades ago, late 80s maybe, as an amateur programmer I read lots of articles explaining stuff like how to write functions in the code.
None of them bothered to explain waht ehy were for or, in effect, why we should do this.
It was a couple of years later, when I was working for a living and had pretty much stopped writing software that I was polishing up some rather poor BBC Micro educational software to make it more usable ( OK probably breaching some sort of copyright) that I saw some function calls in action ( the coding wasn't bad, just the programme design was appalling, if my memeory serves me correctly). A bit of a lightbulb moment.
I was about to post the same, I'm a day late.
But "Capita" and "reputation" in the same sentence.............
The only surprise, expressed so often here and elsewhere, is why the f*** people keep giving them the business.
How often do they need to provide ghastly, incompetent, over priced, inadequate service before people stop throwing more money to them???
Last Dell (laptop) I bought, I spoke to them in detail. Asked, was there room and connection in the chassis to add a second HDD? "Yes" He said. "Are you sure I'll be able to fit the old HDD from my current laptop in there to transfer data and act as extra storage? This is important". "Yes, definitely" he said.
There wasn't. And I complained and they gave me the verbal equivalent of a shrug.
So yes they got the sale. But they won't get any more. And I sure as hell won't be recommending them any more.
My most recent main PC is a Chiilblast.Not a Dell like the previous one was also
My surprise birthday present from herself, in a couple of weeks or so, is a convertible laptop, that won't be a Dell either.
Add in friends and family and that one mis-selling will cost them a fair number of future sales.
I assume that the people on the end of the phone line are on targets to convert inquiries to sales. Of course the inquiries they don't even get won't show on anyone's targets.
I wrote some ...
Outside of the world of the techie an electrical socket is just that. And in a boiler room too. Only some sympathy though, because it's bloody arrogant to pull out a plug without finding out what's at the other end. Just you wouldn't expect a significant part of the business to be it.
Some sympathy for the workman here. He has to do his job. That's his imperative. He needs a socket. The location has a socket. He needs to use that socket. He has no idea how important that socket might be to you, but maybe it's important to him. So he used that socket.
You've appropriated the socket because that was your imperative. But it hasn't given him an alternative.
Was there a second socket for general use installed? Apparently not.
Was there a reason to think a socket might be needed for general use? Well there was one already, so apparently it's a yes.
I do wonder if regulators (across sectors and around the world) are still thinking in terms of normal companies doing good old fashioned making of stuff. Rather than enormous multi-national megacorps making insane amounts of money by skimming across everyone's lives.
There is a general, popular confusion between a lot of money for myself and a lot of money for a multinational (or a nation).
To me and the rest of the public a million quid is a fair chunk of money and mufti-millions seems an incredible amount. But to corporates and nations it's a rounding error.
I wonder if the regulators are still thinking like the public, ditto politicians. and whether this is deliberate because they know that the public will fall for it and their friends in wealthy places won't be bothered.
Absolutely.
I only ever see techie types ( and only a subset of these) want new posts at the bottom of an email. And I don't understand why they do.
Who wants to scroll down a (possibly long exchange) email to find the new stuff?
The subject line should give the context. And mostly you'll know what it's about and only want to see the new bit.
A few years (decades?) back I emailed a big comany's support at companyname.com and got a rather snotty email back saying that this was their USA only support address. So I queried why they didn't then have a USA email address rather than the generic .com. Their response was that .com was a USA address.
This; ........have told me of catching mistakes not because they had done the exact calculation themselves but because the too-rough...............t-quick-estimate in their head showed too large a difference........., used to be taught to 11 year olds. Always have a rough estimate in your head of what answer you need.
Anytime you need to use a calculator you need to have some idea of the sane answer range. Medicines,timber, stationery orders, copper tubing, whatever. If you need to calculate it accurately you need to error trap it.
Maybe the schools don't teach that anymore? They do still teach estimating, though.
<minirant> And if you don't need to do it accurately maybe you should bloody well do it in your head anyway.</minirant>
In UK we see a lot of green reg plates ( at least round London). Or cars with no exhaust pipes. (Chargeable hybrids still will, of course).
There's a lot of them.
Forecourt leccy prices are rumoured to be as expensive of buying petrol, currently- which makes the more expensive vehicles much less attractive. And in cities an awful lot of people don't have off-street charging at domestic rates.
An issue with domestic solar here - I don't know about Spain of course- is that information is sketchy, so finding out what if anything is suitable for your home depends on contacting a contractor who may or may not bother to give an answer. Every contractor has a different answer, if they do bother to get back to you. The various options aren't provided in any way that's systematic or comparable. The calculations are done by using generic examples and not individual use cases. And somehow the payback time is always about ten years what ever combination of panels and batteries you damn well choose to get installed. Almost as if the pricing is designed around charging users accordingly. Presumably the target market is people in the 30-45 age range with young kids and an established career. i.e. it's worth it to them to invest in something that will have been paid for and giving them free energy by the time the kids are grown up.
Or just called "deleted". With the explanation, if required, that it gives them a second chance if stuff is deleted by accident.
(Precisely what it is meant for, of course).
"Trash" has a slight degree of ambiguity ( a very slight degree) in that it can be used to mean "all the annoying stuff that I don't know what to do with".
And yet, even when I was learning coding in school in the 70s and later teaching myself other stuff, like 6502 assembler in the 80s I was given a good inkling that you don't hard code data components. Especially not ones that will be used in a calculation. I'd somehow had it explained/taught to me that this was just inelegant and poor practice, even if you thought it'd never need to change.
And in my experience this is a place where instructions often go wrong. One of the places*. The writer knows what's meant to happen. And what every step does. So there are all sorts of ambiguities or missing details that the customer won't have a clue what to do with. As in something along the lines of; The writer, presumably, knew that for a given function of a device you had to keep a certain button held down for 5 seconds. The instructions say "Hold down the button n then press button y" but no mention of the 5 seconds or that you have to release that button before you press the other one.. The user presses n, immediately presses y and then snatches their fingers of the buttons like the device was on fire. And nothing happens. Or the device acts as it would if button n was pressed for normal use.
*Even more egregious imho are the instructions that explain the simple and obvious steps- but carefully omit the bit that's hard to explain.
Home secretaries, whatever their personal and party viewpoints have to deal with the public perception of law and order. Irrespective of what any kind of research might say this means a strong belief that all kinds of crime are increasing - especially the personal violent stuff, locking more people up for longer reduces crime, that our NHS services are full up because of the "immigrants" and so on.
No one ever won votes by saying we should try to rehabilitate prisoners and spend more on treatment or drug programmes.
The way the education and exam system is structured, having a law degree (especially if fully qualified to practice) mostly requires a good memory to rote learn your way through GCSE/A Level/University, a tutor, or even better a private school helps a lot, public school even more so. And good contacts. Training contracts and pupillage are hard to get. Unless daddy knows someone.
The "Freedoms" and "control" we gained by leaving the EU were carefully never specified. Instead there were a bunch of shibboleths; control of our borders,straight cucumbers and of course freedom to save a few paltry million in contributions by paying considerably more in lost opportunities, border controls and so forth.
In a nutshell.
It appears that business decisions aren't made on the basis of long term health and profitability of a company. But rather the demands of equity traders who make their money on the basis of shirt term share value. In effect liming the soil.*
*For non-gardeners, putting lime on the soil releases nutrients quickly. But it also depletes the soil by releasing the nutrients without replenishing them. In the short term you get a good crop, but long term you can end up with very poor harvests.
So many of the groups ( here in the UK but I doubt it differs from many other places) that are run by volunteers are run by old volunteers. And many may have been volunteering since before they retired but put more of their time into it after. i.e. are used to doing things how the last chair person wanted it done and are set in their ways. It takes a good generation or more for that to work through, with some of them. Not all. Some are more flexible than others, of course.
I suspect the answer is "nobody"
Relying on anything touted in the tech world seems to have a significant risk that as soon as people start to build their work around it the rug will get pulled from under them.
Edit - and possibly their careers if they've thrown their lot in with one of these new-fangled ideas.
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