Posts by keithpeter 2068 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jul 2007
http://techonomy.com/conf/te14/future-revolutions/owns-future/
Above page has a useful summary of Lanier's position and reasoning. His old style home page has a lot of writings on it. Interesting author and fresh viewpoint.
Coat: mine's the one with the Nokia 3420 and a notebook and pen in it
"Every day I have to face how much outdated Linux design is, how outdated its tools are, and how much workarounds I have to devise to make it work as I need. "
What are your needs?
Can you give an example of a kernel/OS that you consider to be less outdated?
Coat: mine's the one with a 9front .iso in the pocket
Now the climate seems to have shifted so that those responsible for their very important war work receive full credit, do we think that there is a possibility of a reprint of the original edition of Gordon Welchman's The Hut Six Story, not the bowdlerised one?
PS: can you imagine reverse engineering the logical design of the Lorenz from operator mistakes, cribs and sheer trial and error? amazing.
@kryptylomese
"Why does it matter if the company even exists or not and why do so many people care?"
Just sit down quietly for 10 minutes away from a screen or connected device. Take a pencil and a piece of paper.
Now make a list of the consequences of Microsoft *products* suddenly becoming unavailable.
Think small and medium businesses. Think most educational institutions and health services. Think the civil service itself.
Of course, it won't happen suddenly. If there was the slightest chance of Microsoft tanking, you'll see UN level action to keep them afloat.
Microsoft will remain profitable on legacy systems for decades with dwindling returns. We can't blame them for trying out new things can we?
"However, IBM knows what a crown jewel looks like and they will keep just enough people on MQ and CICS while not trying to loose too many of the ol' boys who still have their place"
Wonder how the "ol' boys" feel about 'having their place'? Any of the "ol' boys" care to comment?
As an "ol' boy" in a different field, I'd be checking my CV and looking where to go to sharpish myself.
Mines the one with the pension pot in the pocket...
"Suggest looking at a longer term distro - something from the Debian tree is my current choice."
If you like the Fedora way of doing stuff, why not CentOS? A good 5 years of support with updated applications. Familiar admin (dnf won't arrive until RHEL8).
"Imagine, you had migrated to Linux iso XP, Gnome or KDE, no matter, both versions (or clones thereof) are still actively supported. Imagine you migrate to Linux iso 10?"
@Hans 1
In my dreams, but, if pigs were seen flying in formation over Birmingham, and cats were cohabiting with dogs &c with a few tweaks to an image we could have This or This and minimal re-training (system already has OpenOffice/GIMP/Inkscape).
Yes, XP -> Win7 did involve training.
"Non-Windows thin clients are in the pipeline for next year."
@AC in the bank: won't that just be pushing the issue back to your servers? I'm assuming those thin clients will be logging into an MS style desktop and/or back end services.
@nematoad
"Both have stated that they will not be using systemd."
Got a reference for the Slackware statement? The Slackers seem a pragmatic bunch and I am not aware that they have ruled out systemd in a possible future release as a result of dependencies on the systemd suite.
@bazza, quote below from OA
"This project owes a lot to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and I'd like to send you a sincere offer for collaboration," he writes, promising that there will be contributions back to that project soon.
Quote from Wikipedia stub article at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD
"Debian GNU/kFreeBSD was discontinued as an officially supported platform as of Debian 8.0."
I wish the project luck, but I wonder how wide the uptake will be. Most BSD* people prefer to use their own tool chain rather than the GNU one. Also watch out for launchd!
"Enterprise features, including Data Protection Under Lock, are missing."
I take it that a large company that actually uses Windows 8.1 phones and that actually relies on this feature for data management can block the update while they investigate migrating to an alternative platform?
"However sites, including El Reg, cause the page to slow down so much with video/animated ads"
Try just using a hosts file that redirects most of the algorithmic ad servers to nowhere. There are various ones around, google something like "hosts file to block ad servers" and you will find the first few (non-advert!) suggestions of interest.
I find this makes firefox on a core-duo laptop under linux usable with full content rendition - no lags on scrolling except for embedded (content) videos &c while still allowing 'organic' ads from the actual servers that are serving the pages.
Just my compromise in a difficult area. I agree fully with the sentiment conveyed by the second sentence of your post!
Boots in about 20 seconds on a core duo laptop, windows key bound to main menu so hitting windows key and typing 'firefox' and enter loads the browser, wifi just works with Intel wifi so not fsf compliant but useful.
Around 500Mb RAM use on a 2Gb machine with firefox running on this site. Top shows Xorg hitting around 30% cpu and load averages in the 0.5 range which is a bit noisy for a core-duo (my normal Slackware and/or Debian installs run around 3% and 0.01 when not doing much). So so.
"[...] code up an OS using nothing but the Logo "Turtle" style commands."
@Shadow Systems: nice idea. The LOGO I used ages ago used to have the same functionality as LISP and so the project would probably be feasible.
Downloading the 780Mb iso for Solus to try it. The trade-off for no Office package in the live .iso is probably the smaller download size. 64 bit only apparently.
"The Ubuntu Mate devs must have thought the Mutiny layout was as valid an option to present to users as the other presets that are provided"
I may be talking out of the back seam of my jeans (I have before) but could this presentation of the MATE desktop be of value to those who cannot use 3d graphics acceleration and who wish to use a Unity style? I recollect that Unity 2d bit the dust some time ago and my experiences with llvmpipe were less than stellar at that point in time.
Coat: I'm not using Ubuntu regularily now so what do I know?
"When Ubuntu was creating Unity, they actually went out and hired UI usability consultants who actually talked to actual ordinary people in order to come up with their design. "
I could live with Unity if it was the UI provided by (say) an employer.
I actually think it makes sensible use of a wide screen display. I didn't like the menu-at-top-of-screen that inexplicably hid itself (mouse safari to reach obscure options on a large monitor), but then I thought that the HUD was genius. The only reason that I stopped using Unity was the LibreOffice short cut keys meltdown that dogged the UI for ages. I'm a big ALT-keys shortcut user.
I recollect the Canonical Design posts about user testing...
https://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-unity/
...worth reading even 6 years later. I've see nothing similar from anyone else in the Libre world. References welcome.
My problem with Unity is the orientation to naive users.
What is the planning for skill growth? Vygotski's 'zone of proximal development' (Google it) to borrow a term from my profession (I'm a teacher of maths to adults). Basically what is the onboarding promise?
Earlier Unity releases also had a responsiveness issue when hitting Mod4. Gnome was a lot more responsive, and I have to say I still rather like Gnome 3. Mind you, I used dwm/dmenu for years, so I'm quite used to hit-button-and-type-stuff interfaces.
Having analysed my own desktop use, I'm posting this off an install of Debian Jessie with wm2 as window manager, xbindkeys, dmenu, pmount, ifconfig, xterm and applications (LibreOffice, texlive, R, dia, GIMP, surf and a few others). Works for me with a bit of scripting, pstree output does not scroll in a standard terminal. Probably for noone else. 9wm was a bridge too far, and fvwm was a little bloaty.
Coat: I'm not using Ubuntu at present although I kick the tyres now and again.
@/dev/null and others
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/glibc-security-patch-cve-2015-7547-a-4175572402/
It appears that there was some kind of patch released then from OpenSUSE. The patch for at least part of this vuln is still being applied to Slackware versions which consequently don't respond to the proof of concept exploit. Please read whole thread.
As PV put it...
"I've had two requests in email to remove the patch since glibc had supposedly fixed the issue that prompted it, but left it in place anyway. Maybe luck, maybe slack."
Tramp Icon: every device with an Internet connection is only a few hundred milliseconds away from all the other devices. We are all in this kayak together so perhaps paddling in same direction would be a good idea...
@Grumpen
"...it was a physics simulation of the most non-trivial kind....the value of the code was in the horribly convoluted variations of the (partly known) algorithms."
Look for the notebooks. All the serious physicists I have worked with kept a notebook for each project. Everything went in the notebook and was dated. Theoreticals for claiming priority and keeping track of what you refer to as magic numbers (aka 'parameters') and the experimentalists just in case of little ...err... upsets(*) in the lab.
(*) slide 25 makes especially instructive reading. Writing it down helps you think it through before modifying equipment...
"That's why Fortran only uses columns 1-72, you punch sequence numbers in the last 8 columns (going up in 10s so you can insert missing cards later, just like you used to do for BASIC line numbers)."
Excellent, I wish I could go back in a time machine and tell the 22 year old me about that. That old mainframe was the first card-punch input machine I had used. 'Coffee batch' before that.
Mind you, those card punches took a bit of typing. We did Algol as an undergrad, I had to learn FORTRAN on the 'job'.
@Grumpen
"I warned the poor guy supposed to polish this monstrosity that he'd have a "window job""
Honest question: would it not have been easier to find out what this thing did by running it with a variety of inputs covering most cases and simply re-code it? I mean is there a point where you just decide to start again with a (comparitively) small system?
PS: I think we need a thread for code that has been kept in systems for decades but never run.
"There is something about academics that mean they can't code...."
I suspect the OA was talking about academics in other subjects rather than computing lecturers. Physicists and Biologists and Chemists live very close to their problem domains and probably see the computer as a huge calculator that can print things nicely (well, I did). They may not need/want to abstract away the underlying logic of whatever problem they are trying to solve...
PS: @Tom 13 I used to number my punched cards in pencil on the back just in case I dropped the stack. That was considered to be a useful innovation at the time...
"Internally the system is likely to have enough redundancy and loos coupling to survive quite a beating, possibly even downtime in several AWS centers."
@Destroy All Monsters
Above is a quote from OA that caught my eye. Your comment...
"Internally the system is likely to have enough redundancy and loos coupling to survive quite a beating, possibly even downtime in several AWS centers."
...I'm wondering about consistency of the data across independent geographical centres and vertically across different microservices. A relational database does guarantee (eventual) consistency with various arrangements for rollback &c
@Charles Manning
'Agency' and 'internal locus of control' vs 'external locus of control' are the $5 words for describing your hard won experience should you ever need to justify or explain the interview process to outsiders.
"I used university as a learning opportunity but I also taught myself LISP because it looked interesting"
That is the kind of attitude/desire to learn that *anything* new depends on.
"For a non-techy to have to encounter all the quirks while still doing their own non-computer job, it's a bit much and too steep a learning curve, too soon, can put people off."
£80-£100 for a recycled Thinkpad/Dell Latitude of ebay would take the pressure off the main machine and allow time to be allocated in small chunks.
Best of luck with it.
"...complete with scripts I'd written to automate his packages and install his fonts, etc"
In a spirit of respectful enquiry, why on earth are you preventing your friend from taking autonomous control of his computer by providing scripts that hide the distro-specific details? Is that not replacing one form of dependency (Windows commercial mystery) with another (some random guy's idea of a useful script)? Are you offering a support contract?
PS: I don't downvote, I'd rather engage just in case I'm wrong.
Coat: despite the rain, I'm off out as this is a Windows thread really.
"(Don't understand the downvotes)"
@Charlie Clark: the downvoters are the ones who have not had to deal with a Web application created by cut and paste from various sources without any use of a central library of routines.
Ex-PHB: I don't code. But I can now recognise future pain when I see it.
"To my mind the best way to do this is to have a separate phone with separate email address."
I'd just swap my SIM card into the old Blackberry 7230. Still has a 5 day battery life and does email (just re-authenticate the email address) as well as phone/sms. Can trickle charge off USB wherever you can find another device with some juice.
Disclaimer: I'm in mild, slightly damp UK
@ Martin Summers
The chap up the screen mentioned the word perfect icon so we are talking about some time ago. There may have still been a lot of DOS computers around, and the Amstrad PCW may have been more common than a Windows machine.
I'm seeing the other end of this one - 16 year olds today spend many more hours on mobile interfaces than they do on Windows and it is beginning to show. Try asking about backups of work...
"OpenSUSE failed to boot post-install, UBUNTU keeps crashing."
What is the make/model of your laptop?
When you say crashing, is that a kernel panic (black screen with a dump of some registers and all controls frozen, you have to press power switch to reboot) or is it just that daft popup window that says something about internal error? If latter, it isn't serious but I agree not what you want with an unfamiliar system.
PS: At work I have a small PC with an atom processor and 2Gb of RAM. Windows 10 for Education actually runs rather well on that low end hardware. Pity about all the data swiping/corporate politics around what appears to be an actual improvement.
I always wondered how much Amazon would pay for random desktop search terms like *perc*2014* and similar (percentages worksheets and lessons used in 2014/15 academic year in case you are wondering).
Now I imagine we know - not enough to cover the cost of maintaining two versions over the Unity 7 to Unity 8 transition.
I agree that this is a sensible move by Fedora/RedHat, effectively giving something like 2 years of support on a given Fedora release. I find Fedora 23 quite a nice implementation of the Gnome concept of the desktop. Korora and Chapeau (two 'batteries included' distributions built on top of Fedora) provide very nice live distros.
More good news (my feeble excuse for hijacking the Fedora thread)... Slackware 14.2 is now beta, and (you may want to sit down for this bit) has pulse audio installed by default. Quote from Mr Volkerding "Best of all, we're finally a modern, relevant Linux distro! ;-)"
...I work as a teacher, so I have a large degree of autonomy in the job and the job *requires* me to be away from my desk for large stretches of time by definition - but the timetabling system will tell you where I am. I am monitored by outcomes and through process (teaching observations) and by various kinds of procedural information (attendance registers for students, ongoing progress monitoring of students &c).
1. If you are in a hot desk place, what actually stops you from working at home for one day/20% of the week? The implication is that it does not matter where you sit in the building - why not extend that concept?
2. Someone up the screen observed that once data is collected for one purpose, it will end up being used for other purposes, possibly not so well thought out. This is a real issue in my experience - quite possibly a law on the level of 2nd Law of Thermodynamics but for organisations. Of course there is no careful framing of the hypothesis that is being tested, and so no certainty that the data collected is sufficient to decide the case, a good example being the one about collecting desk occupancy data during seasons with high annual leave requests.
3. Another common pattern that I have observed is the way setting a numerical target for something tends to 'collapse' wider concepts of success. Sort of like the wave packet being condensed in Quantum Mechanics. Once a target exists, the system is gamed so the target is met. Schools have to show X % of passes at A-C in Maths and other core subjects, so it has been observed that both extremes of the ability range get lower resources while the middle get intensive coaching to ensure C rather than D. I'm currently in the part of the system that deals with the fall-out of this.
4. What happened to 'management by exception'? Am I really out of date on that one?
I don't work Tuesdays (fractional post) so off out while it isn't raining.
I'd agree that this book is an excellent and intellectually satisfying read, and I approve of the idea of reviewing books a few years after their publication - that helps people discover things that might be new to them once the initial marketing/PR push by the publishers stops.
I'm less interested in the fan-belt side of things (although I found that interesting in the book) and more into the mathematics. Through Dyson's work I found out about Nils Aall Barricelli. This eccentric and independently wealthy scientist working on the cusp of biology and mathematics managed to wander unscathed through a world war and was able to get time on the Princeton computer to run his 'digital life' experiments. This chap was close to cellular automata but probably lacked the mathematical tools to explore those. He was also working before the RNA/DNA transcription process was known. Amazing.
More on the link below...
http://nautil.us/issue/14/mutation/meet-the-father-of-digital-life
Coat: sunny day: off out.
@ Quortney Fortensplibe
I tend to use my phone for accurate(ish) timekeeping with the advantage that it reminds me where I am supposed to be and what I'm supposed to be doing a little in advance of when I have to be there and doing it. I feel no real need for that functionality to be duplicated in a less flexible way on a device on my wrist as yet.
I rather like the idea of one of those wrist watches with one hand and a dial that has 24 hours to a revolution. You can sort of associate the left hand middle side with getting up, the pointing-to-the-top bit as noon/lunch and the right hand middle-ish side as time for wine/dinner. I'd fancy that when I retire and no longer have to track things to better than half an hour-ish.
Like the first actual clocks it tracks the Sun.
ADSL, around 2.4 Mbits/sec early in morning, degrading to about 1Mbit/sec evening when the missus wants streaming content and fbook.
I could live with this at a sensible monthly cost, but we have to pay line rental for a phone line that is only really used for broadband and then a broadband cost on top. At least I can use my own router and generic settings &c.
"If you can't work out how to build a particular package, someone else probably has. They haven't got a 2.9 package yet, but it will happen once the package maintainer gets round to it."
GIMP is, of course, part of a default install (in the XAP package set) and so is not found on Slackbuilds, but I take your general point.
"That's having 400000 sines each dependent on a previous cell's value and then changing the first cell manually but at random. and waiting for the last cell to change.
I accept no caching under that scenario.
Mostly retired so I don't need this so much but I do find it all so amusing when people complain about LO's speed.
I'm beginning to notice a trend: global evaluative statement about oOo/LO but then when engaged with I can never get any detail...
Pint: I'd better stay offline for the next 24 hours as, you know, that will be safer.
"If you're doing this kind of shit in a spreadsheet then you need to be tarred, feathered, set on fire and drummed out of town on a rail."
@ Alan Brown
Why?
Seriously, 5 minutes it took to think it out on the back of a payslip, set up the formulas and run the simulation with 10k rows. Then about 10 more minutes to get the macro sorted and collect 30 data points, then about 2 minutes to graph the lot. Answer back on viability of project within the hour.
How long would an alternative take? And what would be your alternative?
Genuinely interested, not trolling.
I see the humble spreadsheet as a sort of doodle pad for numbers. A way of getting the *logic* sorted and then take it further into something with a bigger overhead if needed.
This is mathematical modelling, not your corporate 'business application'
"I once read that if you find the speed of your spreadsheet calculations cause you to need to make a coffee while you wait for them, that's the sign that it's time to dump your spreadsheet and move to a proper database."
In the example I gave above, it would be time to write a program in a compiled language. Spreadsheets are still easy for 'quick' doodles and getting the logic sorted. Quite often, I just get the answer anyway and don't write the proggy.
OP hasn't come back to me. <Gallic Shrug>.
@Chemist: possibly doing egg-sucking tutorial here but is that calling sine with same argument or random/varying argument? LO and Excel can cache results &c.
@Blitterbug (chap with the Surface): Have a look at Data Smart by John Foreman. Basic model making with a spreadsheet - you can run the practical activities in both LO > 4.xish and MS Excel. Not too much difference between a 4Gb core-duo desktop / win7 /Excel 2010 at work and a Thinkpad core-duo X200 / LO 4.something at home, except for macros (who ever designed the macro dialog for LO needs an award - preferably in N. Korea and collected in person with return journey by boat) and some aspects of value dependent formatting.
Happy new year all
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