Posts by keithpeter 2067 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jul 2007
"The welfare bill come out of different pot of money. Simples really."
Er - what?
UK jobs -> Elsewhere (doesn't matter where really)
UK tax base shrinks
Less tax raised, so less money for welfare, defence, health, education, building houses &c
Where is Worstall when you need him?
Coat icon: mine's the one with a copy of Grundrisse in the pocket
"How computers work, as opposed to how to use them."
OK, so are we taking an historical/hardware approach or building up from logic (and/or/not and Boolean algebra, leading to shift registers, half adders &c) or from the conceptual side (Von Neumann machine/Turing computability which rests on the 'diagonal proof' and its generalisation) or through programming (variables, assignment, loops, subroutines/functions then into more abstract areas) or all of those?
Could take a bit of time (and need some serious skills). Best of luck. One tiny activity I use sometimes: take an 8 by 8 grid of squares on squared paper. Draw a resonably complex shape (each square is either black or white).
Now devise a way of sending the shape to someone else using an sms message. Document the method for reconstructing the shape.
Now find a method that will work for a shape drawn on a 16 by 16 grid, and then a 32 by 32 grid &c.
"There are fourteen different downloads linked from
http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php"
True enough, and I take the point being made but these 14 downloads are essentially installing the same OS but with different default setups. They are provided as a convenience to the one who is installing, and to allow the one who is installing to demonstrate compliance with local laws (the no codec variants). It would in principle be possible to have a single Mint DVD (at least for the Ubuntu based install) and then ask the installer a series of questions about the software required (c. f. the Debian installer as run from the netinstall image).
The various Widows versions have different functionality I understand, so that Windows 7 Home edition as supplied with my refurbished T61p under a scheme for refurbished computers will not be able to do everything that the College machines with their Windows 7 Enterprise (?) versions can do.
My 3120 is still going strong with 5 day battery life. I use it as an emergency phone.
Having said that, what will happen with the current range of Nokia branded s30/s40 phones, e.g. the Nokia 108 &c? Will they carry on under the Microsoft brand? Will Nokia continue to use the s30/s40 OS at all?
Nvidia 6200 card needs legacy drivers on Ubuntu 14.04
Puppy runs in ramdisk I recollect, so check BIOS entries for the other Linux isos. Google the mobo model &c. F6 and nomodeset may (according to a quick google) help with Ubuntu.
64 Bit: should be OK but try a 32 bit live CD just in case
Note to mods: previous more detailed post kept getting blocked?!
Put the Ubuntu disk in, cleaned off the drive, and loaded it. Or tried to. Refused to install. Tried again. Same thing. Gave up. NEXT.
I would be very interested to learn more about this desktop PC. Brand, processor, video card &c.
If you managed to boot Mint into a live session, just hit terminal and do an lspci command and post it here.
I test out stuff like this....
"...came in early/worked late/weekends just to prove how "valuable" she was."
Disclaimers: I don't work in IT but I do have to think about people's motivation a lot. This comment is not genered especially, applies to Tims and Tabithas
What drives this overwork and inability to share/work with other people? Is it a cynical strategy to increase wages? Is it insecurity/bad attack of imposter syndrome? Or is it simply never having learned how to work with other people? Or all/any of these depending on the specific Tim/Tabitha?
Consequent on a diagnosis, has anyone devised strategies for managing the issues short of waiting for the Tim/Tabitha to disappear or jumping ship themselves?
Just wondering...
Coat: mine's the one with the herbal tea and essential oils in the pocket.
Is this copying CD to CD or is it about format shifting (CD -> mp3 so I can listen to the stuff I bought on my phone)?
If latter, then Brennan et al are in trouble are they not? I recollect a promise to do something about format shifting something like a decade ago but still 'nowt.
"Are you kidding its becoming Windows. Still Red Hat should give Poettering all kinds of stock options. Even Microsoft wasn't able to cash in on others work as well."
All the code is GPL licenced I believe. So the system can evolve into something a bit saner over time. Some of the *bsd people are hoping to build their own launchd so having a *thing* that lives between the kernel and the applications seems to be a popular development.
Quote from OA
"Windows 10 feels rougher, not only because of bugs in the preview, but also because restoring a desktop focus has made the tablet experience worse in some respects."
Hopefully UI designers (everywhere) will draw the obvious conclusion from this expensively won experience: design one UI for touch and a different one for Desktop. Don't compromise.
@Shadow Systems
" Touch screens are fine if you're a media consumer, not if you're a Professional whom needs to Get Shit Done. Email, meeting notes, calendar appointments, marking up schematics to collaborate in manufacturing, and all the other things that a physical keyboard will make infinitely easier for someone whom needs to GSD"
I enjoyed your spirited defence of hardware keyboards on phones. I see two issues...
Installed base working fine:
My fairly ancient Bold 9000 can do all the things in your paragraph above with the exception of marking up diagrams (which task I personally would rather perform sitting at a device with a larger screen in a quiet well-lit room free of distractions). I can also drop the Bold down the stairs and sit on it accidentally without cracking the screen or the case unlike some makes of tough-screen device. There is a replaceable battery and a charge lasts several days depending on call frequency. What size is the replacement market?
Motivation for buying new shiny devices:
Is the (possibly saturating) market for small form-factor mobile devices not driven by shiny consumer oriented apps and bandwidth consumption? How would a distinctly work oriented device fit into that?
The tramp: yes, I am a cheapskate
I hope that this discovery will lead to questions being asked about the resources being spent on mass surveillance of home and allied populations - i.e. huge data trawls producing low priority information that is mostly just deleted after some period of time.
Just possibly someone might begin to think that a little spending on actual secure systems for the basics like this might be a better idea?
Jaron Lanier writes about 'siren servers' by which he means the way various agencies 'sell' large IT based projects to gullable politicians/corporate managers. Shiny, sound good, but apparently generate little advantage.
PS: if this happened in the UK we would never hear about it of course. Rest assured.
I sort of expected it would be MATE. Judicious customisation of the panels (basically removing one) can result in something that looks very Windows ish thus reducing training cost/pushback on change. The Alt-F style keyboard shortcuts for LO and all work just the same as in Windows as well.
Slackware choice interesting: you have a plan for pushing out updates to the slackbuilds I imagine. Running RStudio from a slackbuild had me recompiling WebKit almost twice a month. Good luck and write it up when it happens.
Probably not for this application but have a look at Deepin Linux. Very win7 ish custom DE on top of Ubuntu LTS. Has codecs and flash.
@Mr Pott
About those seats, and the people sitting in them. Which of the many variants of desktop Linux had you in mind? I'm interested from the point of view of staff (re)training, having had some experience of that and still occasionally having problems sleeping at night.
Or where these people already using a Linux desktop and the development described in the original article allows you to virtualise those seats?
"After much wailing and gnashing of teeth we're going to look at a Remote Desktop connection back to a server in head office which will allow them access to a copy of IE. Hopefully the cost will be more than the cost of a new HR solution and they can just ignore the old one."
I use an RDP session into my general purpose work desktop most days from my linux laptop and it works rather well for 'business app' administration type things (not so well for anything that needs graphics). I'm a teacher so I suppose we get cheap licences &c. I prefer the rdesktop client but remina does actually work as well.
Coat: Mine's the one with holiday brochures in the pocket.
I suspect if they forced the Microsoft coders who came up with the ribbon interface to actually use it it would have never gotten past the planning phase...
Alas, I think The Ribbon People actually thought that The Ribbon was a good idea. I have to face the fact that there are people in the world who think like that.
I just go to the tills where people get paid to scan the stuff.
When there is a queue and some spare bod comes around and asks 'would you like to use self-checkout' I just point out that the reason that I am in the queue is that I have already decided not to use self-checkout. I then respectfully suggest that if the spare bod really wants to get the queue down, they could hop on a till themselves.
Mind you, I'm tending to go to markets (the ones in the open air with stalls) far more now, and I also find myself using small corner shops as a matter of deliberate policy.
Credit to Mr Dabs for logging the self-checkout phenomenon. I think that this was a brave move to make on this particular Web site because I have an hypothesis that many here would like interacting with a machine with a pretty obvious logic rather more than interacting with a human being.
I think that the ultimate supermarket rant is still that of David Foster Wallace from the pre-self-checkout era. See 7th paragraph of Wallace's text below...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122178211966454607
Alas, David Foster Wallace will not be able to update the rant, and that leads me to the thought that we should all perhaps sit down for a bit and not worry about minor things.
Coat icon: off down to Birmingham Food Markets to buy veg and argue with the 'KIPper who runs the pots and pans stall. Always fun.
Dad had a friend who worked in a bunker in a cellar somewhere off the Dock Road or there abouts or near the town hall. I remember a row of CRT monitors set into grey desks with joystick controllers in front. As you moved the joystick, the monochrome CCTV cameras dotted around Liverpool city centre moved. Pressing a rocker switch on the end of the joystick zoomed in or out. Traffic flows were monitored visually as well as using pneumatic sensors set into the roads near traffic lights. A computer matched the traffic lights to the average speed of traffic through the city centre. The average speed was shown on a large display. It struck me at the time (as an abnoxious teenager) that the drivers of the cars throught they were in control with the illusion of agency, but really the computer program was in charge of the *average* movement through the centre, so that any relative advantage you gained in one section of road would result in a longer wait at a subsequent set of lights. [1]
I supose as the cost (both capital and energy to run) of computing devices continues to drop [2] we will see more of 'management' of cities. [2]
[1] (PDF, see slide 8 for the display section) http://www.ciht.org.uk/download.cfm/docid/df2d4cbb-435d-4f2c-bd044db69f02d0ef
[2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/08/how-low-power-can-you-go.html
I popped Fedora 22 workstation on a recycled Dell Latitude E5420 i5 Sandybridge laptop with intel graphics (and an atheros wifi card, I swapped out the Broadcom).
Gnome 3.16 seems fairly snappy to me. The new scroll bars on 'native' applications take a bit of getting used (hint: middle button to scroll). Firefox and LibreOffice are not 'native' and use scroll bars you can actually drag. I like the new notifications.
Default filing system is btrfs for / and xfs for /home, and the installer default is to set up LVMs and grab around 60Gb for root. I usually go for ext4 and a single partition. I find customising partitions on the 'spoke and wheel' installer requires some clicking around, and the 'make more space' command is downright confusing as it actually deletes partitions.
You have to enable the RPMFusion 22 repo to actually play music or anything as per usual in the RedHat world but that really is a 'just click a couple of times' job.
Yum: I used to use yum -localinstall sometimes but can't find the corresponding command in dnf. Not sure if the mirrors plug in is functioning or not in dnf updates, I did see a few time-out errors when updating and installing.
"This wasn't for one moment slave labour, it was paid employment, with little alternative but the rather unattractive option of the workhouse."
Read Robert Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists for an insight into aspects of the building trade in the late 19th cent. And just a good novel with clear strong writing. You had to watch out in case "the thing" happened in those days.
"It's as though every architect born after 1945 decided 'Gosh, what the world really wants is square grey boxes with square glass, just like they had in Soviet Russia'."
http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/ingenious-john-ochsendorf
It has been suggested that this tendency reflects the education and experience that structural engineers have. They work with a limited range of materials and regulations prevent exploration of older structures.
I rather like *some* recent work: e.g. the way the old and new structures in Manchester Piccadilly have been integrated, the renovated tea hall at Leeds Art Gallery, the Liverpool Picton Library extension that puts a roof over a gap between the two buildings so you can sit *outside* the Picton dome.
But, in general, I take your point.
"While there are many reports of the positive impact of this font in the popular media, it is important to note that no published peer-reviewed empirical research can be found (as of 5/7/15) that has shown this font to be effective with English readers. Two studies have investigated the effect of specialized fonts used with students with dyslexia. Rello and Baeza-Yates (2013) measured eye-tracking recordings of Spanish readers (aged 11-50) with dyslexia and found that OD did not significantly improve reading time nor shorten eye fixation."
Any quantitative data about the effectiveness of this font that will contradict the Wikipedia article above? If so, I'll use it for all my handouts next year (I'm a teacher).
PS: what licence is it issued under?
"I wonder where you got that from?. As far as I remember Cuban hospitals started to use Linux about 15 years ago. I am more concerned about Cuba when they let Microsoft in."
Have a look at the Nova 4 user manual, especially the section on network installation.
Fully agree with your observations on TTIP however
http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/13117/tech-cuba-reforms/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad
Just thinking random thoughts and standing rms on his head a little: those places where technology isn't seamlessly packaged, closed or easy to use may have an advantage in that (some) people are used to hacking things (using 'hacking' in its sense of 'adapting stuff to meet needs'). Is this not the logic of the Raspberry Pi?
A point to watch: will the Cuban government allow free software in? Because once it is in, people will be able to get round what controls remain...
PS: A weekly drop of 1Tb on a hard drive currently beats my adsl connection's bandwidth by a factor of around 5.
@ The Mighty Spang
Aghhhhhh they've changed.
Mmine was Sanfordised cotton and cost around £50 which I thought was a lot for a bag. I've had it since 2008. Going strong. Just get a sleeve for devices (I use a little muji zipped one that has pockets for pens and notebooks on the outside, something like £12) .
Have I got this wrong? OA recommends that devices be set up so they wipe data when not in communication with server for a period of days. OA then cites the 3 minute time out as limiting the time that a thief has to hack/reset the machine. Surely a thief will just isolate device from network connection and hack away at their leisure?
PS: phone cameras are pretty good these days. Screens full of information can be snapped quite easily on trains or in coffee bars. A bit of staff training about where to access sensitive or commercially valuable information might be a good idea in addition to IT 'governance'.
Hello All
I was thinking (always dangerous I find) today about the cleaners, catering staff and security guards in the building where I work. All outsourced. Most on minimum wage or minimum+£1 or so. Many receiving benefits (most people who claim housing benefit are working).
Why do we subsidise employers? What would be the (macro/micro) economic impact of jacking up the statutory minimum wage to 'living wage' levels as a way of cutting the benefit bill?
Picture with article: One of those twin rotor choppers was flying circuits round Selly Oak/QE Hospital a month or so ago. Low and people looking out the windows. Very impressive - the rotors go amazingly slow given the scale of the thing. I'm assuming it was an exercise of some kind.
Back on topic: presumably low risk traffic on the cloud. They would just use project names for anything sensitive ("RE: steampunk - starting positions now please")
"if the taxi drivers have only been able to be shafted by uber because they resolutely refuse to come into the 21st century"
What is this 21st Century of yours like?
Mine is the one with electric self-driving cars and motorways lined with solar cells to generate electricity. I'm not sure who will actually need to *own* a car then. We can just rent one by the minute. Automated lorries and deliveries by drone.
I've become good at remembering names - it is a useful survival skill in teaching. If they know that you know their name they will behave better than otherwise...
Over the years I have taught quite a few students with names similar to famous people and some similar to infamous people. One wonders what the parents were thinking of!
"Cinepaint (a high bit depth fork of the Gimp) used to be very good, but no longer works with modern versions of Linux. Sigh."
http://www.deb-multimedia.org/dists/jessie/main/binary-i386/package/cinepaint
The cinepaint .deb there plus the three libraries and cinepaint-data package install OK on Debian Jessie and bring in some dependencies from main (libcms1 and so on). I didn't enable the deb-multimedia repository as I don't want it overwriting stuff from main, so downloaded debs and used dpkg -i and handled the dependencies by backtracking and installing those (sort of slackware style). YMMV.
Cinepaint has to be started from terminal and complains about not being able to colour manage the monitor (laptop, Jessie MATE desktop). Looks really old fashioned, like GIMP 1.x ish. Might be an early build?
Looks like it was taken out of Debian Main after squeeze. There is some stuff on the mailing lists.
PS: liblcms1_1.19 package I got from Wheezy, I've run into that one before and its probably the cause of the colour management error.
"I'm a Conservative voter ( of the socially progressive, libertarian, small state variety )."
Excellent. Now who owns most of the docks in the UK? And who owns most of the power stations? Who owns most of the telecoms companies, and the Royal Mail? And the small company that produces radio isotopes for use in hospitals and your dentist's x-ray machine (an early privatisation)?
When you roll back the state, other corporate bodies (I'm thinking of Thomas Hobbes' powerful image here) tend to fill the vacuum. Individual share ownership hasn't really happened has it? The UK's best export at present appears to be rent/profit.
Now: can you get rid of OFSTED and just 'let the market decide' in education please? Could save a cool half billion that way, and stem the tide of head teachers taking early retirement.
"Although I do understand your point and where you are coming from, is it fair to foist a second placed UKIP candidate as MP onto a constituency which voted for eg Labour or Tory?"
There is another way.
Scottish assembly has roughly 75% seats awarded by FPTP in constituencies and the other 25% based on a regional list transferrable vote system. Your vote basically gets used twice. I can't get the data broken by constituency so I can map it into the 9 English government regions (each with their own list) yet, but rough estimate on that through on England results as a whole would suggest something like 14% of 150 seats allocated to the regional lists or 20 seats in total. Better than 1 but not the full proportionality.
Do you think 20 seats would be enough of a 'pressure release valve'? Certainly give the kippers a voice.
Irony: the party now in power is the one least likely to consider radical change in the voting system (and the Labour Party never really explored that either when they had the chance).
Disclaimer: unshy labour voter
How about if you can only vote if you are either working/full time education or have sufficient NI contributions over your working life to entitle you to a full pension. If you're the ward of the state (i.e. on benefits) you don't get a say?
The qualified franchise worked *really* well in Ulster in the late 50s early 60s didn't it? (Not).
Sit down quietly and think through the consequences. Especially think about the next time there is a global economic downturn...
Random fact: most of the people claiming housing benefit are in jobs.
One third of the electorate didn't vote (unknown is how many did so in protest, and how many just didn't care either way).
One factor: Safe seats.
In the constituency in which I reside the incumbent was returned with seven times the number of votes of the candidate who recieved the second largest number of votes. Around 21 000 of us could have stayed in bed/gone out/done overtime - those votes do not count for anything. Not surprisingly, the turnout was 12% lower than the average turnout for the election as a whole.
UKIP did not have any safe seats. UKIP voters would have turned out in a gale/tornado/torrential rain/floods. The 'safe seat' effect tends to increase the proportion of the vote recorded for underdog parties, although I fully accept that the FPTP system acts as a barrier to such parties winning seats.
In the system used to elect the Scottish Assembly (roughly 3/4 constituency and 1/4 proportional representation based on regional lists) all the votes counted would have fed through to register a preference for regional MSPs, so a reason for turning out. Plus the underdog parties (UKIP/LIBDEM) would have been allocated some of the regional seats, so house slightly more representative. And an even smaller majority for David I think, I'm still puggling the R scripts.
Data presentation task: map constituencies to the nine government regions in England (each with roughly the population of Scotland) and then apply the same regional list system as in the Scottish Parliament. Not enough to change composition of Commons radically, but slightly more representation for underdog parties, and an even smaller majority for Conservatives.
Meeja note: Huge celebration and triumphal hurrahs for Consevatives on securing a majority in the Commons that is smaller than the one John Major had in 1992? Good heavens above.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/09/labour-left-miliband-hating-english
(Nick sort of balances Polly)
An interesting question: how did we get to be socially conservative with a small c &&c. History? Echoes of empire?
Disclosure: I have lived in various parts of the UK but they have tended to be the parts that are still red on the BBC's map. Not deliberate, just the way it happened.
"Jessie made headlines early in its development because it opted for Xfce instead of GNOME as the default desktop. Eventually, though, Debian went back on that decision and you get GNOME 3.14 if you accept all the defaults in the installation process."
That happened in the development phase for Wheezy as well. Now Joey Hess has moved on, I wonder if it will happen in the Stretch cycle. Google for Joeyh's posts to the debian-devel mailing list for the reasons behind XFCE4 as default.
I installed from the live MATE CD. Reasonable selection of software on boot. Install time about 20 mins with no Internet connection(*), added a sources.list file manually, then a walk down to the Selly Sausage cafe in Selly Oak to install all the extras (R, LaTeX &c) on their fast wifi.
(*)I switch the wifi switch off, allow the wlan0 detect to fail, then select 'do not configure network at this time' option then continue. Decline popcon, and decline network mirror prompt. Use the sources.list generator to set up a suitable list for apt-get later.
Pint: no sausage icon
Yup - I winced when I read that word.
However a set of cards like this about, say, protected characteristics or about, say, safeguarding of vulnerable adults and children would lead to discusssion of the issues among people who work with members of the GBP.
Much better than the 'online training' that we get that consists of multiple choice quizzes about pointless facts. It should be possible to produce a 'facilitator's guide' to using the cards with a group of staff so no expensive external trainer needed.
Nice find
Anecdote: A N.Y. music critic was writing a review of a Glass piece in the early days and was surprised when the guy fixing his washing machine came over to correct one of the descriptions. It was the composer.
I read a blog post by the critic a few years ago but google is flooded with links to book reviews at present so I'll have to dig for the source. Might be in Kyle Gann's Minimalism book.
Coat icon: I'm off down to Waterstones now to see if they have a copy in yet
The fashion for thin client devices seems to preclude replaceability.
Just wondering if laptops, as they become niche for those who produce stuff, and as Moore's law looks like it might be rolling over, will become more modular like desktops thus allowing upgrades on a basic screen/keyboard/battery shell? Standard x86 or Atom based logic boards allowing upgrades and swappable batteries and storage.
PS: There is a unified history of electronic computing to be written from the standpoint of the engineering involved in getting rid of heat is there not?
"...to see young children following in my, and I'm sure many others, footsteps and outfoxing the hapless IT depts of schools."
Some of the earlier generation of outfoxers may now be running the show...
http://www.pennmanor.net/techblog/1to1devices/#/5
(Part of what appears to be a small and carefully managed project based in a school with involvement from teaching staff and clever use of peer mentoring).
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