Posts by keithpeter

Re: Xilo is hard to beat

The Talk and Surf product capped at 10Gb/month traffic looks ok to me as it includes line rental.

Now to investigate the *process of switching* (groan) both Internt (EE) and phone line (BT). Sigh...

Re: Just wondering...

Interesting reply as always Trevor. Just a couple of thoughts...

"The sales guys also spend a lot of time training the channel partners so that they know enough about the product to answer questions/sell the boxes as well as to ensure channel partners are up on the technical side of things enough to provide tier 1 and tier 2 support. (With tier 3 typically going back to the startup's engineers.)"

Manuals? Wiki? Videos? FAQ cheat sheets? Basically why the need for actual presence?

"...at the executive layer they have to work closely with all the other tentacles of the company to ensure that A) they know what's changing and B) they manage to push those changes/training down to their army of salespeople and channel partners..."

Again issue tracker or wiki?

Am I being naive(*) or could not some of the organisational structures developed by the libre/open source community get used here to reduce the need for actual face time and allow a human scale sales committment?

(*) Quite possible, I work as a teacher.

Re: Must say it..

"For consumers not wearing sandals, choice of Windows 10 for £0 or some ragtag unsupported shareware OS for £0 is indeed a 'no brainer'"

Quite so.

However GNU/Linux is available in various distributions, some of which have paid support pricing models (warmtoned headgear), and some of which have 3 to 10 year free support and a fairly solid reputation (smallest US currency denomination plus OS, and Deborah and Ian, and those chaps in London who hold hands just down from the Eye).

Theo De Raat does not strike me as the sandal wearing kind of chap come to think of it.

Re: cool phone number

0121-777-7777 (seven 7s) is a radio car company in Birmingham of which I am a semi-regular customer. Let's hear it for Asif and his beemer.

PS: paying for a landline just for broadband. Landline is a long way from exchange, adsl low speed at present. I want to dump the copper.

What is my best option for cheap (non-streaming) bandwidth without a landline?

The tramp for obvious reasons.

Re: "The Imitation Game"

"The "U-571" of Turing Biopics (What a complete load of tosh, dramatacised up for Hollywood)."

Not seen it so can't comment, but the publicity drive here in UK does mean my students have at least heard of Turing. Silly code games in maths lessons - went down very well, a bit of safety stuff from CEOPS made them think about https and the little padlock...

Re: Microsoft Hates Stable Software Like Windows 7

"The longest Linux support I know of is 5 years for the Ubantu LTS editions"

RHEL and clones (CentOS, Springdale Linux, Scientific Linux (Fermilab)) do 10 years.

https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/

Re: The original Bedazzled

Yup, I was actually reading Dr Faustas (the Marlowe) play when I first saw a (repeat) of Bedazzled. Very close. The postbox adulation scene had me in stitches...

Re: Burden

"Some of these requests are simple to serve. We have the reports, it's a straightforward public interest case, no problem. Others require a tortured process of pulling together separate data, various bits of separate reports and it's all a bit trivial in terms of the value of the information released."

Can you not publish a catalogue of available reports? Metadata so people can craft queries that you can provide easily?

Hungry journalists can always do the cross referencing themselves...

Re: jong un's a wrong 'un

"but china will always look after them..."

Up to a point. Will be interesting to see at what point the puppet masters decide it is time for a change of puppets...

Sudden Changes

"Rubbish. The teacher had an exemplary attendance record over nearly 30 years employment."

I'm suspecting (if the cause of the stress is actually work related and not something outside of work) that there has been a change of management recently and faces don't fit.

Teaching for 30 years implies a degree of resilience and the inspection regimes (both OFSTED and management 'quality assurance') are fairly stiff with the radically incompetent /just can't cope people generally managed out smoothly.

Not requesting any more information, just clarifying for the commentards.

Re: 100m

"...they didn't ask for keyboards which turn out to be £200 a pop from their exclusive supplier."

Does that happen in the commercial sector as well?

If so, it might explain why the young man in the shoe shop who sold me some boots today typed the trivial transaction on a lovely mechanical switch keyboard on his PC based POS terminal. Well solid clack. Sounded like Cherry blue. I reckon the keyboard was worth more than the pokey little monitor he had.

Should we really encourage 17 year olds to drop out of College?

Is this really a good message to be sending to the youth?

Disclaimer: I teach in a College.

Springseed - Re: Nice article

I rather like the UI of Springseed 2.0. Fits the 'pillar box' screens on laptops well.

But can't find how it stores notes (not in ~/.config/Springseed any more)

Contacting dev seems hard, issues on Git are ageing nicely...

I'll stick with cherrytree as mentioned for now,

Re: Hurried reporting?

You do realize that the people who resigned did so because they were pro-systemd and their decision to quit had to do with the amount of bullcrap emails and massive bombardment and continuous sabotaging from the people against systemd.

Arguably. I was pointing out that the original article had not explained any of the background.

"People who haven't written a single line of code but can not stop trolling the entire internet day and night about how bad systemd is."

Perhaps we should be grateful that some(*) of the people concerned are not writing code. Can you imagine what it would look like if they did attempt to?

It just might be that a good solid non-systemd fork (or 'spoon' in the sense of Refracta) would make things easier for the main distribution. Think about it. No legacy rc.conf stuff, no need to support several init systems, cleaner dependency chains &c.

(*) I'm obviously excepting kernel developers and Debian packagers and such from this statement

Re: Net access as a Utility?

"...in the absence of free net access, how does a person suffering from extreme poverty, get access to them?"

People in that position need various forms of support: health; sorting out financially; accessing what benefits they may be entitled to; and sorting out with some kind of plan for the future if there is a viable one; help filling in forms due to literacy issues; and possibly just a square meal.

Sounds like a day centre/drop in with multiple services and a subsidised cafe as a safety net to me. You could run those as social enterprises. Some paid staff, some volunteers, some basic skills teaching from local colleges. Might save money in long term (ElReg's pet economist might not agree about that).

Alternatively, how about 50kbytes/sec free for all, faster when you pick a supplier and pay a contract? Then make sure Govt sites and basic education material is low bandwidth??

Re: They're not alone

@Vector

Still crap, but it gets the basics done 'til I can replace my dead laptop.

Refurbished thinkpad of ebay. Core Duo less than 100 notes runs any Linux and a reasonable stab at Windows 7 (perhaps just over the ton for more RAM in that case).

"There are some really good ways to make these things non intrusive."

Just wondering: National Grid. Reaches just about everywhere. Large metal structures striding over fields. Could Grid not be used to relay mobile to anywhere within a fraction of a mile of the transmission line, or if leaky cable not feasible on that scale, to within fraction of a mile of the pylons?

Am I being thick?

Re: People die in railroad switching yards all the time.

http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/eventlisting.php?showSearch=true&view=list

'sometimes' rather than 'all the time' but a railway interchange in the UK is pretty safe compared to (say) a motorway.

Re: Herding cats with long tails

"But of those, there are probably 50 to 100 dedicated committees, and a long tail of thousands who only contribute the odd patch. Some other metric is needed."

Rank contributing accounts in descending order of commit frequency then stop counting when you reach 50% of total commits? The number you get is some kind of indicator of the inner circle. Could use 75% if you just want to cut out the long tail. Might be fun to have the company allegiance if any of the most active committing accounts.