Posts by keithpeter

Re: Error bars

So the self-selecting sample and the randomly selected sample were disjoint?

i.e. noone returned two questionnaires? One randomly assigned and one self-selected?

Best of luck with it all.

Re: SLAs make work for idle hands...

The whole target thing just does not work for things like health care, education and policing/emergency services.

Goodhart's law and all.

Plus the fact that you need to have slack in systems (perhaps education not so much because you usually know who is coming into the institution well in advance) to deal with transients and politicians always see this as 'waste'.

Going out to walk in the woods to ease my blood pressure (35+ years of this crap).

Re: Please see the British education system"

@Terry 6 and anyone else who has an interest

"Gove told Sky News the so-called “limiting judgment,” which means that a failure in one area means failure everywhere else, should be examined."

Politico newsletter quote above is actually quite hopeful. Gove and Cummings are responsible for the current omnishambles in education. Perhaps this is the dawning of insight?

For those 'not in the system' basically it is an INC OR at present on about 15 strands. If your school/college/nursery gets a 'unsatisfactory' on any one of them then the overall grade is 'unsatisfactory'. Irrespective of the grades on the other 14 which could have been outstanding. Dig a little deeper, and you find that an 'unsatisfactory' grade can come down to one student saying the wrong thing in one group interview once.

Now, I'd like to appologise to the vast majority of commenters how came into this thread for some light hearted fun and to share war stories.

Re: Worth reading just for

"a Bitcoin wallet for the terminally gullible"

Command line wallet? Liking it

Re: When it comes to Linux, I can't be arsed.

"I am finding it interesting how changes in Linux [...] is taken with far less grief than any changes made to Windows."

A couple of possible reasons

People who decide install Linux tend to be more confident with this IT malarkey. My understanding is that most Windows users basically use what the computer came with

Linux distributions provide a much wider range of choice. Don't like Gnome Shell? Use xfce instead. Prefer old-school init and admin? Slackware is still going strong. You get the drift.

Back on topic: had a play with the rawhide live iso last evening on my test bed Thinkpad L440

Anyone using smbus based trackpad who notices a frozen pointer after waking up from sleep with recent Fedora versions (and Debian - it is kernel related), have a look at...

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/touchpad-dont-work-after-suspended/73733/22

and

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1097080/ubuntu-18-04-mouse-on-lenovo-thinkpad-x240-not-working-after-suspend-hibernate

Re: This brought a few laughs on Friday afternoon

@Voice

"My grandma does not want to hear or read about workarounds."

The grandmas round here take their grandson/daughter to the shop and get the man to set up a suitable usually second hand/recycled computer or tablet so they can read the screen OK and it has the language(s) they need.

Then if anything needs attention later, they take it back to the shop (or the man comes round).

Yes, we still have IT shops - usually doing phones, tablets and printers as well. We also still have cybercafes.

(This isn't the kind of area where people drop £2.5K on a computer but we do have a good range of services locally).

Re: Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom: Mao Tse Tung...................NOT!!!

@ac

The article was about mainline kernels and presumably aimed at the small cohort of people who have very recent hardware and who therefore need to take advantage of recent updates from within the Ubuntu ecosystem.

Thanks.

Re: Lesson Learned?

@Elongated

I take your point but remember which company the OA was writing about.

Icon: I had to actually use their products every day for decades.

Re: Low bar

I suspect the drive here is to reuse these refurbished modules that the Framework laptop is resulting in and generate a bit of publicity.

I personally would quite like to see one of these working with its original operating system and typical software (Windows 3.11 and Lotus mail/organiser according to the Wikipedia page). The local transport museum has a range of motorbikes from early days through to the end of the BSA era. Quite interesting to compare and contrast design approaches and practical solutions as they changed in time. The same with computers might be fun.

Icon: self explanatory

Re: Toolbar or Ribbon

@Primus:

"you had to remember all the codes and put them in manually"

The trick was/is to develop some style sheets for documents and just reuse them. Guaranteed consistency. Use a folding text editor and you can drag drop whole chapters &c.

LyX and Texmacs are available as well for a more visual point and click approach. Might help with the tag remembering. Texmacs isn't [La|TeX] native, but it exports reasonably well.

@All

OnlyOffice

You have to dig around the site to find the OnlyOffice Desktop version, they characterise it as an App. OnlyOffice docs appears to be cloudy. The Linux (64bit) rpm converts to a tgz fine on Slackware and is quite snappy on an ancient T60 core duo with iffy graphics, no name SSD and 3Gb ram. They do want you to go cloudy though. Big buttons on the home screen and all.

I have not found the LaTeX thingy yet. Native formula editor is sort of graphical and fiddly. Not bad overall. Worth playing with. Less annoying than Caligra which is not for me a demanding achievement.

Headings view brings up a right pane with an outline of your doc headings. You can promote/demote a given heading but you don't appear to be able to drag/drop or reorder headings which is a great shame.

Edit: you can export a writer document to LibreOffice .odt format. If using the native maths formula format the formula is editable in Open/LibreOffice which is very nice,

Icon: Troff for the win

Re: "Japan’s ability to protect its consumers from huge losses"

Yes, it will be interesting to see how it goes. According to the OA, the Japanese company was required to keep customer funds separate and has been posting updates on the total holdings. The issue appears to have been access to detailed transaction history.

If the result looks OK perhaps we should copy/paste the regulations?

Icon: not an investor

Re: Users is the correct word!

"How about this: you go and build a company providing free software and charge nothing for it. See how it goes."

OK Voice, I think my first move would be to find an operating system that was maintained by a charitable foundation that also made the source code, build scripts and bug database freely available. Along with the system admin tools and the installer. And which provided three releases: unstable, testing and stable.

Seriously: Ubuntu was a breath of fresh air back in the Warty days but not so much now. I hope Canonical gets a huge admin agreement from some company with colossal data centres.

74¢ Re: Burger slinger?

According to the OA a slider costs 74¢ so I'm getting the picture...

Re: Rate your skill level

Descriptors or an example for each level might have helped.

These are tricky to draft and you will need a different set of descriptors for each role but the results will be much more useful for planning training.

Icon: I used to write such things

One of my employers used to run on Excel and all.

Now they run on Office365 for us minions and a variety of SAAS systems for keeping track of students and for managing teaching resources.

When working remotely I do everything in a Web browser. As do my Windows using colleagues.

It will be interesting to see what happens in (say) 5 or 10 years.

Re: Hmm

My grandad looked after a static steam engine that powered a large flour mill back in the early 60s before he retired. I have actually seen blokes shovel coal into a huge furnace to get the steam up (albeit at a young age).

Some change in a bit more than half a century. Humans could be really dangerous if they got organised.

Icon: obvious

Re: Serious Hat Tip for this chap

@RWAP

I thought that section on the printer emulator was most interesting. Using essentially forgotten knowledge to enable people to continue to use working industrial equipment. That has real impact on industrial employers.

Well done Sir.

Re: Microsoft Defender ASR snafu.

well sed

Re: "...can now enjoy active contempt."

Round about 52 degrees north

(Greetings from the Midlands)

Icon: no coffee pot available here

Re: Wouldn't hold out too much hope...

@Martin and all

Remember P&O were employing ship's crew. They were able to pay workers from outwith the UK less than UK minimum wage, hence the attraction of a hire and fire process. Yes, they got away with it as a result of a lack of remedy.

Lightbulb moment: perhaps Mr Musk needs to sign a treaty with Prince Michael of Sealand? Base all the companies in the Principality. Could probably fit a data centre in the lower floors. No shortage of cooling water. I'm sure Prince Michael would welcome some extra bandwidth. Ideal for satellite links.

https://sealandgov.org/

Re: Quaker Oats is keeping "Quaker"?

I was a leveller but after recent events, I am leaning towards being a digger.

Just thinking aloud here but in the case of the need for a rename, how about

Seagull Software Foundation. Minor modification to the logo. Many will come up with rationales...

Re: Yeah, Baby

I mean nano is absolutely fine for what config files need to be changed at the terminal level. Especially as most configuration for the user is done graphically in the desktop.

PS; ed has its uses