Posts by gerryg 803 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Aug 2009
Did you discount the risk premium of not being made redundant, add in the employers pension contribution, the insurance cost of six months sick pay at 100%, then six months at 50%, six weeks leave? What about the stress of real accountability and delivering customer driven requirements?
...the warmth towards the Linux ecosystem has increased considerably. I have no idea if/when the year of LOTD will arrive but the hostility has declined.
A lot of the reasons for not using Linux are essentially that Microsoft inadvertently or intentionally makes playing nice a bit difficult.
It's got a lot better (though my shiny new laptop has a WiFi dongle because ..) So while someone rants about why Windows and why not Linux just sit quietly and recall that Steve Balmer was on the money when he described Linux as a cancer.
Has everyone forgotten Red Hat's attitude to source code. If you want access to it (and updates, not sure) you need a subscription.
Not only is SuSE European, it doesn't play fast and loose
It there is any age difference between SuSE and Red hat, the first SuSE distro emerged in 1993, I'm not sure but happy to be corrected, I think Red Hat is younger.
The problem was never interoperability and always political. There's a documentary vid knocking about which is painful viewing . FSFE will probably have a link somewhere.
With a change of administration, Microsoft flew in their top sales gurus and made a few promises, local research centre, jobs, etc. Suddenly their Munich centred distro (it had a snappy name Munix?) was heaved out and Windows was back.
Increasingly local administrations are finding that Libre Office is not so awful after all. The German government funded the hardening of some KDE component or other back in the day associated with kmail, kontact etc.
If politicians could only stop accepting the equivalent of Taylor Swift concert tickets and actually focus on the wider needs of the polity... Both CCTA and MoD (GCHQ too IIRC) have long since indicated that Linux based systems are no worse than any other option.
It's all there, we just have to get the CMA (El Reg passim) to do its job on cloud computing, interoperability, open standards (cont p 94)
You can still read the Magna Carta. I'm not sure if it is still true but Acts of Parliament used to be written with similar ink on vellum, specifically because of the problem you parody. Laser discs fell by the wayside not long after the BBC Micro project terminated, so until some geek or other worked out how to access those their longevity was about 1600 years less than the OP.
OpenOffice was at least open source I can't remember if if was free software too. If Oracle hadn't tried to take future releases proprietary there would have been no need for a fork of the project.
So in strict vocabulary terms you are correct but Sun were not the problem.
The part of the story no-one seems to be mentioning is that Sun bought the company (Victor Kiam eat your heart out) because the relicensing deal for Microsoft Office would have been more expensive. Sun initially made Star Office free as in beer and subsequently as in speech.
When something is free as in beer there's not much room for "soft" "marketing". That has always been the dirty little secret of proprietary anything and the millstone attached to Free Software.
No-one seems to get sacked for not choosing the option with the minimum cost function
This plague of proprietary form over function was sort of highlighted by Taylor Swift of all people. When invited to give Apple her music for free she is said to have responded by pointing out she doesn't ask for free iPhones.
Each to their own n'all but the author of the article has previous regarding KDE.
KDE seems to have a relatively happy constituency of users and its got a 30 year pedigree. I was a bit cheesed off with KDE 4 but otherwise I remain happy.
I might be happier with another DE but all that paint that needed to be watched drying prevents me bothering to find out, c f., distro hopping. I started with S.u.S.E 6.0 and I'm now on Tumbleweed. I neither know nor care what I'm missing
But if you really care: https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Deepin/Installation
This is nothing more than open standards redux.
The problem regarding proprietary standards and lock-in is hardly news, Cabinet Office was busy avoiding the problem 15 years ago, not for the first time. Is there any reader who remembers the CCTA writing about all this in about 1995. Cloud is the walled garden problem on steroids. Apparently the Competition and Markets Authority is investigating. That shouldn't take less than 10 years by which time the suppliers will have nimbly skipped on.
And El Reg can report on that
"A long time ago someone at Microsoft demoed Open Office against Microsoft's standard internal expenses spreadsheet. As it opened, the existing data was corrupted"
Of course it did. Why else would someone from Microsoft run the demonstration?
c.f. MS-DOS/WordPerfect
c.f. ISO 29500 "transitional"
If they both work the same 35 hours, say 40 after commute, then there is a large hole in the day requiring childcare and other stuff. So a third salary is required, neither of them are cleaning the bathroom and one of them is working for almost no money.
If they don't work the same 35 hours and do not have childcare they will barely see each other.
So no paradigm shift but nice try.
Others have been saying this for years. See the file format wars of the early 2010s. Cabinet Office produced some half decent guidelines which were mysteriously withdrawn and nothing has happend since. At the time someone said "it would be nice not to be here in 10 years time" and now the CMA has opened an inquiry into the problems of lock-in with cloud.
It's always been about interoperability and for some reason (I think we can guess) government of any persuasion has always listened to those with a vested interest in avoiding it.
May I just put a word in for the Brother HL 1110? B&W laser printer for about £80 with good enough graphics for QR etc. Mine is about 8 years old. It has to think a bit before it prints the first page but with crisp type. A new no chip toner cartridge costs about £20. No dried ink no half empty problems and has never let me down.
On the rare occasions I need a colour photo I get one in the high street for a couple of quid
There are alternatives to Redhat.
This reminds of Bruce Perkins circa 1998, no #chickenlittle but *if* a solution is needed than parasites such as me need to work out whether they are part of the problem or part of the solution.
Too many of the "community" spend hours screaming by forum but perhaps rather than demanding they could find other ways of contributing.
I fund some projects that are of particular importance to me, nothing that would cause them to gasp, but a few quid every now and again.
Linux, the kernel, is too important to too many people, that is safe. Other projects needs to be cared about more.
LibreOffice complains fairly regularly that too many corporate users don't support the project. But according to Wikipedia only a few percent of all users see enough value to support it.
I look at the list of corporate sponsors for openSUSE, that looks fairly healthy but for reasons that escape me, it continues to be treated as the runt while others spend their time respinning Debian derivatives, freedom of choice n'all but if they think there is a problem possibly respins are not the answer.
> My choice is: can I please not have so many choices?
Then don't look. If whatever you are happy with is what you are happy with, then lucky you.
It's not always necessary to have an opinion
For example I have no idea how many distros there are - I don't look and I don't care - 25 years ago I picked what is now Tumbleweed.
> but it's not OK to say "you should like this because it's so customisable" when it's not customisation that I want.
Who was saying that?
It doesn't really matter if "this vulture" doesn't get on with the KDE philosophy. This is all about the power of choice.
Back in the day Timothy Pearson thought KDE 3 was where it was at (and given the travails with KDE 4 it was possible to see his point).
I recall he had certain complaints about the changes to the underlying infrastructure too.
So is plugging away at TDE and here we are. Yours for the using. Or not. That's the point.
I'd be curious to know how long a company could tick along without a CEO. Are the divisions unable to walk talk or chew gum without the CEO telling them to breathe in and breathe out?
What size of decision reaches the CEO.and how many?
Similarly whether breaking up large company into smaller units would give better or worse shareholder value.
And why $50 million and not $100 million or $25 million.
Is he going to leave?
On the specific issue of power efficiency, with a decent graphics card, say 300W for a desktop, 12 hours day.
3.6kWh about 70p/day
How efficient would the new PC have to be to justify the expenditure?
What about all the energy used to make the existing PC?
Or the cost of disposal?
In the private sector eventually the internal transaction costs exceed the external transaction costs, limiting the size of the organisation, (Ronald Coase). That's one reason why there's more than one supermarket.
Enterprise software is a sales pitch designed to convince large organisations they can lower internal transaction costs. In the private sector a firm has to cope with the decision or die. In the public sector they just keep spending and put it on the tax bill.
Back in the day SUSE kernels used to have specific patches applied.
But AFAIK SUSE just use the stable versions. (I think there was some sort of announcement about 15 years ago) So really it's the usual suspect.
Randomly I've just watched a doc about Gary Kildall and as a result wonder if the usual suspects had played nicer if there would ever have been a demand for Linux.
They are just selling what they have always sold. The real problem is the over promoted tossers trapped in the headlights vaguely recalling that "no-one ever got sacked for buying IBM" and making a false read across.
There is no doubt that a Linux based is less convenient but as Obama said about something else, that's the point.
The RIAA playback curve has got nothing to do with "distortion intrinsic in the mechanical pickup" but is an attempt to flatten the RIAA encoding curve without which the bass would require more room (wider grooves) so reducing playback time.
While I broadly agree with your view of CDs versus mechanical recoding and rejoice at the ability to listen to Electric Ladyland in its entirety without a stacking mechanism and the LPs being sides 1-4 and 2-3, I do occasionally muse whether the loss of ritual and artifact associated with a 12" disc has contributed to the demise in the perceived value of "the album".
https://www.suse.com/download/sles/
Free support for 60 days
https://www.suse.com/source-code/
Typically, the source code is distributed along with the binaries. You can also send us a written request to provide the source code for a SUSE product by addressing your written request to:
SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH
c/o IP & Privacy Counsel
Maxfeldstrasse 5 , 90409
Nuremberg, Germany
That is a restatement of the problem not a solution.
Last time I checked the Internet is pretty big and no-one needs a specific piece of equipment.
Once people promoted beyond their level of competence started choosing walled gardens for solutions it's only a matter of time before the wall become a problem.
Given that the solution was never going to focus on interoperability and open standards it's just further evidence that the national centre for cyber security advises the use of chocolate teapots.
If the only way central government can play buzzword bingo with words such as integration, efficiency, cross-departmental collaboration, synergy is by using software from the same organisation (and it really doesn't matter which one) then someone somewhere is missing the point.
Why does the bingo card never include: lock-in, resilience, independence, innovation (let alone reliability or security)?
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