Posts by druck 1893 posts • joined 6 Jun 2007
Upgraded today, and no issues with the upgrade itself.
Note that in Mate 20 (and Ubuntu 20) Python 2 is no longer installed by default. All my scripts were already Python 2 & 3 compatible, but the shebang's were still set to usr/bin/env python', so they either need to be changed to python3 or install python-is-python3
I've never found upgrading painful. I did come late to the party only starting with Mint 13 (the first with Mate as default), and have been upgrading in place ever since without problems. I'm sure as soon as the option appears to go from 19.3 to 20, that will be smooth too.
My Raspberry Pi 4 running a Raspbian Buster image that started off as Wheezy on a 256MB Pi B, and has been run on every variant since and upgraded in place for each release along the way.
I do make sure I have backups before I start though!
Be aware that the transformers in dual wall sockets tend to be very inefficient, some even operating when nothing is plugged in. This can mean a lot of heat needs to be dissipated, and how successful that is will depend on the type of wall it is fitted in. A thermal camera shows they only thing worse is an old inductive dimmer switch, and even they are only active when the light is on.
There are much better ways of recovering a deleted open file, than crashing the system and hoping fsck recovers it. I did it the other day on Linux when I deleted an open log file, it wasn't very important but I got it back anyway. I believe even on Solaris the file handle will be under /proc/<pid>/<fd>, and a quick google shows the fsdb command will help in this situation.
My first digit camera was an Olympus 1.3Mpix with a slide out lens cover, which took so long to start up you'd miss the photo, but an improvement on the previous bulky ones containing a floppy disk! My last Olympus was a SP-550UZ, very compact 18x stabilised zoom which was great for taking pictures when flying.
My favourite though was the C-2100UZ which had one of the last CCD sensors before everyone went CMOS, it was only 2Mpix and ate batteries in minutes, but was more sensitive than anything I've had since, able to use fast shutter speeds even at the maximum 10x zoom in low light. I remember buying a 64MB Smartmedia card for it in Changi airport in a 2 hour stop off in Singapore on the way to my first trip to Australia. It cost a huge amount, although cheaper than 32MB in the UK. It increased my budget to an average of 6 photos per day for the month long holiday!
Sadly they didn't have anything I liked last time, so I've now got a Fujifilm X-S1, a huge beast of a 26x zoom bridge camera, but the advantage of lots of external buttons to go straight to a feature, rather than spending ages navigating menus. It enables you to get much more out of the camera.
The best example of 'Envelop' being the Microsoft Research centre in Cambridge. It's sole purpose being to suck in promising Cambridge graduates and let them play with toys, rather than going on to setting up their own companies producing superior products, which lead to Acorn and many others.
That's 13 people out of the workforce for up to two weeks (depending on how quickly they can get tested), from contact with just one person who tested positive. It will result in effectively a permanent lock down of everyone using the app, and at some point the money to pay to them keep self isolating over and over again, will run out.
I think you mean there is no other application that comes close to a spreadsheet in terms of usability, versatility and usefulness.
Excel is one example of a spreadsheet, with quite a few good features, but also a whole load of limitations and bugs, which my fellow commetards have only been too eager to point out.
@Bob. Locating your launch site near the equator has nothing to with the extra speed gained from the rotation of the earth, a few hundred mph difference from that is insignificant when you need 17,000mph to reach orbit.
The latitude of the launch site determines which orbits you can reach easily, i.e the latitude of the launch site is the minimum inclination of the initial orbit. To reduce the inclination to get to an equatorial orbit (for geostationary satellites) requires a lot more fuel for the transfer stage, the further north (or south) of the equator you launch from. That reduces the amount of useful payload the rocket can deliver.
Most of the Atoms were capable of running a 64 bit OS, but Microsoft restricted them to 32 bit Windows 7 starter. If you tried installing Windows 10 on them, they would default to 32 bit, but it was possible to do a fresh install of 64 bit Windows 10, it was hopelessly slow with only 2GB of RAM though.
My old N455 netbook has both 32 bit and 64 bit Linux Mint on it. The 64 bit variant is noticeably faster until you open a few tabs in the browser and it runs out of memory, the 32 bit one struggles on a little longer due to a few 100MB less memory usage.
You can't lay contract tracing at Johnson's door, almost every other county is doing it, and most of them they started before us.
You are right about all the false positives, and that's why the decentralised model won't work. The false positive alerts will automatically propage from phone to phone, and countries using it will be paralysed by a large amount, possibly the majority, of their population being told to self isolate, again and again and again. They'll never escape lock down.
The centralised model won't have any less false positives, but has the advantage but there is then control over how fast and how far the positive alerts can spread, so the country won't be crippled. Yes this will also limit the propagation of true positives too, but then the entire point of this isn't to find every case of the virus, its enable lock down to be ended and make people feel safe enough to go back to work.
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