* Posts by keithpeter

2052 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jul 2007

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

keithpeter Silver badge

Re: Dicks are Dasdardly

@Boolian

Ever thought of working as what we call a 'clerk of works' aka CoW in the UK?

https://www.sillencehurn.co.uk/70/852/understanding-the-role-of-a-clerk-of-works-in-construction

Back a few decades ago they were on a percentage of the contract price.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Up the mountain to survey the Alpine vista, it s-nailed on

Fresh version of Windows user-friendly Zorin OS arrives to tempt the Linux-wary

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Coincidence...

@UrethralAnts

Yes, certainly, if I want my door re-hung I don't phone a plumber, so I take your point. 'IT' isn't one thing, it is a huge range of skillsets and occupations that arise in response to the needs of the market.

I suspect that the post by Liam was within the framework of desktop operating systems and the sort of questions that arise from ordinary people performing (or attempting to perform) mundane tasks on those.

Within that very small circle on the Venn diagram, Windows is hugely the most common system and therefore what people are used to. So they can be somewhat discombobulated when meeting a different system.

Fedora 41's GNOME to go Wayland-only, says goodbye to X.org

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

"Very few distros _don't_ include XWayland because there are still fairly few Wayland-native apps, and if you don't have it, you have a bunch of terminal emulators and an extremely limited app selection."

My cynical old self thinks you'll still be writing that sentence in a review of Fedora 82 in a couple of decades...

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Hardware minimum spec?

Just wondering if Fedora Project will update their min specs info to reflect machine generation.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/release-notes/welcome/Hardware_Overview/#hardware_overview-specs

Could get complex - is there a general 'profile' for a Wayland only AMD64 processor machine?

Linux for older phones postmarketOS changes its init system

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Plasma 5.23 runs fine on Slackware 15 along with a good selection of the KDE applications. For that to happen there is elogind [1] and eudev [2]. Slackware generally gives you the stock experience that the upstream projects chuck over the wall. Very little in the way of customisation. Which is a Good Thing for general purpose desktop use on a laptop in my opinion. And an even better thing is that the underlying system works in a very familiar way so I can use my learnings over the years with only minor evolution.

The OA mentions the postmarketOS desire to 'work with' KDE and Gnome which to me implies that the postmarketOS developers want some modifications or extra features added to these huge projects to make the phone interface work better. Not simply compiling what upstream chuck over the wall. Hence the need to 'smooth the path' a little perhaps?

[1] http://slackware.uk/slackware/slackware64-15.0/slackware64/a/elogind-246.10-x86_64-1.txt

[2] http://slackware.uk/slackware/slackware64-15.0/slackware64/a/eudev-3.2.11-x86_64-1.txt

Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: What is going on?

Not either/or.

I'm sure that Boeing have supplied lorry loads of documentation including the names of employees who 'know about doors'(*).

I'm sure the investigators have not (yet?) had the specific information they asked for (which employees did the various stages of the job in question)

Icon: past audits remembered. (vastly less in the way of bad consequences)

(*) in a general way

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Repeat after me:

Your suspicion is correct, that employer does not provide RDP access.

Other employer actually mandated RDP and provided no other way of accessing services from outside the buildings using a personal laptop. I'm not sure how that would have played out over COVID period, running a zoom or teams client within an RDP session. I had stopped working for them the year before.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Linux Mint

Would that be 1) boot off USB stick running a live iso 2) chroot into mint install 3) run apt-get autoremove?

Or am I barking up the wrong tree totally. I agree too much for ordinary computer as a thing to be used people.

keithpeter Silver badge

Re: Repeat after me:

"...can suggest what components Linux desktop lacks for use in a corporate setting"

One of my employers runs (almost*) everything through MS 365/Sharepoint with bolt on subscriptions from other providers (course materials mainly). I just log in using Chromium on a Linux laptop and all fine (well as fine as Teams ever is but no worse than Windows users).

(*) A recent change in the finance/HR systems means that there is ONE function that I can only reach from a computer that is inside the employer's network (and therefore runs Windows 11 for Education). Fortunately I don't need to access it often. Just pop into an actual office and done.

Tiny Core Linux 15 stuffs modern computing in a nutshell

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

The Manual

They put a lot of work into that manual. Nice to see.

See icon.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Thats ok then

The John Stonehouse / Clive Muldoon strategy did not work so well back in the day...

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Ccea blocks me, why?

Oh, they don't like US either (just checked using my sdf.org shell account and links)!

I have absolutely no idea why they do that. Try

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-access-your-personal-learning-record

The actual UK government Web page for students about the personal learning record that uses the ULN as the key.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Just in case...

...anyone recognises a possible repeat of this anywhere in the UK's labyrinthine public sector IT estate

https://ccea.org.uk/regulation/guidance/unique-learner-number

City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

"They should have defended the equal pay claim robustly [...]"

The council did. All the way to the high court. They lost.

The resulting precedent is working its way through the system now, and it is estimated that about one third of councils in UK may end up in financial distress as a result.

(One issue that has been raised locally is why there was not a fall-back plan for the possibility of losing the various legal challenges.)

Best of luck.

keithpeter Silver badge
Joke

Just a reminder that the next Birmingham City Council elections are in 2026.

Plenty of time to put together fully costed plans over, say, a 20 year time scale for a city of 1 million people during a period of considerable technological and social change. Look forward to reading your manifesto.

A gentle reminder to all who may not live in the region that HS2 kind of happened as a result of central government policy. The city and (WM Combined Authority tbf) just had to deal with it. HS2 being, of course, a model of project management with clear timelines and the consistent delivery of a well articulated plan (see icon).

Best of luck.

VMware's end-user compute unit reportedly headed to private equity firm KKR

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: $3.8 billion purchase price on $1 billion revenue?

Or extra risk being priced in?

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Re: It's friday - time for beer.

"My manager has sent me hot chocolate on occasion."

My inner paranoid android thinks: 'delivery tracking provides unobtrusive way of checking that you are in your house'.

Icon: no read receipts on this forum.

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, openSUSE to get better installation

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

"We want good advice on routes out"

I'd suggest making a list of the applications your people use (Web browser plus.... office? Graphics? Music players? Video editors? Sound production &c) and researching available alternatives in Linux land. If someone has a strong need for a proprietary application e.g. knitting pattern generator or something really specialised they may struggle to find an alternative.

I'd also suggest trying a live ISO by booting from a usb stick without altering the hard drive. Mint Linux, Mageia Linux et al, there are loads of different ones. Try using the live session for a day or several and see what you think.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Possibly this from OA?

" Linux specialist Phoronix reports that the latest Noble daily builds now supports GNOME's accessibility tools within the installer."

PS Anyone heard from shadowsystems who used to post here?

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

keithpeter Silver badge

Re: Anyone live in Brum ?

I used the Birmingham City Web site recently to report a missed bin collection and separately to check an aspect of my council tax registration. Both transactions went fine, auto-generated email confirmations, and the bins got taken.

The pages look like the standard gov.uk templates. They work well, and work on low spec devices, so perhaps not trendy design. Whatever is behind the Web pages seems to work ok. Not really an ERM function so won't be the actual Oracle at issue.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Quite a lot of LED street lights have been installed around inner ring and in some residential areas. But still many of the older ones that are not sodium are still around (the orange/yellow sodium ones have mostly gone).

The LED street lights seem to have an array of actual high power LEDs so I imagine you could disconnect a third of them in each array?

(I suspect the sound bite was more along the lines of 'we are scouring the teacups for savings' than an actual policy)

keithpeter Silver badge
Childcatcher

Re: Why?

@ Tron

"Services are being withdrawn from people thanks to this farce."

Actually it is the other farce that is mainly responsible for the cuts to services and the rise in council tax, and the enforced fire sale of assets. Not that this farce is funny mind you.

Birmingham is not the only local authority that is grappling with the pay equality legacy. Lots of questions about that.

Icon: our future

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Re: Look for trends

"The board think their will has been imposed and aren't being corrected, the staff largely continue to WFO..."

Might be worth quietly checking local employment laws for 'custom and practice' regulations, and unobtrusively logging working arrangements.

Just in case.

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

"...In my experience WFH makes for happier people and has created a sort of organic flex in the organization that wasn't there before..."

Stuff like that is 1) really important and 2) very hard to quantify.

Perhaps we need generally to look beyond the spreadsheets?

Upstart retrofits an Nvidia GH200 server into a €47,500 workstation

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

The noise? I gather that server fans go fast all the time and make a lot of noise whereas my reading of the article suggests that in the workstation design here the fans slow down or speed up as needed (I could have misunderstood).

This thing is definitely in the 'hand made mechanical wristwatch with complications and a gold case' category though I suspect as Lee D posted up the thread.

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

..."that's a pretty edge case and not really representative of most people out there"...

It occurred to me the other day that the phrase above could actually apply to anyone choosing to use a laptop/PC as their main computing device.

Most people I work with tend to use their phones for most things now. An actual PC sitting on a desk with an external monitor on top of the case is seen as a tool provided by their employer and mainly used to access the MS 365 account via a Web browser.

Interesting times.

Damn Small Linux returns after a 12-year gap

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Hardy Heron...

The desktop installation CD was a live ISO (although not hybrid I think). I recollect that the 5.0X Ubuntus had a live CD and an installer CD that were separate.

Ubuntu 6.06 and 8.04 both came with a Desktop, browser, photo viewer, GIMP, music player (no mp3 codecs then cos patents in US). GParted and some other tools. In Hardy network-manager was sufficiently functional to automatically configure the wifi for supported cards.

Good luck to this new-old DSL variant.

Infosys enjoyed a boom in UK government invoices in 2023

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Re: Fishy Rishi ROI

I'm hearing that sung by Rachel Unthank accompanied by a concertina and washboard.

As my Dad used to tell the trawler skipper once he had sorted their Decca, radar and VHF (and after I had cleaned the seagull crap off the 500kHz long wire insulators) 'It'll be alright when you get to sea Captain'.

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Re: Harks back to

@BorisTC

Hope he is capable of learning from experience and so gets the message for next time.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: You were warned to shut things down!

Excellent.

Did the computers restart OK?

DEF CON is canceled! No, really this time – but the show will go on

keithpeter Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Ugh, Vegas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persi_Diaconis

Yeah, mathematics people, no fun.

On topic-ish: I wonder what they'll come up with for the video wall?

KDE 6 misses boat to make it into Kubuntu 24.04

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Enough to make it worth packaging the KDE desktop in the opinion of the maintainer of the OpenBSD port/package.

Return to Office mandates boost company profits? Nope

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Measures

I'm going to have to read this paper.

It isn't clear to me a priori that using profits or share price as the output indicator (before change compared with after change) is OK. Lets face it we are in a worsening business environment for many sectors so there could be other time based factors coming in. Can it be possible to isolate the change in outputs specifically due to location of employees?

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

keithpeter Silver badge
Childcatcher

Re: Not knowing what words mean

"...accuracy vs precision"

I used to teach that lesson to workshop based vocational students and lab technicians early in the term. Along with Precision's little friend Resolution. And the Error cousins Systematic and Random.

I had a small selection of 'modified' verniers and micrometers. And a slightly distressed top-pan balance. Early in the term because reading scales exposes any perceptual/eyesight/dyslexia issues fairly promptly. And they used the ideas in later practical work.

Went well that one. A lot of concepts in 3 hours.

The Land Before Linux: Let's talk about the Unix desktops

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Re: Meet the New War....same as the Old War

"Well, you have to right click your App Image program icon in order to select "RUN" in order to lauch the program."

@Jumbotron64

I just downloaded the Inkscape 1.3 appimage. One time only I had to right-click, select Properties and the Permissions tab, and tick the little box that said 'Allow this file to run as a program'. Then I can double-click the icon(*) and start Inkscape forever after.

Strikes me that some kind of user intervention should be needed before running a random downloaded file, but I think perhaps a popup 'set permission' box might be a good idea like on Winders.

* I prefer to make a simple inkscape.desktop file and stick it in ~/.local/share/applications/ myself so that the application appears in the menu and I can add a launcher - but that is probably too much 'twiddly twiddly' by your definition.

Top Linux distros drop fresh beats

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Older hardware.

There was discussion on the Slackware forum about building the older CIP versions of Linux 4.4.x some years ago. The context was in adapting Patrick Volkerding's build scripts though. The final outcome was a build script. The discussion was a bit noisy.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/civil-infrastructure-platform-kernel-slackbuild-4175723704/page3.html#post6423285

I got the impression that the CIP kernels are buildable by mortals but may have configs that are unusual and may need work for normal desktop type applications.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: First time I have heard of the CUA for decades

"Now I open Firefox or Thunderbird. Where is that familiar menu bar? "

Press ALT.

If you want to keep the menu bar displayed then right click over it and tick the box.

But I take your main point. Chrome / Chromium is a good example of the absence of a menu bar.

Burnout epidemic proves there's too much Rust on the gears of open source

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: "Burnout"

@elsergiovolador

dominated: this word choice implies something about the decision making process in projects that requires some evidence I think.

A more general point: In the last half century or so I've noticed a huge change in access to information about what we might describe as IT. It was quite hard to get information in (say) the mid-80s unless you were associated with a university department or you were working for a large organisation, a company or the military or the communications utilities.

Now any kid with a hand-me-down laptop can run powerful software similar to the systems used by the largest corporations and can access full information about the software, often several layers of information even down to the source code.

Seems likely to increase equality in some sense by removing barriers.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: "Burnout"

A non-rhetorical question: aren't most large open source projects connected with a charity of some kind?

I'm thinking of Debian and SPI.

Icon: me and money are like oil and water.

IBM Consulting is done playing around, orders immediate return to office

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Re: In a previous life

"[...] and I can make sure you are not burning out"

Well done that manager

IBM overhauls rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points

keithpeter Silver badge
Trollface

EF Codd

So under the old system, Ted Codd would have got one point for his well known paper and perhaps another for the book?

Cool.

KDE 6 hits RC-1 while KDE 5 brings fresh spin on OpenBSD

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Slackware KTOWN live iso | OpenBSD

Slackware contributor Alien Bob provides a live iso with KDE 6 beta2 (released late December). Looks nice. Is installable. Can be updated in step with Alien Bob's 'ktown' repository. Read the documentation. Not sure what his release schedule is.

@KWD: I find that xfce4 on OpenBSD 7.4 is OKish after I increased the memory settings for default user in /etc/login.conf. Sometimes a core from the panel or settings component gets dumped in the home directory. This is on crappy old thinkpads with integrated graphics.

Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor

keithpeter Silver badge

Re: but not much of a word processor either.

Which is basically what I used Wordpad for but in a work context.

Ideal for quick memos and all.

I used it for longer documents when drafting just the text on my ancient Compaq laptop on the way in on the train (Winders 95 era - no MS Office on that machine). Copy over to Word on the college PC and format to Corporate Standard (complete with the logo that made the resulting file 10 times larger). Good days.

These days I suppose people would use Google Docs or something or install OpenOffice/LibreOffice/OtherOffice.

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Re: Survival characteristics

"There's plenty of evidence that PCs did not make managers more productive — quite the opposite, in fact, since dictating correspondence to experienced secretaries and having it produced by a dedicated typing pool is almost always going to be quite a lot faster than writing it in something like Outlook or Word, for example."

I'm just old enough to have worked as a messenger boy in an office where managers would often simply ask the secretary to send a 'hurry up' letter or a 'very sorry' letter for routine communications. These letters were so standard that the secretary just bashed one out on her Selectric and the manager signed it. So yes I take your point for written stuff.

I was more on about the spreadsheet allowing data based challenges to the centralised MIS systems of the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps because my later working life included that.

I also take your point about productivity decline. I have a feeling that we now measure and attempt to interpret a much larger volume of numerical data than previously simply because we can. I also have a feeling a lot of that data is quite noisy so people are trying to control random fluctuations and that does not work.

Icon: Happy new year all, I'm off out on a slightly less rainy day.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Survival characteristics

Thanks to Liam Proven for a thought provoking essay which I have just caught up with on a wet Wednesday morning.

I would argue that UNIX had superb and imaginative marketing.

A small group of people in one branch of Bell Labs managed to market their operating system to Bell's bureaucracy very effectively, and through publishing technical reports and papers managed to market their system to Universities in many countries within a matter of years. Joseph Ossanna appears from what I have read to be the kind of genius middle manager you dream of working under, and it was a shame that he died so young.

This observation brings me to a wider point: the changes in organisations that occurred in step with IT capabilities. Those flea-powered 'personal computers' when running Visi-Calc and successors enabled middle managers to argue back to central MIS using evidence. Not to be underestimated, that.

Yes, a LISP machine could have been used in the same way but the 'right cast of mind' referred to in the OA was very rare. Hacking up a bit of a spreadsheet (as many here know to their cost having had to clean up the messes) has a much lower barrier to entry.

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

keithpeter Silver badge
Childcatcher

Re: Customers are the security liability

Which was my point.

Unless the original email's subject line said something like 'don't open this email' you can't really extract any moral from the statistics supplied by the post to which I replied.

keithpeter Silver badge
Childcatcher

Re: Customers are the security liability

Interesting. Can you remember what the recipients had to do to 'run' the attachment?

What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it

keithpeter Silver badge

Gamification of definitions?

Interesting account.

Contract not licence? So who will provide the remedy for contracts being broken and how enforced? UN Convention on the Law of the Sea(*) model or something like the WTO?

Non-profit? How many different definitions of that are there in the nations of the world? Do those definitions overlap? What arbitrage opportunities do differences in coverage provide?

Paid by contributions monitored through software running on some Website collating issues/commits? How on earth are you going to define the business logic used? What if someone *removes* a few hundred thousand lines of code from a mature and somewhat crufty project? If someone works through a few hundred pages of documentation dotting ies and crossing tees how is their contribution compared to someone else who provides a critical 10 line fix that resolves a show-stopper bug based on decades of experience with obscure race conditions?

This is going to make the ANSI committee process look like a play group.

Icon: briefly middle mngmnt in a UK public sector organisation that had to claim 'formula funding'. Still get flashbacks.

(*) No prizes for guessing which large and powerful maritime nation refuses to ratify.

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: This is why I abandoned Windows.

"...GIMP is the only program I think I've ever encountered that doesn't let you save a modified file on exit..."

But the unsaved state is caught and I can cancel the exit. Same idea just upside down logic? Sort of like ed with the ? when you q with unsaved changes.

But I agree doing what t'other programs do would help consistency.