Posts by Doctor Syntax 28087 posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"No matter what. After all, the Tories are still blaming Labour for the ills of the world 12 years after Labour were last in power."
To be fair the aftereffects of Brownomics were pretty severe. BoJo has had the gift of a pandemic and now a war to make it hard to allocate due blame for his own policies.
To be fair, most "boomers" are now in their 70s.
How long are such "generations" supposed to last? AIUI these are the cohort born 1946 or later so they're mid-70s or younger. That puts the majority in their 60s.
Being slightly older my own definition is one whose musical tastes were defined by the Beatles, their contemporaries and successors. In restrospect I think I've always had more in common with those 10 or more years older than those just a few years younger as exemplified by the cousins on one side of the family vs the other.
They'll do that until they run out of budget. Limit the budget*. when they relise they're wasting it they'll start flogging off some of their slots. Money - real or virtual - puts a value on a resource. If the resource has no price you end up with the tragedy of the commons.
* This doesn't have to be a financial budget - you can have a virtual currence allocated to projects and departments.
often at a hit to actual productivity
This may well be because "productivity" is actually a measurement of inputs,* In such cases inputs are hours of bum-on-seat time and this can only be measured when the seas are in the office. A manager of inadequate competence will thus perceive productivity as having fallen to an unmeasurable level when working at home prevails. Assessment of the adequacy of Rees-Mogg is left as an exercise for the reader.
* When challenged that nothing is being done about $ISSUE governments will inevitably reply by how much is being spent on dealing with $ISSUE, not on what results are obtained. Extra points are gained by declaring what is proposed to be spent rather than what is spent. Extra extra points for declaring the same spending multiple times whilst giving the impression it's additional money every time
Very many years ago at a routine senior scientific officer meeting it was mentioned that we were running low on case submission forms but there'd be no problem just getting them reprinted would there? Challenge accepted - my officemate & self ended up completely redesigning them because they were the main means of getting the information about what we were supposed to be doing.
This was a completely paper based system with copies going to every section involved. The case envelopes grew fatter and fatter as lab notes, chart recorder output, maybe small snap-fast bags of odd bits, Thin layer chromatography plates, photographs etc. were added.
I sometimes wonder if it ever became electronic. Possibly not because having that case file to hand in the witness box was essential if only to stop some smart-arse cross-examiner asking* to see something if they thought you couldn't produce it.
Subsequently I had a contract gig at a business that did such form production work. They kept referring to the document cycle by which they meant simply the design process and print ordering. To me the document cycle meant the whole thing of sending out stocks of documents, receiving the filled in document, the various trips round the lab and its eventual filing as part of a complete case. It did occur to me that they could have added an extra line of business with something like optical marked form reading of completed documents.
* If they knew you could they wouldn't ask, of course.
I dumped then when they closed my local branch. They rung up to see if they could meet to sort things out. I said OK but the meeting would have to be at the branch they'd just closed. TBH the person I was speaking to wasn't happy about it either.
It raises the question of what was done with the different coloured (or otherwise) copies. Did they eventually move to an online filing system to make them unnecessary?
My local builders' merchant has just moved from NCR pads (one copy for the office, one for the customer to keep and one for the customer to hand to the lads in the yard to tell them what to load. They now print out the two sheets for the customer and yard (I'm not sure if they print a third for the office). However as NCR paper is necessarily flimsy whilst the printer paper isn't and the printed version is A4 whilst the NCR was about A5 they're now using much more paper.
Don't worry. In a few years people will realise that there's a great opportunity to do all the work they need on their laptop or desktop. All it needs is for the capabilities of the H/W to deliver performance get sufficiently ahead of the software's ability to mop it up with even more shiny UIs.
It's an interface which resembles a phone or tablet desktop (if thet's the right term for such UIs) in that it presents a palette of applications. Some people prefer it. I'm not one of them but I realise some do. And there may be some environments where it's by far the best fit, perhaps combined with a touch sensitive screen for some sort of embedded control system.
It's the Linux desktop equivalent of Windows 8 - or possibly the other way around as Unity was released first.
As I want a Linux system without systemd I do not choose RHEL. There are other distros with other characteristics. Thank goodness for all that effort that goes into producing different distros which is not, despite views to the contrary, wasted.
And yes, I do understand the difference between GPL & BSD (although I may have to check on the multitude of other licences in the spaces between, nor do I conflate FOSS with GPL. Actually I read FOSS as Free and Open Source Software regarding the "and" as a union operator, not an intersect.
"One of SFC's sponsors is RedHat. What do they do again?"
They
(a) publish the source for their distro, including their own contributions to that code, under FOSS terms and
(b) they sell a supported binary version of that distro. If you buy their binary version you are essentially buying support.
Is that sufficiently clear?
If you don't need their support then without paying them a penny you can use the Alma or Rocky distros which are built from the RHEL distro's source. You can even use the Alma & Rocky versions with 3rd party paid support.
"They don't prevent them."
This also applies to laws against theft, fraud, assault, murder...
How exactly would a law prevent data blunders?
At most they will say what should be done but they can't actually ensure that it will be done or that the people tasked with doing it will be sufficiently competent, even if they think they are (see Dunning-Kruger effect). Ultimately all they can do is punish failure; it's in the nature of laws.
Vivaldi also allows you to go back to proper menu and title bars. I suppose the GTK way of doing things reclaims some of the space lost to needless tabs.
Along with the scroll bars It's the handling of icons that's hard to get round. It means that a GTK app sticks out like a painfully sore thumb in an environment where the other applications aren't.
Compared to the Seamonkey mail interface it's extravagant in use of screen space. The tabs are part of the problem and the other is that the Reply/Forward etc buttons are in their own toolbar at the head of the message pane and the To and From are stepped down to make room for it which just takes up more vertical space. Seamonkey allows the detailed display of header information to be toggled. The sidebar can be hidden so that's not an issue.
The default theme claims to take colours, menus & buttons from the OS. As far as button icons are concerned they're not from the OS so it's stuck with the line-drawing style icons which look like a cuneiform writer's attempt at hieroglyphs.
I would, however like the conversation view if it didn't hide the folder pane. The fundamental problem here is the notion that the basic unit is the message so that by default sent messages can be kept separate from the received messages to which they're replying and received messages separate from the sent messages to which they are replying. The basic unit should be the thread (or conversation if you prefer); a singleton messages is just a thread which as yet has only a single message. It looks as if I'll just stick with Seamonkey until someone cracks that one properly.
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