Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Yes we had to charge, went for a coffee"
And as long as EVs are relatively few then that's fine. If you had to queue you might have been able to have dinner and an overnight stay. With a majority of vehicles being EVs the existing charging structure would become a bottleneck.
Don't install on the same drive Windows is on. Because Microsoft updates are known to overwrite the GRUB loader that start Linux.
If you've already got Windows installed and there's enough space on the drive for a second OS then you can install Linux on the same drive. It's better mannered than Windows, will recognise the existing OS and put it on the boot menu.
The only thing that's necessary is to shrink the Windows partition to free up the space which you can do in Windows anyway.
A lot of us have stories like this:
A cousin-in-law got hit with early ransomware back in W7 days (booby-trapped email from an acquaintance's hacked or spoofed address). Fortunately it very badly written ransomware & quickly recovered by Photorec running from a live CD. Cleaning up the files (you wouldn't believe how much cached shrapnel photorec can find) was certainly a job for Unix pipelined commands but that's no problem as I was using those before Windows existed*.
But my CiL, now in her nineties is still running the same PC on Zorin, and has been for years without needing to run "greps and bashes". Why should she? She has a Windows-like GUI running browser (Firefox), email (Thunderbird), and word-processor and spreadsheet (LibreOffice). I can't remember what she uses for photographs and she's particularly keen on looking up places on Google Earth. Even her Windows-using children have no problems with it.
As I said, a lot of us have similar experiences so we know that every time somebody like you comes out with stuff like your "greps and bashes" we know that all you're doing is repeating a lot of utter bollocks you've read somewhere and don't know enough to recognise your echo-chamber for what it is.
*Back in the day I was running RDBMS under Unix in a business where the more senior IT management were wedded to VMS. Sometimes I wonder how that went for them in later years.
The ERP systems I worked with ran on servers under varieties of Unix. Linux has largely replaced Unix for running servers. If you have such an ERP system today surely you're running - or could run - on a Linux server platform. Aren't you simply accessing the server with a web-browser? If so, why can't the web-browser run on Linux unless it has to be some ancient version of IE?
It's another of those ill-thought-out defaults: system clock is set to what it thinks is local time. The sensible thing thing, especially if making provision for travel between time zones, is to keep the system clock at UTC and show local time by applying the current local time zone's offset. Linux adopts the sensible option.
"What other business could get away with having products that are so bad that every month ... we have a ... Patch Tuesday,"
These days elReg Patch Tuesday reports seem to list other vendors as well. But Windows seems to have started a tradition the others have followed which is possibly worse than being the only one.
Incidentally today I learned about https://0patch.zendesk.com/ which some may find useful.
Dual boot or VM, neither is difficult. Dual booting with SCO did take some sysadmin skills once upon a time but these days checking you've enough free space is available and not ticking the "Use all the disk" box is about all all the admin knowledge needed to set up a dual boot Linux to try out.
In Blighty the scope of the term "engineer" depends on who's saying it. For a BSc (Eng) in might be a BSc (Eng). For a member of the appropriate Chartered iIstitute it might be a member of a Chartered Institute. For others it might be a skilled tradesman. It's not like it is in Oregon.
Until recently he didn't know that in court an "expert witness" has some legal training, training that he neither had, nor was offered. In particular he did not know about disclosure.
I spent 14 years in a job where being an expert witness was at the core of the work. No legal training was given. OTOH I was constantly thinking, as should any witness, expert or other wise "If I get this wrong someone could be wrongly convicted".
Apart from that the one warning I would give to anyone who is being called as a witness, especially as an expert is "be careful of the side that's calling you; they may well want you to say more than you intend so you must stand your ground against them as well as against counsel on the other side".
I'd guess that even if he-d read them they wouldn't have included a critical warning. The expert witness' worst problems come from the side that calls them. The examination that turns into a cross-examination trying to get them to over-commit. The statement that had to be retyped because it had to be on a different form, the original mentioned suspects who are no longer before the court. etc.
"just that the pages they do scrape are subtly altered to replace words with others, opposites or something completely irrelevant."
Not subtly altered, just a stream of completely random, possibly in multiple languages. LLMs build statistics of word associations. A good dose of white noise should weaken the statistics. Even better, start with a random stream, pick out occasional pairs of words from the stream and feed them back in as if they were genuine associations in real text.
"Airlines will have worked out when the hassle and costs from missed bags are less than those for a few hours when a plane is doing nothing or stuck at the wrong airport."
Better for whom? Not for the passengers who end up without their baggage.
If the airlines were obliged to pay to provide a couple of changes of clothing, toiletries and new baggage to put them in at the destination the working out might reach a different conclusion.
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