Posts by Doctor Syntax 42398 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"The reason was the real estate."
And they probably think they're getting better value from office plus staff when office plus staff are in the same location as when they're not. The question should be "are they getting the same value from staff?". If so the way to get value from the office is to off-load it if they can. Your partner's daughter should consider getting out if her employer's manglement doesn't realise they've fallen for the sunk cost fallacy.
"Most companies don't own their own buildings, and they have to pay the same lease cost whether or not someone is sitting in a seat."
True, but when they see the smpty seats they can't fool themselves they're wasting money. If they bring everyone back they can.
They're not new distros release every month. Read the article & you'll realise it's a new version of one of the relatively small handful of suitable for immigrants distros, any one of which you could reasonably choose. And any one of those only releases a new version every quarter or less. Anyone accepting of the monthly incoming and potentially bricking shit-shower of the alternative with their uninstallable KBwhatevers can't reasonably claim it to be confusing.
"With almost all Linux distros, you can have the install process shrink your Windows partition and make space to install the Linux distro, altering the startup process to allow you to select at boot time whether you want to boot to Linux or boot to Windows."
If I were setting that up fore someone else that's what I'd do. It also has the advantage that you can mount the Windows partition to have access to any data on it. I hesitate to suggest that someone with o experience of installing and OS in case they made the wrong choice and trashed a Windows partition they still needed to use or had un-backed up data. (Although one always backs up ones data, don't one?)
"In this one. APT/deb aren't the be-all and end-all. There's no undo function. There's no easy clean way to revert to an old version"
I can't, off-hand, think of an occasion where I've needed to do that in a Debian/Devuan repository-installed application.
For out-of-distro applications the neatest thing is to have then install in /opt with their own little directory tree. Those don't show up as extra mounted file-systems and you can remove the n application's tree cleanly without touching anything else. By comparison even Appimiage is an unnecessary overhead.
Keeping a separate /home partition is, of course good advice and also a separate /srv partition for applications that store data outside of /home. This introduces a problem with Debian/Devuan (and possibly others) which default to keeping web server and mariadb data in /var (and possibly other applications as well. Having experienced grief with trying to preserve /var in a reinstall I now set these up with the data in /srv and links back to /var
"The office suite is LibreOffice, but surprisingly, the stable version 7.6, not the newer version 24.2 found in upstream Ubuntu."
I'd have thought that word "stable" makes it unsurprising.
"There are more Microsoft-like Linux productivity suites with a Ribbon UI."
There are also Windows versions of them. Even friends who use Windows are using these rather than pay for Office.
"There are some unwelcome GNOME accessories with their weird CSD button-bar, such as the Evince document viewer."
Perhaps KDE would really be a better choice of dektop for an emigrant from Windows distro.
Or, if you have space on your computer, try installing one of the options under VirtualBox. There are a number of options recommended for people in your position - Mint, Zorin, Lite ... Liam has covered all of them in various articles.
You'll have seen references to Red Hat, Suse and others which are enterprise versions and you can safely ignore them. Many are primarily intended to run servers even if they can be desktopped.
"They're not removing much methane from the atmosphere - the methane produced from the cow shit is a tiny proportion compared to what the cows fart out every day in the fields."
And that's something their bovine ancestors were doing for millions of years before anyone came along to domesticate them. It will eventually be oxidised back to carbon dioxide and water just as has always happened. Also the carbon dioxide produced simply replaces that which was removed by photosynthesis by the fodder plants which the cows ate. It's a closed loop of a year or so's duration.
What is different between now and the time of the cows' wild ancestors is the release, as carbon dioxide, of other carbon which was sequestered by photosynthesis hundreds of millions of years ago.
"the bequests of even highly commercially successful people indicate how little they owned but were apparently quite content"
But would you be content today with the same standard of living?
Actually, it's more complicated than that. If you're dealing with highly commercially successful people they'd have a few apprentices and/or journeymen doing some of he commercial work and a domestic servant or too doing the domestic work. The wills wouldn't necessarily reflect their standard of living.
You won't be seeing the wills of those people (except for those few of the apprentices or journeymen who went on to be masters themselves). You also wont be seeing the wills of those born into such families that might well have lead to expectations of commercial success but whose lives were cut short by the diseases which are either readily treated today or which we now avoid, partly due to greater knowledge and partly due to some of the extra household equipment that we now possess.
Does your jurisdiction have a small claims court/route/whatever? In general such a process enables your to (a) put in the claim yourself (b) obliges both sides to pay for any legal representation they make themselves so the other side can't threaten to bankrupt you with expensive lawyers.
The board were making a deal* with other peoples' money. A company is owned by its shareholders, therefore it was their money, not the board's. If, now, the shareholders vote to reinstate the deal it will be their decision as to what to do with their money. They have that right,** the board didn't.
* For some versions of "making" and "deal". The "a" seems OK.
** And, of course, the right not to do s
We've been harvesting energy from the sun for a very long time indeed. It's called growing food. One of the things about solar energy is that there's a strictly limited amount available at any one time and it has to be shared out. Currently we're seeing plans for solar farms, some fortunately being turned down by planners, presumably on the basis that we need electrical energy more than we need food.
"if Altman gets megarich off AI and plows more money into fusion"
But in order to get megarich he's going to need the cheap energy from the fusion reactor. To make this work he's rally going to need a complete virtual fusion reactor to spring into existence long enough for him to get rich - and who wants to be around when it springs out of existence again. Yes, I have just been re-reading In search of Schroedinger's Cat
"If you want something done quickly, report it as broken."
Have a genuinely unskilled assistant who, on suspicion of that, will be sent round to look, can be guaranteed to break it and then bring it back to the workshop for investigation which will take at leas until next week.
"You have some sessions with the customer to make part of a plan, build that part, and continue to iterate."
A third alternative. You build some sort of prototype - possibly even a sketch of the UI with a note about what does what. You present that to the user. Once they see something that may vaguely resemble what they were looking for they're better placed to think it through and clarify. But don't put effort into building part of it properly because even if it shouldn't be part of the finished product you're stuck with the sunk costs.
The analogy to construction is more if I just said "I want a house. Four bedrooms. Get started.",
Someone who wants a house either goes to an estate agent to buy one that already exists or they go to an architect* to get a design put together. Only then do the builders/devs get started.
* Occasionally someone will want to be their own architect
