Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"When the less knowledgeable users install say, Mint or Ubuntu, does the installation suggest this or is /home partition automatically created?"
Good question. Don't know because these days I always ignore any recommendations & go for a fully split install:/boot, /, /home, /usr, /usr/local, /var, /opt, /tmp & swap. And preferably with LVM so a good chunk can be held back and added where necessary.
But a separate /home should be a minimum default.
"Anyone who says any Linux distro is easier to install or update than Windows is crazy."
Yup, I'm feeling a bit crazy.
It could be something to do with the time it took to take a brand new W7 laptop and bring it to current with updates (omitting nagware & telemetry of course). An update version that spent hours apparently looking for updates but not doing anything. Time spent googling, being lead to several alleged updates which, on clicking Download went straight to a page thanking me for downloading and giving install instructions but not downloading anything. Then, having got an update version that worked, going through the remaining recommended update descriptions one at a time deciding which to hide & which to install.
I wouldn't tackle that for anybody but my grandkids and even then I was sorely tempted to wipe it & take a few minutes to install Linux. Maybe next year.
"Visio is a bit of a bugger - Dia and Co don't cut it "
Enterprise Architect ( http://www.sparxsystems.com ) isn't free in either sense but fairly reasonably priced IIRC and runs on Wine (don't we all?). It's a long time since I had an update (maintenance subscription but you can live without it, IME it's more for features than bug fixes) so they'll have poured even more into it by now.
"add milk to the cup first before pouring"
Wasn't that practice introduced to avoid cracking your inferior china? With good quality china you pour the tea in first. Then, if you really must add milk, pour it into a separate cup. Both are excellent liquids but you really shouldn't mix your drinks.
"my package had been left behind the bins."
They lied. It wasn't behind the bins. It was in the bins. Not your bins, the neighbour's. Now work out which neighbour.
Our standing instructions with Amazon are to leave it in the greenhouse. The greenhouse is perfectly visible across the drive opposite the front door. The last time we had a delivery whilst we were out it was left in the neighbour's greenhouse which isn't even visible from the road.
"Baby Boomers keep dying of old age and Millennials use ad blockers."
I find the first part of this deeply worrying. I'm slightly too old to be a Boomer so the thought that people younger then me are dying of old age.... Just no!
Nevertheless my advanced years are no reason not to use an adblocker.
The problem, and its potential solution, must lie with the publishers coming to understand their audience. They need to realise that it's the nature of the adverts which causes blockers to be used, not the ads themselves. Apart from malvertising, which is sufficient reason in itself, we have annoying animations, booming sound and all manner of other offensiveness, including tracking.
The publishers need to take control and ban any form of active ad: no sound, no Flash, no JS or other coding. Just embed them in the page then they won't get blocked and not so many that they become such an annoyance that readers just avoid the site altogether. Embedded ads, of course, can be tuned to the content of the page which itself is an indication of what the reader's interested in so no need to track.
I don't think there's a great deal of time for the publishers to turn round on this. At some point the advertisers - the real advertisers, those with a product to sell - will realise that because they've been driven to use adblockers others will also be using them, their ads aren't going to get through so there's no point in wasting money on the snake-oil salesmen advertising industry.
"Companies running a pension deficit should have payout caps on pensions to protect those on the lower levels while the higher levels feel the impact of decisions they probably took part in"
Pension deficits can have complex causes.
In part they come from HMRC or its predecessor, the IR. They tend to assume when companies get their pension funds in surplus that they're trying to hide excess profits and order a contribution holiday. If the surplus was due to the investments doing particularly well as soon as normal service is resumed the fund finds itself in deficit.
Then there were some decisions of our never-wise (even after the event) chancellor Gordon Brown. Remember the changes to tax allowances on dividends to shares held in pension funds?* And at the same time I understand that he introduced accounting changes which effectively raised the significance of pension funds in stock market valuations; given that companies have their pension funds invested in each other it put in place a positive feedback mechanism which exaggerated the effect of the tax changes.
And, of course, if the stock market goes down even a previously balanced fund goes into deficit.
In BT's case there is certainly a long term plan to rectify the situation by excess payments. As a BT pensioner myself it's something I keep an eye on.
*I think the pension firms were supine about this. They give annual projections of what pensions are worth. If they'd given an addition projection of what the pension would have been worth without the tax even Brown would have had to back off before the next election.
"We have a 3% marked share by end users in Windows phone as a failure. But a 2% market share on the desktop for Linux is a success.....?"
Isn't the 3% "marked"[sic] share on phones something to do with Linux eating the phone market with Android.
I've just spent what seemed the best part of a life-time setting up a Windows laptop for my granddaughter. What a pain. Broken update mechanism, even discounting the effort needed to keep W10 malware off of it. Seeming inability to archive the current install status short of imaging the entire shooting match. Inability to customise logon screen (would like to hide admin ID behind "Change user" button). By contrast an alert for 44 updates for KDE arrived this morning and they were installed in about a minute. Just why do Windows users put up with this mess on the desktop?
"After all, why ask the line staff (who are going to be stuck using this) anything about THEIR needs or what actually WORKS opposed to management's theories of how it should be?"
Why would the line staff know anything worth while? They're on a much lower pay grade than the managers.
This, if you think about it, is where consultants come into it. They can find out from the line staff and pass it on with a price tag which shows that it must be right. When dealing with management who know the price of everything and the value of nothing adding to the price actually is adding to the value.
'Let's not venture too far into the weeds about how Winston Royce (the fellow who called it "waterfall") said it would never work on large projects, okay?'
That's exactly where we should venture because what he described as waterfall was a straw man. What he was trying to point out was that you may need to go back and revise some of the previous stages as you discover more about the job. Obviously the paper was too long for the PHBs who got as far as the end of the description and thought "That'll do.".
"especially contractors not wanting to have the pain of looking for a new contract the minute they finish the current work, may often go along as it is financially better for them too."
My experience was that delivering a good job was the key to not having that pain as it ensured you moved straight onto the next project.
"What do you think it should do?"
New job. The company had a system it had written for a client. They and the client had decided to sell it to other customers as a joint venture. I was given the job of knocking into shape for their first two new customers. I very quickly realised it was monolithic - any user could get into any part of the system irrespective of whether it was needed in their job. Isolation wouldn't be easy due to the technology used (good for prototyping, not for production) so I made a start in re-writing it in a different language as a series of separate modules.
Then the salesman sold it to another customer assuring them it would be a drop-in replacement. A quick look at what they had told me it wouldn't fit, someone was going to have to manage customer expectations and I was the one caught in the middle. So I went to management, asked for a spec of what I was supposed to produce and was told that whatever product I came up with would be the spec.
I left shortly afterwards.
