Posts by Doctor Syntax 40432 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Get (or rent) a hybrid or take the train if you want to nail 600 miles in a single trip."
Let me guess. You live on a bus route near a train station. You don't make journeys that require multiple changes of bus or train train. When you make journeys in your locality you restrict yourself to walking distance of home or places near bus routes.
The evidence against this thesis is that the manufacturers of Satnavs and the web-based routing services such as the AA seem to have made no attempt to refine their routing data which they've been using for years. I still get the web-based services offering routes which seem to prefer the scenic to the practical and only a few days ago I encountered an HGV stuck in a local hamlet having missed a turn by a few yards and then not having followed what should have been the more practical escape route.
'consumers ... have no voice ... and won't feel comfortable with this, "Linux," thing that people keep talking about.'
A good few of them now seem to be comfortable with it when it comes pre-loaded as a Chromebook. If MS get more & more arsey about H/W to the point that they start making it difficult for PC makers then we might see systems coming onto the market pre-loaded with Mint, Ubuntu or whatever. What with smartphones, tablets, Macs & Chromebooks consumers are starting to realise that Windows is not the only game in town and that the alternatives do the job are not really harder to use.
Cue complaints that LibreOffice isn't 100% compatible with MS Office without admitting that MS Office frequently isn't compatible with itself.
Trees with blossom are just flowering plants that happen to have adapted a particular mode of growth. A given flowering plant family can have herbaceous and woody members. The rose family, for instance, has members ranging from the strawberry, distinctly herbaceous, through roses and blackberries, shrubby, to apples and pears, trees.
"As with all malware that throws up irritating pup-ups, the solution is to uninstall it"
I wonder if some of the AV vendors will bring out a product to do this - or make it an option in existing products. This idea offered FoC to any of them who may be visiting.
@ Medixstiff
The immediate takeaway point is this is a philosophy of ship when it's fit to ship vs ship on a given date (say July 29th?) whether it's fit or not.
Another point is that new kernels are released on a cycle of a few months, not a few years. It's not a case of some new shiny that has a big marketing machine cranked up to go on it.
You should also realise that this is just a kernel release. Only a few people waiting to pounce on this: people who like to keep a bleeding edge box to play with, kernel devs taking this as a new baseline and distro builders. Of the latter those building rolling latest-everything distros will incorporate it. Others will do so if it fits into their time-line for a next release.
For most users it's the major distro releases that matter. They do tend to release to a fixed schedule for the simple reason that they're building from components that, like the kernel, have a release when it's ready approach. And for those of us who've been round the block a few times the distros we prefer are those that have the most conservative release cycles which can run to years; we're not sitting chewing our fingernails in anticipation of a new distro release let alone a new kernel.
But the real issue is that the comparison between Linus and a corporate CEO is utterly false. His role is that of gatekeeper of what actually goes into the product free of any external concerns. That means that the Linux kernel is a product determined entirely by the organisation's QA authority. It's the absence of media, boards and shareholders that allow that to happen. The stakeholders here are just the developers and users; that is, the people who really matter.
So, taking your statement that you like this at face value, I have to agree with you.
@Arnaut
I take it you're thinking of the Real Scotsman version of socialism.
What Nick was describing is just the British electoral cycle:
A Labour govt gets elected. It does a whole batch of populist stuff, some good, some not. Iin the mean time makes a pig's ear of the economy as a whole by neglecting, if not asset-stripping, the wealth generating part of the economy.
At some point the state of the economy can no longer be shrugged off as just bad luck. At the next election they get turfed out and a Tory govt gets elected (or, as we've recently seen, a Tory-led coalition). This needs at least two terms to clear up the mess, trying to get rid of the crap, start wealth generation and get the good stuff on an even keel. In fact, as an economy can't be turned round that fast, things get worse before they get better.
Eventually there are sufficient voters who can't remember enough of the last Labour govt, fall for the populist hype and elect Labour who then start the whole thing off again.
"The largest cost of a road is the initial construction, operation is relatively low and not much dependant on the use."
"Initial construction" is a one-off. Maintenance is an ongoing cost into the indefinite future added to which is the periodic cost of reconstruction to widen or strengthen it as demands change. The Fosse Way was initially constructed by the Romans who did not have motor vehicles. Apart from the route what you see of the Fosse Way today is nothing like the Roman's work - it's the result of cycles of reconstruction and intermediate maintenance which, even allowing for inflation, must amount to several times the initial cost.
If the industry wants the income it must be prepared to accept the liability. Given that the user's point of contact is with the site rather than the broker the liability should fall on the site. The site itself might then push the liability onto the broker. Otherwise you're saying that in order to read the content the user must may a ransom to some scumbag.
The only good management course I can think of was one where somebody had discovered the size of the last contingent's bar bill & set out to better it. No beer icon because to do that needed the contents of the top shelf behind the bar.
However, there was one so bad it turned out for the best. My reaction led to me being offered early retirement the following week.
"All calculations were done manually using one of these"
And about 10 years before that we were using similar Marchants in a statistics course. They tended to vibrate quite a bit. Running a division they vibrated so much they walked along the desk.
The first thing I did with my first grant cheque was to head along to a typewriter shop & buy the cheapest portable in there for £10. That avoided having to read my own handwriting. I think it's still in the attic somewhere - it shouldn't be because it acquired a dose of woodworm in its wooden case.
"20 years ago a Marketing exec was telling me about her bold mailing campaign, and how a 2% return would be a good result."
Did you ask her if that was net or gross? Every customer pissed off & lost should be set against the number of customers gained. Marketroids don't think about this of course. They daren't.
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