"You've gone from possibly a pure windows estate, to managing four operating systems."
Life gets awfully complicated when you throw Windows into the mix.
33111 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"It would have been interestign to see how Munich would have managed during the pandemic, if they'd carried on."
Probably used Zoom for conferencing.
Very likely NextCloud for file sharing. Maybe OpenKolab. Maybe just mount a remote drive; networked drives go back an awully long way in Linux history, well before Microsoft got into the act.
It's amazing what you can do when local politics doesn't get in the way.
"If only some large body had thought of this! And tried it! Oh wait, Munich did, and gave up."
Yes, but even Microsoft can't afford relocate a big local office into every city that decides to quit using their software. I suppose, of course, when they've retrieved the situation in one city that office is now redundant and they can relocate it if they want to play whack-a-mole.
Of the recent RHEL clones AlmaLinux has a link on their front page to TuxCare who will provide commercial support. Rocky Linux has a link to CIQ but their site seems to have been designed by a marketing so concerned to make a good impression that they don't actually say what they do: support? hosting? In any case I'm quite sure TuxCare would be equally happy to support it - and Debian.
Canonical offer enterprise support for Ubuntu as does Suse for Suse.
Lack of enterprise support is just another of those scare stories that doesn't stand up to close examination.
"But Windows supports more programs that are significant to more people."
There's a circular argument here. People decide that MS Office is significant to them. If they were to deide, as GitLab presumably does, that something else such as LibreOffice is significant to them then the compulsion to use Windows goes away. But people see Office as significant to them because they've been told that that's what Windows provides.
Now as MS wants to move more users to subscription and inflation tightens budgets does a monthly spend for Office 365 seem a good idea any more? And what happens if the next Windows is also the subscription model that MS seem to want?
"I have no doubt that one day, self driving cars will be better at driving than humans ever were."
It might vary depending on where you live but if you take the number of vehicles on UK roads, reasonable estimates for annual mileages and the statistics for fatal accidents the bar for self-driving cars is fairly high and higher still when you realise that it should match or beat the experienced driver and the accident statistics are skewed by inexperienced drivers.
"The important difference being that it wasn't really the autopilot that landed you, autopilots were on airplanes for literally decades before the automated landing systems were flight rated"
Which really proves the point. If people over-estimate what autopilot on planes do and confuse it with automated landing systems it's very likely that they'll over-estimate what it does in cars.
This is what's apt to go wrong with specifications. Specify exactly what the system is supposed to do and it might do that and nothing else.
Never mind the flock of sheep, can it cope with just one sheep that looks as if it's about to head into the road? And how does it recognise "looks as if it's about to head into the road"?
"At least drones have some kind of viable, believable and remotely feasible use cases. NFTs are a gigantic steaming pile of festering bullshit designed to part even more fools from their money."
Parting fools from their money is the feasible use case for NFTs.
"What about just sticking to what was agreed, cannot be that difficult."
I'm not sure which agreement you mean.
The Good Friday Agreement was for no hard border in the island of Ireland which worked because both N & S were in the EU.
The withdrawal agreement left NI effectively in the EU whilst Britain left.
The agreement by which the Irish Republic became independent of Britain whilst the six northern counties remained in UK (full name The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland).
Any two are mutually consistent, the three are not. This simple piece of logic may have not have given rise to a problem in Brexiteer's heads but in reality it's been a problem since day one. Brexit done? Only if you shut your eyes to reality.
Then it only leaves southern England to melt / sink into the waves / fall victim to a plague of zombie estate agents (delete as appropriate) and "Global Yorkshire" will be free.
This is an attractive idea but I'm not sure that the post-glacial rebound* is even still continuing and it would never have been enough for the sink beneath the waves option.
* The weight of the Ice Age ice on Scotland, N England & N Ireland caused them to sink somewhat and sea levels fell due to the amount of water tied up in the ice cap When the ice melted sea levels rose quite quickly. The deformation recovered much more slowly but did recover. It gave time for Late glacial beaches to be formed which were then hoisted tens of feet higher giving rise to the phenomenon of raised beaches, readily visible around the coasts of N Ireland and Scotland if you know what you're looking for. But the S of England wasn't covered by ice so as the north was pressed down the south bulged up a bit and then when the rebound took place it sank slightly.
It may have escaped your notice but the Irish Republic is part of the EU. They joined when we did but they didn't leave.
Why on Earth would the EU want to fence of part of itself? They didn't instigate this, the Brexiteers did and obviously considered that fencing off part of the UK as their logical solution was an acceptable price to pay.
I think the problem can be summed up like this:
United Kingdom - no internal border of any kind
Good Friday Agreement - no hard border in the island of Ireland
Brexit - a border somewhere.
Pick any two because all three together are impossible. Brexit was BoJo's addition. The conundrum won't go away just because he's going. Goodness knows what his successor will do with it.
"We have had the tories for a while but varying governments from Cameron to Boris."
I think it's a truth that applies universally to governments of all hues and shades. Announcing the same money for whatever it might be several times over as if it's new money each time is part of the same mind-set.
"True", "False" or "undefined" drives me absolutely nuts.
But if the real value cannot be determined you either end up with 3 possible values including undefined or demand a plain unvarnished Boolean you end up with 4 possible values:
true,
false,
true but might be false because you demanded something and you've no way of telling the difference between this and true
false but may be true because you demanded something and you've no way of telling the difference between this and false.
Spam filtering? Nigerian princes & the like no longer get through Microsoft's filtering, it's true. But emails allegedly from Microsoft regularly do. If they can't work out which emails they sent and which they didn't it's not really that good.
Having your own domain (although in my case I let Mythic Beasts run it) has the advantage of setting up as many aliases as you like so that if one is abused you can slam the door and be aware of whoever it was who abused the address they were given.
"When in reality desktop Linux is (more specifically its UI offerings) still woefully lacking on the user experience front and at least a decade behind MacOS and Windows."
It's always easy to spot those who haven't used it.
It's also easy to spot those who regularly use it; they're the ones who get roped in to sort out friends and family with Windows woes.
"Because he was a decent person with a chance of winning."
I rest my case. We need a party with a chance of fixing things. Corbyn had about as much grasp of reality as the Moggies on the other side. Starmer was not a great success running the CPS which doesn't reassure me that he'd make a good PM.
The current Tory leadership contest I find staggering: I'd have thought that they might have realised that what they need is that rarest of things, a safe pair of hands. They still haven't grokked that.
LibDem voters just want to be a party of protest against whatever government is in power. When Clegg did the responsible thing by joining a coalition in the aftermath of the Brownomics debacle they punished him at the next election.
Have you ever been to work meetings and found that there are a few individuals present who will drag it into the mire by finicking about minor details as far off topic as possible with everyone else losing the will to live? I rather think the average grass-roots party setup will be a magnet to them. Commit time? It would be a time sink.
This is exacerbated by the likes of some commentards here and elsewhere whose immediate attitude to anyone in politics is that they're unscrupulously corrupt and only in it for their own self-interest. Oddly enough it never occurs to them that they might, as such principled individuals, go into politics to make an improvement. Maybe that's because they realise that the likes of themselves would immediately brand them as unscrupulously corrupt and only in it for their own self-interest.