Posts by VoiceOfTruth 1648 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2022
Over the last couple of years during the lockdowns it was evident that many shops had closed in central London. They were not closed 'for the duration', they were closed for good. They had perhaps seen the writing on the wall and decided to jump ship while they still had a few quid in the bank rather than spending it to keep open unviable businesses.
Leicester Square is a fairly horrible tourist area these days, with Irving Street leading off it to Orange Street and Charing Cross Road. It *was* populated by restaurants mainly aimed at tourists. You can check on Google Street View if you can't visit in person. I passed through there on Saturday. Many of the restaurants have closed down. It is much the same in parts of Soho - closed restaurants. Unlike some other businesses, restaurants depend on the presence of customers. Sure, there are restaurants which do takeaways. But in the main restaurants means having customers present. Elsewhere I see that in Jermyn Street and Piccadilly there are empty shops. Perhaps they too were unviable.
Offices whose staff work from home (where possible) realised this can be done if your staff and managers can get along and not just butt heads. This means companies can physically downsize offices. Hot desks, coming in to the office once a week or once every two weeks to 'show your face' rather than using Skype or whatever is not unreasonable. We remotely manage equipment at sites I've never been to, so working from home is not even a problem to solved for me. The knock on effect, though, is the cafes local to my office no longer see my custom. It may not be much, my £4-£7 a day, but that's £25 a week or so from one person. Multiply that by x dozen in our office, and those local cafes will suffer.
I am not fixated on food shops or restaurants or cafes, but I'm mentioning them as I don't think the points I make with them can be contradicted.
The commercial mortgage holders who seem intent on building high street empires are suffering, and frankly I want to see them punished - punished by losing a lot of money. They took out huge loans, based on the stupid principle that prices can only ever go up, bought some property, then hiked the rent to the tenants. Now, AC (After Covid) those tenants can't pay/won't pay/have gone away, and these mortgage holders are getting screwed. They got greedy. Note one of the points in the article about Sungard 'failing to renegotiate landlord rental rates'.
I'm an old no-beard UNIX geezer, and I was a child in the 1970s. I clearly recall the power cuts then, and I remember seeing the uncollected rubbish in the streets. Other aspects of that time that I read about later I didn't see or wasn't aware of or didn't know about. But... London even in those troubled times seemed viable. What I have seen (and am still seeing) with these closed shops in the number 1 shopping areas is a lack of viability. The Tube was busy on Saturday, things are much like they were BC (Before Covid), but something seems to have changed. Though there are lots of people around, seemingly, the number is sufficiently less than BC to render certain businesses unviable.
How has the release of this new Ubuntu descendent helped you in any way? Is it substantially different from other distros?
My prediction: it will be available for a while. Maybe a few hundred people in the whole world will try it. They will mostly fade away, like they always do. A few diehards will stick to it - maybe 10 people in the whole world.
In a few months people who waste their time wondering about this sort of thing will ask 'what happened to the rolling remix of Ubuntu distro?' Lemme tell you: Nobody cares.
The interminable supply of new distros is nothing but a waste of time.
-> we need a really dominant Linux distribution
Indeed. And one consistent package manager because it is a huge WASTE OF TIME to learn more than one. I'm not interested in the reasons why a is better than b - that too is a waste of my time. The Linux 'community' (such as it is) should make perhaps 1 or 2 distributions, and kick the others to the kerb. That doesn't stop other people doing their own thing, but it will substantially reduce the amount of duplicated work (= wasted time). Work only on these 1 or 2 distros, and completely ignore the others.
Linux has also become hideously complicated compared to how it used to be. Who does this benefit?
Yet Another Linux Distribution...
I am laughing, I really am. I am chuckling at the dunderheads who keep doing this. Another distribution of Linux (that's GNU/Linux, you uneducated Windows Lusers), based on constantly moving branch, is all the world needs. This one will surely usher in the much-feted Year Of The Linux Desktop.
I hope it will use Gnome 42, so I can enjoy the inconsistent theming while taking solace from the new text editor which is not gedit. And great bolshy yarblockos to those who give me a thumbs down.
-> And this is why the year of the Linux desktop will always be far in the future.
Another reason is the constant reinvention, the constant rebuilding in whatever programming language is topical, of things which should by now be stable.
I remember a few years ago Ruby on Rails was popular. At a place where I was working at the time, some people wanted to rebuild something which was already running well, which was well understood by those who maintained and supported it, and didn't have any significant problems, on Ruby on Rails. It wasn't going to be a 'big' improvement. It would instead have been a lot of work just to get to the stage where we already were. It's just a rewrite in a popular language.
That anecdote is a metaphor for Linux on the desktop. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. But not get any further ahead.
-> Windows XP made theming part of Windows and was thus a strong incentive to switch to Linux, or Mac OS X, or indeed anything else
Get the hell out of here! Windows XP was far more successful that anything Linux has ever produced. I can not think of a single person who switched from XP to Linux because of theming.
The USA is not a good country. It is now actively trying to prevent China's rise by pretty much any means short of actual war. But war is being planned. Taiwan is being armed by US missiles - a fact which is not lost to China. I think that China has had enough of being lectured by fat Americans who only bring war to the world.
Thanks for the link.
Alas we in the world are very forgetful unless there is some sort of accountability. If Blair and Bush had been treated in the 'free' western press the same way Putin is currently, maybe I would have a smidgin less negativism about these jump-on-the-bandwagon-Putin-is-bad people.
When I read these sorts of reports about these finger-pointing ignorers, apologists, or supporters of mass murderers like Bush and Blair it does rather tingle.
I have no quarrel with either Russia or Ukraine and wish them both peace.
I've 'watched' China for several years. The scale and the speed at which China things is what alarms the collective West (meaning the western countries with the USA as self-appointed leader and decision maker) the most. Look on YouTube for Chinese docks - they are incredible.
China has not yet completed its version of the Industrial Revolution. It is still in the early stages of it, perhaps about 25% of the way through. We really have not seen much yet. Prepare to be amazed.
Keep read-only snapshots of file systems. ZFS can do this, NetApps can too. I imagine that other higher-end file systems/volume managers can do the same. A good thing about NetApps is that Joe User does not have an actual account (I mean in a UNIX way) on them. So he/she/they can't turn off the read-only toggle.
It's our data, but it will be sold off. Boris Johnson, American by birth, will do whatever is necessary to cosy up to his home country.
For about 2 years there has been nothing in the news except for Covid. Then the Russia/Ukraine problem started and Covid was not mentioned. Now it's back again. The establishment still treats this country as though the people are subjects and they are the lords and masters. We are here to serve their means and desires.
Next up is social credit scores. Unvaccinated = -1,000 points. Double vaccinated + booster = +3 points.
This company, with a proven record of fraud, somehow keeps managing to collect government contracts. We then read a few years later how there were problems, difficulties, and the outsourcing to $usualsuspectcompany did not go according to plan, and any anticipated savings were lost or were negligible.
I am far from being a communist of even a socialist, but these outsourcing deals are there to enrich a small group of people who know people in government (party affiliation is unimportant), while socialising all the risks to the tax payer.
Repeat for the next government contract.
You would be amazed (though probably not) how many people talk the talk on security, but have no idea what they are talking about and no real idea how to implement it. Even worse, they don't implement it continuously.
For years and years I remember seeing in various computer magazines articles that you don't need an outbound firewall if you (supposedly) protect your systems. Er hello, numbnut computer magazine reporters: outbound firewalls are one way of noticing unexplained traffic.
-> Not so much application C as library C.
Yes! I have seen and read penguins laughing about 'Windows DLL hell'. Meanwhile there is shared object hell on Linux. Why did rpmfind come about? It's because of applications requiring certain versions of (not just certain) shared libraries.
The Linux solution to this: let's not fix that, let's do something else. And if you don't like it, go and fork it and do your own thing.
-> In real life, most Linux users probably use 1 or 2 distros
Please don't look down your nose at the other 49,998+ distros out there. And after you have tried them all and find something to dislike in each of them, you can always start your own!!!
Back in the day there was Windows for Workgroups. I suggest a modern update: Linux for Knobheads. Out of the box, or rather straight from the ISO, it will be configured with ext4 for /, and btrfs for /home, and xfs for /bigfiles. It will have a new package manager called knobby, with packages called knobs. And it will use only gedit and not any new fangled text editors. And no systemd.
And after you have checked your log files and found one download, you can announce to the world that LfK is alive and well and you are looking for volunteers to help run it. You can have endless discussions about which forum software to use (php is easy to code insecurely, so that's not a good idea. Perl is, what is Perl these days? Does it still have the date += 1900 necessity? Maybe write a new one from scratch in Go. No Rust).
-> Wot? Linux is a kernel not a distro.
Put the semantics aside, please. Nobody runs Linux. You can't even boot Linux without a boot loader. GRUB, the common boot loader, is not itself part of Linux. Linux without all the tools and programs and header files and libraries and so on is useless. We all know that Linux is just a kernel. Nobody apart from penguins who have had too much drencom care one groat. Hearing this one more time does not in any way enrich my life.
What can your customers who 'boot a Linux kernel' do without applications that accompany or run on that kernel? I'll answer for you: nothing whatsoever.
with all these stupid incompatibilities between the different Linux versions. Sometimes more choice does not lead to a better end product, it just leads to hundreds or thousands of percent of duplication.
Do you know why there are FlatPaks and Snaps? It's because the built-in mind bogglers that some people have the impertinence to refer to as 'package managers' are worthy of inclusion in the Cryptic Crosswords books from The Telegraph. They are not straightforward or simple, and definitely not suitable for your grandmother. I would use a nasty word to describe them, but I don't enjoy reading swear words from other people so I won't inflict my own either. Instead I will say that RPM/YUM/DEB/Pacman/CrackPipeToke are all essentially a great big stinky pile of nastiness.
Just go and Google 'Linux Package Managers'. One of the results is '22 Best Linux package managers as of 2022'. Twenty Frickin' Two of the best! I imagine there are probably at least 50 of the worst somewhere. Back to my point: imagine how much time has been wasted producing all these stupidly incompatible piles of junk.
I have seen software which only installs on RedHat. So great bolshy yarblockos to all the Linux penguins who insist that a program built for RedHat will 100% run on Debian, or CrackPipe Linux or whatever single-digit user distro they run in their potholes.
In the post about Gnome 42 the other day, there was mention of a new Text Editor. One of its useful new features was autosave. For crying out loud... I had that 25 years ago. But because there is a new text editor on Linux it's supposedly worthy of mention. Hint: it's not.
Starting from NT rather than the DOS-based things...
NT 3.5(1) was sort of OK but limited.
NT 4. Usable, limited in its own ways. Stability with some drivers was a big problem. Fart in the same room and it could crash.
Win2K. Very good. Stable, responsive, didn't try to do 'too much', probably the best of the Windows family.
XP. Inflicting gaping security holes on the wider world. Usable, wide support across the board.
Vista. Skipped.
7. Stable, slower (meaning here less responsive) by a long way in comparison to Win2K.
8. Skipped.
10. Tried it for a while. Saw how slow and unresponsive it is compared with 7. Decided to stick to 7 and not upgrade. Shove it, Bill.
11. Haven't tried it.
When it is eventually *usable* it will probably be OK.
-> "It is intended for developers and power users,"
Without emacs? Shurely there has been some misteak.
-> 53GB of disk space
What is this? That's almost enough space for two installations of LaTeX.
-> plenty of assurances floating around online that all those bugs have been fixed and it's fine
That would be the Linux 'community', which it turns out has many blinkered fanboys and rather fewer honest reviewers in its number. To them: Linux is good, Windows (and everything else, actually) is bad.
I wrote in another post that I don't quite trust btrfs. No fanboy is going to convince me otherwise.
I hae used bootadm and zfs on Solaris for years: rock solid, stable, reliable, predictable.
I like the idea of btrfs, but is it ever actually going to be all of the above any time soon? I'm not convinced by amateur Linux users who insist that it is, when I know they do not speak from any important experience. Their home 'server' with some ironic hostname is not the same thing as 24x7x365 requirements. Basically I don't quite trust btrfs, and that for me makes it a big no no.
Sure... ZFS requires a chunk of memory, but I am prepared to trade that (add it as a cost, if necessary) for what it offers. And the what it offers is substantial.
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