Posts by keithpeter

Re: What a cowardly little shit.

@Roger Kynaston

That would be the ones who didn't die of caisson disease.

(TBF they didn't know much about the bends in those days)

"Canonical is not Microsoft [...]"

at this time...

Re: I like Gnome

I tend to be the first in the meeting. There is time.

See icon

I'm sure that IBM would love to outsource all that tedious development of the OS to other organisations. That Big Red Logo company might actually have to invest a bit more perhaps?

(Probably not a whole yacht's worth, just a mast and a couple of sails.)

Re: Can still get that new fondle slab, if upcycling

https://www.neverware.com/

Neverware (name always struck me as odd) was a start up that compiled Google's Chromeos with extra drivers and so forth and some management software (optional).

The idea was that schools could use older recycled laptops to run ChromeOS and manage students work and all. You could run the OS from a USB stick or blam it onto the hard drive. Worked quite well on old Thinkpads.

Google liked the idea so much that they bought the company.... so perhaps there is a business case here.

Re: Fun with punch cards

Sometimes, a print statement printing a single line followed by a form feed may have found itself within a for...to loop of modest size thus fortuitously providing me with a supply of paper for the next week.

I liked the pale green and white alternating lines on the wide format line print paper.

Re: As a young broadcast engineer, unschooled in IT at the time

"On several occasions, they have broadcast nothing but color bars or test patterns for weeks or even months instead of their program material."

None of the regular viewers phoned in? Perhaps no regular viewers, in which case advertisers getting milked / or its a scam?

Monitoring the output sounds like an ideal application for one of these AI programs. IF the image does not change much if at all AND IF the audio is silent/single tone/ repeated cycle of test tones THEN email admin?

Re: Sounds like a crack team for dealing with an IT outage

I would imagine that the solicitors are working to minimise the liability of directors as suggested by your last sentence.

There could be a range of liabilities as I gather that this company is acting as an intermediary between the IT person and a larger company in such a way that NI and tax payments are involved. Quite a few parties in a range of contracts there.

Best of luck to all those involved.

Re: If and only if ...

"As with mainstream education, the ostensible outcome (of delivering capable people) has effectively got lost as other considerations take precedence."

Metrics that measure pointless things because no-one is prepared to trust the teachers(*). Budgets spent on consultants advising on dashboard designs to display current metrics (the ones that change twice a year) in 'real time' to senior managers who attend conferences about strategic development.

(*) Can't trust? Don't hire.

OK: I'm calming down a bit now. Good luck.

Re: Quieter kids can speak up in chat,

Yup at a level appropriate to the basic mathematics I teach that is one I've used, especially hilarious with anything to do with probability or stats. I use MCQs with students divided into small groups. Each group has to agree on a response and be prepared to explain why they think that is the correct response. All good interaction builders.

UK A level exams some decades ago had really evil 'assertion - implication' questions. You had two statements (say 1 and 2) then you had to decide if 1 implied 2 or if 2 implied 1 or if there was a double implication or if there was no implication at all.

Re: Mirror Image

Thanks for reply. The key point is that you escaped and did not have to face the customer.

Internal politics: imagine a large college with dozens of departments and not enough classrooms...

Re: Crashes?

Mr Huff had an interesting later career as a consultant. Might want to research that a bit.

Re: Computer O Level

"So after bolting the PC together, adding extension to the OS and then writing our programs we all managed to get a C grade, which looking back was a bit harsh from the examiners."

I bet you got a high mark for the coursework component (depending on the program you devised and the assessment criteria for the project). Did your certificate split the components or just give a grade?

When we had coursework on Maths GCSE courses, the coursework mark was always higher than the exam component mark. The students were not getting Aunty Carol to do it for them as they had to explain their thinking to us and at the College I was teaching in then we took that seriously.

Of course, it does not really matter - in a 35 year teaching career noone has ever asked me what grades I got or what degree classification. I've been judged on what I actually do which suits me fine.

Re: Dont go away mad, don't go away sad. just go away.

I get the impression that a lot of these incidents happen during international conferences. Mix a fairly large number of people from very different countries/social contexts &c together and add late nights and possibly alcohol.

The obvious solution is just not to have as many international conferences. Saves money as well.

Re: Sinclair pocket calculator

@Dan 55

Beats a slide rule and quicker than log tables (both of which I have used)

So something like 3 to 5k in recruitment costs together with significant extra work for the remaining technicians until the posts were filled?

Seems a little self-defeating?

Re: Hmm....

"Some EVs now have options to store and then output electricity, all these hooked up could potentially help the grid meet peak demand by using that stored electricity"

@TerryNutkins

Thanks for taking the time to describe your car use/strategy.

Non-driver so no big views on the OA except that a move over to electric drive for inner city vehicles means cleaner air for me.

I've often wondered if having batteries of some kind in houses with appropriate spare space could help smooth out electricity demand curves and thus reduce (not eliminate!) the need for base load stations. I've also wondered if there is research on low power density batteries that don't use rare earth-like metals: perhaps even good old lead acid as space in a static installation is less of a problem.

It strikes me that even if only (plucking a figure out of my nether regions) 40% of households and some office/shop buildings added a battery that could store 24 to 36h power use the result would be significant efficiency gain for the grid.

Icon: my life-style change contribution

Re: Debian 11, also known as Bullseye

The Debian distro names are all taken from characters in Toy Story, the animated film.

https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/Bullseye

Sooner or later they are going to run out of characters...

PS: I've got cache problems or some people round here can type really fast! I've been beaten to it.

"The ones who pay have the right to know how much they pay and what they get in exchange"

I worked in further education for some decades as a qualified lecturer and (briefly) as a manager. The pay scales are and always have been public, and job adverts for college teaching/management positions sometimes indicate a starting point.

https://www.ucu.org.uk/fescales_england

Is that the kind of thing you meant?

Re: Power Users

"The good news is that the wsl2-wsgl stuff works extremely well so maybe we can dump the shell entirely and just use gnome, kde, xfce or whatever. Could be an option worth exploring."

xfce4 with the Chicago 95 theme pack packaged up as an easily installed 'shell' - with menu entries for MS Office and all might prove quite popular with users?

See icon... or is it?

Re: okay...

Try one of the BSDs?

Coherently designed core

Packages to add depending on use case

Re: YAY NASA!

224

Re: Back in the olden days

In addition to the Y lamp socket adaptors in the lamp holders (with radio plugged into one of the sockets, so nothing remotely like an earth), there was the nail where the fuse wire should be in the porcelain bank of fuse holders - the kind you pull out - by the leccy meter. My old Dad used to do repairs for neighbours. I remember him not being happy about that one (terraced houses).

Re: Depressing

"...telemetry and particularly crash reporting to be hugely beneficial to the development process"

@doowles: don't you end up with loads of very similar crash reports? Lots of duplication? Just wondering how this works for programmers, not challenging or doubting what you say.

https://www.schrodinger.com/platform

https://yum-info.contradodigital.com/view-package/epel/schroedinger/

A superposition of libraries to consider.