Posts by bailey86 181 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Dec 2011
Just had to upgrade to Ubuntu 17.04 for other reasons - and due to thinking I had a Unity problem I tried other desktops.
I was happy enough with Unity - the alt-tab and alt-` are really useful. But the winner for me is Gnome shell.
As mentioned - it just feels cleaner/faster/more polished - alt-tab and alt-` is done better - and it mainly stays out of the way. And it's nice to have a change!
The response from the French, German, Italian, Spanish, etc press on the Monday after the referendum was unanimous criticism of the EU for not looking after working class people and being to federalist.
An Italian paper suggested that power should be transfered from the European commission to the European parliament.
Incredibly, incredibly dangerous.
If the will of the people is not followed then there will pretty much definitely be bad consequences. 1.2 million more people voted leave then voted remain - that's a huge number of people.
We discussed it to death, we had debates, newspapers were full of little else. Then we the people decided - and we voted to leave.
Leave was a democratic decision - and democracy is precious. The sight of a Prime Minister peacefully leaving No 10 after losing an election is something to be incredibly proud of. The sight of ministers standing in draughty church halls hoping that we the people have voted for them is special. Not enough votes, then don't get in your ministerial car, you're not wanted anymore, go home. We want someone new and fresh doing the job instead.
What you are proposing is to block the democratic process. What? Would you like the army to step in to stop Brexit? Or a coup d'etat by Ed Milliband and Nick Clegg (who were the only really pro remain politicians).
And this is something you may have missed about the EU - it is not just a project to create a Federal superstate of Europe - it is to be an unelected, unaccountable dictatorship of cronies and eurocrats. Just look up the quotes from JC Juncker - and that is just the public quotes!
One day the scale of the near miss - and how we've just avoided disaster by voting leave will become clear. Either the EU will seriously reform, backtrack on it's empire building, get more democratic etc. Or it will continue on it's current empire building path, and implode due to the inherent waste and inefficiency which is directly caused by its lack of democratic values.
You may think that you're 'right' and that millions of others were 'wrong'. I happen to think that I'm 'right' and you are 'wrong'. So we have a disagreement. So, in a democracy we debate it, then we vote, then we follow the will of the people.
And before you think of all the Leave voters as inherently stupid or naive please think about it. Is everyone who disagrees with you stupid by definition? Hmmm.
Personally I have spoken to Remain people and they have no clue about the EU referendums of 2005, about which countries voted etc. How we were told we didn't need a vote by president Blaire. And how the referendum votes in France and Holland against the vast EU expansion of sovereignty were completely ignored by the EU and enacted anyway as the Lisbon treaty. How can they say others are stupid when they don't this basic bit of EU history?
It just proves to me how arbitrary and undemocratic the EU is. And why we are best out of it.
Either we are entitled to the funding or not according to some rules. And these rules should be respected and enforced.
How come some unelected, unknown someone just decide off their own backs where the money goes. This is the core of the EU problem - unelected, unaccountable, not sticking to the rules even if there are any. This is what has lead to the massive EU corruption and waste - as non-democratic processes always will.
http://jubileedebt.org.uk/reports-briefings/briefing/the-never-ending-austerity-story-why-greeces-third-bailout-solves-nothing
https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Juncker
http://www.aecr.eu/the-eu-is-fed-up-with-democracy/
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2016/07/15/italian-banking-crisis/
Hitler / Junker finds out about Brexit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUFQwtA6FYQ
I think some cool heads and intelligent people have now looked at Credit and realised how much better off we're going to be. This is why Theresa is pushing ahead with it.
Steady as she goes number one.
It's a blight of our industry that others think that all socially inept A types are geniuses.
I've come across a few A types who were incompetent - but used the obscurity of the tech to cover up their inadequacies as techies and who deliberately deceived management. Don't underestimate the willingness of some A types to be devious and disingenuous.
I think there's an easy way to distinguish between any good programmers and poor ones - are they good at documentation? If you hear the 'self-documenting' nonsense then run a mile - if someone considers documentation as part of doing a good job then that's someone who can be part of a team.
Of course, sometimes, management don't care about long term maintainability. In that case it's fine to have one person working on a project in any way they want. As long as management are prepared to pay for replacing the whole system if that one person leaves. I've been called into that sort of situation as well - and the options I presented were to replace whole system - or offer stupendous pay to get the one person back.
'Congratulations. What you have described is what I call Dev Dev. Not once in your comment did you mention systems.'
Of course (live) systems are involved in what I wrote. That's why I put the example of the live hosting being implemented from the very beginning of a project. And that would obviously include how those live systems are maintained etc. It was a main point of what I wrote.
As an extreme example, too often this is only thought of after a developer has built a site on their laptop. Some live hosting is arranged, the site is now copied to that hosting - and only now does anyone think of how to deploy changes to the live site in a managed, tested and safe way.
I thought I'd made it clear. And automated testing should mean that deployment to live is trivial. In fact, I worked in one place where devops was done well and deployment to live was carried out by junior devs.
And also, it is why you need CTO backing. To implement Devops you need be able to organise both development and systems - and CTO backing will be needed because very often those two groups will dig their heels in.
One developer working on a new site/application which is not live yet - easy.
One developer working on a site/application which is now live with transactions/articles etc flooding in - not so easy.
(Remember folks - the days of static websites are pretty much behind us).
Many developers working on a live site/application simultaneously - very hard. Devops needed.
Get it right and the stakeholders can be extremely happy - a team (which, ahem, I set up the Devops for) received (expensive) champagne for a project delivered ahead of schedule.
Most of the time there are two main problems.
The first is developers who have no idea about Devops and have no inclination to work as part of a team. If you have developers like this then the only way Devops can be implemented is with CTO backing.
This brings us to the second problem. Most management do not understand the need for Devops. They think that their genius developers can all work together on the same systems without any management/devops - as if by magic. Then they are puzzled why nothing gets fixed anything like quickly.
The good news - the kidz who know their stuff are trying to sort it out. Github/Bitbucket, Pull requests, CI tools like Shippable/CircleCI, automated testing, Heroku, hosted MySQL/CDN's, Javascript apps sitting on REST API's, Slack, Basecamp, Ticket systems, etc, etc. But unless there is CTO buy-in to get someone to implement this properly then most projects will turn to mush after they go live.
And this is a key point - before a project goes live it's easy - any part can safely be bodged around with - progress seems to be good. As soon as it's live the development grinds to a near halt.
One of the answers is that the whole development and deployment to live needs to be sorted out at the very beginning of the project - before any meaningful development has taken place. So,as an extreme example - a live site could be initially set up with a single 'Hello World' HTML page (behind HTTP AUTH etc) and the developers are set up to deploy their changes safely to live during the development process. Site editors can also be adding content to the new 'live' site. Then, 'going live' means simply removing the HTTP AUTH - and - crucially - further development is carried out in exactly the same way that development was carried out during the site build.
The final part of this is missing from most places where I've worked - and it is key - difficult - but key. Automated testing - primarily BDD testing I would say over unit testing. Imagine your site/application having every single aspect built with a test implemented at the same time. I've worked somewhere where websites could have a few thousand tests each. So a developer makes a change - large or small - and after they submit their change three thousand tests run (on dev/QA/staging etc) to check everything else on the site/application still works. Beautiful - and the way it should be done.
And I agree with the article - this Devops needs to be maintained/enhanced throughout the project development cycle - and even into the maintenance cycle.
Errr...
People go into Apple stores, or go onto Apple's website, and order Apple branded products, which are supported by Apple, and run software written by Apple, and link to Apple on-line services and pay their money to ... yep ... you guessed it ... Apple. Who manage all the advertising, selling, buying, inventory, shipping, etc etc - and this is all carried out worldwide.
Turns out they have to outsource most of their manufacturing from the US to China - that's the point that Cook was making - they are forced to do so because of the lack of skilled workers in the US - that was the whole point of the article.
RE the request for 30,000 engineers:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203687504577003763659779448
'Jobs told Mr. Obama that Apple employs 700,000 factory workers in China because it can't find the 30,000 engineers in the U.S. that it needs on site at its plants. "If you could educate these engineers," he said at the dinner, "we could move more manufacturing jobs here."'
Also,
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/nov/22/michele-bachmann/michele-bachmann-says-steve-jobs-told-obama-he-mov/
I agree that the USA should work towards universal, good quality state education - it would be good for them as a country. I know it's stating the obvious but a country with a better educated population is going to make more money - which I think is why I think the USA is getting more into debt all the time. And Cook may well advocate improving education - I just don't see it happening anytime soon. (President Trump might prove me wrong - ya never know).
And I think you need to be careful when comparing human rights records and personal freedom between China and the USA. The USA has far, far higher incarceration rates (please Google this is you need the details). They've framed people and locked them up in solitary confinement for forty years for daring to ask for better conditions, locked people up for 23 years even though they knew someone else had been convicted for the crime, etc etc etc. Sadly these cases are just the tip of a planet sized iceberg of suffering.
At least good education is available to all in China. And as for the ability to change the system my point is that the current US governance system is designed to keep the status quo - i.e. a very rich elite trying to keep society inherently unfair. My point is that this may only be changed by cataclysmic events - and the country running out of money might just cause such events.
Wait - you didn't think that all Apple's one million Chinese workers are illiterate peasants fresh in from the paddy fields did you?
Many years ago Steve Jobs explained to Obama that he needed about 30,000 skilled engineer types (ref WA's biography). He needed engineers to build and run the plants and China had them available.
If it was unskilled workers only which were needed then the USA has tens of millions of unskilled, uneducated workers prepared to work for peanuts - no problem - but it had nowhere near enough skilled workers.
China has worked hard for a long time to improve state education *for all* - and has especially worked hard to train technical personnel.
The US of A has catastrophically missed it's chance here. I get the impression that the ruling elites in the USA are stuck in the plantation owner mentality of the 18th century - i.e. an extremely rich elite exploiting unskilled workers.
So in the 21st century the USA has a too large a percentage of unskilled and poorly educated population being kept in place by a justice system which seems to border on institutionalised slavery - whereas China has increased its skilled population for decades.
The result is that China now has all of the USA's money - which must surely mean that the USA as a country is unsustainable.
Sadly, I don't see the USA changing anytime soon - and I fear it will only be by a cataclysmic failure that their system of governance will change.
(Bootnote - I'm no Apple fanboy (not owning a single Apple device) - but give them credit for doing a hard thing and being a manufacturer. We're told all the time that manufacturing and exporting is good for a country).
OK.
Landlords or companies found guilty of not maintaining properties within the regulations are get banned from renting out properties. Sounds fair so far.
Those houses are then available for purchase - so - due to the law of supply and demand - more houses are available - prices go down - and first time buyers will find it easier to get on the housing ladder.
What's not to like.
BTW - This is what they used to have in Sweden - no ownership of private property unless you lived in it. The result - plenty of high quality housing available at half the cost of what it was in the UK at the time. When I was there it was quite surprising to see beer at fives times the UK prices - houses at half the UK prices.
Sorry to state the well known obvious - but the more private landlords you have the higher the property prices. All I'm suggesting is to enforce the rules more strongly to get rid of the bad ones - and make all of them pay more tax.
Remember, it was the landlords who used to pay the council tax (called housing rates) until the landlord's friend Thatcher transferred that bill on to the tenants as the poll tax which is now the council tax. And Thatcher brought in the tenancy agreements which allow landlords to kick people when it suits them (every six months I know but if you've got kids in school six months is nothing). So they've had a good deal over the last 30 years. Time we redressed the balance - and as mentioned - no private landlords - just regulated housing associations and council houses like they had in Sweden would be the best way to provide good quality, affordable housing stock.
'You know your onto a good thing and would be worse off paying the same rates of TAX as a permie and this is why you are a contractor instead of permie, because the money is better as you pay less tax.'
I think I need to restate what I said.
If IT professionals had to be short term permies then working in London would be pretty much unfeasible - earnings can be less than a decent living. I've worked with permies in London and they are so badly paid they have to commute for hours and live in cheap areas - not sustainable long term. Most of them eventually make the jump to contracting (or certainly want to). And these guys are very often experienced guys who are very good at what they do.
Contracting isn't just about how much tax you pay - it's what you can claim for as expenses.
There is a London bubble problem.
Also, companies need flexibility when employing IT staff. Might need someone for only one/two months - part time - for a few days etc. Contractors have to still pay the bills in between contracts - so need to be paid more to build up a buffer.
Permies often think contractors are raking it in - but how would you cope with effectively losing your job every few months and having to interview/negotiate for a new position whilst still getting bills in. The grass is really just the same shade of green - we're workers too just trying to make ends meet (in our case by providing a flexible service).
And as mentioned - it's not that contractors pay no tax - don't forget VAT. And before anyone says VAT is zero gain - then why is it implemented? You add value - a company expands - makes more money - pays more VAT. ATW the government received 97.7 billion in VAT in 2014. I'm happy to pay no VAT if people think it is a zero gain tax - but 97.7 billion doesn't sound like zero gain to me.
(And BTW - closing down VAT carousel fraud by sorting out the rules properly might be another area GO could look into).
Finally, Landlords. I bet not one landlord works as hard as the average contractor. They contribute nothing to society - just making money from money. As mentioned - getting rid of the bad ones would at least be a step forward. It would release more housing stock which may help the housing situation - and get away from the ridiculous situation we've got now where paying rent can be more expensive than what the 'landlord' is paying for the mortgage.
How will killing off several entire industry sectors and destroying companies ability to improve their IT systems boost the coffers?
(And lets get this out of the way first - before you think contractors pay no tax I'd like to point out that most pay plenty of VAT - and HMRC are already going to increase their dividend payment tax take due to dividend tax changes - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dividend-allowance-factsheet/dividend-allowance-factsheet).
A quick look has shown that the IT outsourcing industry was worth 41 billion GBP in 2011 - probably even larger now. Let alone the support industries like the recruitment agents, accountants, insurance companies (for liability cover), hotels, train companies, car leasing, B&B's, restaurants, service stations, coffee shops etc etc whose staff are all employees.
The Recruitment Industry alone is worth over 28 billion of which the largest part will be placing contractors (which feels about right to me since the agencies I've seen have very shiny offices in very expensive areas of the city).
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/11191471/Recruitment-industry-now-bigger-than-its-pre-crisis-peak.html
So all that would go to zero.
To put it simply - currently companies do not pay anywhere near enough wages in London or other big cities to properly cover transport and housing costs. Contractors can claim for costs when working away from home which makes working for London companies feasible.
So, thrusting companies will want to expand, more staff/turnover (more tax paid) etc and will need to expand their IT (because EVERYTHING runs on IT) - and they won't be able to because all the IT contractors have disappeared and are now claiming benefits due to there being not enough jobs in their home towns.
Blame the London bubble if you like - but that's the way it is.
The biggest loss is this - flexibility for industry.
It's weird that a Conservative chancellor is even thinking of severely damaging the British economy by trying to get us all on to a sort of Marxist, everybody on the payroll, inflexible Communist style industry control.
If he wants more tax revenue then maybe he should go after the private housing sector. All those landlords living off everybody else's backs while channeling their 'profits' through private companies. Get them into jobs and paying PAYE. Maybe ban people from being landlords if they don't maintain properties properly. Hike the tax landlords pay (and get them to pay the rates again) to discourage people making money from nothing - boost the fair rent systems like they've had to in some cities in the US of Capitalism. Even, say it quietly, rebuild all the council houses and flats which Labour governments built and which the Tories gave away for votes. People might then be able to live AND work in London.
Am I right in thinking this is for PHP-FPM only?
http://legalhackers.com/advisories/zend-framework-XXE-vuln.txt
'I. VULNERABILITY
-------------------------
Zend Framework <= 2.4.2 XML eXternal Entity Injection (XXE) on PHP FPM
Zend Framework <= 1.12.13
...
- PHP FPM
http://php.net/manual/en/install.fpm.php
"FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with
some additional features (mostly) useful for heavy-loaded sites."
Starting from release 5.3.3 in early 2010, PHP merged the php-fpm fastCGI
process manager into its codebase. However PHP-FPM was available earlier as a
separate project (http://php-fpm.org/).'
So does this mean that standard Apache/PHP installs are OK? And on Debian unless php5-fpm is installed we should be OK?
'Dispose the whole shi%#t altogether. Google made absolutely sure it is a PITA to install Linux on it.'
Errm. Installing Crouton (Ubuntu for chromebooks) is fairly trivial - just one command to install and then one to run it.
'Download crouton
Open a shell (Ctrl+Alt+T, type shell and hit enter) and run sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -t xfce
Wait patiently and answer the prompts like a good person.
Done! You can jump straight to your Xfce session by running sudo enter-chroot startxfce4 or, as a special shortcut, sudo startxfce4'
I installed unity instead. It's all so easy because ChromeOS is based on Linux. For the techies - Crouton installs a simple chrooted login.
So, my Lenovo N20 chromebook becomes a 1Kg SSD drived laptop running Ubuntu perfectly and fast - at a cost of 180 quid!
Since they tend to come running home to the mummy country when they get elderly and suddenly prefer to be back in the bosom of the NHS and care services it's only right they they contribute to the UK whilst earning (often tax-free) money abroad.
Otherwise they are being incredibly selfish - and surely Worstall (who I agree with on many points) would not be justifying that would he?
Normal Bleutooth audio may be lacking - but Aptx is great. I have a...
http://www.richersounds.com/product/wireless-streaming-accessories/qed/uplay-plus/qed-uplay-plus
...so I can feed 320kbit music from my S4 into my stereo (stereo grandad!) and it works great - audio quality plenty good enough for me.
Some Cambridge Audio bluethooth speakers do Aptx as well - and again sound pretty good when you take into account the limitation of a standalone speaker. Some are even contain a rechargeable battery which is great for beach, BBQ's etc.
I contracted at a company in High Wycombe which sells technical musical equipment. Great place to work, lovely atmosphere, chef cooked free lunches, free Nespresso's all day etc.
The main IT guy was a nice bloke who was trying to run a Windows network - however!
He told me that over the course of a few months they'd expanded and taken on designers, musicians, coders, techies etc - all in all about 12-14 new staff.
He said that something like all but one had said they wanted to use a Mac - and - nearly all had actually turned up with their Mac's expecting to get on with their work on them.The main Windows users were admin staff using email and spreadsheets on their company issued Windows machines.
And - the article picture reminds me of Drupalcon Croydon 2011. Full of very techie people doing very techie things - and when I looked around the main hall with several hundred delegates in it all I could see were Apple logos - and that was four years ago. Me - on my old Elitebook with Ubuntu installed.
Things do seem to be changing.
NT4 wasn't really fit for purpose until SP6 - which was so large it was more like a new OS - and SP6 was released over a year after USB 1.1.
Some of us were trying to use NT4 on our workstations as it was more stable than win98 so USB would have been nice. Acutally, it was because NT4 couldn't run a dial-up modem that I switched to Linux. If I've needed to use an MS only tool (VB6, XML Spy) I've run Windows in an VM - and actually Win2000 worked well in a VM - the bloated XP, not so good.
Going back a bit it was easier to get Debian on to HP servers than Dell - which is why we have bought HP (approx 10/12 servers) for the last ten years. ISTR they had released drivers as open source and had Debian install images available - and probably as a result we've never hit a problem installing Debian/Ubuntu. Their ILO stuff where you can get a web interface to the hardware bypassing the OS ain't bad either - but it does need licenses which complicates things - so if they release that as open source as well then that would be helpful.
First off - conspiracy to commit murder is wrong - but I no longer trust the US of Oil so put that aside. Selling services for murder is wrong (sadly/ironically if drugs were legal then disputes could be settled in court and there would far, far less demand for hitmen). As for selling passports - well if there were more peacemakers in the world and fewer warmongers then people wouldn’t be so desperate to bend the system.
So, a person helped willing buyers buy from willing sellers - and this is wrong why?
My understanding is that there was quality feedback/reviews. This guy should be given a knighthood for saving hundreds/thousands of lives of people who bought good quality pills from reviewed sources rather than some ketamine laced death pill from a dodgy asshole in a nightclub.
Even the fucking judge knew he was a good guy
‘she described Ulbricht as "a complicated person" who didn't "fit the typical criminal profile"
before spinelessly handing out a sentence worse than what the prosecution asked for.
Now that judge, has she never, ever done drugs - has none of her children, friends, relatives, associates ever done any illegal drugs at all. Of course they have - we all have. So why don’t we ALL go down to the jails and hand ourselves in. Why don’t we all just go now and sit in prison.
BTW - Let’s look at Katherine Bolan Forrest
According to WP - ‘In August 2014, Forrest dismissed a price-fixing suit against Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Glencore. She held that, although the defendant's actions did affect the aluminium marketplace, the plaintiffs failed to show the defendants had intended to manipulate prices.’
Hmmmm.. Nothing dodgy there at all - she sounds like a model crusader for justice. Nonsensical lying double-speak of which Orwell would be proud.
And she has two children - and I assume she loves them as much as we all love our own children. I wonder - what would she do if she heard one of her kids had had a spliff - would she immediately march them off to jail and throw them into one of the USA’s brutal gulags they call jail. No, probably not.
We have a fucking Prime Minister who’s probably done some coke (he won’t deny it cos then someone would probably come out and say that he did). So why isn’t HE in prison? After all, that would mean he’s an evil drug-taking sicko.
The reality is that we all take fun stuff when we’re younger - and then grow out of it - maybe apart from the occasional spliff. Some people have seriously fucked up lives (mainly due to alcohol problems in the family - ironically, if more people smoked cannabis and fewer drank alcohol then there would be less abuse/violence around) and these people hit the hard drugs to shut out their problems. These people need help not jail.
Reality check number two - legalising drugs has been a success in Portugal (drug use down) and Colarado (with the bonus of hugely increased tax income).
Reality check number three - because there is so much illegal money to be made in drug import/export the very worst of humankind get to be extremely rich and more powerful than governments (see South America or examples). These psychopaths then get to fund wars, carry out trafficking, murders, bribery, corruption and extortion - so then everyone suffers.
You want the world to be a better place - then legalise all drugs. It’s time everybody stopped being hypocrites.
Thanks for that - the instructions are also available here:
http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_remove_systemd_from_a_Debian_jessie/sid_installation
Hmmm... what to do?
On servers I can't really see that services such as Apache/MySQL/etc would be affected by reliance on systemd. So, it might be possible to install Jessie - carry out your instructions - and then carry on. If a required package needs systemd then use something else.
I'm currently trying to find a comprehensive list of what packages would rely on systemd.
Bear in mind that the guys calling might be victims themselves - and maybe working for people who are not very nice. And surely it's a symptom of poverty that this is one of the 'work' options available.
We (wife and I) do a polite 'Sorry, we have no computers here' and a second or two later the call usually drops.
Smells to me like a difficult problem which they are trying to sort out properly. Everyone always underestimates the costs/time required to do the job solidly - and a reset makes perfect sense. It's well know then version 1.0 is how you analyse the problem and version 2.0 is where you may get things right.
That's right Anonymous Coward - I'd blame myself for being careless and stupid. I certainly wouldn't call for the death penalty/gitmo treatment for the chancers who wandered in and took my stuff. I wouldn't be happy with them but I'd be an adult and take responsibility for my own slip-up.
It's about time more people started acting like grown-ups and facing up to their screw-ups - rather than calling in the spin-doctors, Feds and SWAT teams to say 'there, there, there - all bedder now - you can stop crying."
Go and see the video footage of the heartless, infantile helicopters pilots murdering civilians including children.
And of course the US of Hate is going to try to get Assange into Gitmo - look at how hard they tried to get McKinnon for merely finding that the idiots had not set passwords on their servers.
It's even more laughable - they are moving their head office approx 15 miles just to get this contract:
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/Munich,+Germany/Unterschlei%C3%9Fheim,+Germany/@48.2262922,11.5214542,12z/data=!4m15!4m14!1m5!1m1!1s0x479e75f9a38c5fd9:0x10cb84a7db1987d!2m2!1d11.5819806!2d48.1351253!1m5!1m1!1s0x479e71b56804dedb:0x41d25a40937a470!2m2!1d11.5672!2d48.28412!3e0!5i2
It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
And Kolab looks pretty good to me.
https://mykolab.com/screenshots
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2174714/data-center/munich-opts-for-open-source-groupware-from-kolab.html
And I've been using the very latest Outlook/Exchange on my latest contract - and it's bloated rubbish. It seems to be more confusing and impossible to use then when I last used it in 1999. Add in the fact that Exchange is now so bloated that one person is not enough to run an instance and I reckon Munich are in for a world of pain.
And there we are people:
'The report also notes that Microsoft is planning to move its German HQ from nearby Unterschleissheim to Munich as of 2016'
That's how desparated MS are to win this sinlge contract that they are prepared to waste possibly hundreds of millions to get it.
The shame is that no-one cares about the workers who will now get slower more unreliable software. If they do switch to MS I really feel for the Munich workers who will get genuinely depressed from using such poor software. The best will leave and Munich's quality of service will nosedive. All to satisfy some egos at MS.
What would Steve do?
After reading Walter Isaacson's biography I would say that SJ would have spent 3 bill on making something awesome instead. Heck, for 3 bill they could have bought all their customers a pair of Sennheiser's each.
Saying that - a colleague has pointed out that Beat stuff is *very* popular with the kidz - so maybe a good money making move - but as mentioned - I don't think SJ would have liked the strategy.
The anti-chromebook shills are pretty fast and furious - someone/somecorp must be worried.
I catch trains regularly and see everyone lugging heavy laptops doing spreadsheets, docs when a Chromebook would be fine. Certainly on my trains which come with cheap wifi.
My laptop (Elitetebook) and charger come to about 2.5 Kg - my HP 11 inch Chromebook uses a phone charger and comes to 1Kg. I know which I prefer to have in my backback when travelling to clients, being away, holiday etc. It's almost down to the weight of an iPad.
Good browser, Google docs - and crucially Secure Shell which gets me into servers. Most accounts, documentation, ticket systems are web based these days (or probably should be). All I'm missing is Netbeans - but if I'm using NB then it means I'm doing some serious work for a few days/weeks and I'll leave my normal laptop onsite anyway.
Sofa surfing - it makes a better (and cheaper) tablet than a tablet. Multiple tabs, wireless mouse, great keyboard. Also, mine has no fans, air ducts - sits on lap on sofa or in bed with no overheating.
School use - no-brainer. Zero maintenance, access to Google docs, Scratch and other online resources. Login to any machine with your Google account and all your bookmarks, apps, extensions, etc are all there.
And all this at £200.00.
My only complaint is mine is probably a little under powered - I went for the lightest - but I presume they'll get nippier with time.
I predict things will get very interesting.
Thought I'd like to record a thanks for gplus. It means I can easily decide which circles see which posts, which means I can bore my family with pics of the kids, but save my friends from seeing them.
Also, gplus seems to be the go to means for techies to share posts and discuss technology subjects. Being able to subscribe to a circle for, say, Drupal, JavaScript discussions is really useful.
At least we have choices.
I think it's a shame that Ubuntu didn't stick to a basic default such as Gnome 2 or XFCE. Users who wanted to try advanced stuff like Unity could have added it and used it as well - or it could have been an option on the install screen.
The shame is that you need to be a slightly technical user to install the simpler desktop - it should have been that the default install should have supplied a basic desktop.
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