• 31 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I am completely satisfied with the idea that all doctors should be career doctors who have dedicated a large part of their life to the study and practice of medicine.

    I am not entirely as satisfied with the idea that all politicians should be career politicians who have dedicated a large part of their life to the study and practice of politics.

    Parliament would be a much richer and more effective place if it were populated by people from a range of backgrounds and specialisms. I don’t think it’s a good thing that a sizeable fraction of them all studied the same politics degree at the same two universities.








  • It’s a command that pulls a whole bunch of useful system information and sticks it on one page.

    Really, the biggest use of it is for showing other people your system- especially showing off. It’s a staple of “look at my system” brag posts.

    But to be generous, there are (small) legit use cases for it. If you manage a lot of machines, and you plausibly don’t know the basic system information for whatever you happen to be working on in this instant, it’s a program that will give you most of what you could want to know in a single command. Yes, 100% of the information could be retrieved just as easily using other standard commands, but having it in a single short command, outputting to a single overview page, formatted to be easily readable at a glance, is no bad thing.





















  • I don’t think these stories are “designed” to do anything in particular; they’re just reporting on reality.

    It’s no more than a story about “a building has burned down” is “designed” to make arsonists think about what they’ve done. Sometimes it’s just about reporting the facts.

    And in any case, Leave voters aren’t a monolithic group. They run the gamut from “die hard UKIP hardcore eurosceptics” to “I just wanted to give David Cameron a bloody nose”. There’s a significant group of Leave voters for whom “Brexit has cost us lots of money” is an interesting story with cut through.



  • Almost two decades ago, as a teenager, I decided to give Linux a try as a bit of fun and as a learning activity. I put Ubuntu 6.06 on an old Windows 95 desktop which was languishing in a cupboard having been long replaced. The install disc was, I’m fairly sure, a freebie that came with a magazine. I was amazed at how easy it was to install and how smoothly it ran, and had lots of fun playing around with it and learning the ropes.

    Have had a Linux machine or two on the go ever since. At some point in the last decade I made the switch from using Windows as my main OS to using Linux as my main, and these days I only use Windows on my corporate-provisioned work laptops.

    I’m still an Ubuntu user. I’ve distro hopped occasionally, and Debian has a place in my heart, but I always came back to Ubuntu. There’s a lot of meming about Ubuntu being terrible, but the reality is that it remains an incredibly polished, high-quality, “just works” OS which largely keeps out of my way.

    Over the last two decades I moved into software engineering as a career, although I’ve since moved out of the industry onto non-techy things. Linux continues to scratch my techy itch in my spare time.




  • To be fair, there are (or were) lots of distros downstream of RHEL marketing themselves as drop-in replacements, not just Oracle. And this move isn’t likely to stop Oracle (and the rest), only make the transition experience less smooth for clients (ultimately all the downstream distros can just rebase off of CentOS Stream instead; they lose “bug for bug” compatibility, but will still largely be drop-in replacements).

    I also find it hard to muster any sympathy for IBM of all people, even when their opponent is Oracle (who are the lowest of the low).