Unemployment up, vacancies down, youth unemployment highest for 11 years, wage growth down. It doesn't really tally with the large economic growth reported a few days ago.
Not suggesting anything dodgy, I wonder where the mismatch is. Just reporting lag between growth and employment figures, much higher productivity via AI, something else?
There was disucssion the other day about hospitality and again mismatch in number of opening / closures now versus employment opportunities in that sector. Is that venues just opening for a much more limited amount of time? Or again reporting lag and that there is now a lot more closures?
Locally
Massive new Ibis and Mercure hotels in Paignton and stunning new top end IHG Group hotel in Torquay opened in last 12 months
New Shopping developments in Paignton and Torquay. Much needed visible regeneration Tory Council using Labour Government grants and funding
Brixham extending Harbour capacity and plans for a new harbour wall to increase Harbour size.
Massive new Marina and Hospitality site under development Nos Marina on River Dart up river from Dartmouth.
Very positive signs of growth, regeneration in South Devon
Much as I dont't want to talk down the South Hams/Torbay...
Retail in both Paignton and Torquay is bleak. To think back in the day, Torquay had stores such as Chanel.
And Noss Mayo is currently very underwhelming. Great loocation, but no reason to go there. A small cafe - other than that, the retail is solely around buying boats and chandlery.
The local hotel capacity is probably overdone. There is concern locally that unused capacity will be used for asylum seekers.
Labour members may think Mr Streeting shouldn't have resigned, but given the opposition he'd voiced he surely couldn't stay in post. What they should have asked was whether he should have voiced that opposition in the first place.
There's a touch of cognitive dissonance in the poll answers. They want Starmer gone, but disapprove of any practical action to dislodge the limpet.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
Apple bit naughty with the multiple monitor support, artifically capping it with different chips. But M4 onwards can, if I remember correctly standard m4/m5 chip in macbook air = 2 external monitors, but mac mini can do 3 and the max chip in all devices can drive silly amount of external monitors, I think 5. These can all be ultra high res monitors like 5k. You can also always buy a displaylink dock that allows 3+ external monitors.
Because of the shared memory between cpu and gpu, for a good experience, the real limiting factor is amount of RAM. But 16Gb should be plenty to drive multiple monitors with ease. The M series chips really are a revolution.
Not anymore all M4/M5 machines can run 2 external monitors with the built in display also working
"if I remember correctly standard m4/m5 chip in macbook air = 2 external monitors, but mac mini can do 3 and the max chip in all devices can drive silly amount of external monitors, I think 5"
That is what I said 2 external monitors. They are still artifically capping it as it could drive more.
I don’t think it’s so much artificial as looking at memory bandwidth and going - got to put the limit here for things to work nicely
You can drive 3 external display with no issues through 3rd party tech, including a set up with super ultra width and 4k monitors, even on the base M2. So the thought Apple couldn't make it work natively for 3 rather than the cap of 1 was BS to again drive people up their ladder.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
That's always been a compulsory GCSE.
And the content of the current one was written by Michael Gove personally. Having taught it, it's anything but as described. So if you think it is woke, either you have seriously misunderstood it or your daughter's teachers have found a remarkable way to manipulate it.
As it happens, my younger daughter is doing GCSE English at the moment.
What board is this? Her essay on Mice and Men (for example) included none of this, and she got a very high grade on the coursework element.
A former boss held the opinion the Steinbeck was the best thing ever but, after doing Of Mice and Men at school, I can never bring myself to even try anything else he wrote.
It has the advantage of being short! Steinbeck wrote much better books. Is it English literature though or world literature in English?
OMandM is not available in GCSE Eng Lit in England. It is in Wales and is for iGCSE. Gove specifically took it off for being written by somebody who was not English and too woke.
How he left A Christmas Carol in on that basis I've no idea but I suppose that is at least by an English author.
Its a few years since my boys did Eng Lit, but my complaint about it was more that only passages of Shakespeare etc were covered rather than the entire work, thereby failing the big picture.
To be fair that is one improvement. The question is now 'Starting with the extract, explore how X/Y/Z is presented in this play.'
I still think it would be better to have actual copies and refer to it all the way through though.
The key question to me is "what is the point of studying English Literature?"
Is it to give some grounding in our culture? Is it to teach critical analysis of texts? Is it to instill a love of reading as a pleasure? Or more depressingly is it to pass an exam with tick box answers?
In large part these are contradictory.
I think that at GCSE level a large part of the point, as with almost every subject, is "introduce everybody to this general area of study and culture, so that the people who didn't know they were going to find it interesting have a chance to encounter it, and go on to maybe study it further or maybe just have a side interest in later life". Plus some practice in the general skills of "get better at reading, thinking about it and writing out an argument or opinion".
Remember that big row we had, a few days ago? When I had an epiphany on the train from Berwick to King’s X, and I realised the big problem with HS2 was the obsession with speed? As I said then, we don’t need the speed, Britain is tiny. We just need the extra capacity
“THE obsession with HS2’s speed is to blame for its failure, an official review has found.
“The project’s focus on achieving the “highest possible speeds” has led to spiralling costs that have crippled progress, according to Sir Stephen Lovegrove. The former national security adviser said the high-speed rail line had gone “disastrously wrong” because of the decision to “gold plate” the project and political pressure to “keep things moving”.”
I don’t need or expect grovelling apologies. I will, however, accept large financial gifts. DM me for my bank deets
I thought the mocking was because you were several years behind schedule relative to the PB train experts who'd been saying that HS2 was about getting the fast passenger trains off the existing lines.
ECML was still not as quick as it was pre-privatisation 90-91 last time I used it, back then there was talk of London-Edinburgh in 2 hours.
Um the fastest ever London to Edinburgh train was 3 hours 29 minutes achieved by 91012 and a shortened mark 4 rake on a non-stop press run in September 1991.
It was 5h30 after the Peterborough improvements in 1971-72.
It then drifted towards 5h40 (but remainded 5h3x) going up to 1977.
In 1977 with the line improvements for HSTs being implemented, the Flying Scotsman was reduced to ~5h27/5h28 with Deltics in their last year on the service.
The HSTs came in and reduced it to (IIRC) 4h47/4h50 in May 1978, then further 4h37/4h40 in May 1979.
4h35 in 1982, following linespeed improvements in Scotland
4h30 in 1985, following the Selby diversion
It drifted up a few mins after this before falling to an all-time best of 4h23 by 1988/9.
Under Diesel it was 6 hours 35 - the A4's weren't that fast.
To add - the problem is all the easy improvements have been done. on the ECML from York onwards the remaining sensible improvements is diverting to the outskirts of Northallerton (it currently goes through the town) and straightening the route between Darlington and Newcastle for it's currently rather slow and windy.
But that will cost billions so is way down the list of priorities - reality is it's going to be roughly 4 hours for ever more..
Particualrly if they ever do build an actual high speed line to Glasgow with a branch to Edinburgh.
Happy to oblige with my comment FPT
Remember that big row we had, a few days ago? When I had an epiphany on the train from Berwick to King’s X, and I realised the big problem with HS2 was the obsession with speed? As I said then, we don’t need the speed, Britain is tiny. We just need the extra capacity
“THE obsession with HS2’s speed is to blame for its failure, an official review has found.
“The project’s focus on achieving the “highest possible speeds” has led to spiralling costs that have crippled progress, according to Sir Stephen Lovegrove. The former national security adviser said the high-speed rail line had gone “disastrously wrong” because of the decision to “gold plate” the project and political pressure to “keep things moving”.”
I don’t need or expect grovelling apologies. I will, however, accept large financial gifts. DM me for my bank deets
This is a subject I know quite a bit about, unlike most of my output.
It's not about speed. It's about capacity. Fixed track is still the most efficient way of transporting large numbers of people. And it's not even primarily about, say, Manchester - London capacity. It's about taking the Manchester-London (the logic works just as well for other city pairings) trains off the local network so you can run far more trains on the local network in Greater Manchester and Staffordshire and so on.
By far the easiest and cheapest(!) way of doing this is new infrastructure. 4-tracking existing 2-track alignments is superficially attractive but 1) it is hugely expensive and difficult to tinker with the live railway rather than put in new off-line improvements, 2) every junction you meet you need to grade separate, which is eye-wateringly expensive, and 3) in most cases, towns have been built up to the railways built in Victorian times - there is rarely the land available, and aquiring and demolishing large numbers of houses is expensive and politically difficult.
And if you are going to construct a new alignment, you may as well engineer well so the new trains can go reasonably quickly.
I do strongly agree however that in a medium sized, densely populated country such as ours, you get diminishing returns on particularly high speeds. 200kph is probably fine, and considerably cheaper than 300kph.
(Much of the rationale for the speed was to make rail competitive with air between London and Glasgow, which does have some economic logic to it (the arguments here are complex so i'd ask you to trust me on this, which is a bold ask on an internet forum). However, there was never a plan to do anything new north of Wigan - i.e. for half the route - and because the new trains don't tilt, they would actually have to go more slowly than the existing trains between Wigan and Glasgow, losing some of the advantage of the southern half of the route and also potentially slowing down other traffic on the network. So not a great outcome even if you do get your speedy bits in South Britain.)
Hi Cookie
When you look at west coast main line, there is a couple of large bends at the bottom of Cumbria near Kendal where the line obviously has to follow the valley.
I'm assuming that things like this, plus the volume of towns etc in Lancashire, and the more rugged landscape will add a fair bit more journey time on, compared to the east coast line, which seems to whiz past flat arable fields most of the time?
So as you say if you want speed, fly Glasgow to London (if you can afford the drop off)
The west coast is the slighty more direct route so ought to be quicker. But as you say, the topography is challenging to engineer for very high speeds.
In fact (though I am getting away from my area of expertise here) that the best route for pure speed potential might actually be the Settle- Carlisle roite, the engineering of which is astonishing. But that would come withplenty of other challenges!
I think youth employment may see a sudden and significant short term increase.
Growing signs in Devon and Cornwall, specifically Torbay of a stay cation boom.
Concerns about Flights, Jet Fuel, Safety etc has seen what was sluggish and slow holiday occupancy rates June to October increase markedly in past few weeks.
Very significant trend too from 7 day bookings to long weekend and 4 day midweek bookings.
The Hospitality, Retail, Cleaning sector already starting to seek and advertise for summer staff having realised that their reduced staffing won't cope.
It could be a bumper summer for UK tourism IF the weather plays ball.
Mods - can I appeal for a ban on the term 'staycation' for anything other than a holiday where you stay in your own house? What Brixian appears to be describing is what many of us would describe as a 'holiday'.
I’m afraid that sluggish lexical diesel train has long ago left the station. Staycation now means a holiday in one’s own country, and it is useful - we didn’t have a single word for this common phenomenon. Literally holidaying in your home is much less common, so the demand for a word wasn’t there. The market always wins
Homestaycation? House-hols. Notgoingawaycation
When I was a kid, days in Rhyl were called holidays, days at home were usually called babysitting, and days abroad every called adventures...
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
It's the subject you find hardest that it is perhaps most worthwhile studying. (Sorry, was that too gnomic?)
Q. What does the poet mean by x? A. Who knows? If he wanted to communicate what he meant, he would have written a concise essay, setting out his views and his reasons for them. Instead, he has vomited a lot of words on the page which neither rhyme nor scan and the meaning of which is shrouded in gnomic metaphor.
I can also confirm that the poetry studied at GCSE is woke.
That is a bit like studying a painting via chemical analysis of the pigments and the physics of the brush strokes. It completely misses the point.
Poetry, literature, film, art, music, religion etc are a different domain of knowledge and one not lending itself to binary answers. They are about interpretation, meaning, emotion and metaphor.
Fox jr2 wrote a very interesting defence of the actions of Othello in A level English, arguing that his violent behaviour was down to PTSD and that he should be regarded as a psychological casualty of war. It changed my perspective on the play. Is this a "Woke" analysis? Or one that rejects the "Woke" view of the patriarchy as intrinsically violent?
Q. What does the poet mean by x? A. Who knows? If he wanted to communicate what he meant, he would have written a concise essay, setting out his views and his reasons for them. Instead, he has vomited a lot of words on the page which neither rhyme nor scan and the meaning of which is shrouded in gnomic metaphor.
I can also confirm that the poetry studied at GCSE is woke.
That is a bit like studying a painting via chemical analysis of the pigments and the physics of the brush strokes. It completely misses the point.
Poetry, literature, film, art, music, religion etc are a different domain of knowledge and one not lending itself to binary answers. They are about interpretation, meaning, emotion and metaphor.
Fox jr2 wrote a very interesting defence of the actions of Othello in A level English, arguing that his violent behaviour was down to PTSD and that he should be regarded as a psychological casualty of war. It changed my perspective on the play. Is this a "Woke" analysis? Or one that rejects the "Woke" view of the patriarchy as intrinsically violent?
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
It would be reasonable, in any review of the play, to say that Priestley was advocating socialism, and was criticising the level of inequality that existed in 1912.
If your daughter is expected to treat socialism as being correct, in her answers, that would be wrong.
I'm reasonably sure that isn't the case ? One of the benefits of studying Eng Lit is surely teaching you to analyse and understand other people's POVs.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
I sometimes do remote tutoring using the browser version of Teams on Fedora 44. Works fine.
I think youth employment may see a sudden and significant short term increase.
Growing signs in Devon and Cornwall, specifically Torbay of a stay cation boom.
Concerns about Flights, Jet Fuel, Safety etc has seen what was sluggish and slow holiday occupancy rates June to October increase markedly in past few weeks.
Very significant trend too from 7 day bookings to long weekend and 4 day midweek bookings.
The Hospitality, Retail, Cleaning sector already starting to seek and advertise for summer staff having realised that their reduced staffing won't cope.
It could be a bumper summer for UK tourism IF the weather plays ball.
Mods - can I appeal for a ban on the term 'staycation' for anything other than a holiday where you stay in your own house? What Brixian appears to be describing is what many of us would describe as a 'holiday'.
I’m afraid that sluggish lexical diesel train has long ago left the station. Staycation now means a holiday in one’s own country, and it is useful - we didn’t have a single word for this common phenomenon. Literally holidaying in your home is much less common, so the demand for a word wasn’t there. The market always wins
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
Yes, but you won't be able to daisy chain them unless you have a specific type, but you can just connect one with USB and the other with HDMI, I do this at the office and have two 27" 4k monitors connected, the only downside with Mac external screens is they need HiDPI or they look a bit crap. You can with a bit of effort enable HiDPI on all monitors though.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
As others have said, get a Mac. End of discussion.
Stuff like video calling is notoriously bad on Linux, and the community are less than supportive if you’re not a software developer.
Mac Mini Pro will drive three screens, comes in at £1,599 with 32GB/1TB (you don’t need as much memory on a Mac as on a PC unless you’re running LLMs locally). https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini
Labour members may think Mr Streeting shouldn't have resigned, but given the opposition he'd voiced he surely couldn't stay in post. What they should have asked was whether he should have voiced that opposition in the first place.
There's a touch of cognitive dissonance in the poll answers. They want Starmer gone, but disapprove of any practical action to dislodge the limpet.
Shades of Brexit? A majority agree that they want Starmer gone, but not who they want instead, with the result that Starmer remains the least unpopular of all the possible outcomes.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
I sometimes do remote tutoring using the browser version of Teams on Fedora 44. Works fine.
Just because you’re a masochist, doesn’t mean that we should be encouraging others to do the same.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
My brain is good with concepts, abstractions, models. It is hopeless with facts such as names, dates, faces. So I studied maths.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
I sometimes do remote tutoring using the browser version of Teams on Fedora 44. Works fine.
Somebody built an unofficial native app for Linux, works absolutely fine.
My GCSE set texts were Hamlet, The Great Odes, and To Kill A Mockingbird.
I was lucky with To Kill A Mockingbird that I had read that years earlier, the book that proves lawyers are the best.
I got MerchVen and Eyre. Both good but I remember feeling hard done by with Eyre because the other class got Flies which sounded better to me. I enjoyed the recent BBC adaptation of it.
Meanwhile, drifting off-topic into politics, Birmingham City Council is a complete mess. Reform ended up with the largest number of seats, but nowhere near a majority, and nobody will work with them. The Labour leader has ruled out the party going into coalition with anyone. The Greens are apparently trying to cobble something together with the Lib Dems and the Conservatives plus a few of the more rational independents, but any attempts to form a coalition with the Tories are likely to be scuppered by CCHQ as happened in Worcester.
Who is going to run Birmingham? Will our recycling ever be collected again?
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
As others have said, get a Mac. End of discussion.
Stuff like video calling is notoriously bad on Linux, and the community are less than supportive if you’re not a software developer.
Mac Mini Pro will drive three screens, comes in at £1,599 with 32GB/1TB (you don’t need as much memory on a Mac as on a PC unless you’re running LLMs locally). https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini
Wait until after the 8th as there may be new hardware announced.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Saturday jobs and summer jobs are much harder to come by. I see it around me that lots of the hospitality venues are now only open 4 days a week and more limited hours. And of course the high street is fucked. They used to be the go to for young people looking for a temp jobs.
It bad as a) it can be a good laugh and opportunity to meet people you wouldn't otherwise meet and b) dipping your toe in being a grown up, you learn some good lessons about how the of world of is work not how you want it to be.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
Up to the age of 16 I was expected and planned to be a doctor except I really didn’t want to be a doctor, so I spoke to my father and agreed I wouldn’t do A-Level Biology, and chose History instead.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
It will be long hours for minimum wage, but she’ll get to meet loads of people and they generally have a load of fun.
Q. What does the poet mean by x? A. Who knows? If he wanted to communicate what he meant, he would have written a concise essay, setting out his views and his reasons for them. Instead, he has vomited a lot of words on the page which neither rhyme nor scan and the meaning of which is shrouded in gnomic metaphor.
I can also confirm that the poetry studied at GCSE is woke.
That is a bit like studying a painting via chemical analysis of the pigments and the physics of the brush strokes. It completely misses the point.
Poetry, literature, film, art, music, religion etc are a different domain of knowledge and one not lending itself to binary answers. They are about interpretation, meaning, emotion and metaphor.
Fox jr2 wrote a very interesting defence of the actions of Othello in A level English, arguing that his violent behaviour was down to PTSD and that he should be regarded as a psychological casualty of war. It changed my perspective on the play. Is this a "Woke" analysis? Or one that rejects the "Woke" view of the patriarchy as intrinsically violent?
Was PTSD around then?
Had it been invented by then?
It must have been around, even if it had not been diagnosed.
You always got soldiers who had simply had enough and ran away. Even Wellington acknowledged that good soldiers could simply break and run.
In my opinion (only an opinion), PTSD helps to explain a lot of the sacks and massacres that took place in the past.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
As others have said, get a Mac. End of discussion.
Stuff like video calling is notoriously bad on Linux, and the community are less than supportive if you’re not a software developer.
Mac Mini Pro will drive three screens, comes in at £1,599 with 32GB/1TB (you don’t need as much memory on a Mac as on a PC unless you’re running LLMs locally). https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini
Wait until after the 8th as there may be new hardware announced.
Good point. There may be better specs, or discounts from retailers on current-spec models.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
This hasn’t been my experience at all.
My wife (for reasons known only to herself - I was expecting her to use Windows!) chose to use the Linux install on our home PC for all her work from home days, much of which is spent video conferencing with work colleagues. There have been plenty of the usual “why am I muted? Oh, the microphone isn’t plugged in” issues that plague every video conferencing session ever, but the video conferencing itself has been seamless.
My GCSE set texts were Hamlet, The Great Odes, and To Kill A Mockingbird.
I was lucky with To Kill A Mockingbird that I had read that years earlier, the book that proves lawyers are the best.
One thing that has always niggled with me is how they cover up the death of Bob Ewell at the end. Rather like Of Mice and Men, or the musical Oklahoma!, an extrajudicial killing is seen as the way to resolve the situation.
They all speak to that American meme of the "good" violent man being the answer to the "bad" violent man, rather than real belief in the law and justice, which are seen as ineffective or flawed.
Another avenue of summer temp work used to be things like picking in the fields / temp factory work, but circular thing has occurred young people didn't want those jobs, so they hire from abroad, so now they aren't available even if you want them as farmers via gangmasters to bring in a load of young Eastern Europeans for the summer on temp visas.
Even during COVID, the government couldn't convince people they might want to do these jobs in any sort of numbers. People would have rather been locked up in their own homes than go out and do these jobs that were very low risk in terms of catching COVID.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Saturday jobs and summer jobs are much harder to come by. I see it around me that lots of the hospitality venues are now only open 4 days a week and more limited hours. And of course the high street is fucked. They used to be the go to for young people looking for a temp jobs.
It bad as a) it can be a good laugh and opportunity to meet people you wouldn't otherwise meet and b) dipping your toe in being a grown up, you learn some good lessons about how the of world of is work not how you want it to be.
The combination of overregulation and immigration has done a number on the market for casual employment.
Meanwhile, drifting off-topic into politics, Birmingham City Council is a complete mess. Reform ended up with the largest number of seats, but nowhere near a majority, and nobody will work with them. The Labour leader has ruled out the party going into coalition with anyone. The Greens are apparently trying to cobble something together with the Lib Dems and the Conservatives plus a few of the more rational independents, but any attempts to form a coalition with the Tories are likely to be scuppered by CCHQ as happened in Worcester.
Who is going to run Birmingham?
The officers, probably.
But as with Starmer, as with Brexit, as with housebuilding, as with infrastructure like HS2, as with all sorts of things... It's trivial to assemble a majority against something. It's much harder to assemble a majority for an alternative.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
This hasn’t been my experience at all.
My wife (for reasons known only to herself - I was expecting her to use Windows!) chose to use the Linux install on our home PC for all her work from home days, much of which is spent video conferencing with work colleagues. There have been plenty of the usual “why am I muted? Oh, the microphone isn’t plugged in” issues that plague every video conferencing session ever, but the video conferencing itself has been seamless.
My GCSE set texts were Hamlet, The Great Odes, and To Kill A Mockingbird.
I was lucky with To Kill A Mockingbird that I had read that years earlier, the book that proves lawyers are the best.
One thing that has always niggled with me is how they cover up the death of Bob Ewell at the end. Rather like Of Mice and Men, or the musical Oklahoma!, an extrajudicial killing is seen as the way to resolve the situation.
They all speak to that American meme of the "good" violent man being the answer to the "bad" violent man, rather than real belief in the law and justice, which are seen as ineffective or flawed.
There are two conflicting memes, in US media. One is that "violence is never the way" to deal with systemic wrongdoing. Injustice can be acknowledged, but it has to be solved by people at the top removing the rotten apples.
OTOH, a man's got to do, what a man's got to do, and violence is a legitimate means of settling more personal wrongs.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Saturday jobs and summer jobs are much harder to come by. I see it around me that lots of the hospitality venues are now only open 4 days a week and more limited hours. And of course the high street is fucked. They used to be the go to for young people looking for a temp jobs.
It bad as a) it can be a good laugh and opportunity to meet people you wouldn't otherwise meet and b) dipping your toe in being a grown up, you learn some good lessons about how the of world of is work not how you want it to be.
The pub wherein I drink has several students working bar and waiting shifts. And some with whom I occasionally drink was complaining the other day that he can't get staff for his kitchen-fitting business.
Admittedly I've no idea what he is like to work for; he's a persistent grumbler as a drinking companion.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
This hasn’t been my experience at all.
My wife (for reasons known only to herself - I was expecting her to use Windows!) chose to use the Linux install on our home PC for all her work from home days, much of which is spent video conferencing with work colleagues. There have been plenty of the usual “why am I muted? Oh, the microphone isn’t plugged in” issues that plague every video conferencing session ever, but the video conferencing itself has been seamless.
Yes. Rather unexpectedly, I've had no issues at all using Teams and Zoom on Ubuntu in recent years.
Meanwhile, drifting off-topic into politics, Birmingham City Council is a complete mess. Reform ended up with the largest number of seats, but nowhere near a majority, and nobody will work with them. The Labour leader has ruled out the party going into coalition with anyone. The Greens are apparently trying to cobble something together with the Lib Dems and the Conservatives plus a few of the more rational independents, but any attempts to form a coalition with the Tories are likely to be scuppered by CCHQ as happened in Worcester.
Who is going to run Birmingham?
The officers, probably.
But as with Starmer, as with Brexit, as with housebuilding, as with infrastructure like HS2, as with all sorts of things... It's trivial to assemble a majority against something. It's much harder to assemble a majority for an alternative.
Also I think a few years of pragmatic management by the officers getting things fixed would make sense all round
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
This kind of stuff is why many devs have moved to OSX - which is a derivative of BSD Unix.
Most servers in commercial application are Linux now.
If Europe was serious about technological independence, a European company backing a maintained Linux distro for desktop, with easy setup, is almost trivial thing.
Hell, the UK government could easily afford such - enough desktops in government.
But it would take spending money to save money.
Ubuntu/Canonical is London-based.
SUSE used to be German, but it's long enough since I had to care about them that I've no idea whats happened with them.
It’s not so much the Distro, it’s the apps that run on it and video and sound drivers have always been a nightmare.
I'm not sure that matters. The vast majority of people will never properly install an OS - they'll use what comes out of the box and any auto-updates it drags down. And if you're bundling an OS with hardware you can select for components that run nicely out of the box - like MacOS or Android.
A full, easy install, with the required drivers for graphics cards etc, would massively ease roll out into U.K. government and other institutions. It’s not about end users - but about the support issues.
Once you have such, with office apps as required, you could actually get adoption.
The issue is the investment to create this in the first place.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
Apple bit naughty with the multiple monitor support, artifically capping it with different chips. But M4 onwards can, if I remember correctly standard m4/m5 chip in macbook air = 2 external monitors, but mac mini can do 3 and the max chip in all devices can drive silly amount of external monitors, I think 5. These can all be ultra high res monitors like 5k. You can also always buy a displaylink dock that allows 3+ external monitors.
Because of the shared memory between cpu and gpu, for a good experience, the real limiting factor is amount of RAM. But 16Gb should be plenty to drive multiple monitors with ease. The M series chips really are a revolution.
I don’t think it’s artificial. The IO hardware for Displayport / HDMI outputs takes up a lot of silicon real estate. Every output you add takes away area that could be used for an extra CPU or a GPU functional unit or something else.
The Max chips are simply larger & have space allocated for more output encoders, amongst other things. That’s also why they cost so much more!
Meanwhile, drifting off-topic into politics, Birmingham City Council is a complete mess. Reform ended up with the largest number of seats, but nowhere near a majority, and nobody will work with them. The Labour leader has ruled out the party going into coalition with anyone. The Greens are apparently trying to cobble something together with the Lib Dems and the Conservatives plus a few of the more rational independents, but any attempts to form a coalition with the Tories are likely to be scuppered by CCHQ as happened in Worcester.
Who is going to run Birmingham?
The officers, probably.
But as with Starmer, as with Brexit, as with housebuilding, as with infrastructure like HS2, as with all sorts of things... It's trivial to assemble a majority against something. It's much harder to assemble a majority for an alternative.
Opposition certainly seems to be a much more attractive prospect that governing in Birmingham.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
This kind of stuff is why many devs have moved to OSX - which is a derivative of BSD Unix.
Most servers in commercial application are Linux now.
If Europe was serious about technological independence, a European company backing a maintained Linux distro for desktop, with easy setup, is almost trivial thing.
Hell, the UK government could easily afford such - enough desktops in government.
But it would take spending money to save money.
Ubuntu/Canonical is London-based.
SUSE used to be German, but it's long enough since I had to care about them that I've no idea whats happened with them.
It’s not so much the Distro, it’s the apps that run on it and video and sound drivers have always been a nightmare.
I'm not sure that matters. The vast majority of people will never properly install an OS - they'll use what comes out of the box and any auto-updates it drags down. And if you're bundling an OS with hardware you can select for components that run nicely out of the box - like MacOS or Android.
Oh I think most people probably need a decent browser, word processor, spreadsheet, mail client and video call tool and would be happy.
I suspect it’s that last bit that would be painful, everything else is easily achievable in Chromium if nothing else works
All of that is possible in Linux. It just needs putting together and supporting.
Meanwhile, drifting off-topic into politics, Birmingham City Council is a complete mess. Reform ended up with the largest number of seats, but nowhere near a majority, and nobody will work with them. The Labour leader has ruled out the party going into coalition with anyone. The Greens are apparently trying to cobble something together with the Lib Dems and the Conservatives plus a few of the more rational independents, but any attempts to form a coalition with the Tories are likely to be scuppered by CCHQ as happened in Worcester.
Who is going to run Birmingham?
The officers, probably.
But as with Starmer, as with Brexit, as with housebuilding, as with infrastructure like HS2, as with all sorts of things... It's trivial to assemble a majority against something. It's much harder to assemble a majority for an alternative.
I am (fairly) reliably informed that, as Reform realised they now had control of Essex County Council, an early topic of discussion at the count was 'stopping the boats.' Any illegal immigrants into Essex come in, I'm told, through the container port at Purfleet.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
A MacBook is the answer.
I've got my first ever MacBook (14" pro) from work and very impressed by the hardware. The software is better than MS (although they've also improved over last few years, largely by copying ideas from Mac/Linux) but not what I was led to expect. Similar glitches/corner cases to Linux. I'd always expected it to be super-polished.
@ydoethur - some recommendations: Fedora (upstream community Redhat) works well, is well updated and well supported by third parties. No problem getting official Zoom downloads for example. Not sure on the MS Teams situation (for any Linux) but the web-based version is ok. I would have recommended CentOS for install and forget/long support/stability, but Red Hat screwed that up. Rocky Linux is the new version of that, not been around for all that long but looks to be the successor (and you can use any downloads of not-included apps that are made for Red Hat). Rocky v Fedora: Rocky will have long support over several years, Fedora support only last 18 months to 2 years, then you need to upgrade (doesn't take long, but is a bit of downtime). I use Fedora. I put my dad on CentOS, then Rocky when I got fed up with trying to remotely support his Windows PC issues (about ten years ago - I'm not sure he actually realises it's not Windows).
Other options, my experience: openSuSE: bigger, slower, some odd decisions but well supported. Ubuntu flavours: always a bit flaky in my experience. Arch: great, but you do need to be techy. Smaller ones come and go.
If you were willing to pay for support then Red Hat/SuSE both good options, but if it's just you that's probably not financially worthwhile!
Whatever you go for, try out both GNOME and KDE Plasma. My preference is Plasma, it's more similar to Windows if you're transitioning, but it's a very much a personal preference thing.
ETA: Sorry, wasn't clear: Rocky is Red Hat, without the trademarks and without the commercial support included.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
This kind of stuff is why many devs have moved to OSX - which is a derivative of BSD Unix.
Most servers in commercial application are Linux now.
If Europe was serious about technological independence, a European company backing a maintained Linux distro for desktop, with easy setup, is almost trivial thing.
Hell, the UK government could easily afford such - enough desktops in government.
But it would take spending money to save money.
Ubuntu/Canonical is London-based.
SUSE used to be German, but it's long enough since I had to care about them that I've no idea whats happened with them.
It’s not so much the Distro, it’s the apps that run on it and video and sound drivers have always been a nightmare.
I'm not sure that matters. The vast majority of people will never properly install an OS - they'll use what comes out of the box and any auto-updates it drags down. And if you're bundling an OS with hardware you can select for components that run nicely out of the box - like MacOS or Android.
A full, easy install, with the required drivers for graphics cards etc, would massively ease roll out into U.K. government and other institutions. It’s not about end users - but about the support issues.
Once you have such, with office apps as required, you could actually get adoption.
The issue is the investment to create this in the first place.
IIRC France tried doing that a few years ago, working with I think Dell and Red Hat to do a “Linux France”, with the idea that all public sector computers would run on it rather than Windows. The plan was to use limited hardware configurations and port all their software across.
They tried for a couple of years, but abandoned in the end and went back to giving Microsoft millions of Euro.
Good to hear anecdotes of the driver and dependency Hell being better now than it used to be, but I still wouldn’t use one for a user PC in production.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
It will be long hours for minimum wage, but she’ll get to meet loads of people and they generally have a load of fun.
Ta! That sounds like good advice. I’m sending it on
It could take a long while to identify the original sin of British politics, the canker at the heart which is rotting it from the inside, but I suspect it's a bit like that thing about when the best popular music was released.
Everyone will come up with an answer dated from when they were a young adult.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
This hasn’t been my experience at all.
My wife (for reasons known only to herself - I was expecting her to use Windows!) chose to use the Linux install on our home PC for all her work from home days, much of which is spent video conferencing with work colleagues. There have been plenty of the usual “why am I muted? Oh, the microphone isn’t plugged in” issues that plague every video conferencing session ever, but the video conferencing itself has been seamless.
THanks - which version is she using?
Debian stable. If your hardware is supported & you want something that just works then it’s perfectly fine. But it runs on a two-three year update cycle, so I would probably personally choose Ubuntu for whatever I bought new for the hardware support.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
(Apple is also being a bit weird with their UI changes - OSX is no longer the paragon of UI virtue that it used to be. I think the vast profits they make from the iPhone & iPad ecosystem have led to them abandoning OSX to the wiles of their graphic designers.)
*cough*Mrs Thatcher was not going to double VAT (8 to 15 per cent so not quite double) and was going to reduce inflation (it went up, not least because of VAT) and unemployment (from 1 to 3 million)*cough*
But for decades if not centuries the phrase ‘political promise’ has been used ironically.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
Up to the age of 16 I was expected and planned to be a doctor except I really didn’t want to be a doctor, so I spoke to my father and agreed I wouldn’t do A-Level Biology, and chose History instead.
I never heard of anyone at my school (as I said back in the '50's) swapping streams. One picked at 14, either Geography, History, and Latin or Biology, Chemistry and Physics, plus of course Maths, the two Englishes, French and either German or Spanish. And that was that.
I haven't read the Telegraph since the days of Boris when it ceased to be a newspaper and became a fanzine. Absurd made up stories simply to glorify the disreputable oaf. I'd signed up for it and they made it quite difficult to unsign up.
......and until today that's the last time I'd read it.
But then early this morning I noticed two links from MexicanPete a poster whose politics I like. They were predictably anti Burnham their line being that the ecconomic miracle in Manchester was fake and he'd twisted the figures8.....basically the usual Telegraph fare. Opinion and News merged into a giant loathing of all things 'LEFT'.
But then I read further and away from the politics and what I didn't know was that it had become a really nasty rag. Hardly different from the Daily Mail which it seems to have modelled itself on........
*They are wrong about Manchester. It really is a throbbing Metropolis. I've just done a tour of the Northern Quarter and it really is quite indistinguisable from the place it was 30 years ago
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
This hasn’t been my experience at all.
My wife (for reasons known only to herself - I was expecting her to use Windows!) chose to use the Linux install on our home PC for all her work from home days, much of which is spent video conferencing with work colleagues. There have been plenty of the usual “why am I muted? Oh, the microphone isn’t plugged in” issues that plague every video conferencing session ever, but the video conferencing itself has been seamless.
THanks - which version is she using?
Debian stable. If your hardware is supported & you want something that just works then it’s perfectly fine. But it runs on a two-three year update cycle, so I would probably personally choose Ubuntu for whatever I bought new for the hardware support.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
(Apple is also being a bit weird with their UI changes - OSX is no longer the paragon of UI virtue that it used to be. I think the vast profits they make from the iPhone & iPad ecosystem have led to them abandoning OSX to the wiles of their graphic designers.)
Betfair, Makerfield. Thanks to the Restore backer, it is possible to back both Reform at 3.2 and Labour at 1.6 for a profit.
Admittedly it's a thin market so not worth doing to pay for your fortnight in Bermuda Torquay but for pb bragging rights about how shrewd a judge you are, maybe.
*cough*Mrs Thatcher was not going to double VAT (8 to 15 per cent so not quite double) and was going to reduce inflation (it went up, not least because of VAT) and unemployment (from 1 to 3 million)*cough*
But for decades if not centuries the phrase ‘political promise’ has been used ironically.
Yep, but the failure to hold a referendum had rather direct consequences. And it taught the electorate that there was a tiny sliver of a chance of ever getting one. It's one reason I did vote to leave because I knew there was no way we'd ever be granted the great privilege of having our opinions matter for anything EU-related ever again.
If we'd rejected Lisbon and that had stuck, it would've been a lot better for the country.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
This kind of stuff is why many devs have moved to OSX - which is a derivative of BSD Unix.
Most servers in commercial application are Linux now.
If Europe was serious about technological independence, a European company backing a maintained Linux distro for desktop, with easy setup, is almost trivial thing.
Hell, the UK government could easily afford such - enough desktops in government.
But it would take spending money to save money.
Ubuntu/Canonical is London-based.
SUSE used to be German, but it's long enough since I had to care about them that I've no idea whats happened with them.
It’s not so much the Distro, it’s the apps that run on it and video and sound drivers have always been a nightmare.
I'm not sure that matters. The vast majority of people will never properly install an OS - they'll use what comes out of the box and any auto-updates it drags down. And if you're bundling an OS with hardware you can select for components that run nicely out of the box - like MacOS or Android.
A full, easy install, with the required drivers for graphics cards etc, would massively ease roll out into U.K. government and other institutions. It’s not about end users - but about the support issues.
Once you have such, with office apps as required, you could actually get adoption.
The issue is the investment to create this in the first place.
IIRC France tried doing that a few years ago, working with I think Dell and Red Hat to do a “Linux France”, with the idea that all public sector computers would run on it rather than Windows. The plan was to use limited hardware configurations and port all their software across.
They tried for a couple of years, but abandoned in the end and went back to giving Microsoft millions of Euro.
Good to hear anecdotes of the driver and dependency Hell being better now than it used to be, but I still wouldn’t use one for a user PC in production.
For exactly the same reason that Valve created SteamOS, it behooves any sensible country that finds itself dependent on Microsoft to develop an alternative option. Not because they intend to actually use it, but because a functional BATNA acts as a wonderful incentive when you’re negotiating pricing for the next five year contract with your MS representatives.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
This hasn’t been my experience at all.
My wife (for reasons known only to herself - I was expecting her to use Windows!) chose to use the Linux install on our home PC for all her work from home days, much of which is spent video conferencing with work colleagues. There have been plenty of the usual “why am I muted? Oh, the microphone isn’t plugged in” issues that plague every video conferencing session ever, but the video conferencing itself has been seamless.
THanks - which version is she using?
Debian stable. If your hardware is supported & you want something that just works then it’s perfectly fine. But it runs on a two-three year update cycle, so I would probably personally choose Ubuntu for whatever I bought new for the hardware support.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
(Apple is also being a bit weird with their UI changes - OSX is no longer the paragon of UI virtue that it used to be. I think the vast profits they make from the iPhone & iPad ecosystem have led to them abandoning OSX to the wiles of their graphic designers.)
Liquid Arse, sorry Glass, it fucking awful.
Yeah, exactly.
When even the most extreme Apple fanboys are spending more time pointing out the manifest flaws in your new OS release than they are about anything else, you have a problem.
The hardware is fantastic though. As long as that’s the case people will put up with Liquid Glass.
I think youth employment may see a sudden and significant short term increase.
Growing signs in Devon and Cornwall, specifically Torbay of a stay cation boom.
Concerns about Flights, Jet Fuel, Safety etc has seen what was sluggish and slow holiday occupancy rates June to October increase markedly in past few weeks.
Very significant trend too from 7 day bookings to long weekend and 4 day midweek bookings.
The Hospitality, Retail, Cleaning sector already starting to seek and advertise for summer staff having realised that their reduced staffing won't cope.
It could be a bumper summer for UK tourism IF the weather plays ball.
Mods - can I appeal for a ban on the term 'staycation' for anything other than a holiday where you stay in your own house? What Brixian appears to be describing is what many of us would describe as a 'holiday'.
I’m afraid that sluggish lexical diesel train has long ago left the station. Staycation now means a holiday in one’s own country, and it is useful - we didn’t have a single word for this common phenomenon. Literally holidaying in your home is much less common, so the demand for a word wasn’t there. The market always wins
Homestaycation? House-hols. Notgoingawaycation
On the contrary why don't you call a UK holiday a vacation, and a foreign holiday a holiday. Or vice versa.
Staycation clearly means staying rather than travelling.
The refusal of so many people to consider a holiday in this country as a holiday is a not insignificant part of the economic problems of this country with the UK tourism deficit approximately being the UK trade deficit:
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
It will be long hours for minimum wage, but she’ll get to meet loads of people and they generally have a load of fun.
Ta! That sounds like good advice. I’m sending it on
No worries. I did similar when I was a student (a while ago now) with a local company, and more recently did some work with Sodexo installing fancy computers to replace the tills at a number of racecourses and temporary venues.
Another option might be local supermarkets, even the small 7-11/One Stop types. They usually employ a lot of mums who will take August off if they can. Trick is to apply now, rather than wait until the summer.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
This hasn’t been my experience at all.
My wife (for reasons known only to herself - I was expecting her to use Windows!) chose to use the Linux install on our home PC for all her work from home days, much of which is spent video conferencing with work colleagues. There have been plenty of the usual “why am I muted? Oh, the microphone isn’t plugged in” issues that plague every video conferencing session ever, but the video conferencing itself has been seamless.
THanks - which version is she using?
Debian stable. If your hardware is supported & you want something that just works then it’s perfectly fine. But it runs on a two-three year update cycle, so I would probably personally choose Ubuntu for whatever I bought new for the hardware support.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
(Apple is also being a bit weird with their UI changes - OSX is no longer the paragon of UI virtue that it used to be. I think the vast profits they make from the iPhone & iPad ecosystem have led to them abandoning OSX to the wiles of their graphic designers.)
Liquid Arse, sorry Glass, it fucking awful.
Yeah, exactly.
When even the most extreme Apple fanboys are spending more time pointing out the manifest flaws in your new OS release than they are about anything else, you have a problem.
The hardware is fantastic though. As long as that’s the case people will put up with Liquid Glass.
True, I’m still telling people to avoid upgrading to anything 26. It was a real mess on launch, and still isn’t perfect.
I haven't read the Telegraph since the days of Boris when it ceased to be a newspaper and became a fanzine. Absurd made up stories simply to glorify the disreputable oaf. I'd signed up for it and they made it quite difficult to unsign up.
......and until today that's the last time I'd read it.
But then early this morning I noticed two links from MexicanPete a poster whose politics I like. They were predictably anti Burnham their line being that the ecconomic miracle in Manchester was fake and he'd twisted the figures8.....basically the usual Telegraph fare. Opinion and News merged into a giant loathing of all things 'LEFT'.
But then I read further and away from the politics and what I didn't know was that it had become a really nasty rag. Hardly different from the Daily Mail which it seems to have modelled itself on........
*They are wrong about Manchester. It really is a throbbing Metropolis. I've just done a tour of the Northern Quarter and it really is quite indistinguisable from the place it was 30 years ago
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
It will be long hours for minimum wage, but she’ll get to meet loads of people and they generally have a load of fun.
Ta! That sounds like good advice. I’m sending it on
No worries. I did similar when I was a student (a while ago now) with a local company, and more recently did some work with Sodexo installing fancy computers to replace the tills at a number of racecourses and temporary venues.
Another option might be local supermarkets, even the small 7-11/One Stop types. They usually employ a lot of mums who will take August off if they can. Trick is to apply now, rather than wait until the summer.
Such places often want people who'll work unsocial hours too.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Right and wrong answers in History?
Yes, in the same sense that there are in physics, biology or chemistry though the temperature in which it operates is different. In all those disciplines there are significant assertions and beliefs which count as knowledge in the Popperian sense of being justified claims, evidence based, which are open to the possibility of falsification (and of better verification) either by a better analysis of the evidence or by new evidence arising.
Eng Lit (it seems to me) operates differently. I think it is possible to make of it a genuine subject, and this could be done by attaching it more closely to history as basically a branch of history (which it is) and more closely to language, by requiring (as I was aeons ago) to learn Anglo-Saxon or Gothic or medieval Latin as part of the deal, as well as having a deep understand of the grammatical structure of English and its historical evolution.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
This hasn’t been my experience at all.
My wife (for reasons known only to herself - I was expecting her to use Windows!) chose to use the Linux install on our home PC for all her work from home days, much of which is spent video conferencing with work colleagues. There have been plenty of the usual “why am I muted? Oh, the microphone isn’t plugged in” issues that plague every video conferencing session ever, but the video conferencing itself has been seamless.
THanks - which version is she using?
Debian stable. If your hardware is supported & you want something that just works then it’s perfectly fine. But it runs on a two-three year update cycle, so I would probably personally choose Ubuntu for whatever I bought new for the hardware support.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
(Apple is also being a bit weird with their UI changes - OSX is no longer the paragon of UI virtue that it used to be. I think the vast profits they make from the iPhone & iPad ecosystem have led to them abandoning OSX to the wiles of their graphic designers.)
Liquid Arse, sorry Glass, it fucking awful.
Yeah, exactly.
When even the most extreme Apple fanboys are spending more time pointing out the manifest flaws in your new OS release than they are about anything else, you have a problem.
The hardware is fantastic though. As long as that’s the case people will put up with Liquid Glass.
True, I’m still telling people to avoid upgrading to anything 26. It was a real mess on launch, and still isn’t perfect.
They could fix the issue with a very simple option to turn the sodding glass effect off. Not only does it look like arse, it uses loads more resources.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Betfair, Makerfield. Thanks to the Restore backer, it is possible to back both Reform at 3.2 and Labour at 1.6 for a profit.
Admittedly it's a thin market so not worth doing to pay for your fortnight in Bermuda Torquay but for pb bragging rights about how shrewd a judge you are, maybe.
Not sure betting on one of Labour or Reform win in Makerfield will boost anyone's reputation as a PB seer. However, you're right. Laying Restore is free money.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
It is very much focused on young people. In the last eight months the unemployment rate for those 35 and older has actually declined by 0.2pp to 2.9%, while that for those aged under 35 has risen 1.3pp to 8.8%.
I finished Netflix's Legends drugs war drama last night.
Absolutely brilliant if anyone looking for a boxset binge. Only six episodes sadly.
Now hoping there is series 2 in the pipeworks.
Believe Me, the ITV 4-parter which ended last night about victims of the black cab rapist John Worboys, might be this year's Adolescence or Mr Bates in terms of impact. It shows the struggles of victims to be taken seriously amidst the indifference and incompetence of the police. https://www.itv.com/watch/believe-me/10a0144
Remember that big row we had, a few days ago? When I had an epiphany on the train from Berwick to King’s X, and I realised the big problem with HS2 was the obsession with speed? As I said then, we don’t need the speed, Britain is tiny. We just need the extra capacity
“THE obsession with HS2’s speed is to blame for its failure, an official review has found.
“The project’s focus on achieving the “highest possible speeds” has led to spiralling costs that have crippled progress, according to Sir Stephen Lovegrove. The former national security adviser said the high-speed rail line had gone “disastrously wrong” because of the decision to “gold plate” the project and political pressure to “keep things moving”.”
I don’t need or expect grovelling apologies. I will, however, accept large financial gifts. DM me for my bank deets
I thought the mocking was because you were several years behind schedule relative to the PB train experts who'd been saying that HS2 was about getting the fast passenger trains off the existing lines.
ECML was still not as quick as it was pre-privatisation 90-91 last time I used it, back then there was talk of London-Edinburgh in 2 hours.
Um the fastest ever London to Edinburgh train was 3 hours 29 minutes achieved by 91012 and a shortened mark 4 rake on a non-stop press run in September 1991.
It was 5h30 after the Peterborough improvements in 1971-72.
It then drifted towards 5h40 (but remainded 5h3x) going up to 1977.
In 1977 with the line improvements for HSTs being implemented, the Flying Scotsman was reduced to ~5h27/5h28 with Deltics in their last year on the service.
The HSTs came in and reduced it to (IIRC) 4h47/4h50 in May 1978, then further 4h37/4h40 in May 1979.
4h35 in 1982, following linespeed improvements in Scotland
4h30 in 1985, following the Selby diversion
It drifted up a few mins after this before falling to an all-time best of 4h23 by 1988/9.
Under Diesel it was 6 hours 35 - the A4's weren't that fast.
To add - the problem is all the easy improvements have been done. on the ECML from York onwards the remaining sensible improvements is diverting to the outskirts of Northallerton (it currently goes through the town) and straightening the route between Darlington and Newcastle for it's currently rather slow and windy.
But that will cost billions so is way down the list of priorities - reality is it's going to be roughly 4 hours for ever more..
And four hours is FINE. How much do you think it would benefit the economy if we spent sixty trillion quid and built HS9 and got that down to three hours? Two hours 45 minutes? In the age of zoom and FaceTime it matters not a jot, you can do almost everything remotely. Instead of spending eighty billion pounds on new train lines spend £80m making sure all trains have excellent reliable WiFi
Moreover, we are entering the era of fast safe driverless cars and buses and, soon, driverless helidrones. The future for fixed track expensive trains is not entirely clear
I'd make the case that for the places that get them, fast trains to London are a *bad* thing. I live in a formerly pleasant bit of the Peak District. 15 mins from my house is a railway station from which one can catch a train that's sat on the blocks in Euston about 1h 45min later. This is of varnishingly little utility to me, as I regard London on a dump to be avoided at all costs.
What it means in practice is that the locals are now priced out of all the nice houses by people who should be living in Essex, who still work in London two days a week, and do the rest WFH, and the developers are throwing up Barratt boxes for us unfortunate locals to be moved into because we can't afford the nice houses any more. We shouldn't need more housing in our town, the population was actually drifting down slightly, but now it's just being repopulated by flight from the SE, and it's steadily turning the place into an overpopulated shithole like SE is already.
I'm a fortunate, I've little more money than most, and bought my current house before this was really a thing, so it's gone up in value considerably. Right now I'm in the middle of buying a reasonable house (I.E. not made of cardboard and with a decent garden). I'm moving about as far away from the fast rail connections as is viable whilst staying in the area, and I'm still probably spending £150k more than I would have if it wasn't for the London influx. The money I'm spending now, ten years ago would have bought me a 6 bedroom farmhouse in a couple of acres, now it's buying me 4 bed semi with a reasonable garden.
IMHO we should build a wall above Birmingham and make the southerners pay for it.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
This kind of stuff is why many devs have moved to OSX - which is a derivative of BSD Unix.
Most servers in commercial application are Linux now.
If Europe was serious about technological independence, a European company backing a maintained Linux distro for desktop, with easy setup, is almost trivial thing.
Hell, the UK government could easily afford such - enough desktops in government.
But it would take spending money to save money.
Ubuntu/Canonical is London-based.
SUSE used to be German, but it's long enough since I had to care about them that I've no idea whats happened with them.
It’s not so much the Distro, it’s the apps that run on it and video and sound drivers have always been a nightmare.
I'm not sure that matters. The vast majority of people will never properly install an OS - they'll use what comes out of the box and any auto-updates it drags down. And if you're bundling an OS with hardware you can select for components that run nicely out of the box - like MacOS or Android.
A full, easy install, with the required drivers for graphics cards etc, would massively ease roll out into U.K. government and other institutions. It’s not about end users - but about the support issues.
Once you have such, with office apps as required, you could actually get adoption.
The issue is the investment to create this in the first place.
IIRC France tried doing that a few years ago, working with I think Dell and Red Hat to do a “Linux France”, with the idea that all public sector computers would run on it rather than Windows. The plan was to use limited hardware configurations and port all their software across.
They tried for a couple of years, but abandoned in the end and went back to giving Microsoft millions of Euro.
Good to hear anecdotes of the driver and dependency Hell being better now than it used to be, but I still wouldn’t use one for a user PC in production.
For exactly the same reason that Valve created SteamOS, it behooves any sensible country that finds itself dependent on Microsoft to develop an alternative option. Not because they intend to actually use it, but because a functional BATNA acts as a wonderful incentive when you’re negotiating pricing for the next five year contract with your MS representatives.
I think a lot of the problems with such projects, were because too many of the senior people appeared to be more interested in using them as leverage to negotiate with M$, than to actually deliver the project to the business!
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
This kind of stuff is why many devs have moved to OSX - which is a derivative of BSD Unix.
Most servers in commercial application are Linux now.
If Europe was serious about technological independence, a European company backing a maintained Linux distro for desktop, with easy setup, is almost trivial thing.
Hell, the UK government could easily afford such - enough desktops in government.
But it would take spending money to save money.
Ubuntu/Canonical is London-based.
SUSE used to be German, but it's long enough since I had to care about them that I've no idea whats happened with them.
It’s not so much the Distro, it’s the apps that run on it and video and sound drivers have always been a nightmare.
I'm not sure that matters. The vast majority of people will never properly install an OS - they'll use what comes out of the box and any auto-updates it drags down. And if you're bundling an OS with hardware you can select for components that run nicely out of the box - like MacOS or Android.
A full, easy install, with the required drivers for graphics cards etc, would massively ease roll out into U.K. government and other institutions. It’s not about end users - but about the support issues.
Once you have such, with office apps as required, you could actually get adoption.
The issue is the investment to create this in the first place.
IIRC France tried doing that a few years ago, working with I think Dell and Red Hat to do a “Linux France”, with the idea that all public sector computers would run on it rather than Windows. The plan was to use limited hardware configurations and port all their software across.
They tried for a couple of years, but abandoned in the end and went back to giving Microsoft millions of Euro.
Good to hear anecdotes of the driver and dependency Hell being better now than it used to be, but I still wouldn’t use one for a user PC in production.
For exactly the same reason that Valve created SteamOS, it behooves any sensible country that finds itself dependent on Microsoft to develop an alternative option. Not because they intend to actually use it, but because a functional BATNA acts as a wonderful incentive when you’re negotiating pricing for the next five year contract with your MS representatives.
I think a lot of the problems with such projects, were because too many of the senior people appeared to be more interested in using them as leverage to negotiate with M$, than to actually deliver the project to the business!
Unemployment up, vacancies down, youth unemployment highest for 11 years, wage growth down. It doesn't really tally with the large economic growth reported a few days ago.
Not suggesting anything dodgy, I wonder where the mismatch is. Just reporting lag between growth and employment figures, much higher productivity via AI, something else?
There was disucssion the other day about hospitality and again mismatch in number of opening / closures now versus employment opportunities in that sector. Is that venues just opening for a much more limited amount of time? Or again reporting lag and that there is now a lot more closures?
Locally
Massive new Ibis and Mercure hotels in Paignton and stunning new top end IHG Group hotel in Torquay opened in last 12 months
New Shopping developments in Paignton and Torquay. Much needed visible regeneration Tory Council using Labour Government grants and funding
Brixham extending Harbour capacity and plans for a new harbour wall to increase Harbour size.
Massive new Marina and Hospitality site under development Nos Marina on River Dart up river from Dartmouth.
Very positive signs of growth, regeneration in South Devon
Much as I dont't want to talk down the South Hams/Torbay...
Retail in both Paignton and Torquay is bleak. To think back in the day, Torquay had stores such as Chanel.
And Noss Mayo is currently very underwhelming. Great loocation, but no reason to go there. A small cafe - other than that, the retail is solely around buying boats and chandlery.
The local hotel capacity is probably overdone. There is concern locally that unused capacity will be used for asylum seekers.
Q. What does the poet mean by x? A. Who knows? If he wanted to communicate what he meant, he would have written a concise essay, setting out his views and his reasons for them. Instead, he has vomited a lot of words on the page which neither rhyme nor scan and the meaning of which is shrouded in gnomic metaphor.
I can also confirm that the poetry studied at GCSE is woke.
That is a bit like studying a painting via chemical analysis of the pigments and the physics of the brush strokes. It completely misses the point.
Poetry, literature, film, art, music, religion etc are a different domain of knowledge and one not lending itself to binary answers. They are about interpretation, meaning, emotion and metaphor.
Fox jr2 wrote a very interesting defence of the actions of Othello in A level English, arguing that his violent behaviour was down to PTSD and that he should be regarded as a psychological casualty of war. It changed my perspective on the play. Is this a "Woke" analysis? Or one that rejects the "Woke" view of the patriarchy as intrinsically violent?
And how did this go down with teachers/examiners?
It doesn't seem an unreasonable analysis. Shakespeare, gratifyingly, tended to create characters who were sufficiently well-rounded that they lend themselves to this sort of analysis (in the way that characters in 'An Inspectors Calls' do not appear to). But is that what the teachers want? Or do they just want kids to say 'Othello was part of the patriarchy and therefore intrinsically violent'? My impression is that there is a large part of the educational establishment wants only the latter.
In any case, this seems a very niche thing to spend quite a large proportion of educational time to study.
Though also, I concede, this reflects my own preferences for questions with right and wrong answers!
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Some at least of those internships are unpaid.
My son's internship was paid, but even an unpaid internship is likely to be more useful than menial work experience when it comes to finding suitable employment after graduation. It obviously depends on parental financial support though!
I finished Netflix's Legends drugs war drama last night.
Absolutely brilliant if anyone looking for a boxset binge. Only six episodes sadly.
Now hoping there is series 2 in the pipeworks.
Believe Me, the ITV 4-parter which ended last night about victims of the black cab rapist John Worboys, might be this year's Adolescence or Mr Bates in terms of impact. It shows the struggles of victims to be taken seriously amidst the indifference and incompetence of the police. https://www.itv.com/watch/believe-me/10a0144
OK maybe BBC's half hour documentary about shops will have more immediate impact. It makes you wonder about the bubble the government and top police live in if they need television series to point out such problems.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Microsoft used to provide a Teams client for Linux which worked OK. Zoom still do.
For Teams you now have to use the Web client, which is not as "good" but is still functional. You can use it in Chrome / Chromium or Firefox.
Everything else is fine on Linux unless you absolutely have to interact with people using MS Office macros. I always provide documents as PDF (from LibreOffice) to avoid any incompatibility.
I use it because I do lots of mapping and server stuff, and it just works better.
As for distributions, there are various technical arguments about why the ubiquitous Ubuntu is bad, not all of them relevant. I use it but Mint might be better for 'just working'. It shares the same base but makes a few different technical decisions which are probably sensible.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
Up to the age of 16 I was expected and planned to be a doctor except I really didn’t want to be a doctor, so I spoke to my father and agreed I wouldn’t do A-Level Biology, and chose History instead.
I never heard of anyone at my school (as I said back in the '50's) swapping streams. One picked at 14, either Geography, History, and Latin or Biology, Chemistry and Physics, plus of course Maths, the two Englishes, French and either German or Spanish. And that was that.
It is still a depressingly narrow choice post-16 and schools seem to be encouraging 3 rather than 4 A levels
NB. Since we’re talking jobs I am very happy to report that the three month contract my eldest was given by the local metallurgy outfit has just been converted to a full time role!
The resulting levels of parental relief are probably palpable from orbit.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Microsoft used to provide a Teams client for Linux which worked OK. Zoom still do.
For Teams you now have to use the Web client, which is not as "good" but is still functional. You can use it in Chrome / Chromium or Firefox.
Everything else is fine on Linux unless you absolutely have to interact with people using MS Office macros. I always provide documents as PDF (from LibreOffice) to avoid any incompatibility.
I use it because I do lots of mapping and server stuff, and it just works better.
As for distributions, there are various technical arguments about why the ubiquitous Ubuntu is bad, not all of them relevant. I use it but Mint might be better for 'just working'. It shares the same base but makes a few different technical decisions which are probably sensible.
You dont have to use web client. There is open source Teams client for linux that works perfectly well and the developers are constantly updating it.
I think youth employment may see a sudden and significant short term increase.
Growing signs in Devon and Cornwall, specifically Torbay of a stay cation boom.
Concerns about Flights, Jet Fuel, Safety etc has seen what was sluggish and slow holiday occupancy rates June to October increase markedly in past few weeks.
Very significant trend too from 7 day bookings to long weekend and 4 day midweek bookings.
The Hospitality, Retail, Cleaning sector already starting to seek and advertise for summer staff having realised that their reduced staffing won't cope.
It could be a bumper summer for UK tourism IF the weather plays ball.
Mods - can I appeal for a ban on the term 'staycation' for anything other than a holiday where you stay in your own house? What Brixian appears to be describing is what many of us would describe as a 'holiday'.
I’m afraid that sluggish lexical diesel train has long ago left the station. Staycation now means a holiday in one’s own country, and it is useful - we didn’t have a single word for this common phenomenon. Literally holidaying in your home is much less common, so the demand for a word wasn’t there. The market always wins
Homestaycation? House-hols. Notgoingawaycation
When I was a kid, days in Rhyl were called holidays, days at home were usually called babysitting, and days abroad every called adventures...
I think Staycation started being a thing in the correct sense (of day trips from home) after the 2008 financial crash. That its become bastardised and used to represent something that very many people in this country call a holiday, is ludicrous. A staycation is a different thing to a holiday in the UK.
(And yes, I know that languages and usage evolve. Its just that this one should be de-evolved...)
Q. What does the poet mean by x? A. Who knows? If he wanted to communicate what he meant, he would have written a concise essay, setting out his views and his reasons for them. Instead, he has vomited a lot of words on the page which neither rhyme nor scan and the meaning of which is shrouded in gnomic metaphor.
I can also confirm that the poetry studied at GCSE is woke.
That is a bit like studying a painting via chemical analysis of the pigments and the physics of the brush strokes. It completely misses the point.
Poetry, literature, film, art, music, religion etc are a different domain of knowledge and one not lending itself to binary answers. They are about interpretation, meaning, emotion and metaphor.
Fox jr2 wrote a very interesting defence of the actions of Othello in A level English, arguing that his violent behaviour was down to PTSD and that he should be regarded as a psychological casualty of war. It changed my perspective on the play. Is this a "Woke" analysis? Or one that rejects the "Woke" view of the patriarchy as intrinsically violent?
And how did this go down with teachers/examiners?
It doesn't seem an unreasonable analysis. Shakespeare, gratifyingly, tended to create characters who were sufficiently well-rounded that they lend themselves to this sort of analysis (in the way that characters in 'An Inspectors Calls' do not appear to). But is that what the teachers want? Or do they just want kids to say 'Othello was part of the patriarchy and therefore intrinsically violent'? My impression is that there is a large part of the educational establishment wants only the latter.
In any case, this seems a very niche thing to spend quite a large proportion of educational time to study.
Though also, I concede, this reflects my own preferences for questions with right and wrong answers!
He got very good marks from his teacher. Indeed at parents evening the teacher waxed lyrically over his work saying that he always brought new perspectives, often out of the blue.
Fox jr2 is a a very talented creative, often thinking out of the box and writes exceedingly well.
It is fairly easy to pass Eng Lit with formulaic answers, but to get real top marks you need to grab attention by writing something much more perceptive.
My own education was principally scientific, explaining the mechanisms of life, but the creative arts are on a different plane. They teach us why and how to live.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Microsoft used to provide a Teams client for Linux which worked OK. Zoom still do.
For Teams you now have to use the Web client, which is not as "good" but is still functional. You can use it in Chrome / Chromium or Firefox.
Everything else is fine on Linux unless you absolutely have to interact with people using MS Office macros. I always provide documents as PDF (from LibreOffice) to avoid any incompatibility.
I use it because I do lots of mapping and server stuff, and it just works better.
As for distributions, there are various technical arguments about why the ubiquitous Ubuntu is bad, not all of them relevant. I use it but Mint might be better for 'just working'. It shares the same base but makes a few different technical decisions which are probably sensible.
The choice of distributions is probably one of the things that puts people off Linux, but the open nature of the system makes it inevitable I guess: You get the rapid evolution of a variety of systems which is probably a good thing on net, but the same plethora of systems can be a bit overwhelming.
The various diehard enthusiasts shilling for their personally preferred system don’t help either.
Q. What does the poet mean by x? A. Who knows? If he wanted to communicate what he meant, he would have written a concise essay, setting out his views and his reasons for them. Instead, he has vomited a lot of words on the page which neither rhyme nor scan and the meaning of which is shrouded in gnomic metaphor.
I can also confirm that the poetry studied at GCSE is woke.
That is a bit like studying a painting via chemical analysis of the pigments and the physics of the brush strokes. It completely misses the point.
Poetry, literature, film, art, music, religion etc are a different domain of knowledge and one not lending itself to binary answers. They are about interpretation, meaning, emotion and metaphor.
Fox jr2 wrote a very interesting defence of the actions of Othello in A level English, arguing that his violent behaviour was down to PTSD and that he should be regarded as a psychological casualty of war. It changed my perspective on the play. Is this a "Woke" analysis? Or one that rejects the "Woke" view of the patriarchy as intrinsically violent?
I very much used to hate the premise of English Lit. I tended to think that Shakespeare just sat down and wrote, and happened to be brilliant at it. He didn't worry about all the bullshit analysis that the Lit classes went into.
I have revised my opinion a bit now. I can understand that there is value in understanding WHY something works so well as a play, even if the playwright didn't ever think in those terms. However I also suspect that learning HOW does not then make writers better.
Its a bit like all those shit managers out there with Management degrees to prove that they know the theory.
Or my favourite - someone giving you a talk on how to give good presentations but it absolutely shit at them...
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
Up to the age of 16 I was expected and planned to be a doctor except I really didn’t want to be a doctor, so I spoke to my father and agreed I wouldn’t do A-Level Biology, and chose History instead.
I never heard of anyone at my school (as I said back in the '50's) swapping streams. One picked at 14, either Geography, History, and Latin or Biology, Chemistry and Physics, plus of course Maths, the two Englishes, French and either German or Spanish. And that was that.
It is still a depressingly narrow choice post-16 and schools seem to be encouraging 3 rather than 4 A levels
When I was at school at least starting doing 4-5 A-Levels was really common. People who were struggling then might drop one after the first year. Also, there has always been UCAS grade / point system at was supposed to just require your best 3, but there was definitely a lot more positivity from university admissions when you were doing 4 or 5. Any more and I think they just thought you were weird and unncessary.
But when polled, nobody seems to knows who Rupet Lowe is. YouGov is online surveying, Restore seems to be online right wing mano-sphere influencer hobby horse. I wonder if this number is picking up terminal online types and overemphasising their support.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Some at least of those internships are unpaid.
My son's internship was paid, but even an unpaid internship is likely to be more useful than menial work experience when it comes to finding suitable employment after graduation. It obviously depends on parental financial support though!
I wouldn't look down on an applicant with menial work experience. It shows self-discipline, commitment and ability to turn up on time, which are useful generic attributes when applying for any job. You just don't want to spend too long doing them.
I spent the summer of 1983 working as a chef in a Wimpy Bar, and learnt a lot about work and workplace relations. It was a strange inverted society with the summer staff being university students and the bosses and permenant staff all having left school at 16. It levelled the playing field nicely and we all piled down the pub together after work.
Not least of the lessons was the importance of studying hard so as not to be stuck there permenantly.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Microsoft used to provide a Teams client for Linux which worked OK. Zoom still do.
For Teams you now have to use the Web client, which is not as "good" but is still functional. You can use it in Chrome / Chromium or Firefox.
Everything else is fine on Linux unless you absolutely have to interact with people using MS Office macros. I always provide documents as PDF (from LibreOffice) to avoid any incompatibility.
I use it because I do lots of mapping and server stuff, and it just works better.
As for distributions, there are various technical arguments about why the ubiquitous Ubuntu is bad, not all of them relevant. I use it but Mint might be better for 'just working'. It shares the same base but makes a few different technical decisions which are probably sensible.
You dont have to use web client. There is open source Teams client for linux that works perfectly well and the developers are constantly updating it.
You'd think so but when I applied for a passport earlier this year, the Passport Office insisted I use the Teams app. Everyone praises the online experience but that's because most are renewals rather than new applications.
Comments
Retail in both Paignton and Torquay is bleak. To think back in the day, Torquay had stores such as Chanel.
And Noss Mayo is currently very underwhelming. Great loocation, but no reason to go there. A small cafe - other than that, the retail is solely around buying boats and chandlery.
The local hotel capacity is probably overdone. There is concern locally that unused capacity will be used for asylum seekers.
But if people will vote for LibDem MPs...
They want Starmer gone, but disapprove of any practical action to dislodge the limpet.
Caesar is the best, Hannibal was a loser.
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
In fact (though I am getting away from my area of expertise here) that the best route for pure speed potential might actually be the Settle- Carlisle roite, the engineering of which is astonishing. But that would come withplenty of other challenges!
Poetry, literature, film, art, music, religion etc are a different domain of knowledge and one not lending itself to binary answers. They are about interpretation, meaning, emotion and metaphor.
Fox jr2 wrote a very interesting defence of the actions of Othello in A level English, arguing that his violent behaviour was down to PTSD and that he should be regarded as a psychological casualty of war. It changed my perspective on the play. Is this a "Woke" analysis? Or one that rejects the "Woke" view of the patriarchy as intrinsically violent?
Had it been invented by then?
One of the benefits of studying Eng Lit is surely teaching you to analyse and understand other people's POVs.
You're not obliged to agree with them.
Stuff like video calling is notoriously bad on Linux, and the community are less than supportive if you’re not a software developer.
Mac Mini Pro will drive three screens, comes in at £1,599 with 32GB/1TB (you don’t need as much memory on a Mac as on a PC unless you’re running LLMs locally).
https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
https://x.com/bbcnews/status/2056624751360057692?s=46
It is hopeless with facts such as names, dates, faces.
So I studied maths.
Who is going to run Birmingham? Will our recycling ever be collected again?
It bad as a) it can be a good laugh and opportunity to meet people you wouldn't otherwise meet and b) dipping your toe in being a grown up, you learn some good lessons about how the of world of is work not how you want it to be.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
It will be long hours for minimum wage, but she’ll get to meet loads of people and they generally have a load of fun.
You always got soldiers who had simply had enough and ran away. Even Wellington acknowledged that good soldiers could simply break and run.
In my opinion (only an opinion), PTSD helps to explain a lot of the sacks and massacres that took place in the past.
My wife (for reasons known only to herself - I was expecting her to use Windows!) chose to use the Linux install on our home PC for all her work from home days, much of which is spent video conferencing with work colleagues. There have been plenty of the usual “why am I muted? Oh, the microphone isn’t plugged in” issues that plague every video conferencing session ever, but the video conferencing itself has been seamless.
They all speak to that American meme of the "good" violent man being the answer to the "bad" violent man, rather than real belief in the law and justice, which are seen as ineffective or flawed.
Even during COVID, the government couldn't convince people they might want to do these jobs in any sort of numbers. People would have rather been locked up in their own homes than go out and do these jobs that were very low risk in terms of catching COVID.
But as with Starmer, as with Brexit, as with housebuilding, as with infrastructure like HS2, as with all sorts of things... It's trivial to assemble a majority against something. It's much harder to assemble a majority for an alternative.
OTOH, a man's got to do, what a man's got to do, and violence is a legitimate means of settling more personal wrongs.
Admittedly I've no idea what he is like to work for; he's a persistent grumbler as a drinking companion.
“Brexit broke the connection between things that are said and things that are done, promises that are made and realities that ensue”
https://bsky.app/profile/pimlicat.bsky.social/post/3mm723fnwlk2x
Once you have such, with office apps as required, you could actually get adoption.
The issue is the investment to create this in the first place.
The Max chips are simply larger & have space allocated for more output encoders, amongst other things. That’s also why they cost so much more!
I finished Netflix's Legends drugs war drama last night.
Absolutely brilliant if anyone looking for a boxset binge. Only six episodes sadly.
Now hoping there is series 2 in the pipeworks.
Any illegal immigrants into Essex come in, I'm told, through the container port at Purfleet.
@ydoethur - some recommendations:
Fedora (upstream community Redhat) works well, is well updated and well supported by third parties. No problem getting official Zoom downloads for example. Not sure on the MS Teams situation (for any Linux) but the web-based version is ok.
I would have recommended CentOS for install and forget/long support/stability, but Red Hat screwed that up. Rocky Linux is the new version of that, not been around for all that long but looks to be the successor (and you can use any downloads of not-included apps that are made for Red Hat). Rocky v Fedora: Rocky will have long support over several years, Fedora support only last 18 months to 2 years, then you need to upgrade (doesn't take long, but is a bit of downtime). I use Fedora. I put my dad on CentOS, then Rocky when I got fed up with trying to remotely support his Windows PC issues (about ten years ago - I'm not sure he actually realises it's not Windows).
Other options, my experience: openSuSE: bigger, slower, some odd decisions but well supported. Ubuntu flavours: always a bit flaky in my experience. Arch: great, but you do need to be techy. Smaller ones come and go.
If you were willing to pay for support then Red Hat/SuSE both good options, but if it's just you that's probably not financially worthwhile!
Whatever you go for, try out both GNOME and KDE Plasma. My preference is Plasma, it's more similar to Windows if you're transitioning, but it's a very much a personal preference thing.
ETA: Sorry, wasn't clear: Rocky is Red Hat, without the trademarks and without the commercial support included.
They tried for a couple of years, but abandoned in the end and went back to giving Microsoft millions of Euro.
Good to hear anecdotes of the driver and dependency Hell being better now than it used to be, but I still wouldn’t use one for a user PC in production.
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Everyone will come up with an answer dated from when they were a young adult.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
(Apple is also being a bit weird with their UI changes - OSX is no longer the paragon of UI virtue that it used to be. I think the vast profits they make from the iPhone & iPad ecosystem have led to them abandoning OSX to the wiles of their graphic designers.)
But for decades if not centuries the phrase ‘political promise’ has been used ironically.
......and until today that's the last time I'd read it.
But then early this morning I noticed two links from MexicanPete a poster whose politics I like. They were predictably anti Burnham their line being that the ecconomic miracle in Manchester was fake and he'd twisted the figures8.....basically the usual Telegraph fare. Opinion and News merged into a giant loathing of all things 'LEFT'.
But then I read further and away from the politics and what I didn't know was that it had become a really nasty rag. Hardly different from the Daily Mail which it seems to have modelled itself on........
*They are wrong about Manchester. It really is a throbbing Metropolis. I've just done a tour of the Northern Quarter and it really is quite indistinguisable from the place it was 30 years ago
Admittedly it's a thin market so not worth doing to pay for your fortnight in
BermudaTorquay but for pb bragging rights about how shrewd a judge you are, maybe.If we'd rejected Lisbon and that had stuck, it would've been a lot better for the country.
When even the most extreme Apple fanboys are spending more time pointing out the manifest flaws in your new OS release than they are about anything else, you have a problem.
The hardware is fantastic though. As long as that’s the case people will put up with Liquid Glass.
Staycation clearly means staying rather than travelling.
The refusal of so many people to consider a holiday in this country as a holiday is a not insignificant part of the economic problems of this country with the UK tourism deficit approximately being the UK trade deficit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tourism_rankings#International_tourism_receipts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tourism_rankings#International_tourism_expenditure
https://www.prestigevenuesandevents.sodexo.com/ can be her starting point.
Another option might be local supermarkets, even the small 7-11/One Stop types. They usually employ a lot of mums who will take August off if they can. Trick is to apply now, rather than wait until the summer.
Eng Lit (it seems to me) operates differently. I think it is possible to make of it a genuine subject, and this could be done by attaching it more closely to history as basically a branch of history (which it is) and more closely to language, by requiring (as I was aeons ago) to learn Anglo-Saxon or Gothic or medieval Latin as part of the deal, as well as having a deep understand of the grammatical structure of English and its historical evolution.
However, you're right.
Laying Restore is free money.
https://www.itv.com/watch/believe-me/10a0144
I live in a formerly pleasant bit of the Peak District. 15 mins from my house is a railway station from which one can catch a train that's sat on the blocks in Euston about 1h 45min later. This is of varnishingly little utility to me, as I regard London on a dump to be avoided at all costs.
What it means in practice is that the locals are now priced out of all the nice houses by people who should be living in Essex, who still work in London two days a week, and do the rest WFH, and the developers are throwing up Barratt boxes for us unfortunate locals to be moved into because we can't afford the nice houses any more.
We shouldn't need more housing in our town, the population was actually drifting down slightly, but now it's just being repopulated by flight from the SE, and it's steadily turning the place into an overpopulated shithole like SE is already.
I'm a fortunate, I've little more money than most, and bought my current house before this was really a thing, so it's gone up in value considerably. Right now I'm in the middle of buying a reasonable house (I.E. not made of cardboard and with a decent garden). I'm moving about as far away from the fast rail connections as is viable whilst staying in the area, and I'm still probably spending £150k more than I would have if it wasn't for the London influx. The money I'm spending now, ten years ago would have bought me a 6 bedroom farmhouse in a couple of acres, now it's buying me 4 bed semi with a reasonable garden.
IMHO we should build a wall above Birmingham and make the southerners pay for it.
SteamOS is one of few examples of doing it right.
Valve, as usual, is built different.
Fingers crossed.
It doesn't seem an unreasonable analysis. Shakespeare, gratifyingly, tended to create characters who were sufficiently well-rounded that they lend themselves to this sort of analysis (in the way that characters in 'An Inspectors Calls' do not appear to). But is that what the teachers want? Or do they just want kids to say 'Othello was part of the patriarchy and therefore intrinsically violent'? My impression is that there is a large part of the educational establishment wants only the latter.
In any case, this seems a very niche thing to spend quite a large proportion of educational time to study.
Though also, I concede, this reflects my own preferences for questions with right and wrong answers!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3pzwx449no
OK maybe BBC's half hour documentary about shops will have more immediate impact. It makes you wonder about the bubble the government and top police live in if they need television series to point out such problems.
Programme link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002t4vt/on-the-front-line-exposed-the-high-street-crime-crisis
For Teams you now have to use the Web client, which is not as "good" but is still functional. You can use it in Chrome / Chromium or Firefox.
Everything else is fine on Linux unless you absolutely have to interact with people using MS Office macros. I always provide documents as PDF (from LibreOffice) to avoid any incompatibility.
I use it because I do lots of mapping and server stuff, and it just works better.
As for distributions, there are various technical arguments about why the ubiquitous Ubuntu is bad, not all of them relevant. I use it but Mint might be better for 'just working'. It shares the same base but makes a few different technical decisions which are probably sensible.
The resulting levels of parental relief are probably palpable from orbit.
(And yes, I know that languages and usage evolve. Its just that this one should be de-evolved...)
Fox jr2 is a a very talented creative, often thinking out of the box and writes exceedingly well.
It is fairly easy to pass Eng Lit with formulaic answers, but to get real top marks you need to grab attention by writing something much more perceptive.
My own education was principally scientific, explaining the mechanisms of life, but the creative arts are on a different plane. They teach us why and how to live.
The various diehard enthusiasts shilling for their personally preferred system don’t help either.
Yes I voted for it. And it’s a fucking catastrophe
I have revised my opinion a bit now. I can understand that there is value in understanding WHY something works so well as a play, even if the playwright didn't ever think in those terms. However I also suspect that learning HOW does not then make writers better.
Its a bit like all those shit managers out there with Management degrees to prove that they know the theory.
Or my favourite - someone giving you a talk on how to give good presentations but it absolutely shit at them...
https://x.com/YouGov/status/2056651637926580259
I spent the summer of 1983 working as a chef in a Wimpy Bar, and learnt a lot about work and workplace relations. It was a strange inverted society with the summer staff being university students and the bosses and permenant staff all having left school at 16. It levelled the playing field nicely and we all piled down the pub together after work.
Not least of the lessons was the importance of studying hard so as not to be stuck there permenantly.