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mackwinston @feddit.uk
Posts 2
Comments 136
Register to vote for the General Election
  • On that site:

    Our electoral system needs upgrading, and if you join us then collectively we can influence the next government to upgrade our democracy so that every vote counts.

    It's extreme wishful thinking to expect the next Labour government to change a voting system that just gave them a landslide to one that would have them governing in coalition.

  • Life Wirral School - Post Panorama Airing
  • And if the school hadn't been run like this for years and it being known it was like this for years there wouldn't have been a TV programme to make. I think you'd have to be pretty gullible to believe their statement.

  • What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux?
  • An older friend of mine told me years back about an incident that happened on a university VAX running Unix. In those days, everyone was using vt100 terminals, and the disk drives weren't all that quick. He was working on his own terminal when without warning, he got this error when trying to run a common command (e.g. ls)

    $ ls -l
    sh: ls: command not found
    

    So he went on over to the system admin's office, where he found the sysadmin and his assistant, staring at their terminal in frozen horror. Their screen had something like:

    # rm -rf / tmp/*.log
    ^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C
    # ls -l
    sh: ls: command not found
    # stat /bin/ls
    sh: stat: command not found
    

    A few seconds after hitting return, and the rm command not finishing immediately, he realised about the errant space, and then madly hammered Ctrl-C to try to stop it. It turns out that the disk was slow enough that not everything was lost, and by careful use of the commands that hadn't been deleted, managed to copy the executables off another server without having to reinstall the OS.

  • British watchdog has 'real concerns' about the staggering love-in between cloud giants and AI upstarts
  • That's nothing new, that's the very basis of how a firm works out how to price an item or service, at the maximum price the market will bear. It has been this way since the year dot.

    Collaborating with "competitors" however must be prevented or the market won't work. (This is the reason we have anti-monopoly laws, and anti-collusion laws). The laws exist already they just have to be enforced.

  • England could produce 13 times more renewable energy, using less than 3% of land – analysis
  • You can't build any kind of power generation facility without having some negative environmental effect. Tidal power does have quite serious impacts. The Severn Barrage was talked about decades ago, but even as far back as the 80s was seen as too environmentally problematic even though that one scheme alone could produce 7% of the UK's power (more today given efficiency advances as well as technological advances on the generation side).

  • How to stick to cycling as a new rider over the winter months
  • One of the hardest parts of taking up a new sport, cycling or otherwise, is staying motivated enough to keep going. I definitely didn’t cycle consistently when I started, and had to keep coming back to it again and again before I properly fell in love with the sport.

    Part the problem is that it's seen just as a "sport" or "leisure activity". Build cycling into your daily routine, going to the shops, going to work etc. giving cycling a purpose, then at least in my case I'm a lot more motivated to do it even if the weather's a bit crap.

    Then the truth emerges, riding in the rain just isn't that bad and we've all been making a huge fuss over nothing.

  • Are older, but Linux compatible computers capable of running the newest kernel/version of various distros?
  • How old is "older?"

    I run the latest Debian on a 10 year old Macbook Pro. Linux has given this laptop a second life as a lab machine - it's still plenty fast enough and it has a really nice screen (Retina) which Debian gets right out of the box with no tweaking. The only thing I needed to do when installing Debian is manually get the drivers for the WiFi hardware during the install (although Debian has the non-free firmware by default these days, they aren't permitted to distribute all firmware and the WiFi hardware in this machine unfortunately happened to be one of those).

  • Opinion: The small but crucial detail that will lead to Feddit.UK's inevitable downfall.
  • Why not just rename the instance, instead of creating a completely new one? Rename it, make sure feddit.uk still redirects there, job done. People are lazy and won't migrate unless they have to - I think you underestimate the difficulty in migration (getting everyone to do it. Just look at migrating off reddit to lemmy - so many people declaring how they hated the changes at reddit but how many actually moved? 1% of them? 0.1% of them? 0.01%? I would expect the number is closer to 0.01% than 1%). Just rename feddit.uk but keep all the users and all the communities so it's literally zero effort for the users and communities, even their bookmarks will just continue to work with a properly done redirection.

    Also - I'm picking nits here - but "Feddit" isn't infringing a copyright, you cannot copyright a word. It would be a trademark infringement not a copyright infringement. The law around trademarks is quite different to copyrights. Even if Reddit gets wind of feddit.uk, the likely outcome will be a "cease and desist", and feddit.uk will have to be renamed, not some kind of catastrophe. Reddit's only going to go to the effort of pursuing a trademark case in the UK courts if the feddit.uk admins are completely intransigent and refuse to take action.

  • Fedxit: Migrating to a new instance
  • Looking forward to wave 3. Too bad but it has to be done.

    One of the weaknesses with Lemmy I think is that communities themselves aren't distributed - a problem solved by both Usenet and FidoNet decades ago (for instance, a FidoNet bulletin board ceasing meant that the community there would have to be moved to another BBS - the FidoNet echoes ("communities") were themselves distributed so as a user you could just move to a new BBS and whole communities wouldn't have to be moved. Similarly with Usenet - your usenet server get shut down? Just move to a new one and subscribe to all the same groups.

  • Today on "But I neeeed a car for heavy items" - a literal boat anchor

    10kg of bruce anchor and 20kg of anchor chain and warp. It's easier with a bike because our harbour is drying and I can cycle out to the boat at low tide and not have to lug all this stuff all the way back to the car!

    10

    Christmas ads and it's barely mid-July

    Just went to the Met Office website to see what the weather is going to do for the next few days here in "the except the North and West". Right at the top of the page...banner ad from Royal Mail for Christmas deliveries! It's not even mid-July!

    3