Mike Meredith

All! About! Apple’s! New! M1X! Processor!

 Computing  No Responses »
Oct 172021
 

All the details of Apple’s M1X processor! Here first! Before Apple has announced it!

Yes this is just click-bait. Just like all the other videos/posts/stories or whatever about Apple’s soon-to-be-announced (perhaps) ARM-based processor that supposedly scales up more than the original M1. It’s going to happen sometime (which is probably on the 18th – tomorrow at the time of writing).

So where does all the early speculation come from? In all probability it is nothing more than speculation and click-bait. You’re wasting your time clicking on this story no less and no more than checking out the others.

Except this one is honest about it being just click-bait.

The Naked Horseman

The Best Linux Distribution Is …

 Computing, Linux  No Responses »
Oct 162021
 

The one you’re running.

A bit of a simplistic answer but there’s a great deal of truth to it. It is too easy to get distracted by the new shiny and keep changing distributions. When the time could be far better spent just learning Linux – to a great extent all Linux distributions are the same. You can get Firefox (or whatever browser you prefer) with any of them; similarly LibreOffice is nearly always available. It’s the software you use on a daily basis that is important; not which distribution you’re using.

Similarly the desktop environment you use is selectable – this laptop has a distribution-specific flavour of GNOME, Awesome, Xmonad, and i3 (although I spend most of my time in Awesome). You might be able to tell something about my preferences for “desktop environments” from that list! A whole new desktop environment and a whole new look is just a quick software install away.

And a whole lot quicker and less disruptively than you can install a different distribution.

Different distributions offer different feature sets and different system administration commands (dpkg vs yum), but it isn’t that difficult to adjust to these differences especially when most of the time you are just using the computer to do real stuff rather than just managing it.

The Round Table

No, You Didn’t Pay for the Roads!

 General  No Responses »
Sep 202021
 

In the UK there is something known as “vehicle excise duty” which the owners of some motorised vehicles have to pay. Before 1937, this was paid into a road fund used exclusively to pay for the creation of the road network. But from that date, roads are funded out of general taxation and local council taxes.

Which means that everyone (or just about everyone) is paying for the roads and that is no bad thing – we all benefit to some extent (although the pollution is a bit of a drag).

Filthy Roaring Beasts Rushing Along The Scar

The interesting thing is that because local roads are locally funded (to an extent), there is a good chance that a pedestrian is paying more for the roads within a city than the car driver – the driver is more likely to be a visitor to the city and thus pays considerably less. So by the argument that whoever pays should have priority, it should be the pedestrian who does!

Doing Your Own Research Isn’t a Sin

 General  No Responses »
Sep 182021
 

There are a fair number of memes out there at the moment throwing rocks at people who “do their own research” (meaning reading a few articles online).

The point they are trying to make is not unreasonable – casual reading up on a subject doesn’t trump the results of professional researchers results.

On the other hand, reading the right sources is research; not as valuable as academic research with all that extra “stuff”, but research nevertheless. The OED definition includes :-

To engage in research upon (a subject); to investigate or study closely.

Doesn’t say a whole lot about publishing papers in a peer-reviewed journal, the scientific method, or all that other tedious stuff that separates the professional academic researcher from the amateur.

There is of course a whole other post on how to do research properly in terms of background reading :-

  1. Wikipedia may be a good start but it’s just that – a start.
  2. You need to assess the trustworthiness of a source; if nobody trusts the source you’re reading it probably means the source can’t be trusted.
  3. You’re looking for accepted wisdom; you need to do a lot more work to start looking at the kooky stuff.
Unnatural Nature
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