More Zonkyness

Author: Mike Meredith

  • The Best Linux Distribution Is …

    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

  • Winchester Images

    Entering The Great Hall
    King Alfred Looking Down At The Runners
    The Bridge
    The Naked Horseman
    The Old Church Garden
    The Round Table

  • No, You Didn’t Pay for the Roads!

    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

    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

  • Medical Insurance and Paying For Others Healthcare

    One of the most amusing (if you have a sick sense of humour) things about the debate between fans of the current US system (devotees of privatised health care) and those proposing a more rational and efficient system, is the whole “I don’t want to pay towards the care of another”.

    Once you get past the level of selfishness approaching a sociopath, and think deeply about how insurance – any insurance – works, you realise something. People with private health care insurance are already paying for the health care of others because that is how insurance works.

    The insurance company sets monthly premiums at a level they calculate will leave them with profit after all the healthcare costs and overheads are taken care of. Most of the people paying those insurance premiums are unlikely to ever use up those premiums on their own health care; those premiums are going towards the healthcare costs of those who do exceed the total value of all the premiums they’ve paid. And of course to fill the pockets of the insurance companies.

    So the next time someone objects to “socialist” healthcare by saying that they don’t want to pay for the healthcare of others’, just point out that they already are.

    Posts in a Foggy River