@edps
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Changing ‘job’ is subtly different from changing career. Do by all means change job if you are unsatisfied with your present employer, in fact in many areas of employment you cannot progress without changing companies. Changing career and potentially throwing away 10 years of expertise is a totally different bag of worms and one which may cause you future problems as the country enters into a period of major instability. In this respect I would be very cautious at doing anything which did not <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>build</span> on your current areas of expertise.
All that said, you should consider if it would be worth discussing your dissatisfaction with your boss, or the HR department. Some companies have an enlightened view of career development, others do not.
If this all fails consider making an approach to a head-hunting firm. You may well find that someone out there is looking for someone exactly like you. If nothing else it will polish up your CV technique.
[edit] seems to be a bug in underlining selected text. Underlining as you go <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>seems</span> to work, but also fails when posted.
A ‘sticky’ for anyone to call-out spammers (as used in MM) might be useful if the membership grows a lot.
I took Chem Eng (nearly Bio-Chem Eng). That really was a jack of all trades course with pretty much a common core along with most Engineering undergrads up to the end of the second year. This had value in later life, as it enabled me to understand what I did not know (lots), but enough to know when I was being BS’d. I do however think it to be somewhat dangerous to take the concept beyond the second year as there are a lot of areas where you need specialised basic skills. (As a simple example while I know enough Civil Engineering to know about designing foundations, I also know that I’d make a right pig’s ear if I tried to do it myself!)
I forgot to add that of course you find the Screen Saver under Settings->Personalisation->Themes (a really obvious place to look-sarcasm). I should also add that the problem is probably associated with an Intel Graphics Driver as none of the other hardware in the house has the problem despite not have a screen saver set-up.
As said, the web, but when looking for a one place comparison I normally gravitate to Toms Hardware for things like graphics cards.
IF Xen etc had working bare-metal hypervisors with full pass-through of graphics then Windows 10 would be junked as failed technology. Unfortunately this facility (and a few others such as decent games support) do not exist under Linux, so for the moment I cannot dump Windows 10 much as I would like to.
The optimum amount of ram depends what use you make of your desktop. For just office work 4GB is more than adequate but Windows is becoming an increasing memory hog. I seem to remember a study a year ago that showed 6GB was (at that time) the sweet spot for games. I expect this has grown so I would opt for 8GB of ram.
Some blogs are more positive in recommending a minimum amount of 8GB.
I probably had the same ‘joy’ of self-build as the OP. I now get my kicks from the *Raspberry Pi. If you make use of ‘HAT’ products these are essentially plug and play, but if you want to save money you can always learn to solder. (not that hard with a good solder station and third hand.)
Some of these bits of kit do need a few lines of code to make them work, but in the main these are ‘cut and paste’ jobs. For example, this link is the description and ‘code’ to get a simple DAC to talk to a cheap £4 pi zero. This combo + a £6 speaker & wifi at the very minimum gives you a fairly good quality Internet Radio, add in a monitor and small mouse/keyboard combo and you have a very useful little kitchen computer . This is possibly a ‘bad’ example as it either needs soldering or connector crimping to build this, but HATs have similar fulsome code support, and generally require little or no soldering.
- and the Arduino but that does need some real building and codeing. Maybe Steve can comment on this latter as he and his son have used it as a learning/teaching aid.
Thanks Steve, that is a much better link than those I found and totally appropriate for thin wires – I’ll waste a couple of dozen more crimps and have another go!
I honestly do not know exactly WHERE the contention takes place. VMs are i/o bus/disk hogs in their own right Acronis has regressed from my viewpoint and consumes far too many disk/network cycles even on local backup. Heaven knows what Win10 does, but I suspect it is snooping all over the architecture (bus/disk?) before reporting top level to M$. I’d therefore hazard that the bottle neck is a mobo bus issue rather than Internet so pi-hole ought to help but only a tiny bit.
I think I may investigate loading the vm cores into ram disks. Really that should not work as Windows 10 is SUPPOSED to intelligently use available ram. (I have 16GB to play with).
I’m a heavy user of VM and often have two or even three machines on the go (four max). Although my four year old box has enough cores/flops and memory to handle this,, Windows 10 has stuffed up the i/o bandwidth by grabbing far too much band-width for iits poxy ring-home spy-ware needs.
Unfortunately Xen does not cut the graphics pass-through mustard so I’m stuck for the moment with Windows 10. Bottom line I look at upgrades as a possible way of opening up bus bandwidth limitations when I’m running more than one vm (even one can stutter if Acronis is running (unfortunately now also a new band-width hog with its cloud stack-even though I do not use it)) 🙁 .
We each logged in ‘on-line’ just the once for each account then reverted to using TBird and POP3. I suspect that following the massive Yahoo break-in that BT wanted to be able to verify that accounts were associated with ‘real’ BT users. I further suspect that POP3 did not give them their required verification step. :unsure:
@Dan. If you check out the linked cli commands in the OP you will find that the Pi architecture is subtly different from standard Debian, probably due to its non-x86 cpu. Believe me if the solution was as trivial as modifying xorg then it would not have generated the pages of links you will find on the subject!
A trivial example of a major difference is that most monitor set-up commands such as overscan, hdmi, resolution etc are issued in /boot/config.txt
I thoroughly recommend the Pi to anyone who likes tinkering, or likes fighting an OS to bend it into shape. It can all be done without soldering, but a little soldering opens cheaper options.
We too used TBird and BT for years without problems. They only appeared after the Yahoo debacle was revealed. As I said the cure for us was an on-line log-in.
Richard, the worrying thing is that once you apply ‘deep-learning’ or ‘machine learning’ the actual work of preparing the program itself can be done on almost a by-rote basis. I’m not even sure that the future amount of skill required to service such machines will be that high – taking the automotive industry as an example, nearly every new car has a diagnostic set-up that tells the mechanic which board/part to replace.
It is becoming a gray area on where the capabilities of human intelligence start and machine intelligence ends. The old Turing Test no longer applies as a gold-standard break-point Beeb link. (However,I’m not sure it was ever a very good test). Unfortunately most links on AI versus Human intelligence are dated due to the progress made in AI in the last few years, those that are not are unfortunately tainted by religious rants e.g. ‘Only something made by God can create’.
If you plot AI progress versus time we are now close to the point where the effects of exponential progress start to kick-in. This link is a good mid-year CEO level read on the situation of AI at that time. As the writer reassuringly says ‘humans will need to be in the loop’. Unfortunately the writer did not pose the corresponding question ‘How Many’?
Just to put in my nickel, from my perspective there are very simple differences between the effects of Automation and AI on employment prospects.
Automation (I’ll include simple PC functions in this) removed the burden of repetitive unthinking work and therefore had its biggest impacts on unskilled and semi-skilled workers.
AI has the capability of replacing derivative creative and decision making processes. It will therefore have its biggest impact on ‘professional’ and creative people. IMO about the only creative jobs not at threat in the longer term are those that rely on serendipity or a novel mindset to create something absolutely new.
Going back to the war theme a GPS programmed drone is mere automation, AI is an autonomous sentry robot that takes reasonable and sensible live fire decisions
My wife and I have had BT email problems, and we both use TBird. The cure for us was to log on to the BT web site (again), and access email there.
It seems that BT need some sort of verification step that TBird does not use, however once we had logged on via the BT web page we were set to go.
The following are just some thoughts on how I mentally categorize my hobby, however there are probably two ways of broadly categorizing Maker Activity:
a) By subject (e.g. Media Centre, Security Cams, Home Automation etc)
b) By hardware (e.g. Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Micro Bit, – including all their many clones)
As the first way of categorizing gets big very quickly, I’d probably opt for the second way and add four broad subject areas. e.g.
Raspberry Pi
Arduino
Micro Bit
Education
Home Automation/Security
Programming/Code tips
How-To
I have no axe to grind on how these things are categorized, but I added Education because most kids are going to get thrown into this at 7 and most teachers know naff all about the subject so parents/grandparents will have to do their bit. Programming/Code tips were thrown in for the same reason
Home Automation covers all the pre-built stuff (Lighning etc), security cams etc
The last one I threw in as many people do not know the basics such as soldering, and where to start.
A Makers Section sounds like a good idea.
Although Pis make fairly good Linux programming platforms, they are very horsepower limited, and the SD card is prone to turn into sintered silicon at the slightest provocation. However combining one into a make project becomes much more fun and potentially both useful and practical. My #1 son uses a Pi I bought him to act as an intermediary between his all-Apple setup and non-Apple Lightning and other home automation gear. When the kids give him time he plans to use Pis/Arduinos as home automation devices in their own right.
I guess you could add the MicroBitto the list as schools will soon be encouraging the 7+ kids to start programming them, (and it should be possible to tie Pis Arduinos and Microbits together in some projects. (Microbits have in-built stuff such as accelerometers and joystick interfaces.)
I have a friend who is a Union Convenor in the other half of Govia (Thameslink). His unbiased opinion is that the management of Southern Region are totally ratcrap at doing their job, and probably the worst possible man-managers in the whole of the UK. The management in Thameslink sat down with the Unions and explained their objectives, and worked through the issues with the union reps. As a result Thameslink have had driver only trains operating on many of the same routes for ages.
Southern on the other hand were TOLD by the Dept of Transport that they HAD to implement driver-only trains and the Government would keep them financially whole for any costs of disruption. The so-called Victorian-era management of Southern then took this as an open invite to INSTRUCT the RMT that they HAD to accept driver-only trains. This sort of attitude puts the backs up of anyone never mind Union leaders as a result the poor bloody public are caught in the middle of a total screw-up. When I managed Unions I would have been fired for incompetence on this scale!
So in order of blame top of the heap is Southern Management, followed closely by the Dept of Transport and then the RMT
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