Thursday 31 August 2017

Economies of Scale

As a person who voted to leave the EU, I thought that I should get some of my thoughts  about why I voted this way into print.

Great Britain has always benefited from being an island nation. If we had been connected to the mainland in 1940 we would have been overrun and the world would be a different place.

But we now belong to an organisation that is mainly the countries of the mainland, and it is so large that it has lost the benefit of economies of scale in so many ways. It is not homogeneous enough in so may ways to work well. Do we need an EU armed force? But only a few countries would want to contribute to a navy.  It could be argued that we have a major possible opponent in Russia, but as in past wars, the armies of each country could work together if needed. Could a large armed force be easily controlled? Each country knows its own terrain best.

One of the major drawbacks  to the EU is the finances. They have not been able to do an annual reconciliation for many years, so when we in Britain ask for the bill for leaving, The EU is unable to calculate it.    Can GB calculate  what we think it should be? Yes, because we have a chancellor who looks after the financial departments of government and could, with a bit of push and shove, get the figures out of HMRC and others. Britain is slimming down many government departments, and making them more efficient. We now need to simplify our tax system.

The EU machinery is very top heavy because of the need to have representatives of each country in every department. I cannot imagine an EU with a single tax system for every person. This would be impossible to manage. That is why it has to be devolved. but to be properly devolved each country's tax system should be the same.

Is GB the right size for a good economy of scale? Suppose that GB were to break down. Could Scotland, Wales, England, Northern Ireland each build up their infrastructure to cope successfully? That's more people working for the government. And border controls?

If things were to break down even further to the concept of city states, such as Manchester and London being completely independent states then I think the whole concept of government will have broken down. Each would have it's own tax regime, administration, military and policing and external Foreign relations. Medical science would come to a halt, unless there was a medical science body that would help cross fertilisation of ideas, But where would it be based? None of these city-states would be big enough to negotiate business contracts with companies that are larger than they are. You start to wonder what proportion of the people of the British Isles would be involved in Government.

So I see Great Britain  being the appropriate size to be independent of the EU and able to manage it's own business.

Tuesday 15 August 2017

Playing with Linux Operating Systems

Because I have been a bit restricted in what I can do lately, I dug out my play computer and tried a few Linux OS's on it. Here is a bit of a report.

The computer is an ASUS P5K with 4GB of RAM, 153GB IDE hard disk with an IDE-SATA converter and a 15 inch monitor. It has a Wifi card that sits on the motherboard.

Initially the computer had a SATA hard disk with Zorin 11 on it. This had installed easily and worked fine. It is a 'simple' OS that is sort of an XP replacement.

I overwrote this with Parrot linux 3.7 as it was in one of the recommended lists. It had the old text based installer and went in without problems, and updated easily over the wifi.

I then changed this disk for the IDE with converter and installed KDE Neon 5.8.5 that I had downloaded back in January. This installed easily enough but I had a bit of trouble getting it to stay connected to the wifi. It wanted about 270 updates, and when you  hit the 'update all' button it overlayed a screen of all the files that were going to be updated, but it was a long list and you couldn't scroll down or see any way of removing it. Hitting the enter key did it. I had to try and update about 4 times over the wifi, because it kept stopping when the wifi failed and I was unable to restart it.  In the end I carted it indoors and wired the Ethernet in. It eventually updated. One of the features was that the machine refused to respond to the power down instructions. The only way I found to stop it was the power button.

Not happy so I installed Kali Linux 2016-1 over it. Once again a text based installer, it took it's time installing, but got there. It didn't mind that I went out for coffee, just kept working, not like the Neon.  it's quite fast, but the only login on it is root. I haven't found an office suite on it yet, but it is a dedicated security toolkit distro based on Backtrack and Helix.

Ah, well, if you're bored then you might be interested in trying
https://manjaro.org/  I haven't, but it's an Arch Linux derivative
with... a GUI installer!  The download page looks to have KDE flavour. -Ralph
That kept me from being bored. I downloaded the KDE version, and every time I booted it, my screen displayed a message " out of range " which implies that it cannot adjust the resolution to that of this ancient Toshiba 15".  This is a condition that I have seen years ago when a computer could not set the screen size. I  think that it is 'working' because every time I hit a key the CD runs up.  I booted into SolyDK and that worked OK, as does everything else.

I have a cheep IDE-to-SATA converter on the hard disk drive and it is giving me grief too as I keep swapping drives.

I used to be a great fan of Mandrake about 12-15 years ago, but didn't like Mandriva. I'll have to give the latest incarnation another try.

I tried Mageia, but could only find the XFCE version. I liked it because of the ease of installation and guidance, but on booting it always brought up a terminal window and needed a root login before proceeding to the GUI login. And it was dreadfully slow.  It says my screen is a 15"  Toshiba  with 1024x768 resolution.  I think someday I'll have to try it again as it doesn't seem right.

And at the end of it I decided that my IDE-toSata converter had a poor solder connection on the SATA connector so have had a go at fixing that.

Have given up/finished. Have now four HD's with PArrot, Kali, Mageia and Zorin that I can plug and play via the SATA cable.