Even with a 10% pay cut the VC will be remunerated over $1,000,000 per year, even despite the university’s poor financial performance.

Having worked at a university the waste is in plain sight. Vendor lock-in, consulting fees (especially with the Big 4), high executive pay, and compartmentalisation between professional and academic staff are high on the list.

In my area (different university) there was a constant stream of poor decision making. Moving to the cloud? Let’s hire a consultant to tell us what to do, and then do it in the worst possible way, instead of using internal capabilities! I suggested that the contract include provisions for “best practice” as listed by the vendor (HashiCorp) but this was ignored. The consultant gave us spaghetti Terraform code and an inefficient, high cost subscription layout.

The professional and academic staff barely talk in my experience. Academics do their own thing as much as possible. Professional staff throw solutions over the wall, mostly because of the existence of the wall in the first place.

The university was looking at using “crotch sensors” (motion sensors under the desk) to measure desk utilisation, spending money on “smart” ambient sound solutions etc. in the executive building, and other high cost solutions looking for a problem, at the same time as freezing staff and threatening redundancies. I was denied training but offered access to an LLM subscription (GitHub CoPilot) along with other IT staff, because AI is the going buzzword being parroted by the executives.

The higher education sector seriously needs an external review… and a proverbial kick up the bum.

Absolutely. I think Victoria is the model to follow. I was more alluding to significant interstate investor activity in Qld perhaps partially due to improvements in Victoria’s housing incentives.

Victoria also has a vacancy tax. It’s good but downside is exporting would-be investors to other capital cities. It’s almost as if federally-coordinated action is required.

Yeah, I usually follow the Greens and warm to MMT thinking, but using interest rates to improve housing affordability is just a really big misuse of a big lever with broad consequencess.

Now, they didn’t talk about it at all in their media release and maybe it hasn’t even been considered by Aus Greens, but a big theme in The Green New Deal in the US is looking at fiscal policies that may reduce inflation, like continuing to reduce dependence on petroleum through electrification and public transport infrastructure (every person who catches PT is reducing oil demand), and improving healthcare through universal healthcare like we do here. Of course construction may be the limiting factor when it comes to inflation, but a wartime-style focus on construction supply is basically what is being proposed by MMT proponents.

Back to Australia and the Greens, if they were talking about price stability and alternatives to higher interest rates I might be more supportive. I can think of another political candidate also calling for lower rates in the US - Donald Trump. The reality is that it’s politically popular to deliver lower rates risking future price inflation.

On one hand, the hate that’s being directed to the e-Safety commish is disgraceful.

On the other hand she is effectively proposing an internet licence for all Australians to be able to interact online via mandatory age verification. It applies to all social media sites but the definition of social media is so vague it basically just says a digital service which can be used to communicate with other people. She is deserving of our scrutiny.

https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Social_Media/SocialMedia/Terms_of_Reference

Yeah it is a bit of a pain. I currently only have a few users. Tooling-wise there are ways to tail the journals (if you’re using journalctl) and collate them but I haven’t gotten around to doing this myself yet.

That’s probably a fair point. I can’t say too much as I haven’t touched Windows desktop or server too much.

Could be apples vs oranges here though as we’re talking about getting started versus well established setup, but my current employer is looking at adopting Ansible + Packer for imaging and partially Ansible-managing Windows servers where it makes sense because of limitations in SCCM and GPO. As far as I can see across the divide Windows Server isn’t all smooth sailing.

I can’t say I’ve managed Linux desktops at scale (so technically I should leave it there) but I do manage several hundred Linux VMs with Ansible, and I manage all of my PCs with Ansible. Desktops are a different ballgame to servers, dealing with end users and all, but I still don’t think it would be that hard once it’s been set up.

That sucks :( I’m pretty much in the same boat. I get to use a Linux desktop at work on the proviso that I don’t raise support requests. We use Microsoft for nearly everything so naturally it’s an uphill battle. The web UI is quite buggy and “not recommended” by my org. Teams doesn’t support Firefox so I have to run a separate browser especially for it.

But aside from interfacing with Microsoft everything just works, and really nicely.

That’s awesome - great to hear about Linux desktops bring used by non-techies especially in a company.

How was it received out of interest?

At work we use separate clusters for various things. We built an Ansible collection to manage the lot so it’s not too much overhead.

For home use I skipped K8s and went to rootless Quadlet manifests. Each quadlet is in a separate non-root user with lingering enabled to reduce exposure from a container breakout.

It’s called Microsoft Clarity, and yes, Teams does it https://clarity.microsoft.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_replay

Securing proprietary hardware against peeps installing alt OSes

OpenZFS is under a completely FOSS license but it’s incompatible with the GPL and can’t really ever be merged into the Linux kernel. The workaroundids to provide it as source code which gets compiled as a module every time there’s a new kernel via dkms.

More controversially, Canonical ship OpenZFS pre-compiled in Ubuntu which some lawyers believe to be infringing on ZFS’ codebase.

Honestly the OpenZFS situation on Linux is probably the biggest single reason for the growing interest in btrfs and bcachefs, the former slowly becoming default on more Linux distros over time and lots of investment from SUSE and Facebook AFAIK.

ext3 had journaling, but not ext2. Also ext3 doesn’t really exist anymore as it was merged into the ext4 driver which can read the old format.

The company behind GitLab is seeking buyout offers, so make of that what you will.

My employer uses GitLab CE and it’s pretty good, and it is FOSS. The EE version is “open core” so not really FOSS.

If I were starting from scratch I’d be looking into Gitea/Forgejo as well.

Maybe a bit of a case of sour grapes on both sides? The Greens nearly took Fiona’s seat last election at 47.7% to LNP’s 52.3%. The ward office window was smashed and tensions were high. No excuse for it but the garbage that the LNP posted out was… truly garbage.

In my country that would be a civil offence, not criminal.

I’d recommend at least taking some precautions (e.g. use TLS or Wireguard, firewall if possible).

The main reason I’ve steered clear of OpenSUSE is its commercial backing as opposed to being a true non-profit community distro like Debian or Arch.

Red Hat have influenced Fedora decisions before and obviously blew up CentOS as a RHEL clone when they had the chance. Canonical constantly make bad decisions with Ubuntu.

I will add that I’ve heard nothing but good things about SUSE and OpenSUSE. SLES sounds like a decent alternative to RHEL and the OpenSUSE community distros sound pretty solid.

Windows Vista. I absolutely decked it out with free/open source software (LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, KDE for Windows) before I dual booted Windows and eventually made a more permanent switch. Never looked back.

I did have to use Windows for my old job (Win10 from memory?) but now I have a job where I can use Linux.

Next step is to switch my partner over from Windows 11 (she’s already on board with the idea).