Re: What flamewar?
I'm fairly sure Richard would agree with the "kind of naive and slightly stupid", but would take umbrage at the article for attributing the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem to Linus.
70 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Nov 2007
I'm curious about the measure of "NSFW" images ... using Jamie's Rant as a survey of El Reg depravity, I didn't see any (by Canadian office standards) "firing offense" NSFW images. Tasteless yes, unprofessional yes, scoldable certainly, firing no.
Now the double entendres in the headlines and subheads in Bootnotes, on the other hand ...
G.
"Dematerialisation" is an exquisite choice to describe freeing the Word from the crass bonds of the physical world so it can range freely in the aether!
> Digitisation might be a better translation of the Italian word that gave rise to dematerialisation.
How very British to prefer to speak of "giving it the finger".
G.
The headline is pure onomatopoeia and not misleading at all; the sound of a Canadian robin breaking its neck on a large picture window is definitely "bonk".
The bird-feeder explanation, though, is improbable. I've been overfeeding birds in my back yard (north of Edmonton) for decades and never had a bird crash at the back, while they regularly bonk into the big front window. The difference is that when they come in to the front fast and low they can see clear blue sky reflected back to them and figure they can go on forever.
Setting the windows to slant down and in, like an airport tower, would be better for the birds (and reduce window washing), but that would look a little too geeky even for me.
G.
Linus "ripped off" MINIX? Wisdom sourced from Ken Brown's "Samizdat" perhaps?
See http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/ for Dr. Tannenbaum's response to that drivel.
"As I soon learned, Brown is not the sharpest knife in the drawer."
G.
Back in the dark ages -- late '80s I think -- a buddy of mine touring a plant under construction spotted an instrument mechanic tearing apart a monitoring device. Since my buddy's team was doing the data communication and processing that would be slurping the gadget's output he went over and asked "what's wrong?"
And received the answer "This fucking fucker's fucked."
Beautiful! a sentence that hit the gong in three out of four words and transmitted exactly zero information since the very fact he was disassembling it suggested it might be broken.
PXG may be excessively modern in his liberal use of apostrophes, but he is absolutely correct in pointing out the oxymoron in Program Temporary Fix: they're as temporary as income tax. The original idea when the terminology was coined back in the last century was that they were temporary patches; now they're universally acknowledged as lasting until hell freezes over.
That one is /not/ a Gun Control Law, but a "long-gun" (rifle and shotgun) registration law. It's not particularly onerous; our hand-gun laws are far worse. I wasn't at all uncomfortable registering my old Lee-Enfield.
What was wrong with the long-gun registry was the political theatre that got wrapped around it; it was presented as protecting Good City Folks (particularly from Ontario) from crazed Hunters and Farmers (particularly from Oilberta), and oddly enough rural folk didn't much care to be stigmatised.
The Conservatives used the evil registry to crank up their base in the election and haven't had the courage to ditch the rhetoric.
Not to be pedantic, but Sony hasn't provided a rationale.
Product differentiation seems a plausible reason, but here's a more likely one: it allows them to be more friendly to individual nanny-states who want to micromanage communications with their people. And that seems to be spreading: Think Of The Children (English-speaking world), Thou Shalt Not Criticize The Elite (France), The State Is A Perfect Shining Diamond (China and its many imitators), Muhammad Is The Perfect Prophet And My Interpretation Is The Only Right One ...
These rulers are comfortable with their ability to manage physical things like a game on a DVD but are still struggling with those insubordinate electrons.
G.
> They are an enemy of Microsoft, and like every other organization that cannot write an operating system themselves, they ported UNIX.
I'm afraid you're showing your limited background there. IBM wrote, from scratch, rather a lot of operating systems back when operating systems were terra incognita (and their purpose and functions still being defined) and it gave them away up to 1980 or so, in source code (assembler), under the rubric of "Systems Control Programs (SCP) -- necessary to make the hardware work", since they were a hardware company.
I agree it's unfortunate that the one that had legs was OS/360 VS2 (which morphed into MVS or whatever it's called nowadays) -- VM/370 CMS was much more fun and was the first "Personal Computing" experience for many employees of large organisations (at least, of large organisations that weren't engineering firms).
G.
> However, Unisys sells a lot of its mainframes to federal and state governments, and among these customers, budgets are set and they don't care a whit about utility pricing even if it might save money. (Your tax dollars, pounds, and euros at rest.)
Please be a little more charitable to your hard-working public employees. The guys and gals putting together the recommendation will *never* be rewarded for proposing an efficient solution that involves an uncertain cost -- that's gambling, innit?
G.
Any default, like abstaining or spoiling a ballot, helps keep the current crooks in power.
When all the choices are bad (and in Canada's election, yes, they are all bad), just hold your nose and vote for whichever of the out-of-power crooks has the best chance of turfing out the in-power crooks.
The resulting shakeup slows down the crooks: it takes the new ones a while to get their snouts into the trough, and we briefly have slightly better government.
Canada's current crooks are really unhappy with not having a majority. Minority government makes it so much harder to get all the way into the trough.
> Or are they hoping people will "just" reinstall everything?
Interesting idea. A reinstall will certainly do another, more thorough pass at covering tracks. And outside the enterprise environment, it's likely to cause regression in security patches, making the box vulnerable to other/more herders -- more track covering?
G.
and Hosni Mubarak is clearly a visionary leader. He's just showing that "meatspace rules rule" and moving his country to the "closed network" that El Reg's Bill Thompson advocated in his great polemic of 2002: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/08/09/damn_the_constitution_europe_must/
any more than the NASA's beautiful false-colour pictures of galaxies are photographs.
And you do not loose any virtue or reputation from having the drooling 'tards look at it.
And yes, it doesn't do anything useful for security, but for heaven's sake let go. The scanners are a way for the "we're all going to die" establishment to back off without loosing face; if we object strongly, they'll have to find something more obnoxious.
G.
This seems a little much from the rag that's been banging on about the Rise of the Machines since 2003 and coined the initialism "RoTM" in 2006.
If I thought you were serious, I'd have you up before the European Court of Human Rights for hate speech: the fruitcake is one of the high points of British culinary art and really doesn't deserve the abuse its getting these days.
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Paris, because she's better looking than the other icons. Especially Prof. Sharkey.
I think Monty Python is unlikely to be the origin of the "love in a canoe" simile since I'm sure that I heard it in Western Canada sometime in the late '50s or early '60s.
Not that I would disparage that fine group -- I couldn't possibly, not after Mr. Cleese announced "Michael, you're no longer the funniest Palin".
G.
> Off is off.
Really? like your desktop system, where pressing the "Off" button is a servile petition to the god-like operating system to stand down and take a rest if it's not too inconvenient, shutting down the hardware in the process? That becomes slightly more urgent if you hold it down for ten seconds?
And your TV, if it's new enough to use integrated circuits, only goes into "standby", not off. Off is when you pull the power cord.
G.
"So, exactly how useful is it to pump electricity _into_ the grid when no-one needs it, and pull electricity _out_ when everyone else is doing the same?"
I can't speak for England, but in Canada the times when solar power generation is possible are also the times of maximum consumption for industrial and office needs. We haven't seen a Solar Surplus yet in Alberta, so it's pure virtue.
G.
in Edmonton (lat 53degrees, just short of Edinburgh but in the Canadian prairies where it gets seriously cold in the winter) it's a reasonable goal to do NET zero ENERGY, but not off-grid: during the summer, generate enough solar and pump it back onto the electric grid to make up for what you draw for appliances and winter heating.
Mind you, it's not for the faint of heart. It takes serious insulation and attention to all efficiencies, and depends on local regulations allowing you to sell electricity back on to the grid.
See http://www.riverdalenetzero.ca/ and follow the links to the engineers that can actually deliver the goods.
G.