Gaaahhd Bless America!
That's all...
240 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2007
As someone who doesn't frequent crappy places like Costa and the like, the various silly names they give their different ways of serving the same thing mean absolutely nothing to me. When I had to have a meeting with a customer in a café recently the waitress understood what I meant by "a black coffee please" without me having to work out which menu item meant that.
I'd love to use Mint. It's the only distro that has a default desktop look so nice that I'd actually keep it rather than customising my own.
Trouble is, every release I've tried has installed beautifully and booted fine the first time. But the second boot has always hung at the X login, rendering it unusable.
Lucky I've got the sense to take full dumps before trying...
I only live a few hundred metres from my local exchange, with all its mobile antenna on the roof in line of site from my house. I currently pay BT shitloads of cash every month for a 'phone line that I only need so I can get broadband. So as soon as 4G's available here I'm getting a 4G broadband router and dumping the 'phone line. Reckon the cost of the router will be paid back in six months of not paying BT.
...is to make it harder for supermarkets to under-cut pubs and drive more of them out of business.
Now whether I actually WANT to share my local with the sort of person who currently slobs out in front of the TV with a cheap slab of Stella, then gives his wife a kicking before falling asleep, is another question. But if it brings the price of his "lager"[1] nearer to what a nearby boozer that I don't use is selling it at, he might just go there instead.
And taking away the ability to use irresponsible loss-leaders from the supermarkets might just cut their profits a bit, which is no bad thing either.
[1] As opposed to PROPER lager, which actually DOES have some flavour and isn't just there to get you pissed as quickly as possible.
Very true. I have horrible memories of when I had a BT Internet dialup account with a website as part of the deal. Uploading files by FTP, I'd see 10% of them fail with error messages identifying the IP address where the problem was occurring and showing clearly that it was in the BT network. (I worked for BT myself at the time). But it was obvious from the start that the 1st line people were mainly interested in rejecting as many faults as they could - as soon as they found out I was working from a Linux machine, the response was "We don't support Linux". Then when I showed the same problem from a (work) Windows laptop, "Oh, there was a transient problem on the network".
1st line have a lot of crap to put up with, but when they try to bullshit someone who actually knows more than they do, they don't make any friends.
...because Java is the one language I've programmed in that I hated every minute of.
What a relief Android (maybe others, I haven't looked yet) can have pretty rich HTML5 apps with the SQLite database engine to provide storage. A whole app with only a dozen lines of Java.
Now if they'd only put Perl on them all...
...I refuse on principle to drink any Greede Kerching beers (even the admittedly excellent XX Mild).
This is a company that produces beers that pretend to be from such old breweries as Ruddle's, Morland and Tolly Cobbold without the slightest indication that they're all brewed at the same Westgate Street brewery. I've even heard them being sold in GK pubs as "guest beers", pretending they're nothing whatsoever to do with the GK brewery.
And they even produced advertising material pretending that their piss-poor IPA had been Camra's Champion Beer of Britain, which it wasn't.
Jimmy Wales has announced that Wikipedia will be leaving GoDaddy over this. https://twitter.com/#!/jimmy_wales/status/150287579642740736"
Though given the number of complaints about their services I keep seeing on Digg, I'm surprised more people haven't buggered off already.
"I'm saddened to see how many people think that a person who has a belief different to theirs should be fired."
He wasn't fired for having beliefs. He was fired for refusing to obey instructions. The fact that he thought those instructions were against his irrational beliefs was irrelevant.
Interesting to see that they've actually separated out different types of drinks, something that's rarely done. And good to see that while spirits confer no benefit, wine confers some and beer gives the best benefit.
Some years ago, Prof. Richard Doll (he of the tobacco and lung cancer connection) did a similar study which gave the same results. His showed that drinkers only got back to teetotallers' mortality rates above sixty-odd units per week. It would be interesting to see what level they've found that to be for beer drinkers compared to wine drinkers; extrapolating from what they've published free suggests they'll be showing a higher cut-off point.
I'll enjoy my Real Ale tonight even more...
One problem is, half of it gets restarted again even if you think you've disabled it. And with more recent releases, such staples as Kmail don't even seem to be able to work without Nepomuk.
Though actually, since Kmail's functionally useless because they screwed up kaddressbook, so that was another reason to dump it.
And all in all, KDE4 gets in the way of me getting things done. XFCE (like KDE3) allows me to get on with my work.
...is that it just works as a simple interface to control the windows on my screen. Unlike KDE4, it doesn't try to do all kinds of ridiculous things that just use resources and don't actually provide any useful functionality. Seriously, who needs crap like Nepomuk, Strigi and all the other stuff KDE4 depends on?
Otherwise they wouldn't have to have such a massive advertising budget for it.
General rule of thumb: the better and more lavish the advert, the crapper the product.
Proved for me by a cheaply-printed sheet of A4 I saw at the Zythos Beer Festival a few years ago in Belgium, "Chouffe. het bier is beter dan de slogan" (Chouffe: the beer is better than the slogan). And it is!
Research by Professor Richard Doll and others in 1993 showed that about 30 units a week produced the lowest mortality rate. It wasn't until drinkers got to 63 units a week that their mortality rate became as high as that of a teetotaller.
It would be interesting to see a similarly properly-run study looking at the mortality rates of people who habitually drink different types of alcoholic drinks. I have a strong suspicion that spirit drinkers might well be skewing the average quite badly (for example, it's well-documented that brandy is far more damaging to the liver even than other spirits).
So many times I've sat waiting for a page to load and I see my browser saying it's waiting for ssl-google-analytics.l.google.com, s.ytimg.com or ad.be.doubleclick.net. So as far as I'm concerned, they're getting in my way so I'm going to block them.