Posts by Mike Flugennock

China could penetrate US with new huge missile

Re: FUD

I wonder what percentage of all military boasting etc is just FUD designed to bankrupt your opponents in their effort to counter the perceived threat..

One hundred.

Hey, waitaminnit... why do the Chinese need a missile...

...when they can destroy the US by calling in their debt?

Of course, like Dennis Miller, I could be wrong.

Reagan slams webmail providers for liberal bias

B'WAHH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA... oh, damn, I've wet 'em.

Microsoft's new retro-flavoured logo channels Channel 4

speaking as a graphic designer with 30-odd years' experience...

...Jesus H. Tap-Dancing CHRIST. Did they pay actual money for this? Oh, who am I kidding; I'm sure they did -- well into six figures, at the very least. Not bad money for about ten minutes' work.

Hell, it looks like they didn't even have to use an actual drawing application to do it, either, or even spend any time trying out different fonts. It looks like it was done by a design department intern, right there in the client meeting, on a laptop with the drawing tools in Word, and the fonts that came installed with it.

I almost feel sorry for Microsoft these days; seems they just can't stop stepping in it.

I detect a familiar odor...

"This wave of new releases is not only a re-imagining of our most popular products, but also represents a new era for Microsoft, so our logo should evolve to visually accentuate this new beginning," Hanson said.

The box "is important in a world of digital motion" while the little squares of colour are "intended to express the company's diverse portfolio of products".

Jeezus, it totally stinks of sage in here. Somebody open a window.

Boffins zapped '2,000 bugs' from Curiosity's 2 MILLION lines of code

Re: WTF?

Traffic signals? Aren't those things only suggestions?

Sounds like an inside joke my wife and I came up with while driving around Margarita Island, Venezuela on our honeymoon. They had the usual traffic signs, speed limits, traffic lights and such, but folks there were rather -- shall we say -- casual about paying attention to them. My wife and I began referring to them as "The Suggestions Of The Road", as opposed to the Rules Of The Road.

The locals in many of the smaller towns on Margarita solved the problem of people ignoring traffic lights and stop signs and speeding through intersections by rolling sections of tree trunks into the centers of intersections, forcing people to slow down in order to go around them. Worked like a charm.

Curiosity spins its wheels and shoots up the Martian landscape

cool pan shot...

...and it looks like the first thing Curiosity did was to spin a doughnut. Awriiiigghhht.

Get'cher motor runnin' (daaahhhhh dah dah dah!)

Head out on the highway (daaahhhhh dah dah dah!)

Apple TV: Rubbish, you don't like documentaries – I'll just flick to porn

"Fed up of having to pick up the remote controls...?"

Waitaminnit... y'mean there are actually people out there who can't even be bothered to pick up a goddamn' remote and push a goddamn' button to flip the channel to something they like? Goddamn' lazy fat-asses.

Cripes, man... when I was a kid, I actually had to get up off the goddamn' couch and walk across the room, sometimes as far as twenty feet -- uphill, in the goddamn' snow -- to flip the channel over to "Creature From The Black Lagoon" after Bugs Bunny was over. ...But you try and tell young people today that, and they won't believe you.

But, seriously... this goddamn' tuner is supposed to know what I'm interested in how, exactly?

...By building up a preference profile for you.

And those preferences could get prodded out of you in different ways - by questions, by monitoring your playback history (what you switched off, what you switched on), and what's already loaded on your drives and media devices...

Oh, yeah, the goddamn' thing is going to spy on me, of course. How stupid of me.

Y'know, I've been a devoted MacOS user ever since the beginning, and I wouldn't use anything else, but jeeeezus -- Apple really is sailing off the edge of the Earth lately. Thanks, but no thanks; I'll stick to manual channel-flipping, on those rare occasions when the wife is out of town and I have the remote to myself and actually feel like watching a little TV (more often than not, usually either Turner Classic Movies or the NASA TV feed).

Disney sitcom says open source is insecure

Re: I would care...

I can only hope that the average attention span of the target audience mean that they only noticed the pretty colours and points when they were expected to laugh. Is this clip typical of USA kids TV?

Sadly, yes, but for a few bright spots here and there.

Re: Payback? @ Greg

One half-assed remark by a writer who clearly doesn't know their stuff does not an indoctrination make. I grew up watching Star Trek and some seriously weird 80s/90s cartoons, but I don't currently believe that talking cats can fly jet fighters, nor have I tried to solve any server issues by dumping the rack's warp core...

During CNN's "coverage" of the Columbia disaster, the "crawl" on the bottom of the screen announced that at the moment it broke up in the upper atmosphere, the ill-fated Shuttle was traveling "25 times the speed of light"*. To this day, I wonder if the bonehead Trekkie intern at CNN was ever fired for that blooper.

*the Columbia was, in fact, traveling at approximately Mach 25 -- 25 times the speed of sound.

NASA picks the target for Curiosity's first road trip

Re: Grand Challenge

Not only that, but the rover:

- has limited energy to use per day

- has limited cpu power to steer itself safely around hazards

- crew needs to get accustomed with driving, so it won't go at top speed for sure

- may find science underway that may arouse the scientists

- etc...

Also, don't forget the radio lag; round-trip light time is something like 20 minutes, so you can't really drive the rover in "real time", like the old Lunokhod drivers back in the early '70s. There's a bit of a radio lag to the Moon as well, something like two seconds; this meant that astronauts on the Moon had to be a bit patient when talking to Mission Control, but the radio lag wasn't so long that it kept you from controlling a rover from Earth in near-real time. For example: when the remote operator of the LRV camera was shooting the LM liftoffs on Apollos 15-17, he had to start panning the camera up at something like T-2 seconds, so that the command would reach the camera when the ascent stage lifted off.

Office 2013 to eat own file-format dog food

Re: docx not welcome here

Most of my experience with MS Orifice is by way of taking in files from clients destined for page layouts -- Word files for conversion to plain text for final formatting in InDesign, Excel files for export to vector-based infographics for cleanup in Illustrator -- and I, too, am constantly having to write back to clients asking them to please not send .docx files because Word can't open them, despite their having been created in Word.

For the record, I'm still using Office 2004 here -- works fine for me, and I see no reason to jump aboard the endless upgrade treadmill -- and Word 2004 can't read its own .docx files that it creates itself.

Microsoft: It was never 'Metro,' it was always 'Modern UI'

Modern (moderne?)

...Because we all find the term 'Modern Art' so confusing after forty years of it. ;)

Good point. When I tell my friends I enjoy "modern jazz" I end up having to specify jazz created between circa 1948 (Miles Davis' first sessions for Capitol) and circa 1967 (death of John Coltrane).

Re: Modern Scam they should call it instead...

I only use my mutil-touch trackpad when I have no space (5inX8in) to put both the mouse and my hand.

Until a track pad will work with my fingers and give me the control, at high resolution, that my mouse gives me; I, for one, will keep using a mouse*.

* - when I can use my eyes instead of a mouse, I WILL SWITCH, otherwise, I'll keep my mouse.

Hear, hear.

One of the things that first attracted me to MacOS over twenty-five years ago was -- along with the clear and intuitive GUI -- the fact that I could work the GUI with a relative positioning device, i.e., a mouse, instead of having to type commands for simple operations such as moving/copying/deleting files and such.

I've repeatedly given stylus-driven tablets a shot ever since they first became available in the early '90s, and I've always gone back to my mouse. I liked the idea of tablets -- being a designer and illustrator and all -- and the idea of using a stylus/finger "gesturing" method to work the GUI, but in practice, the tablet was always slow and clumsy.

The only thing I've found that works as well as a mouse is the touch pad on my laptop.

Re: Modern Scam they should call it instead...

...For laptop users—i.e. 75%+ of the computer-buying public that isn't buying iPads and other "post-PC" devices—the Modern UI's design will finally be a step away from the ageing mouse, towards a closer integration with multi-touch track-pads that all laptops come with these days. (Yes, even Windows laptops have them now.)

And, for people who want a tablet that can do double duty as a PC, Microsoft will have you covered there too.

The mouse will become a niche input device sooner, not later. It would be moronic to continue with the anachronistic and obsolete WIMP desktop approach to GUI design...

Shill much?

Re: Modern Scam they should call it instead...

...At Microsoft they must be on crack...

Whoa, hey, man! There's MS's new brand name for the Windows 8 UI, right there: "Crack".

No, really, gang; I'm only half joking here.

Re: Keep digging

Keep digging? Or, perhaps, even better...

just wondering...

...after checking out the Mondrian painting -- haven't there been some other OS overhauls or new applications which used the names of famous painters as code names? Just wondering, as now I'm thinking they could've saved themselves all this embarassment and code-named their new turdlet "Mondrian".

Or, maybe not. I'm not clear on the legalities of using famous proper names. There is the Tesla Roadster, though...

Deadly pussies kill more often than owners think

slightly inconvenienced?

Right on, there. Who's going to open the cans? Oh, sure; Minnie could use her claws to rip open the bag of Meow Mix, but she needs the large bald ape with opposable thumbs to open little can of chicken and gravy.

Re: What A Load Of Homo Sapiens Bullcrap !

A lot of it, I think, depends on the environment. I live in the middle of a large city, and I wouldn't think of letting my cat out. There's just too much danger from cars, dogs, disease, sadistic children, weather. If you raise your cat as an indoor cat from the beginning, as a kitten, it works out quite well, though the wife and I would never have dreamed of declawing her, as there's the mouse population to deal with. So, we make sure to give her plenty of options for places to work her claws and plenty of positive reinforcement when she uses them; our sofas are remarkably unclawed, although the top of one of the sofa backs has a large permanent indentation as it's one of her favorite napping spots in the house.

When I was a young teenager, our family lived in a far suburb -- "exurbia", as it's called -- far enough from the city that it was borderline rural, and so there was plenty of space for cats to range without having to go anywhere near a highway. We had a nice, big yard that bordered on a small meadow between our neighbors' back yards, and that was the local cat hangout, as well as the source of the field mice that showed up in our garages. Our cat never had to go near a busy street or highway as he could do all his socializing and hunting in our backyard (plenty of mice and moles) and in the little meadow (many a half-eaten rabbit turned up on our back patio in the early morning). We collared and tagged him in case he got lost -- he never did, in sixteen years -- and he got on great.

In the city, it's way different. We have some neighbors who let their cats out -- I recognize some of the "locals" and know where they live -- and they seem to do OK, but the wife and I were not very comfortable with the idea, and so we raised Minnie as strictly a house cat. It's a pretty big house, though -- an old three-story townhouse -- so she has plenty of room to hang out, and good hunting in the winter when the mice start sneaking in.

Re: Biggest thing my cat ever brought in...?

After I finally figured out what the commotion was about the first couple of times, whenever I heard the telltale sounds of Minnie cornering a mouse, I'd also like grab my camera if I could, then sit back and watch the show.

About twenty years or so ago, PBS did a really excellent documentary entitled, iirc, "The Secret Lives Of Cats" as part of its "Nature" series, following house cats around and filming them in the style of a wildlife documentary. The hunting footage was as amazing as any I'd seen shot in Africa.

Re: Do you find...

Ours is a really awesome mouser, but one problem we have is getting her to drop it before she runs off someplace to hide it, to be found days later by me or my wife as we walk around the house sniffing and asking each other "what's that smell?"

We can't really give her a hard time about it; she's working on instinct. I've been to South Africa and seen this done by leopards and cheetahs -- they'll nail an antelope, eat some of it on the spot, and drag the rest off someplace out of the way to stash for later.

In Minnie's case, it's half a mouse in the third-floor bathroom, or behind a filing cabinet, or in my backpack. I've since learned to keep my backpack zipped up and my closet shut tight.

Re: It's spiders with mine!

Ours like to keep up her chops by hunting those first big, fat, slow flies of early spring. Many times, I've seen her leap up and snatch them right out of the air and chomp them down like popcorn shrimp.

Re: That usually means they like you

Actually, I used to think that, although I've heard that what they'e really doing is trying to teach you how to hunt... like when lionesses take their cubs with them when they're old enough, make them stay under cover and watch what she does, then shows them the kill as if to say "OK, now, did you see how I did that?"

"Surprising, if not startling"?

What's so surprising? F'crissakes, man, they're cats -- you know, like lions and leopards.

Our little Minnie may be cute and sweet and affectionate, and she may like to curl up in my lap while I'm watching TV, or snuggle up between my wife and I when we're in bed, but that doesn't change the fact that she's a little killing machine.

Mind, you, we live in the middle of the city, so needless to say, we raised Minnie as strictly an indoor cat, though we didn't subject her to the humiliation of de-clawing. Still, even though she's strictly a house cat, that doesn't mean she doesn't get plenty of hunting in. Normally, I'd say we have a bit of a mouse problem at our place, but we don't as we've got Minnie on the job. Last winter was especially cold, and a fair number of mice were finding their way into the house; Minnie nailed pretty much every mouse that dared to show itself -- at least ten that I know of. She was amazing to watch in action; she went from being our sweet little Minnie to being something relentlessly and ruthlessly efficient. I'd be at the drawing table working, and suddenly there'd be this big commotion in a corner on the other side of the studio, and it'd be all over before I knew what was happening, and Minnie would be trotting into the hallway with a mouse clenched in her jaws.

Way to go, Minnie. Good job, sweetie.

Look out, little furry folk! He's the all-night working cat.

Eats but one in every ten --- leaves the others on the mat.

--jethro tull

Success! Curiosity Mars lander arrives precisely on schedule

Re: Haven't seen the footage yet...

...If only we could have had a video feed of that decent and landing. That would have been one awesome sight.

When the Curiosity next-gen rover project was announced, my first thought was that maybe this would be the rover with the ability to capture and transmit full-motion video, even if it was only 320x240 grayscale clips. Oh, well, too bad, would've been cool. Still, this little hot rod's made of awesome, anyway.

I was never sure what kind of camera system -- if any -- the sky crane had. Pathfinder and MER, iirc, had low-res downward-pointed cameras that worked as part of the ground acquisition system for descent and landing. Some of the first images to come back from Pathfinder (and MER, if I remember) were ground-acquisition camera images looking straight down at the surface transmitted some seconds before touchdown.

I guess if Curiosity's sky crane had a system like that, we'd have gotten some really dramatic images back by now, of the newly-landed rover viewed from above as the sky crane flew off to auger itself in a safe distance away.

Speaking of which... shame, really, that the presence of spilled excess fuel at the sky crane's crash site preclude a visit by the Rover. Those would've been some really interesting images, especially for the engineers. Some of my favorite fotos from Spirit and Opportunity were the close-up shots of their crashed heatshields and backshells taken for the benefit of the engineers.

And now, I'll just finish with a song...

"Perfection still possible – thanks, Yanks"

On behalf of American space geeks everywhere, you're quite welcome. The pleasure was all ours.

Old hippies and punk rockers -- ON MAAARRRS!

...The 'hippy guy' and the 'mohawk guy' two seats up from him were noted by several people, but as I said, 'if you are smart enough to work at JPL, you can do your hair any way you damn well like!"

I always liked watching JPL Mission Control during the Pathfinder, MER and now the Curiosity landings, for the huge differences in appearance and "culture" between JPL Mission Control and the MSFC Mission Control in Houston. The guys in the "big room" in Houston are all clean-cut, straight-arrow-looking engineering types, and the JPL guys look like a bunch of old hippies.

Woz: Cloud computing trend is 'horrendous'

Stop me if I'm wrong, but...

Isn't "the cloud" just a different trendy name for "networked computing" (from back in the late '90s), which was, in turn, a different trendy name for "mainframe"? You know... like back when everybody just had terminals which couldn't store any data locally and could only use and handle data stored on centralized "big iron", and when the mainframe fell over, everybody's data was lost and/or entombed?

And that's the big new thing, huh? Turn over all your work to the control of one company, who stores it all in one centralized location? Oh, yeah, it's new, it's cool. What could possibly go wrong?

Wasn't the whole personal computer "revolution" at least partially about having control over your work, and breaking loose from the whole centralized control thing?

Like I said, stop me if I'm wrong...

Facebook: 83 million IMPOSTERS stalk our network

My account is fake, but not "fake"

I suppose my Facebook account is technically fake as it's not in my "real" name, but uses the pseudonym I use in my political cartoons, protest videos, blog posts, and last but not least, comments on El Reg.

However, I run it as if it were a "real" account: I "friend" only people I actually know or work with in person -- mostly progressive activist types -- and generally keep my privacy settings locked down tighter than a prima donna's corset. I use it primarily to promote and share my political cartoon work, so I also try to treat it as if it were a "professional" account -- so almost all the stuff in my feed is activism/news related, no bullshit about what people are having for lunch, none of that crap.

Still, ironically, because it's under an assumed name with a constructed persona, it's "fake". I've considered setting up a separate account in my "real" name as my "straight" professional account, for posting links to my commercial design portfolio and my resume and such, and perhaps linking it to my LinkedIn account (jeezus, talk about useless; don't even get me started). I haven't bothered with it because I already own a domain name based on my "real" name, complete with an email address and Web site that potential clients can go to, and I just can't see where having a Facebook account in my "real" name would add any value to my "straight" professional Web presence. Based on everything I see going down vis-a-vis Facebook, it seems better for my career if my "real" self just stayed the hell away.

Ahhhh, there's good news tonight!

Facebook shares closed down 4 per cent on Wall Street on Wednesday to $20.9 - which, fact fans, means that the network's value has been nearly halved since its Nasdaq debut in May with its $104bn price tag, or $38 a share IPO...

Hot damn, popcorn time!

Re: Cats have accounts

...and the sad thing is, the stuff the cats posts is probably way more intelligent than the crap posted by humans.

"Zuckerberg is no Bill Gates"

...and, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Using Facebook causes less eco damage than farting, figures show

hey, waitaminnit...

I thought using Facebook was pretty much the same as farting.

Outlook.com launch a gold rush for jokers, spammers

Re: How long until....

Y'know, I was just about to ask here... should I just go ahead and put outlook.com into the "shoot on sight" list in my SpamAssassin ruleset right now?

If Hotmail was a person it could have kids now. But it would be a crime

Re: Health Workers minimise harm?

They may be physically capable of sexual intercourse but that don't mean they are mature enough to make such decisions, but then again, neither are most of their parents. link.

Y'know, being from the Colonies, I'm not really up on British social/cultural types, but that sketch is still hilarious. "Oi, look, dey got kiddie porn in 'ere!" D'ahh ha ha ha ha ha.

To drag things back on-topic...

Around 1993, when I got my first PPP Internet account and learned how to use Eudora and procmail, one of the first domains that went into my straight-into-the-shitcan list was hotmail.com. Never in the nearly twenty years I've had email did I see anything either delivered from hotmail -- or spoofed with hotmail.com as the "from" address -- that wasn't spam. In fact, in the mid '90s, throwing hotmail.com, along with yahoo.com and aol.com into my procmail "shitcan list" pretty much eliminated 90% of the spam aimed at my inbox.

So, I suppose I do have hotmail to thank for consolidating all that spam in one place so I could shitcan it all in one stroke.

I had a hotmail account very briefly about ten years ago -- actually logged into it only once or twice -- as a backup address for email while on the road and, as the article mentions, to provide a sacrificial email address for those obnoxious-assed Web sites which insist that I "register".

Of course, it seems that gmail.com has taken over that role recently; I had gmail.com in my SpamAssassin "shitcan without mercy" list for quite a while, until I was forced to open several gmail accounts to start a couple of blogs I run and my YouTube channel.

I also use them as my sacrificial email addresses to throw at aforementioned obnoxious-assed Web sites, and for order confirmations when I shop online, and as emergency backup addresses in case my own domains' email servers go down (rarely). I log onto them once or twice a week, maybe, to catch any stray email I may actually want to read, and to scrape out all the spam.

remove statutory rape jokes...

...and you'd destroy a huge swath of modern humor, along with at least half the rock'n'roll and blues songs ever written.

Good thing that, say, Groucho Marx isn't still around to hear people bitching about underage sex jokes. In one of the Marx Brothers' movies, Groucho's character was named S. Quentin Quayle -- a play on the expression "San Quentin Quail", a regional slang term for promiscuous underage girls.

US flags from the 1970s SEEN ON MOON

Re: Hubble

Fantastic resource, the internet.

Sure as hell is:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1999/14/image/

Re: but where's

I thought it was supposed to be a Flying Fortress not a Lancaster?

As I recall from the Weekly World News report, it was a B-17. Who are we to doubt the WWN?

Of course, all the moon-landing hoax nutcakes...

...will claim that it was Photoshopped. Retards.

Conspiracist whackjobbery aside, here's another cold one for the guys'n'gals on the LRO Team.

Skype denies system upgrade enables in-call spying

Translation

Skype has issued a formal denial to reports that it has been allowing law enforcement to listen in on users' calls following a change in its system architecture.

So, I guess that means they're letting the police listen to Skype calls, then?

BOFH: Shove your project managementry up your mailbox!

Re: Business-ese

"Think outside the box" was a rather cool expression for about a week; then, suddenly, everybody and their cat was using it.

Nowadays, it's one of my favorite expressions because I can use it to determine whether or not someone's had a single original thought in their lives. As soon as they say "think outside the box", I can be fairly sure that nothing else they say is worth listening to.

Re: Cricket bats versus baseball bats

An aluminium baseball bat will produce a thoroughly satisfying *PING* when impacted upon a miscreant's head...

Maybe it's a generational thing, but I always thought the sound of an aluminum bat rather wimpy. For my money, there's nothing like the sound of a good old ash Louisville Slugger catching the ball (or a PM's head) right on the sweet spot, about halfway between the label and the tip of the bat -- that "home run sound" as many ballplayers like to call it.

Google asks YouTube commenters to stand up and be counted

Re: Big Brother's Fabian deception strategy

...And no LinkOfHyrule, expressing racist or homophobic opinions is not trolling, it's freedom. Get over it.

Amen to that, pal. Nowhere does the First Amendment guarantee free speech only if it's "nice". I think racist and homophobic opinions of the kind blurted out by politicians and the like on public airwaves are vile and disgusting, but if those creeps are OK dealing with the kind of backlash they're going to get, then, fine; they pays their money and takes their chances.

But, seriously, folks...

I'm active in a number of dissident movements in the US, including local antiglobalization and antiwar groups and Occupy DC, along with being active in activist media as a videographer and cartoonist, and using my real name on my work is out as I also earn my living as an illustrator and designer, and it just wouldn't do for my "straight" clients to see my real name on samizdat newsreels, posters and cartoons posted at Indymedia or Occupy. So, about fifteen years ago, when I registered my domain for my cartoon site, I created an alternate persona, complete with a pseudonym which I've used consistently across the Internet. I'm "Mike Flugennock" on my blog, my YouTube channel, Twitter, Facebook, The Reg, on the macosx.com user forum, and a couple of MST3K and Deadhead forums I hang out on.

As much as I'm appalled by Google's latest push for "real names", I can totally agree about the quality of the discourse in the YouTube comment threads -- bottom of the barrel, at its very best. This is why, when I first set up my YouTube channel, I decided to disable comments on my videos. The first couple of pieces I posted had comments inadvertently left "on", and I was amazed at how quickly the comment column filled up with flamage, trollage and spam, and how much time it took to scrape all that crap out of there.

those who choose to remain anonymous

...those that decline this option are shown a new page asking why they chose to remain behind a cloak of anonymity...

Why? WTF do you mean, "why"? None of your goddamn' business.

What happens when Facebook follows MySpace?

Re: What is "permanent"?

...What to do? Lots of copies, and keep making them. Hopefully they will be on media that can still be used in 10-20-30 years. Nice to keep old units (anyone have 9 track tape drives?) just to make sure.

So, keep those 8 inch floppies, they may be needed!

I still have the high-capacity FireWire Zip drive that I bought along with G4 minitower back in '06. I test it out from time to time to make sure the hardware works, and that the test cartridges are still readable. I copied most of my Zip cartridges to CDs -- and then to DVD ROMs -- a few years ago, but I still keep some of the cartridges containing the more important stuff; I even bought a few 750mb blank Zip cartridges recently when Office Depot had them on special. When my budget permits, I'll be making fresh copies of all that material onto compact USB drives.

Much of my more important Hi8 video footage has been transferred to miniDV cassettes -- one of my back-burner projects, for when I have time, is to edit some of that stuff and burn it to DVDs -- but I've still hung on to the old Hi8 cassettes as they're still in good shape.

Still, I drew the line at saving my old SyQuest media. I've only got so much space around here.

Perhaps, Matt, you should do what I do...

...which is to save my memories on DVD ROMs and a flash drive or three, in protected zippered binders on a bookshelf in my studio, and keep the original fotos in a proper foto album, and perhaps print copies of some of the better fotos on some coated photographic inkjet stock and frame them on acid-free mounting board.

Just sayin'.