Posts by Mike Flugennock

'We're public now, so could you please click on an ad or two'

"could you please click on an ad or two"

Y'know, I feel I should be appalled and outraged by that crass remark, but instead, I can't stop grinning from ear to ear.

It reminds me of around 1994 or so, when the Web was first being polluted by advertising; even then, there was already a large number of users who were annoyed with the flashing, wiggling, tacky banners assaulting their eyeballs as they tried to seek entertainment, information or news. I distinctly recall news.admin.net-abuse.email and many of the other news.admin.net-abuse.* forums being invaded by pissed-off spammers and other Web hucksters pissing and moaning about how they wouldn't have to do what they were doing "if you people would just click on an ad every once in a while".

Also, as I recall, back then the original Web advertising revenue model was rather flawed -- straight-up pay-per-click, iirc -- and legions of pissed-off Web users were deliberately sabotaging advertisers' business model by repeatedly clicking on ads, driving up the advertisers' costs until many of them had been driven out of business. The marketing and advertising type, predictably, responded to this by whining about how those mean old users had broken their business model.

These days, of course, we hear much of the same bitching from marketroids about people using JavaScript filters and ad blockers. Huh. Stop me if I'm wrong, but aren't sites which accept advertising being paid for running the ads whether the site's audience actually sees the ads on their browser or not?

This kind of whining from Failbook's COO also kind of reminds me of one time about eight or ten years ago, when this marketing/advertising honcho from ABC TV went on the Today Show one morning, looked the whole country in the eye and told us in a flustering, indignant tone that viewers who skipped the commercials were thieves. As with Ms. Sandberg's tacky plea, I damn' near pissed my pants laughing.

Does Britain really need a space port?

Re: Does Britain really need a space port?

B'wahh ha ha ha ha ha. Good one!

I'm somehow imagining something like a combination of KSC combined with a generous dollop of an old Dan Dare comic book. And absolutely, Britain's answer to Gene Krantz would be some gruff old silver-haired dude in a raggy wool sweater, chomping a pipe and with the biggest goddamn' walrus moustache you've ever seen.

The traditional American astronaut breakfast -- at least up through the Apollo era -- was some variation of steak and eggs with black coffee and orange juice. I don't know enough about English food to hazard a guess here... although whenever a British Shuttle finishes "rolling out" after landing, I'd guess the CDR's first words to Mission Control would be something like "well, chaps, I believe a cup of tea is indicated..."

Oh, and don't forget that along with your spaceport, you'd need an astronaut hangout. In Cocoa Beach, near KSC, it was this scraggly bar -- I forget the name -- where the astronauts all slobbed out, ate really cheap greasy food and slammed down many beers before climbing back into their Corvettes and roaring off. Your British astronaut hangout couldn't really be a normal "pub", it'd have to be some scruffy old joint with lots of old Stones records in the jukebox, and the bartender is some trash-mouthed old RAF guy who's full of stories about his Avro Vulcan days.

spaceport in Britain?

Mind you, being a Yank, I'm spoiled by living someplace where we have open space out the ass, but I've seen maps and satellite imagery of The Isles, and it doesn't look like you guys really have a lot of room for a proper spaceport. Aside from real estate for launch complexes, pads, servicing areas and such, you'd need to have plenty of clear downrange for spent stages to fall. I mean, c'mon... a spent booster stage falling on Stonehenge? That'd be all you frickin' need.

Besides, don't you guys already have something like three or four major airports pretty much taking up the real estate you'd need for a spaceport? Then, there's that whole Equator thing.

Also, what about Australia? Have your space big-shots considered swinging a deal with them, or has someone already thought of that? Australia's got plenty of flat open space, downrange out the ass, and really good beer -- although they may still be pissed off about the whole Skylab fragment thing.

Re: the joyride business

Good point. Most folks don't talk much about suborbital because it's not "glamourous", I guess, though there's plenty of research that could be done without actually having to go into orbit (as I recall, Shepard and Grissom's Mercury suborbital flights had something like five minutes of zero-g at the top of the trajectory).

Mind you, if through some outrageous luck, I found myself offered the chance at a suborbital jaunt aboard SS2, I'd be on it like a big dog.

the joyride business

"There has to be a serious risk for the whole sub-orbital 'space tourism' sector that its possible wealthy client base will realise at some point that you can see a black sky from a balloon and you can experience free fall and float about weightlessly in the (much bigger) cabin of an ordinary aeroplane (that's what actual space agencies do for zero-G training and experiments, in fact)..."

All of that is true, but, still... only going into space is really like going into space. It's a unique experience far beyond high-altitude ballooning, or a ride in the Vomit Comet.

SpaceX joy as Space Station robo-arm grabs Dragon's tail

Re: Mmmmmm, cheese.

Hm, good point.

Not all crackers would pose a problem, though. Soda crackers or saltines might not be so good as they're brittle and crumble easily, but Triscuits or small Wheat Thins might work.

Obviously, a non-crumbly cheese is a must. Bleu would be right out, but Brie, Camembert or a Swiss or Jarlsberg would be just right.

Can't recall if Wensleydale is a crumbly cheese or not. Iirc it's what Wallace and Gromit found on the moon, but they were able to eat it under gravity.

Damn, now I've got that old Monty Python Cheese Shop Sketch stuck in my head now (Will you shut that bloody bazuki up!)

Re: Impressive

You betcha, man. Watched the whole thing on the NASA TV stream. It was real exciting as the Dragon approached, then got real boring for a while as they sorted out the misdirected LIDAR target reflection issue, and suddenly got exciting again. Man, was that pretty to watch. Wished I'd had some Strauss to play in the background.

Re: This is Very very good...

"Very good" doesn't begin to describe it. I was 12 years old when I watched Armstrong step out onto the Sea Of Tranquillity; this wasn't nearly as globally life-changing as that moment, but in its own way, it was made of awesome. Part of it, I think, is due to the fact that the Dragon capsule is designed to return safely instead of burning up, can be reused, and SpaceX already has a mananed version in the works. I'm no big flag-waver, but it's good to see someone getting close to having the USA's next generation of manned spacecraft ready to fly soon. I'm no rabid nationalist type, but after Apollo and the Shuttle, the idea that we were stuck buying rides from the Russians rankled a bit, for some reason I can't really describe.

I, too, noted the sparseness and tidiness of the SpaceX mission control room in California. I was almost disappointed after nearly a lifetime of watching the action in Houston's MCC. Never mind what a proper spaceship is supposed to look like, MCC Houston is what a Mission Control is supposed to look like -- especially back in the Apollo era; now, there was a mission control... guys smoked in that room, and cursed, and slammed down gallons of coffee, and smoked and cursed some more. Talk about your "man cave".

astronaut has cheesy line ready?

"Dragon by the tail"? Well, kind of corny, but at least he didn't belch out some smarmy canned blabbery supplied to him by the NASA PAO... like they did every time a Shuttle docked with Mir or ISS, or every time a Shuttle landed.

Let's remember that most of the US astronauts and Russian cosmonauts are ex-test pilots, many with a heavy engineering background, so their humor tends to be a bit corn pone (guys like Pete Conrad, Charlie Duke and Dave Wolf being the exceptions that prove the rule).

What's copying your music really worth to you?

Re: "Audio" CDR

Stop me if I'm wrong, anybody, but as I recall, there was really no difference between the data CDRs and audio CDRs besides labeling. I used just regular old CDRs to burn my mix discs for years before somebody had the bright idea of labeling "data" and "audio" CDRs, and they still play fine.

It's been some years, but I seem to recall something about complying with some country's tax law revisions regarding copyright and blank digital media... or maybe it was just marketing.

Re: Bah!

Ahh, yeah; I remember them...

an unlimited supply

and there is no reason why

I tell ya it was all a frame

they only did 'cos of fame!

who?

Re: The problem is...

In Thee Olden Days, we bought a song on vinyl - a record. Then came cassette tape (and remember, folks, Home Taping Killed the Music Industry - oh wait, it didn't, they're still here). Some people copied records to tape, many others bought tapes of the same records they already owned, just in a different format, for convenience...

You nailed it, man. In Ye Olden Days, whenever I bought an LP, the first time I'd play it would be to dub it onto cassette so that I could listen to it in my car, and on my deck at home to avoid excess wear and tear on the vinyl. I'd dub the LP, then put it back into the slipcase and stash it on the shelf as my "master", safe until the cassette wore out, and then I'd pull the LP to make a fresh tape dub, then put it away again. I have LPs I bought in college which are still in near-mint condition because I handled them this way.

I do that with my CDs and my bootleg live footage today; I rip the CDs to mp3 so I can ilsten to them with iTunes without risking any damage to the CDs in the process of handling them, and my bootleg live stuff is downloaded as FLACs or 320k mp3's, then backed up to audio CDs for use as a "master". I also still occasionally dub stuff to cassettes to play in the old boombox while I'm working in the garden.

Re: What about..

Some of us that started to mp3 vinyl so that it could be played back on said devices.....

time must cost something as you cannot just rip it like a CD... (or tapes as well)

I think that's the unspoken dirty little secret of the vinyl revival; aside from all the talk about the unique sonic characteristics of properly cared-for vinyl on decent-quality equipment -- ripping vinyl to mp3 doesn't produce a "signature" (that I know of) and you can't encode DRM on vinyl.

No shit, Sherlock!

No shit, Sherlock!

That is all.

Windows XP update fails in infinite .NET patch loop

Re: HA!

(to be fair or unfair, I did consider a conspiracy by MS to help phase out XP lol)

Y'know, I'm not even "officially" an IT guy -- I'm largely self-educated in that respect, so there's huge gaps in my knowledge* -- but based on everything else I've read here, I also wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it were discovered that this was deliberate, in order to force people to go to Windows 8. It was the first thought I had before I got even halfway through the article. Granted, most of your garden-variety conspiracy theories are totally whacked, but every once in a great while it turns out that it really is a conspiracy -- but, then, again, never attribute to malice, etc.

I'm reminded of that old geeks' joke from about twenty years ago, about the development of an early Windows version -- or was it a late DOS version: "It ain't done 'til Lotus won't run!"

-----

*...and I'm also using OSX. I could make some crack here about how MacOS has always "just worked", but that argument is pretty much beat to death, so screw it.

Facebook jumps then slumps in first few minutes day's trade

the attention spans of teenagers?

...The problem with a site that depends on the whims of teenagers for a large portion of its revenue stream is teenagers are notoriously fickle, and have the attention span of (insert appropriate metaphor here).

Well, I won't speak for anyone else here, but when I was a teenager, I actually had quite a solid attention span, but -- and this was a big "but" -- it had to be something actually worth paying attention to. Granted, it was the early/mid '70s, but even then there was all kinds of electronic media jangle competing for my attention: we'd just gotten cable TV in our area, so there were suddenly shitloads of channels to flip through, plus "Pong" had been released during my freshman year of college...

Re: The Emperor's New Clothes.

Seriously. There is no "there" there ... How can a company with absolutely zero product be worth that much? What has facebook produced that I wasn't doing with computers before zuckerberg was born? Eventually people will realize that it's just a big wast of time and start bailing in droves...

My wife went totally gung-ho for Facebook a couple of years ago. When I told her there wasn't anything she could do with Facebook that couldn't be done with a blog or a properly-run listserv, she got all huffy and gave me that goddamn' tired-assed "Luddite" rap, finishing off with telling me I just hadn't learned to "embrace" it yet.

Historical precedent? Sure ... Holland, tulips, and the mid 1630s. For more see "Orchidelirium"...

Florida real estate in the 1920s? For more, see the Marx Brothers' Cocoanuts.

NASA found filming August's Mars landing in California desert

The "practice version"

"...The lightened practice runabout also doesn't have Curiosity's rock-melting high powered laser ..."

Well, hell, where's the fun in that, then? Crap.

Why GM slammed the brakes on its $10m Facebook ads

re: ads following you around, etc.

"My experience is not so much of a puppy following me from site to site as advertisers wasting money on me..."

Sounds good to me. The more money we can get those hucksters to waste, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

Re: Facebook ads

Seem to be mainly "have you been mis-sold PPI, Have you had an accident and want to Sue? Do you want to meet sexy singles"

As I mentioned on a couple of other threads... when opening my (rarely-visited) Facebook account, I gave totally bogus info; Facebook thinks I'm a thirty-five year-old woman living in Tripoli. The little thumbnail ads in my right column are hilarious: lots of cute chicks in headscarves, and almost all the ads are in Arabic, with the occasional one in English offering opportunities to study abroad in North Africa.

Re: Not quite on topic

"... can anyone tell me why anyone thinks FB is worth a squillion dollars?"

Yes: some people are frigging idiots.

Uhhm, yeah... what he said. Apparently, there are still plenty of dumbasses with lots of money who weren't fleeced during the original Dot Bomb Era.

"Rich" media? Hah, ha, that's rich!

"Think about most banner ads: they have rich media and flash or video. These are all the things that would compel someone to want to click on an ad"

This is a joke, right?

Totally agree; AdBlock, NoScript and FlashBlock, FTW.

Also, as long as I'm here, just a bit of translation:

"Think about most banner ads: they have rich media and Flash or video. These are all the things that would compel someone to knee a Web site in the groin and, while it's doubled-up in pain on the ground, kick it repeatedly in the teeth."

You're welcome.

Last time I saw a Porsche or Ferrari ad?

I've seen a smattering of them in the States, usually magazines or the occasional billboard, but nothing on TV -- and not a one for Ferrari -- while ads for US and Japanese makes, of course, are all over the place, non-stop.

As opposed to Porsche, BMW advertising is like a rash all over US TV, print, billboards, you name it. I don't know what that says about BMW, other than that they're one of the "hip" cars for affluent Americans to drive -- but then, so is Porsche, and I have yet to spot a Porsche ad on TV over here.

Mind you, I'm sure things are entirely different in Europe and the UK.

SpaceX and Bigelow sign deal for inflatable space stations in orbit

Re: 5 star

"If all it took was a working spacesuit to get a ticket, i'd be building one....

Its just a pressure suit with life support system... how hard can that be for a reg reader?"

Welll-llll... not so fast, there, Sparky. You've got to consider thermal and micrometeoroid protection, a comms system, internal heating/cooling, power for your life-support pack and your internal heating/cooling pumps -- not to mention serious mobility issues, and... well, just have a look at this...

Have a good time. Don't forget to pre-breathe.

Just found a problem with that subhead...

Shouldn't that read:

BUBBLES IN SPAAAAAAAAAAACE! ...all caps?

Facebook co-founder renounces US citizenship pre-IPO

BZZZZT. Next contestant, please.

"Well, yes actually, they are job creators, this guy especially..."

BZZZZT. Ooops, you said "job creators". Shill much?

Thanks for playing. Here's a copy of our home game.

Jetting off abroad? Pack protection ... for your Wi-Fi

Re: Pop-up: "WARNING! You need to update your software NOW!"

Y'know what I always got a laugh out of was -- while visiting any given site -- getting a pop-up window with an alert dialog box flashing a warning that malware has been detected on my system, and that I needed to visit some other site for a free malware scan and AV software download. It was absurdly easy to tell it was bogus, as the pop-up was always designed to look like a Windows XP alert dialog, and I was visiting the site from a Mac.

Granted, there's been more OSX-targeted malware/scamware going around lately, but it's still pretty easy to tell as -- with a proper set of Firefox extensions -- I can determine if it's a fake alert dialog by control-clicking on the alleged alert dialog to see if it's either an animated .gif or a Flash animation, and where it's loading from. This is assuming I even see them in the first place; I've got some fairly iron-fisted pop-up blocking rules set up in Firefox.

Well, the warning is certainly appreciated, but...

...anyone who falls for a pop-up that appears out of nowhere and tells them they need to update their software while on a strange WiFi connection has got to be... shall we say... hopelessly goddamn' rock stupid.

Of course, one of the first things I did after installing my current Adobe Creative Suite was to turn off auto-updating and create a "deny forever" connection rule in LittleSnitch for all my Adobe CS apps. Turning auto-updating off in Firefox -- and everything else with the ability to auto-update -- pretty much goes without saying.

Grab your L-plates, flying cars of sci-fi dreams have landed

Deja Vu all over again

D'ah, big damn' deal. This shit's been hyped up forever, like in this old issue of Mechanix Illustrated from the early 1950s? I don't know about you, but I think the mom and little boy in that illustration look positively terrified, as if they're about to be blown off the roof by Dad's rotor wash.

Oh, and btw, let's not forget this little humdinger... JANE! HELP! STOP THIS CRAZY THING!!!

Indian callers could see bills DOUBLE after spectrum auction chaos

Re: TRAI will get trashed

"Once the Indian population realised that their daily dose of phone chat is curtailed by calcified government officials at TRAI, they will be coming after them with sticks, spears and parangs."

Damn straight, man. Unlike here in the formerly-good old USA, Indian workers have had no problem with dragging executives out of the street and beating them to death. Boo yah!

Re: Hate to say it...

"vested interests"... who do you think I am? A BIG business owner? A politico? I'm just an ordinary guy who is..."

...being paid by some astroturf outfit to shill for their bosses in Internet forums.

No thanks necessary; the pleasure was all mine.

re: code talk: "investment destination"

Ugh, this guy just said "investment destination". Translation: "a place for corporations to set up shop and jerk around customers and workers with impunity".

You're welcome.

A quick translation

"The proposals disregard international best practice in spectrum policy and jeopardise the investment of billions of US dollars in new mobile infrastructure in a sector that either directly, or indirectly, employs almost 10 million people and serves more than 911 million consumers. However, there are also signs that some of the operators’ dire warnings about how it will negatively impact investment and growth in the market may have been deliberately over-exaggerated."

Translation:

Do as we say, or the little fuzzy kitten gets it!

Virgin Media site goes titsup in Pirate Bay payback attack

They should have expected us

They should have expected us.

Groupon CEO plans to 'reinvent local commerce ecosystem'

Eeeewwwwwww...

He said "ecosystem"!

Never mind any analysis of business models; I'd consider this huckster to be full of shit for simply using the word "ecosystem" in his letter.

European Space Agency heads for Jupiter's moons

Launching in... 2022?

...and, taking eight years to get to Jupiter? That means I'd be... seventy-three? Christ, I could be dead by then.

Y'know, missions like these with long-range event horizons didn't used to worry me, even as I hit my 40s, but now... I just turned 55 this year, so now when I read about a really interesting mission that won't launch for ten years and takes another eight to get to Jupiter, I'm like 2030? D'ahh, shit, man, I'm gonna miss it!

Barnes & Noble plans instore NFC Nook-book bonk-buying

"Publish to Nook" button in Word?

Technically, it sounds like a nifty idea, but, then... I imagine all those unpublished novelists and poets out there who are unpublished for a good reason, and I think "Publish To Nook" button in Word? aaaauuuuggghhhhhhhhh

One word: paper

"Microsoft's own e-book format, Microsoft Reader, had that as an optional patch which wasn't enough to save the format - Reader will be killed off entirely at the end of August although no content in .lit format has been available since November..."

So, am I correct in assuming anyone with e-books in .lit format is going to be screwed fairly soon?

One word: paper.

That is all.

Google founders, James Cameron, go asteroid mining

Re: Google...

"If the founders of Google and senior members of the company want to do something for the good of society, they could always pay fair tax and stop avoiding it like it's evil or something. Or is this just another ego project?"

DING DING DING DING DING! We have a winner!

Re: What resource?

"So what you're telling me is that someone has finally discovered one of the rare gravy asteroids. All we need now is the yorkshire pudding asteroid and the beeferoid - and space exploration is more or less solved..."

And, let's not forget the Mashed Potato asteroid, and the Chicken-Fried Steak asteroid (for those of us in the Southern USA).

Re: What resource?

"Maybe its orbital solar power stations? given the current state of spaceflight tech thats got to be more practical than mining asteroids that are millions of kilometers away."

Space solar power stations? I seem to recall, back during the "energy crisis" days of the mid '70s, this being one of those ideas that was hyped relentlessly until it was discovered that it'd be impractical and more trouble than it was worth.

You can thank Obama's "JOBS" program for this

Cameron and the Chocolate Factory honchos are simply taking advantage of Obama's new and torturously-acronymed JOBS legislation, which basically legitimizes the kind of sketchiness and flat-out fraud that helped inflate the dot-com bubble.

Cameron, Schmidt, Page, et. al. likely don't give a shit one way or the other if their crazy-assed Star Trek business idea pans out or not; they'll take the loss, figure out a way to write it off on their taxes and keep on truckin'.

SpaceX Dragon gets green-light for launch to Space Station

Re: Errr. software?

Say what you want about the Russians, but it seems they've got the automatic self-piloting approach and docking system down cold on the Progress, as well as their backup manual human tele-operated system.

Interesting to note here that the SpaceX unmanned cargo freighter -- as well as the Japanese and ESA freighters -- can still only pull alongside and stationkeep while the RMS is deployed to pluck them up and mate them to the hatch. No surprise, though, as I'm sure the hardware and software for unmanned autopiloted rendezvous, approach and docking cost a buttload to develop and test.

PLANET-SWAP shock: Stars grabbed dirtballs from other clusters

Rogue planet "tootling" through the Universe?

I've never heard it described quite that way before. I assume that's an astronomical term?

Shuttle Discovery to buzz Washington DC at 1,500 feet

Re: Shuttle Discovery to buzz Washington DC at 1,500 feet

"C'mon Joe, If Dubya hadn't spent literally trillions on a couple of loud and nasty adventures a, B.O might have had more resources to send NASA's way..."

And if B.O. hadn't continued Bush's programs of massive Constitutional violations, unilateral imperialist wars and occupations, and hadn't continued to throw buttloads of money at stock brokerages, bankers and other corporate interests, he might have had more resources to send NASA's way as well.

Re: I always liked that shroud they put over the engine exhausts

Well, actually, you're kinda right, in a way. It's an aerodynamic modesty shield, which gives the tail of the Orbiter a nice, clean aerodynamic shape to insure smooth airflow, so that the multiple curved and concave surfaces of the engines don't create disturbances in the air behind the combined vehicles -- and, of course, so that the innards of the engine nozzles and thrust chambers aren't contaminated by dirt, dust and various other "schmutz".

Actually, those of us around Capitol Hill saw much more than "dick"...

Actually, those of us around Capitol Hill and the East Building of the National Gallery got to see much more than "dick".

I live on Capitol Hill, about five blocks from the Capitol, and it was a simple matter to borrow the wife's PowerShot and dash down to the reflecting pool at the West Front of the Capitol. I got several really nice clean shots, but the one I've linked here of it flying over the Capitol was the best of the bunch.

A cold one for all the guys'n'gals who helped keep this sweet old bucket flying for a quarter century.

Dad sues Apple for pushing cash-draining 'free' games at kids

Re: Had similar experience...

My fault for not 'vetting' the app properly but as it's aimed at kids I assumed it would be ok...

Maybe once upon a time, a long time ago, but these days it seems that when a smartphone game is advertised as "aimed at children", that means it's a warning label.

Yeah, maybe this guy shouldn't have given his kid the password...

...but that doesn't let game makers -- or Apple -- off the hook for exploiting children with "free" games. Just because the guy made a mistake doesn't mean it's OK for smartphone game hucksters to fleece him. I hope he kicks Apple's ass until it bleeds.

Pirates not to blame for Big Media's sales plunge

Excellent article, but...

...I can't see how the "Red" cameras democratize content creation. Have you seen the prices on those goddamn' things?

Now, a Sanyo Xacti, at around $US125 -- that's democratization.