Posts by Goat Jam 2482 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Mar 2008
FACT: Women are risk averse and prefer to follow the path that promises the most security.
FACT: Women are just not that interested in "computers" or tech in general.
It really is as simple as that. Trying to sheet the blame onto nasty men and their evil "business environment" is so mind numbingly stupid that it would take a gibbering feminist to come up with the idea.
"Another reason to go with LMDE where you get supposedly eternal updates "
Yeah I'm on LMDE and it is perfectly functional and stable but updates are virtually non-existant. I'd like to think that all the faffing around at Ubuntu HQ, moving ubuntu furter away from "standard" distros (dropping systemd for upstart etc) would encourage the Mint guys to choose a camp and put their efforts there. As things stand LMDE seems to be very much the unloved cousin while Clem and co spend all their time trying to follow the leader whith Ubuntu changing the rules every release.
well, retarded.
So some guy comes along and says he gets good value from his zune. Whatever, each to his own etc.
Yet three people appear to be compelled by that statement to downvote his post because?
Well, who can say?
I am often accused of being a MS H8ter, which is not entirely unfounded, but I still fail to see how some dude claiming he gets use out of his Zune is worthy of 3 downvotes.
OK, if those figures are actually correct (you failed to provide sources for those figures btw) then I will be happy to acknowledge that the next big thing will be everybody wanting to wear so-called smartwatches.
Personally I don't see it happening but then it's not like I am infallible after all.
"A watch is notification device, after all. Currently only for time and date (and in some cases, pressure) but you look at your watch to get information very quickly"
Yet, as my completely unscientific study showed, most people don't wear wristwatches today.
Irrespective of what you have personally attached to your extremities I invite you to take a personal survey of the people around you and determine how many of them are in the habit of wearing a wristwatch.
The result you find may surprise you.
"What about driving? I get a call, I'm driving"
I don't know about you, but my phone is paired via BT to my cars head unit and when I receive a call I simply need to press the "phone" button on my dashboard and I can commence the call hands free and without risking incarceration. It even mutes the Doobie Brothers album that I am listening to for me in order to facilitate the call.
There is no need to send an "I am driving, bugger off" hang up message at all and it is all quite legal.
Of course YMMV.
"Are you one of those people who don't wear a watch and can't imagine why anyone else would? "
Well, as I said, I have never worn a watch, and it is quite true that, as you suggest, I can't really imagine why one would.
But nonetheless I did perform an impromptu survey and discovered that most other people today, apparently, don't wear a watch either.
Obviously you do wear a watch. Nothing is wrong with that of course. But just because you like to wear a watch it does not automatically follow that everybody else does too.
As far as I can tell, the only way these so called smart watches will catch on will because of the "non watch" functionality that they probably will provide.
Functionality such as fitness monitoring.
Which reminds me, the other thing I noticed during my impromptu study is that there were more people wearing some sort of "fitness" related wrist device that counts steps taken and calories burnt (without any sort of time/phone functionality, or even user interface, it was all done on the phone it was paired to) than there were people wearing traditional time keeping watches.
And for the record, Samsung are indeed struggling to sell their so-called "smart watches"
Nobody is buying the Samsung watches, because, well, why would you really?
Who wants a watch with a 2 day battery life? How will you use it as a phone? If it needs to be paired to a smartphone then what is in fact the point of it? You may as well just use the phone.
In fact, just the other day I made a point to note whether the people I came across were wearing a watch and I was shocked to see that almost nobody was.
Ten years ago that would have been unheard of.
Apparently, people these days are just not in the habit of having a watch strapped to their wrist like they did in the past. I know I haven't worn a watch my entire life, and I am no spring chicken I assure you.
However, if all these companies want to compete with each other on who can be the biggest failure making smart watches for people who mostly don't wear watches then who am I to say otherwise?
Carry on!
"Grab yourself an SSH tunnel and enjoy"
I am in Australia and I have a US based Linode VM on which I have indeed configured an ssh tunnel that I have already used to do proof of concept tests to stream from netflix and once I proved that I could do it I wondered "why the hell should I jump through hoops like this?" and cancelled my subscription before the "honeymoon period" expired.
Right now I am watching George Clooney ham his way through "Three Kings" which I obtained through <ahem> "alternate channels" and all I can say is thank god I didn't pay for this uninspired crap.
Of course, as always, YMMV
"I'm kind of confused by an article like this. Yes physical media is on the decline with cloud storage and online streaming increasing but the author doesn't seem to have a very good grip on interpreting real world issues."
Well, to be fair, Mr Chirgwin is an AGW true believer so he is not particularly adept at interpreting real world issues. Fantasy disaster scenarios are more his thang.
"Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity"
Clearly, they have a lot of catching up to do if they want to be as profitable and successful as companies like, say Ford Motors and HP.
Those two bastions of corporate diversity and political correctness are prime examples of how corporate innovation and profitablity is hugely improved by assembling vast HR departments that are dedicated to cataloging their employees by race, colour, gender and sexual alignment and then ensuring that all catagories are equally represented on the payroll*.
Actual ability is not important of course
This is clearly the best way to ensure immense profits and only a heteronormative white male rascist, sexist, homophobe would suggest otherwise.
</sarc>
* white males excluded of course
"because half of Mac laptop buyers want to run Windows apps at least once in a while"
Well, that may or may not be true, but it is also true that MS are currently working really hard to merge all their Windows lines to a point where it doesn't matter what type of Windows you have your code will run on it.
What is the figure MS put out a week or two back? I think they said that 80% of code can be cross platform compatible right now. Of course that does not mean that things are currently quite like that in reality, but if MS are successful in that endeavor then there is no reason that an ARM sporting Mac couldn't run Windows RT (or its successor) instead.
Personally I doubt that MS will succeed with their One Ring strategy but stranger things have happened.
"the less likely they were to trust scientists as a source of information about environmental issues."
Yeah, right. Plenty of scientists don't ride the Global Warming bandwagon. For the ones who do, this whole thing has become a religious crusade.
17 years without warming while CO2 levels have continued to rise is all the proof I need that the computer models predicting catasrophic runaway temperatures that were used to kick this nonsense off in the 1990's are not worth a lick of spittle.
Besides, when you get Prince Charles batting for your team you know you are on a hiding to nothing
"The reason for that mobile-industry-in-a-paragraph history lesson is that there is no reason to assume that today’s Apple/Samsung duopoly is any more enduring than the Motorola/NEC of 1994 or Nokia/Ericsson one of 2000."
For all intents and purposes, everything up to the introduction of the iphone was based on feature phones. Feature phones, by definition are self contained. You buy a Motorola phone in 1998 and there is nothing to lock you in to changing to a Nokia in 2000.
These days we have smart phones. Smart phones use, for want of a better word, a software "ecosystem". In the smartphone market a user will (usually) invest in purchasing some apps for their phone and once doing so experience some degree of lockin (to the OS), depending on how much money they have invested.
For the same reason that the computer industry evolved into a duopoly so has the phone industry.
Just as with PC's we have apple on one side and Android in the place where MS used to be. Just like the PC industry there are multiple vendors crowding into the Android space.
The situation is nearly identical. Why you would contend that the results in the phone industry would not mirror those of the PC industry escapes me.
It is true that Samsung could lose the lead at the top of the Android heap but it far less clear that MS will be able to supplant either apple OR android at the top of the heap any time soon.
The Gimp may be a bit kludgy & user hostile (or so I've heard *) but at least it keeps on working no matter what.
Cloud=FAIL indeed.
* I do use it to do basic stuff but I'm nowhere near your typical artsy graphic designer bod.
PS. I must add that ironically the ad linking algorithm in play at el reg is assuring me that the "Microsoft Cloud" will "turn chaos into clockwork". Of course it will.
"Personally, I think that he is sort of on the right track - *startups* will find it very difficult to do what Apple are doing, concentrating on hardware, but Apple itself should have no problems - apart from the very very successful and profitable hardware division, they have enough cash to re-tool as they see fit and seem quite capable of identifying and exploiting new markets."
While I don't disagree with the thrust of this argument I would like to point out that all of the "identifying and exploiting new markets" that apple have ever done with any success was under the stewardship of Saint Jobs.
It remains to be seen whether Tim Cook is even partially as visionary. So far I have not seen it in him.
HFT add zero value to the economy, they are nothing but parasites. They will buy and sell shares within a period of a few seconds and cream a profit from doing so. The few seconds they held the share for does not constitute an "investment" in any publicly traded business which is what the share market was originally intended as.
Share markets are/were meant to be places where business could raise capital by selling shares in themselves to investors.
HFTs are not investors. They make profits by buying and selling shares at a rapid rate and creaming a profit from each transaction.
It should be understood that every cent of profit taken by these bloodsuckers comes at the cost of the true investors who have made good faith investments in businesses in the old fashioned sense of the market.
"Everyone with even an ounce of technical knowledge or telco/ISP experience knows that full fibre replacement was the only way to build a network for the next 50 years."
Everyone who is not a budding socialist / technology utopian understands that investing $8.4B for 166,000 connected users is an unsustainable business model.
.how on earth are they serving https from Apache 2.2.3 on Red Hat Linux without using OpenSSL?
Maybe they use RHEL/Apache as a reverse proxy to a bunch of IIS servers running the actual web code?
It's a fairly typical scenario and often fools sites like netcraft into thinking the site is running on apache.
"sure we should never speak out against racists because then we'd be just just as prejudiced as them"
How is believing that marriage is a contract between a man and a woman the equivalent of being racist?
Oh, that's right, you leftists are wont to accuse everybody who disagrees with your viewpoint of being a "racist" or "sexist" or "denier" or "gaia hater" or whatever your cause celebre for today is. My bad, carry on.
I saw some ads for this while installing nvidia drivers the other day. When I looked it up online I saw that it was from EA and said 'meh'.
This article seals the deal as far as I'm concerned.
On the bright side I just got Bioshock Infinite for less than $10, so all is sweet
Next!
What is the purpose of this?
Is this yet another attempt by the CSIRO to push their climate change catastrophe nonsense?
Are they attempting to show that soil carbon is a good or a bad thing?
If they prove that (the non-existant) climate change we are (not) experiencing increases soil carbon levels will that be touted as a disaster or a boon?
Do they understand that if you have no soil carbon you basically have sand.
You can't grow stuff in sand.
I expect that this is just another monumental waste of resources by the CSIRO who are desperate to push their Agenda 21 crap in Australia.
Every living thing is carbon. When you eat, you are eating carbon. Demonising carbon as some sort of poison is simply insane.
Why we need to "map carbon levels" across Australia is something that is only understandable by ecotards and global warming true believers, of which Mr Chirgwin is one.
Not surprised that this article is simply a regurgitation of the rubbish spewed out of the CSIRO with no insights or attempts to put this press release in to any sort of context.
I truly despair at the state of science today, I really do.
Also reporting.
"Because they know that women only go into jobs that are percieved to be fun or cool."
Nope, women go for jobs that are easy and require little technical ability. Air-conditioning is a mandatory requirement too, obviously.
With IT you get the aircon it is true, but even drooling Windows helldesk monkeys still need *some* technical chops.
"There is no doubt whatsoever that [...] giving [females] a voice in the male-dominated cultural and political landscape, is a 'must-do' with regard to getting the largest, and most vulnerable, populations of the planet to realize their own potential and find a way out of living behind the curve. "
Ha ha ha, that's a cracker. Every western nation that has been infected with the cancer of feminism is rapidly unravellng as we speak. To think that having more of it will make the world even better despite all evidence to the contrary is just crazy.
You give females a voice and they go straight to voting themselves a big daddy government. In other words the first thing they say is "give me your stuff you beastly male" Then they spit on you.
Stop being a beta Scott and take the red pill, you will be all the better for it.
"They have to differentiate between a low cost and a high cost device"
This another way of saying they need to maintain an artificial "high cost device" price point.
Wintel have been doing these sort of market distortions for years of course, and have been getting away with it due to there being no viable non-wintel alternatives available. The trouble is that here in 2014 there are viable alternatives so this sort of market arrogance is no longer viable.
I wonder if they will ever figure this out?
"Does the software market really need "resellers" to such a significant extent now?"
Software resellers could essentially be redesignated as "licence compliance consultants", their main purpose being to navigate the minefield that is MS SKU's & licencing on behalf of their hapless customers.
Agreed, I looked into getting a Chromecast so that I could basically use it either as a CEC adapter for XBMC or if not, as a media player streaming from my own library and apparently neither of those options is available.
It is apparently just a portal to various web based streaming services which is useless to anybody living outside the USA.
Your problem is this; "coded by skilled coders".
Have you seen the drooling monkeys being churned through universities these days?
Companies that develop applications want to hire the cheapest people they can. As long as the code runs/compiles they don't give a rats arse about how efficient the code is. Nor does anybody give any thought to producing maintainable code.
Some of the code I see, and sometimes attempt to fix, is truly horrific. Epic monstrosities of incomprehensible, multiply nested if statements, repeating code blocks and byzantine layers of unnecessary complexity.
Recently I found a function in our code base produced by a low rent Indian coder (a "Team Leader!" to boot) that was over 600 lines long with vast amounts of reduntant crap and so many nested if statements that it made your eyes water. I managed to distill that crap down to a readable 40 lines or so. It wasn't an easy job I can assure you.
It's much harder to fix crap code than to write clean code in the first place yet we continue to write crap code. Why is that?
Don't get me wrong, I agree with everything you said but the sad reality is that the people who do the hiring & firing don't give a shit. As long as it works without crashing long enough for it to be demonstrated to a potential customer is good enough.
They have a desperate need to hit quarterly targets
Sony are a textbook example of how to destroy a business.
Up until the 80's Sony was held in high regard by both consumers and professionals. Their products were the best in the market and they could command a price premium as a result.
Their first misstep was an ill considered move into the low end of the market. By the mid eighties consumers were being offered cheaply made junk from SE Asia with the Sony brand on it. You could still by the proper Japanese made kit but if you were not careful you could get burnt. They were trading on their good name in order to sell substandard junk. Any graduate of Business 101 could tell you this sort of strategy will not work in the long term but the geniuses at Sony HQ pressed on anyway.
By the late 80's audio media was shifting from analog to digital. Sony saw this shift as an opportunity to leverage their still considerable customer loyalty into using various proprietary media storage systems and thereby obtain a market spanning consumer lock in. Even while the "standard" MP3 format was in mid boom Sony was attempting to keep their customers locked into Sony's own proprietary formats. They even subtely screwed with existing standards. Anybody who has been told that "you should only use Sony branded blank CD's because others won't work properly in this Sony kit" will know what I mean here. Of course, consumers looked elsewhere for the kit.
In the 90's, Sony decided to "diversify" by entering into the production side of the entertainment industry by buying some big name music labels and movie studios. This put them into a position where their internal business divisions had a clear conflict of interest. The electronics side of the business were driven to sell more electronics and the best way to do that is to sell the products that people wanted to purchase. Even if sometimes those products were used to consume "illicit"
copies of media. This was in direct conflict with the media division, who were more focussed on curtailing the behaviour of consumers that it considered to be against the best interests of Sony Media. Consequently Sony became heavy users of a whole raft of anti consumer DRM technologies making their CE kit even less attractive to consumers than it already was in order to appease the media division. This culminated in the infamous rootkit fiasco of course.
Sony are reaping what they sowed, starting back in the 80's. They won't be missed.
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