* Posts by Tim99

2001 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

Build a bonkers hi-fi

Tim99 Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Nice kit, but...

Nice anecdote Angus. My experience differs.

I used to listen to a lot of live music, from Gregorian chants in small churches to the Who in large halls.

In 1975 my wife bought me an LP12, complete with an SME arm and a Shure V15, which we played through a cheapish amp and speakers. I then spent the next 20 years saving up to buy stuff to match the LP12 - Fortunately my wife reigned in any golden ear traits that I might have had. The final system had Naim amplification, and a Linn Ittok/Asak and speakers. After a "Hi-Fi" demonstration that sounded impressive, I bought a medium price CD player. When I got it home and listened to it, we were appalled at how bad everything sounded, Yes the odd crackle and pop from vinyl had gone, but so had most of what made the music enjoyable. I took the CD player back. Eventually I bought a Naim CD player which we thought sounded Pretty good.

Now comes the vaguely interesting bit, I had a serious car accident which resulted in minor brain damage. Afterwards the LP12 still sounded reasonable, but the CD was uncomfortable to listen to. Unfortunately, although the LP12 was still good to listen to, I no longer had the mechanical skill to drive it without damaging records. I sold the entire system to a nice junior doctor for a fair price and bought a simple B&O all-in-one that sounded OK, not much musical enjoyment but OK for social and background listening.

So it would seem that the brain is at least as responsible for what we hear and enjoy as the equipment that we use...

Shouty Shouty, because that is what most Hi-Fi now sounds like to me.

Microsoft offers beta of Windows Server 2012 Essentials

Tim99 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Why don't thay ust call it

@AC - 05:54

Excellent post. I used to supply and configure SBS to 50 user or less organizations - We wrote and supplied custom software that could use MS SQL Server, and found that it was cheaper and less hassle than supplying Windows and SQL Server separately. Exchange was a 'free bonus'.

I am retired now, and fortunately don't have to worry about getting paid for this stuff anymore.

I do however, recommend the OSX Lion Server for businesses that have a few users and who can't find a reliable Linux consultant; and don't want to setup a Linux based network themselves. It is a no-brainer if the owner/directors have an iFondlePhone or Pad as it is very easy for them to set up shared mail and calendars for out-of-office use. As for the vast array of PC software, most of them only want MS Word and Excel, and the Mac versions are pretty good.

An easy to use and set-up server with all of the features that many small/micro businesses need for about a thousand quid, with no need to buy CALs with an easy upgrade path to 50+ users could be a good deal.

Some of the bigger VARs denigrate SBS as there is little scope to gouge the SMB punter with multiple servers and CALS - As a result, I have seen several installations where the punter has more than 3 MS servers for less than 20 workstations courtesy of their friendly neighbourhood VAR - The reliability has generally been poor in spite of the punter paying thousands a year in support. I wonder if MS have effectively killed the small business sector to placate the larger players. This would certainly give an opportunity to someone who can supply the needs of the vast numbers of <50 user businesses.

Apostrophe’s cause problem’s in e-health system’s

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: 2012

"Why are people still encountering data entry problems that were solved decades ago?"

Perhaps the people implementing it are under the age of 30, and their supervisors have not actually implemented a non-trivial system?...

War On Standby: Do the figures actually stack up?

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Older Apple iMacs

@Philip Clarke

I think you misunderstand "standby" Apple has the numbers for a newer iMac here:

http://www.apple.com/environment/reports/

Standby is < 0.5W; Sleep is < 1.5W; Idle is 85W with the display on, or 35W with the display off.

Maximum continuous power use is ~205W.

If you want to save power, use the Apple menu put the iMac into Sleep mode when it is not actually working - Or you can use the shortcut keys for Sleep - [Control]+[Eject] followed by the [S] key.

FileMaker Bento 4

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: A database?

I'm not sure about this version, but previously Bento used the SQLite database. SQLite is very capable at the hundreds of thousands of rows level, and supports most SQL commands, foreign keys, triggers, transactions, etc.

In the past I have been able to use Bento to cobble together a couple of simple solutions, and then have used a text editor on the Bento file to edit the created DDL to polish table structures. FiileMaker have gone out of their way to cripple Bento to protect sales of their FileMaker Pro product, so it is possible that they may have closed that back-door.

Simply nobody is rushing to beat the Microsoft licencing price hike

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Small beer

I'd love to know what your company does - 2000 odd Windows desktops with 750 odd Windows servers - That's less than 3 workstations for each server.

Back in the day, when I used to do this stuff, our rough rule of thumb was 1 Windows server for 10-30 Windows clients; or 1 *NIX box for 50-200 users; or 2 mainframes to hold it all together for about 50,000 users.

Uphill, in the snow both ways...

Acer bigwig sees gloomy future for Ultrabooks in Europe

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: it's the 'ultra' that's the problem for me

This may not work for most people, but I use a fondlePad for "light web browsing and (heavy) SSH".

iSSH works for me...

Study fingers humans for ocean heat rise

Tim99 Silver badge
FAIL

Re: @Norman123: The problem with your flavor of denialists

"when they erupt volcanoes erupt they emit vastly greater amounts of CO2 in a single day than mankind has in his accumulated history by a factor of about 100"

No. This is WRONG. For some real numbers read: http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/2007/07_02_15.html

Over treasonable time periods human activity produces >two orders of magnitude more CO2 than volcanoes.

Or: http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming-basic.htm

(If you want pretty graphs. click on 'What the science says... Select a level... Intermediate'

"The Mount Pinatubo eruption emitted 42 million tonnes of CO2 (Gerlach et al 1996). Compare this to human emissions in 1991: 23 billion tonnes of CO2 (CDIAC). The strongest eruption over the last half-century amounted to 0.2% of human CO2 emissions in that year. "

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: memory

Er, no. As someone who was a professional scientist in the 1970s I can remember no such thing. The basic science of the greenhouse effect was accepted at least 70 years before that. Infrared spectrophotometers capable of accurately measuring C=0 and C-H bond stretch (a primary mechanism for the greenhouse effect) were becoming inexpensive and common in the 1960s which, perhaps, allowed for the expansion of interest in this field.

I do recall 1976 as the hottest summer for over 300 years :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_United_Kingdom_heat_wave

Followed by a cold winter in 1978, thought to be caused by the two preceding hot summers.

Hit upgrade on Symantec Backup Exec, and unleash Hell

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

Serves them right

Serves them right - They should have learnt rsp and tar and xcopy like wot we had to before they let us near a proper computer.

In the snow, uphill both ways...

LOHAN sucks 27 inches

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: How about Tubing??

(in a former live a chemist) - Yes me too.

I should have mentioned that it might be worth running with the gas ballast valve open for a few minutes - This will help get rid of any solvent (from glue, siloxane resin, gaskets, etc.) or water that may be entrained in the system/oil.

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Re: Performance loss at altitude?

You have a leak - a single vane rotary pump should be able to get 15 mmHg...

Apple design chief Jony Ive knighted - but not by the Queen

Tim99 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Civil list

An old Italian proverb: "There are three ways to great wealth - Inherit it, marry it, or steal it." The first two just mean that an ancestor, or spouse, stole it.

IBM smashes Flash out of Wimbledon, serves up HTML5 app

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Market forces apply

The performance and battery life of most tablets is poor when Flash is used.

Also - Why would you cut yourself off from 70 million plus users who have access to the type of funding that bought them an iPad?

How politicians could end droughts forever But they don't want to

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Building and running a desal plant is not cheap...

Maybe the State of Victoria is not very good at it? The State of Western Australia produces about one third of the output of Wonthaggi at about one tenth of the capital cost:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Seawater_Desalination_Plant

The Binningup plant at Bunbury has already been commissioned, and is expected to be near full capacity later this year:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binningup_Desalination_Plant

Interestingly the water is usualy of better quality than that from the local groundwater and reservoirs.

Micro Focus accuses NSW Police of software piracy

Tim99 Silver badge
Pirate

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

A prima facie case under the Federal Copyright Amendment Act 2006?

'Attitudes to robot sex will change'

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

@Mycho

"Take the human aspect out of any kind of sex, remove the other person having feelings and desires of their own, and you're masturbating."

You make that sound like a bad thing (Gene Hunt).

Yet another OSX/Java Trojan spotted in the wild

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

Re: I'm no fan, BUT!

@Wensleydale Cheese

"You lose the database side of things and some accessibility features, but the rest runs fine."

Before I retired I was a database developer, so the database bit was what I was hoping to use in LibreOffice (without loading Java). These days I use SQLite from the command line or the FireFox SQLite Manager Add-on. There has been talk of LibreOffice using a native SQLite driver without Java dependencies, but I am not sure what stage that is at.

As you say, LibreOffice seem to be depreciating Java - In view of the potential uncertainty that the Oracle purchase has brought, this may be a good thing anyway.

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Re: I'm no fan, BUT!

Libre Office requires Java to be installed for full functionality on the Mac, so you are just changing the potential attack vector...

You're crap and paid too much for the little work you actually do

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: One man's......

OK, sorry for my original comment. I know that acedemia is a special place with special funding and politics - That is one reason why I took my science qualifications elsewhere...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: One man's......

Unless you work for a company that has less than ten users "Why don't you have loaner computers?"

After many years experience in a business environment I note that, on balance, MacBook Pros are somewhat less likely to fail than professional level Dell machines - It is also likely that the Apple kit has the same components across machines, so duplication of the user's environment onto the loaner is easy - YMMV.

Why Windows 8 server is a game-changer

Tim99 Silver badge
Flame

Re: PowerShell

I have been around this stuff for 40 years and have used *NIX, proprietary minis, Novell, and Microsoft servers (back to the days of PC LAN/LAN Manager ).

No Microsoft server product has EVER cost $750, and taken 5 minutes to set up, and "just works for the next ten years". Why would I believe them now? The *NIX stuff from the 1980s still works fine ...

Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: I seem to recall that ..

There were a lot of "copied" disks around with viruses on them.

We had an external engineer who had just come back from the USA to service some equipment. He showed LSL to two of our people who really liked it. They installed it on their PCs. The PCs were on Novell networks interconnected on a WAN - Two days later we had a few hundred infected machines. It was the first big infestation that I saw.

LibreOffice debugs and buffs up to v.3.5

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

Java

Now, when they have finally killed the Java dependencies (particularly for Base) it will be almost perfect...

NoSQL databases not just for the 'cool kids'

Tim99 Silver badge
Thumb Up

...simply because they're web-apps?

Yes, you are right. Most of the web based systems out there, that I see, could manage with SQLite.

http://sqlite.org/whentouse.html

"SQLite usually will work great as the database engine for low to medium traffic websites (which is to say, 99.9% of all websites). The amount of web traffic that SQLite can handle depends, of course, on how heavily the website uses its database. Generally speaking, any site that gets fewer than 100K hits/day should work fine with SQLite. The 100K hits/day figure is a conservative estimate, not a hard upper bound. SQLite has been demonstrated to work with 10 times that amount of traffic."

Pentax Q compact system camera

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Auto110

My wife had an Auto110. It lived in her handbag - Very "handy"' BUT very susceptible to camera shake - it was a bit too small to hold securely...

iPad typos are Apple's fault, not yours - new claim

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Works for a rubbish typist

I am a rubbish typist, using two fingers on one hand and three on the other. It works pretty well for me.

The predictive text/spelling is sometimes a bit strange - If I type in "iz" instead of "is" it returns "in", so obviously its mind-reading abilities are a bit naff... Typed on an iPad 1.

Bill Gates discusses nuclear development deal with China

Tim99 Silver badge
Flame

Liquid sodium?

Liquid sodium, nuclear power, and the man who bought Windows to the world.

What could possibly go wrong?

<Flammable substances icon> That's what mixing sodium and water looks like.

Apple recalls first iPod Nanos over battery flaw

Tim99 Silver badge
Happy

Mine is 6

Er, I have.

I use it in the car connected to the audio system. It still works OK, and the sound quality is much better than that from the car's CD player (Although that might be down to the bad surfaces on some of Oz's country roads).

The e-mail that I got from Apple includes "Our initial diagnosis indicates that because your product replacement will likely be covered by the warranty, an AppleCare Protection Plan, or another Apple repair or exchange program, there should be no charge to you."

Firefox offers glimpse of new tablet version

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Opera?

"Let users use alternatives to your software on iOS? Speaking as a generally appreciative customer who dislikes control freaks and would like a middle ground."

They already let users have alternatives - Have you tried Opera? http://www.opera.com/mobile/

Tim99 Silver badge
Stop

Obsessive?

@GotThumbs,

OK, your entire posting history is about how you don't like Apple and Steve Jobs. You might need to get a little perspective. Pretty much all of the historic slate market has been a disaster - The modern fondleslab market only exists because of the iFondlePad...

Myself, I have 2 Debian based computers, a MacBook Pro and an iPad, maybe a bit over the top since I am now retired, but the iPad gets used a lot.

Apple vanishes MySQL from Mac OS X Lion Server

Tim99 Silver badge
Happy

Not a fan of MySQL licencing

To a developer, MySQL was always sub-par because of licencing - If you needed to distribute a DB with a non-FOSS application, MySQL was always an expensive choice. I favor SQLite for standalone use or for small web sites that are only going to have a few hundred thousand rows with say, 10 concurrent users (which is probably 95+% of the sites out there). SQLite databases/applications convert easily to PostgreSQL, SQLite to MySQL has been more difficult...

Well, that about wraps it up for the NBN

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

Reference countries and statistics

How about Sweden or Norway?

Some wiki data:

Population: AU 22M; SW 9M; NO 5M

Area: AU 7.6M km2 ; SW 0.45M km2; NO 0.38 km2

Pop Density: AU 2.83/km2 (233rd); SW 20.6/km2 (192nd); NO 12.5/km2 (211th)

Urban Population: AU 92%; SW 83 %; NO 55%

Ref: netindex.com

Internet speeds: AU 8.3Mbps (44th) SW 25.2 Mbps (3rd) NO 14Mbps (9th)

"Promised" Speed: AU 62.2% SW 83.1% NO 95.2%

All three countries are wealthy, have low population densities and are urbanized, so the "tyranny of distance" may not be that bad...

HTC Flyer 7in Android tablet

Tim99 Silver badge
WTF?

They're having a larf

An Apple 10" 16GB Wi-Fi fondlePad for £399, vs £480 for a 7" Android with a pen?

The Apple has a 1024-by-768 screen vs 1024 x 600 for the HTC.

Alright not the same thing, but a capacitive pen for the Apple is under a tenner...

OK, I already have a fondlePad, but I'm also a Linux fanboi, so I'd buy the HTC at £299.

Verity Stob and the super subjunction

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

Colonial English

Probably as a result of climate and distance, we in Oz have found it necessary to subjugate existential angst by defining a universal function that always returns the string constant:

"It's all good mate!"

Beer, obviously.

Plague of US preachers falsely claim to be Navy SEALs

Tim99 Silver badge
Stop

Military service

Er, PMs with combat experience since WW II- Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Wilson, Heath and Callaghan. Douglas-Home was too young for WW I and too ill for WW II.

It has been said of Heath's Cabinet that only Thatcher had not served in WW II, and this was why she had little concept of service, community and society...

Obama to overhaul heinous US patent system

Tim99 Silver badge

@attoman

You can thank (the British) Tim Berners-Lee for HTML which he developed whilst working at the (European) CERN organization.

Berners-Lee has said that HTML is an application of SGML, which itself is a descendent of IBM's Generalized Markup Language; which was developed in the 1960s. D/ARPANET used different protocols described in the BBN Report 1822, and came later.

Julian Assange gets helping hand from OJ Simpson's briefs

Tim99 Silver badge

@Ian Micheal Gumby

Seriously Ian; I have been worried about you, and your posts, for some time. Unless you have a particular reason for spending so much time on this topic, you need to lighten up or get help.

I appears that you are not very bothered about the US Government breaking its own laws, but you are very angry about Assange. Generally governments have much more power than an individual. As to whether Assange is guilty of sex crimes in Sweden, I don't know and you probably don't know either. We may find out (or not) IF he is extradited.

Perhaps you think that everything should be secret, it doesn't bother me so much since I retired.

So, not that it is any of your business, I will tell you that I was born in 1951. An IQ score by itself doesn't mean much but, many years ago, mine measured at 148.

Tim

Tim99 Silver badge
Stop

@Got to love this quote...

Er, he did not allegedly "steal" classified documents, the US Government still has them, he copied them.

Perhaps your obsessive need to vilify this man is as a result of Right Wing Authoritarianism tendencies? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism

Alternatively, he may have raped your cat - In which case, I apologize for my insensitivity.

DEC founder Ken Olsen is dead

Tim99 Silver badge

In memoriam

A sad day for those of us who cut our teeth on the PDP.

US Navy puts stops on server spending

Tim99 Silver badge
Welcome

@The Cube

"...except for the dumass thin client fad du jour of course".

Using technology that can trace its ancestry back to the IBM3270 and the DEC VT52/241 seems like a good idea to me. I *liked* VT220 terminals. I would have thought that new slim and energy efficient colour flatscreen displays offering central management would be very useful in mission critical and harsh environments like the Navy.

It might cut down on the number of PowerPoint presentations out there too...

Bot attacks Linux and Mac but can't lock down its booty

Tim99 Silver badge
Stop

@AC

Sorry, I did not make myself clear to you. I wrote that OX 10.4 was out at the same time as XP - I did not say when they came out, or which came out first. The timeline is:

Mac OS X Server 1.0 in Jan 1999; 10.0 Desktop (not really usable) Mar 2001; OS X 10.1 (free upgrade from 10) Sept 2001; 10.2 (paid upgrade) Aug 2002; 10.3 (paid upgrade) Oct 2003; and, as you say, 10.4 April 2005; 10.5 came out in October 2007 and 10.6 in Aug 2009.

Windows XP RTM - August 24, 2001; XP Retail: October 25, 2001( I was a Microsoft DAAP and Developer, so I got mine early); XP SP1 (free upgrade) Sept 2002; XP SP2 (free upgrade) Aug 2004.

Windows 2000 Retail: 17 February 2000 (Again I got mine early - We were shipping products that ran on NT 3.51 & NT 4.0).

So we are talking about a few weeks difference between when a punter could buy usable versions of XP and OS X. Vista RTM November 8, 2006; Retail: January 30, 2007

Tim99 Silver badge

@xxlyyk

Possibly. I don't think we can project too much from the original stats other than we should suggest that home users consider updating to newer versions of their operating systems (or new machines for Windows XP Home users).

If we look at market share by OS type/version:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10

The numbers for Windows Vista and 7 show a 9% Infection rate for 33% distribution (good @ ~1/3 of expected infection) XP has 75% infection for 57% distribution (~1.3 times infection rate).

"OS X Other" (Presumably OS 10.6 plus all previous versions of OS X other than 10.58 and 10.11.4) has 3% for Infection for 3% distribution (corresponding infection?). OS 10.5.6 has 9% Infection for 1.5% distribution rate (6 times infection rate) - OS 10.4.11 has 4% infection for 0.4% distribution rate (10 times infection rate).

What I do find surprising is the numer of XP Professional infections. Generally, we could think that XP Professional is managed by "professionals" whilst the perception is that OS X is often managed by "users". If the Windows XP "professionals" were doing their job properly, the rate of infection should be lower.

If we believe Symantec (and I personally haven't used any of their products for the last 6 years), the original Windows versions of the Trojan.Jnanabot infection had 0-49 infections on October 26, 2010. The article says that the number of infections is now "in the thousands" (maybe 10,000?) so we are looking at maybe a few hundred Windows 7/Vista infections with a few more hundred OS X infections of which the substantial majority are on old systems.

I help run (as a volunteer) classes for retirees. We use Windows XP, Vista & 7, OS X and Linux. We get pupils to set up separate 'admin' accounts and 'user' accounts for their systems. The advice that we give is "Only use the 'user' account for normal tasks - If you get a message asking you to install something, be suspicious."

I note that the MacBook Air no longer ships with Java and that it now can be downloaded from Oracle - I, like you, try to avoid Java on client machines.

So in conclusion: Unless we know the breakdown of "OS X Other", I might suspect that Symantec are trying to whip up interest in their Apple producs to a growing Apple "Home User" market as their Windows Home market share is threatened by the free Microsoft Securty Essentials product.

Tim99 Silver badge

@WOW

"That's more Mac OSX Infections that Windows 7 infections"

No, not really - OS X 10.4 was out at the same time as XP and 10.5 was out just before Vista. If you ratio them out they correspond roughly to their user bases. The user ratio of the current version of OS X (10.6) to previous versions is roughly 2:1 - So it would seem that the main lesson we learn is "Old versions of both OSs are more vulnerable that newer ones".

As an aside, when I teach people to use OS X, I recommend that they turn Java off in Safari - They almost never seem to need it...

Microsoft pumps cash into IBM bete noire

Tim99 Silver badge
Troll

Kebabbert attacks IBM...

Please, just have some perspective.

Looking at your posting history, one could imagine that an IBMer raped your hamster - or you could be Florian's brother...

Apple iPod Nano 6G

Tim99 Silver badge
Troll

Form over Function: Sockpuppet/Troll over Reality?

Surprising how most people who say they have these problem post as AC.

" I have over 500GB of legitimately purchased video from the iTunes store that is pretty much tied to Apple's offering unless I want to spend weeks with TuneBite.

That's why DRM is such a bad idea - once you have a significant investment in DRM'd content you are pretty much stuck for options on the hardware to play it..."

I am a bit of a Freetard myself, but you should be aware that "On 6 January 2009 Apple announced that they had reached an agreement with major record labels to sell all music on the iTunes Store free of DRM restrictions."

You do know that you can just copy the entire iTunes Music folder to anywhere you like? Songbird plays all of my purchased MPEG-4 Audio Files fine, that I have copied to a Debian server, and allows me to add whatever I like.

The nano always was limited in capacity ( currently 16GB) compared to the classic (160GB), but videoplayback was useful (if your eyesight was good enough)...

Ballmer's 'lost generation' note finds resonance

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

QBasic

QB wasn't that bad. We used it to write apps that sent and received laboratory instrument data down serial lines. A few tens of lines of code at most: To wait for a signal, read the header, extract the data and format it to be transferred to a network of IBM-PCs, then tell the instrument that it had got it, and that it was OK to delete it.

We could (and did occasionally) have done it in C on a 'proper' computer, but QB was much easier.

Two years ago I met someone who was a consultant employed to project manage an update of a major utility's SCADA. He said tthat the old system did everything in some strange basic on DOS - We can't get the serial cards we need anymore, except from scrap. Why did they use that? I asked "Quick Basic, from the 1980s by any chance?" - A: Yes, how did you know?.

Telling point: 25 years ago that was probably the easiest and cheapest way of doing instrument control in-house. You could have used a networked PDP-11 based ethernet system, at say 200,000 quid; or done it for about 15,000 quid in house, and only had one level of purchasing authority to negotiate.

Visual Studio suits up for business apps

Tim99 Silver badge
Gates Horns

Re: Good idea, in theory

"The people making them aren't stupid, but can't graduate above Access VBA"

The learning curve for Access VBA is longer and steeper than, say, VB; and much more complex than C#. I used to worry about distributing a 60+MB runtime/support environment for a 3MB Access/VBA front end to SQL Server - Eventually I realized that a Windows distribution of 60MB was pretty small compared to the 3GB base install most punters had for XP plus another 1-3GB for Microsoft Office.

iPad alert: Are you a selfish elite or an independent geek?

Tim99 Silver badge
Grenade

Click Tarts

A quote from the orginal MyType authors' website: "MyType is a personality based social networking application that allows you to explore your personality using several popular personality assessments such as the Jung Typology and and a survey with questions drawn from the International Personality Item Pool. Please keep in mind that MyType is an entertainment service and is in no way a substitute for the services of a psychological professional. You come to MyType to have fun and, perhaps, to learn a little bit about yourself and your friends."

Another soft-science statistician's meaningless drool-fest, but this time linked to a commercial site. Why is it so hard for even 'professionals' in this field to come up with good science? Perhaps they are not taught cause and effect - Like if you have the traits "wealthy, highly educated and sophisticated", and "value power and achievement much more than others" and are "selfish, scoring low on measures of kindness and altruism" you actually have money to spend. Are you likely to have made an effort to makea lot of money if you are "interested in video games, computers, electronics, science and the internet"?.

I run a couple of Debian boxes, a MacBook Pro and an iPad. so I must be a wealthy/sophisticated/selfish/independent/young geek. What might get up some geeks' noses, is that when this retired old/fat/bald slob whips out his iPad, it (but alas, not me) is a girl-magnet.

The iPad is lovely. It, or its successors, are likely to be what most people will actually use.