Posts by Matthew Greet 16 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Apr 2007
Umm... What? Until Apple rejects an app advocating creationism by stating creationism is rubbish, they can't be said to be taking sides. Allowing something into a marketplace is not the same thing as endorsing its contents. Only the stupid think that not wholeheartedly advocating one side means advocating its opposite.
Judge Dredd himself is a fairly one dimensional character, albeit rigid and violent. The appeal of Judge Dredd is not Dredd himself, rather what happens in the dystopian Mega City he inhabits. As long as the writers and director understands this.
Imagine that. An investor should consider if the company's business plan is likely to be profitable. The idea of profit must be a radical, new concept as the stock market wouldn't have ignored it in the dot com bubble. That would mean stock market investors are utter morons, and a menace to economic stability, but that can't be right.
Email convenience does make it convenient for lobbyists to spam and for people to write incoherent or poorly presented arguments. You just have to visit any forum to see the latter. Can't say I blame the MP for reverting back to low-tech.
I once made the mistake of making my email address public. I had to abandon the address entirely in a year.
Plenty of people can be technophobic but this has no keypad? Telephony has been so commonplace for so long that even the elderly knows what it does and how useful it is. The other features are good but the lack of a keypad would insult an elderly person. It would also restrict them to calling four people, suggesting that's all the people they know.
You could give someone a regular handset then give them this as a managed, emergency device using a backup service provider. It is not a primary communication device.
Bush pandered to the Christians, Obama does not. Obama needs to tell ICANN to tell the Christian complainers to shut up. Everybody here agrees that approving the xxx domain is a no brainer decision. If ICANN doesn't have the thick skin to ignore those who lack the brains to make no brainer decisions, Obama needs to appoint people who do.
I'm all for anti-trust regulation and thought Microsoft should have been split up but the iPhone only has 25% market share. The app developer still has plenty of opportunity with other handsets. This contrasts with OEMs who did what Microsoft told them because buying retail or switching to another OS would destroy razor thin profit margins.
Of course, the SDK terms are still obstructive and evil but the FTC doesn't go into heavy regulation. Americans don't like regulation. So why are the FTC doing this now?
After decades of deregulation, it is painfully obvious that the banks will inflate any bubble as much as possible for as much profit as possible and deny that it must burst, even though it's a mathematical certainty and repeated throughout history. That is, anything the banks want leads to instability. Therefore, to ensure stability, we must deny anything the banks want. If the banks aren't complaining, a regulator must investigate what is going on and stop it.
Securitisation makes the inflation and subsequent burst far worse. This is why this banking crisis is far worse than the last one. It is imperative that the banks are screaming like toddlers because that's what they are, irresponsible toddlers. But with our pensions.
The ministers ignore evidence based reasoning because it isn't what the voting public want. In the MMR vaccine scare, there was no evidence that it caused autism yet the public wanted MMR vaccine withdrawn because they believed it did. The scare did not exist in any other country. The public want to be scared, not governed by evidence based policy.
MMR was not withdrawn because the health minister listened to the doctors. I guess the ministers are too exhausted to fight this one.
MVPs are an indicator of genuine, technical excellence (unlike MSCE) and a CV enhancer. MVP carries a good reputation. Though the MVP scheme is good marketing for Microsoft, it is also good marketing for the award holder. It is not a badge that indicates a sucker.
Thus, Jon Skeet is a fool for not renewing his award. He's not going to stay at Google forever and the award will help get his next job or contract. He should have told Google that third-party awards are none of their business and if they're worried about MS IP property, MS abdicated secrecy by giving it to a known Google employee in the first place. Failing that, he can refuse anything that's MS secret.
Anything from Microsoft should be treated as lies until independent, detailed evidence shows otherwise. Microsoft do not merely do their own thing or write non-compliant web browsers, they have a history of obsfucation, terminating support, vapourware, incomplete documentation and buggy implementations. Withdrawing OpenGL support, terminating DCOM on Unix mid-development, trying to sabotague Java, sabotaguing SAMBA interoperability, killing Pen Windows with vapouware, inadequate RTF documentation, very buggy Visual C++, plain awful ADO, dubious support for ODF... The list goes on and on. And this is the non-Web stuff.
I'm sure others will describe horror stories about Microsoft's attitude to Web standards. Microsoft have shown themselves to be untrustworthy at all levels, especially when developing with their stuff. There is no reason to believe they've changed.
There is something wrong when a court declaring that a university can indeed maintain their academic standards is news. This is so frivilous, the judges shouldn't have let it get to court in the first place. The idea that religions correctly described the natural laws was squashed in the Age of Enlightenment and that finished centuries ago. How these schools even exist boggles the mind.
I remember trying to use Word OLE Automation, which was so buggy, I abandoned it in favour of generating RTF. Then I found out that RTF is just an alternate format for Word documents. The keywords describing a table or run-time fields were named but not its behaviour. The documentation didn't state the field name for today's date, let alone the options for formatting it. The documentation only properly specified character and line formatting. Anything more sophisticated required reverse engineering how Word saved it.
The OOXML documentation is a big steaming, worthless pile? Normal practice.
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