Posts by Stevie 7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
ISC??
Wassat then? I read the bloody article several times *and* swept it with a regex but couldn't find any likely culprits. I thought it was usual to use a TLA only *after* it had been spelled out, or was this phased out along with the rest of the education system after I left the UK?
Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.
Why is that "When you take the guns away from law-abiding citizens, only the bad guys will have guns" statement not complained about by the law enforcement agencies being so openly dissed every single time some twillup says it?
The NRA used to have a line that ran along the lines of: "There has never been a crime committed by someone using a legal automatic weapon", which was true as far as it went, in that if you owned an automatic weapon and some swine nicked it and shot someone, the crime was, by definition, performed using an *illegal* automatic weapon. I haven't heard that one since the rash of people taking their legal automatics into public places and trying them out during the various financial crises of the end of the last century though.
It's about time the local PBA's started complaining about this "bad guy" slur on their members' characters.
It's also about time people, especially venal politicians, admitted publicly that America is a big place and firearms laws that make sense in one place may be sheer lunacy to apply in another. One can make a very good case for ease of access to firearms in rural areas where the livestock is quite capable of taking a person ten falls out of ten, and inclined to do so given half a chance. They make little sense in the urban sprawl of our larger cities.
But I feel uneasy when someone snarls that he or she cannot wait five days for their handgun permit in a place where a rifle can be bought legally over-the-counter with no wait at all. If you wanna hunt, go hunt. If you are so eager for a handgun, perhaps youi need the wait for the edge to come off your temper.
Typical lack of precision in the reporting.
"What really upsets me with this story is the implication that *only* young (former) criminals have the skills required to carry out the work necessary to combat cyber terrorism,"
That should obviously have read :
"What really upsets me with this story is the implication that *only* young (former) criminals have the mad skillz required to carry out the work necessary to combat cyber terrorism,"
Once again all cogent meaning in an article is lost and the whole rendered farcical because of lax editing by The Register.
How sad that this is still being debated. Cobol does its job and does it well. The popular old-saw criticisms of the language do not withstand study by people who actually know how to write the stuff and are easily avoided in practice. Not to mention, you know, the "billion lines" of code still in use etc etc...
Most of the problem is that people are so busy trying to debunk the language from the experience they had writing one report in it as coursework in college that they fail to engage their brains to ask the question "why, then, is it so widely adopted and still going strong?" or if they do, they spit back the old Linux-v-windows answer - because peepul is to stoopid to do the right thing.
The Wikipedia article on Cobol has at times been riddled with the most ridiculous nonsense, of which I think "it can't do accurate math" (along with example code containing the Cobol-101 Howler that "proved" the point) was perhaps the funniest.
As for the examples of what you *could* do with the language (AC 09:56 et al), such things were not used by anyone wanting to keep their job, since ALTER, VIA and all those no-memory, card-to-card era innovations (so that compact monolithic code could be written that would run in 256-or-thereabouts words of memory) were declared obsolete and dangerous once resources were available to allow people to do the same job in a straightforward manner. It's illuminating to compare such constructs with what is considered clever in perl circles today though.
I wouldn't mind, but there was the most awful kerfuffle recently when it was uncovered that the clever sods that persuaded certain financial institutions to toss their Cobol stuff in favour of more modern (aka "better") alternatives had not understood the code they were tossing out and had re-written basic currency calculations as floating point operations (rather than decimal-scaled integer, which can be found in every version of Cobol under the data type "Computational"). No-one is sure how much money was lost as a result of this "improvement". What a shame that so much focus was on the language used that none was spared for understanding the task at hand. What a shame no-one considered that Cobol factors that sort of oversight into the language by having an intrinsic datatype for doing the job. It also handles records (C calls 'em structures) better all-round than any other language I'm familiar with. Oh well.
An acquaintance put it best: "Cobol is an excellent DP language. C [and C-type languages] is an excellent IT language".
Thanks Dan. You put your finger right on the key issue.
My first PC came bundled with Lotus Office and a nice little inexpensive alternative to the six-times-as-pricey MSOffice it was too. Of course, it didn't have the tight integration and increasingly sophisticated automation that the MSO components sported, and no database product at all, but it was nice all the same. I thought the screen recorder was probably the most innovative addition to any IT trainer's toolbox I'd seen in years.
Then IBM acquired the company and, well, that was all she wroted. They couldn't dump features fast enough. Screen recorder was the first to go.
All I remember of "notes" was that the bucketful of toolbars a new user was faced with were confusing and difficult to figure out. The suck factor was about the same as for the MS products of the day, and everyone was talking of building intranets to replace the need for either of them.
Never was tempted to try sharepoint. Glad I didn't, from all the buzz here.
[4 fireman sam] Oh sam, you don't really believe a warranty works the same way your car insurance does, do you? That Dell assess the risk and price the service accordingly based on customer calls?
For starters, Dell doesn't provide the "onsite" service in metropolitan New York, Unisys does (or did, last time I used them). Dell's prices will be dictated by Unisys's bid, plus whatever markup Dell decided was reasonable (and their definition of "reasonable" would almost certainly differ radically from yours).
They also will sell you a service that specifically features *in-home* repair (and for which they charge more than their "carry-into-a-service-center-yourself" service contract), then tell you , when you inevitably wish to actually use the service for which you've paid, that you live outside the technician's service area (defined, as far as I can make out, by where said technician lives) and that you'll just have to carry the device into a service center anyway. They will if you live where I live, anyway, which is in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York.
Now I don't know about you, but this pretty much defines a canonical definition of the phrase "fraudulent practice" in my lexicon, and I have absolutely no problem in this instance with the A.G. using an issue that needs fixing as a springboard to the Sate Governor's mansion.
Not withstanding that for "most users" (your phrasing), laying hands on a screwdriver capable of undoing the screws without chewing them up (probably voiding the warranty you hold so dear) is no trivial matter. I have several sets of them, but Auntie May, if she possesses a screwdriver at all, is probably only going to have the ubiquitous slot type or a Phillips #2 if you're lucky. With which of these do you suggest she start dismantling her laptop?
Asking the customer to reseat the plug and power cable is a reasonable over-the-phone request. Undoing *any* fasteners and opening the case isn't.
Sorry, sam. I tag you with a big red "fail" sticker.
Women only carriages? But what about the Lesbian Menace? And what of the poor Male passengers, forced into close proximity with women-starved gropers? How is this a solution at all?
No, the only solution is that each passenger, regardless of sex, should be packaged in a self-contained "transit tube" at the station of embarkation. Claustrophobic passengers would be gassed into insensibility at this point. The tubes would be loaded onto flatcars that would replace the old carriages, with everyone properly isolated from their fellow perverts. Tubes would be offloaded and the passengers decanted by an automated system at the destination station.
All this loading and unloading would be done using robot mechanics and large articulated manipulator arms developed from the space station tech. Destinations would be encoded to be read from an RFID.
Only in this glorious transit utopia can everyone travel free from the worry that their bum is going to be tweaked or their pockets picked.
Cue: Rule Britannia.
The lack of grasp of the principles involved shown by the majority of the commentators is truly the most unbelievable part of the whole story.
What part of recoil-less escapes the masses?
And guns that require oxygen are called flintlocks.
For crying out loud! Even if you didn't pay attention in skool there's the wikipedia. Okay, as you were. I don't know where I was going with that.
[4 Thomas 18] Yes they are, and including them in center console GUI-driven fittings (along with the stereo) has resulted in a Mercedes Osamamobile ending up in the middle of my front lawn having plowed through the phone pole and 40 feet of chainlink while Mr IQ was adjusting his driving quality experience parameters instead of, you know, driving.
I think when you buy electronic stuff like phones, GPS sets or portable video players (and yes, I've had to move sharply to get out of the way of one idiot watching a sunvisor-mounted video while behind the wheel of a speeding car) you should have to prove conclusively that your IQ is higher than that of the thing you are trying to buy before you can walk out of the shop with it.
Clearly a biased report.
The Hitachi Magic Wand is noisy, requires mains electricity and comes with stern warnings about it overheating if it runs for more than half an hour. It is consistently rated "better than sex" by women who are asked, yet was not included in the models used in this so-called poll.
Mrs Stevie assures me she only uses hers for the articles on gardening.
This is what the bees get for going with a single-vendor proprietary comms infrastructure!
Seriously, what is it with the UK and the Green Movement? When did the debate shift from "Sounds Plausible, Let's Have A Butcher's and see what's what" to "Chemicals??? Death To Big Pharma. Gnyargh!"
I realise that this problem has a much more immediate, if no less important, impact to UK agriculture than to that of the USA where I currently live (and where the problem is still not being seen for what it is), but it seems awfully slim evidence to use as "The Cause".
Oh, and while I'm here, the damage done at Minimata Bay was immediate and to the then-current population. It required no long-term studies to figure out something was wrong, and it took only a few months for the blame to be properly assessed. The main obstruction to the whole affair was, if I remember rightly and I do 'cos I was alive, young and angry at the time, the Japanese reserve in such matters and the politics of the situation. Once face had been lost, the whole sorry affair unfolded in the press in no time.
Why didn't he just put it in his own bank in the first place? I mean, he ended up doing that anyway. Oh wait, that's right, he had to wait for the check to clear.
No, wait, now I'm confused again. He thought a bank he didn't have any relationship with would cash a check faster than one he did? B of A said if his wife came along she could cash the check, so why didn't he just ask her to do that if it was so all-fired important to have the cash in and there and then?
Nope. There's more to this than a stupid bank, thouhg why a thumbprint would be a door-opener I can't think.
And as for AC "B of A is frighteningly anti-consumer": Couldn't open a Bank Account???? Whyever not? Anyone can open a bank account. All you have to do is prove that you are who you say you are. Easy if you are a citizen, easy if you aren't and have a passport and a phone bill. I should know. I am a furriner and have had bank accounts in NY since day one.
Of course, none of the banks knew the law, so they made it up as they went along. Citibank wouldn't let me open a current or "checking" account, Nat West wouldn't let me open a deposit account. Each used the same (wrong) reading of the law (which simply states that if you don't have a SSN you must have 20% of any interest earned over the year withheld by the bank in anticipation of you dodging taxes). For the time it took to get the SSN (18 months in them days) I simply wrote checks from NatWest and saved money in Citibank.
Now if you were going to attack the amount of time the banks (especially Citibank) take to clear checks drawn and deposited in the same city, you've got my support.
Interesting article.
I would really like to see some figures for real-world migrations between each major small-system OS family - Linux / Mac / Windows though. I wonder if anyone keeps such data and how reliable it is?
Comments about "people swapping" from whatever to whatever generally meet solid skepticism from me since I lived through twenty-five years of "Oh yeah, we're actively migrating off the mainframe" studies and "Cobol - dead in our enterprise" quiz results. We all know how that turned out. Not only that but I've got some personal experience in how the Mac/PC thing has played out in a couple of large arenas.
But it would be instructive to study how people change their computing habits over time on a large geographic scale.
Successfully killing co-operative targets with a six-shot laser that needs a Hercules to lift it? I see the weapons scientists at the Pentagon are as pig-useless as the regular kind then. Probably wasted moths and millions of dollars on arguing what to call the damn thing before picking up a test tube or slide rule.
Where are the army's laser rifles? Where are the Delammeters and Phasers for Azathoth's sake? Where are the military jetpacks, forcefield armour and pocket-sized nuke grenades?
They should be made to give back their lambskins in shame!
[4 jake] Oh jake, for Azathoth's sake grow up! Did you stay where your parents could see you and did you constrain yourself to their approved behaviour when you were out of their sight?
This DINK argument really needs to be retired from libertarian rhetoric. It is so lame a 12 year old could poke holes in it without breaking a sweat.
Only an idiot would assume that kids are extensions of their parents' authority, even if their own childhood reflected that.
Did yours? Mine didn't and I was a total pussycat compared to just about everyone else I knew.
Where were the parents? Probably at work some of the time. Perhaps at more than one job.
Wuckfit.
[4 A J Stiles] Rubbish. If it bugs you that much, have a word with the "offender" and/or use a script to put it right. A single line of perl should be able to make you a happy camper.
I have a colleague who whines in full cap mode about someone who sends him 18 point font e-mails. He is so busy being cleverer than everyone else that is has never occured to him he could hit ctrl-A and resize the damn writing before reading (a three keystroke operation with our e-mail client), and it would apparently choke the very life from him to pick up a phone and alert the "offender".
The office manager at my place sends out "ransome note" e-mails, designed to make creative use of the colour palette and font selections. Does this bug me? A bit, but rather than obsess about it I simply wrote a filter to file his blithering somewhere until I'm in a receptive mood and can read his stuff as comedy.
But the salient point here is that the annoying woman in question received no warning that her behaviour was considered a disciplinary matter.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you don't tell someone they are the root cause of a perceived problem, you shouldn't expect tham to fix it. This isn't Star Wars and no-one can use "The Force", though it seems more and more people expect some sort of spontaneous behaviour modification in today's world.
I have to wonder when we in the western world decided that talking to each other was unacceptable.
I rather think that the residents of this "fine" town have more pressing and deadly reasons for the property prices that prevail than these brown boxes. I won't drive through the downtown area at night on a bet after the first (and last) time.
The Long Island lawyers are, however, not slow to recognise a possible money-spinner when they see one, as anyone who watches the USA channel (for NCIS reruns) can attest. There's a firm that runs umpteen adverts a night suggesting imaginitive ways you might have possibly suffered alleged injury or long-term sickness along with a kind and I'm sure philanthropic offer to "help seek redress".
The problems facing the Linux community are largely of their own making. Linux is a perfectly adequate Unix-like operating system with all that implies: stuff lying around with "known bugs" after 30 odd years because the bunch of accademics that built thebits in question saw something shinier when the job was 95% done. Ask about this and one gets back "good enough" answers. Push harder and you get defensive "well Windows is worse", as though that either made sense or was relevant.
Linux will continue to be a "poor cousin" until the community decides whether it wants to deliver what it oh so often claims - a better computer experience than windows. That will involve many things, amongst them fixing ancient broken stuff, deciding what the desktop should look like and more importantly how it should behave (this last was an awfully long time dawning on the Linux GUI desiner community) so that people can make it work quickly and then push ythe OS details to the back off their heads because (and this is important) most people do not want, and do not enjoy having, to eff-about with their computer OS. They want to do other stuff, like write letters, build spreadsheets and so on.
As I've said before, choice is good but no-one would buy a toaster that required one to define the line voltage, shape of bread and colour of the casing before you could get on with the business of singeing bread.
And you need to get the manufacturers of certain key software packages to port to Linux, (pay attention Linuxfans, another important point coming up) even if you personally have never understood the point of that software. The Novel geek who asked a roomful of people why on earth they'd need a digital camera USB interface two years ago was removing just about everyone on Madison Avenue from the potential audience for Suse 10, and he didn't even know it.
The same geek also said he couldn't see why they needed to add pivot table support to OpenOffice spreadsheets (the obvious answer, that the product they were attempting to usurp offered them was aparently lost on him, as was any intuitive desire to go find out what they were and why so many in the insurance and sales industries use them). With that he'd just told everyone in the room that adopting his product would make their buyers and sales reps angry with the IT boob who did the job. And he said all this proudly. Waytergo Linuxgeek!
The problem isn't the interface. It's cultural. Linux will never be what it's adherents want it to be until the community at large becomes more attuned to what the computer *user* world wants. SmallYellowFuzzyDuck is right, and until he is wrong Linux will not be a serious contender for the workstation of choice stakes in business.
I await the storm of "Stupid Windows Users" posts I usually attract with this sort of posting, but everyone should know I don't use windows or *any* toy computer OS as my yardstick for what constitutes a decent, robust OS.
And double bah!
Here's an idea no less feasible than slime tanks lining the old cavity walls:
How about so-called "scientists" genetically engineer open-air, photosynthetic coral-building organisms. You could smear your walls with them in a nutrient paste and, once the colonies had established themselves, start building up layers of coral on your walls.
Much nicer than pebble-dash, greener than stucco and what other finish can you apply to your house that will eventually add another floor and a garden shed to your manor, with no effort on your part? Need a granny flat? just wait about five years and the old bat can move in with no expense spent over and above the original seeding (which you'd do out of pure eco-mindedness and to insulate the house against the bitter global-warming-induced winters).
Instead of sinking ships as reefs you could tow 'em into position and anchor them, give 'em a good spray of Stevie's Patent Coral Goo and leave them to turn into real coral, capsize with the weight, sink and become real submarine nature preserves.
Why, I should get a Nobel Prize for Thinking Up Worthwhile Stuff For Scientists To Do just for the idea itself!
[4 Grease Monkey] Never heard of a beeper exploding or catching fire.
Or a transistor radio.
Or an electronic keyboard (Casio, Yamaha, Roland, Korg etc).
Or a camcorder.
Or a point and shoot camera (Nikon, Kodak, Canon, Olympus etc).
Or a digital watch.
Or a set of solar powered garden landscape lamps.
Or a walkman.
Or one of those squawking wand things they wave over you at airports these days.
I'd have to experss scepticism about your "catastrophic failure" assertion based on this.
Almost every UK hosted site I've visited in the last few months has delivered a snotty lecture at me "suggesting" I change my browser. I, following the standard netizen protocol established fifteen years or so ago, voted with my mouse and bought what I was looking for elsewhere.
Blacklisting these sites just seems to be anticipating the hysterical anti-IE rant they deliver and since the webmasters clearly don't want IE-delivered custom, would appear to be doing everyone concened a favour.
Webmasters! If your website has a problem rendering in a browser, perhaps it's time to consider trimming Teh Bling (aka the Tat) from the bloody pages.
Or you could just, you know, forego all that lovely money people are trying to spend at your wretched site.
[4 Mike C] Er...perhaps if this Lion technology is so prone to setting fire to your car or blowing your left buttock off there might be some sort of acknowledgement in the marketing, like maybe a big warning sticker along the lines of "Possible Car iIncineration Threat" or "Potential Bottom-Maiming Situation".
Here's a thought: If Lion batteries are that unsuitable for use in exactly the sort of places casual entertainment electronics find themselves (in a car, in a pocket) perhaps the manufaturer had their collective primary sensory cluster up their posterior dorsal orifice when selecting them as the (permanently mounted) power source of choice. With a slight sacrifice of the perplexing design drive toward ever thinner devices (why do you need thin stuff if you take your life in your hands by putting such stuff in your pocket?) they could have powered it using Triple As that have no significant history of singeing off your left nipple just because you get whacked by a cricket ball in a lunchtime game.
But of course we are talking Apple here who just "get it right" and can do no wrong (whatever that is).
What idiot posts on the internet and then tries to claim breach of privacy?
And once again I find myself reading that a term (in this instance "skank", last week it was "Tw*t") is subjective with no real definitive meaning when the context it was used in is clear from the surrounding blither. I can only assume the ACs saying this are employed by the Rebel Without A Blog (Anymore)'s legal team.
Alright you smart arses! If psychology is so broken, how did those commie bastards brainwash Laurence Harvey into shooting The President, and Frank Sinatra into covering for him? Eh? Eh? If it hadn't been for a piece of blind luck the entire western world would have been under some commie dictator who looked like one of the guys from Ocean's Eleven (the original, not the remake).
The Inkblots are a strategic asset in the never-ending hunt for the innocent victims of red plots and the pinko idiot who wikified then should be in Guantanamo for doing so.
Senator Stevie, Mrs (ret'd).
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