Posts by Stevie 7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Obviously some hideously dangerous mind-creature has invaded the brains of these former human now-alien pod-puppets. We all saw how this played out in "The Astronauts Wife", now revealed as the truest film ever. It's only a matter of time before everyone is infected now.
It *does* explain the heretofore inexplicable fondness some have for overpriced and proprietary Apple products in a world otherwise in love with Open and Cheap Thingies though...
You don't think the earth-bound vector is via...the iPod do you? *Now* I understand all that insanitary earbud-sharing I see. This is obviously a bigger problem than we realise. I'll bet there's nothing on those iPods but white noise!
I can't figure out what the people in Europe and the UK do to their bulbs. I've been using the "Energy Efficient" flourescent type since they came out and have had precisely one blow. The slow start time people complain about I *have* seen, on exterior, high-output spot lights, but it is certainly no worse than the start to full-brightness time on a sodium vapour lamp (and if you want to talk dangerous, they are a better candidate methinks). New interior-use bulbs sold in the US do not suffer this problem.
My older fittings did take a few seconds to come up to full brightness, but the newer spiral "almost bulb-shaped" ones are bright from the moment I switch them on. As for hard wearing, I used one in my cooker extractor hood because no-one told me I shouldn't. It is the one that blew - after a couple of years as compared to about once every nine months for so-called "rough-duty" filament bulbs. The bulbs also give a nice white light, indistinguishable from incandescent fittings they replace.
The only place I don't use them is in the dimmer-equipped light fittings, because all my fittings use the universally sold cheapo thyristor dimmers that are incompatible with the electronics of the flourescent lamps, or work with a three-way switch circuit that works in the dumbest way I can think of.
If instead of the switch selectively switching on both of the two bulbs at half or full brightness, the dimming action worked by switching on one bulb, then the second, I could fit flourescents without a problem. Why half-bright bulbs is better than one bulb at full whack is a mystery to me. It has no actual effect on the spread of light, as is proved when one bulb inevitably blows.
As for LED fittings, why they cannot be manufactured to turn on fewer elements in a "dim" mode is something someone brighter than me (or those older flourescent bulbs) will have to explain. Three-level incandescents are common in the US, so the market for an off/half/full bright LED bulb is there.
Is there any way The Register writers could fall out of love with the once-droll but now older-than-Methuslah gimmick of putting an exclamation mark after every word in a Yahoo-related article subtitle?
As for Yahoo, I've been a fan of their Groups feature since they were called Clubs. I reckon they are simply the best all-round front-end for an interest group available for free. Mail agregator, image storage, file storage, simple database, calendar, polls (possibly the best way of starting an argument on the web is to make a poll and youcan't do that any easier than in a yahoo group). What's not to like?
Of course, they suffer from the same maladies that any WWW meeting place does, but there are some easy-to-use features built-in to the web interface to combat some of the most egregious ones.
It's certainly true that like many other companies they've seen their core business eroded by other, more focussed efforts, and have lost some of their own focus in the all-too common stampede to find a way of mitigating the damage by branching out. 360 had no chance against the slew of already entrenched blog products available. I'm surprised it lasted this long to be honest. Let's hope FLICKR has more legs.
Now if only they had someone intelligent designing their group front-page template so that logo image sizes could be nice and small if you want, life would be good. Having a tech team that had a clue and/or actually tried using their product before venturing to suggest "answers" to questions (Real Example: "how do I arrange for a small group logo image not to auto expand to a bedsheet?" Real Clueless Response: "Upload smaller images") life would be even better.
Perhaps a tighter focus on what the company is trying to achieve, what they want to be in the 21st century and so on, is required.
Designed by idiots, built by idiots, ridden by idiots. An idea only one braincell less moronic than "push to talk" cellphones.
Here on Long Island it seems like we see deaths caused by idiots driving these idiotic things every week of the summer. I'd call it evolution in action, but sadly the deaths tend to be of the same kind that so often occur with a drunken driver - the moron walks away unharmed while the largely innocent victim is dead or so badly injured they might as well be dead.
Making a jetski silent seems to this reader like putting a silencer on an automatic firearm. It doesn't make it any more deadly, but it does make it a damn sight more dangerous.
[4 Dan] Here in NYC we have Whooping Cough. Read that again. Whooping Cough for Azathoth's sake, a disease that was dangerous, recognized as so and roundly brought to bay during my childhood in the UK by people who understood the danger and worked hard to mitigate it.
Why do we have the disease again? Because certain immigrant populations in the city believe that the drop in the numbers of a disease "prove" that we didn't need the vaccination, and Everyone Knows there's dangerous chemicals in the jabs.
Azathoth help everyone if an epidemic starts in The Bronx, because I'm told by people who know more about such things than I do that once it gets a hold, a disease like Whooping Cough or Measles (another "exagerated" danger said population doesn't believe in) gets a good hold in the community, even the vaccinated are in danger.
Of course, should a disease break out it will be because of a secret government plot targeted at the (insert your favourite ethnic group here), not because the dimwit parents chose to put their children and those of their neighbours at risk.
Gah.
Mine's the one with the handbell in the pocket and "unclean" written on the back.
The existence of a "landscape" will limit this "Bing"'s market penetration?
Well, against your Corel, OpenOffice and Linux I give you Netscape, *the* browser of choice when IE went live.
Corel had a nice market. Doctors' offices and lawyers' offices seemed to run on their office suites for many years. But they failed to build to their target markets in any real way, with the result that in the end there really wasn't much difference between their word processor and Word.
The failure of OpenOffice had more to do with it not coming close to being a replacement for MS Office than any "landscape", and in the development teams for it not putting in any real effort to deliver those functions. It simply didn't have features that non-geeks understood, needed and wanted to use (pivot tables for example).
Linux on the desktop is an attractive idea, but impractical unless you know something about computers and are willing to mess around under the hood. This is far from a consumer-oriented product. How many toasters would you sell if every time you wanted to buy one you had to take the cover off it so you could set the line voltage, number of bread slices it would take and so forth? I'm eager for the day a Linux distribution passes that milestone, but none has yet.
Each of the examples from the article is in fact a demonstration that if you seriously want to go up against a MS product you had better understand your market and play to its expectations rather than your own. MS plays this game very well.
As for the connotations of "Bing", I thought of the old crooner rather than the younger loser. Why this is significant escapes me though.
No, I don't necessarily think this Bing will be a Good Thing for Mankind. But it isn't going to fizzle just because Google is there and the Big Guy In The Playground.
Then again, anything's better than Wolfram|Alpha, judging by my attempts to use it.
Nothing like hearing a tried and tested technology with deep market penetration and five decades of maturity in real world applications as diverse as banking and shop floor manufacturing systems being rubbished by a bunch of people who last used it to write a piece of course work in some bumf*ck university course.
Almost every criticism I hear of the language is either false (usually born of the complainer's own ignorance) or subjective - I'm particularly impressed by those who complain it is too "wordy", like anyone actually types in this cut'n'paste world. The most damning argument against the language in its own Wikipedia entry was for years a howling joke on the idiot wot rote it, showing he a) didn't know what he was talking about and 2) hadn't read the fine manual to find out.
The last time I looked a Cobol program could be written monolithically, modularly, dynamically linked (we usually didn't bother because static linking makes for faster programs and a compile took only a few seconds on a real computer) or statically linked. It could be written procedurally, which was the usual way people went about it, but: it could also be written in an entirely declarative way. It could be written as a decision/action matrix. It couldn't be written using OO techniques entirely, since that feature was still coming (it had been delayed by a blind alley involving people who thought "C" would make a better Data Processing language and that we wouldn't have any Cobol by 1995 doncha know). That is no longer true.
The compiler I used then (and it has long been superceded by a more modern one) was extremely good at figuring out what problems really were and reporting them accurately, in-line.
Of course, that was on a Unisys Clearpath mainframe running OS2200. If you're going to run a reliable language with mature features well-understood in the business DP world (none of that silly doing currency calculations in floating point variables that the bright young things thought was such a good idea during the "Cobol Out, C In, Baby Out With The Bathwater" heydays of the early 90s), you really should be running it on the Rolls Royce of Operating Systems in a reliable recoverable environment.
:o)
It is worth saying that someone once opined at me that perhaps people insisted on viewing Cobol as an IT language during debates on it, when in fact it is a DP language. The reverse could be said for "C" and its bretheren. Thank you Dan for that insight.
No, not at all like a mortar, which is a high trajectory indirect fire weapon. This weapon purports to be able to put a round through a window, said round being then told to explode *before* it hits anything, a direct fire technique requiring little retraining of the rifleman's skills and not being rendered unuseful by the presence of heavy-duty bunker roofing like wot a mortar is.
It remains to be seen whether it can be made to work reliably under battlefield conditions.
It must be hard training the soldiers not to put them down in places where they disappear into the groundcover withn all that applique camoflage though. That applique is cool tech though. American too, as it happens :o)
I've been to northern Alberta and it's riverbanks and rural roads tend to be composed of fist-sized water-worn spud-shaped stones. Pushing a hoverbarge over these would bring new meaning to the phrase gattling-catapult-of-360-degree-indiscriminate-death-by-subsonic-but-still-hoofing-it-a-bit-rocks.
Why not just load the bits of oil rigs, prefab canteens, bags of pron and other comforts of home required by teams of burly men in the middle of nowhere into cylindrical cases and use a variation of Saddam Hussein's supergun to lob the stuff to the site?
[@ American Plug Digger] Nope. American cars will continue to use gasoline, which will plunge in price once all the Europeans have gone over to cute li'l electric golf cart cars so that once again we'll be able to drive our cast-iron bowling-alley-sized Chrysler Le Behemoths from New York to Chicago in first gear for about eight cents.
We've also figured out that that whole "ozone layer hole" thing happens over someone else's country so it's their problem, not ours. Bonus!
Thrrrp! :oP
Don't waste hard-earned money on expensive "fixes". Simply screw seven feet of ordinary zinc-plated 5/16 chain to your head before attempting to use your overpriced music gimmick. The static will flow to ground as you trail the chain behind you.
If you don't want to spring for screws, simply add another foot of chain and knot it round your neck.
Although I don't know what all the fuss is. Anyone who sprang for an iPhone must be brain dead anyway.
Why the flock do I *want* a book that can be a phone? I'm trying to read. The last effing thing I need is to be interrupted by a phone call.
Make the bloody thing portable, resilient to "tote impact", able to display colour and piccys and make it CHEAP. There's no bloody point in the damn thing if it costs as much as a library before you start reading.
Keyboard. Phone. Azathoth on a bike.
A cookie is needed to track "shopping cart abandonment"?
Wouldn't that data be available in the server-side copy of the shopping cart that never gets completed?
Surely, no-one in their right mind would design an essential metrics collection based on the exsistence of a cookie? The user can flush these things on a whim. How then is such data useful?
Sorry, you had me right up until you started whining about not being able to farm your cookies out to a third party, at which point the ol' sympathy bladder drained abruptly.
I can tell the Greeks that the pictures stay on Google Maps forever. I moved that pile of dirt off my driveway *ages* ago.
People ought to be allowed to forget trifling errors in which they order dirt in cubic yards that only have 9 cubic feet in them instead of the usual 27 - and FYI it only took me two years to find places to shovel the bugger - but there, giving Mrs Stevie yet another excuse to bust my balls is the evidence that I screwed up again for all to see.
It seems to me the real evil inherent in this "deal" was basing the rebates on the harm to another company's product line rather than on the success of Intel's own line of fine products.
I should have thought that in this enlightened age any capatalist marketplace would outlaw any practice that sought to degrade sales of a competitors product by any means other than the clear superiority of one's own.
It smacks of Restraint of Trade to me.
Of course, then you will see the same economics that made Apple a second string player in a market it virtually invented - people will go for cheap over quality almost every time (not suggesting AMD doesn't make a quality product of course).
Maybe it would put the brakes on the idiotic chipset races that mean PC games that won't run on a machine more than six months old. Imagine that. Game manufacturers would have to improve gameplay rather than just adding more shine.
FYI: It isn't just Americans doing this, nor is it confined to the computer industry. A rather large UK company I am acquainted with has extremely predatory practices of a similar nature to the Intel nonsense, so much so they've become something of a watchword for "bully" in that particular market.
Life. Marvin the P.A. had it right, I reckon.
How many gs (new S.I. unit: gs = Google search) does it take to fab the chips, support components, printed circuit boards, metal framing, case etc for a single Google-approved server? Now fill a room with the buggers and do the sums again.
It'd be funny if the answer could only be expressed in googols.
[Misuse of the power supply/MacBook] Er, it's a laptop. Only a fool would design a laptop and its support devices so that they couldn't withstand the light pounding of being moved, used, put away, used on a train/plane etc. The description I've read here of the cable suggests it isn't suitable for application when it will be flexed a lot , which it will be if the MacBook is a working machine and not just a pretty-looking desktop with a small screen.
Once again, were this a Dell problem I doubt I'd see so many appologists at work defending the brand. One or two shorting power supplies might be a case of rough treatment (and does the thing come with any kind of warning sticker advising kid gloves?) but in these comments we're seeing more than that.
I'll take the engineer's line here: The braided outer sheath should NOT be current-carrying unless there is a problem, in which event it should do what it is supposed to and cause an immediate failure of the fuse. It does have one, doesn't it? The G4 power supply I had to replace for a friend didn't, which I found puzzling given the better design it was supposed to represent, but I'd have thought the need obvious.
This is clearly a case of protective custody pending internment under the new anti-swine flu legislation that is...oh hang on, we changed governments and don't do that sort of stuff any more.
I still don't believe it. The word of a menial domestic just doen't have the same weight as the lovely, talented Victoria's, especially since she's going to be a space-ranger.
4 Ron Howard:
"When you come to film in Rome, the official statement to you is that the Vatican has no influence".
And when you come to New York you are probably told that the Mob has no influence.
And when you come to Hollywood you are probably told that the various luminaries of the silver screen have no influence.
The real problem would seem to be that when you come to Rome, the luminaries of Hollywood's Silver Screen have no influence. You should have networked more when you were in New York.
:o)
"Stop making a fuss". They sound like a bunch of arts students playing at running a company.
Oh, hang on, we're talking about Apple aren't we? These are the guys who came up with the "Buy from us because you're too stupid to work a PC" ad campaign.
Disgraceful.
As for SWIFT codes etc, if Apple wasn't prepared to deal with this issue then they should have barred European developers from the iPhone app developer business. Apple are great when it comes to making a piece of equipment look like it once sat in the Space Wheel in Kubrick's 2001 but seem to be a mile short of proactive once things get out of alignment with their very narrow predicted event track.
If this were eBay or Paypal we were discussing I doubt that any of the appologist AC's would be weighing in on the side of dithering and bankrupcy.
If this sorry story is subject to an El Reg re-enactment - as it surely must be - it will have to be done using vintage Major Matt Mason toys. This is problematical on several grounds:
a) The toys are no longer being made, having gone off the market during the Nixon administration, forcing an eBay-driven acquisition model with all the atendant risks of scam sellers not delivering the goods
2) The moonbase accessory, while available on eBay, is priced substantially higher than the current estimated cost of setting up the real thing and running it for two years.
I remain optimistic that El Reg will come through.
[4 Steve Swann] "Fusion reactors"? Did I blink and miss the landmark experiement that proves it is possible to get a positive energy flow from a sustained fusion reaction? Odd, I'm normally all over that sort of thing.
[4 Paul Powell] All the notes and tooling we used the last time was quietly destroyed. It seems that the Apollo project was produced like a military aerospace project would be - highly comparmentalised and subject to certain laws that *require* the manufacturers involved to destroy all documents after 25 years.
Next time someone says "We can put a man on the moon but we can't...." look up in surprise and announce that we *can't* put a man on the moon, not without reinventing all sorts of wheels that we no longer know how to make and that people don't want to pay for.
And it *is* that hard. Hard enough that it drains money from the tax coffers faster than a publically traded bank does every time we do it, poses a severe health risk to the people making the journey at almost every step of the way, and we're not at all sure why we would go in the first place.
Don't get me wrong. I was dragged up during the Von Braun-as-a-good-guy years and fully expected to be taking vacations in the Sea of Tranquility by now. I even had little picture cards I got with ice-lollies that told me what it would all look like, and I still have my "Sky Ray" Space Captain's badge. I'd go myself tomorrow if they asked, and damn the very substantial risks, but I couldn't look anyone in the eye and give them a reason why they should pay for it.
I can do that for Earth orbit space shots of course. People tend to forget that their Cable TV, Cell Phones, GPS devices and even their reliable (hahaha) weather prediction are all predicated on a healthy earth-to-orbit business. But the Moon? We only went there in the first place because the Russions said *they* would and everyone knows you can't let that sort of nonsense go unchallenged (grunt grunt).
Er...I believe that searching remote hard drives is what Dixon of Dot Com wants to do. How does your suggestion help?
I doubt this can be made into a workable solution any time soon anyway. It'll probably morph into third-party "sherrifs" doing the work on behalf of the short-staffed plod.
And the best part? You guys in my old homeland will let them. Look at what you've let them do since I left for good in 1991. Cameras everywhere, ASBOs (what a great innovation - legislation that proves that it doesn't work every day of the week), you've built yourselves the world of 1984 through apathy and indifference.
What's needed, of course, is a shirtload of ultra violent, technologically-equipped masked vigillantes with nifty names like "Hooded Justice".
So, not so much "playing" as "selecting pre-recorded loops of digitized crap".
Old stuff. At least when Mick Fleetwood played his jacket (he had a Linn Drum connected to sensors in his clothing) he was actually playing the stuff as in live extemporization.
Even I can do the old Valerie Singleton "I've got one here I made before the show started" type music.
And that bloody iFlute thing sounds more like an occarina. I think the real thing costs about four quid if it's handmade. Or you could run one off yourself out of sculpey for around a pound.
I call for the maximum sentence. This madness must stop. Fine the bugger til he bleeds, then bang him up for a few years. Then, if he's a foreign national, repatriation to the mother country. That should put the fear of God into the rest of these so-called "Admins".
Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.
Wow. Someone figured out that IT investment never makes money. We've only known that since, like, the 1960s, and in these days of complete turnover in five years the situation has only got worse.
The only reason to electronify your voting is if you want to do something other than cast votes and count them afterward. After all, elections are not held the night before the post becomes vacant.
Exactly what sorts of things someone might want to do with votes in a silent, unsupervised, high-speed environment is left as an exercise for the reader.
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