Posts by David 141

Responsibility?

If some group like Anonymous was behind the attacks you'd think they'd be the first to claim responsibility.

People just out to steal data are going to keep quiet.

Voting is irrational

People only vote at all because everyone else is doing it. There is stuff all chance of any one persons vote making any difference.

tl;dr;

Also, this is last weeks news.

Better yet

Ideally you'd want to send the plans for the time machine back into the past so you could (have) invented it earlier (which of course you would have done already).

Excel?

And there is a reason why you'd need flash embedded in Excel?

Web designers fail

If people stuck to plain HTML and anchored links to bits of text (the way the web was intended to work) and only used images for actual images (rather than widgets) then mobile phones would have no trouble with web pages: re-wrapping the text, shrinking the images etc.

The problem is the f***ing web designers who seem to think they are graphic artists who have to lay out (mess up) the text with all sorts of buttons and menus and other crap.

Email is hard

Email lists proved to be too hard for the average Muppet to figure out.

Things like sending an email to the subscription address to subscribe/un-subscribe (and not the address of mailing list itself) apparently require a three-digit IQ.

Men are clueless, and careless.

"Statistics also state that you're probably a wanker. For marrying the wrong person in the first place or for forcing her into adultery with constant jealousy and suspicions..."

Actually the statistics say that it is women who are usually (correctly) suspicious. Men are generally clueless about their wives affairs, and careless about their own.

Of course statistics do show that men are almost always wankers (literally speaking), but then most women have also been shown to like a bit of alone time.

F2P can cost

F2P games are usually full of adds, and if you want to do any optional extras you have to be prepared to pay pay pay. Want a sonic screwdriver? That'll be $5 on your credit card, thanks. Your own K9 unit, thats $10...

PEBKAC

My six year old daughter has had no trouble using Ubuntu, without any instruction at all (she had previously used various versions of Windows).

Just saying.

Who needs publishers?

I might be missing something here, but why would an author bother going through a publisher at all, if they could sell directly on iTunes?

Virtualisation

How many mobile chips on the market will actually feature hardware assisted virtualisation??

The ARM Cortex A15 will, but when will they start shipping? Not this year.

I wonder if the main ruse of virtualisation will be to make phones and tablets that are harder to jailbreak, and to make it easier to lock down DRM media, as with the PS3. Walling off DRM protected playback in a virtual machine looks like a plausible reason for using a hypervisor on a mobile device.

The device driver argument is probably a red herring. One of the biggest roadblocks to using hypervisors is that they still need device drivers written for them if they wish to truly abstract the hardware.

Sick of this s**t

I for one would be happy to use a codec that was larger and slower if it worked _everywhere_ and didn't require that I download and install a dozen different (incompatible) players, codecs, plug-ins and f***ing DRM.

I'm sick of content being distributed in 10 different formats, in 10 different containers, with 10 different DRM schemes. I'm tired of some clips in some obscure format that only works in VLC, or working on a PS3 but not a PSP even though they both (supposedly) support it. I'm sick of half-baked plugins that crash; of codecs that come with malware, and software that requires diligent searching on obscure nerd video forums to get to work.

Sick of it I tell you!

The next half-wit who devises yet another media format should be locked away in a dark room and forced to watch silent black and white movies for the rest of their life.

This is why is like MP3. It has many flaws, but at least you know it works in every damn player on the planet.

Password recovery

"Isn't there anyone in Florida that knows how to reset a password with physical access to the hardware?"

For $17,000, yes :-)

Civil disobedience

Participate in a physical protest, block a few roads and buildings, wave some placards, chain yourself to a tree and you get what, a suspended sentence, a night in the cells maybe?

And for participating in a DDoS? Go directly to Jail for 10 years, do not pass Go?

Anonymous might do better to organise some flash mobs and real protests.

Vive la revolution

"Another case of governments getting into situations like wars they cannot win, like this one. How long will they resist billions of losses, crippled economies, shut down of stock exchanges, banks, etc. etc."

How long did the French monarchs continue to insist on their divine right to absolute authority? Until their heads were removed from their shoulders.

Vive la revolution.

About time

They should have done this ten years ago.

Sarah Palin could be the USAs first...

Sarah Palin could be the USAs first Celebutard president. It's hard to see how she can lose.

But personally, I'd rather vote for Paris.

Betamax

If you use a tool that can be use to crack encryption on a digital copy of the Bill of Rights, you can still be prosecuted (not for copyright infringement, but for circumvention), if that same encryption is also used to secure 5 minutes of "Steamboat Willie".

That's right - 5 minutes of Steamboat Willie trumps the Bill of Rights.

America, you got fucked.

Bunch of useless parasites

They may not have any real power anymore, but they have a spectacular amount of wealth, and they do SFA for anyone.

And as for the Royal Family, they're even worse.

Bring on the robot cars

And get rid of the idiot drivers once and for all.

What's an ISP?

Anyone with a domain name and a cheap PC can run a mail server.

All they'll end up collecting are emails from those too lazy or stupid to use something secure.

I pity the human race

FFS people, all someone has to do is raise the specter of "foreign control" and you start foaming at the jaws like a pack of trained hounds.

A return to mercantilism? Seriously? A policy design by merchants and ruling elites, and designed to benefit the rich and powerful? From an era where the monopoly was considered a good thing? Where the "good of the nation" was put before the good of the people in it?

Why not return to full blown imperialist nationalism as well?

Do you want to feel a boot stomping on your face for eternity? Go ahead and hand over power to the monopolists and demagogues.

SF?

BSG Still had FTL, gravity generation and whatever enables raptors to get off a planet with such a small drive (obviously not chemical rockets). It was still Space Opera, but it was less wussy than Happy Trek. It also spouted a lot of mystical dualistic crap about he human mind being better than AI.

BSG was great because of the plot (well, except the ending), and the characters.

Caprica sucks because the characters are so shallow and the plot is pretty meh.

Widely believed

It's also (still) widely believed that the sun orbits the earth (http://www.gallup.com/poll/3742/new-poll-gauges-americans-general-knowledge-levels.aspx)

(And that's just the US. Imagine what the stats must look like for less "well educated" countries).

No actual programming

How many hours of actual hands-on coding are done in the course of an average comp-sci paper?

Compare that to how many hours actual hands on coding are done by a programmer in a typical month. It should be obvious why graduates can't code - you can't learn to program well with so little experience.

All the best programmers I met at university learned to code themselves, outside of their coursework.

Drone carriers

They should replace them with drone carriers.

(I have no particular reasoning for this statement - I just think robots are cool).

Lol

So he basically admitted that the only reason his customers are sticking around is because they have no choice?

He couldn't manage to say that the customers might stay of their own accord and manage to keep a straight face saying it?

I wouldn't invest in a company with that sort of business plan.