* Posts by deadlockvictim

1390 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

Big Data bites back: How to handle those unwieldy digits

deadlockvictim

Photoshop Plugins

Developers have been handling digital pictures programatically for the last 25+ years. I wonder if the time of functions which work like Photoshop-plugins has come.

If the current paradigms don't work well with new data, then we need to find appropriate ways to work with it.

It's Lego's 80th birthday party, but only the boys are invited

deadlockvictim
Happy

Re: Two problems...

Hi,

I buy Lego for my children (and me too, I must admit) now in kiloware. I get on ebay, at local bring and buy sales, from ads in supermarkets and so on. Because Lego is so durable, even 40+ year old pieces are still usable. I am thankful that parents don't want to keep their children's collections anymore and are so willing to part with them at a fraction of teh new price. New Lego is not cheap but there is good value in secondhand collections.

My girls (5½ and 4) are slowly getting into it as an aid to role-play. It helps that they also like princesses and pirates. A few judiciously bought new boxes (pirates and some pink blocks) and all is well. The unique pieces do have their place. Doors and windows are greatly welcomed, for example.

Ice core shows Antarctic Peninsula warming is nothing unusual

deadlockvictim

ecological hell

Can we all agree the Lewis Page will end up in Ecological Hell by being made to serve on the Rainbow Warrior against honest fishermen trying to earn a honest wage from the sea's good bounty?

Assange granted asylum by Ecuador after US refused to rule out charges

deadlockvictim

Re: "Now if only New Zealand would show us another example, bla bla,

What are you on about?

( Apologies if I have just fed a troll. )

First, Google goggles - now the world gets self-censoring specs

deadlockvictim
Unhappy

Committee for Purity in the Camp

I thought at first that El Reg was being sarcastic, but it seems to actually exist. The Committee of Un-American Activities does spring to mind.

I wonder whether orthodox Israeli soldiers will be wearing these when they are next engaging neighbours or co-inhabitants?

Apple Mountain Lion file points to Mac Pro update

deadlockvictim
Thumb Down

naive perhaps

What's wrong with being a girl?

NASA's $2.5bn Curiosity rover: An Apple PowerBook on wheels

deadlockvictim

Re: The irrelevent Apple mention

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Apple buy ARM Holdings some 10 years ago? I could check it up but, then again, I couldn't be arsed. If I'm right, then this would make Apple mention not so quite correct.

deadlockvictim
Joke

Curiousity & Powerbook G3s

What first thing came to mind when I read the intro was wondering whether it cost as much as a PowerBook G3 when they released. Probably not.

On another note, I want to know what it does to cats. That must have been a fun easter egg to program.

First full landing site and colour pictures back from Mars

deadlockvictim
Unhappy

Wannabe American-Irish

Walk around Dublin and you'll find many, many Irish people, usually young, who really, really want to be American. They shop in the States (or, at least, used to), speak with faux-American accent, pepper their language with Americanisms ('enough already' and so on). You hear them on radio quite often too.

They are just so cool.

Big biz 'struggling' to dump Windows XP

deadlockvictim
Happy

I believe that Nelson Muntz put it best

Two Questions:

Q1. Will any of the senior managers who sanctioned this short-sighted push to locked-in software suffer in any way for this?

Q2. Which large company will have the next financial meltdown on account of, ahem, unsupported software?

Remember, boys and girls, Microsoft delivers the lowest Total Cost of Ownership because they say so. I never asked, from whose viewpoint they were talking about — the customers' or Microsoft's.

Numbers don't lie: Apple's ascent eviscerates Microsoft

deadlockvictim

Re: Muha

You seem to forget that, as a rule, techies don't decide what platform or software they use, management does and management likes the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. Management, it seems to me, is reassured by the immense cost of the software and the licences. It doesn't have to use them. It prefers Excel and PowerPoint.

So dream on about your typical company migrating away from MS to Unix. It's not going to happen soon.

And because there are many more jobs offered in MS technologies than in Unix technologies, people end up learning said MS technologies, regardless of whether they are the best or not.

Not all of us are clever enough or lucky enough to be able to work for Google or die Deutsche Börse.

deadlockvictim

Look around the workplace

Microsofts's strengths are in server, client and office licences. Look around your office. While there may be people who have iPads, and many, many who have iPhones, how many have (or are allowed to have) a mac as there standard desktop machine? Not many, if any, I expect. And as long as that remains as it is, Microsoft's bottom line is safe.

We do have people who use iPads to connect to the terminal server while travelling. If Apple has cannibalised anybody's markets, it is that of Nokia and laptop makers. For those who want to check their email and internet access, then an iPad is far more agreeable than a laptop while underway.

Yahoo! Poaches! New! CEO! From! Google!

deadlockvictim

Google finally gets to take over Yahoo!

Dear Ms. Mayer,

Can Google have the exclamation mark once it has finally devoured the remains of a once great search engine please? Google! would look rather good.

PC-makers hope for Windows 8 hero to sweep up sales

deadlockvictim

Thin Clients

Popular with whom exactly? The poor bastards who have to use them or the very satisfied sysadmins whose life has become easier?

Facebook's ONLY failure: Expectations management

deadlockvictim

Children in Sweetshops

The trading around the Facebook IPO reminded me on young children in a sweetshop with holiday money. The traders displayed the same sort of financial acumen.

The children spent rashly and quickly, disregarding (if they even knew) what was good for them. They bought on impulse and spent all that they had. They then gorged on the sweets and were unpleasantly surprised when they complained the next day of stomach-ache and lack of sleep.

I suppose that one could say that the moral of the story is not to buy sweets from strangers, but, the sweeties seemed so nice...

Ten... bits of Jubilee tat tech

deadlockvictim

Nation vs State

@graeme leggett: I think that you're wrong and it may depend on how one defines a 'nation' and a 'state'. The definition of a nation is, at any rate, not something that is commonly agreed upon. We will have to agree to disagree.

I tend to think of the U.K. as a composition of nations, partly because of the Five-(now Six-) Nations championship and partly because the citzens of the U.K. whom I meet tend to identify themselves as 'Scottish', 'English' or Welsh' but rarely as 'British'. Indeed, almost the only U.K. citizens who do identify themselves as 'British' are the very ones who aren't, namely Unionists from Northern Ireland.

BTW, are you a member of the European nation?

deadlockvictim

National Flag

... weary of the national flag ...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Union Jack the *state* flag. Each of the 4 nations within the Union of Great Britain & Northern Ireland have their own flag. Otherwise the strips of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England would all be variations of the Union Jack. And for those who aren't aware, the Union Jack is a composite (more or less [1]) of the 4 national flags of the Union as it stood in 1801.

[1] The Irish state flag at the time was a harp on the dark blue background, if I remember correctly.

Facebook IPO plunge sparks tidal wave of lawsuits

deadlockvictim
Thumb Up

The Social Network II — The Market

I have to admit, I am enjoying the sequel to 'The Social Network'. Many lead performances are quite convincing, there is lots of childish drama and lots of huffing & puffing. We have learned an important lesson about the marketplace, too, that, apparently, greed isn't always good.

And to cap it all, we had a wedding in it too. Just too romantic.

My prediction: Mark Zuckerberg as best supported actor.

Keep out of the Olympics' way, earn a haircut from TfL app

deadlockvictim

Olympic Spirit

Surely the Olympic spirit would be to shoot up on erythropoetin regularly und undetectably over a period of years and then just run from A to B as directed to you by stewards?

Nympho hauled to loon-cooler after serial bonkathon brutality

deadlockvictim
Coat

Re: IT connection

Nonsense, bondage and repressed sexuality is part and parcel of hardware (fnarr, fnarr) terminology:

Master & Slave?

Motherboards?

the whole sticking of floppies or hard-drives into their correct slots?

Mounting correctly?

What would Freud have made of this?

And we wonder why there are few women in IT...

iTunes fanbois outraged by Apple's sex-life quiz probe

deadlockvictim

Re: iPhone Users kissed?

Isn't there an app for that?

'Geek' image scares women away from tech industry

deadlockvictim

Re: So what?

I, personally, would be scared to become a teacher. All it takes is one student to complain about inappropriate behaviour and your career is ruined. Such accusations never go away.

deadlockvictim

Women in IT

In my 20 years in college and the working world, I have only met one female sysadmin (self-taught, as one tends to be), a few female programmers (and they didn't remain as programmers) and a few female DBAs (almost all of whom are Indian, Chinese or from the former Communist Bloc).

Those women I know who studied Computer Science in the 90's have gone on to work in the Civil Service (but not at the codeface, so to speak) or become technical analysts, writing documentation, user stories and generally being responsible for the translation of business logic in technical documents. None of them, that I know of, have stopped what they were doing on account of motherhood.

I suppose, if I had to summarise in general terms, all of these women seem to chosen fields where there is much more human contact than there is at the codeface.

One last point: when I was stuying science in the 1990s, roughly half of the students overall were female in both first year and fourth year. The proportion of women to men was much higher in the biological sciences and conversely lower in the physical and chemical sciences. Computer Science was about one third women. The Engineering faculty was even worse. they had about 10% women, if what I was told was correct. Excluding the students of Computer Science, the dept of Mathemathics, however, had more women than men.

To what extent is this nurture / social influence and to what extent is nature? Is the whole engineering aspect so unappealing to women?

No sex please, we're Telstra

deadlockvictim
Thumb Down

How many women are there in Telstra's management?

I'm sure that equality of the sexes is uppermost in the minds of Telstra execs when it comes to making it easier for parents [1] to gain management positions.

[1] And I don't just mean parents whose spouses stay at home and look after the kids.

Internet's first 'Hall of Fame' REVEALED

deadlockvictim

Re: Blah...

And with good reason: for tens of millions of poor unfortunates, he has created what they understand the Internet to be.

'Apple will coast, and then decelerate' says Forrester CEO

deadlockvictim

Apple's Success

Apple isn't successful because it is Apple. There aren't that many more macs around than before (or so it seems, at any rate).

I do, however, see iPads, iPhones (and formerly iPods) everywhere.

It seems to me that Apple succeeded wildly in these markets because they made elegant products that perform simply and well. They aren't especially cheap, but Apple has clearly demonstrated that price-sensitivity is not an overriding factor for such items.

Conversely, Nokia snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the mobile phone market precisely because their products became mediocre in the extreme. They were not at all user-friendly or elegant.

Swiss, German physicists split the electron

deadlockvictim

Kingons, Queeons & Republicons

Splitting electrons is soooo boring. They'll just find another little Russian doll.

I want to see proper, popular research, research that would be published by my journal of choice, namely 'Hello!'. When are we going to get concrete proof of the Pratchettian Kingons, Queeons and Republicons. The theory [1] has been around since the late 1980s. I, personally, am prepared to undertake the torture of minor royals in order to assist this valuable and necessary research.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mort-Discworld-Novel-Novels/dp/0552131067/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334815856&sr=8-1

Compulsory coding in schools: The new Nerd Tourism

deadlockvictim

Databases

I like the idea of teaching relational database theory and practice in schools. It gives both logical theory and real world practice. SQL is easy enough at the beginning but it can get quite difficult when the conditions become complex. Not to mention the importance of backups after you've just deleted the contents of a table.

As well as that, being able to create and use a relational database is a useful skill in the real world, especially in an office where everything is done on spreadsheets.

SQL is scripting rather than programming, but it would expose pupils to logical thought and the necessity to formulate clearly what is to be done.

Nokia on 'brink of failure', warns analyst

deadlockvictim

Re: Nokia are doomed, but Elop could have done something

To be fair, Microsoft's mice, keyboards and joysticks are not at all bad.

'Don't break the internet': How an idiot's slogan stole your privacy...

deadlockvictim

Libraries & sharing books

» The remarkable 1850 Libraries Act didn't mention copyright – and didn't change it at all – it merely gave local authorities the power to raise taxes to create public reading rooms...

And look what happened: by allowing everyone to come in and just read a book without paying for it, they destroyed the entire book industry. Home reading is killing books.

Google shows off Project Glass augmented reality specs

deadlockvictim

Google sell ads

Google is in the business of selling ads. That's how it makes its money.

Just think what a boon these internet-connected glasses will be to advertisers as you walk by a premises where the advertiser's products are being vaunted.

High school student expelled for dropping F-bomb in tweet

deadlockvictim

Firearms

Would he have been expelled if he had brought a firearm into school?

Google asked to bin autocomplete results for Japanese man's name

deadlockvictim
FAIL

Japanese Names

It may sound as if I'm trolling, but I reckon that the problem is that he has a Japanese name and the vast majority of Japanese names in Google's mighty database(s) are pornstars.

Consider that Google is an American companies and American companies are very prudish by global standards [1]. Although Google is populated with many, many Clever people, the association in the data banks has been made and this poor fellow has suffered as a consequence.

I suspect that this will cause many Japanese to migrate to another, more Japanese-friendly search engine. One that is Japanese and has Japanese sensibilities at heart.

Well done, Google.

[1] I had my account on a social networking site disabled once because the uploaded picture was of myself and my Japanese girlfriend in kimono. We were at a wedding. I was given no explanation as to why the account was closed, but I guess that the editor saw the kimono and assumed that she was a geisha. As we all know geisha are prostitutes and this sort of thing was not what they wanted.

In retrospect, the ignorant editor did me a favour.

Google cools data center with bathtubs, dishwashers

deadlockvictim

Effluent temperature

Am I right in thinking that the effluent water coming out of Google's plants will be considerably warmer than what went in beforehand?

If this is the case, would any of the ecologists out there explain to me what the environmental impact will be on heating up the Hooch [1]?

[1] A great nickname for a river. It sounds like slang for alcohol.

UK's Guardian prints 'Assad family' emails leaked by activists

deadlockvictim

Re: I don't get it.

Isn't she fair game?

As the one who took Paul McCartney for all that she could get, I would've thought that she is very much fair game.

It also may have something to do with the fact that she isn't a brutal dictator who slaughtered thousands of people and while she made one old ( and much beloved ) old man unhappy, Assad has spent a long time inflicting misery on his people.

Underwater Greek volcano brewing Lara Croft style earthquake

deadlockvictim
Happy

Re: Change my icon to cynical, but:

On that note, the Greek government should insure Greece for about 500 billion Swiss francs (stabler currency, you see) and then pray that it does/doesn't explode (depending on your viewpoint).

On the other hand, if a really big eruption at Santorini was able to sink Atlantis, God knows what this one can do.

New iPad: Crack open your wallets, fanbois, here's what it'll cost

deadlockvictim
Thumb Up

Re: Wow...

Strawberry milk (ichigomiruku) is good too, especially on hot summer days. It is a bit sweet though.

The 'one tiny slip' that put LulzSec chief Sabu in the FBI's pocket

deadlockvictim
Unhappy

I'm confused

I'm confused.

Who is the Good Guy here and who is the Bad Guy?

Is there a Happy End?

Do we know whether Michael Fassbender will be playing the clever FBI agent who caught the dastardly hacker or will he be playing the brave hacker in his fight against the bad corporations in the upcoming movie about this tale?

Atlassian seeks geeks in Europe

deadlockvictim

Atlassian

Atlassian. Aaargh. It makes my eyes hurt. Would someone tell them that that the nominalized adjective of Atlas is 'Atlantic'.

Methinks this name may already be taken though.

Oceans gaining ACID faster than last 300 MILLION YEARS

deadlockvictim

ACID

ACID (in all caps) for me is something that all good databases should have. It seems to me that more atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability is not a bad thing for the oceans.

Inside Apple

deadlockvictim

Re: Well spotted

Andy Hertzfeld et al. worked at Apple in the early 1980s. Methinks that Apple corporate culture changed drastrically in late 1990s.

Texan TSA crew accused of nude scanner ogling scheme

deadlockvictim

Re: All pointless

To be fair to the US authorities, if this were to happen, 19 muslims would be found and sent to Guantanamo Bay or back to Saudi Arabia, PATRIOT ACT III "You ain't seen nothin yet!" would be passed within weeks and some random Middle Eastern country would be invaded.

Sigh.

I'm sure that I'll be asked to explain this post to the U.S. Customs' officers should I ever enter the U.S.

Microsoft licensing hike sparks UK piracy, bankruptcy fears

deadlockvictim

Re: It's welcome news for me in Switzerland

You live in Switzerland and you use the handle 'Wensleydale Cheese'?!?[1] Shame upon thee! You probably live in the British outpost of Zug. That's like living in Cupertino, CA and using BSD.

There are so many nice cheeses there - Emmental, Vacherin, Ziger, Tilsiter and Gruyère to name some famous oned. The list in Wikipedia [2] goes on.

[1] Or whatever the correct sequence is to express righteous indignation.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheeses_of_Switzerland

Apple's Chinese labourers get 1.6 per cent of iPad loot - report

deadlockvictim
Thumb Down

I believe that there is relevant saying from a holy man for this situation

No big deal.

We may have cared about wage-slaves in the Third World before, but we never did anything about it in a constructive way, except, possibly, feel a bit guilty. We still went on buying.

Could we have a hypocrisy check, please, before people are allowed to post their indignity on the topic of how poor the workers in China are, please? Only those wearing and owning nothing that was made by slaves for a mere pittance may post. Just check the labels on your clothes for Indonesia, Malaysia, China and so on.

Let he (or she for that matter) who is without sin cast the first stone.

Russians drill into buried 20 million-year-old Antarctic lake

deadlockvictim

More National Stereotyping

My first thought on reading this was that our American neighhbours would be sure that the Ruskies are drilling for, and will find, oil. What else could this be about?

Berkeley Breathed has already beaten me to the punchline, but I think it's time to bring liberty to Antarctica.

ENORMOUS BACKSIDE FILMED FROM SPACE in moon flypast

deadlockvictim

mooning

This expression no doubt comes from here.

boom tish

NASA: Solar system may have alien origin

deadlockvictim

The things that you'd have us believe

The things that you'd have us believe: that the planets and solar system were made in outer space?

Not for me, thank you. As a loyal follower of the Church of Adams, I believe, nay, know, that the Earth was built for mice.

Apple: Yes there are horrendous accidents, but we CARE

deadlockvictim

AppleCare

Apple cares all right, but it's pricey and you have to pay every couple of years to renew their care for you.

McDonald's punters offered sex in exchange for Chicken McNuggets

deadlockvictim
Big Brother

Just curious

I wonder how much sales of Chicken McNuggets rose in this particular branch once the articles spread like wildfire across the media...

Apple offers cash for old kit

deadlockvictim
Happy

disposing of old apple stuff

If you've old apple stuff that you'd like to part with, we anally retentives at the LEM Swap List would be happy to buy it from you. The exact URL is available via your friendly local search engine.