Posts by Denarius 2180 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2009
agreed, but feeding cattle real cattle food, ie grass, turns waste biomass into food. conclusion; total food resources increase. Much grazing land is marginal for food cropping, but grows grasses adequately to support ruminants. Also feeding grains to cattle produces unhealthy to eat meat while grass fed meat is relatively safe and tasty. I for one am fed up with the rennaisance of the medieval flagellants of the greenie and PC brigade, so Lewis is sport on.
fully concur with basic user testing comment. Done a bit of testing in my time and always found the best feedback came from barely trained but willing users. (yes, they can exist) Run across gear like tablets designed to be heavy, slippery and impossible to hold without leaving finger gouges in the screen. Why not rubber gripping sides instead of hard smooth plastic? It does not matter if it resembles the black slab of 2001 and is hard to use. Bloody boutique shops are a waste of $$. Give me kit done by an engineer focussed on making something that just works.
True. Turn 40 and you become invisible, even to motorcycle outlets where the midlife crisis customers are the best customers. Turn 60 and no employer wants you even though they winge to the government about the need for more skilled labour. This while the excuse for a national gov is busy making education more expensive and lecturing the oldies about working until they drop. The state schools are excellent places to train your kids to be devout materialists if that that's what turns you on. Literacy might be a bit dodgy though.
BTW, all previous commentards forgot the hoop snakes that chase you down hills. Did I mention Aus snakes are the most venomous in the world ? And our spiders do well in the horror stakes. The flesh rotting ones in eastern states are world beaters. The Queensland irukandji jelly fish make the bigger stingers like Portugese Man o' War look anemic. Perth is not boring either, unless you need the nightly shootings that Sydney has. Perth provides as many drugs, drunken hell holes and brothels as any other big city. It does have a working rail system, unlike any other Oz city. However most jobs are in the north west, not Perth. There is this strange belief Perth is isolated, so the bigger companies are run from third world countries like the USA, via a PHB colony in Sydney so expect enlightened management, not.
Sounds so familiar. Single suppliers at least kept the parse (sic) the parcel down (can you understand PHB ITIL babble ?) Decent management (ok its rare) could get fixes underway quickly. But no, the local slobbering colonial idiots had to get another scheme imported to break what were very functional systems. Wont need a Carrington Event to bring down the ruins of western technology, the pollies and managers will do it.
colliding galaxies are noticable due to the massive star formation triggered by colliding gas clouds. Many of these stars are large and go supernova. This tends to stuff up the view of the city lights and smog. The chances of being in the kill zone of a supernova are higher than in an undisturbed spiral.
So the Mayans were only off by 4 billion years ??
more dubiously compatible gear to better display steadily devolving crap with so few notable exceptions. Bring back human to human conversations and good books, enough have been written. Even a historian or two have learned the art of writing to be understood by most literates lately. And no, Gibbon does not count IMNSHO
at least deforestation is easy to fix, given the large area of farmland being abandoned in north america. Moderate reversion of grassland to forest elsewhere would also help, if one can ignore the techno-fudists who ignore the creation of grassland by large scale burning by humans destroyed forests in preliterate times.
printed valves were mentioned in an article I read 40 years ago in some US electronics magazine.
Certainly not as small, but similar concept and ran on relatively low voltages. Went no-where as I never saw another reference until now. Might be just the electronics for Jupiter Moons probes where everything glows in Jupiters radiation belts.
better understood ? Not according to spaceweather.com. The very delayed cycle 24 and the rapid and unexpected slowing of the solar subsurface "conveyor belts" are completely unexplained. Of the 16 or so AFAIRC theories, none are working or match current data. Nice to know there are still challenges.
except that by then the oil, coal and gas will be long gone. Hopefully the religious freaks will have sustained themselves into extinction so the civilised remainder will have built decent nuclear energy plants not run by share holding PHBs. May be other energy sources that by some technological miracle will be affordable.
bureaucrats ?? You means PMs ? many PMs, no techs and nothing happens, very slowly. Seems Meg is reading from same playbook as IBM. See Cringely for gory details.
Or was that Ray Lane ?? No matter, this outsourcing business is making in-sourcing look very desirable. One of these decades.
ah! the golden days of fun flame wars.
I still draft documents in vi before formatting in some WYSIWYG word mangler. Using a text editor that has no "smarts" to bugger up my line of thought allows more thought to be applied to the document. Not for most people so desist from the flame icon, fellow commentards.
I note a few articles around the web making the observation that word 2 and excel 3 did most common jobs well, in windows 3.1 and 4 Mb RAM. That was nearly 20 years ago. Progress has slowed, hasn't it ?
I assume you, AC, are a troll/MS lackey. nobody in my large corporate environment can contain their rage when office 2010 or even worse, office 2007 is foisted on them. Office 97 was excellent and 2003 worked well. The change of interface is so big Open Office variations are welcome.
The MS office suite has blown the best MS argument for staying with them out of he water as there is no consistency with previous versions.
ask the japanese civilians abducted for NK spy program training if NK attacks other countries. NK ship carrying addictive drugs off Oz also. Social attacks are attacks, just not with guns.
SK also has a slight problem with attacks from their neighbour. The yanks have problems as a culture, but aside from their multinationals, mad bankers and deluded talk/radio show hosts, have been remarkably restrained as a world power.
RH support ? Nice idea if it existed as a working unit like the old HP, IBM or Sun help desks. In my small experience it wasted a week not answering my question. Neither did google ;-) At least detailed Debian/Ubuntu answers are there in the docs or google.
As for cloud, still have my doubts. Private clouds maybe, but what does the corporation get that a VMWare farm or virtualbox does not give you already ? Lastly, having seen the new desktops from Gnome and Ubuntu there will never be a year of the linux desktop, unless M$ succeed in making their OS even more user hostile.
even better, WTF is the point of CBDs in this age where most communications are electronic, not physical ? Abolish those expensive tax breaks for the rich and move office spaces to edge of cities and maintain medium site densities. No need for lots of cars, flying or not.
Given the stresses on critical parts of flying vehicles of any kind are far higher than ground vehicles one wonders if hordes of flying cars will ever be safer than trains or cars. Lose a wheel and you usually just stop. Losing a wing or rotor has less benign consequences.
Adding a ballistic recovery chute opens a whole new can of disaster worms. A large chute blasting in front of traffic is not a fun way to fly. This is why meat bomber drops are called well before the jumpers leave their perfectly good aircraft so saner aviators can be out of the area.
Never seen such a process for 20 years. PHBs and sales weasels define problem, solution and implementation so nothing works much or well and the poor users get more crap to deal with.
And its all ITs fault. Sackings, finger wagging, more process and bonuses for the weasels.
You'se guys must be in-house.
don't you love explaining detailed technical stuff to clerks whose eyes glaze at the word volume group or zone, but want lots of step by step instructions? The love of power is the root of all IT evil.
Paris because it is about the same level of intellect in change control all too often. Where is she anyway ?
yep, that phone works at 20m on Barrier Reef or when I need a time check in a cramped sailplane cockpit another piece of electronic crap lying around is all I need NOT.
The citizen mechanical self winder I have has lasted decades, still going well, minor glass scratches only. Withstood Wet seasons and south Oz drizzle on a motorcycle at high speed, not to mention the old fire pump incident. I like my large chunk of metal because it is functional and robust, something not found much these days.
Have to agree with the ex-pros about depth ratings on watches. As a rec diver,I am not going beyond 30 meters and only ever been to about 40 m once. Pros need better, but how many deep deep sea divers are there ? Still, a ponce wearing an overly flashy watch beats twerps in blinged up ute with liquorish tyres and a loud exhaust. Not as noisy and easier to shut up.
Are you too young to remember the newspapers in 1970s screaming that by mid 1980s we would be out of petroleum, metals,food, water and land ? So middle roman empire. First time this prediction was made was circa 240 AD. In 1980spredictions were by end of century temperatures would have polar caps melting and flooding cities and by 2020 there would be 2 meters of sea rise ?
In 1990s lots of expert apocalyptic pronouncements about how we would be dangerously hot by 2010 and massive hunger and population migration was coming real soon now.
In 2009 in Oz, a government expert on climate change stated that Oz would never see big rain events again. Get used to drought. Six months later, big floods, followed by 2 years of more floods. Last week another government quango stating Oz will have droughts again.
This in a country where an unofficial anthem has the line " droughts and flooding rains".
So far the track record of climate change prediction has been zero on specifics and unproven on generalisations. Yes the temperature trend may be upwards. Has been since last Ice Age, with blips caused by Maunder minimums, massive volcanic eruptions and a couple of small comet impacts. Humans might be adding to warming in an unknown degree. But until there is a model that can be falsified and tested, it seems reasonable to deal with things that can be measured, like running out of easily extracted fuels causing energy costs to rise.
More efficiency in industrial processes and use of resources would have most peoples support, so long as it is done on a commercial basis instead of funding floggers of ineffective expensive panaceas like windmills.
Who has power to spend money in current largeish organisations ? (say > 5000 staff)
HR ? not really
IT: nope
Senior PHBs ? often
Finance sharks ? rarely
Which area is mostly permissions withholder ?
HR: yes
IT: over-ridden at drop of a vendors lunch or this weeks feature article; no
PHBs: definitely
Finance : Yes !
Where do most PHBs come from? (using 3 big IT firms as examples)
sales weasels.
So the big corporations have management consisting of those with big influence and generally lowest knowledge of the organisation,,who dont manage people, more used to manipulating them, usually with a weak grasp of return on investments, and a raging ego.
Conclusion: whatever is going on, the CIO title was always a scapegoat. Any control they have is white-anted by finance, who dont carry responsibility for destroying productive areas, overridden by sales weasels at all levels and made futiile by the bastard offspring of finance, control freaks ffrom change control, quality and related wastes of oxygen.
Summary: The CIO never really existed as specifiied, and will probably vanish as a concept.
I suggest this is a cultural rather than a business inspired development, as the ruins of western thought seem to think that the only activities humans do can be scripted in a spreadsheet or data model
oh yes it is ! everyone has the right to be completely unoffended by everything, especially if it means they can inflict their own mental or moral poverty on everyone else. No-one should be ever frightened or scared. So said one of Oz chief meddlers/public funded pest do-gooders a year or so ago. Best demonstration of the need for natural de-selection heard ? Queue RH quote...
Bring out the fluffy bunnies discussion, except rabbits are a major ecological pest in Oz. What about animal rights; drat, cant even sign off without offending someone.
more like gone to India or some 3rd world hell hole, like USA as its economy implodes after a few more bonkers bankers bonuses. There is the usual round of slash, slice, dice and downsize followed by the" bugger, we need more staff" process that has a 3 year cycle.
As for cloudiness, ha ! a few techies may evaporate, but the security and network jobs will proliferate, as will the customer managers, incident managers, qualty auditors and other non-technical groupies.
Not suggesting Matt is cruising for a bruising are we ? Definitely a reaction, none of it supportive.
I wonder what is creating the appeal about handing your IT stuff to semi-anonymous providers out there. Is it another manifestation of fear of responsibility so pervasive in the ruins of the West ?
Matt should have a look at the big enterprise outsourcerers. These "institutions" are indeed infested with process oriented "staff". It takes weeks to do what the old internal IT staff did in days or minutes. Yep, clouds are so much easier, right up until the outsourced network company has a switch upgrade fail, DNS stuffup or a simple backhoe incident down the road. Lastly, the privacy rules are easy to manage when the servers are in the basement room, behind 3 or more security controlled doors. In a cloud, who has access to the hardware and where is it ? If one works for a cloud provider, servers have access control protection, except the PHBs never allow for the cost of physical guards or escorts, so fixing hardware becomes difficult. Multiple redundancy helps the cloud provider to a point, but eventually even a raid z6 with multiple hot spares needs a server engineers love.
We who are results oriented are fleeing IT, precisely because it is so hard to do a good job thanks to the process droids, babbleware and the latest fads. Clouds are the old bureau by another name.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
