Posts by Steve the Cynic 1028 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jul 2009
Fair dues, I'd forgotten about those. So, only two sane forms of contactful advertising...
But I suppose that those things set up so you can try the electric massager that clips over the back of your chair, the "touch me" windows on packaging, so you can buy the product covered with everybody's finger grease, the little scraps of paper by arty pen displays so you wind up buying a half-used-up pen, etc. count, although possibly not as *sane*.
About seven years ago, something like that, there was a brief fad for contactless advertising(*) - you put the company's name in your phone's Bluetooth identifier and paired up with the poster for some sort of bonus - and it appears that this has been, thankfully, forgotten. The idea, I suppose, was that many people would forget to remove the name from their settings, and thus get the name in front of the eyes of more potential punters. While I did have a Bluetooth-equipped phone at the time (a RAZR, whose 100 metre range Bluetooth was allegedly illegal to use outdoors in France), I had no intention of standing in the Tube station faffing with my Bluetooth settings for a fecking advert. So that's why it was forgotten...
(*) I have a problem with this term. Advertising in most media is contactless, in the broad sense that it does not involve contact between the advert and the consumer. I can think of only one sane form of contactful advertising: Braille ads targetted at blind people.
Well, duh, I could have told you that. This information comes from the sort of person who sees any security-related message box as saying "Argle flargle, fleen your ogglefloggle?" and clicks OK.
Then somebody expects the results to be accurate, and is surprised when not only is it not accurate, but it is in fact no better than fiction. I'm not surprised by this, not at all.
Forgive me while I go outside for a good long laugh...
... OK, I'm back. I feel weak. Really, do you seriously think much of anything in China involving dealings with foreigners does not involve the government? And with the bank being majority-owned by the state, well...
No, the surprise here is that a higher court sided with Apple.
You know not whereof you speak, well, not fully, anyway.
Papers can be served by post, yes, and any form of post will do, even not-signed-for types like plain old first class.
But they can also be served in person, and for some classes of paper this is probably a better way. You, as originator of the papers, do not have to do it yourself, and it is most common to employ a private detective to do it, especially if, as in my case, the servee is 200 miles away.
In extreme cases, they can even be, in the words of an official to whom I spoke, be "nailed to her door" (in my case, the defendant was female). I protested that my name wasn't Martin Luther or anything, which raised a chuckle, but apparently it is legally valid in England, provided that you swear before a court official that you have done it.
Or just buy an aftermarket substitute sensor bar? Is that so hard?
Or maybe you lot over there in Blighty don't have access to such things, but over here in France, any shop selling Wii accessories (Game, Micromania, Carrefour, Auchan, etc. - the last two are *supermarkets* ffs) will have at least one, possibly more, sort of replacement sensor bar, wired or not.
FAIL for all the various people who are too dim to know better, and probably shouldn't be allowed to even stand in the same room as a piece of technology.
... do you know the dangerous one?
Not the lions, they're lazy sods, even the females. Lying around on the ground all day.
Not the leopards, they're lazy sods too, lying around in trees all day.
Not the snakes, they're generally scared of people.
No, the dangerous ones are the hippos. Everybody thinks they're docile lumps. But they are grumpy, aggressive so-and-sos with *huge* teeth, and they are large (up to 3 tons) and significantly faster and more agile than you'd give them credit for.
I'm supposed to put on the water to boil and then stand there in the kitchen watching it rather than stepping out to do something more interesting. (Seriously, it doesn't take as long to cut the veg as it does for the water to come to the boil, and if I'm cooking meat-and-veg in foil packets in the oven, and rice in boiling water on the top, the meat-and-veg go in the oven long before the water goes on to boil...)
((For the terminally curious: pork chops or slabs of salmon or something of similar size, with peppers and mushrooms, onions if you like them, maybe apples and dried cranberries on pork, dill on salmon, etc. Wrap in foil, in the oven for 45 minutes on French gas mark 4. 3-way white/red/wild rice mix takes 15 minutes to boil, plus 15 minutes to get the water boiling. And I'm supposed to do *what* in the kitchen while it's cooking? (Evidently not nookie on the floor, duh.)))
FAIL for more stupid advice from the H&S-obsessed lunatics running the country I left behind three years ago.
Here at the edge of Lille I ordered ADSL *three*years*ago*, and all I could get was unlimited-downloads 20 Meg ADSL2+, or 100 Meg fibre. And by unlimited, of course, I mean limited-only-by-the-bitrate but without AUP caps below that. (Got ADSL because I could do that without having to deal with asking the landlord for permission to have a fibre box installed.)
When I was setting it up, my wife asked me what the caps were, and she was gobsmacked to hear that there weren't any.
Oh, and while you can buy the sort of pisswater-masquerading-as-beer that costs less than this Tesco service over here, you can also buy beer that's a little more, um, robust. Carrefour sells a wide range of bottle beers all the way up to 12% abv.
FAIL icon for British broadband offerings.
So, you think that because you deliberately didn't read the EULA, then clicked OK indicating that you had read and understood it, and agreed to it, it doesn't apply to you?
(It may well not apply, but any law on the applicability of clickware EULAs would not centre on the question of whether you read them or not. It would centre on whether clicking OK is sufficient to create a binding agreement. But if it doesn't, you are, by clear implication, not allowed to use the software, because your right to use it is based on the existence of a binding agreement. If, on the other hand, the law comes down in favour of the clickware EULA being binding, then your non-reading doesn't enter into it one way or another, just as it doesn't when you sign a paper contract in the real world.)
I, too, am not a lawyer, but I've read up a bit on b2b and b2c contract law, and all I can say is my God, what a mess.
FAIL for you, sorry.
They aren't forward thinking here. It's an SEC filing announcing the strong possibility that the CEO will shortly sell off a vast number of shares, and explaining *why* he will be doing so. Other investors need to know this so that they don't think it means something is wrong with the company, or the CEO, or something.
Even if it is not required by law / SEC regs, it is just good policy. It's not about planning ahead.
... because both you and your colleagues are unaware that the correct English translation for French "elaborer" is not "to elaborate". The technical term in linguistics is "false friend" and they abound between closely related languages like French and English. Here's a selection of other apparently similar French words that do not have the same meaning in English:
"demander" == "to ask" (e.g. a question) and not the stronger "to demand"
"actuel" == "current" and not "actual"
"deception" == "disappointment" and not ""deception"
"terminer" == "to finish" and not the full sense of English "to terminate"
"commander" == "to order" (as in a restaurant) and not "to command" in its sense of "give orders" (pun, yes, deliberate, yes)
"dégradé" can have a sense that has nothing whatever to do with "degraded".
In the context of stars, a "dwarf" is a general term covering all sorts of small stars, whether brown (not big enough to actually even be a star), red (significantly smaller than our own, mostly red, and never going to the red-giant phase), yellow (similar to our own Sun), orange (smaller, more orange-looking), white (post-red-giant super-hot cinder, basically), or black (white dwarf that's cooled far enough to not emit meaningful amounts of light).
So we orbit a yellow dwarf, and this planet they've just found orbits an M-class (i.e. red) dwarf.
Black dwarf stars are a largely theoretical concept, as the universe isn't old enough for a white dwarf to have cooled enough to become a black dwarf.
... a brief look at the piccies in the Wikipedia page on "Bird strike" before posting more about this subject.
In particular, damage to aircraft from bird strikes is a significant cost to the aviation industry, and does cause fatalities. Windscreens are the most commonly *damaged* non-engine component, with cracks or even total destruction of the screen being possibilities, but almost any forward-facing part of an aircraft can be hit and damaged.
Playboy has a long-standing and largely deserved reputation (among those who look at the non-pink bits) for quality journalism. Of course the main problem is that nobody believes that you buy it for that purpose.
Some of the best journalism happens at the weirdest places, and a consistent winner is, of all things, The Christian Science Monitor.
MacOS X is many things, some good, some bad, but it is not a Linux variant.
((Check the history: it is derived via NeXTSTEP from CMU's Mach kernel, and this work pre-dates Linux by a few years. The other ingredients in the sauce are parts of FreeBSD and NetBSD.))
FAIL icon for you, then...
(The points made about malware itself are sound.)
It's easy to change a product that people love. What's hard is doing it in a way that means that people *still* love it afterwards. For me, the recent changes to Googlemail have moved it from "useful tool" to "necessary evil".
Oh, and where did the "advanced search" button go from the main Google web search page? Or am I just hopelessly behind the times?
So, it was "marketed" / promoted on the basis of companies being able to claim .brand type domains ("http://enjoy.coke/" was mentioned somewhere, if memory isn't playing tricks on me), but many of the largest and/or most important companies won't be able to use it.
Proof that one's worst enemy is normally oneself, I guess.
Oh, and why would the fact that the Slovenes use "Rim" as their word for "Rome" have the slightest bearing on whether a Canadian firm called (ok, abbreviated as) RIM can register that word as its gTLD? Reducing the relevance of that is that from a marketing point of view they'd be better off registering .blackberry anyway...
It says right there on the fecking box that Office H&S is for use, well, by students and people at home. Duh. It even says on the aforementioned fecking box that it's not for commercial blah blah. (Well, it does on the French-language editions, anyway, and it says it on the title bar of the apps when you run them.) And you get a big discount on the price of one OffProf licence, and you get three licences for that one price. And you want to use it for commercial blah blah as if you paid full price?
Bah. Big fat FAIL for the guy hanging up the modem connection.
It's because you get redirected to a page on http://www.google.com:443/ (i.e. HTTP non-S over the HHTPS port), and your firewall doesn't pass non-SSL traffic over that port. There's worse. The page doesn't exist on the non-443 version (via HTTP still) of the server, nor on the proper HTTPS version.
Big fat FAIL icon for Goggle.
And the recent arrival of the new-look gmail is proof that Goggle is stupid enough to actually implement this feature. I swear, someone thought it was a good idea to have zones with scroll bars that only appear when you point the mouse at the zone in question, and someone else thought it was OK to let this be released. And having the "compose" button in red, the "stop, danger" colour (OK, beer makes composing emails dangerous, but not all gmail users are drunk enough to need this) is just moronic, mitigated only by the fact that there are sane themes that don't have it in red.
And now I can't turn it off. Grr.
Sorry, needed to vent again. At least they left the ads all the way over there on the right, where I can't see them because I'm looking at the left-hand-side of the window, where the mail is.
FAIL icon for Goggle.
It has such historical oddities buried in it. Indeed, this decision derives from one of them. Prior to 1736 or so, witchcraft was punishable by death in England, although not normally by burning at the stake, which was reserved for the Continent and Scotland.
At that time, the Establishment came to the conclusion that, in fact, they could find no real evidence that witchcraft was real (although plenty of people were accused of it, and some even brought such accusations on themselves). So the legal principles were changed, along with the law. The witchcraft acts made all claims of being a witch (or other magical practitioner) illegal because they were fraudulent. In 1952, the last of these acts was replaced by a law that still makes such claims illegal, but now allows an escape clause: "for entertainment purposes only".
French TV does have a "watershed" time, but it's not immediately clear to me (a) what time it is and (b) what's allowed before versus after. Certainly I've heard both 'putain' and 'merde' on 101%, a thirty-minute magazine show that airs daily at 7pm on Nolife.
That said, the French have odd standards on age ratings. /Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia/ is rated 18 in the UK, but the French DVD of it I just received has a 12+ rating (not allowed for under-12s).
Actually, some planes don't respond easily to that method of exiting a stall.
The phenomenon is called "deep stall", and mainly affects two types of planes. The first type is anything with a T-tail, where the horizontal stabilisers end up in the "dirty" airflow downstream of the stalled wings, and therefore you lose pitch authority. The second type is the F-16, whose flight computers are notorious for obstructing pitch-down input during a stall.
None of that, of course, excuses the pilots of that plane.
Yes, indeed, the transcript avoids giving the accurate literal translation of 'putain' ('whore'), but in that situation, he isn't saying that. It's just an expression of alarm / frustration / etc., sort of like saying "damn" or "bloody hell". And it has an excellent mouth-feel for expressing this, as living in France for any length of time will tell you. (I'm racing towards three years, and yes, I say it too, sometimes. It occasionally is heard in the enhanced version, "putain de merde".)
Similarly, "bordel" isn't translated at all. The observant will note its similarity to "bordello", and it does indeed mean nothing more and nothing less than "brothel" when used in a technical sense. When used in casual speech, however, it means something similar to "tangled mess" - "dans ce bordel de merde" (lit: "in this brothel of shit") is sometimes heard.
Use of charcoal is more-or-less carbon-neutral, because as any reasonably well-educated person knows, charcoal is, in essence, heat-treated wood. You build a big pile of logs, branches, and twigs, cover it mostly in earth, and then burn it in not enough air. This drives off the water and other contaminants, leaving behind what is essentially pure carbon. But this carbon, when burned, goes back into the atmosphere, where the tree got it from in the first place.
I don't generally have a lot of time for environmental activists and their activities, but they should not be criticised for this particular thing, as it isn't inconsistent with the general theme. We could argue about whether it would be better to use the wood directly rather than via charcoal, but it's worth noting that wood isn't all that great a fuel - it's better than the dung used in large portions of the Third World, but significantly worse than coal, oil, or even charcoal - because it contains way too much water (simultaneously non-combustible and energy-absorbing).
I read the Pern books as a teenager and student before giving up when the sequel to The White Dragon was released (and it all seemed too neatly tied off, thanks, with excessively blatant disregard for physics). However, it left an impression somewhere, because twenty years later, the name of one of her characters bubbled out of my subconscious into the name of an MMORPG character I was creating. (And then eighteen months later I finally looked it up to see if I could find out where the name had come from...)
I've actually read this story. It was, as she said, fairly soft porn, soft enough to be included in a collection of her short stories that could be bought in normal bookshops.
And no, it wasn't among her best writing, either. As porn it suffered by having too much of her hallmark political intrigues, and as political intrigue it suffered by having too much porn. A sort of lose-lose situation.
I remember sitting one night in a room lit only by a monitor playing Doom. I was cracking through episode 2 and had to stop and laugh at myself halfway through my first encounter with Rockethands, because the dark and the hunt had my heart going twenty to the dozen, thumpthumpthump.
Good game.
Which false dichotomy is that? The art-versus-craft one, that's what.
Most people (I'm not one of them, mind) would tell you that, for example, oil painting lies on the art side of the split, while programming (by whatever name you give it) lies on the craft side of the split.
Some people attack the dilemma by denying that programming is craft. Cobblers. Or, rather, not cobblers, but a totally inadequate response.
The truth is that the split is an illusion. In the ancient world, it certainly was. Our very word for what we produce, "technology", has at its heart an ancient Greek word, transcribed in the Latin alphabet as "techne" or "tekhne", that meant nothing more than "art".
So of course what I do is craft, and it is also art, because they are one and the same. Whether we call the craft craft, or engineering, or whatever, it is still art.
So I am an artist, and damned proud of it, just as I am a craftsman. The oil-painter's problem is that he has a blank canvas and racks full of paints, brushes, and so on, and someone wants a painting. My problem is that I have editors and compilers, linkers and debuggers, and someone wants a program. Progressing from the one to the other is applying at the same time of the art and the craft either of painting (the painter) or programming (me).
But the graphic designer also produces art, and craft.
Because, remember, the two things are one and the same. If you call the one a "creative" and the other a "developer" you are missing the point.
Your opinion may vary, but if it does, you are wrong.
Standard Missile 3. It's already done it once. About the only limitation is that the Russians probably don't have quite as clear an idea of their satellite's location as the Americans did of theirs. (And wouldn't tell even if they did know, perhaps.)
((No joke icon because it isn't really meant as a joke.))
Your grandfather used it ... My mother was a chief programmer on the third generation version in the 1960s (3rd generation of LEOs, that is). If you read about the history of LEO, you should find a mention of the installation at the head offices of Freeman's (mail order catalogue people). Because of that installation, I once (aged about 9) got to eat lunch with my father in the Freeman's staff canteen. (He worked for LEO and various other companies as what we'd now call IT support, both in-house and out-sourced.)
And in the late 70s, the aluminium honeycomb cabinet door panels from a decommissioned LEO 3 made awesome loft flooring for our house.
I had one of these some years ago, and it was indeed a fine machine, light in weight and with a pleasant, properly-spaced keyboard whose principal faults were a US layout and a total absence of rake. A set of AA-size batteries lasted days.
The interesting feature not mentioned in the article is that the display, although fairly low-resolution and cobweb-growingly slow, was pixel-oriented rather than character-cell oriented - the BASIC included commands for drawing lines and circles.
I used to use it to type out random stuff, and then feed it to my PC via the serial port.
I had chicken pox as a whippersnapper of about 8 or 9, back when nobody much in the UK bothered with vaccination against it. I had the itchy spots and not much else. The family across the road had two kids, a lad my age who was vaguely unwell from the same batch of pox I had, and a girl a couple of years younger who was seriously ill with it.
And of course while I had it, I wasn't allowed anywhere near my father, as he had managed to escape childhood without getting chicken pox, and it is almost always in the "seriously ill" category when adults get it...
So, folks, don't do this. The chances of your kid being seriously ill from real chicken pox are much higher than they are for the vaccine.
I gave up on Ubuntu when, the very first time I tried to install it (from a magazine cover disk, if you must know), it gave me the big finger and stopped halfway through the installation because it couldn't find the Internet to download up-to-date versions of the packages.
Dudes! Let me install the (bad word) thing first, then go looking for upgraded components once I have it properly installed and configured. The purposes for which I wanted to set up a machine didn't include having it go out to the Internet for anything.
I notice that the article doesn't explore the question of exactly /why/ nobody adopted caseless rounds. Sure, caseless ammo is lighter, but it has some serious disadvantages compared to brass-cased ammo:
1. Nothing on the round itself protects the propellant from mechanical or water damage.
2. While you don't need a normal-operation ejection port for spent rounds, you still need a way to extract mis-fired rounds.
3. Caseless ammuntion makes the problem of cook-off worse, because there is no handy piece of brass to carry away some of the waste heat of firing, so it all goes into the chamber walls.
4. In a corollary to (3), the hot chamber walls take immediate effect on a caseless round, rather than after the small delay needed to heat up the brass case. Cook-off, therefore, tends to continue once it begins.
Plastic-cased ammunition, telescoped or not, will lack most of those disadvantages, provided the propellant remains sealed inside, as it is in traditional rounds.
Unfortunately, aerostat is a wider word than blimp, or airship. A hot air balloon is an aerostat, but it is not a *dirigible*. No matter what the level of rigidity, all airships are dirigibles, almost by definition, while hot air balloons are not.
So my vote is for going back to basics and calling them dirigibles, like they often did in my youth.
If you do that, you'll find that +specificword (prevents matching against 'specificwords', 'specificwording', etc. but also prevents it searching for 'flute' **instead** of 'lute') has been replaced by "specificword" (double quotes).
The flute/lute thing is the most stupid thing imaginable. I asked goggle to look for information about Renaissance / Early Modern many-stringed instruments, but goggle decided that I really wanted to find information about wind instruments, and NOT information about what I asked for. WTF? I could almost see it offering both in a single search, but ... 'Did you mean ...?' links are annoying because they take up space on the screen, but once in a while I really did make a trypogaphical error, and it's useful then. Completely discarding what I type, aside from a 'we searched for this other thing instead of what you asked for, but here's a link that will search for what you wanted rather than what we wanted' link is unforgiveable.
Sorry, still need to vent.
Article quotes someone as saying that the thirdworld countries need the jobs so we should ship our waste to them for recycling, even though:
1. Our countries need the jobs.
2. Their countries are environmentally unsound etc.
3. Our countries need the jobs.
Oh, did I already say that? Hmm. Maybe it's important.
And maybe "because they need jobs" isn't actually the reason why the stuff is shipped over there. Maybe it's "because they'll do it for a tiny fraction of the price."...
That's OK, I just upgraded my copy of Office. I went from 97 to 2010 in one huge suicidal leap. The automatic language detection is cool, much better than "Oh, you're using a French keyboard layout, you must be writing in French".
Mostly, though, I'm left wondering what the fuss is all about on this Ribbon thing, aside from the fact that it's a bit on the big side. In fact, its size highlights the main difficulty of modern screens - they are too wide for their height when editing single documents. You either "fit-width" in which case they don't show all that much height *of the document*, or you use a fixed zoom and waste the right-hand side of the screen. Bah. Good for games, though.
Does it look like the old Web version of gmail or the new one?
If it's like the new one, then it severely sucks, automatically and without the slightest possibility of redemption.
In case you hadn't noticed, I don't like the new version of the web interface to gmail. And Google, if you're listening, 500 characters isn't enough for me to give in-depth feedback on the steaming pile of (bad word) that is the new gmail interface. Seriously, where did half my contact list go? Oh, I see, there's a mouse-hover-sensitive self-hiding scrollbar. Which numbskull thought that was a good idea?
Sorry, needed to vent. Fortunately at the moment you can turn the new interface back off.
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