Posts by gimbal 259 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Dec 2009
Did they give that dog* some good ol' community service, for that? I mean look at him, he's veritably cheering the assailant dog on.
I wonder how long it took 'em to finally get around to the tazer/spray work? and is there any counseling available, for "The dog ate my squad car".... A day of golf, and all's well?
If "the big boys" are having their ground threatened by a possibly-valid (?) patent claim, maybe they'll lend some reconsideration about the very nature of patent-driven development.
Having said that, I realize it's completely naive. I'm sure that the IP-lubbing executives of the boards will all be very adept at putting their fingers into their ears and loudly saying "La-la-la", to ignore the deeper principles of the matter.
If one is not close friends with the entire customer base, one does not play jokes with the said customer base, whom one might want to continue buying products from the company employing oneself. Doesn't common sense ever become common?
So, I'd received that email, too. I'd joined the MSI support forums, once, while I was looking for information about how to replace a cracked monitor screen, in an MSI laptop I had previously purchased. What that email amounted to, as I received it, was: A flaming bag of dog-poop on the doorstep. I mean, seriously, what part of customer service are those jokers failing to understand?
If there may have been any question, as to whether I'll ever buy another MSi product, that question is now closed, with a simple ,"Nope, no way." Not to hold the whole company accountable for some jokers - and the people who hired 'em, and the people who instructed the rest of 'em to set up the MSI customer service system like they have - just to wrap it up, as far I could care about it. I'm not one to support poor business ethic, by any means.
I mean, seriously, do you kind folks realize how significant this is for the Chinese population?
Have you ever seen the documentary, Tank Man, from PBS Frontline?[1] It starts out, about the Tienanmen Square moment, where a single man blocked a column of tanks - proceeds to address the Tienanmen Square movement, and (as I recall) ends with addressing matters related to the fact that that one image is absolutely impossible to find, in China - and that there have been US congressional hearings, with companies related to the whitewash, specifically focusing on Google, Cisco, Microsoft, and Yahoo.
I mean, wow.
Godspeed, Google - never thought I'd say that.
Moderatrix, if I kindly may:
[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/
I think that the *real* money comes in the executives finding new and inventive ways to justify their paychecks. Harumph!
I mean, seriously, "OData"? Another odd, probably naively designed, and firstly, proprietarily based "standard" from Microsoft? Aren't people getting tired of that old trick, yet? (Probable answer: Nope!)
Ahh what they hey, I'd just like to buy the whole world a cola if I could. NARF!
...and for people desiring to hold people responsible for their being truly irresponsible with information they've been entrusted with.
...Oh wait, I may well be playing to a deaf audience, there. Cheers.
MIne's the one with the label that reads, "Nomex"
I bet, it's all from a set for the new Star Trek movie, The Wrath of Joe the Electrician, in which Joe steals a Romulan pliers-ship, so as to subject Captain James T Kirk to an adulthood Bris -- the catch phrase, "From hell's electrical closet, I snip at thee! Snip snip!"
...and all that, just because Joe's union was denied the right to take Earth Day as a holiday. Pure Evil (R)!
Though I'm no great scholar about the matters, myself, but from what I've caught about it, the emergence of relations between the US and the Russian Federation has not been altogether smooth, at the margin. I do remember hearing of a couple of jokes cracked by their PM, at the time, Herr Putin, in regards to the US Pres at the time, Herr Dubyah. That's not much, I know. Also, indicators about it may creep into some literature from Russia - I'm citing the works of Sergei Lukyanenko, at that.
One could call it a hunch, supported with some sparse facts, which is pretty much what it is :)
...I'd be starting my vacation plans, now. I'm just sayin', I don't think I'd want to be in the line of sight to a Chinese Government Scapegoat Hunt, on this issue.
I applaud Google's show of bravery, wholeheartedly, but I am honestly not sure if even they are sure of what consequences the Chinese Government would seek to enact, if Google stops filtering results, there.
It's called dpkg. It's been developed across years of experience, in the Debian Linux distribution, and now, as well as being used in the ongoing releases of Debian Linux and other Debian released operating systems, it's also being used throughout distributions deriving off the Debian design - including Ubuntu, famous at least for its presence on some Dell netbooks.
It's called dpkg, and can be used via such as the famous 'apt-get', the relative newcomer, 'aptitude', and the couple of GTK-bsed and QT-based X-gui package manager applications.
It's called dpkg, and it's a working model for this kind of thing.
There's also RPM. I don't know if RPM's design is quite as far thought-out as that of the dpkg architecture, frankly.
@PhonicUK : I for one would like to agree, but I'm afraid that all the executives (and all the king's men) will get their IP/DRM-brand (TM) knickers up in a bunch about it, before anything useful could be produced of the idea.
It may appear that progress proceeds backwards, in some offices, on some days.
...then, while private industry learns how to make that work, with a profit margin, the gov agencies can be pushing on to the moon. While that proceeds, researchers can be taking the lessons learned from that re-do of the space race, and figure out how we'll get to Mars.
Before all that, what we need is an inspired leadership - not only enough to resolve the criticisms of cranky congresspersons who didn't get a good parking spot fore the day, but as well, to inspire the engineers and the broader population not only to "play along", but to get it $(#$(#$ done.
I'm thinking of something in the spirit of John Kennedy. I'm not joking, there. It was his initial leadership that got the ball rolling, in the US. The appearance of competitive goading from the USSR of that day did add some fuel to the US national motivational tanks, as well. Then, after people applied themselves - being inspired to, rather than inspired to fumble fingers and turn the channel to watch the next episode of American Idol - rather than fumbling with bollocks, they got it done. and humankind made it to the moon. (with a whole lot more of significant details, occurring in the while, such that I've elided to the margins, here, for the sake of rhetorical brevity)
Vision and direction are, together, the first thing. Funding, the second. Engineering, the third.
Oh look, a new mayonnaise commercial.....
...perhaps can't see the forest for the trees, when it comes to the female side of what keeps our internets, corporate networks, and stand-alone computer systems working.
So, big surprise. The preppie-doll-company wound up making a preppie-looking "computer geektette". I expect that some creative girls, out there, shall wind up making their own modifications to GeekBarbie's ensemble, to make it more honest looking (as any amount of honesty would do, at this point) - to which prospect, I say, hear hear.
Oh and I so notice the diplomatic, "Other Operating Systems" accolade, in reference to that domain including Linux. Marketards beware, Microsoft is moving on objective.....
P.S. @Henry Wertz 1: I presume, sir, that you had meant to refer to Apache Lucene. Cheers.
I'm afraid that Oracle is going to destroy the Java programming language, like a blind mastadon in the China shop. They've already nuked the daylights out of the original java-dot-sun-dot-com web site, re-branding it as if Java was just some sterile by-product of the Oracle company. It's not, today - not yet - nor did it develop as such.
The vitality in the Java community has been a real, driving force in the now widely developed popularity of the Java programming language, throughout its existence. Oracle's style, as represented (I say, pretty clearly) in their recent sterilizations of Sun's Java web site, will ultimately estrange the Java developer community, thus hampering the progress of further development in the Java programming language. We all loose, by that approach - or the Oracle excs win, if only by thinking as if they'd successfully assimilated a market technology.
I hate to say it, but it looks like they're about to take Java down from the inside, and I'm not sure if they have consciously intended to.
Not to be nominated as a candidate for the village savant, but seriously: Why do we even need Flash? Doesn't the unadorned Java API have enough to offer - seriously?
Looking at Adobe's "Tour de Flex", it looks like there are some highly specialized user interfaces being made with the Adobe toolkits. Do we need to recall the infamous Turing principle, in order to illustrate that those same UIs can be made with Java? So why haven't they been? (Hint: It's not a trick question, but I'll leave it as an open question, here, anyways)
Google should just be straightforward about their megalomaniacal intentions. Let us stop waiting in suspense. for the day when the friendly Google logo will read, 'w3 0wnz j0000'.
I'm not saying it was nice, but I notice that I don't share in Jobs' pain, about Apple's competition.
Oh well! :shrug:
All that fancy talk about the social significance of the commercial web, it amounts to a bunch of heady marketing.
I presume that most of us are past the evolutionary point of mistaking technology for a golden carrot dangling on a stick - most, but possibly not everyone. I guess that there are still some who believe their jobs depend on the mystification of technology, even to such a point that their depictions cease to be recognizable as anything rational. All hail the dianetics of the next big thing (so we'd like to wish)?
Oh idealism, what great lengths you've lead us to believe we'd supposedly reached.
Signed, the gloomy stormcloud of the moment.
Get a private pilot's license. Rent a plane - not an airliner - and fly yourself - just a thought.
Theoretically, if private piloting was more popular, it would also be more affordable.
As far as making any sort of a lemming-like rush on security systems, I'd like to think that continued scrutiny of the systems will be good. Indeed, no system is perfect, and if a system is that flawed, we sure shouldn't waste our time giving ourselves a false sense of security, with it -- and wasting more government tax revenues, t'boot -- would you agree?
But seriously, I admire the temerity of the Russian space program directors, in this bold announcement - not only because it affords one with nearly an excuse to use a fancy word such as, temerity, but moreso, I see that the announcement would allow the Russian nation to retain her sense of boldness and independence, while no less enacting (or proposing to enact) an event that (positively, so one would hope) would affect the global scene. That they would propose to invite other national space programs' cooperation, about it, I think that must be simply amicable.
Of course, the question would return, of how they would propose to fund the program. I'm sure that the good gentlewomen and gentlemen in those offices will get around to figuring that out, though, at some point..
I raise my coffee cup, in salute to the boldness of bold, positively intended announcements. Here's to seeing what it results in, on the launchpad. *cough* I mean, positively so.....
...for complete malware invulnerability, tomorrow. (kidding, kidding)
Colonies, indeed, though! It could seem* like a kind of a colonial approach to the whole computing environment, couldn't it though? I say, good call, Hollerith 1, in first drawing the metaphor about colonization.
With the Microsoft juggernaut caught up on the legal concertina wire of uncertainty, the Google team may be thought free to proceed undaunted, on their own respective courses for do-gooding consumer surveillance and data-sharing (in ref to another Reg article, at least once) while Apple do-goodily locks the Apple consumer (and entices share-holder, let's not forget) into an imperial plan for the "the full Apple experience"? I think it may shape up to be a peculiar year, indeed. God Save the Queen.
* but we're just imagining it, therefore it's of little consequence - isn't that how it's supposed to go, these days, for those of us in the rank-and-file at least?
(Artistic license validated by Bogus and Sham, Ltd. License number 55531415927)
Pardon me for being out of the loop, on this, but I hadn't known Nullsoft had been bought out by AOL. So, yeah, I can see that AOL's expertise would probably be a contributing factor in the ultimate degradation of the software. Does it at least come with an uninstaller that actually works, today?
So some thesis-jockeys, somewhere, came up with some claptrap of an accusatory tone, eh? Neat. So, then, they accused the creators of Thomas the Train of high philosophical treason, did they? Wow!
I think it's kind of entertaining, in a circus-barkers kind of way. Who even needs a bearded lady, after all, when there is such an amazing thing in the (*cough*) social sciences community.
I mean, for shame, if the creators of the series do not genuflect to liberal thought police. For shame!
Er, now, what were we talking about again?......
I mean, we'd all be much more entertained with an exploration of Tiger Woods' little black book, right? Or to watch Paula Abdul dancing with Fred Schneider? So who *needs* to know what the surface of Mars looks like, after all? It's just such a groovy earth we have going on ... in our little commercially engineered bubble.
Putting the snark aside, I just wish people would realize that space exploration leads to more opportunities for *skilled employment/labor/work* - from the vehicles to the instrumentation, not to forget the gurus who plot the launch and orbital trajectories, and all the support tasks and community economies. It's practical, not only scientific.
As far as the selection of launch vehicle, then, I don't s'pose I gots much place to says what them NASA folks use to punch a schmart guy or a schmart missus into orbit.... Nice to hear about it, though, that NASA still exists.
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