Just call it Parrot
... or Norwegian Blue. Perl5 rulez.
Posts by StoneTheKiwis
8 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2011
Clutching at its Perl 6, developer community ponders language name with less baggage
Mark Zuckerberg did everything in his power to avoid Facebook becoming the next MySpace – but forgot one crucial detail…
Donald, YOU'RE FIRED: Rogue Twitter worker quits, deletes President Trump's account
Seven pet h8s: Verity is sorely vexed
Godmother of Unix admins Evi Nemeth presumed lost at sea
Monday 8th July 2013 12:08 GMT
Having been a commercial fisherman around the top end of NZ in an earlier life, I can say first hand that the Tasman can be tougher than you could imagine. Once caught in 110knots (recorded at Cape Reinga lighthouse) while the forecast was for 15 - 25kts. This was before satellites; my boat survived but another boat didn't. Lost a mate when his boat was overwhelmed near the coast up there - a skipper and boat that had survived many years cray fishing at the Chathams in some of the very worst weather. Things happen at sea to the best of us and the best of our boats.
May the Nina and all her hands find peace and contentment in whichever world they find themselves.
Head fed cyberspook resigns abruptly
MeeGo and the Great Betrayal Myths of tech history
Wednesday 22nd June 2011 13:59 GMT
I don't know Andrew ...
you normally write reasonably sensible stuff, but this looks like a bad hair day.
OS/2: at one time this outsold Windoze by a wide margin in Germany, a market where people tend to prefer function over form. There were tons of first-rate apps for it, starting with StarOffice as OS/2 only in its first 5 iterations before Sun bought the company as part of its attempt to move all OS/2 desktops to itself. OS/2 is till used by HSBC bank here in the UK due to its acquisition of Midland bank. The reason I switched from OS/2 to Gentoo Linux was simply that it got to the point where I spent more time maintaining the toolchain than using it, and have to say that the crap multi-threading, while know on Wind, was a shock on Linux. Try compiling something, burning a CD and doing other normal stuff simultaneously on OS/2 and it works; on Linux you burn coasters (not that I would go back mind ..). What really happened, as documented in various US records, is that IBM suits lost their bottle in the face of illegal pressure by MS.
Android - I have a Samsung Galaxy S, bought straight after a Nokia 5800 (only a so-so touch screen phone) and this is frankly a disappointment. Android is only saved because its rooted, has a custom ROM and apps like ConnectBot with portforwarding etc, otherwise the whole thing is immature and sloppy. But that's Google sloppiness for you, starting with their gratuitous mangling of the FHS, to their choice of Java instead of something decent like QT, to the rough and sloppy implementation of core apps (as I first found when writing a perl interface for GoogleCheckout). It long ago became apparent that "Do no evil" was not a promise from them to the world, but a command to the world to "do no evil" to Google.
Meego - I'm not a fanboi, don't know where you might vote and CBA bothering with it. But I would buy a Nokia Meego phone in a heartbeat, as many others would. Standard Linux and FHS, able to run a shedload of Linux apps, supported across phones, tablets and automotive systems etc. And with Nokia engineers it would have all the tweaks to battery life and basic functions that Symbian is so good at.
Nokia's problem has always been piss-poor management, and that has only been exacerbated with Elop's final mismanagement before the boat sinks - a classic example being his assertion that they would recoup decimated mark-ups in "services", while being unable to explain or quantify to questioners what this meant.
Is Elop also a 'myth'? Alas no, this is just as calamitously real as the others mentioned, and even though betrayal is the wrong attitude for the problem, the fact is that none of these situations benefited us poor mugs in consumer land at all, and in fact we are the losers on every count.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
