Re: Enough snark already
They'll get a hug.
Isn't that special?
1331 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Feb 2012
'we played with it for a few minutes at a PR event and took a few photos?'
Yeah, yeah - clickbait. I know.
But if the reviewer had played with it for a while, or even - here's a thought - downloaded the beta of iOS 6 and used it for a few months, they'd have had a few more substantial comments to make.
This has been another message from 2012's World of Tech Fail:
MS - a blocky Lego UI that no one really wants with an undefined name.
Apple - a new phone that's just like the old phone, but with moar phoniness. (Let's just say there is reason to believe Maps in iOS 6 is *so* not going to be a win in the UK.)
Nokia - burning.
HP - falling.
Yahoo! - flailing.
Google - boring.
Amazon are doing okay. Everyone else - what happened to all that fun cool shiny?
Heh.
Nice try to confuse people who don't know anything about nuke technology by pretending that 'passive safety' has some relationship to 'fail safe.'
"If we built national or international infrastructure for radioactive waste disposal and long-term storage"
and if pigs could fly we'd have all our electricity generated by sparkly magic ponies.
Says Wikia: "In the United States alone, the Department of Energy states there are "millions of gallons of radioactive waste" as well as "thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel and material" and also "huge quantities of contaminated soil and water."[13] Despite copious quantities of waste, the DOE has stated a goal of cleaning all presently contaminated sites successfully by 2025.[13] The Fernald, Ohio site for example had "31 million pounds of uranium product", "2.5 billion pounds of waste", "2.75 million cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris", and a "223 acre portion of the underlying Great Miami Aquifer had uranium levels above drinking standards."[13] The United States has at least 108 sites designated as areas that are contaminated and unusable, sometimes many thousands of acres.[13][14] DOE wishes to clean or mitigate many or all by 2025, however the task can be difficult and it acknowledges that some may never be completely remediated. "
Good luck with that as a plan.
Actually Germany has a plan - to reach 39% renewables by 2020.
The plan was greeted by the usual hooting, shrieking and faeces throwing from the 'critics' when it was announced.
The reality is that renewables have been breaking generation and reliability records year by year, and 39% is now looking like a conservative estimate.
It's not realistic at all.
Simple fact is there will be massively destructive resource wars before India and China come anywhere close to reaching the consumption levels of the USA.
It makes zero, zip, nada, fuck all sense to complain about a 2% or whatever shortfall in projected energy output while ignoring the fact that there simply aren't enough physical ingredients - water, rare earths, accessible nitrates for fertiliser, copper, and many, many, more - to make all the shiny the developing world might be persuaded to want.
Yeah, and we waste a lot of energy too.
Oh - and only a troll like Page seriously thinks renewables people obsess about wind to the extent he does.
People in the biz are waiting on tidal barrage, tidal stream, osmotic, hydro, geo, OTEC and the many varieties of solar to make up the rest of the mix.
The real problem isn't that renewables don't work - it's that some people still believe that renewables are some kind of personal insult for entirely irrational reasons that have no basis in fact or science.
They're the kind of people who would have laughed at the Wright brothers for trying to get one of their basket contraptions to fly.
That'll never happen because the telcos won't allow it.
They're very protective of their mediocre networks, and they don't want non-approved software on them.
Of course almost any geek can crack iOS and get root access to a proper unlocked OS.
But that's different to allowing everyone to do it.
Well said, sir or madam.
Hollywood doesn't have a piracy problem - it has a problem with shitty moronic Recycled Cliche Part 29 OMGCGIBBQ!!1!! craptacles.
It's obvious management has total contempt for audiences. So it's not a surprise if audiences return that contempt and go find something interesting to do instead.
"Do I trust 3rd parties to hold/trade my Bitcoins?"
At the risk of stating the bleedin' obvious, a currency you can't trust third parties to hold/trade is about as much use a chocolate teaspoon in the Sahara on a sunny August bank holiday.
How many more 'mistakes were made' is it going to take before users of Libertarian NerdCash[tm] realise there's no such thing as an unhackable digital system?
Actually they're tools in the literal sense.
Mainstream policy economics - ignoring heterodoxers like Steve Keen, who mostly gets it, and Krugman, who almost does - is purely a propaganda exercise.
It's politics by other means. It has no interest in empiricism. It's as much - if not more - of a pseudo-science as astrology and homoeopathy. Only PSICOP has always and inexplicably ignored it, preferring to bully faith healers, who are far more of a danger to Western civilisation than the people who put millions out of work, kill science funding, and direct clever people who could be doing incredible research into useless quant-wankery.
The history of the Monetarists and the Chicago school demonstrates that the 'ideas' were created to discredit and undermine the effectiveness of Keynesianism and the ideas of dangerous dissidents like Minsky and Henry George.
It's a Soviet-style exercise in state-sponsored opinion management - like Lysenkoism but about money.
And then you get bloviators like Orlowski and Page who take a pop at hippies but ignore the fact that raving Randian nutjob thieves and cheats are bankrupting entire countries in Europe and running for president in the US.
Priorities, eh?
Right.
"build an army of small devices people can throw at anything for next to no money."
That's actually a good idea. It's an empty niche and an open market.
But it would also require innovation. And - as you said - corporates everywhere are reactive, not imaginative.
Even Apple is just spinning out old stuff with a few tweaks rather than the cool new stuff of the Jobs era.
Tech at the moment is basically a merry-go-round of mediocrity. Everyone is falling over themselves to copy the iPhone and iPad, which are themselves badly limited and a drag on innovation.
Apple sort of gets the UX idea, even though it often fucks it up with bugs and limitations - like poor call quality, and a vile 'secure' file system.
RIM/BB got it by accident with messaging, then lost it.
No one else seems to at all. MS certainly don't. They never did - which didn't matter when the world was run by Windows. But it's not any more.
Everything Connected could be a big new shiny. But I don't see it happening while everyone is still hypnotised by Steve's ghost.
Sad - not just in terms of lost products, but in terms of lost jobs, contracts, and income opportunities.
that sometimes Apple approaches acceptable levels of build quality and customer service.
Sometimes.
But the spin machine makes this out to be some kind of epic win, when really it's barely approaching the minimum service level consumers have a right to expect.
And this is only true because the service levels offered by the competition are often (usually?) even poorer.
The entire consumer electronics industry has trained the public to accept bad work and minimal innovation and treat it like a life-changing revelation.
We all love corps who slimily fake friendliness for cash.
If Cupertino was bovvered about the punters it could ask its boys and girls in blue to fill in issue feedback forms and use them to fix problems and improve products based on real customer needs.
Instead it's all about controlling the punters emotionally and faking the happy.
Smooth.
Patent protection is out of the reach of small inventors. It's a ridiculously expensive, slow and and complex process, especially if you try to protect an invention across all significant territories.
So patent law is fundamentally broken in the sense that it is not a level playing field. Big Corps have the resources to patent troll and fill the innovation space with noise. Smaller inventors get nowt, because the whole point of patent law - i.e. protected income from genuine innovation - is not available to them.
It turns out to be remarkably easy to copy good ideas and/or keep them from market if you can afford lawyers who charge more than a grand an hour.
As for Apple - they may have won the legal battle, but they're getting their arses kicked in the PR war. I know a number of keen iPhone owners who are disgusted by the direction Apple has taken and disappointed in the lack of innovation in iOS. So they're considering alternatives.
Apple may or may not lock down the US - I wouldn't bet on a win at appeal - but the brand has been seriously damaged by this case.
Acksherly the true definition of 'fittest' in evolution is circular.
If you breed, you're fit. If you don't, you're not.
Any suggestion that 'fit' means some kind of Fifty Shades of Grey Nordic superhuman with egg box abs and an IQ higher than that of the entire Linux kernel dev team circa 2001 utterly misunderstands how evolution works.
If the proverbial fecund and feckless teenage single mums on benefits are breeding while members of Mensa with jobs in the City aren't, it's not the teenage etcs who should be worried about their evolutionary viability.
Actually the take-away for non-nukers is that lax management and poor oversight are endemic in the industry, and rarely get corrected at all, never mind fast.
It's a political and economic problem, not a technological one. Technically safe-ish nukes are almost possible. But you don't hand nuke technology to pointy-haired bosses and freebooting profiteers like TEPCO and expect them to run it safely - because they can't and won't.
If anyone believes otherwise, email me and I'll sell you a nice shiny bridge someone gave me recently.
At a fair price, too.
"not a single person is set to be measurably harmed by radiation"
Er - in the reality-based world, if that's true at all (and time will tell) it'll be because the population around Fukushima was evacuated outside a nuclear exclusion zone.
Travel restrictions are still in place today.
So really nuclear is safe as long as you don't mind making huge areas uninhabitable when it goes horribly wrong.
Apart from that it's fine, I suppose.
And in the real world, corporations are piling up cash stocks while firing workers.
So yes - let them keep all the money. They'll only hand it to workers because they're nice like that.
Meanwhile cut essential services and infrastructure investment because 'government can't afford them.'
Idiot.
His major crime is pissing off corporate and military America.
Contempt of court, as you call it, is just another convenient excuse in a long-running campaign to gag a political dissident.
Asylum is an established diplomatic tradition, and Hague's attempts - and your attempts - to argue otherwise are 100% proof spin and sophistry.
When you consider that not even at the height of the Cold War did the Soviet Union or any of its satellites threaten to storm an embassy to pull out an asylum seeker, you can see how far the US has fallen from any claim to the moral high ground.
Also, MS is addicted to drama and nonsense.
While Apple has its issues with iOS/OS X - file sharing between iOS and OS X continues to be a nightmare, and iCloud only kinda sorta works as it should - the Apple strategy of splitting off a new touch OS and then slooooowly merging it back with the desktop OS over a good few years makes a lot more sense than this panicked me-too mess.
MS could easily have made Metro/RT the default for touch, added better touch and gesture support and improved internals for Win 8, then gradually worked out a good compromise for the desktop between Metro and something-better-than-Metro for Win 9.
Instead we get a bolted-together Frankenstein OS that is going to baffle desktop users and turn them off future updates. (Takeaway point - if Win 8 fails it won't just fail on its own, it will prejudice buyers against future versions.)
I suppose Win 9 might still happen, but right now Windows is a burning platform. Turning off Aero ('It's so much faster!') and improving the internals aren't going to cut much ice with punters when the UI makes them work harder for no good reason.
Also, never put graphic designers in charge of UX, because they think their job is done once a UI has bright colours and sans serif fonts - and they have no frickin' clue about actual usability.
content != software
Content is third party apps, music, videos, books, etc.
MS has so far failed to create much of a market for any of the above. iOS is arguably still the market leader for general content, Amazon is doing very well with books and will likely move to movies-on-Kindle within the next year or two, and Android is bringing up the rear if anyone wants an alternative.
Being able to run Office on a cheap tablet is going to appeal to a lot of people. But content it ain't.
You appear to be mistaking MS for a company that cares about users or technology.
On the up side, Windows Mini Paris !Metro Any More 8 RT Fun and Games Edition Pro will likely see the departure of Ballmer and his replacement by one of those round things that Google tried to sell recently as a media platform.
And it will be better at doing his job than he is.
But then so would a cheese plant, a brightly painted vintage RAM chip, or a drunken amoeba with piles.
A UI that lets devs change the fucking wallpaper would be a good start
Genuine no-bullshit multi-tasking
A position/distance sensor above the screen
A pressure sensitive multitouch screen
Proper network file management, so I can load a file from my Mac/PC/device into an app, change it, and save it back from that app to any Mac/PC/Device on the network
Failing which, easy data sharing between accounts on iCloud
Or - ferkrissakes - at least give us file sharing in iTunes that supports folders properly
In extremis, a 3D(ish) UI with eye position tracking and/or drag-to-spin, pinch-to-zoom
But it's such fun harassing the unemployed, especially during a Depression.
Kicking people out of their wheelchairs, making cancer patients stack shelves for nothing, abusing NEETs for being lazy while your trust fund gets fundier and fundier and you snort more and more of it - what kind of lunatic wouldn't enjoy this?
Be fair. It's not as if anyone is asking them to work in a bank.
When the High Court quashed the billionaire Tchenguiz brothers arrest warrants recently, the judge said that it was because the SFO didn't have a hot-shot financial lawyer on its team who could package up the evidence and argument to a high enough standard.
The ruling says - literally - that the warrants were thrown out because the SFO were under-resourced compared to two billionaires.
I mean - hey. Good luck with that justice thing, yr'honour.
Doesn't really apply to the the Fruity Tech Titan [tm] vs Samsung etc, but I thought it was an interesting example of the legal process being far out of its depth.