Posts by Aaron Miller

Apple is GOLDBRICKING IT: BEHOLD the iPad Glister-Slab

I wonder if the headline writer knows

that "glister" is an alternate form of "clister" or "clyster", which is an archaic word for an enema.

It's primarily a wrist-mounted auxiliary touchscreen for your phone, with the ability to do some basic fitness data logging and run local apps, including but not exclusively watch faces. If you're already using a wrist-mounted fitness tracker and an iPhone, it's cool because it gives the same or better capabilities, plus a lot more. If you're already using an iPhone but not a fitness tracker, it's cool because it lets you do most of what you do with your phone without taking your phone out of your pocket, plus the fitness tracking capability. If you don't have an iPhone or don't like wearing bracelets, it's useless.

'F*** off, Google!' Protest blockades Google staff bus AGAIN – and Apple's

Re: Blockaded, heh?

The grammar fascist always feels himself above his own rules, which is how he can castigate someone for a trivial misuse of 'blockaded' while permitting himself the abominable 'blockadedizationer', which ought to fetch anyone a slap.

Re: America is a strange place

"Bread and circuses", more like. In the end, that'll be what brings us down, if anything does.

Re: AC

An excellent suggestion! Austin, in particular, fosters the sort of community which San Francisco expatriates would likely find simpatico -- and, in Texas, there's plenty of room to build the sort of bedroom communities whose lack is here at issue.

Re: land of the free, home of the homeless

Visible and conspicuously flush, hence frequent targets of solicitation for funds with which to maintain the enormous homeless population which San Francisco's soft-hearted citizens choose to foster.

Soft-hearted and soft-headed, too, in my opinion -- I can understand the impulse behind picking up a stray kitten; I've done it myself, often enough. But you've got to master that impulse at some point before you've picked up so many stray kittens that you can't properly provide for any of them.

Re: Excuse me for being thick...

Google invests a lot of time, effort, and money into seeing to all its employees' needs, or as close to that as possible. There are extremely sound business reasons for so doing; on the one hand, it tends to cultivate loyalty to the company on the part of its employees, and on the other, it does a great deal to alleviate the little nuisances of everyday living which would otherwise distract said employees from spending their every effort on behalf of the company.

This effort, though, is by far most effective for employees who spend their time mostly at the Googleplex -- for a Googler, being at work means, among other things, access to free food, laundry service, exercise equipment, play equipment, and frankly if Google could legally play host to an on-premises brothel then I strongly suspect they'd offer that amenity as well. Being at home, however pleasant, means worrying about all those things yourself. Especially given the sort of nigh-monomaniacal focus on one's vocation which tends to come with being a skilled enough programmer to get hired at Google, is it any wonder that Googlers largely prefer to spend their time at work?

Re: @AC 2055 (GMT) Boston Resident

What? Of course the American aborigines had a "non-immigrant policy"! It's just that theirs, which operated largely at the retail level of slaughtering a farmhouse's or outpost's worth of whites when opportunity arose, failed to out-compete our own ancestors' wholesale "come on, then, if you think you're hard enough" policy.

"How is that fair?"

When were you promised life would be fair? By whom? Did you get it in writing? -- signed? Witnessed? Notarized, perhaps? Failing that, were you promised you'd always be able to afford to live in San Francisco? By whom? -- &c., &c.

Not really. When the rent increases beyond your ability to pay it, you either move somewhere you can afford, or you get booted out to make way for someone else, who can pay the rent.

Re: Rent Control wont work either

What about the presence of these buses prevents San Francisco's city fathers from implementing "decent public transport that everyone can use"? Unless you're prepared to postulate running gunfights between Google buses and Muni buses, which would be entertaining but seems highly improbable, I'm not really seeing how the presence of the former prevents the multiplication of the latter.

Bay pride: WD slips out FOUR-DRIVE network FILE STASH

Re: Rebuild times

What reason have you to suspect that a RAID-1 mirror on this box won't behave the same way as your vaunted WHS 2008? All RAID is not RAID-5.

Nookie becomes, um, a virtual reality for Oculus Rift gadget gamers

Re: I guess I am too old

Spaghetti, no doubt.

Down with Unicode! Why 16 bits per character is a right pain in the ASCII

"...my fellow Delphi users should notice that Embarcadero has dropped support for the UTF8String type..."

What else to expect from something as backwards as Delphi? Pining for the days of Turbo Pascal is like pining for the days of Lisp Machines, only without sense and good taste.

Speaking in Tech: 'I'm not a pimp just because I wear a fedora'

Not a pimp, perhaps

but a bit sad? Certainly. It's not 1957 any more, lads, and you're not Indiana Jones.

Torvalds suggests poison and sabotage for ARM SoC designers

Re: He's right.

There's always some asshole ready to make a dribbling tone argument.

Do not adjust your eyes: This Kobo ten-incher has a 2560 x 1600 resolution

Re: Great

Read it? You won't be able to see it.

Boffins' keyboard ELECTROCUTES Facebook addicts

Pylon of the month [Was: Re: Ignores behaviourist research]

Dear God in heaven. And I thought there was nothing sadder than a trainspotter -- at least trains move.

Four ways the Guardian could have protected Snowden – by THE NSA

Still entirely susceptible

to rubber-hose cryptanalysis.

Keep calm and carry on spying on Americans, US politicos tell NSA

So there are some hypocrites

Including those who, for example, lambast others for hiding their identities while doing precisely the same themselves -- or does it say "Obnoxious Git" on your birth certificate? Not that that wouldn't be hilarious, mind you, but I doubt somehow it's the case.

Dear Linus, STOP SHOUTING and play nice - says Linux kernel dev

Re: He's rude, but he's right

Good point, Graham. I prefer stuff that actually works. That's why I switched to a Macbook Pro. A decade and a half of shit sandwiches is enough. And this latest little contretemps in the LKML nursery is just that much more proof that I made the right decision.

'It's GOOD we stopped selling the iPhone'

Oh, and "independently sovereign" is redundant; a sovereignty isn't dependent, and a protectorate isn't sovereign.

"Cower" is the word

If he had the courage of his supposed convictions, he'd emulate Manning and face judgment for what he's done.

Curiosity team: Massive collision may have killed Red Planet

I read the blog.

You're a loon. End of story.

Ex-inmate at Chinese prison: We made airline headsets

Lesson: Don't go to prison in China

That's that sorted, then.

Can lightning strike twice? Intel has another crack at Thunderbolt

Hardly a NAS

Thunderbolt isn't a network interface; you could have a TB 10GbE NAS right now, if you wanted to pay for it.

Shorteurs rejoice as Vine comes to Android

"fanboiyim"

You're a mensch!

Eric Schmidt: 'Google IS a capitalist country... er, company'

Re: "Governments have a lot more power than we do ... if the law changes, we will follow it."

Potentially being able to influence the result of a process of government isn't anything like having more power than, or even as much power as, government -- were Google so equipped, they could just tell the revenuers to get stuffed, or else to take their best shot.

Put more simply: How many divisions has Google?

United Nations: 'Overpopulated Earth? Time to EAT BUGS'

Re: "gourmet buggery"

The opposite of a Christopher Street bath-house, you might say.

Re: Chickens

Perhaps you aren't an evangelistic vegetarian, but there is precious little in your rhetoric to dissuade the observer from thinking you one. You would be well advised to attend to that, lest you inadvertently present yourself as something you're not.

Re: Bone up on Malthus

Guy Fawkes: You clearly, if not quite succinctly, state the crippling flaw of all utopianism: entropy. I assure you that you need not find it so difficult to relinquish the remnant belief in same, which leads you to rail against the inevitable, and I offer the further assurance that you will certainly find yourself a more joyful and less burdened person for its absence.

Re: @Aaron Em - @RonWheeler - Or...

Mr. Marsden: Your point regarding my use of names is well taken, and I have remedied the laxness in which it originated. Unfortunately, in every other point under consideration, your analysis leaves everything to be desired.

You don't merely confuse correlation with causation; you fail to recognize them as distinct entities, an error not evident in the paper you cite, and which I am therefore forced to assume originates in sloppy habits of thought on your part. You are several hundred years too late to get away with pre-Copernicanism, sir; I urge you to update your understanding of science.

You further attempt argumentum ad solum radicem to deflect my charge of eugenicist belief on your part, despite your having blithely assumed the existence of an ideal human breeding habit, on your way to a flat declaration that you know the means of accomplishing same; if I am culpable of any error in that regard, it is in classing you a eugenicist rather than a dysgenicist, clarification of which question I sought to elicit by the response at which you see fit to sneer.

Then, of course, you accuse me not merely of ignorance, but of argumentum ad effigiem. While our past disputations have left me with a rather low opinion of your intellectual acuity, they lie far enough behind us that I had hoped better of you now. I must say, sir, you have done masterfully well in frustrating that hope, if sadly in no other regard.