Re: Stupid
"But for those stuck with Windows-ONLY software (that isn't WINE-friendly), they're kinda stuck, you know?"
And for stuff that only runs on older versions of Windows?
33089 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"I worked at an Ad Agency for 18months and what they did with your data was shocking."
What, if anything, did they or could they do to measure negative effects of advertising campaigns?
I can't see how they could do that other than going round with clip-boards and we know how that can be subverted by the way the interview is constructed.
"What about a manufacturer's website for drivers?"
You keep raising that. Let's look at it.
Where do these manufacturers make their money?
By selling the H/W that their drivers support.
What would happen if they poisoned their drivers?
They'd burn their main business. (Remember how quickly HP had to row back after the shit-storm they raised by playing silly buggers with their ink cartridges.)
Why would they want to do that?
"While we cannot ascertain the information that has been published, we can confirm that no EastNets customer data has been compromised in any way"
How often do we see this sort of PR statement made immediately after an indication of a breach before there's been time for an investigation and how often is it followed by a climb-down.
"The only way to have a two-way dialog with the server was through teletype situated in the server room."
Server or mainframe? The characteristic of a server is that it provides services. Unless all the users of those services are to be herded into the secure server room it's going to have to communicate externally. Alternatively you could secure even further by closing it down, removing the power, encasing it in concrete and burying in a hole in the ground.
"If there is a fix in the next month, we will KNOW that the NSA has been working with m$ on this."
Alternative possibility. Microsoft did a deal with Shadow Brokers some time ago so that fully supported stuff would get patched beforehand leaving W7 users with an incentive to migrate to 10 given that they've resisted everything else so far.
"What is the point of inventing and not actually market your invention?"
There are a whole lot of skills involved in inventing and a whole lot of different skills involved in manufacturing and marketing. It's unreasonable for a small company, and even less for an individual to possess all those. It's a perfectly legitimate business to invent, design, etc. a product and licence it to others to bring to market. ARM would be an example. Patenting some bundle of vague ideas is not, however, inventing under any reasonable interpretation of the word.
Water is also a by-product of conventional vehicles. Water evaporates, especially at the temperatures it's produced at in an ICE. What temperature does a fuel cell reach?
The A/Cs preferred horse is far more polluting. If you look at any old photos from the days of horse transport look at the state of the streets. Somehow none of the historical dramas ever get that bit of scenic detail right.
"Perhaps you need to raise your standards for your domestic electrical infrastructure?"
That takes us back to Neil Barnes's point. If this sort of car charging was to become universal then the infrastructure would need investment and that's not a decision for the individual motorist.
"Electric vehicles - when parked at home - can conversely help to smooth the demand upon the grid, by using their batteries as local storage."
You could charge the battery off-peak which eases Neil's worry about generating capacity although the overall amount of power generated still increases as he says.
But you seem to be implying that you could use the battery to store power for the home. You'd be a bit annoyed to get into your car and find it grind to a halt a few yards down the street because you'd just been using its battery to cook your breakfast.
"Hydrogen as a fuel is very poor when you consider the energy it takes to make it."
The energy required to make it, i.e. separate it from the oxygen in water, is the energy that's stored in it as a fuel to be recombined with oxygen so this aspect doesn't really matter. What matters is the overall efficiency with which you can go through the entire cycle.
But the issues raised in the articles are valid. It's difficult and potentially dangerous stuff to store and distribute and the overall environmental friendliness of it depends on that of the energy source.
I inherited a code base that the boss had written. He appeared to have been a Coboller so his response to C, having discovered C macros, was to write several C macros which made things look more Cobol-like (at least that's what I think they were doing). As soon as I needed to change the code wrapped up in some of those on a case-by-case basis I rid myself of the whole lot by running the code through cpp.
Another classic was the day-of-week code which occupied a page and a half which I couldn't understand for the good reason that it was wrong; come the new year and it crapped itself. It needed urgent replacement which was about a line long: call library function to return current date as an integer mod 7.
But the worst part was the fact that the entire suite was a single program so that everyone in the user organisation got all the functionality including whatever their job didn't entitle them to see. Bits of code needed by one screen were wrapped up in the code for another. I started to disentangle it but left well before that was complete.
"in my entire experience as a programmer, I have yet to see anyone developing on anything that wasn't either a PC running some flavour of Windows, or a Mac*."
Although I did end my working life slumming on Windows I've used a whole slew of Unices including SCO on my old laptop as development and operational platforms. I also had colleagues developing on VMS. And personally I started out on ICL 1900.
There's a lot more to life than Windows & Macs.
"Lovely...here in the states, a "Billion" is actually 1,000 million...or 1 to the 9th. On the other side of El Pondo, its 1 to the 12th, which to Americans, is a trillion...but, a trillion in the UK is..1 to the 18th,"
Cough. 1 to the 9th, 1 to the 12th & 1 to the 18th are all 1.