Posts by Kristin McKechie

Constant Re-Indexing of Existing Pages??

Wouldn't this make Google into the worlds largest DDOSer if they are hitting every web server on the planet fast enough to scan every page every few minutes or so as they claim....

Bye Bye bandwidth....

..."...initilising Stage 1 RoTM..."...

...Stage 2 will be the automated slaving of surface to surface nukes and space based lasers to the PANDA core for interventionless at-sea interdiction of all 'deviant' life forms....

Nothing to see here.. move along...

I operate under similar Codes of Conduct, both with my company and under my membership of the Computer Society... I don't see anything wrong with what Google asked their employee to do - make a choice...

Every one of us makes choices every day as to which side our bread is buttered on, and if we are then given the opportunity to negotiate a better solution that all parties can live with so much the better - there is no news here

Welcome to the 'Post and Packaging' scam..

I wonder if the recipients of any of this stuff thought to look at the amount they were charged for frieght?

I once ordered a $15 USB to Serial converter that arrived in an enormous box like those... the freight on the thing cost more than twice the value of the part... I complained VERY loudly, but could not get the charges reduced since once a parcel is larger than a standard letter, the cost is based on the size of the box, not its weight... and apparently I had 'agreed' to the charges as part of the Terms of Service in the purchase...

If the dispatcher happens to get a nice backhander from the freight company... who's to know???

Look hard at your incoming freight bills people... you might be more horrified by the impact of this scam on your wallet than you are on the impact on the environment...

...Ångermanland newspaper...

stuff like this this must happen there all the time if Sweden has a newspaper dedicated to the complaints of angry men....

Typical..

...nurse Lovelace gets sued for bringing a purplish, blobby entity to life (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/15/nurse_lovelace/) while Doctor Loveland-Curtze will probably get a Nobel prize...

Just goes to show that the Doctors take all the credit while the Nurses do all the real work..

*disclaimer: I'm married to a nurse*

ballistic nuclear misses...

...are these the ones the US now call 'friendly fire'?

This whole sad story reminds me of a poem I read once...

The wisdom of these words has stuck in my head and formed the basis of numerous software development reviews...

Author Unknown:

"I really hate this damn machine

I'd really love to sell it

It never does quite what I want

But only what I tell it"

hmmm.. 4.3m siezed

... less 2.8m disgorgement and 1m fine... so the scammers made a $400,000.00 profit over 2 years? 200k per annum still looks like a good wage for doing f**k all to me....

Can anyone say anti-trust?

IBM got burned a long time back for over-reaching - swallowing Sun may bring back a lot of unpleasant memories....

What I take from those figures...

... from only twice the revenue in PC & server sales M$ makes nearly four times the profit... do we think we are being screwed yet?

... and from nearly 5bn in sales from God phones Apple makes less than 20% in profit - hardly heavenly in that market...

I'm no Apple fanboy, (never owned anything made by Apple), but I think I can see who is giving the market the fairest deal...

Yawn!

Wake me up when somebody cares what Microsoft call their next flop any more

Ummm....

Has anyone asked how this obviously unwell person managed to travel unseen from his hotel room to the top of a very high, (but also very popular), tourist destination and apparently throw himself from the lookout?

'He disappeared after leaving the room to visit the bathroom' just sounds a little short of a full explanation.....

If he had taken his car, I doubt his wife would have had time to fly from Colorado to hand out Wanted posters before the body was discovered....

Errr.... anyone heard of anti-trust laws?

I'm not a lawyer, (or even American), but I was under the impression that it is illegal in the US for anyone to set up pricing cartels such that competition is stifled, (especially so for an already convicted monopolist.)

My understanding is that charging customer at or below the cost of production is referred to as 'Predatory Pricing'? Surely, what MS are doing is not paying Buyers to use Live search, they are paying the Advertisers! (i.e. "You pay nothing until we get you a sale, and even then your fee goes into the consumers discount").

While I'm all for a discount whenever I can get it, it seems to me that MS are running pretty close to the wind - wonder how long before Google responds by calling for the Regulators....

It's a silly conspiracy if it is one....

... seems to me that if this is some sort of conspiracy, then it fails miserably... all Google have really achieved is to provide Enturbulation with some high profile reporting...

I'd never heard of Enturbulation before today - and I just usually laugh at the whako's trying to sell me the Scientology crapola... but after reading this I think I'll troop on over to Enturbulation to see what all the fuss is about.... if Google were trying to reduce Enturbulations traffic, I think they picked a really stupid way of doing it...

How long before...

... some script kiddie takes over the .mil.dork metwork and adds the good Colonels bot net to the already growing list of spam servers emanating from the good'ol US of A?

If Ballmer needs some help figuring out just how fat his pice of shit is.....

.... he just needs to read this....

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/14/16TC-winoffice-performance_1.html

This is first objective trial that I'm aware of that compares the performance and memory requirements of all of the Windows and Office combinations on comaparable hardware, (using a virtual server to mimick capabilities)...

These tests prove that Vista performs at least 50% WORSE than XP even with TWICE the RAM on the SAME hardware....

No Fista fanboy will ever be able to tell me again that Fista is anything other than shit... I'l just point them at this and ask them to show me where there is any improvement over XP....

A sad indictment

The general standard of the comments here are a fair indication of the fact that is must be relatively easy to be a 'superhero' in any intellectual persuit - the competition isn't that strong...

Despite the sad fact that humanity has just lost a great mind, most of the comments here are little more than ad-hominem attacks on either the man's character, his wartime activities or his contemporary colleagues ...

Why can't people either pay their respect or just keep their silence in face of a great man's passing - no matter what his nationality, politics or 'achievements' its still a sad day for the world.

All This Proves...

... is how thin the veneer of 'civilisation' is over Western 'society'.

We seem to think we are all civilised and morally upright, but one small example of social engineering and everything falls to pieces - I bet most of the looters went to church the next morning feeling totally at ease and holier than thou...

God help America if this is an example of what happens when peoples taboo's get breached - Post-Apolocypse they'll be ripping each others throats out...

The issue is not who owns the standard, but whether the standard will last!

Personally I couldn't give a monkey's if MicroWhoEver defines the stardard for Office Documents... What I care about is whether I will have the ability to read a document I create in ten, twenty, one hundred years from now!

I have ABSOLUTELY NO FAITH that Microsoft will be able to guarantee me peace of mind in that regard! I have been in this industry too long, and seen Microsoft jump tracks too many times to give them the benefit of the doubt in this regard again.

I work in IT for Government related matters, and I can tell you straight that our prime concern is the issue of ensuring that public documents will always be available. MS Office has gone through so many variations, (and will in all likelihood continue to do so), that it is now not possible to guarantee the taxpayer that we can meet our statutory obligations in respect to permanent record keeping in the future.

If OOXML becomes a 'standard' and we are all railroaded into continued reliance on a single vendor for provision of the means to store, retrieve and display public records, then I fear for the future of our children. We will be at the mercy of that orgainsation's whim to change it's standard, potentially causing the loss of access to the history on which government is based.

Imaginge how 'inconvienient' it might be for you if you suddenly get told that you cannot prove that you paid your water rates ten years becuase the your local council cannot read its old records any more?

The US is STILL supporting Afghan insurgents... Only in a round about way..

"...and ours, is that WE were backing the Afghanis back in the 80's. "

Where do you think all that heroin that US citizens feel compelled to shove into their veins comes from? And who do you think benefits most from its sale?

Nearly three quarters of the worlds opium/heroin trade comes from Afghanistan - paradoxically production has INCREASED since the US lead invasion. The warlords who oversee the trade are supported and protected by the US Military and most of the profits go into US owned companies: see http://opioids.com/afghanistan/herointrail.html

or (for a less biased view try the United nations)

http://www.unodc.org/pdf/publications/afg_opium_economy_www.pdf

When they were in power the Taliban were actually accused of trying to manipulate the price of heroin by trying to outlaw the growth of opium poppies...

Now, probably as a reaction to their ouster the Taliban are also actively exporting heroin. Poor Afghan farmers certainly only get a small slice of the pie, the rest of the vast pile of money being generated probably makes its way into the coffers of US and Russian arms dealers across the globe.

If the US wants to beat the Taliban in Afghanistan, it first has to curb its own desire for the principle product of the region. While US dollars are pouring into the country in the form of drug money, US soldiers will continue to be killed by weapons and explosives stamped 'Made in the U.S.A'

All things in balance

Just as we shouldn't get religious over the concept of single exit methods, we should also not get religious about permitting multiple exits - it depends entirely on the situation, and the purpose of the module being developed which 'rule' is appropriate...

Personally, I try to work towards minimisation of exit points solely to give myself the comfort of ensuring that I have encapsulated all possible behaviours and states within the module as I can - so that once finished I can treat that module as a black box going forward. If I have to build 'driver' modules for any piece of code to accomodate multiple potential return states, then that just makes my own life harder downstream. I don't know about others but I often cannot remember the details of a piece of code six months after I have signed off on it and started something else....