Posts by Stevie 7284 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
We must send in -T-h-e--M-a-r-i-n-e-s- a scientific peacekeeping force to secure this valuable desert of diamonds for democracy immediately!
Restart the government! Tell Halliburton there's a new -c-a-s-h--c-o-w- revenue stream up for grabs! Defrost Vice President Cheney and the rest of the Completely Unaffiliated With Big Armaments Think Tank!
Begin Operation Sparkly Freedom of Democracy!
Numbers?
Cos not for nothing, if you *don't* have a spare keyboard, mouse, USB hub, decent power supply and HD capable monitor lying around, the uptake is about the cost of an E Machine and the experience significantly less fulfilling.
And if you have those things at a school already, chances are you have the rest of the kit to go with it. Python will install just as readily on Windows as Linux, a far cheaper and less bothersome thing all round if you already have the windows investment.
And I speak as an early adopter, someone who has been running two Pis (that original one I waited six months to receive and the newer, better model that I got two weeks later) for fun and after six moths buggering about still thinks the GUI is so slow as to be an impediment (especially if you don't put in that powered hub - you'll be plagued by the secret double click insensitivity issue that no-one talks about openly).
I think there are a few kids messing with them, because I've seen them doing so on the web and here in the pages of El Reg. But I don't think those truckloads of Pis are being bought for kids in the main. Nosiree. I think they are being bought by college kids and professors, hobbyists who need a cheap controller and don't want to use Arduino and people who want a cheap set top box.
Because that is what the vast majority of web traffic about Pis is telling me.
There is a great clamour for the Pi here in the USA, where they can at times be hard to find, but they are being sought by old farts like me, not by kids.
I think the offering of credit checking may be a legal requirement.
Three times in the past dimwit banks holding my mortgage have "lost" tapes containing ID theft information, carefully collected to be logically adjacent and mightily encrypted as ECIDIC. Said banks were reassuringly positive that "no one could read the tapes in question" and that they were thinking of encrypting the information more robustly some time real soon now (apparently the thought that getting hold of a reel-to-reel tape deck and the equipment to drive it might be trivially easy, especially for people who keep "finding" these "lost" tape reels has not found popular acceptance with banking IT).
And each time I got a year of credit checking out of it. Since banks never give anything away in the US for free I have to think there was some piece of needless left-wing liberal legislation forcing their hands.
Well, although the internet was there it was the blossoming of the World Wide Web, a graphically driven environment as opposed to the glorified man pages it was up until the early nineties, that really started the explosion in the IT industry.
And that was fueled entirely by an explosion of new users using the easy-to-understand Windows 95 GUI and gleefully following Microsoft in the dance to make the WWW part of their lives by the simple expedient of showing it off as a way to add an upgrade path for software.
Microsoft seized the initiative in the browser wars too, and pushed the whole thing forward at a very much accelerated pace. In a very real sense the WWW came about because of Microsoft, not in spite of it.
As for "the time being right", well, many point to Unix having had X windows for two decades before MS hit the bricks, but in all that time what was done with it? It remained a way to open multiple consoles and little else.
No inexpensive computers running the hated MS operating systems means no IT industry pushing products, both good and bad, out for them. That industry puts a lot of food on a lot of tables in one way or another. No popular usage of the WWW means no iPad, for example. I honestly doubt that Apple would have created the infrastructure for such a thing on their own. Their focus was on the machine in your house.
The MS innovation I think probably having the most impact is the idea that ordinary people needed affordable computers for doing stuff other than computer oriented jobs.
The next most innovative thing must be the context sensitive menus that bloomed all over Windows 95, enabling the user to self-educate because it had a "I know what I want to do, I just don't know how to do it yet" approach. The wisdom of the day was that if you didn't understand how the OS worked you had no business owning a computer - a laughable premise. And before you start in on me about Apple, I've had my hands on the Rolls Royce of contemporary Apple kit and can tell the world it was about as user friendly as Tax Instructions - three separate help libraries that had no cross integration.
Next up was the idea of plug and play. No longer did you need to be an expert in computer innards to install an external peripheral or internal expansion card. It took a few tries to get it working seamlessly, but WIn 95 and Lexmark managed a seamless, painless printer install experience for me in mid '96, the days when Apple were putting out ads suggesting a printer install on a PC involved dismantling the machine. Ask your Apple user of the day if they could install and configure an extra SCSI card for a comparable experience.
Next up would be the suite of products that eventually coalesced into Visual Studio (and then got nerfed but that is the Way Of Things) and which was so successful as a RAD tool the world plus dog was trying to emulate it in their own tools (Cafe, enyone?) or get in on the action by providing third party plug-ins for VS.
And I can make a very strong argument that MS created the very atmosphere that ushered in the usable Linux desktop, the Shangri-La goal of the OS community, by exploding the potential market for such a thing.
I could go on, but there's no point, really. You come across to me as one of that community who hate Microsoft and cannot see round the red haze that envelopes them at the mention of the name. That's your right.
It's true MS play dirty pool at times, but they learned to do that early on with the experience they had launching Word against Wordperfect, the WP market leader of the day. If you grant them nothing else you have to give them kudos as fast learners.
The fact is that for all Microsoft's products being of questionable quality from a technical standpoint, from a user experience one they set the bar for most of the late part of the 90s and the early oughties. To chant that people only like their stuff because they are stupid is to tread water and achieve nothing, progress-wise, in the fight to wrest the IT world away from them in the new millennium (something I heartily support in principle).
This takes me back to the days I was working for a bleeding edge MS partner on the Beltway. We had two departments: Apps and R&D. The R&D people were enraged that the apps group used Visual Basic to craft front end interfaces to our (mainframe hosted) product instead of Visual C. They used the latter for purist reasons.
Apps used VB because they could make easy to understand and use front ends in sparrow's fart time, impressing the bejayzuz out of our customers and freeing up essential time to discover what they'd forgotten to tell us vis-à-vis requirements. Saved us person days of false starts and freed up scarce technician resources for the real work, but the R&D people hated VB on principle and couldn't wind their heads around the idea that it was a profit game.
"I've never used Red Hat but I was two years behind you"
Well, those two years were a hive of innovation and expansion in the Linux world.
And in those two years saw a most significant shift in the politics of selling Linux to the world: the quiet death of the "runs on old kit" mantra (not before time).
It would be more than a decade before people stopped saying "people won't use Linux because they are stupid", started seriously looking at what non-programmer people wanted from a system and started delivering it though.
I attended a very memorable Suse 10 presentation which featured a lead tech talking endlessly about Blue Screens (until yours truly stopped him and asked for a show of hands for those who'd actually seen such a thing in the last five years), who then went on to describe features added to OpenOffice in such terms it was clear he and the teams involved had no connect with their potential customer base.
He was dismissively unaware that the world used pivot tables as a vital sales tool for example, and could not see any point in adding digital camera support to a workstation even though Madison Avenue and Times Square were only a few miles distant.
The disconnect with the actual state and needs of the current world of application IT in the enterprise was astounding. Either that, or I guess Novell could afford to not have sales departments, newspapers and magazines included in their customer base.
"I'm curious to know why you erased NT4. "
Because the Red Hat instructions said to do that. Part of the experiment was to test the assertion "Red Hat 4.2 is easier to install than NT4". Test failed. Spectacularly.
"Could you not create the boot floppies by booting DOS from a floppy? "
So you didn't pick up the lack of availability of DOS in the enterprise in any way, shape or form from my "where the fuck do I find a copy of DOS in this day and age?" question then? DOS was several years obsolete and why would any enterprise solidly using NT4 keep a copy? You didn't need it to load NT. It hadn't shipped with a Microsoft OS since forever. Even Windows 95 didn't require a DOS machine to start from for Torvald's sake.
"And why did you not back up NT4 or at least partition the hard drive and put RH on the clean partition?"
Government kit with very small hard drive, less than half a gig. AKA Your Tax Dollars At Work.
"I don't know about you, but perhaps the second thing I was taught, a bit after how to use the write tab on a floppy to prevent future pain, was "Never delete a working OS beyond recovery before trying to install a new one"."
Well thanks for the vote of incompetence but the very first thing I learned was "never experiment on kit you care about", a lesson some of my younger colleagues are forever learning and forgetting it seems.
The whole point of the exercise was to put the widely held and disseminated at the drop of a (Red) hat common wisdom of the day - that Red Hat Linux was easier all round than NT4 to install configure manage and cope with and that it would run on old as in obsolete kit just fine thank you very much - to the test and hold its feet to the fire.
As it turned out the people singing up Red Hat Linux 4.2 in that way were as full of snot as I thought they would turn out to be, and the showing Red Hat Linux 4.2 gave under the most favorable conditions - while still cleaving to the "old kit" mandate - was so appalling that the fire never got lit.
The installation was a nightmare that required the removal of the computer case in order to read chipset stampings to achieve, there being no self-discovery involved, the driver set was incomplete when it was all done, the desktop was wallpaper with none of the embedded functionality that was the point of the NT4 GUI, and the computer ran so slowly as to be useless.
And lets not forget that the installation could not be performed off the CD anyway since the bootable floppy images it shipped with were broken in a fundamental and stupidly avoidable way. That alone spoke volumes about the professionalism of the RH crew responsible, who apparently weren't familiar at that point in time with the "test *then* ship" rule.
I could give the NT4 install discs to the interns and have them install it on the very same obsolete kit and not have any qualms that they'd have a desktop up and ready for me to look at inside three hours, and that the computer would enable the people in that office to do the work they were actually paid to do rather than effing about with the OS trying to get it to do *its* job.
In those days I built mainframe operating systems for a living and I found the Red Hat installation a pile of foetid dingo's kidneys to put it as politely as I can. Your mileage might have varied, but after comparing notes with people who actually tried out the same installation in their enterprises I would put real money on it not doing so.
Which is not to say that the current version is not a fine product when matched to modern, up-to-date hardware.
" the only drivers being those on the disk, it was an interesting time trying to turn it into somehting resembling a useful machine"
Amen, brother. I had an even worse time when I said "enough with the speculation!" and obtained a copy of Red Hat 4.2 around the same time period.
Step 1) Erase machine's NT4 OS.
Step 2) Load DOS. The real one, a windows command window will not do. Answers to "where the fuck do I find a copy of DOS in this day and age?" were met with shrugs from the years out-of-touch-with-the-real-world RH tech support drones.
Step 3) Create bootable floppies.
Step 4) Boot from floppy and stare at "Error" message. That's all, just "Error".
Step 5) Download fix from -A-s-s- Red Hat. Answers to "How do I do that since I erased my internet capability with windows in Step 1?" were met with shrugs.
(several steps omitted)
Step 74) Run Linux to general "meh" when compared to NT4 running on equivalent machine.
Conclusion: It took longer to install, longer to configure, longer to understand and couldn't run any of our required applications. The GUI looked pretty and did nothing. Pretty much the definition of non-starter.
Eschew all of the above and use only FIELDATA.
a) It does everything you need for programming a real computer, and does it in 3/4 the space by simply acknowledging that Johnny Foreigner doesn't matter.
2) It is also a friendly encoding scheme in that it only has caps. If everyone is shouting, no-one is. Thus a major annoyance on the intarwebs is removed as if it had never been.
#) Brought to you by Univac, proper computers for real programmers. Remember: If you can pick it up without a crane, it isn't a real computer, it's a toy. Don't put your important software on toy computers.
Plus: OS2200 - a mature, secure operating system with utilities people actually fixed in a timely manner so there are *no* "known bugs" still dragging their arse into theater twenty five years on and no buffer overrun attack scripts available on the web for the asking. Unix or WIndows? Don't make me laugh.
I don't understand why this individual didn't do what everyone else with a legitimate gripe against the Men In Black does: Call The Daily Show and explain what is going on.
These days more people of voting age get their current affairs information from this show than from genuine news outlets.
After the eye-bleedingly bad "upgrade" they made to Yahoo!Groups recently I'm not surprised they screwed up the bug bounty thing.
Did you catch the default banner they are using to replace the artwork Groups owners had in place?
The developer in question was in no doubt as to whether the changes were a good idea or "a load of balls".
Glad to see the mainframe/Cobol era "take something that works well and enhance it until it stops working" school of thought is alive and well thirty five years after I first encountered it as a newly minted programmer.
"... and if the supercharger network takes off the range becomes a non-issue if you can charge in 20 minutes"
Except that the domestic grid is already not fit for purpose to hear some tell it, and this is the first year in my twenty years of home-ownership in which my house did *not* suffer a power outage just for being hooked up to LIPA, leading me to suspect that the problem with battery powered cars on Long Island - which one might naturally assume was an ideal place to deploy the technology given that most driving is short-hop well within the charge range of a Tesla - will be that they end up stranded in garages day after day when the LIPA-operated grid has no juice for them.
As for putting the batteries next to the floor, I always thought this would end in tears. One look at the New York moonscape masquerading as a road network should lead you to do so too. Hell, I shuddered when I saw an old 1963 Morris Mini Minor barreling down Straight Path last year because I knew from personal experience there is only 4 inches of clearance between the road and the sump fins on that car and in New York a 4 inch excursion in road surface height is par for the course, especially after the snow plows have had a go.
"You are missing out that people rejected XP when it first came out. It wasn't until 2 years and 2 service packs later that it really took off."
In what universe? XP was bacon sandwich popular in my neck of the woods. I had to hold off buying myself until 2002 but that was a hardware acquisition cash flow problem, not an inherent desire not to buy the first decently bullet-proof user-oriented OS MS had put out (I was using a pre MMX Pentium 1).
The only blue screen I ever saw at home with XP was solidly tied to Norton Nagware too. I never saw one at work until two months ago, when the motherboard on my workstation was starting to show squirrels. I'd asked for months to get it swapped for a new 64-bit Win7 machine, but I'm low man on the ladder and work for the Government and your scarce tax dollars mustn't be spent unwisely on fripperies,.
We know this because taxpayers tell us so.
So they went to all that trouble on the innards and then plonked it all in an oversized rectangular brushed stainless steel box a-la 1970 *oriented 90 degrees the wrong way* and used the winder from a cheap clockwork robot of the sort given away by McDonalds in "Happy Meals"?
Who was designing this thing? The props team from The Prisoner?
Exactly: a castle built on hot air. One wonders if the driving force behind the drive to do it in the first place wasn't some politician. They are experts at starting projects which require non existent technology to provide deliver star trek sourced results to nobody in particular.
See: Airport body scanners, biometric passports, SDI etc etc etc.
The chief problem I have with both iTunes and WMP is that you can't influence the levels while you burn a "security copy", so those party mixes everyone loves tend to feature random volume settings.
Well, that and the totally f*cking lame state of the iTunes "Gracenote" database o' album covers. About 4/5ths of my 65gb collection is identified in iTunes as "white box with musical notes".
Couldn't find "Close to the Edge". Couldn't find "Bridge Over Troubled Water". Couldn't find "Aladdin Sane". Couldn't find "Amok" by Atoms for Peace ffs.
Must be the easiest database in the world to back up on account of there being only a handful of pictures on the bloody thing.
"the waterproofing powerdown is rather innovative, truth be told"
Not so. When my now 80+ year old Dad was an apprentice at [large UK electrical research plant] there was a popular and expensive (in them days) practical "joke" in which people were called on their GPO phones and told by a "GPO Representative" that due to an earthing fault they needed to immerse their handsets in a bucket of water.
I was reminded of this only last week when I got a call from an Indian gentleman identifying himself as "Windows" who told me that every time I signed onto "The Internet" I was "causing viruses".
Christ all f*cking mighty!
I'd be less outraged if the search for efficient use of limited space didn't have so many sweeping curves or lack of any sort of clue about claustrophobia's impact on productivity.
It isn't hard. If you can't fit a desk and swivel chair in your office for each worker *let them work from home*!
If you can't trust them to work from home, rent cheaper office space!
I've seen several times in these hallowed pages the claim that cellphones were "widely used" in the early 90s and were going digital in a big way by '93.
As a cell phone user in metropolitan New York, I can say from first hand knowledge that this ain't so. About half the people who could afford to use them had cell phones in '95, all analog, and the coverage map was still pathetic outside of cities no matter who you signed with. There were digital phone offerings by '96, but they were so expensive that only corporate show-offs were using them and the coverage map was even worse than the analog one was.
At least, that was the case in Manhattan, Long Island and on the Beltway (Maryland side) in this universe. I had to pay roaming charges in Baltimore too, because my AT&T coverage was limited to one city as a home area.
If they had only okayed Graffiti for use on the Newton it would have had a very different history. I remember seeing one of the first Pilots in '96 and laughing at the idea of having to use a special alphabet. Then I tried it for myself. In less than an hour of learning I could write notes while talking to people, *without looking at the screen while I did so*. Contrast with the time needed to "train" a Newton until it could be said to be reliable.
Glad to see you have three hands. You'll need them with a DC25. One to hold the wand, one to stretch out the hose as it tries to collapse back down from nowhere near the "18 feet" advertised to about three feet of rigid pipe and the third to fend of the DC25 as it keeps running up for a hug as you clean.
I wouldn't mind but this is such a blatantly obvious non-working part of the "I just think things should work" design it should not have been recapitulated in later designs as it was.
Also, the design of the hose fixing is not fit for purpose. Mine broke humorously close to the warranty expiration period when one of the two (!) plastic(!) tabs that take the entire strain of the hose pulling against the vacuum as you extend the wand - which is magnified if anything so much as partially blocks the suction - sheared off. Rather than fork over $50 for a new hose (can't get the bit that broke as a separate item of course) I improvised a proper metal tab.
Cleaning a sofa with a DC25 is so difficult it is hard to see how people can downvote with a clear conscience.
Of course I realize I'm supposed to just buy a Dyson portable to do those sorts of job. No-one really thinks the DC25 wand is for actually cleaning anything.
Well, you've had years to fix the potentially lethal and poorly engineered hose on the DC 25 Mr Dyson. Where is it?
Downvote away. I have a DC25 and know the unpopular truth.
Also: Never looses suction, true, but won't clean so much as a paper punching off the floor if the carpet beater gets clogged, as it will in a real house.
I may be mistaken but I was under the impression that evolutionary change in a species takes place over a much longer period than the one in which Sir David has been in a position to spot it happening.
Saying "nowt new has evolved since t'war" is true, but fails to properly capture the vast sweep of time I thought necessary for any such change to become established in the population.
No doubt I am missing the point of the great man's thesis.
For all the talk of degradation, tapes I made on a budget JVC deck in the 1980s still play just fine with no audible artifacts, even though some of them have been stored in a damp basement and some of them have been cooked in the 100+ degree F heat my car can achieve of a summer's day.
Reel to Reel tapes I cut in 1963 still played on the old Stellaphone, albeit with loss of top end, until my dad in a fit of lunacy erased them "to test if the recorder was working properly", thereby committing audio recordings of the Xmas '63 Top of the Pops and a number of rare audio gems (the soundtrack to Steptoe and Son - the attempt to holiday in France episode for one) to the great bit bucket in the sky.
What was really annoying was that he could have bought tape from Radio Shack for a few dollars that would have been in better shape for recording than the fifty year old Phillips Standard Play substrate. Then he wanted me to actually listen to the rubbish he'd recorded, which was just noise from the local radio broadcast that day.
You could probably see all this stuff on sale in Canal Street, NYC.
I had a colleague years ago who delighted in seeing how many genuine Rolex watches he could score for ten dollars on Canal Street. He was a consultant based in Minneapolis and would return there each weekend bearing priceless gifts from New York.
"Programming != Software engineering"
True, but when I was a Cobol database programmer we knew enough to guard against this stupidity when zipping in and out of separately collected subroutines via the Linkage Section.
Tsk! Baby out with the bathwater again, youth of today, general lack of wherewithal, three world wars, shrapnel in the head, wouldn't've happened in my day, flogging too good for them etc etc.
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