Posts by Stevie 7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
"Instead of feeding cereals to pigs which then get slaughtered and eaten, why don't we just eat the food we grow directly? Would make sense in a world of 7 billion people and rising."
Okay. By that reasoning wouldn't it make sense to stop using expensive electricity to heat your house and simply burn the excess population?
And who the fist-lightningbolt-skull-musroomcloud wants to eat a cereal sandwich? Get on message!
People calling for a corporate switch from MS Office to OO or one of it's forks need to understand that they are *not* compatible office suites, and switching may not be an option for offices that have heavilt developed MSOffice infrastructure.
You can do many of the easier jobs with the free alternatives to MSOffice, but formatting in Write is nowhere near the clever stuff you can do in Word 2003. Calc runs slower than Excel when heavily loaded with functions, uses a cursor-movement shorthand that is not derived from the Lotus 123 standard that everyone knows and loves, has a different function language punctuation standard and "imported" Excel workbooks lose macro functionality. Not disabled. Lost. I'm impressed with the database, but it ain't close to being as clever as MSAccess - a useful tool for small systems and for prototyping/proof-of-concept work of larger scope. Slide shows are of no interest to me other than in their simplest form so I cannot comment knowledgeably on that.
Fair Disclosure: I use OpenOffice for all my personal projects and MSOffice 2007 for all work-related stuff.
You cannot discuss Office Suite compatibility if you think people use MSOffice just for memos and balance sheets any more than you can discuss Windows Vs Linux is you don't understand the semantics of the Kernel Model and the difference between root and user accounts.
A "pre-paid" credit card isn't a credit card at all. For most purposes you are better off using a Debit Card than one of these perplexing things. I've never understood why anyone would use one in preference to a real credit card.
a) It will run out of money and stop working a damn sight quicker than a credit card.
2) It uses your money instead of the bank's and why would anyone do that by choice?
$) Fraud is your problem instead of the bank's.
For someone who supposedly didn't appreciate the legal nuances of unauthorized entry into a foreign military computer, he has a fine grasp of the nuances of the legal nuances of geography when it comes to going to trial.
Sorry, I buy his "didn't understand" defense about as much as I bought Reiser's "cleaning my car" explanation. But I would say that to a judge were I to be called for jury duty on this case and would have no say in the proceedings from that point on (in America).
On another note, has anyone else noticed the similarity of the Home Secretary to a Romulan? I hadn't until I saw the Reg's picture of him.
Also to split the rape into a forcible rape and ahm - a normal rape.
Not so. The split is Forcible Rape and Statutory Rape.
Not saying I agree with the demented stance on rape (which is actually a stance on abortion as I read it) but if you're gonna pick fights pick 'em with the real men, not the straw buggers.
Makes no sense. Sounds like a typical datascrape-mistaken-for-information-by-markters example to me.
I once saw a newspaper article where it was proven that statistically women were five times more likely to get cancer if they became nuns, which only goes to illustrate what Olly White said in nineteen seventy mumble: Computers can't make a broken [manual] system work, they can only demonstrate it breaking faster.
Enough "smart phone" war footage! I want my old Bakelite twisted pair handset back!
Bonjour. A net discovery service that is too pig thick to figure out that if you aren't *on* a network it should quietly sleep for progressively longer times.
Amazing how people slander Symantec for larding up their systems with useless clock-hogging crapware but give iTunes a pass for the same behavior with the added bonus of filling the log with error messages.
Not to mention the stupidly inadequate level of indirection in the iTunes app that results in albums being broken up and scattered all over the bloody interface instead of being dealt with properly.. But that is another subject.
"Better design". Riiiight.
The world is smaller again, and another piece of The Dream is gone forever.
Well Done that man. I would have liked to meet you but I wouldn't have intruded on your well-known desire for privacy. The world needs more people like you and those who helped put you on the moon. It's not about skills or ability (though they do help), it's about vision.
People will whine about "just a stunt", which is correct if you insist on viewing the program through the eyes of a politician. I prefer the view through the eyes of the engineers and astronauts, who were opening a new frontier, something we could use about now.
Unfortunately, opening such challenging frontiers takes time and money. The public has a short attention span and is notoriously tight-fisted, and the politicians whose job it is to loosen the grip on the purse strings are venal and have a four year problem horizon.
It's sad that we took all that achievement and focused inward again, on saucepans and watches and phones that fit in a large pocket and cause millions in litigation but cannot provide a satisfactory connection between me and my parents so we can talk. I heard you clearer from the moon in '69 than I hear my mum speaking from Alberta, a comparative stone's throw away.
That small step is by any objective assessment a high point in human achievement, arguably *the* high point to date, and serves as a signpost: look, it's possible. Now do it again, better.
Nice one, Mr Armstrong. Life well-lived.
RIP.
My mum owned a cat that was, for want of a better phrase, traditional cat skills challenged.
One day he came in an rubbed around her legs crooning weirdly .
"What the hell's wrong with the cat? ARRRGH he's killed a mouse!"
Yep, they do bring in their kills to show off. Not a big cat person myself, but this behaviour is obvious, not anthropomorphic.
I can say this because the cat in question was in fact incapable of killing anything of the mammal family since it would sneak up, then sit up an mewl at the target, which would run or fly away at top speed. The birds of the area knew him by sight and would let him "sneak" in amongst them while they fed since they knew he'd announce his intention to attack when he was ready. It always seemed to come as a surprise to the cat that the target would flee, too. He never learned.
The mouse it brought in that time was cold and stiff as a board. It had obviously died of old age, but that didn't stop the cat from claiming the credit. It laid the body at my mum's feet and then demanded she look at it with very odd and bizarre behaviour. What else could it have been about?
Well that's all right then, so long as there was no *intent* to harm anyone.
Why would they need to do that though? I mean, they must've run wires for the phone to the Kremlin, the lights, the electric Samovar gifted from the People's Tea Collective, the fountain in front of the building, the illumination for the pastoral statuary depicting Soviet youth on tractors, gazing into the glorious future, shielding their eyes with one hand and clutching scythes with the other (actual Five Year Plan poster used for inspiration of that last one).
No doubt there is a clever reason why they simply didn't run the wires through hollow rebar, which would be my way of doing it because it would be easy to manage and a bit less obvious than bathing a building in microwaves. I think even borscht cans set in the walls with bits of string going to the listening post would be less obvious than that to be honest. No doubt I am being naive.
The world is, once more, a smaller place.
I remember the Radio Telescope as an iconic piece of the backdrop of my childhood. Even the name "Jodrell Bank" is evocative, more like something one would find in a good SF story than lying around on Earth on a signpost or two.
When I was given the option of having my first picture cheques, I picked the ones showing five different technological achievements of Great Britain because one of those achievements was the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank. A nice picture it was, too.
A great achievement and a stunning innings. Well done that scientist.
"They're complaining, for Cliff's sake! How much more British can they be?"
The correct way of expressing that sort of thing is to sigh and shake one's head. I consider it a complete moral and technical failure of the UK 's younger generation that there is no emoticon for that.
Harrumph!
Well, it is more about keeping in touch with their roots, since those who do this is acutely aware (and proud of the fact) that they are descended from immigrant populations.
And it isn't "everyone" in America. Not nearly that number.
What I as an ex-pat would like to know is: why does this, the temperature scale and the units of linear measurement used in the domestic USA cause such extreme angst in the vocal population of the UK? You reactionary nitwits really blow the "stiff upper lip" thing I've got going here when you freak out in public about something trivial that doesn't affect you and which happens in a country in which you do not live. What's the big deal?
Get a grip for fuck's sake. You're British. Act like it. It drives Americans mad with envy.
"buyers would actually be confused by what they were buying."
The way to tell is to answer these three questions:
a) Did I buy this inside a glass cube from a bald thin guy in skintight black jeans and a golf shirt who rang up the purchase with an iPhone?
2) Did I queue for three days to get in the store to buy my phone?
*) Do I have to create an iTunes account to modify the contents of my phone?
Beware: If the guy you bought from was thin and wearing skintight black jeans but was *not* bald, you may have been dealing with a sales representative of Adobe Corporation and may have bought a copy of full-product Acrobat or Creative Studio, neither of which can be used to make calls (though I'm told the iPhone voice quality is only mediocre so there is still chance for confusion).
Safety check: Does it say "Samsung" on the case?
*I* believe the first playmonaut on the moon should not be bound by silly "return" prerequisites but should go for a record of some sort, and viewing footage of brave British attempts to beat the Americans at their own game at Woomera gives me the inspiration needed.
The playmonaut's LM should free fall toward the lunar surface. At the same height that the Eagle wimpily cut it's engines, the PLM should ignite a truly awe-inspiring cluster of boosters for the attempt at both the hardest moon landing and deepest penetration of the said heavenly body.
We can pick him up on the second mission.
None of this bollocks would be necessary had the judge not been a total dick about the evidence. Excluding it based on the time it is submitted to the court alone is not a path to justice. The issue should be "is the argument sound based on the facts" not "is the argument defensible based on an arbitrary subset of the facts".
Nor is a settlement based on a judge's ire a path to anything but an appeal and the start of woes for Apple in Korea.
"All you need is a CNC machine, get it to understand the code"
I love computer geeks who honestly think like this.
No, you have to be able to run whatever type of CNC machine it is (in this case a milling machine of some sort) manually without f*cking up the workpiece, the tool or the machine tool itself. You can run a 3d printer on simple jobs just from a drawing, but subtractive machining is a bit more skilled, even if you have a computer to turn the handwheels for you.
That is why CNC machining is such an interesting hobby and such a well-paid professional field.
"Once replicators are truly perfected, everyone will be out of a job. But in a world where you can just replicate everything you need, there'll be no need for jobs. Or money. Or any of that related bullshit that makes our present civilisation so unbearable... speed the day!"
I await with interest the method by which one will pay for the supplies to run the replicator, the parts to repair it when it breaks down or indeed the replicator itself if we have sent money the way of the wire recorder.
*I* predict coin in the slot replicators and legislation limiting private ownership of replicator tech.
The receiver is *legally* the gun, not *essentially*.
One might argue that the gun won't fire without the bolt, or the firing pin or any one of a number of parts including the ammunition.
Not sure what that gains us though other than an insight that once again legislation trails technological reality.
But I already had that insight about two decades ago, so no real gain whatsoever.
<<This seems so unbelievable that we can "send a man to the moon">>
We can't, not any more. The Apollo project was compartmentalized and produced under the rules governing department of defense contracts, and after a certain number of years years any paperwork held by a company on such a project has to be destroyed by law. No-one thought the information worth archiving at the time and, well, there y'go. All that research, in the shredder.
OMNI did an article on it some years ago. Rarely has my ghast been so utterly flabbered.
If we could muster the public will to do it again, most of the key research would have to be done over just to get back to where we were. The costs will be ... interesting to contemplate. I imagine we'll measure them in Investment Bank Officer Bonuses to keep the numbers manageable.
Cool article. It's about time we had some decent snaps of the landing sites. I was beginning to think we'd have to wait until Playmobil made a camera small enough for The Register to send.
On the other hand, I once diagnosed a perplexing problem that had had a certain department of "No GUI's, Not Now, Not Ever, NEVER" admins baffled for days by simply not knowing that is was a sign of unmanliness to boot the GUI to Sco Unixware. After a five minute poke around in the GUI to see what was what I found the clearly announced and prominently flagged network permissions issue that was new to that release and couldn't be spotted in a CLI if you looked for ever and a day if you were firmly convinced Unixware was SVR4.
A computer is just a tool. Unfortunately, so are many of the people who are in charge of them.
The index coagulation on last name should be a thing of beauty. I once worked on a system which the soundex search would only retrieve the same (wrong) 200 names because no-one had considered that the target population didn't spread their last names evenly over the alphabet sensibly but insisted on using the same one over and over again.
What if B&N allowed you to pay a nominal fee, say a couple o' bucks, to download a Kindle-ready version *at the store* that would evaporate after, say, 14 days?
Cross platform reaching out that would shift loaners (something B&N do for free on their own Nook) for a fee and get otherwise elsewhere readers into a B&N store with actual paper in the shelves.
Not saying that it would be trivial to set up, but it would steal a march on whoever decides "the hell with it" and starts offering cross platform compatibility as a draw to get people to abandon both the Nook and the Fire.
Everyone focuses on what Amazon has over the competition but it is possible to turn that model on its head and work out ways to leverage what a trad store has over Amazon.
I can't think of a worse way to "consume" books like "An Index of Possibilities" or "The Domebook" or "How to Hold a Crocodile" than a a screen smaller than the book. Imagine trying to browse the Times Atlas of the World on even a large screen computer. The experience would be completely lost.
I really do not envy those who will live in the world of the future where oversize books are a thing of the past. The current fad for razor-thin small screen tat is, for all the advantages they offer, throwing out some babies with the bathwater.
Mine was to control a 3d printer originally, but my kid crashed her grandfather's car and that 3d printer turned into an impact absorbing front bumper assembly, a radiator core, sundry hoses and some dent-dinging.
Stil, no-one was hurt except the mechanic who lost both eardrums when he presented me the Bill.
"Perhaps you're not the target market for the Pi. The extra stuff you describe is the sort of gubbins a lot of IT pros and tinkerers have lying around."
REALLY????
Someone should tell those people who brought the Raspberry Pi to market then because they have been spouting the most misguided guff about reinvigorating the youth market into exploring computers in the way the BBC computer did in the Early Upper Silicon Age.
When everyone is done being snotty and/or superior, perhaps they could direct the questioning troll to the Pi website where it is all explained in small words.
Because the designers clearly DO expect people like this to show an interest.
"post about giving "boot to the head" to unruly patients.
Um I would think that if your employer found you you were talking on public forum about kicking patients you would be fired."
Unless, of course, you had heard the incredibly funny radio sketches (and one audience participation chorus song) from the Canadian troupe The Fanatics. If you had, this would begin to take on the tone of furloughing someone for medical cause because he had donned a knotted handkerchief and droned "my brain hurts" or had made scurrilous and invasive comments about lumberjacks in song.
Is no-one else worried that venting in semi-public after a hard day and using obvious hyperbole to let off steam is seen as an actual threat to do physical harm with no evidence that this is in fact a realistic fear?
if not: when is that Simon bloke who writes so much "violence in the workplace" porn on The Register gonna get his, then?
A Boot to the Head for the idiots who did the firing for not understanding the difference between the internet and real life. And one for Jenny and the Wimp.
"Don't forget Access. None of the freebies come near it"
Trudat. Ignore the downvoters. Access is a wonderful prototyping tool for proof-of-concept, a great fast development tool for small admin databases and it is still (just) ahead of the pack.
To me, the fact that it once allowed me to pull reports out of the air concerning a huge mainframe upgrade and show the complete tw*t in charge that I had better things to do with my life than do his idiot make-work puts it in the hall of fame. I can make useful applications in sparrows fart time and make them look good enough to draw attaboy comments from those that shoulder surf. It has some issues, but none that have been show stoppers for this one-time mainframe DBA.
I use OpenOffice for most things now, but I often wish I didn't. From the formatting woes I get in Writer which wants one and only one page format throughout a Writer-authored document to the bizarre formula lock-ups in Calc that require me to restart the workbook to clear them, to the truly demented Base need for an autonumeric primary key on any table you want to use in a foreign key relationship with another.
The iPad is a very cool toy and one that many (not me - cost prohibitive) find indispensable in their everyday lives BUT if you look at what people who create for a living are saying a truth emerges: that the small form factor that makes iPad so easy to tote around while remaining just large enough to be useful for visual content is far too small for the adjuncts needed to create volumes of whatever. That is, these people tote around a keyboard of some kind because it hurts to squish your hands into a 10" tabslab configuration.
Some will come back with "write by hand" but I like many of my generation and (to judge by actual examples from my colleagues) just about everyone from the generations after mine have abominable, unreadable scrawl for handwriting that often cannot be read back after a couple of weeks have passed and the subject has been forgotten. I also get terrible writer's cramp, always have. And no-one in the produce-content-to-feed-me-n-the-wife-n-the-kids business will write by hand by preference.
Once you are using a keyboard you lose most of what makes the iPad to thunderously useful - portability.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I used to produce content, quite a lot of it, using a blue Handspring Visor with an ultra-cool folding Stowaway Keyboard. I'd still be doing it if I could find a decent replacement for the battery/button board for the Visor. All the ones I've had in my hot'n'sweaty hands have suffered battery leaks and are destined for uselessness (because of corrosion in the foil-contact buttons) as a result.
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