Posts by Stevie 7284 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
I'll believe it when I see it.
If it hits glass it won't stay attached when it shatters (windshield shots only?), if it hits metal it will have to puncture it without killing someone, and only the roof will work (I suppose the trunk would too, if the vehicle has one) unless the target is a white van.
There's *always* someone on the train tracks, it's just that your distance from the real business at hand prevents you from seeing it.
I had to point out to some of our younger SAs who were indulging their imagined superiority at the expense of the applications programmers recently.
"They ought to fire them all" one said.
"If they did, why on earth would we need *you*" I asked, smiling?
I then went on to explain that out business wasn't running computers for their own sake, and that far from being the most important people in the place, they were like janitors: The most important people in the universe when the lavatory is blocked and backing up, paid to prevent that ever happening at all other times. In other words, if they ever had to step into the limelight, they had already failed at their most important function - to stay out of the way so others could do the real work of the place.
SAs. Gotta love 'em.
How to mess with your kid:
Install Pac Man wall art. Gradually move Pac Man while he sleeps each night. Closer...closer...
One night remove all dots and Pac Man decal, and replace bedspread with one having a line of dots running up the middle.
Velcro gaping maw Pac Man sculpture fabricated from plastic hemisphere forms and yellow paint to bedspread at around chest level.
Wake child with loud playback of Pac Man "non-nom-nom" sound effect.
"Awesome design". Keep saying it, and it may come true.
All through the late 90s/early oughties I was being told this, then I had the "good" fortune to have to attempt repair on my brother-in-law's G4.
Myths:
Awesome case design - actually pretty much the same as a bottom-end "suitcase" Dell except that the heaviest thing in the case, the power supply, was hung by two screws (the PS mounting flange had four holes, but the case chassis was drilled for two in a classic bodge) with a one-foot acceleration drop over the most delicate thing, the motherboard.
Awsome electronics - Said power supply contained no (0) changeable fuses, so a power surge took it out just like it would have done to a PC Server one, but at three times the replacement cost. The bios battery was an unusual design too, and rather than the 5 dollar disc affair found in the terrible PC and available in any supermarket was an 18 dollar cylindrical thing I had to find a specialist electronics store to buy it from.
Awesome accessory design: The mouse cable broke due to mishandling by the owner who though Apple built to last, and because the mouse was weld-glued together rather than screwed I couldn't fix it. The three tonne monitor broke it's flimsy futuristic stand made of materials fundamentally unable to withstand the torque resulting from the crazy design when I looked askance at it one day. I splinted it with aluminum but recommended wooden blocks to take the weight (I call them iBlox and can manufacture them to order if you have a saggy G4 monitor).
Awesome OS. During the aforementioned pre-OSX days I was harangued on a regular basis by those who claimed this was a "better" OS than Windows. Things they didn't mention at the time included the three separate and unintegrated help systems that make looking for anything a nightmare (cf Windows 95 - single point of entry for help), no standard hot-key GUI navigation I could find or dig out of the help systems (cf Windows 95 hot keys) and most infuriatingly, the feature that had the OS crash if the mouse pointer hovered over an icon too long (which I found was a known issue once I knew about it myself).
Awesome lack of obsolescence. Well, you don't need to change an Apple when software advances these days (not true of the OS 9 era though). You might if you need more memory, to judge by the tales of former iMac owners I know personally. But should you need a replacement part for your old mac, good luck. That mouse I talked about earlier had to be replaced via eBay because it wasn't "cool" any more.
Awesome handles on the case - that one is true. You can get a really good grip on a G4 when you want to hurl the bag of crap out of your house and at the person who brought it to you.
Apple sell a rebranded Unix in a computer that is essentially a PC with 2000 dollars of your money stapled to the case. I know what I'd do if I really liked OSX, but then, I can always use 2000 dollars.
The iPad *is* awesome though.
It seems an awful lot of expense and trouble to go through, given one putatively has government levels of cash to call upon.
Wouldn't it be simpler to just float a company to buy up ISPs and install sniffers on the hardware, or to fund co-location outfits with black-hat techs on staff?
I'd have thought the cost of running a physical brute force attack on a submarine cable would have most people looking at the suggester of this idea with an expression several degrees to the south of "askance".
Presumably the story here is that the photos are shared without Facebook actively working to facilitate same.
I tried to explain the obvious to my kid. You put "private pictures" on web. Friend sees them and hits ALT-Print Scrn. Some time later, recently unfriended friend decides to photoshop'n'share.
There is no such thing as a private document that has been in the hands of someone else.
The changing of the conditions of the sale were bound to cause a riot. This was a foregone conclusion, easily predictable from previous experience going back to Woodstock.
Sorry, but people who aggressively market their products in such a way as to promote dangerous conditions deserve to be held accountable when other people get hurt. Not everyone there initiated the stampede, but everyone in the area got caught in it.
I'm with the Indonesian Police on this one. Someone's fingers need smacking with the responsibility ruler, and the buck stops at the top.
At the risk of being cuffed and stuffed for wanting "in" on Top Secret Stuff, does anyone know why that big pipe goes for a trip around about 1/3 of the upper exhaust bell?
I had a car once that relied on the gasoline passing through the fuel pump to keep it cool (and woe to he who suffered vapor lock when it didn't). Does this engine use the cryogenic fuel to cool the bell for some reason, and if so, why only one side?
Not a spy, just love real science.
Why do we tolerate this sort of thing? Why do we allow it to continue year after year? Has the advent of cheap electronic communications blinded us to what is important?
I speak, of course, of the unpronounceable name "chpwn".
No-one who eschews vowels should be granted a platform to spout their views. In an ideal world there would be ubiquitous apps to force recalcitrant offenders to make their names make sense.
I mean, only last week someone was bitching about "F'nor", and that was a made-up character's name.
This horseshoe of pits was obviously a prehistoric public lavatory. You can't ask hundreds of people to the virgin-slaying and expect them to hold it in for days. And no-one wants the majesty of the occasion ruined by the sight of people crapping in the surrounding fields.
Stupid so-called "scientists".
These remains are clear and incontrovertible evidence that the cave in question was once submerged under fathoms of ocean water.
Fish swim in and die. End of story. No need for all these complicated "nets" or unlikely "fishermen", whom everyone knows would have been too busy fighting dinosaurs to fish anyway.
Bad science all round.
Pfft!
Stupid as it seems, you have to tell people not to do this sort of thing or they go and do it.
A dozen homes a year are lost to idiots starting up a turkey-powered rocket motor in their garage or apartment. I totally want to do a turkey this way (what red-blooded male wouldn't) but after reviewing my 70x100 ft garden concluded years ago that there simply wasn't enough blast radius allowance.
I also think all those British people mocking the deep fryer have to answer for the deep fried Mars Bar before any nasturtiums are cast.
Traditional British Chips - possibly the best ad-hoc meal ever invented in the history of the Universe - are, sadly, largely a thing of the past since the government subsidies were deep-sixed by Thatcher and her anti-chipshop agenda.
Yeah. Mmm. Had some odd ideas indeed. One laughable one from the Pern stories involved a computer that had survived thousands of years intact and that housed an AI with a human speech capability and interface reminding its students to "back up their hard drives" after a learning session.
Authors. Can't stop putting their own life experiences on paper no matter how silly.
As for the unpronounceable F'nor and Mnementh: Really? Okay, F'nor is pronounced like Fynor without the "y", and Mnementh is pronounced in the same way anyone who deals with computers for a living would pronounce "mnemonic", it being a fairly common word in IT.
Even I know *that*.
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