Posts by Stevie 7284 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Adobe Air sits on the JVC which means that if you have (say) a copy of the complete National Geographic and if (say) you rebuild your machine after a couple of years, your CNG won't work after Java updates itself on installation. Nothing you can do will fix it either.
Given the piss-poor implementation of the reader the loss is debatable.
Adobe Air also uses a proprietary document format. Anyone know how to port these to pdf format, because I'd like to have access to those magazines again.
Which is my point. Not stupid buyers, just educated by the extremely dangerous yet reasonably safely deployed technologies of the past to expect better from the venal and/or stupid manufacturers and the software "engineers" who work for them.
As for "safety" standards, how are they expected to come about when the first thing confronting anyone who opens a box o' software or a make bundle is a linear mile of legalese announcing that there are no warranties, nor any assumption of responsibility, and that whatever you have in your hands is in no way, shape or form guaranteed to do what it says on the box it came in? Even Apple wave their hands in the air and mumble on this point, and they have at least made (an extremely unpopular in the early days) an attempt to get control of the chaos. Difficult to say you have a safe electrical system if everyone and his dog is encouraged to rewire the sockets at will, as it were.
To get the types of standards we are speaking of in place there has to be some admission that the vendor bears responsibility for what happens when you switch whatever it is on.
So it is your contention that one should not buy a Speak 'n' Spell nor accept one as a gift if one is not a System Administrator or possessed of a CS degree?
Hard to argue with the logic.
Next up: why you shouldn't have access to a domestic electricity supply if you aren't a chartered electrical engineer.
The sooner the Space Aliens from Planet Pluto arrive to dispense free subspace-net service to the waiting masses the better. That'll show these so-called "service" providers.
Assuming the Space Aliens from Planet Pluto are not too pissed at Neil DeGrasse Tyson and the other members of Project Relabel Things Instead Of Doing Proper Science, and decide to go with the Death-Ray Everyone On Sight plan instead.
Neinneinnein. You misunderstand.
Ve knew zere vere traitorous technicians solely responsible for zis outrage last year - but vere zen as now unable to name zem.
Ve directors vere, as previously stated, kept totally in ze dark and out of ze loop and vere not part of ze conspiracy.
Now please can ve drop zis nonsense and buy some of our cars?
I'm looking at going partway down that path, then heading for Linux Mint (probably).
Just not willing to use that GUI. My mother in law has it and when called to fix her "internet" it takes forever because MS hid everything and only wants me to see what they think I need to use.
It just could have something to do with MS tossing the baby out with the bathwater and replacing it with a butt-ugly mess only marginally attractive when used on a touch-screen fitted device.
Next year is the year of the Linux Laptop for me and it is entirely due to the GUI redesign. I want a machine interface that does what I tell it, not one that hides what I need behind a search engine.
And man those assymetric tiles are ugly. They make my head ache just by being in my field of vision.
The practice of applying for ridiculously broad warrants and then only using the bits one needs is obviously an attempt to comply with reduction of paperwork statutes in line with government mandates on the subject.
As for the "scary" Pacemaker aspect, well, "Everyone here gets [a heartplug]".
I have a small reputation here for being able to read and maintain the Perl code of a former employee who wrote Obfuscated Code as a job protection scheme (it didn't work). Some suspect a Secret Weapon, but I tell anyone who wants to know How The Trick Is Done.
The reason I can sort his stuff out quickly and the other Unix SAs can't? They insist on using vi and emacs to get at it and I use Scite, a styling editor that color codes great swaths of code based on the language you tell it you are looking at.
So while others struggle for hours with odd punctuation and weird "reserved words" I can immediately see it all for what it is - malicious bullshirt - and get down to reformatting the regular expression hiding in the chaff.
Editors are tools. Evangelizing tools based on their philosophical purity is a game for those with infinite amounts of free time. I just want the pile of nasty off my desk quickly and quietly.
Well, notwithstanding that this would discourage anyone from using a system designed to help spooks get into one's knickers, might not one answer to these idiotic productive company vs deep-pocketed patent aquisition leeches be to put a bounty up on their company's data (anonymously and "jokingly" of course)?
You don't need a screwdriver. Just place the pad of your thumb over the middle piece and pull up. Then you can simply snap it back into place. By doing this carefully, no-one will see you do it. Practice this move until you can do it quickly and out-of-sight.
Now wait for the time some nitwit hands you their cube and challenges you to scramble it and time the solution. Do so, but as your last move pry out one cube and invert it. Turn back to the owner as you give the cube a couple more twists (for obfuscation and misdirection).
Hey presto! Unsolvable cube puzzle.
The obvious answer is to use your card once, cut it in half and request a new one.
By answering all those "Please have our credit card" mailings one should be able to build up a reserve of one-use credit cards big enough to cover the lead time on a new card from such-and-such provider.
Indeed, the banks should really just start issuing new cards on a weekly basis and mailing them out to heavy card users like me. Or base the decision on a given number of transactions. Twenty charges == new card in the mail, that sort of thing.
Gotta go. I hear the sultry siren call of Amazon.
Squirrels? Get real. MBAs are the real danger.
The biggest failure of the power grid to date in the USA is pretty much founded in the power company solely at fault firing everyone who had any experience of running a power generation and distribution network and replacing them with IT professionals and meter readers.
The results, as explained in the official report, were an almost purpose-built grid crasher employing a highly redundant design of military grade. Viz:
Closing down the most important of seven power generation facilities for maintenance during its heaviest load season.
Failure to properly maintain the grid infrastructure (i.e. not trimming trees).
Ignoring field reports of shorts and fires because the computer generated instrumentation was not agreeing with eyewitness statements.
A clueless IT team who at no stage of the diagnoses and fixing of the underlying problem causing those instruments to disagree with the field reports showed any awareness that their job *wasn't* just to keep some servers running and therefore had no situational awareness of their own contribution to the building fiasco.
A complete failure to recognize the consequences of a local power shortage problem and remediate it before it caused a massive overload of the whole network because no-one at the desk knew jack about how power stations must work in a national context and what a local network must never do.
And my personal favorite: Once the problems were acknowledged and recognized for what they were (a disaster in the making), working the problem solution playbook (a replacement for actual people who knew what they were doing) from the wrong failover scenario because the down-for-maintenance power generation facility had already put them in a "class one failover" and no-one realized it.
The importance of squirrels when placed in the context of this sort of Long Range Directorial Uckfup is, I submit, so small as to be negligible.
The robot from Lost In Space (the TV show) was the epitome of what a robot should be: Clever, resourceful, possessed of a deadly weapon and ultra cool Steampunk-meets-the-Sixties aesthetics, and mounted on caterpillar tracks.
Contrast with the inexplicably tumbling android door-openers, non-avian Frisbees and one-armed track workers so-called "robotics experts" have managed to come up with so far. Ludicrous and ugly.
Plus, none of them can hold a proper conversation. The Robot could play chess, pontificate on Dr Smith's perfidy and drive The Chariot, all without need for supercomputer links, WiFi, Bluetooth or USB cables.
"The actors who play the Gallifreyans must curse the Beeb costume designer who came up with those daft outfits. "I'll just look around to see what's happening. Oh no - I can't"."
"I won't wear this daft outfit"
"You vill, or zee Gallifreyans vill be given ze Lynch Mentat Eyebrows"
"Nooooooooooo!"
BGP? All those ARPANET-era protocols were built with an optimistic "trustworthy" outlook. They should have been scrapped and replaced years ago when the internet stopped being the sole province of students and the US armed forces.
The internet: a model for how politics works in a democracy. You only replace something or fix it if it breaks catastrophically. Otherwise, you soldier on with a brave face.
Not if you actually want to use it for anything it isn't. Indeed, the premier reason for dodgy performance on all Pi models to date has been given as "insufficient power supplied" and the advice offered is "you can't just use a phone charger and expect it to work".
I get my Pi power supplies from Sparkfun because they offer one that is guaranteed not to suffer from overvoltage if the unit is plugged in without the load attached and which can deliver the oomph required.
I doubt this is an Arduino killer, unless the power consumption of it is significantly lower than the original 256 meg Pi model B.
It is neat, though. I might buy one just because.
Pfft! I opened my gas barbecue one time and was severely threatened by a Praying Mantis in full attack stance. Stood its ground, too.
I'm five foot eight anna bit, and quite wide. The insect was about an inch and a half long and mebbee an eighth of an inch thick at its widest point.
It had me in the color department, me being my usual unattractive mix of pale pink and angry sunburn and it being a gorgeous lime green.
Important safety tip there from Little Mouse.
Always don a helmet, goggles, athletic cup, shin pads, padded gloves, a hockey goalie's mask, a SWAT tactical vest, elbow and knee pads, reinforced lederhosen, cervical collar, American footballer shoulder pads and stout boots obtained from the "toe-tector" people before hurling your coconut to the concrete with all your might.
Was it built with renaissance era materials, or did we cheat a bit?
Actually, I looked it up and it's both. Nicholls rid himself of the deathtrap at 2000 feet and landed using a conventional modern 'chute.
Although the account states he floated "safely down" to that altitude, he could have just free-fallen down as safely. Leonardo stated that the user would suffer no injury, but seemed oblivious of the danger posed once the parachutist was grounded but the flying tent was still coming down on top of him, and the actual test suggests that the downward progress was rather too rapid for comfort.
If anyone actually lands with one of these I'll give you and Len the win.
Admittedly the bloke could draw and paint, and was a fair hand with the chisel.
But seriously, none of his "genius" devices could ever have worked. Screw-driven flying machines that would look good towed around in a carnival but would not budge upward so much as an inch under power. Hand-cranked tanks that were harder to move than if stripped of the gears and such and just pushed around from the inside. Gliders that wouldn't.
I watched a show from the UK where they built his "terror weapon" - an oversized catapult that anyone should have been able to see would never work. The arm was so massive it was less powerful than the smaller "Deluxe Castle Smashing Engyne" on account of all the energy being used just to swing the arm. The effective payload could only be measured using imaginary numbers.
The vaunted Chip and Pin, in which so many show such charming trust, is of no use when buying online or over the phone, or at a flea market, or on a ferry with no WiFi.
The credit card credential is inherently insecure. The issue is that remote software views the card as the card owner. Marshall McLuhan's message is writ large in the implementation.
The larger implications of the "fix" for this will prevent it happening for many years in all probability.
I protect myself against Government Spooks turning on the camera and mic in my iPad by having it sit in a pocket of my backpack and play "Hey Mickey" on infinite loop when I'm not using it.
They can spy on me all they want, but they are going to be driven earworm-crazy on any given day.
You try going home after a hard day at [REDACTED] and giving the SO a good seeing-to after a few hours of that playing into your headphones.
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