Re: I could literally feel myself becoming schizophrenic
Steer clear of PK Dick's work too, then.
Posts by Stevie
7284 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Page:
- ← Prev
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
- 58
- 59
- 60
- 61
- 62
- 63
- 64
- 65
- 66
- 67
- 68
- 69
- 70
- 71
- 72
- 73
- 74
- 75
- 76
- 77
- 78
- 79
- 80
- 81
- 82
- 83
- 84
- 85
- 86
- 87
- 88
- 89
- 90
- 91
- 92
- 93
- 94
- 95
- 96
- 97
- 98
- 99
- 100
- 101
- 102
- 103
- 104
- 105
- 106
- 107
- 108
- 109
- 110
- 111
- 112
- 113
- 114
- 115
- 116
- 117
- 118
- 119
- 120
- 121
- 122
- 123
- 124
- 125
- 126
- 127
- 128
- 129
- 130
- 131
- 132
- 133
- 134
- 135
- 136
- 137
- 138
- 139
- 140
- 141
- 142
- 143
- 144
- 145
- 146
- Next →
Poseidon's Wake, Naked at the Albert Hall and Farewell Kabul
'Not paying for any of that music was probably a mistake. Buh bye!'
Good luck displacing Windows 7, Microsoft, it's still growing
Monday 4th May 2015 22:52 GMT
Bah!
Half my office is yelling about borked computers this week. Seems an upgrade was run. My computer seemed OK so I did some checking.
The "upgrade" was from XP to Win7.
I thought I was the last one to get Win 7.
I had to stamp my foot and hold my breath to get it too, so I should have guessed we still had a lot of XP out there.
How Groucho Marx lost his voice and found his funny bone
Bridge, ship 'n' tunnel – the Brunels' hidden Thames trip
Meet the man who inspired Elon Musk’s fear of the robot uprising
Facebook serves up shaved, pierced, tattooed 'butterfly' as CAPTCHA
Thursday 30th April 2015 23:37 GMT
Re: ???
"People who aren't used to bodymods can get a bit worked up about such things. Leave them to snigger and make faces for a bit, they'll get over it."
Nonono, I love the shaved look and the rings, it's the depiction of the demon that says "keep out".
I reckon for the internet win you'd have to go with the same art composition but use a Gug as the depicted subject.
Or the Mouth of Sauron. That would work too.
UK exam board wants kids to be able to Google answers
Thursday 30th April 2015 23:27 GMT
I wasn't a big fan
"One of my friends also managed to give the wrong arguments to tar at the end of the exam and managed to overwrite all his work...."
Damn! If only your friend had had to rote-learn the most useful forms of the tar invocation.
Curse you, inevitable consequences!
Actually, I can never remember that bloody thing myself. Don't use it much. Have to look it up in mi' trusty Unix in a Nutshell when I do.
Thursday 30th April 2015 23:19 GMT
Re: No, it's just the opposite
"What is important, Google or no Google, is that the students should be able to apply knowledge."
Knowledge implies you know things which in turn means you, at some point, memorized what you know. Otherwise, you don't know it.
So:
At what point does the "open book" thinking examiner draw a line and say "you should be able to call upon this knowledge at will in order to do what we are teaching you to do"?
A physical chemist must have a passing familiarity with the gas laws, various mathematical techniques and so forth. He or she is no bloody use to anyone if those have to be looked up when needed.
And the despised rote learning lets me do arithmetic tricks in a rum, pizza and fag-addled 60 years maltreated brain that my 22 year old believes are damn near miraculous.
Dear me no, let us expunge rote learning of multiplication tables in first grade because they are of no use at all and anyway, you can always use your phone to do the math.
And if anyone thinks that internet access during exams will result in anything other than a tsunami of cut'n'paste plagiarism, well, I have this bridge for sale.
Thursday 30th April 2015 15:22 GMT
Bah!
I love the "why memorize, just look it up" mindset that has taken hold of the public education system.
It's a root cause of why no-one under the age of fifty five can make change on demand, and why the bank teller I got into it with a few years back couldn't look at a column of amounts and see from the amounts involved that his calculator-derived result could not possibly be right.
I intervened only a few weeks back when a group of young high school seniors were trying to figure the 15% tip on a four person bill, and were at the stage of realizing that in the whole group, no-one knew how to work the tip calculator app on their late-model iPhones (each senior had one of course). In a place where we have an 8 and a bit percent sales tax there was an easy tip I could give them to prevent the waitress being stiffed, but the fact that not one of them could spitball a 15% tip from a bill submitted in a decimal coinage system quite frankly boggled my mind.
Yes, you can always "look it up" (except when you can't, but we'll not talk about that case because gosh, you have internet everywhere except when you don't and it always has the truth on it except when it doesn't) but there's no comprehension behind that mindset, only the surefire prediction that it won't be too long before we need to cater for people looking up how to look stuff up.
Wait ... isn't that the service Google aspires to be?
Obligatory Wikipedia reference for people to look up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
(Provided to ironically illustrate the difference between the actual experience and "looking it up". This note added when I realized no-one under fifty-five would likely get the reference and would assume the Wikipedia entry *was* the experience).
Thursday 30th April 2015 15:09 GMT
Re: the toxic sludge pool
To be checking the average comprehension skills, spelling and grammar usage in these very comments and drawing conclusions as to the utility of non-quantitative knowledge assessment techniques in the education of the commenters over the last thirty years, iniquitous soft one!
Burger me! Microsoft's chainsaw rampage through sacred cow herd
Brits send Star Wars X-wing fighter to the stratosphere
Apple Watch HATES tattoos: Inky pink sinks rinky-dink sensor
WHY can't Silicon Valley create breakable non-breakable encryption, cry US politicians
MAYHEM in ORBIT: Russian cargo pod spins OUT OF CONTROL
Close encounter: Apple Macs invade the business world
TURKEY-SIZED 'platypus' T. REX found by kid BAFFLES boffins
'Use 1 capital' password prompts make them too predictable – study
Hawking hologram comforts One Direction fans with Zayny parallel universe claim
When THINGS attack! Defending data centres from IoT device-krieg
Who was downloading smut in the office while eating ice cream?
Monday 27th April 2015 15:16 GMT
Re: I found the IT crowd's porn stash
No argument about the inappropriateness of what you found and much kudos for the way you dealt with it, but since when did beach bikini and lingerie photos become "soft-core porn"?
When I were a lad, that label was stuck on "Emmanuelle" and similar fare.
I never asked what it was stuck on with, of course.
Licence to chill: Ex-CIA spyboss Petraeus gets probation for leaking US secrets to his mistress
Monday 27th April 2015 15:01 GMT
There are significant differences
Yes. A general should be under no illusion as to where his loyalties lie.
I'm not excusing what Manning did. I just don't believe we should do so for the good General - who, of all people in that theater of war, should have understood the possible consequences of his actions.
How come he isn't cooling his heels in a cell?
Apple Watch: Exactly how many vids does it take to teach a fanboi to tell the time?
Monday 27th April 2015 14:53 GMT
Re: Bloody Casio never did create a video explaining how to use their watch
John Brown (no body) doesn't RTFM? After they went to the trouble of packing such a big one with the watch?
Shame, sir!
Took me, old mainframe know-nothing fit-for-the-human-scrap-heap idiot all of ten minutes to get it unpacked, synch'ed to NYC timezone and running on the Steviewrist.
The old PAG40 had a better display (which could be read from the ISS I reckon), the compass was less flaky in the presence of electric fields and the backlight was brighter, but changing the batteries every three years was a pain and eventually resulted in damage.
The PAG240's solar cells have gone from a medium charge on unpacking to full charge during everyday wear.
Admittedly, it can't do the internet, but then, that's why we have smartphones and tablets. But it will tell me the time without need for a wall socket until the solar cells go nails-up.
And I can get it very wet indeed without the need to visit an iStore to see if I can beg them for a replacement under warranty.
And it looks 21st century awesome, not like it should be adorning the wrist of Roger Moore as he takes on Count Saruman in The Man With The Golden Watch.
MASSIVE FAIL: Indian gov DOXXES net neutrality campaigners
Monday 27th April 2015 14:42 GMT
Bah!
And the best part is that if India follows and extends New York State's practice of overriding caller ID and auto callback on Government Departments Phones (because callers are agents of the governmental will and not individuals, though if they leave a message on your answering machine it sort of presupposes they want to talk with you eventually so why make it hard FFS?) there will be no way of tracing whoever made the dump and so ... India Becomes Wikileaks.
Interestingly, the details divulged by the leak are about as interesting as the actual Wikileak about how Ben Afleck was reluctant to have it known that his great-something Grandfather owned slaves.
This Means Something.
Unisys looks to ‘streamline’ as losses increase, sales fall
Friday 24th April 2015 19:59 GMT
Bah!
If you walked into a mainframe computer showroom you would buy the Unisys Clearpath mainframe - it's lovely, it's elegant, it's beautiful. It is quite simply the best.
And Britain should have the best. In the world of the mainframe computer it is the Saville Row suit, the Rolls Royce Corniche, the Château Lafitte 1945. It is the mainframe computer Harrods would sell you.
What more can I say?
Synths you've been gone: Vintage tech rules at Musikmesse 2015
Monday 27th April 2015 12:46 GMT
Bah!
Recently underwent extreme trauma when I found my otherwise pristine SH101 had developed a scratchy pot after sitting years in storage. I've got an MC202 too.
My best man's brother was an early adopter. When I told him what his mint condition DX7 might be worth after seeing a beat-up one in a Guitar Center, he almost coughed out his teeth.
Top Spanish minister shows citizens are thick as tortillas de ballenas
Apple Watch RIPPED APART, its GUTS EXPOSED to hungry Vultures
US judge lobs antivirus patents back to Hell
UK rail signals could be hacked to cause crashes, claims prof
SUPERVOLCANIC MAGMA reservoir BUBBLING under Yellowstone Park
Fukushima nuke plant owner told to upgrade from Windows XP
'Aaron's Law' back on the table to bring sanity to US hacking laws
Thursday 23rd April 2015 21:45 GMT
Bah!
... draw a distinction between hacking and unauthorized access.
Good luck with that given that often that distinction isn't clear in the heads of those who do it.
I'm beginning to see the intransigence of the prosecutors in the Aaron Swartz affair as a symptom of a much broader malaise loose in the justice system(s) of he country.
The recent higher profile of cases involving over-zealous police at work are another, even if one allows for "press hysteria" bending the perceptions of what is going on.
Most worrying is when one considers the privatization of prison systems incentivizing harsher penalties and treatment while incarcerated, and the over-reaching of the law enforcement forces that has gone on under the umbrella of anti-terrorism laws as behavior that would previously have been harshly criticized (if not illegal) is instead tolerated "for the public good" (the recent ukfup involving the FBI in Las Vegas being the most egregious example I can think of in recent times).
No, I don't have a fix, but as John Oliver would say "This is a conversation we need to have as a nation".
Facebook, Google execs cough to their biggest privacy blunders
SEX: Naughty female stegosauruses offered it on a PLATE
Cash register maker used same password – 166816 – non-stop since 1990
FBI alert: Get these motherf'king hackers off this motherf'king plane
Thursday 23rd April 2015 16:14 GMT
Bah!
Chris Roberts was a twit for sending that message. Security people have no sense of humor and this "joke" wasn't particularly funny to start with.
Airliner manufacturers are twits for making the plane control gubbins be on the same network as the passengers.
And the way to stop armed hijackers invading the cockpit is to not have access from the cabin to the cockpit in the first place.
Why are any of these hard to understand?
Love-rat fanboi left bobbing for Apples in tiny Japanese bath
The huge flaw in Moore’s Law? It's NOT a law after all
Google pulls plug on YouTube for older iPads, iPhones, smart TVs
Wednesday 22nd April 2015 15:50 GMT
Bah!
Although I have watched YouTube on my new smart TV, I don't do so with any sort of regularity on account of that's not why I bought the TV.
I have cable for HBO, though it is turning into the 12-hours-of-boxing-then-12-hours-of-Game-of-Thrones network and so decreasingly relevant in my viewing preferences, Netflix for most things I actually want to watch (UK series without adverts thank you very much BBC America, almost-new movies, foreign movies etc) and cable for The Daily Show and New Tricks.
I imagine that if a new API means a new app, the network that supplies the apps for my TV will probably address that. If they don't, well, pfft. I've yet to see anything on YouTube that warrants a big screen or lives up to the visual real-estate (though I'll cut that Polish Spiderdog bloke some slack).
Philip Glass tells all and Lovelace and Babbage get the comic novel treatment
Mortgage data splashed all over the net. Thanks HSBC Finance
Tuesday 21st April 2015 14:18 GMT
The problem is that the penalties
... for these kind of screw ups are too lenient.
I totally agree.
However, your solution lacks practicality. I would suggests a "No bonuses for anyone" uckfup clause in the terms of employment. The bank squirts all over the web or lets someone in who does, the three-letter brigade go cap in hand that year with only their meager wages to survive on.
Page:
- ← Prev
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
- 58
- 59
- 60
- 61
- 62
- 63
- 64
- 65
- 66
- 67
- 68
- 69
- 70
- 71
- 72
- 73
- 74
- 75
- 76
- 77
- 78
- 79
- 80
- 81
- 82
- 83
- 84
- 85
- 86
- 87
- 88
- 89
- 90
- 91
- 92
- 93
- 94
- 95
- 96
- 97
- 98
- 99
- 100
- 101
- 102
- 103
- 104
- 105
- 106
- 107
- 108
- 109
- 110
- 111
- 112
- 113
- 114
- 115
- 116
- 117
- 118
- 119
- 120
- 121
- 122
- 123
- 124
- 125
- 126
- 127
- 128
- 129
- 130
- 131
- 132
- 133
- 134
- 135
- 136
- 137
- 138
- 139
- 140
- 141
- 142
- 143
- 144
- 145
- 146
- Next →
Biting the hand that feeds IT
