Posts by Stevie

Re: a crash or odd behaviour ... when the machine is supposed to wake up

Well, not for nuthin' my Windows 7/64 bit/Dell Inspiron lappy has been suspending and hibernating and coming around in a working, stable and predictable fashion for the four years I've owned it. This behavior has survived an O/S re-installation (so I could fit a clean install on a much larger hard drive), a simple memory upgrade and the carving out of the registry by hook and crook of McAffee, which doesn't go away even if you refuse to pay for it and tell it to fuck off in as many words.

My wide's laptop has never had an issue waking up either. Same OS/Model. Smaller hard drive and memory allocation.

My old XP desktop never hung when waking from sleep either. Nor did the one I had at work.

Re: All this stuff emphasises...

You missed the part of the article that spoke of the criminal not compromising local (ie Russian) credit cards then?

Fraud is prevalent in the US, but it is often rooted in the digital misdoings of Russians who know better than to defecate where they eat (a habit various US domestic mineral resource exploitation operations could learn to emulate). I understand that Russian prisons knock those in the US into a cocked hat when it comes to unpleasantness of stay, and Russian police are not hampered by many of the laws intended to restrain the more enthusiastic of our own boys in blue.

Re: Oh, please...

If you want to learn to fly, don't waste time with machines at all, simply learn to grow wings and hollow bones.

Re: Misleading Language

The word 'deprecated' does not mean 'obsolete' unfortunately. Perhaps a little more backbone is called for when deciding how long to deprecate stuff before making it obsolete (I'm dancing hard around the non-verb ' to obsolete' as you can tell).

There's graceful degradation of the internet and there's disgraceful degradation of the internet. The question is, which one do you want?

Browser writers! Have some gumption and get rid of useless, dangerous stuff!

Re: As that would mean cheap 4K monitors

4K is NOT cheap for a computer monitor.

Such equipment should cost no more than $99.

How on earth are we to afford our Oracle licenses if you keep spending thousands on bloody monitors?

Re: Was it him?

And here I thought OS/2 died because it was tied into the proprietary microchannel architecture that IBM refused to license and ultimately dropped as a Waste Of Time.

IBM are good at Aiming At The Wrong Target. From the Wikipedia page on OS/2

"At the launch of OS/2 Warp in 1994, Patrick Stewart was to be the Master of Ceremonies; however Kate Mulgrew of the then-upcoming series Star Trek: Voyager was substituted at the last minute"

So instead of the "captain" who rebooted the Star Trek franchise with nitromethane, they picked the one to whose show's theme you could sing:

"Boring song, it's a boring song,

A boring song,

A boring song,

What a boring song

Boring song, it's a boring song,

A boring song,

And *what* a boring show."

Consider:

ST:TNG - people exploring out beyond the limits, ever outward and upward.

ST:V - people running for home and the familiar as fast as possible.

Which metaphor do you want nailed to your product?

I had a colleague who lost a hard-won and prestigious CIO position when his support of OS/2 outpaced IBM's.

Re: Is that a bad assumption to make?

It is my understanding that yes it is a bad assumption to make, at least in New York.

If you want the tape to be admissible (ie of any use whatsoever in a legal proceeding) you must inform the other party that you *are* recording the conversation.

Re: Bah!

'So would you be happy to take your nice new car for a service to a garage where the mechanics had only been trained on engines over 10 years old?"

Define "qualified". If you are comparing apples to apples my answer is:

Perhaps, perhaps not but I would certainly have no qualms about taking my twelve year old car to the mechanic certified to work on that year's model.

I don't put as much stock in a piece of paper as you seem to, and everyone has a dealer/new car horror story that would seem to counter the "new certification = damnfinething" line of thinking.

The reality is that the mechanics haven't changed much and the changes can be understood by anyone with the ability to read and retain what they've read.

The reality is that anything that requires the levels of oomph an Oracle certification *should* deliver are the sorts of things that Oracle Corp want you engaging their support personnel for and the sorts of things for which if you wing it Oracle will start the hand-washing process and the making of regretful noises when you *do* call.

Save your money and train your personnel on-site. Retain your workforce and craft their training to your needs. Sometimes you need a full toolbox and a plasma physicist. Most times a couple of spanners, a decent manual and a Gunson's Sparktune will get you through - if you know how to use them.

When was the last time an Oracle certified professional saved you a call to support when the chips were down, and did that save you money in the long run?

Re: Bah!

The problem that *I* see is that the harvesting gets any information at all.

Stop keeping data around as tuples and the attack doesn't go away but it ceases to return information, only unrelated data. That data should only BE related when accessed through proper channels by authorized persons using encrypted meta data to do the job.

The day of the relational database would seem to be over.

Bah!

"No, although I know most of you refuse to believe it, the fact is that the future is phone, period."

I hope so, because then maybe some money and R&D might be spent on making these devices fit machines for making a telephone call.

I don't believe the future is in any of the devices mentioned here. The fact is that the phone is portable but unusable as a workstation due to the tiny viewing area. The tablet is a marginally useful workstation that is only portable if you carry around a bag in which to port it. The "Pocket/Useful Screen" dilemma will not be solved by anything currently available.

I suspect the answer will lie in a several-generations-of-development-distant descendant of Googleglass coupled with freehand micro-gesture capture and voice-interaction. When the input area is anywhere someone isn't standing and the viewable area is a virtual heads-up illusion the dichotomy will not exist.

And Azathoth help us all then. One sneeze and the fridge defrosts all your Chipwiches into inedible sludge while you are twenty miles away at work, your Netflix account closes itself and your cloudy music library is erased.

Re: No comparison to The Cube?"

"everytime you feel it getting monotonous or predictable, it goes off on a tangent."

That would make it a circle though, wouldn't it?

Re: Bah!

Wow, I got roundly down-thumbed for showing sympathy for mac users. No wonder no-one likes 'em.

Re: If you just want a 'time jump changes history, ruins everything' thing,

Jeepers creepers try reading for context occasionally!

City on the Edge of Forever was not just the plot, it was the writing which was of a quality not often met in those days and that particular episode was written by Harlan Ellison who knows a bit about plotting and character development. And, as it happens, about Skiffy too.

What I want is a quality series of scripts from people with genuinely new ideas who can write them intelligently without recourse to "timey-wimey" or "waves sonic screwdriver, problem goes away", and who don't fall prey to the "special effects will substitute for plot" thinking that characterizes every f*cking visual SF B movie. It's the difference between "Quatermass and the Pit" and "The Blob" or "Alien" and "Aliens Vs Predators".

Azathoth on a bike, we have a robot about as scary as a Nerf Drone and a math teacher who does Wire Fu in the last but one episode. Even the odd clever ideas are being swamped in stupid, and wrapped in holey-woley plotting.

What I want is an episode or two more like the "Dalek" story from the Eccleston season: clever, well-written and scary as a visit from the taxman. I believed Eccleston was terrified, because for a brief time I was too.

Of course the writers fell prey to the "if one Dalek is scary, fifty thousand will be scarier" Hollywood-style wuckfit thinking and there went the franchise back into meh in a welter of ill-advised CGI.

Footnote: Star Wars is an outlier, but the later retouched efforts have started pulling it back into mainstream Hollywood SF meh so it soon won't be. SFX never trump story and writing.

Re: Live Tiles are just icons

Hucking fuge icons that take up acres of screen real estate for no useful purpose on a device *NOT* using a tiny touch sensitive screen and a fat finger as its primary input peripheral.

They are also butt-ugly, too big, unwanted, too big and butt-ugly. They add no functionality over the standard icon or the cascaded menu item (my own preferred way of digging stuff out of the machine) on any device which can provide the mechanism to unfold the menu.

Tiles work for fingers on screens. They are, even then, too big and butt-ugly, but at least there they serve a useful purpose. They serve no such purpose on a conventional keyboard/mouse/screen computer and I SHOULDN"T HAVE TO DEAL WITH THEM IF I DON'T WANT TO IN THIS F*CKING DAY AND AGE FOR F*CK'S SAKE!

Have a shouty too. >Bo@

Re: M$ - THE TRUE TRAILING EDGE OF TECHNOLOGY

"The web browser."

But they *were* first to make the "proper*" web browser free - or did you miss the sticker price on Netscape Navigator?

I can make a very good case that MS shaped the development of how the web should look and feel.

But no-one needs all those knee-jerk downvotes, so I'll sit on my fingers.

* there were many ways the cognoscenti could browse the web for free in them days, of course, but doing so was a pain and involved giving up what most people would expect in terms of ease of use and functionality.

Re: "one my post "

one MAY post. Tsk. 2/10. See myself after class.

Re: Linux doesn't have Bourne shell,

...but uses an emulator for #!/bin/sh, and that emulator is usually bash.

I did not know that. Now I do. I die less dumb. Result!

Thank you Nick.