Posts by Greg J Preece

Re: better languages?

Hehe, I see your point. I probably should have clarified that as "languages that are either more useful in the real world, or teach skills that are." They wanted us to use Python for all our web development. Yeah, not likely.

Re: I don't hate java

Forgot to mention Maven, as that's also part of our build process. But yeah, I agree 100%. If there's one language where you almost never reinvent the wheel, it's Java.

Re: I don't hate java

Reinventing the wheel? Java isn't my primary language, but when I'm using it that's the exact opposite philosophy I see coming from other Java devs. Build your own MVC and persistence gear when Spring 3 and Hibernate are available? Are you nuts?

Re: Surveillance

No, he wasn't. Read his fucking post.

Re: Nevermind the gaps.

Obviously the system could be abused and then you'd have to add in the "cost" of such abuse and you'd need to be clearing up a whole lot more cases before the privacy trade-off is worth it. Your comment, however, appears to take the position that such abuse could never be prevented (or its costs mitigated by the benefits of solving cold cases). I'm cynical enough to understand that position, but I hardly think we can take it as read.

Every single previous privilege and system we have given to the police has been abused. It's not a stretch of the imagination to believe that this might also be abused, is it? Are the anti-terror laws that we absolutely must have to stop the country immediately exploding used more against actual terrorists, or ordinary punters/protestors?

Re: Nevermind the gaps.

Please explain to me, why is storing the whereabouts of anybody in a car, anywhere in the country, for half a dozen years, acceptable to keep tabs on just a small fraction of bad apples in the populace?

You say that as if you were, or ever will be, given a choice. It amazes me how this kind of mass surveillance can just happen, with little to no publicity, oversight, or referendum, but when PIPA turns up everyone goes batshit fucking insane.

Re: Yep - that's Sony

Double standards because one is American and one is Japanese?

Not exactly. Sony make shit software, but they don't force you to use it. The T1 works perfectly well in mass storage mode, doesn't demand that it manage your content, lets you import just about anything, etc, etc. That's typical Sony stuff really. Technically excellent, despite their best attempts to ruin it.

Do I detect sarcasm?

Perhaps a little. ;-)

I may have previously owned a Sony MP3 player. Never again! But then, I've been buying Cowon players since then, right up until their recent fascination with Android.

The old buttons were nicer. They're useful for flicking to the next page without effort. I hold the reader sideways by the base and read landscape most of the time, so to switch pages I just push my thumb. Not everything has to be touchscreen, you know. Buttons still work pretty well (better, most of the time).

Re: Payback? @ Greg

One half-assed remark ... fair enough. But how many of the target audience will have heard that remark and let it sink in? All it takes is one percent of the target audience to believe it and one percent of that subset to end up making the decisions.

If they get to that point so uneducated that they're still basing computing decisions on an off-cuff remark they heard on the Disney channel in their pre-teen days, the company has far bigger problems.

Given that the content of these live-action kids shows is such utter dross, what are the chances that anyone will remember any of it? It's like enduring a visual frontal lobotomy.

Re: Payback? @ Greg

But they are of an age where they might grow out of this pap, get a decent education and then end up making "enterprise software purchasing decisions". Or, if not enterprise level decisions, then at least at the SMB level. Then they regurgitate this nonsense and reach a decision along the lines of "well, no-one ever got fired for buying MS/Apple/ProprietoryStuff (insert your least favourite software here)". And thus the cycle of lock-in continues.

One half-assed remark by a writer who clearly doesn't know their stuff does not an indoctrination make. I grew up watching Star Trek and some seriously weird 80s/90s cartoons, but I don't currently believe that talking cats can fly jet fighters, nor have I tried to solve any server issues by dumping the rack's warp core.

Re: Payback?

Errrr....you guys are aware that the target audience of this show aren't exactly those people making enterprise software purchasing decisions, right?

Thunderbird with Lightning installed does fairly well with our Exchange server at work.

Re: Brilliant idea

Steam can do skins. It's done skins in the past, and when you first install it you get a short glimpse of the original military green skin. I imagine there'll be an official corporate one.

Re: Connected to the possible movement to Linux?

I run both, and in honesty I can't think of a single thing I have/need in Windows that isn't replicated in Linux. It might be called something different, but it's there. (Though I do already use a lot of OSS on both systems.) Going back the other way is when I find that I'm missing things.

Where the hell's the PDF reader? Why are the widgets so shit? Do you seriously refer to this as a command line terminal? What do you mean the only built-in archiving is zip? And why is it so slow? And do I seriously have to download and update every single piece of software individually? Are you drunk?