Posts by Fred Flintstone

Re: Problem, Reaction, Solution ... Conditioning behavior.

But what would you then do if you wanted to state "Man I hate Justin Beiber, he's such a conceited twat" as an established fact? According to you, any audience would interpret "Man I hate Justin Beiber, he's such a conceited twat" as opinion. The first part "Man I hate Justin Beiber" is clearly a statement of dislike, but the person stating is may be in possession of information that "he's such a conceited twat" would be an accurate representation of fact - yet will not be able to establish that in a tweet.

Did anyone actually keep track of how many times we have managed to cram "Man I hate Justin Beiber, he's such a conceited twat" into posts by now? Just out of interest :).

Re: @Micheal

That is a gloriously good summary - thanks for that (especially with the collaborating data). I never knew this.

I would upvote you 10 time if I could :)

Re: Slap on the wrist?

That's not a fine, it's a travesty encouragement

There, fixed that for you, but I agree: fines are supposed to stop errant behaviour. The level of this fine basically acknowledges that the law doesn't matter one jot as long as it's Google.

Re: Laptop

As long as you don't buy mine - I have my eyes on that as my next one as well. Macbook would go to my son after getting an SSD of sorts, because it's robust - childproofing a computer has more to do with physical robustness than any misguided attempt at locking a child out from what it already knows more about than its parents :).

But no, you won't - because I need a non-UK layout on account of having to deal with various languages that had to reach beyond the 26 characters A-Z to express themselves..

Having said that, the retina Macbook is also eye-watering. But that has less to do with its display than the price..

Re: Does it matter? @ TheOtherHobbes

Top-end Apple laptop? 4 or 5 years, easy.

Umm, I don't think so - it depends which part fails. Batteries, for instance, are known for a short life (that's why you can never get them under extended warranty), and hard disks run AFAIK a close second.

Having said that, I tend to have a machine cycle time of about 2..3 years so I never get the extended warranty - also because I tend to take good care of my machines. It makes sure it keeps running reliably (in my experience, if electronics fails it tends to do in the first 3 months), it makes it easier to resell, and it's in general much nicer to work with a good looking machine..

Re: "on drugs or taking the piss?"

The two are not mutually exclusive, but I think you forgot "deluded".

I'd vote for "on drugs and deluded", keeping the good ol' 2 out of 3 rule alive :)

Re: Yeah right.

The more accurate description is thus "asocial apps". Which means they are indeed very much in tune with Facebook..

Re: Frikkin' lasers...

Genius idea. Nature already provided an in-sheep mounting bracket as well :).

Re: And yet...

..all I have to do is say something negative about Steam, and it brings out massive downvoting.

That's easy.

Steam = vapour <> Cloud

Anything else I can help you with? :)

Re: A stunning achievement by all those overweight scientists

"gravity challenged" might fit the situation better anyway :)

Re: @Richard 12

Cruise control also cuts down *substantially* on speeding tickets ..

My fav use of cruise control is alongside roadworks which narrow the road. If traffic allows (you need some room) I set speed at what is allowed, which then leaves me 100% free to watch the road and other drivers instead of having to guard against going 3 miles over and being penalised for watching traffic for safety reasons..

Oh, and smooth changes of speed are good for fuel consumption.

Re: A lot of "Moral High Ground" crap here

I really hope the people laughing here are 100% certain that their own deck of cards is nice and secure.

I wasn't laughing, I was annoyed with someone who (as a tech hack) should know better being stupid. Apple screwed up, badly, but the author cannot blame a lack of backup on Apple - especially since he had a Mac in that collection. Getting a decent backup going on a Mac is incredibly easy with time machine, and it's even easier if you se t it up on a network mount because Time Machine will automatically resume as soon as it recognises the home network.

As for you, if you use Windows get yourself a copy of Acronis True Image Home (download from acronis.com). That's all you need, and once you made the emergency boot CD (of which I always keep a spare ISO dump on the backup disk itself) you just let it do its thing to have a full, up to date backup (also saves deciding on what to back up - just do the lot). If you do this at least weekly you should be fine - better than buying yet another external drive you'll never use.. The benefit of a full backup is that you don't spend a week digging out serial number and installing and configuring everything again - you just rebuild from scratch and get on with it.

Hahaha - yes, I listen to BBC's Radio 4 Now Show too :)

Re: Caffeine, MagicPrefs, GPGMail, Chicken of the VNC, photorec and more...

With you on GPGMail, although I tend to use Thunderbird which works just fine on OSX 10.8 (OSX Mail doesn't do read receipts and delivery flags which sucks). Thanks for the photorec tip.

I also like MenuMeters (www.macupdate.com/app/mac/10451/menumeters) and exiftool (www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/) which just had a new release..

It's so pointless..

I'm uncomfortable with the amount of force brought by both sides to fight an issue that is, well, almost driven by function.

If you have ever had a rectangular shape in your hand it's evident that it'll be more comfortable if you round the corners - heck, even a pack of cards has that (although the argument there is more to prevent wear). If you have ever used onscreen buttons you know there is a certain size below which nothing will be reliable. They're all design aspects anyone with half a braincell will eventually arrive at - independently. They do not constitute great contributions to mankind, sorry, and I say this with the greatest respect to designers, because I have seen them do great things to tech usability.

If either party had an absolutely groundbreaking concept they were seeking to protect, such as a battery that actually lasted longer than half a phone call, fine, OK, bring out the big guns. But all of the tactics and fighting over *this*?

They are seeking to gain a commercial advantage over the most trivial matter ever, and I fear the precedent this will create (either way) will be yet another massive stifler on innovation. Personally I would get both CEOs in one room and then smack both of them around the ears for wasting time in court and wasting corporate funds sponsoring lawyers.

Yes, I use Apple products, but also Samsung. Right now, I'm impressed with neither.

I think it's too soon to tell. I suspect there will first be a phase of obfuscation to bury the painful needles in as large a haystack as they can get away with (or omitting the critical bits and hoping that volume masks the omission). Another play I expect is using complex or rare formats, such as only providing the data in printed form in steel boxes welded shut, to be collected only.

On the plus side, there is at least a start.

Re: You need to log in to use this part of the site

Yup, I think you missed "masturbating", but I guess you left that out because they don't do that in public unless they sing and are called George Michael, but I digress.

I prefer to express malodorous as "Having missed their annual bath. Twice", but that's a personal preference (and the few who know me personally now know who is behind the alias :) ). As far as I can tell, the rest is more or less correct. Maybe a sideways reference to inflatables, but that would possibly be overdoing things.

Thanks for the summation. However, let's not forget that sex sells. Even for charities.

Re: Powerline Adapters ?

Ditto here - the damn things kept falling asleep to the point of going comatose (I tried 2 different ones, same problem). I wonder if they were used for this review, which may go some way towards explaining the frequently dropped network..

Re: plugged into the same 13A socket

We mirrored the data across three servers. However, they were all plugged into the same 13A socket

So what you're saying is that they suffered the traditional "cleaner outage" problem? :)

We took the precaution to choose a provider who was also hosting some VERY major clients, clients who insist on testing everything that moves (redundancy, power fail checks, personnel screening, ISO 27001 and banking law compliance). It means we have the benefit of all of that without having to pay for it ourselves. It still costs about 20% more than a "standard" provider, but it's worth the extra.

Of course, we still have a full outage scenario in our BS25999 BCM (and test this), but it's less of a worry than clients choosing bad passwords until we go 2 factor in a few months..