Posts by J 3 896 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"All that means Microsoft could take Linux, GNOME and GIMP and sell it as proprietary software - the GPL is unenforceable without the courts' recognition of copyright."
True but, as many will point out, anyone will be able to do the same with windows XP, Office 2003, etc.. Is Vista 5 yet?
Why would anyone want to do that is beyond me, though.
OK, so you don't like reading, or at least thinking about what you read. In which case I'm not sure what you're doing here. Try again. Or you just like the sound of your own voice, I guess.
See, I will write the important bits in shouty letters just for the benefit of the hard of reading. You're welcome.
The poster above said that HE BUYS A LOT OF CDs. He WOULD buy about one a year IF he hadn't PREVIOUSLY DOWNLOADED stuff to try BEFORE. You know, because of what he wrote earlier, that radio only plays STUFF HE DOESN'T LIKE. Got it now? If you don't agree with his general approach to it all, that's a different story, but you got to at least understand English to begin with (it's easy, even I can do it and I haven't been doing it for long!)
"There is barely a day goes by when I am not reminded that things were better in Franco's time."
You should choose your companies better, then. You know, people who are not rabid right-winger, Nazi-friendly, murderous-dictatorship-loving morons.
Spain has a lot of them still today, I know, but that's no excuse (my sister is there getting a PhD in political science studying *exactly* the most terrible of Franco's years).
There are people with such idiotic ideas everywhere apparently. You know, they miss the Brazilian military dictators of 1964-85, or they miss Pinochet in Chile, or the Nazis in Germany (even if they weren't even born then). Just goes to show how quickly we can descend into savagery given the slightest chance.
Why should a British site bother with Ireland's quaint customs? After all, I've been once reminded by Irish friends that they are not British (in spite of the whole British Isles thing, mind).
Who (who matters) the feck cares about St. Patrick anyway? Here in the US it's just an excuse to drink yourself silly. And in the rest of the world I know people don't even know it exists (they find other excuses to drink).
Funny, but I thought the obscenely rich did not need to be "fooled" by this traditionally stupid practice of trying to make the price look lower. You know, why the hell does something cost $9.99 instead of $10?
Or even worse, my favorite pet peeve the gas station: are they going to give me $0.002 of change if the gas cost $10.998 and I pay with $11 (yup, ride a motorbike, isn't that grand)? OK, so they don't even display that third number on the price you pay at the pump anymore, but the stupid thing is there in the advertised price, e.g. $2.659 per gallon.
Anyway, how will they do if the iPad's battery croaks and they have to send the thing back to Apple, just to pay $99 and get a different unit?
I wonder why they don't do something like the following, to get a better estimate of how many active installs of the OS are around: When there is an update of a piece of system software, count how many times it was downloaded. Assuming a significant proportion of the installed machines do get updated, and that one copy of the OS won't update the same package more than once, wouldn't this give a better idea of the number of installed copies than number of OS downloads? (I for one download the distro once, burn to CD and/or copy to USB drive, and install on three our four computers, for example) This idea is so simple that someone must have thought of it, and found out it does not work for some reason. But which?
For now, it is not good yet.
I bike to work everyday here in Merka, and just tested the new "bike" option. There are two main possible routes for me:
- a 1.5 mile one that is straight almost all along, has a terribly steep section, on a part of road the road that is a deathtrap for anything not motorized (a mess of exits and entrances to highway); I did that one once only, to see if it would be that bad... Had to push the bike on the sidewalk during the very steep and dangerous part, took about 15-20 minutes total from home to work.
- a 1.9 mile one, which has way less steep hills, and much calmer streets. It snakes around a bit, but it takes me 10 minutes from door to door. That's the one I use every day.
Guess which one Google Maps picked...
Thunderbird for work email (since the Lotus Notes based web version is horrendous and only used in emergencies when there is no other alternative).
Web mail for non-work, private email. More than good enough, has filters, etc. And the FaceSpace et al. stuff gets forwarded there anyway.
The students have all been moved to a GMail based email here now, but staff and faculty will never be. Legal reasons, confidential stuff, dammit... If companies do it why couldn't the university?
"One interesting inclusion is a button that switches you into RAW shooting for one frame if you are in JPEG Only or to RAW+Jpeg if you are in RAW already. It’s a brilliant idea..."
Sure, and it's old too.
My 4 year old Pentax K10D has a dedicated "RAW button" -- you can actually choose whether you want it to last for one shot only or if you want it to stay on the setting you choose. To confirm, from their manual (RAW+ means RAW -- either PEF or DNG, btw -- plus JPEG):
"If you press the RAW button, RAW+ capture and save is exited after one shot.
To continue until the RAW button is pressed again, set [One-touch
RAW+JPEG] in the [A Custom Setting] menu."
I don't know if they invented it either at Pentax, but sure it's old stuff in tech terms.
What will they be imitating next, Sv, TAv and in camera stabilization? :-)
Good change, finally.
Not that it matters much, but maybe I won't have to spend 2 or 3 minutes after next install changing the looks of the thing anymore, we'll see. At a minimum I always change the panels to be slightly transparent and the wallpaper to be something darker. This looks more like it to my taste.
The dark version of the new theme reminds me a bit of the New Wave theme (ships with Ubuntu, but it's not the default) that I use with small modifications, although the colors are a little different.
Definitely right, there.
It's conspicuously absent among people who knee-jerk based on previous "history" and don't consider things case by case, as would be at least fair to the poor sods involved, automatically assuming that everyone is incompetent if there is the least possibility that they were not chosen due to relevant qualities. Guilty until... well, forever if it's up to your "history", right? Yup, very "critical" "thinking" that... just with the wrong part of the brain.
If IEEE hadn't chosen her, they be called racist and/or sexists. When they choose her, they are called the same, with inverted signs. Can't win.
One can't win, eh?
Bunch of sexist racists in here.
I mean, how many posts more will imply that the person was only chosen because of gender and race and looks? Could it have been the case? Of course. But the instant jump here to say that by you guys, the automatic "oh, just a token" response, says more about the posters than it could ever say about the lady in question (whom and whose qualities I don't know, by the way).
Very sad, but so is the world.
After the end of the communist training regime, and the last generations of resulting athletes getting older, who's surprised by this fall? Where is Cuba's volleyball or boxing power now? Have been wanning since the 90s, after the flow of Moscow money ceased since the Ruskies had bigger problems of their own to tackle. Same with most other soviet supported countries. Glaring exception is obviously China, but they are actually a dictatorial capitalist state for any practical purposes anyway.
I wonder how long the Russians will keep making these, specially the black ones...
Well, sort of. Much better that they are doing this than if they were not, of course.
But the slap on the wrist, don't do it again, bad boy!, "punishment" is quite ridiculous, I think. Oh, so the kids are now over 16, so that's fine that they had been working there for years to increase Apple's profit. Something does not compute morally in this whole story.
It would be even better if Apple (and others) were not having their products made in countries that allow that type of situation -- and the law means little. But then Apple wouldn't be able to compete and profit, so all be damned.
It seems like a great starter camera indeed. I'm waiting for the price of the K7 to drop though. :-)
It would have been nice if the picture for demonstrating the "miniature" mode was more adequate for the effect -- which did not show at all in the picture included.
If I understand correctly, miniature mode is an automatic fake tilt-shift baked in the camera. I wonder whether it works well here. I do fake tilt-shift in the GIMP with photos from my K10D, and it's cool. If you choose the right picture. Pictures taken from a high view point (but not directly overhead) are the best for this. Then, some manual selections followed by some well applied blur, plus an over-saturation of colors, and it looks like you are viewing a picture of a miniature model.
Depends on the flexibility of the system and what people are willing to do. Some amateurish ideas follow. :-)
An easy, if not so pretty, solution would be to append .xxx to the current existing addresses, in a grandfathering system, so to speak. So, in the examples you gave, those sites would become hotsex.com.xxx and hotsex.net.xxx, but any newly registered site would not need (or be allowed?) to do that. The old addresses could redirect to the new .xxx appended ones for a while, say. After a certain period (a couple years? more?), the old addresses would stop working definitively.
People *already* don't follow the underlying logic anyway, it seems to me; why is El Reg's URL ended in .co.uk, while if the site was American it would be .com only? Brazilian sites are .com.br and so forth.
On the other hand, this could create new opportunities for scammers, typosquatters, people like that. But pornland is hardly known for being a safe corner of the interwebs to begin with, so I don't know how much worse it could get...
"In fact, the market for open source software is the only truly free market I have ever seen"
Definitely the closest, yes. And isn't it ironic that FOSS is exactly the one that gets labeled as "socialist", "communist", and stuff like that? Quite telling of what type of "free market" the capitalists really want...
"that this was an expensive, exclusive college, where people go to study"
I'm from São Paulo, and know that university quite well -- have had undergrad students from there attending our winter courses when I was still in grad school, and have a friend who works there at their TV station.
It's NOT exclusive, and not that expensive either. Most students in private universities in Brazil are from lower middle class or lower in socio-economical status -- because they often could not pay for good elementary and high school, they are not well prepared enough to get into public universities. Uniban is mostly a diploma mill (in spite of the good intentions of many faculty), there's a ton of units all over the place, and as long as you pay your monthly fees, you're fine. As the semi-joke goes for that type of school, "if you lose you ID card in the sidewalk in front of their door, you're admitted" (BTW, yes, we've always had mandatory national ID cards, boo hoo). Such establishments are also nicknamed "uni-esquina" ("uni-corner", because there's one in every street corner). They try to hire the cheapest professors possible -- i.e., people without any graduate school or teaching experience. Therefore government had to pass a law forcing "universities" to hire a minimum proportion of instructors with masters or PhD degrees. And even then they find ways around that too.
Now, as to whether she was behaving in the way you describe, I can't comment on that. I wasn't there, or haven't talked directly to anyone who was. But I haven't seen, in any of the Brazilian news I read on this, anyone describing things happening like that. So who knows. Either way, even if she DID do what you've been told, that wouldn't justify the near lynching, I believe.
In Brazil, the "exclusive" universities where "people go to study" (well, some of them at least) are the public ones -- where tuition is completely free.
Funny (or not), but that word is used in Brazil for regular office tape -- it probably used to be a brand name at some point in the distant past (the 80s, maybe?), and became a common noun. Now to hear it was the name of something entirely different in other countries makes me chuckle retroactively at the types of people I've heard, in my yuff days, saying "pass the durex"...
Oh, boy...
"So, if I take a sceptical view (like scientists are supposed to) about AGW, I'm just another species of creationist?"
Obviously not, but your poor reading skills and/or naivety do not bode well... But at least you can write pretty Latin words.
First of all, I never said whether I agreed with the theory in question! You guys should hold your knees from jerking so hard. For the record, I do not have any opinion on that theory mentioned, because I have not properly studied it nor the field of work required to understand it -- differently from certain people, I am not presumptuous enough to think that I am qualified to judge other people's scientific work, completely unrelated to mine, based on the likes of El Reg or Scientific American articles, say.
Now, to the REAL point I was trying to make up there: the problem I see is the tactics used there, which you obviously did not get from my post. The "it's just a theory" line is a perfect and glaring example.
Only someone who knows nothing about science (or is dishonestly trying to spread FUD, confusion, whatever) uses it. Hence the reference to creationists, who love to use that all the time.
Because using the "it's just a theory" line (which is technically correct, but then say it for EVERYTHING) is intended to make it sound to the layperson that the idea in discussion is a hunch or a guess. "Evolution? That's just a theory, right? Not anything real, don't worry." NOW, if the theory is right or wrong, that is a different story. But saying "it just a theory" is dishonest and calculated to confuse. You might say it's an unsubstantiated or weak theory, for example. Or you might say it's not even a theory at all, but maybe just barely a hypothesis. Or not even that. Not even wrong, say. But I fear most people here wouldn't be able to tell the difference between theory and hypothesis, because they are too busy doubting everything (or at least everything they don't like) even if they don't know the basics of the fields they are doubting. Skepticism is very good, if used well and not just as a stupid "doubt everything" idea, as some seem to imply. I don't have the time to read everything, society is about delegating tasks. I already have more material than I can find time to read in my narrow scientific field (and I'm wasting time here, ha!). So I unfortunately won't be able to become an expert on everything under the Sun. Tough life, but I can live with that.
BTW, to remind you of the main point of my most: besides the "just a theory" problem, you might have noticed my mentioning of the "cowboy x injuns" tone of the books and articles, and the presupposition that one side is completely honest, competent, selfless and the other is a complete bunch of crooks who don't know anything only trying to profit from whatever they are trying to do. Obviously such tactics are employed by all sides in the debate. Just pointing out that no one seems to care about that. While this other interesting tactic does NOT make the favored side wrong (or right, for that matter), it is very suspicious of the motivations of the book/article/interview authors when such simplistic maniqueism is so strongly displayed.
Regardless of whether anthropogenic change is occurring, this is a very interesting line (title) for this article to contain. Ironic, I'd say.
So, your hero is clearly right and free of bias, and does not decide what he wants and then fudges data and/or analysis to get the desired result. Right? Of course not -- he must be the good guy, because you agree with his conclusions. Funny thing, but I only see the questioning of one side's motives here, all the time. It's the maverick fighters for Truth versus the evil scientists of the consensus, in a world wide conspiracy to... whatever it is. You know, the very nice, selfless, and above all completely honest guys fighting the corrupt system -- or so you make it sound like. Maniquean, simpleton, good only for bad literature (yes, I read Crichton's "State of Fear"; entertaining page turner, of course, but very bad literature if you like anything more sophisticated than, e.g., the average reality TV show).
And all that from people who don't know what "teleconnection" means. I didn't either, but then again I don't go around self-righteously calling other people whose expertise I don't even begin to fathom crooks and liars and etc as you guys seem to enjoy doing. Typical American anti-intellectualism just for the sake of it -- and it seems it's being aped by some Brits, sadly.
"but it is just a theory"
Great, someone has been hanging out with the creationists and IDiots, and learning from their ignoramus tactics. Just a theory, like relativity and quantum mechanics, you mean?
Well, sure Flash sucks, specially on >6 or 7 year old computers like mine. But there are Flash apps and Flash apps. Some run without a hitch and smoothly even on my netbook. Others...
An important part of the problem is the designers making the damn animations. Some make the thing to be as visually annoying as possible, but that's a different discussion. The problem is the ones that require "programming". Well, of the few graphic designers/ web people I know (3 or 4, not many, I know, but still), all usually say they can't program beyond getting someone's code off the web and trying to make it work on their own page. My girlfriend is one such designer. I hope she does not start messing with Flash...
Flash got so popular because it made it easy for people with very little (or none) coding knowledge to do complex graphical things on a webpage. Now, is it surprising that the things can be CPU intensive and behave unpredictably? How is that saying about making things foolproof only to reckon with very ingenuous fools again?
Conservatives, using illegal/immoral/questionable/disgusting (delete/add as appropriate) practices again?
Shock, horror, etc.
Not that all other political groups don't do such things now and then. Most, if not all, do. But conservatives are always the dirtiest, for some reason, at least in the three countries I know at least relatively well.
I liked Avatar, very entertaining and it did not feel like the 2:30h it actually was. To me.
But I believe Original Score (was there music in it, really?), Best Picture, and Director should not have been included in the nominations. Unless direction of mostly CGI counts, which it might. To be a "Best Picture", I'd say it has to be well balanced -- and for that, it would need to have a plot that is at least decent, which Avatar did not have. Simplistic, maniquean, heavy on Rousseau's noble savage BS, and exaggerates on the tree hugging references every 5 minutes.
Er... There is one little detail that you seem to have missed: you can turn and wiggle the Wii Wheel as much and as fast as you want, but you view of the game will be unaffected. You know, it's on the TV screen, static. Or so I understand.
How good will it be to look at a fast moving screen while playing? I don't know, since I haven't played any games on a device like that (Touch, iPhone, etc.), but I don't feel attracted to the concept of bad visual feedback. Will have to wait and see.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
