Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: Is it me?

MyffyW,

I've only ever seen the Lady Nugee thing on the Guardian - so assumed it was the left wing of the Labour party that called her that. But I don't read the Sun or the Mail, so don't know if they do it.

Re: On the phone to SWMBO

A friend of mine managed to have a sub arachnid stroke (apparently one of the worst types) at a hotel holding a conference on stroke medicine with several of the world's leading experts on sub arachnid strokes. It was a family trip, and two of her children are GPs (and were in the room with her), so she ended up getting the swiftest, most qualified medical care possible.

Re: At home

I was talking to a friend somewhere in small town USA. He was just recovering from a lightning strike at home. And what particularly annoyed him was that he'd recently spent $50 on a surge protector for his PC and all its gubbins.

Lighting had killed both PC (not just the PSU) and monitor, as well as TV and a few other things. When testing his surviving gear after the strike - one of the few things still working was this surge protector.

Well working in the sense of passing through power. Presumably surge protection was more of a hobby?

Re: Bad Timing

Tiananmen Square? Really?

It's bad enough when people start complaining becuase someone's had some fun in vague temporal proximity to a tragic event. Or even a sad one. Remember all those radio stations refusing to play happy music after Diana died? But even worse when we have to watch out for historical events.

Isn't it in appalling taste, all those people going on beach holidays in June and disrespecting the sacrifice our brave boys at Normandy? Boo!*

And what about the memory of poor emporer Julian and his army, slaughtered by the Persians in 363 AD? Going to church in this month is definitely hard on the poor sausage, who was the last pagan emporer, trying to reverse the Christianisation of his empire...

Let's just call Apple arses, for the fact that they're being arses.

*On which note, when I heard the headline this morning that Merkel, May, Macron and Trump where there - I had this vision of the perfect rememberance ceremony, where they all get off a landing craft on the beach, and Merkel is waiting for them in a foxhole, optionally equipped with ceremonial commemorative machine gun, to welcome them to the beach. It's possible I have a diseased mind...

Re: The more this goes on...

It's a bit hard to blame the beancounters. Steve Ballmer was a sales guy, and Leo Apotheker refused to listen to his CFO about the Autonomy deal, and actually tried to have her barred from the relevant board meeting to OK the transaction!

So perhaps a few more bean counters wouldn't go amiss?

The old adage is that the salesmen run the company in the good times, and the bean counters after it's all gone titsup.

Whereas what you really want is someone who understands a bit of both. Someone who realises that cutting the free coffee saves almost no beans, but really pisses off the staff - and therefore costs you way more in goodwill than it gains you in money. But someone who equally realises that spending $10 billion on a shiny company over there had better have some seriously tangible benefits - because otherwise you're just pissing your shareholders' money away on hope.

Notice how Apple have done so well recently and bought almost no companies. And what they do buy is smallish ones for their technology. Buying success looks like the easy option, but it's at least as hard as growing it internally.

Re: Will Assange end up in the U.S.?

I don't think he will now. If it had just been the charges of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion they first went for, then I think he would have gone. But now the US have added extra charges, and are going for espionage, I think it'll go through the UK courts for ages and all fall apart. And there'll be a lot of public pressure on the Home Secretary not to do it.

Re: @Jellied Eel - Curious

This is something a lot of people seem to get wrong in the timeline.

No, it's just that Assange hasn't been shy about blatantly lying about the case, and his followers online aren't willing to be critcal of him.

It was proved in one of the court cases in the UK that the Swedish prosecutors asked Assange to face a pre-charge interview (the Swedish law requires this before charges can be pressed) via his lawyer. And this was done the day he left the country for the UK. His lawyer had told him he was wanted for that interview the next morning, and then he flew to Blighty. You don't need to be all that cynical to connect these two facts. Especially as his lawyer had denied this in court, and was then forced to admit the timeline as the prosecutors obviously had the times they'd spoken to him / texted him.

NIck Kew,

I very much doubt courts work like that. They aren't supposed to consider future hassle.

I know the square root of bugger all about Swedish law, but we do know that their supreme court ruled a few years ago that it was disproportionate for the prosecutors to continue to puruse Assange, once he'd hidden out in the embassy. And so they had to drop the EAW.

I'd therefore guess that the local court was ruling on whether they had grounds to start up again - possibly with reference to that original ruling.

Re: This:-

I think you missed the most important part of that strategy.

It's throwing a tonne of someone else's cash at every possible opportunity.

A nice phrase though, I like it and think I'll steal it.

Re: Revenue rose 20 per cent

Yup. So they spent an extra $500m in order to increase turnover by $600m. Well it's a strategy I suppose.

What was it General Pyrrhus said, "one more victory like that and we'll be ruined."

Spelling and grammar aren't really a sign of the quality of the journalism. The Grauniad has been known for this for decades, even back when it was a much better paper than the Lefty Mail that it's degenerated into now.

The lack of checks is a sign of the lack of money the papers have. Which is also the reason why they've lost quality, due to having to do the same with less cash. But I suspect writer's pieces have always been full of typos and such - it's just that in the good old days ^[TM] you had the sub-editors to sort it all out. Subbies, were one of the first things to get cut.

Obviously journos now have to produce more articles per day (and updates to previous ones) in order to keep the website constantly turning over with new stuff. And that reduces the quality, by cutting the time on each piece - as well as meaning more deadlines to meet, hence more typos. But I suspect that stuff was always written at the last minute before deadline in the good old days too, because people are people...

Re: When my wife says "OK Adam"

My Grandad used to turn his hearing aid off (artillery in the war had not been kind to his ears) - and turn Des Lynham or Dickie Davies up on the telly. So when we went to visit you could hear the wrestling/athletics/racing/whatever from when you turned onto his street.

Amazingly though his antennae would always pick up offers of cups of tea, despite not turning his hearing aid on unless forced.

Re: Scream

Is this where the sarge sings the marching song

I dunno what I've been told!

Googles' Home gadget is gettin' old!

Now it's time to end-of-life!

So don't fix bugs,

It's too much strife.

<blockquoteA proper radio tuned to BBC Radio 4 would work a lot better, you never have to yell at it</blockquote>

There speaks a man who's never had to listen to John Humphries of a morning...

Re: The problem is the public

Oh they're doing lots of testing alright. On (mostly) live customers and other road users.

Oh sorry, you meant pre-release testing. Well I'm sure they do some of that as well...

Re: Coming Soon....

Don't buy the auto funeral plan. It might make a mistake and accidentally cremate you one day, when the sun interferes with its sensor data...

Re: Have we reached Peak Peake?

Are you having a fit of pique about the peak of interest in Peake? Perhaps the jealousy has left you feeling peaky? Or has peeking at the Peake peak merelely piqued your interest in picking apart the piquant public profession of Peake-mania?

Re: Manchester

If you think that capsule looks small, have a look at one of the Mercury capsules sometime. Though I don't know if any made it this side of the Atlantic. They're not just small, but ludicrously small.

I saw one at Kennedy Space Centre. Along with the Saturn V they've got. Which is ludicrously big.

Re: Wrong number of legs

Scallops are lovely. Just lighty fried, and perhaps served on a disk of black pudding or haggis. With a nice side salad and some buttery new potatoes. Yum. Or the little ones go well in a fish pie.