Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre

No

There are other formats that do these things perfectly well and arguably more securely. pdf was never meant to be an interactive format, Adobe just keeps bolting badly thought-out features on it in their effort to one-up HTML. That's why it's so dodgy. Also, whoever finds that a "3D" pdf is more explanatory of the nature of a 3D object than a couple of good technical drawings needs an IQ check. As long as the support remains 2D, "3D" renderings are just for the fun and have no technical value.

As for your bird book and stuff, you sound like a 1990 teen who just discovered HTML. Sure its great (although not "endlesss" great: the delivery gadget is usually a big limitation) but with great power comes great... on second thought fuck that, we're taking about Adobe after all.

An ornithology book with actual chirping in it sounds like a TERRIBLE idea (with emphasis on terrible). Bird songs vary from territory to territory, they also vary with time (both periodically and linearly). Not to mention inter-individual variations. On top of that, manking came up with a shitload of means to overcome the limitations of "indirect" media to describe objects and sounds (think of it as regular expressions for the real life) which means that any birdsong you include in your book will be hugely less usefull than a standardized, written, boring, description of the same. Same for floras actually. Did you ever wonder why all the good works on plants an animals feature drawings and written descriptions, not actual photographs and sounds? That's because the latters can only show one particular example while the formers are able to capture the essence of the whole species.

As for interactivity, it's an interesting debate (switching back to entertainment here). Which is more interactive, written words that let you build your own representation, or a pre-made, same-for-everyone rendition? I let you decide: I have no pre-made answer to this one (see what I just did?).

What's in a name?

Yeah, I can't understand why they didn't go with Larry'sLeisureSuite or something.

Oh wait.

You sound confused

Looks like someone is confusing "majority vote" with "rabid lobbying and scaremongering by a small minority". But I guess you could say that this is indeed what "separates America from other countries".

Keep networks neutral?

Well, there are pros and there are cons. But what's the link between network neutrality issues and technical infrastructure quirks, pray tell?

Morón airfield, pilot jake requesting permission to land

(Sorry for the somewhat offensive title, I've been waiting for this one since I read about the Morón airfield on El Reg!)

Anyway, you do realize how much that traffic must annoy the hosting provider -if not the ISP-, right?

What he did was akin to putting up a big "I'm a vacation, don't bother stealing my fancy furniture, jewellery, home cinema system and 3 macbook pros since It won't bother me at all" sign on his house. If you do that and get robbed, your insurance company will probably charge you through the nose. Same here. Except that it¯not even HIS house, nor his furniture.

PR departments. Answering journalist is what they do.

>If every request to a company's PR department was responded to then the company would fairly soon be doing nothing else.

The PR department's job is to answer requests, ESPECIALLY from journalists. Well, not in Apple's case obviously. But in every other company in the world that's what they do. Now if the Big Man Himself in could take the time to answer 3 times from His Shiny iPhone of Power, maybe some lowly PR drone could have spent 3 minutes gathering some material and let the girl dig through it. Mind you, more like 10 seconds as they probably already have canned answers for most cases, because that's the very first thing a PR department would do when coming in existence: prepare canned answers. Even before they get an internet connection.

Are you kidding?

Argentina would like to disagree with that one. And France too, to a lesser extent.

Linux exclusively

>Unless you have one [A780], it is unlikely you are running Linux _exclusively_.

And what do you reckon Android is?

Source

Clearly the source is BP, in an attempt to deflect a bit of the heat towards other energy sector. "Hey we had a leak alright, but everyone else does, too. Lookitdat. Oil leak, information leak, same-diff".

The Burka is a social symbol

Not a religious one.

Find me somewhere in sacred text where it is even mentioned. Go ahead.

So yeah it's frown upon in France (not banned, just not accepted in schools). But so is stoning adulterous women to death. Is that a bad thing? Freedom of religion being suppressed?

We DEMAND our stonings! Or not?

Vote with my money?

Well I used to vote for AMD with my money (for the last 10 years or so), never disappointed, always got more grunt for my bucks with them than with Intel. But I'm stepping away from the x86 architecture these days, so although I still don't waste my money on Intel crap I cannot really endorse AMD anymore... they DO try and provide other types of chips, but they are just not very good at it. Yet?

Plus I hold sort of a grudge against ATI, so it doesn't help that AMD bought them... and didn't fix the mess...

Erm, as a matter of fact...

... now that you mention it the email-firing habits of Stevie J. do share a few characteritics with the 30 mm garden variety cannon.

But you are right, I might have loosed control over my letter-repetition disability in this case. Is it to late too say its the spell-checker's fault? I mean these things are not very reliable. You could even say that their intentionnally bobby-trapped. Damn, I guess its to late for that excuse now, I should of though of it earlier. Etc etc...

What's your point exactly?

«From the Smithsonian website, "The Smithsonian Institution, the world's largest museum complex". Note "complex".»

And it is important because?

«Also, you must have been not paying attention whilst at the Smithsonian. An article published in 2007.»

Ah, I think you misread the paper as the sign in the museum clearly states that the statues are representations of the elders and look towards the land to protect their people and that they were the main actors of huge summer festivities in which the natives filled the eyes with corals and flowers to increase fertility. Plus some other stuff. From memory.

Or, oh wait, maybe, just maybe, the person writing the article was not the same as the person writing the sign in the actual museum? Maybe the largest museum (or "museum complex" if you like) in the world employs more than one single person after all?

«You'll be pleased to know that Europeans and Asians make the list.»

Well of course, I don't know why they wouldn't. If you re-read my post I think you'll find that I was singling out the US not for their mistakes but for their tendency to not read scientific reports from anywhere else in the world, leading to a periodic re-inventing of the wheel.

Well, I souldn't tell you this but...

Well Roger me senseless with a sockful of 16 Mo DIMMs if you're not right.

However I was referring to the kill -9 method as a pre-emptive solution, not as a fix. Fixes are for lusers. Appart from the obvious "kill -9 -1" as root followed by some explanation related to *shuffle* *shuffle* Transciently-Induced Heat Sink Low-Limit Uninteruptible Breaker issues (T.I.H.S.L.L.U.B issues. for short and for the slow-minded), everyone knows that the real problem is front-end programs such as word processors or slideshow-building programs which fire up subprocesses and fail to close them properly.

As you mentionned, the kill tool will do nothing if the targetted program is already dead but still locked by its parent, the parent here being (most likely) openoffice, which is written in java with all the java-related problem with garbage collection and memory freeing. So in order to kill the zombie processes you need to prevent the parent process from locking up it's dead children, which is achieved by opening all the documents you're currently working on and disabling the autosave and the version-tracking options. You'll probably also want to remove any previous versions of these files, as they might have the autosave option enabled which would block the whole process. Obviously.

The next steps are a bit tricky and must be performed in the right order or you might lose some valuable data. In order to free up the memory pointers that might have been created by the zombie processes (thus locking them up), you need to select the whole content of the documents you're working on and delete that. Then click the "save" button, and click yes in the popup box. For every document. It's a bit tedious but safety is everyone's responsibility, isn't it? BE VERY CAREFUL as if you did not disable all the autosave and version tracking options the changes will be autosaved and committed to disk instead of just freeing the unused java pointers that lock the zombie processes, and you might lose some data. We wouldn't want that to happen, would we?

It's then time to kill the zombie processes, which should not be tied to anything anymore at that point. That can be done by typing "kill -9 -1" then "enter" in a virtual console. However, during the summer this approach sometimes fails due to the cutoff triggered by the aforementioned

Transciently-Induced Heat Sink Low-Limit Uninteruptible Breaker issues. So overall it's much safer to just pull the plug (after removing the battery in the case of a laptop), to clear any memory of previous thermal events. All modern machines have power-loss recovery mechanisms anyway so it is a harmless way to ensure that these nasty heat sink issues won't propagate.