Posts by MD Rackham

Or got promoted into top management.

Re: Carshare

No passenger needed in California for all electric vehicles; those get a sticker that authorizes them to use the carpool/carshare/diamond/HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lane.

As for those asking why the Tesla didn't swerve: he was on the 405--the HOV lane may have been clear enough to allow 65 MPH driving, but chances are the adjacent lanes were bumper-to-bumper stopped. "Rush hour" on that stretch of the 405 lasts 24 hours.

Re: Is anything ever obsolete?

SECAM - System Entirely Contrary to the American Method

Re: Fly me to the Moon

Had much more to do with the cost of the Vietnam war than the "Great Society" programs.

Nixon was the one that killed Apollo, killed the Mars follow-on, and settled on the flawed and under-funded STS development.

He also cut back many of the Great Society program while escalating the Vietnam war.

So it was politics, but as practiced by Nixon and his "southern strategy" (i.e., promoting racism).

Those are the features that the iPhone is missing?

You have a strange set of user requirements.

Re: As any good medical professional will tell you

We called them WORN drives: Write Once, Read Never.

Re: Not surprised...

This is a terrible new trend!

And what's with the integrated floating-point unit these days? I remember when an FPU was delivered in its own separate rack, as dog intended (FPP-12)!

It also had more to do with deregulation than regulation.

Re: 2017 and people copying games and planting malware inside hacked versions.

"We have never had an undetected error."

The headline has been altered from when it first went up.

It was originally "a metre away" which is 3x the 30 cm the article discusses. The current headline of "a few inches" is better. Still misleading, but not something I would have commented on.

Complicated by the fact that those juicy government contracts that Google has contractually obligates them to keep such data. And to make it available to auditors.

I (briefly) consulted for a company that thought those federal contract details were just "boilerplate" and could be ignored. When the feds were done with the audits and started assessing penalties and yanking contracts, the company was shut down as it was suddenly bankrupt. Oops.

(Of course the CEO was a libertarian asshole (but I repeat myself) who didn't think any rules should apply to him.)

Sure, like a black hole.

Or Brexit. Or President Trump.

(Please, just bring on the Earth-devouring black hole rather than more of that.)

Re: Comey was required by Congress to inform Congress

There was no "email fiasco" except in the minds of low-information voters.

She handled email the same way as her predecessors. Sorry if you fell for the Republican con.

Really, really sorry if you fell for the Bernie con (which Clinton diplomatically didn't mention as another reason for her loss).

Re: Mummy has a few "connections" and has worked them to death..

The problem is not that Mummy cares enough to make the effort, but rather that her "connections" could actually make a difference.

Justice should be blind to the presence of connections, or even the presence of a doting mother.

It may not be the way the world actually works, but don't expect sympathy from me when it sometimes does.

Re: Why won't Apple backport security?

You might want to check for updates before complaining too loudly.

"Security Update 2017-001 10.11.6" is available to fix the cert bugs on 10.11 via Software Update.

Re: Huh?

The article points out that advertising makes up most of Google's revenue, so if this boycott starts to affect ad revenue it will show up quite clearly in their bottom line revenue and profits.

Reduced revenue and profits tends to negatively affect share price. I'd say both count as "market forces."

Re: But,

Better yet, buy the space to advertise Windows 7.

Re: Correction:

I don't understand what makes you "cringe."

Is it your own ignorance at not being able to read those languages? Is it the thought of "those people" being able to vote? Is it the color of their skin? Is it typical American white male insecurity? Is it shame at the size of your "hands?"

Re: Stopped using

I think it's sort of telling that Mossberg thinks that iPad apps cover the totality of what is done on computers. There is more to life than word processing/spreadsheets/games, although most "pundits" don't know that.

(Not to mention that ARM really isn't up to the task of those non-word processing/spreadsheets/games uses.)

Re: "I just open the casing once a week to wipe the dust off from the phone."

We all do. Are you saying you don't?

Next I suppose you'll tell us you skip the monthly recalibration of your car's Johnson bar.

Re: Quite an achievement!

I just received my W-2 as a PDF. It's 45K in size.

For 250 employees that's 11 MB. Even less if it was a single PDF so all the PostScript header stuff wasn't repeated 250 times.

A bit large for an email attachment, but if the District Superintendent asks, then you do whatever it takes!

Re: How can this be patented?

Kiki approves of this idea.

Re: Just because sales have tanked

A salesman are you?

"Blame the product" is the #1 excuse salespeople trot out when confronted about their own poor performance. (Occasionally it's true, but most often not.)

Re: Super Cali ...

It died of old age.

(It was increasingly tired over the last few years.)

Re: Oh, not again....

If we went "with the vote of the people" we'd be discussing President-elect Hillary Clinton.

Re: Red light

On laptops that have an LED indicator to show that the camera is on, clever people (pronounced "bastərds") have managed to reprogram the microcontroller to disable the indicator function. So an indicator isn't as useful as one might assume.

Re: Uh oh!

Start counting down. Between 6-9 months from now the main processor board will fail in some fashion, ranging from bogus indicators to complete (literal!) melt-down of your freezer contents.

The cost of replacing the board is greater than the cost of the fridge. Samsung will not honor any warranty on it; there's always some way that it's Not Their Fault.

This is from a sample of six Samsung refrigerators from myself and friends. All six have had processor board failures. All six have been replaced by units from more reliable manufacturers.

(The ice maker usually fails around four months in.)

Re: MEH x 10

Those other laptops that attract more flies are undoubtedly more "specked".

The fact you consider the Mac Pro (Late-2013)™ to be "dildo shaped" suggests that you may have some misconceptions about how to use computers.

I would seriously suggest further investigation before attempting to use an older "cheese grater" MacPro.

Re: Journey time

If anyone actually looked at the Musk presentation data, they'd see that the 80-day transit time is the "best case" scenario with one particular Earth-Mars alignment. Worst case was 150 days, or nearly twice as long.

And all of that was in support of determining thrust and fuel requirements for the desired payload mass to Mars, which determines the size of the booster, not for the purposes of scheduling how long you need to board your cat for.

While I'm at it, he also didn't promise 100 passengers to Mars in 2022. The 2022 date is for a completely different mission to Mars (Red Dragon), and he specifically stated in the Q&A that the first test flights of his "spaceship" would have many fewer than 100 people on-board. I would expect that the first flight(s) would have 0 humans on board.

Re: Our Windows windows will be resizable, soooon, vows Microsoft

Obligatory pedant comment pointing out that neither Smalltalk on the Alto nor Star Office featured overlapping windows. They were both tiled systems.

But the Apple visitors to PARC thought they'd seen overlapping windows so that's what they implemented, and did a rather clever job of it.

(Around the same time the AT&T Blit did have overlapping windows, but I've never heard any claim that anyone from Apple saw a Blit. And I no longer recall the exact timing of who released first. Needless to say the Blit didn't go very far.)

Re: Remember an IPv6 numer? And not use DNS?

And when presented with one of those misconfigured DNS installations, you never have to look at, type in, or mentally compare an IP address?

This reminds me of calling tech support because your computer won't boot, and you're told to fill out a trouble ticket on their website. The high-level solution is best until it isn't there.

Human-readability of addresses isn't the most important issue (by a long shot), but it sure is annoying.

Re: He is the 506th person to die in a police shooting this year in the Land of the FreeTM

What difference does it make where he was headed or what he does in his spare time? He could have been headed to the local fluffy-kitten sacrifice cult annual BBQ and he still wouldn't deserve to get shot for explicitly following a cops orders.

Being a cop is not terribly dangerous compared to other jobs. Being a crab fisherman is considerably more dangerous, but we don't use that as an excuse to allow crabbers to shoot people.

Having grown up around cops I can say quite confidently that most cops are racist assholes who are incredibly insecure anytime they are not 100% in control. There are some good cops out there, but they've been bullied into just going along with the rest.

Re: RUD

I'm sure the EUTELSAT folks will be surprised that SpaceX is "taxpayer funded", considering that they paid $60 million+ for the launch of their satellites.

Or does receiving government contracts for one thing mean that everything else you do is "taxpayer funded"?

Re: Next-gen?

Since case-insensitive is the default setting for HFS+, what is it that you think makes it "not work (properly)"? Locale handling? Honest question.

Yes, there are issues with HFS+, mostly just showing its age. Not sure anyone is going to argue with you there. But whatever follows it is sort of by definition the "next-gen," at least for Apple.

ZFS appeared to get canceled by Apple's legal department, not because of technical issues.

Re: This is why we cant have nice things

But there is no evidence in this article that Broadcom is abusing patents via submarining or patenting the obvious. These 10 patents are well known and widely licensed and, as the article noted, were previously licensed by Sony.

It's possible that it's an oversight on Sony's part, but if Broadcom has really contacted them then an oversight could have been quickly remedied. More likely Sony is using their lawyers to try to cut a better licensing deal as part of a settlement. ("Well, you could continue this expensive patent litigation for a few more years, or we could just license the patents for 10% of what we were previously paying. Your choice.")