Posts by xperroni 557 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010
Indeed, while we were not victims of any alien anal probing, Mrs D explicitly expressed a wish that something vaguely similar but eye-wateringly more vigorous could be inflicted upon Microsoft.
Because it wouldn't be an Alistair piece if it didn't refer to other people's buttocks.
Kinda obsessed with the stuff aren't we?
> Why do you insist on trying to put in in a much wider context? And why so anti the idea?
From the article:
"Shams 1 is a strategic investment in our country's economic, social and environmental prosperity," said His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE and ruler of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.
"The domestic production of renewable energy extends the life of our country's valuable hydrocarbon resources and supports the growth of a promising new industry. The inauguration of Shams 1 is a major milestone in our country's economic diversification and a step toward long-term energy security."
So who put the idea in a wider context wasn't me, but its owners, who reckon Shams is the way towards a post-hydrocarbon, renewable-energy future. Only it isn't; it's just a gas power station that takes advantage of the fact it's located in a very sunlit place, though at a sizable material and estate cost. The idea might have its merits, but even if it does, it's a stopgap solution at best; it's certainly not "the future".
> Of course it can work as a concept without gas. They just have their reasons for using gas in their
> hybrid design... because it's pretty much free.
So the station is meant to demonstrate the viability of solar power, but the makers decided to give it an extra push with gas just because they had some lying around doing nothing?
Oh, now it makes perfect sense!
And surely these conditions (lots of sun year-round and free gas) are found the world over, so really this design is bound to see widespread deployment.
Definitely a victory for solar!
So they take up a huge estate and fill it with tons of kit in one of the hottest places on Earth – and still the "solar" station can't work without a little push from burning fossil fuel?
Seriously, why bother with all those mirrors at all? Just commission a nuclear station and call it a day.
Yup, it's the windows licensing fun all over again...
The best part about it all is how it makes the experience significantly poorer to honest users who paid for the software. Pirates need not bother with any of this.
I don't know how a "good" software sales model should look like, but sure as Hell it shouldn't make life more miserable to honest buyers than it does to thieves.
Normal-sized USB plugs always have a USB logo on the upper side, period. There is no "except" to this – at least in 10-odd years using the things, I've never found a cable that didn't comply. Side-tilted sockets are a little bit more of a challenge, yes, but in any given device they'll all be tilted to the same side – you figure one, you figure all.
Really, whenever I hear people complaining about USB plugs, I don't know if I'm just too sharp, or it's them who are too stupid. Actually, I do know – I'm not that sharp really.
Of course Google has had a web hosting service for some time now. It's called Google Sites, and it's kinda nice actually; I use it to host files for my blogs and the odd web page.
Since nobody ever talks about it I suspected it would be sent to the gallows someday; could this be it?
You know what I like best about those times? Patronizing adverts. Really, it seems companies never missed a chance to paint their customers retarded.
To me the saddest thing is that Gnome, once properly plugged-in, is actually quite a likable desktop; it just so happens that it's released in quite a screwed up form. There have been movements to rectify this (Fedora 17 for example brought back "Power Off" as a plain menu item, no more Alt-Click required), but unfortunately it may be too little, too late.
That makes [RISC processors] (a) cheap (b) low power (c) easily testable and (d) easily integrated.
Also, the simpler instruction set lends itself well to architecture-level optimizations (e.g. pipelines). That's why Intel went to the trouble of making their chips RISC-like on the inside even though they still show a CISC facade to the world outside.
I live in Brazil, and we have a running joke here where someone starts reading a news item that is choke full of omissions, completely misrepresents the subject, and barely even gets grammar right – then someone else says "damn, you're doing it again... You're reading local press articles!"
Such is the state of Brazil's national press.
So I think this is actually great for Google News: their feed just got rid of that much useless junk.
Nokia's networks division and feature phones did well. (...) The bright spot was strong sales of its Asha phones: feature phone sales grew by 3 per cent, and sales into Asia-Pacific continued to climb.
So it's in-house technology that is saving the day, while Windows phones continue to flounder?
Why, who'd have thought!
Ironic that Foxconn hails from Taiwan – you know, that place where the Chinese nationalists entrenched themselves after they lost the civil war to the communists and were drove off the mainland? Yet their companies deploy factories across the Popular Republic and harass its workers like they own the country. Meanwhile the communist government seems blissfully oblivious to such abuses, using its time and resources to bicker with Japan about a couple rocks half-lost in the middle of the sea.
Really, some worker's paradise you got over there...
My son, you seem to ignore the ways of the World.
When AMERICA asks you to cough up whatever information you have, they're doing it only in the interest of preserving Freedom ©! And you can be just as sure they won't misuse it in any way, because they said so!
In contrast, when those godless COMMUNISTS so much as ask you the time of the day, you can be certain they're plotting nothing short of destroying you, defiling your woman and corrupting your children!
So don't ever be fooled again, for there's not only good and bad corporations, but also good and bad government probes. They're easy to tell apart: those that hail from THE FREE WORLD are the good ones, and the others are the bad.
One of the reasons they're not handling human transport duty to SpaceX right away is because the Merlin / Dragon is a new design in its early revisions, therefore prone to little mishaps like this one. As launches pile up, enough data will be accumulated to iron such glitches.
Microsoft's bot also accused various innocent websites of pirating copies of Office, Xbox 360 and Visual Studio
Wait, pirate copies of Xbox 360?
I thought that was a games console! Is pirating hardware really that easy already?
Or do MS bots just sprinkle product names liberally over message templates before firing DMCA take-down requests at random?
Just askin'.
If my workplace is any guide, everyone.
Seriously, every single time someone gets hold of a laser pointer, the first thing they do is frantically wave that thing about everyone else's desk and/or face. It's even as though lasers emit some kind of radiation that impairs human cognition, turning otherwise sensible people into flashlight-wielding morons.
You don't even know it's not Nokia making the own-brand phone.
Yes, you're right.
And if Nokia has sunk so deep that manufacturing hardware to brands other than its own looks like a good idea, then it's as good as dead.
Which kind of proves my point.
Problem is, many in the press have already decided Microsoft's mobile offerings will fail, and don't look forward to changing their opinions regardless of the facts – not when talking up disaster is this much fun.
It's not that I think they're wrong – Windows 8 could crash, burn and leave a hole in the ground for all that I care – but even if Windows 8 really is good, it won't be easy to clean up all the bad rep Microsoft got since they canned Windows Mobile 6.5.
So good luck to Redmond and their victims partners, they'll be sure to need it.
there have been persistent rumors that Redmond might have its own handset on display
And so the world goes on its natural way, as Microsoft gets ready to screw yet another "partner" who made the fatal mistake of tying its fortunes to Redmond's goodwill.
Really, who'd think this could end any other way?
RIP Nokia, should have found your balls and gone it alone (or adopted Android) rather than outsourcing your future to MS.
Am I alone in thinking the unity desktop looks aweful with or without Amazon.
Same thing here. Ever since they instated Unity I have considered giving Ubuntu another chance, but in the end I can't stand the fluffiness of the UI – to say nothing of the increasingly dumb(ifying) feature decisions.
Looks like I'll settle down with Fedora for a long time...
How can you be a traitor to a country to which you owe no allegiance?
What, don't you know?
All of us who live in the Free World © owe the US a never-ending debt of gratitude for keeping the Evil Empire and its International Communist Conspiracy at bay. The fact it's been more than 20 years since anyone could claim any reason to believe such conspiracy even existed is no excuse.
Therefore, anyone interfering in US matters is an enemy and traitor not only of America, but of Democracy & Freedom ®, and rightfully deserves to be shot, hanged and burned at the closest available stake.
We've always been at war with Eastasia!
Then...there is also the possibility that Linux has never made it big for desktop use, simply because the majority of computers users just really don't care about it.
As early as 2002 I read an article that claimed Linux would never get big on the desktop. The author argued that, just as Microsoft never tried to get mainframe admins to switch to Windows, but rather took advantage of a paradigm shift (from dumb terminals to desktop workstations) to rise to prominence, so would Linux dominate the next platform, whatever it turned out to be.
The "next platform" turned out to be a mix of technologies: handsets and tablets on the user-facing side, cloud-y servers on the backend, and the web sitting somewhere in between. And to a degree, Linux does thrive on it, though the dreams of unquestioned dominance have obviously been exaggerated.
So perhaps arguing "who lost the desktop" is missing the point, and we should rather be asking "how to win the mobile client"?
I really have no idea what the problem is here.
I have been using Linux since 2001. It works. Fedora runs just fine on my Japanese Panasonic notebook, Gnome is a pleasure to use, and I have never got any problem installing or using the programs I want. And I'm no kernel Guru – I just run the GUI package manager and click "install", couldn't bother less with what goes behind the scenes. Compare this to my (2005-2008) experience with Mac OS X and Fink / Mac ports of Linux apps, where I could count myself lucky if things were just half-broken.
It all makes me wonder what is De Icaza really so butthurt about...
Ironic that Java was originally intended to be a browser thing that was going to be the secure multi platform alternative to the evil that was (and still is) activeX.
That's something that baffles me too. Java the language's memory model is pretty anal: you cannot cast objects as anything other than their own classes and super-classes (in order to, say, access an arbitrary object as a byte array), nor can you access object fields via pointer offsets or otherwise perform any feats of pointer arithmetic. Hell, in principle you don't even know your pointers – there is no necessary relationship between the "object references" a Java program works with and the actual memory layout, other than a one-to-one relation between references and objects.
You would easily have me believe that such a strict memory model would be simple to implement securely – yet that clearly isn't the case. How can this be? Is it just sloppy programming? Or are there inherent challenges to securely implement a virtual machine architecture such as Java's?
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