Posts by DropBear 4735 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
You have no idea how often I search for some means to prevent a page to open ANYTHING* that isn't a link leading to another page, in the same tab. So far? Zero success.
* Completely disabling javascript doesn't count - not a single one of the relevant sites would work without JS (as previously noted, 'href' links are well and truly dead - these days most links are created _after_ you click somewhere...)
Why not? Frankly, the Martin Jetpack looks kinda real, even if you still can't buy one - it does seem to be an actual flying thing. Not the most tuxedo-compatible gadget, I give you that though...
Not at all if it immediately chirps up to a rescue satellite. I thought that sort of thing was standard practice with EPIRBs and such anyway. They'd just need to carry one suitably mounted to release on a wet crash. The only difference is you'd be interested in the FIRST received position, not the latest...
AFAIK, metal detectors typically work using electromagnetic fields, which have the inconvenient property of not working underwater much at all. And stuff like sonar et. al. that do work might not be all that great at discerning metal from anything else down there. So no, I don't think there's any straightforward way other than trying to detect a wreckage-shaped bump on the ocean floor, and that might take essentially forever (have you got any idea how hard it is to lower and drag a giant comb down there?!?)...
"Sadly Mr Zak's musical tastes aren't detailed, but we can bet there are some stinkers in there."
I must admit ad hominems against the subject of an article apparently not supported by any evidence in the article itself (particularly against someone who's sole "offence" is not being a pushover) is a new low.
A balmy 3-4Gs...? What's that compared to the 40Gs Barlennan and the other Mesklinites thrive in...? Interestingly, also around a Red Dwarf btw...
I'd appreciate if you'd stop trying to speak in my stead. Yes, I do hate adverts. ALL ADVERTS. Where I plan to get the "content" I'm interested in when poor "content creators" have all starved due to lack of "ad revenue" is not your problem. FYI, there are other ways to support the ones I really care about...
When all else - absolutely all else - fails and literally nothing else but Windows Proper would work, one might want to give ReactOS a try. Yes, it's still all over the place and I really wouldn't try to use it as a main OS, but various bits and pieces kinda started to run on it lately, and it's not like you have much to lose at that point by trying...
Actually, yes, that one could be infected with malware strictly by downloading a bunch of compressed but otherwise inert data* to be interpreted as sound or pictures is indeed very much news to me. I DON'T mean clicking on the "use our shiny automatic 'downloader' instead!" button roughly four times as large as the actual link, mind you. Nor downloading something called BlockbusterActionMovie.mp4.rar.docx.bat.exe and just double-clicking it blindly as a bat either. Nor browsing a malicious download page with a browser full of holes and enabled scripting. Just the media file itself - how exactly does that "infect" anyone, again...?
* Yes, one could possibly find and exploit some weakness in the splitter / decompressor coercing it into executing embedded code if one really is crafty enough; so tell me, which one are you targeting with surgical precision - quartz.dll? FFmpeg? Haali? LAV? Any one of the myriad hard-coded things built into stuff like KMPlayer or GOM? Yeah, you know what - I seriously doubt this is actually being done by anyone, anywhere: the 'downloader' route is far easier...
I must admit a device that is essentially a glorified microscope optics attachment for a smartphone is not exactly a new idea and has not been for the better part of a decade probably. I have a disruptive idea of my own though: mounting said smartphone into a sort of cheap goggle-like frame for your face to re-create a view-master-like 3D experience! This thing will rock and disrupt so hard!
The best argument against buying a car with an 80-mile range is the experience of having owned a car that can go a thousand miles on a single tank (not that I'm the target market anyway, not by a long shot...). Yes, almost all of my trips would fit comfortably within that range (I rarely get out of the city), but "almost all" is fundamentally different from "all", and there's nothing else feasible around for the exceptions, so this could never work for me. Even if I could afford it, which I absolutely don't.
To be fair, Duck Duck Go isn't exactly making it easy for me to love them; I did set them as default search on a new browser install but there were so many instances where it could literally not find more than 3-4 hits (where direct Google was still churning out lots of something) that I simply had to abandon them on purely pragmatic grounds.
Now I do realize one can argue about exactly how relevant the results returned by Google were, but that's neither here nor there - it applies equally to ANY set of results returned by ANY engine: much of it is dreck so it's only of any use if I'm reasonably good at knowing which results are the promising ones to investigate. But to make that work I first need a list of results to select from, and Duck Duck Go was failing me repeatedly. Now I do realise your experience might be drastically different, but that's what happened to me...
"it was more about how I had built up (like every teenage boy does) ideas and what she would look like without all the clothes on, and the reality didn't match to the dream."
Kinda like how with every single couple that there ever was or will be the reality of what a person is really like is guaranteed not to match at all the other party's early ideas (nor later ideas for that matter, but those will probably be a good deal closer to reality)...?
Wait, your bus company has a WEBSITE? Luxury (yeah, I wish I were kidding...)! Almost none of the minor entities I'm interested in (from pubs/restaurants to smaller retailers/services) even consider having their own website anymore - all of them are happy with a single Facebook page (and/or maybe a Yellow Pages entry) and that's it. The ones I'd very much like to strangle myself are those with a single page of their own, stating "see our current price list / timetable / whatever vital information on Facebook!"...
Yes, I do get it they all want MOAR public exposure and "free advertising" by being "liked" as much as possible but that only explains this, it does not justify it. If Lucifer showed up with a magic button causing every one of these FB-only like-whoring monkeys to go out of business instantly, I'd press it before he even finished explaining the terms...
If only our local newsrag would have the decency to do the same... but noooo, it's Eastern Europe, so we're happily runnig ads for magic healers with magnets and crystal ball gazers happy to "remove curses" all they long, full page, just keep the money flowing... Oh, and good luck trying to explain even to fairly reasonable people why your "(non-)belief" and their "belief" are not supposed to be equally valid. It's in print, man! It MUST be true! "Look, I'll get you the book - you should really read it; you'll see they're right, it's all explained in there...!"
"You must find it infuriating that every car has a steering wheel right in front of the driver's seat"
I didn't downvote you but it took all my self-restraint not to. Just because everyone apes everyone else these days as far as smartphones go it doesn't mean they should and it certainly doesn't mean they have to. I would pledge without hesitation not one but several firstborns for a phone with a traditional, large, landscape slide-out qwerty keyboard - or heck, even for a modern iteration of the franken-thing that was the Nokia 6800. Yes, it would probably still have a touchscreen and icons. No, FUCK rounded corners.
"But an open source project is usually driven by passion"
Not exactly - rather, an open source project is almost always driven exclusively (often quite literally) by its developers, unfortunately, and its user base (if present) might well be captive in some sense and using it out of any number of other considerations rather than actually considering it usable. The reality of contemporary computing being that users normally vastly outnumber developers and are usually not in a position to "simply become a developer" themselves for a range of reasons, that's a Really Bad Thing as far as users are concerned.
We can argue until the cows come home whether and how much that should matter from he developers point of view or whether non-contributors should have any say over what's being showed down their throats, but that reality won't change: devs have no interest in making what they make particularly usable; for them, usually it already is usable enough as-is. And as much as I dislike companies, that's one point they see differently: they actually tend to care about people liking or not what they deliver. Considering just this single aspect and nothing else, I find it hard to object to their presence in OS projects...
I still think a single device that can work as either phone or desktop is the future, but not using the same GUI as Unity tried to do (or as Android keeps failing to - yes, it's possible, no, nobody seems to like it much). Any GUI with a hope of succeeding to pull off that convergence in the future will have to reflect that various screen sizes / distances have radically different requirements for UI elements, and that people generally hate change and no newly emerging paradigm can hope to be instantly so much better than the old as to simply overcome that resistance. Change for the sake of change, backed by nothing but lofty ideals will always be rejected.
I wouldn't call successfully training muscle memory to "twitch like this, wait approximately that long, catch returning object here, repeat" (basically by random trial and error until you get it right, which is why so many of us never manage to get to three objects) a particularly "intelligent" and/or amazingly high brain function.
Because the simple folk are much better known for their desire to conform than their ability to think independently; when the pack leader du jour reaches for a stone, everyone else is eager to do the same lest they be judged different and cast out of the mob. Considering Assange is a) being continually dragged back into the limelight for another cheap potshot by the media and b) somewhat difficult to look up to these days and that c) the only thing mobs are good at is either cheering or lynching whoever crosses their path, the latter becomes inevitable. Hari Seldon could probably even point out the specific equation that makes it so.
Sounds like it incorporates a substantial amount of Borging too, for good measure. Maybe Canonical was just pushing that to its logical conclusion with those, uhhh, overly extroverted search lenses of yore...
"How else are you to ask for sugar from your neighbour?"
Yeah, about that - I don't personally know anyone who has ever done that or would conceivably consider doing it. We'd just stroll over to the nearest corner shop although that never happens due to a modest permanent stockpile. Buffering, people! It's not rocket science. Then again, that's just us...
" the three years you do at uni are to prepare you for the 15 year or so apprenticeship you are about to embark on"
Weird, I was under the impression those three years were supposed to launder into legality the decade-or-so of actual learning that you should have been doing on your own prior to that...
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