Posts by Maty

I find myself cheering for Microsoft? My, how the world has changed!

the kudu

Mention must also be made of the Kudu armored personnel carrier built on a Landrover base by the Rhodesian security forces. A model of this weird-looking beast can be seen here ...

http://www.newrhodesian.ca/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=251

ahh...

I used to take a Dak regularly between Grand Reef and what was then Salisbury in Rhodesia. The old Gooney bird had to fly very low for part of the journey to avoid rockets, which meant getting bucked around a lot by thermals.

So, on a trip with newbies, some of the infantry guys would fill one of those green NATO airsickness bags with fruit salad, and once the plane started the full roller-coaster bit and the newbs were looking a bit green, he'd pretend to barf into the bag.

Then he'd pass it to the person next to him, who'd take out some of the fruit salad and start to eat it. We had to stop doing that eventually because too many newbs didn't get to their own barf bags in time.

The best security is to live in the right place.

Two years ago a builder was working on part of our house. When he left for the night there was a thousand or so quids worth of power tools on the lawn. Since this was visible from the street I asked him if the tools would be okay. He gave me a worried look and asked 'It's not going to rain, is it?'

Pick the right bit of the backwoods, and security consists of making sure the doors have doorknobs and not handles. Bears figured out doors long ago, but you need opposable thumbs to open a doorknob.

B'ND's listening station in Bad Aibling...'

Bad, Aibling! Bad!

Politicians and the net ...

... go together like monkeys and nuclear physics.

There are two issues here. Firstly, politicos - and today's specimen is a fairly typical exhibit - are mostly from a generation that thinks using email puts them on the cutting edge of the digital revolution. So people who can't tell a browser from an operating system are making legislation about the internet. Unsurprisingly, since they don't understand the Net, and have trouble controlling it, politicians fear it, and their legislation reflects this.

Secondly, legislation is a slow, cumbersome business designed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when there was little urgency, and plenty of time for checks and balances to swing ponderously into place. Meanwhile the internet moves on and evolves. So we get laws made today that address issues relevant in 2005.

So we get stories like this one. Politicians who do not understand the present proposing legislation about the future based on an irrelevant and misinterpreted model from the past.

not just $

One of the reasons the rich are getting richer is that the 1% really work at it.

I remember the Economist did an article on this about two years back. If you are a kid in the 1% life consists of being rammed into a 'top' nursery school, then rounds of private tutors and extra classes until you can get into the kind of university that gets you a valuable degree and contacts among the 'best people'. Then its on to a high-pressure life in management, lawyering or finance.

The rest of us tend to have a slightly more laid-back attitude, allow kids to more or less develop at their own pace, take gap years and so on. In short, the rich work harder at getting and staying rich than the rest of us. Given that they have more practice, the right funding and contacts, they succeed more often too.

turn it round ...

If the Chinese or Russian government wanted access to emails on servers based in the USA in violation of US privacy laws, would there be any doubt of the response?

How do you spell 'hypocrisy' in American English?

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." –Mark Twain

Congressman John Carter shows that some things never change ...

flash ...

Remember the outrage when Steve jobs said that iOS would not use Flash? If only more companies had followed his lead ....

say ....what?

'... various mouth-breathers glue themselves to shop windows and thus frighten the horses.'

Okay, can someone explain to me why a mouth-breather glued to a shop window might frighten the horses? Since the average horse doesn't spend that much time around shop windows, the horse might assume mouth-breathers to be a perfectly normal attachment.

Or assuming that we are not to take the statement literally, this must be a contender for mixed metaphor of the year.

the not-so-slippery slope

@ P.Lee

In a thoughtful post you ask:

'As long as "no-one gets hurt" are we likely to progress from pretend-sex to trying it out in the real world?'

Well, we've had the internet as a 'pretend-sex' playground for the past two decades. As far as I know a wave of 'real-world' moral debauchery has failed to sweep across the west. Apart from the extreme conservative (small 'c') viewpoint, most people would say that sexual politics and gender relations are in a better place now than they were a generation ago.

We can debate whether the internet has helped this (I think it has) but it's very hard to prove that it has been a hindrance. Certainly as a satanic instrument of moral perversion in the real world, sex on the internet has been a total failure.

And to think a few years back people were building websites based entirely on Flash.

The rich aroma of BS

So the digital centre will 'unlock major challenges in the data value chain', with 'meaningful engagement' and 'collaboration solutions'. Looks as if this was written with a buzzword generator.

http://www.1728.org/buzzword.htm

This team-oriented explicit implementation is actually a user-facing projection of multi-channelled tertiary budgetary management typical of an objective-based innovation infrastructure. A paradigm of an assimilated executive system engine in fact.

See? Anyone can play. Now where to I apply for my £3bn?

'If a respected scientist over the age of forty explains at length why something is impossible, there is a good chance of it happening within twenty years. If a substantial number of scientists under the age of forty are working on that same thing, it's practically certain.'

Arthur C.Clarke 'Profiles of the Future' 1957 (paraphrased)

a thought ...

If they made a version with a screen on right and left eyes, could they tweak it to get full 3-D?

iTunes

'... helps [the] user to know how to use and download iTunes”

Actually, if done properly, this would not be a bad app.

Maybe iTunes has improved its interface since I scrubbed it from my computer a few years back. But I remember the iTunes interface on the PC as a counter-intuitive POS which made it as hard as possible to do even the simplest functions, presumably in the hope you'd end up buying something out of sheer frustration.

Author rates

If amazon ever gets its wish that 35% goes to the author, this will indeed be a revolution. Many publishers offer royalties of between 4% and 12% of sales. And sales to things like book clubs can net the author less than 10p per book sold.

The author can get some of this eased by having an agent fighting on his behalf, but then the agent takes anything from 10-15% of the author's profits as well. Writing is like acting - the few who make it big do very well, but at present most writers would make a better living flipping burgers.

different cultures

Who was it that said 'The US and the UK are two countries divided by a common language'?

Having frequently visited the US, it's my experience that most Brits get into trouble at the border by thinking that Americans are Britons with a funny accent.

Brits rather like a bit of non-conformity, Americans hate it. At the border, the trick is to put yourself in a readily-recognizeable category and conform to it. So for example, if you're going to Nevada, don't bring skin-diving gear, even if you have a good reason.

Don't joke. It's not that the border officials don't have a sense of humour, they don't have a British sense of humour. In their minds, they are under-paid and under-valued. If you seem to be making fun of them, it will not end well.

Finally, don't judge all border officials by those at big-city entry points. If you saw some of the crap that they have to put up with, you'd also lose your sense of humour fast.

'There is actually an extensive, ongoing, developed monitoring of a specific known threat.'

There may be. The problem is that if I'm going to give up my liberties in exchange for protection against a threat that for 'security reasons' no-one can tell me about, then I need to have a great deal of trust in the people I'm giving up those liberties to.

The British governmental system falls laughably below that standard, so if it's all right with you, I'll opt for open government and take my chances.

Don't blame Blair ...

We elected him. And the reason we as a nation go along with the government stripping away our liberties one by one is, to put it tactfully, because we're a generation of lily-livered cowards.

There was a time when we accepted that the IRA would exploit the benefits of living in a free society to perpetrate acts of terror. We didn't think that the answer was to stop living in a free society. Today ...

Ah well, at least they haven't banned coffee yet.

hmmm...

So Apple objects to inscribing words describing female genitals on an iPhone, yet has an entire ad campaign based around a song that originally described male genitals?

(So what did you think 'Gigantic' described? - the next line 'a big, big love' is another clue)

http://antiquiet.com/music/2014/04/apple-iphone-commercial-pixies-gigantic-black-phallus/

Space saver ...

Up the transparency a bit, and you've got a window by day, and a TV by night ...

coffee is your friend

Stop. Have a cup of coffee.

When working through a tech problem one tends to get tied in knots - I want to do X to solve Y, but X isn't working, so we need W to fix X. So you start with someone who has an email problem, and midway through, the task has become teaching that someone to use the DOS prompt. That's the moment.

Stop. Have a cup of coffee.

It actually saves time, because while on the phone you are using half your mental energy to prevent yourself from crawling down the phone line and strangling the person on the other end. While in a state of caffine-induced calm you often come up with a new approach.

Also, quite often the problem resolves itself over the coffee break. That's when the 'client' realizes he hasn't turned the monitor on, or is using the mouse from the computer beside his own. Or whatever process was hanging has finally finished or given up.

In the same way, when something goes dramatically wrong with my own system, experience has shown that the best approach is a.gather information on the problem. b. coffee break c. attempt solutions.

Voice calls? sooo 20th century

Recently I saw a presentation for a new phone (I forget which) in which the ability to make and receive voice calls was not even mentioned.

And a good idea too. I don't like strangers walking up to me in the street and selling me stuff. Why the hell should I let them do it in my living room? With IM and email, you can filter out the spammers and crooks much more easily. With friends and family you have a clear record of who said what, and you have time to think it over when you need to pick your words carefully.

Particularly with strangers, voice conversations should be like face-to-face meetings. Something you set up beforehand.

I see GW2 was left off the list. Is this because it featured the kingdom of Orr which has left malign artifacts all over the game environment?

(cf Reviewer's name ...)