Posts by Pompous Git

Re: They could always

If NZ voted for a new Australian flag I think it would be a trollface saying "Durr, I iz so stoopid"

Just a feeling I got while over there, you understand?

Sounds like you never heard the one about New Zealanders emigrating to Australia lowering the IQ of both countries :-)

In compensation for the bad joke, I must say the feeling I had while in New Zealand recently to visit my part-Maori daughter and grandchildren was, if I had to live anywhere other than Tasmania, it would be New Zealand. I was treated with enormous kindness and respect, particularly by the medical staff at Palmerston North hospital. So different to the treatment I have usually received at Hobart's RHH.

And for any bacon lover visiting Palmy, the dry-cured bacon at the little café opposite the library is to die for. At least as good as that I have made for myself.

Re: TV programmes on bush tucker would be very different

But would there still be the prize winning 'Cuiver Reserve Chateau Bottled Nuit San Wogga Wogga', with its bouquet like an aborigine's armpit?

You're just jealous because we Antipodeans pay a lot less for first-class wines than you poor, benighted Northern Hemispherians ;-)

Re: Invasion of Europe

So will the future history writers be forced to refer to the current refugee "crisis" as the Syrian Invasion of Europe?

History writers are never "forced" to write anything. They must however interpret if they are true historians as distinct from historiographers. Each generation carries its own cultural baggage and thus will understand/interpret historical facts differently. To illustrate, I will use what seems a simple enough concept: recycling.

I was recently taken to task by a youngster because for using the same bottles for my home brewed beer for over thirty years and calling that recycling. Recycling to him means taking the bottles to the municipal tip, smashing them in a 200 litre drum put there for that purpose so the broken glass can be sent to Indonesia to be melted down and made into beer bottles of arguably considerably lower quality. He is "saving the planet"; The Git is "killing the environment". I suspect that future historians will reverse that judgement.

There are people alive today who would have been given arsenic as a medicine in their youth. It was still the favourite cure-all of the medical profession well into the 20th C. If they suffered from arsenic poisoning, a common enough occurrence, they were given more arsenic as a cure. In hindsight, that was beyond stupid.

Re: To the victors, the spoils.

You also say current generations shouldn't be taking responsibility, I disagree on this as only in the 60's were the Australian government taking the kids (Rabbit proof fence) and even now most indigenous races on the planet get a shit deal, that's not liberal pc thinking, just how it is.

Very much is made of the "stolen generations"* and perhaps it was cruel to remove those children from their traditional environment. OTOH, the "stolen" children were educated and became equipped for survival in modern Australian society. Were the children who weren't "stolen" better off for not becoming so equipped? Even now, traditional Aborigine communities have trouble with school attendance. Is it better that these children learn that there's no prospect of employment in the future, just the dole, petrol-sniffing and alcohol abuse for all and physical and sexual abuse for the women? There was a TV news item this very year of Aborigines complaining about their kids being taught English in primary school. And one also on the surgery a plastic surgeon, horrified by what he saw an Aboriginal man had done to his wife's face, had to perform to restore functionality.

* I have read accounts of where Aborigine mothers gave their children to be fostered and educated because they thought their children deserved better than growing up to become uneducated alcoholics.

Re: @DougS

We actually do have some written records of how native societies treated eachother.

We also have written records of how the Australian Aborigines treated each other. Geoffrey Blainey points out in his excellent book Triumph of the Nomads that the Aborigine tribes were constantly at war with each other. The death rate was higher than that of the general population of Europe in WW1.

Re: To the victors, the spoils.

This is about a university trying to counter a history of lies and hypocrisy, which is the job of a university.

No it's not. It's about inventing a new and entirely imaginary history. To quote Keith Windschuttle:

Lyndall Ryan claims that in July 1827 a party pursuing the Aboriginal killers of a stockman at the Western Marshes left 60 blacks dead or wounded. She has taken this report, without acknowledging it, from Shayne Breen's 2001 book on northern Tasmania, which cited a newspaper story. But if you trace the story back to its source in the archives it refers to an event where a party led by Corporal Shiners of the 40th Regiment and four stockmen pursued the Aborigines. At nightfall they got to within forty yards of the Aboriginal camp before the dogs detected them. They got off three shots and only wounded one man. In other words, the press report was a wildly exaggerated rumour.

It's clear from this that far from respecting Aborigines, Ryan is claiming that the Aborigines were so stupid, that instead of fleeing into the night, fully 60 of them sat around a camp fire while five men with muzzle-loading rifles shot them all. The dogs must have been pretty useless too as one might have expected they would have harassed the shooters.

Henry Gee's In Search of Deep Time concludes:

When white settlers arrived in Tasmania they regarded the Stone Age inhabitants as animals and hunted them down to extinction.

Jim Everett wrote:

Aboriginal identity has been a problem area for Tasmanian Aborigines and non-Aboriginal Tasmanians since the death of Truganini in 1876. The official decree was that after Truganini, Tasmanian Aborigines were extinct. The recorded remnants of Tasmanian Aborigines, mainly nine women, survived on the islands of the Furneaux Group off north-east Tasmanian. These survivors increased to a sizeable population on the islands, and soon established a community on Cape Barren Island. The Cape Barren Island community was eventually placed under control when the Tasmanian Government introduced the Cape Barren Island Reserve Act 1912. There were, however, other Aboriginal survivors on mainland Tasmania, who integrated into white society to hide their Aboriginality. These mainland Tasmania Aborigines have publicly announced their identity over the past thirty or more years. The majority of recent problems over Tasmanian Aboriginal identity have surfaced because this group is seeking to be recognized as Aborigines after the islander Aborigines paved the way for Aboriginality to be accepted by mainstream Tasmanian society.

It's an odd feeling reading the writing of someone who is "extinct", not to mention communicating with him at UTas and elsewhere! Scary shit!

Re: Two things

Firstly, I'm astonished that anyone could seriously claim it wasn't an invasion. They were there first. They didn't arrive in boats afterwards.

"They" (Aborigines) were most definitely not here first. As I pointed out in the post above, there were at least two preceding human species here before the modern Aborigines arrived. They were invaded as they were here before Europeans, but that does not mean they were here first.

The truly sad thing here is the extent to which Aboriginal activists and the Black Armband historians will go to stifle scholarship. They were royally pissed off when ANU's John Curtin School of Medical Research found that Mungo Man's DNA bore no resemblance to other ancient skeletons, modern Aborigines and modern Europeans. They have successfully prevented DNA analysis of the Kow swamp people.

Re: To the victors, the spoils.

Overall, when it comes to treatment of the 'indigenous people' there is little glory in the European settlement of Australia, and plenty of selfish greed and thuggery. In fact there's no shortage of behaviour by European settlers towards those people who were already in residence that is simply disgusting.

I agree, but then there's plenty of examples of the opposite. Some of it misguided for sure, but it's there in documents written at the time.

OTOH there doesn't appear to be much enthusiasm for noting the "selfish greed and thuggery" of the Australian aborigines when they wiped out their predecessors on the continent.

One of these spanners is Mungo Man, who was discovered in 1974 in the dry lake bed of Lake Mungo in west NSW. Mungo Man was a hominin who was estimated to have died 62,000 years ago and was ritually buried with his hands covering his penis. Anatomically, Mungo Man's bones were distinct from other human skeletons being unearthed in Australia. Unlike the younger skeletons that had big-brows and thick-skulls, Mungo Man's skeleton was finer, and more like modern humans.

The ANU's John Curtin School of Medical Research found that Mungo Man's skeleton's contained a small section of mitochondrial DNA. After analysing the DNA, the school found that Mungo Man's DNA bore no similarity to the other ancient skeletons, modern Aborigines and modern Europeans. Furthermore, his mitochondrial DNA had become extinct.

Then there's the Kow Swamp People.

Following on from Mungo Man, the fossil record shows that between 10,000 and 50,000 BCE, Australia was populated by humans with thick robust skeletons that were unlike Aboriginal people today. Skeletons dated at 10,000 years ago found at Kow Swamp were almost like Homo erectus (a species of hominin that existed in Asia until 30,000 years ago). From about 10,000 years ago, the fossil record is dominated by the gracile skeletons that were like Mungo Man's of 62,000 years ago and Aborigines today.

The aborigines weren't just wiping out races, they were wiping out whole species of humans! But PC says this can only be discussed in hushed tones behind closed doors in academe.

Re: Seriously

The Romans invaded England before the Vikings got here

More to the point, the Romans invaded before the Vikings existed. Prior to ca. 890 there were no Vikings.

Re: How about...

"It's_a_ship_not_a_boat_you_landlubbers!"

"It's not a balloon! You stupid little thick-headed Saxon git! It's not a balloon! Balloons is for kiddy-winkies. If you want to play with balloons, get outside.

....

Bismarck? Of course I'm not calling it after Bismarck. It's a Zeppelin. It's nothing to do with bloody Bismarck!

....

It's not a balloon! It's an airship!"

Re: Seriously

Pedantically, Genoese, not Italian as Italy didn't exist as a concept then.

Excellent bit of pedantry there x7! Have an upvote. Most scholars date the beginning of the Risorgimento to somewhere after the end of Napoleonic rule and 1815. Curiously, my favourite Hobart restaurant in the 1970s was Garibaldi's. I have no idea whether the owner was called Giuseppe Garibaldi, or not, and he's certainly old; I see him walking the streets of Hobart still. He's certainly old (90s?) but unlikely to be the original. Lars may disagree, but then his arithmetical abilities seem a bit dodgy ;-)

And another bit of pedantry from me. Went researching through my library and discovered that farming began in Scandinavia some 500 - 1,000 years after it began in the British Isles.

Re: Seriously

Sorry for this rant but I have found that the older I get the more pissed off I am with nationalistic trends.

And the older I get the more pissed off with fuckheads like yourself coming out with pseudo-history that would have embarrassed Immanuel Velikovsky or Erich von Däniken. Farming came to the British Isles between 5000 BC and 4500 BC from Syria. The Viking Age of Scandinavian history began ca. 790 AD so how the fuck did they introduce farming to Britain five thousand years earlier? FFS!

Re: Seriously

Columbus faked his log because he was traveling in Portugese waters. No one was quite sure how big the world really was at the time, but Spain and Portugal had already divided it between them, contract brokered by the Pope and all...

Another historical sidenote:

In 1508 Bartolome De las Casas wrote: "there were 60,000 people living on this island [Hispaniola], including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it...."

de las Casas, Bartolome History of the Indies Harper & Row 1971.

Worth a read: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen, Touchstone Press 2007.

Re: There's a better alternative to "Boaty McBoatface" too.

A friend's wife's Relay for Life team is called The Pole Dancers so I think we can ask for their votes too :-)

Re: Seriously

The Spaniards sailed the seas long before the Brits. Columbus anybody. Just call it HMS Viking as the Vikings brought sailing and so much more to a bunch of farmers lost on an island in the sea.

Alfred the Great (born in 849) was in 882 engaged in naval actions against the Vikings. You need to learn history pal! Columbus was born 600 years after Alfred so you also need to learn something about the arrow of time.

Re: It's the data harvesting

So you're arguing over the semantics of the word "copy"?

Er you turned it into an argument about semantics chum, not I.

And no, I do not think "Windows = Finder" and nowhere did I state that. I compared the Finder to the MS DOS Executive since they perform the same function. They are, as I stated quite different and clearly the Executive was not copied, or stolen from Apple. You, like so many people who have a computer OS as a religion, are a bore.

For example they do seem to have a problem with cruelty to donkeys. Or perhaps I'm being a silly ass?

"Kiss my ass" is cruelty to donkeys? I will have to ask my friends who breed donkeys on their hobby farm...

Which reminds me of a very bad joke.

A Tasmanian farmer's wife was reading the newspaper one night. She remarked to her husband: "Bill, it says here that humans are the only animals that experience orgasm".

Bill leaves the kitchen and returns a considerable time later. He says, "Narelle, I reckons youse are right about the sheep and cows, but I wouldn't be too sure about that pig of ours!"

Re: The author misunderstands Microsoft completely

Users buy computers to run applications not operating systems.

It never cease to amaze me that so many commentards here are deluded and believe the opposite of that is true. So it goes...

Re: It's the data harvesting

"taking an idea and running with it" does not imply theft, it implies that it is built on and improved from the original. Secondly you implied that Xerox's ideas became unavailable to researchers once Apple used them. Untrue ... Windows 2.0 used Apple's extended ideas, which is where lawsuits started

"Theft" is your word, not mine. I used the word "copy" which you objected to because you said Apple "took" the WIMP idea.

My friend Tony copied my star-picket puller several months ago. This required him measuring it, making a sketch and photographing it. All a matter of a few minutes. I dare say, given Tony's inventiveness, the copy he made is an improvement on mine.

About an hour ago, my friend Chris took the star-picket puller to assist in removing some fencing. He didn't steal it, I didn't accuse him of theft, because even though he is depriving me of its use for several days, he has done so with my permission.

Now do you understand the difference between copying and taking? I suspect not.

Here's an image of the MS-DOS Executive from Windows 2:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MS-DOS_Executive,_Windows_1.04.png

I suspect the resemblance to the Macintosh Finder is remarkable only while under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. In System 7 at least which is the earliest I have used; it's on the Mac SE sitting under the desk at which I am sitting.

Re: Please....

As far as Linux goes, I need an OS that can run on my hardware and support all my programs.

W10 doesn't have Media Centre any more, so allowing w10 to install on the computer that used to do free-to-air TV* would no longer work. The software that came with the tuner doesn't run at all on w7; the software that came with the replacement tuner doesn't run stable on w7 so is unlikely to do so on w10. Windows Media Centre worked with both.

* Sadly, the TV that served as a monitor for that PC died; it only had an analog tuner and there are no analog TV broadcasts any more, hence the use of a computer/DTV tuner. New TV has its own digital tuner, so the computer that also does music is running Mint 17.3 so it can connect to the Internet as well. I tried to continue run W7, but as I related elsewhere, MS updates ended up rendering it useless.

Cheapskate? That's all the laptop I was using could take!

Please accept my apologies then. I have an antique of that ilk; a rather nice Dell Latitude. What renders it pretty useless for web browsing isn't the RAM limitation though, it's the screen resolution: 800 x 600.

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

Because what's the first thing you have to do when you climb into a car for the first time: find out where everything is located.

Given the number of vehicles failing to indicate a lane change/corner turn, I doubt very many drivers do so, or if they do, they've forgotten! They're possibly too busy memorising the location of the battery, fuel pump, spare wheel, etc ;-)

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

But.... Microsoft is trying to get all desktop users to devolve slightly by making us have Gorilla Arms from using our 26-inch desktop touchscreens all day long.

But it's just so "convenient" spending half the day cleaning the greasy fingerprints off that monitor by wiping it on your jeans ;-)

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

You know, come to think of it, I could make Windows 7 run faster with less resource usage by setting the display to 800x600 in 16 colour.

That would mean, of course, that there might not be any real performance improvements over Win 7.

About a year ago, out of curiosity, I ran Winword 2 under Windows 3.11 in a VM using one core and spent some time working on a document. I finished the document in Word 2010 on Windows 7 running on bare metal (four cores). There was absolutely no noticeable difference in speed. So it goes...

Have an upvote for using your noggin.

Re: It's the data harvesting

Secondly Apple didn't claim ownership of the Xerox ideas.

Er, I didn't say they did. You implied they did with your statement "They took some of the ideas and ran with them."

Took = ppl of Take.

Take = to get into one's hold or possession, to seize or capture, to catch or get (fish, game, etc.), especially by killing.

When someone copies my work I take that as flattery. I don't get precious about it, though I do send the occasional notice that the copier should acknowledge me as the source where they haven't.

Wasn't sure anyone would get it.

Some do; some even manage to get offended. Extolling the virtues of Metric rather than Imperialist measurements also gets the latter's goats. All good fun :-)

Re: This article is still wrong

This article is still wrong

AC, you say "PC sales are down". The article quotes HP Ink's CEO Dion Weisler"We have not yet seen the anticipated Win10 stimulation of demand that we would hope for." Which would appear to be little different, yet you say it's "wrong". It's a quote FFS. Why is the article "wrong" for quoting the CEO of a major PC manufacturer?

Re: listening with one ear

I see this as Microsoft putting their immediate interests first; their customers and their own long-term business interests are very much second (or worse!) to those...

I thought about this comment for some time before concluding that you are making at least one possibly unfounded assumption: MS management are acting rationally.

You have, you know...

You noticed, too Vic. Seven times... :-)

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

It's now just a couple of months short of 89 years since the deth of the Model T, and rather a lot of essential bits of the car driving interface are still not standardised. Where are the controls for sidelights, headlights, warning lights, front windscreen wipers, rear windcreen wipers, turn indicators, front fog lamps, and rear fog lamps? Not in the same place in different brands of car, or even in different models of the same brand.

What is it about "pretty much" that you don't understand?

I updated 2 laptops (both were purchased around late 2014) to W10. One went really well but the other I had to revert back to W8.1 because the Wi-Fi stopped working. I don't know who is to blame for the failure.

Oh, it's definitely your fault. You just have a bad attitude towards MS. If you just adjusted your perception of reality with some mind-bending drug or something the upgrade would have gone as smooth as pooh.

Does this need a sarc tag for the Merkins?

Re: It's the data harvesting

Take a look at the original PARC/STAR GUI and compare it to that of the Lisa/Mac. The Apple version is obviously not a copy. They took some of the ideas and ran with them.

So when Apple were running away with PARC's windows, icons, menus and pointing device ideas, they became completely unavailable to the researchers any more because they weren't copies. How does that work? Curious minds and all that.

Re: Menu or search? and Change or stagnate? and Privacy

Remembering where I'd put them in hierrchical menu was a pain, and ordering the whole lot alphabetically was also pain. So Windows 8.1 with search instead and hence also Windows 10 are n improvement rather than a step bckwards, as far as I'm concerned.

So presumably when you can't remember the name of the application, you search on dingus, doohickey, hickey, thingamabob, thingamajig (or thingumajig), thingummy, whatchamacallit, whatnot, whatsit and so on until you hit on the correct sequence of letters. You have far more patience than I do!

All the howls about Windows 10 seem to indicate two things: a lot of people are scared of change

Scanner stops working, sign-cutter stops working, what's to be scared of? Just tell the customers MS has decided that you need to be put out of business.

BTW, what's your address and password to your wifi so I can come and take some of your Internet bandwidth to compensate me for the bandwidth MS stole without my permission.

until I got things up to 4GB

What a cheapskate! Until w7 I always maxed out the RAM on my machines and back in the early days that cost an arm and a leg. It paid dividends in speed though and I was frequently asked how come my machine with a "slow" cpu was much faster than theirs with a close to the cutting edge cpu. Swapping to hard disk is a big slowdown.

Now that's out of the way, all Linux distros I've used have been much less of a memory hog than any Windows release. Your problem sounds like it's being caused by you starving the machine of what it needs. More RAM regardless of OS.

Bloody youngsters!

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

@ Pompous Git - For any device there is an optimal range of layouts for users. Slurp has forgotten that human anatomy is fixed and will be fixed for a long time.

That is somewhat dependent on how much the Microserfs are willing to go to piss their customers off. I know I've had days where I would cheerfully have sawn off various of their appendages -- without anaesthesia. Like when my Small Business Server was an open relay for two whole fucking weeks while I waited for a patch to fix it!

Re: MS Forgot Basic Consumer Needs

When all you know is shit, you accept shit as normal. (I'm looking at you too website "developers.")

I couldn't agree more. Have an upvote...

They'll just pull a CryptoLocker. Upgrade you anyway, then immediately lock you out of your machine until you hand over your credit card details.

In your dreams. I don't believe that's possible when my W7 is running in a VM on Linux, not connected to the Internet and behind a firewall.

Re: It's the data harvesting

You probably meant "the windows metaphor"?

No, I thought about it, but the original WIMP interface was of course invented at PARC. The Macintosh interface was a copy of a copy, the first commercial implementation being the ill-fated Lisa. Windows is a copy of a copy of a copy and therefore far from being "invented" by MS. But then I said nothing of invention. I merely remarked it has been a great success. I don't know of a more widely adopted WIMP interface, but I am willing to stand corrected if you do.

I do think it's actually irrelevant who invented WIMP. More relevant was BillG's dream of a computer on every desktop. And his company achieved that. Not IBM. Not Apple. Not Atari, Not Commodore...

Re: Lots of hate for a small loud group group

they hate ms with a passion ...many are diehard OSX/OSS users

You are clearly delusional. Far from hating MS, never mind with passion, I'm glad they fucked w7. If they hadn't, I'd still be using w7 as my primary OS. As for OSX I haven't used that for over 5 years. I don't know of any OSS versions of InDesign or CorelDRAW! Where will I find those? Or are you just a useless twat who just got out of the pub?

Re: It's the data harvesting

A man of taste and refinement

I do believe you are the first person ever to say that about me ;-)

Re: It's the data harvesting

So - in essence - you're bigging up Linux distros for doing a good job of copying Windows; while slagging off Windows for being Windows?

Fuck me - I can't cope what that much wrong-headedness...

Some things are worth copying, some not. Live with it. The Windows metaphor is a great success. Similarly, books have long been published where you read from top left to bottom right and front to back. MS seem to want to change the metaphor, but I suspect it will be as successful as persuading the book-reading public that it's way more kewl to read books where some pages have to be scanned bottom to top, some from right to left and the index is in the middle of the book, rather than at the end.

I will take a pass on fucking you.

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

As everything else changes around it, an OS *has to* change to keep up: not many 64 bit apps gonna run on Win ME, are they?

You're a bit arse about there. I had to move from PageMaker to InDesign when I upgraded from WinXP to Win7. (An excellent move as despite PageMaker being more than good enough, InDesign was what PageMaker should have been from the start.) IIRC Win32 applications arrived long after 32 bit processors replaced 16 bit processors, not the other way around.

And who the fuck ran WinMe voluntarily?

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

In fact it was a Cadillac that first hit on the "modern" layout: and the Austin 7 that took it and made it stick.

In short - you've failed across the board to make the point you seem to be trying to make.

Precisely where did I state that it was the Model T Ford arrangement that was adopted? You would appear to have a reading comprehension problem.

Re: User feedback

but hey, I've retired and don't have to deal with MS data centre software any more

Retirement is cool. Until a few weeks ago I would assist my friends with win7 issues, but the only assistance in that regard I provide now is the advice "upgrade to Cinnamon Mint and I will help. Otherwise it's tough titty".