Posts by Mostor Astrakan150 posts • joined Monday 23rd April 2007 15:51 GMT
Gods yes. Luckily, Ctrl-Ins, Shift-Ins and Shift-Del still work. C for Cut? No... Copy. X is for cut because it looks like scissors, see? And V for... well, being conveniently next to C.
At least vi has the excuse of being able to run on anything from a paper terminal to my Linux laptop.
http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
If you look at the daily and weekly demand, you can see that usage starts to go up by ~6:00, and stays high until ~22:00, after which it tapers down. This suggests that lighting isn't the biggest drain on the grid. Industry and trains, probably...
The WWF, alas, have joined that band of organisations whose utterances follow this pattern:
- The World is going to hell in a handbasket and we are all going to die.
- The cause of this is $THING_THAT_HUMANKIND_DEPENDS_ON
- To fix it, YOU must do $THING_THAT_VIOLATES_CAUSALITY
- If you don't, well, WE have Raised Awareness, so it won't be OUR fault
Whereupon they bask in a sickeningly sanctimonious Holy Light of righteous disgust. For extra points, they'll install tiny little windmills on the roof of their houses that produce just enough energy for the laptop they use for blogging about it. Other symptoms include an inability to use SI-standard units, preferring instead such units as "Enough for X Households".
Ye gods, if we didn't have WWF, and there were no light, how dark it would be.
Can't you SEE? The poor entertainment industry has been so depleted by evil pirates that they can no longer afford to think up stories for themselves, and they have to use the stories of old movies. They try to put a brave face on it by calling it "re-imagining", but unless we go out and buy these movies two or three times in various formats, THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER ORIGINAL STORY AGAIN!
We got cable. We got a box that records the serials we watch. So an evening of brain shutdown starts at the list of recorded programs. Sometimes we watch programs at broadcast time, and we actually have to sit through the commercials. I swear, being able to fast-forward through the commercials, and to have bio-breaks whenever we want, THAT is the killer feature of recording cable boxes.
This is the European Food Safety Authority (or, yes, "Brussels" to the terminally lazy, even though they have offices all over Europe). One of their jobs is to verify the sometimes completely absurd claims that people make about their wonder food. So someone made a few claims about a bottle of water, most of which got approved, bar one.
Catch: http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/2075.htm
That's the claim that got rejected. What the "applicants" claimed was that regular intake of water "prevents" dehydration. Now in legalese and doctorese words have very specific meanings, and "prevents" is used in the context of vaccines or something that prevents you from getting a disease. We're definitely on *this* side of the looking glass here, and words don't mean what you want them to mean.
Now no matter how regularly I drink my 2L of water usually, it won't keep me from getting dehydrated next week if I don't keep up the water habit, where, say, getting a flu shot now will protect me against flu for a long time.
So the lusers here are the water peddlers. They worded their claim wrong.
TL;DR: Whatever source you got that from, got it wrong.
I think I should mention that where you brits require four letters to refer to man- or ladyparts, the Dutch require only three. Have I seen them proudly adorning cars? Why yes, yes I have.
I used to think in terms of "Microsoft tax" and all that, but actually a machine with Windows on it is cheaper than a clean one. This is because the crapware peddlers pay the OEM for the privilege of having their "first one's freeware" installed at birth. So they effectively pay the MS tax for me, and like as not knock a bit off the hardware price as well. I'm writing this from a lovely HP G56 the Windows install of which never saw the light of day. When offered all kinds of antivirus support and software support and extended warranty, I cheerfully, and politely, told them to fuck off, so no money haemorrhage through that route. I really no longer care about whether Dell pays MS or not.
That, by the way, is what all this Trusted/Treacherous computing is all about. They want to force you to use their crapware and keep you from replacing it with something decent.
All you need to do is bring a bootable USB key to the shop, and see if you can find all the devices you care about. (WiFi, Ethernet, webcam and what-have-you), because if something important is missing you're basically out of luck.
I've always wondered. Because gay men do not, actually, lie with mankind as they would lie with womankind. They lie with mankind as they would with *other* mankind. And of course, lesbian women don't lie with mankind at all.
Or am I now being too Bible literalist myself?
But we do seem to attract all the people who dropped out of other studies. And they do tend to be the kind of people who take "Ye Gods, I never knew you could do it like that," as a *compliment*.
If it were, we'd see all kind of weird phenomena, like people who comment on articles *before* they've even read it.
But in the interest of stating the blindingly obvious, again and again: Stuff you care about belongs on your own computer.
I know exactly how SME IT works. They get a guy in to do it for them.
I only gave one example because I didn't care to give all of them. I only gave the command line example because it's easier and quicker than clicking your way through screen after screen of stupid questions. Even if you are a dedicated point-and-click fan, it's *still* easier to use the one that comes with the OS. Because that way, installing MySquirrel is no different from installing, say, Apache, and you only need to learn one way to install stuff on your system.
Unless of course you are stupid enough to use an OS that doesn't have a native package manager, or one that's so broken that anything someone can come up with is an improvement.
Weheyy! Yet another method of getting crap on your servers. And this one, by the looks of it, requires a live Internet connection. I can just imagine the friendly little chats with the firewall people. You want to go for that expression on their faces that says: "Why do we even bother?"
Use the operating system tools, you miserable b*st*rds!
Oh, and on Linux, it's "sudo apt-get install mysql" done. Do you *really* think that making your customers click through several screens of happy cheery windows is more user friendly? This is a bloody database server! Your users are not your basic stockbrokers and clerks and receptionists, they are the greasy-haired crowds wearing the "sod off" T-shirts. They do not appreciate their time being wasted with more useless crap.
Hauntingly familiar. As if I've seen something like it before. Something portable, with a keyboard... No. Damn, it's gone. It'll come to me. Wait.
Ah! A LAPTOP! Such as you can buy at your local PC Illiterates for half the price of a fondleslab.
Mind you, this doesn't look like it would actually stand up on your lap. Maybe someone can construct something with a hinge or something. Don't you LOVE innovation?
"The foreman had explained that the accountant could go and boil his head and the accountant had explained to the foreman that the thing approaching him rapidly from his left was a knuckle sandwich."
They're trying to get Google to do their work for them and flag sites that someone, somewhere thinks is infringing someone's copyright in some way. The copyright police will then get on with suing the persons found guilty and profiting from the proceeds, citing google's authority.
I don't see why Google doesn't leap at the chance.
The start of the program saw Murdoch Senior playing the "I'm too important to know this shit" game and his son spouting bullshit like an agricultural machine, trying like anything to deny that the whole spying and illegal wiretapping was nothing to do with them, honest, guv. It was about two three hundred lone rogue reporters, and being ripped to shreds for it.
And yet, we are now discussing whether Mrs. Murdoch used her right or her left hand to bitch-slap the git who tried to cream-pie Murdoch Sr.
Does anyone actually remember any of the bullshit coming from Murdoch Jr? Does anyone *mention* it in any discussion of yesterday's proceedings?
Well done, that man. If Rupert isn't paying him, he should be.
Part of the problem is no doubt that the company who owns the disks that store your data will happily hand over the data on said disks to whoever asks nicely enough.
Now they start doing it for the moniez?
That particular run of articles was a welcome balance to all the ones that said, basically, "O My God We're All Going To Die."
Creationist: "When you teach your religious belief that the Earth is million years old (and all the mountains would have been ground to dust in that time, so who are YOU calling stupid), then you must also teach the theories of those who believe that God did it just six thousand years ago! You must TEACH the CONTROVERSY!"
Rationalist: "But there is no controversy! We have scientific data! We have sound theories, verified, shot at, amended, bickered over, and finally agreed upon. Young Earth Creationists have the Bible, which is not a work of Geology! There IS NO CONTROVERSY."
Creationist: "Oh. Well, we'll bloody well walk into your labs and MAKE one!"
Yeah, that's going to go down well. Think *you* are being hard on Evolutionary theories, Mr. Creationist? You're nowhere near as vicious as an evolutionary scientist who smells traces of bias in some bit of data.
Chutzpah!
What else is there to eat? If the ju-ju had meant us not to eat people, he would't have made us of meat! (Flanders & Swann, 'The reluctant cannibal').
For more details than anyone not in the food industry needs about slaughter and the treatment of food animals, Temple Grandin is the go-to woman: http://www.grandin.com/
"Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man."
Apparently, when Sir Terry Pratchett was negotiating a deal to have Reaper Man filmed in the US, he was told: "Yeah, nice script, but lose the skeleton."
That deal fell through, for some reason. Possibly Mr. Pratchett telling them that he was already filthy rich, and didn't need to have one of his books violated in that way.
Now I haven't read much about his other utterances, but going by this, he's a Hacker. A Tinkerer. A guy who will actually come up with useful ideas. He knows full well that people will independently come up with the same idea sometimes, and he doesn't mind. Perhaps someone else will get the details better, in which case he'll probably give them a nod and maybe do it the same way.
Geniuses are constantly feeding off each other's ideas - in music, in technology, in painting, sculpting. They're not ashamed of it and are happy to acknowledge each other's input. It's the idea that counts, not who came up with it first. That is one of the great things about Open Source.
And that is why the patent system must die. You simply cannot come up with the great ideas if at every turn you have to worry if someone out there is going to charge you huge sums of money because they wrote a few shoddy pieces of paper on something very tangentially to do with what you're trying to achieve.
I've heard that Japanese has different numbers for big things and small things, as in "mitsu" being 3 (small). Hence Mitsubishi being "three (small) diamonds".
Groan moment: In the Metro, nice big fat letters: "Fukushima now seven, like Chernobyl!!!!" It's a bit like priorities on support calls, where lusers keep bleating at you to ESCALATE!!!! SO NOW YOU SODDING BASTARDS WILL FINALLY GET IT THAT YOU SHOULD BE DOING WHAT YOU CAN!!!"
Never mind that you were *already* doing what you could, only now, because of all this escalation crap, you've lost just a little more time.
If you want to implement law against tracking, you need the Public(tm) to speak out against it first. The presence of a Do Not Track header in every request lets you do that. If you don't, then the scum can defend themselves saying: "But how were WE to know that he didn't want us to unzip his fly and rummage around inside?" Which would start a whole long and tedious discussion about opt-in, opt-out, reasonable expectations and what-have-you, during which business continues as usual, and then, oh, the government changes and nothing happens.
This way, when someone is caught tracking people who have enabled the Do Not Track header, they are demonstrably wrong.
The Windows Update window with the "Express install (recommended)" setting, which would result in me installing the "malicious software removal tool" over what Norton already gives me, most likely breaking it in the process. I am also looking at the check box which says "Don't remind me about this update again". In fact, I look at it every bloody time. I am also looking at Windows Media Player, which keeps trying to install later versions I don't want.
It sodding works for now. Stop trying to change it.
Well done to Canonical for *not* doing that.
It isn't that bad when you turn down the volume as low as it will go. It's a cute girl imitating a goldfish. I bet you, if Beethoven had been around at the time, it would have cheered him up no end, and convinced him that his ironic condition could be a source of joy as well as sadness. And she got the days of the week in their proper order too, producing a work of chronological excellence. After all, even the Mamas and the Papas didn't dare go beyond monday, the Bangles famously put "Sunday" *behind* "Monday", to universal ridicule. All you haters simply don't understand the deeper meaning of this piece. The passing of time. The reflection upon the fragility of existence. Philistines!
On the one hand, the patent system can do with a good overhaul. On the other hand, is Gitmo closed yet? So how long is *this* going to take?
"App" is short for "Application". "Store" is just short. A hardware store is a store where you buy (or indeed, *store*) hardware. A drug store is where you buy drugs. A general store is where you buy generals. An app store is where you look at apps, then recoil in disgust.
I would mightily prefer it if people with more money than scruples would bloody well stop trying to patent and trademark the use of the BLEEDING OBVIOUS! Yes, I'm looking at YOU, Mr. "You've Got Mail(TM)". Stop snickering in the back, Mr. "IS NOT operator" (patent pending).
For the love of the FSM, can we get this banned under the same kind of treaty that bans the use of landmines? Patents were created to help the truly innovative minds of our age to profit from their brain child, like James Watt and his steam eng... Um. Edison's light bu... ah. Marconi and rad... Oh fuck it.
If this sort of thing is allowed to grow and fester, pretty soon you won't be able to move at all without some bloody patent/trademark troll going "Ah HA!"
The malicious rumours spread by eco-terrorists about a stealthy trip to the pet shop in those days is vile and evil and should be quashed at its source.
The last security auditor I had to deal with suggested that we turn off FTP, because apparently it sends passwords across teh networkz in plaintext. No, really? Well, given that you've been *told* that this is a print server, and all they can do with FTP is waste our paper, also that it doesn't have a password, and even if it had one, they could still print stuff using port 9100, I don't think we'll prioritise on manually logging in on ~50 print servers.
Run the script, take the output, cut and paste it into Word, profit!
There are security experts out there who really deserve respect, don't get me wrong. But they don't work for the kind of outfit that ends every report with "And therefore you need to install our spiffy security package".
Lissauer said: 'These data will enable us...'
These days, "data" is treated linguistically like water: "How much data" rather than "How many". Only the old hands might refer to such a thing as a "datum". We have an old school scientist here.
Yes, completely tangential. Simple minds are easily amused.
Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And after it's grown,
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.
Clone, clone of my own,
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And when I'm alone
With my own little clone
We will both think of nothing but sex.
There's more: http://members.tripod.com/~bardic_circle/aclone.htm
Hopefully, this will finally convince the last remaining few followers of the "This Site Is Best Viewed With Internet Explorer 6 on A Colour Monitor" school of web design that it's not the customers that suck, it's their web development platform.
Mind you, it has improved a lot in recent years. It's also a nice comeback for the idiots at "why firefox is blocked.com". Several big players in the browser market makes for an environment where you can't favour one, and are therefore more or less forced to stick to standards.
Can't be! Guinnesses are bigger than that!
What about a kiss, boy? We don't go galloping for the clitoris!
What on Earth are they drinking? It looks like some kind of stout, only smaller...
"Bus - derivation Greek. Plural buses."
You spend ages waiting for a bus, and then all of a sudden loads of bi come by!
"But not, fortunately, when his own phone started playing up. Suddenly it was perfectly safe to work under the tree, and the nice BT engineers (with whom I was quite chummy by this point) were able to connect me up while they were fixing my neighbour's fortuitously faulty phone line."
What, *bulllet holes*? Tchah! Kids these days. No respect for their neighbors' property. I blame the parents.
You're doing it wrong.
The way you do it is to persuade the people making it to come and work for you, then proceed to make those people the happiest people in the world. Surprisingly, this does not *always* involve giving them lots of money, but it does involve letting them do their thing.
Buying the company that is doing this, then telling everybody that, oh, Open Office is now Your Intellectual Property, then asking the makers what they're going to do about it, is less than perfect, as the obvious answer is for them to say goodbye, and continue their much appreciated work for someone else. Leaving the company with a heap of source code, and not the people who made it what it is today.
Let me splain.
In sane places, you download the fixes for the fuxes. You store them in a central place so as not to over-stress your Internet pipe. You then give your TEST servers a little poke, and they partake of the alledgedly fixed software. You very carefully test whether this makes them fall over in interesting ways. If they don't, then you give your PRODUCTION servers the same little poke and hope that you didn't miss anything.
In insane places, every server wants to be connected to the Internet to function at all, and to acertain that you're not a filthy pirate. As an aside, these boxes will then automatically download the MS fixes as soon as they become available, and politely ask you whether you want to reboot or yes. Only NOW, for people who have a screw loose and actually allow this to happen to any server they care about, there is an ADDITIONAL tool that PREVENTS this thing from happening, should you lack the wit to keep it from happening in the first place. Which will be automatically installed at the next automatic update. Are you with me so far? Well, then. When six months have passed, the fixpack blocker will then cease to block the fixes that you shouldn't have let the machines install in the first place, presumably causing them to be installed automatically after all, unless you have had the notion to disable that behaviour in a more permanent way in that time.
And yes, I agree. That is madness.
But then again, I also think that putting a firewall on your machine to block people from haxoring into your system's less secure facilities, should be a practice abandoned in favour of fixing the sodding leaks in the faulty facility in the first place, or not running that facility in the first place.
So yes, while people are crowing that here MS has given us yet another feature to control the deployment of their shit on our servers, I would argue that there should be only one way. One that works properly.
RELEASING PAPER PLANES IN SPACE: NEW CURE FOR CANCER
Ah.... The good old oncological ontology blog.
On my morning Tube ride, I spotted the familiar scavenger logo in that bastion of journalistic excellence that is the Metro. Gentlemen, the Vulture has now well and truly landed. If any dates and wild parties with supermodels ensue, we will of course expect full Playmo-coverage.
It just struck me. Are there really, well, I suppose we must call them people, who, upon the release of a new iShiny device... INTENTIONALLY damage their current iShiny, and then, blue eyes shining innocently, claim to their insurers that their property was damaged only by Cruel Fate itself?
Please tell me, if such people exist at all, how are they punished? What circle of Hell is reserved for them? How, in a Universe ruled by a Being that is both omnipotent and good, can such an evil be allowed to exist?
Not putting it up there in the first place, ye stupid buggers?
XP sucks. It's just that it sucks in ways that users throughout the last ten years have gotten used to. For crying out loud, I had to do a complete OS reinstall this month because a game misbehaved, and hosed the entire box. Thing is, when XP goes Windows and needs a wee re-install, I'm fairly sure I know the voodoo to fix it. When 7 goes Windows, I haven't a clue. Chances are, neither does your IT department.
Ogods... I just spent about two days hacking and wading my way through a big Word document, the information in which will have significant influence on my future work. It had lots to comment on, being written by a non-native speaker[1], and I didn't even start on the actual layout.
Fonts changing willy-nilly. Margins floating between Zero and Two Inches with no clear reason why. No two bullet lists looking the same, presumably to illustrate all the beautiful different ways in which Our Lord and Mircosoft allows you to list things. Some of the pages on A4, where others are on Letter landscape, maybe to accomodate a picture that Word thought wouldn't fit on A4 size paper. Headers and footers appearing, changing and disappearing at random (which is really handy if you have to write comments on it. "About Page Unnumbered about three down from where you suddenly switch to Helvetica").
I'm sure the person wrote it with the same amount of pleasure as I read it.
This is why, when I have a big document to produce, I use Komposer, a WYSIWOTSIT web page editor. Its most important feature is that it doesn't have all the formatting crap that MS (or Sun) bestows on us. When I'm happy with the words, I'll cut-and-paste it into a Word document. At least that way, I won't have to deal with all the editing damage that you can inflict on your document with mis-aimed clicks and I can concentrate on, you know, actually producing the words and the pictures.
[1] And damn you, *I* am a non-native speaker. It doesn't excuse the crap English.
