Posts by Coruscating Frenzy 29 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2009
Yes. Apparently the requirement that gay actors only play gay characters was lifted as part of the Cretinous Adherence ti Literalism Repeal Act of 1967, wherein it was acknowledged that certain sections of the population were able to distinguish the difference between an actor and the character(s) he or she might play. This allowed people like Daniel Radcliffe, for example, to play a boy wizard despite having no magical powers whatsoever.
As one who was once one of those demoralised high-churn permies (and I'm not being sarcastic - I think that is a very apt description) I feel vindicated. All the grief handed out to anyone who even hinted that the Symbian Way was not the Best Way, and here we see chickens coming home to roost.
Any software development organisation that commited such stupendous amounts of resource to debugging and repairing releases couldn't keep going on like that forever. I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. Anyway, I left a long time ago, amid much merriment and glee, and the feelings of rancour and relief were mutual and reciprocated I'm sure :-)
As an ex-Symbian employee, it always looked to me that Symbian was botching Symbian. Their own lack of expertise in the basics of software development, and costly reliance on squads of defect fixers instead of good coders and designers, made them slow and unresponsive. Lots of Golden Hammers and magic formulae to be protected by people with a vested interest in preserving their own status and none in promoting innovation.
Too many people in Symbian basked in the reflected glory of the original set of clever people who started it all up and then bailed. In the end what emerged was a pretty dumb company. These guys actually reviewed code as if it was theatre performance, fer chrissake!
Having sat on both sides of the interview process, I have to agree.
BCS membership has never been of interest, even when it is mentioned on a condidate's CV. Interviewers that are worth a damn don't give a hoot about paper qualifications and membership of associations. Experience and approach. Do you know what to do and do you know how to do it?
For heaven's sake, get a grip FFS.
If you don't like Facebook ... here's the news ... it's not compulsory. You are allowed to go through life without a Facebook account. You are even allowed to stop your children using it. It really is a case of user beware. The Internet is not a nursery. It's full of the same people that inhabit the city streets at night. And some of them want to rob and rape you. Or your children. Your duty of care to yourself and your children hasn't gone away just because you're a social networking site. Technology doesn't fix people and their behaviours. It just makes whatever is going to happen, happen faster and more efficiently.
If the various branches of government are being run by "amazingly stupid people", someone should look into how that happened.
Oh, they got there because someone voted for them? Perhaps that's the source of the problem then.
Still, it does seem very odd that the people of Britain consistently vote for "amazingly stupid people" all the time. Sounds more like a bullshit theory with no basis in fact to me. Maybe you're the amazingly stupid person who drags down the average.
I can't help feeling that there is an obvious point being missed. The problem is not with the technology, but with the people who use and abuse it. It is a social phenomenon, not a technical issue. Yawping about technical fixes to suppress undesirable behaviour on Facebook is the antithesis of the perennial libertarian knee-jerk response to a government seeking to do the same with ASBOs, ID cards, national databases, etc. in orded to control our daily lives.
Either you wish to see paternalistic technical control regimes applied throughout modern life to protect people from their own stupidity, or you don't. Either that or you land in a bizarre land of cognitive dissonance where you are complaining that "the government is oppressing me, but Facebook doesn't protect me."
As far as Facebook is concerned, I say let natural selection take its course. If Facebook becomes unusable people will stop using it. If people are stupid, they should take the consequences.
How does that work then? If the Celts didn't migrate into what is now Britain until approximately 400 years before the Romans arrived ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts & http://www.xtimeline.com/timeline/Celtic-Migration ), exactly how did the Scottish (crap) weather put any sort of selective pressure on genes that were still resident in Central Europe some 40,000 years earlier?
Perhaps your grasp of evolutionary time and the mechanisms of natural selection were obtained down on the banks of the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River :-)
The real question is not: is this guy a tit? Yes of course he is. But I expect he's learned a valuable lesson already.
The important question is: what benefit is there in prosecuting him? Is society protected any better because of the retribution that is being meted out here, or is some officious plod-squirt just getting his jollies off on 'punishing' an easy target?
Given my natural bias against the filth and their corrupt practices, I'm afraid I go with the latter. Once you give the educationally disadvantaged a uniform, a nightstick and carte blanche to harass anyone who speaks out of turn, they just turn out to be a bunch of c*nts!
I wouldn't dispute it - I was making no claims for this ex-pat Kiwi's uniqueness in the world of Shanes. It was more the connection to the movie aspect.
Sounds like any Australian Western afficionado would have had a hard time hearing the dialogue for all the grunting going on at the back of the cinema.
My younger brother went to school with a kid called 'Shane'. According to my parents, his mother claimed he was so named because "that was the movie that was on the night he was conceived". However, that would have been 13 years after the original release date. They were from New Zealand, so moving pictures were probably a huge technological leap for them in the 60's.
Presumably, somewhere in the world, there is a man called Horse.
The default options were to keep the old settings. That's what I found, and it seems that several other Reg readers got that too.
So, is this a bit of anti-Facebook propaganda that you've punted as news without actually checking, or are there really people getting the 'Everyone' option as default?
As someone who spent time defect-fixing at the Symbian gulag in Cambridge, I can tell you that there is no feedback loop between those who fix the defects and those who introduce them. So the years of debugging invested in the Symbian OS never led to any improvements or increased stability. The idea that their code monkeys had anything to learn from their testers and defect-fixers was just too much heresy.
They could have done with a couple of experienced people at the Engineering Manager level. What they got were some political chimps who liked to talk bollocks about football and play favourites.
I checked at BT Centre and they told me that your £120 goes into a small box labelled "Dave's Pitiful Little Drop In The Ocean".
Then, every Friday lunchtime, there is a ritual unveiling of the box in the middle of the largest table in the largest boardroom after which BT senior managers are invited in to point and snigger before a specially hired contractor, dressed in a Busby costume, wipes his arse on the notes.
"... the serval, a cheetah-like beast"?
Have you ever seen a serval? Or a cheetah, for that matter? There's one or two servals at Marwel Zoo near Winchester for those who'd like to verify a simple fact.
A serval is, on average, a third of the size of a cheetah and virtually the only thing it has in common with a cheetah is the colouring.
And since it is quite safe to sit in an enclosure with human-reared cheetah (in my experience - they purr, lick your hands and face, and like to lean on you like a big old bagpuss - beautiful friendly animals), I hardly think we that much to fear from something derived from a timid little serval.
"Wild servals are thought to be capable of bringing down a gazelle" - yeah, on a really lucky day, with a very small, weak gazelle with no mates.
Servals normally eat rodents, frogs and birds. Pretty much like your domesticated cat, if the Whiskas isn't forthcoming. Not much evidence of the domesticated cats round here eating small children. Unfortunately.
With reference to the loss of his job ... the success or failure of a prosecution is immaterial. In the UK civil servants have to abide by a Civil Service disciplinary code which covers terms related to bringing the service into disrepute. Whether the written outpourings of his fevered mind constitutes an offence is a matter for the courts. The public association of those outpourings with the Civil Service is a disciplinary matter for his employers. There is no dispute about the authorship of the text, and the association to his employers is made plain even in the article under discussion: "their case against Civil Servant Darryn Walker". Therefore he has pretty obviously brought the Civil Service into disrepute in a massively public way.
"This couldn't have happened in the 60s because ...
...Everyone would be dead from drug overdoses anyway."
Like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Keith Richard, Grace Slick, Frank Zappa, Roy Harper, Roger Waters, Dave Gilmour, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Pete Townsend, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, etc.?
So, yeah, like THAT all happened.
This is not a uniquely US problem. It's about the difference between having vision and having a Vision Statement. This sort of conservative risk-averse thinking is so ubiquitous in corporate heirarchies I'm surprised it's even commented upon these days. The number of times I've seen exciting and imaginative work canned because some monkey-brained manager couldn't see past the next bonus review doesn't bear thinking about.
I know this might sound heretical, possibly blasphemous, and undoubtedly a case of "political correctness gone mad", but I wonder just how many people have considered the possibility that the woman with the same job title as you might be doing it better, faster and/or to a higher quality than you?
Maybe I need to lie down in a darkened room until the nice doctors come with my medicine.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
