* Posts by Planeten Paultje

33 publicly visible posts • joined 12 May 2007

LinkedIn U-turns to appease peeved users

Planeten Paultje
FAIL

Oops, and...

...Mea culpa, Mea minima culpa.

Adobe releases lengthy list of Apple Lion woes

Planeten Paultje
FAIL

Networks?

"We don't support networks" said the Adobe rep when asked why CS5's Premiere doesn't play ball with Xsan.

Google muzzles political dissidents with YouTube ID tweaks

Planeten Paultje
FAIL

Wankers

Instead of announcing what they were doing, they gave me the runaround for an hour, trying to log in into my accounts that I knew I hadn't changed.

After a lot of tries I suddenly could log in as if nothing had happened.

Certified Made-in-America Cock-Up.

South African Bill to block all porn

Planeten Paultje
Thumb Down

Nice....

....backdoor effort in killing off sex education and aids prevention, meguesses. And also a practice round for the implementation of the nuts, bolts and gears of a totalitarian state.

Men at Work swiped Down Under riff

Planeten Paultje
Coat

I can't hear it....

....but then I'm no Aussie. Did they do spectral analysis on the flute riff? Is this the equivalent of patent trolling?

Britons warned of plague of the 'supercats'

Planeten Paultje
Thumb Down

Miauw!

Considering that tiny wild Saudi desert cats are known to be able to completely take apart a grown man, you don't want to get too close to an even bigger wild cat. As long as we stick to fully domesticated felines for symbiosis, we'll be all right. Mostly.

Tomorrow's World comes back to the future

Planeten Paultje
Thumb Down

Seriously DUH!

"There is fog in the Channel. The Continent is isolated."

Huge 'vampyrus' bats being hunted to extinction

Planeten Paultje
Unhappy

Yeah....

> and that all the countries where they live should cooperate

Like that will ever happen.

Crystal ball torches woman's flat

Planeten Paultje
Flame

Campbell-Stokes attack!

Silly question: Why do people have no insurance?

But anyways, its Basic Physics™. Anything in the focal point of a large lens will fry, given enough sunlight. The mount of the ball is meant to keep things away from the focal trail. Its the opposite with a Campbell-Stokes recorder where the hours of sunshine are recorded as burn marks in a strip of special paper:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Campbell-Stokes_recorder.jpg

Reg reader bombarded by 3 sales calls

Planeten Paultje
Flame

Heh....

Reminds me of this evergreen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWoz9M4Tsj0&fmt=18

Red Hat sticks lawyers on non-neutral Switzerland

Planeten Paultje
Linux

Switchers

My city council (Haarlem, The Netherlands) replaced Windows with Linux on all of their PC's a few years ago and they never looked back. They are saving themselves a boatload of money every year too. Training of users? Yes, of course. But they now have more control over their machines and network and less maintenance.

They had a carefully worked out plan and didn't rush things. It paid off for them.

Prolific penis-pill pusher gets slap on the wrist

Planeten Paultje
Unhappy

Joke

> US $63,400

That's a bad joke, right?

Kids blame technology for homework hand-in failures

Planeten Paultje
Stop

Heh :-)

It devoured my paper.....

MacBook buyers bite Apple over copy protection cock-up

Planeten Paultje
Stop

DRM

@Kenny Millar: "You cannot move forward by holding onto the past"

Holding onto DRM *IS* holding onto the past.

Royal Society says goodbye to creationism row vicar

Planeten Paultje
Stop

PZ Myers

I agree with PZ Myers' stance on this issue:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/09/michael_reisss_big_mistake.php#more

Creationism does not belong in science class, but you have to explain what science is and does and why creationism has no basis in science.

Anything that blatantly goes against solid evidence is crap and should be exposed and dismissed as such.

Apple channels Pandora with iTunes 8

Planeten Paultje
Flame

To bury the peace pipe?

I've heard of burying hatchets, but peace pipes? Or are we trying to prevent more cancers this way?

US nuke missile crew falls asleep on the job

Planeten Paultje
Unhappy

Bad air maybe?

I assume all these "secure" rooms have their own air supply. If the filtering is a bit off or something, I can imagine people falling asleep.

UK boffins roll out video periodic table

Planeten Paultje
Boffin

Always nice to see Sodium sizzle....

An urban legend (unverified, '50s, '60s) from Amsterdam goes as follows:

Over the year the chemistry faculty lab of the University of Amsterdam used to collect the sodium left-overs from practice in a big jar with petroleum. At the end of a fourth semester two students were (as usual) dispatched with the jar and two long tweezers to the moat running along the lab building. Their job was to dump the sodium scraps into the water one at the time, and let nature reclaim the element.

At first this was fun of course, watching the sodium perform all kinds of different stunts on the water, depending on scrap size. But after some time the students started to realise that they were going to be there for the best part of the day, dumping sodium at the rate they were instructed to maintain. By that time the thrill was gone and they decided to turn over the jar and dump its contents into the moat in one go.

Allegedly a blast resulted that took out a few parked cars and a lot of chemistry lab windows. The story doesn't recount the students' fate......

I got this story from my brother-in-law, who studied chemistry at that faculty in the '60s, though it happened before his time.

Japan to fund creation of 40W, 40in OLED TV

Planeten Paultje

Ground breaking....

I also expect it to be bank breaking ;-)

Warning sounded over black hole in UK physics teaching

Planeten Paultje
Coat

DUH.....

That's a serious national embuggerment. But the UK can rest assured that for instance The Netherlands aren't fairing too well either. So why bother doing something about it? Costs a lot of nice money to train good teachers and for what immediate ROI?

Teens use technology to party in strangers' pools

Planeten Paultje

Hmmmmmm.......

An alligator rental service may just fill the new hole in the market methinks ;-)

Air France pilot in white-knuckle near miss

Planeten Paultje
Pirate

> Navigation 101

"course and heading are two completely different things"

Good point (and no worries, I'm not a pilot ;-). He might still have been in his corridor though, but

> John Freas

"if said driver unexpectedly yanks the machine into a turn toward the other traffic, the convergence angles change and if the other target is suddenly predicted to enter the safe bubble that the TCAS intends to preserve, it will set off the alarm."

Very plausable, I vote for this explanation of events.

Planeten Paultje
Pirate

Maybe not related?

It would seem the two incidents just may not have been related. Making two turns (after which the plane should be on course again, and still in its corridor, if the pilot knew where he was) would not get you closer to the plane in front, assuming same direction and speed. The sudden climb is more likely the result of the aircraft proximity warning system advising the pilot to climb, because another plane was detected on a head-on collision course. The other plane would have had the same warning, but be advised to descend. We'll hear what really happened eventually, and two pilots will probably be flying chickens in Africa or something.....

Commodore goes titsup (again)

Planeten Paultje
Thumb Up

Not solid?

> "the OS was ok, but nothing remarkable and not exactly solid."

I beg to differ. I managed a lab with 20-odd A3000's, running from an A3000 Unix server. After an initial three+ years of incremental upgrades (ethernet to utp, system upgrades and tweaks, single-user to multi-user FS) it ended up running for four more years, withstanding the daily battering in school without any significant maintenance, exept for the odd hard drive replacement. The last Amiga OS I used (v3.x something) was very solid. Power outages and uncountable rogue power resets by students never touched it, never required me to act upon. It was also very well-integrated with the last Amiga Unix. When the lab was dismanteled (to be replaced by Macs), it was in perfect working order.

As for remakable: That was why we installed it in the first place. It allowed us to teach graphics/animation/video. And we (legally) ran Mac OS on these machines too for DTP classes.

But now we have OSX and we're not looking back. However, sometimes I still daydream of the only things that did leave this world with the Amiga: the concepts of Draggable Multiple Screens and Multiple Simultaneous Resolutions. Still ahead of this time......

Network Solutions hijacks customer sub-domains for ad fest

Planeten Paultje

I tested this.....

.....with my own domain name, like: nonsense.planetenpaultje.nl/ and all the permutations I tried reverted to the registered name. Very nice job by my registrar (should be standard configuration with any registrar of course).

Creative threatens developer over home-brewed Vista drivers

Planeten Paultje

Idiots

Dit I say "idiots"? Quite. they are idiots!

Finland censors anti-censorship site

Planeten Paultje
Flame

The sole purpose....

....of this kind of legislation is to stifle free speech. Attacking kiddy porn is just a straw man, set up to achieve that goal. Anyone protesting the use of the law beyond it's original alledged purpose can and will be accused of condoning or proliferating kiddy porn; nobody wants to be in such a position.

I hope the Fins, their constitution and its guardians are robust enough to see them through this......

Babbling net software sparks international incident

Planeten Paultje

Incident?

These Dutch diplomats and politicians are devoid of humour. Nothing new there.

Apple nears MacBook revamp release?

Planeten Paultje
Thumb Down

Al MacBooks?

As MacBooks are meant to take serious beatings every day at the hands of school kids, I have difficulty thinking new versions will be Al clad. The MBP housings are wonderful, but they're clearly less tough than the MB's polycarbonate ones.

Florida uni cops taser shouty student

Planeten Paultje

The trigger....

....to this assault may have been his question about impeaching Bush. Maybe the rentacops saw that as an attack on the US on US soil.

US car thieves floored by manual gearbox

Planeten Paultje

NCIS....

....had a nice show where the doctor is taken hostage and his former assistant is allowed to drive away in the doctor's car, a vintage English automobile. The poor guy had never heard of a "clutch" and couldn't get it moving ;-).

Gorilla rampages through Dutch zoo

Planeten Paultje

Eye contact and smiles

News reports indicate that the lady made extensive eye contact with the gorilla, while also smiling. This may have been understood by the gorilla as threatning, thus leading to the attack.

I guess a lot of signs will go up in zoo's, warning the public for making eye contact with and smiling at apes.

Satnav driver's car totalled by train

Planeten Paultje

Surely this has to be an urban myth

I mean, a railway crossing with gates on *both* sides that have to be operated *by hand*?!?!? NO WAY!