Posts by GrumpyMiddleAgedGuy 40 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Nov 2013
IE became dominant because it was the best browser at the time. Netscape was awful. It was so awful that MS sat on their backsides for 15 years and really didn't worry until Chrome came along. Chrome is far superior browser, and suddenly all those people who chose IE because they were "stupid" and didn't know any better decided to switch to Chrome. (A bit of a simplification but essentially true)
"...can’t innovate without being diverse and inclusive." Well, I have one word to say about that: Japan.
The reality is that the UK in the 19th Century was one of the most innovative places on earth, and very homogenous.
I am curious. Are the major universities going to spend cash to ensure that ther intake isn't too Chinese? Thought not.
Positive discrimination is still discrimination.
Have you watched the BBC lately? It is popular trash. E.g. EastEnders, Strictly come Dancing. Also it is deeply left-wing and biased; a claim its own management has agreed with. And it is unbelievable that 1000s of mostly poor are jailed for not paying for their licence. (Are we living in Victorian times?)
The sooner it gets privatised the better. A dinosaur.
I remember ActiveX in the browser well, and wrote some excellent in-house controls, which were replaced by sub-standard javascript/HTML controls because of security concerns - despite the fact the controls were only available in-house. I always felt the idea had promise but was a non-starter because of the anti-MS brigade spreading FUD. I'm not a believer that everything has to be on the client either, even if that has become the way of the world. Not everything needs to run on phones AND desktops. Quite ridiculous really but sure I'll be shouted down.
Your objections are based on ideology. The fact is the House of Lords works. If it's not broken, don't break it.
Sadly it is now being populated with political cronies. Not a step forward. And frankly those who support "reform" are the "useful idiots" (as Stalin would say) who provide cover for professional politicians to do so.
Why shouldn't it be he first thing that appears when you are Googled. If it's not a lie. If it happened.
The idea that information should be restricted because someone doesn't want you to know about it is simply foreign in a democracy. As is the idea that being offended is another way to control others or restrict their rights. Grow up.
Happened to me just once. I aced the interview and believe I said all the right things. Good review back to the agent, and then they decided to go with someone else. I just sensed that the guy was uneasy that I did so well. The fact that this happens says a lot about the quality of management.
Well, it's possible that the 1930s were the warmest decade in the last 100 years, before NASA and others decided to process the available data. There is a reason that the temperature graphs start in the 1950s.
Saying that it is not an unreasonable things to do since the data needs cleaned. i.e. checked for reasonableness and outlining values removed. etc. However it add more uncertainty. Given that it has now been 25 years without significant temperature rise, the claims of global warming (originally 5 degree per 100 years!) have to be regarded as very suspect.
You can't do that - that would be another bill for people unfairly dismissed. It would cost even more millions. Think Sharon Shoesmith.
I just don't understand how it would cost £750million to scan a passport (a document designed to be easy to scan) and update that information in a central database. How do we get into such a mess? Perhaps we should start an OS project and do it in a fraction of the time and cost?
So, if she had known there was a potentially violent partner she would have turned up with armed police in tow? I don't think so - it simply is not feasible, which is why your wife probably made a wise decision.
However I have a simple scenario that should worry you. You have children at school age. You have bought a house specifically to get into a good school. The Labour Minister for Education decides that good school are good because they have good pupils and "disadvantaged" kids go to poor schools. So he decides to even things up. He says "I have access to you income (tx Tax Department). I going to come up with a scheme where you DONT get into a good school because you are close, you go to the school I assign you to and the assignments will be based on fairness (read: Middle class kids get sent to poor schools)."
This kind of information allows social engineering on a grand scale. Be afraid, very afraid.
You are naive if you think the police attend every crime and investigate it fully. The don't. They make decisions based on cost all the time. Police in London for example wont come to a car accident, even where road rage is involved, unless someone is hurt. They choose to "concentrate" on more important crimes. [ I know this from personal experience ]
Recently we had a case reported where a convict escaped from prison for 10 years, no police investigation, in fact it emerged that at one point he even flagged down a police car and got a lift.
Bear in mind Assange is wanted on a questionable rape charge, Rape has a low conviction rate and the police are constantly criticised over there "inadequate response". Yet somehow, THIS rape case which didn't even happen in Britain, and has been prioritised to the value of over £6,000,000.
That a political decision made higher up.
Why I'm so annoyed about this is that a couple of years ago we had a gang appear in our street. The police didn't act on intimidation, car damage, ship lifting and drug dealing that resulted, until a young boy was stabbed to death. Then they claimed ignorance(!) and finally arrested those involved and everything went back to normal. That's the real result of diverting scarce resources away from real crime.
Sound like a publicity gimmick to stir up the usual (Linux) suspects and get noticed.
I've never heard of gamepe before.
The "safe" functions are only wrappers around the standard functions that make it a little harder to do things like run off the end of a buffer. There absence from Windows 7 is not a vulnerability. Assuming that is what the report is saying.
Wealth inequality is increasing because the nature of how we make our living is changing.
A large proportion of "service" jobs do not require great skill - there is a large pool of labour (supply) for limited jobs (demand) => low pay. Those who have capital can use foreign workers where necessary =>relatively high returns.
I would say educational opportunity is more important than the welfare state - it allows people to change their circumstances. The welfare state however ensures that those at the bottom aren't too badly off or too angry about it.
As someone who only just avoided being blown up on 7/7, I'm not particularly impressed by the publication of these details. Terrorism is a real danger and its childish to pretend that GCHQ and NSA are the real enemy.
Next time a train or plane is blown up, and there is a very good chance there will be a next time, I hope those who have supported these leaks feel comfortable with themselves. Apparently targeted individuals have changed their behaviour, making it much harder to track them.
Why does everyone buy into the "the sender [alien civilisations] will have long since ceased to exist, or will have changed beyond anything the receiver might recognise as intelligence"?
Good grief. Frogs and crocodiles have been around for 100+ million years, and we're a lot smarter than them. And change into something not recognisable as intelligence? What, a flower? Someone has been watching too many episodes of Babylon 5.
We are alone. Any civilisation even slightly more advanced than us could populate the galaxy in 10,000,000 years. That fact that we are still here speaks volumes.
I been reading up on some of this stuff. Some very old articles on "triple entry accounting" suggest that it is better for companies to adopt their own internal currency than use double entry bookkeeping. The reasons are somewhat technical but the question remains: how do you separate bitcoins from, say, a small company that adopts its own currency (internal vouchers) for bookkeeping reasons?
I think that law makers are going to find that very difficult to do.
There is a fundamental issue of freedom at stake here. Over here in the UK we have gone further down the line of deciding/codifying what behaviour is allowed and what is not. Hate-laws have virtually silence debate on immigration, people have been arrested for saying things as simple as "If you don't like xyz, then go home to your own country". The same goes for gay rights. (Some was even arrested for saying "Do you know your horse is gay"!)
The results is that and old couple running a B&B and the Catholic Adoption agency partially closed down. These are not good things, and there is no evidence that there is any positive to come out of it.
"Rights" always are going to compete with each other - and then judges will say what you can and cannot do. In short it is deeply coercive.
If you are an atheist, that's fine you may not believe in religion. If you are religious you may consider atheist as deeply immoral and damaging (religious people work harder, are more honest, marriages last longer than cohabitants, etc). Live and let live is better than someone deciding who is right. I'm always stunned at the intolerance of atheist (I think they think everyone else is stupid). Anyway, it is not proper for the business to take a position on a such political matter.
Not sure that really is the case. There has been a least one case dismissed where the magistrate ruled that the police cannot really claim to be offended by bad language. Unfortunately not a precedent, but the same claim would succeed now in a higher court.
But I digress. Lovely video.
Well, I got a MSc. in IT from one of the worst British Universities and it was a joke. I used to be a high school teacher and the graduates would not have passed high school IT exams. IMHO, the Uni was a machine designed to get primarily overseas students an impressive sounding British qualification for a price.
Ironically I did the MSc since I have a BSc from University of Queensland, one of the top 100 universities in the world, but it was not acceptable as a pre-requisite for post-grad courses in the UK.
In the UK, the whole outsourcing, overseas students thing is a joke riddled with people playing the system.
City of London: If you get access to the figures you might find outsourcing is not as cheap as you think. Certainly when our company cast around, they found that all the outsourcing companies charged about the same for the same tasks. (Collusion? No, how could you suggest such a thing?). The quotes came in around 85% of that required to do it locally.
I guess that makes sense - pay a pittance to those actually doing the job, and charge as much as the market will bear (why charge 30% of local rates when you can charge 85%). Big profit margins.
The company I worked for had a similar experience with Indian outsourcing. Not only that, our project was fixed price. Once they decided they were gong overtime, they presented us with drivel and walked off site. I was told later that the received about 90% of their fees.
I despair.
If you believe the marketing types, most markets tend to a profile which has one major market player on 75%, second place on 20% and all the rest at 5%. (yes, I know there are exceptions, not as many as you might think) It may mean the search engine market is mature and MS simply won't be able to make headway without some sort of massive mindshift.
I personally like BING but don't really care that much. I tend to use Google more, and use BING when I don't get results. I'm guessing most people are the same.
Blue screens? Your living in the past. I've toyed with going to Open Office and the like for years, but frankly they're just not good enough. And Linux is a mess. You want to install some software? You just have to recompile the kernel. And doggy interfaces. Linux absolutely sucks. Lets not mention wobbly screens.
Apple are on a role at the moment, but I've never really liked the way they treat their customers. My son has iPhone that he dropped. Try getting Apple to fix it.
Microsoft isn't perfect but reasoned discussion is better than this tribal nonsense.
It would be madness to port Office to Android.
I remember thinking years ago, when java first came out, that Java would not conquer the desktop, but it would mean that people who didn't like MS could migrate their apps AWAY from Sun onto Linux. That's what happened and look what happened to Sun.
If Office moves to Android, the only reason I and millions of others buy MS disappears. A particularly dumb business strategy. No wonder Nokia went down the proverbial.
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