Posts by Nick Palmer 275 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Feb 2007
... seen or perfectly understood, no Captain can do very wrong if he places his Ship alongside that of an Enemy..."
Nelson, Victory, off Cadiz, 9th October, 1805.
http://www.wtj.com/archives/nelson/1805_10c.htm
That's not a collision, that's commitment! :P
"Tall and tan and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes, each one she passes goes - ah
When she walks, she's like a samba
That swings so cool and sways so gentle
That when she passes, each one she passes goes - ooh..."
Wait....there was a news item...?
User calls me.
User: My laptop won't turn on.
Me: Are there any lights showing?
User: No, it's just not working.
<We go around the houses a few times checking the power etc>
Me: OK, looks like it'll have to come in.
<Time passes, then user comes into my office>
User: I've brought my laptop in, it still won't turn on.
Me: OK, let's have a look.
<User hands me laptop case, most notable feature of same being a &%$£ing huge tyre-mark across the middle.>
User: It's just not been working at all...
Me: ...since you drove your car over it?
User: <sheepish look> Errrrrr...yes...
Me: No shit.
User: Is it covered under the warranty?
Me: Oddly, no...
Paris, 'cause she's still got some tread on her too...
We've had law made via judges in this country for centuries, and by and large they've done OK at it - in some respects better than Parliament. Judges, by and large, tend to have had reasonably successful legal careers before they get the big horsehair syrup and crimson bathrobe, which requires at least SOME mental horsepower, and most serious precedent is decided by the higher appellate courts anyway (Court of Appeal, HoL), who tend to be pretty bright.
One might infer, on the basis of his conduct and the facts of the Mosley case, that Paul Dacre's an anal retentive curtain-twitcher with a prurient interest in kinky sex and a wholly mercenary interest in punting his wretched rag at others of the same ilk, and that he's simply indulging in some teddy-throwing because a perfectly sensible judiciary decided that that wasn't a good enough reason for invading someone's privacy, but [Francis Urquhart] I couldn't possibly comment [/Francis Urquhart]. What I WOULD say is that it is vile to see (yet again) that a creature of that sort can apparently yank a Secretary of State's chain hard enough to commandeer, at least in part, the legislative process. Privacy law courtesy of the Daily Fail, the frothing mouthpiece of the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" idiots; now there's an edifying prospect.
Vista Home Basic is a gutted version that doesn't include features that were heavily promoted by MS as part of the Vista experience, Aero being only the most obvious. Anyone who equates HB with the other Vista editions is frankly on crack. They didn't label these machines as "Vista Home Basic Capable", they labelled them as "Vista Capable", when these machines are clearly incapable of running the majority of versions of Vista - @Justin, it's not just that they can't run Ultimate, they can't run Home Premium, Business OR Ultimate.
Consider the following example - one buys a laptop equipped with XP Professional. You need the machine to logon to a domain and other businessy type stuff. It's shipped with XP Pro, but labelled as Vista capable, so you can just upgrade it when Vista comes out, right? Wrong. You cannot upgrade it, because it'll only run VHB, and you would need to have Vista Business running on it to have the same functionality as under XP Pro. Congrats, you got screwed by the Vista Capable logo campaign.
The campaign was clearly designed to lead people to believe that they could have all the promoted features of Vista when it came out on the machine that they had bought, and it was designed to use that false impression to avoid a slowdown in PC shipments over the year-end/Christmas period. A lot of people were misled and deliberately so. I hope the action succeeds.
Devil Bill, cause they're ain't no Devil Ballmer.
...are both right, in that the user experience has been getting steadily less familiar and agreeable, but I think that that isn't a "WIndows" problem nearly so much as an Office one. Let's face it, you could run Office on Linux if you wanted to, and the key thing that the users of the W and the X'd be complaing about wouldn't be anything to do with the OS, it'd be the ghastly redesign of Office.
...indicate that W7 runs very well on netbooks and similar low spec machines, and faster than Vista on anything else. I'm taking this with a pinch of salt, naturally, but looking forward to giving it a bash. If they HAVE got it right with 7, then I think reports of their demise will prove a little exaggerated....
...that what Lewis is (really) saying, is that Lockheed and partners have managed to come up with something almost like a present day F4 Phantom - it's not the best bomber, it's not the best fighter, it's not the best reconnaissance aircraft or defence suppression aircraft, but it may well be that it does all of the above sufficiently better than most others that it doesn't make sense to buy anything else?
I remember watching an interview with a very senior former McDonnell Douglas chap who said, basically, that everything about the Phantom was either wrong, or a dodgy hack to deal with a problem; it was hugely un-aerodynamic, the flipped-up wingtips and droopy tailplane were there as bodges because they had to be, and it still worked, because crucially, none of the likely opponents had anything better (or at least they didn't once they put a gun on it...). In this case, if they have pulled that off, they appear to have done so with a plane that has a lot right with it (and even has a VSTOL option - I invite you to consider the implications of trying to get a VSTOL Phantom...but not with a full mouth or if you're prone to heart problems... ;-) ). That would really be rather a good thing, especially for our cash-strapped military, and our death-tech guys at BAE are involved in the F35 too, so it's not a dead loss from the jobs and economy point of view either.
Anyway, good article.
Quite rightly, they want ****ing SHEDLOADS, and also quite rightly they'll be prepared to spend shedloads to get it, with the net effect that with any luck, US soldiers will actually get stuff that works, while their poor relations over here will be attempting to munge something together out of cotton wool and bent paperclips.
We have a couple of these in service, although most of our machines are Dell Latitudes. It's worth noting that even the majority of machines that ship with 3-year onsite warranties on the hardware only warranty the battery for 12 months. You can buy 3-year cover for your battery for the latest Latitudes, but that's extra - although at £38.50, it's not exactly ruinously expensive. I've heard worse deals than the Apple one in this case, but I'd still rather have a user replaceable battery.
The shuttle is an experimental spacecraft, it always has been, as have been all manned spacecraft. It doesn't go up and down the fscking M6. It operates at the ragged edge of possibility for current technologies, and in the most hostile environments to which any manned craft has been exposed. No, it wouldn't be allowed on the roads, because if it were, muppets like you might get at the controls. Newsflash; the "Harry Stamper experience" was a bloody movie, so you don't get shuttles which can handle lumps of rock the size of Ladas bouncing off them - real spacecraft are incredibly fragile. The LEM for the Apollo missions had a skin that was thinner than the foil you wrapped around your Christmas turkey. The skin of the Shuttle has always been vulnerable to impacts. What these people do is by its very nature dangerous; every flight is almost a test flight, but they do it anyway. The programme lost a crew, and they determined at the time what caused the accident. What they have been doing since (among other things) is attempting to determine whether there are measures that they could take that would improve crew survivability in the event of another accident. Of course it's very easy to cherry-pick a couple of sentences out of the two-and-a-half page executive summary of a 400 page report and say that they're just stating the obvious. It's also as utterly imbecilic as an assumption that there is some parity between a real spacecraft, a piece of Hollywood nonsense, and a family saloon.
"Bagpuss gave a big yawn, and settled down to sleep. And when Bagpuss goes to sleep, all his friends go to sleep too. The mice are ornaments on the Mouse Organ, Gabriel and Madeleine are just dolls. And Professor Yaffle is just a carved wooden book-end in the shape of a woodpecker. Even Bagpuss himself, once he is asleep, is just an old, saggy cloth cat - baggy and a bit loose at the seams. But Emily loved him."
...and the statement on the web page is a corker!
"With my deepest regret and sincerest apology I am left with no option but to announce that I am forced to close the children's entertainment theme park "Lapland New Forest" for 2008 due ( I believe at the time of publishing ) to:
* Intentional organised crowd manipulation and event sabotage during and since our first trading weekend.
* The unscrupulous and inaccurate negative bias media broadcasts of both local and national press and television companies that contributed significantly to fuelling widespread public concern, frenzy and distraction since the 1st December 2008.
* What I believe to be a wholly illegal action by the credit merchant company called "Streamline" of seizing /withdrawing all funds without notice from the Lapland New Forest Ltd bank account leaving us completely unable to trade...."
Couldn't agree more. I don't object to paying for music, I don't even object to buying downloads, I just wanted them to be freely usable across my devices once I'd bought them. Amazon provide that, and then this bunch decide to fuck up the deal. "“This artistic project addresses the topic of current media distribution models vs. current culture and technical possibilities,”" Yes, we've established that with most distribution models it is still possible to be a thieving, freeloading Cretinous Useless Negligible Tosser. Now go and "address the topic" of throwing your useless selves under a steamroller, you wankers.
..."The pirates reportedly refused a command to stop and be boarded, and fired on the Indians with handheld weapons." Against a Talwar class (as I understand it a heavily Indianised, messed with and upgraded Krivak III) frigate...with a few AKs and the odd RPG? That's Talwar-class as in "4,000 tons of the Subcontinent's finest death-tech..."? *facepalm* As Zaphod'd say "OK, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah? "
...on the comments for the OSC letter, but it appears to not work very well. May be if they ran it on ASP it'd work better (joke, OK?) :P
"No complaints, though, when the Beeb hagiographise Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7358483.stm), or punt Dell's installation of same onto new PCs (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6610901.stm)? Firstly, you're wrong on the projected delivery date and secondly the idea that no technology should be covered until it's released (note that; Windows 7 does NOT "not exist", it exists in a very early development form), even when there's a preview at a prominent trade show, is frankly bizarre. The BBC covered Hardy Heron pre-release, and it's covered OSX variants as well as the iPhone pre-release. No complaints from OSC about any of that, and those involve commercial entities that effectively received free advertising. One is left, then, with the ineluctable conclusion that what's got you squealing for the waaahmbulance is the fact that it's Microsoft. Hate to break it to you, but they still ship the vast majority of desktop OS sales; if the BBC DIDN'T cover what they were up to then they wouldn't be doing their job. As it happens, I thought they covered a few of the key issues and managed to get a dig in at MS concerning where some of the ideas might have come from (hence the fruity phones line). I'd say it was fair, balanced, not hagiographic, and moderately interesting."
The databases are coming! The databases are coming!
Seriously, I'm delighted to see Aaron's return to his usual form; obviously the Thorazine's worn off, which can only be a good thing, since we can look forward to more examples of his rapier wit and Solomon-like discernment. And by "rapier wit and Solomon-like discernment" I mean, of course, "spluttering, incoherent schizoid word-salad with a side order of xenophobia to go, please, hold the grammar" (thank you moderatrix...)....
We REALLY don't think that you're all like Aaron, honestly; it's just that it IS rather fun taking the mick out of him. Your uncle sounds like a hell of a soldier. @ Mark: "It's a dull, drab picture full of powdered milk, tinned tongue, and backyards full of home vegetable plots while the people stubbornly hung on by their fingernails against the best the Icelanders could throw at them." Updated to current spec for you.... *grin*
...I desperately want to see what this inbred, mouth-breathing, window-licking muppet comes up with next. Aaron, don't be a stranger, y'hear? One thing that we're still desperately short of over here is frothing incoherent loons with their underpants on their heads. Well, aside from Mail readers, of course, but they're a bit boring by comparison with Aaron here. On the bright side, it may actually be proof of the young earth creationist hypothesis - come on, do you seriously think that if we'd had 4 billion years of evolution, species striving desperately with one another, wresting survival from the jaws of extinction, steadily becoming more attuned to the brutal reality of natural selection, we'd have ended up with THIS guy?
Excuse me, there's a database coming through the walls to get me...
"For us the matter is not finished. Quite the contrary."
So does that count as an EPEC fail by .gov.uk? I'm really starting to like Viviane Reding...OK, she's a bit scary looking, but sometimes that's not such a bad thing...
And I'm with Chris Simmons on this. And yes, the City of London Police have been a bad joke in this, as have the IC and Home Office.
being URL truncation and automatic image downloading are similar to problems that Microsoft had years ago - and fixed years ago - on the Windows platform (and indeed seem to have avoided on Windows Mobile completely), and were vilified loud and long for having. @ Kiminao - this isn't "slightly embarassing", these are bloody GLARING security holes that should never have been allowed to make it into the released product. Funnily enough, the same sort of flaws provoked howls of derision from Apple fans, and anyone daring to say anything like "That being said, the issue now is when it will be patched--not if, because such a flaw cannot go unpatched." would have been vilified as a credulous buffoon. Ah well, how the wheel turns, eh?
Evil Steveil for obvious reasons...
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