Posts by Mike Flugennock 2068 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007
"Download.com has apologised for bundling open-source packages, including Namp and VLC, with crudware toolbar installers."
Download.com has apologised for being caught bundling open-source packages, including Namp and VLC, with crudware toolbar installers.
There, fixed it for you.
No thanks necessary.
...do they mean a _new_ redesign coming up, or the current redesign which makes the site run dog-slow, and gag on reloads, and choke on tweets half the time? (most common Twitter alert message: "oops! We did something wrong.") And, is the pop-up message about their new "activity" feature -- which won't go away and stay away -- also part of this?
Oh, and I also saw my first tweet spam -- uh, sorry, "sponsored tweets" -- last week. Way to go, guys.
That is, underwhelmed.
Sounds like a really really complex, convoluted version of the old Rushing A New Format To Market To Squeeze More Cash Out Of Customers trick... complete with DRMed downloads. Ooops, DRM. Bzzzzzt. Sorry, thanks for playing.
Yeah, maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I've already got "lifetime rights" through the ownership of the actual, physical copies of "Yellow Submarine", "DOA", "Night At The Opera", "The Way We Were", "Plan 9 From Outer Space", the Looney Tunes box set, and the Charlie Chaplin box set sitting on my bookshelf across the room, here. No weird, skanky, DRM-tainted, network-based "lifetime rights".
I logged on the other night to upload a video to my "channel" (spit) and stumbled into their spiffy new redesign, which looks like an even bigger pain in the ass than before.
Needless to say, the first thing I did was visit the Privacy settings to make sure it was still locked down tighter than a prima donna's corset.
"It added that the design of YouTube's Channels page had also been rejigged to help users 'find great videos'."
Oh, would that be the excuse for that column that gobbles up a third of the page when I go there, and is full of bullshit videos I'm not the least bit interested in -- and which I can't get rid of? It was bad enough that when I visited there (without logging in) the screen was crammed with boxes recommending crap like glitzy music videos and shitty trailers for shitty movies. Seriously, man... every time I go there now, the screen is at least two-thirds full of boxes recommending useless shit that I wouldn't watch with a gun to my head.
About a year and a half or so ago, I integrated one of my Gmail accounts -- one I opened in order to start a Blogger blog -- with my YouTube account, which more or less accompanies the blog... but only after ignoring about six months of their goddamn' nagging, and only after they basically forced me to.
The new uploading scheme is a piece of shit, too. I never could get it to upload properly -- it just sits there at 0% while my router flashes away as if there's data going up -- and ended up choosing the "old upload method" option. Cripes, how long before they take _that_ away?
Goddamn' wankers.
Screw it, man. I'm off to Vimeo.
"Your point is valid, but saying 'The guy in NZ was using a standard consumer -- or perhaps "prosumer" -- telescope and a commercially-available webcam...' is somewhat wide of the mark. He custom built his own scope at considerable expense. Certainly well above the consumer level."
Thanks; I stand corrected. That totally got by me.
"BTW there's nothing more meaningless than the term prosumer. Plenty of amateurs in all sorts of fields use proper professional level equipment. It just depends on their budget."
Good point. I was fishing about for a term denoting high-quality equipment a cut above consumer-grade but not necessarily professional grade, and all I could come up with was "prosumer" (actually, I'm not that nuts about it, either).
Of course, by the same token, there are lots of people with professional training stuck working on thin budgets who manage to turn in top-quality work with as nothing more than a Sanyo Xacti, a handheld MP3 recorder and FinalCut Pro.
...consider that the HST captures its high-quality imagery by operating outside the atmosphere, with a really stonking-assed huge scope. It's designed to look damn' near back to the beginning of the Universe, capturing images in pants-wetting detail.
The guy in NZ was using a standard consumer -- or perhaps "prosumer" -- telescope and a commercially-available webcam... which, of course, means that his Beta Pectoris image is made of awesome, ranking right up there with that French guy who takes those gorgeous images of the Shuttle and ISS in orbit.
And, yeah, I noticed that the headline font is an overly-frilly one which I see frequenly headlining astronomical images -- including releases from the HST team -- but somehow, considering the meaty, beefy, juicy, tasty goodness of the NZ image, I just can't get that worked up about the goddamn' font.
A pint of Good Bastards Dark for our amateur astonomical hero.
What really burns my toast -- and gets a cheap laff -- is that not only is it egregious bullshit, but it's almost all sports-related expressions: "team player" (American-rules football), "in the clutch" (baseball), "crunch time" (basketball) -- and they're almost always used by managers who look as if they've never been in any kind of any organized sports a single day of their lives. They watch a lot of it on TV, and dig all the interviews with the coaches, save the stuff that sounds catchy and parrot it back to people at meetings.
So, now I'm curious... do pointy-haired Brit managers load up their speech with soccer and cricket expressions? "Own goal" and "late before wicket" spring to mind...
"I can almost imagine him entering the interview with a ghettoblaster blaring out Eye of the Tiger..."
Wow... y'know, that's actually a pretty cool idea...! I never thought of that...
Y'know how all those big-time WWF wrestlers all have their own "entrance music" when they come down the aisle to the ring? I forget who started it... there was one in the late '80s who actually did enter the ring to "Eye Of The Tiger" -- I think it may have been Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka.
But, anyway, yeah... come in with your iPod hooked up to a little pair of speakers in your jacket pockets as you walk into the interviewer's office. Fuck YEEAAAHHHH.
DUHN... chunka chunka chunka DUHN DUHH DUHN... chunka chunka chunka...
Welll-llll... OK, maybe not.
Still, you have to admit it would've been a really great League Of Gentlemen sketch.
Wow, great little nugget of advice, there.
"Etcetera. If you´re reeling off a list of qualities or whatever, when you get to the end do not under any circumstances say etcetera. Any decent interviewer will ask you to expand and the chances are you'd got to the end of your list and you'll be up shit creek without a paddle."
...and, needless to say, you don't _ever_ want to say "up shit creek" at your interview.
"Anything. This applies during the pregnant pause. Let them sweat it out, they'll be more uncomfortable that the text book technique isn't working and will give in before you do."
...but whatever you do, don't start humming the "Thinking Music" from "Jeopardy" while you're waiting for the interviewer to say something.
"When more candidates showed up at regular intervals, I decided to quit before I was even hired and left the building.
Now I am worried that perhaps I failed some stress test???"
Wow, y'know... this may sound really wacky, but -- as it seems corporate wackiness knows no bounds these days -- maybe that _was_ part of the "stress interview". Maybe they hired a bunch of community-theatre actors to dress up, come to the office and sit in the waiting room and pretend to be applicants waiting to be interviewed for the same position, while you sat there, being made to wait, and the HR people watched for your reaction.
Yeah, sounds totally over the edge, I know, but let's not forget how much cash corporations have pissed away on those executive retreats where they walk on hot coals. Seriously, I would totally not put it past them these days.
"i guy i used to work with did all our interviewing, and he said to me once that 'he liked to throw in a few curve balls' when interviewing"
Eurggh. Curve balls, huh? Sounds like the kind of guy who put a lot of batters on base when his curve balls went wild and beaned them.
I'm not actually in IT myself -- I've been a graphic designer since the late '70s and began using computers to do it in '85, which explains why I read the Reg -- but a lot of this applies no matter what your profession.
Regardless of what Mr. Connor tells us, every manager I've ever worked with has used "team player" as a euphemism for Someone Who Doesn't Mind A Total Lack Of Personal Recognition For His Talent, or "All Your Best Ideas Are Belong To Us". While I fully recognize the importance of collective effort on a project -- I've been a member of quite a few really sharp, talented design groups -- the reality, unfortunately, is that most managers use the "team player" rubric to sugar-coat a lack of personal recognition and the appropriation of ideas without giving credit... not to mention that nothing bugs me more than hearing some paunchy, pasty-faced manager using sports metaphors.
At this point in my career, I've seen the phrase "team player" beat to death in so many ads, and heard it thrown around in so many interviews that I sometimes want to hunt down, torture and kill the management consultant who first stole the phrase "team player" from some football coach he heard being interviewed on TV.
I wish I'd bookmarked the link to an article in one of the business rags about some of the weird-assed, borderline Dadaesque questions asked in job interviews at several big, brand-name companies -- really whacked, off-the-wall stuff, problems with no solutions, really irrelevant, screwball questions. As I recall, Google and GoldmanSachs were the leaders in this kind of interview batshittery. I remember thinking that if those were the kind of bozo questions GoldmanSachs asks its job applicants, it's no wonder our economy's in the toilet.
Perhaps that's why many applicants seem nervous or disinterested; they might be scared to death that the interviewer is going to ask them something like "if an airplane crashed on the border of the US and Canada, where would the survivors be buried?"
...if I'm not the only one here who's thinking lately that "black-hat SEO" is kind of a redundant expression these days. I'm wondering because I've read some Web site copy that's supposedly search-engine optimized, and, maa-aaan, what a load of gibberish. I suppose it's "human-readable" in that I can understand the words on the page, but what I've seen is so infested with empty buzzwords and catch phrases that I can hardly imagine any actual humans being able to get through it all without their brains exploding.
Also... stop me if I'm wrong, but isn't it possible to do a secure search by simply typing "https://" ahead of the URL instead of regular old "http://", without being logged in? I'm only wondering because i have three gmail accounts -- two for a couple of Blogger blogs I run, and one as a backup address for work -- but I never run searches while I'm logged in...for security reasons, if you know what I mean.
"How have they worked out the elevation of 0m "sea level" on the moon?"
Huh, wow. I've been thinking about that, too. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that it involved some radar imaging and establishing "sea level" based on the mare/lava basin which reads as farthest from the radar. Mind you, this is totally a SWAG (Scientific Wild-Assed Guess).
Some commenters on this forum:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-504894.html
...are suggesting the Apollo 11 site at the Sea Of Tranquillity is established as "sea level". No definite answer there, though.
Right now, iirc, 100k woudn't quite cover a seat aboard a Virgin suborbital jaunt, but, yeah... take the 100k, invest it wisely, and just wait until Virgin Galactic (jeez, what a pompous name) gets going and the price of suborbital trips comes down a bit; if all went well, your 100k would've earned itself a nice chunk of interest and you'd be able to buy that seat aboard SpaceShipTwo and still have a good bit of cash left.
You'd have to be patient, but it'd be a win-win in the end.
"Is this not why we sat agog as Kirk slept his way across the Alpha quadrant?"
Seriously, man -- and with that slim, lithe green hottie, too. Talk about Love Knows No Color; nailing Lt. Uhura is one thing, but that hot-assed green alien dancing chick... boo yah!
Wild green alien chicks, FUCK YEAH.
Actually, at least in a technical sense, they'll have been into 'space' if their parabola meets/exceeds the official FAI definition (100km, as I recall). Still, it wouldn't be nearly as fun as spending a day in orbit.
I'd be hard-pressed to choose, but given the economy, I'd end up holding out for an orbital trip and going for the cash. The five minutes or so I'd actually be in free space at the top of the arc would hardly be enough to dig on the zero-G and get some video footage. Orbit is really where it's at; you'd get sunrises and sunsets -- really freakin' awesome ones -- every hour and a half.
A few years or so back, the company that handled all the ISS "space tourist" flights was kicking around the idea of offering circumlunar flyby (non-orbital) trips with surplus refurbished/upgraded Soyuz hardware, but I don't think that ended up going anywhere.
...I've mentioned my position on this in one of the Cassini threads, so I can only add JEEZUS H. CHRIST, YOU GUYS! IT'S NOT A WEAPONS SYSTEM! IT'S GOING TO FRICKIN' _JUPITER_, F'CRIPESAKE! NOTHING FRICKIN' _LIVES_ THERE! GET A GODDAMN' _GRIP_, ALREADY!
Phew. Thanks. I feel better now.
...believe it or not, I instinctively clicked on this article thinking it was a new BOFH column riffing on browser privacy in an office; I mean, really, I kinda glanced at the title and thought "cool, a new BOFH story!". I was ready for some good cheap laffs involving the PFY swiping the Boss' cookies or a Beancounter's history or something, but instead it was... d'ahhh, never mind.
Seriously, though... even though it's been a while since I worked in an "enterprise" environment -- i.e. a "cubicle job" -- a well-done and informative piece.
Thanks. No, really, seriously.
Coat-getting icon, because I can't believe the abbreviation BOFH duped me into clicking on this article which was not written by Simon T. at all.
"Microsoft makes an excellent mass market browser, but the lack of a browser extension community has harmed its ability to reach out to the growing number of users who need their browser to do something different..."
Y'mean, like... uhh... not doing the WWW equivalent of pantsing me in public?
"I also think it's time for an internet 'drivers license'..."
Y'know, that idea's kinda funny and entertaining every time we read here about large numbers of 'Net users being revealed as idiots by the latest phish or other social engineering skankiness, but, seriously...? M'eh, I dunno. I keep flashing back about fifteen years, when some batshit New Jersey state assemblyman (as I recall) proposed the licensing of programmers.
...perhaps for "officially" released live recordings, but what about us bootleg collectors? I'd like to see iTunes try that with the metric shit-tonne of bootleg live Grateful Dead -- plus the additional metric shit-tonne of Stones, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Who sitting on my external drive. I'll bet iTunes would totally crap its pants -- IF LittleSnitch were allowing iTunes to connect to the Internet from my machine at all.
"I'm not sure whether this is an advantage or a disadvantage, but portions (at least, possibly all) of the Paris Metro have mobile service both in the stations and in the trains."
D'ohh, jeezus. So, what's French for "I'm on the train... the TRAIN... I'M ON THE TRAIN...!"
I'll get my coat, for the Petula Clark joke I'm trying to think of.
Thank Dog again, for LittleSnitch and regular old iTunes.
If Frank Zappa's music weren't NSFW, there wouldn't be any point to it; hell, pretty much the entire Fillmore East June '71 live album is one big NSFW... not to mention Slade's "Thanks For The Memory" ...and, would iTunes Match pitch a fit when reading the ID3 tag for "Cum On Feel The Noize"?
"Oh, and my "old iPod" is still used as a USB drive. All you have to do is check a box in iTunes and you can mount it on your computer as a drive, and move your music, movies or files over however you want."
The first year that larger-capacity iPods were available, a friend of mine bought one for just that purpose. He'd use it occasionally for actually listening to music while he worked, but most of the time it was repurposed as an extra USB drive. He liked that it was flexible that way.
I've managed to go an entire decade without an iPod, though lately I've been considering breaking down and getting one of the video models to load a bunch of my movies and old Looney Tunes on for the four or five long airline flights I make per year.
Farcebook _is_ run by morons. This kind of pissfight over "real" names is proof.
At any rate... good for you, Mr. Rushdie. Shame you have to be famous to get any action out of Farcebook, and a shame he was forced to show them his passport.
I recently was forced to give up my mobile phone number to have one of my Gmail accounts reactivated after Google suspended it, citing "suspicious activity" (as they have yet to define what the "activity" was, I'll have to assume they're doing it to drag in all the "refuseniks" who aren't giving in to the "let us have your mobile number in case your account is compromised" nag). Technically, it wasn't a phish as I got the message from Google as I was logging in (rather than a scam email), though due to their inability to tell me what the actual "suspicous activity" was, I'll have to assume that Google is phishing for mobile numbers.
Normally, I would've withheld my mobile number and abandoned the account, but it was the account I had to establish to set up a blog on Blogspot. Bastards. Call it a "hissy fit" if you want, but I'm totally behind Rushdie on this one.
"And this is the brave new world of internet "freedom" some people have been chomping at the bit for. Sigh. Minority platforms denied half the web and you've replaced content industry middlemen who at least had an incentive to invest in new talent development with Apple as a middleman who don't give a toss about the content at all, other than to make sure they can enforce their conservative values on what you should be allowed to see."
Luckily, for "citizen journalists", there's local hosting of video and, of course, the Community Video archive at archive.org, where I have an account, and where I've already begun uploading the best of my "samizdat newsreels" I originally posted on YouTube and my city's local Indymedia.
Back To The Future.
That is all.
"Where the youtube video rippers/downloaders will happily download the videos of cats playing the piano or people falling off bikes from youtube if you go to the TV shows section and try the same thing you will find you won't be able to download the videos (well none of the ones i have tried worked)..."
Well, I'm using the ultra-nifty YouTube video sucker available at
http://mp4downloader.mozdev.org/drupal/download/firefox
...and while I haven't tried to download any current TV shows -- because, quite frankly, most of them are shit and I'm not into them anyway -- I've had no trouble at all downloading entire movies (OK, so it was an old Tarzan picture from the early '30s) as well as entire episodes of MST3K (yeah, I'm really into MST3K; you got a problem with that?) and a metric shit-tonne of old Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons.
Besides, for me, the YouTube ripper has proven most important for stuff like ripping mp4's of police-brutality footage from Occupy sites (the ones Google claims they won't censor) as well as Reuters and Russia Today segments on events in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Greece and Occupy sites in the USA.
Basically, I'm not so bugged if I can't rip a copy of a "30 Rock" episode from YouTube, because I'm too busy downloading footage from Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Oakland, the Athens general strikes, and the uprisings in Syria and Bahrain before they're "scrubbed".
I've never, ever, EVER given out my mobile number on my CV. I get enough SMS spam on my mobile as it is, even though only the smallest handful of people I know personally have the number, with explicit instructions to NOT GIVE THE DAMN' NUMBER OUT.
My CV contains only my land-line number, along with my email address, and the URL of my online portfolio. Who the hell knows who would get my mobile number once I give it to a company's Personnel department or to a recruiter?
I'm totally down with you on the meditative state of concentration vs. phone calls &etc. While not a programmer, I'm still in a line of work which requires a seriously hyperfocused, Zen-like state of concentration. When deeply into something like a brochure spread or magazine cover, I refuse phone calls of any kind and even go so far as to quit Thunderbird to keep the email flag from going off while I'm in the "zone".
"I don't think I could work for someone who writes something like 'Y U No get it?' on a public forum anyway."
Uhhmm... I think he was just being sarcastic. I'm sure most of us use the kind of weird, deliberately-misspelled slang in casual personal communication that we'd never use in professional communication.
While I can totally understand Mr. Connor's gripes, perhaps he'd like a bit of the view from the other end.
I'm a graphic designer by profession, but since the late '80s, as the tools of my trade moved into the digital realm, I became knowledgeable about computers and networks as part of my work and stayed ahead of the curve through continuous and judicious self-education -- cultivating friendships with programmers, CSS geeks and network engineers and, of course, my daily reading of El Reg.
As far as how my CV looks, let's just say that being a graphic designer, my CV -- along with containing pertinent info -- needs to look snappy. The CV I send out runs a grand total of a page and a half. I don't over-do on the design, keeping the page bright and white, going easy on the graphics and keeping the typography clean and tasteful. At my last "cubicle job" before I began freelancing, I was the tech coordinator (aka "house geek" in a design shop full of technophobes) as well as one of the team leaders, so I had the privilege -- or misfortune -- of reviewing the resumes of designers applying for positions in the design shop. While most of the CVs were in the form of subtly tasteful letter-size trifolds and such, I still had to evaluate designers' CVs coming in the form of little boxes, tubes and pop-up books, just to name a few. I ended up canning almost all of them because they were just too goddamn' precious for words, and told me a lot about the nature of the designers sending them out.
The general rule, as I understood it, was that nobody wants to see what I did for more than five years -- ten years, tops. Other things such as the how-to columns I did for "Step-By-Step Design" in the early '90s I place under a separate "Professional Accomplishments And Awards" heading.
Lying on CVs? As Claude Rains would've said, "I'm shocked -- SHOCKED -- to find that applicants are falsifying their CVs here!" I'm sure I'm not the first person to -- shall we say -- "gussy up" his CV, but I'm glad to say that I've never flat-out lied. Still, I can understand why many people out there do. I've been tempted to myself, in the depths of job-hunting frustration, after reading in the news lately about all the high-profile, big-dollar executive types who were found to have lied massively on their CVs and totally gotten away with it -- at least for a while. What always stops me, though, is those very same news reports stating that said CxO was, in fact, totally busted with falsified CVs and forced to resign in disgrace. Besides, I've managed to pile up enough real, actual achievements in my career that I don't need to lie about stuff -- plus having been taught by my parents about the ethics and morality of lying at a young age.
The part about inserting buzzwords that would get me an interview, though, kind of stuck in my craw. I can't begin to describe my frustration with Personnel Department boneheads who send along designers' CVs packed to the gills with empty bullshit, but trash perfectly respectable CVs due to the absence of vacuous jargon like "bring to the table", "outside the box", or my personal favorite, "team player". Imho, people who still use the phrase "outside the box" show themselves entirely incapable of actually thinking outside the proverbial box, and should be made to wear an electric sign around their necks flashing the message "I HAVEN'T HAD A SINGLE ORIGINAL THOUGHT IN MY ENTIRE GODDAMN' LIFE."
I also hate Personnel departments who insist on resumes in Word, even those from graphic design applicants. It's not so much because I can't edit and format something as basic as a resume in Word, but I guess it's because as a graphic designer, the old maxim about how your CV is an advertisement for yourself applies even more -- and when some cubicle drone in a Personnel department demands I send my CV as a Word file, it basically robs me of my chance to show off my chops just a bit -- not that I'd be one of those prima donnas who sends out his CV as a pop-up book (really, I wasn't kidding about that). (For the record, I lay out my CV in InDesign and export it to a lean'n'mean inkjet-quality pdf)
I can totally dig Connor's frustration with poorly-written CVs, though. I don't know if it's really gotten that bad or if the wide availability of the Internet just makes it seem that way, but I've lost track of how many Web sites and blogs are polluted by the writing of people who don't know the difference between "there", "their", and "they're", the difference between "its" and "it's", who write "would of" when they mean "would have"...I won't list it all here. It's as if all those boneheads from back in school who were flunking English class have all reappeared and are writing blogs whose copy is full of these mistakes and makes me want to gouge my eyes out, especially when the authors are native English speakers. Seriously, man; it's not nitpicking, it's basic communication skills in your _native_language_, f'cripesake.
I'd go Connor one better in this regard: have someone else copyproof your CV, no matter what your native language is. One thing I learned from working on newspapers in high school and college -- and, professionally, at ad agencies -- is that you can never proof your own copy; you're always going to miss errors because you know what the copy is supposed to say.
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