Posts by Peter Mc Aulay
241 posts • joined Monday 16th April 2007 13:32 GMT
Re: What's not to like?
Best of all, when the client company goes down the tubes it's their problem, not yours.
Posted in Paper computers: Not mere pulp fiction
Re: Paper loses
That's alot of "if"s. I've never seen a bookworm, but I have seen plenty of dead machines, defunct service providers and corrupt backups. Also, my books can sustain damage and still be readable; yours do not degrade so gracefully.
Discrete unpowered storage media readable by eye still has alot going for it, even though the storage density sucks, and it doesn't have backlit displays, automatic bookmarks, search or internet connectivity.
I may move to e-books at some point, but not yet.
Re: @Eenymeeny
Hear hear. I used to work for a bulk fax company that accepted Word documents from customers. That never worked very well, even if you factored out the users who just had their default paper size set to Letter instead of A4.
Re: History
Not that much faster, TBH.
Re: This is assuming the products are the same
I think the point is that that not so distant past is distant enough for a commerical enterprise to collapse while waiting for the market to change.
Re: We are
Maybe the Von Neumann machines do not use the same criteria for selecting target systems as we would. Perhaps they avoid systems with short-lived yellow stars, cold gas giants and life-bearing worlds and instead go for long-lived red dwarf stars with hot Jovians and/or lots of asteroids, and no pesky natives.
Or how about:
4) Civilisations generally don't do this because landscaping an entire galaxy is rude. But it only ever takes one, so perhaps:
4a) Species that engage in this sort of thinking tend to go extinct because they take the same approach towards their home system and hit Malthus's limit before they can spread too far. We may well kill ourselves off before we reach the necessary tech level, for instance.
Using fewer assumptions there are still a few other options:
6) It has in fact been done, but colonising civilisations are sparsely spread through space and time so that we simply missed them. If the last lot in the Milky Way disappeared a mere 50000 years ago, no trace of their works would remain visible from here (unless they left megastructures behind). In fact, we could go extinct again without ever being concurrent with a single other civilisation in the Local Group, even if generally speaking life is abundant in the universe.
7) Colonising the galaxy turns out to be really hard and its history is full of single-planet cultures wondering where all the aliens are. Most go extinct without ever seeing any.
Re: And a bloody good thing too!
Word of the day: "Copypasta", possibly a typo but I love it!
It has begun
These are merely the intial stages of Economics 2.0. Prepare to be rendered obsolete, humans.
Re: Makes no difference,
Heh. Mine are lazy buggers. They like to watch *me* hunt insects.
Re: Vermin
BB guns work, but I would recommend the semi-auto type unless you can track & aim really quickly. Repeat the procedure over a few weeks and make sure to shoot from cover. If you don't they'll just learn to fear armed monkeys instead of the hand of Zeus and it won't work as an area denial effect. (Cats are very superstitious.)
Not even the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia...
...could make me look back fondly on CDE. It was a bloated rotting pig and saying it runs quickly today is like saying Windows XP (or indeed, 3.1) is lightweight and elegant: very, very relative.
Beer, because obviously those neurons need more scrubbing.
Installing web apps on users' computers
Not helped by the advent of the iPad, which requires you to do exactly that if you want it to work properly (ok, technically you install an app rather than a web site, but still).
Reliable technology
Call me old-fashioned, but a LAN server (of whatever type du decade is appropriate) and regular maintenance (and backups) are all you need to host your own data indefinitely.
By 2042, my house will still have a server, a network and a backup system, even though they may no longer look like tentacled gray boxes in a closet. Face-what?
Re: If you knew SUSY like I know SUSY...
Just goes to show that to a serious mathematician, "familiar and everyday" does not mean what it does to you and me...
Re: @Nigel 11
Apart from that, the "uniform sea of low-energy photons all outside each other's light cone" final end state idea depends on proton decay, which is not demonstrated to happen. So, no Big Rip.
Re: Students Complain At Having To Do Work!
Not so very long ago the Chinese were forced to refine steel in their own back yards, and doing manual labour was the most highly regarded form of employment.
Truly, Maoism is dead.
Just say no...
...To mail servers with arbitrary limitations and per-user licencing costs. Save the money and get a hosted Linux VM with Exim/Postfix, Dovecot and Kronolith. Maybe Apache and IMP or Roundcube. Maybe some anti-spam and AV tools as well. Bam, done. Then you can fairly easily write some scripts to generate a reasonable config for your other customers, make it cloud-deployable, whatever.
Yes it takes work and some command line skills to admin that, but evidently so does Office365, and as a bonus it requires no Exchange-fu and causes much less rage.
(A recovered Exchange admin.)
Posted in How to put "Stuxnet author" on your CV
Re: No. Just no.
Actually, only people have ethics - corporations do not, and will indeed happily hire such people.
Re: resting?
It'll be less under acceleration, no doubt.
Re: Yay
Certainly he is well preserved.
Re: New and intuitive
No doubt the most often used gesture will be the one involving the raised index and middle fingers.
Hardly matters
Yes, this idea of removing DVD playback capability from Windows is prima facie absurd.
However. Windows users already are accustomed to having to hunt down and install third party software in order to perform even the most mundane of tasks. They'll hardly notice. As others have noted it'll merely result in an increase in VLC downloads.
Re: A shame in one sense
"[Y]ou can't run a business off of nothing but techie-emergencies."
Apparently you can if you diversify enough. There's a local PC/electronics shop that sells anything from disco lights to Maplin-type kits to hard disks and VGA cables. When asked about e.g. low ESR radial polarised electrolytic capacitors they hand you a thick catalogue to choose from, and ask how many you want. Bless.
Most PC shops aren't like that though, in fact I've avoided most of them since the 1990s (the incompetence of PC salespeople is of all ages).
Styling
Another reason why these things have traditionally failed to gain any traction with the mainstream is that they look incredibly dorky.
Re: I stopped reading after the first point
The reality, though, is that nobody cares about backup processes. What counts is restore processes. (Demonstrating the need for the latter so you can fund the former is left as an exercise for the reader.)
"Dynamics, delete!"
Voice control is the future for business apps. Really, Microsoft?
Just imagine an open plan office in 2014 full of suits frantically shouting at their tablets. What could possibly go wrong?
Re: Who is even affected?
Two words: Virtual Machines.
Evolution
From small screens and single-task systems to big screens and multi-tasking systems to... small screens and single-tasking systems. Full circle in 30 years, a little slower than the fashion industry but still, well done Microsoft.
I blame the mobile computing hype. Everything is a phone these days, even things that are not phones.
Bahaha
Then again, experience with SharePoint (not very recent but proving very resistant to alcohol) long since convinced me that Microsoft sucks at anything to do with time zones, date handling, etc. so this comes as absolutely no surprise at all.
Re: how will they fix their machines?
They take it back to to the shop and pay the ignorance tax, just like in the old days.
"The art in this case was probably pottery."
Piratebay and neo-Nazism
Sure. I bet you're the type of guy who opposes Walt Disney cartoons for ideological reasons, too.
Exit strategy
Sounds like maybe he's preparing to apply for a job with the Syrian government.
Save a lot of pain...
Except perhaps for the kind of problems that are caused by a broken user profile, of which unfortunately there are many in previous versions of Windows.
We live in hope.
You're a geek (or this issue would not arise in the first place). You already *have* a media server :)
Even better, gas giants can be mined for hydrogen fuel and electricity so they would make a natural watering hole for interstellar spacecraft to visit. Assuming certain things about their propulsion systems and other workings, of course. I'd say the odds of stuff being left in Jupiter orbit or on its moons (many of which are subject to heavy erosion, though) are about as good as stuff being left on Luna, depending on how long ago they were visited.
And if you're adapted to space or even just different gravity, pressure or gas mixture, Earth may not be on the to-do list at all.
Buzz bomb
I keep imagining an Iranian air force jet flying alongside the drone and simply tipping it over with its wing tips.
A reactor which burns nuclear waste is not green technology? How's that?
I thought the wedge shape was simply for reducing the lighthugger's cross section. There also was a thick coating of water ice for ablative armour. (I don't remember any magnetic shielding, but it wouldn't surprise me.)
Are Snapshots Backups?
When you back up something, you copy it somewhere else for safekeeping. That's sort of the point.
Taking snapshots is more like generating patches using diff - you still need the original for them to be useful. That's more like a journal or redo log, not like a backup at all.
Snapshots + off-site replication fixes that (indeed, my Bacula setup uses VSS to take consistent backups of Windows filesystems), but snapshots in themselves are not backups.
Your point is valid only you seriously believe the plod know about Tor, darknets or indeed much about IT in general. Historically there is little evidence to support this hypothesis.
Posted in Web czar: 'Drag your nan online'
Remember what happened to the last Czar.
Fuck off you twat, there are enough computer illiterates online already.
Nearly correct - the great RAM shortage of 1993 was cause by a fire in a Japanese epoxy resin factory. There was another RAM shortage in 1999 because of a bad earthquake in Taiwan. And again in 2002, I think.
We never learn, apparently.
Useless features
From day one I've wondered why Flash would ever need microphone or webcam access, and to this day I've yet to see a single legitimate use for it. Get rid of it if you can't secure it properly Adobe, sheesh. And while you're at it, take Javascript and other rubbish "active content" support out of your PDF reader...
Who says?
If the business has agreed that IT's function includes keeping the network free of viruses and malware, and usually also that this must cost next to nothing, then most likely yes, he does say.
Customers often don't realise the implications of what they're asking. Clarifying and correcting this perception may be IT's job but very often they have no say in the matter.
If someone burglars your house because you left the door open, this is not the locksmith's fault. If you left the door open because the lock is too difficult to operate, it's probably still not the locksmith's fault that you or maybe the architect insisted on having that type of lock.
Change for change's sake
All Linux desktops used to look like they were cobbled together by hackers and engineers with little regard to user interface design. Ubuntu lately looks the same, only they put the marketing people in charge, again with little regard to user interface design. At least they're consistent.
Canonical continue to fail to see the point of a desktop, which is to run applications, so you can get things done. Users don't really give a shit about kernel versions, Gnome variants or licencing holy wars. They just want a machine that works. Linux keeps approaching that point, only to go off on a different tangent - No! This is not how stable production software is produced. People need to know when to leave well alone.
That said, I run Ubuntu with Unity on my 13" netbook and it works well (this is probably because the only apps I use are Firefox, LibreOffice and Terminal). On my other machines, which run different things for different tasks, I almost certainly would not.
Luckily, if your Linux distro succumbs to feature rot, you can just pick another, and never look back :)
