Posts by Francis Fish
273 posts • joined Thursday 17th August 2006 16:24 GMT
Re: Cant beat ASCII
Except when it's utf-8 - been burned by the two char space that looks fine in all editors but doesn't render properly when you turn it into a book.
More seriously - only geeks like us use text. This doesn't help at all. I think the point other people are making about OpenOffice is valid. I've personally had far more success with it opening documents that MS own software. I even managed to rescue most of the content from a document that Word had completely broken.
Install adblocker
All the crap just goes away. I never see it. I get to content that's relevant and isn't spammy. I get to companies' websites when I want something they have.
I did used to do things like mark Homeopathy clinics that claim they can cure cancer as lies (or whatever the button is).
I also installed http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/, which has cured a lot of this anyway.
Posted in When open-source eats itself, we win
Re: LibreOffice
I just wish the presentation software on my Mac didn't crash and destroy my work. Stopped using it then upgraded and it still went boom. The spreadsheet and word processing are fine. I did buy the Apple office equivalent and it's fine and about a tenth of the price of MS Office, but its a bit too ... Apple. You can't save as a different format but have to export, things like that.
Also has an unmentioned use of rescuing broken MS Office documents - if you have a document that won't load in the MS tools LibreOffice will usually help you at least get your content back :)
I would also quite happily part with a few Euros to help pay for dev, e.g. the broken presentation piece, but there isn't a mechanism.
Re: There are too many of us
Ah yes, but, ... a great chunk of what we use now wasn't regarded as resources years ago because we couldn't do anything with it. The overuse of oil is becoming worrying, but I do think that economics will sort it out eventually. The danger is some kind of oil is mandatory cabal will get together with the too many people thinking, strangle innovation, make us all eat kelp products and call it progress. This can only lead to poverty and suffering for the large number of people in the world who are still trying to get a decent standard of living for themselves and their kids. They need better technology than we have now.
Personally don't want to turn my back on these people, whatever Attenborough may say.
Re: There are too many of us
Nope - according to the original Malthusian nonsense we all died years ago. This is just more of the same. The all assume fixed resources and no human ingenuity. If you look at anything around you, from your shoes to the computer you read this on the amount of resources needed to produce it has dropped radically over the last few years. Compared with the amount of energy Victorians needed to live we're doing really well on a fraction of the resources per person.
I remember people talking about the appalling starvation in Biafra and other places when I was a kid - subtext being "too many (black) people" - it was racist bollocks. In fact, when the economies pick up in those places a lot of the time the problem was not *enough* people, at least with a decent education. It was nasty politics and wars that killed those poor Africans. The Malthusian agenda of population matters is just a gentler version of allowing the disparities that caused these wars to continue for cynical political reasons.
As an example of this kind of double standard I remember the debate about sanctions against Iraq around the time of the first Gulf War. The right wing just wanted to go to go bomb Saddam and the left wanted to starve the Iraqis - I think the right wing position was more honest.
Population matters is this kind of softer approach - be more honest to just shoot people, but then the reality would be too hard to stomach.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Re: IT literate?
Driving a car and fixing it aren't the same thing. Come on.
Re: Straw clutching
Yeah - done at both ends indeed - I can't watch Channel 1 on Freeview - seems about 5 mins of content an hour. The idea of paying for it, quite frankly, turns me right off.
I read somewhere that they don't make that much from ads anyway - could show a lot less of them, but then of course you'd need more than 10 mins of content per 20 broadcast time, wouldn't you?
Patent?
"it has just been awarded a new patent on parental control of children's spending, so a child could have an iTunes account but every transaction (or every transaction above a certain point) would have to be authorised by the parent."
I'm sure that Microsoft already have something like this for their gaming platforms. And I also thought that you weren't supposed to be able to patent the bleedin' obvious.
How big a rise?
I mean, a quid?
Two?
I would be bothered because?
I suppose if things aren't £299, but become £305 it's harder for the marketers, but so what?
When I were a nipper in the 1970's
There was deffo gonna be a new ice age, and too many black people (of course the starving was caused by wars from post-colonial fall out, but who's counting).
This is why I'm cynical - dodgy science and scientists not behaving like scientists not withstanding.
But
How would the marketing droids pay their mortgages? </rhetorical question>
That hot coffee thing
Mickey D's used to keep their coffee really hot and the lawsuit where somebody burned themselves was justified. It's often used in the 'consumers are stupid' debate - but in fact there was no need to serve the coffee at that temperature and they deserved what they got.
It would suit the large corps to stop the litigation culture, but that would probably be even worse if it's the only way that they will pay attention to the safety of the rest of us. That said, bankrupting small shops because someone happened to slip on some flower petals is also downright stupid. I don't have an answer to this one.
I think predictive also means it guesses what key you might be typing
I remember reading somewhere that it predicts what you might be typing next and makes some keys have a larger hit area (without changing the display).
Maybe the problem's with that algorithm?
I think what poor old MooseNC means is
50% more of not a lot is still not a lot. A bit like the equal pay rows of yore.
Migrate to a new platform? In the busiest part of the year?
Idiots. Just ...
I did work in one place where we were forced to do a major update on the 24th, at about 16:00. And then the support guys had their holiday ruined.
Idiots
I hear they're about to do it again this year too - but I don't work there any more.
Oh FFFF
Just charge the car off peak and be done with it
Please ...
read the post this refers to, plus the comments. And the article makes clear that the suit is ambiguous, don't call a man out who did something that benefited others unless you are willing to do something just as useful yourself.
I've seen this before - it used to be Microsoft
I remember an internal presentation waaaaaay back when I was an Oracle employee, but it was Microsoft then.
Nothing new here, he just keeps changing the enemy.
The thing that costs money isn't the server kit or licences, it's the yards of programmers needed to make them do useful things - if they already know IBM's offering and are effective with it, why the hell would you go to Oracle, and have to retrain them all while accepting lower productivity for several months, maybe even years? Madness.
Pushing the market to work their way works for Apple
So ... why do MS fail where Apple succeed? I think maybe Apple has more sex appeal. But don't forget MS real customers are corporate - massive site licences for their product and that desktop lock down. By definition, this isn't the mobile market - it's now the dinosaur market.
False positives
It only works if there are no false positives, or the probability of them is about the same as their occurrence. Doctrow's "Little Brother" discusses this really well.
Of course, the agency could deal with this
By only taking 15% rake off instead of 30 - cynical, moi?
I keep seeing people remapping their ORM onto these tools too
I generally work with Rails and we did do some stuff with Mongo (before we threw it out and did a warehouse - which is SQL but deffo not relational IMHO).
The thing that annoyed me was someone wrote an adaptor that worked fine with the tool and gave you some useful abstractions that modelled the way it actually *worked* - then some other dimwit came along and tried to make it look like Active Record - then the developers tried to use it like it *is* active record.
It fell into a world of pain - it works differently, it has a different use case, it uses map/reduce. Don't try and make it look like something with SQL underneath it - use it how it was intended an you will get what you need. A list of key/value pairs you can get to quickly from a key, or a large set of relatively homogenous data you can ask questions of. SQL-type joins just eat resources because you *always* have to do the equivalent of a full table scans to join your reduced sets together. We kept using up all of the memory on our Mongo instance once it got past a certain size.
Pick the right use case, this stuff is brilliant. But the number of use cases compared with SQL is really tiny.
Pedantically, SQL doesn't do a good chunk of the relational model, it's a pragmatic attempt at something that did the bits that were easiest to implement (in the 1980's). A system that implemented a true relational model (as in tuples that contain whole rows, for example) would do everything these systems do and SQL can do. Have a trawl around the O'Reilly catalogue for some of Chris Date's newer work.
I've no idea how to implement this though. But the theory is really sound and complete.
Posted in Apple iCloud pricing revealed
Meh
Nope ... I _implied_ Dropbox more use and doesn't have the lock in. Didn't say anything about it being cheaper, but there's not much in it.
I don't need any more free email. I had a macmail account years ago and it just disappeared, I think the domain was sold to Apple. Been on google mail ever since.
I've already got all of the rest of it with my Android phone and google (it even links to my work email running on MS tech). I don't miss my iPhone, but do use a Macbook for coding, but that's because it works for me. I can also add any service I bloody well like, if it has an app, without Apple's permission.
Posted in Apple iCloud pricing revealed
So I pay for an Apple-only service or carry on using Dropbox
The free dropbox works for most people with modest needs and you can up your box size by referring people.
My business pays $135/yr and I think it's a good service. I get 50GB and infinite undo if I need it. Without the infinite undo it's $99. I can get to it on my Linux/Windows and Mac machines, without the lock in.
Most of us don't need webmail any more - most of us already have it from Google/Yahoo or Microsoft, for free. Anyone remember the now defunct Macmail?
It seems very late and very lame to me.
Posted in Microsoft man saves drowning woman
The noise is from the iCrap headphones Apple supply
Seriously, the noise you hear is because the 'phones Apple supply are really poor quality and not very good at actually sending the noise into the person's ear. I do agree some people have their music really loud - but if the phones weren't crap you wouldn't know - and they wouldn't need to have them set so loud either.
Cue Fanboi rants ...
Posted in Google Go strikes back with C++ bake-off
Long term maintenance?
I wonder how readable each was? It's long term maintenance that bothers me. The fact that you can optimise the hell out of some code doesn't mean it's readable or won't be so brittle it blows up in your face if you want to make a minor change.
Very leery of optimising code. Profilers can ofter point to subtle bugs where you're doing things too many times, initialising something expensive a lot, but always skeptical about optimising things too much, as it's usually me that has to pick things up afterwards.
Aw ...
Spoilsport
Posted in FBI fat-thumbs data centre raid
This isn't cloud computing ...
It's bog-standard data centre computing.
That's the problem - This would be almost impossible to do without seizing every machine in a cloud scenario.
Do try to keep up.
Scala for Android
Still looking into it, but much less typing and messing about with bazillions of anonymous inner classes. And it's not C pretending to be a bad implementation of smalltalk.
I do run AV on my Macbook
I run ClamXav - never gets in my way, just keeps on keepin' on, doesn't lock the machine up.
Oh, and it's Open Source
Posted in Zuckerberg: Give me your children
You aren't the demographic
Your IT knowledge and how far back it goes is irrelevant. It's a simple replacement for sending a group mail (either snail or e) to keep your friends up to date and sharing photos and so on.
You obviously don't need it - fine.
I find the sites useful and twitter has replaces RSS for me - but whatever suits your needs.
Posted in Reg ed rattles the Red-Headed League
Nah
He has been known to call himself Jaffro (ginger afro) - he's now over six foot tall and hasn't been bothered in a while ;) He just looks down from on high and they shut up.
I just want people to think a bit harder about throw away comments and about how they would feel if it became a big deal that they had blue eyes or whatever - it's what's inside that counts. The odd comment is part of life and I wouldn't care one way or the other, it's the consistent bullying that I have trouble with.
And the original context was "ginger step-child" - which I think is *really* nasty. As in ginger is synonymous with unloved - not funny.
I had a row on linked in with some tosser who bullied someone out of a place I used to work a few months ago - as in "wtf would I link to you"? That was fun. He didn't understand why I wouldn't link to him - weird.
Posted in Reg ed rattles the Red-Headed League
Yeah, yeah whatever
Personally not a red head but my son is - the bullying was so bad he walks to school and won't get on the bus and of course the school did f-all. You say this isn't prejudice? If you say so.
That's why I get irritated, I'm not hypersensitive - just don't like bullies or normalising bullying. Of course, with a name like Fish I used to get it all through school anyway. So maybe my hypersensitivity comes from disliking bullying and so on?
I left school with a broken nose and 8 O levels in the 70's - again this mustn't count as abuse in your lexicon.
That's why I don't like it - I don't like this kind of crap being thought of as acceptable because of where it can lead. I stand up to it now, even when it's uncomfortable.
YMMV
Oh, please
I can't be arsed with you - troll off.
Can we stop that redheaded stepchild crap
Just because English people are scared of celts, doesn't make it ok. It's still racism. Bet you wouldn't say 'black stepchild'.
Posted in Woz snubs Paul Allen, praises pea soup
Nokia weren't inept
The carrier controlled what got connected to their networks. They decided we were too stupid for devices like the iPhone. Apple had the cachet to change this - this was a good thing. It's a shame that Nokia and others didn't have the same power - but they didn't.
Not having some designs waiting ready for the dam to finally break, that *was* inept.
Sounds ideal, but
Anyone with those skills is either working in a job that doesn't require all the form filling and govt BS, or is teaching at Uni level.
They can't afford people who can teach that stuff. So they teach MS and trivial web design (using MS tools, so you don't get to understand HTML).
No idea how to fix this one.
Oh, no, not another Apple-ism
Apple do this alt key crap. If you want 'extended' features hold down alt when you've opened a menu. My favourite is textmate - replace in current selection needs you to hit alt when you've selected some text - this is one of the reasons I stopped using it.
It can be quite entertaining to select the menus in your app of choice and press alt and shift and see what functions they think you're too stupid to see.
It's in the Apple style guidelines somewhere - and it's complete arse.
Everyone knows
"Everyone knows Macs are a fucking joke in the enterprise due to Apple's inability to provide decent server and general centralised management software coupled with the fact the enterprise needs to control it's systems, not Apple, which goes against Apple's mindset where Apple controls everything."
We run Linux for servers, Apples for devs. Works absolutely fine and costs tons less and is far more reliable than the equivalent MS stuff. Macs talk fine to other brands of *nix. MS talks fine to ... MS.
There is at least one govt research dept that uses Macs for the scientists (because they're generally talking to the unix-based back end systems). There are 2x more macs than PC's and 2x more MS support staff than Mac. Work it out. It's people that cost the money, the higher price for a well built machine that doesn't crash constantly and will last for 5+ years more than compensates.
I do think they need to sort out their email and calendar clients though. The contention that they are really good at design and usability is very funny when you have to work with their awful offerings.
I've had an encrypted home directory on my Mac for years
Seriously, it's two mouse clicks.
I would also lay money that most of the govt pc's have no encryption at all. Straw man time.
>> I believe JAVA is the very best implementation of OO
Really?
Not used it since 1.4 - but remember all those lovely things (ints shorts reals etc etc) that *weren't* objects. Believe that it automatically turns them into objects when it needs to now.
Also - why does everything have to be attached to a noun? Why can't you just define a method that does stuff?
And don't get me started on Strings being final - "we don't trust you, because we're drones like you are". Nah.
Posted in O2 chops away at middle-aged spread
Maybe they need to invest too?
In training their staff to know what is is they're selling.
Switched to T-Mob after very poor customer experience where they had to keep ringing someone else to tell me about using my Andriod as a Mifi, whether they would "allow" me. Sod that, went to a store where the guys knew what they were selling.
Posted in Lane Fox promises sub-£100 PCs
Not ECDL, there's a "first steps" access course
Which the missus teaches, as well as ECDL.
Most of her ECDL folk have just been made redundant and are looking to be able to prove to an employer they can do the basics. In MS products too.
First steps is probably enough to get started.
I like my Kindle *it just works*
It works and comparing it with an iPad is silly, it costs less than a quarter of the price. I was interested in an iPad for reading stuff (have actually read a ton of things on my old iPhone) and the Kindle made economic sense.
Kindle will also do a Steven Hawking reading thing, which I plug into the car. Not brilliant, but means I'm still doing useful stuff when commuting.
Also switched to an HTC Desire, because *it just works* and has buttons with labels on that say things like "back" and "menu" instead of having to guess where the app has buried them in the user interface. Plus I can check my diary, twitter and email from the desktop without starting an app. When the new Android 3 devices come down the pipe, costing around £200, I'll probably get one and be able to do about 10x more than the folk with iPads. Then I will give the Kindle to my other half.
Grateful to Apple for breaking the network's monopoly and assumption that their users are stupid, but moved on. Also moved on from O2's non-3G 3G and 500MB tariff to T-Mobile 3GB standard package. Plus the hassle free MiFi that's built in, so I could use the phone with the Kindle ... hmmm.
BMI works in flatland
'cos it's based on a square and people are (strangely) three dimensional.
This makes people who are short or tall have an index that is meaningless.
Also - it doesn't distinguish between muscle or fat,
So, it's a pile of crap and needs to be replace by something that has a meaning.
How many times to we have to pay BT for their copper?
Original argument back in the day was BT needed to be compensated for the vast swathe of copper in the ground that they had inherited from the days before nationalisation.
OK. But how many times?
Bt/Virgin/et. al all far too expensive, mostly because of BT.
Posted in Tech firms warn Ireland on bailout
After the Ponzi scheme ends
If it's ordinary people like you and me we just have to take it on the chin and remember we signed a piece of paper that said markets can go down as well as up.
No sympathy for the banks that screwed up. Tough shit, guys. the rest of us learned that money can disappear when the music stops - why should you not take the loss like everyone else has to?
And there's the whole thing about the EU riding roughshod over Ireland's sovereignty - when they said they didn't need any help for at least 6 months. The English used to say the Irish were to childlike to run their own affairs - now the EU bureaucrats say the same thing. Screw 'em. And screw bailing out people who should have known better.
Java copies C# these days, bro
Annotations anyone?
And it *is* a mongrel language that isn't fully object oriented and full of irrelevant low-level crap (short integers? Strings and regular expressions having no syntax to support them? Why?)
Oh, and why the hell does everything have to be a noun? Why is String final? Why does IBM's offering come on multiple DVD's (Oracle's probably does as well these days).
Plus the bugfest that is being able to call class methods from inside an instance with no syntax to differentiate between them.
Posted in Facebook bug sin-bins female users
Oh Noes! Obligatory anti-twitter comment by someone who chooses not to use it
If it's good enough for Saint Stephen the National Asset, it should be good enough for you.
If you don't like it, don't use it. But stop whining, eh?
And the twatter thing. Tha's old now. Prehistoric.
Works for me
As long as you remember to log out occasionally and let it recover the space ... even if you use sleep all the time, it still works in Finder, but the sexy GUI doesn't work.
