Posts by Michael Hawkes
61 posts • joined Tuesday 5th May 2009 15:25 GMT
Anecdotal evidence
I work with a bunch of eye doctors and they give talks every week about interesting cases. One year one of them spent a few months helping out in a hospital in Alaska. He presented a case where a patient tried to commit suicide by holding a cartridge to his forehead with a pair of pliers and tried to set it off by holding a lighter to it. The cartridge went off, but instead of penetrating the skull, the bullet ended up between the globe and orbit, doing some damage to the eye (mainly burns). The doctor had pics, so it probably happened. The patient was held for a psych eval.
Fail, because the patient missed out on a Darwin award.
Re: Morons of the world, unite!
There was a suicide as recently as April: http://micgadget.com/34842/suicides-return-foxconn-workers-forced-to-work-long-hours-in-silence/
Re: Starting to be excited about this ...
I work with a bunch of eye doctors, so I wonder how long it will be before one of them gets a set of these for "research".
It would probably be more useful to people with certain conditions, such as macular degeneration or maybe glaucoma, where they have some good, but patchy vision. People with dense cataracts, cloudy corneas, etc might have a hard time with Glass, though I'm guessing.
Posted in DataDirect in job slash bloodbath
Marketing VP?
Does the marketing VP get paid by the word? The response is so padded with unnecessary words, it makes me think he (or the company) is dishonest to some extent.
"In order to continue to maintain solid double digit growth..." "To continue to maintain," is a bit redundant. "Solid," is solid word count padding worthy of a college freshman. "In order," isn't necessary. "To continue double digit growth..." means the same thing, but exhibits brevity.
I've also seen Windows performing better in a VM (XP and Win 7 in VMWare Fusion on a Mac, Win7 and 2008 Server in Hyper-V on a Dell server), even when I dial down the number of cores and RAM the VM's are allowed to use. Running Windows 7 in Hyper-V with 1 GB of RAM runs better than Windows 7 on an Optiplex with 1 GB of RAM. I don't know why, but it does.
I've run Ubuntu in VMWare Fusion and Ubuntu Server in Hyper-V but haven't played around with them enough to appreciate any difference in performance, though neither seems to suffer from the limited RAM I've allocated.
Re: Wait a minute
I wouldn't say we don't pay enough, but as a large state-funded university, they seem to offer us fairly good deals :-) On the other hand, I don't look at their profit margins. I do recommend Dells (and Apples), but that's mainly because they seem to install less crapware than other manufacturers. Caveat emptor, however.
Wait a minute
I hope Dell doesn't get out of the PC business. We've got hundreds of Optiplex PCs (and dozens of Latitude laptops) where I work, and on the rare occasion that something breaks, their service has always been excellent - the parts arrive the next day and they always ask if I need a tech to come and install the parts. My personal experience with Dells is they they've been more reliable than the Macs I've owned.
Re: Dell and Linux
After getting a Project Sputnik XPS 13 last summer, I tried using Ubuntu for a few days, but eventually got fed up and installed Mint.
Football fields
Is that a new unit of measurement for the Register? Shouldn't it be measured in doormats?
VGA
At the university where I work, VGA is commonly used to connect laptops to projectors. All of the classrooms have VGA connections in the teacher's desk or speaker's podium, while some will have DVI or HDMI as options. VGA may be legacy tech, but it still works well.
tl;dr
B/c ppl hv attn spans of gnats.
Why do they need to be innocent?
In the US, the president and governors can grant pardons or commute sentences for people who are guilty, which is probably why it's a sometimes controversial practice. I can't decide if the US or the UK has a better grasp of when pardons should be granted, but if it happened in the US, Turing would probably have been pardoned by now.
Thoughtcrime
I'm not from the UK, but isn't increased government regulation and government intrusion supposed to be anathema to Conservative ideals?
Re: A good job for the MIT robot lab, allied to Lockheed-Martin
RAT-101? Would that be the first iteration of the Rat-Thing from Snow Crash?
I have a bad feeling about this
Jar Jar Binks on Ice.
Textbooks that feature Yoda, Obi-Wan and other "wise" Jedi masters throughout.
A sitcom with a young Padawan as sidekick and comic relief who constantly gets into trouble and is frequently rescued from a predicament of his own making.
Spies, pirates, thieves?
Sounds pretty American to me. Maybe we should give them citizenship.
Posted in Surface more profitable than iPad
Cut corners
It's because they cut back on rounded corners
Late to the party, but with lots of money
They should pay Psy billions of won and call it "Gangnam style". They can have an ad with Bill Gates and/or Steve Ballmer doing the dance from the video - instant meme! Dress them as Santas for holiday sales.
para-what?
"parasitic pornographic websites" tapewormlove.com? theliceshack.xxx?
Posted in Does Box really need $284m in VC cash?
similar to Dropbox
The university where I work started using Box recently and it is much, much easier to use than Sharepoint. I've use it on Macs and PCs, and have accessed it with iOS and Android devices.
It's pretty much like Dropbox in that you can store your files "in the cloud" and access them anywhere there's a network connection. You can also 'invite' people to upload, download, or edit files in your personal Box folder. Most of the people I work with use it to collaborate with other rather than emailing documents back and forth.
Dear sir or madam,
Her Majesty's Government has recently give my company, Bastard Ltd, the copyrights to 10,617 Nigerian business proposals. We are looking to transfer the copyrights for these documents to you personally. If you send £1000 by wire transfer to handle the administrative fees, our company will arrange for an international courier to deliver the copyright documents to you.
I await your prompt reply.
Yours,
D. Bastard
My bets
I have my virtual money on Tsinghua to win it and University of Colorado to take second or third.
Re: Tell them to sod off.
"And if it turns out they are deliberately manipulating the results..."
So what?
It's their page, they should be able to do what they want with it, including promoting their own products.
If you don't like their search results, go somewhere else (Duck Duck Go, Bing, and Ixquick are good search engines). If enough people start taking their searches elsewhere, then maybe Google will decide they need to shape up.
Corneas
I work with ophthalmologists who perform cornea transplants and I've met patients who have had them done. I don't have an FB account and normally don't think very highly of the company, but for this I give them a thumbs up. If it gets more people to sign up as organ and tissue donors, it will be incredibly worthwhile.
A cautionary tale
Tell them it's potentially dangerous, definitely frowned upon, and that if they do it they risk getting an ICBO (Intentional Coding Behavior Order).
Posted in Battlefield Earth ruled worst film EVER
Now...
I'll have to watch the ones I haven't seen yet.
glare
I hope they do the same for the Cinema Displays. Glossy screens are too much of a distraction with the glare. I want a monitor, not a mirror.
Posted in So, what IS the worst film ever made?
Re: Manos: the Hands of Fate
It wasn't that bad. It has women in negligees having catfights, and a guy who looks a lot like Arthur Brown.
The Room
"The Room" by Tommy Wiseau is a bit odd. It's a bit like an after-school special as told by drug dealer.I thought the ending was great, if only because it ensured there would be no sequels (we can only hope).
Re: Worst movie
As MST3K noted, Manos is Spanish for Hands, so the title can be translated as "Hands: The Hands of Fate" Hilarious movie, despite that.
Re: Motivations mean nothing.
Even if he is playing to the audience, techies aren't the crowd Republican congressmen usually try to play to.
ONLY a t-shirt?
It's not ONLY a t-shirt. It's a sentiment. If it were only a t-shirt, nothing would be printed on it.
An omen
As foretold in the App of Revelations. Signs and portents, I tell ya. Steve Jobs didn't die; he was just leaving ahead of the rush.
Except...
“We reject the view that government suppression of the internet, phone networks and social media at times of unrest is acceptable.”
Except when there are riots in London and whatnot.
Posted in HP may NOT spin off PC biz
After shooting itself in the foot...
the HP board is now busy reloading.
WTF happened to HP? It used to be a decent & respectable tech company founded by some of the pioneers of Silicon Valley. The past few years it's been one fucking drama after another. What happened?
Meh - because I'm a fan of HP printers and RPN calculators, but not their computers.
Diaspora
Diaspora is still around https://joindiaspora.com/. Now, off to the pub.
It's not fair
"It's not fair on the newspapers if all the social media can report this and the newspapers can't. So the law and the practice has got to catch up with how people consume media today," Cameron said.
It seems as if he's implying stricter control of social media, without actually saying it. If the PCC gets renamed the Ministry of Truth, then we'll know the Memory Hole is on the way.
Posted in Java daddy borged by Google
Egos
"...no guiltless parties with white hats in this little drama." Maybe Gosling fancies himself as a Silicon Valley Yojimbo, begrudgingly allied for money/expediency.
Big hair
He's just complaining because he's no longer Wanted: Dead or Alive.
Be on the lookout
Godzilla started due to nuclear testing, so a nuclear meltdown might be an up-to-date equivalent. Maybe they'll make a movie about it.
Job titles are problematic
Job titles wouldn't be a good way to track jobs either. Tracking by job titles seems to imply skills that are easily transferable, but a lab technician for an optical shop would probably have a hard time working as a lab technician for a pathology lab, and presumably they both require different skill sets than a lab technician in a university computer lab.
Posted in Apple plots iPad 2 production reduction
One way to look at it
While it is annoying when they don't conveniently announce product releases, it even more annoying when they announce something that doesn't get released, such as the mythical white iPhone 4. My guess is they're hedging their bets, rather than intentionally keeping people in suspense.
Posted in Halfords.com crashes off the internet
Rob Halford
I didn't know the Judas Priest frontman was so popular.
Posted in China net filtering overlord gets pwned
Hubris
Maybe he doesn't know as much about the internet as he thought he did.
As with other Google products
Google may "wave" it goodbye.
But no CDs!
So smartphones are okay, but CDs, flash drives, and other removable media are banned? I guess PEBKAC hasn't made it into the military jargon yet.
Don't pay attention to what he says
You're still alright with me. The Reg and Slashdot are my first two stops for browsing tech news in the morning.
I'm ready
I'm ready for the app, which means I'm also ready for the self-inflicted license fee, though I hope it doesn't cost that much.
Profit motive
'The cloud is democratic' is such BS. Companies that host/provide clouds are in it for the money. If there's no money to be had, they won't provide the service. Democracy is only useful until the profit disappears.
I think they've been borrowing some of Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field.
change the conditions
One solution might be to stop giving subsidies to "natural" persons. If they want subsidies, they have to become "legal' persons, then the info can be published.
