Posts by AbortRetryFail
162 posts • joined Wednesday 2nd February 2011 16:48 GMT
re: I Eat Cannibals
You said: "The only true source of creativity I see in today's tech landscape is Apple, inventor of the cell phone, the tablet, and the MP3 player"
This is a joke, I presume? Apple invented none of those.
re: Start Over
@ j2-core
You said "Now I have a wife and a kid and want to post pics but not to all of my friends and I don't have time to select the individual friends I want to share with"
Facebook already has something analogous to Circles - it's just not very obvious. You can create lists and add your friends to those lists.
Then when you share something, the text field where you add the friends to share with also accepts lists as well as individual friends. So you can share to one or more lists rather than individual friends.
Keyboard layout
Really disappointed to see that they've chosen to make the bottom-left key "Fn" rather than "Ctrl".
For some reason I just simply can't get on with that layout (I've tried) and that would put me off buying one.
re: Despite trying hard to keep up...
yes, this one slipped by me. As did the checkbox that lets friends of friends see wall posts and photos in which they have tagged you, which is perhaps far more concerning and annoyed I only just discovered that one - when did that get added?
Posted in An introduction to static code analysis
Rubbish article
The author states that nobody writes C++ any more and makes a thinly-disguised sneer at the "misfortune" that you may have to maintaining it, then goes on to contradict himself by making a long list of market sectors that do actively develop in C++.
For the record, myself and a large number of others do actively develop in C++. And with judicious use of smart pointers and RAII techniques, there is absolutely no reason to have resource leaks. And all without some bloated garbage collection that cleans up when it feels like it rather than when you want it.
The whole article seems to be a cross between an advert for a tool and a troll for comments.
Kiln People
The temporary cloning of yourself onto a humanoid "blank" in David Brin's "Kiln People" would be pretty useful.
Some wouldn't work
All great books, but some just wouldn't work.
For example, Snow Crash predicts a Metaverse and we now have them. Plus, like a lot of Neal's work it would be fairly inpenetrable for the average Joe.
Cryptonomicon even more so.
The Legacy of Heorot is "Aliens done properly" and people would just see it as a remake of Aliens.
Ringworld would be interpreted as Halo, even though it predates it.
Deathworld would be seen as another Starstip Troopers - all guns and shooting aliens and... actually, that sounds pretty good. :o)
Posted in Japanese nuke meltdown may be underway
So much junk science and ignorance
As someone has already mentioned, anyone with any knowledge of physics and reactor design can see that this situation is under control now.
I was sent a really interesting (and long) blog post today written by someone who appears to know what they are talking about. He's a PHD working at MIT and whose father worked in the German nuclear industry.
http://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors/
Posted in Council loses USB of patient records
Safend Protector
My current client's security policy is that *all* USB memory devices are encrypted and Safend Protector runs on all machines and actively blocks all attempts to write to non-encrypted devices.
Why on earth are they not using something like this? Allow users to write to unencrypted devices and they will.
As an aside, the employee should be sacked for Gross Misconduct.
Posted in Nokia's 15-year tango to avoid Microsoft
Qt is GPL and may survive
Hopefully Qt will get forked PDQ and will continue to be developed, although being GPL will be of less use (those seriously using it have commercial licenses).
Damn shame - Qt was just starting to look like a serious cross-platform development framework.
Posted in Flickr thinks again about 4,000 pix loss
re: why don't they offer a useful function...
The trouble with allowing users to back up their metadata is that, presumably, you'd need a way of allowing them to restore it too. Which could somewhat open the floodgates for people forging comments, feedback, and the like.
Having said that, in the case of Flickr, it would be damn useful to at least be able to back up the title, description, keywords, tags and people. In other words all the stuff you can enter yourself (as opposed to social stuff like comments and faves that come from other people)
It's the metadata
If eBay closed someone's account and they lost all their trading history and feedback rankings, people wouldn't be saying "what a moron for not backing it up" because there is no way of backing up stuff like this.
This situation is the same - the photos themselves are (ironically) of minor loss as he has them backed up.
