Posts by ribosome
782 posts • joined Thursday 21st June 2012 13:12 GMT
Re: I'm not Eadon...
You remind me of a French taxi-driver's comment on why a well known crook had just been re-elected Mayor:
"C'est un vieux con, mais c'est notre vieux con a nous."
the Roman Catholic Church will split along liberal and conservative lines
Why would the conservatives be in South America, where Liberation Theology got started?
I'd hope they'd be sending missionaries to the North and East to preach against capitalism.
Re: So much for infallibility
It is significant that it was declared just as the French took over the Vatican. "OK you may have all the soldiers and the artillery, but I'm occasionally infallible."
Re: The Church is definitely not a business.
Rupert Murdoch? Is that you?
Re: The Church is definitely not a business.
He's only just got the job. Give him a chance to get in McKinsey and decide what to do with underperforming subsidiaries. Given that the Africans are net recipients of money and the Episcopalians and the Anglicans are cash generators, I think we can guess where this might end up.
The Church is definitely not a business.
He's lasted 7 years. In industry, what CEO presiding over falling customer numbers, reduced income, and general staff dissatisfaction, would have lasted so long? Especially as his recipe for fixing the problems as "OK, let's do things like we did last century. Or preferably the one before."
Even his takeover bid for the right wing of the Church of England was a dreadful flop.
The Roman Catholic Church needs to get the headhunters in. Richard Branson might demand more changes than they liked before accepting the job ("Stuff celibacy and let's move to my private island"), Larry Ellison might feel Papal infallibility didn't go far enough, but surely there's someone out there with a good track record?
Ah. Mark Zuckerberg. The very person.
Re: Pay for my own device, and have them lock it down???
Under neo-fascist capitalism, citizen, it is your duty to align your needs and desires with those of the corporation.
Posted in Paper computers: Not mere pulp fiction
As paper PCBs already exist this is a solved problem. UV resin, in fact, can be applied on-press.
Posted in Paper computers: Not mere pulp fiction
Re: I like both - Shocker!
Upvoted for the Good Omens reference. I agree: there is no electronic equivalent of collectors books. But I would cheerfully swap 80% of my physical books for electronic tomorrow; I could use the shelf space.
Re: The more MS pushes people to rent their software
If I lease a car and return it, every journey I made in it doesn't suddenly cease to have happened unless I lease a new car from the same company.
Re: @Eenymeeny
A US study suggested that PP was used slightly more than Excel, to about 34% of entire Office usage. You have to understand that the gradual loss of progress in the US and the increasing reliance on litigation is fueled by vast numbers of office staff firing powerpojnts at one another. The ability to produce a memo on half a side of letter paper has been supplanted by the ability to present the same information, less well presented, as a ppt.
The other day I got a screenshot which was sent as a ppt. It was at unfeasibly small scale so to read it I had to extract the image from the ppt into something else. I guess the monkey hadn't heard of Paint.
Because the survey was before people knew what it was like, when they still thought it would be a status symbol. Office workers are the ones who want Office Pro even if they only type letters and look at simple spreadsheets.
Re: Keys are WAY too small on BBs
OK, so they aren't for you.
I still type about 65-70wpm on a standard keyboard.
I can just about type on a glass screen on a 7 inch tablet. A 10 inch tablet is useless. I can type several times faster on a BB keyboard than on any glass keyboard I have ever found, and much faster than on a landscape thumb keyboard like the one on the Nokia N900. Yes I use the ends of my thumbs, yes there is a bit of a learning curve, no I don't have to get out a laptop to check emails. Yes I am male. No I have not had a hand transplant.
BlackBerry presumably make phones with keyboards because enough of us want them.
Looks practical
I suspect that this one is coming out second because Blackberry know that the replacement for the 9900 must be as near perfect as makes no odds on day 1. Just as the Playbook was used to get QNX working with a presentation layer, and the various devs were used to refine it, the Z10 is being used to identify final OS tweaks. But the Q10 is the magic bunny and it has to come out of the hat with everything working.
I also suspect that the "glass weave" might actually be kevlar twill - light and very strong. I will find out when I get one.
Re: Oh, lookie! An Xtian! (was: Wise up?)
Now now. A lot of Christians, beginning at least with St Augustine, would totally agree that Genesis is a collection of myths. They might just disagree with you on the significance of myths.
Genesis goes wrong at word 3, because Elohim is a plural form. It has to be either borrowed from a pre-Hebrew myth, or it reflects an original 'in the beginning, the God's...', which is quite likely.
I love asking Jehovah's witnesses how the first sentence of the Bible goes, because I am a smartarse. But a theologically educated smartarse.
Re: Lewis misses the point
Yes, sorry. Inaccuracy is my middle name. For some reason I thought the WO was in charge of all shell development.
Re: Lewis misses the point
It was more complicated than that - the British ships had inadequate precautions against flash from a turret hit making its way down to the cordite store. That should have been foreseen and was cheaply fixable. Then there was the problem that although the battlecruisers were supposed to engage at extreme range, their rangefinders weren't good enough at long ranges. And then there was the refusal of the War Department to adopt a fire control calculator because it had been developed by a civilian. But, finally, there was the scandal of the crappy supposedly armour piercing shells that bounced off. Even after Jutland, the War Department failed to fix the issue for far too long.
I worked with a Jutland survivor in the early 70s (that is correct, he was a middy at Jutland and didn't want to retire in the 70s) and he still could be raised to white heat on the subject of government incompetence. His view was that the entire naval branch of the War Office should have been immersed in a sea covered with patches of burning oil for a few hours, so that the survivors would have their minds concentrated.
Re: Eh?
The more left wing of us have never forgiven Napoleon for losing at Waterloo. If the British aristocracy had gone the way of the French one, we might still be in a mess, but it would be a less oligarchic mess.
Re: I didn't realise there was a difference
French...UKIP wants to trade with johnny foreigner so long as he stays at home and knows his place.
Re: I didn't realise there was a difference
Presumably UKIP supporters see an opportunity to get Thales out of the game.
Re: Lewis misses the point
Isn't the issue that the MoD doesn't really believe there is going to be a war, so it's OK to be as corrupt as is comfortable?
I've just read George Bonney's book about the events around the battle of Jutland (Skagerrack), and it seems that nothing in the MoD has changed since it was the War Office. Then, it was shells that didn't go bang properly, and the War Office refusing to admit it.
Nobody really questions the need for carriers - they are still seemingly expecting to fight a Pacific war without satellites and tactical missiles, having finally fixed some of the materiel problems of 1944-5.
Re: Yeah......right.......
Sox prevented the financial crisis in 2008, didn't it?
Re: More EU beauracracy. Business costs up once again
You do realise that living in a civilised society has costs, which is why Somalia doesn't have taxes and we do? Frankly, I'd rather live in a country that is less "competitive" but is nicer to live in. (I already do this to a certain extent by living in the South-west of the UK, where incomes are lower than in the South-east, but we have a much higher quality of life.)
Re: Trade War?
As far as I know all our Azure services and Office 365 are hosted in Europe and therefore have to be compliant with EU law. I checked this point when I opened our Azure account.
Re: SO what?
We won't get their expensive military kit and the bits for their ("our") nukes. We won't be able to buy Apple phones and HP laptops. We won't have to buy the output of Hollywood. We won't be able to sell them Mulberry bags, French films, Parmesan cheese, BMWs or champagne. They will go around flogging everybody half price Boeings to try to destroy Airbus. They will also try to bend the entire Middle East to their will to stop our supplies of oil and gas, but good luck with that.
I haven't run my slide rule over this, but I suspect that a very powerful country dependent on imports might just have more to lose than a loose federation which borders on countries with vast natural resources that are in need of further development.
Re: catonaut - worse
The root "cat" means away from or downwards. So a catonaut would be a sinking sailor. This one is merely an aeronaut.
Re: Good luck to "the company formerly known as RIM"
Not because Canada and the UK are currently the main markets for top end BBs, and because there was virtually no growth in the smartphone park in the US last year (200M=203 million?)
A good place to launch a new product first is where people might buy it. Iron the bugs out, then launch in the US.
Re: iOS user curiously impressed
I am extremely glad Apple did not buy Palm.They would have removed everything I liked about webOS. Nokia would have been a better fit.
Re: Roaming?
I suspect this is what Blackberry had to do to get the carriers to stock the phone. When the route to market is through evil monopolists, what else can you do?
Having said that, isn't there an opportunity for organisations to offer their own BES services to the outside world? I'm thinking here of things like the National Trust or Oxfam - a potentially useful source of income.
Re: Sorry, wrong.
I'm sorry, I thought all journalists lived in a world of crime, prostitution and premature death. Because that's what sells advertising.
Big Brother, as a tribute to those fine journalists of the British Tabloid Press - especially the one who recently wrote that journalists shouldn't nark on bent coppers.
Re: I want a new netbook
Fair enough, but still cost twice as much as a netbook and presumably no warranty.
Re: Accounting
You are aware that many accountants are self-employed and that in many small businesses the book-keeping is a part time job?
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make, but your use of the term "accounts department" suggests you know little about how much of the world works.
Accounting
A lot of people still need to do their accounts. Every cheap, good system runs on Windows. "cloud-based" systems mean Internet access, not always available. For this purpose the netbook was perfect. We still keep an MSI Wind as backup in case a main computer fails, and its performance on email, basic spreadsheets and accounting programs is perfectly adequate. It also runs all day on the big battery and cost under £300 in total.
One of my wife's clients decided the other day he needed a new computer to do his book-keeping. He phoned up the local computer "specialist" and has ended up with £2500 spent on Windows 8.
Problem in a nutshell. Netbooks were too good; they cannibalised laptops. So the industry decided collectively to sell expensive ultrabooks, and tablets that are not actually good enough for any daily work. Problem solved.
Re: The cost of storing nuclear waste
"thorium reactors could use current nuclear waste"
In the nuclear industry, all the way from mox to fusion, the word "could" invariably means "start shovelling cash into a money pit now".
I could create for you a world-beating wide bodied nuclear passenger aircraft, but I think the cost and the timescale would be impractical. However, I'm prepared to give it a go. About a billion pounds should be enough to get my corporate HQ running.
Re: If your name's not down, you're not coming in... [sorry, but the mistakes were driving me nuts]
A reasonable proposition if we actually had any feasible way of doing it. Of course, given enough time, the Lake District will doubtless be on a subducting plate.
Re: Eh?
The USA was founded by extremist Protestants, people whio couldn't get on in this country because we wouldn't let them persecute other people for their beliefs. We basically exported a wide range of criminals to Australia, and vindictive sadists to the US. The expected results followed.
Re: Its America
but...if people start robbing stores using bananas, other people might question the need for the right to bear arms.
I say hang the unpatriotic bastard. And let off the guy who just took capitalism to the limit, but at least patriotically carried a gun.
