'Facebook is completely undreamt of even by the worst spying nation' This was the week when Google+ head Bradley Horowitz told the world that that whole Facebook thing was soooo last year. According to the +er, Facebook is the "social network of the past", mainly because Zuck's ad strategies are so intrusive they're putting people off. When people are online socialising, they should really be …
There's a few "sponsored" things popping up now and then. But on the mobile it's fine. It is the mobile adverts which will kill it given the amount of people only using FB on their phone.
But G+ is crap, I signed up and I've not used it since. Facebook don't send you spammy emails either with "This weeks top posts" and other crap I'm not interested in.
I had quite a few interesting experiences when working at the university hospital as scientific programmer for the image processing system we had developed. This was a DOS system with monochrome text monitor, equipped with a frame grabber and an extra colour monitor to show the image from the camera and ant processed image. One day a user came to complain that since my last software update, the mouse was behaving in reverse: move left, the cursor goes right, move up, the cursor goes down, etc. I explained that I had not changed anything in the mouse-handling, but agreed to come and have a look. It turned out she was holding the mouse with the "tail end" facing her. After rotating the rodent 180 degrees I invited her to try again. Rather red-faced, she went to work.
Five minutes later she comes into my office complaining that the image was upside-down (again blaming the software upgrade). Completely baffled at this, I went and had a look. I found everything looked normal (all text readable without putting a crick in your neck). I suggested all looked well. She then said that it was the colour image on the monitor which was upside-down. This image just showed some bacteria, which looked much the same in any orientation. The text on that screen also looked fine. I asked her again what the problem was, and finally it dawned on me. I went to the microscope, rotated the camera (which she had mounted) by 180 degrees, and asked her if this was better. Very red-faced, she went back to work.
I think she would not have dared come to complain about anything that month, even if the system had caught fire.
I sat through a presentation on Monte Carlo simulations of the charges within the gate of a transistor once. The scientist giving the presentation talked about 1 slide of apparently random dots for over twenty minutes before apologising that he'd got the slide upside down.
Brilliant but scatty
Upside down monitors on microscopes... it's important. You gradually develop an association between the controls for the slide stage and the image you see. Used to annoy the tits off me when you swung a certain set of prisms into the beam path and the whole universe swapped left, right, up, down.
Same kind of thing happened to me when I was taking my first steps in protein modeling. Some joker swapped the wiring to the X,Y,Z knobs on the Evans and Sutherland vector graphics terminal I was using and in the dark, wearing stereo glasses, I damn nearly fell off my chair when my ' world' sheared away in quite a different direction
I've a small digital microscope that is fine except for one truly aggravating quality. The image capture software operates the mouse sideways, moving the mouse horizontally moves the cursor vertically and of course vice versa. Imaging is fine, facilities for measuring are great. The requirement to lie down on your right side to make sense of the mouse movements is just strange. Never seen anything like it.
"The people who say they’re against this bill need to look victims of serious crime, terrorism and child sex offences in the eye and tell them why they’re not prepared to give the police the powers they need to protect the public."
If you won't let courts have the intercept evidence you already have, WTF is the point of collecting even more intercept evidence you can't use?
Wow, i would not work for you!
Are you suggesting that people should leave their phone on the table outside and have it stolen.
Perhaps rather than judging people on what devices they have you should judge them on the answers to your interview questions. If they have a call during the interview and their phone is not on silent, or they actually answer it, you may have a point.
No, jeremy 3. You might want to work for me, but I wouldn't hire you. Do you see the difference?
Occasionally, I'll ask someone I'm interested in hiring if I can view their (so far un-noticed) cell ... if the thing is turned off, the process continues. If it's live, the interview is over.
"We consider that paying an appropriate amount of tax in the country in which profits are made is not only a matter of basic economics. It is also a matter of morality."
Ok, so an MP from the Oppenheimer family wants to pontificate on others' tax arrangements. Irony.
Next you'll be saying Margaret Hodge believes in homeopathy. Or is anti-immigrant to the point of encouraging discrimination. Or feels that the Proms are less cultured than Coronation Street. At least no-one in her party fiddled their expenses or cheated in an election, what a plus point. Oh, wait ..
I caught this story in today's New York Times, noting that Starbucks is promising to pay some millions of pounds that it is not legally required to do. I think this is a mistake; they should not pay one penny more (of less) than legally required. If the politicians don't like that they should correct the laws they passed rather than griping about the nasty capitalists and the accountants and lawyers who advise them. They made the problem and they should correct it, even at the cost of some embarrassment, or should be turned out by their constituents in favor of legislators who will act more honestly.
I agree. I'm not sure I would be very pleased if I were a shareholder in a company that decided to make millions of pounds less profit that it could. Whilst I think Starbucks should be paying more UK tax, the fact that they aren't is a failure of UK law, politicians and tax collectors.
This post has been deleted by its author
Yeah, well... if you happen to know the addresses of any would-be legislators "who will act more honestly", please do share.
We've looked, and frankly it's a gruesome choice. Most people with the brains to understand the tax system are too busy making money to want to change it; and most people who do want to change it, don't understand it, and therefore vote for their choice of knaves, idiots or lunatics who believe or claim they can do something about it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
