Posts by Youngdog

D-D-Dixons, Dixons....

A £150 bribe is probably just enough to get me through the door of one of these places. Unfortunately I d-d-don't want one.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oOwqdZzIkc

Company Punts Own Product Yawn

Creating a link for people to click that takes them to a page loaded with well-meaning sentiments might make people feel 'engaged' and create the illusion of credibility.

Unfortunately the 'engagement' is akin to someone taking the Pepsi Challenge and then letting the twonk from Pepsi do the tasting!

RIP Steve

"Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life...have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

The world is a poorer place without him

Even for a tank..

..getting this thing off the ground will take a lot of effort

To quote Douglas Adams;

"..making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a billion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it..."

As every good trekker knows...

..when discussing Russian hardware it is customary to refer to them as 'wessels'

Reckless Getaway...

..really is a lot of fun to play.

Unfortunately, as El Reg reported earlier, after a couple of hours play I was filled with an unquenchable desire to go out and rob some Banks. Well, I say 'unquenchable' - not strictly true. But I have still hit a bit of wall in that I can't find ANYWHERE to spend my ill gotten gains on Flat-screen TVs and Mobile phones! Wassatallabout eh? Now sitting here, surrounded by bags of loot, I have found the time to contemplate my actions, reflect on what went wrong and think of the children. BAN THIS FILTH IMMEDIATELY!!!

And second to the AC first poster - GOF2 rules. Once I got the experimental mining drill, a decent ship and one of those warp drive doo-hickeys to go collect Void ore I was in Han-heaven.

Seems reasonable enough

..if it turns out whoever did this was at the time being paid to work with this sort of information then it looks as though they're doing their best to get to the bottom of it.

As for;

"I would like to see a full statement of who did it, why and how, followed by what they are doing to prevent a repeat"

Easy tiger! What's wrong with assuming that if/when they find out you will too eh?

Have a good weekend everyone - Beer'o'clock in my part of the world now so toodle-pip!

Huh? Can someone please explain...

..how this experimental API can prefetch a page that normally takes 7.2 seconds to load and present it for instant rendering when it only took 4 seconds to load the results page and click on the first link?

I NEED TO KNOW GODDAMMIT!

With my hectic modern lifestyle, I am all for shaving the odd second here and there off mundane tasks - but Google repeatedly screaming OMG 0.0s!!!! at me in the video just sets off my BS detecter and leaves me with a poor first impression of this technology

I know...

....all we need is a really, really, REALLY long straw

Business as usual in a lot places I'm afraid

The Board being out of touch with what's happening on the ground and passionate, committed engineers who, working in narrow silos, don't see the overall picture really is BAU in any tech company of significant size.

Typically the engineers are baffled that, although they can see problems, the company still seems to retain some profitability and the crisis they are all hoping for that might bring much needed change just never occurs. Similarly the Board is baffled that, despite their leadership, management is unable to implement their vision without encountering issues such as staff retention, rising costs or poorer than expected sales.

The truth that both these sides choose to ignore is that to lead the field in any market usually involves just being in the right place at the right time and can come down to a single decision made months, or even years, previously that at the time probably didn't seem significant.

Every time you read about the latest successful company (or person) what you don't see is the endless graveyard full of also-rans and failures. Too much credit is taken for their own success without the humility to realise that, like a lottery, success was bound to happen to someone and doesn't come down to pontificated company 'values' or mission statements or personal/corporate visions.

Don't get me wrong - there are things that companies typically do that ensure they never even get close to no.1 (short term focus on costs, hiring outside the field, creating management layers to buffer accountability and generate promotion paths) but lets just see how this rant is recieved first before we go into that one!

Thank you El Reg...

..for reminding me it's Mother's Day on Sunday. You have well and truly saved my bacon. If anyone else out there is as hopeless as me then I am pleased to tell you InterFlora.co.uk are taking orders for Mother's Day delivery up until Saturday night.

Once you have your order confirmed feel very ashamed that you were too busy reading about technology to remember your dear old Mum. And don't forget to call her!

Don't take the piss out of Baby Doll...

...

Can you cross-reference tiger

owners with all the moustache-

wearing sous chefs within a 4-mile radius?

Yes, yes you can - if you don't trust your tagging and linking to the herd and instead just hoover it all up and put your efforts into the Application level rather than the Data/Transport level

Iriots

Oooh, you fibber!

You have quite clearly quoted him as saying there are parallels between the two - not that one caused the other! True I have not watched the video but I think it's fair to assume if what you stated in the headline was anywhere in it you would have quoted that as well.

I agree with JaitcH - in a world where our leaders lie to us on a daily basis because it is 'in our best interests' perhaps we should listen to what he actually does say!

Right, without further ado, I will now watch the video....

Vote Strangelove!

The party of common-sense solutions to the problems facing humanity;

- Reduced population densities in the 1st world to sustainable levels

- Avoid pension crises through lowered life expectancies (to between 0 and 30)

- Helping the 3rd World by removing Global economic inequality

- A return to a back-to-basics 'stone-age' values system to remove dependance on fossil fuels

- An end to Capitalism via total elimination of currency-based economies

- More of those lovely white Christmases you remember as a child

"A sacrifice required for the future of the human race"

- our beloved Fuhr, er, Party Leader Dr. S.

But don't take his word for it! Here are just a few of the glowing testimonials our policies have recieved;

"I heard about the Strangelove Party in the 60's, advised a succesion of US Presidents and couldn't stop laughing when I was awarded a nobel peace prize for ending the Vietnam war even though it was my idea to bomb 1/2 a million of them to death!" - Dr H. Kissinger

"What modern Politics lacks is a party with vision. A party not afraid to make the 'hard choices'. A party that knows what must be done to make the world, truly, a better place. The Strangeloves ARE that Party" - Ernst S. Blofeld

"I wish we had one of them doomsday machines" - Gen. 'Buck' Turgidson

32-bit OS? How quaint....

...FLAME ON!

Just do a massive pingsweep...

..and take all the unused ones back!

Or let ISPs NAT and have two levels of IPv4 addresses - call it IPv4^2!

Only ONE of the ten has a built in mouse?

The real advantage of wireless KBs is you can control your below-the-telly media centre PC from the sofa - but what's the point if you need a separate mouse! OK - a true ubergeek don't need no steenkin' mouse but Win7 is a sod without one and there is a SHOCKING lack of these on the market with one built in. I eventually found the Zippy RF 666 - there are others with more functionality but I frickin' hate touchpads.

Glad 'The Fighter' got a couple...

...Ok the film played fast and loose with the facts and Bale's performance reminded me of De Niro's 'Johnny Boy' from 'Mean Streets' more than once but the chemistry between him and Wahlberg was amazing and probably down to how much time they obviously spent around each other to make the training scenes look so amazing.

The real standouts though were Melissa Leo (a thoroughly deserving winner) and Amy Adams - their superb, naturalistic performances made this much, much more than the usual sugar-coated Hollywood take on these sort of stories. Christ if the suits had been running the show it would have been Julia Roberts on the nomination list.

Oh and I forgot to add...

..Happy New Year to everyone at Vulture Towers and all the good readers who, like me, spend waaaaay to much time on this site.

Have a happy and prosperous 2011!