Posts by Denarius

so its fossilised then ?

Step up Sir Elton with the new release of Crocodile Rock

how about

Phones: Screens that can be seen in sunlight. Original Dell Streak achieved this, nothing since. A Samsung I saw recently came close. Autocorrect that gets out of the way or an easy permanent go away. Firefox works fine with this, flagging possible issues but does not stop input, unlike every B* phone I have used. Better battery life. If it needs a recharge more than once a week its not enough. A belt clip that does not require a car crash jaws of life team to get off. Every one I used would slide off any time under any circumstances, until I wanted to remove it.

Laptops: Less OS crap and a matte screen as others have typed so it can be seen in daylight.

Software: bring back UI designers who are not devotees of touch, scratch and smash in frustration.

Cars: Auto-arresting functions for morons who tailgate. Car locks door and calls cops if vehicle is travelling over 75kmh within 3 car lengths of vehicle in front. Self-driving cars might reduce the need, right up to the time some fad of day software writer puts in a new feature that makes them uncontrollable but have a really cool useless feature.

TV: built in lie detectors., mandated volume down as soon as ads crank up modulation.

internet connectivity ?

would the latest Firefoxes run with adequate response times ?

Illusions

One suspects HR have no clue as to consequences of hardware and software information leakage. After all, that is something those techies do, so not real work or knowledge. The guards at door are security, aren't they ?

Secondly, there is no real choice these days. The vendor lock in of IBM and Notes or M$ running on Windows. Backend servers have the wide choice of Sparc , PowerPC and Intel. running COTS derive packages with language de-joure. Since MS is in mix, that only leaves Intel with linux VMs. Spooks are highly conservative by nature so no ARM stuff unless sneaked in as a research project. So infrastructure knowledge is nearly irrelevant because there is not much choice. Network analysis will tell you anyway.

Given the massive increase in $$$ for spookeries while the rest of the government is cut means Orackle is doing well, hence SQL. Given that SQL is a standard for databases, I cant see that its acknowledgment as a language has any significance. I would be astonished if Hadoop had made it out of the wild idea category. As for off-line stuff why should it be any different? The PHBs will specify what they use elsewhere.

In short, the adds merely display what any inquiring mind would assume, so are of no significance . Whether the PHBs in ASIO understand that is another matter. The biggest illusion is that ASIO know anything that was not passed on by their masters overseas except for a few bits about imported idealists re-exporting their cultural behaviors.

An upside

to the slow 3G here then. Any extra traffic on local feeble 3G will make timeouts even more common so none of Googles adds will display. All I lose is email and a bit of browsing. Sad to say I am not sure I care anymore. As for smart devices, why are they so stupid ? Can't be just my age, I hear young'uns mumbling the same thing.

showing age maybe ?

never met a sysadmin or DBA who gave a hoot about private customers info. Yes we could read it but had much more entertaining things to do, coffee to slurp etc. Something from from the BOFH archives mentions this, decades ago. Perhaps report could mention destructive CEOs as an organisational threat. Internal staff doing their jobs plus extras are a potential threat indeed, but would love to see a comparison of worst costs for feral admin/DBA versus PHB. A few companies spring to mind as prime examples. Some have two letter acronyms, some have 3.

best last line for a long time

Thank $DEITY I had no coffee in mouth. Well said sir !

Cmon, let's hear it again

god botherers interfering with business again. Don't they know the Arab proverb ? "All merchants have the same religion"

nothing to do with

the strange custom of building bit barns in the highest cost areas of Oz then ?

origin of Alien beastie

I understood from some TV show that the beast was partly inspired by a small life form from deep ocean greatly enlarged. As for surrealism, isn't that what we have experts and pollies for ?

back to the past...

so after all the modern management and individual departmental software contracts since 1998 the elected PHBs discover it does not work in cost reduction, so they are going to a common platform. Hmm, How far will that go ? Just hope there is no machine intelligence involved in the content management system or some Treasury and AG docs will have the machine think it would prefer talking to Marvin the paranoid Android. Then again, the martian one also sounds familiar in there judging by some of the non-privacy announcements from AGs.

Best Big Idea in a long while

compared to luxury buildings for the filthy rich to own and keep empty or CEO ego feeding skyscrapers it is positively sane and reasonable. Meanwhile, Murder on the Orient Express can get an update or the Trans-Siberian Express get a big makeover.

new product viability

it has to be no more than current top end, preferably median

it has to be 10x better than anything else

It has to be reliable (hello Jazz disk)

it has to have no competitor likely for 2 years, preferably 3.

Given the boggling amounts of data from astronomy and CERN, it _might_ get a run for biggest end of town and be ignored for mere enterprises, if and only if it is delivered at a fixed date, fully working

chances of that? guesstimate is 5% given all megacorps attitude to their technical staff. Still, licensing to LTO consortium might be a steady legit IP income.

OTGH

Makers cant support all OS 4evah. Not unreasonable to declare a cutoff date. However., the failure of so many users to update suggests that the "new" software suggests that it offers no benefits, or worse, is a pain. At what stage is good enough sufficient for the life of the hardware or organisation ? OTOH, does HP flog fog, sorry cloud services ?

easily managed though

All Oz govs think cutting budgets is cool. How about t making make the spooks responsible for paying all data collection costs and storing it? Win/Win. No costs on consumer and spooks/cops/whatever have to show stashing costs in a shrinking budget. With a strong oversight audit from a a joint sitting of both houses committee. If the spooks suddenly cant pass costs on it might make them target the dragnets. Yeah, I know, I will wake up soon.

why would anything else be expected ?

successive governments (for want of a better term) have cut, slashed, sacked, cut again and use very temporary staff and outsourcerers.. This government campaigned on nothing at all, a true Seinfeld .event, except not entertaining or informative. So why would anyone in management aka PHB land have a clue as to what was considered or could be done, especially as none of this info really lives inhouse anymore. Given Dimia/DIACs fun with web server logs a pattern is emerging. News Next up, is pen and paper cheaper and more cost effective ? Is the ultimate archival material fired clay tablets ?

no worse than the curse

of XML replacing simple text config files. UDEV also drives me crazy when hardware gets replaced after lightning strikes. Oh for the simple days when hardware just got probed at boot and config files could be read by humans. Sun beat RH there too. One distro has resisted the obstufication movement, SlackWare. Have to try it one day when the local excuse for a network gets above 8KB/sec again. NBN, the best ghost national network never built.

oh good another way to be doomed

real soon now. It was getting quiet with Tony out of country. Methane, so flame so appropriate. I now await the "OMG, we're all gonna die" brigade procession. on what passes for media these days. Not knocking the research, just what may be extrapolated from it.

did he control for

A fundamentalist culturally mandated materialist based based belief system managing most schools having an influence ? Meanwhile, Dr S Jones, well put except for last assumption. The existence of forgeries is no proof the genuine does not exist.

Most of the "internet groups" I observe are just like small communities, especially the materialist ones. I might know, because unlike most commentards, I have lived in multiple small remote communities. Very few had decent coffee too.

In a cynical moment I question whether the USSA ever had much Christian influence after 1880. The rapid adoption of Darwinian derived politics and social practices suggests a Christian derived view of humanity was weak. Recent surveys( Barma et al) of religious adherents claims of belief were contradicted by their lack of knowledge of their belief systems tenets. Dropping the meaningless labels is merely honesty, not a drop in belief. That I could ascribe to internet use, as more people realise their doubt or disbelief is common.