Posts by dshan 57 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2009
Aaron Swartz looks down upon the Earth, specifically Washington DC, smiles wistfully and shakes his head.
"Be dumber. If only I'd thought of that."
His thoughts are interrupted by an incoming phone call. It's Gabriel. He picks up.
"Aaron, sorry to bug you but it's Saint Peter, he's forgotten the Pearly Gates passcode again."
"Oh for fucks sake... Okay, I'll be right there."
It should come as no surprise that the Valley's elite prefer a school that bans or limits the very tech the parents make their money from, Silicon Valley is full of crazy beliefs — anit-vaxers, adherents of "organic water" and Ayn Rand for example. It's no surprise that they also believe without evidence that "too much screen time" is somehow damaging their kids (more than having reptilian overlords as parents?)
Back when Dell (the company) went private Dell (the person) was full of promises about how once they were free of the chains of public ownership they'd innovate like crazy, Dell (the company) had all these breakthrough products in the oven that would soon be released to transform the business and return it to the glory days.
Years later and we're still waiting for these revolutionary products, all they have produced is a series of failed ideas, boring PCs and a huge takeover that saddled Dell (the company) with an even bigger mountain of debt than they had already. Now the prospect of more financial trickery looms in the hope there are still suckers out there prepared to finance this long con for a bit longer and allow Dell (the person) and his partners to ready their personal lifeboats.
I don't think patients are uninterested in it necessarily. I think they mostly don't know anything about it, or why they're supposed to use it. What benefits is it suppoed to offer? I know I've barely heard of it, and recently I've been spending more time than is good for my blood pressure on the MyGov site. Is it more or less interesting/useful than a royal commission into ba... zzzz.
The government is usually happy to shout its achievements from the TV, radio, etc. at any opportunity (see NBN) whether justified or not, but this thing, has it ever been mentioned?
If a technology is "required to provide a complete web browsing experience" then I'd say by definition it's "a core piece of the web platform" and so should be in Mozilla's wheelhouse.
As noted by others Firefox's PDF viewer works very well now, and I recall they spent a lot of time and effort to develop it using Javascript. They said at the time this was so it would be easily expandable and maintainable; to just dump it now for another viewer seems odd to say the least.
Also, why bother doing anything further to Flash now, just kill the sucker and be done with it. If they make it more "secure" it'll just be another excuse for websites to keep using it.
Most satellities only operate for around 10-15 years at most, I find it hard to believe an old Soviet-era military satellite is still operational after 25 years. Even if its electronics was still working it'd surely have run out of station-keeping propellant by now. It might be a rogue I suppose, there are several old Soviet nuclear-powered military radar satellities orbiting out of control, some leaking coolant as I recall, but I don't know if any are still transmitting after all this time.
I don't think they're hiding real alien signals or anything, but there's something fishy about this "old Soviet" satellite explanation and I want to know more details. The Russian scientists sat on this signal for over a year before the news leaked, supposedly while runnning checks to rule out things like military satellites, yet only a few days later it's all dismissed as just that. It's all rather odd.
Another thing Boris amd Nigel forgot to mention about the glorius post-Brexit future -- the tea will be shite and made by lunatics armed with fscking coffee pots!.
Now you know, are you going to sit there like stunned mullets or take to the streets and demand a return to simple human decency? I think we all know the answer to that question...
So wake me when they run a real man's shell like cshell or korn. Linux/Unix is all about being able to write indecipherable scripts in any of 27 different shells, until Windows can do that they're just playing at providing "choice".
And when are they going to start implementing the 49 different desktops and 36 different file managers any self-respecting OS needs if it's to be taken seriously by overweight white men with beards? And what about filesystems, Windows has like what, two or three? Friggin' jokers.
Instead of interfering with a goat on a hillside has the writer at any point in this saga opened Console and had a gander at system.log to find out what is going on with these crashes? You'd be amazed what you can find out about what lies behind such problems by doing more, looking deeper, than simply throwing up your hands and claiming it's all beyond you. Computers are logical, there's always a reason for anything they do, you just have to look hard enough to find it.
For example, ever since I upgraded to OS X 10.11 I've been having issues with ejecting an external HD that I often use to transfer & convert videos from another Mac running EyeTV. Often, but not every time, I was told the volume couldn't be ejected and would I like to retry the operation (which usually failed) or force eject the bugger. I usually took that option though I knew it wasn't good to have to keep doing this.
After months of this nonsense I finally decided to get to the bottom of it once and for all - when I next encountered the issue I ran "sudo lsof | grep /Volumes/<VolumeName>" and discovered it was fscking Spotlight trying to index the contents of the disk! But surely that couldn't be, I'd disabled Spotlight on that disk years ago... A visit to System Preferences/Spotlight/Privacy showed that in fact this was no longer the case, somewhere along the line (I suspect during the 10.11 upgrade process) the "ignore <VolumeName>" setting had been lost and so Spotlight was holding onto the disk like grim death trying to index it's contents. Now the disk ejects every time just like it should.
At no point in this saga was I tempted to sacrifice a goat on a windy hillside, or use Chrome.
Hate to tell you this (well, no actually I don't at all) but I did the reverse. I dropped one of my Ubuntu PC dual-boot setups and went all-in with Win 10 on it, it's so much better than Win 8.x and Win 7 that's it's not funny. It's better than Linux in many cases too (on the desktop anyway), hence why bother with two desktop penguins when one will do? Face it, the year of desktop Linux came and went years ago, mostly it went...
Windows 10 is the best version of Windows in years. It's finally usable again. To stay on 8.x or 7 when you can go to 10 for free is simply nuts.
Not too long, too short! Story not boring, no story to be boring! There is very little CGI in it, almost all of it is real life action with real people doing totally batshite insane stunts.
There was a notable lack of jokes, but if you want to see a comedy go see a James Bond. The person who makes this film simply unmissable is Charlize Theron, she steals the movie and brings it home with a stake through its heart. With one arm. Literally with one arm... Nathan Jones? He was a total extra.
Some things should not be rebooted indeed, but Mad Max isn't one of them thank God.
What I'd like to know is what happens if your apt building is already served by HFC cable? I live in a Sydney suburban block with access to both Telstra and Optus HFC cables currently (though none of the units has ever been connected to the Optus box in the basement), several have Telstra/Foxtel cable connections, but most have ADSL internet. There is currently no scheduled date for NBN in this area, but when it finally arrives are we likely to get this new FttB thing or will they simply wire up the remaining units to HFC and use that instead? (Yeah I know, a real First World problem for those unable to get any decent broadband currently).
Being unable to get any information out of NBN Co. re their plans for this neighbourhood I'd normally be tempted to contact my local member to see if he has any idea what's going on, but given that he's currently very busy embarrassing himself and the nation at every opportunity, turning the Australian internet into a Big Brother-like surveilance system and eating raw onions on TV I doubt it'd help.
Hmm, after reading that load of politician BS-speak I'm starting to wonder if Tony's really all that bad...
But seriously, the amazing thing is how both sides of politics, and both NBN Cos, are predicated on the shared ideology that the company must be sold off to private investors asap after the NBN is finished (or nearly finished).
Despite the overwhelming evidence from the abortive privatisation of Telstra and the endless billions that has cost us taxpayers, the endless negotiations, disputes with the regulator and rivers of money spent trying to undo Telstra's oppressive government-created monopoly over the last mile, neither political party dares contemplate the idea that creating another private "natural" monopoly in the form of a privatised NBN Co. might not be such a great idea.
We spend $12+B in bribes to free ourselves from the dead hand of Telstra's local loop monopoly, tens of billions more to actually build the NBN, and then promptly turn that victory into another private monopoly and start the whole process over again!
How many trillions will it cost our children and grandchildren to free themselves from the monopoly of NBN Co.?
Why 470 London buses instead of a smaller number of F35s? Let me list the reasons...
1. Buses are cheaper, the Conservatives are all about saving money you know.
2. Buses are more reliable, the Conservatives are very reliable about reliability.
3. Bus drivers are cheaper to train than fighter pilots (see point 1 above). These drivers won't be unionised (Conservatives all let out a big sigh).
4. Buses, London buses in particular, are more manoeuvrable than the F35. Who knew? Not the RAF and RN that's for sure...
5. London buses are faster than the F35, can sustain supersonic speeds for longer while using less fuel in the process (see point 1 above).
6. London buses have a proven kill record, one considerably better than the F35 in fact. So far the F35 has only been proven to kill budgets, London buses have killed actual people!
7. Buses are basically more airworthy and mission-capable than the F35. Who knew? London commuters, that's who.
I get no sense of reassurance from NBNCo's answer to your question. It was a non-answer, they didn't answer the question! We already *know* they're working on FTTN and HFC "solutions", that's what the new, "improved" Mal-and-Tony's-cheap-and-cheerful NBN is all about after all. That's not what was asked, the question was ignored for meaningless PR-speak.
Why would anyone get any reassurance from that? In six months they could turn around and announce their wondrous new "solutions" which just happen to not include any fibre-to-YOUR-premises options, or fibre options that are absurdly expensive and of very limited availability, and still claim to have met their announced obligations. Because they never committed to anything in this area, aside from their pre-election blatherings of course, and we all know now what they're worth...
Forget whether she should have know the Soviet Union was going to collapse, heck, forget even that she thought invading Iraq and Afghanistan was a good idea, and kept defending it long after the truth became obvious to everyone. Forget Gitmo, black sites and torture.
All you need to remember is that she thought George Bush would make an excellent president! She knew him quite well, and she still thought that! No one who has proven to be so utterly clueless, so totally unable to see the real nature of someone she worked with every day for years, should be on the board of any significant company, let alone one with the aspirations of Dropbox.
Well, given that the gold iPhone has been such a hugely popular model that Apple have had to expand production by around 75% as fast as possible then either there are a hell of a lot of aspiring Kardashians out there or it actually appeals to a much wider segment of the market than the nickname suggests.
Apple thought the gold 5s would be popular in Asia; they were wrong, it's wildly popular everywhere.
How amusing to know that people still go to supermarkets and endure "checkout hell". I have only very rarely entered such establishments in the last ten years, ever since I discovered that you can do your supermarket shopping online and have it all delivered to your door. It saves massive amounts of time, the need to queue up with other sleep-deprived and often tetchy citizens and makes doing the food shopping almost a pleasure.
A well-designed (or even reasonably designed) website running on my desktop or iPad beats the hell out of battling with the crappy stupid tech these self-serve checkout systems employ. Once every four to six weeks I sit down and knock out my supermarket shopping online in less than 30 minutes while sipping on a home-made coffee and sitting in my most comfortable chair. The next day a nice chappie lugs it all up three flights of stairs and wheels it into my kitchen for me to unpack and store in the fridge, freezer and various cupboards. The only things I usually need to physically go out and buy are fresh fruit and a loaf of bread now and then. The internet's not just about pr0n you know...
Ha, ha. The BBC thinks people still go to the cinema!
Trouble is the cinema has always been 3D - full of all those dreadful 3D people who talk through movies, text and eat loudly, endless ads, etc. The beauty of streaming movies to your HD set at home is there ain't none of those 3D distractions (and it costs a lot less). There are very few movies I'm so keen to see that I can't wait until they come out on DVD/Blu-ray/iTunes. I can wait Hollywood, I can wait...
Excuse me while I slip into my Tony Abbott costume... I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, and outraged, extremely outraged, to hear that taxpayers money is being spent to help drug-addicted contractors and NBNCo staff indulge their disgusting weakness for chemical stimulants. I gave up such sinful stimulants when I was a seminarian, why can't they?
This is typical of Labor, encouraging the use of addictive and destructive drugs in the workplace, and making the good, honest and hard-working Australian taxpayers pay for it! They should all drink more water, and pay for their own coffee at an Australian-operated small business out of the money they charge the Australian taxpayer for their services. That's the virtue of a free enterprise drug trade.
When Jobs criticised Adobe over Flash he also made a point of saying they should get involved in HTML 5 and produce tools for it like those they had already built for Flash. In short, he wanted them to do exactly what they are now doing.
Jobs is the one having the last laugh re Flash. He would be very pleased to see how right he was about Flash (dead on Android, dead on Linux, dying on OS X and Windows), and that Adobe are (finally) waking up to the opportunities HTML 5 presents and getting involved with it.
A single-engine prop plane? C'mon, the really rich dudes laugh at those toys for poor people. A Saudi prince or a Wall Street hedge fund manager wouldn't been seen dead within 100m of anything with a propeller, let alone a single-engine jobby. Paris Hilton wouldn't let the owner of a Pilatus give her a lift to her Pilates class.
"Windows RT: Windows Recycled Technology (with Genuine Metro (tm)) takes the best features of Microsoft's over-hyped, under performing Windows Phone 7 operating system (little tiley things all over your screen and a touch screen/keyboard/mouse mashup UI) and combines them with the worst-in-class marketing Microsoft are famous for as well as some random bits from Microsoft's previous desktop operating system (no, not Vista, the other one) to give users who are too stupid to buy an iPad something to play with."
I'm shocked, shocked I tells you, at the way these huge multi-national corporations are so keen to ignore the wonderful benefits of the free market, free trade and all that palava they love to go on about.
They should be overjoyed at the opportunity to sell their products everywhere in the world on an equal footing, going head to head with their competition and demonstrating the wonders of free market capitalism. Instead they want the government to legislate them their own little monopoly where they can charge what they like where they like.
Exactly right, the lack of Google apps on unlicensed Android implementations like the Fire is a Google restriction not an Amazon one (though I'm sure in this case Amazon are quite happy to not be allowed to install them).
Android itself is 'free' and open source but the Google store and other Google apps are not.
"Is Android open?" isn't the issue. The correct question is "is Android a good mobile OS?" The short answer is "no", the slightly longer answer is "no, and it's not improving nearly fast enough for the vast majority of users".
Nobody outside the CompSci and IT world knows or cares what open source is, they only care about what devices do and how reliably and easily they do it. Twenty years of failed attempts to mainstream Linux have failed on this rock and still the advocates of failure insist on continuing that failure. The FSFs strategy on software is like the Morman church's strategy on drugs, no matter how often it fails they refuse to try a new approach.
Why don't the Beeb simply put their content for foreign markets up on iTunes (and other services when/where available) and save the bother of having their own app? No, it wouldn't be streaming, but they'd get AU$1.99 per viewer per show (after Apple's cut) and probably make much more in the end than trying to persuade a limited number of tight-fisted expat Poms, who own a particular iDevice, to fork out for a monthly or yearly subscription.
The time, money and hassle of developing and supporting their own player app, for multiple platforms, simply isn't worth it.
Some of their shows are already available this way (e.g. Dr Who and that Attenborough chap's recent efforts), why not the rest?
My only complaint is the 5.0 release number. One thing Mozilla shouldn't copy from Google is incrementing the major version number every time they release a fairly minor feature, bug fix and security update. Chrome's double digit release numbers already make them look silly, why copy a daft idea Mozilla?
C'mon this is really a 4.1 or 4.2, not 5.0. And 6.0 due in a couple of months? Madness.
The idea that the sun has been getting brighter over the last hundred years or so and thus warming the earth has been often quoted by global warming doubters. The evidence has clearly mounted against this idea, but they keep pushing it anyway. Repeated studies failed to show any measurable increase in average solar output, just the normal variations as the solar cycles progress. This new research seems to indicate precisely the opposite is in fact happening - the sun *may* actually be reducing it's output, getting cooler not hotter. What we do know without a shadow of a doubt is that the average global temperatures have been rising at an accelerating rate for the last century or so.
Do I really have to point out the contradiction here? On the one hand the hotter sun is supposedly the real cause of global warming according to some, but now evidence indicates that the sun may actually be cooling (temporarily). So, the earth has been warming while the sun's energy output was steady, or possibly falling; therefore the sun can't possibly have been responsible for the warming that has occurred already.
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