Posts by Turtle

Re: ?

"'Those users might just bugger off somewhere else.' We already have."

Well, *I* haven't buggered off anywhere. I'm staying with XP.

Re: Adventures in the Netherlands

"I am not an audiophile, so I don't really care about bitrate or codec quality, what this means is that Youtube is absolutely perfect for me and probably another couple of hundred millions other viewers/listeners. I don't need to pirate anything, I don't need to pay Spotify, it's a freetards wet dream....."

Since YouTube receives, literally, hundreds of millions of DMCA takedown notices yearly, and since even Google admits that 97% are legitimate, then, if using YouTube is not, technically, piracy, what then do you call it?

@Wzrd1 Re: Directional Arrows

"Their problem was that of budget. A serious budget, with little to no cost overrun tolerance. It wasn't unique to the space program, it was endemic to anything not military during the Cold War, later to everything due to economic depression."

Not strictly apposite to your comment but the phrase "There's never enough time to do it right but there's always enough time to do it over" did come to mind.

(I guess we'd have to change that to "There's never enough money to do it right but there's always enough to do it over.")

@David W.: Re: Large. Stupid.

"You're ripping on the founders because AOL were dumb enough to cough up 800m?"

Perhaps you could explain to me, just for the sake of a bit of amusement, exactly how you derive the idea that I was ripping the Birches from my post. I know it can be difficult to follow pronouns and their antecedents, for people with certain kinds of learning disabilities. Unless, of course, English is not your native tongue...

Re: "Expensive..."

Particularly for the insurance companies.

@mutatedwombat

"Valve has already ported some of its AAA games to run on Linux, as have a number of others."

Examples? I've looked through the entire list and I didn't notice anything that comes close to being an AAA title. I saw a few good games - Amnesia The Dark Descent and Penumbra Gold Edition stand out (for someone of my particular tastes, of course) - but those are not triple A. The only Valve games I noticed were Half-Live - the original from 1998, and the two expansion packs - along with Team Fortress, and Counter-Strike. So no AAA titles there, either...

If I've overlooked something, I'd be interested to know.

@Don Jefe

"Yep. Eat one every morning with my waffles."

If you need Klonopin with your waffles, perhaps you need better waffles.

@Anonymous Coward 101: Re: Cobblers

"There is no evidence smartphones cause dementia. I know this, because it is obviously bollocks."

This is a memorable quote! The very essence of ratiocination!

: )))

I Am So Very Sorry... Re: Eadon, You are zapped.

I am so, so sorry that I didn't get here in time to read his farewell post...

@Pete 2: Re: His own best customer

"Though if I thought I bore even the slightest resemblance to one of the world's most famous nutters leaders..."

He might be a lot of things but "nutter" would almost certainly not be among them. Possibly the things that make someone like you think that he's a "nutter" are the things that any intelligent ruler would do in order to maintain their iron rule over a country. It's a matter of perspective, really.

To most people claims to have scored half-a-dozen holes-in-one in a single game of golf might seem so preposterous as to be "batshit insane" - but heaven help any North Korean who expresses doubt; and that serves various purposes: 1) it allows the government to find and render harmless anyone with an incipient tendency to "think for themselves"; 2) punishing such people will "encourager les autres" (Voltaire, "Candide", repeated by Foch, well, you know); 3) it gives anyone who disbelieves the official propaganda a renewed sense of their own powerlessness and a general sense of complicity...

@NomNomNom

"It's not sustainable, even over the short-term. Wikipedia puts the current figure at about 1300 billion barrels of oil left as proven reserves and we are burning through oil at the rate of about 30 billion barrels per year. That's 43 years left of oil at current consumption rates. It's obvious that we are using the oil unwisely driven by short-term greed rather than using it in a more strategic long-term way."

It's a stupid point of view and for a very simple reason. Let's assume - for no good reason - that your figures are correct. If we make the clearly impossible assumption that we cut our use of oil in half, starting today, then the supply of oil will last, not 43 years, but 86 years. Do you *really* think that an extra 43 years before there's no oil, is going to make any kind of real difference in the long run? The chances against it are stupendous! Is there some sort of new technology that will not be ready in the next 43 years but will be ready in the following 43 years? No, those extra 43 years are highly unlikely to supply us with any new advances that couldn't be made in the 43 years which we already have and don't serve as a bridge to any sort of assured future. It's not as though we need to stretch the supply in order to last to some specific date.

And that's a 43 year reprieve under some clearly impossible assumptions. If we use more realistic assumptions, such as, let's say, a 10% reduction in oil consumption, the benefits of reduced oil consumption become positively ephemeral.

And one has to wonder if the modernization of India and China (37% of the world's population, bear in mind!) is going to make it impossible for the total world consumption of oil to do anything other than rise. And if it does rise, perhaps those 43 years of oil left to us becomes 40 years, or 35 years, or even less.

In the event that the supply of oil is such that will run out in the near term, then as a remedy, conservation is a complete waste of time. And the resources that would be invested into conservation of the oil supply would be more wisely and intelligently invested in finding petroleum substitutes that can be used with the current, already-existing and already-deployed infrastructure. And if you really believed in the impending exhaustion of the world's oil supply, then that's what you would be agitating for: massive investments in finding petroleum substitutes, and not some foolish and not-fully-thought-out ideas of solving the problem by conservation.

@The Indomitable Gall

+1 Insightful.

Nicely done! : )

@MJI: Re: Windows love hate

"As to Windows server 2012, we want the menus back, why have server OSes got worse since Netware stopped?"

I am not sure that OSes have gotten worse since Netware stopped, but I am sure that the UI's for every type of software, for reasons completely unconnected with Netware in any way, have been degenerating for a long time now.

Drama Queens Of The World, Unite! Pt II.

"Guess what America, the terrorists won. In the haste to stop them your government became the monsters they believed you to be. Well played."... Aaron Milne ‏@wigginsix 14h Retweeted by Trevor Pott"

Oh so THAT'S what it's all about! Islamic fundamentalists attempting to get the United States to have mobile users' "number, location, handset signifier, and possibly IP address" recorded in various "repositories".

It's good to know this stuff... I guess.

@Crazy Operations Guy: Re: I won't put too much stock in the "More intelligent" comment

The word "intelligent", let alone the phrase "more intelligent", does not occur in the original article, and, as I write this, it occurs in no posts here other than your own.

Re: Non-Dutch people speaking Dutch

"You end up having to clear your throat after every second word because in English you only make those sound when your trying to bring up a very stubborn bit of flem!"

In English that's "phlegm" but in Flemish, it's, uh.... ugh.

@David W.

You're making the very foolish assumption that, for the people who got fired today, working for Zynga was their ideal career, and not, let's say, a job that they were compelled by circumstances to take because all available alternatives were worse.