Posts by PhilipN 719 posts • joined 12 Oct 2010
Ugh. Do not know whether it was actually the graphics on a VGA monitor or (or as well as) splattering organs but I succumbed to something like motion sickness in less than 2 minutes. Is it any better on modern systems? Cannot try since just thinking about it makes me queasy. Ok so it was the blood and guts.
Today's internet was built on the back of advertisers' dollars, yes? Was there another way? I am genuinely interested.
We all or most of us pay a monthly stipend for the bandwidth, not that much different in principle from the days of ftp, gopher, etc but would we have had all the graphical and multimedia content?
Reminds me the thinking is that porn was behind the growth of VHS.
Any advance on ads, porn ..... ?
but memories fade, even about "embrace, extend, extinguish".
And the Browser Wars
And the DoJ case against Microsoft (q.v.)
At least MS have learnt : last time around they went with the NCSA Mosaic donkey. Now they are riding the competitor's thoroughbred.
P.S. I would not have wanted an Andreessen-controlled planet either.
Uhhh yeah? Thought that's how all US executives operate?*
So if sales are flat find another company to buy to hit the target by consolidating sales.
Even better make it an overseas company so the executives can go off for a jolly occasionally.
and again and again
*On the other hand I was a pimply-faced newbie in the City of London when I first heard the expression "window-dressing" to (cough! cough!) "improve" the balance sheet ahead of results time.
Good article. FWIW since it is tangential I took delivery of the Mate 20 Pro phone a week ago and I am mightily impressed, not just with the phone but in the sense that Huawei are making some very smart, coherent and thoughtful decisions to push themselves up the sales charts in both phones and PC’s.
Bound to be in fact already is political pushback against Huawei but if this gives the PC industry a much-needed boot up the arse it is a Good Thing.
P.S. 32.5 cm tall? You mean y.... Oh the bag is 32.5 cm. Phew!
The main statement : “ double-check whether anything had crossed my desk”. Smart move - making sure first there is no paper trail so she can say whatever the hell she likes. How could she not know?
She ain’t presidential material though: they are past masters at “plausible deniability” without so clumsily demonstrating how they achieve it.
Exactly. Coincidentally just before seeing this piece I was thinking of winding back a Mac Pro to an earlier iteration of the OS, under which a super-duper Esi-audio card not only worked but worked magnificently. Unplug/switch off the ‘net, plug in the drive with the FLAC’s/MP3’s and time to wake up the *****g neighbours. Now why would I need Mojave or W10 for that?
No, that’s not what I meant.
I know this is going to attract an inflammatory response and, tragic it is that so many infants are at risk, might I suggest it would be better in those places where the risk is greatest if the blokes were encouraged to keep their todgers under control?
Is what MS always say when they’re harpooning another user favourite.
Be happy : “The theoretical argument against democracy is, of course, that man being prone to evil, something external to him and indifferent to his passions must be put up to govern him; the people will corrupt themselves, but a despot or an oligarchy, when it has satisfied its corrupt desires, still has a wide margin over which it may rule well because it is indifferent.”
I was stifling a chuckle nay a guffaw while writing that. Must be ‘cos I take comfort from MS’ protection against you corrupt bastards.
“Innovation” dates back to Ballmer - and he even remembers to say it again.
“Digital transformation” is a new one on me : count how many times MS execs use it in the next 6-12 months.
I wonder how much they pay the PR people to come up with these Orwellisms?
Same here.
That is to say I have forsworn getting another Crucial NVMe thingy.
Not because the one I got was crap (although eventually that was proven to be the case) but because I was too late (thinking the problem may be with my machinery - which is quite picky when it comes to NVMe - and then trying different formulations) to get help from Amazon, and when (per Amazon suggestion) I emailed Crucial to recover the ridiculous amount I paid they did not even reply.*
Once bitten .....
FWIW one of the things I tried was a PCIe adapter which takes NVMe SSD's. The Crucial one did not register. Threw it in the bin. Bought another - non-Crucial - and it is fine.
*P.S. I do not live in the USA so getting redress is sometimes too much of a PITA.
"the NeoOffice engineers have continually added improvements to NeoOffice that you will not find in OpenOffice or LibreOffice such as:
Native Dark Mode
NeoOffice > Open at Launch menu to open Calc or Impress instead of Writer at launch
File > Browse All Versions menu to restore previous versions of your documents
Native file locking to safely edit files in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or network drives
Native Mac grammar checking
Native Mac text highlighting
Support for Mac Services
Native floating tool windows"
And :
WordPerfect support
While thinking about this remembered getting DV’ed the last time I called out the guy who holds up a long queue of the caffeine-desperate at rush hour by using a card - the kind requiring a VOUCHER to be PRINTED and then he has to find a space on a busy counter to sign the thing. Bastard! All for a 2 or 3 dollar/quid cup of coffee. Was he claiming it on Expenses?
Point of the comment is time was - the time of pen and paper - you could ask the restaurant to write a receipt for a lot more than the actual bill. Now that is how to charge expenses. Course none of us ever did that?
With acknowledgement to (a recent issue of) the FT, the C-in-C British Cavalry responded to the threat of WWII by ordering more fodder and second horses for officers, while the Wehrmacht busily developed the Panzer.
Easy to say he was a dumkopf but where did he have the authority to commission the design, construction and delivery of new battle-worthy tanks - and the formation of regiments to deploy them. And all else besides - a MAJOR and costly undertaking.
It wasn’t until it was almost two years too late that the politicians got organised.
So why don’t the MP’s put themselves under the spotlight?
After all, the soldier only does as he is told, yes?
Just this past weekend as chance would have it a live CD with the previous iteration of Elive on it was the first fossil I found in the drawer when I had to try and re-boot an old Mac Pro which had the flu. Booted, ran, GUI, the lot. Love it! Definitely will give this new-fangled version a twirl (knowing I can wind it back 5 years if the need arises and I shall be happy as a sandboy).
I do not get paid for an opinion. I get paid for my expertise in formulating an opinion which suits the party paying. And as those statements prove I can lie for free.
And allow me to introduce my assistant, Miss Nomer. Her opinion is that Earth is not a “planet” because it does not wander. The term derives, I think, from the Ancient Greeks, feet planted firmly on Plane... oops Ecosphere Earth from which vantage point all other components of the Solar System wandered across the sky and ergo were planets.
Above-quoted phrase and "asswipary"** - Great! I shall have many and varied uses for both from now on.
Less subtle than the Department of Defense [sic] "implementing a pause" in deliveries of the F-35 as opposed to "told the manufacturers to fix these issues or stick their contract up their corporate ass [sic]".
But nothing beats Ballmer's "We built too many Surface tablets" when writing off another billion dollars instead of acknowledging that "nobody wanted to buy this dog" and "our market research and projections were crap".
**Hope I am not being pedantary but shouldn't this be hyphenated?
Cupboards-full and more all the time - all the way from serial, parallel, printer, scsi, FireWire 400 and 800, usb 1 through XX, Ethernet, and not forgetting vga, DVI-whatever, HDMI, power cables galore, audio cables with 1, 2, 3 or more jacks, optical, RCA, DIN, and now Thunderblah-blah 1, 2, 3 ....
But why is it -
1. The last critical connector cable is always two inches short.
2. That immensely valuable gender-changer at the bottom of the drawer turns out to be female-female instead of male-male.
Better stop here I’m getting angry
Too late : Ever tried counting the contacts on a scsi plug to see which frigging one it was? Sh**t!!
Cut the (bruised) top off an apple once and a fully-grown wasp staggered out from the core. He must have crawled in as a wee wasplet and couldn’t back out. Or was having a doze to sleep it off. Had no choice - after all wasps look and sound so ANGRY and the way they fly at you is so THREATENING - but to squash the b*****d.
Just imagine getting stuck inside a reasonably full barrel of cider and not even being able to drink your way out.
Slight correction. IBM’s desktop salesman understood the market very well. They were desperate to sell boxen, which meant Windows, and no incentive to push OS/2.
AND MS would wield their monopolistic power by threatening to withhold information about the latest version of Windows (so it could actually run properly) unless IBM turned its back on OS/2. Ergo market opportunities for Compaq et al and the rest is history.
And originates from long before XP, and even before 95. ‘Cos, for example, the favoured word processor early on became WordPerfect and whilst it’s series of owners tried to stay ahead of and then match Word feature for feature MS built undocumented API’s into each iteration of Windows to make WordPerfect explode.*
By comparison OS/2 had an excellent basic set of workhorse programs (Faxworks for example had a built in graphics subsystem so you could amend and annotate faxes, add signatures etc on the screen 20 years ago or more) then the developer’s website would suddenly and “inexplicably” disappear, the supposition being that the developer, understandably, succumbed to the Microsoft shilling.
*Remember there was an OS/2 version (5.2 if memory serves) of WordPerfect but at a time when cross-platform compatibility was essential (that is, until MS succeeded in making compatibility unnecessary) it was ill-formed. Basically a pig’s ear.
But then there was a Linux version too, which did not justify the name WordPerfect. Not just the ear - the whole pig!
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