Posts by apjanes 85 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2011
I may be wrong as I'm not a lawyer, but don't these license agreements a. have to abide by and not take away constitutional rights and b. have to be understood (and therefore reasonably understandable) by those who accept them in order to actually hold up in the court of law? Has any big company actually try to enforce the concept you present that "Apple owns them but give [sic] you 'free use' rights to their property" Jason 5?
#6 When DVDs stop restricting you to a specific zone depending on where in the world you live. My mother in Canada would love to have some of the great BBC nature documentaries for her birthday but if I buy them over here I she can't play them due to her zone. So much for a connected world.
"Now go and accidentally sit on a rackmount server, on an iPad and on an egg whisk. Two of these will break and be out of order for a while."
Your argument here is not exactly generic or all encompassing and really only works because you chose one of the most fragile of all kitchen utensils. Try "accidentally it on a rackmount server, on an iPad and on a rolling pin", Two of these will keep working without a hitch and it won't be the iPad.
In most cases the same applies for: wooden spook, knife, cooker, dishwasher, fridge, need I go on?
In terms of operating robustness I also disagree with the author and agree with many of the posters. My wife has a mixer that was passed on to her from her grandmother. It's built like a tank and will still be going long after any of the modern electronics items kicking around our house!
Why are you being such an arse jake? So you are good at your job and know how the "shit works at ones & zeros level". When a company needs "cock-ups" fixing then I'm sure you are the man. However, when a company needs a well designed and usable UI I would make a bet you're not the guy they ring. Just because you are hot at something doesn't mean your hot at everything and it doesn't mean that everything you are not hot at is shite.
Let's be honest, there are people out there who "have never seen a relay in action" and "don't grok hex" who also don't need a 9-5 and turn down work on a fairly regular basis (the 1980s thing just proves you're old, not hot).
This is not a comment on the rightness or wrongness of GNOME's decision, it's a comment to point out that just because your way works for you and what you do it doesn't work for everyone and everything.
... how many of those women who you dated, impregnated and then left to move on and impregnate another woman (not to mention the children who have a dad spread among four other families) would class you as caring and empathetic?
When engineers produce a rather dubious definition of what caring an empathetic actually are, the study starts to look meritorious! :D
"Value is a perceptive concept applied by humans"
This is spot on. The very fact that value it is perceptive makes any attempt to assign value to user uploaded data complete nonsense. To you my holiday snaps are worthless but to me they are priceless. To me the latest album of the Cheeky Girls is inconsequential (despite being copyrighted material) to the unknown fan who uploaded it, it's worth way more.
that without copyright protection artists would no longer produce and our arts & culture would stagnate. I simply do not believe this is true. Many cultures (Egyptians, Greeks, Babylonians, etc) had thriving cultural output without any copyright protection whatsoever. Artists produce art because they are artists. The inflated and often excessive riches that some artists get (or at least did in the recent past) seems to me to be a somewhat modern phenomenon.
I'm no Microsoft fan (tend to like what does the job for me), but I think the two keys in your post bailey86 are "work with .NET for eight months" and "a few years back". I've been developing .NET for 10 years and find it a fully featured, stable and easy to use platform. Sure, it's not perfect, but I've certainly found it good.
I also think that (as much as many people would like it), Microsoft still has some way to go before being dead. Sure, it's been pretty crap in the consumer market, but many business systems are still Microsoft based and, in my experience do pretty well. Sure, you can argue licensing cost vs. open source but the fact remains that, like it or not, Microsoft is firmly entrenched in corporates. It's also pretty well known that corporates move pretty slowly and so, while the end user might forget Microsoft for Apple, Facebook or Google, I don't think their main profit base is dead yet.
Perhaps the strongest evidence to his apparent nuttiness is that he's willing allege publicly on the Internet that he has stitched up high ranking and powerful people in the country HE IS CURRENTLY LIVING IN! Surely if he really did this he'd want to keep quiet about it... forever??!
"...This may have seemed true earlier this year because we hadn't started trying yet."
Um, surely not even trying to make money on mobile in 2012 is a sackable offense??! I mean how many years has it been clear that mobile is the primary platform of the future for social networking?
Clearly it's your choice whether you use the keyboard or mouse, so this isn't criticism, merely a comment that I have always found it odd how many people don't seem to bother with keyboard shortcuts. For me, the more I can do with a keyboard the better, after all the keyboard gives me 10 'pointers' rather than one and, if I'm typing it avoids me having to move my hand to the mouse!
That is why I use 'Executor' (Gnome Do for Windows), ALT-Space brings up a dialogue for me to type any program or folder I want with far more speed than a start menu.
Each to his own though!
@Some Beggar "If it isn't safe to overtake without exceeding the speed limit then you shouldn't be overtaking."
No indeed, but we happen to live a world where humans make mistakes and misjudgement. As I am human I would like the option to break the speed limit in order to prevent imminent death as though I THOUGHT I could overtake without breaking the speed limit the oncoming 40 tonne truck is rapidly educating me as to my mistake.
On day we may live in a world where cars are controlled by flawless robotics, but for now we don't.
That MAY work if the biggest hardship that comes of your site being down is that the I don't get to tell the world of the tasty fillings in the "deep fill" sandwich I had for lunch which I had to pay full price for because my 20% off IDV (Internet Discount Voucher) couldn't be downloaded (i.e. you're site is REALLY unimportant), but if you're Barclaycard (like in this article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/27/barclaycard_offline_payments_down/) you better make sure you have engineers and testers and network guys to get you out of a hole or, event better, keep you out of it in the first place!
This piece doesn't really show how important you are, the exact opposite I suggest.
The sin of Onan was refusing to raise up children for his brother with his brother's wife. Any children that were born would be classed as his brother's, not his, and in the custom of the time that wasn't exactly desirable. What Onan WAS prepared to do was enjoy humping his brother's wife, he just tried to ensure that his fun didn't result in the kid that he was obliged to produce.
@Titus Technophobe: I don't think many people are arguing that it is morally 'okay' for people to pirate IP, but that neither is it morally right to give those who may (or may not) be victims of piracy to shutdown/impede/cause problems for others merely on the basis of suspicion. Laws like SOPA cause a huge amount of burden and risk on EVERYONE who runs a website, regardless of whether or not they themselves are engaging in privacy or not.
In a crude attempt to use your bean analogy, even though it is not right for the bean pirates to take your beans because they can't (or won't) get them legitimately, does that make it right for you to send the 'bean police' in to destroy my fields because I gave directions as to how to get to your fields to some stranger who happened to be a pirate?
And yet it seems to me that some scientists are starting to consider a supernatural origin not because of the gaps, but because of what is being seen as the gaps are understood. It was a lot easier to conceive of the chance assembly of a "simple cell" when the gaps led us to believe the cell was simple.
Why I find highly irritating is the way people (particularly readers here) seem to think that there is a war between science and religion where scientists are the rational, open-minded, educated, good guys and those who believe a religion are blind, irrational, dim-witted, "creotard", baddies. Nothing is farther from the truth. Have you never heart of advanced, intelligent, open-minded, scientists who have developed religious faith BECAUSE of what science has taught us, not in spite of it? Have you never heard of scientists that doggedly stick to a wrong conclusion in spite of all evidence because of their own presuppositions which they are unwilling to release? There are both open-minded and dogmatic individuals in both camps.
Unfortunately, comments like this that try to lump all scientists or all those of religious conviction into a single stereotypical basket simply, in my opinion, illustrate a lack of open-minded intelligence of the poster and all those who give it the thumbs up.
Sorry, but I think you've got bit of a disconnect in your argument. Whether or not you think JavaScript is shite and assembler kicks ass, has little relevance to the quality of the UI. Ultimately the UI is the end product of WHATEVER underlying technology you use to render it and is the result of how you design it, not the languages/frameworks you use.
Yes, the choice between the type of app (web, desktop, console, etc.) may introduce certain constraints and require certain choices, but I'm sure you've seen crap UI in desktop apps as well as the current "high level mush" that is typically used for web development. If it is indeed "mush" is not to do with the use of JavaScript, but how JavaScript was used.
The blanket statement that hydro isn't viable because of reliability is not actually true. Two thirds of Canada's electricity is generated by hydro and last time I checked it was plenty reliable. The main potential issue for hyrdo in the UK is to do with demand and capacity.
1. The UK has many millions more people than Canada requiring much more electricity
2. The UK has far less space to build hydro plants and, as such, far less water
These issues, rather than reliability, might be the show stopper for hydro in the UK.
As an island with plenty of coastline, tidal seems like a good potential source.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
