Posts by DropBear 4735 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
They say once upon a time a Mathematician, a Physicist and an Engineer were given a small red ball each and asked to find its volume. The Mathematician measured the diameter and calculated the volume. The Physicist went the Archimedes route and measured the liquid spilled. The Engineer, well, opened the catalogue of small red balls and looked up the standard volume (hey, stop kicking me, I'm one too so I'm allowed to bash ;)...
@Mark 65: They are certainly free to do that, as long as they are prepared to live with the backlash it will (did) generate when people get miffed by the snowballing lack of honesty. Funnily enough, someone else is doing the exact same thing right now on IndieGoGo (called the "Invizbox" this time) except those guys are doing it right - up-front, with nothing up their sleeve.
The problem is that sometimes project owners "forget" to mention that their all-in-one bespokefully custom in its uniqueness, exquisitely crafted by elves at the north pole "product" is basically an unmodified existing (and usually dirt-cheap) piece of obscure hardware, possibly with some freely available open source code that may or may not have been slightly tweaked by them - often offered with a handsome mark-up. And no, chucking a larger RAM onto something doesn't quite qualify as "custom" unless you're the PCB house. Past the fact that the Kickstarter ToS explicitly forbids reselling of existing goods as a your own "project", things that get too close to that line are usually frowned upon even if they don't cross it outright, especially when they are less then forthcoming about the true nature of their "product" or even straight-up deny such claims once they inevitably surface. There would be no noise if all they said was "we slightly modified an existing router and we packaged some anonymizing software for it, you can have one for this much" - but that would hardly stir any excitement, isn't it?
They say a skilled diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip. Well I for one - when applicable - much prefer to tell the retard in question to fuck the fuck off instead. And I definitely salute someone with the balls to do that much more often that I can afford or dare to.
...test out the Z-pinch theory of fusion generation, which eventually proved fruitless.
I wouldn't quite give up on pinch fusion that fast (whether or not it's properly "Z"...) - the guys over at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics seem to be onto something with their aneutronic approach...
We have a similar scheme in Romania but that number isn't exactly a secret; you are expected to hand it out left right and centre for something as simple as buying something from a company that issues invoices. I'm not sure exactly how far one could abuse knowledge of that ID, but in situations that require actual identification one has to present an actual physical ID card with one's photo (yes, the number's on it) - if you assume ability to forge that card, knowing what to put onto it sort of becomes a mere trifle. What I'm saying is - it's not exactly something used to authenticate anyone...
I'm pretty sure prestige in the launch business is worth a lot more than possibly sabotaging a few satellites that will ultimately end up replaced anyway; this is just business as usual - which, in Rocket Science, traditionally includes plenty of fuck-ups as well...
Well, laugh all you want, but sheep actually DO have a maximum velocity in a vacuum - guess what, it's the speed of light, as for everything else. Now if that thing is really moving with nearly 2% of C... it's mind-boggling-fast indeed! There is of course that niggling "if" - but come on, El Reg is never wrong...
Quit your current employer, honestly ... there are employers that value your talents and efforts.
Are there? I have only heard tales... and frankly, the ones I've seen so far all regarded employees as some sort of nearly-human minions, expendable sentient chimps or something; some of them actually expressed apparently honest perplexity as to why we withdraw our salaries the minute we get them (hint: what's left after paying last month's bills is barely enough for another month of food - but that's an alien concept for them).
So, just because Nokia was undeniably in trouble before Elop arrived, it follows that in spite of obviously doing everything he could to drive the company in the ground, he absolutely did no such thing? Tell you what, you might need to call in Spock to explain the logic of that one...
(though the warming of the world is also in doubt, as air temperatures have been steady for the last fifteen years or more - and it turns out that deep ocean temperatures are not increasing either, leaving the "mystery" of the apparent end of global warming "unsolved")
As much as I have my own... issues with AGW, this is a bit of a non-sequitur: the quoted article itself notes that there's not really doubt that the upper ocean got hotter (without pretending to completely explain everything that doesn't seem to fit, of course).
Is it sad that I didn't even need to read the article to suspect it was a phone-home server suddenly going unreachable, and the devices hard-coded not to work in that case...? Should we just accept it as an immutable law of the universe that exactly the same way engineers will always tend to leave an open UART with root access and programmers will always tend to code in a back door bypass, companies will always tend to require their product to "keep in touch" (purely for your own good, of course, and the sake of CHILDREN!)...? Aaaaaanyway, mine is the one hanging from the CAT5 from my Tomato router...
As much as I keep that book in high regard, recent developments caused it being referred to so bloody often that it pretty much lost all its meaning by now. It's not the book's fault, but its "punch" has been diluted worse than the proverbial "wolf!" outcry (except of course we really DO have that many "wolves" around, sadly).
There is nobody sitting on those forums getting paid to patiently copy-paste the same thing for the 1001th time for the sake of a noob who can't be arsed to make a good faith effort to find one of the previous 1000 answers to the (usually) trivial problem he doesn't know how to solve. Now, if he already tried that and it still doesn't work or the problem is a particularly specific one not covered in the usual places that's a different situation and people normally don't get abused for asking for help with that sort of thing. But I'm really not surprised nobody likes people who go "hey, listen, no idea how to do XYZ, could you write me a step-by-step tutorial?"; the expression "let me Google that for you" exists for a good reason. And this isn't even specific to Open Source - try telling me with a straight face you have never met any of those people who figured out long ago that getting anything done is much easier by straight-up asking others to do it for them than expending any effort of their own...
Yeah, well, I challenge you to define a more objective difference between "want" and "need" than "what I think I should have" vs. "what you think I should (not) have". On a very basic level, air, water, food and some warmth probably qualify without an argument - then what? Do you really "need" a knife, or a shoe? I mean, you could just try eating with your hands and/or use a rock of you intend to slay a chicken yourself - yet most people wouldn't classify those things as a "want but not need"... And once we're off the path of "there's practically nothing you actually need", we're right back at "I want it, therefore I need it, full stop".
Sure, you can steal the market by selling a one-off...but then you starve yourself out of the market because once you sell it, you never hear from the customer again.
Exactly. Regardless of how forcefully the article tries to bend things into the shape required to support its conclusion, planned obsolescence (as much as I hate it too) is not really optional anymore simply because producing, say, an appliance that will effectively last someone a lifetime will drive the manufacturer out of business quickish-like. There was a time when that approach might have worked for a medium-sized factory, but with today's globalisation and ubiquitous reliance on economies of scale, that would never work. That appliance can't be as cheap as it is now if you can't produce it by the millions, and you definitely can't produce it by the millions if you only get the occasional sale of replacing a terminally busted unit. But hey, what the heck, never let the facts get in the way of a good rant, huh...?
It is by no means news that some people just prefer to do absolutely everything on a computer by typing. Yes, ok, I get that. And I'm fine with it - never tried to "convert" any of them to something they seem to really hate that much: clicking. What I definitely don't appreciate though is the absolute lack of willingness on their part in general to even admit that other people might exist who legitimately prefer mice and GUIs and are just simply more productive with them they could ever hope to be with keyboards. It's almost like a cult thing, some sort of holy eloi / morlock division. And it's distinctly uncool.
I'm not trying to win some absurd millisecond race of actions-per-minute or argument over how hard it is to hit a particular target with a mouse cursor here. I'm saying that I can hit something mundane like "open" or "save" or "view" or "preferences" (or even just "close"!) practically blindfolded even in a piece of software I've never seen before while figuring out to type ":wq" or ":q!" to do the same in a particular program is extra work I have to do every. damn. time.
Yes, working with a single software all your life can and likely will lead to familiarity with keystrokes that do just what we call them - provide a faster shortcut over clicking; but in my experience, what I do instead is use an innumerable amount of various pieces of software briefly for whatever I need done every one of them getting used every once in a blue moon, if ever again at all. There's no way in hell I could ever hope to figure out how to do what I want done in every one of them by continuously browsing manuals and memorising endless groups of keystrokes - but I definitely CAN figure out the same, over and over again any time I need it, with a few seconds of trawling through their menus, if not by an immediate glance at a suitable button on one of their toolbars.
So thanks, but no thanks. Don't come telling me how "superior" command lines are - they aren't; what they are is "different". If they better suit what you do with your computer, if you prefer them, by all means more power to you. But asserting your way is the best way is just not gonna cut it.
...except this time the aliens dreading our obvious naval prowess decide play it safe and nuke us from orbit - it's a kinetic bombardment with funny-shaped projectiles, no less. The world seems doomed until a young, rebellious misfit accidentally realizes stacking them tightly makes them annihilate themselves harmlessly. The stakes are raised once again as the aliens step up to cosmic speeds...
Me, I prefer the "A Complete History Of The Soviet Union As Told By A Humble Worker, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris" version...
So you say you'll handwave the technicalities of the hardware away, I just have to run some binary blob to do it? Nice try, no thanks. I'm sure I'll be professionally shoehorned into having to use this or something similar sooner ar later at some point, but as long as I have a choice: good riddance, mate.
Let me translate - I think they were referring to the presumably astronomical resolution of such a larger display (but that's not what they said, agreed). Thing is, try reading anything in the standard 10 point font on a eleventy-billion pixel screen; even full HD monitors become problematic unless one cranks up the windows font size - at which point hilarity ensues with lots of apps that were designed / laid out for one and exactly one font size (the default). What the new Windows intends to do about it I dunno - my hunch is poor apps will still look poor, they'll just pay better attention to system stuff working at least...
No, as Henry Davenport rightly said, it's the Moron Tax.
I would argue calling it that is only appropriate for regular players. After all, it's said even the Lord got fed up with the Scotsman praying every day for a lottery win to ease his poverty and told him "I'd love to help you out, but you really have to buy a ticket first..."
There's anecdotal evidence about something similar having been done by one of our colleagues back at the uni - allegedly he snuck the sentence "if you are reading this, a box of beer is yours" somewhere halfway into his diploma thesis he was doing with one of the more easy-going professors. Needless to say, the beers were never collected...
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