Posts by Gene Cash 6875 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2007
You're not going to be writing docs from scratch, but if you're on the train and go "oh **** they misspelled the client's name all the way through" you can do a quick update right there. Or move paragraphs around, or toss in boilerplate, etc etc.
That's what I used to do on my old Palm. And sweet monkey jesus, it was slow.
Yeah, I agree with the AC. They managed to screw up a Debian distribution with apt and packages, yet to upgrade you had to reflash your ROMs and lose all your apps and customizations! In the last rev, they finally realized "oh yeah, we can do that package thing" - it took 'em 4 OS revs to figure that out.
Plus, instead of good ol' debugged crond, they went to some sort of alarm daemon that died frequently, meaning you lost alarms and reminders a LOT. That should tell you the "not invented here" mentality we're dealing with.
Also in the last rev, they went to HUGE ICONS IN THE START MENU. They're so large that you can only get 5 menu items, which pretty much eliminates any user-friendlyness. The excuse was "people can't hit the old menu items with the fingers" - A) there was no complaints, at least on internettablettalk.com, B) I had no such problems, and C) that's what the stylus is for!
Later, we discovered that the guy that did the touchscreen stuff left, and the new guys didn't know how to use the pressure readings system, so they screwed up the GUI to match.
Then they announced another rev called Freemantle about 11 months ago. However "it won't be compatible with the N800/N810" and will need an unspecified new device. Then the tumbleweeds appeared and we haven't heard anything since.
I believe Nokia has laid off all its Maemo developer staff as there's been NO new development, no maemo.com upgrades and no new news on internettablettalk.com. The last news articles on ITT have been about the Kindle and the fact you can't delete blog posts, for cryin' out loud!
And of course I'm sure El Reg remembers the epic bag of fail that is Ovi.
This is sad, because I wrote a nice bunch of useful (at least to me) apps in Python and pyGTK.
They're still not nearly as bad as Palm though. The hardware actually works, and I've never had an issue with the touchscreen, plus I regularly get 2 weeks between charges with some pretty heavy use.
I don't see why this is so exciting. Everyone is reporting on this.
This is just so people can look professional, and give a reason to sack them if they don't.
I'm just glad I don't have to look at plumber's butt and tramp stamps, and deal with a smelly git at the counter that looks like he just quit his other job at the circus.
The counter people around here do NOT look like Paris, and I don't want to see their 50 year old deflated funbags, thank you very much.
Ares 1 is known as "the shaft" because that's what the taxpayers are getting. It'll use up all the money fixing all the problems in the design instead of building capability.
Besides, we should leave science and space and all the other high technology to the Russians and Japanese. The US would rather watch reality TV than have to learn all that hard stuff. Math is HARD!
There's a reason the best cars, steel, and electronics are made in Japan and not the US, and especially not Britain.
Granny needs to chill the hell out. I think if the cop had tried to cuff her w/o tasering her, she would have hit him, and then she'd be in jail for assaulting an officer. So he actually did her a favor. And after she gives him that much static, she's going to get cuffed. No two ways about it.
"not argumentative/not combative" my left butt cheek! She needs to spend a couple weeks in jail to sit and think.
I had a granny like that, and she'd go off like that regularly. I wished I'd had a taser.
Apparently, that's more difficult than flying to the Moon. Why is this so bloody hard? Why, with all the variations out there, there's not one single plain old optical mouse with 3 goddamn buttons?
On the other hand, I do have to admit MS does cut'n'paste far better than X11.
GM has been dying since the '70s and has been too egotistical to seriously consider any reform to stop it. You can see with the current battles that the UAW STILL won't listen to reason.
You thought the British car industry labor woes were bad... we've got it tenfold. Now ours is dying just like yours did.
I've kept both cats and steers (I grew up on a farm) and neither one had any more personality than the other. Cats are full of the hate and anger and general pissedness-at-the-world. I'd rather have anything else for a pet. And speaking as someone that recently had to put down his dog (prostate cancer) - I really don't find anything wrong with what she did.
And I must applaud her for turning the tables on Anon.
Of course naming two of my steers "Lunch" and "Dinner" was probably a little tasteless, but I did like being able to say "look, here comes Lunch!" -hahaha!
It has been raining hard literally all week. Daytona Beach has had 20.06" inches of rain just this week. Lots of people have been flooded out and it's been declared a disaster area. Orlando International Airport has had 10.57" this week as well.
For budget reasons, they really want to land at KSC. They'll be able to land at Edwards no matter what, so it will be left until it's the absolutely last option.
Today there weren't any thunderstorms within the 30 mile radius, but there was lots of little storms just southeast, moving northwest, and they were worried that these could run up and cause problems between the deorbit burn and the actual landing.
And yes, it's that hard to tell what the Florida weather is going to do in 2-1/2 hours.
And you're still an idiot if you rely on a single source of nav data, be it map or GPS satellite.
Years of getting lost has taught me to not go somewhere unfamiliar without at least two and hopefully three nav aids, like written directions, a sketch, a Google printout, a commercial map, and maybe GPS unit.
I use my Nokia N800 with Google Maps downloaded using Maemo Mapper, and a Holux m241 Bluetooth GPS. Google hasn't yet stomped on Maemo Mapper like they did Viking.
It's not the satellite system that's to blame, it's the extremely shitty digital maps from the likes of such moronic retards as Garmin, who appear totally incapable of providing maps for my area less than 14 years out of date, and that's being generous. They've also never noticed that the two major highways through the center of Orlando actually connect, so they end up sending you on a goose chase through downtown. This is 18 years after the interchange was built. EIGHTEEN YEARS, PEOPLE!
East Orlando might as well have "here there be dragons" scribbled on it as far as Garmin is concerned. The entire neighborhoods of Waterford Lakes and Avalon Park are almost totally missing, and they've been here nearly 20 years. WHAT THE FUCK?!
If they're this screwed up with places I know about, how much should I trust them in places I don't know? Garmin's right up there with Palm and General Motors on the list of people I'll never buy from again.
I've always been rather impressed that Google Maps has been the only thing to be consistently correct, and I've only found a half-dozen very minor errors total.
Yup, so did I... man, when I tried to use Xandros, I was shocked at the horrible user interface and the fact it was more locked-down than my Windows system at work. I thought "how can someone make UNIX so difficult to use? Is this a SUN product?"
The lack of useful manual didn't help either. That is NOT the way to increase Linux sales. On the good side, a 4G was only US$300 at the local store.
We did the EXACT same thing in '58 with an Atlas missile with a tape recorder aboard (see Project SCORE) except ours worked, and yes, the purpose was to scare/impress the Russians.
While I have no love for North Korea, I think the US gov't should STFU and mind our own damn business. North Korea followed all the proper international protocols for announcing a launch.
I've talked to some Japanese friends and they seem to have the same "the sky is falling!" attitude America had when Russia orbited Sputnik. The sensationalism in the Japanese press is incredible.
...if'n it was a real story. Plus the cops don't speak English that well... they make AManFromMars sound lucid.
And as the joke goes: "What's worse than a tourist driver with a map? A tourist driver with GPS!"
Until recently most Garmin GPSes didn't know that 2 *major* highways here (I-4 and the 408 tollway) actually had an interchange!
Yeah, that's why I went out and bought one of the old-school Asus 4Gs last week, after seeing all the crap new netbook designs. The 4G fits in the small tankbag on my bike, and displays GPS & map info. Oh, and it only cost US$300. Job done.
Two stores down was the Sony shop with Vaio Ps on display. For $1500. For that much, it better come with Paris herself to carry it for me. But as a Japanese friend said, they probably spent a year and 5 million dollars making another couple mm thinner.
But seriously, what is a netbook except a really small laptop, maybe running Linux rather than Windows? What I would REALLY like is a Nokia N810 with an x86 processor instead of ARM, so I can get rid of their crap OS and run Debian on it.
True open source hardware will arrive when those 3D prototyping "printers" drop from $50K each to something the average Joe can afford. I'm talking about the devices that use lasers to solidify plastic one layer at a time.
Already you can find simple & cheap CNC-type machines advertised in Make magazine. That's the sort of thing we need.
This "building block" stuff is great, and I love it, but it's not really something that you can go too very far with.
So from what I can tell from Google Patents (and IANAL!) the "FAT Long File Name (LFN) patent" basically covers the vfat & umsdos filesystems where they provide compatible-with-msdos longer-than-8-char filenames.
Can anyone else confirm this?
So yeah, I'm rooting for Tom-Tom here, especially since I think Garmin suck, and they're the only major competition.
I see Google has the same opinion of them that I do... several of my friends have been hurt by these damned creatures appearing out of nowhere without warning.
The "he was driving too fast" folks have obviously had NO experience with these foul animals. They will literally jump out of the bushes at your car/motorcycle and you get absolutely no warning whatsoever. Google (heh!) for "deer motorcycle" - bonus points if you do image search.
If they went extinct, I would be much much happier. I shoot as many of them as I can get away with.
Because I can stick to FVWM2 and ignore this shit.
I don't have to go along with the rest of the crown and have "Aero" or "iGloss" or whatever the fuck excuse to sell video cards this week.
I said "apt-get install kde" and it said it wanted to install 370 packages totaling over 807MB. Uh, no. Just... no...
Oh hell yeah, I completely agree. I had a Lexmark that would just fall off the USB bus at random times and require a power toggle to appear again. How can you screw up something that standard?
Plus I'm no longer dicking around with drivers or that CUPS nightmare. If it doesn't do postscript, it ain't a printer as far as I'm concerned, especially for a laser. My US$150 Brother does PS just fine.
Hell yes, I laugh at a road accident, ESPECIALLY if it was provably down to someone's stupidity. You're joking, right?
I consider someone being stupid on the roads and getting their just desserts to be a very happy event, especially if it results in one less person to run over me. Stay off the cell phone, stop turning around to smack your snot monkeys, and PAY ATTENTION to where your 2-ton SUV is going!
Oh yeah, and to the guy on a Harley-Davidson that doesn't^Wdidn't believe in front brakes and skidded past me through that intersection... HA! That was hilarious!
Have you seen most American breasts? Ewwww!!! There's a reason Paris gets on TV for her not-much-at-all.
And yes, Sarah Bee, I consider some cow whipping out a tit for her snot monkey just as offensive as my whipping out my non-dairy creamer for a wizz. I don't want to see that, and I shouldn't have to. It's not sexual, it may be "natural", but it's most certainly disgusting. Make it stop.
Thank you, Facebook.
And they're that bad in Florida too, as if you didn't already know.
I was banned from computer classes for questioning the "science" teacher's opinion that creationism was da thang and wondering about that nasty evolution stuff. Plus I went from an "A-/B+" student to a "D" student, all of a sudden. Then when I threatened to go to the school board, they started giving me bogus made-up science "awards"
Mr. Michael Kratzer, I hope you burn in hell forever.
The new GUI is hideous and an amazing waster of screen space, battery life is shorter than a hamster's, and it crashes. A LOT. It makes Windows 95 look stable.
Oh yeah, and the 810's built-in GPS takes about 5-8 MINUTES to get a fix. If it does. It's so bad I use a separate bluetooth unit.
The only upside is you can easily write stuff in Python & pyGTK.
And with all that, it's still better than anything Palm puts out.
That's a good indicator of a company that doesn't know it's ass from a hole in the ground, and I'd pretty much instantly return it to the store.
The last time I've run into that situation (with an XM radio) the promised hardware never appeared, so I wouldn't hold your breath.
I don't know about the other side of the pond, but over here in the USA, the car service "techs" are seriously shit. ABS is already beyond their capability to fix, as they were unable to fix my Camaro's system, and it eventually locked up the brakes just for the hell of it and put me into a guardrail. There's no way in hell they will be able to deal with this.
I have no problem with this system when it's working, but when it breaks then a) it's probably going to get someone killed and b) you won't be able to get it fixed
Oh yeah, and what about pedestrians? Can it reliably see 'lil Suzy run out in front of the car? And can it distinguish the aforesaid snotmonkey from a squirrel or a cat? Is it going to lock up the brakes every time a trash bag floats up?
IBM's VM/CMS did *exactly* this when I was in college in the '80s, and it wasn't exactly new stuff then. "VM" stood for "Virtual Machine" and you logged in and had a virtual System/370, and you ran whatever OS you wanted, usually a stripped down single-tasking thing called CMS shrunk down just as this article describes.
Why has it taken 15 years for this to be rediscovered? What's next? Punch cards?
"... hypervisor can detect memory pages that are duplicated by multiple instances ..."
Whoa. They've rediscovered "copy-on-write" too! These people are GOOD!
I don't care if "Linux dominates the desktop" or "Linux dominates the PDA/subnotebook" as it certainly dominates my desktop and my Nokia N800.
I use Linux exclusively at work at home because I Need To Get Shit Done and Windows always craps out when I depend on it.
I honestly don't give a damn if anyone else uses Linux, or Windows, or Mac or whatever.
God knows Americans are idiots. Most of my colleagues can only count "1... 2... uhhh MANY!" They can't google an error message, their "solution" to a server issue is to power it off and back on w/o warning, they don't understand what a heap overflow or memory leak is in Java, and when asked to type in a simple command in bash, the result is total panic.
And no, I'm not posting anonymously, they're too stupid to read El Reg.
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