Advogato blog for haruspex

9 Oct 2008

Thu, 9 Oct 2008 04:14:19 GMT

@ marnanel: Sounds like you are best finding another country.

Come to Canada, at least we respect and are knowledgeable about other countries and cultures. The condescension of your child's teacher and your bank is not worth tolerating.

2 Oct 2008

Thu, 2 Oct 2008 16:25:37 GMT

Bailout, schmailout.

Bob Ellis:

For I wrote a book, you see, .... It was about how, if you sack too many people, or you underpay and impoverish too many people, there aren't enough customers left to sell things to, and the economy goes to hell. I wrote it in 1998 and nobody attacked any one of the arguments. They tiptoed away from the argument. They were above such things.
And lo, it has come to pass. Americans too impoverished to buy houses had stopped making their payments, and cash their creditors owed to lending entities further up the money chain could not be paid either, and like bird flu the illness swept across the planet, and here we are. And I was right; and Michael Costa and Peter Costello and all the neocons and Friedmanites and Tim Blair were wrong. And we are now in big trouble.
...
Decide how long Alan Greenspan should spend in gaol. For he nearly wrecked the world, in my view, with his one percent interest rates and house loans to fools as dumb as Barney in The Simpsons, ... Decide how long George Bush should spend in gaol for squandering a trillion dollars (thus far) on two needless unending wars and another trillion thus far bailing out his upperclass coke-sniffing accomplices who like him couldn't add.
And, boy, they really couldn't add. They thought the dollar could be floated for instance, and China's command economy with its fixed undervalued currency and low house prices was doomed to fail. They thought they'd won the Cold War against such barbarities, and socialist command economies didn't work. And they borrowed money from China, trillions of dollars from China, to prove their system worked better. China, which quietly won the Cold War by lending it to them, if you care to add up the figures.

16 Nov 2007

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 21:26:47 GMT

etbe: Neither. One should use ZFS (>> RAID).

13 Nov 2007

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:45:25 GMT

Signs of the Apocalypse:

Via Jos Kirps's Popular Science and Technology Blog, we learn that complete source code for the final release of Multics has been released by Bull Technologies and made available by MIT.

7 Oct 2007

Sun, 7 Oct 2007 12:02:09 GMT

bradfitz: What was scarier than the text of the article - let's face it, we have known for years the man is a moron - was the photo accompanying it. A pile of sycophants, clutching their cameras for a chance to photograph the most potent symbol of their country's failure in every sphere. Not what he's earned: A lynch mob.

17 Sep 2007

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 12:08:04 GMT

salimma: "once" anti-GPL?!

24 May 2007

Thu, 24 May 2007 19:07:16 GMT

trs80: Yep, swapping controller boards can work. I did it successfully last year to a Samsung 80GB that failed. Of course, I then had two working chassis and only one working controller, so I should have been able to organise a warranty replacement (which never happened for various reasons). It was obviously a dead controller: one of the ASICs had a matchhead sized explosive divot in it.

15 May 2007

Tue, 15 May 2007 00:17:16 GMT

mikal, right! after all, where'd you think we^W they got the idea? :/

10 May 2007

Thu, 10 May 2007 05:56:58 GMT

mikal, I think everyone in a position to make a comparison knows by now that United are utter crap...

21 Apr 2007

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 22:27:44 GMT

louie: Yes, the "pathetic commentary" on low expectations due to Microsoft is indeed sad.

But when you wrote,

No wonder everyone wants to move to web apps.

I initially thought you were being sarcastic: Because of course then, "this application may from time to time act like the web application it really is, and have unpredictable latencies or unreliable operation, ..."

But perhaps you were earnest, and were saying that people perceive web applications to be more reliable. Well, perhaps they can be a smooth experience, where your connection (and server) is fast, low latency and reliable. But in general it's not going to make the issue go away... Firefox is one of the few applications that crashes for me on OS X. :)