Posts by Matthew Poole
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There's also a new blog by founder and one-again owner Roger Shepherd
That's not the same Roger Shepherd of nz.comp fame, notorious hater of Lunix and other challenges to the global Microsoft hegemony?
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two word solution - gaffer tape!
(there's even a clear one now!)NOOOOOOOO! How, then, can one possibly make that timeless joke: "What do the force and duct/gaffer tape have in common? They have a light side, and a dark side, and they hold the universe together"?
So, so wrong, on so many levels.
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it relies on endless growth in a finite environment. This is impossible, but society in general is happy to live in a state of self-deception
The growth should be cyclical, and would be if central bankers weren't so terrified of deflation. Capitalism's need for growth is not unbridled in its purest form, but as we've seen with "too big to fail" we're not in a pure capitalist system. Capitalism's growth is self-regulating, or pushes for other resources to be found. Run out of one resource, find an alternative. That is the beauty of the system.
Is the earth a finite environment? Technically, yes. But there are many sustainable sources of energy, minerals and other necessities that we can use. The utilisation of those alternatives will see a shift in consumption, not a termination. We're not even close to consuming all the resources of the planet, only a few of them.
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Oh, Danielle, if you want more help with your crisis of faith, consider this: the richest 400 families in the US have a combined wealth of USD1.27 trillion. Yes, with a t. And the 400 highest-paid Americans had a mean income in 2007 of USD345m, with an effective tax rate of 16.6%.
Source here. Quite a scary article, given that Key et al think we should try and be more like the Yanks. Starting with their tax cuts.
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You guys aren't helping me much with my 'isn't capitalism just a big pyramid scheme?' problem, I must say.
Most forms of commerce are pyramid schemes of one sort or another. It's not the form, but human nature. Look at communism, which was a beautiful theory that got thoroughly corrupted (Coat. Getting) by the motivations of those who implemented it. Capitalism at least doesn't pretend to be about equality of man or any of that other nonsense, it's all about accumulation of money.
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Yeah, getting a TS clearance can take a long time. In NZ I'm told the SIS aims to get vetting for TS completed within six months, but it can take longer, especially if a person has lived oversees or has other aspects of their life that require deeper investigation. Apparently in the US 18-24 months is more normal.
Chief executives of agencies that grant clearances can give temporary access to classified material pending results of vetting, especially if the initial police records checks come back clear. My ex-NZDF network engineer friend was given temporary Secret clearance so that he could start working while his TS vetting was completed.
[edit: I knew the status of his clearance application because I was one of his referees. He told me where things were up to in the process so that I wouldn't get surprised by a call from the SIS wanting to arrange an interview.]
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One of the most serious difficulties I see in the idea is simply the accounting of what a margin actually is.
Exhibit 1, y'ronner: Hollywood. Never underestimate the ability of numbers types to twist and fudge and generally distort any existing concept you may have had of any aspect of income and expenses.
Hollywood accounting is actually the best possible example of why capping margins would be so incredibly difficult in practice. If movies that turn over nine figures at the box office can make a loss on paper, it's primary school maths to make an iP*'s margins fall within some arbitrary percentage.
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Kyle, the difference wasn't sufficient for my purposes when I was using a Mac. Plus, it's just one example of Jobs' over-arching need to control every. single. bloody. thing that users do with Apple's products.
As for the quality of Apple's computers being higher, this is the company that's the subject of a class-action lawsuit for lying about the quality of its displays. Having used a 27" and a 20" I can confirm that the display on the 20" is vastly inferior despite Apple's marketing implying that the only difference is the size. I also experienced a drive failure and a memory failure within four weeks of delivery of a 24" that I was using at work. For something retailing at $3200, that was a very, very poor hardware reliability level. Worse, in fact, than the reliability of the numerous PCs I've built and used at home over the years, with precisely zero failures and only one potentially dodgy RAM DIMM.
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Expandable from 64 KB up to 1 MB RAM or more!!
And people think Apple products are expensive now. I hate to think how many top-line Mac Pro's one could buy for the inflation-adjusted cost of that memory upgrade.
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It's not that hard, but it's really not an issue for me. I've never once thought about doing it. And the third-party themes all look butt-ugly.
I don't want a third-party theme, I want to set my own colour scheme. And if I want my title bars to blur from fire engine red down to a delicate shade of magenta today, and then tomorrow change it so they go from azure to gunmetal, that ought to be my prerogative. Apple makes that incredibly difficult to do, and pointing me at a link to pre-made themes doesn't change that in the slightest.
You've been working with Macs for over 20 years, I haven't. I'm used to a flick of the eye to determine which window has focus (all the more so with sloppy focus on open OSes), not a concerted re-focus of my view to look to the top of the screen. With large monitors and multi-layered windows, the effort required is all the more significant. That people think it's at all normal to re-focus their view to determine which window is active just strikes me as bizarre. Maybe it's down to how I work, with many applications open doing different things, layered and overlapping, often side-by-side.