User: ptaff

They don't bounce much.

On: Life-Saving Baseballs

I wonder why they used baseballs - yes they're more resistant than, let's say, tennis balls, and you don't want to crush the electronics inside.

But if the ball is supposed to locate people who are stuck inside a pile of debris, I guess the deeper the ball gets, the better; and baseballs don't bounce much. Imagine throwing a SuperBall(TM) and a baseball inside an irregularly shaped tunnel 1 feet wide - which ball will get the deeper inside the tunnel?

Re:Not that we'll get there . . .

On: Sir Isaac Newton: The world Will End In 2060

Maybe Sir Isaac was only wrong about the beginning of the Epoch.

Put it in late 1991 (oh, Linux's birth?) instead of 1970 and it the pieces fit perfectly.

We can't blame him for foreseeing Linux and not GNU nor UNIX - after all, legend says he's been hit by an Apple - which indeed with OS X now shares the end of the world with all of us believers :)

Re:Oh?

On: Safari Beta Leaked, With Tabs

If you could open more than 4 windows without making the OS crash, the taskbar would become so cluttered that it would make it unusable.

I also despise the XP-way of putting all IE windows on the same taskbar 'button': 2 steps that could be made into 1 with a tab.

My 0,02$

Oh?

On: Safari Beta Leaked, With Tabs

So, Galeon, Konqueror, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, Safari, (...!) all have tabbed browsing?

Who's missing? oh! sorry, I remember, they don't care about usability anymore, they have 95% of the market.

"People don't use tabs, look, mommy, 95% of people live without."

Innovation: don't ever use bright ideas from others.

Apache 2?

On: Mandrake Linux... Not Dead Yet?

Seems like people like to adhere to the principle "if it ain't broken, don't fix it".

I browse through the package list and can't find the ol'and'reliable Apache 1.3 - why force the upgrade?

They also include PHP4.3 which is known as unstable (despite the branch)

Last complaint: galeon-1.3 is, IMHO, not ready for consumption and is barely usable next to galeon-1.2; as I enjoy the Mozilla project very much, it's fat and I like to have a slim graphical browser - skipstone and phoenix aren't there neither.

Re:In IE6

On: Mozilla Now Even Includes The Kitchen Sink

IE has trouble with XHTML. They spend so much time making sure people don't use standards...

Have a google search with:
site:w3.org xhtml "cannot be displayed"

This is an old bug, Microsoft seems to be too absorbed with DRM to care about it.

query...

On: SQL Server Developers Face Huge Royalties

SELECT max(money)
FROM ms.customers
WHERE ms.cant_read_EULAs
AND ms.really_wants_to_lose_market
HAVING Slammer;

Thanks for that cooperation

On: Evolution Endorsed by Steves

Finally!

I'm so happy that Steves endorses Evolution!

Thanks M. Ballmer, thanks M. Jobs!

Finally a free PIM for all platforms!

And they are so humble at Ximian's they don't even report the news on their website!

Must be true about 1% of bugs

On: Microsoft: Because Bugs are Cool

Billy must be right about the few bugs reports. A simple query on google:

site:microsoft.com bugfix

suggests that only around 20 bugs were fixed.

But searching with:

microsoft bug

Gives more than a million results.

Re:Don't understand their error rate calculations

On: ESA Satellite Recovers: Total Loss To Geostationary

I guess there has been a misprint and 109 is really ten to the ninth power.

Probably attained with error-correction, too.

NT source

On: Inside The Development of Windows NT

Oh, so now we learn that NT is not from "New Technology".

So in a couple of years we'll learn that:

• ME: Miserable Everytime
• CE: Cramped Environment
• XP: Xor Performance
• Office: Other File Formats Imply Collaboration: Encrypt!

You can't to that near to a computer anymore

On: Using DNA To Build DRAMs

We're talking DNA, so any cancerigen factor must be accounted.

• No more smoking near the computer;
• Use suntan cream on your laptop when under the sun for a long time;
• You can't grill meat on your processor anymore;

...and don't forget that urge for the computer to mate!

Liverpool, you say?

On: Soundless Music?

I guess it's not the first time that people get moved by music from Liverpool without being able to hear it. A similar worldwide experiment took place between 1962 and 1966. Then the lads made music to be listened to.

PHP >= 4.3.0 is not a great update

On: Security Hole Found in 4.3.0

Class methods are not working as they should in PHP >= 4.3.0; I'd suggest to anyone who does OO in PHP to stay with 4.2.3 as long as they want to keep their scripts working. See for yourself this Bug report

obvious?

On: Do Comets go Poof?

If comets have a tail, I guess they're losing mass. If I lose mass on a regular basis, I won't go *poof*: I'll just gradually disappear. Or I'll gently break up in pieces that will make the mass-loss even more evident.

How come 32,000?

On: iTunes Tops Out At 32,000 Songs

Well, that number not being a true power of 2 (that would make 32,768), we should conclude that the limit was forced by design, not by variable-size.

Now why did they choose put a compiled-in limit below what is possible? To make it possible afterwards to "patch" with a smaller number to comply with a bogus DRM "security measure"?

Dig?

On: More on the Mars Ice Cap

Wouldn't it be feasible to simply dig onto the crust of Mars and provoking volcanoes? Volcanoes would both heat the surface of the planet and bring gases into the atmosphere. Yeah, we would have to dig for years, but I guess not milleniums :) -- The first dotcom failure: command.com

Re:textmode realplayer for unix

On: Getting Your News as MP3s?

Here is a snippet I use for that very purpose:

vsound -s -d -t trplayer -q rtsp://example.com/ |sox -t au - -t wav - | lame -b 128 - out.mp3

as an added bonus you can listen to the stream while recording it. All four programs (vsound, trplayer, sox and lame) are available on freshmeat.net

No text editor

On: Essential UNIX Tricks and Tools?

One day my buddy had to recreate a lost passwd file, with no editor... was pretty proud to solve it with echo:

echo "root:x:0:0:root:/bin/bash" > /etc/passwd

One time I had to delete a whole tree which had become infested with (zillions?) of files. rm -r * complained about "too many arguments"

for i in `ls -1`; do rm $i; done

solved it.