Slashdot Mirror


User: mfearby

mfearby's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
375
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 375

  1. Re:The Pope's doubling-down on irrelevance, I see on Pope Francis To Issue Encyclical On Global Warming · · Score: -1, Troll

    How many of these billion "Catholics" actually attend church other than for weddings, funerals, and baptisms? Ten percent of that figure, if you're lucky. But bums on pews doesn't affect the climate in any way, and certainly isn't going to make carbon dioxide any more or less of a "pollutant" simply because Pope Francis puts out a document. CO2 is good for the planet.

  2. Re:The Pope's doubling-down on irrelevance, I see on Pope Francis To Issue Encyclical On Global Warming · · Score: -1

    At least it's a non-issue insofar as carbon dioxide levels are concerned. The link between CO2 and increasing temperatures doesn't survive outside actual greenhouses to grow plants (which don't have their own global weather systems, oceans, etc, to counteract its isolation). Sea levels have been rising slowly ever since the end of the last ice age. This has happened in cycles since time immemorial, and will happen again. If anything, we could do with a lot MORE carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to help counteract the next ice age, and to increase fertiliser for plants, needed by the MANY hungry people you'd think the Catholic Church should actually care about.

  3. The Pope's doubling-down on irrelevance, I see on Pope Francis To Issue Encyclical On Global Warming · · Score: -1, Troll

    Climate change is a non-issue. The temperature has NOT risen since 1998. Fact. If people build homes on increasingly marginal land and closer to the sea or low-lying areas, then OF COURSE the effects of ANY climate event will be more severe! This is NOT proof that carbon dioxide is pollution.

  4. Re:SEARCHABILITY on Apple's App Store Needs a Radical Revamp; How Would You Go About It? · · Score: 2

    Amen to that, brother! The search is terrible. We need the ability to sort by popularity, download count, most recent first or last, etc. And when you click the back button to go back a page, actually go back to the page as I had it previously, not a collapsed version of the category I was looking at. I HATE looking in the App Store for apps due to the cornucopia of rubbish. The crap to quality ratio is very high, alas.

  5. Re:Incrementing NSNumber in ObjC is UGLY! on Apple Announces New Programming Language Called Swift · · Score: 1

    I was receiving a pointer to an NSNumber in a recursive function and wanted to increment it so that the ultimate caller eventually would have the value. I guess I could use an int internally then set the pointer to the NSNumber to the final result of the int, but that seemed like just as much work. Anyway, I'm ditching Objective-C now that Swift is here, so it's no longer an issue

  6. Re:Somebody post a SWIFT example PLEASE! on Apple Announces New Programming Language Called Swift · · Score: 2

    It may not measure up to whatever fly-by-night languages to which you might compare it, but it's a MAJOR and LONG OVERDUE replacement for Objective-C, which is the only language any serious Mac developer has had to put up with. I for one welcome our new Swift overlords.

  7. Incrementing NSNumber in ObjC is UGLY! on Apple Announces New Programming Language Called Swift · · Score: 1

    I had to figure out how to increment an NSNumber over the weekend. It's not pretty:

    NSNumber *num = [NSNumber numberWithInt:[num intValue] + 1];

  8. And if they make me have a Facebook account... on Facebook To Buy WhatsApp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... UNINSTALL! I refuse to have a Facebook account and if Whatsapp starts making it mandatory to have one, then I'll go back to plain old SMS.

  9. Created custom email alias for Linked In on LinkedIn Accused of Hacking Customers' E-Mails To Slurp Up Contacts · · Score: 1

    I created a custom email alias for Linked In and use a really nasty randomly-generated password which I store in a password manager, so they'll never get anything else out of me. I also never put my work Outlook email address and password in. I'm not THAT stupid :-) Some people obviously are, but I'd hardly call that Linked In's fault.

  10. Developers, developers, developers, developers! on The Rising Power of Developers · · Score: 1
  11. Re:Aus Labor Party is anything but democratic on Man Formerly Charged With Rigging Student Ballot Exposed As Labor Official · · Score: 1

    We have election scrutineers from each party to observe the process. I've done it once before and we all watch the boxes like hawks, and the counting of ballot papers, too. You'd only need sturdy metal boxes if the ballot boxes had to be collected by, say, your local govt-friendly militia to transport them to a "safe" counting location (i.e., where their contents are simply replaced anyway).

    Democracy in Australia is one of the best-functioning in the world. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you do, you end up with the US system where elections are a complete farce. It's amazing how they hold themselves up as a beacon of democracy to the world. Their elections are less free than some dictatorships!

  12. Re:Aus Labor Party is anything but democratic on Man Formerly Charged With Rigging Student Ballot Exposed As Labor Official · · Score: 1

    There is no way that the Australian Labor Party could be considered Centre Right, not in a million years. They're more Centre Left than anything, and Greens Left or Far Left. And by extension the Liberal/National Coalition could be Centre Right or Right. They both compete for the centre ground.

  13. Re:Aus Labor Party is anything but democratic on Man Formerly Charged With Rigging Student Ballot Exposed As Labor Official · · Score: 2

    The argument that three greens are a viable alternative simply because they aren't one of the major parties is a very poor argument indeed. Their policies would ruin this country utterly! The Liberals appoint their leadership through a ballot in the parliamentary party room. You don't like it, vote for somebody else. It has worked fine for a long time and just because Labor is tearing itself to bits, doesn't mean the Libs have to change to suit people who wouldn't vote for them anyway.

  14. Re:Aus Labor Party is anything but democratic on Man Formerly Charged With Rigging Student Ballot Exposed As Labor Official · · Score: 1

    I have sometimes routed my preferences to ultimately land with the Liberals but upon finding out that they would be deprived of my AEC-funding as a result, most definitely I'll be putting a "1" in the Liberal/National Coalition box this time. Thank you, kind sir :-) You've done me a great service.

  15. Aus Labor Party is anything but democratic on Man Formerly Charged With Rigging Student Ballot Exposed As Labor Official · · Score: 1, Interesting

    They might come from the "social democratic" tradition but there's nothing democratic about the Australian Labor Party. They're the masters of branch stacking and rigging votes, especially through union representation at national conferences. The party has become a joke and the sooner they're turfed in the coming months, the better. They need a few terms in the wilderness to clean up their filthy act.

  16. Might have something to do with the fact that... on Poll Shows That 75% Prefer Printed Books To eBooks · · Score: 1

    Might have something to do with the fact that most ebooks (and particularly the reading software for same) totally suck! The Kindle reader is almost entirely devoid of features. Its bookmarking facility is a joke! Add to that the lack of real-world page numbers and instead you get numbers that go into their tens of thousands; I guess it's a word/character count or something, but you can't use that in a footnote reference! If they're going to give you this bizarre substitute for page numbers then they could at least put something in the interface that shows you the equivalent dead-tree-edition page number. It's the little things like this that totally turn me off. Even PDFs from reliable, DRM-free, publishers such as O'Reilly often have problems copying code samples - lately I've been getting bizarre Unicode private use characters! That's not very handy. Overall, I will only buy ebooks for technical tutorials, references, etc. Fiction and other non-technical-fiction has to be dead-tree!

  17. Re:Too little, too late on Giving GNOME 3 a GNOME 2 Look · · Score: 1

    I've also grown tired of the need to find a new distro every 18 months to two years when the one I happen to have been using for a while decides to embrace batshit crazy as its new philosophy. I've used most of the major distros in my time except Red Hat/Fedora. My last distro was Debian after Ubuntu ruined everything with Unity, but even Debian with GNOME 2.3x wasn't doing it for me any more. My new PC hardware also seemed to have some stability issues so I just decided to jump ship. Another consideration was a decision to write software for Mac/iOS to make money. Nobody makes money writing software for Linux (not easily, anyway), and Apple has a loyal customer base used to not being afraid to spend money on good/useful software.

    I have to say that Time Machine is great, and transferring a user account/profile from one Mac OS install to another is dead simple. Microsoft could learn a thing or two about how Apple does this (the User State Migration Tool for desktop admins is utter rubbish by comparison). Switching to Mac was made easier knowing that it's fundamentally UNIX underneath, so I have the best of both worlds. A rich ecosystem on the desktop where batshit crazy isn't foisted on its users willy nilly and a foundation that's rock solid. What more could I ask for? And most of my favourite OSS software is available on Mac, anyway, like Open Office and The GIMP. No brainer, really.

  18. Too little, too late on Giving GNOME 3 a GNOME 2 Look · · Score: 1

    Why should I put in hours and hours trying to make bad software usable? I used Linux for 5 years until 8 months ago when I finally gave up on Linux because GNOME 2.30 was consigned to the dustbin and I got sick of the alternatives. Since then I've bought a Mac and never been happier. Sure, the Finder is utterly pathetic, and I pine for a taskbar to replace the dock, but apart from those two abominations, every other aspect of the Mac experience is without equal. So having a crappy file manager and no task bar is a price worth paying. But since GNOME shell ruined more than it improved, the Mac is by far the lesser of all the evils currently on offer. Sorry, Linux, but your fascination with throwing the baby out with the desktop environment bath water every few years is doing more harm than good; it's alienating users more than it's winning new converts!

    PS: yes, I also wish my home and end keys actually did something useful on the Mac; thank goodness for the Keyfixer Firefox addon.

  19. I think the FSF has lost it on Taking Action For Free JavaScript · · Score: 1

    Who cares what license the javascript has underneath a page that I happen to visit? As long as it runs. It's not like I have to install some evil proprietary flash or java applet to run it. Get a life, FSF!

  20. Re:E17 is the only genuinely free option. on After 12 years of Development, E17 Is Out · · Score: -1

    How many people seriously choose a desktop environment based upon its license? I have *so* given up caring about all this licensing crap. In fact, the level of my interest in that crap now is demonstrated by the fact that I switched to Mac six weeks' ago. I just want a computer that god-damn well works, and works well, without me having to constantly move distros because bored-sh*tless developers decide to throw the baby out with the bath water every year or so. I've never been happier with a computer than I am with my new Mac. Sure, the Dock and the Finder are dumb, but there's Spotlight (way better than Nepomuk!) and ForkLift, and I don't mind paying $22 for a file manager, either, that's how much I've given up caring about FOSS :-)

  21. Does anyone really care any more? on After 12 years of Development, E17 Is Out · · Score: 3, Insightful

    10 years too late, I reckon. We've all moved on from this kind of "gratuitous eye candy above all else philosophy" and it's all about consistency, usability, integration, and last but not least, features now.

  22. Re:"the year of the Linux desktop"? Make them stop on Valve's Steam License Causes Linux Packaging Concerns · · Score: 1

    I had no idea people cared about the UID of their /. accounts, but I've been here for a very, very, long time. I'm not going to invest the time and energy refuting all of your points, but suffice it to say, I've reached the limits of what tinkering with my OS can teach me. I'm all about "getting things done" now and if I have to read a lengthy HOWTO to achieve something that "just works" somewhere else, sorry, but the "just works" is going to win. I hope that Linux does get to the point where it can claim >= 10% desktop market share, but as long as its as fragmented as it is, that day will never come. Oh, and happy to have wasted your time :-)

  23. Re:"the year of the Linux desktop"? Make them stop on Valve's Steam License Causes Linux Packaging Concerns · · Score: 2

    You managed to summarise his points quite well... Not too sure about the last one, though... but it was a funny read :-)

  24. Re:New Doctor is mostly disappointing on The New Series of Doctor Who: Fleeing From Format? · · Score: 1

    I've sat through every last one of them. Some were better than others but the proportion of crap in these new Doctor Who episodes is much higher than in the classics.

  25. New Doctor is mostly disappointing on The New Series of Doctor Who: Fleeing From Format? · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Those stupid angel statues, for God's sake! How utterly lame is that? And this obsession with Amy Pond and Rory and their family. And a floating spaceship where some carnival clown in a glass box controls everybody? What were the writers smoking that day? Lame! This is no way lives up to the classics from the likes of Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee.

    The new Doctor Who is at risk of being what Enterprise became to the Star Trek franchise -i.e., so bad that no self-respecting Trekker/Trekkie will acknowledge it.