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User: Joska

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  1. Re:Easy - Play to their Ego on Ask Slashdot: How Would You Deal With A 'Gaslighting' Colleague? · · Score: 1

    Oops, I see now that I essentially duplicated the above comment and advice a bit further down, and yes, it did work perfectly for me as well.

  2. Re:Start sucking up on Ask Slashdot: How Would You Deal With A 'Gaslighting' Colleague? · · Score: 1

    This actually worked for me back in my early twenties, although I would say that envy is a form of insecurity and fear of a potential adversary is what triggers the sabotaging behavior. My company had hired a superstar consultant who for some reason instantly regarded me as a threat and said dreadful things to me at every opportunity when others were not within earshot. Since his behavior was based on completely erroneous assumptions about me and in fact I liked the guy, I simply greeted him like a friend, ignored those comments with a momentary confused look and carried on being friendly. I began asking him for advice, which is an admission of vulnerability and a clear acknowledgment of his superior knowledge and experience, all true at the time. After an interval of bewilderment on his part, he realized that I was never hostile to him and in fact looked up to him. He became my biggest ally and gave me endless much needed advice about office and corporate politics. I still use that knowledge decades later, so it was a completely successful strategy. It was easy to implement because it was based on honesty so I wasn't acting a part. People pick up on insincerity unless one is a very fine actor but then the OP has little to lose at this point and kindness is unlikely to backfire.

  3. Soo very courageous on Apple Explores the Idea Of Killing Headphone Jack On the MacBook Pro (thenextweb.com) · · Score: 1

    These folks have courage to burn. Pressuring people to use wireless headphones with the inevitable added distortion of a transmitter and receiver together with the special joy of having to recharge its batteries is all so very admirable. Since forums are filled with accounts of the Lightning charging cable failing after three months, how long may we expect the headphone dongle to last? Voila, another revenue stream. There is more to their glorious courage though, since it turns out that as recently as 2011 but very likely to this day for all I know, they were still making Macbook batteries that swell and wreck the device from the inside, with the stiff middle finger for anyone who thought they were entitled to any sort of compensation. True innovators, they are the only company to have perfected the swelling battery tech with the feature being unavailable from any other OEM or aftermarket battery supplier at any price. This is presumably part of a well planned strategy to save their precious customers from the embarrassment of being seen in public with a pathetic old relic sporting the ancient and obsolete headphone jack into which just any old headphone may be connected. See, thoughtful and considerate in addition to courageous. TC deserves a medal of valor for such bravery. Horatio at the bridge has nothing on him. P:

  4. Re:Finally we will get high end computers on New Intel and AMD Chips Will Only Support Windows 10 (pcworld.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Right. It's high school debating tactics and not a reasoned analysis when you simply ignore or gloss over any inconvenient truths and push your conclusion or more precisely, belief or claim, with everything you've got. So tiresome. If anyone can be bothered to refute any of your claims point by point, I'll leave it to them.

  5. Orwellian much? on New Intel and AMD Chips Will Only Support Windows 10 (pcworld.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Intel and AMD are so committed to a good and trustworthy experience for their customers that they are only accommodating installation of the perpetual beta, that data mining sensation, Windows 10? This constitutes a big bet that nearly all of their customers are completely ignorant or utter fools, with the remainder being an insignificant minority that can safely be ignored.

    After 20 years of Windows, I'm finally in the process of switching to Linux. I can clearly tolerate a somewhat rubbish OS for a long time but when it's essentially a sinister joke and a toy rather than a serious tool, even a procrastinator like me is motivated to make a change. Of course much of the Win 10 evil has been back ported to Win 7 and 8 but could in theory be avoided. After a while though, one tires of the cat and mouse game of choosing which updates to avoid and now how to get around the update rollups. This business with chip support is just the most recent slap in the face from an increasingly cynical and adversarial Microsoft who is apparently the driving force in this present fiasco.

    KDE Neon, for example, is way faster on an old laptop than Windows on a recent Xeon workstation, so this no painful switch. Thus ends the promise of Longhorn, at least for me.

  6. Re:TTP etc = Conspiricist garbage. on TPP Scuttles Attempts To Fix Orphan Works · · Score: 1

    Silly fiction. Obviously, had dinosaurs ever existed we would still have them because they were supposedly so big and strong that they could beat up any adversary, even without fighting dirty and thus could never have become extinct.

    Similarly, our governments would never entertain anything so preposterous as criminal copyright. Life without parole for infringers next? How about capital punishment for x downloads? I won't fall for any of it. We live in democracies, after all, where the government represents the citizens who elected it. Am I right? ;)

  7. Re:Boycott on HTML5 App For Panasonic TVs Rejected - JQuery Is a "Hack" · · Score: 1

    Good reasons to boycott the pig. It's a fairly good looking pig, thanks to the proverbial lipstick on it but it still sucks big time. Besides, the traditional look is clean, functional and also distinctive. How important can it be to make everything worse?

  8. Re:I am going to neowin.net on Fire Destroys Iron Mountain Data Warehouse, Argentina's Bank Records Lost · · Score: 1

    Why in the name of heaven did this thing post my comment as AC? Oh, because I thought putting a checkmark beside my name was the thing to do. So much for singing the praises of the old site's wonderful design. Anyway, Neowin time, like I said.

  9. Re:Link broken? on Come Try Out Slashdot's New Design (In Beta) · · Score: 1

    This fixed width rubbish is very frustrating for anyone lacking a tiny monitor or a scrolling fetish. It's tempting to be sarcastic and complain that it's still too wide for my new workstation, a smart watch, but I fear the joke might be lost on whoever thinks Slashdot needs to become just another blog. I've checked it daily since the late nineties so it's close to my heart, to say nothing of useful and informative. Seeing it ruined would be a great shame.

  10. Re:Kids these days... on Direct-to-Vinyl Recording Makes a Comeback (Video) · · Score: 1

    Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! As long as the wax is naturally occurring, those cylinders were the last pure, accurate and worthwhile means of storing music. Damn those electrophiles!

  11. Re:Please tell me it wont be an accurate replica.. on Plans Unveiled For Full Scale Replica of the Titanic · · Score: 1

    That's a big one right there.

  12. Re:Please tell me it wont be an accurate replica.. on Plans Unveiled For Full Scale Replica of the Titanic · · Score: 1

    The junk steel and the compartment divisions that stop short of the ceiling are the bits of authenticity that are most troubling. Seriously though, it's not a remarkable object with the benefit of hindsight and scarcely merits a replica. Maybe he can be persuaded instead to sink some money into architecture and rebuild Frank Lloyd Wright's 1906 Larkin Building in Buffalo, NY. This would rectify a very real loss to history with the added benefit of a significantly decreased iceberg threat. It's a win/ win.

  13. Correction? on Cyanide-Producing GM Grass Linked To Texas Cattle Deaths · · Score: 1

    If you publish a correction, would it not be appropriate to maybe actually make the correction in the faulty headline? This is a new low in sensationalism when you deliberately leave misinformation in place. It's heartbreaking to see a reputation for noble intentions gained over many years squandered so casually and pointlessly. I've been checking this site for news daily since the late 90s but maybe it's run its course now and the time has come to move on. So sad.

  14. Re:Legitimacy? on Canada's Conservatives Misled Voters With Massive Robocall Operation · · Score: 1

    There is a simple blood test but it's encumbered by patents and at around $10,000, a bit too expensive for most individuals to use. We generally stick with tea leaves or entrails to make these determinations.

  15. Illegitimate beginnings on Canada's Conservatives Misled Voters With Massive Robocall Operation · · Score: 2

    Not so much a merger as a hostile and fraudulent takeover engineered from the top. I was a member of the Progressive Conservative party at the time and every vote taken on the topic of the so-called Alliance (an alliance of the former Reform Party with nothing whatsoever, apart from itself) the result was nearly 100% against any discussions whatsoever on any subject. They were recognized as radical right-wing kooks and rightly shunned. Whatever its shortcomings, the old PC party's members were often highly intelligent, respected democracy and despised corruption. Such a party would accommodate corporate interests but stopped short of completely selling out the country for personal gain. EX PM Mulroney's despicable government in a way set the present events in motion by ruining the PC party's reputation.

  16. Re:Why not... on Apple's Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) Now Open Source · · Score: 1

    Only if the snake oil uses vacuum tubes.

  17. Re:Paul Simon / Kodachrome on Kodachrome Takes Its Final Bow Today · · Score: 1

    I suppose on Slashdot, insightful is a synonym for irrelevant. How much do these song lyrics tell us about the film? Think for yourself indeed.

  18. Re:modest proposal on Mpeg 7 To Include Per-Frame Content Identification · · Score: 1

    All true, and the unscrupulous advertisers may even pose a greater risk. ;)

  19. Re:Better on Squeezing a Wikipedia Snapshot Onto an 8GB iPhone · · Score: 1

    Thank you, anonymous cowardly brother (or sister). People's complacency about truth defined by popular consensus and mediated by members of a clique distresses me more with each passing day.

  20. Re:OO to the rescue? on MS Excel Users Susceptible To New Vulnerability · · Score: 1

    Since this scored a 5, it may be helpful to define random strangers and compare the relative threat they pose with the other types. Being a simple soul, it had already occurred to me to avoid opening attachments from unknown sources, but this new level of complexity has me intrigued.

    Perhaps I'm being pedantic, in which case, I'm sorry. ;)

  21. OO to the rescue? on MS Excel Users Susceptible To New Vulnerability · · Score: 2

    Does this mean that OpenOffice is the workaround for the moment?

  22. Re:Is ALL Denon suspect? on Denon's $499 Ethernet Cable · · Score: 1

    I don't support companies that believe in abusing the trust of their customers. People without a technological background don't deserve to be preyed upon simply by virtue of being vulnerable.

  23. Re:Some day... on Denon's $499 Ethernet Cable · · Score: 5, Informative

    This type of test has been conducted a great many times over the years. Notable is the work of Dr. Floyd Toole when he was head of the acoustics lab at the Department Of Physics at Canada's National Research Council in Ottawa. He was able to demonstrate that people of all sorts would recognize and prefer the sound reproduction that was most accurate in terms of having the lowest distortion, flattest frequency response and best loudspeaker dispersion as long as they did not know what equipment they were listening to. When they did know, their beliefs and preconceptions essentially determined their perceptions.

  24. Re:Get a used small-office HP LJ-4xxx on Affordable Laser Printers? · · Score: 1

    I second the above motion. According to what a technician told me, the HP Laserjets from the HP4 up to the 4100 are magnificent machines. The newer ones are just good and only if you stick to the top models that don't use gravity feed. The significant factor if you are on a budget is that the 5, 4+ and 4 are now considered old and have almost no market value. The 5 has a duty cycle of 35,000 pages a month, which for many people means years of use, and for some of us, perhaps a lifetime (sigh...) Sure, rubber rollers age and parts for these deluxe machines are not cheap but replacing the whole thing at today's prices is no catastrophe and it will probably outlast most new printers anyway. Also, additional memory is essentially free since it is generic ram from now obsolete PCs. I've supplied these to many friends and they all still work flawlessly. BTW, the P models are for lighter duty use and the L is the despicable gravity-fed rubbish. Now go forth and print, brothers and sisters.

  25. Product Placement, Anyone? on New Battlestar Galactica Spin-off Series Announced · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    This could have been a fabulous show but what poisons it for me, no pun , etc., is the damned tobacco promotion. Come on now, these people have never been to Earth, yet somehow the accursed Sir Walter Raleigh has travelled through time and space to bring them the same cretinous habit that is killing millions of addicts here and now? It breaks my heart that I can't enjoy this show as the overall quality is otherwise stunning but pushing that stuff is pure evil. Maybe the Cylons really are better than us. Do they smoke? I don't remember, but I don't think they sell each other out.