Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Facepalm of the day

The non-news of the morning is apparently that we’re a culture of whiners.

 

http://www.news.com.au/money/money-matters/its-hard-to-be-heard-above-the-whingers-as-consumer-rights-become-a-toxic-culture-of-negativity/story-e6frfmd9-1226614321771

 

No surprise there, given we’ve spent the last 20 years telling everyone the customer is always right, right?

 

Take the fact that some people are just whingers, throw in some freeloaders, sprinkle in a few scamming ripoff merchants and finish off with people who just flat out have totally unreasonable expectations. 

 

That’s what we’ve always had.

 

Now multiply that exponentially by a consumeristic society with a terminal case of narcissism and enough entitlement syndrome to be self-sufficient in moral outrage for the next century, and that’s what we’ve got now.

 

Finally, factor in ubiquitous access to the internet and social media that means even the most blindly cretinous person can now make their mindless rambling babble visible to others, and you can bet some vacuous me-too sycophant will “like” it too.

 

The simple reality is that as Scott Adams once wrote, one of the originally suggested names for what we now call “the internet” is “I’m a moron and I’ll prove it, too!”.  Just because someone has managed to peck out their mental dribble on a keyboard does not mean it’s automatically worth reading, any more than a “like” means that someone made the momentous effort of moving their mouse about a centimetre and applying pressure with one finger.  Both only mean anything if you want them to.

 

We need to get out of this mindset that because we read it, it must be true.  That went out the window right around 1995 when Bill first gave Joe Average access to the net without much in the way of knowledge.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Impressive uptime



Not bad at all.  Boot time Saturday, 28 September 1996.  The box was running two Quantum full-height 5 1/4" 800MB SCSI drives that had been in there from at least before that boot date.

According to some Google archaeology, these were a 7,200RPM drive.  Assuming no spin-down, that means the edge of the platters travelled an astonishing 26,202,699 kilometres during that uptime, or to put it another way, these drives travelled the distance to the moon - and back - a little over 34 times.

The box was finally taken down on March 29 due to increasingly noisy drive bearings.  Can't think why.

Monday, April 1, 2013

Your sensationalist crap of the day

Look at this sensationalist jouno crap:

 

http://www.news.com.au/world-news/o/story-fndir2ev-1226610154834

 

The bloke was injured when a generator stator fell, absolutely nothing to do with the nuclear part of the plant.  But of course the headline is “nuclear power plant accident”.

 

Presumably it would be “critical injuries at nuclear power plant disaster” if someone fell over in the cafeteria and poured their spaghetti bol down the front of someone else.