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Comment: Re: So? (Score 1) 271

by DingerX (#48339433) Attached to: Dealer-Installed GPS Tracker Leads To Kidnapper's Arrest in Maryland
So they have video of the abduction, they have the victim, they have the place where he held and abused her, and you think, after the police made public appeals for information, any judge is going to toss the whole case because the car dealer installed a tracking device? They didn't discover the crime subsequent to installing a tracking device. They had a crime and a life in danger.

Dealer-Installed GPS Tracker Leads To Kidnapper's Arrest in Maryland 271

Posted by timothy
from the cheaper-than-lojack dept.
New submitter FarnsworthG writes A news story about the capture of a kidnapper mentioned that he was caught because a car dealer had secretly installed a GPS device on his car. Apparently this is becoming common for "buy-here-pay-here" dealers. The devices are sold by Spireon, among many others. Raises interesting privacy questions. FarnsworthG also points to this Jalopnik article condemning the practice, when it's done without disclosure. The kidnapping itself, of Philadelphia nursing assistant Carlesha Freeland-Gaither, was captured by a surveillance camera.

Comment: Re:Dear Intel (Score 1) 724

by DingerX (#48058329) Attached to: Intel Drops Gamasutra Sponsorship Over Controversial Editorials
Marketing works on the principle that those jerks share, if not the same zip code, at least the same corporate culture as engineering. And the turnaround between when they observed the situation, when they made a decision and when we got to see the effects of that decision is several years shorter than engineering. So, yeah, I stand by what I say, and, hell, I'll add: I do not own stocks in any electronics hardware company, but I feel that shareholders should examine the performance of Intel in this case and see it as a predictor of where the company will be in four years.

In any case, if their marketing guy is a such a rube as to be roped in by this, is it absurd to imagine that their 2018 CPU will be powered by an E-Cat?

Alright, to finish things off, here's what someone who actually paid his dues, going out in a blaze of glory for pointing out Games Journalist Corruption, has to say.

I know, nobody's reading this. Well, hopefully someone at Intel is; and if you are, here's another post by that editor so horribly offensive because of her gurl parts that you publicly sided with a lynch mob. This one is on ethics, a word, to judge by their recent actions, so unfamiliar to your colleagues, that I wouldn't be surprised if the SEC levied historical fines against your company.

Comment: Re:Dear Intel (Score 1) 724

by DingerX (#48050889) Attached to: Intel Drops Gamasutra Sponsorship Over Controversial Editorials
Yeah, screw Intel. If those morons can't see that this is not a fight where they can associate their brand with either side and win, then they obviously can't make decent engineering decisions either. And it counts as taking sides to pull their ads in reaction to editorials about an internet hitmob masking misogyny behind a self-righteous insistence of "ethics". Yeah, sure, it doesn't bother these same people that games journalists get flown across the world by big games companies, put up in a hotel and presented their game with complete tech support. These guys aren't the ones vociferously complaining when their favorite reviewers give a game 9/10, even when the stupid-ass DRM code means that nobody can play it for a week after release. But, sure, some angry dude claims his ex slept with a journalist, who didn't cover the game, or some woman dares to point out the way in which games we all love make women uncomfortable, and suddenly, the press is corrupt for shoving feminism down peoples' throats.
So, screw Intel. Or, to use the language they clearly prefer, assrape and teabag those assholes.

Comment: Re:Complex question. Simple answer (Score 1) 363

by DingerX (#47840971) Attached to: Bill Gates Wants To Remake the Way History Is Taught. Should We Let Him?
Uhh... Europe? I know quite a few humanities Ph.D.s who are teaching in high schools out here.

Seriously, when I was in a public HS, we had high school teachers with Ph.D.s, in the STEM classes (well, okay, not the TE part). In the humanities, we had people with M.S. in education, and no clue what's going on. You want to know why history sucks in High School? The teachers were those students who got straight Cs in history at the university and an education degree.

Comment: Complex question. Simple answer (Score 2) 363

by DingerX (#47840547) Attached to: Bill Gates Wants To Remake the Way History Is Taught. Should We Let Him?
If you made computer science a mandatory subject, and then required that the students be taught to type in, line-by-line, the source code for libreoffice, then what was taught in the course would not be incorrect. It wouldn't be computer science either.

The counterargument here is that "Big HIstory" focuses on a grand narrative without approaching the methodologies used to construct such narratives. Historians try to teach methods, and specifically ways to approach texts and to construct arguments from them about the past; they try to get students to look at histories not as "correct" or "incorrect" (although they can also be that), but rather as someone's attempt at interpreting the data in a way relevant to us.

The fact that most High School history classes suck and feature some nutcase rattling on about pet theories and spewing lists of crap for students to memorize has nothing to do with what history teachers want, and everything to do with the fact that "Coach of a High School Sports Team" is not a full-time job, and most schools have more coaches than gym teachers. So they gotta teach something, and that education degree means they can teach whatever they want; a Ph.D. in history is not so flexible, and (thanks to union rules) costs cash-strapped schools more money to hire.

Comment: Re:Wait until SP1/SP2 before buying ? (Score 1) 304

They don't do SPs any more. Calling them "Mandatory Updates" allows them to get around any promises they made regarding SPs. Oh yeah, and this update? I'm not affected, since my machine is still unable to install the mandatory update.
WTG Microsoft. You should be glad that platforms are not part of your core mission.

Comment: Re:Wha? (Score 1) 204

by DingerX (#47437909) Attached to: New Microsoft CEO Vows To Shake Up Corporate Culture
Yeah, "Flatten the structure" means, at some level, have fewer bosses responsible for more employees. "Increasing communication" means having more bosses responsible for fewer employees. Doing both together means firing the people the CEO's entourage doesn't like.

reduce time it takes to get things done by having fewer people involved in each decision; = fire people.

quantify outcomes for products and use that data to predict future trends; =If it doesn't sell in the first quarter, kill it. Predict the market by abandoning lethargic products and jumping on the winner. You know, like how the massive Kinect 1.0 sales led to the dominance of the XBone. On the other side, when PlaysForSure fails, replace it with the Zune Store, when that fails, replace it with the next. Then fire the whole team, except for the useless ones. Put them on the next iteration of Windows Phone.

and increasing investment for employee training and development. =hire more of the consultants who write buzzkill press releases. Note it didn't say "increase our emphasis on employee training and development" or "find new ways to enrich our employees' skills and competencies", but rather "increasing investment for" -- "buy new things with this ostensible goal".

Comment: Re:It true !!!! (Score 1) 711

by DingerX (#47159165) Attached to: Apple Says Many Users 'Bought an Android Phone By Mistake'
Context? Nobody watches in context. If he makes two "light digs" at Android, that's your story. Apple just went from the "industry leader", telling people what they want, to the "industry reactor", telling them what they don't want. It doesn't matter whether it's only a few seconds of a keynote, or whether it's true or not, it fits the narrative.

Master your own narrative or be a victim of other's. Isn't that the lesson here?

I know, you can't hear me over the thumping base of your Beats headphones.

Comment: If by "middle of the pack" you mean "back" (Score 1) 390

by DingerX (#46118789) Attached to: IE Drops To Single-Digit Market Share
You know, if you look at their performance numbers, as well as those for reliability, standards compliance and memory footprint, they come in second-to-last, with Opera last; of course, when you compare IE to the chromium-based Opera Next, and not plain Opera, then IE still is 2x worse than the others.

Comment: Interface also sucks on a touch screen (Score 2) 513

by DingerX (#46026941) Attached to: HP Brings Back Windows 7 'By Popular Demand' As Buyers Shun Windows 8
Here's what I don't get: When I work with a phone or a tablet, I usually hold the screen at a certain distance, so that all the information displayed therein is on a fixed arc of vision. When I work on a PC, I sit in front of a screen. That screen may be big and far, or small and close, but, generally, it occupies more of my vision than a mobile screen does. It is therefore more tiring to scan items displayed all over the screen, which is why interface design (before Windows 8 screwed things up) put list-information and menus in part of the screen. To spray it across the whole screen is fatiguing. But Microsoft never understood that people have screens that are physical sizes and not fixed arrays of pixels. Hell, Windows 8.1 gives me a great choice on my 13.3" full-HD touchscreen: either have Windows do a crappy scaling job to make the screen look like a blurry 720p screen, or render everything properly, but at a resolution where the interface's touch points are smaller than the accuracy of anyone's fingers.

Windows 8.1 has some great things: it's really fast, for one. But Metro sucks, the touch-screen implementation sucks, and all that useless corporate "change for change's sake" sucks. Building software is different from selling clothes (or building hardware). Interfaces don't have "fashions", and retraining operators every three years makes your product less relevant than having them be dependent on your idiom since forever. Just ask Adobe.

Comment: Re:Have you seen the PCs they're selling these day (Score 1) 564

by DingerX (#45921785) Attached to: PC Shipments In 2013 See the Worst Yearly Decline In History
Speaking as someone who just bought a Haswell convertible, the only problem is Windows 8. I've got a touchscreen convertible with an SSD and eight hours of battery life, and I don't want that horrible abortion of an OS.

Okay, it turns out that you're right. I don't understand the convertibles thing either. Why would you want to do that with Windows? The best, by far coolest, reason I've found is that I can have a laptop where the keyboard isn't attached to the screen, so I don't kill my back, and the screen can be put in profile mode, so I can work on full pages. Good grief, this fad is the sorriest excuse for something hip since the baby boomers started the SUV craze ("Finally, a car I don't have to lean down to enter").

Yes, for a Tablet, I use a Tablet (and with a 7.7" AMOLED screen, like they used to make back in the old days); for a desktop, I use a desktop (with a Model -May God Continue to Bless America- M keyboard, and an embarassment of screens. But for something portable, I've got this convertible monstrosity.


Well, a low-velocity body-computer bag-ground impact wiped out my Windows 7 netbook. That's why I buy 'em cheap. And, Windows 8 wiped out any cheap Windows 7 netbooks. That's why the drop off. Sure, I HAD to buy a portable computer. Otherwise, why the hell would I spend money on that abomination unto the Lord known as Windows 8 (or 8.1 -- "8+ iterations and we still haven't figured out that pixels don't correspond directly to use visibility").
