Cool Cash card confusion – News – Manchester Evening News

“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.” – Tina Farrell

I find this hilarious.
People are unable to work with negatives probably because they are not exposed to them that much in reality.
The concept of zero was only thought up much later than basic numbers and negative numbers later still.
In the everyday use of mathematics negative numbers have very little relevance.
Only in temperature are negatives used extensively.
In finance you talk about reducing your debt rather than increasing your balance, even though debt is a negative amount.
And in the UK, where temperatures are very rarely negative, it is perhaps excusable for those with little education in maths, the person quoted did not have a 16+ certification in maths, to have a lack of understanding of negatives, as they have little bearing on their everyday lives.

But even so, it made me giggle like a little girl when I read the above quote.
How people can be so wrong but at the same time totally convinced of their fallacious position.

Ok. I like Leopard on the whole, but here are my issues as per one day of use;

• Firewall is just plain stupid: On installation it turns off ALL your previous security settings. And, here is my problem, hides the ones that are configured. I selected “Set access for specific services and applications” as there are some that I want to use. [Such as IM and iTunes etc].
  But where is the ability to set what protocol and range of ports an application can communicate on that existed in 10.4? This has been removed. For the casual user who does not know about ssh, vnc and port forwarding etc. this is great. It looks simple. But it’s simplicity is its failing. I want more transparency and control of my security settings.
• Spaces not quite good enough: Don’t get me wrong. I am loving spaces. I keep my cli windows and vnc clients running in a space separate to my browsers and yet another for email and IM. Fantastic. BUT I would also like; a different desktop image for each space to make them easily visually identifiable, the ability to have different sets of desktop icons to be able to collate information specific just to each space and the ability to navigate spaces using gestures [command + (move mouse to right of screen) would be good way to navigate]. Overall a really nice feature, but not up to Apples previous standards of innovation.
• Stacks hides content: This is another little annoyance with a cool new feature. I have a ton of applications and
  when I click on the Applications stacks all the applications appear in a grid. Good. But then you see a little icon in the bottom right saying “4 more in finder”. WTF? Why can’t I navigate within a stack grid to see ALL the contents of a stack? Why am I forced to exit the stack into finder just to find those hidden applications. This is just an annoyance for me, but I can see it being very limiting for others. How many documents do you normally have in your documents folder? Better just open it straight in finder and forget about using stacks. I can see how useful it is for a download folder where you only really care about the last few downloads [sort by date added] but for a folder with a lot of content where you are not sure what you want it is a bit pointless. Just having scroll arrows on the grid format would have made this feature more usable.
• Network drive connectivity is counterintuitive: A big claim. It is actually a lot more integrated and easier to connect to a network drive. But for those who want to connect as a different user it is counterintuitive.
  In 10.4 you would go to finder, select “GO | NETWORK” or ctrl + K, and then select the target networked computer and then you were presented with an option to connect as a particular user for that target computer. Great. makes sense, even if there are a lot of clicks.
  In 10.5 you go to finder, select “GO | NETWORK” or ctrl + K, and then select the target networked computer and then … It connects to the target computer as your login on this computer!! This means that if you do not have login permissions on the target computer as the present user you are presented with an empty screen. You then have to select the target computer in finder, which should now be in the places section, and then click “connect as” in the folder pane.
  So a simple and logical process has been simplified for those people who keep the same login information across all their machines.
  For the rest of us we just have to put up with a two step process, instead of the old one step process, to connect to a remote drive.
• Interface unprovements: The new dock looks nice. Until you open an application. The active application notification is an annoying out-of-place looking blue led. I can’t place it, but it just does not look right to me. It does not seem to fit with the whole new 3D look. The menu bar is also a little strange. I am loving the opaque effect, it looks great, but what happened to the rounded edges??? The reason you know it is definitely Apple and not some skin for windoze is the rounded edges, and wasted screen real estate, on the menu bar. I would have preferred if they had rounded the bottom edge as well and then had the desktop background visible plainly behind it. Yes trifling, but then I have covered the few main annoyances already.

All in all Leopard is pretty good. As I use Firefox and Thunderbird I have not looked into the improvements in Safari and Mail.app, and as most the people I know use Windoze messaging I have not played with iChat either.
But it is not up to the high standard Apple set with 10.4, which was a killer release, and they need to go back and rethink some of their decisions on things.
I know that in reality Apple need only be slightly better than Microsoft to keep winning accolades, but I feel they should be competing with themselves as Vista has proven a total fustercluck and competing with it does not take enough effort on Apples part.

Engadget
Anil Dash

What is wrong with companies having a sophomoric dig at each other.
I mean come on.

Lighten up.

But, let me throw my oar in to the ridiculous heated debate.

A search on Flickr for BSOD gives the following;

We found 1,093 results for photos tagged with bsod.

Whereas for kernal panic you get;

We found 25 results for photos tagged with kernal and panic.

Now doing a little math, and assuming Kernal Panic refers only to OS X, amongst other assumptions, Apple would have only 0.25 % of the OS market. [Of course this is a totally facetious example.]

Now I agree that OS X has ‘issues’ but stability is not one of them.

All Apple has to do is keep slightly better than the main rival.
And that seems to be all they are doing.
[Although MS has made is somewhat easy with the total fustercluck that is Vista]

I would like to see a lot more innovation in OS X. [leopard did not have the wow-factor.]
I would also like to see some stability and usability in Windows. [One word. Vista.]

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: This made me cry

I read some anime blogs and one a few weeks ago mentioned that they did not believe that kids of the future, as shown in the anime Denno Coil, could be as integrated with technology at such an early age.

They were skeptical about a child’s ability to integrate the advanced AR technology into their daily lives.

This video on FSJ proves this skepticism to be totally off-base.
Just as I can do virtually anything with a computer, but my parents generation can not, this trend will no doubt continue into the future as new technologies emerge.

By the time the baby in the video is 18 I doubt he will find multi-touch, pervasive communication and computing devices unusual or even special.
He will wonder what all the fuss is about the iPhone.
He will grow up in that world.

The one aspect of Denno Coil that I do find off-base is the tech-savvy nature of the grandmother, Megabaa.
My grandparents, who are about the same age as her, can not even use a DVD player, even though they totally mastered the VCR in the early ’80s.
Will seniors be able to keep up, as shown in Denno Coil, with the rapidly changing face of technology? I think this is unlikely.

But I hope to prove this wrong myself.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Georgia clues to human origins

This made me laugh at the irony.

What are they going to teach their children now?
That some mystical bogeyman in the sky put the fossils of our antecedents there to test the faithful?

Better not say that as I am sure that is what they will do!

BBC NEWS | Health | Women ‘choosier’ over partners

In some research that should win them an ig noble prize some scientists have discovered that men are primarily attracted to women on their looks whereas women are interested primarily in cash and security.

The first thing I thought was “like, duh”.
I often complain that the sciences are underfunded in the UK and then some scientist spends years proving what was already known and pretty obvious and makes my initial complaints seem stupid.

Sigh.

Manga Mania – WSJ.com

The article actually does have a point in that perhaps Anime and Manga are not a good idea for PR for Japans tourist industry.
But they get the reason completely bass ackwards.

The issue is one of perception of the content and not the content itself, and the prejudice of most western individuals towards the Manga and Anime media.
The article itself highlights this prejudiced perception in the following except;

Perhaps the biggest problem is the highly sexualized nature of the form

I would hardly call Yotsuba&! highly sexualized.

Manga and Anime are just forms of media.
It is like saying that all western movies are highly sexualized because some movies are pornography.
It doesn’t make any sense.

The reason we in the west focus so much on the minority of Manga and Anime that is highly sexualized is due to the history of comics and animation in the west.

Originally Comics and Animation in the west was just the same as in Japan today. They were edgy, dark and sometimes had adult themes. But then the censorship efforts of the 1950s took their affect and effectively neutered comics and animation until the 1980s. [Even though some underground comic artists and writers continued to write small distribution publications in spite of the restrictions. Some were even fined or jailed for their attempt at creative expression.]

Due to decades of censorship, most people in the west associate comics and animation with fluffy childhood innocence and not with any adult themes.
Thus the breadth of content shown in Manga and Anime, ranging from fluffy childhood stuff to hard core pronography and grotesque horror, passing through sitcoms, dramas and action thrillers, just flies over the heads of most westerners who have put comics and animation into a very small narrow box.

I think that if the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the JNTO, push the breadth and variety of Anime and Manga, and not just the familiar suspects popular in the west, they might be able to turn the prejudice around, and generate a more diverse interest in Japan.

I hope this happens.

But until that time we will have to put up with articles that get it (almost) completely wrong.

No. Not the lameass movie but a little bit of soul bearing on why my brilliant dot com idea, geekmeets, amounted to less than a hill of beans.
It has taken nine months before I could even begin to write this and thinking about it still makes me a little depressed.

The plain and simple truth is I took on far too much at a time when I was not mentally prepared for it and, of course, like a house of cards it all fell down.

I felt for some months after I put Geekmeets on permanent hiatus that I had let down those who found the idea intriguing and were actively cheering me on from the sidelines. But I no longer feel that way.
The only person I really let down was myself, and the only person who I need to truly reconcile with is also myself. [I just wish I would return my calls.]

Geekmeets was, and still is, a great idea, and I may still get around to working on it again.
But until that time I will live as a happy drone, developing feverishly away in Java.

So I sincerely apologize if anyone feels I have pushed them away because of this, a common thing I tend to do when depressed about something.

[Perhaps after this net-catharsis I can now get back to blogging and net-socializing normally...?]

Machinist: Tech Blog, Tech News, Technology Articles – Salon

I really think Nintendo have got it all thought out.
Their game plan is inspired.

They are taking commercial game systems back to their family and friends roots, away for the hard core nerds and fragmasters that dominated gaming in the last decade.

I remember in the late 70s, the family all surrounding Pong and playing against each other. An almost Utopian childhood memory.
Although games originated in the nerd infested computer labs of US universities in the early 70s, they were not popular or well known.
To become accepted computer based games had to become a social and family event to be able to compete with traditional board games.
[Which were derisively called bored games by the gaming community of the day]

Games systems moved further and further from this initial ideal as they became accepted and mainstream.
They reverted to the geeky and cliquey image of the PDP11 based university gaming geeks of the early 70s.

But Nintendo have changed all that, and this

make health fun

idea is inspired.

It has been tried before, but the Wii is probably the first time the idea might actually have a chance.
[I for one have a sore right arm from playing Wii sports... What will the Wii Fit do to me???]