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Comment Re:Anthropometrics (Score 2) 819

I'm 5'11" and there is plenty of room in Economy plus. If you're a frequent flyer you can get Economy Plus for free when you book a ticket on United, I assume Delta is the same for their frequent flyers.

I'm 1.95m (6'5" for Americans) and once had to fly Austrian Airlines transatlantic. They have 31 or even 30" seat spacing, the seats were so cramped I had to sit with my legs angled out sideways, and to shift them from the right to the left had to lift them up, move across, and drop them down again (bit hard to explain in text form). For eight hours.

Result: I've asked our travel people to never, ever book me on an Austrian flight again. Well, that and Hello Kitty Airways.

So they may have saved a few dollars by squashing in some extra seats, but they've permanently lost a passenger who does quite a bit of flying to Austria. I don't know how many others they've lost this way...

Comment Re:coordinated work (Score 1) 146

Lots of construction work is only safe to do when the crew is working together. [...] It's not just a union thing.

It's certainly a something thing. Here's a conversation I had with a construction worker in NY:

Me: Hi, how's it going.

Construction worker: I'm having my lunch [As in: Go away].

Me: Mind if I grab a seat? [There wasn't any other seating, this being the point of the attempted conversation]

Construction worker: CAN'T YOU SEE I'M HAVING MY LUNCH?

I just assumed it was some kind of union thing, they're being paid to eat but not anything else, so if I want to ask whether I can grab a seat I have to do it during paid work hours.

Comment Re:Switched double speed half capacity, realistic? (Score 2) 316

From TFA

PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) or low-resistance helium technology was employed.

They actually use a variant of PMR that's based on magnetic monopoles. The reason why they're "shipping only to select enterprise clients" is because there's a limited supply of those, looted by the Red Army from a secret Nazi lab in 1945 and only recently rediscovered in former NKVD archives in a bunker outside Moscow.

Not a lot of people know that...

Comment This should read "Old Windows Coming in September" (Score 1) 251

From TFA

"Threshold" is expected to include a number of new features that are aimed at continuing to improve Windows' usability on nontouch devices and by those using mice and keyboards alongside touch.

What this backwards statement is actually saying is

"Threshold" is expected to reinstate a number of standard Windows features that were removed/crippled in order to impair Windows' usability on nontouch devices, once again making it usable by those using mice and keyboards.

.

I expect the packaging to be a Windows 7 box with a "9" sticker strategically pasted over the "7".

Comment Re:I hope not (Score 1) 511

It was just coming into favour when I left. When I was around it was Modula-2 and Eiffel (for OOP) at University.

Given that Eiffel was created by Satan himself to torture lost souls, I can't see how Java could be worse. The language itself was quite nice and had some good ideas, but the programming/development environment was appalling, I'd rather spend eternity in the company of Beelzebub and all his hellish instruments of death than have to develop code using those tools again.

Comment Re:Reputation (Score 1) 212

This is what happens when a customer doesn't want to own the system they are buying. Like a lot of places they probably had MBAs at the top who took the whole "not our core competency" thing too far. Yet again. Sure hire a vendor or vendors. But Own The Fucking System. Don't just let the vendors do what they want. It is a licence to push out shit with no oversight. I don't know for certain that this was the case here but that would be my guess.

That's not a silver bullet. There's a government IT project running in Australia where they decided to do exactly that, Own The Fucking System. You now have a government department with this huge tumor growing out the side of it that develops, updates, and maintains their IT project. Since govt.departments aren't set up to run IT development work, it's ended up as an antipattern for everything you can do wrong in a project of this nature. There's way, way too much to type in here, but given the level of fail I'm sure one or more people will write books about it at some point.

Comment Re: Uber is quite retarded (Score 1) 341

Hahaha, you make it sound as if "being licensed" has some implication of advanced skill.

Licensing implies some minimal level of quality control. People in western Europe, and most parts of the US, are used to a relatively good quality of taxi transport that comes about from decades of regulation. Now before you complain about how bad things are in your home city, try catching a taxi in St.Petersburg, or Bucharest, or Tirana (in St.Petersburg I'd get a marshrutka which is shared with lots of others or a taxi from a hotel, in Bucharest I'd get in a car driven for a fee by a friend's cousin's brother, and don't even ask about Tirana). Even cities like Budapest a decade ago were still the wild west until they introduced stricter regulation of drivers, now it's almost at the level of somewhere like New York, although hailing a cab on the street is still a no-no (you phone for it and order one).

So before you advocate a free-for-all, remember that the current situation only exists specifically because there isn't a free-for-all.

Comment Re:+1 for this Post (Score 1) 427

Linksys hardware is crappy, unfortunately. Also, it is debatable if any hardware made by a US company [...]

Linksys hardware isn't made in the US, it's designed and made by Hsu Chien Lucky Golden Noodle Manufacturing Co. in Taiwan (OK, that's not quite the name, it's actually Gemtek in Hsinchu, Taiwan, all Linksys/Cisco/Belkin/whatever do is put their brand on it and resell it). Still, it's crappy hardware, and any firmware they bundle is an instant legacy product the minute it ships, the only way to get newer firmware is to buy a more recent product. They should stick to noodles...

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