Month: February 2012

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“Fire”-ing on a Few More Cylinders

Just added an Android app to my Kindle Fire to enable access to 25GB of Skydrive storage I’ve barely touched. Who really needs all that much local storage on a tablet, anyway? If one were to need desktop/notebook levels of local storage on such a thing, that’d seem to indicate either

1. a need to do desktop/notebook kinds of tasks or
2. the need for a tablet more like this, or even this in order to… do desktop/notebook kinds of tasks.

Note: the link to TabletKiosk’s Sahara tablets at the article the second link above points to is malformed. Use the link provided in the preceding sentence if you want to check it out.

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Impending Doom

Every day, I see evidence that those in our society who make their living by the written word are increasingly influencing the remaining few who bother to read at all with illiterate pronouncements, accelerating the slide into nonsense. Case in point (just one of many over the last few days alone):

“Clearly, the tablet and mobile worlds have begun to impact the desktop OS in a major way. This begs the question: Can the desktop survive?”

Methinks the writer has no idea what a petitio principii fallacy is.

Beg the question=”take for granted without basis or justification”

I just hate it when “mass man” semi-literacy (or should I say “cultural illiteracy”?–w/a tip o’ the tam to E.D. Hirsch, Jr.) debases writing this way. But that’s what happens when supposedly literate people have been trained–certainly not educated–via less than literate organs such as pubschools, contemporary “higher ed” and the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind. Ah, well, I suppose it’s just one more evidence of society’s slide into a Dark Age, when more and more people don’t even know much about what they don’t know… or care. And it is, of course, this increasingly self-enstupiated, self-deluded, autolobotomized group that seems to be guiding the course of our society. But then of course,

“In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”

Continue reading “Impending Doom”

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It’s a Problem…

How do “bottomless cups of coffee” work, anyway? I mean, if they’re bottomless, how could they be cups, and how could they hold coffee?

Somebody wasn’t thinking when they made that one up.

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Whitney Houston Died for the Grammys…

Color me unconcerned, unsurprised and untouched. Drugs and alcohol were such a large part of the celeb’ Houston life that this was a foregone conclusion. In fact, every time I heard news indicating she was still alive, I was a tad surprised.

The “Manufactured Music Industry”‘s hagiography of this pathetic celebrity’s self-waste of a life and talent is, frankly, revolting. The “Princess Di Phenomenon”? (That was another outpouring that gagged me–nearly as much as the Elvis and Michael Jackson crap.)

Just let it go.

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Ignorant, Stupid or Just Plain Liars?

Over and over and over again, the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind utters completely false (or torturously-deniable?) statements simply because the lies agree with the Hivemind narrative on a topic. The example that spurred this particular gripe?

“…hydrofracking, a relatively new process of extracting natural gas by breaking up rock with pressurized water…”

See? It all depends on what the writer can later claim was meant by “relatively new”. In terms of the typical lifespan of Americans or the average readership/audience of Hivemind organs, “relatively recent” is an outright lie, since it’s been a commonplace oil-and-gas-field technique for over 60 years, just another tool in the toolbag of oil and gas developers. Heck, I* can recall conversations on the topic with friends, acquaintances and clients in the oil industry 30 years ago, myself.

Now, of course the lying scumbags (I almost typoed “scumbarfs” *heh*) in the Hivemind pushing this “relatively recent” meme can always say they mean relatively new in human history (or geological time frames or whatever) in order to deny it’s a lie, but then they’ll just lie about something else, as well.

“Relatively new process” MHWA…

But hey. This sort of easily refuted lie is just common fare with the Hivemind, and the illiterate, aliterate, self-lobotomized sheeple just eat this toxic waste up with a spoon and then say, “Please, may I have more?”

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Richelieu Is Running the “Feddle Gummint Bureaucrappy”

…and likely your local city government as well.

“Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.” —Cardinal Richelieu

Just search for “too many laws” (don’t use Google unless you want your searches used against you… just sayin’. Use scroogle.org or some other proxied search engine). A moment’s thought pre-search will avert any surprise at what you turn up. *heh*

Anarcho-tyranny*, much?

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Say What?

I don’t know exactly what it says that my only downloads on Tuesday were Holst’s “The Planets” (performances by an orchestra I’d not heard before) and the Kama Sutra (Kindle format, ‘cos I can’t locate my hardcopy).

Oh, wait. I forgot Knox’s Irregulars, borrowed from the Kindle Library.

Reaching for eclecticism, O I guess. (I loves me some typos in the morning, I does indeedy.)

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Macwarz Redux: Android vs. iOS

So-called “smart phones” and tablets are just another area of computing, one where, once again, Apple fanboiz-and-gurlz (in and out of the Hivemind) claim all kinds of Apple magic. In one area, the vaunted (and debatable) OS stability area, once again reality takes a bite out of the Apple. As of last June, iOS and Android reached a more-or-less parity of distribution among users, despite the phenomenal sales record of the iPhad (15 million in 2011, according to industry figures, still not quite as many as Apple had projected, but phenomenal). I haven’t find any current estimates, but the 6 million, or thereabouts, Kindle Fire’s sold in Q4 of 2011 (yeah, Xmas! *heh*) may have twitched the ratio a tad.

But, stability? Pretty much parity.

Apple’s iOS is the more misbehaved mobile OS, according to Crittercism crash reports from November and December.

Of course, that’s only part of the story. There are a lot of Android and iOS devices in users’ hands, and the various devices run different versions of the OSes. A wee tad more depth shows,

Apple’s iOS 5.0.1 was the most crash-inclined version of all, accounting for 28.64 percent of crashes between Dec. 1 and Dec. 15. iOS 4.2.10 accounted for 12.64 percent, iOS 4.3.3 for 10.66 percent and iOS 4.3.5 for 8.9 percent.

Among Apple devices, the great majority of crashes were logged on iPhones—74.41 percent—followed by the iPod touch, at 14.87 percent, and the iPad, at 10.72.

The most crash-prone version of Android was version 2.3.3, with a 3.86 percent share of the iOS/Android crash pie. Looking at only Android crashes, version 2.3.3 accounted for just shy of one-fourth of all Android crashes, followed by 2.3.4 with also nearly a quarter of the Android-only pie.

With so many different iterations of OS versions out and about, it’s really something of a wonder that there aren’t more application-caused crashes.

Still, no kudos for stability to Apple over Android, though with The Monolith Apple Empire vs. the Fragmented Android Gaggle, a parity of user base numbers isn’t translating into a perceived parity between the platforms. If even one major player differentiates itself from Apple in multiple areas–so-called “smart phone” and tablet both, say–and offers content and user experience that’s even comparable, at more affordable pricing, Apple’s share of this area of computing would go in the direction it did in the desktop area when it priced itself down to 5% of the total PC market there.

It’ll be interesting to watch, although since I have alternatives that work well for me now, I don’t expect it will impact me all that much.

Of course, readers here know I regularly use various versions of Windows, Linux, BSD and now Amazon’s modded Android (on the Kindle Fire). We run a place that’s pretty much free of Apple’s Evil Empire* here. 🙂

Continue reading “Macwarz Redux: Android vs. iOS”