Posts by Shakje

Not wanting to vote Lab or Tory is one thing

But a vote for UKIP is a vote for stupidity. If you're pissed off at the integrity of the current parties, it might be worth looking through the history of UKIP to see how squeaky clean they are - never mind that their policies beggar belief. It's been shown time and time again that the EU is good for us, and that the Lisbon Treaty isn't really that big a deal. If you really don't want to vote for one of the major parties, but want to vote for someone who actually might do good things for us I'd suggest going Lib Dem. A vote for UKIP, while not as abhorrent, is as inherently useful in the long term as a vote for the BNP.

Auto-updating

You still have to go to the site to download updates, it just tells you about them on startup..

Personally I prefer Opera to any other browser.

About time.

Nothing more.

Are UK2 any good at hosting?

Assuming it's the same people who did the awful CS servers...

@Goat Jam

So you mean like UAC?

It's application side that it tells you to reboot, it's got nothing to do with Windows. If Windows suddenly enforced lots of security practices (eg Vista) people would complain, apps would stop working, and people like you would get off on slagging off the OS for doing what you want it to do.

You even fail at trying to be a leet scener by spelling it p0wned. My IQ, at last test, is 168 and I'm a 'wintard' but then that doesn't register with you does it, because you're actually stupider than a lobotomised frog. I really hope you don't actually work in IT. Just grow up.

First thought is that it looks like

A pulse rifle..

@Ed Blackshaw

I'd pay particular mention to Japan as well.

Re: BNP - UKIP and those meddling EU Commissioners

Two things.

1) If you want to protest vote why would you vote for either a racist right-wing party, or a party that has made countless mistakes and has more disreputable MPs than the SSP had?

2) The Tories want to be less centrist in Europe, and pull out of several centrist coalitions. This means that they are having to form new coalitions, but the only more right coalitions are with minority parties (who are also pretty right-wing), if they continue along this path they will probably alienate the larger countries in the EU.

I don't defend Labour, except to say that the Tories are always going to be a lot worse. David Cameron has about 3 solid policies in his entire manifesto, and snubs everyone by saying "let's play it by ear". That is all.

@Seán

Whatever your views on religion, freedom of religion is a basic right, and it's pretty obvious that China doesn't respect it. You're quite free to practice scientology even if I hate the religion and might be doing my utmost to destroy it as an organisation.

Whatever they face there's no need to be as violent as they have been. The US has interfered all over the world for countless years, it doesn't give anyone an excuse to treat the citizens like crud.

@Michael

"I want a voice controlled interface like Star Trek where I can say "computer, check the register for a story about tabs, remember them?""

Opera has voice control as standard.

Re: Threads

Just because it's specific to a library implementation doesn't make it wrong. Most of us don't choose threading models, we just use the one that the OS we're coding for lumbers us with, and all the threading support does is to standardise thread usage so that you don't have to worry about stupid different ways of doing it.

Someone mentioned the Oregon petition

lol.

This should be fun to read in a day or two then

Won't it.

Domestic cats

It looks like people saying that their domestic cats have misread, the article clearly says "like other cats" not "like all cats".

Even with...

off the shelf PCs why not just get this and use the spare grand to customise it + get a monitor?

http://www.alienware.co.uk/product_detail_pages/Area-51_x58/area-51_overview.aspx?SysCode=PC-EU-A51-X58&SubCode=SKU-DEFAULT

I'm not saying I think it's right...

but surely the people complaining about the use of expenses this way don't think this is isolated? I would of thought that it was obvious that if paying for your cable on expenses is legal, then surely there's a lot of politicians from every party doing exactly the same. Strikes me as just plain naive to assume that this is a Labour only problem, or that the Tories would do anything to change it.

However it's more than welcome to see Wacki getting done (maybe that should be Whacki from now on).

Also, the potential next Home Secretary for the list somewhere above this, I'd suggest that Ian Blair was originally in the running for it, not sure if that's changed now..

Simples

1. Domestic violence against women is bad.

2. The majority of domestic violence (let's say vast majority) results in women getting hit and not men.

3. Domestic violence against women probably has far different reasons to domestic violence against men because of cultural beliefs.

So why is this a bad thing? If anything petition for a similar survey to be done about the other way round, however don't knock them for doing something like this. Knock Waqi for being a tit instead.

What's that...

...terrorism has returned to its normal low levels pre-9/11, yet we're pouring £12b into that and no more into crimes that happen every day? Good job guys. Good job.

I really wish people would try and understand the facts...

before posting utter drivel. Firstly, can we get past the idea of all immigration being the same, there's three types, illegal, asylum and economic, the first two are slightly related, but only because if you claim asylum you're no longer illegal. Economic migration is what covers most of the Poles/Eastern Europeans etc. who come here completely legally to work, are given jobs, support our economy and build our houses. If we didn't have Poles we'd be in a real state, however most of them do in fact live in proper houses, and are packed in tight. They're paying council tax, and at the same time are providing work without the need for more housing which UK builders would probably request. Jobs are a market, and unfortunately, we've got to the stage where people have expectations about how much a job is worth (in exactly the same way that people kid themselves about being able to afford hugely expensive houses on high mortgages). If people are offering to do it cheaper, they'll get the job, it's pretty straightforward that bit. We have a minimum wage for a reason, and if you're in a paid-hourly job there's nothing saying that a company can't take better value. Maybe you should reconsider your job choice, or start making cutbacks to fit in with the market.

Asylum seekers tend to genuinely have some sort of case, however we're pretty bad at dealing with them. They're given small amounts of food tokens to look after themselves and if their request is refused they're given £50 to get out of the country and told to leave. Most first applications are refused, but the numbers drastically change after appeal (presumably when a closer look is taken at them). Here's the thing, we have a huge backlog of asylum applications (and along the way some have been lost, so some people will never know about the result of their application because the state doesn't know who they are), and so it does take an inordinate amount of time to process them, which means some people have to wait around here for 5 years until they know what to do. The asylum system desperately needs a rethink, but the number of asylum seekers per person of the existing population in the UK (ie the proportion of asylum seekers to existing residents) is actually ranked 12th in Europe, so we're hardly being flooded by asylum seekers.

Illegals are another matter completely, and the government is slowly doing better at getting rid of them, however it's still a major problem and one that will always tarnish immigration as a whole, and needs fixing at some point, the BNP are not the way to do it though.

The BNP hold disgusting and hateful points of view, however I'm quite happy to defend their right to say it, as to the people who have said that they are left-wing, this appears to be some sort of brainwashing that is applied to the inner parts of the BNP. The definition of right-wing is a party or section of people who want things to stay the same or return to a previous time, a left-wing organisation seeks constant change from the norm or what has preceeded. This clearly makes the BNP + Hitler right-wing, and the worst kind. It's generally applied to racist organisations simply because the idea of reverting to a "pure" society suggests reverting to a time before immigration has taken hold.

Re: *Yawn*

"Go on, please, please do, because I really want to counter it with the fact that many people who have enough friends to justify having parties now use YouTube as the source of the night's soundtrack...."

haha

Are you for real? If you're too much of a twat to see how wrong this is you need help, however I'll give you a little hand. People come round to mine, I stick on a CD, some people will go "oh, I like that, I'll buy it", some people will go, "oh i like that, i'll buy and download the track", and some won't care, they'll just come across to my house to listen to it. Now I already hear you saying "but YouTube isn't like that! It's free! WAH!" You see the great thing is, if I've bought a track that I like, I can find it on YouTube and point some mates at it, of which a few might buy it. Or if I've heard a track I like and I'm not sure what it's called, I can find it on YouTube and then buy it, or if I want to look for remixes, I can usually find the one I want on YouTube.

While it goes against your grain that something for free can actually have positive effects on sales, it's true, and if you opened your mind for a moment instead of reacting with utter revulsion at something you don't understand you might see that.

@Simon Brown

Ok, let's look at this one step/para at a time.

1. Two things on this. Firstly, if you didn't have the PRS money would you just stop eating and die or would you cope? I've lived on very little money, and survival isn't an issue, I'm sure it's nice having the extra cash, but I would expect you would be just fine without it. Secondly, do you honestly think you will see any of the extra money that the PRS makes from Google?

2. You're not giving permission to "improve productivity", you give permission to listen to music, that's all. If it improves work, so be it, but that's nothing to do with you, for exactly the same reason that you don't pay your landlord extra when the street is quieter than usual outside your bedroom window, letting you wake up better and be more productive in your studio. You've already asked someone to pay for the performance when the radio station paid for it. Get over the fact that you can't charge everyone who listens to your music, however much you would like to. This is the reason that the extortionate figures quoted in p2p trials are ridiculed, there's no guarantee that anyone at that workplace wants to listen to the music, or that every song played increases productivity, they might just have read a technical manual the night before. It's arrogant to assume it's because of you that the productivity has increased, which is what you are doing.

3. Where did you get the 95% figure? I would assume the majority of the number is made up by the unpaid section. That's a problem with the system, and kind of reinforces what most people are saying, that the system currently just doesn't work and needs changing. 'Google, took $5.7bn in revenues for q4 2008 and I'm supposed to give them my music for free because it's good "promotion"'. No. The issue isn't with user-uploaded music, it's with the Premium videos which have been uploaded specifically by the record companies. YouTube already pay royalties for them, the PRS is asking for more. You've spectacularly missed the point, however, for clarification - if you got a decent paying job would your landlord ask for a higher rate? Also, promotion is everything. It's what record companies spend most of their money on, because without exposure you won't make any money. If you're not making money, it's possibly because you're not any good. While it's easy enough to do, most people will not grab YouTube content, or download tracks illegally, but will, if they like it, either purchase the track as a download, or even better, order your album. If you're not making any money out of that it's not YouTube's fault, people are still buying your stuff, you're just getting shafted by the music industry, which, once again, is pretty much what people are saying already.

4. That's not a logical conclusion. YouTube already pay for the music, they're being asked for extortionately higher amounts of money. It's like making a film and using your music, then when the film studio has made huge profits on the film, asking for much more money. It's stupid.

Quite frankly, I find you arrogant and naive. Even if you're music is good I can't see you doing too well, simply because you come across as abrasive.

@Wot DaPho

Generally most things have legacy code in them, the trick is keeping the interface in one place so that when you do need to add to it, you're using the same controls/theme as everything else, and hiding what's legacy and what's not from the user. This is just sloppy :)

Oh dear

Someone found a vulnerability in a beta? Isn't that the whole point?

Applications...

Am I incredibly dense or is it really obvious that a) there will probably be a hard reset option for when the system is in an unrecoverable state and b) it's actually most useful for instantly bringing back servers that die because of ridiculously unlikely circumstances.

It's naive to criticise it for obvious things when you haven't seen it, because it's likely that the dev has already thought of it if it's that obvious. No? Presumably if you have snapshots of the system leading up to a crash and working fine, you could possibly even resume applications from a previous point in time if you wanted to?

Just out of interest...

I agree that the current government not only scares me, but disappoints me very much. I've always been a Labour supporter since I could vote, but the last 8 years have been, shall we say, "difficult". The problem is this, while it's clear that they are completely insane with power, of all the people available, I still think that big Gord has the best chance of salvaging the economy. While I wish they had a chance of getting in, the Lib Dems are, as usual, out of the picture. That leaves Cameron's blue brigade. I don't have any faith in Tory economics at all, and while it seems the Mr. Brown isn't doing particularly well at the moment, I can only imagine how exponentially worse the Tories would be. In terms of privacy, I can't see there being much difference, they'll just transfer the fear of terrorism directly to fear of immigrants, asylum seekers, and kids, and use it to their own ends. The policies they come up with are useless because they don't actually have any firm convictions, just reactions to whatever is in the Daily Mail at that particular point in time. That, for me, is even more worrying than an ID card scheme that will end up getting shelved because the public, police, and a large section of the government all hate it.

@Doug Southworth

Good for you, you're a raging idiot (does that make you mad?). I salute you for being an obnoxious twat, and since you are quite happy to stereotype the French (while totally ignoring the resistance which probably did far more than the Americans overall, even with less loss of life), I'm quite happy to blame you for the dead Iraqi and Afghan civillians, not to mention the torture of illegally held suspects. In fact, I might as well just blame you for the coalition soldiers' deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, because it's also clearly your fault the coalition went to war. That sound fair? Twat.

Also..

@Aron: I also heard Al Gore arrived in a banana shaped spaceship with Bill Clinton and Che Guevara.

@Herby: I'd entertain you if you actually read anything other than pro-Republican anti-Gore putdowns of CC theory. But you don't read the other side more than just quotes do you?

Who cares what exactly it is?

I'd say Macs were less secure. Just because the user has to auth operations (lol UAC) doesn't make it any more secure than anything else. The fact that the user expects not to be infected because of stupid fanboys mouthing off about how secure the system is, means that they are more naive and trusting when it comes to downloads.

WINDOWS HAS ITS FAULTS. But instead of trying to constantly tout how much better your overpriced system is, how about you start educating Mac users in the art of intelligent browsing so that if Macs do ever take over, at least we won't have the same number of idiot Mac users as we have idiot PC users. I'd guess that it's probably stable at about 80% in both camps.

""I quote from one of their Mac and PC commercials "I run Mac OS X so you don't have to worry about the viruses and spyware that PCs do"."

True enough, in the sense that viruses and spyware written specifically to take advantage of Windows -- anything that looks for files on Drive C, as a trivial example -- will fail to run under OS X. Therefore the malware that users of (Windows) PCs have to worry about are not the same ones that Mac OS X users do.

It's all in how you phrase it, isn't it?"

So if I get a virus on my PC I can sue can I? If that's a direct quote, him running OS X prevents me from getting a virus. Since my PC is a machine and doesn't worry about virii I'm assuming I don't need to anymore. Awesome.

Re: FOIA

You already have, it was disclosed in the government documentary entitled "Roswell High"

Anyone actually care who the MP is?

The Tories, as usual, have seen an opportunity to publicise something that sounds on the face of it, pretty straight forward. If he really thought it was terrible, he would have protested at the time and not just handed it over. OTOH if it really was by appointment, couldn't the police charge him with something and shouldn't they to add weight to their argument?

Sounds like something completely mundane, blown all out of proportion to spread blue FUD.

Seriously...

Sorry for asking a silly question, but why exactly is FF3/Chrome better than Opera? Chrome especially. The only downside I've ever found to Opera is that there are less plugins than FF, but since most of the functionality I need to get from plugins is already in Opera, this doesn't really bother me. Seriously, it's a great browser..

That doesn't mean I agree with what's happening here, it's clearly ridiculous. Might as well suggest that you don't bundle notepad/calc because there's plenty of other alternatives.

As for Apple, I wouldn't agree that an Apple PC is a PC in the same sense as any other PC. They clearly have a monopoly on shiny computers that cost stupid money and are good at about 5 things.

Re: why Linux would never suffer the same fate

Replace the chmod step with lots of annoying UAC boxes and it's the same walkthrough. Like the article says, it has to bruteforce admin passwords to spread across the network..

@R Callan

Win ME

He has a face like a squashed brick

but seems like a likeable chap, if a bit insane.

@David Wiernicki

That would be idiotic. You should just sue anyone who downloaded it for a lost sale..

Re: Victory for Liberty

On the other hand, there are more bobbies on the beat round here, and the police are genuinely nice and helpful. The real worry for me is that the actions of Ms. Wacki aren't helping people's opinions of the people that actually do a good job.

@Ashley Pomeroy

I remember Sonic 2 being harder on the GG than the MS because the first boss had bouncing cannonballs you had to jump over or duck under and you couldn't see them as well on the GG screen (they bounced out of the screen, but not on the MS). GG was good with some really good titles..

After that there was the Mega System and the Mega CD (32-bit!!!). One of my mates had a NeoGeo (his dad was rich), which was amazing. Oh and then there's the Saturn.

@Ascylto

Are you an iPhoney? :[

@EvilGav

Pretty sure the Paediatrician is urban myth inspired by the second example.

"Nick Griffin claimed the leak was good news for the extremist party because it showed its members were not "skinhead oiks". He's quite right, anyone can be an idiot racist.

While I don't condone anything the BNP believes in, I do respect their right to political freedom, and do find it sad that people can have their employment affected by their political leanings.

Also, I would imagine that quite a few of the names are fake, as it's a perfect way of calling the list into question if it ever does get leaked. I would expect that the people who are real and live at real addresses with associated e-mail addresses are quite probably members, where as any with discrepancies have been added before the leak as a security measure.

Perhaps a useful analogy

If you paid someone to build an extension on your house, and within a few months cracks started appearing down the brickwork and some bricks started to crumble maybe you'd complain to the people that built your house, if they refused to do anything about it and then you found out that several other people they'd built walls for experienced the same thing, maybe you'd be more likely to seek legal counsel. Suppose further that you found out that people had complained about it before you had the work done, and had discovered it was because they used cheap bricks.

I kow it's hardly the same, but I can see why the guy is pissed off. While there's a large number of frivolous lawsuits that make the news every day, it doesn't mean that the person filing is wrong for doing so. Bear in mind that if the guy tried to return the phone he'd probably just get another one with the same problem, and if he tried to get his money back he'd still be tied into an AT&T contract but without a phone. So it's a lose lose situation really. He's an idiot for buying a shoddy piece of kit for an extortionate sum in the first place, but I'd probably be just as pissed off if I ended up with something which is fundamentally shit.

If I bought a phone and it a) handles calls like an armless lumberjack handles logs b) is significantly slower than advertised c) starts to fall apart from structural issues, I'd be as pissed off as this guy is. Would I sue? Only if everything else had been tried first and failed.

Apple does need to learn that it can't just lie about things in adverts (which it has a record of doing) and get off scot-free, and that if they charge their customers above the odds they have to provide something that is worth that extra dosh.

@Ted Treen

Actually it depends on how you define a "similarly configured" PC. If you mean buying it from Dell or PC World, yes you're right. But that sort of defeats the purpose. If you get a PC custom built from a smaller manufacturer (ie local PC shop), do it yourself, or even just look on market sellers on eBay you will get a far better deal. As I've posted before on a seperate story (in great detail), my entire PC package comes to £800ish with accessories and OS included. The equivalent Mac system is £1700. So no, a similarly configured PC does not cost the same. The thing is, there's an option of getting a PC a lot cheaper if you don't go through a big supplier, if you get a Mac you have to pay the stupid amounts of cash on top. I'm not going to call all Mac-users idiots (in fact my brother-in-law uses all-Apple products), but if you either a) don't have 2 grand to throw about on a good system and b) want to play games on your computer, you need a PC. Which is why I have a PC.

As for MP3 players, I bought an iRiver H140 a few years ago, it has better sound quality, better storage for the price (did at the time) and better featuresets than the equivalent iPod, and it looks nice as well.

Phones, I have an N95 8Gb, which, although doesn't have the best interface in the world, I use the 5 megapixel camera regularly, enjoy the fact that I have MMS, and generally also enjoy 3.5G + WiFi internet access. As I also play chess, I have Shredder mobile running happily on it, which I'm pretty sure doesn't work for the iPhone. Also, I assume that Route66 doesn't work for the iPhone either. If I'm wrong I'm quite happy to forget I ever said the above.

Generally I just prefer a better solution to something shiny and expensive. But that's just me.