Posts by MikeG

Another reason why Bing won't be #1

Well, here's another reason Bing will never reach #1: three or four years ago I got fed up with badly-constructed search spiders consuming my bandwidth and blocked the whole damn lot apart from Google. And I know a good many admins of reasonably popular sites who've done the same thing.... so good luck, Microsoft!

Hah!

"Mastering The Internet" sounds like the title of an elementary Further Education IT course. Of course, many in the government could benefit greatly from such a course, given their fatuous pronouncements on Internet matters...

Hah

PI's pronouncements about Google always make me laugh, since as any fule kno, Simon Davies works as a consultant for certain rivals of Google ;)

Oh that dratted solid booster

According to NASA the solid booster will also cause vibrations up to 0.5 G. They were talking about some Heath Robinson system of a tonne of moving weights to counteract it.

@RW

Correct - the IWF has NO legal powers whatsoever; it merely compiles its secret blacklist, and it is entirely up to ISPs whether or not they implement the blacklist. The screwups are entirely due to the usual cack-handed monkeys employed by ISPs. And it is to your ISP that you should direct any complaints about censorship.

Not completely surprising

I blocked Cuil's "Twiceler" spider with htaccess after it repeatedly ignored my site's robots.txt (which only allows Googlebot) and spidered everything it could to the tune of 1GB of data... I've wondered how many other site owners have had to do the same.

Silver lining

Well, it's not all bad - it's put a temporary stopper on the incessant Wiki messing by anonymous UK dingbats :)

@JonB

Yes - some variant of the "ejection capsules" which were designed for aircrew ejection at supersonic speed/high altitude... though travelling for any time in one of those capsules would be a claustrophobic experience.

Opera

One of the 3.6% Opera users here, though I do use Firefox occasionally for the sake of a couple of plugins. As for IE 7, I only ever use it for a single solitary website whose Shockwave content just won't play nice with either Opera or Firefox.

The Reg stats made me take a look at the stats for a little website I run that averages around 12,000 unique visitors a month, and I found we'd had 53.3% Firefox, 31.5% IE, and 5.3% Safari (what?)...

Biometrics? Hah!

Biometrics - apart from fingerprints, which I don't think are included under that heading - are ridiculously inaccurate and hilariously reminiscent of the 19th century Bertillon System (look it up on Wiki) which had endless false positives and was eventually ditched in favour of fingerprints. The only people who stand to benefit from this crap are the fortunate contractors; someone really needs to dig into their links to Labour, because this absolutely stinks of plain brown envelopes and big backhanders.

Not "hacking" as such

Yahoo email has a password retrieval service in case you forget your password, which asks you a secret question like "What is your pet's name" - and supposedly her secret question was "What is your ZIP code". Durrr.

@Jon

You're thinking of barrage ballons. Anti-submarine blimps were used in WWII for search and rescue missions, anti-sub patrols, and escorting convoys. Their big advantage was that they could stay aloft for 60 hours.

Not a laptop!

The story appears to have become mangled somewhere along the line - seems it was just a hard drive that was sold. It doesn't come as much of a surprise to those of us unfortunate to live in the Charnwood area, given our council's inability to do anything correctly.

The story's on http://www.loughboroughecho.net

Only 1 Gig?

Vista with only 1 Gig of memory? Oh, that'll be fun, I don't think.