Posts by J 3

Heh

They should have employed financial criminals (aka Brazilian bankers), then their data would be safe.

Simple

Just don't hold it the right way.

With love

SJ

(do I put the joke or the eveil Jobs icon now...? Aw chucks, evil Jobs it is)

because of the revolutionary new features like a flash

"because of the revolutionary new features like a flash"

Ah, sarcasm. Always nice and appropriate.

Lazy much?

Come on!? I'm reading this, and thinking "yeah, nice description of the package management ease of use, and the graphical goodness of it".

Then it suddenly becomes yet another stupid lazy Internet tutorial like the multitudes that you can find on Google, full of command line stuff, because it's easier to write. Aren't they paying the reviewers enough to take a few screen shots and add them to the text, really? I know, describing "click here", "then click there", "then search" (and adding all the accompanying screen shots) is boring and all that, but someone has got to do it.

Teach them to do it the NEWBIE way first, FFS. Then, later, when they are comfortable with the whole concept, MAYBE then introduce them to the command line tools. If there is no alternative.

(Disclaimer: I myself work on the Linux command line all day long -- except for the web browsing parts and the like, of course -- and I love its boundless power compared to graphical tools for us running scientific applications. So it's not a case of being bitter about the command line at all. It's just that if most users out there had ever seen something like Synaptic in action, wiping the floor with Windows and OS X software installation routines, they would never believe. And you continue not to show them.)

Rhythmbox

"Rhythmbox can be slow on older hardware"

Well, let me qualify that a little bit. On my 8 year or so old hardware (1.8 GHz single core, with 1 GB RAM) running Kubuntu 10.04, Rhythmbox runs very well. So if you have anything like that or better, fret not.

Actually, I started using Rhythmbox because Amarok started being a resource hog sometime ago (I don't know whether they have fixed that later, but I haven't gone back to check). On that hardware, Amarok would take forever to start, and then stutter during playback anytime there was a little bit of harder work by the CPU. That very rarely, if ever, happens with Rhythmbox.

Will see...

TB 3 is broken for me, for some reason. I get an error message (below) and it does not go from there.

In TB 2.x, I get an error message when connecting to my IMAP inbox: "The current command did not succeed. The mail server responded: EXPUNGE Invalid or nonexistent document." But it happens once only, and then I just click on the "Get Mail" button again and it works normally, retrieving the messages. The error only shows up once after starting the app. This error appeared one day when I was trying out Evolution (crappy). So I went back to TB... and the error was there. I guess Evolution changed something in the server, is that possible? I Googled that message a few times, no success.

TB 3 gives the same error *every time* I click on "Get Mail" and then proceeds to not getting the mail... I changed every option I could find that seemed remotely relevant, but nothing.

Will try 3.1 tonight and keep my fingers crossed. Maybe I won't be able to use it anyway, since my 8 year old home computer has only 1 GB of RAM to begin with. It's running Kubuntu, but still...

Hopefully...

I've forced myself to use Opera exclusively for the past 2 or 3 weeks. It was quite pleasant in some respects, I really want to keep using it, but also annoying in others (running 10.53 Linux beta on Ubuntu 10.4 and 9.10). I hope it gets better with the new version. There are a few showstoppers.

It's a very geeky browser. Tons of options, menus, sub-menus, etc. etc.. Which I liked, because I'm of a geeky persuasion (always preferred KDE for example, since it's so much more option rich than GNOME, or used to be before KDE4...). I quite like the Speed Dial thing, too. And it does feel quite faster than FF on my 8-year old home computer.

The problems? First, why the hell do the imported (from FF) bookmarks lose their original order and become alphabetical? That is quite stupid. Of course, after looking for the bookmarks two or three times you get used to the new position, but the old places, after years, are quite automatic, and should not be messed with. I looked for any option that tells how to order the bookmarks, but found none. Also, the bookmark layout is terrible to navigate, for some reason.

Second, it mangles several pages. It seems to have a problem with some CSS, I suspect. Those pages display fine on FF. E.g. some Yahoo News pages get all the content squished in a narrow vertical strip of some 50 px or so. Others, like the local Weather.com page gets elements all over the place, out of alignment. Most other pages look fine.

Third, the auto-completion in form text fields is junk compared to FF. It only remembers the few default ones you set explicitly in some configuration tab. But I have several email addresses, for example. I don't want it to always complete with that one only.

Fourth, the user/password management is flaky. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Depends on the site, it seems. I couldn't figure it out. But for El Reg for example I am sure I asked for it to remember the details, but it never fills them.

Fifth, it does not recognize the Java plugin on pages, although it sees it is installed (in the content details configuration tab).

I don't know if there is a "bug" report system for Opera where I could report these things. I never bothered to look because I am not submitting anything to something that is not FOSS.

Viscosity wrong?

"NCAR researchers warn that the simulated dye in the water has the same viscosity of water"

Ah. Forget about it, then. I don't know why they even bothered running it like that.

I suspect penguins will be unaffected nonetheless.

For him, it was a new toy

Hey, at least *someone* understands the iPad's raison d'etre. Now who's the most intelligent species, huh?

Sunday and Utah

Of course, Sunday. They cleanse their souls in the morning, and then need something to justify going to church again next week!

Anyway, Utah? Hyper-moralistic Mormon-land Utah? Why doesn't that surprise me?

RAM

Why don't these manufacturers include 2 GB instead of 1 GB of RAM, I wonder? Memory is dirt cheap nowadays. When I bought my Eee 1000HE a year and a half ago I also bought a 2 GB RAM module for it -- for the fortune of $15 -- and now I have a spare 1 GB module laying around somewhere. I'm sure the manufacturers can get much better pricing. And considering RAM is usually quite a critical component for speed and general responsiveness feeling, why not do it?

Why did it take so long?

Well, probably it didn't really, who knows.

But I don't buy this "small target" logic. Macs have been around forever and they are NOT, and have never been, in negligible numbers. Among some demographics Macs is nearly all that had been used for a couple of decades.

For worms, it makes more sense that a small installed base is a problem. For trojan horse, not so much, I suspect. After all, you go looking for a Mac version of a program, right? The audience comes to you, not the other way around like in a worm. And of course trojan horses don't depend on the (in)security of the platform, since the user is actively (if inadvertently) installing it. That's why I don't understand why there aren't news of much more trojans for Mac.

So yeah, even if it is a much smaller target than Windows running machines, it is still a lot of Mac machines. And belonging to people more likely wealthier than average -- given the cost of the Mac ecosystem in general compared with the stripped down cheap PCs most people buy.

That's why I don't buy this excuse.

Well...

Google can end this fight if they really want to.

1- Convert YouTube to WebM exclusively.

2- Watch world and dog complain that they can't watch the latest stupid viral thing with their Safari or IE9 thing. But look, it works on Firefox (or Opera or Chrome)!

3- Watch the mad scramble by remaining browser makers to support YouTube or else have their market share diminish a bit. Or a lot, in Safari's case, since it's not much to begin with.

Microsoft knows this to be true, that's why the recent back-pedaling "OK, if the user installs it we're fine with it" -- very easy to see that morphing into "we only do what the customers want" blah blah and offering WebM for IE9 on Windows Update, etc.

Interesting...

"lousy for back-and-forth, search-and-find, "where was that bit?" studying and reference"

Weird, since I would think that's exactly where a digital version would be great. Now, that's just my preconception, since I do not own an e-book reader, and have only played with an iPad's e-reader in passing once (refresh time was pretty good, as far as I remember, but could be better if they got rid of the "page-turn" graphical effect). With that disclaimer stating my near complete ignorance of the subject...

See, people are complaining about "how to quickly flip between page 20 and 600"... Haven't anyone here heard of bookmarks? Wouldn't a "temporary quick bookmark" be a simple function to have? Like: you are on page twenty, then you click to add a "temp bookmark" and a little button with the page number appears in the top of the screen, say. The you find the other passage you're interested in, turns out to be page 600, and do the same there. Now, how hard is it, specially on a touchscreen, to click on the 20 and then on the 600 bookmark button? Hey, and you can have not only two, but 4 or 5, no? So, except for the 1 s refresh time, I don't imagine how this is worse than a real book. And in at least one aspect it is better: I can "let go of the pages" to look something else up, or type on the computer, or whatever, and the e-reader will still hold the pages for me.

Is there no e-reader that does what I said above, really?

The "taking notes" thing is another one where I don't see the disadvantage, but that might be because I myself never, ever write on books, or highlight them -- I have always written my notes elsewhere. But that's just me being weird, maybe.

Off topic, but...

"This way for the respective fucking expletives, if your delicate constitution can take it."

I hate this new thing on El Reg, where the links are not distinct from the regular text in any way whatsoever -- both are black, and not underlined (or is it just my Firefox on Linux installs?). If it was intended to be like that, who had such a "terrific" idea? OK, it could be worse, like the whole text but the links underlined, but still...

Hm...

What was the name of the CEO fellow? Was by any change Konstantin D., I wonder?

Jobs, children, morals, national security...

Every time I see people claiming to be defending one of those in the title, I get VERY suspicious of their REAL intentions (or of their general intelligence, but usually it's just hidden agenda)...

Heh...

"A row quickly ensued, and Lesley Quirey "ran around to the back of his car, where there was a Staffordshire bull terrier and pickaxe handle and I immediately thought that something wasn’t right", as Brown explained."

Ah, British understatement, gotta love it. Something wasn't right indeed.

entirely and stupidiously

I must use that phrase somewhere now. Entirely and stupidiously brilliant.

the Touch is Logitech's latest

Cue fruity lawsuit in 3... 2... 1...

if Apple allows such apps to be sold through its monopoly app store

Is that even a question? Or was it rhetorical?

And the Google ads at the bottom of this one...

Ha, 4 out of 5:

Pretty Women from Russia

Date Sexy Russian Women

Ukrainian Women

Beautiful Russian Ladies

The 5 one, lonely IT angle of the ad world, was:

Domain name value