* Posts by CD001

925 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2009

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Enough with the Apple App Store apathy

CD001

Actually...

The Ford -> Apple comparison is, in some ways, more relevant that the Apple -> Microsoft comparison.

If Ford insisted you only bought THEIR petrol, people would simply buy other cars and only rabid Ford fanbois an' goils would buy Ford cars. It's not like Apple are in a monopoly position (in the business sense), any more than Ford are, in any market not even iTunes with the likes of Amazon MP3, Spotify or even We7 kicking about now.

CD001

I don't discriminate...

I don't discriminate ... I hate everyone

Oddly enough that's what it says on my baccy tin.

CD001

F/OSS

A good amount of open source software is submitted to the F/OSS community by PROFESSIONAL developers/programmers in their spare time. If you can use someone else's OSS library inside your own program and cut development time/costs then it's not unlikely that you might want to submit your own libraries/code back to the OSS community and save someone else the headache of solving the problems you've already solved.

There are plenty of big companies that actually do exactly that.

F/OSS is way more than just the bedroom coder freeware of yesteryear.

Everything Everywhere dips toe in retail waters

CD001

Yup

"Everything Everywhere Wednesdays" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue does it?

Three jailed for phone box thievery

CD001

Yes...

Because committing "serious criminal offences", like breaching RIPA legislation, has been such a deterrent for BT in the past ;)

Sony tweets 'secret' key at heart of PS3 jailbreak case

CD001

Please

Please re-read the content of YOUR post and tell me if YOU ARE a fucking idiot. If you're going to bring someone else's intellectual capacity into question - you'd best make damned sure your own house is in order first. *sighs*

Bank scorched by stupid Facebook policy

CD001

Free your hate

^ KMFDM ^

'Tree Octopus' proves journos no smarter than 13-year-old Americans

CD001

Alternatively

Nothing you read on Internet forum postings is true - everything you read here, for instance, is a lie...

Mozilla plans four Firefoxes in 2011

CD001
Troll

HTML Standards

Which standards would they be then? HTML 4.01 Transitional? Strict? XHTML 1.0 Transitional, XHTML1.1 Strict? HTML 5 which is not even standardised yet and is a bastardised HTML/XML mashup where tag closure is optional?

The thing with standards is that non-standard elements have to be created before they can become part of the standard. Take the ubiquitous "title" attribute - that was originally an IE extension.

Mind this is the first rant I've ever seen where "fucking with the standards" wasn't actually aimed at IE.

Oh noes - I may have fed the troll...

BBC apologises for Top Gear outrage

CD001

Yup

Except you'd never get the paperwork past health and safety

CD001

To be fair

I reckon the only reason the Mexican Ambassador complained was to prove that he WASN'T asleep with the remote in front of the TV and thereby justifying his wages.

He's probably put his feet up or gone for a quick nap now, knowing that he's done a good job for the year :)

Aussie advertisers call for more bloat in web ads

CD001

Wow

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if not watching a recording

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Wow in the age of Sky/Virgin+ and PVRs - people still do that? ;)

Although there is a setting in my TV that automatically turns the volume down whenever adverts are on to make them approximately the same volume as the programs.

Sulky fans biggest threat to gaming, says Black Ops developer

CD001

OTOH

I just bought "Monday Night Combat" on Steam - it's an XboX port so I was somewhat wary ... but it's actually really, really good (apart from the server browser, that's iffy). Think Team Fortress 2 meets Tower Defence and you're about there.

It's an indie game, it only costs a tenner, it's great fun (and has slightly more depth than you'd imagine) - what's not to like?

Creativity isn't being stifled by "angry gamers" - it's the big companies not being prepared to take risks and just rehashing the same old formats over and over again, stifling creativity themselves that is, in part, WHY you get people bitching about the game when it isn't 100% perfect - it's not like it's a new formula or even, in most cases, new technology (various underlying engines will have been bought in or built on top of existing ones). Even Monday Night Combat runs on some version of the Unreal engine - but at least the game itself is innovative.

Photo loss blogger to Flickr: You're f*cking kidding

CD001

True enough

... but unless I missed something Flickr has never been punted as a managed professional solution aimed at enterprise (or even business level) users. For the price they charge, you probably shouldn't expect a minimum SLA (probably not even well-trained staff unfortunately) - hell, SagePay don't even seem to have a minimum SLA and they're a card processing outfit.

To be honest, I'd be totally farked off if I was in that guy's position - I'd probably write my own system, host it with a cheap hosting outfit and run off nightly backups on a cron job. It wouldn't have quite the community aspect of Flickr but you could use something like OpenID for user authentication I suppose so people wouldn't be just signing up for your site.

Gates: Killing the internet is easy

CD001

Thing is...

The thing is, the government in power, if dictatorial enough, could just outlaw the usage of that equipment in their country and mobile or even land-line phones. It would be possible to effectively throw the whole country back into the dark ages if you had enough power.

After all, if the punishment for using any device more modern than a typewriter was death - as in no trial, a death squad just turns up and your door and executes you - would you risk it? Even if rewards were offered to helpful members of the public for dobbing you in?

A somewhat extreme example perhaps - but history is littered with extreme examples of "ruling with an iron fist".

CD001

Not in the UK

We're an island - there aren't THAT many pipes going offshore connecting us to the global Internet at large. Want to shut down the Internet in the UK? It's not a single point of failure but it's not that far short as the cables come ashore at only a very few locations.

Openistas question UK.gov's £300k crime-mapping website

CD001

*sighs*

7 HTML errors - if you can't even get HTML right you shouldn't be building a web app.

Virgin Media kills 20Mb broadband service

CD001

depends...

They're a bit sneaky - they don't actually advertise the "deals" they offer to CURRENT subscribers - give them a ring and try getting the call escalated to UK support (if you're REALLY lucky you might get straight through to UK support apparently) and find out what they can do; remember, shy bairns get nowt.

CD001

Sort of

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So basically, at 30Gbps, you'll just use up your "fair usage limit" (oxymoron?) that much quicker than I did.

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OK, pedantic correction, 30Mbs (not Gbs - I'd love that :D ) - however the traffic management kicks in at different points depending on the service you're subscribed to. You can download more on the higher packages before it kicks in so you're probably less likely to hit traffic management issues at all on the big packages (unless you watch a lot of online HD video - and does the missus know you're visiting those sites? ;) ).

Unlike many ISPs VM (technically) have no download caps (I used to get snotty letters from BT years ago) ... you can download as much as you like BUT traffic management ensures that your download will take a LOT longer than you might expect (if it's a biggy). It caps the amount you can download in any given period of time by increasing the amount of time it takes to perform the download.

You pays your money, you takes your choice - VM aren't perfect but after the NTL merger they were the ONLY cable ISP - although BT Infinity might be returning some choice to the punters who'd prefer to be on cable ... hmmm BT or Virgin, not quite Hobson's choice but ...

CD001

odd...

Funny, I'm currently on the 20Mbs service, I've never yet hit throttling as far as I can tell, I consistently get 1.8 - 2.4 MBs download speed from half-decent servers (that's 14.4 - 19.2 Mbs), a latency on (UK) gaming servers of 10 - 30 ms and I can only remember 2 outages (the longest lasting just over an hour) in the last 6 months.

For a consumer ISP that's pretty good.

They were in talks with Phorm a while back (when BT was trialling the technology) but it never went any further than that, I think they learned from BTs failure.

OK, they're not the cheapest in the market and yes, ringing their call centres (which I've only had to do once) is a painful experience but really, for a consumer ISP for online gaming, including downloading games through Steam for instance, they're pretty hard to beat.

Microsoft hits autistic Xboxer with cheat evidence

CD001

Reward...

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That's a reward, isn't it - and not a punishment which you kinda might think was more deserved ?

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Maybe - maybe not. The kid was a kid; he let someone else access his account to unlock achievements that he was stuck on - a little bit like when my brother asked me to get him past level 4 on Sonic when we were kids (the difference there, of course, being that Sonic was on a Megadrive, there was none of this internetty thing and getting him past the bit he was stuck on didn't affect anything else anywhere - no shiny bonus items, no gamezor bragging rights).

So the kid in the article was a bit of an idiot; maybe he lied about things to try and stay out of trouble ... that's what kids do. With luck he's learnt his lesson but he's got a new gamer tag, presumably that's a new "account" - so he's going to have to unlock ALL of his previous achievements again. If Steam lost records of all of my achievements (including some bloody tricky ones in TF2) and related content (achievement items in TF2 for instance) - would I be happy with a £10 Steam voucher ... hmmmm.

So his punishment for giving access to his account to someone else, who then cheated the achievements in, was to loose his account and all achievements. The kids got enough problems with being autistic and having an overly-protective, gobshite of a mother - a month's XBL doesn't cost MS much, it wouldn't even appear as a blip on their marketing budget, and it'll generate goodwill amongst most people hearing about it and presumably help keep the kid locked into the XboX and XBL. Sounds like a sound investment to me.

Court orders seizure of PS3 hacker's computers

CD001

As I said before

If you want the best gaming buy a PC - apart from MGS4 and GT5, what other "must have" PS3 exclusives are there?

CD001

Meh

Just buy a gaming PC - granted the initial outlay is considerably higher but you get better games for it - I've clocked up almost 400 hours in Civ 5 since I bought it, about 300 hours on TF2 (according to Steam) and probably about the same on X3 games, no idea how much on Total War games - none of which are available on consoles. I suspect, from that list, only TF2 would even work on a console (from a UI standpoint as much as anything else) - but it would utterly ruin it by moving from server/client to p2p.

The only console games that have come close for me have been in the Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy series (I mostly game on a PC but I've owned all three generations of Playstation).

MP: Googlepoly hurts British business

CD001

I'm sorry...

... but just NO - Multimap was shite - it was always shite. Google maps blew everything else out of the water when it came along and (perhaps most importantly) was much, much faster.

It could be argued that many improvements made by Multimap wouldn't have happened if Google Maps hadn't come along - even Bing Maps is something of a Google Maps copy (actually, Bing Maps isn't as awful as you might expect).

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> Any new online business will pretty much stand or fall based on its

> relationship with Google

Maybe - unless the business is in China perhaps where Google isn't dominant.

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> to the extent that if you don't design it to be "Google friendly" you

> may as well pack up and go home.

Not really - Search Engine robots, including Googlebot, pretty much read web pages in the same way that screen readers like Jaws do - a well designed website written/coded with the WAI in mind will, by default, be Google friendly. Any modern website should be written in this manner anyway.

Since Google are famously reticent about letting people know exactly how the PageRank algorithm actually works making a site specifically "Google friendly" is something of a nonsense the best you can do is follow best practices and standard SEO techniques and hope for the best - go too far in trying to game Google and they will remove you from their index (ask BMW).

I'm not saying that Google ISN'T becoming the next Microsoft, I'm not saying that they don't abuse their (virtual) monopoly in search and I'm not saying their "do no evil" mantra is complete BS (privacy, what privacy?) - BUT credit where it's due, they do knock out some useful or innovative apps.

Google maps was (IIRC) the first AJaX-ified mapping program - you didn't have to reload the entire page to scroll the map - a winning feature by itself.

Compare Google Analytics to Webalizer which was the bog-standard tool installed before Google Analytics came along - and without Google Analytics we'd not now have Piwik.

Google Earth, Gmail, Translator and so on and so forth - most things Google do are either innovative or better than the competition in some way - that's how they got to be where they are, Google Search was a revelation when it came out; no crappy, slow-loading portal page just a search box and a logo and relevant results.

It might not be healthy for one company to "hold so much power" as you put it but remember, when they started it was just a couple of lads, in a garage, who knocked up something better than all the big boys on the web at that time could manage; there's nothing to say that the same thing can't happen to Google if they rest on their laurels.

Forget Flash – content is king

CD001
Troll

Obvious

Please, don't feed the trolls.

CD001

hmmm

Hmmm meta keywords? They were abandoned in about 2000 when the search engines realised everyone was gaming them? IIRC about the only Search Engine that pays ANY attention to them (and it's only a small part of how they rank their results) is Bing.

Meta descriptions are still useful (if under 150 characters) for creating the additional information that appears with a search result.

That doesn't make Flash any more useful for Search Engines or Screen Readers of course - good semantic markup is what it's all about (and "respectable" links to your site).

Middlesbrough cabbie relieves lad of iPhone

CD001
Joke

Aaah...

... but if the youth in question had been out on the lash then the victim was also a criminal - ooooh who do you side with now?!?

NYT casts Assange as 'arrogant' (with a little 'Peter Pan')

CD001

Ummm - what?

Do you mean that freedom of speech, religion, the press and the right to assemble for peaceful demonstrations is a bad thing or that it's not one of the best American traditions?

Does that mean you're a fascist or that you really, really like apple pie?

I'm not really sure I understand your comment so don't know whether to upvote or downvote it.

Mozilla reaches for almost perfect 10 with latest Firefox 4 beta

CD001

Depends on your system

Weirdly, Firefox is considerably faster to load than Opera or IE8 on my home PC (i7 930 @ 4Ghz, Win7 Pro 64-bit, 6 gig RAM) and about the same speed as Chrome - whilst on my work PC (Intel Q9550 @ 2.83 Ghz, Win XP Pro 32-bit, 2 gig RAM), with the same FF build and extensions, Firefox is actually much slower to cold boot than Opera or Chrome and about on par with IE8.

Still - I generally recommend Opera for people who actually use their browser purely for browsing (rather than as a development tool) - though having said that Opera Dragonfly is great! Actually the IE Web Developer toolbar isn't too bad either.

UK tech retailers are rubbish

CD001

OTOH

On the flipside - I found the staff in a store called Apollo 2000 actually seemed to know what the hell they were talking about. It seemed they had staff who knew about specific areas, one guy for TVs another for white goods and so on...

... it might have just been a bizarre fluke, in that one particular store on that one particular day, but it was a refreshing one.

W3C apologizes for HTML5 brand confusion

CD001

You couldn't

You couldn't serve XHTML Strict as XML without older versions of Internet Explorer borking (7 and down if I remember rightly) - I did try it once - and it was only really Strict that had to be served as XML.

Oh, and strict doesn't support iframes so following "industry guidelines" for 3D Secure falls over.

The Last Airbender up for nine Razzies

CD001

Avatar

Avatar ...

FernGully with smurfs ... without Robin Williams as a deranged, experimented-upon bat.

It was pretty though.

W3C tackles HTML5 confusion with, um, more confusion

CD001

Now?

Now - maybe not. There are some improvements in the semantics of HTML 5 though which should mean, in future, HTML 5 pages could be better processed automatically.

The <nav> list for instance semantically marks up that part of the document as being a navigational list. Probably fairly useless at the moment but it could be useful for something like the automatic generation of sitemaps or to help search engine robots get a feel for the importance of pages by the <nav> list nesting.

So there are some improvements in HTML 5 but probably none worth attempting in a live environment until the "standard" has been standardised.

CD001

Really?

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HTML5 has been deliberately designed to suit the browser manufacturers more than ordinary normal users

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Think about this for a moment - under XHTML all the tags needs to be XML well-formed. This means the browser doesn't need to worry about whether that <p> tag is followed by an </p> tag. In theory then, if the code passes XHTML validation the browser doesn't need to fall back to tag-soup rendering and _should_ be able to process the page faster.

Again, in theory, if XML "well-formedness" was mandatory (and web designers were taught to write half decent code) browsers could do away with tag soup rendering all together, chop out a huge lump of code and be more efficient.

HTML 5 not only allows XML well formed tags but ALSO HTML 4 style unclosed tags - and both are valid. It's a standard in which there's no standard way of doing things. This doesn't sound like something designed to suit browser manufacturers to me - more like something designed to cater to lazy arsed web designers who can't code for toffee.

CD001

Ye-es

And to "focus on the quality and development of HTML 5" they killed off XHTML 2 which looked a better (albeit more complex) specification if you ask me.

Lane Fox promises sub-£100 PCs

CD001

Oh

There is a place in schools for Windows - those drab business studies rooms where the best fun to be had was locking the teacher in the supply cupboard ... not that we ever did anything like that of course!

Yank fires up iPhone-controlled beer cannon

CD001

Actually...

There are some good micro-breweries in the US so I've been told (I have a friend who's half American by birth and now lives over there - the "wonders" at British customs kicked his American wife out of the country so he went with her) though I've only experienced Sam Adams which is perfectly drinkable.

The same can certainly be said in the UK - there are some micro-breweries making some truly great beer. I'll take your Sly Fox and Caldera Brewing and raise you Brew Dog http://www.brewdog.com/ ;)

DUP website translated into Irish by mischievous hacktivist

CD001

welcome...

Welcome to the Internet - even posting in their own native language most commentards fail badly at grammar ;)

Facebook boobs over breastfeeding page... again

CD001

To be fair

The word used was vulgar rather than obscene - and to be honest, I find breast feeding mildly disgusting (no idea why - I don't like spiders either - just one of those things that makes me shudder and go "eeeuuuurrggh") - I don't want to see sprogs clamped onto their mummy's leaking, distended, veiny norks.

It may be totally natural but so's taking a dump and I don't want to see pictures of that either - I would class both as vulgar. Everyone has their own, slightly odd hang-ups.

Don't see the reason for taking the page down though - my weird hang-ups are my problem and I'd simply not visit a page on breast feeding. If things can be removed for "vulgarity" Facebook should have probably banned my account months ago for my status updates when I'm having a bad day - plenty of vulgarity there ;)

For sale: 50,000 compromised iTunes accounts

CD001

WTO

If I remember correctly, and to be fair I'm not entirely sure on this, but didn't the USA breach (and continue to breach) their WTO obligations with the way they deal with online gambling? Should we ban the States from the Internet as well?

Disappearing filth leads to dropped charges in extreme smut case

CD001

Eh?

Why would liberals applaud the toughening of a law you've just described as "illiberal"?

Google battles Derby cops over access to Street View data

CD001

OMFG

qui custodiet ipsos custodes

Video games go off quicker than tomatoes

CD001

IIRC

IIRC Valve have promised to release the Steam lock-in on purchased games if they ever go titsup. Wouldn't necessarily help for things like TF2 where you can only play online and you'd lose any achievements I guess... and, of course, promising is only words - if they went into administration they'd probably not have much say in the matter.

Still - you can get stuff easily and cheaply from Steam when they've got one of their bonkers sales on. In some cases you can pick up games that you'd be hard pressed to find elsewhere, like the XCOM collection for instance.

Default judgement FAIL: ACS:Law muffs up in court

CD001

The question

The question then becomes - if they can't even manage to follow due process - why the fuck are they allowed to practice law?

Flame throwing Apache flees Oracle's Java group

CD001

Oracle

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See where that leaves Oracle 5 years down the line.

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Let's see - it'll leave Oracle in exactly the same position it's in now. A database giant with a shed-load of server middle-ware running on Java. The only difference will be that they'll have almost total control over Java as fear of revocation of TCKs will bring the smaller vendors into line.

Larry Ellison will declare himself Emperor of Javaland and crush these rebel scum on their small moon of Harmony... ummm, or something like that anyway.

The year's best... PC games

CD001

Slightly different focus

I'd not say Civ V was worse than Civ IV - it's just focused very slightly differently.

Some things have been simplified such as espionage (ok, removed in this case), diplomacy and the United Nations BUT a lot of careful thought has gone into the balance and combat.

Railroads costing a couple of coins a tile is fine since they give you a bonus to production (as well as the movement bonuses) if you're connecting a city to the capital; this can stretch out your coal reserves if you're unlucky enough to have only a limited (or non-existent) supply by reducing your reliance on factories. This is just one nice balancing aspect.

The combat system is MASSIVELY improved - it's hard to overstate the tactical change that combat has undergone. No longer do you merely stack 50 Modern Armour units on a square and blitz the world - now you can only have one unit per tile but you can have ranged units for over other units ... this makes artillery (with their 3 tile range) immensely valuable - ditto on battleships.

You're also far less likely to suffer "weird" deaths in Civ V - even a badly damage Destroyer is not going to be further damaged by some barbarian archers on an island somewhere (at least I've never seen it).

... ummm ... yeah, I've clocked up almost 300 hours on Civ V since it was released a couple of months back *whistles* :)

WikiLeaks supporters milk Twitter API in DDoS attacks

CD001

Erm...

It HASN'T been fine all week - out status logs have 2 different codes for successful orders; one for orders that have gone through WITH 3D Authentication and another for those that have gone through without (because the issuing bank isn't enrolled or we're getting a particular fail status from 3D Secure).

Normally there's something like 90% of orders go through with 3D Secure - we had a run for several hours where only perhaps 10% were going through fully authenticated.

Yeah - it didn't loose us any orders but I don't know if we are charged a higher cost per transaction on non-3DS orders (I'm a techmonkey not a beancounter).

EU telecoms to Apple, Google: 'Pay up!"

CD001

Hmmmm....

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Someone knows there is 'gold in them hills' so the first ISP to drop prices, raise service standards and quality will trounce the others and I'll be first in line to drop the rest in favour of the best!

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For 6 months or so until they go bust - unless they actually manage to get enough punters to be one of the largest T2s going then they MIGHT have enough clout to get decent peering agreements with everyone else... but of course, getting that many customers also increases your bandwidth requirements.

CD001

Try...

Try owning a PS3 - Install GT5 and within 2 days there have been about 240megs of updates... not an enormous amount these days but I remember having to pull down a 14meg Netscape install and it taking 45 minutes or so on dial-up...

In the last 10 years or so I'd say data usage (for those of us using the web regularly 10 years ago) has probably increased by at least twenty-fold... and there are far more regular web/Internet users now.

Online gaming is now the province of the console crowd almost as much as the PC gamers - and whilst the games themselves are relatively low bandwidth it's a constant trickle of that low bandwidth across many more machines - not to mention the software patches.

Still - if everyone went back to dial-up it's put and end to DDoS attacks ... I dread to think how many machines on 56k it would take to packet flood a server of the web.

Three bumps up mobile broadband contract charge

CD001

Funny...

Funny how everyone on another thread not a million miles away was screaming the the Telcos should charge for the services they provide instead of bitching that the services provided by GoogTube, Apple or Aunty are shafting their profits and could they please help pay for the needed upgrades...

As soon as an ISP ups it's price slightly everyone starts shouting well there are cheaper alternatives - I'm gonna end my contract - rah rah rah...

... and we wonder why the ISPs lie to us about "unlimited" contracts for a cheap fixed monthly rate.

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