* Posts by CD001

925 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2009

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US opts out of carbon trading

CD001

Not to...

"It's regressive, but the poor - i.e. the millions of non-productive consumers - are basically the problem here."

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Not to mention the fact that that's essentially arse-about-face. The poor are GOOD for the environment. The poor don't buy iThis and iThat and consume all the resources on the planet. We'd be fine if everyone lived in C14th style poverty - our impact on the environment would be negligible.

So the problem is fat, rich mofos fuelled by Thatcherite "me, me, me" capitalism. Personally I'd suggest nuclear war - the following winter would stop "global warming" and once we've blasted the human race back to WAY pre-industrial levels the remaining life can get on recovering.

Oracle spreads blame for MySQL 'misperceptions'

CD001

Actually...

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tracking down people with Enterprise level skills for architecting, implementing & supporting these products

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Actually - THAT - is the tricky bit. Technically you can put together a lovely little package with FreeBSD or your particular *nix of choice and mung in a MySQL server and the software need cost you nothing...

You don't even need a support contract if you can in-house the staff to maintain the system (which works out cheaper if you're building apps in-house) - trying to _find_ someone with the right skill level on that software however...

Hotmail always-on crypto breaks Microsoft's own apps

CD001

hmmm...

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one wonders if it will give Hotmail users a false sense of security.

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MS software giving (clueless) users a false sense of security? Say it ain't so!?

Apache threatens Oracle with Java exit

CD001

I'll take...

I'll take the Peanut M&Ms cheers - they make much better projectiles from the back of the cinema :)

Facebook serves '23% of all US display ads'

CD001

Hell...

There's always the gullible, the old and the insane - it's how snake oil salesmen have always made a living. Only the method of delivery has changed.

The wily and/or cynical are unlikely to pay any attention to the ads - funnily enough 'cynical' is the collective noun for Reg readers.

Hacker sinks Royal Navy website

CD001

correct me if I'm wrong

But if you're coding in XHTML then alt tags are required in images - and if the image is purely a design element then you are SUPPOSED to use a blank alt tag.

Granted - neither case applies in this case ;)

Ex-Sun boss gives Ellison open source wedgie

CD001
Troll

See image

That is all

Microsoft's IE 8 'most widely used browser', rules ASA

CD001

Seriously?

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I've lost count of the number of arguments/comments on this site where Firefox fanboys keep preaching it's the most popular browser...

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Find one - just one - where someone has said that without quoting the W3Schools stats.

I've seen millions where people say IE is shit and quite a few that say Firefox is buggy/bloated (and quite a few really annoyingly smug posts from Opera users - yeah, I get it it's a good browser, I even use it occasionally - jeez) - but I can't remember having ever seen a post stating "Firefox is teh most used brwsr on teh intarwebs - EVA!1!!!!."

CD001

Soo...

He's probably on here reading this right now then...

Oracle kills low-priced MySQL support

CD001

Show...

Show me a PHP framework that doesn't do this already - they pretty much all do (with varying degrees of success) or you could use PDO.

Switching DB server isn't exactly a huge headache any more (well, if you'd written your SQL in a server-neutral kind of way in the first place... and aren't relying on stored procedures/triggers) - probably the "trickiest" bit is compiling the new DB server into your *nix of choice.

First official HTML5 tests topped by...Microsoft

CD001

Oddly

Oddly enough both Opera and Internet Explorer (8) take much longer to load (from cold) than Firefox (with several extensions) on my PC at home. Though my home PC is a Windows 7 (x64) box with 6 gigs of RAM so "slow" is somewhat relative.

Though on the XP system at work, Firefox (with the same extensions) is far slower than Opera to boot.

CD001

I try...

I try not to be cynical and a standards compliant browser from MS can only be a good thing but this is only testing conformance to HTML5 standards - which as the article states aren't standard yet.

This does not cover CSS, JS or the DOM (and manipulating the DOM through JS of course), without which a web document (HTML) is basically just a browser compatible .odt - actually less since the HTML should just deal with the semantics with the CSS as the presentation layer.

Still - it looks like there is a light at the end of the tunnel - I just hope it's not the proverbial oncoming train.

Ruskie teacher fired for objection to Microsoft Office

CD001

Though...

To be fair "To¥ota" actually looks kinda cool - though even better with a couple of adjustments

To¥oT - like some kind of crazy owl face .... erm, ok, back to work now

PayPal hardware failure fingered for worldwide outage

CD001

Pffff...

Pffff... amateurs - they have to try a LOT harder to get the kind of outages that SagePay seem to suffer.

... oh, hang on, that's a bad thing right?

Microsoft's IE9 'nearly finished'

CD001

Hmmm

You're right - I haven't used it... but weirdly I'm actually almost optimistic about IE9 - they _seem_ to be moving more towards a standards compliant approach. I'll be bloody amazed, not to mention relieved, if their JavaScript engine follows the the same DOM as everyone else and they manage to get some more CSS3 implemented (c'mon, border-radius at least)...

Still - it's going to be bloody years before old versions of IE are eradicated from wild - but it would be nice to be able to stop writing one lot of code for IE and another for everything else (well, I write for everything else first and apply IE kludges afterwards).

Microsoft vision chief sees world without Microsoft PCs

CD001

The kids love it...

At the moment - fashion is fickle.

Give it 15 years and an MS rebrand and it'll go come around again... come to think of it, 15 years ago Apple had no brand desirability outside of design studios.

Mind - I've still got an old Sony Ericsson k800i - I'm so not swayed by fashion. Does it do the job I want it to do for the price I'm prepared to pay for it? Like all other appliances, that's pretty much my take on it.

How many people actually look at the brand on say, their washing machine or fridge/freezer?

CD001

Unless

Unless you're talking the economic/legal definition of monopoly of course, which is slightly different and which - oh, big surprise, since we're talking about a business here - is the version used when referring to Microsoft (for instance).

"... when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it."

(cardinal sin of quoting Wikipedia but in this instance it happens to be correct).

Note the words SUFFICIENT CONTROL as opposed to total control? Yeah - that's, legally speaking, a monopoly. So Doug - do some research before wearing your smug hat next time - failing to do so makes you look like a plonker.

CD001

Except

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But regardless of what the open source crowd keep repeating ad nauseum they're still on top...

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Except in the server market of course - probably supercomputing as well - oh and graphic design studios, post production in movies perhaps - oh and mobile devices, best not forget mobile devices or anything that uses an ARM processor (like car engine management systems - though why you'd want a window-based GUI on that is beyond me).

So if by "on top" you mean "on top of the office environment", yup - spot on - they've also done pretty well in the world of gaming (I think the XBoX can be described as a success these days) not to mention "Games for Windows".

The problem though is that the market has grown WAY beyond desktops and games consoles so MS are now the dominant force in a shrinking market - they're still "top dog" on desktops and they're one of the big 3 on consoles but there are sooo many more devices out there now from smartphones to set-top boxes and tablets - and MS are playing catch-up in all these areas.

LimeWire (finally) dies under judge's gavel

CD001

This is a title, this is only a title...

Good grief - you could at least tell us what the shop was so we all know who to avoid!

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If the music industry charged resonable prices then more people would pay.

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Ye-es - what 7 or 8 quid for an MP3 album, 79 - 99p for a single track?.. or for a physical CD album maybe 10, 15 quid give or take? That's less than a round of drinks up the pub - and lasts a lot longer. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

Though I agree, there's no reason to ban P2P - and in fact it hasn't been banned as it's just a technology. The music industry is simply going for the low-hanging fruit - those P2P companies that are easy targets and have a large enough user-base to make it worth making life just a little harder for those pirates.

I can't imagine they'd be delusional enough to believe they can ever stop piracy - but they might be able to make it less convenient than just legitimately buying the MP3/CD in the first place.

Good grief, that's almost defending the music industry ... I need a bath now, I feel dirty.

CD001

bs

Amazon MP3 store is not DRM'd I don't think but you are restricted to a 30 second preview before you buy. It's got a reasonable bitrate though (320kbs).

Spotify has a free (ok, ad-supported) service that allows you to listen to 20 hours of music a month. You can also buy tunes through Spotify - though I don't know about DRM on them as I've never bought through Spotify.

We7 has a free (again ad-supported) unlimited service which also allows you to buy tunes - I don't know about the DRM as, again, I've never bought from them.

Last.fm radio is free (subscription is optional and only prevents the radio stopping every 20 minutes or so). Full tracks from a huge swathe of artists - it's generally my first stop for finding "new" artists that I might like. For listening to specific tracks you already know about "on demand" it is effectively useless though.

When it comes to buying music - I generally get the CD as it gives a good "master" copy with cover art and so on - but I have bought the odd track from Amazon MP3. Normally when there's only 1 good track on the album and the rest is "meh" (Papillon by Editors for instance - or Panzermensch by And One).

To be honest, unless you live in a shanty town on the outskirts of Bogota, there's not really a good excuse for pirating music any more.

Google illegally divulges user searches, suit claims

CD001

HTTP modification

The "best" solution might be, perhaps, if instead of passing the full URI in the HTTP Referrer the browser simply posted the URI of the referring document minus the query string. The problem there of course is that with Mod Rewrite and RESTful web services it's a little hard to tell which part of the URI is the document and which is the query.

Don't see how this is a Google (or any other search engine) problem though - they're just correctly following the HTTP specs.

How to stop Apple and Google's great web lockdown

CD001

Hmm...

There's nothing really _wrong_ with JavaScript (oki, ECMAScript) - development isn't even that painful with an IDE like NetBeans and using Firefox's "Web Developer" plugin. The only real problem comes with browser implementations.

There's the right way and the IE way. Almost everything will work the same across FF/Opera/WebKit based browsers but won't work in Internet Explorer (although IE9 is supposed to be rectifying this - I can't say for sure as I'm not using the beta) but there are several abstraction libraries out there, of which JQuery is probably the most well known.

I actually quite like JavaScript - I like the way it deals with objects in an extensible way - it's a bit wrong but I quite like it. I like the fact you can tweak the prototypes (adding a search method to the Array class for instance)... it's not that bad - once you're used to the idiosyncrasies of implementation across browers.

Apple threatens Java with death on the Mac

CD001

Must admit...

I was wondering that myself... IIRC MS got into trouble for "abuse of monopoly position" (again) over their not-quite-compatible JVM bundled into Windows - Sun took them to court IIRC and the MS JVM was removed.

So Apple remove their JVM and... what? I assume Oracle will make an OSX JVM and things will carry on just as before. Or are Apple users incapable of installing third party apps now?

CD001

Tit for tat

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I always found it ironic that Steve has decided to pan the company (Adobe) that made the Mac the dominant PC platform in the creative industry.

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I think Adobe started that one when they moved to simultaneous Windows and Mac development (and release) of Photoshop/Illustrator. I'd not be surprised if Creative Suite wasn't installed on more Windows boxes than Macs these days.

Apart from the fact that graphic designers seem to like monochrome grey windows and meaningless coloured blobs in the top left of those windows, there's no real compelling reason to use Macs even in design studios these days.

I actually think, on a pure shiny, shiny basis, OSx is beginning to look a little tired - Win7 is actually prettier and the Konqueror desktop isn't too far short either (this is, of course, entirely subjective - that's the thing with aesthetics).

CD001

except

Except the number of games on MacOS is far more limited than on PC - despite Valve's recent efforts. So Apple doesn't really want gamers; and gamers don't really want Macs - we tend to gut the internals to throw in more RAM, better GPUs and the like every so often ... in fact I only do a complete PC replacement when a CPU upgrade requires a new mobo (new slot for instance). Even aesthetically we're not that interested, Macs look like PC gaming cases from about 5 years ago (like old Lian-Li cases).

Apple is really aiming at the consumer devices market; phones, media players, netbooks - those sort of things. They don't really want desktop users. Still, they do make shiny toys.

Mozilla man accuses Jobs of 'bypass the web' scheme

CD001

If...

If you can't see the point of "display:none;" - you've never written a web app.

Court strikes down Facebook probation

CD001

A liberal

A Liberal in the UK != a Liberal in the US ... the US definition of liberal does my noggin in.

Liberal bad, Liberty good - erm... wtf?

A "true" liberal would be more like a Wiccan - do what you like so long as you're not hurting anyone - which seems pretty sensible to me and requires some kind of punishment for someone breaking the "so long as you're not hurting anyone" clause.

I'd describe myself as a hard-line liberal - e.g. extreme punishment for breaking that clause.

Dixons risks future of humanity with Star Wars-themed ads

CD001

And...

If you're a hyper-intelligent, spacefaring shade of the colour blue - you may just decide to get rid of the source of the annoying adverts by, oh I dunno, getting someone to destroy the planet to make way for a new inter-galactic bypass.

Microsoft's fear of an OpenOffice

CD001

Odd...

At work we use MS Office. At home I use OOo. When working from home I take the .xls/xlsx, doc/docx files that have been put together by myself or co-workers and load them up on my PC at home in OOo ... and I've yet to hit a single real problem with it.

I wish I could say the same about the different versions of MS Office we've got installed at work (I think there's still a couple of machines with Office '97 on).

CD001

Which...

Which oddly enough is STILL more expensive than FREE...

New game or meal out + OOo

vs

MS Office OEM/Home

Hmmmm - I've never yet had to do anything at home that's required my use of MS Office over OOo - to be fair, I've never yet had to do anything that's required the full "complexity" of MS Office anywhere, ever.

MoD braced for painful weight-loss surgery next week

CD001

If...

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"do you want to be part of a federal superstate?"

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If it means we can fire the clueless, halfwit career politicians in this country, I'm all for it thanks - it's not like we seem to be fit to govern ourselves in this country any more.

I can already blag my way through in French and German - so what the hell, bring it on.

OOo's put the willies up Microsoft

CD001

Then...

Then why are "Macros" in "View"? They've nothing to do with viewing or layout. Looks to me like they just sort of got dumped there since they got rid of "Tools".

The ribbon interface has one very serious drawback - it has a far more limited amount of available space especially when further cluttered with icons. The "classic" dropdown menu approach enabled far more options, laid out in a far more specific tree structure without having to mung things together just because you've run out of space in another section.

CD001

Ribbon

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Speaking of idiotic software design, has anyone else noticed that wordpad in Windows 7 has been ruined by that damned ribbon?!

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Really? I've had a Win 7 desktop for best part of a year now and it's never occurred to me to actually even load up WordPad (been using OOo at home since forever - long before Win7) ... I might load it up for the first time tonight to have a looksee :)

That is assuming it appears in search - I soooooooo hate the Win7 start menu and the way you can't organise the damned thing yourself.

-- and yes, the only reason I have a Windows PC at all is because it's my gaming box.

CD001

It was..

Access: it was good for creating relational diagrams before MySQL Workbench got up to scratch... but as an actual database? People use Access for that?

National Schools Film Week punts unsafe URL

CD001

Act of Union

The Act of Union (which created Britain) was enacted by a Scot ... so it could be said that Britain was formed by Scotland uniting with England/Wales (since the English had conquered the Welsh).

Who exactly conquered who in that then?

Robot teddy bears attack Alzheimer's

CD001

So...

So, when I've got Alzheimer's and am only able to remember events that happened in my youth whilst lying in a bed, doubtless with white linen sheets, in some institution and a freaky teddy bear starts walking across the room towards me - I'll be expecting it to start bleeding milk...

KANEDA!!!

Apple buys out $1bn data center squatters

CD001

IIRC

I think it started turning a profit a few months back now ... it's nowhere near paid for itself yet but it's not haemorrhaging cash any more.

vBulletin sues ex-devs over 'from scratch' competitor

CD001

Why...

I've never really understood why people pay for forum software when there's phpBB, it's only a forum - it's not even like it's difficult to RYO (I did it once as an experiment to see how far I could optimise the database queries back in the days when threaded, tree-structure forums were the norm) - the hardest bit is making a good cross-browser JavaScript WYSIWYG GUI and you could probably use a mix of CKEditor and HTMLPurifier for that now (no real need for BBScript if you can properly sanitise HTML input).

Legendary steampunk computer 'should be built' - programmer

CD001

Umm...

Isn't it more like the original meaning?

http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/first_computer_bug.htm

Diary of an Overflow Addict

CD001

hahah

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PHP programmers are ill-mannered, ignorant, puffed-up little swine.

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Damn - nailed me!

Actually - to be fair, despite the fact that I AM (mostly) a PHP codemonkey... many PHP coders can't script for toffee and, considering it's a (predominantly) web based language, a surprising amount don't seem to worry about script overheads or performance either (and probably don't understand how the garbage collection works in PHP).

Still it's a good language for quick 'n' dirty apps - so it tends to attract quick 'n' dirty coders ... although there are exceptions (Magento for instance looks quite professional when you nose at the source code). PHP is (thankfully) starting to grow up now.

I am surprised however, that you've only just discovered Stack Overflow; especially considering many esoteric programming queries hammered into Google these days will pull up an SO result.

Virgin Media introduces P2P throttling

CD001

Not to mention...

Not to mention the fact that if you're with VM anyway you can pull iPlayer and 4OD down directly through the set-top box and watch it on your TV anyway - odds are that if you're going to pull down an hour's worth of iPlayer, you're not going to be doing it on your PC ... well, unless maybe it's a laptop and you're in bed.

CD001

My new business FreeISP...

"So if you do start up your own ISP providing proper 1:1 contention symmetric fibre-based connections of the >100Mb/s truly unlimited and no throttling ever variety, I'll take one of your top package please"

Certainly Sir, that will be £199.99 per month paid in advance.

CD001

The OP is right

You ARE stuffed if you're on cable AND want to stay on cable... although that is changing (very) slowly as BT roll out the fibre.

I've been on cable since it was Telewest; it's a better technology than ADSL so I'd be loathe to switch to another provider because doing so would mean that I lose cable, so yes, I am forced to use VM IF I WANT A CABLE SERVICE - which is what, I think, the OP was trying to say.

CD001

Ummm... what?

If you read the article you might notice that this seems to be a shift of focus onto the upstream.

They're increasing the upload speeds available to everyone so you can get your home videos on YouTube that little bit quicker. However, and this is the important bit, they've not said anything about illegal filesharing over P2P - merely that they're restricting the bandwidth it can consume. Could this possibly be to do with the nature of P2P, in that it uses the upstream to seed YOUR torrents?

So ye-es, pulling down 10TB over HTTP is the same as pulling down 10TB over P2P ... except with HTTP it's a web server sending the data down (via a professional backbone connection you'd hope), with P2P it's some other twonk(s) chewing through their upstream bandwidth (on their home connection) to seed the damned thing.

At least, that's how I read it - it doesn't appear to be about copyright infringement (which is what everyone assumes as soon as the phrase P2P appears) it's about freeing up the upstream (good for gamers).

The question is - when do we expect they'll announce Virgin VOIP? They've got to be targeting that upstream bandwidth for something.

Google shocks world with unthreaded Gmail

CD001

So...

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BTW: Am I the only one here who has never used Outlook, thick,thin, light, heavy, or whatever form it may come in, ever, in any version at any time? Do I get an award? :)

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Unemployed or Self-employed?

For some reason businesses love Outlook, especially when paired with Exchange... though it does have its uses when you need to read someone else's emails (open other mailbox).

Never used it outside the office - never will.

Microsoft surrenders Live Spaces future to WordPress

CD001

Maybe...

... just maybe ... the fines, anti-trust suits, Vista, RRoD and all the myriad other problems MS have faced are finally hitting their bottom line slightly. They've even made redundancies recently IIRC.

It could be that MS are actually going to channel effort into the things they're good at; marketing a so-so operating system and office applications. If we're lucky they might actually get the last niggles out of Windows 7 (which, to be fair, isn't a bad OS), tighten up on security and you never know, IE9 might even be usable!

Nearly all of Microsoft's forays outside of their core competencies have bombed, badly, the one exception being the XBoX - which, I believe, is now profitable - so maybe they're they're realising that it might be time to focus on their core lines for a bit, until times are easier again at least. When they've got cash to burn again they can return to their bad old ways.

iPhone fanbois run off road in CoolBrand race

CD001

Overstated beauty

... means trying too hard and, normally, failing. Think of any over-plastic celebriclone and how much many of them actually look like Pete Burns as opposed to the girl in the office who somehow manages to look great despite just seemingly having thrown her clothes on in the morning and whipped her hair up (my guess is that it actually takes a lot of effort to manage that look of effortless beauty ;) ).

Sex Party proposes new classification system for Oz

CD001

Nooo....

Prostitution is selling sex, not using sex to sell something else.

Besides - who exactly is being exploited in a legitimate porn business? The well paid "actresses" (better paid than their male counterparts) or the mugs that actually blow their cash (shoot their wad) on the end product?

Visit enough nightclubs and you'll know you can have the "real thing" for the price of a few drinks; best guess - porn is for married men *shrugs*

Christian group declares jct 9 on M25 cursed

CD001

Good Omens

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Many phenomena – wars, plagues, sudden audits – have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for Exhibit A.

- from Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

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... via Wikipedia

IIRC the whole of the M25 was one huge occult symbol that slowly emitted evil as it was traced by the traffic driving along it.

... odds are, this being El Reg, 280 other people will be familiar with Good Omens and there will be 273 posts all but identical to this one.

Apple in 873-page legal claim to word 'Pod'

CD001

Line6

The excellent range of POD Guitar FX processors!

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