* Posts by CD001

925 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2009

Details of all internet traffic should be logged – MEP

CD001

MEP

We don't get to vote on MEPs ... just MPs.

Boss leaves robot in charge of office

CD001

Richard Garriot...

Lord Bottish?

An ode to rent-a-nerds and cable monkeys

CD001

ye-es ... let's see, in the small (maybe medium-sized) business I work for (100+ people) we have a grand total of 1 in-house web-monkey, which would be me. I'm also the only person proficient to program in C++ or C# and pretty much the only DBA.

So long as marketing let me know in advance of any ad-tracking, mod_rewrite malarky they want setting up beforehand I can normally take a couple of weeks holiday without having to remote in... unless SagePay falls over *sighs*

CD001

... I have to ask, why?

Valve chief says Apple will own your living room

CD001

It's not static though - when I were a wee lad it was either Nintendo or Sega. It was the original PlayStation that totally "revolutionised" the console. It's probably only a matter of time before someone else comes along with the "next PlayStation" that knocks Sony and Microsoft for six.

CD001

...if Apple released a product that did EXACTLY what you wanted and was at a price that you were willing to pay ...

Then it wouldn't be an Apple product - they've yet to produce ANY device that does exactly what I want a price I'm willing to pay...

I've no real use for an MP3 player (I spend most of my time in the car or at a desk unfortunately) so a bog standard memory stick does the job - so that's the iPod out.

Mac computers aren't, traditionally, much good for gaming, although that has been changing recently, but they're more expensive (for equivalent hardware) than PCs - in fact the only marginally tempting thing about a Mac (well a Macbook) is Logic Studio which they no longer port to PC.

iPhone - does far MORE than I want from a mobile phone as about all I use one for is texting "are you up the pub yet? - I'm in a taxi" or making the odd call (on a PAYG tariff I spend maybe £60 a YEAR).

And the iPad ... again, no real use for one for pretty much the same reason I've no real use for an iPod.

The last thing I bought that did exactly what I wanted at a price I was willing to pay was a Sony home theatre system - it's an amp, some HDMI ports and some speakers - exactly what I wanted - no additional bells, whistles or "funky" UI.

Microsoft flags Firefox and Chrome for security failings

CD001

Not to mention the fact that I went there with NoScript on and saw, well, a lot of boxes telling me that "This page requires Flash Player version 10.2.0 or higher." ... *sighs*

What an absolute crock of flaming bullshit ...

Opera brings fondleslab-style reading to bog-standard web

CD001

I think this is perhaps more referring to "apps" in the fondleslab/featurephone sense ... i.e. native wrappers for web applications rather than totally local applications.

And - tbh - I think it looks like a good thing; here's an experiment for you, create a 3 column layout for a web page where the height is defined by any of those columns and all three columns must be the same height ... WITHOUT using tables.

Though, to be fair, "grid positioning" has been under development for years:

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-grid/

Dubstep ringtone wins Nokia compo

CD001

I kinda like it in a Deadmau5 sorta way ... and I'm the wrong side of 30 so it's probably just lost all credibility ;)

Spotify's rising revenues gobbled by royalties blackhole

CD001

Last.fm used to be good for small/independent artists and DJs too - you can put your own stuff up there. When they actually had a player that allowed you to steam albums (you can only stream the radio now) it was good to find random stuff that you might want to listen to, via the related artists feature, give it a bit of a listen and see if it was "interesting"... now I do the same thing with Spotify, but that lacks those really small or unsigned artists.

I used to subscribe to last.fm as it was a decent service for those reasons (and the radio secondarily) ... I stopped subscribing when they changed to "radio mode"; sort of wonder whether they should be paying _me_ as I'm helping propagate their database every time I scrobble something.

Smut oglers told to opt in to keep web filth flowing

CD001

I don't buy it ... I'm convinced each passing generation is getting tamer and more prudish.

Try (not to) think about say, your parents, or people their age (say mid 60s) swinging in the 60s when "the pill" was invented... or your nan banging away with some American servicemen posted over here in WWII - the Victorians were overtly prudish and yet what were some of the very earliest uses they put the camera to when it was invented? Yup, porn. Apparently prostitution was rife too.

... and keep going back ... now try reading The Canterbury Tales.

I'm beginning to suspect Demolition Man may prove to be strangely prophetic.

CD001
Gimp

Teenagers fap - and this is news?

If they're old enough to be interested in porn - they're old enough to be looking at it on the web without being even remotely disturbed... seriously - what's the big deal about your 13 yr old son fapping off to some random pron on the web?

Christ, when I was 13 you had to nick the mags from the newsagent you did the paper round for ... what, you didn't think that was a perk of the job for teenage boys?

Maybe there should be a special ISP just for the "speaking as a parent" brigade - one with the most restrictive net nanny on it ever - so they get the Internet in the form of a sanitised walled garden and they can leave the rest of us alone.

Geek girls lauded on Ada Lovelace Day

CD001

That's only part of it ... what they're working on now is the whole thing.

Put down the Java manual

CD001

Even many, many aeons ago Borland (when they were still Borland) used to provide a free command line compiler for C++

I remember dicking about with it a bit using a basic text editor (possibly even notepad), an old "Hands on C++" textbook probably from the early 80s looking at the graphics on the cover, and writing some tiny little automation programs that ran from the command line; nothing impressive or really worthwhile I was just tinkering for the sake of tinkering :)

The biggest bar to entry was simply getting C++ to do anything useful with the Windows GUI (MFCs *shudders*) - and the same thing can be said of Java (though the Netbeans platform helps).

Sony: all new PS3 titles will require PSN Pass for online play

CD001

That's how the PC gaming market (with the odd exception like Egosoft) has worked for years... now that consoles are basically PCs (they have HDDs and connect to the internet) it's not entirely surprising that the consoles are coming in-line with the PC world of DRM.

There IS no second-hand market for PC games ... expect no different for consoles in the long run (though will they bring the price of console games down in-line with PC games - I doubt it).

CD001

There's basically no resale value on PC games - for all intents and purposes, once you've bought a PC game you can never resell it; the consoles have traditionally relied on "untweakable" hardware and physical disks as copy protection - on the PC it's been the wild west since, well, before there were IBM compatible PCs (think every generation of "personal computer" since the Beeb).

Circumventing copy-protection systems on the PC has been there since the get go so the protection systems have been getting more and more shirty forever (Starforce comes to mind - sack of cak that was).

So, the advantages of PC gaming are that the games cost less in the first place and (MMOs excepted) there's no additional fee to play online - some are even "free to buy", like Team Fortress 2 and rely on micro-transactions after the fact to fund the game (moar hatz).

The downside is that there's no resale market for PC games.

CD001

Damn - that's harsh. Just as I was thinking that one of the few things the PS3 has over the XBoX is that it doesn't require a subscription to play online...

CD001

Selling PC games?

I'm not saying it's right but you've pretty much not been able to sell PC games back to stores (Gamestop et al) since noCD(DVD) type cracks/rips have been able to port the whole kaboodle onto PC HDDs for years - most games companies have given up on on-the-disk protection on the PC because it doesn't work; they get much more draconian about it (*coughs Ubisoft*)... and as these draconian measures go, Steam is one of the lesser evils.

She might not be able to sell Civ5 but she might be able to gift it to a Steam friend maybe (in exchange for the first round of drinks up the pub or something)? Assuming, of course, she knows anyone that would like it.

Chrome browser 'is becoming Number Two'

CD001

popular != most used

Think how many iDevices there are that have Safari installed - bit like Windows+IE on the desktop.

Don't bother with that degree, say IT pros

CD001

Don't get me wrong - I'd still have taken that £13k p/a job; it's just that you're sold the "get a degree - earn more £££s" line all the time - the reality isn't quite like that and if I'd bought into that line to the tune of £27k debt that reality would have been a bigger kick in the nuts... not to mention that your "quite a bit more" figure is going down by the year...

When I went to Uni (first year with loans and we had grants as well and no tuition fees - kerching!) the amount you had to earn to _begin_ paying your student loan back was about £28k p/a IIRC which is adjusted for inflation every year so it's always been more than my salary... and at such a low interest rate I've never bothered to pay it back (it's actually at -0.5% atm so it's paying itself off without me doing anything) - financially it makes better sense to put the money into an ISA or higher interest e-banking account until such time as the interest rate on the loan is higher than it would be on the ISA (or you're earning "too much") and then just pay the loan off in a lump sum; student loans were only about £1500 p/a then mind as they didn't have to cover tuition fees.

If you go to Uni now it's what, £18k before you have to start paying your loan back? Less?

CD001

@Charles Manning

Actually - I DON'T expect a programmer to come pre-loaded to my requirements; that was kind of my point - Universities seem to be churning out programmers that ARE pre-loaded to some predetermined blueprint, to *sombody's* requirements, with a specific set of skills - they don't seem to have been taught how to learn or solve problems nor do they have a real interest in the field they're employed in (remember crapverts like "get an IT qualification - earn ££££s"?)

I don't care if they're a C# .NET developer or some kind of warped guru who thinks in x86 Assembly... however I do expect, if I'm employing a programmer, that they have enough interest in the field in which they're working to know that there are other operating systems beyond Windows, that .NET is MS-specific (Mono not withstanding), that if they're a .NET developer (for example) I'd expect them to know the shortcomings of that as well as the benefits; they must have an ability to think on their feet rather than dogmatically pursue a language/framework that they're comfortable with when it's not the best tool for the job.

The most important part of programming is problem solving - coding is pretty much a matter of grammar and vocabulary in which you can be retrained; it's not a massive a leap to move from C# to Java for instance - or to a lesser extent C++ or PHP. I'd expect a computing graduate to understand the principles and be able to problem solve - _really_ detailed knowledge of the language comes best when you're using it day in day out, i.e. on the job.

I'll happily admit that I know nothing about how ARM assembler works, I've never needed to, BUT I have enough interest in this crap to fondly remember RiscOS on the Archie (which ran on an ARM chip) from some oooooh 15+ years ago.

CD001

@Robert Long 1

Totally agree about expanding the program language repertoire ...

My interest in computing got serious when I was at university (doing a degree in Art *shrugs*) and the web was just beginning to really enter the public consciousness; before the original .com boom - I wasn't about to try and switch course so I started to teach myself because it fascinated me - being able to make something, in a computer, and see it there, on the screen - upload it and everyone can see it...

So I started with the very basic for the web, HTML - added in CSS to simply things and begin separating the semantics from the style ... added JS to make it more interactive ... added PHP/MySQL to make it easier to maintain (not having to upload files over FTP; just very basic CMS type stuff initially)... then Perl and so on throughout my degree and well into my working career.

The problem you have there, with Perl, JavaScript and PHP is that they're not strictly typed and that leads to some "quirks" when you start applying OOP principles (can't be properly polymorphic for instance) ... but of course, when you don't know anything else, you don't realise that.

Started learning Java in my spare time and OOP suddenly clicked; even more so with C# as that "feels" like a better language to me and I find it much easier to "get along with" than Java - I think that the PHP code I use in my day-job is now MUCH better because of my experiences with Java and C#. I don't try and shoehorn PHP into a strictly typed language (it isn't one) but I do much better understand OOP principles (abstraction, interfaces, patterns ... ) and can better apply them to PHP.

CD001

Funny - the Romans seemed to manage to build things without bits of paper using some kind of strange apprenticeship scheme - the laws of physics haven't changed in the last 2000 years so there's no real reason why an architect shouldn't be taught "on the job" (especially now that Physics is no longer a requirement for degrees in architecture).

However programming principles, designs and practices change frequently - a computing degree from 10 years ago is probably ONLY worthwhile as an indicator that the person has (or should have, it's not always the case) a good understanding of IT principles - if they've not kept their skills current they're probably going to be useless in a real-world environment - even with a degree you still need to keep learning on the job.

Though I tend to agree - we really need something like RIBA for software architects (RIBSA perhaps).

CD001

Good database design never goes out of fashion young man!

"It's the key, the whole key and nothing but the key, so help me Codd"

3NF - 40 years old and counting.

CD001

Resistant to education

... I LIKE that term! :D

CD001

Ironically - when I was "straight out of Uni" (11 years ago) - every job advert said 2 years experience; my first job out of Uni - web designer on £13k a year ... which I was happy to take as I knew it would start to get me that experience.

If I'd clocked up £27k worth of debt going to Uni now - I'd be less than pleased with having to have chalked up that massive debt for that wage.

CD001

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You also see this "Must have a degree" for php jobs which isn't as far as I know taught at unis.

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What's that got to do with the price of bacon - a degree SHOULD NOT teach you a programming language (specifically) it should teach you how to program (big difference).

CD001

While this all may be true ... you can run into issues with fully qualified programmers with bits of paper and everything - particularly when the education system is geared towards creating drones for a particular software environment...

Programmer: "Why don't we use .NET on the website?"

Me: "Because it's a LAMP stack using Slackware, Mono isn't production ready and we don't need the overhead".

Programmer: *blank look* "But .NET works on everything? What's Mono?"

Me: *facepalm*

It all comes down to the person and how they're educated - my biggest worry, being self-taught and effectively working in isolation most of the time, is that I might be very, very wrong and never even know it - I work fairly hard to ensure that I'm not but still...

CD001

Weirdly the degree you actually have is actually less important than having one... a degree basically says "yup, I left my parents' basement and went away for three years to gain some life experience*" ... my programming experience is largely web based (LAMP stack) but I've also taught myself Perl, C#, Java to a certain extent and tinkered with C++ (when Valve released the Half-Life SDK with the full source code I HAD to have a look).

The one advantage I'd say self-taught "bedroom enthusiasts" have is that they tend to remain enthusiasts (e.g. enthusiastic about programming) ... something the education machine can have a nasty habit of draining away.

Oh, my degree ... Arts & Design, finalled in Fine Art Sculpture - on paper I'm more qualified to cast bronze, use an arc welder, or chisel stone than I am to turn on a PC - and I have far less enthusiasm for art these days than I do well structured objects or good database design.

*life experiences such as alcohol tolerances, surviving food poisoning and experimentation with controlled substances and sexuality ...

500 jobs threatened as Virgin Media shutters Liverpool call centre

CD001

Bugger

The few times I've had to deal with VMs customer services, the best, most helpful responses I've had have been delivered with a scouse accent :\

Spotify adds 'temporary' private listening mode after Facebook backlash

CD001

Gee! I wish everyone did that then there'd be no money to be made from music and we could all go back to listening to local folk groups up the pub for entertainment as that's all there'd be available outside of London (and maybe a couple of other big cities) - huzzah! Go you!

... muppet.

CD001

It IS an option - you just turn it off in "preferences" (not that I've had to yet, I've not linked Spotify to Facebook as I don't have to, being an existing Spotify user ... yet).

All Spotify are doing is utilising the Facbook login system - in the same sort of way Stack Overflow allows you to log in with your Google account (or OpenID and so on)... what creeps me out is the possibility of Facebook becoming kinda like the passport office for the web :\

We7 morphs from jukebox into a radio station

CD001

Grooveshark - though I have absolutely no idea how that's legal... they claim it is. *shrugs*

Euro beaks mull copyright of software features

CD001

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So any developer of a software product just has to ensure that they provide a detailed set of manuals in order to be able to kill the potential competition with litigation?

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Which might not be an entirely bad thing ... have you seen some of the API documentation out there? ;)

Bank emails punters asking for their, er, email address

CD001

Weakest elements in the security chain are those flesh organic parts.

Reebok used 'very fit woman' in buttock-related deception

CD001

Wow...

... and I thought adverts in the UK were bad - I hope that's not indicative of the general quality of American advertising.

Aussie parrots hit the sauce and hit the deck

CD001

There was a feature-length documentary from friggin years ago called "Capricorn's Beautiful People" ... at least that's what I remember it being called - according to IMDB it was "Animals are beautiful people", either my memory isn't entirely correct or someone with a time machine has been subtly and pointlessly changing very minor facets of the past?

Anyway - that film had a whole sequence in it with various critters getting mullered on fermenting fruit - giraffes were the best :)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071143/

Facebook's complexity will be its doom

CD001

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People came out of the woodwork, some I'd had no contact with for 20 years. "Hey, remember at school when?" "Erm, no, I've moved on, forgot that."

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You're under no obligation to accept anyone's "friend" request you know. I've got a grand total of something like 30+ friends on Facebook - except for about 5 (who I've met on online games, forums or even on random shit on Facebook itself) all of them are people I know offline.

If I get a request from someone where I think "yeah, I vaguely remember the name but really, who the hell are you?" - then I just ignore the request. Ignored loads from people I probably knew in school - I've done way too much crap since then to remember them.

The new "home feed" on Facebook is, however, pretty crappy - and it's no longer actually easy to navigate Facebook or find anything... I have absolutely no idea where to look now for a list of things that I've "liked".

Veggies tricked into dating meat-gobbling escorts

CD001

Why Vern, what is that smell? - ayup, bullcrap

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Unfortunately there was no filter to let people search for users who had ticked that option. Veggie Dates explained that it was a feature that they had intended to include but it had not been possible.

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WTF - seriously? It's not possible to do a conditional search on your database to only return results where "user.veggie = 1"?

Apple loses bid to trademark 'multi-touch'

CD001

Jawa - they sell androids (though you may have to expect the occasional one with a bad motivator).

CD001

If you can come up with a single term or phrase that defines "normal sex" ... you need to live more ... seriously.

Spotify tethers future to Facebook

CD001

Am I missing something...

Am I missing something or is it that Spotify are basically now just using the Facebook ID API (or whatever it's called) to deal with logins ... they could have used OpenID or Google ID to achieve the same ends - this is something that _many_ web services are doing these days so that they can farm off the whole user auth part of the code and their users get the convenience of being able to use the same login over many services (good idea or otherwise).

Of course they could _always_ use the same login details on multiple services but this way you have a single point of internet "identity" - update your details or change your password in one place and it's updated your details for all places... the biggest concern here is that Facebook are angling to become the defacto operator for everyone's internet identity.

I'm not convinced the pros outweigh the cons when it comes to having a unified "internet identity" - even less so when the data controller is Facebook.

Virtual and real worlds collide in gamers' minds

CD001

GT

Sort of reminds me of the original Gran Turismo - there was a billboard that went up in a field next to the motorway on my way to work with a huge Gran Turismo advert on it that stated "Remember, you're not playing Gran Turismo".

... quite bad when Garbage's "As heaven is wide" came up on the car stereo.

Georgia Parole Board blocks Amnesty email campaign

CD001

Yeah, Iran had a much better economy until recently ;)

'Angry Bird in the Sky' spotted by astronomers

CD001

Looks more like a Chocobo to me

Mathematicians slam UK.gov plans to fund statistics only

CD001

They have to bribe you

They have to bribe you to study statistics obviously - pure maths and theoretical physics can be fun - something which can never, ever be said of statistics...

Hackers break SSL encryption used by millions of sites

CD001

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Most Opera users have zero extra "plugins" or "scriptlets" or "widgets" running at all.

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I've got a chess widget, does that count?

Oh - and one that allows you to blow up the website with a little Asteroids style spaceship, you can shoot the HTML Elements to make them go boom - quite therapeutic :)

CD001

You can do that in the browser-that-shall-not-be-named-for-fear-of-being-accused-of-fanboyism (rather than the other browser that shall not be named because it's crap).

CD001

No JavaScript would also mean many, many more page reloads to validate form data (rather than winging it around behind the scenes with AJaX).

Still, I'd argue that on any website where you're actually trying to sell anything JavaScript _must_ be optional - which is a pain from a developer standpoint; for instance, I load in the address format based upon the country selected (postcodes are optional in Ireland for instance) ... if the customer changes country I need to load in a new address format - without using JS/AJaX that means a whole page reload. The whole step-by-step process of completing an order is a whole lot more clunky without JS... it works, but it's clunky.

JS is a useful tool for hiding complexity in web applications from end users.

Online gamers strike major blow in battle against AIDS

CD001

Why downvote a troll, with an obvious troll icon?

What's worrying is that there are actually people that really, genuinely think like that...