Posts by CD001

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Firefox has the most consistently accurate rendering of all the browsers.

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I'm not entirely, 100% convinced by that any more - FF does have the odd quirk I've found recently (some strange things happen when you style "buttons" or try to make anchor tags mimic those buttons in appearance).

Still, as a web monkey, I tend to always fall back to FF for the Developer Toolbar, HTML Tidy (in view source), ColorZilla and a couple of accessibility testing plug-ins... for actually using the web browser as a web browser though - I think Opera is better (apart from the fact that it tends to render fonts a little smaller).

Any string in single quotes, in PHP, is a string literal - basically.

Though when it comes to paths it's probably easier to just use UNIX-like paths and drop them into a realpath() function - though that does return false if the file/directory doesn't exist which can make debugging "interesting".

It's probably good practice to also enclose any variables you want to output in curly braces (just in case) so "Hello $foo\n" might be better written as "Hello {$foo}\n" - it makes sense if you want to output something like "Now you're {$sExpletive}ed\n" ;)

Reminds me

To many people, MP3 player == iPod - gonna be the same deal on fondlslab == iPad; except for Reg Readers of course, to whom it will be a fondleslab - and for whom the countries of Bolivia and Bulgaria will always be associated with "marching powder" and "airbags" respectively (yes, I was propagating a country table in a database yesterday, thank you).

The 'b' in this case _may_ stand for binary - as in it's in a binary system but that's just a guess.

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Slightly off topic but it seems to be the same for when they discover a new animal or insect - they name it after the "Latin"

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I've often wondered that - though it's just as often Greek; hippopotamus for example, roughly translated as "Horse of the water" - whereas the Germans just call it Nilpferd "Nile Horse" using, well, the German word for horse (of course).

Ditto on Schildkröte (Shield "Frog" - very approximate translation as there's no differentiation between frogs and toads in German) - we'd call it a tortoise :)

Which just means you'll end up with 2 camps - graphic designers creating Flash content using Adobe tools because they integrate well with the whole CS suite (Photoshop, Illustrator etc) and app developers possibly using Visual Studio to build Flex apps because that's what they're used to.

I might hurt Adobe's market share with the Flash authoring tool a bit but I'd be amazed if it killed it outright.

Actually - trash bin works more like...

Move file to trash -> file is easily recoverable

Empty trash -> file is flagged to be overwritten as and when something needs to use that disk space

Unless you're using a program that specifically writes over the blocks on the disk, the file is still there, and still potentially recoverable, even when you empty the trash.

Just sayin'

Boring... I can remember this cranky old Windows XP desktop I'm typing this on at work crashing exactly twice in the last 3 years.

If you want a Windows (7) machine that crashes a lot ... put an ATI graphics card in it and play Brink. Now, who's fault is it? Microsoft for allowing ATI (nee AMD) to install less-than-stellar drivers on a Windows machine, AMD's fault for writing the drivers in the first place or Splash Damage (Bethesda I suppose as they own the ID engine) for releasing a game that doesn't play well with AMD cards on Windows 7?

In the murky world of Windows PCs it's not necessarily that east to pin-point the culprit when stuff crashes... now they could take the same approach as Apple took with Flash (it causes crashes, therefore we're banning it) but then it wouldn't BE a Windows PC any more - it would be another locked down system useless to inveterate tinkerers.

You do get a choice of channels on the VM Superhub as well ... and it pretty much works out of the box (as well as you'd expect from any Netgear kit anyway).

The point, I think you're missing, is that it's not the world's greatest wireless router (doesn't seem to have any QoS management for instance) - but, until this update, you couldn't put it into "modem only" mode and use another router, you were (realistically) stuck with the one built into the Superhub whether you liked it or not; somewhat annoying if you were a VM customer from the days when they simply provided a cable modem and had therefore already bought your own wireless router that's actually far better than the one built into the Superhub.

To be fair though, the only reason I upgraded from the 20Mbs to the 30Mbs service with the Superhub was that my old wireless router packed up - and the upgrade was cheaper than buying a new one... it's taken a few months but now my 30Mbs connection IS actually faster than the old 20Mbs service* to start with it was somewhat... variable :\

*OK, technically the 30Mbs connection was always _slightly_ faster but it seemed to fluctuate more - sort of somewhere between about 23 Mbs and 27Mbs whereas the older 20Mbs service was pretty much rock solid at about 19.6Mbs (depending on the server in both cases of course) - but I was hardly going to complain though because they'd ratcheted me up another "loyalty bonus" (or whatever) as I've been with them since the Telewest days, so I'm actually paying less, per month, for my 30Mbs connection than I was for the 20Mbs *shrugs*.

Civ V

TBH the combat overhaul is Civ 5 is the best thing to happen to the series since... well, ever. It's FAR more tactical now than it ever was - you no longer just create an enormous stack and go yomping but create a mix of long and short range units and use terrain (such as hills - or even mountains once you've got helicopter gunships) to your advantage. That, in itself, makes Civ 5 probably my favourite Civ game yet (and I've been playing it since the first version on an Amiga A500+).

As an added bonus, the annoying espionage system from Civ 4 has been dropped.

There are a few things I miss from Civ 4 however:

1: The United Nations Resolutions - the UN is now just a crappy win mode for whoever bribes the most city states.

2: Actual benefits from researching "Future Tech" - at the very least I'd love it to up the happiness of your civilisation slightly; the global happiness thing in Civ 5 gets a bit naff at the end-game when you've got lots of huge cities - you have to adopt some very weird cultural policies just to keep your civilisation happy; e.g. Honor (the "early game" combat policy) to get the happiness bonus from each "city wall" upgrade (walls, castles and so on).

3: Religions - they're just not in Civ 5 at all, which is a bit of a shame because they worked well in Civ 4.

4: Different leaders with different bonuses per-Civ; just one leader per Civ atm and therefore one set of predefined bonuses per Civ.

... still, many of the big changes in Civ 4 that made it the Civ 4 we all knew and loved came in with the 2 expansion packs. The way things are going with Civ 5 there'll not be any expansion packs just a continual trickle of DLC which may eventually rectify any/all of these little gripes *shrugs*

Teh internets r gigo

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Given the greater quantity and considerably lower quality of modern day comments, readers pay very little attention to comments.

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As epitomised by tl;dr

What's the point?

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Why shouldn't we rise up and rip their throats out? Why are we not massing on Downing Street with pitchforks and cudgels?

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The greatest trick the Tories ever pulled was to destroy society (as a collective) - I'm alright Jack, everyone else can get stuffed. You may see sporadic bouts of self-motivated upheaval (rioting to nick some trainers and TVs perhaps) but unless there is a fundamental societal change there will never be any large scale, organised resistance to the status quo; people will keep their heads down and stay in their place - nobody will try to improve the situation for _everybody_.

Cuckoo

Funny - to spec up a similar Apple machine to my PC would cost 50% more (e.g. closer to 3 grand than 2) - and my choice of games would be seriously limited and, let's be realistic here, if you're spending 2 grand on a PC you're going to be gaming on it (and/or making or modding games perhaps and using 3d apps like Maya).

And the really daft thing is, if you're NOT going to play games on it then a <£500 PC will probably do you - in which case you're looking at maybe a 100% markup (or more) to get a Mac.

The ONLY point I can see in Macs is as an expensive niche device for people who want to use Logic Studio - I don't even think they're very pretty, the case designs look like something Lian-Li were doing about a decade ago and the OSX UI is well, grey - but for some reason Macolytes seem to equate the "PC" with Windows 95 in a biege box from 15 years ago.

Enjoy your lunch Mr. Troll.

You're

You're probably not most people - remember, they're targeting BT customer's here; "We'll offer the same shizzle as BT but call it a SUPERHUB rather than a HomeHub - 'coz SUPER is better than Home innit?!"

Most punters want a box they can plug in that will just work with their laptops, iPads, Nintendo DS's and other assorted games consoles. If you live in a built up area with several wireless networks around I almost guarantee you'll find at least one running without ANY (not even WEP) encryption and no password (and of those that are passworded I'd guess some are using the default admin/password pair).

People want their PCs, home networks, whatever else to basically fall into the white goods category - plug it in, switch it on and forget about it. They don't want configuration, or even options in many cases; I sit opposite a graphic designer at work, a Macolyte, she can't can't understand why I'd want to set up my OS to use "Evil Dead", or any other non-standard samples in the sound set - that I actually like "tinkering" for the sake of it.

Yeah

... because there's no legal, free alternatives to listen to any of the mainstream shite that appears at V of course? (I can think of at least 3 off the top of my head) Christ, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get CDs from most of those bands from the library (except maybe Beardyman - yeah, he was on the bill, in tiny little letters way down the rankings).

Wow

Predictable comment is predictable - only mildly surprised it was so far down the page.

Trollin' Trollin' Trollin' RAWHIDE!

WTF?

Seriously? People have down-voted a post because it was posted by a Christian?

Unless it's being down-voted for implying that it' s OK to "cross the line" as long as the Gospel says so, there's nothing warranting the down-votes here - and I'm from the general school of thought that religion is a largely harmless* diversion for people who feel the need for the universe to make some kind of sense (I tend to think shit happens, there's no grand plan and the only difference between us and soil is time).

*largely harmless - insofar as it's often used as an excuse to cause harm rather than a cause of harm in and of itself. People are basically monkeys with better weapons and chimps will happily murder each other without having to invoke some higher power - without religion we'd simply have "philosophical" wars rather than religious ones.

Curses

E'Gads! Tis what one gets, forsooth, when befouled with "RegExp English" Circa 1560!

Still, 'tis a step to the fore from Chaucer edition I was, but until recently, benighted with!

Probably

Probably already exists in Japan.

Dr. Flexi Jerkoff

Good, there's oxygen on this planet.

Logical

... since, like whales, icebergs also calve.

aksdjnasdkjn

... called Helga... with a beard.