Posts by Andrew Norton

nope

I'm just not a frequent Reg reader any more. 10 years ago, it was 'refresh every few hours'. today I'll pop by every few days, maybe. Part of it is the new editorial direction Andrew's taking things.

I also did a quick search of the site, for IE9 against firefox 4, They both got a 'look to have feb release' piece, and both got a release piece, but apart from a few 'standards' based pieces that concerned multiple browsers, and a 'no track' piece, thats been about it since September, when there was a 'first look' and a 'review' of the beta. There were four more beta's between then and release.

Firefox, by comparison, got a post about the release candidate on march10th. Beta12 pieces on feb 25 and feb26, oh and feb 21.Beta11 feb 8th. Beta10 on jan25 with a followup on feb3. Jan 17 beta9, Beta7 on November 10...

Thats 9 pieces for Mozilla, to IE's 2. Hardly what I'd call "the same treatment"

cars head ditchwards?

er no, cars go straight ahead if you take your hands off the wheel (assuming the wheel was straight to begin with)

If your car is heading ditchwards, I'd take it to a garage ASAP and get it's alignment done quick-smart, because you're wearing your tyres unevenly, and could have them fail on you.

If your front-end alignment is ok, then it might be that you're experiencing the 'crown of the road'. Put simply, roads are not 'flat' but curved slightly, with the center slightly higher than the outside edges, so that water goes to the side, for drainage, reducing ponding.

Loquor ergo sum

I comment, therefore I am.

oh sweet jesus

compressors and canned air... dear god...

Industrial compressors. Nice. Nice as in nice oily air from it that is. just what you want...

And canned air. Ooh lovely very cold air, nothing quite like it to crack solder joints.

The other problems is that you;re BLOWING. that dust, where's it going? You don't know. Some of it you're jamming under components.

The whole point is to REMOVE it, not randomly shift it about. Use a vacuum cleaner. Either make sure the nozzle is grounded (static=BAD) or, some people use a paper funnel on the end. When you've got the loose stuff, use a WOODEN toothpick, it's hard and small enough to shift the crap, BUT not hard enough to cause damage to components. Then repeat with the vacuum cleaner.

BLOWING dust around randomly is just stupid.

brewsters Millions

"Heller and Salvino are both just a couple of overgrown Wharf Rats. Why else would anybody spend $10Million to get a $60,000/year job, unless he planned to steal it back with interest."

ahem, vote Pirate!

re: so it seems

Except for everyone that commented on the story when it broke (and was covered elsewhere) on Friday

tree or tier based system

you mean kinda like how Opera has been doing it for a few years?

On my server, i still run 9.64, and I have ~ 300 tabs open, in a bunch of groups. It would be unworkable without this. Ho long has the functionality been there? Well, that Opera's been running the same session since July 2008...

equivilent funcioinality?

"I don't know about synthetic benchmarks, but browsing with AdBlock and NoScript is noticeably faster than browsing in Chrome or Opera, which don't have equivalent functionality.

No, they really don't - unless scripts can be allowed or blocked on a per-domain basis within the same page (so you can could to allow theregister.co.uk, but disallow googleadservices.com and quantserve.com), and without script surrogate functionality, you're stuck with a binary choice of either allowing or disallowing script for a site. "

So you mean unless it works the way it does?

go to site, right click, Site Preferences. you can block by domain. Actually, you've been able to block by domain for years, since about 2003 at least.

It's clear you've never even looked closely. just repeating marketing rubbish. There's a reason Mozilla spends Millions on advertising, it's to get people to believe their crap.

Oh, and you know what else the adblock substitutes don't have? lists that contain things that aren't supposed to be there, but are part of a personal agenda - you know, like Adblock did a few months back...

security concerns?

Would this be the same firefox that has had more exploits over 08, than IE, opera AND safari combined? (115 to 31+30+32)

The one that patches all the exploits so fast there's still some exploits for firefox 2 unpatched from before 3 came out.

That 'you can look at the source code' also doesn't mean much, unless you actually DO. Else you're just making the same assumption that it's ok. It's the PERCEPTION of security, than real security.

errors you say?

"Actually, I bought CDs from my local Tesco supermarket in 2000, so that's wrong."

Of course it is, but just be Glad he's enabled comments on this one so you can actually point it out. I can, for instance, tell you exactly where the music departments are (or at least were) in 3 Asda's in Liverpool - Speke (former TR7 factory), Aintree (right by the racecourse) and Walton. That'd be pretty hard to do if Andrew was correct, since I've not set foot in Blighty since 2002.

just for the record, 30 seconds of looking got my this article from 2006, which had this as the second paragraph http://www.musicweek.com/story.asp?storyCode=18064&sectioncode=1

"26.8% of CDs and 27.4% of DVD are now purchased through supermarkets, compared to just 15.2% and 12.0% five years ago, research by market information provider TNS shows."

I found it when i was looking for a link to a story i remember reading years ago, that Eminem sold the majority of his 'music' through supermarkets.

ah, the 'substitution ratio'

"The “substitution rate" (how much lost per download) at the moment is at a ratio of 1:1 which doesn't make sense as it is."

It doesn't, and many people, including software companies (Such as EA at the news Spore had become the most downloaded PC game according to Torrentfreak - funnily enough, said list of most downloaded games was included in the DEAct consultation documents), have said it's nonsense. Then you have the ratio from the (extensively flawed) study Mr Orlowski championed a few weeks ago.

One thing that didn't get a mention here (or at least i've not seen it), when it came to substitution ratio, was the nice little piece published earlier this week by the US GAO. You should be able to find it easily enough, but the gist was 'there's no evidence to back up loss claims, or the substitution ratios they're based on'

Of course, that report, like the one by the Canadian Government saying p2p actually increases sales, and the ones by all the independent researchers (such as myself), will be ignored in favour of industry-sponsored ones, that have big losses, but give no data or methodology.

Icon because that's what happens when people resort to substitution ratio arguments, as everyone knows it's a load of crap, even Labour Candidate Ricahrd Mollet, standing in South West Surrey (and formerly a high muckety-muck in the British Phonographic Institute)

oopsie

you're right. there's no figures published for now, to compare with 10 years ago... therefore my statement was strictly false (but still more accurate than that substitution ratio stuff before - and I noticed my comment on that, the first one, was NOT approved)

So lets go to 10-year figures we DO have for singles, say 1998 and 2008 (and even better, 1998 was before Napster)

Singles sales for 1998: 77,610,000

Singles sales for 2008: 115,200,000

That's actually a growth more like 45% (using rough mental maths, I'm sure you can calculate it differently. So I was wrong again, it's not 30% growth, it's MORE!

My source for these figures? My word, it's the BPI's top product lines publication, which shows 33% growth in single sales between 2007 and 2008 (maybe thats what I was thinking of when I said 30%

Now, on the other hand, the same document shows that album sales are falling, after a peak in 2004. At the same time though, in 2008, there were still more albums shifted than in 1998, about 8% more. Most of the drop corresponds with a take up in digital singles purchasing, so presumably a-la-carte music buying is shifting the sales from full albums, to individual album tracks (ie singles) as people eliminate the filler-tracks. (a warning of this has been distributed amongst BPI members, although since you've not worked in the music industry - as I have - you'd probably not have been aware of that)

Icon because, well, actually looking at the industry's data seems to be too 'technical' for many people, such as politicians tasked with 'Business' portfolios

Firefox fanboi fail

"You don't hear Firefox bleeting the way Opera do.

Why not?

Easy: Firefox is a browser people WANT to use. Opera isn't wanted,"

Except by Mozilla. Without opera, how will Mozilla see new features to put into Firefox?

The difference is Marketing. with $50M to spend on advertising (got from Google, for adverts) there is a lot of marketing (and a lot of lies in that marketing - 'fast safe secure'? Firefox is none of them, when compared to other browsers)

re: politicos

"I suspect almost all politicos and council leaders would respond in a similar manner."

I strongly doubt that 'Pirate Party politicos' would. (hint hint!)

Vote Pirate come election time!

@AC (12:10)

"...but does it work on Ubuntu (or any other Linux for that matter)? What about OSX? If not then we know where the problem *really* lies..."

Does the code work if the program (firefox) is not running, or better yet if it's not installed? Probably not, so we REALLY know where it lies.

When a company says it's product is 'the most secure', and spends more than half its annual income on marketing, I'd guess it talks about 'secure' in the anti-terrorism sense. (IE keep claiming safety, and hope people are stupid enough to believe the line of crap)