* Posts by Tony Green

240 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2007

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Won't follow Apple Store rules? How 'bout an iTASER TREAT!

Tony Green
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Gaaahhd Bless America!

That's all...

Polish man mistakes hot iron for mobe

Tony Green

I don't speak Polish...

... but I'd be pretty willing to bet that "Fakt" is the Polish equivalent of the Sunday Sport or Daily Mail - ie full of made-up bullshit. Either for entertainment (as in the SS) or to stir hatred (Mail).

Hold the front page for ETERNITY: Murdoch kills The Daily

Tony Green

Good news

Let's hope the bastard took a big loss on it too.

Ten technology FAILS

Tony Green

"Failures", surely, not "Fails"

Unless we're trying to be a load of mindless Americans (with apologies for the tautology).

Brain boffins: 'Yes, math CAN make your head hurt – LITERALLY'

Tony Green
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What makes my head hurt...

...is the use of (tautology alert) mindless Americanisms on a BRITISH news site.

Debenhams cafes ban outré terms like 'espresso' and 'cappuccino'

Tony Green

Sounds sensible to me

As someone who doesn't frequent crappy places like Costa and the like, the various silly names they give their different ways of serving the same thing mean absolutely nothing to me. When I had to have a meeting with a customer in a café recently the waitress understood what I meant by "a black coffee please" without me having to work out which menu item meant that.

Canonical flings out Ubuntu 12.10 – now with OPTIONAL Bezos suck

Tony Green
Unhappy

Re: Well, you haters can hate

I'd love to use Mint. It's the only distro that has a default desktop look so nice that I'd actually keep it rather than customising my own.

Trouble is, every release I've tried has installed beautifully and booted fine the first time. But the second boot has always hung at the X login, rendering it unusable.

Lucky I've got the sense to take full dumps before trying...

Nominet mulls killing off the .co from .co.uk

Tony Green
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Not very well thought-through.

I'm sure there are more than a few situations where completely different people have xxx.co.uk to xxx.org.uk, and quite legitimately. So who gets the .uk and who gets booted?

Manchester is 'PIRATE CAPITAL of the UK'

Tony Green

Scousers only at number FOUR???

Amazing!

Everything Everywhere's 4G: Why I'm sitting this one out

Tony Green
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The sooner the better

I only live a few hundred metres from my local exchange, with all its mobile antenna on the roof in line of site from my house. I currently pay BT shitloads of cash every month for a 'phone line that I only need so I can get broadband. So as soon as 4G's available here I'm getting a 4G broadband router and dumping the 'phone line. Reckon the cost of the router will be paid back in six months of not paying BT.

McAfee: Emma Watson riskiest celebrity search

Tony Green

Another great advantage of totally ignoring popular "culture"...

...is that of all the names listed, the only one I've even HEARD of is Piers Morgan. An I don't think I'm likely to google the man who inspired Stephen Fry to redefine the word "countryside" as "killing Piers Morgan".

UK.gov's minimum booze price dream demolished

Tony Green

The important reason for a minimum price...

...is to make it harder for supermarkets to under-cut pubs and drive more of them out of business.

Now whether I actually WANT to share my local with the sort of person who currently slobs out in front of the TV with a cheap slab of Stella, then gives his wife a kicking before falling asleep, is another question. But if it brings the price of his "lager"[1] nearer to what a nearby boozer that I don't use is selling it at, he might just go there instead.

And taking away the ability to use irresponsible loss-leaders from the supermarkets might just cut their profits a bit, which is no bad thing either.

[1] As opposed to PROPER lager, which actually DOES have some flavour and isn't just there to get you pissed as quickly as possible.

IT support bod? Whatever you earn, it's not enough

Tony Green

Re: In my humble experience...

Very true. I have horrible memories of when I had a BT Internet dialup account with a website as part of the deal. Uploading files by FTP, I'd see 10% of them fail with error messages identifying the IP address where the problem was occurring and showing clearly that it was in the BT network. (I worked for BT myself at the time). But it was obvious from the start that the 1st line people were mainly interested in rejecting as many faults as they could - as soon as they found out I was working from a Linux machine, the response was "We don't support Linux". Then when I showed the same problem from a (work) Windows laptop, "Oh, there was a transient problem on the network".

1st line have a lot of crap to put up with, but when they try to bullshit someone who actually knows more than they do, they don't make any friends.

Tony Green

Re: Too true

This is one of many advantages of being a Linux/Unix specialist. 99% of these situations give me an easy "sorry, I don't know anything about Windows" out. And a bloody good reason never to learn anything about Windows!

Java won the smartphone wars (and nobody noticed)

Tony Green
Unhappy

A pity though...

...because Java is the one language I've programmed in that I hated every minute of.

What a relief Android (maybe others, I haven't looked yet) can have pretty rich HTML5 apps with the SQLite database engine to provide storage. A whole app with only a dozen lines of Java.

Now if they'd only put Perl on them all...

Digg, deep in the hole, sells self for $500K

Tony Green

Surprised Digg was worth even that much

An entirely self-inflicted collapse when they pissed off all their users to service their greed. Their loss was definitely Reddit's gain.

Atos IT workers threaten strike during Olympics over 'living wage'

Tony Green

Are there ANY olympics sponsors who aren't complete arseholes?

Legendary sci-fi fantasy author Ray Bradbury exits planet Earth

Tony Green

Sad, but at least he had a good innings.

The Martian Chronicles was such a gripping read that I couldn't go to sleep until I'd finished it. And I enjoyed it so much I reread it the next day.

UK websites: No one bothers with cookie law, why should we?

Tony Green
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55 websites?

Well that's obviously a very good sample that's going to give them an accurate picture of what's going on, isn't it?

Greene King pubs to offer free beer Wi-Fi

Tony Green
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Would be useful, but...

...I refuse on principle to drink any Greede Kerching beers (even the admittedly excellent XX Mild).

This is a company that produces beers that pretend to be from such old breweries as Ruddle's, Morland and Tolly Cobbold without the slightest indication that they're all brewed at the same Westgate Street brewery. I've even heard them being sold in GK pubs as "guest beers", pretending they're nothing whatsoever to do with the GK brewery.

And they even produced advertising material pretending that their piss-poor IPA had been Camra's Champion Beer of Britain, which it wasn't.

The iPad 3 would make me so horny...

Tony Green
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Buying cars every year...

...just as stupid as wasting wads of cash on the latest, soon-to-be-outdated Apple crap.

Oh, and they're number plates, not "license plates". We're not the 51st state yet.

A month to go on Cookie Law: Will Google Analytics get a free pass?

Tony Green

Re: Don't need no law

That's because you, like me, know what a cookie is and how to block one. Not the sort of thing that helps the average user who doesn't even know what a web browser is and just thinks the IE icon is "the Internet".

Go Daddy boycott threat for backing hated anti-piracy law

Tony Green

the big ones are starting to move

Jimmy Wales has announced that Wikipedia will be leaving GoDaddy over this. https://twitter.com/#!/jimmy_wales/status/150287579642740736"

Though given the number of complaints about their services I keep seeing on Digg, I'm surprised more people haven't buggered off already.

More BT heads roll amid biz transformation

Tony Green
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BT Management...

...haven't been worthy of any respect for many years.

Man sues boss for 'condemning him to eternal damnation'

Tony Green

Nope!

"I'm saddened to see how many people think that a person who has a belief different to theirs should be fired."

He wasn't fired for having beliefs. He was fired for refusing to obey instructions. The fact that he thought those instructions were against his irrational beliefs was irrelevant.

A pint a day keeps the doctor away - scientific FACT

Tony Green

I'd think it's more likely that it's so that American business can make more profit by selling consumers smaller measures. If it's America, then it's money that matters.

Tony Green
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Beer is best!

Interesting to see that they've actually separated out different types of drinks, something that's rarely done. And good to see that while spirits confer no benefit, wine confers some and beer gives the best benefit.

Some years ago, Prof. Richard Doll (he of the tobacco and lung cancer connection) did a similar study which gave the same results. His showed that drinkers only got back to teetotallers' mortality rates above sixty-odd units per week. It would be interesting to see what level they've found that to be for beer drinkers compared to wine drinkers; extrapolating from what they've published free suggests they'll be showing a higher cut-off point.

I'll enjoy my Real Ale tonight even more...

Bloke gets wedding tackle trapped in ring

Tony Green

A better local rag than mine

Most of the comments on that story would have been rejected by the pathetic prudes who moderate the East Anglian Daily Times. The Southern Daily Echo gets respect from me.

Why GNOME refugees love Xfce

Tony Green

One problem is, half of it gets restarted again even if you think you've disabled it. And with more recent releases, such staples as Kmail don't even seem to be able to work without Nepomuk.

Though actually, since Kmail's functionally useless because they screwed up kaddressbook, so that was another reason to dump it.

And all in all, KDE4 gets in the way of me getting things done. XFCE (like KDE3) allows me to get on with my work.

Tony Green

Is this a problem from previous versions? I installed my first XFCE desktop a few months ago and the buttons are all in the order I expected them to be. Though a lot of window-manager themes allow them to be re-ordered.

Tony Green
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The best thing about XFCE...

...is that it just works as a simple interface to control the windows on my screen. Unlike KDE4, it doesn't try to do all kinds of ridiculous things that just use resources and don't actually provide any useful functionality. Seriously, who needs crap like Nepomuk, Strigi and all the other stuff KDE4 depends on?

Blogger freaks after airport lackey fondles checked-in vibrator

Tony Green

Reaching out...

"Agency officials have also reached out to the passenger to personally apologize for this unfortunate incident."

Wasn't that part of the problem in the first place?

ISPs end PM's web smut block dream

Tony Green

It was hard work in Scunthorpe...

...but even worse in Cockermouth.

BT to fibre-up another 114 exchanges

Tony Green
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Talk Talk?

TalkTalk's commercial boss David Goldie claimed that BT was trying to regain "the monopoly position that it lost many years ago" courtesy of its provision of fibre optic broadband.

Apparently disgusting that BT should actually INVEST in infrastructure.

Plods to get dot-uk takedown powers - without court order

Tony Green

Here we go again

If history teaches us nothing else, we should learn the lesson that whatever powers the police are given, they'll find a way to abuse them.

I can just see the Met in particular using this to silence anybody critical of their trigger-happiness, ignoring of 'phone hacking, etc.

Mozilla strokes coders with Firefox 6

Tony Green

Validation

Perhaps I could suggest Total Validator: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/total-validator/

It works for me.

Linus Torvalds dubs GNOME 3 'unholy mess'

Tony Green
Unhappy

Maybe not

Sadly the download link on that page leads to a 404. So maybe it isn't available for Mandriva after all.

It's official: Journos are dumb as a bag of IE users

Tony Green

And better still...

...according to Eddie Mair on Radio Four, this was "a story about an Internet

search engine".

Reckon he's a Mosaic user.

Murdoch's PIE BOY jailed for six weeks

Tony Green

What a total arse!

Successfully gave all the Murdoch media a nice "look how they're victimising our Rupe" story and pushed what needed to be publicised off the front pages.

He should have a copy of the Sun shoved up his backside every day for the rest of his life.

Sun compo entrants' privates exposed in public

Tony Green

Amazing!

Sun "readers" have actually evolved sufficient intelligence to use computers. Who'd've thought it?

It's official: IE users are dumb as a bag of hammers

Tony Green

Would that be...

...in any way related to communists (with the correct spelling)?

Tony Green

Differences

Internet browsers - barely any difference between them. How different could they possibly be?

You're not a web designer then?

UK Cops 'duped' into arresting wrong LulzSec suspect

Tony Green

Highlights?

I hope they at least offer him some guided tour highlights of the big smoke apart from the cell he has probably had to endure.

Seeing London will remind him why he likes living in the Shetlands.

Tony Green

Even if they don't find anything...

...I'm sure they'll manage to find some kiddy-porn or similar to justify collaring him. They'll certainly never admit to grabbing the wrong bloke.

MPs probe science behind bogus gov booze guidelines

Tony Green
Pint

No, Guinness is crap

Otherwise they wouldn't have to have such a massive advertising budget for it.

General rule of thumb: the better and more lavish the advert, the crapper the product.

Proved for me by a cheaply-printed sheet of A4 I saw at the Zythos Beer Festival a few years ago in Belgium, "Chouffe. het bier is beter dan de slogan" (Chouffe: the beer is better than the slogan). And it is!

Tony Green
Pint

It's even better than that

Research by Professor Richard Doll and others in 1993 showed that about 30 units a week produced the lowest mortality rate. It wasn't until drinkers got to 63 units a week that their mortality rate became as high as that of a teetotaller.

It would be interesting to see a similarly properly-run study looking at the mortality rates of people who habitually drink different types of alcoholic drinks. I have a strong suspicion that spirit drinkers might well be skewing the average quite badly (for example, it's well-documented that brandy is far more damaging to the liver even than other spirits).

Popstar hackers snaffle Lady GaGa fans' email addresses

Tony Green
Facepalm

Imagine the shame

Outed as a fan of that publicity-whore.

News Corp kills BSkyB bid amid 'difficult climate'

Tony Green
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In other words...

...the Dirty Digger's pulling back while the heat's on with the intention of coming back for another go when the short attention-span of the public means most of them have forgotten.

Sweaties decode ultimate mystery of chips

Tony Green
Happy

I'm only a sassanach...

...but that really did make me laugh.

90% of visitors declined ICO website's opt-out cookie

Tony Green

Things like Google analytics are a pain in the arse

So many times I've sat waiting for a page to load and I see my browser saying it's waiting for ssl-google-analytics.l.google.com, s.ytimg.com or ad.be.doubleclick.net. So as far as I'm concerned, they're getting in my way so I'm going to block them.

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