Posts by MET

Microsoft urges developers to tag sites for IE8

Not quite the consequence you were thinking of

"[The IE8] beta sucked worse than 7. MS should do everybody a favor and just get out of the browser business"

Then 90% of users will still be using IE6 or 7 in years to come, and you will still be complaining.

MS bashes Gay(wood) Xbox Live gamer

Thinking internationally

This reminded me of the wonderfully named 'Randy Bender' (literally meaning horny homosexual for those outside the UK) who was heavily linked several years ago. El reg even did an article on it but sadly the link is no longer valid. Googling 'randy bender' nowadays seems to bring up a long list of namesakes.

I worked with a 'Randy Winkel' once, which is almost as similarly amusing.

Should Europeans pay to receive phone calls?

Tail wagging the dog

The logic of this report appears to be as follows

1 in the US local calls are free and long distance very expensive

2 in the US mobiles were sold with land line area codes so users expected free local calls

3 someone had to pay so they made it the callee

So this whole problem appears to derive from the US charging model and the bizarre decision to give a geographic area code to a device that is designed to travel.

Given that neither points 1 or 2 are true in the UK (I don't know about the rest of Europe) it would seem odd to imply the same conclusion here.

Better to change US phones to have non geographic area codes than pay to receive calls here.

Remembering the Commodore SX-64

Don't use a colour TV

Computers really do display poorly on a cololur TV. The trick is to use a black and white - assuming you can still get hold of them. In the days before monitors they were always the best thing for programming on.