Posts by Dai

Apple in shock talks with Reg reader

iTunes should be a web app...

Never used it on Linux (for obvious reasons) and my experience with it on my parent's windows machines lead me to suggest that the 90s called and want their idea of a dedicated and closed software interface to external hardware back. It does really, really, really suck and I'm not usually a man for repeated modifiers.

Proper portable media players are the ones you can just drag and drop to - you know, the ones that comply with widely accepted open standards. And proper media sales operations don't require that you need to download 80megs of cruft before you start giving them money. There's these brilliant things called websites...

In years to come historians will marvel at our collective willingness to put up with Apple's closed ecosystem nonsense just for a few glossy surfaces and fancy UI innovations. And before I get labelled as a hater I would happily buy DRM-free music from Apple (or anyone else) if they showed any inclination to let me do so without taking over my computer.

Firefox syncing tool Weaves its way into beta status

@Barney Carroll

Haha - I see what you did there, you used sarcastic overstatement to make me sound like I was some sort of fanboy! You trickster, you :-)

Anyway, wouldn't it be nice if we saw a genuine innovation coming from Mozilla? They've a lot of very talented developers working on Firefox but recently all they've been doing is playing catch up with features from other browsers, and trying to get the thing to speed up somehow. Which is nice - these are good, worthwhile, things to be doing - but I'd hate to see the browser market stagnate again.

Another Opera feature...

... and a long standing one. Way to redefine the paradigm, Mozilla!

Orange issues Heroic update

Donut?

Is this linked to the forthcoming donut release, which is scheduled to be rolled out to most Android based phones next month?

Cameron condemns Tweeters as tw*ts

He was trying to make a funny...

... by using a naughty word for shock value.

Jonathan Ross has been suspended for less. And he would have at least made his comment (a) funny and (b) coherent as well as sweary.

I am genuinely scared that this man may be our prime minister soon.

Facebook mimics Google's 'poor man's email'

@Anonymous Coward

Or perhaps IT teachers can type faster than you?

El Reg salutes ultimate shed anthem

But...

... it works on Opera, @AC.

Genius piece of marketing. My next shed will be coming from there now...

UK.gov loses 29 million personal records

But...

How many of these have been lost by "UK Government" and how many have been lost by private companies contracted to provide services that have traditionally been done very well "in house" by actual civil servants?

9/11 an inside job, says Irish pop folkster

You mean...

The MAN-CORR. Call it by it's name...

Life a mess? The Moderatrix can help

Is this like "notes and swearies"?

Can you recommend any office-safe insults, for when some one is just plainly a complete **** ****ing ****-bubble of a ****head but you would quite like to continue being paid by them?

Independent dubs El Reg lesbian

@Danny

"The lesbians always come first !"

Could you link to a peer reviewed study that proves this?

Byron review calls for computer game ratings

A quick read.

...the report itself is worth reading properly, she does talk a lot of sense. The slightly sensationalist nature of some of the recommendations misrepresents that whole. The stuff about media literacy, particularly, is spot on.

Also regarding Dr Tanya, I so, so, so, so would. And so would the rest of you. Come on, cleavage and a PhD - that's geek man heaven, right?

Veggies a 'perversion of nature': Official

B12

@Mr Stalin

Bacteria (friendly ones or otherwise) produce Vitamin B12. No plants, no animals.

Are bacteria plants or animals - an interesting question and not once that is going to be answered conclusively on a Register comments page.

Top secret UK data network goes live two years late

Just goes to prove...

The only UK governmental body who should be allowed to do any big IT stuff is JISC. The large number of Reg Readers in academia will know how good stuff like SuperJANET is...

AOL tosses Netscape into the dustbin of history

3G users...

Already know how useful early versions of netscape (optimised for low-bandwidth connections) can be....

Brown knew data loss was disaster waiting to happen

But...

I was wondering why this article wasn't about Gordon realising that TNT were shite and lose stuff all the time? Certainly an on-time amazon delivery is as rare as rocking-horse poo... something which will surely resonate with Gordon.

Or that it was about how Gordon realised that EDS were both shite and overpriced - given the part they have played in pretty much every UK government IT balls up in the last 10 years?

Let's stop blaming the Civil Service. Two private companies are useless and therefore data has been lost.

On the Office format wars

Not nearly radical enough.

There exists a perfect solution. ASCII.

If you think about it, we don't really need to apply our own formatting to documents. I would go as far as to say that many spend more time fighting with Word (no, I didn't want you to go in to a numbered list there) than we do actually writing the documents.

I generally write everything in plain text, then apply the appropriate mark-up at the last possible moment. Indeed, where I have been lucky enough to work alongside a press and publications office I can just send them my plain text, and it makes their applying of the appropriate house style about a million times easier.

Would you expect your web designer to author all of the text on your website?

Of course if your document really needs that heading in precisely 14pt bold then you carry on.

But the sooner the jobs of composition and layout are seperated, the better for most of us.