Posts by Tim Williams 32 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2008
If they required you to login to iPlayer with a unique code on the TV licence (as already suggested above), this would also open up the possibility of selling TV licences to non-UK residents. As I understand it iPlayer is currently limited to UK only IP addresses
There are a lot of expats (and people from other english speaking countries) out there who would probably (and happily) pay the full licence fee just to get at the iPlayer.
"How expensive is it to live in England, and do you know where I can find a good IT job?"
The UK government keeps loosing vital sensitive data by sending unencrypted CD/DVD's though unregistered post. Microsoft security would be an improvement...... Perhaps you should try Ireland ?
I'm intrigued by this, I thought that US citizens weren't supposed to go there. I realise that many Americans DO go to Cuba, but i'm reliably informed that it isn't a good idea to publicise the fact that you have done so when you return. Yes officer, I had a great time in MEXICO.......
Does it matter if you believe man made CO2 emissions are responsible for global warming or if it's a natural cycle ? Does it even matter if you believe it's happening at all, whatever the cause ?
Wake up people, fossil fuels are a finite resource sooner or later they are going to run out. Surely it makes sense to :
a) Use what we have as efficiently as possible
b) Work as hard as possible on sustainable alternatives now, rather than waiting for the oil to run out and then panicking because we have nothing else.
The side benefit of this that CO2 emissions will go down, so if that is causing global warming, then great, we've saved the planet. If it isn't, we haven't lost anything because we had to switch over sooner or later anyway.
I have a computer with a very sensitive variable speed processor fan. Most of the time it runs slow and quite, however, it's not uncommon when i'm web browsing for a flash movie to cause it to make a noise which reminds me of an aircraft taking of. Occasionally the movies that do this are on The Register....
I note that you censored my last demolition job on fixed width page designs. Perhaps I hit a raw nerve with that one.
Firstly I am a web designer myself and in my experience fixed width page designs are rarely needed and are often simply the last resort of an incompetent designer who can't cope with idea of a flexible page width. There may be a few specific cases where a fixed design might be justifiable, eg a page with a very small amount of content which would be unlikely to fill even a very small screen, but I can't think of any reason to use a fixed width for a general site design.
Furthermore, you state that you used a fixed width in order to give yourselves more control over the page, however, by definition, by giving yourselves more control you have to take it away from somebody else, ie us the poor users who now have to adapt our browsing preferences to fit in with what you think is good, when a flexible width design would have enabled everybody to make there own choices.
To all of those who think the fixed width is good because it fits in with you style of working, that's great, but for the rest of us we have lost the ability to choose. I ask you, is it so difficult to just resize your browser window if the page isn't a comfortable size for you ? I think I might start a campaign to have The Register fix it's width at 1580px, which fits nicely with what I want, but probably doesn't suit anybody else.
In the meantime, my greasemonkey extension for Firefox (available on the userscripts website) is fixing the problem, although it has forced a change in browsing habits, since I prefer Konqueror to Firefox, I now have to start up a separate browser to use the reg, so my visits are likely to become less frequent since this requires extra effort. I may even drift off entirely, as a long term reader (8+ years) that would be a pity.
It's now done, it dosn't get it quite right but is good enough for me. I've made it available on the userscripts website for anybody else who wants to try it.
I'm also using the user agent switcher with the following user agent when accessing the reg :
Mozilla Firefox with Register fixed width killer
I suggest we all do the same, hopefully if enough people do this they might notice that we still like the reg but don't like the new design.
Just tried a small experiment, I downloaded the reg home page and with a few quick edits to the style sheet I now have the page rendering to the width of the browser fairly well, with the other headlines flowing to fit the available space. For good measure I moved the teaser headline box so that it was directly under the main headline. It looks so much better for just a few minutes work. Come on el-reg, you know you can do it !
This is particularly aimed at those who think that fixed page width is a good idea :
This is essentially about user choice, using a fixed page width forces everybody who uses a website to have the same page width, whether or not that width is appropriate to that user.
Using a flexible page width enables the user make a choice, they can set the browser window at a width that works best for them and the website will adapt to it.
El Reg : I want the ability to choose my page width back ! Stop taking away user choice.
I also feel for people using this website who have eyesight problems, fixed width designs and enlarged fonts really don't mix. This design suffers from text flowing outside of boxes and overprinting after 2 or 3 CTRL-+'s in firefox.
My initial reaction on viewing this new design for the first time today was that I felt like my eyes were being assaulted, there was just to much stuff trying to grab my attention crammed into too small a space. I think this has already been said, but the effect reminds me of a tabloid newspaper (which this isn't) not a tech news website (which it is).
It doesn't help that this new design no longer fills my 1600x1200 screen, i'm having to do a lot more scrolling to read articles now, which isn't good for my RSI. Furthermore a fixed width design like this is likely to cause horizontal scrolling problems on small screens. I feel a 'fix The Register' firefox extension coming on if one dosn't exist already.
The boxes down the right hand side of the page, which on the old design had a nice balance to them now feel overpowering and distract the eye from the main content of the articles, which makes it more difficult to concentrate on reading the stuff I came to your website for. The grey box in the middle of the articles listing increases this sense of 'assault' on the eyes when viewing the main page. Dividing a block of text with something that isn't relevant to that text is a design disaster.
The end result of this new design is that my initial view of the front page now contains 70% less 'stuff that interests me', which isn't good for you guys if other people feel the same, website traffic and hence advertising revenue is going to go down. I read the Reg because it isn't like a traditional newspaper, if that's the road you want to go down, then you're likely to loose me as a reader.
A final thought : Was there any user feedback involved in this ? You seem to have decided with this new design to try and fix problems which to my mind don't exist. Please guys and gals, don't mess with success.
Quote : "DECE is taking the lessons learned from the successful 'buy once, play anywhere' experience that we enjoy with CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray today, and using a similar approach in developing the next generation digital media experience."
Correct me if i'm wrong, but don't most commercial DVD's and Blu-ray discs have region coding ? Which means you can't play them anywhere and it's not as though they haven't tried to bork CD's to stop them being playable on computers and other non-approved devices.
Why dosn't the BBC print an access code on the TV licence which you can use to access services such as the iPlayer ? I personally object to the the fact that people who don't have TV's but do live in the UK are (potentially) getting all of the BBC content without having to pay for it. Using an access code on the licence would also give the BBC the opportunity to sell TV licences to people outside the UK who want to watch the BBC.
Moodle is a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), not a Content Management System, although it can perform many of the functions of a CMS as well.
Interestingly, when you query the OU's Moodle server (labspace.open.ac.uk), you get the following result :
Linux Apache/2.0.52 Red Hat
So it would seem that MS didn't manage to persuade them to run Moodle on windows, even if they haven't lost other OU business yet.
The oil is running out, that should be pretty obvious to most people by now. I no longer believe the "global catastropy if we don't change" theory, not because I believe the science is wrong in principle, but because I no longer believe that there is enough of the stuff left that's causing the problem (primarily oil) for us to reach the worst case scenario.
Concerted international action might bring the current oil price spike down, but that will at best give us a temporary breathing space.
Whatever you believe, the oil is running out so we need to be more efficient with what we have left and where possible switch to something better.
"It's easy to disable this feature - just click on Link Scanner and uncheck AVG Search-Shield."
I tried that and it caused the AVG icon on the task bar to constantly show an error state warning me that vital components had been disabled and that my system was no longer protected. Unfortunately this warning masked more important warnings, eg virus database out of date, since you get used to the icon always showing an error. In the end I had to de-install and the re-install AVG without the link scanner.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't a short-termist dash for profits what gave us the sub-prime crisis ? Yes you can cut R&D now and make a quick profit from the cost reduction, but in a few years time your business will tank because somebody else will come up with something better and take your market away. AMD and Intel are a great model of exactly how you should run a manufacturing business, strong investment in better processes and better designs.
The comparison with long established 'mature' industries is spurious as well, you only have to look at the automotive sector. GM and Ford have failed to invest in improved manufacturing techniques and designs, while the Japanese companies have invested. GM and Ford are now loosing billions...
A reason has occurred to me why M$ are doing this. ISO have taken a lot of flak over the approval process, not least because they are not supposed to approve competing standards.
My undersanding was that OOXML was accepted into the standards process because M$ convinced ISO that a standardised migration format for legacy documents was required and that ODF wasn't suitable for this. This effectively implies that OOXML isn't intended for new documents, which should therefore be using ODF. In order to prove that they really meant this to ISO, M$ might have had to agree to implement ODF in Office so that it could be used for new documents.
Surely Qualcomm buying all the spectrum is anti-competitive. Some body needs to talk to the monopolies commission about this and have the auction re-run with rules to ensure the spectrum is shared between at least 2 providers.
If you want spectrum to be technology neutral you should ensure a level playing field so that one company can't buy the entire spectrum and force it's technology on us to the exclusion of others.
Give me an example of a tech merger of this size that actually worked.... Oh dear there isn't one. Welcome to cloud cuckoo land.
This has to be for short term gain, there's no other answer. It's this kind of thinking that gave us the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. I really hope he doesn't succeed.
Perhaps if we force fingerprinting onto every airport with a single departure lounge (or even domestic flights in general), people will be so put off the idea of using domestic flights that they'll take the train instead and stop using energy wasting short hop flights.
If the database is not on the web then presumably the only way interested parties can get at the data is by physically travelling to the databases location (Horray, lots of bad for the environment carbon emissions) or by putting a CD in the post, which means we will soon have partial copies of the data floating about in every single government office in the country, being accessed on insecure internet connected computers.
Or is the government proposing to build out an entirely separate physical network just for the ID database ? How long before someone accidentally connects a computer to both ?
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