Posts by Ian Ferguson

Mozilla hits back at Firefox 3 quality slur

Quality not quantity

I too would prefer they delayed the launch if it means creating a totally clean browser.

And if they could fix the ridiculous memory-hogging problems that mean I need to restart Firefox every few hours to flush the gigabyte-sized memory hole it has created, that would be nice too.

But - ideally - they should be stripping it down, not adding more features. The reason I and many others originally switched to Firefox was to take a step back from the slow, ponderous, feature-heavy monster that was IE. Firefox is getting that way again - and with IE's new minimalist look, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of people start switching back. (Even if under the minimalist hood, IE is still a clunky horror)

DoubleClick caught supplying malware-tainted ads

In any other media...

This is a prime example of how far online advertising has to go compared to other, more established mediums. None others, such as newspaper, radio or TV, would consider it acceptable to run an ad without carefully vetting it first. Not to mention the various industry watchdogs that keep advertisers on the straight and narrow. This industry has a lot of growing up to do!

Prince sends army of lawyers to take on Pirate Bay

Further entertaining browsing

If anyone has half an hour to spare, a good sense of humour, and is definitely NOT at work I highly recommend browsing the entries this week's b3ta.com photoshopping challenge - www.b3ta.com/challenge/

I quote the challenge:

"Midget pop mentalist Prince is threatening to sue his fans for breach of copyright for using his image on fansites. So fire up Photoshop and give the odious little twerp something to complain about."

TV villain talks into wrong end of iPhone

Re: Thats not an iphone!!!!

Yes it is! The ports at the top... are at the bottom. How do I know? Because I have one sitting on my desk... feel free to mock.

Remembering the Commodore PET 2001

Lovely.

Although the Acorn Electron was the first machine I learnt to program (or programme as it was known in those days), I still have respect for the PET - a design classic. Storage, keyboard, CPU and screen all in one neat unit? Funny how things come around!

Ooh, I do hope this series touches on the BBC B micro - not the earliest or the most powerful of its time, but the first computer of the people most certainly, and the BBC Basic language truly a beauty to behold (the astonishingly well written manual is still on my bookcase, and I still occasionally flick through it with glee, much to the disgust of others)

Lily Allen gets 'social networking' TV show

Hahahahaha

Hahahahahahahahaha.

That's all the meaningful input I have to this.

Re. to MahatmaCoat - don't be too hard on Australia, I am a huge fan of The Chaser, possibly your best export of recent times, apart from cheap wine :-)

Asus to launch desktop Eee PC next year

Any excuse...

...for your editors to stick that piccy in a story.

Next week: Asus 'to continue manufacturing products' ;-)

Living brain in powerful robot body tech goes live

I for one...

...welcome our new high-tech moth-brained robo-stomping mechanized overlords.

Ukrainian eBay scam turns Down Syndrome man into cash machine

Re: Please read other people's posts...

Greg said: 'eBay is NOT making money out of scammers.'

Yes they are - maybe not from scam sellers, but certainly out of scam buyers. If you've been the victim of fraud when selling something on eBay, they couldn't care less - they'll still charge you the same.

As I keep saying - my personal opinion, don't use eBay or PayPal. Ever.

Yes: STOP USING EBAY

I've been conned a little like this but in a reverse way; I was the seller of a £300 phone, and the buyer paid through PayPal, received the goods then vanished. It then turned out that he was using stolen credit card details; the card company did a chargeback on PayPal, who then billed me for the money. I initially refused to pay but had to when they referred the debt to a collection agency.

PayPal are owned by eBay and neither outfit were remotely interesting in even listening to my concern, let alone helping me. I wouldn't even say they have poor customer service; it is non-existent, bordering on criminal negligence. I have spent a good deal of effort on warning people NOT to use eBay OR PayPal since; my slightly selfish aim is to make sure eBay loses out financially through my word of mouth to at least the £300 cost of the phone, as I place the blame squarely on them for making the theft so easy and untracable.

Hell, if I was less honest, I would have taken a different lesson away from the experience; that it is incredibly easy to commit fraud through eBay, and you won't get caught.

The iPhone: Everything you needed to know

Buying experience

I bought mine today at an O2 shop - they actually had more staff than customers (one to monitor the queue, one to hand out cupcakes, one to 'demo' the phone to queuers, one to let them in the shop, one to clap, one to try and sell you insurance... etc, etc, etc).

There was a queue of about ten people - I went to have a coffee over the road until it went, but it took aaaages - about five or ten minutes per customer at the single till. I can only assume it was something to do with the insurance and other crap, because when I went and got mine I gave a sharp NO to all the stupid questions they kept asking (No I don't want to be shown how to use it, no I don't want your overpriced insurance, no I don't want accessories at a markup, no I don't want a bloody cupcake) and I just paid and left - 30 seconds maximum, why they couldn't do that with everyone else I don't know!!

I kind of feel sorry for the O2 and Carphone Warehouse employees - Apple must have put some real pressure on them to make it a big event, but a more pointless spectacle and waste of manpower I have never seen.

At least there wasn't the whooping and high-fiving of the queue like at the launch of the Apple shop in Southampton - that was seriously painfully embarrassing. I was going to queue in the vague hope that they were giving away freebies, but I came to my senses when I realised the local rag were taking pictures of the queue... now that's something I'd never live down!

Nintendo confirms Wii DVD support coming

Good idea

I was most disappointed to find my Wii doesn't play DVDs - I had kind of assumed it would. I'm not big on having millions of gadgets so just having the Wii under the TV would be great. Please, please let it be a firmware upgrade...!

Hospital radio station struggles with Yahoo! email 'blockade'

Wow, you got an answer

I've had similar problems trying to un-blacklist legitimate email domains from Yahoo and BT before, but never as much as got a human response from either service provider. Nowadays I've given up and if customers complain they aren't getting emails from us, I have to tell them it's their overzealous providers' fault and there's nothing I can do... in other words, I badmouth them (BT particularly) every single day. That's what lack of customer support gets them :-)

Topless Liverpudlians confined to tropical fish stores

British law

This is why it's a good thing that British judges can appeal to common sense to override laws in exceptional circumstances. If somebody DOES kill a Scotsman in York, they can be assured to be going down sharpish; unlike America, where as far as I can see the letter of the law is considered more important than common sense, causing some obvious criminals to be let free on technicalities.

On the other hand... is the penalty for treason still death in the UK? If so I fear for my head, as I was a little haphazard in stamping my Christmas cards last year.

Striking writers target Desperate Housewives

I find this whole thing hilarious!

Maybe this will force TV studios to hire presenters with their own personality!!

TV Controller says goodbye, and hello

Identity

I'm guessing the real TVC is either;

a) Dominic Vallely, and he's pretty much admitted as such, but is denying it for fairly obvious legal reasons;

or

b) Not Dominic Vallely but hates his guts and is using his name as a clever parting shot.

Both equally possible!

Kylie Minogue launches social networking site

AAAAAAAAAAARGH mindless hacks!!!

Why is it that lazy journalists jump on any press release with the latest buzzwords in it? Just because the Kylie PR contains the words 'social networking', the BBC, Lester and many other reputable (!) news agencies have splurged out this story as if it's actually news.

It's a website. With a message board. You can set up a profile. Just like millions of other websites! It doesn't mean it's anything revelatory.

'Pop singer has website' might be news in 1997, but not 2007. And have you even looked at the website? It's pretty pants. It's no more 'social networking' or 'web 2.0' than this site.

Not that I have anything against Kylie, I hasten to add, having thoroughly enjoyed her live warbling and gyrating twice in recent years.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard - Finder

Rating is -1%?

Wow, that IS harsh!!

Shuttle crew completes daring wing repair

Cufflinks...

...is there anything they can't do?

Honda to put ultracapacitors on the road in '08

Carbon nanotubes...

...is there anything they can't do?

Samsung samples SATA II 2.5in SSD

Price?

Any idea of what the retail price is likely to be? I'd certainly consider it, even if it is an order of magnitude more expensive than the HDD version, simply because of reliability. I've lost two laptop HDDs in the past year with painful consequences (I do back up, but with a daily stream of photography going from my cameras to my laptop, I really can't back up frequently enough).

Music in China: The Inside Story

Interesting

Yes, thanks, a superb article. It would be interesting to hear the Chinese indie bands' side of the tale - is new talent fostered in any way? Do unsigned garage bands have any enthusiasm for chasing a contract and rock star lifestyle, or is the outlook bleak?

I ask this because at initial glance it looks like the anachist heaven that many western consumers would like - no DRM, no cost, listen to what you like not what you can afford... but if the net result is to stifle creativity, everyone SHOULD be less keen!

Royal Navy presses IT Crowd for nuclear missile 'servers'

Yup

I've always shuddered at that advert. I'm sure he's a lovely guy and everything but frankly I'd hope for somebody a bit more focused in charge of nuke-wielding computers...

Data recovery firm sounds Mac hard drive damage alert

Seagate mainly to blame

I've had two 120gb Seagate laptop HDDs fail - both in my MacBook. However, it was a 'home upgrade' - I replaced the smaller HDD with the 120gb version myself, as I was unwilling to pay Apple's ridiculous markup when buying the MacBook in the first place.

Of course it's difficult to say why they failed but I suspect it's a mixture of Seagate lack of manufacturing quality, and the rough handling I give the MacBook (it's often strapped to the back of my motorbike). So maybe not entirely surprising, but I'd certainly expect them to last longer.

Another issue is the way the hard drive is 'parked' by Mac OS X - I have a suspicion that it is not properly parked if the battery suddenly runs out of power (for some reason the MacBook has stopped giving me a 15 sec warning like it used to). I'm fairly sure this contributed to my last hard drive fail, as the battery failed then I carried it upstairs to the power cable. I'm no hardware genius so I might be talking bollocks!

But as Bob Bobson says above, Time Machine is the critical feature of Leopard. I will be upgrading purely for this reason, for better or for worse.

Guardian blogborg takes aim at global warming

Savings need to be made at industries, not at home

If the Tesco store down the road didn't leave it's lights on all night, it would probably save enough electricity for the whole street to use space heatings on their patios...

eBay employee 'torpedos' fraud trial

Don't use eBay

I've not used eBay for a year now and highly recommend nobody else does. You might get a couple of bargains on there, but then you WILL be defrauded, no matter how careful you are.

Me - I lost £300 when selling a phone, and eBay/PayPal had the audacity to assume that *I* was the fraudster when I made the complaint, as I was the seller. £300 out of pocket, eBay/PayPal accounts terminated, and the worst customer service I have EVER experienced bar none.

I'm surprised eBay and PayPal are even legal, frankly, the problem with fraud has reached epic proportions. I'd trust an email from a Nigerian asking if I can transfer a million pounds more than I trust eBay.

How many $$$s does Apple make from an iPhone?

Capital cost plus contract

What is truly astonishing about the pull of the Apple brand is that they've managed to (or will manage to) break the UK philosophy of getting a free phone with a pricey contract OR buying the phone outright then using a cheap no-strings contract (pay-as-you-go).

Apple and O2 are planning to charge us the full cost of the iPhone, AND charge a £35-£55 monthly contract. And they'll get away with it, too.

Much as it annoys me (particularly as I'm stupid enough to fall for it, and will be buying one), I have to admire their marketing abilities to be able to hype a product up so much that people will unquestionably break their usual purchasing patterns.

And Apple are raking it in from all directions - the cost of the phone, the ongoing contract, the music and video downloads... I might as well sign over my soul to them, they pretty much own it (or maybe 50/50 with Tesco).

A380 touches down in Oz

Novelty

Question is, once the novelty wears off, are there actually any costworthy benefits?

That's what did in the Concorde - lovely as it is, if people aren't prepared to pay a premium, they're not going to get the customers.

UK Charts Company to recognise album sales on USB Flash disks

Why

Um, why? What's the point of these? Couldn't they just stick the MP3 and video files onto a normal CD or DVD - which have equivalent storage capacity but a tiny fraction of the cost?

It's not as if you're buying something you can re-use, either - 512mb is piddly for a USB key, and if you do want to re-use it you'll need to wipe the content, which defeats the purpose of buying a hard copy in the first place.

I've tried to understand the benefit of these but really can't get my head round it - somebody please enlighten me!

What would make more sense - possibly - is if you could take your own USB key into HMV, plug it into the wall, and select what music and videos you want dumped onto it. Or just use the internet like everyone else!

Ballmer: Microsoft will power the mobile revolution

I'm enthralled!

Ooh sexy... data sharing and VPN access on a mobile!! That's going to set the public's collective pants on fire, much more than this touchscreen / WiFi / video / widescreen / YouTube bollocks.

Dealer debuts campest MacBook Pro in the universe

Eurgh

That must scratch SOOO easily. Gold is very soft and mallable.

Not to mention being very heavy, and picking up fingerprints faster than an Al-Qaeda operative trying to infiltrate the House of Commons.

Not to mention that gold doesn't actually look very nice, by today's fashions. The only people who like to flash it in considerable quantities are the chav/bling crowd, who as far as I'm aware, aren't massive Apple Mac devotees. Perhaps they need a subtle gothic cross motif.

If they made a platinum version, that would be a different matter...

Finger-chopping jihadis derail MPs scanner system, claims MoS

Um...

Wouldn't a security chap sitting behind a desk at the workman's entrance solve 99% of security problems? All for the cost of a reasonable wage.

'Fiendish' Trojan pickpockets eBay users

Moral of the story is...

...don't trust eBay or Paypal. I've lost considerable money through them - not as much as this poor lady but still enough to hurt. And like her, I place considerable blame on them for not doing enough to stop this kind of fraud.

It doesn't make any difference that it was a spoof site - the problem is, eBay have built up a system that is much too susceptible to fraud, and expect people to continue to trust it, when it is so obviously broken.

Removable hard disks make a come-backup

Reliability?

I wouldn't have thought magnetic disk-based hard drives were reliable enough for backup. I've never had a magnetic tape or solid state memory USB drive fail on me, but I've had countless hard drive failures.

Backups are too important - this is also why I stopped using iomega's Zip disks - too prone to failure.

Apple opens up iPhone to app developers

Hurray for tight control

Personally I hope that Apple keeps relatively tight control on what is and isn't allowed on the iPhone. I've always been of the opinion that the reason why smartphones never take off with the general public is that while there is a vast array of third party software, it's just too darn confusing.

I never want to have to wade through a variety of World Clocks, Diet Calorie Counters, CD Collection Organisers, and other assorted crap in a vain attempt to find useful, free or reasonably priced software.

If it means that everyone who releases a piece of software has to pay Apple - so be it. At least it will keep the quality control tight.

Still, this is great news, if not entirely unexpected. It means I'm definitely going to buy an iPhone in November, whereas I was going to wait for a reliable non-bricking unlocking mechanism. Yay!

Mobiles give you brain cancer?

TV masts

I'd be interested to know if there was a public health outcry when TV masts started popping up around the country. Or, for that matter, analogue radio transmitter masts, or overhead power lines, or telephone cables, or steam trains...

I'm guessing the panic will die down as soon as the public eye finds something else in new technology to worry about. Probably in-car HUDs frying your eyeballs, or futuristic silver spacesuits being carcegenic.

Digital downloads get pop-tastic applause

Re: Sick of hearing about Radiohead

They're not the first, but they're (probably) the biggest.

Sorry, not heard of Harvey Danger myself, although I'm sure he/they are very good - I'm probably out of touch, but names like 'Radiohead' and 'Madonna' do tend to seep into my thick skull...

Speaking of Maddie (oooh... probably no longer a good nickname for her, come to think of it), sounds like she has a bit of common sense - investing in live concerts rather than recordings. As far as I'm concerned it's the future - you can't (yet) pirate a live experience, and trying to stop people pirating recordings is like holding back the tide with some mashed potato. So the obvious money is in live events.

YouTube invades Google Earth

A bit less pointless

I can't see much use or fun to be had out of the Youtube map thingummy, but I can recommend flickrvision as much more entertaining:

http://flickrvision.com/

This displays a constant stream of photos being uploaded to Flickr, marked on a map of the world. It's pretty fascinating, I could watch it for hours.

Currency launched to cover the cosmos

Dumb PR

Seriously, how pointless is this. Have you seen the values? Instead of a change-friendly system like pennies (1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100), they've done these in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. "Er, sorry mate, I can't pay you five quids, I only have two fours on me. Do you happen to have a three? No?"

And how big would your pockets need to be for these... come to think of it, the sheer cost per gram of lifting items into space in the first place is likely to be far more than the value of these 'coins'.

Not to mention accessibility - how exactly are blind people meant to differentiate between blob shapes?

Apparently one of the driving reasons for coming up with this is that 'magnetic stripes will be wiped in space due to background radiation' or something - don't you think that once we have Space hotels and shops, we might possibly have completed the transition to chip-and-pin?

Dumb, dumb, dumb, and a blatant attention-grabbing press release, duly lapped up by lazy journalists.

.Asia domains are go

Also...

eur.asia ... for those too slow to grab an EU name

fant.asia ... for Disney fans

Lawmaker shows nudie pic to high school seniors

Shock! Men like to look at porn

It's a shame nobody can admit that most men like to look at porn, even men in positions of responsibility.

Hell, if a politician freely admitted this, I'd vote for him.

Er... is that the pope?

Police cuff 77 in fake cheque crackdown

$2.1bn?

How exactly did they come up with that ridiculous figure? I've just written a counterfeit cheque for six bazillion fizzillion pounds, is that newsworthy too?

BT aims to make UK a Wi-Fi kibbutz

Sounds good

One thing I'd like clarified though; will non-BT FON users be able to access BT Openzone hotspots as well as BT customer's hubs?

That would make FON truly worthwhile joining; I've held off doing so for now because where I want WiFi is in public and commercial areas, the type of place that BT Openzone WiFi is available; but FON tends to be around people's homes, in housing estates and obscure places.

I'm surprised chain coffee houses and pubs and the like haven't signed up to FON to try and pull in the punters; I suppose they just see WiFi as an extra potential revenue stream.

Microsoft revamps Zune with Flash

Wireless sync

Still absolutely dire compared with the alternatives (Apple and others), but wireless sync makes sense. Do you know if the iPod Touch / iPhone do this?

Tidal power plans pit greens against greens

Three words:

Three Gorges Dam.

CERN BOFH needs a bigger storage array

Astonishing

An astonishing amount of data considering all they want is a boolean result - ie. does the Higgs boson particle exist, yes or no.

Re. "The question here" - the US lottery has millions of players every draw, so of course somebody is going to win; the 50 million to 1 black hole calculation you quote, if it's true, would be an overall probability. If you apply the same logic to the lottery, the odds are stacked towards somebody winning, if that makes sense.

Anyway, all the scientists are saying is that they are pretty certain (and 50 million to 1 is VERY certain) it WON'T cause a black hole. I could say with comparible confidence that the pot plant on my desk won't spontaneously explode and kill me.

The problem is that scientists are too logical to be allowed to provide press quotes - eg. "There's a 99.999% probability that this mobile phone mast won't fry your brains" is logically correct, but will mean the tabloids scream that they admit there is a possibility of the reverse.

LG KG271 and KG275 budget phones

Questions

Sounds good. Is the FM radio and the colour scheme the only difference between the two? I'm tempted to try and buy the cheaper one over the internet - will they work OK in the UK?

Google to save mankind through DoubleClick deal

Doubleclick adverts

I like Doubleclick. Why? Because they put all their ad images under one domain, which makes them easy to block...

Mammoth wool gives up genetic secrets

Bring 'em back

So how much detail have they got? Have they got enough to construct a mammoth foetus in an elephant egg? Or will they have to fill in the gaps with frog DNA and create some kind of fearsome monster that escapes from its island enclosure and stomps round squashing Americans?

O2 goes flat on data

iPhone?

I wonder if they'd let me use this with an iPhone... I'd love to get one, but not at a ridiculous £35 a month. If I bought an iPhone, plugged in a pay-as-you-go SIM and subscribed to the £7.50 / 200mb / month bolt-on, I'd be more than happy. But here's guessing O2 wouldn't be.