Posts by JimT

Poor porn protection hurt Firefox 3 uptake

Nice piece of spin

Methinks they are being selective with their story. Porn makes for an amusing blog release, nice piece of spin there, but it is the least of the issue.

After trying 3.0, the very first thing I noticed was that typing "th" in the location bar no longer autofilled our beloved El Reg; the Firefox Mavens Who Know Best had decided that I must be looking for some random site with a "th" in its URL, or title text, that I had visited at some point. Sometimes I couldn't even see a "th" anywhere within those. I especially liked the touch that the sites it suggested were in no order of frequency or recency that I could recognise. I have no idea what they are thinking, or smoking, but it made typing shortcuts useless. Searching for "Awful Bar" in the Firefox forums gives a sense of the general feeling. Add-ons like OldBar and OldLocationBar try to improve the situation, but can't do enough.

Doesn't bother me too much though; I use Opera as my main browser, and I've kept FF2.

RIP Personal Computer World

I'm looking at the September '79 issue now

Having been hooked into programming by the Sinclair programmable, the TI-57 and some FORTRAN time on a DEC-20, I had blown a whole month's salary and then some - 600 quid, I think - on an 8K PET, which was downright crazy, After I had the PET for a few months, and was approaching the end of my own resources, I bought PCW of September '79. "ESP - The ultimate interface?" Heh. This was what I was looking for. I bought every month's issue for years, until the early 90s, when it became hard to find the articles at all among the phonebook's worth of ads, and everybody with a computer could afford enough minutes of dialup and connect time to get their fix. Ah, CIX. I'd forgotten CIX...

In the pre-net days, when information dissemination was more hierarchical, some heads used to waltz around, building reputations retailing and expounding and generally regurgitating what they read in various mags. We used to call them "comic merchants". The royalty of the comic merchants were those who quoted from PCW and BYTE. Nobody else had real street cred.

RIP, PCW. I'll hunt for a copy of the last issue for old time's sake, and lift a pint to the memory of those days.