Posts by DJV

MS coughs to Hotmail block

Laugh

"Microsoft is dedicated to providing the most trusted and protected consumer experience on the web," said a Redmond COMEDIAN.

There, I corrected it for you.

Brits still getting bull from broadband providers

About bloody time!

ISPs have been getting away with lies about speed for far too long.

Aussie smoko-proofing drug prevents ill effects of cigs

42

"Australian boffins have developed a treatment which allows mice to smoke cigarettes without the usual negative health consequences."

That almost sounds like the mice had a choice, doesn't it! Of course, as we all know, what the mice were REALLY doing was experimenting on us instead (and the playing dead bit at the end was just because they'd gone back to their own dimension to consult Deep Thought).

Mine's the one with "Don't Panic" written in large friendly letters on the back.

Blighty surrenders to Street View

@Bilgepipe

My cats ARE on it! And the one looking directly at the camera hasn't got her face blurred (just furred)!

Microsoft rejiggers EU browser ballot after complaints

@some are just too lazy to scroll

Actually, some people are too STOOPID to realise they CAN scroll.

A few years ago I was nearly wetting myself laughing whilst listening to a colleague on the phone to a brain dead customer who couldn't understand the concept of scrolling down a web page. My colleague was most patient but it did take several long minutes before the clueless tw@t on the other end of the line finally got the hang of using a scroll bar.

Never underestimate the depths to which human stupidity can reach!

EU ministers want new life for IP enforcement

Software

I see no reference to software, which is probably a good thing. On the other hand I see no references specifically saying that software is exlcuded, which is definitely a bad thing. I for one do not want to see the madness of court cases over stupid/obvious software ip/patents on this side of the pond that are currently all the rage in the US.

Google Maps boss to Germans: 'We don't want to invade you'

Think? They never do...

...hence the almighty cock-up that was the launch and subsequent hasty privacy rewrites of Buzz...

Opera's Jon Von Tetzchner on browser choice, the iphone and Google

Agreed

And when they finally get around to implementing more of CSS 3 and HTML 5 than Webkit (Safari and Chrome) and Gecko (Firefox) currently have then they might be ahead of the curve. But, right now, they are way behind.

Microsoft and the Windows Phone 7 noise machine

Agreed

A few bullet points for those of us with some proper work to do, please.

Jobs: I'll decide what to do with Apple's $40bn cash pile

"flip top volcanic island"

and other options from: www.villainsource.com

Nice, mine's the one with the trap door in one pocket and a fluffy white cat peering out the other.

YouTube's IE6 support dies on March 13

Nope, you guessed wrong

I just tried it using IE6* and the order is random.

*via Win2000 on Virtual Box - I am a web developer so I have to keep that pile of crap around in order to test sites on it - but hopefully not for much longer!

Yes, definitely!

With one caveat...

...the deathtoie6.com site goes to abetterbrowser.org in order to recommend a new browser but that site ought to check to see if the user is running a Windows OS that predates XP before recommending IE8! I tried it using Win2000 and it still recommended IE8 (ok, not as much as it recommends the "proper" browsers). Mind you, the Microsoft IE8 page doesn't check either... but what else would you expect from their crappy coders!!

Microsoft re-tiles mobile platform for Windows 7 era

Super!

And not forgetting super BSODs, super holes (ready for trojans/virii/etc.), super bugs.

Opera beta bear hugs plug-in-free video

Jawdroppingly good?

Nope, it lags behind Firefox and Webkit-based browsers in many CSS-3 areas (multiple columns being a very important omission). Ok, so it's not the total laggard that IE is, of course, but absolutely no way is it "Jawdroppingly good" or "pushing the boundaries".

I can't comment on the "Mini" version as I don't surf the internet from a phone.

QLogic sues over video of chip frying egg

They should...

...have nicked the bit from Carry on Screaming where Kenneth Williams meets his end shouting "Frying Tonight!"

H.264 video codec stays royalty-free for HTML5 testers

Almost like GIF

Except we (and Mozilla, obviously) can see the trouble ahead.

Grenade, because H.264 is like one just waiting to go off.

Fujitsu: 'iPad? That's ours'

@John Naismith

"First there was the iPod"

Actually, no.

First was the name "Apple" - do you remember that a certain 1960's beat combo used the same name for their record label?

Survey outs Britain as nation of tech twits

Three per cent ...

"Three per cent identified Bill Gates as an American comedian."

Well, I'm with them on that!! Though, arguably, his sidekick, Ballmer, is actually funnier.

TalkTalk kills Tiscali

You forgot...

you forgot the <sarcasm> </sarcasm> tags...

Johnson reveals ID register linked to NI numbers

NI Numbers not unique

Not sure if this is urban legend or not but I did hear many years ago that one batch of NI numbers got issued twice in the 1960s or 1970s - if that's true then there are a small number of people who have identical numbers to someone else.

Transcription errors also cause problems - see:

http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070917/text/70917w0029.htm

Oregon profs plan giant robotic space cockroach warriors

I for one...

I for one welc...

... hey, stop eating my leg!

Hacker rattles 21,000 iPhone unlockers

FastHosts? Hacked?

Situation normal then...

Firefox 3.6 hits ice - won't show up till Spring

@Shocker

You forgot 4

4) And still miss the date resulting from 3

The Great Aussie Firewall is dead: Long live the firewall

Remind me...

Remind me not to go live in Australia then. It must be terrible having the government deciding what you can and cannot view on teh internets, and have them easvedropping on your surfing habits. Not like the free and open society we have in the UK.

...oh wait

Mozilla glares at Microsoft, chews on Direct2D graphics cud

@Opera leads, everyone else follows (as usual)

If that was the case then Opera would already be rendering CSS attributes like border-radius and column-width (already present in Firefox and WebKit-based browsers). Of course, I do expect that Opera will add these several years before Microsoft finally get around to implementing them (badly or inaccurately) in IE...

O/S bloat: What's the cure?

Single point of failure

"But Microsoft doesn't see it like this, and one product manager said it wasn't a good idea to consolidate functionality from Windows-controlled VMs in a Hyper-V environment because you would then run the risk of a single point of failure."

And that just about sums up Windows - the single point of most computer failures. Heh-heh (waits for flames).

Triumph in Geneva! LHC beams up and running again

December 3rd?

I thought the End of Time was going to be on December 25th!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meDLj5ANGNQ

New 'reversible' paralysis-ray turns victims blue, flaccid

@Neil Barnes

You s*d - I've now spent half the day reading Girl Genius! Thanks mate!

Google remaps Earth for iPhone

GE 2.0

Did Google buy their route algorithm from Microsoft? It's about as accurate as the Tube lines on the Bing map where the stations are (just about) in the right place but the lines bear no resemblence to reality - example, check out the Piccadilly line between Acton Town and Hammersmith.

NASA maps Mars with child labor web games

Azure? Eek! Silverlight, oh noes....

"The website is built on Microsoft's Windows Azure platform"

which probably accounts for how slow it is....

I was interested in it until I read that (and other commenters saying it needs Sluglight).. will now avoid at all costs.

NASA: the Moon is a hydrated mistress

@Ahem

Actually, it was a good effort and a nice reference to an old Robert Heinlein book. I will leave you to find the real title for yourself.

Firefox keeps Microsoft 'honest' on 5th birthday

@Matt 5

Oh, come on, do yer research! it's been quite extensively documented that MS had pretty much abandoned further browser development after it had "won" the browser wars around 2002 or so. Without Firefox kickstarting the new round of "wars" we would all still be stuck with IE6 - even Windows 7 would have shipped with that hunk of junk.

BOFH: The stupidity criticality

Deceptive

Deceptively tame until the pay off - nice!

ESA proposes ion drive Sun-dodge Mars commsat ploy

News?

Blimey, I've got a couple of collections of SF stories by George O Smith based on similar (but scaled up) ideas. They were written in the late 1940s and all the technology was based on valves! Fantastic.

Mines the one with the Venus Equilateral collections in the pocket...

Lloyds TSB's online banking system shows no love for Firefox

I thought it was just me!

I've got several computers and 2 of them (my main XP PC and Win7) stopped working under Firefox last week (though another older one running XP still worked fine). I tried a system restore to a few days previously but that didn't fix anything.

On the XP machine I then backed up my settings (using MozBackup) and completely uninstalled Firefox including deleting any directories it left behind. Then I did a reinstall of Firefox from scratch and tested LloydsTSB again - no problem. However, I noticed that if I restored all of the backup then the same problem returned but just restoring the essentials (bookmarks and saved passwords) it worked ok. I then manually re-installed all my add-ons and checked the LloydsTSB site after each install but nothing broke it. The Win 7 one (which is actually running under VirtualBox on the main XP PC) is still borked - but as this is an unlicensed, unactivated test I'm not too worried!

Abigail's Windows 7 Party

Excellent!

More please (and more BOFH too).

Boffins: Stop trying to monetise us, you don't know how

Suggests?

Boffins "suggest that the government resists the temptation to meddle until it knows what it's doing"

Government knowing what it's doing? The words "freeze", "hell" and "over" come to mind...

Google patents (2004) home page

Doogle?

Does that mean that www.doogle.org is fecked?

Pair charged with BNP list breach

Charged?

They should be rewarded!

Amazon limits PS3 Slim sales

I will do my bit...

In that case I will do my bit and not order one in the first place. Suits me fine, I don't play games anyway (ok, so I play Spider Solitaire, big deal) and have boycotted all Sony stuff for several years now because of the way they screw with customers.

Perseid meteor shower set to dazzle disappoint

"one to tell your grandkids" meteor shower

Ah, that'll be the one where a meteor hits the weapons satellite setting off a dazzling celestial light show and we all wake up blind the next day. Then the giant walking plants kill us.

Fun.

Chinese youth beaten to death at net addiction bootcamp

I hope...

I hope his parents at least get their money back!