Posts by MichaelGordon

The Register's 2018 homepage redesign: What's going on now?

Layout still needs some major work. For example, if I view the page with the web browser window at my preferred width I only get one story per line when more would clearly fit. This is demonstrated by the fact that if I make the browser window roughly 1/3 wider than my preferred size I get 4 stories per row. Other than that I don't think there's anything major that can't be fixed with a few CSS overrides to move/resize/hide a few things.

As Tesla hits speed bump after speed bump, Elon Musk loses his mind in anti-media rant

Re: unexpected honesty

It's really odd, that kind of remark often comes up. Can one point me to some specific date for that mythical Golden Age when people did in fact respect journalists more than now?

True - the phrase "yellow journalism" was coined in the 1890s to describe the sensationalisation of news.

You love Systemd – you just don't know it yet, wink Red Hat bods

Re: suggestion for the pillock

He really is the Thomas Midgley Jr of Linux.

Google blows $1.1bn to hire HTC's Pixel people, forming one big happy handset team

Re: About time!

I've got the original Moto-G and would update to a newer model but they don't have a notification LED, which is an absolute deal-breaker.

Opera Jon's sparkling Vivaldi proves the browser isn't dead

Re: UI still needs important work

The killer problem for me, as was the case in the version I tried a while back, is that there's still no way to get the tabs to behave the way I want. When I close a tab it should select the tab to the right if there is one, or the tab to the left if there isn't one to the right. The reason for this is that my heaviest use of tabs is when reading The Register, BBC News etc. - control-click on everything on the home page that sounds interesting to open them in a new tab, then move to the first tab to start reading. Closing a tab/story should then take me to the next story, not back to the home page.

Other things such as the lack of a proper menu bar, putting basic items such as "New Tab" into a sub-menu rather than being at the top level, and overriding my preferred window manager with its own title bar that provides substantially less functionality, are annoying but can at least be switched off. Having said that, I've had Vivaldi pop itself to the front of the stacking order for no readily apparent reason a few times, so it looks like switching to a native window doesn't quite turn off all the stupid.

All in all, not even close to tempting me away from Palemoon.

Mozilla to boot all plugins from Firefox … except Flash

Re: Pale Moon?

For me, the Australis mess was the final straw that pushed me to use Palemoon exclusively. Fortunately the Palemoon developers haven't gone insane and have stated that they'll continue to support NPAPI no matter what Firefox does.

While it would be nice if everyone switched to HTML5 video, there are going to be sites with <embed src="foo.avi"> for many years to come. On Linux the MPlayer plugin (or VLC) is the only reasonable way of handling these pages, making a browser in which it doesn't work a complete non-starter.

Github's 'Atom' text editor hits version 1.0

Re: Not impressed

Not managed to lock it up on file loading yet, but any attempt to bring up the help starts firefox and locks the entire UI until firefox exits or you kill it from the "not responding" dialog.

It appears that their 1.0 release hasn't had even the most basic testing.

I wouldn't bother

I looked at this a couple of days ago at the request of one of our users and gave up in disgust. What claims to be "build from source" isn't - it downloads shared objects that seem to have been compiled on a reasonably recent Ubuntu and won't work on our SL6 boxes; the binary distributions have the same shared objects in and are therefore just as useless to us. It's also impossible to run the build as any user other than root; if you try it fails because it can't chown files it's created in a .atom directory in the home directory of the user that's running the build. No idea why it thinks it needs to chown files it's just created. The build process is some insanely complicate javascript nightmare that I wouldn't know where to start with fixing the problems.

Update: I've managed to build it on an SL7 test box. Maybe it's because I'm running it on a remote machine with the display on my local X server, but it's very slow. XEmacs does similar syntax highlighting/indentation/etc. and it isn't anywhere near as slow with a remote display though.

Opera Jon weaves a brand new browser

Tab handling makes it almost unusable

Is there any way to click on a link and have it open in the background? One of the main things I use tabs for is on sites like The Register, BBC News etc. where I Control-click on headlines I want to read, then look through the resulting tabs; being taken to the new tab immediately and having to go back to the main page to select another story is irritating enough to ensure I won't use their browser. Another feature that's important for the way I work is that the browser shows the tab next to the one I was reading if I close a tab, either to the right if there is one or to the left otherwise; going back to the first tab on tab-close is another annoyance big enough to drive me away.

Quantum teleportation gets reliable at Delft

Re: Einstein is fine - nothing to see here.

Your "shoe" example is a hidden variable theory. Unfortunately it's been proven that no local hidden variable theory can reproduce all the observed features of quantum mechanics. To make hidden variable theories work you need to accept either FTL communication between the particles or communication which travels back in time along the past light cone of the particle.

Hold our tiny silicon spheres, say gravity wave detection scientists

There's no direct evidence of gravitational waves, but see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulse-Taylor_binary - the rate of orbital decay matches that predicted for gravitational waves almost exactly.