Posts by Stuart Butterworth

Prime Minister's health records breached in database attack

@ Gerhardt

re: To the latently Caledonophobic Dan Goodin:

Sorry, you've got entirely the wrong end of the stick there - as a Scot, Gordo Broon is allowed, nay, ENCOURAGED to celebrate his Scottishness.

Its only being ENGLISH thats illegal.

American Stereotype™ walks Google's mean Street View

@AC 18:01GMT

>>I can make stereotypes too, ready? All Londoners are pasty, tea drinking ninnys. See it's easy.

That may well be true for Londoners, but up here in the North of England, we are a different breed from those southern pansies.

Londoners are a bunch of soft nancy-boys, while we are real, red-blooded, hairy-chested MEN!!

The average Mancunian could kick the average Londoners arse any day of the week - so please stop lumping us in with them soft buggers, please...

KDE hopes to fill boots with 4.2 release

Title? What title?

Kubuntu Intrepid installing KDE 4.1 was what drove me to ditch KDE for Gnome on my Linux boxen - I'm going to be trying this out this weekend, but I cant see it being much better than 4.1, which relied far too much on bling rather than a clean look and the ability to customise my desktop the way **I** want.

Terry Pratchett knighted for services to literature

A well-deserved award...

for services to shop-lifting... ;)

But seriously - I've read just about every single word this man has published, and he is quite possibly the greatest living British author - his social commentary is most certainly on a par with Dickens and the like, but his humour lifts his work to another level entirely.

Well done, Sir Pterry of Ankh-Morpork

Amazon peddles Prince for pence

play.com

has it for £1.95 - still less than an album, but more than a single...

Microsoft preps IE 8 for the web-challenged

Shirley...

...MS should be building their browser to meet web standards, rather than the site builders having to build thisr sites to meet Microsofts standards.

Come to think of it, since Microsoft is a member of the W3C, shouldnt they be building their browser to the standards they themselves helped to draft?

American 'football' goes 3D

"proper" footie...

Lets hope this doesn't catch on over here - its bad enough seeing Rooneys ugly mug in Hi-Def, but in 3-D as well??

It doesn't bare thinking about...

Oh yeah - could someone please tell our Septic cousins that the name "football" has been taken, and to pick their own bloody name for that useless "sport" of theirs?

BOFH: The paperless cafeteria

AHHHH...

BOFH is back, and on top of his game...

Now, where do I send my bill for a new monitor and keyboard after spitting OJ all over it?

Enterprise class mobility

re:iPhones and Nokias

@ Mark Allen...

Didn't Motorola release one of those?

Who will be the next Doctor?

@ Dave, re: "Osterhagen Key"

Seeing as you pointed out the rather nice anagram, of Kylies charecter, I'm surprised you never noticed that "Osterhagen" is an anagram for "Earths gone".

One of my fave theories for the regeneration is that he is actually being hit by a Dalek Transmat beam, to be replaced by a human-foirm Dalek who will lead the gang astray while Davros has his wicked way withThe Doctor - not my theory, just one I read somewhere, and it would make more sense than the alternative.

And Steven Fry, Robert Carlyle, or Robbie Coltrane for Doc 11, please.

Web'n'Walk falls over

more than 12 hours...

Web'n'Walk was down for a lot longer than that - yesterday I couldn't get a connection at 930AM, or all day.

And, as a proud Mancunian, could I just say that possibly the only worse insult would have been to refer to me (and the rest of us) a "Southerners"! ;)

Mines the nomex jacket, thanks...

Manchester's congestion charge: pay-to-leave

@ Graham Dawson...

The Metrolink extension was binned (after the land needed for building the had been acquired and prepared - basically all that weas needed was to lay track!) because central government (read: those useless gits in Whitehall!) couldnt afford 2 major public transport works - so the money was spent on the Jubilee Line extension which was Billions over budget, as opposed to the Metrolink, which was vastly UNDER-budget.

The stupid thing about this - several of the Boroughs here won't be affected by any of the charges, but they have voted in favour of it, knowing that people would rather go shopping in, say, Rochdale, Oldham, or Bolton rather than pay to go into the City Centeer.

I live a couple of miles outside of the outer ring - its common knowledge that all the streets round here will be turned into ad hoc car parks for all the commuters wanting to get buses for the final leg of the journey - its going to be hell.

Even worse, i have some friends who live just north of the M60 - they work just outside the M60, about 3 exits clockwise - but as the only entrance to the motorway is ANTI-clockwise, they have to either take a 3 mile detour to the north, or go all the way round the M60, or pay this bloody charge to head along Victoria Avenue, parallel to the M60 to get to the next entrance a mile away.

Also - the press here is going on about getting £3 Billion in funding - nowhere is it mentioned about a loan - nice to know the council putting us into massive debt to pay for gouging us.

And the best bit?

The public transport around here is crap - 3 of the 4 worst bus routes in Manchester run from near me along a single corridor into the center - one of them is (allegedly) running every 7-10 minutes - in practice, this means that there will be 3 every half hour - usually running nose to tail...

Somehow, I cant see these people being able to sort out a decent public transport system able to handle the projected number of passengers.

Grand Theft Auto IV misses week one million sales mark

@ Schroeder

I paid a hell of a lot less for the monitor than an LCD/plasma TV with a comparable resoloution, which brings the whole lot down to around the cost of a PS3 and a decent TV.

As for the heat - lets just say that, with the current weather, I'm considering putting it back to the default 2.4GHz.

but...

I want to know where the version for MY games machine is :(

Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.8GHz

GeForce 8800GTS 512Mb

8Gb RAM

Kubuntu 8.04 64-bit

Wine 0.9.59

24" monitor @1920*1200

Cost not too much more than a PS3, and the only thing it cant do (yet) is play HD-DVD/BD - but give me time...

Welsh student exposed to nude webcam operators

but...

I know several people who do this for free...

US gov may forbid BAE Eurofighter sale to Saudis

so the yanks didnt bribe anyone?

The Al Yamamah deals were pretty big, but the Americans secured even bigger deals around the same time - does anyone really think the Septics didnt make any massive payments to various Saudi princes in order to secure the contract?

And as others have mentioned, it wouldnt be the first time the Americans have told outright lies or otherwise blocked technology that threatened their own aims - lets not forget them convincing the British government to pull the plug on the Miles M52 supersonic test bed, on the grounds that they had proof that the human body couldnt withstand the stresses of supersonic flight - not long after cancellation, the Bell X-1 went supersonic in the US...

US.gov disappears European-owned Cuba websites

@Nic, RE: World Series

I have had numerous discussions with American sports "fans" who know nothing of their chosen sports - including many who thought winning The World Series made them an international success, much like any team who wins The Champions League over this side of the pond.

In fact, it often seems that more Brits know of this fact than the damn colonials, to the stage where making reference to the competition is used purely to extract the urea solution...

Mines the one with the "Treble '99" logo on the back...

Leaked email reveals civil service laptop rules

@ H'arj Imladd

TBH, these people are NOT muppets - they are neither cute, nor funny.

Mines the denim jacket with the Iron Maiden patches, thanks...

Computer system suspected in Heathrow 777 crash

@ Adam

"But that's not common to the recent crash - the autopilot wasn't the problem - it didn't make any difference once the pilot took over - they still crashed."

Flying straight & level @ 20000 feet, if the autopilot freaks out, the crew have plenty of time to go to manual before anything untoward happens.

Unfortunately, @ 2000 feet, 3 degrees nose down, and 120KIA, by the time the crew notice the autopilot has died, they've just about buried themselves into Hatton Cross Tube Station - getting over that fence and pancaking on the grass was a phenomenal piece of flying.

Even firewalling the throttles would do them no good, as the engines take a fair while to spool up once you move the throttles from "quiet" to "loud".

Google to reinvent UK newspaper biz

RE:KenBW2

"London:

To Londoners/Southerners is the Centre of the Universe

To Americans is a country in its own right"

And to us Northerners, it's the sh*t-hole of the universe, a mill-stone round our necks, and an occupying country.

Long live the Mancunian Republic!!

Dreaded Blue Screen of Death mars some Leopard installs

The Reason?

Leopard is bringing in at least 2 new pieces of functionality that previously required APE applications - the ones i have installed on my Tiger box are a transparent dock and multiple desktops (i forget what they are called!).

I believe APE ties itself pretty closely into the kernel, which means that when someone tries to install something new on top of that, OSX goes into the corner and cries.

Sounds to me like someone didnt bother testing every single piece of software in the multiverse - people should be sacked over this travesty! [/sarcasm]

The BSOD sounds a bit bizarre, though - i thought installation problems got a black screen, the grey screen being reserved for fatal problems while running normally?

And why am i posting something almost sensible at the weekend?

Rule 8 invoked..

Air chief: UK should have RAF astronaut

But...

for extended missions, wouldnt the Royal Navy be a better source of astronauts?

Submariners, especially, would be the best choice for people to cram into tin cans with next-to-no privacy and no personal space for months on end.

Great British fry-up under threat

Supermarket prices

I work for one of the larger Supermarket chains here in the UK, specifically, with fruit and veg, and i can tell you that the prices we pay wholesale are stupidly low - fresh fruit and veg has a higher mark-up than most foodstuffs, meaning that next to nothing of the price the consumer pays goes to the producers.

Hell, barely anything of what you pay goes to the boys & girls who put the stuff on the shelves - please remember this next time you feel the urge to rant and rage at them for slight blemishes on the apples, or something minor like this.

**ahem**

Anyhoo, one weird thing I've noticed - we do a range of Fairtrade products - take, for example, a bunch of roses.

Most of our roses come from a mix of UK and Dutch farms - the growers get next to nothing for these, but they are freshly grown and cut, with a minimum travelling distance from grower to store.

Then we have the Fairtrade roses, twice the price, with the extra cost allegedly going to the producers (in Kenya!!) - to get these to the stores in fresh condition, they have to be flown in.

Which means that the extra cost is going on air-freight costs, rather than going to the producer.

Why can't we have a Fairtrade scheme that benefits British farmers - charge a premuium cost for a premium product, but give the extra cash to the farmers, rather than the airlines.

Swiss deploy glass airliner

Re:BTW look to the north east along the top runway..a invisable shadow?

the shadow belongs to a plane (possibly a Falcon 2000) thats taking off - its visible over the runway SW of the shadow.

and the original "invisible" plane (possibly 737-500) has a companion in a similar position 90 degrees CCW of that terminal - looks like a 737-300. it looks like both of those were parked at the terminal, and the gate has been swung away from them to allow them to depart.

the plane with multiple wings could possibly be an A320 - no idea what could possibly be causing all these weird effects though.

Church hall bans 'unchristian' yoga for nippers

so...

i assume they dont hold any christmas or easter services in this hall then, either - after all, these are basically pagan rituals which were taken over by the church.

Trade unions demand right to Facebook

you lucky lot...

My day job involves working face-to-face with customers in a busy retail environment - no access to computers, and if I want to surf t'internet on my breaks I have to use my mobile.

Oh yeah - I've been banned from going anywhere near the computers in Admin after I (jokingly) threatened to install Doom on the bar-code scanners, which run WinCE.