AC 12:01

You miserable cunt.

(Apologies, Sarah, but this sort of occasion is precisely what the word's for.)

Linux?

When you say it supports Linux, could you elaborate please? I have an earlier 500GB version and, whilst it's certainly possible to make it play with Ubuntu, it's a bit of a PITA, due to the way in which it manages users between itself and clients. There was certainly no client software available for Linux in the way there is for Windows and Mac. This entails, at the very least, a knowledge of using chmod as root and a passing acquaintance with the mount command / fstab. All rather disappointing given that the box itself is linux-based. I do have various apps - Thunderbird, Firefox, Tomboy, even Dropbox after a struggle - successfully sharing data on the drive from a variety of Ubuntu, XP and Win7 boxes, but most people would have given up with most of those before getting them working.

@1st AC: @Alex Walsh is referring to the unfortunately accurate reputation these Iomega drives have for making a hell of a racket.

"terrifying yet unambiguously newsworthy apocalypse incident"

Class :)

iHTML

@Gordon Henderson: LOL! I read your comment I checked the name against it and thought, "Surely there aren't two people mad enough to still be using it?!" ;)

@Pete 2

Me and my better half walked into both travel agents in an Oxfordshire market town recently - okay, it was Banbury - and basically said in so many words, "We've got a grand to spend if you can sell us a week in the sun, in Europe, by a beach, last week of September." I'm a regular traveller and book online trips all the time - even though I'm based back in the UK now, I probably still go abroad almost once a month on average - but I thought I'd see what the professionals could come up with. Not too tall an order, you'd think.

Flabberghasted. I mean the only restriction we put on them was that we didn't want to go to Turkey or Benidorm, yet one of them kind of tried to help but was actually as much use as a chocolate teapot, whereas the other one, well, we just couldn't believe it; it was like we were asking her to walk barefoot to Land's End or something. I very nearly did the Holy Grail, "Er, is there somebody else we could talk to?"

Now, what was I doing? Oh, yeah, splitting up the soundboard recording of our last jaunt (to Norway) into tracks...

Toodlepip!

Not Surprised

I mean I can imagine being told that wouldn't go down too well

@MarkOne

"The number of IE updates I get these days is much less than new Firefox releases."

And that should make people feel more secure how exactly?

Best one in ages

LOL-funny all the way :)

@Simon Hobson

Great post, Simon.

The majority of the rest of the contributors are either economically illiterate or doing a very good job of pretending to be.

@Nick Askew

LOL!

"It wouldn't do for us all to be the same" :D

@Nick Askew

"We need to talk..."

(Only the "right" Nick Askew is liable to get that!)

Me? I'm seriously unimpressed with Asus's behaviour here (upon one of whose excellent full laptops, originally supplied with XP but now dual-booting with Ubuntu and almost never fired into XP, I'm typing this)...

Close but...

Surely the headline should be "Goodbye Blackberry mail"?

Priceless

Best for a while :)

@Peter - not true

You're not allowed to take liquids on board in bottles larger than 100ml, sealed in a blah, blah...

The regulations do not proscribe taking empty bottles larger than 100ml through security and thence on-board. I do it all the time as I refuse to pay for bottled water on principle (nothing to do with airports, I don't ever buy bottled water).

Re: @Paul

"So? Can you strip down and re-build your cars engine?"

Er, yeah, I for one could probably still manage that - just give me the tools. In fact the first serious thing I ever did with a vehicle was replace an engine (by myself - I access to a hoist and a ramp) and soon after I became quite adept at stripping rebuilding bike engines; usually in a bathroom! And no, as with computers, I've not had one minute's formal training in vehicle mechanics either. I read up, I considered my actions before proceeding and when in doubt I found someone to ask.

The way some of the comments here read, one would think their posters are actively advocating refusing to think and learn for oneself. Some also appear to think particular skills immutable when, in reality, it's attitude and approach, not some innate aptitude, that determines one's success (or otherwise) across a huge range of skills.

Attitude Adjustment

@AC: "You all call this woman stupid (maybe she is)...but the average person still knows bugger all about computers."

Well, if they want to use one then they should f**king well learn! I don't know if she's stupid or not (although it seems fairly likely) but she damn well sure hasn't got the nous to enquire and seek out answers for herself, which means she will never, in common with the vast majority of other people, get the most that she could out of using a computer; or anything else for that matter.

Whilst I'm used to doing interface design - and don't think I'm too crappy at it whilst claiming no gold medals - there is a point at which "Helping make things intuitive for the user" has reached its limit and the only way users are going to learn more and get the full benefit of a piece of software is if they are prepared to read, experiment and find things out for themselves. I'll try and help anyone with stuff, from computers to life problems, once; maybe twice; but at the point it becomes obvious they're not prepared to help themselves then sod it, they're on their own. And that's the way it should be. Otherwise we're just encouraging the development of a race of morons.

Record Companies Really Are Fuckwits

Heaven only knows how much money I've spent on bands many of whom I'd never even heard of before Pandora served them up to me (using seemingly far better "suggestion" criteria than Last.fm which as useful as it is, largely stays within far too narrow, artificial genres for those with a more sophisticated complex of musical tastes).

We get what we deserve

"instead of messing around with figuring out how to stop it from doing that people just turn the auto updaters off"

I'm sure I'm not the only person who long ago had enough of this attitude. If people can't be arsed to work out even the simplest things for themselves (in this case for example how to get Windows to download updates but not install them until told), they can go fornicate. I am sick to the back teeth of everything having to be dumbed down for those who just cannot be bothered. It's a corollary to the whole Health and Safety culture where those of us with a clue or maybe just more of a sense of adventure are restrained due to the incompetents.

It's no different to driving a vehicle - 30% of people on the roads shouldn't be there but because they are we all have to put up with insanity like traffic lights on roundabouts at 2AM. If you can't drive your computer responsibly, sod off somewhere you can't interfere with those who can.

@The Other Steve

"Come on guys, the days of RP, Standard English and everyone on telly wearing evening dress are long behind us, and good riddance to them. There are far more interesting things to be pedantic about. Like the internet not having been designed to survive a nuclear war, or the true progression of windows version numbers :-)"

Yes, indeed. However misuse of sayings does still make some people come across as ignorant twats - I'm thinking of such as:

"Off his own back"

"One foul swoop"

"A bit of a damp squid"

and so on... The first in particular just makes me want to scream, "Bat, bat, you f*cking idiot; how many cricket runs have you seen scored off someone's back, you utter cretin!!!..." I'm not sure that's what Norman Tebbit meant though...

I think some of you may have misread...

...particularly those of you slagging off so-called "whiners". It's not at all clear from the piece how compliant to W3C Standards IE8 Standards Mode will be. One would like to hope that it'll be a lot more compliant than IE7 and that that's why they've agreed to the change but I see no guarantees whatsoever.

It's kind of self-selecting really - anyone arguing the general drift of the well-known "Time Breakdown of Modern Web Design" graphic is on a bit of a loser convincing most of us you have the faintest clue what you're talking about.

@Daniel Wilkie

1. The meaning of the word "conspiracy" when used in conjunction with "theory" has been so debased by misuse anyone with a brain now ignores it and looks at the theory

2. Akbar's theory holds infinitely more water than yours

3. Your first paragraph is pretty pedantic AFAICS - "apologies for being pedantic" might have been more appropriate

4. Apologies for being pedantic but, if you're going to quote people, perhaps try copy and paste so you don't introduce spelling errors that make you look thick - never a good way to prevail in a discussion of rival theories, I find

5. The main thrust of the original story isn't about a mistake, it's about deliberate misrepresentation by The Times, so please take your straw men away, along with your last paragraph

Observation

@Dave: "he's a brave (or is it stupid) bloke, that section of the A417 is a speed gun hot spot, I've been zapped on that small section of road!"

Agreed - and not having a dig at you but go back and watch it again; as many others have pointed out, this guy is quite clued up - lifesaver on the roundabout, respectfully waiting for others in front to move in in good time etc.; when he comes off the first roundabout, watch him momentarily hold his speed just over seventy until he can see the bridges :)

What on earth are you on about?

There isn't a single piece of remotely dangerous riding in the clip embedded on this page. Frankly, apart from a slight chuckle when he spun the back wheel, I was bored to tears by the entire thing. Judging by their comments, most of the posters on this page have never ridden a bike, would probably die of fright on the CBT if they did and are completely unqualified to comment.

Utter Bollocks

I've spent quite literally hundreds of Euros on bands I hadn't even heard of - and almost certainly never would have - before I found Pandora.

I used to be in a band with a fairly senior IT Manager at an NHS Trust

Having seen the trouble he had just project managing setting up his drum kit, nothing would surprise me any more. Needless to say, very few beats arrived on schedule.

I would say he was potentially the original inspiration for the "only have to beat it once into a drum machine" joke, but that would be unfair to all the other useless drummers I've met.

@Entropy

As in, this bit?:

"However, Godwin's law itself can be abused, as a distraction or diversion, that fallaciously miscasts an opponent's argument as hyperbole, especially if the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate. A 2005 Reason magazine article argued that Godwin's law is often misused to ridicule even valid comparisons."

This law is clearly an ass and (once again, up to the rather ill-advised gender diversion) Bryce Prewitt's one of several posts which amply sum up why.

This stuff isn't hidden, you know

It's all been planned at least since phONEday in '95 - and available in the Q&As for that for starters.

This is (formerly) OfTel's The Big Number Q&A from over 8 years ago:

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/oftel/publications/1999/consumer/qanum999.htm

Legal Action

Count me in. And if I can work out a way to successfully move 100+ domains without causing my customers grief before my reseller account renews in Jan I'm off. I also changed all the requested passwords from the original PDF on the day it was sent. I don't really want to run a dedicated server but they've just tipped the balance of work decidedly in favour of it.

It's very true that you get what you pay for and, aside from a couple of minor gripes that could happen on any shared server system, I've been more than happy with the return from FastHosts up to the last couple of months. I was fairly unimpressed with the original issue but it's the cackhandedness of the response to this one that is just unacceptable - and I'm one of the lucky ones in that at least all of my sites are still up.

I'm also working abroad and won't be able to personally see any post they send me; fortunately it can be securely read for me. On this subject though, I also have a tip for those of you who've been told they've reset your CP password: I think they've said this in the PDF even when you changed that as requested and they've only changed the Admin one, not the overall CP one, if you didn't change the Admin one as well.

Let me get this straight

So the idea is that, if you're an Iranian dissident, the US want you to use a local mail provider instead?

Genius.

Ah, yes...

...and don't park your RF-alarmed motorcycle (and possibly car, for all I know) at Schiphol unless you know the override code.

DAMHIKIJDOK?

@David Paul Morgan

That's because standing at a bar with money out is one of the unwritten no-nos anyone who's spent much time on the serving side of a bar could tell you. In the barperson world - and more importantly the virtual queue representation in their head - that's a "Go Back Two Spaces" card. Wave it around and you'll be lucky to get a drink this side of Xmas.

Fair Points, John

It's just one of my bugbears, as you may have gathered :)

Another one would obviously be enslavement to US influence, from where Euro PNR comes. Yet another would be those who yearn for some alternative world where we're 22 miles from New York, not Calais and, instead of concentrating on things they can't change / are demonstrably idiotic, like running around calling for the UK to leave the EU, could far more usefully weigh in and help stifle these individual excesses.

UK is a joke

Get out of your stupid little islander mentality, for heaven's sake. I flew in a competition in the South of France earlier this year, rode down on my motorbike, through Belgium and Luxembourg. Did I ever have to show my passport? Did I hell. I sing occasionally in a band in Norway, which isn't even in the EU. Do I have to even show my passport to fly there and back from the Netherlands? Do I hell (that'll be the Schengen agreement, for those wondering).

Cut the paranoia and grow up. If you already have, bash some bloody sense into your fellow countrymen.

Inside Knowledge

Now you see, when all the other Dragons chucked out the gold plating guy, the one who gave him the money evidently knew something they didn't ;)

Well, what I know is...

...for the benefit of Andy Worth and others asking, yes, there is certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence of phones causing interesting effects on aircraft equipment, much of it to do with pilots' own phones accidentally left on (or deliberately switched on on the ground). I myself fly much smaller aircraft and will quite happily attest that if I leave my phone on and it rings my variometer goes absolutely ballistic. Yes, if there's a cell on the plane itself the output will be much smaller; but there will be lots of phones. I'm not actually particularly interested in being part of the public trial of the theory that they won't cause incidents!