* Posts by Jon

19 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Oct 2007

Fears mount over missing Webroot founder

Jon
Joke

Erm ...

'"He thinks everyone on the island is out to get him," Candis Thomas said'

Well they will be now after this article

Total lunar eclipse: look skywards Wednesday

Jon

2 days to form my Cult of the Bleeding Moon

/w me for invite

Forth Bridge painters to down brushes in 2012

Jon

Damn shame, that

This is one of the idiosyncracies that makes Britain Great. Why get rid of it for a generic paintjob? What next, sort the schools out? Mumble, mumble, I don't know, grr grr

Griffin Evolve wireless iPod speakers

Jon

Commuter hell?

This equates, in my mind, to more "types" sprawling on public transport playing at full volume something that sounds like a brick in a washing machine. Ah, but wait! All is not lost! Radio transmission you say? Why, I have a vast collection of funeral dirges on my iPod right here. All I need to do is point at ... let me see, yes, /that/ yob ... and hit play ...

Actually I am sure it wouldn't be that simple but a man can dream. Where's me ghetto blaster? ;)

How believable are government claims on ID cards?

Jon

Faith in the Government

Finally people are realising that the Government is not the alpha-and-omega of cure-all solutions. I think it took a good solid catalogue of failures and errors to make people realise it for themselves, eg. losing MHRC data, etc etc etc. People are seeing the big Govt types for the incompetent so-and-so's that they tend to be.

English language succumbs to Symbiotic Ephemeralization

Jon
Unhappy

What absolute rubbish

The author's assertion that "[a]ll this [symbiotic ephemeralisation, pollination symbiosis] readily occurs as an atomic effort within a deregulated chaotic macro environment" clearly belies the fact that his comprehension of inter-macro-micro-crossarchitected systems, that is to say, an ostensibly chaotic dynamic structure or set or interrelated collection thereof, is, or indeed are, nothing of the sort; rather it is that they exhibit numinous microstatic relationships coupled with a pool of variables of significant volume to give the illusion of dynamism! God!! He so has not done his homework!

Sun pulls MySQL into its orbit

Jon

Mysql's income

comes from licensing, afaik

Anyway I suspect this will herald in Postgres's ascendancy

Taser touts MP3 player that's a real shock to the system

Jon

This is a good idea

I actually think this is a good idea. With proper training, sensible user background checks and the like, violent crimes could be cut simply by providing an unpleasant deterrent. Yes, it *seems* unpleasant because, after all, aren't we intelligent and civilised beings? Well, Reg. readers may be but the average yob on the street isn't, thats for sure, and I have yet to see any useful crime-cutting initiatives out there. Yes the possibility remains that 'orrible youfs (or is it youves?) may get their hands on the iTaser. Well, they already have knives and guns so that's a step in the right direction, IMO.

Antarctic Xmas punch-up airlift cost £45k

Jon

I can understand

Imagine being trapped in a remote, inhospitable location with someone who continually makes tapping noises. That would be SOO ANNOYINGGGGG!!!!

Vista provokes user synaptic collapse

Jon

Ah, but Un*x has the same thing

If you think about it: you are logged in as root and you "cd" to /home/usernameX, whose . perms are rwx------, where they are the owner, let's say. You, as root cannot see that location to list it etc but you could change its permissions such that you could see it. See? :)

Virgin Mary appears in Google's Iowa data center

Jon

Better than nothing

Surely a few jobs is better than none. In any case, it creates a piece of industry around which other industries can grow (logistics, cleaners etc)

:)

Darling admits Revenue loss of 25 million personal records

Jon

Dear Government:

I would like to serve my country by setting up a system to prevent this sort of thing recurring. It is very complex which is why I will ask a whopping £1million for the work.

Kind Regards,

Me.

--------------------------------

Actually this kind of imcompetence is rife and not just in Government. Banks and other large organisations are like this too. They're just too big and unwieldy and plain inefficient to get things right on more than an occasional basis. A top-tier bank, when sending money to my account in another top-tier bank, lost this money. Turns out they put it in second class post. The threat of legal action chivvied them along nicely though. :)

Man wrongly detained for 50 days has ISP to thank

Jon

@ Anonymous Coward

Did I miss something or did you just argue with yourself about having something to hide?

Student taser victim spared electric chair

Jon

@ Andrew Armitage

I'm not clear on your point. Are you saying that they correctly used the "least amount of force" option available to them, or that they didn't and went overboard? Define "this behaviour", as there are two sets of people behaving differently.

Jon

Maybe not the most popular view

but I think the force was reasonable. Despite one's opinion of John Kerry, he is a public figure and as such may attract the attention of the usual glut of nutters. Andrew Meyer was making a big fuss and attracting negative attention to himself. If the cops hadn't stepped in it all could have gone horribly wrong, for which - guess who? That's right, the police - would take the blame for not stepping in sooner. He should be glad to get away with a tazering in my opinion. I suspect I don't trust the government any more or less than the average Reg. reader but I know rational behaviour when I see it, or indeed, when I don't. The police are damned when they do and damned when they don't and I think it behooves us public to consider, when we debate something, whether we are valuing the point or action that is least damaging to society as a whole, or simply pointing the finger at easy, accepatable targets just so we can be seen to be doing something, or - horrors! - just to fit in.

California court tilts towards mandating web accessibility

Jon

@Stu Reeves

Blind people using text-to-speech in browsers? Already exists, you say? Yes, I know that. That was the joke, you see? Ah, but of course! That would be missed if one were using just such a browser that did not render the "Joke Alert" graphic audibly! Woop! Woop! Aaarrgggh! I've destroyed myself! End of the World Imminent!!! Anyway, seeing as clarity is evidently not my bag, my point was that the debate seemed to focus on solutions that were excessively labour-intensive, and irrelevant (ie rewriting a million web pages rather than using one browser plugin) and have been resolved in reality, as you pointed out. So this, I'm certain you'll agree, renders the discussion a mooted flap-fest. :)

Jon

Furthermore

There seems to be alot of "Cor, these blind people! They'll be wanting to fly in the Air Force next" arguments being spewed forth here. Well, guys, that's just pure bloody-mindedness. I'm not even going to grace that with an "IMHO". That's just the sort of mentality that wants to keep disabled people out of daily life because it's too much inconvenience - not to mention unsightly - for the rest of us able-bodied folk. If that's your argument, and believe you me, you'd be by no means alone, then by all means put your balls to the wire and say it and back it up. If you went blind, do you think that by making things accessible that can be reasonably made so, like web sites and shop fronts, at no real disadvantage to the able-bodied if you think about how to do it intelligently, you'd be asking too much? Just because the Government decrees that it must be so, that makes it undesirable, and let's make the lives of all the blind people in the world that bit worse to prove our point, shall we, thus deflecting our guilt onto the government? Ok, so people aren't created equal, wihch is why you have yet to hear any blind people pushing for car-driving rights, have you? But what exactly is wrong with putting in that little extra effort to grant the disabled a few small, feasible improvements to their lives. And even if we can't be bothered getting up off our fat arses to make those improvements - and yes I do fit snugly into that category, I have to say - then even voicing support and concern seems to be beyond the reach of many "people". And, no, this isn't the </rant>, end of rant, I'm sorry to say. It's the beginning, you get me?! The beginning!!

Ok, now, here's the end.

</rant>

MALFORMED XML EXCEPTION. NO MATCHING <rant> .... aaahhhshhiiiitttBOOOOMMM!! ;)

Jon
Joke

IT for the blind

Yes, a lawyer will get paid for this. That's not a sin, that's business. I wonder if springing the law on large businesses is the only recourse some disabled people get. Yes, businesses are often required to tailor their physical store to the needs of the disabled: ramps, staff that speak, etc., etc. No, being dyslexic doesn't qualify as a disability.

Anyway, enough arm-waving. Here's my plan: I will write an extension to the popular Firefox web browser that prints out to braille. I will base the design on an app that prints ASCII to braille that was designed by some students at my school years ago. I will obtain a printing device that prints braille to test. I will also develop an alternative interface based on speech, and partner up with speech-synthesis / recognition companies to build in a voice recognition interface / test to speech interface for the browser. I will charge everyone $1million for all of this, which everyone will gladly pay.

Google's 'Gphone' said to be mobile OS

Jon

Ads

Ads ... hmmm. What can I say? @ Mr. Brennan: You say we have few sources for findoing about new products. That's true in the main but it's not carved in stone. Especially now with user-generated content proliferating on the web, ad makers have a harder time than before to compete with the word-of-mouth revenue stream. Personally I support that sort of WoM information simply because it takes the influence and agenda that a large ad agency may have and puts it in the hand of the buyers and sellers in a single location that people know about, more like a traditional marketplace.; therefore giving you a more level playing field.

<br>

@ Mr B's detractors: We can moan about ads but it's all capitalism in action. If we don't like it we need to opt out of buying advertised stuff, as one poster does, and / or form forums in which to buy and sell this stuff ourselves.

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