Phallic logo?

Is it just my childhood-like innocence, or isn't it just some cherries?! Sure you could say they look like balls if you want but I think you're grasping for something that's not there. So to speak.

As for the box, colour me sceptical- especially of the graphics performance. If it can do what jobby says it can it could even work as my new media playing box. Bet it won't, though.

I reckon I'll pick up an iPhone v1

I'm taking a road trip across the US this summer, and will be in town on July 11th... of course, you've got to sign a 2 year contract to get your grubby mitts on the new phone, so I think I'll keep an eye on eBay and snap up a mark 1 from an Apple fanboy that's upgrading.

The new model doesn't strike me as that impressive- the GPS isn't really GPS (it's 'assisted'- i.e. using cell towers and the like) and if anything it looks a bit worse than the old model. 3G, sure, but I've only got a limited use for that. EDGE will be enough to download my (text) e-mails and such.

Now, if it had a better camera with video or something like that, I'd be interested.

Mark, seriously...

You don't code web pages for a living do you? Let me show you how the conversation would go with my boss if I did what you suggest:

"Hey, boss... IE8 is out now, and it renders web pages a lot better. Do you mind if I go back and remove the last two years of IE-specific hacks I've had to do all over the place?"

"Isn't there a quicker way? That'll cost loads!"

"Well, yes. I could just put a meta tag in. But it's not right."

"F*ck off. Do it."

The other issue you seem to be blindly ignoring is that all IE users don't magically upgrade to IE8 the second it comes out. It takes years- the sites I run still have around 60% IE6 usage, and IE7 has been out for ages. Just because IE8 appears doesn't mean that we can forget all the others exist.

(BD vs upscaled DVD) ...or you don't care

HD is nice. I occasionally download stuff and watch it on my laptop in HD. Some of the scenery in Lost looks amazing.

Am I going to get an HD set? God, no. The price vs. benefit ratio just isn't there yet- DVD quality does me fine for now. By the time I roll around to getting an HD set (once everyone gets one at least the economies of scale will kick in) I still don't know if I'll get a Bluray player- downloadable HD content might be more than a pipe dream by that point.

Yes, but

Argh, the Register comments are just awful for geeks explaining that how *they* do it works far better than anything a billion-dollar company understands.

Most people (read: the vast, vast majority of people) never go into the Google preferences page. They search, find their result and go. So yes, 'power users' can tweak all the way to 100 results per page, but the she was explaining why the default is 10, and will stay at 10.

Yes Mark, you're still wrong

I could code in a server-side browser detection for every page. But it'd be an obscene amount of work- I deal with a lot of pages that are just simple HTML files *without a server-side backend*- so I'd have to add one to every page, and probably waste a huge number of CPU cycles every day doing unnecessary processing.

Or, I could add a meta tag to the included template I use, which will appear on every page. I think I know what I'm going to do.

How disappointing

Not knowing what on earth 'Screaming Monkey' is, I took a look at the site. It appears to be a virtual machine for Javascript(/ECMAScript) alone? How disappointing. By the sounds of the article it was going to sidestep all the IE problems we have... which are in its HTML and CSS handling.

G'wan, make a 'virtual machine' that embeds Gecko in IE silently. In fact, maybe that's the solution- an IE plugin that is nothing more than Gecko/Webkit. Get people to download it like they do Flash, and then sites can turn it on if they want.

Probably be a hideous resource hog, mind.

ReactOS?! I'll stay with XP

Yes, it has very noble goals but even ReactOS's web site states that it is "not recommended for everyday use". I'll be sticking with XP, thanks...

Mark, you're wrong again

I'm surprised that you can't tell the difference between Internet Explorer versions on the server side, because I've been doing it for years with 100% success.

I think you've got the complete wrong end of the stick here:

"No change to websites needed unless you don't want to update your old crappy site"

That's exactly it. If you have a completely standards compliant site then you don't need to add this meta tag. If, on the other hand, you've got a cackhanded site that was tailored for IE6 (as many corporate web applications are) you slip the code in and it'll continue to display as it did in IE6/7. So basically, everyone wins.

I really don't know why everyone is kicking up such a fuss- and I'm a professional web dev type.

But the IE8 beta...

Is awful. I installed it on my computer briefly and it rendered almost everything that used a 'float' incorrectly. So I'm waiting on the second beta that actually renders stuff correctly before I fully 'hooray' Microsoft.

Ash...

It's been said a million times before, but the hell, it's worth it.

If I e-mail all my documents to people in ODF they won't open them. Professionally speaking, that's a bit of an issue. If Office 2007 read ODF then we'd be fine, but then, on the other hand, if it did that then no-one would notice I was using anything different.

What an idiot.

I had the exact same idea myself a few weeks ago. Get some javascript everyone can use that has a little pop-up, telling IE6 users to upgrade. To suggest that someone 'stole' the idea from him is a load of utter arse.

More to the point though, IE6 isn't going away. Anyone suggesting that people should make W3C compliant sites and tell IE users to switch has obviously never made a web site in return for money, because telling 30-40% of your audience to piss off is not something favoured by any client I've met.

As people have said above, the corporates aren't moving- and that's the problem. My work has a wide variety of ugly ActiveX jobbies for all sorts of jobs. They're old and use shoddy technology, but they work. They're not getting upgraded, and neither is IE6. Don't get me wrong, I hate it, but that's the way things are...

Well...

"It's not as if even the cheapest freeware developer can't find £50 to spare as a one off cost..."

It's not that they can't afford it, but when you're giving the stuff away for free, why SHOULD you afford it?

Re: Yes to women

And to think people wonder why women aren't taking up careers in IT?

Time to pick up a copy of Zelda...

I've got an Xbox softmodded to run XBMC- it's pretty much the centre of my living room experience. It was only moddable by using one of the Mechcommander discs that allowed a similar Linux hack to the one described here.

So come pay day it might well be time for me to pick up a copy of Zelda for safe keeping, till Wii homebrew progresses... my Wii, a USB hard disk and XBMC would be an incredible little living room addition..

Facebook is good. Shoot me now.

A disclaimer to start: I haven't read all the comments on here. But I read the first few, which expressed the usual "I've never signed up for Facebook but I instinctively know that it's a pile of crap" and I got bored very quickly.

I (and everyone I know) use Facebook to communicate with 'real life' friends, and not anyone else. It isn't a place to meet people online- in fact it's been set up to be quite the opposite. I can share photos and videos with them, and see photos and videos they have shared with me. Yes, I could e-mail them to everyone, but I could also print them all out and mail them. Facebook is far easier than both of those.

I can organise events, invite people and send messages to all the attendees. Again, I could e-mail people. I could phone them. But trying to find out which weekend 20 or so people are available to go on a trip isn't easy, and having everyone's responses right there in front of you is simpler.

So no, Facebook doesn't let me do anything that I couldn't do otherwise. But it does let me things more easily. I don't really see myself trading in much of my privacy (you don't HAVE to fill out all those fields, you know). And yes, their business model might be utter crud, but I don't really need to worry about that stuff...

Microsoft cannot make IE standards compliant overnight

Stop saying they can. Looking at the web stats for my site, I'm still looking at 20-odd% of users using IE6. I even have 1% using IE5! If they release an all singing, all dancing IE8 that does everything in a standards compliant mode, it'll be years before everyone is using it, if at all. It's not like Firefox, people aren't used to updating it. They use it because it's there.

Which is why this MS standards meta tag thing makes perfect sense. If they do nothing like it, then I have a choice of having my site broken in IE8, or broken in IE6/7. Of course, I can do some conditional comments to tweak my CSS, but if I'm doing that, why not just use the meta tag thing?

Everyone moaning about this meta tag doesn't live in the real world. I don't like IE-specific sites any more than you do, but they exist. Radically changing IE in IE8 would result in a lot of annoyed (and borderline clueless) amateur web people, and could very easily impede upgrades, as IT admins find out their intranet doesn't work any more, etc etc.

WebKit is the way forwards

Yup, you heard me. The engine that powers Safari. I got a Mac a while ago and was happy continuing to use Firefox, just like I did in Windows. Then Safari 3 came out- blisteringly fast and very, very capable. The WebKit engine that powers is great, and already has some of the HTML5 goodies announced a while back.

Of course, Safari for Windows is a load of utter crud right now, but that's because Apple rushed it out of the door so that people could make iPhone apps. There are nightly version out there that actually use ClearType rather than Apple's own font smoothing, and more besides.

There are also non-Safari versions of Webkit in the works, which might be a better solution- none of this brushed metal nonsense.

Adam

The modem point I'm not so sure on. It might be as simple as them looking for traffic a phone simply isn't capable of doing, like downloading torrents.

As for getting a better deal- I'd love to, but I have nothing to threaten to cancel. That's the problem with pay as you go. I can't really sign up for a contract either, as I'm on a time-limited work permit over here, and 3 year contract terms... well, let's just not go there.

The whole industry just seems utterly corrupt to me. Last time I looked, it was more affordable for me to roam using my old UK SIM card to get on the net.

Not even slightly surprised

I moved out to Canada from the UK a year ago, and the state of the cellphone industry over here completely amazes me- it's so backwards.

Rogers charge obscene rates for data transfer - 5c a KB on Pay as You Go (so about $6 a photo), and an amazing contract add-on costing $7 a month for 1MB of data, then 2c a KB afterwards. Basically, it's suitable only for millionaires and morons.

It doesn't end there, though. Call Display? $9 a month. Voicemail? A mere $7 a month for you, sir. Then they have the cheek to advertise "amazing value" packages- combing the above two will still cost you $11 a month. This is all on top of your normal tariff, of course (cheapest? $25 a month for, wait for it, 250 minutes of calls!)

Basically they're a bunch of money grabbing bastards who don't even know the meaning of the word "competitive". But when, why would they when the Canadian government let them buy their *only competitor* (in GSM, that is), Fido? I have a GSM phone- I can go to no other operator other than their new subsidiary. So I've turned off all the data functionality on my (3G capable) phone, have a pay as you go account... and use Skype a lot.

I'd happily pay more money a month to use mobile internet, send MMSes (hell, even SMSes) and such, but not at their prices. So they lose money. Clever buggers.

RE: How?

Your phone sends its IMEI number to the operator (I think it's the IMEI, anyway). Amongst other things, I believe it indicates what model your phone is. At the very least it could indicate that it wasn't the phone Rogers gave you.

And Chris- yes, it really is that expensive. For further reading, check this page out:

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2118/159/

More expensive than Rwanda. Mental.

Oh shut up

As I read the review, I thought to myself "I bet the first comment will be from someone complaining about that partition thing". And look, there you are.

As the first half the review said, this is aimed at newbies. People who don't know what they're doing with their PC, but want their files backed up. How many of these people have multiple partitions? None. The target market for this thing will have left their PC set up as the manufacturer created it- with one big partition.

I'll admit, it's an odd thing to be left out of the software, but I assume they have reasons, even they are daft. Get off your high geek-horse.

All rubbish

This why places like Facebook get so popular. I've not e-mailed any of my friends in ages- I just send them a message on FB. That way I know it actually gets through and gets noticed...

Really, the best CAPTCHA is one that you make yourself. Well, to a limit- if you make a crap one you'll get everything you deserve. One of the more effective solutions I made at my work was to create a form field labelled "Do not fill this field in", given it the name "email" and hidden it with CSS. A bot doing a DOM scan will pick it up and shove some text in there, and they'll fail validation.

Obviously, that could be (and eventually probably will be) circumvented within 10 minutes if one of these talented spammy programmers took the time- but they don't. We're just one (minor) web site, so they never notice.

Er, no

Kevin, I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that IBM aren't actually offering to destroy every server centre in the world and incorporate the entire internet into a shiny box at IBM headquaters.

The point is that the machine they're talking about *could* handle the amount of data and processing involved, thus slightly smaller versions could handle some ruddy giant operations, like Google search.

Waiter, "Taking things far too literally check" please...

To be fair...

A lot of organisations employ these SEO types, just to make sure that the structure of their pages is correct for searching, and sorting out meta data, etc etc. Yes, a gibbon could handle it if everything was done properly, but as with many websites that have a huge number of contributors, it isn't.

What strikes me as odd is that the first site mentioned in the article is Digg, yet it was never targeted. The Waxy article even goes as far as to say "In particular, I'm stunned that he didn't go after Digg".

Never mind, eh?

iPlayer on Linux- keep up

There's a flash version. It works on Linux. Please, please, shut up about it now.