Posts by Grease Monkey

Doesn't happen like that. It downloads the installer to the HDD. If the download fails it downloads again and again until it gets it right. Then it reboots to the installer. Should the installer fail it will reboot until it gets it right.

You're not talking a DVD sized distro here, it's a pretty small and uncomplicated install. Remember it's only replacing Windows CE.

The pikeys round here and dumber than dumb. They keep stealing fibre.

Is BT vision excluded from your download allowance?

Yes.

"Really quite a strange article. It's almost like Alex is back (but shorter)."

Actually I found it harder reading than many academic papers.

"Flak is actually AAC from the German for anti-aircraft cannon "{Fl}ieger{a}bwehr{k}anone"

I thought FLAC and AAC were both audio codecs.

I'm getting it (and seeing as it's friday afternoon I'll be wearing it to get to the pub).

"Now they've taken to putting bill board ads for it opposite the exchanges that don't provide it yet, even though it used to promised for October last year but has been shunted back to the end of this year."

This is no different from those LLU providers who site billboards offering broadband for under a fiver a month in areas where they actually charge at least four times that. As usual the ASA are useless.

All the ISPs are as dodgy as each other when it comes to advertising.

@Dazzza I find your assetion that people outside urban areas can't get Freeview a little puzzling. Freeview coverage is pretty damn good for the vast majority of the population and getting better. You also forgot Freesat.

As for broadband speeds. I live in a rural are and get 8Mb/s yet I know people who live in urban areas and get 2Mb/s or less. The issue isn't as clear cut as the media would have you believe and living an urban area does not by any means guarantee fast ADSL.

BT's biggest issue is that you can no longer get the service for a one off installation cost. I got my original box (Philips IIRC) for free and no monthly charge (it should have been a one off £30 but I managed to talk them out of it), but you could get the OD stuff for a fee if you so choose. The box was, if anything, better than the box Sky offered at the time. The UI in general and the EPG were much better. Sure you only got the Freeview channels, but if that's what you wanted that was fine. Now you get charged a monthly rate even if you only want Freeview.

It's a shame for BT really as a lot of people were switching back to BT just to get a decent PVR for very little money (free if you paid your cards right). The monthly charge for the basic package may only be £4, but it's still a monthly charge which puts a lot off people off.

It isn't extradition. It's an EAW.

"Personally, I think the Prosecution should have gone to the Swedish courts to get the EAW issued. "

Which is precisely what they'll do if this appeal succeeds.

It doesn't just *imply* that the patent was bogus. It says quite clearly that the patent is invalid.

It will be interesting to see if Samsung now pursue a claim against Apple or indeed the German authorities for the costs involved in revising their kit. It would be a good thing if they did a cost for the courts would make them check patents more carefully before basing a judgement upon them.

"In the last few months and in the minds of the general public, the phrase "Climate Change" had become indistinguishable from "Global Warming" which itself was shorthand for "Anthropogenic Global Warming" (which is the IPCC usage). I suspect this is because of the amazing degree of synchronicity of the BBC's use of the phrase and the newspapers' need to abbreviate headlines."

Employees of the BBC suffer from the same problems as most of the public. The first is that they don't realise that there is a difference between weather and climate. The second is that a little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing. When Joe Public reads a newspaper article on a given subject he assumes that the article is 100% true and the sum of all human knowledge on the subject and that this means he knows everything there is to know about it. When a TV presenter does the same he can mislead millions of people, but the BBC still allow them to do it.

I think it was the Victorians who introduced the concept of "the balance of nature", the popular idea that everything in nature stays the same unless mankind interferes. My point here being that it's fairly easy to convince the public on AGW because of their belief in the balance of nature. Believers in the balance of nature think that if anything changes in nature it must be broken and that it must be the fault of mankind. Of course it may not be so easy to keep them believing. It's not so long since most people were AGW sceptics then we get warm weather for a few years and most people accept AGW. The last couple of winters made a lot of people start to doubt the whole concept of AGW. Which is when the media suddenly switch to using the phrase Climate Change again. You can't tell people we've had weeks of snow because of Global Warming. The result is complete confusion among the public.

"It's usually called the "law of unforeseen consequences.""

Indeed and it tells us that we shouldn't just blindly forge ahead with a plan without thinking it through. However that is exactly what a certain bunch of climate scientists want us to do.

"Einstein never really fully proved E=mc2"

Where to start?

It still hasn't been fully proved. The thing about the way science works is that the scientific community work with the best available theory continually proving (in the correct and original sense of the word prove) the theory until it breaks. At which point they postulate a new and better theory. So far Einstein's theory has stood up to any amount of testing, but it may still break. As such Einstein never fully "proved" that E=mc2.

The whole thing about the "faster than light" neutrinos neatly demonstrates that some scientists have forgotten how science is supposed to work. Many of them immediately claimed the data to be wrong even without seeing all of the data. And why was it wrong? Well because it disagreed with the current best theory. In other words they are putting all their trust in theory rather than the universe. If those neutrinos ( or something else that comes along) demonstrate that E does not always equal mc2 will these people continue to cling to Einstein and declare the universe to be broken?

Not of course that there's anything new about that sort of behaviour. There are still those who claim Darwin to be wrong because they cling to a "theory" called religion. Over the last few hundred years there have been scientists who were argued down by their peers until they eventually managed to demonstrate that they were right. Secience is supposed to work a certain way, but there will always be scientists who want it to work differently. The scientific community needs, if it is to continue to be taken seriously, to expose these people not to give in to them.

I'm getting royally pissed off with successive governments over energy prices. Ministers continually bang on about the way power companies are ripping us off and yet it is these same ministers who support ridiculous feed in tariffs and try to force engergy companies to use more "renewables" all of which adds to the cost of our energy. And I'm not just talking about the current lot, Labour were just as bad and twice as sanctimonious.

Yes, sure the energy companies are trying to make more profit than they should (look at the way retail prices go up immediately when wholesale prices go up, but take months to fall when wholesale prices fall) but ministers must take part of the blame.

If a company did come along touting "100% nuclear and lower prices" the government would be down on them like a ton of bricks for not supporting renewables. This would be the same government that wants more nuclear power. Why? Because the government were signed up to stupid targets to meet on renewables and therefore have to be seen to be trying to achieve these targets. How to do this? Make the customer pay through the nose. All the while quietly admitting that nuclear is the best option.

Sorry it's way less than that these days.Our meter was swapped out after about ten years.

I suspect that they will become compulsory over time. Your meter must be replaced periodically. All the companies will do is make sure a few years down the line that all their meters are smart meters. Then your option only option on receiving your new meter will be to have the "smart" bit disabled. The next step from there will be to either try to sneakilly enable it when you sign a new contract, switch suppliers, change tariffs or whatever. Or better still a new bill payer moves into the property.

And what are the odds that once your property is on smart metering there won't be any option to turn it off.

There's compulsory and then there's compulsory.

Hold on a mo. I thought the meters were fitted by the distributor, not by the company from whom you buy your utilities. Our existing meters were very definitely fitted by the distributor and not the company who bills us.

What parallel port?

@Mr Young so you don't know what tangentially means then?

"Fair enough but when you've designed and built yours you can have a pop at his, until then shush!"

FFS how often does this comment have to be posted on here?

If what you say makes sense then we are no longer allowed to declare that we dislike a movie, a TV show, a book, a song, a car or anything else designed or made by humans. Complete tosh.

At least the OP's criticism was constructive and suggested ways to improve the original rather than just saying "that's crap".

Surely it shouldn't even try to update if the user doesn't have admin privileges?

"The solution surely is to not support Firefox?"

That, Shirley, is exactly the correct solution. And it's the one that Mozilla should be worrying about.

I'm out of the corporate world now, but the policy we always followed is that no software or new version of software could be deployed without full testing. With browsers that meant that they had to be tested with all the common apps they would be used with. Since more and more internal apps were web interfaces that meant more and more testing. As such the current Firefox release schedule meant that users ended up grounded at V4.

You could slip a minor version upgrade past with much less work and a bug/security fix with even less. Now I don't suppose for a minute my former employer was alone in having this policy. As such I suspect that many corporates will abandon Firefox.

And yes before the FF Fanbois jump on me, my employer had the same policy on Chrome. Nor would they allow the use of any of those Google products that seem to remain permanently in beta.

I'm sure Mozilla and Google might argue that their version numbers do not follow the accepted practice of x.00, 0.x0 and 0.0x that you describe, but the corporates would surely respond that they are not going to rewrite their entire software acceptance policy around the peculiarities of a couple of web browsers.

Mozilla, it's less than a year since you suddenly stepped outside accepted practice with your version control. Please step back again. You don't have to copy Google. I suspect that Google will be number 1 browser before too long because they appeal to the man in the street with their simplicity. I believe you have lost that battle already and will never win it back. As such you should maybe try to concentrate on consolidating your user base and producing a quality browser rather than chasing user numbers.

Erm. Help > About

Version information

Version 11.61

Build 1250

Platform Win32

System Windows XP

You're allowed an opinion and people are allowed to disagree.

I'm one of the ones who disagrees. It's a (rare) good move on the part of Mozilla. It's something that other browsers have. You know them they're the ones that aren't hopelessly bloated. Coding something into the product should always be less bloaty and more secure than bunging it on top as a plugin.

I find Firefox starts about as slowly as Opera, but Opera is also my mail client so it should always be slower than just a plain browser. Chrome, however is much faster. Running the three of them Chrome and Opera are Faster than FF, IME. However I do hear a lot of people moaning about how slow FF is and I usually find I can solve their problems by switching off a plugin or two.

FF users seem to feel that their favourite browser needs a lot of plugins. They'll always tell you that FF with this, that and the other plugin is the best browser. It seems to me that they seem to be missing the point that FF isn't the best browser if it needs those plugins to be the best.

Chrome users don't seem to feel the need to extend their browser. And while Opera users certainly have the facility to extend their browser they don't tend to use it beyond maybe Adblock.

@Wibble

Your point being?

@druck you could say the same to the OP complaining about Chrome.

The thing is I happen to like the uncluttered GUI in Chrome (and of course Opera) when compared with FF. The reason I do is again to do with intrusion, a web browser is a tool and I want to see the web page, not other stuff.

"but I don't think there's much mention on the Mozilla blog, or the download page."

As I said, go to the home page and the version number is right in front of you. Chrome users have to dig to find their version number. And Google don't shout about their updates, they do it on the quiet. I know I've mentioned my PVR before, but the process is just like Google's. The PVR quietly updates over the air over night without prompting, IOW Google treat their browser and their users just like manufacturers of other appliances.

Somebody said to me this morning that they didn't see the problem because Opera was on version 11 (11.61 if we're being picky) however IIRC Opera has been around for 17 years, Firefox has only been around for 7. While 9 major version upgrades in 7 years may not seem much, 6 of those have happened in the last year. That may not be intrusive for the tech savvy, but you can bet it is for Josephine public to whom the computer is just another box like the TV or the phone. And that is the market you're dealing with.

"We need a STFU icon."

Sure do. Guess who I'd use it on?

Which probably points to updates being fired out too fast for the testers to keep up.

I'm an Opera user, but I have to agree that Chrome is better than FF.

"we're attempting to make all updates less "noisy" for the user: this is still a release or two away."

That would be about two months away in version twelve then?

Why? Well the Firefox user base is sliding almost entirely at the expense of Chrome. It seems that somebody at Mozilla has looked at Google's method of version numbering and decided to copy it in the ridiculous belief that the version numbering must be the reason Chrome is surging ahead.

The thing that they seem to have missed is that Google don't make a big deal, or indeed any sort of a deal, about Chrome's version number. The vast majority of users don't know what version of Chrome they have any more than they know what software version their PVR is running. Visit the Chrome homepage and you have to dig to find the version number. Visit the Firefox homepage and it's right there.

Google have realised that version numbers are for geekboys and that normal people don't care about them. They are useful for internal controls, but customers don't care. I have no idea what software version my PVR is running and I don't care. I only recently found out that my car is a "Phase 2" and as such some parts differ from the "Phase 1" version. That's because I don't really care. And ordinary people don't really care about the version of their browser, their computer is just an appliance like their TV.

Mozilla need to get wise to the fact that in the last few years the market has shifted from being dominated by geeks to being dominated by ordinary people. These people not only don't care what graphics card they have, they don't even know what a graphics card. Mozilla's intrusive policy on version numbering is probably turning these people off in droves. If you're going to change your version number every eight weeks do it quietly. If you're going to make a big deal about your version numbers then only increment the major version when you are introducing big changes.

The way it's going Mozilla are just hastening the slide in their user base.

" It's one thing to be a lively, edgy tech. site - quite another to be an off-shoot of the Daily Mail"

No it's an IT news site that puts a humourous spin on a lot of the stories.

Anything that claims to be edgy should be taken outside and shot.