* Posts by Jon 66

40 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Microsoft embraces its inner penguin as sudo sneaks into Windows 11

Jon 66
Coat

Now I can get a sandwich

https://xkcd.com/149/

Alaska Airlines' door-dropping flight was missing bolts

Jon 66

Re: "poorly drilled rivet holes"

I think the issue is more that modern CVRs can hold much more than 2 hours, but Boeing have been so focused on keeping commonality in between all 737s that they haven't felt the need to make the disk any bigger. If you look at modern airliners (not rehashings of 1960s ones like the 737 Max), they usually retain CVR for more than 25 hours.

It is a not uncommon occurrence, and quite understandable, for traumatised flight crew to forget to pull the circuit breaker at the end of an incident flight. The technology should protect against this.

Anti-gay bus baron rages at being stuffed in Google closet

Jon 66

Ever heard of SEO?

From HTML source of http://www.briansouter.com/ :

<h1>Welcome</h1>

Suggest that 301 redirect is not the only SEO issue they need to address...

Nokia rides you hard for power

Jon 66
Thumb Up

could have used this last week!

Not sure about mass-market appeal but I came back from a week's camping and cycling holiday in the netherlands last week and my mobile ran out of juice mid-week...

Microsoft update secretly fixed two 'severe' bugs

Jon 66
WTF?

Secret

Doesn't sound like a secret to me

Neil Armstrong slams 'devastating' Constellation cancellation

Jon 66
Thumb Up

At last

The cold war is over

Apple's iPad - 'Will It Blend?'

Jon 66

phew

thank goodness

Shuttleworth goes Maverick with Ubuntu's 'Perfect 10'

Jon 66

I look forward to

Nefarious Narwhal

Mozilla gives passive-aggressive missive to pre-Firefox 3.6 hold-outs

Jon 66

tab mix plus

the tab mix plus add-on allows you to configure this

Whatever happened to the email app?

Jon 66

gmail

It's a shame that the desktop mail apps don't approach threaded messages like gmail. I used to use kmail but once I got used to seeing mail threads which included the messages I sent alongside the messages received I switched. A lot of desktop mail apps will quite happily thread Inbox and Sent but not the two together.

Microsoft: Oracle will take us back to 1970s hell

Jon 66

like my mummy always said...

... they're just jealous

Schmidt defends Google Buzz despite tweaks aplenty

Jon 66
FAIL

Buzz off

I just disabled it in my gmail account straight away without being particularly arsed to find out what it was.

Good to know I'm not missing anything in the least bit useful.

Hacker pierces hardware firewalls with web page

Jon 66

same here

somehow i feel cheated :(

iPhone anti-malware stuck in state of denial

Jon 66
Boffin

i've written my own

sudo passwd root

IE bug leaks private details from 50m PDF files

Jon 66
WTF?

Metasloppiness

This is just the user being sloppy about their META tags and is more a user education issue than a 'bug'. I've seen loads of PDF conversion tools populate file paths in the META info like this. The assertion that you can only change them with a text editor is also a load of bull - there's loads of software out there that allow you to set META tags.

Most users don't bother about these things (as you would expect) so I've always made sure that PDF uploads on my websites populate the META tags with info provided from the web form/database...

Oxford American Dictionary dubs 'unfriend' Word of the Year

Jon 66

shouldn't it be

unbefriend?

Firefox syncing tool Weaves its way into beta status

Jon 66
Unhappy

cross browser standard

What we really need is a cross-browser standard for doing all this sort of thing. I for one won't be applauding any of these individual contributions until i can get (at the very least) the same bookmarks synced on gecko, webkit and opera browsers.

Britney's Twitter feed hacked again

Jon 66
Joke

oops

...i did it again

Google search primed for 'Caffeine' injection

Jon 66

@Dave 160

I know - anyone would think that Google was interested in expanding in the future...

Murdoch threatens to yank News Corp. from Google News

Jon 66
FAIL

hmmm

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/robots.txt

http://www.thesun.co.uk/robots.txt

Opera in top secret iPhone talks?

Jon 66

define "mess"

"von Tetzchner isn't sold on the Google plug-in that turns Internet Explorer into Google Chrome. He compared the move to Netscape's ill-fated efforts to put IE and Gecko rendering engines into the same browser"

[...]

"That didn't make things easy for [Netscape]...You end up with a mess."

Surely that's the idea - but unlike Netscape, Google are creating the mess in someone else's browser :)

Google unleashes internal JavaScript tools

Jon 66
WTF?

@vocal opposers

Why the opposition to anotherJavaScript library? What's wrong with variety and choice in the hands of a developer? Surely the more competition in this space the better and more efficient these libraries evolve.

EU block to Mandelson's filesharing laws removed

Jon 66

@Dom S

"Madelson is a crook. he doesnt belong in politics"

surely this statement is ironic?

Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

Jon 66
Stop

Calm down

If you install any bleeding edge distro the minute it comes out on a machine you rely upon you're asking for trouble.

And I'm sure it's worked perfectly for most people. I get more hardware incompatibilities installing Windows these days. I do understand the need to seek the most newsworthy angle though.

You make it sound like this is the end of the line. They'll identify and fix the bugs very quickly as they listen to their users. That's how open source works...

I stick with the LTS releases personally.

Mozilla plans to tie Firefox 3.7 pigtails in pretty Ribbon

Jon 66
Thumb Down

kde4

this is what kde4 has done:

1. decide they know better than their users

2. decide to fix something that for the majority of users ain't broke

3. try to copy microsoft's perverse idea of what a good user interface is

...hence after 10 years as a perfectly happy user of kde i'm now moving to gnome.

google chrome anyone?

North Wales Police says the law is what they say it is

Jon 66
Grenade

journalists

We all like to jump on the bandwagon and indiscriminately slag off plod don't we? Sure, the hapless police officer didn't do a great job trying to think on his feet, but you can completely understand him wanting to stop a journalist identifying a firearms vehicle being revealed to the public.

Personally I'm sad to hear of yet another instance of this whole holier-than-thou journalistic culture under the pretence of reporting in the public interest whilst merely provoking another headline grabber: who care's if firearms fall into the wrong hands and some poor sod gets shot as long as there's a good story to be sold?

Windows plays virtualization catch up with Linux

Jon 66
Thumb Up

A trifle wordy

"Linux server users are reaping the benefits of virtualization more than those running Windows."

Linux users are reaping the benefits of computers more than those running Windows.

Linux webserver botnet pushes malware

Jon 66

proof of concept

"Probably it's some sort of proof-of-concept thing for hackers,"

concept proved: leave your front door open and people will come in and use your home...

Brown apologises for 'appalling' treatment of Turing

Jon 66
Thumb Up

wordle

http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/1118913/Gordon_Brown%27s_apology_for_Alan_Turing%27s_persecution

he used the word 'Years' a lot

Nokia's £500 netbook: What were they thinking?

Jon 66
Thumb Up

battery worth it

if the battery really does 'last all day' then this would be the feature worth paying £500 for

think i'd put a decent operating system on it though...

US music publishers sue online lyrics sites

Jon 66
Unhappy

accessibility

and all they were doing were trying to provide an accessible alternative for the deaf or hard of hearing

Mozilla tries to shunt Firefox 3.0 users over to 3.5

Jon 66

Firefox 3.5 is not in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

Which is supported until April 2011 (and doesn't suffer from KDE4 either...)

Took me a long time to ditch Firefox 2. You could type a filename into an <input type="file"> form element in to it without it insisting on popping up a frickin' dialog box. The upgrade from 2 to 3 broke enough so I'm not in any rush to go to 3.5 even if it is better for porn...

Another downside of this enforced upgrade is that it's a real headache for developers who want multiple versions of the same browser on their desktop.

Nokia to cull Symbian from smartphones?

Jon 66
Thumb Up

yay

excellent - i've got symbian on my nokia and it isn't anywhere near interesting enough...

NHS Direct wrongly emailed patients' data

Jon 66
Thumb Up

@Dr Patrick J R Harkin

I should imagine you are correct that any NHS email address would have been routed over N3.

Glad to know that our data is completely safe as surely no employee in their right mind would have the gall to put an internet email address into the CC field....

Government pig flu spotter pulls a sickie

Jon 66
Thumb Up

seems to be back online

http://doihaveswineflu.org/

German bomber crashes on Moon Google Earth

Jon 66
Boffin

re: what's the scale

it's 12 metres long ( never used the Ruler in Google Earth before :) )

The 3G map Ofcom didn't want you to see

Jon 66
Boffin

FOI

Sorry am i missing something here? The freedom of information request was refused in April as the report was unfinished. Then the finished report was published in July. This isn't really a cover up now is it?

Google polishes Chrome into netbook OS

Jon 66
Joke

@Def

"And there the whole 'linux is great' thing falls horribly flat on its pointy little bill. There are *no* decent development tools for linux. And until there are, you will never persuade developers to leave Windows."

Maybe no development tools which get windows developers to believe they are writing good code...

Jon 66
Linux

Define OS?

Seeing as it's based on the linux kernel is this an OS in the same sense that KDE, Gnome and Ratpoison are?

As long as I can get bash on it I guess I'm happy :)

P.S. I was just about to flame a BBC website journalist for writing in an article this morning that Google Chrome OS was a threat to Linux on netbooks but I see they've since removed that bit :)

'Grid computing Red Hat' out-Amazons Amazon

Jon 66
Unhappy

@spencer

terribly sorry to darken your website with my inferior school attainments