* Posts by ryan

62 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2007

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Mozilla invites all comers on post-tab future

ryan

@Tanuki

Chrome?

ryan

i never really understood what all the fuss was about,...

...since windows has that nice little tabbed bar at the bottom to navigate between applications.

and it's good to see the Firefox backlash in full swing. now it's mainstream it is no longer cool/nerdy (delete as applicable) enough so Opera is the new browser heir apparent. fuck you fanbois! i'm using lynx as it offers the best browser security lightning speeds and no need to instal clunky addons to disable javascript, images, a site's default CSS etc.

(i'm not really using lynx. and tabs are cool.)

BOFH: Spontaneous Legal Combustion

ryan
Flame

is nobody else worried by the synergy...

between people failing to 'get' Platinum membership, and those same people stating that this BOFH is clearly The Worst BOFH Ever?

you can lead a complete fucking imbecile to water...

Wikipedia self-flagellates over vanishing 'farmsex'

ryan

what about

the google cache? they're still there.

How Warcraft reigned supreme in 2008

ryan
Boffin

Eve-Online

nerdtacular clearly, but superb in an unutterably complex, slow-burning way.

i've have my eve characters for years now, and whilst they'll frequently endure months of inactivity, all other games are just a temporary break from eve.

IWF pulls Wikipedia from child porn blacklist

ryan
Alert

@never mind...

it's not an overtly sexual image, can't see it being flagged as child porn any time soon. the virgin killer one clearly has a sexual overtone.

although that does raise an interesting question - can i sell photos of myself playing naked in a paddling pool as a child to kiddy fiddlers to tide me over in the current economic climate?

ryan

@Excuse me while I laugh quietly to myself

Reg does self-censor - only the other week the lovely sarah bee emailed me to tell me that whilst she wasn't offended by the c-word, some people felt it wasn't appropriate for publication in the comments section of the register.

Bunch of c*nts.

(note to moderators: feel free to replace that asterisk with the letter u)

Google Oompa Loompas cloaking user agents?

ryan
Black Helicopters

@James

or that even Google aren't using Chrome...

Watchdogs decry Kentucky's 141-site net casino land grab

ryan
Coat

@ "Eventually," AC

I'm with you on this one. I'm now boycotting KY Jelly. >:(

Gmail outage causes outrage

ryan

why mail...

and yahoo now offer ymail.com addresses for those who failed to get a half decent address with gmail the first time around.

so that won't be confusing at all.

Secret of invisibility unravelled by US researchers

ryan
Boffin

oversight?

Surely if you bent light around yourself like 'water flowing around a stone in a river' no light would be reaching your eyes and you'd be effectively blind?

IBM gets hip with 'cool' Ubuntu PC deal

ryan

i can't believe i'm actually defending lotus notes on the internet :x

and $$Frontmatter worked from, like, 6.53 onwards so you shouldn't really have had any DTD/Doctype issues.

granted, notes produced some remarkably shoddy generated HTML back in the day, <FONT> tags in particular upset me, but it's incredibly simple to just wrap your Notes content in valid pass-thru and produce perfect HTML

ryan

inline css

out of curiosity, was this in notes 6.xx or something?

I'm pretty sure inline css has worked in 6.55 onwards, although you could just as easily insert it as a stylesheet resource, or give a Page the type "text/css" if you wanted to embed computed text in the stylesheet itself.

regardless, i'll agree that most developers aren't particualrly good at graphic design, but then thats like complaining that your mechanic sprayed your car whilst he was MOTing it and did a crap job!

ryan
Flame

@Liam

Ugly apps in created in Notes are nothing new, but ugly web-apps in notes?

If you were the only person in your company able to click 'Pass-thru HTML' i suspect the problems go way beyond creating ugly applications ;)

flame icon for obvious reasons.

Tasing of unarmed opposition peaks among firearms cops

ryan
Dead Vulture

@armed police = armed criminals

the criminals who're willing to start arming themselves are generally armed already, and with considerably more dangerous kit than a silly taser.

besides, if the penalty for carrying the weapon is that much higher than the penalty for the crime you're planning on committing, getting tooled up isn't such an appealing prospect anymore.

the problem is how and when stun weapons are used, not that the police have access to them.

because nobody's mentioned it so far: DON'T TAZE ME BRO!!!!

IBM's Ubuntu deal favors the server

ryan

Linux, the Notes enviroment & Everything.

Whether people love or hate notes, a lot of the RAAGH!LOTUSHATE! has been brought about by years of sub-standard notes apps knocked up on the cheap to meet a requirement with little attention paid to making them any good beyond meeting the bare bones of a spec. It's entirely possible to create some pretty damn good applications with, for example, out-of-the-box integration into your mailfiles without relying on you using a specific (or buying an entirely new) mailserver.

The beauty of the Notes platform is that it's an 'all-in-one' solution. it has email, it has a web server, you can write and run native applications, and via Eclipse you can extend it's functionality with java classes to do funky Business2.0 stuff like web-enabled collaborative tools.

If you're building an industry from the ground up, like we're seeing in China's fledgling middle-class, there is no reason to use Windows since you escape the userbase catch-22 (windows is familiar so it's used in business; people become familiar with windows because it's used in business) so a mature - and most importantly free - OS like Ubuntu makes a lot of sense.

Imagine then, that you're a 1000 seat organisation and you've saved a metric fuck-tonne of cash on windows licenses by using an opensource desktop/server OS. Spend a relatively small slice of your now burgeoning IT budget on Lotus Domino/Notes and you now have a lot of functionality in one place without having to worry about interoperability.

It's then upto you whether you take advantage of the simplicity of Form-based data-collection and use it to quickly and cheaply produce applications in-house, or pay a notes software house to create something altogether more interesting.

NASA: Mars is good habitat for Terry Pratchett dragons

ryan
Unhappy

no subject

i'm a little disappointed the AMFM script hasn't run against this story yet...

Profs: Teacher-student relationships key to sex education

ryan
Dead Vulture

@much-missed Busted?

Presumably we're talking in terms of failed assassination attempts?

MPs lambast BBFC over Batman

ryan
Flame

I'm delighted to hear that...

Keith Vaz wouldn't take his 11 year old daughter to see a 12A movie... seems that far from being a soundbite wielding shill, he is a responsible parent adopting a mature approach to film classification and his own children's ability to approach violent images with a sense of perspective. I'm filled with a newfound respect for the man!

only kidding Keith, you're still a dickhead.

Hushmail swats code backdoor rumors

ryan
Dead Vulture

@alfie

half a dozen Hotmail accounts say i would!

Inquirer celebrates spammer murder-suicide

ryan
Dead Vulture

@jesse

The whole gun-control argument is deeply tedious (and i honestly don't want to have it again for fear of being shot) but i think it's fair to say that if the idiot in question did not have a gun, he wouldn't have shot his family.

Would he have gone round and suffocated them one-by-one with a pillow? we'll never know. But that isn't really the point is it?

brutally slain vulture icon, for obvious reasons.

Operation Sprogwatch: Keeping tabs on the kids

ryan
Thumb Down

welcome to five years ago.

isn't it fairly simple to track a phone's position anyway? i used to do a bit of work for a company selling *exactly the same* product in a different plastic container. we marketed it to haulage companies, or companies that had employees out on the road, for tracking where they were (which probably did more to prevent children being abducted than bugging the kids, having seen some of the blokes in question). The product sank without a trace because no fucker wanted to be tracked 24/7

regardless - if this item has a use it's for giving to outdoors types who might get lost in the woods (whilst hunting for unattended, unbugged children no doubt). it's always going to wok better as a voluntary safety measure option rather than a bug to plant on people.

Mozilla insists Firefox 3.1 won't hit bum note for developers

ryan

The inevitable mozilla backlash.

Popularity is proportional to how rubbish random internet commenters deem a piece of software is. It's as if Pavlov's dog had been forced to use Internet Explorer.

Firefox has become very popular and pretty much mainstream? now it's very rubbish, insecure, and developed by greedy capitalist pigs. and probably evil to boot.

If Opera were to gain more than 5% browser share it would quickly be announced on The Internet that every install triggers the electrocution and ultimately death of a tiny fluffy baby panda.

BT breaks up families

ryan

we only need...

half a dozen more people to tell us that the woman in the BT advert is called Esther Hall and this comment thread attains the requisite level of farce.

Those BT adverts always made me feel a bit uneasy, the woman clearly originally being friends with the mother of her manchild partner before 'getting together' behind some bushes at a family barbecue, and enduring the whispered disapproval of all and sundry when they announced their union.

um. thats what i got from it at least.

Nvidia launches GTX 200 series GPUs

ryan
Pirate

@frank gobbo

which is why whenever i buy from abroad, i make sure i enter my full first name.

"Gift for" being a very popular first name round my neck of the woods.

ryan
Thumb Up

I've seen the future. it's mediocre.

Bleeding edge aside, technology is becoming cheap enough to treat a desktop PC as a short-term purchase, rather than a multi-thousand pound investment.

Rather than paying through the nose and building myself a cutting edge gaming system every couple of years, i've started spending £300 on a low spec pre-built PC, filling it with RAM and bunging a half decent graphics card in.

Sure, it'll be obsolete within a year, but it was cheap enough to just throw away and buy another one to tide me over for a year. And these disposable desktops even come with a warranty should the unthinkable happen!

OOXML approved as international standard?

ryan
Unhappy

@jai - cadburys cream eggs: corrupt...

...cadbury's cream egg bar, and cream mini-eggs have seen to that.

Armed robbers target Oz biker shindig

ryan
Pirate

@GrahamT, dainese & shoei

aye, if the robbers had burst in on you power rangers you'd have all transformed into dinosaurs or something.

Bitlocker hack is easily prevented, Microsoft says

ryan
Thumb Up

Graham Clueless?

possibly.

I though Jaracada Jim was rather good though. i still have the lovingly hand-labled disc (although christ knows where my photocopied map went) somewhere at home.

EC jacks up Microsoft fine by €899m

ryan
Flame

@Microsoft ATM

yes. clearly that's exactly what happened here.

i for one am glad your searing intellect has cleared that one up for us, Mr Coward.*

*any relation to Noel?

Firefox 3 beta is live

ryan
Flame

OMFG FIREFOX SUZXX LOL!11

It amuses me a little bit that over the past year or two, Opera fanboys have started rearing up to condemn Firefox as a pile of worthless bloatware compared to their fast, efficient, Acid2-rendering offering. I guess some people just like complaining!

You hate IE? cool, so do we. You hate Firefox? you care too much.

US Army struggles with Windows to Linux overhaul

ryan
Alert

@ george, Security by diversity...

.. is all well and good, but i'm not looking forwards to the O/S2 Warp operated nuclear missile silo.

BitTorrent admin's police bail extended (again)

ryan
Coat

re: @Paul, You got owned

PWNership is 9/10 of the law.

BOFH: Defusing the enthusiast

ryan
Flame

@Robert Grant

on a similar note, i've noticed that harry potter will be doing MAGIC in the most recent movie! an unoriginal plot if ever i saw one.

frankly, i liked the earlier ones a lot better, where harry was involved in a bit of rough trade to fund his drug habit.

Most home routers 'vulnerable to remote take-over'

ryan
Dead Vulture

@Colin Wilson

Gibson was slaughtered in the press for being a scare-mongering f*ckwit.

Whilst he - quite rightly - declared UPnP unsafe, he also declared just about every other interface & protocol available to a PC unsafe too.

Besides, turning UPnP off has been considered good practice since it was first introduced.

Clarkson's 'steal my ID' stunt backfires

ryan
Black Helicopters

@ Adrian Waterworth

roughly thirty seconds of searching found me an e-bay auction for some signed clarkson tat, complete with appropriately large (copyable) pictures.

Zep fans warned off touted tickets

ryan
Happy

@ "It's only Led Zeppelin."

Yes, far better to spend our hard earned cash on relevant bands like.. um.. The Spice girls.

it's as if Baby, Ginger, Gobby, Skinny and Doc never went away. GIRL POWER!

EVE Online update kills Windows PCs

ryan

@james "Longer than 2 hours. "

they pulled the bad patch after 2 hours, and put a good one up shortly after.

Random number bug blights FreeBSD

ryan

@mage

but that's a hardware RNG - i thought the problem was that whilst we could fairly easily do it with hardware, it's virtually impossible in software.

also: didn't one of the old pentium chips have a hardware RND built in, seeded by temerature at any given time? i could be high on thermal paste again though.

Rare bug blights Lotus Notes

ryan
Thumb Down

christo

1. when was the last time you used notes?

2. what you just said about admin privilages is completely bogus. one of it's selling points is that it's isolated from the OS and simply hooks in.

BitTorrent site Demonoid.com downed by Canadian record industry

ryan

did you say Canadian record industry?

CRIA are an American owned & controlled organisation.

Hilariously, they actually have very little to do with the Canadian record industry. Just another litigation mill.

Get started with Silverlight

ryan
Black Helicopters

i might be being a mong but...

...isn't this just a MS implementation of SVG?

MySpace ads zero in on user data

ryan

adverts not a big deal shocker.

adblock does an admirable job of pruning the many and varied adverts for crap i have no interest in buying, but if i was only ever being served adverts for products/services i was actually interested in, i'd probably end up turning it off.

besides, adverts just aren't worth worrying about.

Mandriva bigwig (nearly) accuses Ballmer of b-word

ryan

Re: "Good, these are the last people we want on UNIX!"

Nigerian school children are the last people we (you) want on unix?

err, are you *sure* that's what you meant?

Sick Brit yobs graffiti dog

ryan

Banksy...

...tagged a cow and it was deemed art.

perhaps Precious' owner should be looking into flogging her much-loved mutt?

EVE Online goes dark to fight security breach

ryan
Flame

a title

the eve forums have been filled with people whining, wanting re-imbursement, demanding to know exactly what was going on, whilst throwing out the usual threats to cancel all 500 of their accounts and bankrups CCP.

sod 'em. CCP made the right call, and at the end of the day it's all just internet spaceships. i don't care what happened, only that when i logged back in the following day everything was back to normal.

Boeing trumpets 'relevant battlefield laser' raygun

ryan
Flame

in fairness, they actually *can* shoot arial targets down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt2qaTfT8QY

YouTube gatecrashers trash 16th birthday bash

ryan
Unhappy

I live nearby

and i didn't know about this party. clearly i'm getting old. :(

Red Hat, Novell sued for patent infringment

ryan

Software patents.

As a developer i can see the merit of software patents, but the whole system is wide open to abuse.

Patenting functionality just isn't cricket, and these patents seem to only come to light when a vague interpretation of their actual intent can be used to leaver huge punitive lawsuits and generally shit on a developer the patent holder doesn't like.

New web accessibility guidelines will be ignored, says critic

ryan

everybody loves compliance.

especially large companies.

"our intranet pages detailing members of staff who are currently on maternity leave doesn't render properly in safari!"

"what browser do you guys use internally?"

"well, internet explorer 6.. but what if somebody tries to view it in safari?!"

"is *anybody* going to try to view it in safari?"

"ummm.. no. i think one of the guys in marketing has a powerbook at home though."

etc.

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