Posts by Chika

How do elephants communicate?

They make trunk calls.

Kate Bush at 50...

To commemorate her half-century, let us not forget the first line of one song that went...

"Spend a lot of my time looking at the loo..."

A moveable wall hiding a ghost installation?

I WANT ONE!!!

OK, I'll bite

1. It isn't normally the way that a particular company will work that it goes out and buys a complete new set of PCs for its userbase in one go. It's a gradual process.

2. It isn't usual for a PC in situ to be reinstalled with a new OS every time a new OS comes out. The only time this tends to happen is when said PC is either being installed or is being repaired following a catastrophic failure.

3. The above is open to exceptions, of course.

4. If I could get the last couple of bits of software to run outside Windows in some way, I'd kill off the last version of WXP I still have running at home and sling the whole lot to Linux/RISC OS.

To be honest, I use the systems I use because they work. If, and when, they cease to work, *THEN* I'll consider a change. Not before. And I don't care how much spin Microsoft or anyone else puts out about Vista.

@Mark Lockwood

"So how many London Buses can you fit in a hectare?"

Routemasters, Volvos or Bendy-buses?

@Captain Daft

I suppose you realise the meaning of the slang term "number two", do you? Not an eviable thing to be, let alone to aspire to!

Icahn and Microsoft in joint tantrum

Icahn: No, you *can't* play with me, coz you're smelly and naughty and I don't like you! I wanna be friends with these Microsnotty folk coz they promised me lots and lots of stuff if I can stamp my feet and yell loud enough if I don't get my own way!

Microsnot: And if this doesn't work, we'll find some other stooge... <evil laughter>

Yahoo!: ...gulp...

@Jess

I think that the problem isn't just about which systems IE6 will run on. There are still sizeable numbers of users that insist on using IE6 because they have various applications that will not work happily with IE7. That and the fact that IE7 is broken in a few other ways which can sod up the rendering of some sites.

Personally, I prefer to use Firefox, mostly because of (in my case and, I suspect, in yours, especially with that Iyonix) it has the best cross-platform support.

As for degrading gracefully, there are too many idiots posing as webmasters these days to allow that to happen. Sadly, these tend to be the ones with the loudest voices when it comes to this sort of thing, hence the number of really badly thought out sites.

A couple of comments

@Anton Channing

I'd direct you to the comment by Nick Askew. Indeed, a number of perfectly good browsers which are quite capable of rendering a site have to imitate IE's headers purely because there are still idiots out there that insist on writing for specific browsers only and will lock out anything else. That doesn't excuse AVG at all, but it does give you an idea that the problem isn't entirely their fault.

Having said that, I gave up using AVG about six months ago as I found that it was a bit of a hog wrt resources, and that it was woefully underachieving at actually catching viruses, something that came to light when I tried an alternative brand. This doesn't mean that I advise users of AVG to stop using it outright, since even AVG is better than nothing at all.

Michael Grade cares about the interest of the British TV viewer?

Sorry. I don't believe it. He's no Lew, and he never will be.

Before he starts bitching about stuff like this, perhaps he might consider why people are switching ITV off in such big numbers.

@Ash

"Nor do I have puppies in my van."

So you admit that you have a van, then? ;)

Respect!

OK, I'll own up. I'm nearly 45 and unlikely to ever go on the site, fancy dress or no. Having said that, though, I have nothing but respect for them. It takes a lot of balls these days to do something like that.

@Prices

"When will Adobe et al learn that you don't do currency conversions just by changing the $ sign to a £ sign"

When the suckers paying the £ finally start kicking up a stink about it. Or something else comes along and starts ripping the rug out from beneath their fat, swollen, cheese-ridden arses, of course. Hail Foxit reader and all those many folk that do free or cheap PDF converters!

@ac

"its saddening to hear that they will base windows 7 off the vista code base - i was kind of hoping that windows 7 wouldnt be utter crap - oh well. does this mean that windows 7 will have all that drm crap in it as well?"

Probably. Although it is to be hoped that, if they base it on anything, then will base it on the Server 2008 codebase which, though related, seems to have gained a lot more public acceptance.

As for the guy that (rightly, IMHO) claimed Windows 2000 as the best thing they ever did, just look under the bonnet of any Muckysoft OS since then and you will find that it is firmly related to Windows 2000 anyway. And that, however much they would like to deny it, includes Vista! The Beast of Redmond wouldn't know how to write a completely new OS these days if their lives depended on it!

A pity, really...

I wouldn't have minded seeing a Boss like that coming unstuck when presented with a sizeable lawsuit for Health & Safety violations. Especially if it was for, say, topping a few finance department bods with his latest money saving program.

So what became of...

Posted last night following the start of this debacle. For the record, FF3 was fine on Windows, even if it did announce itself as "Hendrix" (the last RC). Seems OK.

Couldn't get the bugger to run properly on Linux, however. I could get it to run, but it refused to install properly, insisted in using an internally installed theme which looked so washed out that some of it was impossible to read and wouldn't run unless I specifically issued the command /usr/lib/firefox/firefox, which was just wrong. Rolled back to FF2 and there it will stay for now. Mozilla had nothing of any use to suggest on the site that the README file directed me to, so sod it!

Just waiting until Thursday and the openSUSE 11 release! ;)

Heh.

Why does this surprise me? So many carping on about the Wii being a "novelty". But then we are talking about games consoles, which could be considered as novelty anyway. As far as it goes, if Nintendo have hit the right formula by ditching an old, staid interface and gone for something that gets people playing, perhaps the competition needs to rethink its own strategy rather than moaning about it.

COF?

What on earth makes Simon believe that all Crusty Farts are old? I agree with the outcome, but let's recognise the farties of the world for exactly what they are!

As for me...

I'm just waiting for the inevitable FoTW...

@Nick Pettefar

Everyone gets their fair turn at being dissed. A few issues back, it was the RISC OS folk. I don't see why we should get all the crap!

Icahn see trouble

Yup. Icahn. On one side, he seems like a kiddy having a tantrum. On the other, he comes off like the worst type of asset stripper. "I want, and I'll keep on stamping my feet until I get what I want." It seems obvious that he wants nothing more than to get as much dosh out of selling the company off to whoever (it no longer matters who might be the buyer). Yang won't jump, so the tantrum just gets worse.

It'll end in tears, one way or the other. And the Paris angle? Well, we are talking about boobs, aren't we?

@ac

"If you really understand Windows, you'd understand that Explorer is the backbone of the OS. Internet Explorer is Explorer which is Windows. IE just uses a different skin."

Ah, that really takes me back. That old "Internet Explorer is an integral part of Windows 98" or whatever.

It was a lie then...

@TeeCee

Stop that yawning!

Damn... you got me at it now!

Here we go again...

Sorry, but the whole of this sounds an awful lot like some of the arguments that were being bandied about many years ago when the CISC vs. RISC debate was being fought over the 16/32 bit designs. The problem was that the best ideas weren't necessarily the ones that got carried forward though, goodness knows, processors such as the PowerPC, the ARM and so forth did receive some support.

The comfy little managers with their bunches of glossy brochures and assurances from certain vested interests were what muddied the pool. Not the programmers. These managers wanted to be safe in their familiar world rather than try out what could have been. And do you know what? Things haven't really changed.

re: @Ubuntu

I suspect that the only thing that puts Ubuntu in the spotlight is its fans. Like you, I've used quite a few distros and find that the difference between them can be less than impressive depending on what you are looking for.

On the other hand, some distros are often tailored for a specific market, something that I suspect is true of Ubuntu. I'll leave it for you to decide which market that might be.

Like it!

I'll just have to remember it next time some user asks for optical<SLAM>

Heh...

And there's me thinking that the term "the other side" had been consigned to history after the flood of channels. Now that you have a double sided TV, all we now need are two channels that are showing enough good to make the expense worth the effort.

@Billy

It might be a bit toned down from the previous stuff, but I get the feeling that there is plenty more mileage in the Batmobile yet! This has the making of an epic!

Mind you, it doesn't make much mention of lift shafts, an indespensible part of an op's equipment! Ah well, <rubs hands together> all that to look forward to!

And Paris is because I doubt that they'd want it any other way!

It's knee-jerk time!!!

It just strikes me as yet another example of reactionary panicking. Just because the term "dirty old man" is in common use, it hardly means that all old men are dirty, or even guilty of sexcrimes. Whatever happened to that fine old tradition of people being innocent until proven guilty? The idea of freedom of speech? Truth and beauty?

Paranoia rules, it seems.

I miss the old Pipex too...

but not enough to stay with them. It took two months and two unsuccessful MAC requests before my new ISP finally took a hand and manually pulled me over, then Piscali had the nerve to try and charge me again!

Two unsuccessful complaints later (each time I sent one in, they would find a new reason why they couldn't/didn't want to do anything about the complaint), I am happily out of their reach. On one hand, it makes you wonder what a company such as Carphone Warehouse would make of such a shambles. On the other, I daresay they are probably breathing a sigh of relief at not having to find out!

@ TimM

OK, calm down! We know that Linux has a few issues with some kit but then how many hardware vendors out there really have much time for Linux? Using it doesn't cost them anything but it doesn't earn them anything either, so hardware support will always run behind with Linux. However, where Linux comes into play big time, all that legacy hardware that people have that they don't want to change out just because the latest Windows won't touch it. And, with the degree of advancement these days, the term "legacy" seems to be affecting technology earlier and earlier.

As for me, I'm sticking to my guns with MS and its notoriously flaky programming practices (i.e. give it at least a year). It seems obvious to me that they (and anyone else, regardless of prominence) have yet to positively identify the correct combination of conditions that effect their product, so I'm sticking to SP2 on the machines that need it. Whether I'll be upgrading openSUSE to 11.0 when it comes out in just over a month's time is also debatable, and the Acorn that handles my email and Usenet stuff will still be on RISC OS 4.02 until further notice!

Just a thunk...

Are we to see a visit from Simon's mother at any time? The BOMFH!

wHollyWeird fallout

Let's face it, guys and gals. This is just another facet of the lack of originality besetting the primarily American media industry. They haven't any good new ideas, so they have to raid the attic for anything that might turn a quick buck.

Talking of quick bucks... anyone for Paris?

Curiouser and curiouserererer

OK, I'll admit it (I admitted as much months ago on my LJ anyway). I tried W2k8 and I didn't exactly hate it. It was Beta 3 though, and it did flash up at least one mention of its Vista heritage during the installation, but it went on reasonably enough. I tried it with and without the Desktop Experience (my only though as to why you might want it is if you have a remote access setup where the users might actually want it).

I will also admit that the installation was on a fairly low spec machine too. A PIII laptop, to be exact!

I'm a little annoyed that it has all the nags that Vista has but, aside from that and the amount of work required to open up the bits you need that W2K3 and earlier always assumed you would need anyway, it didn't handle too badly. The machine it was loaded on had WXP prior to that, and it seemed that there was little difference in the overall handling, though obviously there were odd bits and pieces that needed work at the time.

The thing is, however, given the recent agg about Vista, the availability of SP1 and all its problems, the ongoing nags about its handling and the inevitable gripes about trying to get it to work on older machines and such, I really wonder if M$ has someone in the workstation side of things whose job it is to deliberately sabotage the product?

(Oh yes, and this was entered from my newly upgraded openSuSE 10.3 machine... then I find that they are upgrading to version 11 in a couple of months! I just can't win!!!)

Let's face it, half the problem is label marketing

@Roy,

The biggest problem I can see with your comment is that too many lusers are content to sit with Microsoft because they want to use brand names rather than tools. They want to use Office, not OpenOffice, for example. I know that OpenOffice is easily as good as, in some ways better than, the M$ offering, but ordinary desktop farty out there doesn't want to stray off the beaten path. That's a large part of the M$ strategy towards marketing and, let's face it, M$ still have a pretty good handle on marketing.

@Mike Cranshaw

That's probably why he put the word "arguably" in there. I can think of a few people who might want to take that argument on!

Who knows? Paris might be one of them!

Ok, so the beeb wasn't my first...

...but you could only loosely call the ZX81 a computer!

I still have my Beeb, which was a Model A which I upgraded myself except for the Solidisk DFS which was done by some idiot in Hornchurch. Haven't used it in 10 years, but it was the reason why I became such an Acorn enthusiast in the first place. A real shame it all went the way it did.

A SuSE snob? Moi?

I've been using SuSE since around V6, and I like it. I'm hardly likely to try and cop an attitude over anyone else's distro, however, since a lot of the reason why I switched had more to do with my dislike of Redhat, not a specific liking for SuSE.

But I can't answer for anyone else. You see, generalisations can be dangerous. Including that one!

STFU?

Sorry, but I always thought it meant "Shut The F*** Up". Perhaps this is the message we should be sending to our (sic) illustrious leader?

A title is required (wish I could think of one!)

Nokia are hardly the only company going this way, and the tenfold labour cost difference is the big reason, just as so many service companies are sticking their call centres out to places like India. They want to keep their costs low, and exploiting workers in countries with lower wages and poor working conditions is a way of doing it. In a lot of ways, Romania *is* a third world sweatshop economy.

Having said that, I agree with Spleen in that subsidies are a really crap way of financing such jobs. It is self defeating as the money for such subsidies has to come from somewhere. Often it comes from taxation, which means that the workers end up needing higher wages to allow for this taxation (both direct and indirect), which effectively means that the government is pricing its own workforce out of the market. You can label Nokia as cynical for extracting the subsidy, but the government officials could be just as easily tagged.

Hm... Bochum... do they still have that planetarium?