Posts by Chris Cheale

RE: <table> still required for layout though

Technically he's got a point. Use DIVs and CSS as much as you like there is no way to have 2 DIVs the same height (without defining that height).

For example; you've got a menu on the left and content on the right with different coloured backgrounds - you want them both to be the same height no matter which has the "tallest" content.

Currently 2 columns in a table do this perfectly.

The only way to do it with DIVs is to put both in a "container DIV", give the container the background colour of say the "menu" and the "content" another background colour. Position the "menu" absolutely and give the "content" a "margin-left" the same width as the "menu".

Now, to make IE display the same as everything else you have to ensure there's no padding on the "menu" since IE pads opposite to the standard (in rather than out). Then nest another DIV inside that menu (width: auto) to sort your padding out. Still with me? It does work and there's less markup involved but it feels like a dirty hack and uses a lot of CSS.

However - this is all resolved in CSS3, so this is not really an HTML issue at all.

Anyway - after having read the HTML 5 spec... it looks like XHTML2 without the modularisation (forms for instance rather than moving to xForms). There is actually some good stuff on the way but personally, I think I'll just move to XHTML2/CSS3 when they've matured.

Must be lucky I guess...

When it comes to ISPs - I was with Freeserve -> Orange a few years ago and had no problems. Although I did have to ring them up when they connected new subscribers at 2meg for the same price as 1meg for existing customers - they basically said they are rolling it out to everyone eventually but for existing subscribers those that put a query in about it got the upgrade first - *bing* few days later 2 megs for the same price.

Moved house about 18 months ago, signed up to Telewest (now VM) and so far *touch wood* have had no problems - regularly, on a good server, I lurk about the 480kb/s range (which is about right for a 4 meg connection - theoretical top speed of 500kb/s) - if you bear in mind that the connection speed is quoted in megaBITS not megaBYTES, 8 bits in a byte and all that.

At worst my connection speed drops to about 90kb/s, which is pretty poor (sub 1meg connection) but that normally seems to be due to congestion at the server - visit another server and it'll jump back up to 400+.

I'm not saying that Tiscali are good or bad, never used them - nor Demon etc etc etc. Just please bear in mind that the bottlenecks are moving - server congestion is now a bigger issue than the connection from your house to the exchange... up the bandwidth on that bit as much as you like, it'll make no odds if the servers are drowning.

On some games servers (TF2, CS:S etc) I get "warning, connection problems" and lag spikes - jump to another server and nothing, smooth and consistent <20ms latency... it's not always the connection at your end.

Read EC VAT regulations

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On a side note, this is how Steam will charge up to double the price for some games when comparing US/UK pricing.

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Much as I hate this, this is how it works (EU VAT legislation for goods and services 101):

Games (software) delivered physically (box, disc etc) are treated as "goods" and are therefore VAT-able at the rate of the country of origin - .e.g. you buy a game from the US you pay the US $ price since the relevant taxes are already in the price. HM Customs and Excise may well slap you with import duty of course.

Games delivered electronically are treated as "services" - this means that they are subject to VAT at the point of delivery. So, in the UK an extra 17.5% needs to be added onto the price. This means that when I bought "The Orange Box" it was actually cheaper to order the physical product from Game's website than it was to download over Steam.

This was done because the EU was not getting any cash from online services (subscription based mmogs for instance) based out of the States - which most of them are.

License no - training, probably

Bear in mind there's no longer a dog license in the UK - iffy PC practices vs half-starved, maltreated Rottweiler... doesn't really stack up.

However, this issue of incompetent users is what has given rise to the Vista nag-screen. Seamlessly escalating privileges only as and when required is actually not a bad idea - the problem is that it relies on people knowing what they _should_ do when presented with a pop-up that says "program xxx.pr0n.wmv.exe requires administrator privilieges; would you like to grant them?".

What's required is free, accessible PC training. UKOnline offers this to some extent but they tend to be "want to learn how to use the internet for shopping, email and online banking?". Which is fine, but before you can progress to that you should have completed something on basic computer security.

Besides, the biggest problem with a license is that the people who would be implementing the license are among those least qualified to do so, the government. I've lost track of how many government IT disasters there have been (most of which have never been satisfactorily resolved).

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What about games? Is it really a blow against human rights to suggest that if you can afford a machine with a kilowatt power supply and a dual-core video card, you can also afford to register the thing and its IP address as a danger to the web?

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Won't work - non-static IP addresses for starters, plus gamers are among those people most likely to alter their hardware configuration (chuck in extra memory, gfx cards etc) invalidating any kind of hardware fingerprint. The only people that can halfway accurately identify any "person" connected to the web is their ISP - assuming they've not given their login details to a "trusted technical friend". Besides, it's not like there aren't readily available anonymisers (proxies) out there to mask your IP even if it is static.

The point you were trying to make is that it is the users that require a license, not the software they're running. There are some very technical gamers who may have home networks proxied through FreeBSD with hardware firewalls; who actually know what programs and services should be running on their Windows gaming PCs and what level of internet access those programs require (client/server at least). Of course there are numpties who just play WoW as well ;)

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Anyone who normally runs their computer with an administrative account should be defenestrated.

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OK, but only after we've defenestrated all the sloppy "software engineers" who seem to think that their apps always need to run in admin mode. Even MS seem to have gotten their act together there somewhat - their software actually seems to work fine on limited privileges accounts now.

I'm getting too old

WIMP => Window, Icon, Menu, Pointer (or somesuch) has been since I was knee high to a grasshopper.

Obviously what we have here is LASP... now maybe if we substitute PHP/Perl/Python for Ruby we'd have LASR. See, evolution of light source, from a lamp to a laser - nice.

-- not that I think Ruby is any real substitution for Perl/PHP

blimey...

... someone in Belgium is talking sense ;)

Anyway...

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To Microsoft: Stopping selling in Europe. Let's see how long this pathetic stance will last.

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Yes please, the EU just then needs to make it legal to reverse engineer and redistribute all "non-compliant" software under a FOSS type license. All we'd loose in Europe would be MS support.

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Its more than a little odd that this has taken so long to surface, both Opera and IE have been around for some time, and it seems that Opera have decided its their turn to take a shot.

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View to bigger picture required - Microsoft is eyeing the Opera comfort zone now (device embedded browsers - such as Opera on the Wii); it's a early strike from Opera. When it comes to standards compliance they do rather hold the moral high ground over MS, so that's where they're attacking from.

@every other web-developer (yes - I am one too); agreed IE is the crappiest piece of crappy old crap ever but it is possible to write compliant code that will ALSO work on IE in (X)HTML and CSS; you just have to remember the box model is broken and perhaps add additional containers, NOT tables.

Although the CSS model isn't exactly perfect either; we'll have to wait for the new display model in CSS3 to create certain behaviour currently only available in tables (think of a page with 2 columns, menu and body, and getting the 2 the same height).

Granted if you're writing JavaScript (DHTML/AJaX), IE is an absolute pain - the DOM is seriously broken.

It would be nice if EU pressure convinced MS to put the time into making a decent browser... doubt it'll happen though.

Art...

5% technical talent

35% originality

60% ability to bullshit

This is why illustrators are not generally considered artists - they've got the 5% mastered but the rest is variable. By this measure Banksy is shit, he's got some of the technical talent, a bit of originality (maybe 20 out of that 35%) but fails terribly on that huge, all important 60%.

Tracy Emin however - 0.5% 30% 55% - giving her a respectable 85.5% - is a proper artist. The pretension is more important than the execution.

My degree, granted I didn't go beyond BA, is in sculpture... the painting tutors I had were so far up their own arses that farting and sneezing were one and the same. Aaah, vomit on canvas, yes, I can see how that is a representation of the challenges facing a latter day feminist - it must be terrible having to sink a bottle of gin before you can start work.

Non-union employees

Not really - dear ol' Maggie Thatcher defanged the unions almost totally whilst at the same time instilling the "me me me" attitude in everyone (remember the 80's?).

The twofold effect is brilliant - people won't strike because they loose the pay (even union members) and because people won't strike the unions don't have any negotiating power. Ask an old-skool member of the UCU (NatFHE) or PCS unions.

In fact, outsourcing is the best way to fire people - you don't have to justify making someone redundant (it's the job that's going rather than the person specifically) so you just get shot of everyone at once then when the outsourcing fails you blame the outsourcing company and you're in the clear to create those positions anew with all new people doing the old jobs, for less money and worse contracts. It really does save money in the long run.

Sometimes I wonder when I became so cynical.

What like...

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It often happens that a small software house with a successful product is bought out by a much larger company

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What like JASC (your beloved Paintshop Pro) being bought by Corel? Although PSP still doesn't have native support for CMYK meaning Adobe PS has to remain the professional choice.

Macromedia bought out by Adobe? *waves goodbye the the lovely Macromedia EULA that allowed you to install on work and home PCs*

Syntrillium bought out by Adobe? CoolEdit was the greatest audio editor on Win PCs; what remains of that is now buried somewhere in Premier apparently.

Oh, and every single half decent minor games publisher being bought out by EA and becoming tedious cloning machines.

And that's just off the top of my head, the words merger or aqcuisition generally mean "prepare to kiss goodbye to much that was great" in whatever it has that's been bought.

Or maybe not...

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Let's get Mary Gentle's 'Grunts' on fillum

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I dread to think how much would end up on the cutting room floor to get it below 18R!

"Pass me another halfling, this one's split"

BBFC aren't entirely bonkers

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the amount of tax the government can get from a movie or book compared with a game.

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Yes, you would loose, books in the UK are VAT exempt.

I've got absolutely no problem with the BBFC - by and large they do a pretty decent job, even recategorising older films on re-release (Hammer's Dracula for instance) when the change in society warrants it.

I'd much rather games/films have a classification rating; the alternative is that everything would have to be effectively "U" rated ("Universal; suitable for all"). I like the fact that there's a legal backup as well (theoretically) - parents who piss and whine because the game they bought for their 10 year old, despite it having an 18 certificate, was totally unsuitable, should be punished in some way.

When it comes to _not_ classifying something though, a line has to be drawn somewhere (where no actual law exists - the ban on extremely violent porn for instance) and I don't think they always get it right. The non-classification on Manhunt 2 doesn't really bother me though, the game looks utterly insipid, about as much fun as watching tea cool and get that milky skin on top (full fat milk).

Let's compare it to "The Witcher"; Manhunt 2 has violence, gore, sadism and a bit more violence for good measure (so far as I can tell). The Witcher has violence, a bit of gore, a bit of sadism, a fair smattering of sex and nudity, from talking to a naked dryad that they've actually bothered to texture the pubes on to getting picture "cards" showing the women you've shagged in various states of undress... oh and plenty of "bad" language.

The Witcher passed the BBFC with an 18 certificate simply because the actions you take are not entirely "evil" - much of the game is choosing between 2 evils (side with the victimised freedom fighters and betray your friend, or remain loyal to your friend and kill the freedom fighters?). There's enough depth to it to prevent it from falling into the same category as Manhunt 2. In effect, Manhunt 2 was banned for being sadistic and uber-violent AS WELL as being shallow and pointless.

Died on me in the Midlands

Internet connection went down at about 9:30 last night and was still off when I went to bed at about 11... still to be fair, it's the first time I've lost my connection since I joined Virgin (and it was Telewest then) over a year and a half ago.

I was with Orange DSL before (Freeserve before the rebrand) =\

Actually, they went downhill after the rebrand.

@Grunth0s - if you're working from home, get a business connection at least you've got some comeback then (and possibly a minimum SLA). Virgin Media isn't really suitable for professional use; the lack of a static IP shafts it - the business arm is still NTL:Telewest.

biscuits

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would put a dent in the market economy

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Erm... how? This is a mandate for governmental departments only. As such, they are funded by tax revenue. Reducing public spending could, theoretically, lower the tax rate and actually mean more money in the market economy?

I can think of one reason to pick an application on being open source - legacy. Should you have any older applications, no longer supported by the original supplier, then anyone familiar with the original coding language can be brought in to support or develop that application (oki, working with other people's code is often horrible, but it can be done).

Open source is, in itself, a merit; I've seen some god-awful open source code but at least I've been able to see it - I've no real idea how bad the code is in closed source applications except by how slow they run, how often they crash or by CPU/disk usage (as indicators).

There is no IE

"Internet Explorer" and "Windows Explorer" (which runs the Windows GUI) are basically one and the same thing - they both run on mshtml.dll (well in XP and earlier anyway - they may have redone it for Vista). The only way IE could be "unbundled" would be to removed (most of) the Windows GUI.

The guys at Opera _must_ know this, so I'm guessing what they're really pushing for is getting the EU (who've already slapped MS's wrists) to leverage Microsoft to invest some effort in their crappy, non-compliant rendering engine. Something MS have had no incentive to do since they "won the browser war" against Netscape 8 or so years ago.

Still - they could be cutting their own throats bit here, if IE wasn't so totally useless why would we use Opera?

(Yes, yes, yes I'm using Firefox atm rather than Opera if the RegBots are reading my userAgent - but that's because FF has all the shiny web developer plug-ins, for most people Opera is actually a far better browser).

Pssssssssssh

pwnt - no need for those pesky "...ed"s any more

A couple of small points

... and something to bear in mind - all we're doing is moving the bottlenecks. On 56k the bottleneck was definitely that bit of wire that ran from your PC/Phone to the exchange, very limited bandwidth available there.

Let's say the hardware running a given web server can cope with 1Gb data transfer a second; that's all things considered from ethernet restrictions to the data transfer rate across the motherboard between processors and RAM.

If dial-up users are connecting to that site it can cope with about 18500 users at any given time downloading - which is probably plenty. But get everyone up to 4Mbs and that's oooh 256 users to hit capacity, 20Mbs and it's about 50 users.

Now bear in mind that if it's not a dedicated server it could be hosting several websites, each with several users on at any given time... that's just one factor affecting your ability to download 20Mbs.

Here's another, if you're in a heavily subscribed area, online at peak times, your connection is effectively shared. The contention rate on cable is about 15:1 for residential connections (as opposed to about 40 or 50 to 1 on DSL) so you're likely to get a download speed of about 1.3Mbs max.

However - this only really affects downloads or streaming media. Any (bog standard) web-page will only contain, at most, a couple of hundred Kb worth of content (the page code, linked images, stylesheets and external JS files) and once that's been cached on your PC that's it for that page. 20Mbs down or 1Mbs down, you're talking a difference in fractions a second... but the comments seem to be about download speed rather than web browsing (granted, that's just lots of little downloads).

One final point... latency on cable is _generally_ lower, something to bear in mind if you're a gamer.

I'm not saying Virgin Media is the greatest thing ever and they have got worse since the Telewest days. NTL were the daddy in that "merger"; they still are, and it shows. However... I still think it could be much, much worse... I could still be with BT (they were bad, really bad - right up there with Severn Trent Water and British Gas on the incompetent feckwit scale).

Downloading films

Works fine over cable (not on the computer, through the "set-top" box) but you don't own it - I could pay £3 to watch oooh, I dunno, "House of Flying Daggers" for one day, or buy it from HMV or somewhere for £5 and watch it as often as I like.

Another slight issue, now let's say you've got a region 1 coded DVD player you can buy films on physical disks online from the US/Canada - there's even some sites that do free shipping worldwide. Buying a physical product means that you pay tax based on the country of origin - simply pay in dollars, work out the exchange rate and jobsagoodun.

However, IF that site provides the film in download format it becomes a service rather than a product. This means that, under EU law, it is taxable at the point of delivery rather than origin. This generally means the distributor will just chuck the VAT on-top of whatever the published price is. This can make downloads more expensive than buying the retail packaged versions.

This already happens with games, using Valve's Steam client as an example.

If you order the "Orange Box" over Steam the advertised cost is $49.95 (USD) -> £24.65 - which is comparible to the price on Game of £26.99 (delivered).

However if you order over Steam and give them your country of origin as the UK they have to include UK VAT (service rather than good) and so throw 17.5% onto the price, this brings it up to $58.69 -> £28.97.

The price is still comparible, a couple of quid more rather than a couple of quid less... buy you've actually saved money by getting the packaged version delivered to your door.

Oddly enough this also means that Danish WoW susbscribers pay less to Blizzard per month than German customers since Danish VAT is 25% and German is 19% and the subscription, in Euros, is the same accross the EU.

Naaaah

98 takes forever to boot and then you get the BSODs and having to reboot the frigging thing everytime you make the tiniest software change.

For actual regular use, I find XP is quicker than 98... although 2k is probably quicker than XP but I don't have a 2k install for comparison.

Games worth buying

Since Elite...

Hmmm you could try the X series - sort of picks up the same angle as Elite (if you switch off the storyline); it's not bad although gets a little pointless when you're hoiking around massive freighters and swimming in cash... then again, so did Elite if you ever reached Elite.

Otherwise:

Total War (from Rome onwards - the original Shogun was good, but I didn't really rate the first Medieval apart from the Viking Invasion expansion).

Civ 4 as mentioned by someone else (1 and 2 were good as well - didn't get on with 3).

Half-life and HL2 - for bringing something new to the FPS genre (Doom3 feels really limited when you can only walk into chairs, not pick them up and throw them).

Neverwinter Nights & NWN2 - good stories, quite shiny - the MMOG community could learn from the character advancement system in NWN... oh they did, sorta, DDO.

Final Fantasy VII (onwards) on Playstation... top stories, very shiny!

At the moment though I'm bouncing between Team Fortress 2 mod (HL2) and a game based on Bioware's Aurora Engine (that also runs NWN2) called "The Witcher" - now there's a game that was NEVER intended for kids...

I don't care if it's lazy

it's a shiny guitar gadget...

I want one!

Mind, I'd like a Les Paul standard anyway... or an old Explorer (preferably white)... maybe a Parker Fly... or an Eggle Berlin Pro... ad nauseum.

@Joe

The "Joe Stalin" handle probably wouldn't help your cause either :P

insecure web-apps

Well, yes - comparitively speaking web based applications will always be the weak point in the security chain - they have to be known, public locations.

The trick, I reckon, is to work out what your web-app needs to know. Does it need access to the back office? Really (the answer here should be "no")? How much user data does it need and how much should be encrypted? How are you maintaining sessions and preventing hijacking? Does it matter if the session is hijacked ("if you are not Chris Cheale - click here" Amazon style)? This rather depends on what that session allows access to; is it a "public" or "private" session?

Another thing is how well your app cleans up after itself; just how good is the garbage collection? Don't leave dead session (or other) data lying around - it's just asking for trouble. Oh, and trust no-one - sanitise all data going between your application and display layers - type fix it where you can.

What worries me a little is that because I'm an entirely self-taught LAMP-type developer, I'm sure there are things I'm missing - so I never stop trying to learn.

What worries me a _lot_ is the amount of code for web-apps I've seen that is utter shite; that I'd be ashamed to put my name to, let alone charge anyone for.

Hang on...

Surely the fault lies (mostly) with the "external partner sites"? You shop at whatever.com and it's them that are allowing Facebook access to private details of a transaction between you and whatever.com.

whatever.com should have some kind of "opt-in" (rather than "opt-out") that you, the customer, has to complete to allow them to share this information with their partner(s). Opting out should be simple, obvious, perhaps even autonomous in the case of buying "gifts".

Facebook gives shops the opportunity to legally spam the friends of all their customers. They give it the veneer of "social networking" rather than the normal run-of-the-mill spam by saying "hey, your friend bought this - maybe you'd like it too?" - a bit like Amazon's recommendations? Presumably Facebook charge their partners for this service.

Oki, the service as a whole is a little "iffy" perhaps, but the fault is not entirely Facebook's (unless you want to lay the blame at their door for providing this service in the first place which appears to be MoveOn's angle).

Atari will never die

... if I remember rightly the Atari logo is pretty prominent on a rooftop in Blade Runnner - so the logo at least will live on in one form.

However, Atari games, like Codemasters', used to be synonimous with rubbish; no-brainer arcade crap (or "movie" games *shudders*) that had a gaming life of maybe 10 hours. The problem is though, that since they were raised from the dead like some kind of Voodoo zombie, they've had their mits on one of the best PC titles around - the Neverwinter Nights games (and "The Witcher" which runs on the Aurora engine)... these are actually decent games.

Now with EA owning BioWare (makers of the Aurora engine) and the magic holding the Atari corpse together disipating - I guess we're left twidding our thumbs waiting for the Creative Assembly or Valve to bring out the next decent PC title... although Valve have done very well out of the mod community (TF was originally a Quake mod, which granted was ID rather than Valve, but TFC was big as an HL mod and now TF2 on Source... and CS/CSS of course and so on). Smart move releasing modding tools and the SDK there.

yarrrrrrr

"Facebook, on the other hand, tends to be a web utility, similar to a phonebook."

... is it just me or does that actually make it sounds more useful than "your home on the web"? MySpace ~ Geocities 2.0. Geo-who? shyeah, exactly... there's enough pointless blogs and useless, uninteresting personal homepages (mine included) out there; does anyone actually look at them? Thought not (unless it's an unsigned band page or something) - most people, honestly, have nothing interesting to say.

WAKE UP AT THE BACK! pfffff

Godsbedamnedbuggrit

... now I've got images of Patrick Moore playing the xylophone and that really irritating song in my head...

http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/patrick+moore/

Konqueror

Hmmm... unless I'm very much mistaken, Safari is based on Konqueror so a lot more people use (a modified version of) Konqueror than you might initially expect.

I don't use Konqueror, but I am a web monkey and as far as I can tell Konqueror, Safari, Opera and Firefox ALL cause a lot less headaches with regards to CSS or JS (DHTML or AJaX) than IE. It's just a pain that IE still makes up 85% of the browser market so you have to waste time implementing crappy IE fudges to make up for the browser being so horrendously broken (although to be fair it is getting better very, very slowly - IE7 is marginally better than 6).

Climate change ... it doesn't matter

give it another 3 billion years or so and the whole planet will be a barren, baked rock anyway.

Is that a troll I hear?

I presume that's a troll, humans are _generally_ brighter.

dunno - sounds like a reasonable

Sounds like a reasonable idea to me and not just for use in Africa. Get an exercise bike wired up to a backup battery type doodah for charging your mobile phone, laptop or whatever and you can make inroads on the forthcoming "obesity crisis" whilst saving yourself a couple of quid on your leccy bill.

Not forgetting

That there has to be someone to write/update/improve the applications that allow people to make their own applications.

Machinery may cost jobs in the manufacturing industry, but it creates jobs for people who make, maintain and improve those machines; not to mention write software for them.

Napster and Betamax

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Are you sure providing links to copyrighted material is not illegal? Seems like we have one or two lawyers on the reg.. lucky us eh? Do you need an example... Napster perhaps?

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Technically Napster were done for inducing copyright infringement, not copyright infringement itself. The argument being that the vast majority of Napster users were using it to share copyrighted material (music). Napster was generating advertising revenue based on the back of a user-base that wouldn't exist without that copyrighted music - basically if it was all garage-bands giving their music freely Napster would have had significantly fewer users, advertisers and income.

What this guy did was exactly the same (although I've no idea whether he was selling advertising) - inducing copyright infringement.

Google/YouTube and all the other search engines do something similar, but they have an important get-out clause - the technology has a large legitimate user-base. It's the Sony defence from the Betamax days. Yes the technology _could_ be used for copyright infringement (and therefore is) but there's a lot of non-infringing use going on as well. The defence failed for Napster because, compared to infringing usage, there really wasn't a whole lot of legitimate usage going on (and the biz was out to nail them).

It can work if the controls are in place (which is very, very difficult with P2P) look at garageband.com or download.com (the music section) - mostly unsigned bands with some bigger artists putting music up for streaming - or iLike where it's (mostly) just snippets. The distributor (cnet for instance) can control what material is being distributed and how.

GIGO

Hmmmm, I've got a facebook, Ts & Cs are pretty harsh, you effectively grant them an eternal, non-revokable license to do whatever they like with anything you host there - but if you just give them just basic info an fill the rest with junk *shrugs* - garbage in, garbage out - personally I reckon anyone who buys it will be getting an original Chris Ofili, it's ok to look at, probably worth a bit for a while, but it doesn't matter how you dress it up, elephant dung is still shit.

What's it good for? Well my local pub has a group, saves a few text messages when organising a pissup - but then I've only got 5 friends on facebook, and they're all people I know in the real world (oddly enough I'm not bothered about making new "virtual" friends). Oh, and I like the app from iLike - bulked out my wish-lists on some new tunes which I may not have found otherwise - I have fairly obscure musical tastes, Funker Vogt anyone?

Longevity - well, I only signed up a week ago, I'll give it a few months.

This puts me in mind of...

the askaninja.com episode on badysitters (or baby hitters for ninjas!)

@nickj

Where do I sign up? ;)

Facebook

... and? Storm, teacup?

Here's a hint, it's really basic, don't put anything on Facebook (irrespective of privacy settings) that you give a damn about. Nothing you want to retain copyright to, they own it, nothing you want to keep private (it's called a SOCIAL network) and nothing you'd be too ashamed for a prospective employer to see - they do look you know.

Facebook's alright - but just use a bit of common.

Canada...

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I will welcome you to Canada once you get here, I know a couple people who've come over already! Be warned however, our government has taxed cigarettes to over 10 dollars a pack.

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Presumably that's CAD, which makes them a little over £5 a pack, slightly cheaper than most brands in the UK then?

@Timothy Tuck

erm.... actually, unless I'm mistaken there's no "fair use" in English law that allows you copy music you already own from one medium to another. Therefore ripping CDs or vinyl to MP3 is just as illegal as downloading it in the first place via a torrent... unless of course you're not in England but a less restrictive country, like China perhaps.

I wonder if Microsoft could be prosecuted under English law for "inducing" copyright theft by having a "Rip" button in Media Player?

Bloat...

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One of my personal soap-boxes, this. How hard could it be for browsers to recognise <centre> and "colour" and treat them the same as <center> and "color"? It would take pretty much no effort at all to allow English words (as well as Americaneze ones) in languages like HTML. So why doesn't it happen?

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What would be the point? It's just adding additional bloat to the browsers and making them even less small form-factor friendly (more disk/memory intensive)... ok, in you're example it's only a teeeeeny bit. Let's also add <mitte> <zentrum> etc etc etc....

I'm not overly bothered as to which language it's based on AS LONG AS IT'S STANDARDISED! (hmmm used an 's' there, I must be English... can't even standardise standardise).

4meg VM cable

I joined cable with Telewest (Blueyonder) which is, of course now Virgin Media. Basically, VM just seem to be squeezing a bit more, the changes have been small but noticable, pay for customer service calls, increase in the connection charge on the phone and rounding call-duration to the next minute (rather than second).

There's lots of quite insidious small things that they've done, but the cable internet connection (4 megs for me) is still ticking over nicely - granted I don't get anything like 4 meg download speed but I live in a flat, in a heavily subscribed cable area - contention is hellish. I still ping sub-20ms to games-servers though (about half what I used to get on DSL).

Would I go back to DSL and having to deal with BT? Rearrange this sentence:

"entrails I eat would own rather my"

RE: Vista works great what are you talking about?

I think we need a troll icon?