Posts by Greg 648 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Apr 2007
Hmmm, I need to bolster confidence in our Hacker Safe certificate... I know!
"Currently, the presence of an XSS vulnerability does not cause a web site to fail HackerSafe certification."
There we go! Wait...
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I mean, how stupid a statement is that? Currently, dangerous XSS exploits can't be detected by our crap system, so we simply say they don't count, and as a result give our customers a false sense of security.
Morons.
Finding a game that hasn't been pirated at some point is the difficult one. The fact that this game is high profile doesn't make it any less susceptible.
I've got some of the other GTAs to play first though. That, and other expenses are continuing to slow me down in buying a PS3.
It's a Saturday, so I could kick back away from the computer and relax with some Burno...oh, sorry.
Well, I could always go fly one of my copte-.....damn.
Head down to Laserqu-....damn it!
Watch a mo-...bugger!
OK, OK, easy one. Kick back with a good book and listen to some music on my-....damn it all!
So a day without games, toys, films or music? Thank god for my expansive bookshelf.
>>"Ellis-Jones thundered: "It is just bonkers in this day and age when we are encouraging safety for children on the internet, to come across job adverts like this."<<
Yeah, cos kids are really going to be in danger of JOB ADVERTS! Especially ones that require the employee to be over 18. It's a scandal! Remove this filth!
...is a typical example of American news scaremongering. "Parents, sit up, pay attention, GAMES CAN BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN."
"The red ring of death is connected to overheating of the interna-"
CUT!
He said overheating, that's all we need. BE AFRAID!
On another note, that's the first time I've seen a 360's power brick. Holy shit! My Spectrum's got a smaller power brick than that thing!
"Certainly, you never want to let five years go between releases."
No, no, no, no, no! That's *exactly* what you want to do. Build a system that ruddy well works, and then provide cheaper paid upgrades as necessary, Mac OS style. Don't overhaul the entire system every 5 years and make everyone commit to expensive upgrades for more eye candy. That's when you FAIL.
As per title. I don't mind Safari so much, though it shouldn't be forced on users. iTunes, however, is the sole reason I don't use QuickTime any more. I want QuickTime. I should not have to install iTunes - a CPU hogging pile of crap that I don't need - in order to get QuickTime.
It's got soldered internals in the way Tiny used to get slated for, you can't remove the battery, there aren't enough ports, the cooling system's rubbish, and it's way too expensive, but it's OK, because it's stylish and the functionality sacrifices were worth it because it's thin?
Are you serious?
Cheque in the post, is it?
"Since the legal action was launched, the UK government has drafted legislation which would allow an Attorney General to close down such investigations as he or she saw fit on "national security" grounds."
What a fucking shock. If the government isn't allowed to do something these days, they simply make a tenuous link to Teh Ev1l T3rr0rists!!!11!!1! and then carry on, thanks to those two wonderful words, "national security."
Is there anything they couldn't link to terrorists? Let's give it a try:
The reason they've stopped painting the Golden Gate bridge? One of the bridge workers could be a terrorist.
That plane that came down at Heathrow due to engine failure? One of the engines was peed on by a man whose name sounded like "Osama."
House prices? Well isn't it obvious? Estate Agents are being infiltrated by Al Qaeda to undermine our economy.
Should I get in my car and drive to work, or will a terrorist have come round and let my tires down? FUCK YOU, BROWN.
"The Mgt of DSG need to spend a day at an Apple store if they want to learn how to "do" retail properly."
You're having a laugh. By "doing retail properly" I assume, therefore, you mean having a minimalistic fashionista store setup, with hardly anything on display, nothing to get your hands on, and a bunch of store groupies who can't tell you anything about a product other than that it's cool, hip and in?
Went into the Leeds store once (got some marvellous you-don't-belong-here looks from the staff) to get a battery for the boss' kid's iPod. Asked for a battery, got one. Fine and dandy. For a laugh, I asked him what the capacity of it was, and whether I'd be losing over the original. Pandemonium! What did I mean when I said "capacity," was I sure I'd got the right iPod, does anyone know the capacity of an iPod mini battery, does the boss know, etc. Behind my eyeballs I was rolling about with laughter - I already knew the capacity. I'd read it off the front of the battery when he'd handed it to me. :-)
And now, to wander off the point...
Replacing the battery was a whole other story, naturally. Got back to the office, used the rather crude tool (a bent screwdriver, from what I could see) to jimmy the end off the player. Took the internals out, swapped the battery, went to put it back together and *clatter*.......what the hell was that? There's a microchip on my desk. Where the hell did th....did that just fall off? Did a microchip seriously just *fall* off the PCB??
The boss had to get his friend at an electronics factory to fix it. Apple said, despite the player being in warranty, and it being their battery that had failed, their crap PCB, their replacement, their tools and their instructions, it had nothing to do with them.
Rant over, back to work.
Re: my previous post. I'm not saying that DSG are better. They're far far worse. But they've very little to learn from Apple.
Personally I want my computer store to be the way CeX used to be before they went all gaming-oriented. Now those were some hardcore computer stores, with staff that actually knew what I was talking about.
Exactly how I've always described O2, funnily enough. And they can hardly brag about their data plans. Last year when I was shopping for a new phone they offered me, for £6 a month, a whopping - wait for it - 4MB of transfer! WOW! A WHOLE 4MB! Pinch me, I must be dreaming.
Went around the corner into T-Mobile. Yeah, no worries mate. You can have 1GB for £7.50 a month, and our network's faster too.
First up, if laughing at you is your definition of getting riled up, the people you meet must be really pissed off. :-p
But if you want to turn an argument, you make out like all the stuff I can do with my Athena is just there to show off. (Personally, I was under the impression that that was about the only thing the iPhone was designed for, but hey.) That's a fairly stupid thing to say - it's an Athena. It's big, it's ugly, the HTC drivers make it lag like hell, and for some reason T-Mobile thought it would look awesome in silver and pink. It is not the kind of thing you show off with.
What you have to remember is that PuTTY, VNC etc are only on there because I installed them - ie, I need them. I admin servers and it is damned, DAMNED handy to be able to pull my phone out of my pocket anywhere in the world and sort them out. Just ask Maddox.
Plus, using the massive internal hard drive and a custom media player I installed to watch DivX and Xvid movies on the go is a bonus. ;-) But I guess you can do that with the iPhone to-...what? Sorry? It doesn't support those code.....oh. My bad.
Sorry mate - for actually doing anything, which is what smartphones are actually for, the Athena wins hands down, again and again and again. The iPhone is just a toy for showing off to your mates.
"Message to El Reg - you guys need to start Moderating around here. The comments, while once useful, are just a flame-and-troll playground now. Might be better to just turn them off altogether."
Depends. I even put <troll> tags around mine and you still rose to it. Who's the bigger muppet? :-p
<troll type="usual" repeat="always">
It's now nearly capable of two thirds of what my Athena can do.
There's nothing like using PuTTY to launch a server instance, then VNC'ing into KDE on your phone, launching whatever you like, saving the results, and SCPing them back down to your phone. It feels absolutely bizarre and totally brilliant. :-)
</troll>
As usual. Never liked Alienware stuff. It's always way overpriced, and easily beaten by anyone with half the cash and a little imagination. This doesn't seem any difference. Rubbish. Not even shipping it with a monitor for over £3500 is just mental. I built a tri-screen dual-opteron/quad core SCSI-driven SLI bad boy 16 months ago for something over £2000 (and it's got more memory than that thing!) - Alienware are out of their tiny minds if they think anyone's going to pay that price for this guff.
...people don't just go along with the climate change stuff anyway. Sure, the global warming theory may still be argued over, and parts or all of it may be crap, but how is reducing our dependence on limited fossil fuels a bad thing? How is pumping less crap into our air ever going to be a bad thing to do? I can't see a downside to finding and utilising alternative sources of energy that are cleaner and more efficient, apart from cost, which will obviously decrease as use of a given technology increases. We really need more investment in these technologies to get over the initial problems and start using them properly.
Though it's rather ironic that halfway through me writing that, Winamp switched tracks to Jessica by the Allman Brothers Band (the theme to Top Gear, for the uninitiated).
__________________
QUOTE:
"Not saying that being gay is the same as being a paedophile, but it's the closest equivalent"
i know a few gay people that would not take kindly to that kind of thinking
_________________
I am the Paedofinder General, and by the powers vested in me by a bloke in the pub who knew for definite, I find your sort GUILTY of paedophilia....
Love that programme.
"To us, it proved that students lack the discipline to work outside a school or office environment. Working at home with all the distractions that brings, while the rest of their friends were enjoying summer holidays seemed too hard for most."
Woah, woah, hold the phone. As a student about to graduate, I did my year in industry last year. Now and then I worked from home, when I got just as much done. I work far better on my own rig, at my own desk, with my own music. Fortunately, the place I was working let me have a similar setup in the office, which kicked arse. In any event, I really resent hearing this "lazy student" bullshit I keep hearing. I haven't slept properly in years because I have Uni work to do. When I'm not doing that, I'm doing freelance work and going to a part time job, so that I can afford said University education (cheers Tony).
I've gone off on a slight tangent there. Apologies. Anyway, my point is that not all students are lazy buggers. If they are, sack 'em, or improve your interview techniques to weed out the useless.
Oh look, it's a Britain vs America flame war. I would like to dip my toes in for a second to point a few things out to you, though. While you're still frothing at the mouth and all that.
"#3 You agreed to give up your guns. (See #1)"
Ah, we're stupid because we agreed to not shoot each other, and that shooting each other is a bad thing. I see.
"#4 Gun crimes in the UK have almost doubled since 1997, when the ban on firearms began."
I think you've missed something fairly fundamental here. Perhaps one reason for the gun crimes increase is that things are now classified as criminal that weren't before... Also, even if our gun crimes have doubles, three times two is still only six. I don't think our rate of gun crime comes anywhere even remotely near yours, so trying to infer that gun crime would increase if America banned guns is mind-bogglingly stupid, if you don't mind me saying so.
"How many people will download large files on a phone? I suspect most folk will be looking at facebook..."
Very true, as large file downloads on other systems are often application installers, and installing stuff is a heathen act on the iPhone. </flame bait> ;-)
I like the iPhone's interface, but for the money, my Athena is still far more capable. Finally got my car dock set up for it yesterday, so now it's my phone, ultra-mobile laptop, guitar tuner, GPS device and portable media centre in one. And it still costs less than the iPhone does.
What an absolute load of bollocks, sir. Is the 802.11g wireless standard the one used by the people with the most market share? How about the IDE/SATA/SCSI standards, or the ISO standards for business interchange, and so on, and so on? A standard is something agreed on by a group of people in order to make their products intercompatible - that is, they all run on the same base, or produce similar output, etc. Your "code for IE" approach is only ever going to create huge headaches for developers and users alike, especially when the next question would be "what version of IE are you going to code for?" IE doesn't even agree with itself, so how can it be a standard?
Real web developers - and by that, I mean those of us in the real world - code all their websites TO STANDARDS and then hack in extra annoying code to make them work in IE. That way, the website works in all browsers for all users, excluding no-one. That is the mark of a "real web developer," not some strange loyalty to only one buggy, obsolete browser made by a collection of idiots.
As for the IE6 issue, I wholeheartedly agree with those that want it and every version before it to die. IE6 has tormented me for long enough, and its inability to render anything properly has on occasion made me look a fool - if a site you made doesn't appear properly in a browser, as far as the client is concerned, that's 'cos you're crap, not because the browser's crap. I was pleasantly surprised by IE7. It's still rubbish compared to FF, Opera and Safari, but it's a damn sight better than IE6 and certainly a step in the right direction. The others were appalling, and should be retired in much the same way as a lame racehorse.
While I normally hate to see sites getting knocked around by the MPAA, in this case I'm not all that bothered. TorrentSpy has been crap of late. It would list torrents, and half the ones you clicked on were fake/missing/something else, so it would redirect you to Spankwire, which gets really annoying really quickly. I used to use it for finding old software files that aren't readily available any more, but when they started doing that crap I went back to my old methods.
And I was thinking of upgrading my SLI'd 7900GTX's this year, too. Two of these babies would do nicely!
*Google*
Hold the phone. Crap drivers (though let's be fair, it's new), crap heat dissipation, needs oodles of power (so I'd need a new PSU) and only has 512MB of memory?
So it's basically two GTS cards nailed together, underclocked and minus some RAM?
Question is, then - is it worth the extra £300-£400 to get two of these over two GTS cards? Sure, the GX2 setup would have more power, but £400 more power?
Big quote coming up here....
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The "more money than sense" argument just doesn't stack up. As with most other products in the world, people don't always want the cheapest product available. They want to feel that they are buying the best that they can afford, and to think that they are proud of their purchases.
If this attitude was widespread in other sectors, no-one would buy BMW or Mercedes etc, because, on the face of it, what are you getting on a 3 series that you aren't getting in a Focus? More MPG? Probably not. Faster? Maybe, but not so as you would particularly notice on your rush hour crawl into work. No, you are paying for 2 things, 1) the increased quality - comfier seats, better design and materials etc, and 2) you are buying into the "superior product one-upmanship" that is prevalent in todays world.
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Hate to tell you this, Dan....but for me, what you've just written is the very *definition* of more money than sense. his elitist attitude (not necessarily yours) keeps Starbucks et al in business, and to me it's simply shallow and pointless. It's a pity that attitude is so prevalent, but there you go.
I *do* drive a small car, and I buy stuff that's good value for money, rather than being the big name brand. Note that I never said "cheap," simply "good value for money." I will pay a stinking fortune for a computer or phone if, technically, it's brilliant. If someone asked me to pay the same amount of money for something that was simply fashionable so that I could wave it around at people in a vain attempt to get vain respect, I'd tell them to stick said device up their arse. I paid good money for my Athena, and I'd pay the same for an Eee, but would I pay 6 times that amount for a device that does the same or even less, simply because it's the one on the TV ads? Not on your life, mate.
And when I fill up my car for 15 nicker, tax and insure it for tiny amounts of money, and then hit 50mpg going in and out of the city, I take a quiet moment to chuckle at the Beamer driver sat behind me, because with the vast amounts of money he's spent on his car, I've done and bought far more interesting things.
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