Posts by Havin_it

That's amateur hour

The really enterprising parent gets close to the "competing" children and frames them for petty crimes, or encourages them to chant "I WANT MORE PORN!" at induction meetings and other offences that'll thin out the field nicely.

For more, see Chris Morris's JAM - prescient stuff.

@Mr Angry Coward

I'm not sure why this inflames you so. It's true multimedia in Linux is a horrendous hodgepodge, and I never suggested otherwise, but the OOo developers are going to have to deal with it on some level if they want multimedia support in the suite at all (though that in itself is questionable goal, as you indicate).

Devs have to work out how to make their apps reliably produce sounds and/or video. And your "average person" -- who I'd argue is already *not* an average person if they're using Linux -- won't get far in Linux without having some part of the multimedia stack let them down, and if they don't quit in disgust at that point, then they will soon get an introduction to the horrors that lurk beneath. I can't speak for more than a handful of other people, but a trial-and-error approach to finding a player and backend that plays a given bit of content (over a given bit of hardware) tends to prevail.

So yes, being able to choose between Xine and VLC (does Phonon have a backend for that now? Sweet, must investigate) is bloody handy in my opinion, because one of them might actually work; if the choice were made for me, it'd probably be the one that didn't.

Suggestion

I can't speak for any of the competition, but we use SagePay (nee Protx) for our ecommerce processing, and it does what you seek. You can choose to take "deferred" payments, meaning the authorisation is done as normal, but the debit isn't taken straight away, just "shadowed" (reserved so they can't spend it in the interim) until you log-in and either accept or abort the payment.

The auth system allows you to set rules (thresholds, really) such as: reject txns that fail address check *IF* txn value is £* or greater. This makes a lot of sense because, as you say, there are a lot of inexplicable false-alarms, but at the same time it's best to be covered against chargeback if the sum in question is high enough to hurt.

BTW I don't work for the aforementioned company. They were in fact recommended to us by a competitor(!) as being more suitable for a business of our size. If you have a high turnover and tight margins, you probably want to think about someone else as their servers do occasionally have a wee lie down (couple of times a year).

That or extreme sports

...if you consider the two mutually exclusive that is ;)

Nah, you certainly don't seem to have to have a business to register a .com, or be a nonprofit to get a .org, so I'm sure you'll have nae probs.

May I recommend your.name@goatse.xxx if you can manage to beat the rush for it ;)

PS - are you positing that pornmongers don't spam each other? And I would have thought that the \/14GR/-\ pushers and manhood enhancers would be all over them like a, er, rash, no?

RE: Wrong Focus Yet Again

I would say that if you leave your computer on for months at a time, unless it's a server or a life-support machine, you just may be in the wrong place to cast stones regarding the lifestyles of others. Unless you never sleep, how do you justify keeping it on all that time?

Personally it's quite common for my netbook to be booted and shutdown three times a day: once before work, once at work (if I've had reason to bring it with me), and once after. I use it for both work and personal activity so I hardly think that's evidence of a broken life.

And as a Linux user of some years, I have learned the hard way never to trust the Sleep or Hibernate functions: the former might reasonably be renamed "Die", adn still consumes power; the latter, when it works any better, generally is no quicker than a reboot. Note that this is very much personal experience only, but is a sadly very consistent one.

Yeah but no but

While I see where you're coming from, and don't much fancy the idea of my "beautiful" sites being butchered in this way either, 2 things:

(a) As a web author/provider, you serve up and transmit a page of HTML and some other odds and sods in a presentational style and structure of your liking. Once it's left your server and is represented on the client's screen, it's really up to them what they do with it. By way of an analogy, suppose I buy a newspaper, throw away the sports pullout, and rip the top two inches of celebutard-baiting Heat-magazine-style "teaser" bollocks off the front page before I start reading. Does this make me a thief? No - I bought the paper, it's my right to make it into a funny hat, without reading any of it, if I so choose.

(b) Readability is something the user has to voluntarily use after loading the original page; it's not like the user never even sees your proffered layout and content (although if they were really hard-assed I suppose they could combine it with Greasemonkey) - I don't know what the score is with Safari but I bet it's not automatic either. So your analogy doesn't quite ring true - it's more like you'd be standing outside the store telling everyone who walks out clutching a brochure (and can be bothered to listen) that pages 1-4, 6-7 etc. are drivel, and *they* ought to rip them out and oh, I've some scissors if you need 'em. To be fair, the fruit police would probably give you a doing-over for that too, but for once I don't think they could do much legally, except maybe harrassment charges or an ASBO.

Here's a thought: maybe if the authors of informational sites worked harder to strike a reasonable balance between content and window-dressing/ads/etc, then widgets like these would never have been conceived of in the first place.

They easily could

IP isn't implemented in hardware. Any ISP-supplied modem/router should be capable of doing IPv6, they just need to get off their arse and push a firmware upgrade. My ISP already had to do this once when they went ADSL2+, and this is (in some ways) simpler. *Their* end of the pipe is probably a harder proposition than your end.

Sorry, missed a bit

I forgot to put "...in my experience" or words to that effect. I voiced my opinion on the Internet about something I'm not a leading authority on - sorry if it inflames you so but, jeez man, people do it all the time.

You certainly have a point as I mercifully have never encountered any bespoke (apart from my own) or industry-specific (unless you count Sage, which is soon to have to be dealt with - any advice?) applications to speak of. However, you know what? Neither do most other people who use computers every day (in my purely experience-based opinion). A hell of a lot of people, who perhaps you don't encounter much in your work by its very nature, get through their working (and personal, let's not forget) life with an eclectic but relatively modest stack of apps.

I'm not saying I'm right and you're wrong - I'd certainly have worded my post more carefully in hindsight - but without knowing exactly what you actually do, I ask you: is it not possible that your perspective on this is a wee bit skewed too?

Wouldn't call that "supporting"

More like "tolerating", really. "Support" would be actually implementing it in the browser natively, but they won't do that because (a) it's not yet proven patent-immune, and (b) they'll probably be the ones putting that to the test, as part of MPEG-LA.

Uh, thirded?

I understand people wanting the GUI to look flashy and all, but I find it madness when a phone insists on going through artsy-fartsy animated transitions (which rapidly become pointless after you've seen them a couple of times) just to do something as prosaic as navigating a menu. Maybe this is a pretty small brick in the wall, but it just boggles my mind especially when it can't be turned off.