Posts by CD001 925 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2009
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But then I don't consider myself a Beavis and Butthead type juvenile moron, maybe times have changed.
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Considering even Beavis and Butthead themselves would be in their mid-30s by now (by my reckoning) - I suspect most people under the age of 30 have never even heard of them.
Still, it's got the ad company several column inches they'd never have had otherwise - I'd not have heard of them had it not been for this "outrage".
That's actually an implementation fault - if the person setting up the website had read the documentation on "best practices" they should have a <noscript> fallback that allows "click here to continue" type functionality.
NoScript is one of a handful of browser extensions that I consider essential.
You can still get the Borland C++ command line compiler (I believe) - though it's not Borland any more of course but Embarcadero. Combine that with Netbeans (or even NP++) and you can cobble together little cli apps - it only really gets arsey when you have to deal with MFCs and the GUI layer.
If you're of an age where you're thinking of learning in preparation to enter the work-place (so we're talking A-Level - or equivalent - and up) you _might_ look at the saturated, over-worked, under-paid world of IT and think, nah, stuff it - I'll do plumbing instead.
If you want to get people interested in IT, you have to do something interesting with IT ... unfortunately, in the world of work, most people's exposure to IT is MS Office and that's about it - so that's what they teach. It's not until you've decided to invest your future in IT and taken it to further/higher education level that you can begin to specialise into something more interesting.
The extraordinary conditions are perhaps NOT LIVING IN LONDON! :P
Telewest were consistently very good across the Midlands as far as I can tell (from where I live and people I've known, from Wolverhampton to Solihull to Leicester) - and in these places where it's now VM it's still perfectly acceptable (I generally clock 16 - 18Mbs on a 20Mbs connection and often virtually max-out when connecting to Steam since their servers can actually cope)... the connection's still great, it's the customer service that's bombed somewhat under VM.
Technically he's right - try downloading a couple of gigs of hard-core donkey videos (on parachutes natch - what DID you think I was referring to?) during prime-time and you might notice your connection gets throttled.
Weirdly, I've never actually noticed throttling on my connection - even when, after an old HDD died, I had to re-download every game on my Steam account (40 gigs or something) - though to be fair, I left that running over night.
My 20Mbs connection generally ticks over at 16+ Mbs - as long as the server can cope. I've certainly noticed server bottle-necks since I upgraded to the 20Mbs service.
As an added plus - since I moved to Virgin I don't have to deal with BT any more... which is nice ;)
... and as for you nutters using firewalls or anti-virus software! Wow you guys must have issues!! Maybe you're all just more sensitive about being part of a bot-net? Awwwwwww.
NoScript ain't just about the ads matey - I'm glad I don't do tech support on your machine, that's all I'm saying.
... honestly.
BUT it DOES have some growing up to do - it was never intended to be an OOP language originally and it shows. Look at the "libraries" - MySQLi for instance - the functionality can be accessed procedurally or in an OO manner. It's in a sort of halfway house state, migrating from a procedural to an OOP language.
There's some conformity issues that really should be sorted out as well, $_{EVERYTHING} except $GLOBALS.
Yes, these are both issues with a (fairly rapidly) evolving language and yes they can be mitigated by writing your own wrappers to abstract the core language itself but that's hardly optimal - it feels like the language could do with going over, carefully, cutting away the dead wood and rationalising the rest.
Thankfully, with version 6, they're heading in this direction; removing some of the deprecated features that should (really) never have been in the language in the first place - "register globals" and "magic quotes" for instance.
It's always been a good "quick and dirty" language but at least it's taking a bath once in a while now, putting on clean underwear and the acne is beginning to clear up - I'm still not convinced by loose typing however but that's not just a PHP thing.
If you've got a PS3 anyway - you can already use its in-built browser to go to YouTube and the PSN already has direct access to Aunty's iPlayer (through the 'TV' menu).
Actually, since Vidiactive's solution is a software one, rather than hardware, it's possible it could be licensed by Sony/MS and bundled into a firmware update for the PS3/XboX 360 eventually anyway - or even Virgin Media/SKY for their boxes.
... why does EVERY other major browser maker do it? Even Chrome.
They might not implement add-ons in the same way but they all have them - so it's the implementation that's flawed rather than the idea ... and oh, what is it that Mozilla are rectifying? Oh, yes, the implementation.
Sheesh.
Actually - I agree with that rant - and not just using JavaScript on web forms. On ANY public facing website I'd argue that client-side scripting should be an optional extra and that the site should function perfectly with JavaScript disabled - especially if you're selling something.
Using it in a closed environment, such as a CMS, where you can mandate the users' browser settings is a different matter of course.
There's nothing wrong with using XML/XSLT apart from the fact that, for a web page, it's pointless - that's what HTML is FOR. If you want to parse out your results to WML or whatever, you can do it server-side since you're probably pulling the data from a database anyway.
Maybe the people on WEP have Nintendo DSs - my other half's DS is the only thing in our flat that can't get onto the network because I refuse to lower the router from WPA2 AES (so no professor Layton add-ons for you m'dear!).
That router is a few years old - I bought it because, at the time, Virgin Media didn't support wireless home networking (it works fine, they just didn't support it) and I've never known anything apart from the DS to have problems with WPA2 encryption.
The thing is, before the web 2.0 mob invaded, JavaScript was mainly a sideline - something for doing image-changes on mouseover or other secondary fluff. With the rise of AJaX and JSON though JavaScript has had an ever increasing role in determining the actual layout and functionality of the page (try using Facebook with JavaScript disabled for instance) - and that's when JS performance starts to matter.
Google just reacted to this trend before anyone else by focusing on the JS engine in Chrome to make it fast. It was more of a "sign of the times" than just a simple exercise in willy waving.
To be fair to the much maligned WMP... version 11 under Win7 is actually quite good. I've not had to install a codec pack yet and it just pops up without any additional cruft, it's a bit like playing a video in a window without actually having a player there (well, that's how I run it anyway because that's how I prefer it).
... besides, WMP works a treat for streaming my library to my PS3 (and therefore my large TV and home theatre system) - and that's an older version of WMP running under WinXP (my old PC was retired to become a Media Centre).
Not that I play WoW (tried it for a couple of months, got bored) - but, WoW is totally online and paid for with your credit card (in most cases) - it's not inconceivable that you could tie the game registration to forum membership and therefore the credit card and real name - so it _could_ be verified.
I'm not saying that's what they're doing, just that it's not impossible - or even infeasible.
A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies...
I want my advertising blimps, flying cars, arcologies and dystopian, replicant-ridden future thanks! Oki, so you can get brollies with lights in the handles now but the closest thing we've got to a Nexus 6 is a bloody Google-powered mobile phone *boo*
HTML 5 is shit, there, I said it.
Whilst it DOES have some plus-points like being able to semantically mark up navigation (<nav>) or the <datalist> element to specify valid text input client-side, it's got a few downsides that nobody seems to notice - stuff that seems to be there just to ensure that people who write crappy markup can continue to do so.
For instance they've bundled MSs <embed> into the standard now, but got shot of <applet>. Realistically there should be either <object> as a generic wrapper that replaces <embed>, <applet> and even the new <canvas> or there should be all those specific elements. There's nothing really wrong with <canvas> but why not extend <object> rather than introduce another tag? The same could also be said for <audio> and <video> and even <img> - they could all be <object> - or <embed> if that was chosen as the tag rather than <object>.
... and who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to continue to support tags that are NOT XML well-formed? Maybe it's just me, but I find it much easier to have to close every tag rather than remember which ones need to be closed and which don't and while I can continue to do that in HTML 5 supporting non-XML type tags just adds bloat to the browser for interpreting it.
XHTML 2 was, in some ways, a better considered spec which stripped out a lot of the bloat from HTML (whereas HTML 5 adds to it) - though I was never quite convinced by it having to mung in XForms.
Font anti-aliasing (Cleartype) is on by default across all browsers on Windows 7 it seems (unlike XP) - well, I say all browsers I've only got IE8, Firefox, Opera and Chrome installed.
Without font AA most serif fonts are virtually unusable, or at least butt-ugly, at anything less than about 14 "point" (yes, yes, I know) - especially if they're italicised.
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Furthermore, I'd suggest it is high time that information about users (whether stored in a cookie or otherwise) be confidential (being prohibited from being sold or used by any other party) and communicated only within the single subdomain.
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Ordinarily about all you'd actually store on the cookie is a hash value or similar - what goes into the cookie isn't _really_ that important - the issue is what the site does with any user information or profile it has associated with that cookie.
You simply store all the tracking data you like in the session - you don't have to get consent from the user because the session is essential to run the site (unless you're just a search engine maybe) and you've still got all your lovely profiled data. Of course, this doesn't hold true for third party adverts.
Having your browser delete cookies on exit pretty much avoids this whether it's data in a cookie or otherwise. However, it was recently shown that it's possible to get an almost unique system fingerprint based on the data send by the browser over HTTP though, so this isn't entirely safe.
I can just see X3 Terran Conflict running on a PS3 (not that it's been console-ported for obvious reasons) - as it is, on the PC, I generally use, mouse, keyboard AND joystick.
There's nothing wrong with consoles so long as you don't play sims (except racing sims), RTS, strategy games or FPSs (can't stand the aiming on a console). Since my games collection largely consists of games like X3, Civ and Total War, that's consoles out of the window.
Having said that though - rumour has it they MIGHT actually release GT5 on the PS3 this year and it seems that there's a PS3 version of Twisted Metal on the way (announced at E3) :D THAT'S what consoles are for! Beer, pizza and daft arsed split-screen shooty car games on enormous TVs with a few mates :) Even better with a home theatre system!
Personally I don't see what the big fuss is about paying £100 for Windows 7 Pro when you're quite happy to spend two to three times that amount on a single graphics card! I think the GFX card in my PC cost more than my PS3 *shrugs*
You know Opera has extensions right? They're called Widgets.
Opera is a great browser for browsing the web - Firefox is what I use mostly because of some of those "non-essential" extensions. Web developer toolbar, HTML Validator, Colorzilla, Httpfox and a few that I'd argue ARE essential (for me), NoScript, mouse gestures, and Table2Clipboard (in the office, people want spreadsheets).
Now while Opera has many good things built in (or readily available) mouse gestures and Dragonfly for instance - it doesn't have the same stuff that I use in Firefox; even as "widgets" (and the difference between widgets and extensions is what, exactly?)
Funny thing about the us in the beige box brigade - we actually get to choose our beige box and what it looks like: http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/lian-li-pc-888-pc-case/ not much beige or boxy about that.
And hey, if that's not your cup of tea - how about a bit of DIY (for the true steampunk geek):
http://steampunkworkshop.com/victorian-all-one-pc
Whereas a modern Mac Pro is nice enough looking I suppose - it does look like a PC I had in a Lian-Li case a few years back - it's not exactly ground breaking or "cutting edge" design there. I'd happily let my clients see my custom-build PC complete with blue lights and the rest of it - which I've only opened the side of once since I built it - and that was to install a new sound card *shrugs*
But to be honest I'd rather have clients who weren't impressed by something as silly as what my desktop case looked like - I prefer not to gull the gullible.
... interesting to see if this does reduce instances of hangs considerably (laying the blame at the feet of the plug-in) or whether it's the core Firefox code itself that tends to fall over.
The weird thing with Firefox is that it's behaviour is inconsistent. I've used it for years on a WinXP box (and now a Win 7 box) with masses of developer type plug-ins and had very, very few problems with it.
My missus has it on her WinXP laptop - and for some reason it just hangs on some sites for no obvious reason. So unless there's some kind of crazy going on whereby all the add-ons on my version of Firefox actually make it MORE stable...
Wow - that's actually turning a profit now - quick search says that it first started turning a profit in 2008... I suspect, overall, it's nowhere near paid for the investment yet though - still it's about the only thing that MS do that actually has a thin veneer of "cool" about it.
No matter how many ads they pump out - an OS and Office suite is never going to be sexy - maybe MS should stick to what they're good at, getting businesses to fork over huge wads of cash and leave the consumer devices to Apple, Sony et al.
... that Apple tech support _might_ just be a wee bit easier since all the tech in an Apple is Apple certified? You don't get nuggets like me chucking Core i7s on Asus mobos with Corsair RAM, ATi Graphics cards into Lancool cases and overclocking the CPU by about 40%.
And don't even start on software.
So yes - Apples might be lovely if you want a device "that just works" ... and many people do. I, however, want a device cobbled together to my exact specifications, with blue flashy lights, that I can do whatever the hell I like with. Having it "just work" gives me something to aim for ;)
I guess that's why more people drive Corsas than kit-cars.
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