Erm, one can only assume you're watching the repeats on Channel 4, and not the current series which just finished on Sky One. Daniel Jackson is indeed 'dead' (or at least 'ascended to a higher plane').
Speaking as someone who's had to spec a UK Government website before, I find this browser 'lock-out' surprising.
A company I work for was given the tender to design and create a new website for the (then - 1999) new Ofgem government agency for Electricity and Gas markets - core to this tender was a *27* page fax which outlined the governments provisos on web page design. These included:
No frames.
No animated gifs.
No flash/shockwave.
WebSafe colours only.
Must be completely viewable at 640x480.
Must be accessible with any browser.
Provision must be made for text-only browsers.
Provision must be made for disabled viewers - with the ability to navigate by keypresses, rather than by mouse.
Pages must print fully, and with no background colours.
No single page could exceed 35k.
Mostly good guidelines - and we followed them - to the letter. (Didn't get the job though!) I can't understand why these guidelines have been thrown out of the window. --
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
"We also still had to type in user names that matched the log-in names of our Windows users in two places (the Unix/etc/passwd and Samba's smbpasswd files) for Samba to work."
I take it they've never used Samba aliases then? And the ability to sync/usr/passwd with smbpasswd, either.
There was a 'War Of Independence' special not long ago, which pitted four US robots against four UK robots.
Naturally, the UK won (reversing that little incident 200-odd years ago:) ), but the US robots were truly, truly crap. They had nothing about them, no decent weapons, no armour. Pitiful.
Robot Wars as a competition (not sure if it was actually televised) in the US in 1994. --
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
Perhaps Linus has had a few calls from Apple, saying - 'Look, we're about to launch our Unix-like OS for our Macs, and your Linux OS is taking a large chunk of the market we're looking at....whaddayousay we give you $lots of dollars, and you forget about PPC compatibility?"
Spooky, huh?
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
If it ain't broke.....
on
Freshmeat II
·
· Score: 2
....don't fix it.
Why did they change it?
It'd be pointless just posting and saying 'hey, the design sucks', but it does....kinda.
Design is a very subjective thing, and I'm sure Scoop is happy with the new Freshmeat, but I think (and judging by the number of comments just here, I think I'm right) there'll be another change again soon.
Constructive Criticism:
Fonts are too big.
New logo - uugh...what was wrong with the old one?
Blue bar down left side - uses a _lot_ of space for very little gain.
Search facility seems to be b0rken at the moment - I'll put that down to/.-effect though.
Underline mouseover on links - nice touch, but poor choice of colours - you can't tell what is and is not a link, until you hover over - this is especially evident on the grey bar on the right hand side.
In the UK we've had 10 and 11 digit phone numbers for ages.
Works like this:
(XXXXX) XXX XXX or,
(XXXX) XXXX XXX
The part in parentheses is the local area code, the rest is the actual phone number. If your number was 01234 567890 then anyone else in the 01234 area can call you without prefixing the 01234. I thought the US system worked like this anyhoo - 123-456-7890, meaning anyone in the 123 area can call without the 123 prefix? No?
Oftel, the UK's telephone company watchdog, has recently put into place new numbering schemes over here - mainly to deal with the explosion in mobile phone usage here. Like reserving the 07XXX prefix for mobile phones, the 09XXX prefix for premium rate lines, the 084XX prefix for internet access etc.
Just deal with the changes, American friends!
In London, people/businesses have had four number changes in the last 10 years - 01 123456 became 071 123456 which then became 0171 123456 and then finally 020 7123456! --
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
Very pretty.
Quite small to download and install.
Skinnable.
Slightly better DOM and Javascript rendering than 4.72.
All of which is good.
But, most importantly, it's _STILL_ not as quick as IE. Pages seem to take twice as long (not as long as in 4.7 or in any of the Mozilla builds though) to load in PR3 than in IE5.
Sorry, it pains me to say it, but Microsoft STILL have the better browser.
That thing's huge, so the milkmaid said to the vicar.
But seriously, it's got four bloody fans on it. Unless you had a reasonably large case, you'd have to upgrade your damn case to fit one in!
You might even have to change your motherboard - a lot of motherboards have DIMM sockets and IDE headers which would get in the way of that AGP card's tail.
To me, that seems like quite a good reason to _not_ get a Voodoo 5 6000. Don't even get me started on the external PSU!
Plus the heat! The heat! Apart from the four fans on the card in the test machine in those pics, there seems to be a fan at the back of the machine, and one at the front at the bottom - anyone get the feeling that these V5 6000's get a little "toasty"?
I friend of mine has a V3 3000 and boy does that little blighter get hot - imagine what four of them stacked on top of each other is going to generate?!
I remember reading about the K6-2+ and the K6-III+ on The Register several months ago and yet it only just appears on Slashdot now!
Even in the pics on Toms Hardware the chips are marked "(c) 1999 AMD". It was my impression that K6-2+ chips had been sold in notebooks for several months now?
Don't get me wrong, I think the K6-x series of chips are great, low-cost, solutions (Hell, I run two at home!). I suppose it does just go to show that Socket 7 isn't dead after all.
I wonder how much Intel regret pulling out of Socket 7 with the Pentium 233MMX three years ago?
It's weird - at 233Mhz Intel declared Socket 7 a dead-dog and moved on to the abhorrent Slot 1 platform, yet AMD, Cyrix, IBM, IDT and Rise all managed to come up with processors perfectly (or imperfectly, in the cases of Rise, IDT and a lesser extent Cyrix/IBM) suited to the low-cost budget PC market which are still holding their ground today against Intel's Socket 370 line up.
The guys at Slackware have been providing a distro that is specifically for removable media like LS120 drives. This is called ZipSlack.
Okay, it is more targetted for Zip drives (hence the name), but I'm sure with little or no adaption it could be made to work perfectly well with a LS120 drive.
Plus, this package isn't really suited, as far as I can see, for the linux newbie who wants to give Linux a try and doesn't want to repartition.
If he's really desperate there are Linuces out there that install in a FAT partition and run from Windows (WinLinux springs to mind in particular - urgh).
What's more, there are 100s of "mini-distributions" that are under 100Mb and would easily fit on a LS120 drive - this really isn't new news, guys. -- jambo system.admin.without.a.clue
1 - 6 processors on one card, yet there's no heatsink? Embedded processors these things may be, but they still produce heat, and I'd imagine 6 of them would produce sufficient heat for them to start cooking each other.
2 - The Technical Specs say that there is 32Mb of onboard memory PER PROCESSOR. This means, on the 6 processor board there's 192Mb RAM! Judging by the pictures on the site, there is NO WAY you'd fit that much RAM on a card that size.
3 - Those pictures. I'm a dab hand at Photoshop, and whoever made those pictures isn't.:)
4 - The "upgradeable" board - according to the site you can buy a 6 processor board, and add on as many processors as you like, yourself. A stark contrast from the pictures, which clearly show that these chips are surface mounted, and not slottable.
5 - The "Beta Test" bit. According to their beta-test page, they'll give you one of these boards for FREE, if you offer to beta test for them. This doesn't sound like a kosher company to me! Imagine if nVidia said, "hey, here's our new Super-Whammo-HForce GTS 2000 Pro, it retails for $800, but we'd like you to 'beta-test' it for free!".
If this does turn out to be a geniune product, then the boys at Krasnoconv need to find a decent marketing agency - at the moment they're looking like just one step above totl.net's Spudserver! -- jambo system.admin.without.a.clue
In my admittedly limited experience of setting up online merchant accounts for people (ie. I've done it twice) I've found a couple of stinkers.
These are, netbanx.com and planetpayment.com.
Reasons:
Netbanx: thoroughly unprofessional, aimed at the idiot using Frontpage or Actinic Catalog, no answer whatsoever at technical support (that's both email and phone, folks), took 2 MONTHS to set up the account, obscene charges, takes 60 days for Netbanx to release payments to the account holder.
Planet Payment: have been trying to set this account up for over 5 MONTHS now, have been sent usernames and passwords for their 'payment gate' only to find that they don't work - to be issued with some more, again not working passwords, very US centric, and obscene requirements (we had to fax copies of the director's damn PASSPORTS to them!). -- jambo system.admin.without.a.clue
Roy Bates, the self-styled "Prince of Sealand" is just repeating the same trick he pulled over 30 years ago when he stole the anti-aircraft rig that Sealand is to broadcast his pirate radio station from.
>Am I the only one who expected 768kbps only to find that BT are only guaranteeing 512kbps?
They aren't even guaranteeing that. It's 512kbps upstream with a 50:1 contention ratio. Imagine, if you will, 50 people all sharing the same 512kbps connection, 512/50=10.51kbps.
ISDN is starting to look like a more viable offer than ADSL!
> Also this is an single ISP solution ie Use BT's ADSL = Use BT's ISP.
BT are wholesaling it out to whichever ISPs want it. I know for a fact that Nildram are offering their own rebadged version of BT's offerings.
> Oh well, at least it's better than my 56k that never connects at 56k. (49k tops)...
Heh. No-one's does. You'd have to live in a BT telephone exchange to even achieve anything like a true 56k connection.
I pre-registered yesterday, and I recieved this email in my inbox just a few seconds ago:
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 08:58:21 "GMT" From: "btdigital@btinternet.com" To: "xxxx@xxxxxx.xx.xx" Subject: Your BTopenworld registration
Dear Sir/Madam
Re : Your BTopenworld registration
For a short period yesterday a hidden area of the BTopenworld site holding the details that you registered was accessed by a limited number of unauthorised persons. I am writing to apologise to you for this breach in security.
I would like to assure you that as soon as the problem was identified, we took immediate steps to secure the site.
We are writing to those people identified as having accessed this hidden area to get written confirmation that they have not copied, used or passed your details to any other person and will delete or destroy all copies of this information.
I can confirm that we are undertaking a full and thorough investigation to ensure that breaches of this nature do not happen again.
Once again our sincere apologies.
Yours faithfully
Robert Salvoni General Manager BTopenworld
--
Email reproduced in full, apart from my masked email address.
So...who wants to trust their 24 hour on connection to BTopenworld then?
Our country (the UK, that is) and its legal system is run by mis-informed, net-illiterate politicians who see the internet as nothing but another marketing tool that their spin-doctors can play for them.
The crux of the problem is that:
Apart from a very small minority, Britain, as a whole, is completely 'net' illiterate:
Only the other day, I was stuck behind a lorry on the M6 (as does tend to happen), and I noticed on the back of the lorry, along with the address and telephone details of the company, was written: "e-mail us: sales.ourcompany.co.uk!"(sic) - 10 out of 10 for initiative, 0 out of 10 for knowledge. With people like these running our biggest companies how can our society, let alone our laws change?
Blair wants Britain to be an e-commerce capital - how on earth can this happen when we live in a god-damned backwards nation, where we still harp on about 1945, 1966 and Thatcher!
Our country needs educating - which _is_ happening (but only to our children) - people that run our country, and run our biggest companies need to be net literate. Without this literacy we will have serial litigators like Dr Godfrey and his team of crack ambulance chasers suing every site left, right and centre.
The voices of us geeks and nerds will not be heard - we'll not be taken seriously and we'll be ignored. Either that, or (take Y2K for example) the media will jump on us, bastardise our views and call us idiots when nothing happens.
Our nation, its laws and its people need bringing out of the 19th (never mind the 20th!) century and back into the 21st! -- jambo system.admin.without.a.clue
Slashdot Mirror
"Never mind the quality, just feel the width."
Erm, one can only assume you're watching the repeats on Channel 4, and not the current series which just finished on Sky One. Daniel Jackson is indeed 'dead' (or at least 'ascended to a higher plane').
Speaking as someone who's had to spec a UK Government website before, I find this browser 'lock-out' surprising.
A company I work for was given the tender to design and create a new website for the (then - 1999) new Ofgem government agency for Electricity and Gas markets - core to this tender was a *27* page fax which outlined the governments provisos on web page design. These included:
No frames.
No animated gifs.
No flash/shockwave.
WebSafe colours only.
Must be completely viewable at 640x480.
Must be accessible with any browser.
Provision must be made for text-only browsers.
Provision must be made for disabled viewers - with the ability to navigate by keypresses, rather than by mouse.
Pages must print fully, and with no background colours.
No single page could exceed 35k.
Mostly good guidelines - and we followed them - to the letter. (Didn't get the job though!) I can't understand why these guidelines have been thrown out of the window.
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
"Slashdot discovers unpaid satellite TV, film at 11....or at 9.30 if you're viewing on C-band."
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
"We also still had to type in user names that matched the log-in names of our Windows users in two places (the Unix /etc/passwd and Samba's smbpasswd files) for Samba to work."
/usr/passwd with smbpasswd, either.
I take it they've never used Samba aliases then? And the ability to sync
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
There was a 'War Of Independence' special not long ago, which pitted four US robots against four UK robots.
:) ), but the US robots were truly, truly crap. They had nothing about them, no decent weapons, no armour. Pitiful.
Naturally, the UK won (reversing that little incident 200-odd years ago
Robot Wars as a competition (not sure if it was actually televised) in the US in 1994.
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
Smells very much like an early April Fool.
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
2001-03-20 14:23:03
i am not using any caps. a numeral a capital letter. some patch the slashdot engine. shejeez!
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
Is there something more 'between-the-lines' here?
Perhaps Linus has had a few calls from Apple, saying - 'Look, we're about to launch our Unix-like OS for our Macs, and your Linux OS is taking a large chunk of the market we're looking at....whaddayousay we give you $lots of dollars, and you forget about PPC compatibility?"
Spooky, huh?
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
....don't fix it.
/.-effect though.
:/
Why did they change it?
It'd be pointless just posting and saying 'hey, the design sucks', but it does....kinda.
Design is a very subjective thing, and I'm sure Scoop is happy with the new Freshmeat, but I think (and judging by the number of comments just here, I think I'm right) there'll be another change again soon.
Constructive Criticism:
Fonts are too big.
New logo - uugh...what was wrong with the old one?
Blue bar down left side - uses a _lot_ of space for very little gain.
Search facility seems to be b0rken at the moment - I'll put that down to
Underline mouseover on links - nice touch, but poor choice of colours - you can't tell what is and is not a link, until you hover over - this is especially evident on the grey bar on the right hand side.
IMHO, bring back the old page.
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
In the UK we've had 10 and 11 digit phone numbers for ages.
Works like this:
(XXXXX) XXX XXX or,
(XXXX) XXXX XXX
The part in parentheses is the local area code, the rest is the actual phone number. If your number was 01234 567890 then anyone else in the 01234 area can call you without prefixing the 01234. I thought the US system worked like this anyhoo - 123-456-7890, meaning anyone in the 123 area can call without the 123 prefix? No?
Oftel, the UK's telephone company watchdog, has recently put into place new numbering schemes over here - mainly to deal with the explosion in mobile phone usage here. Like reserving the 07XXX prefix for mobile phones, the 09XXX prefix for premium rate lines, the 084XX prefix for internet access etc.
Just deal with the changes, American friends!
In London, people/businesses have had four number changes in the last 10 years - 01 123456 became 071 123456 which then became 0171 123456 and then finally 020 7123456!
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
It is for the rest of this planet! Well, the UK at least.
They're selling TiVo's over here in the UK, and since we use the PAL format too, I imagine it's only a matter of time before it gets to Argentina.
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
Using PR3 now.
Very pretty.
Quite small to download and install.
Skinnable.
Slightly better DOM and Javascript rendering than 4.72.
All of which is good.
But, most importantly, it's _STILL_ not as quick as IE. Pages seem to take twice as long (not as long as in 4.7 or in any of the Mozilla builds though) to load in PR3 than in IE5.
Sorry, it pains me to say it, but Microsoft STILL have the better browser.
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
That thing's huge, so the milkmaid said to the vicar.
But seriously, it's got four bloody fans on it. Unless you had a reasonably large case, you'd have to upgrade your damn case to fit one in!
You might even have to change your motherboard - a lot of motherboards have DIMM sockets and IDE headers which would get in the way of that AGP card's tail.
To me, that seems like quite a good reason to _not_ get a Voodoo 5 6000. Don't even get me started on the external PSU!
Plus the heat! The heat! Apart from the four fans on the card in the test machine in those pics, there seems to be a fan at the back of the machine, and one at the front at the bottom - anyone get the feeling that these V5 6000's get a little "toasty"?
I friend of mine has a V3 3000 and boy does that little blighter get hot - imagine what four of them stacked on top of each other is going to generate?!
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
I remember reading about the K6-2+ and the K6-III+ on The Register several months ago and yet it only just appears on Slashdot now!
Even in the pics on Toms Hardware the chips are marked "(c) 1999 AMD". It was my impression that K6-2+ chips had been sold in notebooks for several months now?
Don't get me wrong, I think the K6-x series of chips are great, low-cost, solutions (Hell, I run two at home!). I suppose it does just go to show that Socket 7 isn't dead after all.
I wonder how much Intel regret pulling out of Socket 7 with the Pentium 233MMX three years ago?
It's weird - at 233Mhz Intel declared Socket 7 a dead-dog and moved on to the abhorrent Slot 1 platform, yet AMD, Cyrix, IBM, IDT and Rise all managed to come up with processors perfectly (or imperfectly, in the cases of Rise, IDT and a lesser extent Cyrix/IBM) suited to the low-cost budget PC market which are still holding their ground today against Intel's Socket 370 line up.
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
Could anyone imagine how crazy that headline would look 10 years ago?
"Kuro5hin forced down by DOS"
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
This isn't really new news at all.
The guys at Slackware have been providing a distro that is specifically for removable media like LS120 drives. This is called ZipSlack.
Okay, it is more targetted for Zip drives (hence the name), but I'm sure with little or no adaption it could be made to work perfectly well with a LS120 drive.
Plus, this package isn't really suited, as far as I can see, for the linux newbie who wants to give Linux a try and doesn't want to repartition.
If he's really desperate there are Linuces out there that install in a FAT partition and run from Windows (WinLinux springs to mind in particular - urgh).
What's more, there are 100s of "mini-distributions" that are under 100Mb and would easily fit on a LS120 drive - this really isn't new news, guys.
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
1 - 6 processors on one card, yet there's no heatsink? Embedded processors these things may be, but they still produce heat, and I'd imagine 6 of them would produce sufficient heat for them to start cooking each other.
:)
2 - The Technical Specs say that there is 32Mb of onboard memory PER PROCESSOR. This means, on the 6 processor board there's 192Mb RAM! Judging by the pictures on the site, there is NO WAY you'd fit that much RAM on a card that size.
3 - Those pictures. I'm a dab hand at Photoshop, and whoever made those pictures isn't.
4 - The "upgradeable" board - according to the site you can buy a 6 processor board, and add on as many processors as you like, yourself. A stark contrast from the pictures, which clearly show that these chips are surface mounted, and not slottable.
5 - The "Beta Test" bit. According to their beta-test page, they'll give you one of these boards for FREE, if you offer to beta test for them. This doesn't sound like a kosher company to me! Imagine if nVidia said, "hey, here's our new Super-Whammo-HForce GTS 2000 Pro, it retails for $800, but we'd like you to 'beta-test' it for free!".
If this does turn out to be a geniune product, then the boys at Krasnoconv need to find a decent marketing agency - at the moment they're looking like just one step above totl.net's Spudserver!
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
In my admittedly limited experience of setting up online merchant accounts for people (ie. I've done it twice) I've found a couple of stinkers.
These are, netbanx.com and planetpayment.com.
Reasons:
Netbanx: thoroughly unprofessional, aimed at the idiot using Frontpage or Actinic Catalog, no answer whatsoever at technical support (that's both email and phone, folks), took 2 MONTHS to set up the account, obscene charges, takes 60 days for Netbanx to release payments to the account holder.
Planet Payment: have been trying to set this account up for over 5 MONTHS now, have been sent usernames and passwords for their 'payment gate' only to find that they don't work - to be issued with some more, again not working passwords, very US centric, and obscene requirements (we had to fax copies of the director's damn PASSPORTS to them!).
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
Roy Bates, the self-styled "Prince of Sealand" is just repeating the same trick he pulled over 30 years ago when he stole the anti-aircraft rig that Sealand is to broadcast his pirate radio station from.
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
Keep this hush-hush, here's the lowdown on some of the new plotlines for the latest series of the X-Files!
- Mulder finds yet another facet to his sister's disappearance (episodes 1 thru 12)
The X-Files, duller than ditchwater since 1996.
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
>Am I the only one who expected 768kbps only to find that BT are only guaranteeing 512kbps?
They aren't even guaranteeing that. It's 512kbps upstream with a 50:1 contention ratio. Imagine, if you will, 50 people all sharing the same 512kbps connection, 512/50=10.51kbps.
ISDN is starting to look like a more viable offer than ADSL!
> Also this is an single ISP solution ie Use BT's ADSL = Use BT's ISP.
BT are wholesaling it out to whichever ISPs want it. I know for a fact that Nildram are offering their own rebadged version of BT's offerings.
> Oh well, at least it's better than my 56k that never connects at 56k. (49k tops)...
Heh. No-one's does. You'd have to live in a BT telephone exchange to even achieve anything like a true 56k connection.
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
I pre-registered yesterday, and I recieved this email in my inbox just a few seconds ago:
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 08:58:21 "GMT"
From: "btdigital@btinternet.com"
To: "xxxx@xxxxxx.xx.xx"
Subject: Your BTopenworld registration
Dear Sir/Madam
Re : Your BTopenworld registration
For a short period yesterday a hidden area of the BTopenworld site holding
the details that you registered was accessed by a limited number of
unauthorised persons. I am writing to apologise to you for this breach in security.
I would like to assure you that as soon as the problem was identified, we
took immediate steps to secure the site.
We are writing to those people identified as having accessed this hidden
area to get written confirmation that they have not copied, used or passed your
details to any other person and will delete or destroy all copies of this
information.
I can confirm that we are undertaking a full and thorough investigation to
ensure that breaches of this nature do not happen again.
Once again our sincere apologies.
Yours faithfully
Robert Salvoni
General Manager BTopenworld
--
Email reproduced in full, apart from my masked email address.
So...who wants to trust their 24 hour on connection to BTopenworld then?
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
Am I the only person that finds it amusing that ATI have named their latest graphics card after a washing powder??
Radion Powder = Whiter Whites
Radeon Gfx Cards = Faster Quake3Arena
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
Our country (the UK, that is) and its legal system is run by mis-informed, net-illiterate politicians who see the internet as nothing but another marketing tool that their spin-doctors can play for them.
The crux of the problem is that:
Apart from a very small minority, Britain, as a whole, is completely 'net' illiterate:
Only the other day, I was stuck behind a lorry on the M6 (as does tend to happen), and I noticed on the back of the lorry, along with the address and telephone details of the company, was written: "e-mail us: sales.ourcompany.co.uk!"(sic) - 10 out of 10 for initiative, 0 out of 10 for knowledge. With people like these running our biggest companies how can our society, let alone our laws change?
Blair wants Britain to be an e-commerce capital - how on earth can this happen when we live in a god-damned backwards nation, where we still harp on about 1945, 1966 and Thatcher!
Our country needs educating - which _is_ happening (but only to our children) - people that run our country, and run our biggest companies need to be net literate. Without this literacy we will have serial litigators like Dr Godfrey and his team of crack ambulance chasers suing every site left, right and centre.
The voices of us geeks and nerds will not be heard - we'll not be taken seriously and we'll be ignored. Either that, or (take Y2K for example) the media will jump on us, bastardise our views and call us idiots when nothing happens.
Our nation, its laws and its people need bringing out of the 19th (never mind the 20th!) century and back into the 21st!
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue