Can't argue with Spaced - superb comedy. Simon Pegg from Spaced, Shaun of the Dead was also in "Hippies", another very funny comedy (from the BBC? I can't remember - might be C4 also).
The League of Gentlemen, particularly the first series.
IMHO, much better than Little Britain. Not that LB's less than excellent, you understand, just the LoG is even better.
As to further suggestions, it's not BBC (it's Channel 4, which often gives the Beeb a run for its money) but "Shameless" is excellent. I doubt I could descibe it without offending entire demographics, so I'll leave it to you all to Google;-)
...the market share was 45% Linux, 45% Mac, 10% Windows, the Windows users would be the "cool" hacker group making fun of those linux/Max "newbies" who have to deal will so many viruses/adware/security violations every day.
Just like those uber-cool IIS operators make fun of those daft Apache admins, having to put up with all the attacks on the Web's Most Popular Web-Server?
Disclaimer: I *use* Windows. I also use Solaris, Linux and BSD. They're all good - and bad - in certain areas. Unfortunately Windows' area of "badness" is security.
At the risk of getting all serious, it wouldn't be the first terrorist attack orchestrated by France against an allied country... Though I seriously doubt this outrage was caused by French commandos.
I'd say it's time for IPX to head out and start mining that core.
An offtopic mod, and a comment about planetary rape - I guess you fell for the common mistake of assuming geeks are familiar with SciFi;-) "What is this Babylon 5 of which you speak?"
Back on-topic, what is the deal with extra-planetary mining? Legally? Is it just a matter of time, or are other planets protected like Antartica, say?
What retard decided to put binary data in RSS? Or would allow execution of code linked to by an RSS feed? That is truly the most retarded thing Microsoft could have done with regards to security.
That would be Adam Curry and Dave Winer, an MTV DJ and a 'net hacker (the guy behind RSS1 and RSS2, IIRC)
Embedding RSS (and, more importantly, the RSS "enclosure" magic that enables podcasting) is right up there with "let's embed the browser right into the OS", but to be fair to MS it wasn't them who decided to put binary data into RSS. Though I bet they're kicking themself right now - "no patents for us!"
At Glasgow University, if you enter the examination hall with a personal army, you automatically get a pass, although don't take horses, otherwise you'll have to supply adequate water outside for them.
Hmm, interesting (I used to work in the European Programmes Office on Professors' Square). I suspect that you'd need to break Scots or UK Law to get that pass, however - there's just one private army permitted in the UK, the Atholl Highlanders. Pity; I quite fancy swapping my BA Pass (John Street Tech) for a BA Hons (Hillhead Poly)!
i turn that crap off in XP. why would i want my menus to fade in and out, on my super-fast computer... i want them to appear and disappear INSTANTLY.
<aol>Me too!</aol> My XP resembles W2K, and still runs like molasses. Despite that, I tend to disagree with you: firstly, it's about choice. No one's going to force you to use the eye candy. Secondly, some of it will enter "killer-app" territory: already I'm wailing on Windows because there's no way for me to monitor two consoles at once (small monitor syndrome - will code for TFTs) whereas Xorg's composite extension means I can have two inactive consoles on top of each other, and work out at a glance how much longer they've got to go. Sure there are other ways I could achieve this, but this is nice and straightforward, and annoys the Lunix-i5-t3h-su><0rs crowd.
You do know that "Drop the Dead Donkey" is fiction, right?
Go on, admit it, it was the word "sitcom" that gave it away, wasn't it?;-)
Seriously, though, that particular episode has long been held up as a particularly good satire on British censorship, and documentaries discussing it have suggested that it's a pretty accurate portrayal of events surrounding D-notice abuse at the time. Also it's the only example I thought we (collectively) had a chance of being familiar with, apart from the earlier Indymedia server-liberation.
Guilty as charged, m'lud! That particular episode has featured in a number of documentaries about censorship in the UK, and is regarded as a fairly accurate portrayal of D-notice abuse *at*the*time*. I have every confidence things have deteriorated since then.
the "D-notice" mechanism is an advisory system, based upon mutual agreement.
There was an episode of "Drop the Dead Donkey" (1990s sitcom about a news room) in which "Globelink News" had a state secret, and were going to go public with it. Their offices were raided by Special Branch, who duly served them with a D-notice and confiscated all the video tapes, etc. Globelink complained, and were told: "your lawyers will get in touch with our lawyers, and eventually we'll concede that, yeah, we shouldn't have taken these tapes. In the meantime we'll have copied them. Happy?"
Mutual agreement is all very well and good, until you deal with agencies that don't give a toss.
What features of GMail really rely upon Javascript?...I can't think of any reason why GMail should require Javascript.
(Disclaimer: I've looked at GMail, but haven't really used it... for reasons that will hopefully become clear)
From our perspective, you're almost certainly correct. Numerous apps have shown that it's possible to create a webmail app using basic HTML and server-side code. But GMail isn't exclusively for "us", it's also for "normal" users, who like/need nice, fast, slick functionality. In fact, I'd go further and say that GMail isn't really for people like me at all: I'm happy with the hand-crafted Fetchmail/Postfix/Courier-IMAP/Evolution system I normally use for email - hugely impractical for my grandmother, but exactly meets myneeds.
Additionally, and this me being slightly sneaky, GMail (by which I sneakily mean email-on-the-web, not email-from-Google) does degrade without JavaScript: it degrades to SquirrelMail or similar! (I apologies, that's a specious argument).
Back on-topic, for the kind of application Google were building with the GMail project, yes, they could have used my preferred approach of building a server-side app and then enhancing it with client-side code. But it's a beast of an application, GMail, and it's understandable, albeit annoying, that Google chose not to. There's no such excuse for smaller applications (eg. form validation) where some moronic developer decides everyone uses javascript and makes it so that (a) the form won't submit until it's been validated on the client-side, and (b) if you manage to be crafty and get the form to submit, the application falls over because there's no server-side validation.
People should stop developing with JavaScript. How many of us have it disabled in our browsers? It's nothing but trouble.
I'd change that to: "People should stop creating websites that require JavaScript unnecessarily." Unless your application really relies on JavaScript (eg. GMail, etc) your web-app should degrade gracefully on browsers that either don't support JavaScript or where the users have exercised their right to switch the bloody thing off.
There seems to be something about the New Zealand psyche that just doesn't understand the concept of separate routing and protection of cables.
Oh we understand all right, it's just that the concept of "She'll be right, mate" carries more weight. If it's not likely to fail, how are we going to exercise our God-given right to repair it using nothing but twine and 8-guage fencing wire?
If you go back long enough none of the lifeforms should be there. So how long should an animal me somewhere before you call it native?
It's not a case of "how long?", it's a case of "how did it get there?" and "does it pose an environmental problem". New Zealand had no land-mammals (well, alright, it had bats) until around 1000 years ago when humans first started arriving. This enabled a unique eco-system to develop, which has come under enormous pressure from introduced species. Some, though not all, of the introduced animals created problems: possums, for example, are a right nuisance. Last time I was home I was ammused to see possum fur socks, labelled with "World Wide Fund for Nature" labels, because the WWF believe possums are an environmental problem in NZ. Deer, rats, stray cats, stray dogs, even wild horses are regarded with more hostility than they might be in, say, the UK or the US.
Cows? Cows can stay. They don't run wild, chewing through fibre, unlike those fuc[NO CARRIER]
Ah get off your socialist soap box. I have many reasons for disliking the outsourcing jobs to another country. One big one is half the time they cant understand me and I sure as hell cant understand them. Also, like someone before mentioned its harder to prosecute when stuff like this does happen.
Well that's me outed as a commie.
My point was that we can't have the *advantages* of capitalism without accepting the *disadvantages*.
My *mistake* was thinking that one can use words like "capitalism" without being a fully paid-up member of the Workers' International to Rebuild the Soviet Union [Marxist/Leninist branch].
I scream racism when we discuss outsourcing because very few of the arguments against make much sense. The only coherent argument I've heard (and one that I agree with) is that it's a pain to deal with a different dialect of English - and that applies when phoning Essex from Edinburgh, or Aberdeen from Andover.
Let me guess; you got fed up of the sheep and endless rain in NZ and decided the west coast of Scotland was the best place to be?
Well... I considered the North (around Aberdeen), but it sounded a little too sunny;-) Seriously, I last visited NZ two years ago and was struck by the *lack* of rain (this was in late Autumn [April/May]) In comparison, a dry spell in Glasgow is when it stops raining long enough to bring the washing in to dry inside;-)
2. Microsoft fights SPAM. Slashdot equally outraged.
Conclusion: Microsoft is always evil no matter what they do.
Nope, Microsoft isn't fighting SPAM - if they were they'd be cooperating with the "rest of the Internet", instead of promoting their own proprietary scheme - SenderID - that's so un-open as to provoke this comment from the Apache Software Foundation:
We believe the current license is generally incompatible with open source,
contrary to the practice of open Internet standards, and specifically
incompatible with the Apache License 2.0. Therefore, we will not
implement or deploy Sender ID under the current license terms.
Various other disparate organisations have raised similar concerns, eventually resulting in the IETF ditching Microsoft's proposal.
Microsoft, at least in this case, weren't interested in a working solution; they were interested in a Microsoft-friendly, FLOSS-hostile solution. Which is daft, given the open-source nature of most Internet technologies.
What I think people are saying is that there seems to be a higher amount of information sales now that companies have outsourced.
Aye, I accept that, and I accept that we want/deserve some oversight to prevent problems like this occuring. (I've been annoyed by the DVLA - Britain's driver and vehicle registry - being outsourced before; couldn't reschedule my driving test due to language issues;-) I just resent the typical Slashdot rage against the tragedy of it all, when any other aspect of capitalism - and this is only a symptom of capitalism - goes largely unchallenged. We only seem to care when it affects us:-(
My thoughts exactly. And I'd suggest that the number of UK call-centre employees being paid "fairly" is debateable - high if you believe the employers, low if you believe everyone else. This kind of crap strikes me as racism: unscrupulous employees exist in every country of the world; bad wages exists in every country; opportunities to commit fraud exist everywhere. I really hope this "outsourcing means Johnny Furrinner is stealing my job" crap is going to end soon, so we can focus on (all) our working conditions.
(Aside: I'm an "economic migrant" working in the UK. Originally from NZ, I've lived in the UK since 1979 and in Glasgow since 1990. I've encountered far less racism/hostility than many Glaswegians, simply because I'm white and my accent sounds Scottish - and not the Asian-Scottish that makes many Scots a target for racist tossers).
I'm using the regulation "slashdot.org", but I just tried that URL - all I got was a listing, suggesting the existence of a cgi-bin - but I didn't have permission to enter. So... what is this slashdot.org.uk business all about? They're not going to monkey with my 'fox, like Google, are they?
Back on topic: the Gallaghers and Leprechauns in the same sentence? Sir, I salute you!
How is it possible for so many sites to be like this? I have designed a fair number of websites but I really don't know how I'd go about making it difficult for Firefox users
(Aside: web standards seems to be replacing SEO as the new web buzzword). We've got a client who runs his own web development house, focusing on standards. His methodolgy is: (1) we develop an accessible, validating site. (2) since he's the boss, and also an *expert*, he tweaks everything in Frontpage. (3) some sarcastic barstard actually validates the site, and discovers it no longer validates. They email our client. (4) our client contacts us to complain that the site "isn't valid HTML and CSS!" Et voila, instant pile of non-validating, Firefox-hating poo.
Slashdot Mirror
This just proves, once again... that the Amiga is the most secure platform out there.
Hah! Only until Contiki gets h4><0r3d!
;-)
/slinks off to h4><0r an 8-bit browser...
Also from Channel 4 was Spaced...
Can't argue with Spaced - superb comedy. Simon Pegg from Spaced, Shaun of the Dead was also in "Hippies", another very funny comedy (from the BBC? I can't remember - might be C4 also).
The League of Gentlemen, particularly the first series.
IMHO, much better than Little Britain. Not that LB's less than excellent, you understand, just the LoG is even better.
As to further suggestions, it's not BBC (it's Channel 4, which often gives the Beeb a run for its money) but "Shameless" is excellent. I doubt I could descibe it without offending entire demographics, so I'll leave it to you all to Google ;-)
Just like those uber-cool IIS operators make fun of those daft Apache admins, having to put up with all the attacks on the Web's Most Popular Web-Server?
Disclaimer: I *use* Windows. I also use Solaris, Linux and BSD. They're all good - and bad - in certain areas. Unfortunately Windows' area of "badness" is security.
At the risk of getting all serious, it wouldn't be the first terrorist attack orchestrated by France against an allied country... Though I seriously doubt this outrage was caused by French commandos.
Dammit, sir, you provided an informative and hopeful answer, and then had to go and ruin it by reminding me of humanity's greed. Thank you very much.
;-)
Seriously, the "Treaty on Principles Governing..." was exactly what I was looking for.
I'd say it's time for IPX to head out and start mining that core.
An offtopic mod, and a comment about planetary rape - I guess you fell for the common mistake of assuming geeks are familiar with SciFi ;-) "What is this Babylon 5 of which you speak?"
Back on-topic, what is the deal with extra-planetary mining? Legally? Is it just a matter of time, or are other planets protected like Antartica, say?
Dude, I am so not having sex with you.
What retard decided to put binary data in RSS? Or would allow execution of code linked to by an RSS feed? That is truly the most retarded thing Microsoft could have done with regards to security.
That would be Adam Curry and Dave Winer, an MTV DJ and a 'net hacker (the guy behind RSS1 and RSS2, IIRC)
Embedding RSS (and, more importantly, the RSS "enclosure" magic that enables podcasting) is right up there with "let's embed the browser right into the OS", but to be fair to MS it wasn't them who decided to put binary data into RSS. Though I bet they're kicking themself right now - "no patents for us!"
At Glasgow University, if you enter the examination hall with a personal army, you automatically get a pass, although don't take horses, otherwise you'll have to supply adequate water outside for them.
Hmm, interesting (I used to work in the European Programmes Office on Professors' Square). I suspect that you'd need to break Scots or UK Law to get that pass, however - there's just one private army permitted in the UK, the Atholl Highlanders. Pity; I quite fancy swapping my BA Pass (John Street Tech) for a BA Hons (Hillhead Poly)!
i turn that crap off in XP. why would i want my menus to fade in and out, on my super-fast computer... i want them to appear and disappear INSTANTLY.
<aol>Me too!</aol> My XP resembles W2K, and still runs like molasses. Despite that, I tend to disagree with you: firstly, it's about choice. No one's going to force you to use the eye candy. Secondly, some of it will enter "killer-app" territory: already I'm wailing on Windows because there's no way for me to monitor two consoles at once (small monitor syndrome - will code for TFTs) whereas Xorg's composite extension means I can have two inactive consoles on top of each other, and work out at a glance how much longer they've got to go. Sure there are other ways I could achieve this, but this is nice and straightforward, and annoys the Lunix-i5-t3h-su><0rs crowd.
You do know that "Drop the Dead Donkey" is fiction, right?
Go on, admit it, it was the word "sitcom" that gave it away, wasn't it? ;-)
Seriously, though, that particular episode has long been held up as a particularly good satire on British censorship, and documentaries discussing it have suggested that it's a pretty accurate portrayal of events surrounding D-notice abuse at the time. Also it's the only example I thought we (collectively) had a chance of being familiar with, apart from the earlier Indymedia server-liberation.
Erm..you're really citing a sitcom as evidence?
Guilty as charged, m'lud! That particular episode has featured in a number of documentaries about censorship in the UK, and is regarded as a fairly accurate portrayal of D-notice abuse *at*the*time*. I have every confidence things have deteriorated since then.
the "D-notice" mechanism is an advisory system, based upon mutual agreement.
There was an episode of "Drop the Dead Donkey" (1990s sitcom about a news room) in which "Globelink News" had a state secret, and were going to go public with it. Their offices were raided by Special Branch, who duly served them with a D-notice and confiscated all the video tapes, etc. Globelink complained, and were told: "your lawyers will get in touch with our lawyers, and eventually we'll concede that, yeah, we shouldn't have taken these tapes. In the meantime we'll have copied them. Happy?"
Mutual agreement is all very well and good, until you deal with agencies that don't give a toss.
What features of GMail really rely upon Javascript?...I can't think of any reason why GMail should require Javascript.
(Disclaimer: I've looked at GMail, but haven't really used it... for reasons that will hopefully become clear)
From our perspective, you're almost certainly correct. Numerous apps have shown that it's possible to create a webmail app using basic HTML and server-side code. But GMail isn't exclusively for "us", it's also for "normal" users, who like/need nice, fast, slick functionality. In fact, I'd go further and say that GMail isn't really for people like me at all: I'm happy with the hand-crafted Fetchmail/Postfix/Courier-IMAP/Evolution system I normally use for email - hugely impractical for my grandmother, but exactly meets myneeds.
Additionally, and this me being slightly sneaky, GMail (by which I sneakily mean email-on-the-web, not email-from-Google) does degrade without JavaScript: it degrades to SquirrelMail or similar! (I apologies, that's a specious argument).
Back on-topic, for the kind of application Google were building with the GMail project, yes, they could have used my preferred approach of building a server-side app and then enhancing it with client-side code. But it's a beast of an application, GMail, and it's understandable, albeit annoying, that Google chose not to. There's no such excuse for smaller applications (eg. form validation) where some moronic developer decides everyone uses javascript and makes it so that (a) the form won't submit until it's been validated on the client-side, and (b) if you manage to be crafty and get the form to submit, the application falls over because there's no server-side validation.
People should stop developing with JavaScript. How many of us have it disabled in our browsers? It's nothing but trouble.
I'd change that to: "People should stop creating websites that require JavaScript unnecessarily." Unless your application really relies on JavaScript (eg. GMail, etc) your web-app should degrade gracefully on browsers that either don't support JavaScript or where the users have exercised their right to switch the bloody thing off.
There seems to be something about the New Zealand psyche that just doesn't understand the concept of separate routing and protection of cables.
Oh we understand all right, it's just that the concept of "She'll be right, mate" carries more weight. If it's not likely to fail, how are we going to exercise our God-given right to repair it using nothing but twine and 8-guage fencing wire?
If you go back long enough none of the lifeforms should be there. So how long should an animal me somewhere before you call it native?
It's not a case of "how long?", it's a case of "how did it get there?" and "does it pose an environmental problem". New Zealand had no land-mammals (well, alright, it had bats) until around 1000 years ago when humans first started arriving. This enabled a unique eco-system to develop, which has come under enormous pressure from introduced species. Some, though not all, of the introduced animals created problems: possums, for example, are a right nuisance. Last time I was home I was ammused to see possum fur socks, labelled with "World Wide Fund for Nature" labels, because the WWF believe possums are an environmental problem in NZ. Deer, rats, stray cats, stray dogs, even wild horses are regarded with more hostility than they might be in, say, the UK or the US.
Cows? Cows can stay. They don't run wild, chewing through fibre, unlike those fuc[NO CARRIER]
Ah get off your socialist soap box. I have many reasons for disliking the outsourcing jobs to another country. One big one is half the time they cant understand me and I sure as hell cant understand them. Also, like someone before mentioned its harder to prosecute when stuff like this does happen.
Well that's me outed as a commie.
My point was that we can't have the *advantages* of capitalism without accepting the *disadvantages*.
My *mistake* was thinking that one can use words like "capitalism" without being a fully paid-up member of the Workers' International to Rebuild the Soviet Union [Marxist/Leninist branch].
I scream racism when we discuss outsourcing because very few of the arguments against make much sense. The only coherent argument I've heard (and one that I agree with) is that it's a pain to deal with a different dialect of English - and that applies when phoning Essex from Edinburgh, or Aberdeen from Andover.
Let me guess; you got fed up of the sheep and endless rain in NZ and decided the west coast of Scotland was the best place to be?
Well... I considered the North (around Aberdeen), but it sounded a little too sunny ;-) Seriously, I last visited NZ two years ago and was struck by the *lack* of rain (this was in late Autumn [April/May]) In comparison, a dry spell in Glasgow is when it stops raining long enough to bring the washing in to dry inside ;-)
2. Microsoft fights SPAM. Slashdot equally outraged.
Conclusion: Microsoft is always evil no matter what they do.
Nope, Microsoft isn't fighting SPAM - if they were they'd be cooperating with the "rest of the Internet", instead of promoting their own proprietary scheme - SenderID - that's so un-open as to provoke this comment from the Apache Software Foundation:
Various other disparate organisations have raised similar concerns, eventually resulting in the IETF ditching Microsoft's proposal.
Microsoft, at least in this case, weren't interested in a working solution; they were interested in a Microsoft-friendly, FLOSS-hostile solution. Which is daft, given the open-source nature of most Internet technologies.
What I think people are saying is that there seems to be a higher amount of information sales now that companies have outsourced.
Aye, I accept that, and I accept that we want/deserve some oversight to prevent problems like this occuring. (I've been annoyed by the DVLA - Britain's driver and vehicle registry - being outsourced before; couldn't reschedule my driving test due to language issues ;-) I just resent the typical Slashdot rage against the tragedy of it all, when any other aspect of capitalism - and this is only a symptom of capitalism - goes largely unchallenged. We only seem to care when it affects us :-(
Like this could never happen in the US or the UK
My thoughts exactly. And I'd suggest that the number of UK call-centre employees being paid "fairly" is debateable - high if you believe the employers, low if you believe everyone else. This kind of crap strikes me as racism: unscrupulous employees exist in every country of the world; bad wages exists in every country; opportunities to commit fraud exist everywhere. I really hope this "outsourcing means Johnny Furrinner is stealing my job" crap is going to end soon, so we can focus on (all) our working conditions.
(Aside: I'm an "economic migrant" working in the UK. Originally from NZ, I've lived in the UK since 1979 and in Glasgow since 1990. I've encountered far less racism/hostility than many Glaswegians, simply because I'm white and my accent sounds Scottish - and not the Asian-Scottish that makes many Scots a target for racist tossers).
www.slashdot.org.uk
I'm using the regulation "slashdot.org", but I just tried that URL - all I got was a listing, suggesting the existence of a cgi-bin - but I didn't have permission to enter. So... what is this slashdot.org.uk business all about? They're not going to monkey with my 'fox, like Google, are they?
Back on topic: the Gallaghers and Leprechauns in the same sentence? Sir, I salute you!
How is it possible for so many sites to be like this? I have designed a fair number of websites but I really don't know how I'd go about making it difficult for Firefox users
(Aside: web standards seems to be replacing SEO as the new web buzzword). We've got a client who runs his own web development house, focusing on standards. His methodolgy is: (1) we develop an accessible, validating site. (2) since he's the boss, and also an *expert*, he tweaks everything in Frontpage. (3) some sarcastic barstard actually validates the site, and discovers it no longer validates. They email our client. (4) our client contacts us to complain that the site "isn't valid HTML and CSS!" Et voila, instant pile of non-validating, Firefox-hating poo.
It'd be funny if it wasn't so sad.