Again, I am mildly amused by the irony I see in my stat counter on the WordPress Dashboard: some nice person has linked to me on RationalWiki (a sort of anti-Conservapedia) concerning my article about the aforementioned Conservapedia earlier today. Thank you very much to those hypocrites at Conservapedia for indirectly racking up a healthy sum of sessions to this website in merely a few minutes. And to ‘Sid’ who posted the link at 14:38 EST today: I’d like to write you a cheque… :lol:
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Thanks Netscape, and sod off
Netscape helped the World Wide Web to become prominent. In the 1990s. And, at last, this awful anarchorism is to cease development. What I find most amusing is that they claim that it is losing users to Internet Explorer - a browser whose market share is falling as Firefox (which sprouted from a port of Netscape’s rendering engine) and Safari (which has a completely new codebase) join it in the pool of browsers on the Internet.
But in its latter years, the loss of Netscape became something that we would not mourn - in an attempt to hold on to its users, it gained a ‘cool’ (bloated) new user interface, and could use either the Gecko (Firefox) rendering engine or the Internet Explorer engine.
Even worse, it gained stupid, automatic tools to search through Netscape’s portal, Netscape’s mail service, and just about every service they offered. They tried to control your Web experience in a similar way AOL does: yet, of course, people switched to better browsers. Which they could. Unlike with AOL.
All I can really say is ‘good riddance’.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
AQA 63336 - ANY question answered?
I came across AQA 63336 a few days ago, a service which allows you to obtain the answer to almost any question with £1 and a phone capable of sending SMS messages.
Intrigued by the service, I decided to test it. I had originally been led to the site thanks to Simon Howard mentioning on his site that he was a part-time researcher for them. There is an opportunity to ask your first question free on the site - which I did. Here follows the text of my question.
Why?
I was impressed to receive a response within a few minutes. It said that the only logical answer was “why not?” (I can’t provide the original text since I’ve since changed mobile phones).
So far, I’m impressed. But that’s a bit obvious. Time for something a little more challenging, I think.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Schrödinger’s Dishes
Today’s thought for the day: if Finish’s new range of dishwasher tablets is called Quantum Turbo, then after one hour in the dishwasher are the dishes in the state of both clean and dry until the outcome is decided by opening the door?
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Ex-Prime Ministers Who Look Suspiciously Like Cult Television Hosts #364
And I was wondering why I’d never seen them in the same room at the same time…
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Everybody hates Vista
Haha! You go girl. But what I’m infuriated by is that Ballamer simply avoided the question, and didn’t admit that M$ had ballsed up with Vista.
Friday, September 28, 2007
The OS That Won’t Die
After bowing to pressure from consumer demand and the EU, Microsoft has agreed to extend the lifecycle of Windows XP.
Is this really any surprise? Windows XP is more stable, more compatible, less resource-hungry, more secure, and generally a better OS (although of course it doesn’t have a patch on Linux or OS X).
Computer users are finally seeing the light in the fact that Vista is a completely botched operating system compared to the Longhorn vision that appeared… well… it seems like aeons ago now. And all we have now is a slow, clunky, and generally dreadful OS.
Is this all Microsoft could come up with? It’s no wonder people are staying with XP.
Another point that irks me about Vista is that, instead of getting on with it, Microsoft seemed to try to juggle that with trying to introduce tit-for-tat competition for every product Apple and Google pumped out, desperate to remain the market leader.
The Zune. Windows Live Search. Windows Desktop Search. Windows Live Maps. Windows Onecare. Internet Explorer 7.
Even Vista’s start button looks suspiciously like it was pinched from Aqua, OS X’s interface.
It’s even released a few (practically useless) open-source tools. Why are they useless, you may ask? Not just because of rubbish, clunky functionality, but because of the fact that they need Microsoft’s proprietary code to run!
The only decent software Microsoft has turned out lately is Office 2007, and that works magnificently on XP. So there. All the more reason to dump Vista into its own recycle bin.
(Incidentally, I hear that Vista DVDs make a great light show when microwaved.)
