How to kill IE6

March 9th, 2011 § 7 comments § permalink

Internet Explorer 6 is a piece of shit for a variety of reasons that, but mainly because it is dangerously flawed.

But now, at last, it is being killed off completely.

What I don’t understand, not being much of a techie, is what all the fuss about it being killed of is for. Microsoft even has a site dedicated to it with how to help – educate, encourage, join the cause and other stuff.

Microsoft could kill IE6 in one go. No fuss. No bother.

All Microsoft have to do is issue one last update. Make it a security update that when installed installs IE8 or whatever the latest version is that MS has cobbled together.

The majority of savvy non-commercial users don’t use IE anyway, the mojority of non-commercial users of Windows have the auto-updates set so it will do it itself when the user clicks the prompt when asked and if a security update is issued rather than just ‘an update’ any one looking after a commercial IT system would have to be a muppet not to update. Job done.

Those people left that don’t want to upgrade from IE6, well, fuck em.

As I say, I’m no whizz when it comes to these things so it may be a little more involved than that, but still, the premise remains unchanged. Doesn’t it?

thinks on links

January 26th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink

This is how I should blog…

You all know how to use the internet. I will always attribute original content, but I will not spend my precious time googling every potential reader query. I’m the writer, you’re the reader. If you here on Rational Geekery, I assume a level of understanding of the subjects I write about (or at least, you have the competence to use a search engine).

Maybe then I would blog more rather than fucking about trying to foolproof my posts (I get usually get so far then get bored/distracted/confused/lose the will to live and give up).

Anonymous stop hitting the wrong target in their support of Wikileaks

December 10th, 2010 § 1 comment § permalink

The ‘hacktivist’ group Anonymous have had a change of tactic, so we’re led to believe if this image that’s been popping up about the internet is anything to go by (lick to enlarge):

Anonymous take a different tact. Operation: Leakspin is about disemmination of information rather than illegal wars of revenge.

This change of tact away from trying to bring The Enemies of Wikileaks to their knees to distributing the information Wikileaks is releasing is A Good Thing.

Anonymous have been attacking Amazon, Visa, Mastercard and PayPal for supposedly bowing to pressure from the US government and withdrawing their services. The reasoning behind the attacks, using an opt-in botnet, is…

We are trying to keep the internet open and free but, in recent years, governments have been trying to limit the freedom we have on the internet

This is all well and good, but if it’s to keep the internet open and free like the good old days then they were going for the wrong target.

The whole point of an open and free internet is letting people/companies/entities interact with who ever they want. No censure and no coersion or being bullied into dealing with anyone you don’t want to.

Not only are the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks illegal but are they are completely at odds with the ‘open and free internet’ethos.

Of course, some companies need to grow a backbone and not cave in to government pressures when told to stop business with any particular organisation with out a court order. It’d probably be better for their reputation to be seen to be supporting something that is generally seen as A Good Thing rather than withdrawing services at the first whiff of alledged pressure from government under the guise of broken terms and conditions, especially when those terms and conditions must have been being broken for sometime.

But if those companies are being leaned on then they are victims just as much as Wikileaks are.

The people Anonymous should be attacking are the people leaning on companies to stop a lawful activity. With this new direction, it looks like they are doing just that, legally.

On saying stuff on the internet

November 12th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

This is a bloody travesty.

The man convicted of “menace” for threatening to blow up an airport in a Twitter joke has lost his appeal.

Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant whose online courtship with another user of the microblogging site led to the “foolish prank”, had hoped that a crown court would dismiss his conviction and £1,000 fine without a full hearing.

But Judge Jacqueline Davies instead handed down a devastating finding at Doncaster which dismissed Chambers’s appeal on every count. After reading out his comment from the site – “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” – she found that it contained menace and Chambers must have known that it might be taken seriously.

I’m not sure what I can add that hasn’t been said elsewhere. So I say anymore except to point you to Scepticisle and the Heresiarch.

Oh, and this business with Gareth F Compton. Yeah, I said I’d be bloody upset if someone ask for me to stoned to death, but would I call the cops? If it was on Twitter and a one off, a opposed to series of comments like that, then no. OK, Gareth maybe a dick and a hypocrit, but still, just like Paul Chambers, he doesn’t deserve more than a ticking off.

A Daily Mail tweet that caught my eye..

September 10th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

Do you notice anything a little out of place in the following Twitter timeline?

A timeline full of links to the Daily Mail itself, since it started on Twitter and then, *pop*, a tweet to somewhere else.

Ooh, curious, I thought. It didn’t sit right. News outlets, the BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, the Sun etc, all use twitter as a broadcast medium, as variation on the RSS ‘thingy’. They are simply there to give a link to a news item. They don’t retweet, they don’t #ff and they don’t direct you to anywhere except their news pages.

There are exceptions to this, for example Guardians Comment is Free Twitterfeed has an actual person manning it that replies to you and everything, but that isn’t the main feed for it’s news items. The feed for the news item is always just a broadcast.

So when a link to somewhere not the Daily Mail appeared it made me think wonder what’s going on. Had the Mails’ feed been hacked cracked compromised? Has a Mail employee got his own site to promote and thought he’d get a few hits from the Mails followers?

Nothing quite so exciting, I’m afraid.

thisismoney.co.uk is the website for the Mails’ City & Finance section of the paper and they’re running a competition, obviously, to win an iPad.

To enter you’ve got to fill in a load of details about money stuff and search for an independent financial advisor. Once you’ve found the advisor nearest to you, you can enter the competition. Presumably you’ll also get a call from said advisor in the very near future as well (as the whole thing is in the ‘advertising-feature’ section of the site, as indicated by the URL).

So, it may be nothing dodgy going on but what does it say about the Mail when the only thing it can tweet about that isn’t sending you to it’s main website is not how to reduce your mortgage or how to play the stock market but a competition.

I hope whichever Mail reader wins the iPad isn’t stupid enough to use it to preen themselves on cancer-giving Facebook.

Wanted: ‘Gifted’ constituency secretary

September 2nd, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

I know I shouldn’t blog anything anything to do with work, and I normally don’t, but this appeared in my rss this morning (click to enlarge)…

Naturally I clicked the links to see the full advert, and got this…

I just want to get home on to an unfiltered computer and see what exactly being a parliamentary secretary involves.

legislation.gov.uk

July 29th, 2010 § 2 comments § permalink

Just for my records, this post. A new innersting site from the government.

legislation.gov.uk

What it’s about…

Legislation.gov.uk carries most (but not all) types of legislation and their accompanying explanatory documents. For a full list of legislation types held on legisliation.gov.uk see Browse Legislation. For further details of how complete our data set is for each type, click on a legislation type from the Browse Legislation page and see the colour coded bar for each year.

  • All legislation from 1988 – present day is available on this site (see ‘What legislation is missing’ for details of any known legislation we do not carry)
  • There are no secondary legislation items (e.g Statutory Instruments) available before 1988 as they are not available in a web-publishable format.
  • Most pre-1988 primary legislation is available on this site. In some cases we only have the original published (as enacted) version and no revised version. This occurs if the legislation was wholly repealed before 1991 and therefore was not included in the revised data set when it was extracted from Statutes in Force. In other cases we may only have a revised version if the original (as enacted) version is not available in a web-publishable format.

Search Lib-Dem: Get…

April 14th, 2010 § 3 comments § permalink

After searching for Labours’ Manifesto and getting a load of Conservative results, I thought I’d do the Liberal Democrats today (I did do the Torys’ yesterday but didn’t get chance to post it).

I know the Libdems get a rough time of it sometimes, getting overlooked and stuff, but I never expected Google to be so harsh…

Search Labour: Get Conservative

April 12th, 2010 § 3 comments § permalink

I just had a look for Labours’ manifesto. As I typed Google suggested ‘Labour manifesto 2010’ so I went with that. A very poor show from Labour, I must say (click to enlarge) …

Nothing from Labour, who came in at seventh and a bit of a WIN for the Conservatives coming in with the front page of conservatives.com fourth and a link to the Telegraphs’ article about the Conservative manifesto in third place.

A badly written braindump on brainwashed cheerleaders

April 9th, 2010 § 3 comments § permalink

Day two of the election campaign. Or is it three? It’s still early days, anyway and what’s already getting right on my nerves is the bloody party cheerleaders.

Are they brainwashed or something? They’ve never got a bad thing to say about their party of choice. Anything that one of their heroes does it brilliant or put the opposition in their place.

I realise that it’s part of politics, especially on Twitter, but it makes you look an arse. It really does. If you’re a member of a party sure, sing the praises of that party but don’t forget it’s faults or it’s history.

Labour might have done some good in the thirteen years it’s been in power, gay rights, minimum wage and erm, some other stuff. Yeah, well done. Have a big pat on the back. Then you get some twat on Twitter that comes out with the equivalent of ‘Yay! Labour’s the best party in the world!’ or some such tripe and I’ve gotta wonder what is going through that persons head. Because Labour/Gordon Brown/Harriet Harmann and the gang not only have done some good but they’ve also done some horrendous stuff too which seems to have slipped the brainwashees memory.

With the ‘so-and-so stuck it to them’ type of comment, is usually just rubbish. There are exceptions, but the cheerleader pounces on any minor thing and it brings the whole show down to the level of nit-picking and sniping. It’s not big, it’s not funny and it’s not clever. As I said earlier, it makes you look an arse.

Then there’s the ‘witty’, moral-booster. Don’t do it. Really, just don’t. The cheerleader will usually be over stretching themselves with the effort of a witty moral-booster. One I saw went along the lines of…

In a nuclear winter even cockroaches won’t survive but Gordon Brown will carry on because it’s the right thing to do!

I’ve paraphrased a little there, but there was the post nuclear war/nuclear winter scenario and cockroaches, which ok, given a bit of artistic licence, is ignorable easily enough. The part in bold is exactly what was tweeted. It doesn’t even make sense. Gordon will carry on not because he will be elected, not because he’s hard as nails but because it’s the right thing to do. WT & F? I realise it was Twitter, I realise it’s just supposed to be a bit of rabble rousing, but still. Because it’s the right thing to do? This particular outburst of joy and enthusiasm was a month or two ago, not even during this period of official electioneering.

If you want to do your party a favour, don’t be a twat and go overboard with the praise when something goes right, or someone says an amusing throw away gag or what ever. Be realistic with the praise. It doesn’t do anyone any favours. Use your brain instead and think for yourself.

Note: I may have mentioned Labour, but that’s because I come across their cheerleaders the most. Every party has them and I’m quite sick of them already. So nur.

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