Messages

:: I don't understand the negativity being levelled at Harry Kipling

Likewise. Just about the only thing that annoyed me about it was that it's not back next week. Sure, it's a little derivative, but so have plenty of decent thrills in the past, so I'm very prepared to give this one a shot.

The only other niggle was the colouring, which was pretty murky. I'd love to see someone with much cleaner colouring/inking get their hands on the work (or for Boo to perhaps simplify it and add a little more saturation).

Elsewhere, it was an enjoyable prog, overall: a really nice one-off Dredd, a decent Ten-Seconders episode, and some throwaway shooty action from the ABC Warriors (which, it has to be said, very much read like a Pixar version of a comic).

DIdn't Tharg's intro suggest that Synnamon was a reboot? If so, perhaps it's a last throw of the dice, to see if the character could work.

Frankly, I didn't find it all that bad (although I still wonder why a new character was needed when Rose O'Rion is still in the vaults), just somewhat "meh". I wouldn't start gnashing if it returned, but I'm also not excited about the prospect either.

First, this isn't a virus -- it's a piece of malware. Secondly, it doesn't exploit any weakness in the OS -- it's a piece of so-called "social engineering" (in other words, it requires the user to perform actions in order for the "virus" to work -- something no OS can safeguard against). Thirdly, this isn't actually the first case of this on OS X anyway.

Ultimately, I don't think it makes any odds. If another 100,000 cases show up in the next month, fair enough, but OS X as it stands is still significantly safer than Windows out of the box, and even after this attempt at being a shit by someone.

Get a bigger house?

Man, that's a GREAT cover - exactly what the cover  to 2000AD should look like (unlike the turgid mess of last week's edition). I'm also happy to see that the 2000 AD logo hasn't been covered up. Yay!

:: an explosion from my gut

So, it's *shit*, then.

Yeah, some eBay sellers are utter morons. I once won a magazine on eBay, which I needed to complete a collection of something I wanted to sell (something like Toxic). The mag cost a quid, and shipping was about the same. I told the person to clearly mark it as a gift, otherwise I'd get stung for import taxes (I was living in Iceland at the time, and didn't feel very guilty about depriving its postal service of a quid or so to import a 15-year-old magazine that had never been sold in that country).

Sure enough, idiot-face marks it up as 'merchandise' with a value of ?10. This, he explained when I sent him a furious email, was because it would have meant the package would have been worth more had it been lost. The fact that he'd not insured the sodding thing didn't dawn on him, apparently. The only thing his actions did was ensure that it cost me a whopping eight quid or so to import a magazine that was worth a fraction of that. Gnh!

:: Yeah, exchange rates are what I was talking about when
:: I said "UK import shipping fees"

Does the US have actual import fees, though? When I was living in Iceland, EVERY commercial item was taxable, so a five quid DVD (including postage) would actually end up costing you about ?10.35 once the fees were taken into account (24.5 per cent VAT, plus 10 per cent "you got it from overseas, you bastard" charge, but a five quid handling fee). In the UK, you have this to a lesser degree?VAT on items and postage are chargeable on any commercial item that costs ?18 or over and any gift that's worth ?36 or over.

As for eBay fees, I've found people in the US to be terribly greedy, too, largely due to their insistence on using Fed-Ex rather than standard postal services. It's not unheard of for US sellers to charge $12 to ship a CD to the UK, for example.

The main "rip off" charge from my point of view, when sending stuff overseas, is the signed-for rate, which jumps from 66p inside the UK to a wallet-busting ?3.30 overseas. Unsurprisingly, most people aren't willing to pay it, but then if the package gets lost, it suddenly becomes their problem, not mine.

No, you're thinking of the Inspiral Carpets, there.

Si?Godaddy.com is good AND cheap for all of this stuff. More importantly, it has as decent bunch of people who'll help answer this sort of thing. Drop them a line with your requirements and they'll get back with options.

Essentially, though, here's what happens with any provider:

1. You rent a domain for a fixed period of time (usually two years). That's yours for that time, and you can choose to renew it later. Prices vary wildly for the exact same thing. Contracts also vary: before you register your domain with a company, find out whether its policy enables you to move said domain later if the company turns out to be run by muppets. (GoDaddy, for instance, places no restrictions on this.)

2. Get some webspace. Point your domain at it. You then have a website!

3. Get a POP box. Put half a dozen setting into your email client, and you have incoming email. These settings will remain as long as you own the domain and have the same host for it.

4. Set your outgoing details. These will be the SMTP outgoing server of your ISP, and will change if you change your ISP.

Sometimes, 1?3 will be combined into packages (domain+web space+"x" POP boxes), depending on the company. This is NOT automatic.

Anyone who accuses someone of not being a "proper" designer because they don't use a Mac is clearly an idiot. It'd be interesting to know how many of said people actually understand the basics of design (grids, typography, etc) outside of the computer?I bet a fair few don't.

As for the bile from Mac users in general, I find the exact same thing happens in reverse?plenty of PC users do the "Macs are shit" thing, the difference being that the majority of them have never used a Mac. For me, I dislike Windows?I think it's clunky, not very secure, and a pain to work with. Some Windows-based apps are, however, really good. The Windows version of Dreamweaver, for instance, far outshines the shoddy Mac version. The Mac is less clunky, more secure, and less of a pain to work with, although Finder is almost as bad as Windows Explorer...

Not really. I have both a Mac and a PC here, and I've been using both platforms for over a decade. Macs are a long, long way from being perfect, but they're better than PCs for most tasks, seeing as PCs are a long, long, long, long, long, long, long way from being perfect. The lesser of two evils and all that.

That's rather like saying that when your Porshe breaks down, you should scrap it and buy a Ford Focus.

Stick a message on the forum at www.macformat.co.uk and/or www.macassist.co.uk ? they're both good forums for Mac stuff.

What type of Mac is it? What's plugged in to it? Will it start up from CD if you insert the CD (or DVD, depending on what OS disk she has) and then hold "C" during the entire start-up process? If you can do the latter, access Disk Utility on the disk and then choose both Repair Disk and Repair Permissions (in the "First Aid" tab). If errors are found and fixed, repeat the tasks until the disk is clear of errors.

As for the whole OS X not hanging thing, it sort of depends which version she had. OS X 10.0 was a heap of shit. OS X 10.1 was bearable. OS X 10.2 was usable. 10.3 and 10.4 have, on the whole, been excellent and very stable. (I only tend to have system crashes when testing unstable alpha software for review, and even that's very, very rare.)

No, iPods can't play .wmv video files, or did you mean .wma files? Mind you, it can't play those, either, in the same way that most competing players can't play .mp4 files. I find the whole "overpriced" argument very odd regarding iPods, because unlike a lot of Apple kit, they're actually pretty good value for money, and they're extremely usable.