"Developing sites that adhere to standards, as opposed to
Internet Explorer, would be a boon for smaller browser
makers, but it could create enormous complications for Web
developers."
http://www.msnbc.com/news/729918.asp
- standards: making life so *much* harder for Web designers, and
a living doddle for that local browser maker
>> HARD NEWS <<
i was sure that cave was cloosed
Good Friday: the only festival to satisfy MiniNTK's
elaborate requirements: a national holiday, a pagan
celebration, a pseudo-random placement, and a mystic five in
the fifth column of crontab(5). So while we drum ourselves
into a frenzy and gorge on the giant Wicker Creme Egg we
made (from the yummy wood of the Edward Woodward, no less),
we'll leave you, as tradition demands, with just the broken
crumbs of a newsletter, and one topical death/rebirth
analogy. In reverse order: the rebirth. Just who is seeking
to be reborn with her name changed to "Fuck" in order to
challenge the ownership of fuck.me.uk and therefore the
namespace pollution of the whole (fucking) .me.uk
hierarchy? Well, it's "Ms Fuck", obviously - but hats off to
that lady on the Nominet mailing lists if she follows through
with the plan. Somebody's got to protest against these
already-doomed PLDs!
http://www.abuse-of.me.uk/
- nothing there yet, but we'll see
And death? Well, it's probably wishful thinking, but you
know, there *are* times when we regret asking for those
unusually literal BBC illustrations. Still, rather than die
off, the torrent of submissions reached a new high when the
story "Net filters fail the children" was accompanied by
photos of a close-up cheese grater and a chicken. But just
to prove we're not on some sort of vendetta, we'd also like
to highlight a few other equally pioneering publications for
your puzzled appreciation. DAVID BURROWS nominated the harrowing
"What the?" surrealism of "How about now?" in The Economist:
http://economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=949071 ,
numerous readers pointed to Salon's mock-amateur collages,
such as "Airline steward visits minature egg yolk refinery":
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/10/29/central_asian_oil/ ,
but this month's winner, nominated by SEB BACON, has to be
Hans Reiser's introduction to ReiserFS v.4, which looks pretty
much like any overview of a Linux high performance journaling
filesystem - if it had been designed by "The Lawnmower Man":
http://www.namesys.com/v4/v4.html .
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1894000/1894561.stm
- so they didn't have any real breasts on file?
>> EVENT QUEUE <<
goto's considered non-harmful
Ah, we remember the fanzine HOAX, packed with stories like
pranksters printing up official-looking leaflets that appeared
to come from the local supermarket, saying "Fill Up A Trolley
And Get All Your Groceries Free!", and then posting them
through thousands of people's doors. There's another chance to
relive the heyday of public gullibility at STRANGE ATTRACTOR:
HOAX (7.30pm, Tue 2002-04-02, The Horse Hospital, London WC1,
UKP6), who'll be showing famed 1970s mockumentary "Alternative
3" - a conspiracy to transport the rich and powerful to secret
slave-built colonies on the moon. Of course, with its clumsy
jargon of "hot jobs" and "batch consignments", the film was
swiftly discredited: the population being systematically
exploited by a tiny elite of industrialists and politicians,
troublemakers being mysteriously "disappeared", a world on the
brink of environmental collapse - what kind of crank is going
to believe that?
http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk/talks.html
- vs http://www.debunker.com/texts/alternative3.html
http://www.cric.ac.uk/cric/gamerz/
- for real, apparently (ditto latest issue of Edge?)
>> TRACKING <<
sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering
Like Charlie Brown and Lucy, we meet up with MOZILLA every
year around now, and attempt to test its character by
kicking its balls. Last year, we admitted that while time
had not mellowed it, it *had* made it appreciably less
sucky. This year - well, the tree (and the barn door) is
bolted shut for 1.0, and soon the great unwashed will see
what four years in the open source wilderness can do to a
codebase. If you haven't downloaded Mozilla in a while, do
so now before Netscape 6.X ruins the cool-facto. If you
don't care about Mozilla, download Galeon (for GTK et Unix)
or K-Meleon (for Windows), which now match other browsers
for features and speed, we think. Our only fear now is that
as soon as v1.0 gets out, AOL will thoughtlessly decimate
the Netscape-funded Moz staff, in the mistaken belief that
they'll go on to implement the cool 1.1 stuff - PGP, dynamic
fonts, calendar, and main branch support for the Pornzilla
"enhancements" - on welfare. Only if you give them a better
launch party this time, you Virginian dweebs!
http://galeon.sourceforge.net/
- still looking good
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/
- even if we still like dillo
http://mywebpage.netscape.com/aufbau01/features.html
- pornzilla: lot of promises, but looks much older than it made out
>> GEEK MEDIA <<
get out less
TV>> "Lord Of The Rings" forms another easy target for the
dressing-up box "parodies" of FRENCH AND SAUNDERS EASTER
SPECIAL (9.30pm, Fri, BBC1)... a great weekend for fans of
mediocre movies kicks off when swearing Woody Allen fest
MIGHTY APHRODITE (12.10am, Fri, BBC2) is inexplicably
scheduled after Demi Moore dud THE SCARLET LETTER (10pm, Fri,
BBC2)... then Sat sees a 3-way non-collision between made-for-
TV Tony Parsons adaptation MAN AND BOY (9pm, Sat, BBC1),
Robbie-Williams-approved pseudo-self-loathing biopic NOBODY
SOMEDAY (9pm, Sat, C4), and BBC2 still flogging its latest
critically acclaimed ratings disappointment with three back-
to-back episodes of 24 (9pm, Sat, BBC2)... things improve
slightly on Sun - and we don't mean the Shatner-directed STAR
TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER (4.05pm, Sun, BBC2) - with DARIA
THE MOVIE: IS IT FALL YET? (12.45pm, Sun, C5), Patrick Stewart
Holodeck malfunction MOBY DICK (4.50pm, Sun, C5), and a
documentary face-off between the self-explanatory BLAST OFF:
DANGER IN SPACE (8pm, Sun, C5) and THE CENTURY OF THE SELF's
psycho-historical look at Wilhelm Reich, a major influence on
the work of Kate Bush and Hawkwind (8pm, Sun, BBC2)... Richard
Blackwood makes another bid for the "Worst Presenter Of All
Time" crown in BUFFY MEETS BLACKWOOD (9pm, Sun, Sky1),
followed by an "uncut" season 6 opener of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE
SLAYER (10pm, Sun, Sky1) - though it's hardly the unshown
pilot with the different Willow, is it?... the self-
referential teen-horror genre's a bit tired now, but the
Carpenter original's still a bit of a SCREAM (10pm, Sun,
C4)... and THE BIG BREAKFAST is replaced by early morning
showings of POPWORLD (7.15am, Mon-Fri, C4), FUTURAMA (8.30am,
Mon-Fri, C4) and ANGELA ANACONDA (7.05am, Mon-Fri, C4) - if
that doesn't bring in the viewers, what will?... the Zeta-
Jones nudity is merely implied in preposterous caper-romance
ENTRAPMENT (8.30pm, Mon, BBC1)... sadly, Peter "Darth Maul"
Serafinowicz doesn't play the alien who has sex with Dawn
French in appalling "Mork And Mindy" knockoff TED AND ALICE
(9pm, Thu, BBC1)... and there's another chance to see a couple
of films postponed in the wake of that terrible motorcycling
monkeys accident of a few weeks ago: CONGO (10.35pm, Thu,
BBC1) and the original ROLLERBALL (11.35pm, Wed, BBC1) - which
we still think the continuity announcer should introduce with
the catchphrase "They think it's all over - it is now!"...
FILM>> you know, there's something about Easter that just says
"vampire", isn't there, with Wesley Snipes, Luke "Bros" Goss,
Danny "Red Dwarf" John-Jules and Guillermo del "Mimic" Toro -
together at last! - in ultraviolent martial-arts sequel BLADE
II ( http://www.screenit.com/movies/2002/blade_2.html : TENSE
FAMILY SCENES: Nyssa becomes disappointed in her father, the
vampire overlord, particularly when he indicates he's not
above sacrificing her for the long term good of all vampires)
... unless she's being unusually metaphorical, Britney Spears
does not appear to have remade either the 1986 Steve Vai
Devil-Went-Down-To-Georgia road movie or the Birmingham-set
ITV soap opera of the same name in feelgood girl-teen frolic
CROSSROADS ( http://uk.imdb.com/Goofs?0275022 : When [Spears]
exits the shower with a towel wrapped around her, her bra
strap is showing above the towel)... and Spielberg may have
digitally erased the guns, but he's left in all the friendly-
grey propaganda for the rerelease of ET THE EXTRA TERRESTRIAL
( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/et-20thanniv.htm : five
uses of middle school locker room language; adolescents
yelling at their mother, ignoring her, lying to her, sneaking
out, etc. and another trying to touch her posterior; E.T.
shares a variety of new things with the kids, including his
power to levitate. I am not going to get into a debate about
the evilness of levitation)...
BONERS: CORRECTIONS, CLARIFICATIONS, AND "INCORRECTLY REGARDED
AS GOOFS">> thanks to everyone who mailed in translations of
that goofy socialist realist Panasonic ad [NTK 2002-03-01]:
http://newtown.hi-ho.ne.jp/raibo/raidersei/image/agency/cm/mail.swf .
"It's for an ISP", confirmed DOMINIC AL-BADRI, editor of
Kansai Time Out, while ELLIOTT NOEL provided a blow-by-blow
account in authentic fractured English: "Hi Ho, Hi Ho [you've]
recieved mail! Hmph - that great/famous... [as the purple bear
walks by] Suddenly [be] connected... Situation support... The
old woman next door has even made a debut... made a debut!"
What's more, "Go up a level", advised PADDY ROBINSON-GRIFFIN
http://newtown.hi-ho.ne.jp/raibo/raidersei/image/agency/cm/ -
where there's a entire directory of the cheeky little
bastards... almost as alarmingly, our next most popular
correspondence was the firefight over CAM WINSTANLEY's
confident assertion that Ali G's poster weapons were
"definitely not the Heckler and Koch MP5" [NTK 2002-03-22], as
L MAGUIRE, ARTHUR WYATT and JOHN PATE all weighed in with the
conflicting opinion that they almost certainly *are* H&K MP5K
PDWs: http://www.remtek.com/arms/hk/mil/pdw/pdw.htm . In his
defence, Winstanley claims that the jpg we sent him wasn't
very clear, and that "the modular nature of 9mm sub machine
guns means that it could easily be a modified version". He now
admits the error - he "could have sworn that they weren't MP5s
since the distance from the mag to the end of the barrel is
way too small, but the icons on the fire selector switch tell
a very different tale"... once again, it was our international
readers who leapt to the defence of Norick Abe's charity
auction: http://www.ntk.net/2002/03/08/dohmoto.gif - PAUL DEUS
from Belgium revealing that "It is very common in the long-
suffering countries that can be cut off from the UK by fog in
the English Channel to use commas and decimal stops the 'wrong
way round': 4.794 = 4 thousand and 794 Euros, 4,79 = 4 Euros
79 cents. Mind you, since the Euro is so weak against
sterling, neither of the above is worth thruppence-ha'penny in
real money anyway". MARTIN WARD spoiled another of our
favourite jokes by noting that "Msn.co.uk thinks that the
first sentence ends at the first full stop (or decimal point).
So any story about ?x.xx million will have 'missing millions'"
- http://www.ntk.net/2002/02/15/dohpound.png , for instance.
And SIMON BLAKE asked us to stop using PNGs and go back to
GIFs, so we have - patents be damned... and finally, JOF
spotted that Microsoft have recently renamed their "Critical
Update Notification Tool" [NTK 2002-02-22] to the somewhat
more acronym-friendly "Critical Update Notification Utility":
http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?ID=KB;EN-US;Q224420
- while, in keeping with this week's international theme,
"I'm in Iran and blogging as I go - woohooo", chortled BEN
HAMMERSLEY via our "email a meme" submissions form, also
noting that "it also seems you're not censored by the Iranian
web filters. Must try harder!" Oh we will, Ben. Oh, we will...
>> SMALL PRINT <<
Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that
happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it
on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have
nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from stuff they get sent.
Registered at the Post Office as
"'could impose a fee', yet stubbornly refuse to"
http://writetheweb.com/read.php?item=125
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
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