Spontaneous Monotony

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the end of the Falklands War. It seems strange that some seek to criticise the conflict. The Falklands War represents what seems alien to many in post-Dossier Britain: a just war. The people of the Falkland Islands wished to remain British citizens, and 248 service personnel gave their lives to restore their right to make that decision.

As a left-of-centre Scot I am no fan of Margaret Thatcher, but she showed great political courage in ordering the recapture of the islands. If there is nothing else, let this be the one event in the Thatcher years that everyone in Britain can take pride in. Thousands of servicemen showed a more immediate, personal courage, and many sacrificed their lives for their country.

We should never forget those sacrifices, and we should never stop celebrating such an important victory. The Falklands War set down an important marker - the UK would not allow its citizens, wherever in the world they were, to be deprived of basic democratic rights.

The SNP has fulfilled its manifesto commitment to scrap the ‘graduate endowment’. The backdoor tuition fee was introduced by the Lib-Lab Executive during the first Parliament, as a compromise between the Labour policy of tuition fees and the Lib Dem policy of free education (in fact, the graduate endowment is literally half the then tuition fee for a four-year degree).

The Education Minister Fiona Hyslop today announced that the hated experiment is to end - for both current and future students. Draft legislation will be introduced in the autumn, and if passed by Parliament (as it probably will be, with Green and Lib Dem support) will come into force next April. As of then, Scotland will once again be a country that believes in free education. Other parties (even Neo Labour) have made promises to students, and failed to honour them:

We will not introduce ‘top-up’ tuition fees, and have legislated to prevent them

Still others (such as ‘Scottish’ Neo Labour in this year’s election) have argued that it is somehow in the interests of students to have to pay £2000+ for accessing a basic right such as education. The SNP have made a genuine commitment to students, and more importantly have stuck to their word (unlike certain other parties). Long may it continue!

I posted the other day about the surprisingly poor quality of the new version of Safari. People elsewhere assumed that the widespread reports of problems were simply minor bugs, or people who didn’t know how to install it properly, and other such defences usually reserved for the few Microsoft fanboys out there.

Now it’s official. Wired has done a benchmark of various tasks (such things as loading the Gmail inbox page) and Safari came dead last. Yep, worse than IE. Not only that, their review uncovered the sort of crashes and stalls that Apple-zealots have been trying to pretend don’t exist. It’s just lucky for Apple that they weren’t planning to make any money out of Safari for Windows - it’s turning out to be their worst product release since the puck mouse.

EDIT: It’s full of security flaws too! The reputation of Apple’s software division is going up in smoke by the hour.

The gutter tabloids can usually relied upon to spout the now-traditional ‘GAMES CAUSE MURDERS!’ nonsense that occurs any time that someone is murdered by someone who plays computer games (strange how poetry, as another exercise of the right to freedom of expression, never suffers such bile). But it is slightly more worrying when the same rubbish is parroted by the prosecution in a major criminal case

He said the defendant was a “loner and fantasist” who spent much of his time playing computer games and surfing the internet to fuel his interest in serial killers, knives, racism and pornography.

Though it is not my place, nor is it within my expertise, to make any comment about the trial of Stuart Harling, allow me to state one thing: There is no link between computer games and violent behaviour. Computer games do not cause violent behaviour. With that over with, we can move on, and add another entry to the list of ignorants who seem determined to invent a link which does not exist in order to further their demands for censorship.

You might remember that a while back I mentioned a new Windows browser based on Safari’s WebKit rendering engine. That didn’t amount to much, but not wanting to be outdone, Apple have released Safari itself for Windows, and it is even worse!.

Most of the Apple software which is available for Windows is actually pretty good. It might lock out features that every other competitor provides for free (Quicktime), or refuse to work with any player other than Apple’s own (iTunes), but what it does do, it generally does well and with a nice user interface.

Safari blows this reputation out of the water. Its page loading is, according to Apple’s publicity pages, the dog’s dangles:

The fastest web browser on any platform, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

Whoever wrote that should be careful he doesn’t put his nose near anyone’s eye. Safari is the most pig-slow piece of garbage that I have ever encountered. I’m not talking about complicated sites using lots of Flash or Javascript (I haven’t bothered to install the former, since I won’t be using Safari in its current state), I’m talking about relatively straightforward text-plus-pictures sites like BBC News. That, of course, assumes that it bothers to load the page at all. Often, during the ~5 second page loading time (by which point in any other browser I’ve reached the page and probably clicked a link to another one) the ‘progress bar’ will simply stop for no apparent reason. Sites that are working fine (as attested by IE7, Firefox 2, and Opera whatevernumber) simply fail to load. At all.

This could be down to individual connection foibles - I’m running NOD32’s Imon, and a router with its own firewall in addition to my software firewall. That wouldn’t be a particularly promising start (given that other browsers work in this setup) but it would at least be sort-of excusable for a Beta release. Unfortunately, from the comments at ‘Two a Day’, it seems that I am not alone:

Mac user at home, WinXP at work. Installed the beta at work and crashed when I tried to access Yahoo mail. Seems awfully counter productive to release a beta this unstable to the Windows people.

I never thought I’d say this, but I think that IE6 has finally lost its long-treasured crown of ‘worst Windows web browser ever’. Who would have thought that Apple, king of user-friendliness, could release such utter crap?