The UK justice system has gone mad

Posted on by

Two stories for you
The first is a sad story about a three year old girl who was killed by a joyrider. The “killer” was caught but the sentence is appalling

Driver Mohammed Hussain, 26, admitted careless driving, having no licence or insurance, failing to stop and failing to report an accident…In addition to the driving offences, Hussain admitted handling stolen goods when he appeared at Burnley Magistrates’ Court on Friday. It emerged he was out of prison on parole after being convicted of wounding in 2001…

What do you think from that that the sentence was? Years right? Well this is what he got:

He was sentenced to four weeks for the handling charge and 12 weeks each for the fail to stop and fail to report charges, to run concurrently. He was also banned from driving for five years.

Apparently they couldn’t charge him for death by dangerous driving because they couldn’t prove that his driving was dangerous and “Careless driving is an offence which does not carry a jail sentence”

Shocking! He’s killed a human being and the only offence he apparently committed was not stopping and reporting the incident – exquease me? Baking soda?

From the sublime to the ridiculous we head to Dudley in the West Midlands where a man has been charged with Actual Bodily harm for Cutting his girlfriend’s Ponytail off

Man, 21, admits ponytail attack
A Dudley man who was cleared of assault after chopping off his former girlfriend’s ponytail has pleaded guilty to causing actual bodily harm.

Apparently the reasoning behind this is that your hair is considered to be part of the body and therefore by cutting it off he was causing actual bodily harm!
I’m lost for words – the UK justice system has gone to the dogs

Let us consult wikipedia on Actual Bodily Harm

Actual Bodily Harm (often abbreviated to ABH) is a type of criminal assault defined under English law. It encompasses those assaults which result in injuries, typically requiring a degree of medical treatment of the victim. The offence is defined in s47 Offences Against The Person Act 1861 and it is a hybrid offence, i.e. it can be tried in either the Magistrates’ Court or Crown Court. There is a maximum sentence of 5 years imprisonment (or 7 years if it is racially motivated).

So get this, the driver who kills a small girl while driving a car which is not his, with no license or insurance gets 16 weeks (it’s not clear if he got 12 weeks for each offence of failing to stop and the other of failing to report the incident but it doesn’t make much of a difference) while a disgruntled boyfriend could potentially get 5 years for cutting his girlfriends hair off – anyone see a problem here?

Magistrates courts – whatever next!

U-19 World Cup

Posted on by

Sunday is going to be the under 19 world cup final of the cricket world cup
It will be between India and Pakistan – in the quarter finals, India beat England convincingly on Wednesday and on Friday Pakistan beat Australia
Australia, England, Pakistan and India are arguably the top 4 countries so it is only fitting that they are the four countries to make the semi finals
It is even more interesting that it will be an India vs Pakistan final – the two countries that were previously one that have become such huge rivals to the point where they could not even play each other in their own countries

On initial inspection, Pakistan appear to have the better bowling attack, while India appear to have more in the batting lineup. That has been what India and Pakistan have had as their advantages in the past, but as always there is scope for variation.

These are the players of the future, maybe not of the next year, maybe not two years but perhaps in 5 years time – some may have a big part to play in world cups of the future. I for one will be watching the U-19 Final on Sunday and looking forward to how they progress.

Bots

Posted on by

I was piddling around with my webspace today setting things up and looking up the analogue stats
One of the things they have on there is an analysis of User agents of browsers that are visiting your site, and i noticed that all the search bots from search engines have a unique user agent to describe themselves.
From this i was amazed how many there are these days as i scrolled through the list and here is what i found:
Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us
Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

Check them out, there’s MSN’s msnbot, the googlebot, Yahoo’s Slurp bot – what a name!, Ask Jeave’s teoma bot – it means expert in gaelic. There’s some Japanese bot called the baidu spider and even sites like picsearch have their own PS Bot

So let’s take a step back now, these are all the bots that are properly registered and being recorded for a large portion of the internet. Call me suspicious, but what about those bots that well, aren’t quite so well known and have a very specific mission of what to keep an eye on. I don’t know how many people keep an eye on their stats – i’m generally lazy, but i am interested in who’s getting to my site and from where. The majority come from google, resex, serafin message board and more recently the techsurvivors’ forum, which is a little odd since i haven’t been posting there for a while.

One more thing – i noticed that someone accessed my site through a Symbian OS – that means someone saw my site through their mobile phone – how bizarre

Ups and downs of the last 24 hours

Posted on by

I don’t really know what to call this entry because it’s really just a summary of the past 24 hours – i’ll come up with a title at the end
Saw my fave band last night Serafin for their first gig in about 2 years. They’re struggling with the mixing of their second album at the moment, as well as having problems with label since Warner Music bought Taste Media.
But it was really good to see them live again, even with all the problems and they’re great guys – if i hadn’t been working would probably have gone out late with them

Fast forward to this morning a little bit tired having not got to sleep till 1am and running late, despite knowing that I was low on petrol. On my route to work I’m driving along and see the most humongous mile long traffic jam on the dual carriageway. Fortunately it turned out to be just a van that had broken down in an inconvenient place. The petrol gauge was pretty much on the zero line, and i kept debating whether or not to stop for petrol since i was going to be late anyway. I decided i would risk it and fill up on the way back. I thought that that would be that but five minutes away from work a cyclist jumped the lights and i have to slam on my brakes stopping inches away from them brakes squealing. At that point i really felt maybe i should just turn around, go home and go back to sleep. Surprisingly was only 15 mins late and no one noticed cos my manager wasn’t working and everyone else was in meetings! Decided i needed a lazy day at the office and spent much of the day messing around on the internet chatting about yesterday’s gig and trying to find loopholes in the computer system at work’s network for no particular reason!

But back to last night, the drummer from Serafin wants me to design a website for their side project French Car and the Bulimic Wizards. Currently, I am hosting their three albums on my webspace but it’s just there to let people know about the band’s stuff. It’s not a proper site or anything. Designing web pages is something i’ve done for a long time, but i have mostly done sites for me except for a couple i did years ago one for a friend of a friend’s business which isn’t there anymore cos i think he forgot to renew his web host or something. The other was for a company my dad was working for. That design has also gone after they contracted it out to a professional company (rather than me doing it in my spare time in between exams at uni!). But my point is that it feels really weird to do this as a project for a friend aswell as for money and I haven’t got the foggiest what to charge even ignoring the fact that it’s for a friend. I’ll have to do some research on hosting & domain name companies as to which are the best to go with and then i’ll have to see whether or not i have the software to make what he’ll ask me to create. My sites are simple clean, reasonably W3C compliant and easy to maintain. But maybe that’s what he’s looking for – we’ll have to wait and see!

Explaining the Difference between MacOS and Windows

Posted on by

I was pottering through google on my day off today trying to find the solution to a problem where the minimize button would disappear on my mac. I posted it on ResEx forums as i usually do, but thought i’d see if i could find anything on google

Anyway, as always happens when you’re opening links all over the place from google, you stumble on something else which interests you. It doesn’t actually help you with what you were looking for but has turned up because some of the words you’d put into google are on this page too and you are compelled to have a read.

What it was was a Mac Switcher who was asked to explain the difference between using a Mac and a PC after buying a MacMini.
Or as the author puts it:

I wrote this when someone in a reply to my journal asked me to tell them about the mac. I figured it was long and well-punctuated enough to merit usefulness to others. I’m too lazy to fidn the best place on the internet so I’ll put it in this forum and hope no one minds.

Before I get completely distracted again here’s the article Forum: For Those Considering A Mac

I’m always interested in how people would describe the differences, because I’ve been a Mac user for the best part of 15 years, but at the same time had a Windows computer in the house/work/school/uni. Growing up I learnt on BBC Micros learning to program in Basic and playing games as you do when you’re 7-10 years old! Then we got a Amstrad 1640 which apparently had a 68086 intel processor though i thought it was a 286 *shrugs* – it had DOS and something called GEM Desktop as opposed to one of the early versions of Windows. I got a Mac LC II a few years later having used a Mac at school, and my dad bought a Packard Bell 486DX2/66 to replace the Amstrad which nobody ever really liked. I got a Performa 6200 with a 603e processor, and the 486 got replaced with a Pentium 2 laptop. My brother needed a computer, so he got a HP desktop with an AMD Athlon on my recommendation of what he would find most useful. My last (and current) mac was a Powermac G4 450 which is coming to it’s last legs in terms of performance, but still running perfectly well. My mum got a Windows laptop from work, and every office i’ve worked in has had Windows computers. At Uni i used windows, but also DEC Alpha unix machines (which i used to use for transferring files to and from uni as they were essentially ftp servers and accessible off campus) and SGI’s running IRIX. I’ve also got a FreeBSD server at home which i don’t have nearly enough time to play with and took what seems like forever to install. It originally had a Smoothwall Firewall & NAT Gateway which we used in my old uni house to share our internet access – at the time it was cheaper to buy a cheap PC (2nd hand didn’t need to be good and only needed to last a year) and install Smoothwall (which was free) than buying a router.

Anyway, back on topic…
The author is very complimentary about Mac OS X, and is clearly using OS X 10.4 Tiger since he talks about Spotlight. I like the way he talks about things i wouldn’t think twice about like the close, minimize and zoom buttons:

Instead of Minimize Maximize Close buttons on top left, Mac OS X has Red (close) Yellow (minimize) Green (fit window to content, which is sometimes like maximize); and these circle buttons are on the top left.

I would just say the buttons you’re used to in windows on your PC are on the left of the window instead of the right on a mac, a slightly different order and largely do the same thing.

I like the analogy of saying that the taskbar in OSX is at the top of the screen as i know that when i’ve wanted windows to look more like a mac i move the taskbar to the top. I think the description of Windows’ “My Documents” folder is spot on:

There is a My Documents like area of the hard drive and it functions much the same way as in Windows (except that Mac OS X will always let you go up a folder and end up where you should, unlike Windows’ My Documents which sometimes seems located in two places)

For those who don’t use Windows much My Documents appears as both a folder/alias/shortcut/something alien. Because it has an icon on the desktop that is created automatically which is not a windows shortcut file, and displays as such in the location bar. But what it is actually showing you is the contents of
C:\Documents and Settings\Username\My Documents\
If you choose to go up a level when viewing it from this icon on the desktop it takes you to the desktop
If you go up a level when viewing from the actual location it takes you to C:\Documents and Settings\Username\ which is very confusing, and if like me you forget this you want to tear the thing to pieces.

The other comment that is spot on and really well expressed is on installed apps where windows chucks stuff all over the place, but Mac OS X is different:

the entirety of most programs is all packed into one seemingly indivisible icon of beauty – un-installation requires only that you drag the icon to the trash bin (recycle bin). You can of course choose to explore inside the program’s icon and get to the nitty gritty if you feel the urge

I like that expression a lot!

The other thing I like is the comments on constant state of refresh:

Mac OS X is in a constant state of seamless refresh. Whereas in Windows you may need to exit a folder and come back to see a change, or refresh the desktop for some reason, Mac OS X has no need for such things. Something happens, you see the results everywhere, instantly – how it should be.

I only really became aware of this when i had internet access on a windows computer. The reason i noticed it then is because every version of the Mac OS right the way back to System 7 has had the feature described above and I found it very odd when downloading files on windows. In the Mac OS, the instant you start downloading a file it creates it and you can see it in the download location. Windows doesn’t do that, it downloads the file to the temporary internet files and doesn’t show it to you until it’s finished and then moves it to the download location.

I’m surprised the article doesn’t say anything about icons lining up on the right instead of the left because that’s the first thing that hits me when i switch between the two, and has quite an effect on desktop pictures. Also surprised there’s no mention of Exposé yet he talks about X11! I still play with Exposé while waiting for saft to load all my saved browser windows up in Safari, and i’ve had 10.4 for nearly a year – still can’t get over how amazing it is. Dashboard isn’t as much fun to play with as it’s not as quick as playing with the windows!

I’m a big fan of understanding things from doing them, so i would find it very difficult to explain to someone why I prefer the Mac OS without actually showing it to them. But anyway, i think i’ve quoted enough of the article and you won’t read the actual one if i quote any more.

Completely unrelated, MacHeadCase told me about a thread on TechSurvivors’ forum talking about an anonymous surfing add on called Tor – link is to the OSX instructions but it also works on Windows, and various Linux & BSD distros. It uses something called Privoxy but all packaged in a nice friendly installation.
I installed it, set it up, and it’s far too slow to be acceptable so i switched it off – will probably keep it installed in case i have a need for it but I wouldn’t recommend it
It’s a clever idea, and it’s all explained on the Tor: Overview site, and allocated me an IP address somewhere on a virtual server in Amsterdam. Mighty impressive, but the speed hit outweighs the benefits of having that anonymity when i go to sites.

—
* Edited to fix one of the links – missed out a quotation mark!

Stating the Obvious: *Caution Rant*

Posted on by

This is a bit of a rant, so just to give you some advanced warning

My latest gripe is one that i’ve become increasingly annoyed about and is pushed on us more and more
News/Polls that state the obvious, but try and make out that it’s something that’s new/shocking/amazing.
What’s got up my nose to make me want to rant about it? The headline from yesterday’s newspaper that we get at home Blair-Bush deal before Iraq war revealed in secret memo
My first comment on seeing it was “No Shit!”
Ok, so the story is about some memo from January 2003 which has made it’s way to the papers, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg which joins surveys that essentially say things like “Drinking beer will make you drunk”, and “Taking drugs will make you stoned” but wrapped up in a pretty wrapper pertaining to be breaking news stories. In fact what they are are a waste of money and peoples’ time. Someone is being paid to do pointless research when there is plenty of research which can be done to be beneficial to the human race
On top of this there is so much information out there and so many statistics & market research being done that often by the time you get to the core of the article there’s so much information overload that it can be hard to summarise what it’s saying.
These days i’m very much against beating around the bush before getting to the point. I can’t stand it when people spend 10 minutes asking something which could’ve been said in less than 1 – i just don’t see the point of saying things that aren’t necessary or over complicating things.

I’d like to give more actual examples of these kind of stories, but… wait, i’ve found another one in the same newspaper:

Lack of Stroke awareness puts victims at risk
This is not news in my opinion.
Check out the percentages from some survey – they report that 33% would suggest the person lies down, and 12% would wait to see if symptoms worsened. So, what did the other 55% say? Have a pint of beer? Or did they actually say call an ambulance? If that’s the case, it’s not really big news. It would all depend on who they asked (particularly age & profession). The article also says that 22% of people did not recognise the symptoms – i’m not particularly surprised at this and would suspect it was higher for those of my age range. But what it does try and imply is that not recognising the symptoms would mean you wouldn’t call an ambulance quickly if you saw them. It is also implying that the 22% and 45% are related and plucks this magical figure of 25000 lives being saved – when in fact they are two separate questions – so there’s almost certainly a bit of bad maths in there.

What really amazes me is that these are stories from a respected newspaper – makes me wonder what kind of drivel the more common papers like The Sun or The Daily Mail are printing

But back to my original point of stating the obvious – i do find it very irritating, and although the examples in this thread arent particularly good, it does show at times how little thought goes into newspapers before they put ink to paper

Weekend

Posted on by

Am going to be away for a couple of days till Sunday afternoon to celebrate my birthday which is today
Going out with my mates down to West Sussex – have loaded the car with booze and with a bit of luck should be a good trip

Have spent today pottering around on the internet, and stumbled on a couple of interesting links
The first is a site Apple must be annoyed they didn’t register the domain for:
macosx.com
Looks like quite an interesting site, particularly their HowTo section which has the quick way to sleep your mac and hidden dashboard features

I also stumbled on this homepage for yet another OSX maintenance app called mac help mate. It looks nice but it only works on OS X 10.4.x Tiger and is still in beta testing – haven’t tried it yet

Oh, and those who are more observant may have noticed that I’ve added a weather plugin to the sidebar. For a day or so it was showing the weather for somewhere ridiculous because i hadn’t realised that it draws the location from multiple places

Bad news for iWeb

Posted on by

On January 10th, Steve Jobs of Apple announced at the Macworld Keynote a new program to become the 6th application in the iLife ’06 suite: iWeb

In the days before that, Karelia Software had been talking about and released their app Sandvox as a beta

I have not used iWeb, as I don’t have an interest in any of the other apps in iLife except for perhaps iMovie. But i have an old version of iMovie from when it was free, which fits my needs
However, I have tried out Sandvox a little, and today they sent an email that they’ve done a couple of updates (though not much), so I went to their site to check out the latest.
In the discussion forums, there is much talk about iWeb vs Sandvox – one of the links in there goes to the Ars Technica forum. Here they discuss iWeb, and it doesn’t sound good for Apple

Why? My initial suspicions have been proved true – the code looks Ghastly
Yes, it supports CSS, and is XHTML compliant, but (ignore the br tags at the top of each textarea – i haven’t quite figured out how to get rid of them):

To elaborate on the sort of HTML that iWeb generates, it pretty much violates the sort of semantic practices that the W3C advocates. It uses unordered and ordered lists where appropriate. But paragraphs are wrapped in…get this
and instead of using headers h1 through h6, it outputs something like this piece of crap:

To make matters worse, text size is not resizable, and if you even think about using a font that isn’t particularly common, it will turn the text into a PNG file
And it doesn’t stop there, it requires the use of PNGs for the images to achieve the transparencies & reflection effects – but you try viewing it on the most common Browser/OS setup IE6/Windows and it will look nothing like the original design. They’re 24-bit PNGs, so the images are huge!
Next, since the code is pretty much unmanageable to be edited manually, if you want to make a small change to one page you have to use iWeb, which will then reupload the whole lot rather than just what you changed
Finally, it has been speculated that Google will not be able to index any page created in iWeb because of all the bloated code it generates at the top of every HTML file – particularly the div tags as ppmax says:

I built a site once and couldnt for the life of me figure out why google would crawl the site but not seem to index it. Turns out that the pages werent structured logically: I had a bunch of div’s on the page with no structure…. Google will crawl these pages–but by using div’s there’s no way to interepret the relevence or importance of the content contained therein. Which means that you wont get well ranked, if at all.
That’s bad web design

Here is an Example of a webpage made in iWeb – it isn’t too bad with the code, but it has plenty of div tags.
Here’s another – the about me page’s code is particularly ugly to look at

This all links back to Sandvox when Recasse posts:

I’ve been trying out Sandvox, and that software outputs very clean HTML. In fact, when it is officially released, I may start using it to manage some business websites I need to redesign. I’m very excited about it. In its beta state, it’s quite buggy and unstable. Hopefully the 1.0 release will have these kinks worked out.

Well that just about sums up the discussion thread there – I’m gonna have another look at Sandvox now that I’ve seen the results that iWeb generates and compare.
I suspect iWeb will be yet another reason why I won’t be buying iLife

Terry the Cat

Posted on by

Come tomorrow it looks like my dad will have to put down our remaining cat. Aged 15 years old – Terry was always the bigger of the two. His brother theo had to be put down 13 months ago after some sort of neurological condition.
Terry has got cancer of the jaw. And an unusual kind that is very fast – i believe it’s called a spiral tumour – i forget the name
It was only really diagnosed in November, and since then it has grown at a progressive rate
We always knew this day would come but always hoped it would not come this soon.
He looks old when he was always so active – he wants to eat but now cannot do so without a struggle. We have had to change his food from regular cat food to fish & fresh meat.
But last week when he even struggled with prawns we knew that time was short

We have many photos of Terry, in fact we have made up 5 albums of photos of the two cats, but over the the next few days i am sure that i will be sadder than usual once we decide that Terry should not suffer anymore

The photos below are quite old and not brilliant quality, but they are the best I have on computer at present

Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us
Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

Whether it is tomorrow or tuesday or after that I do not know, but it will be soon, as the cancer will begin to cause him more pain soon, and we cannot put him through that

Graphics Card Woes & Strange Books

Posted on by

I haven’t posted anything new on my blog the past couple of days as I’ve been a bit busy
It’s my dad’s birthday this weekend, so needed to do a bit of shopping. He’s a very difficult person to buy presents for, but I can usually find something in the wonderful shop Borders Books – that’s the US site, as they don’t have a UK site, because they sell online through amazon
They have a couple of shops in Central London which are huge 4 or 5 floors full of books, CDs, DVDs, Magazines, Coffee Shop etc. and I always find something I want to buy there.
After about an hour wondering round on wednesday I found a good book on Italian Cinema which would do as a present, but I also found some extraordinary books in the Travel writing section, including several books written by skateboarding legend Tony Hawk which I can’t find a trace of online.
I also bought an intriguing book by Jonathan Margolis, a journalist from the Times newspaper called Mob_Log. It is a “book” showing scenes taken on the author’s camera phone, following his initial prediction when the first camera phones came out in 2002 about how they would change the world. The scenes are photos that nobody would take on a normal camera. The photos are funny, thought provoking, satirical and an insight into life. That probably gives it more credit than it’s due, but I ccouldn’t resist buying a copy at £5.99 (much cheaper than the list price).

Still in Borders book shop, I had a call from my agency to do some work at my old workplace – a different department, and pretty good pay. It’s only 3 days a week, but it should get me by until I can sort out a full time permanent job. I started there yesterday, and it’s a real mess, but I think I can handle it. It’s in the Psychology department, but with a bit of luck my interview next week should go well.

So I left Borders, and thought now was as good a time as any to get a new graphics card which I’ve been putting off for ages. Following the Stevenote on tuesday 10th January (the day before), I thought that I would be trading in my Frankenstein Mac for something newer, and the Graphics card will more than likely be the only thing I upgrade before I do so.

The previous week I’d gone into the Apple Store in Regent Street for the first time and asked around to see if anyone there could make any recommendations without much joy. They suggested Micro Anvika – a computer store that has a few branches in the area. They’re an apple dealer, but also sell PCs. They sell a lot of accessories, and I’ve bought stuff from them in the past.
Armed with a bit of info on what I was looking for – an AGP card that supports Core Image on OSX 10.4, and a preference for ATI, I thought that a Radeon 9600 would be a good card and fit the job.

Micro Anvika have two shops opposite each other, the first one I went to said they do the card but didn’t have one in stock, however, the other branch did. The assistant in the 2nd shop was very knowledgeable, and asked the right questions. He helpfully told me they had one on returns, and would get me a discount because it had been opened, but was still brand new. The customer who bought it before didn’t realise his PowerMac G5 had PCI express, so it hadn’t even been fitted to a computer. Everything looked good, £150, a good spec Radeon card, AGP, supports Core Image. I was excited, and soon I would get some better video playback performance in quicktime, take the load off my ageing processor. I got home, shut my mac down, pulled the old card out, and straight away I saw a problem… the new card would not go into the slot as it did not have an extra notch in it, even though they were both AGP. I looked at the manual, which was helpfully for the old version, the 9600 Pro Mac Edition. The one I had bought was the Radeon 9600 Pro PC & Mac Edition. Unbeknown to me, and due to lack of adequate research, ATI had seriously messed around with the specs inbetween. This card was a 4x AGP only card, unlike the previous version which was 4x/2x AGP. My AGP slot is 2x – and after much exhaustive searching, it seems that the higher spec card, the Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edition is 4x/2x AGP, but Micro Anvika do not sell this one. It’s probably also more expensive.

Irritated, and having put my old graphics card back in, a GeForce 2mx with 32mb VRAM, I booted my mac up. While i was looking at the innards of my mac, I’d pulled out my extra USB ports PCI card and forgotten to put it back in, so shut the mac down again to put it in. Everything back together. Pressed the power button – nothing – PANIC!!! What had I done. I changed the mains cable – again nothing – more PANIC!!! Those who have read about how I built my mac up will know what a mess it is inside with custom wiring – anything could’ve happened. I realised pretty quickly that the power supply was not at fault as when i plugged and unplugged the power cable i was still getting a little spark which was good news, as I do not have a spare. My immediate suspect was the dodgy wiring, and that in setting everything back up i’d dislodged something. Straight away, I pulled out the dodgiest part – the logic board power extension cable which I had used initially to allow the use of an ATX power supply. Once again I tried to power my mac up, with no joy. In a moment of inspiration, I remembered that when I came back from holiday the clock had reset itself to the default January 1 1972 or whatever it is – and that in some mac models, if the clock battery fails, it will sometimes refuse to allow you to boot up. I pulled the battery out, and for no real reason put it back in, pushed the power button and it started up. A sigh of relief! I was back to where I had started, but will probably need to buy a new clock battery sometime this week.

But, I still had the problem that I had spent £150 on a graphics card that wouldn’t work. I couldn’t get back to the shop that day, and decided that I would go back on Friday (today) after starting work on Thursday. So, this morning before I went back I did all my research, and even though the shop assistants were knowledgeable, I hoped that they would give me a refund. I spoke to the assistant who had sold me the card, and he seemed baffled as to why it didn’t work. I explained the problem referring to the manual which did show a card that would fit, especially after I explained several times that my mac had an AGP slot, and was a G4 as the system requirements said – it fitted everything on the box.

Here’s a site on AGP compatibility which shows the importance of the AGP key.
The important diagram is this one:
AGP Keys
AGP 1x/2x runs at 3.3V or 1.5V and requires cards with both notches, while AGP 4x runs at 1.5V or 0.8V and only needs the one notch (the 0.8V uses the 1.5V part). AGP 8x runs at 0.8V, again requiring just the 1.5V notch
Wikipedia summarises it quite well on thei Section on AGP Compatibility
I think I am now an expert on AGP formats!

He then got his boss who initially appeared very knowledgeable wearing an Ixus t-shirt he was clearly showing off all the skills he was trained in. He was nearly onto the right track, but was convinced, like I initially believed, that AGP 2x and 4x were the same type of slot, and suggested that it was only AGP 1x that was really different. The only other Mac AGP card they did was the Radeon X800 which was much more expensive and very definitely only AGP 8x. I could tell now I was gonna get my refund as I started mentioning cards like the Nvidia FX5200 and they said they didn’t do them for macs. The assistant who I originally bought it from now blamed Apple for putting some strange connector on my motherboards that wasn’t a proper industry standard and gave me a full refund. Success! Great relief. I’m not sure if I’d just walked in and said I bought this card and it didn’t work because my board is 2x and the card only supports 4x that I would’ve got my refund.

So, my next challenge is should I look further into whether there is still a graphics card that I can buy which will fill the purpose, or concentrate on what my next computer should be, as that will come with a top spec motherboard, graphics card and everything I want. I still can’t decide what that computer should be