Posts by P. Lee

browser fail?

Ok, FF has extensions and blocking is an obvious one, but why not have an option (on by default) which stops running flash/animated gifs/video if the tab isn't the active one? If you wanted to be clever, you could run the animations for 30 seconds and then freeze them if inactive. Perhaps put a little "pause/play" button on the tab to continue playing media in the background.

Judging by my wife's browsing habits, it isn't uncommon to have 20 tabs open (often on the same website) all with their little flash adverts and applications running. At that point, CPU resource becomes more of an issue than battery!

As a side note, I put noscript & flashblock on everything and my wife hates it. Too many of her shopping sites just break and she finds it frustrating. It's interesting to see a non-techy reaction to what to me seems like a very easy to use system.

As has been mentioned, it may be the moving graphics, not inherently flash which causes the problems.

why the obsession with companies?

Surely open source is about people sharing useful code. You build on other peoples' work and in turn contribute your own enhancements.

If you happen to be able to make a living out of FLOSS then great, but that really isn't the point.

Enough with the dollar signs!

Better out than in

Hands up who wants to have their biometrics added to a massive pan-European, government-accessible, law-enforcement database.

While you've got your hands up, let me just fingerprint you and your children and take a retina scan too. Actually, you may as well just get used to having your hands up.

If the Europeans want to compile such a thing then fine, but count me out.

When the road goes over a cliff, being in the slow-lane of a two-speed Europe is actually a good idea. Having just got rid of our own id card system, let's stay out of one beyond our control. It looks like uk.gov did the right thing for once.

I'm willing to accept the possibility of a few people getting into the country illegally and a little extra crime too, if it means we keep control of our borders and don't hand this much power to the government.

what's the point?

Mobile is effectively a completely new market (as it was for Apple when they brought out the iphone) and it really does not relate much to the desktop & server markets. You can't recompile outlook for ARM and use it as a mail client. It requires new interfaces, new (more efficient) code, new server access techniques. It is essentially completely different.

The question is, does MS need to get into this area? Sure it would be nice, but Win7 phone edition isn't really the same beast as W7; it isn't a "quick-win" to push further office apps and W7 on a phone won't really bring in massive royalties. MS doesn't make phone hardware so the profits will be far slimmer here than on the desktop.

MS's real problem is that the halo effect from iphone/ip*d might drive non-MS desktop adoption at home. If they aren't seen as the only option on the desktop, they lose their mindshare which enables them to get windows in the datacentre as a default. People start thinking about the OS rather than assuming windows. That's likely to mean more *nix and less windows. Of course, every unsuccessful attempt at a market segment (tablets, mobile phone, music, mobile games) reinforces MS's failure and promotes looking at alternatives, even if the failure is unrelated to the datacentre

re: Telcos know location, ATM systems don't

Sounds like a lack of interest by the ATM networks. Add a GPS to the ATMs and include that data with the transaction. A quick query to google maps to calculate travel time and you're sorted.

Ok a bank may not do it that way, but you get the idea.

Thought needed

"Children under the age of 10 should not be playing video games." There, I fixed it.

I know they'll end up being quite competent with computers and playing games, but why, as a parent, would I promote such products to them when I control their environment?

Physical exercise, the ability to hold a train of thought for more than 30 seconds and to delay gratification are important skills. That's what books, board-games and 90 minute football matches are for. Injuries are always a possibility, but heart disease is a major killer.

Icon: Old school parenting

bulletproof, flying spiders

Here in Oz we have all kinds of lethal arachnids.

But I'm sure someone will have signed a bit of paper to say they promise not to let any escape.

What could possibly go wrong?

Embedded iOS?

You have an army of devs who know how to do touchscreen apps for iPhone/ipad. The interface is well-known by lots of people and fairly intuitive.

Why not create a large-screen version for kiosk-type use? No messy keyboard/mouse required. Airport check-ins anyone?

My kids have a big-screen (whiteboard) version of this at school. They register their attendence by moving an icon of themselves from one side of the board to the other, with their fingers. Frivolous perhaps, but cool nonetheless.

Miner 2049er?

oh wait, that'll need an Apple ][ emulator...

singer not currently working sues major corporate

Free publicity and additional sales to follow...

In other news, Apple not found to be at fault for hacked computer. Apple not to blame for security breach.

What we have here is a win-win situation.

All hail the Onebox!

All your URLs are belong to us!

You know, just so we can offer search suggestions. Honest!

I reckon Chrome will be great for apps (roll on NaCl), but for browsing, I think I'll stick to FF with a separate url and search box, noscript and flashblock.

Appeals Please!

So all corporately-owned (is there any other way to express this?) licenses become void if the company is taken over? Ouch!

Forget about who "owns the software", the licenses themselves are sold as goods. If there is no contract signed when money exchanges hands, it's a sale. It may be a sale of a license+media, but it is still a sale. As long as the second sale merely transfers the rights which the first granted, there should be no problem.

Publishers should not really be able to call these legal restrictions "licenses." If you have to return things to the publisher, it is a rental. If they ask you to destroy what you have bought when you've done with it (rather than return it), then it is a rental as the publisher retains control at the end of your usage period.

This is not like a license which you might receive from ARM for their tech, or to use someone-else's trademark. The acquisition process is entirely different. If it looks like a duck...

No resale of phones, mp3 players, garage-door openers, security-systems, cars, washing-machines, TV's, anything with a chip in it. All accomplished with the inclusion of a bit of paper in the box.

Seriously?

The Internet is ruined because you can't see breasts on facebook? How old are you?

I'm slightly more worried about the US' continued insistence that US laws apply world-wide than the distressing lack of online porn.

Tha anglo-saxon world is certainly not becoming more prudish, or else the music/entertainment industry wouldn't be able to punt sex to ever-younger children as it does. What I suspect is happening is that elections are being decided on ever fewer constituencies and the small number of people who feel strongly about things can tip the balance. Governments are therefore playing to the "so it can never happen again" crowd, becoming more and more authoritarian.

The desire to be seen to be "doing something" and the need for that "something" to be cheap and showy leads to lots of intrusion into personal lives. It isn't just porn, check out the badly phrased and intrusive "hate speach" laws and the utterly irrelevant methods for killing foxes law which provoked a constitutional crisis!

Our leaders don't believe in anything except the requirement to play to the peanut gallery. Sadly, noone appears to be voting them out for it.

Do a deal...

Bring Steam to Linux and Valve can have the "for purchase" portal.

Ahem.

I know who you called last summer

and I believe you are probably going to renew your car insurance about now!

Google: "Can you afford not to advertise with us?"

missing models are a problem

I have an old 24" with the almost non-existent gpu. I love the screen size (and 4:3 shape) but hated the fact that I need a separate host for games.

For office-type work you don't need the gpu but screen-estate is always precious and with an imac non-upgradable. A 3Ghz dual-core and a decent gpu at 24" would have been a better option. An additional-screen output option would be welcome as would dual-ethernet.

Smaller screen, faster gpu - I'm not sure its a reasonable trade-off. There also needs to be something between the rather small 21" and the oversize 27"

It's embarrassing that a hackintosh is required because Apple simply don't provide the configurations people want.

has anyone considered what we do if...

...global warming is as bad as the worst fears but it isn't man-made?

70cl?

of Royal Navy Rum?

So much for tradition and doing things right!

Nelson must be spinning...

Insulting the church?

Isn't this a labour government? Since when were socialists known for their love of non-secular religions?

Everyone likes censorship - as long as it's my mistakes and embarrassments that are being censored. Obviously, no-one else should be allowed to censor stuff. For governments, 2G1C, paedophilia, terrorism, "think of the children" etc are just excuses to extend it beyond the traditional "required to protect the Nation in respect of international dealings."

I noticed the UK MPs' reaction to the expenses scandal was "this information should not be made public." Even when pressed, I didn't see any admission of wrong-doing, no-one was guilty, there were just a few "errors" and "mistakes" made. No morality or religion was to be seen anywhere, though there was certainly a desire for censorship.

Surprisingly, people like the bad things they do to be covered up. Even more surprisingly, those in power try to extend their ability to cover things up. How utterly amazing that those who spend their lives trying to acquire power are willing to use any and all belief systems to consolidate their grip on power.

Obviously, what we need is more pragmatists in government.

No tethering? Really?

I used my iphone as a 3g modem for my imac when I went on holiday last year. I know, the imac wasn't that easy to transport, but I had no laptop.

I can't recall if bluetooth or usb was used, I know I tried both and there's a good chance both worked. There was definitely no other internet connectivity around. I definitely remember switching the connection on and off only when needed to make sure OS updates weren't downloaded.

Is this a network-provider dependent thing? I was on Telstra in Oz. They have a 150mb monthly limit so I had to be careful.

Why not do something useful?

Like get a court to rule that 99 pages of T's&C's for itunes is unreasonable and therefore unenforceable and should be condensed down to less than one page.

They could go with the classic, "All your base are belong to us!" and be done with it.

Competing with ships?

How about with road-freight? 75mph is quite fast for roads and they can fly as the crow flies (well, you know what I mean) so that would be fine for non-city-street drop-offs.

Think of them as trains, without the need for government-built track.

re: What happens when most of the criminals are knowledgeable enough to encrypt competently?

They get away with it.

That's a price we pay to live in a free society.

Besides, it appears that bankers' legal activities are far more damaging than any illegal fraud they might commit.

wine = os/2?

IIRC OS/2 emulated Windows so you could run windows binaries. Developers then did the logical thing and only developed for Windows.

Wine is a great idea but it needs to be a stop-gap last resort, not the platform of choice. We need games properly ported. Valve has done some nice things with Steam on OSX (though L4D2 is still missing) but I suspect this is more of a dead-end than linux. Until reasonably-priced Macs have decent graphics cards, Valve's effort must be targeted mostly at hackintoshes - surely a smaller market than linux.

However, Steam has a content-distribution network and a desktop client. Perhaps they are planning to branch out from pure games to other software. In that case, the OSX port makes a lot more sense.

re: punishable by monotheism

The question is not "how many gods do you have," but "what kind of god do you serve?" or perhaps rephrased as, "to whom do you give your ultimate allegiance?"

Some people place it in an external deity, some people put themselves at the top of the tree.

First you need to check the theory behind the value-system. Then check the practice. Do they match? Is the practise a result of the theory, in spite of the theory or not addressed by the theory?

If the primary spokesperson for your value-system raises an army and uses force to make people carry out the correct actions, you're probably going to have problems later on too.

It isn't like atheist-humanists like Stalin or Mao hurt any one, is it? We've never heard of followers of Buddhism (a philosophy) or Hindus (polytheists) fighting have we? We never have to worry about spirit-worshipping Africans starting tribal warfare. The 95% non-church-going UK didn't seem that worried about re-electing a government it knew to have taken them into war of aggression on false pretences, did it?

When people get into power, they tend to use it to further their own view of things. Sometimes that view is "I will fight my god's battles for him," sometimes it is "I'm staying at the top of the pile for as long as possible."

Let's face it, people have a natural inclination to evil. Fortunately, it's only other people who are evil, so it's probably ok to either kill them or cut them off and leave them to rot on their own.

Right?

re: Disparate currencies don't benefit any honest person.

Yeah right.

Because no-one in the Euro-zone will suffer for what the Greeks have been doing.

Different currencies are essential to allow governments to control things. If you don't control the purse-strings, you control very little and different currencies help insulate the policies of one government from everyone else. Though obviously, this insulation is not complete!

The sensible and economically efficient thing to do is to have a global dictatorship. However, we tend to value self-determination too. Democracy is one way to help government reflect the will of the people and provide self-determination. As democracies get larger however, the value of your vote is proportionally reduced, so while it may still be "democratic" it doesn't allow self-determination because of the push to "harmonise" laws, i.e. differences are erased.

There may be a strong push from business to homogenise people into standardised consumers, but people are different and these differences are often broadly reflected by ethnic and national boundaries. It makes sense to localise financial requirements and planning along these boundaries as well.

This isn't an EU-only issue. While we may decry censorship, Google's declaration that it will try to leverage international treaties to override national sovereignty is equally disturbing, regardless of the good outcome.

I'm not even sure why the newspaper article has come out now. I haven't checked recently, but from a balance of payments viewpoint we probably need to export more. The massive drop in value of Sterling will have provided an enormous boost to exporters and discourages imports.

That wouldn't be possible if we were inside the Eurozone.

internal markets

It appears that we are reaping the results of money following student "customers" to academic "suppliers." Lots of the junk degrees need to disappear and some structure needs to reward academic achievement, not popularity.

Yes, I really mean academic achievement, not income-earning projects and commercialisation opportunities.

Perhaps then universities would then begin to care more about the quality of the students and the education they receive than the income they represent.

From the other side, education is for the development of the individual. It isn't job training.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear

I wonder how much McKinnon and the twitterNonBomber or Icelanders were relying on "no harm, no foul," and "nobody would prosecute for that!", or "nobody would use anti-terrorist legislation for that purpose!"

Just wait until the gambling offences are rolled into a "serious and organised crime" bill.

I'm not so much worried about one particular law, it's the cavalier attitude of government to law-making that scares me.

It used to be that the average person would have to do something morally wrong to do something illegal. Is that too much to ask?

incremental dogfood

Surely the point about cloud computing is that you remove the reliance on the desktop os.

If that's the way you're going, then OSX is a good choice. Any hidden software dependencies are likely to be Windows-based so moving to OSX should uncover these. However, you can still get most of the big software packages for OSX, so it's a much smaller, safer jump than Linux, which although more inherently capable, has lower availability for commercial, client-side applications.

Plus, Apple have nice looking hardware, which means many people are happy to make the switch. Don't underestimate the importance of keeping people on-side during a major change. Plus, give people nice looking hardware that they value and they might take better care of it.

As for security - unless you are being directly targeted, risk is more important than security. The risk of having security problems with OSX is much smaller than the risk of having security problems with Windows simply because the malware developer community is so Windows focused.

I guess this answers the question...

Should all disks be encrypted?

what it isn't

Is anyone else tired of people saying they don't like these devices because they can't do xyz on them?

*sigh* It isn't a desktop, laptop or netbook, it never was and never will be. Yes you could probably code up Enterprise java beans on a classic atom linux netbook, but would you really want to? (don't answer that - I know someone out there wants to). In fact, what would be ideal for use on a 10" screen?

Well you could browse xkcd, do the odd email. Read stuff (if it was comfortable to hold at a reasonable distance). It would be a great universal remote control if it was instant-on. You could play the odd silly game or music, check the weather forecast, order cinema tickets, check directions to the restaurant for this evening or see if that gadget is cheaper on ebay.

In short, its an information access device, not a high-power computational device in its own right.

Apple aren't pushing it as a laptop replacement, so why does everyone want it to be one? I suspect because many people don't want to spend that much cash on something so limited when a little more can get you so much more cpu/memory/freedom. But Apple know that the apps are king and are selling a way to run AppStore apps on a different form-factor. If you don't want the apps, don't get the device.

It's a classic problem - it has a screen, does email,web-browsing etc so people expect a normal computer. That isn't it. That's is why Apple have made such big inroads into mobile phones but less so on the desktop. People didn't have the "oh but I want to to do xyz that I normally do" attitude to phones because they were all awful and definitely not computers. Apple have tried to avoid this on the ipad by changing the form-factor away from a "normal computer" to a "large phone" to reset expectations.

Me? I"m hoping for a really good android tablet. Or at least waiting for IPad v2. No skype with webcam is a deal-breaker. for me.

re: sales

Hiding the sales in non-sole-purpose devices is dishonest because the purpose of the stats was to show the uptake of digital relative to analogue. If that's your purpose, you can't discount analogue devices because you aren't sure if someone is using them! Maybe people bought DAB radios and then didn't use them.

The only reason DAB radios are bought as dedicated devices is that they are too expensive to bundle. Vendors have to target those who specifically want a dab radio. Analogue radios are so cheap that they are usually bundled. I have an analogue radio in my car - I didn't buy the car to get the radio, but I definitely use it. There are enough bundled devices (alarm-clocks, amplifiers etc) that most people don't need to go out and buy an dedicated analogue radio receiver. That doesn't mean they don't use them.

I suspect that most radio usage (in-car, outside with a ghetto blaster, on the move for personal players, in the kitchen while cooking) does not require hi-fi output. Nobody wants to spend £50-£250 on a radio for these environments, that's why digital radio doesn't take off - it's an expensive solution which doesn't provide benefits to the users for the majority of use cases.

If I didn't know better, I'd think the government just wants to make money (VAT anyone?) from the churn from analogue to digital and then the sale of the spectrum...

No such thing as bad publicity

Apart from phones (where Google isn't anywhere close to being in Apple's commercial league) where would these two come into conflict?

Its all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I'm not entirely sure why google is going after the mobile phone market, except to try what Apple's doing and pries the market segment away from MS. There's no spare screen space for ads on a small device. To make it work, they'll have to produce an interface which does at least as much as the basic iphone. Good addressbook/maps/gps integration, a pleasant interface, good sync'ing and an easy and consistent way of finding and purchasing apps and data. Personally I'd rather like FLAC playback too since I don't need to carry massive amounts of music and I don't want to convert files on every sync.

Perhaps Google could produce a 3g hardware module for the ipod touch and wifi ipad. Or perhaps a superslim bluetooth-controlled 2g/3g phone with no screen or keyboard (or perhaps just a monochrome 1 line display and numeric keypad) and an ipod touch app for a frontend. That would *really* annoy Apple! ;)

Irony

"As reported in the Doncaster Free Press."

--

And what's with all the love of censorship and the acceptance of this kind of insane officialdom pomposity? Quick assessment: do people blow up airports due to snow-closures or as revenge for poor administration or is this hyperbole? Do serious bombers offer to cancel their mass-murder plans if the snow is cleared from the runway in time for their holidays?

A random twitter about getting the airport open is not the same as sending a letter to the airport saying you're you've put a bomb somewhere in the building because the local mullah told you that all westerners must die. It isn't a hoax - he isn't pretending he's going to do it, its hyperbole!

Just because officials have been making fools of themselves in the recent past by exaggerating any an all threats and handing out out-of-proportion punishments is no reason to allow them to go on doing so. They need reigning in and reprimanding for wasting public funds and paying attention to twitter.

The only thing worse than the stupidity of the officials involved in this actions is the stupidity of supporting them in their stupid ways!

Well it made me laugh...

After running a W7 RC for a while I suddenly started getting messages that I wasn't using a genuine operating system.

I already knew that, but I was rather surprised to see MS come out and admit it!

Who cares whether it works?

I suspect someone just wants it approved for use in principle. Once you have a precedent, you can expand it to do what you really want later.

Once you've cleared any "expectation of privacy" the field is clear for all sort of things, like phorm.

Oh look, our dpi host now has an automated torrent-joining plugin! Now it has a web destination plug-in and we can send information to Google/MS/Apple/Bad guy du jour to help with their search engine/iTunes suggestions.

I'm beginning to feel like Ian Paisley in my reaction to things like this...

re: levies

I have to agree with Henry - there is no greater threat to users purchasing content than having access to it over the internet and feeling that they have already paid for it via a tax.