Posts by Tom Kelsall

I bought an iPhone...

...but after seeing the hoops I have to jump through to make it work the way I like it best, and after seeing the ONLY product which Jobs allows it to properly synchronise with, and after realising that the only way to fill it with music is NOT drag and drop, it's synchronising....

He can go fuck his i<insert natty name here>. I want nothing more to do with iPads, iPhones, iPods, iMacs... you name it. Steve Jobs gets more headscrewed with each and every day and I will not buy another one of his Apple branded products. My "Upgrade" comes up on the 20th May - and I will be getting myself a Desire (anti-google privacy people PLEASE forgive me). Bring on the dragging and MP3 dropping. Bring on the wealth of calendar and email synchronisation options. Bring on the storage of documents and Other Files on my phone. Bring on the upgrading of my device with more memory when I feel like it. Bring on customising the display to my own desires. Bring on the choosing of literally billions of ringtones/SMS tones by simply selecting a sound file from the memory card. Bring on being able to buy as many or as few as I choose.

Apple (forgive the overdramatisation) are DEAD to me.

What I don't get is...

...that everyone above seems to be in broad agreement with my first post, and yet someone silently "disliked" it. Don't hide - come out and tell us what you found so objectionable about what I wrote.

FFS

We all KNEW this. But try to tell it to Facebook... it's like talking to a particularly unresponsive wall. I would kill for an app-vetting process in their system... I don't use apps AT ALL but I still get bombarded with shit on my wall from apps which other people think I might like. FFS.

I don't use...

...internet advertising of any kind. If I identify a requirement or a desire for something, I use the internet to seek it out at my chosen vendors. I don't believe I have EVER clicked on an internet ad banner intentionally. Why am I the only person ON THE PLANET who operates like this?

I've said it before...

Similar problems will end up with similar solutions. Humans' design won't be changing anytime soon, and the same HCI factors will influence GUI design. That being the case, Apple's patents on things like "MultiTouch" should be rescinded as a development of publicly available science rather than commercial innovation. The science of Human/Computer Interaction is pretty well understood and developing all the time - from lots of different directions.

"...impossible to pre-screen..."

No it isn't - it's just expensive.

Errrm.... hold on a second...

Have I missed something here? Didn't Microsoft, through some dodgy dealings or other, get their XML document format voted in as the international document format standard? In which case why hasn't the format been released into the wild so that people like OOO don't HAVE to reverse engineer it? Weren't they up against OOO's ODF format which is already open?

I'm confused.

Tele-WHAT now?

Haven't even pressed the text button on my remote for ten years... fuss/nothing=undefined!

No title required.

All that has to be done, is to convince the artists to step outside the vicious chain of promotor/distributor control. Incentivise the artists to produce music for themselves and publicise/sell it themselves and the likes of Louis Walsh/Simon Cowell will be no more... Artists will make money from their music and mere humans like you and I will have access to what we want at sensible prices.

Let's remember - the promotor/distributor geeks who actually bring the lawsuits (with the exception of f**kwit Bono) are NOT trying to protect artist copyright... they're trying to protect their own profits...

It's not about...

..."roadmap" and "direction" and other Management Speak/Bullshit Bingo nonsense. It's about an interface that wasn't designed for a phone and a bloody awful OS. It's about companies having to overlay an interface on Windows Mobile to make it palatable to phone lovers. (Thanks HtC) and it's about the fact that Microsoft should stick to what they're good at.

Microsoft should make kernals for mobiles and let others design the front end around it.

is* is

It happens with quite a few "is* is" queries; I've tried ten and got about half of them with no suggestions. It seems to happen with NAMES which begin with "is"... Isometric didn't do it but Isere did.

Yet another reason...

for a radical review of global music licensing laws and processes. The artists don't benefit from these suits HALF as much as labels, distributors and so on. The time is right to put the power back in the artist's hands and to sell music directly from artist to consumer - I'd be a lot happier paying an artist directly for his stuff than paying some faceless corporation! And, of course, if I needed a CD version I'd burn one. But I'd be far more likely to carry my music around on my MP3 player of choice and broadcast it direct to my car/home stereo as required...

I would like to see....

an on-board system which artificially overlays "3d" heads-up pictures of controlled airspace onto the canopy/windscreen/etc. You'd have your traditional HUD information, plus shaded areas on the display in different colours according to the type of airspace in front and to either side of the nose. Only "free" airspace would have no colour. Finally, the display would show a particularly noticeable flag when you entered controlled airspace to ensure you either got the hell out or took the appropriate action.

I think the technology exists already for this kind of display; all we need now is the back-end infrastructure to support it.

Passport?

EU Citizens don't NEED a passport to travel in the EU. They need a "Recognised form of photo ID" which includes the EU-designed UK Driving Licence. If they didn't accept his ID card they SHOULD have accepted his driving licence. The man's NOT an idiot for believing what the government told him - that his ID card is a valid form of travel ID. It is. The people who screwed up and P&O who failed to adequately disseminate publicly available information about travle ID changes to their gate control staff.

Storage is cheap.

Deal with it by buying more.

FFS...

When are banks going to realise that they have to make their systems SECURE?!

Off the shelf OS and software, systems with back doors in them to enable the fraudster access, simple PINs being used in place of complex signatures and stored in the clear...

It's an absolute crock of shit, that's what it is. In other news, cars are easy to break into and steal...

They can tell you're...

...downloading; they can tell WHAT you're downloading.... how do they then propose to prove "Beyond reasonable doubt" that you are ILLEGALLY downloading?

They can tell you're uploading; they can tell WHAT you're uploading; how do they then propose to prove boyond reasonable doubt that the person you're uploading to is NOT licensed to download it?

It's a long way from identifying someone who's up/downloading and proving that it's illegal.

Dumbass users

Total FAIL. Anyone with the savvy to install and use OpenSSH should know about the security concerns. Most of the stuff you can do using SSH commands can be done with apps anyway; so why would you bother? I just don't get anyone who leaves security stuff set to defaults.

It's an unworkable model...

It's been working for a while now, but I just don't see how "You are licensed to use it but you don't own it" is a sustainable model. When I upgrade my PC to a shiny new one with shiny new software, I don't WANT to put my old software back on it, but SOMEONE could benefit from it... a sale is a sensible and logical way to pass the "right to use" onto someone else without them having to fork out for another copy, probably of a version which won't run on their old system.

Second Hand Markets exist for EVERYTHING else... why not software?

Details?

Never give out your details to ANY incoming caller... because whatever "proofs" they offer, they could be anyone. Always tell any incoming caller very clearly that to contact you about your account they MUST write to you and please could they refrain from calling this number again. Harrassment Law refers here; if they call another TWICE having clearly been requested to stop, they are potentially harrassing you.

If it's a bogus caller of course they will never write to you...

And me....

Most of my work stuff stopped working under 3.5 - so I have gone back to 3.0 at work. However, I'm happy with 3.5 at home...

*SIGH*

Haynes reckon there aren't enough Smart Cars on the roads to do a manual for them - seriously SERIOUSLY irritating to see this book therefore. I mean - there were what, 18 Lunar Modules?? And NONE of them were "on the road".

GRRRRR!!!!