No Adblock?

I installed Firefox mobile, hoping I could get a decent browser that supported Flash (*when I want it!*) and Adblock Plus.

So far, I cannot get it to install ABP - so what's the advantage over the built-in again?

Biased samples

The Nielson sample set has a built-in bias against:

People who insist upon their privacy (e.g.: I was a Nielson "family" several times, happily reporting what I watched to help the shows I like out. Then Nielson wanted me to report on what I bought, where I shopped, etc. Guess what: I am no longer a Nielson family)

People who screen their calls and don't answer unknown numbers.

People who toss out junk mail.

Granted, this may be like the 419 scammers who make no effort to be subtle, so that they screen out people who are not clueless - it may be that Nielson doesn't care about the bias because it selects against people who don't "consume" advertising anyway.

The fundamental flaw in the whole advertising system is that advertisers cannot wrap their tiny little minds around the fact that they are unwanted and uninvited guests at the party: we, the viewers, allow the program into our lives, and the program says "Yeah, is it OK if these ads come to? - they're my ride, man." We grudgingly allow the ads in, and the ads proceed to be loud and obnoxious, eat all the party mix, drink all the booze, throw up on the floor, insult everybody, and generally ruin the party.

WAHH! PAY ATTENTION TO ME

Quick quiz:

"WAHHH! The world isn't paying enough attention to me! The US is attacking me! HELP HELP I'm being OPPRESSED!"

Who said this?

a) Iran

b) Julian Assange

Maybe Julian should have gone to the Iranian embassy - then would could have ignored two (loonie) birds at once!

Windows RT, or Windows RG?

http://www.deanliou.com/WinRG/

Lower memory footprint, more stability....

Alternative: reading comprehension

Stop using image recognition, and go to comprehension, e.g.:

To prove you are a human, which of the following is acceptable behavior:

a) kicking a spammer in the gonads

b) punching a spammer in the face

c) using a cattleprod on a spammer

d) all of the above.

This is why I hate Flash video

This is why I hate Flash video. I have perfectly good video players on my system, many of which can use the hardware I have to best use (e.g. MPlayer) and can play 1080p30 video at a percent CPU load.

But because Macromedia saw fit to use their own "special" MIME type, and to encourage web site designers to force me to use ONE particular plug in to play their oh-so-special content. those players get muscled aside for a bug-ridden, crash-prone, privacy-invading plugin.

How about you look at the damn "accepts:" header, and feed my browser a damn MP4 file, and let my BROWSER and I decide what to do with it?

I anxiously await HTML5 becoming dominant.

I wish they'd spin Trolltech back out

I wish they'd spin Trolltech back out to being an independent company again - it would make me a whole lot more comfortable about Qt.

It is not in The Puppetmasters Behind The Scenes best interest for there to be a cross-platform, well engineered UI toolkit that could target Android, *nix, MacOS, and Windows with one code base.

(and Qt could work on IOS as well, again but for the decisions of Apple management).

And the wheel completes another turn

First there was real mode.

But it wasn't enough to protect the programs.

So then was created protected mode, and an operating system kernel to manage the programs.

But it wasn't enough to protect the programs.

So then was created System Management Mode, and a BIOS to manage the system.

But it wasn't enough to protect the programs.

So then was created system virtual machines.

But it wasn't enough to protect the programs.

And so was created TPM, and code to use it.

But it wasn't enough to protect the programs.

So now is created a separate processor.

Unfortunately....

Unfortunately, applying quantum computing to Pageranking LOLCats has a tendency to report the page as both highly ranked and lowly ranked until the page is viewed - at which time the Pagerank collapses to a single value, but by then it's too late.

Interesting "difference-that-is-not"

This is an interesting "difference-that-is-not" between OfComm and the FCC. In theory the FCC regulates ANYTHING that can emit RF, be it deliberate or accidental, is regulated by the FCC - so a TV must be a part 15 device (unlicensed emitter) and must follow the regs.

In theory.

In practice, the FCC operates under the principle of "mind over matter" : if nobody who matters minds, then it doesn't matter, so never mind. So in practice it's not much different than OfCom.

Embarrassing, and sad.

This is just embarrassing and sad - like watching an old, overweight man suffering from Alzheimer's trying to fit in at a party by act like what he thinks is hip, but was out of date years ago.

Which, as I type that, is exactly what this is: Microsoft trying to be "hip to the jive my man".

An Alzheimer's suffer has a medical excuse. What is Microsoft's?

Really - this doesn't make me angry, or offended. This just makes me feel uncomfortably embarrassed for having witnessed it.

Are you pondering what I am pondering?

I think so Brain, but if they hung from balloons, wouldn't they be called air-mines?

DLNA - Doesn't Like Nearly Anything

"The DLNA standard - which lays down how computers, printers, cameras, phones and other multimedia devices should share media - works acceptably as long as one has a minimum of technical ability and suitably low expectations of success: when it works, it works well."

But that is astonishingly infrequent. DLNA implementations on TVs are VERY picky about the codec, container format, bit rates, codec parameters, resolutions, and I am convinced the user's dress and choice of deodorant. If even one parameter doesn't agree with the TV, the stream will be rejected, with no clue as to why.

Remedy proposals...

"We don't like that you are the best at what you do, that you are making money, and that you are bloody Yanks so you aren't under our thumbs and paying taxes to us.

Now, we want you to tell us how you will remedy this situation. I'm sure you can image some remedies that might make things better. By the way, are you planning on picking up the lunch tab? - I hear you Americans 'tip' pretty well, ifyouknowwhatimean.

Well, we have to make a quick run to the WC - oh look, we dropped this empty plain white envelope on the table. Oh well, we'll just pick it up when we get back from the WC. Hopefully, it won't blow away - maybe you guys can find something to weigh it down with?

After all, it's such a nice business you have here - it would be a shame if something were to happen to it."

Hacker

Is anybody else reminded of Steve Jackson Games' "Hacker"?

You could spend an action "cleaning" up a system, removing everybody else who had compromised it.

(now, if only SJG would do a Hacker: Designer's Edition Kickstarter, after the success of the Ogre: Designer's Edition Kickstarter).

There are days I wish somebody would write a Warhol Worm that would infect every already infected botnet zombie out there, then "kill" them by overwriting the hard disk: the old "Nuke the entire site from orbit" approach to cleansing the Internet.

Error: logic consistency failure

"Last.fm takes your privacy very seriously,"

Isn't the whole point of Last.fm to publish every last little song you listen to, for others to marvel at? In what way is that "privacy"? Isn't the very use of Last.fm discarding an element of your privacy?

It seems the one word that best sums up the whole Web2.0 is:

ME

"Look at ME. Here MY music list. This is where *I* am. This is what *I* am thinking. Here are MY friends. These are the movies *I* am watching. Let ME tell you more about MY favorite subject - ME!"

And then people are surprised when the various web sites dedicated to letting them broadcast their every little movement aren't very careful with their privacy.

It just make ME sick.

Pity it's so damn expensive.

I used to regularly back up my desktop, my laptop, and my servers to tape (8MM).

But disk kept growing, and tape - at least the sort of tape you can afford for personal use - didn't.

Now, sadly, it is far cheaper for me to buy a couple of SATA drives, put them in the "toaster" (external SATA interface), and copy the data to them than to get a tape drive capable of swallowing my 6TB of data in anything resembling a reasonable number of tapes.

You FOOLS! This is RoTM!

You Fools! Don't you see this is Rise of The Machines material?

First flying zombie cyborg moggies, the next thing you know you have flying zombie cyborg moggies WITH FREEKIN LAZORS IN THE EYES - then full-on Hunter-Killers!

(Yes, I am fully aware of the proper spelling of laser - that is a nod to the various "Imma Firin Ma Lazors" memes).

But I feel the artist needs to hire an assistant to the flying, so he can concentrate on more weirdness - May I suggest CAT-lin O'Shannessy? (Obviously STRINGfellow would just distract the poor thing.)

I'm surpised the cell companies haven't jumped

I'm surprised the cellular companies haven't done more with IPv6 - they control the network, and here in the US they have great control over the devices on that network as well. You'd think Verizon would set up my Android device with an IPv6 address, and set it up such that hotspot mode would hand out routable IPv6 addresses to the devices that support it.

Missing Footnote?

The asterisk after virus implies a footnote, but I don't see any.

Simple rule, really

Everybody follows a simple rule, really:

"What *I* have isn't porn, it's erotica.

Anything milder than what I have is just pictures.

Anything I don't like is porn.

Anything harder-core than what I have is extreme porn."

So from her perspective, "ladies in bikinis" is just pictures.

I'll leave inferences about the other items to the reader.

Report from the future

" and we are dropping the Metro interface, which may have been teh shizzle in the day, but is now looking dated and cheesy..."

Why not a radio trigger?

Why not just use a radio trigger? Have 2 groups, a few miles apart, with telescopes and cell phones. Each reports the azimuth of the balloon, as recorded by the telescopes. A bit of math, you have altitude. At desired altitude, send the launch command. You could likely use a simple model RC controller in the 2 meter amateur band (with a licensed control operator, naturally), and if needed an amp to get the needed power levels to make the trip (I don't know the regs in the UK, but in the US amateurs are allowed up to 1W for such operations (Part 97.215) - and 20 miles line of sight shouldn't be an issue at 1W.

People said the Cell was hard to program

Remember all the people who complained that the Cell was hard to program, due to the fact the SPUs were not the same as the PPC cores, and that the SPUs needed the programmer to explicitly manage moving data from main memory to the SPU memory?

Now this - is this any better (other than the fact that there are more than 8 cores)?

Will nVidia allow this chip to be sold in anything other than board level assemblies? That was the problem (from my perspective) with the Cell - IBM didn't want to sell the chip alone unless you were buying hundreds of thousands of them, so you had to buy a board from one of the board vendors like Mercury Computing. If nVidia won't let companies create their own boards (or package this into more useful form factors than 6U Compact PCI) then it will have similar issues.

And people take issue with US food

Reading this article, I find it amazing people criticize US food choices!

But again: I dare any Reg Hack to come over to the US - preferably the nominal South-east area - and try a proper Waffle House All-The-Way.

Does anybody else see the irony....

Does anybody else see the irony of CongressCritters, who get all sorts of taxpayer funded free travel, much of which is of questionable needfulness, criticizing Google for the crime of paying (but paying ENOUGH, by the CongressCritter's reckoning) for air travel?

Finally, somebody gets it

Finally, a phone manufacturer gets it - making the phone thinner does little good past the point where it will fit into a pocket, so instead, add more battery and keep the same thickness!

Now, if we could just persuade them to stop being silly about making high pixel count cameras that only work well in full sun, and instead reduce the pixel count and increase the pixel area, so they work well in normal lighting. If I want to take >4MP pictures I'll use a camera with better optics than the damn-near-pinhole on a phone.

I don't know which WWF I think less of

I don't know which WWF I think are worse:

1) The totally fake, attention whoring, talentless hacks who put on a show just to make a buck

or

2) The guys in Spandex tights in the wrestling ring.