Posts by Charlie Clark
1707 posts • joined Monday 16th April 2007 14:57 GMT
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Posted in Opera Mini 6 and Opera Mobile 11 debut
Mini is nice
Living on Bada I'm glad to see the update as Mini 5 has had some rendering issues but was always faster than Dolphin and has a better approach to rendering text.
Still waiting for Opera Mobile for Bada but Mini 6 is well worth using. Pity it has to be installed and run from in the games folder.
It's not the numbers
No one cares about how many Sieverts are involved. For better or for worse nuclear accidents are tarred with the "no more Chernobyl" where any form of malfunction is considered to be a threat to life. Everyone "knows" that: radiation is invisible, life-threatening and long-lived. To talk about numbers after that is to play Al Gore to George Bush in the 1999 election campaign.
The perverse consequence of this is, of course, nimbyism with everyone craving cheap energy but wanting at least at arm's length. So, the German government having just extended the lives of its reactors has just unconstitutionally (because the Federal government is not responsible for safety) imposed a 3-month shutdown of 7 nuclear power plants, at least 2 of which will probably not go back into producation, jjust before several important state elections. While this is likely to cost billions in compensation to the power companies it is apparently not endangering the supply of electricity. I haven't currently come any figures as to whether shortfall will be made up by imported power that may be nuclear from France or elsewhere. The editorial in the Economist puts the case rather well: nuclear is pretty much dead in the water in democracies but all the more likely in other countries as the market for power will stay very strong.
An informed debate is required. However, citing WNN is only one side of this. WNN is run by the WNA, a lobby association of vested interests.
Posted in Groupon worth 'as much as $25 billion'
You don't have to buy...
... well in some way you probably do - you are bound to be affected by your bank, pension provider who may well be buying into this kind of deal thanks to the money printed by central banks looking for returns above 0.5% no matter how tenuous.
Valued at != value of assets. That said, value and worth are always defined by "what you can get for them" or "what the market will pay". Talking the value up, even tautologically, is perfectly legitimate. The stockmarket seems to go mad over the potential for earnings and especially for the potential for rise in the share price even though evidence tends to suggest that over time dividends are more rewarding than share price growth.
Groupon does seem to offer its customers (advertisers) some value - coupons and discount schemes are a respectable business model - and I was surprised to see a friend of mine who does not jump on the bandwagon (she uses Opera and does not have a Fuckbook account) had recently printed out some kind of groupon coupon (man, that sounds so shit). So there is awareness out there. Internet valuations all seem to be about scale as there is an understanding that margins are paper thin - Google and Amazon can attest to this - but they do exist and having leading market share is damn good way to keep the competition out as you need more than 50% to make any kind of money.
As for the IPO - just hope your bank is on the selling side.
Posted in Moving to Windows 7: Is it worth it?
What are MS playing at?
I agree that not backporting some form of IE 9 to XP is a mystery, hardware acceleration is irrelevant. MS is touting its new browser to all and sundry only for them to find out that it "doesn't run on their system". A system which will be supported until 2014... So, the alternatives are for safer browsing are: shell out for software and possibly hardware upgrade or install a free browser. IE 9 is not much of a reason to install Windows 7
Back to the article - nice overview. From what I've seen of Windows 7 I think most Windows users will like it.
iframes
It is perfectly reasonable for browsers to mistrust iframes: they are non-DOM aliens allowed to stay for this kind of hack.
And there was one
Looks like Microsoft is hedging its bets by working on the program that installs the codecs but not including them with the OS or IE. Just Steve and the fanbois who are still outside.
But you can
However, this means transcoding to more than one format and, potentially having to pay a lot of money for privilege and more for the hardware. Also, because Safari doesn't play nicely you have to put h264 first with Flash as a fallback.
In other news: Opera 11.10 beta, like Chrome, now supports the webp bitmap format based on the work done for webm. The new format allows for better compression (my tests show webp bitmaps being 25% the size of an equivalent jpeg) than JPEG and degrades much better making it suitable both for photographs and images with large blocks of colour or text.
Read before spouting
I think you might find some code here:
http://www.webmproject.org/code/#webm-repositories
Posted in Org charts on steroids
Also missing from the list
Smartdraw and Micrografx. Haven't touched Visio in years but I remember having to write a script to turn tab-based layouts into something that Micrografx could munch because Visio was such a pain to use. I would hope it's improved. However, if working with data then it is hard to beat Graphviz. Data + Graphviz -> SVG is pretty damn good.
For simple charts and sitemaps Slickmap is a nice approach - give it <ul>s and it does the rest.
Why wait?
DNLA does it all already and isn't limited to Apple hardware.
Not just for developers
Quite a lot of stuff on MacPorts requires xCode to build - anything that uses Coacoa I think. Obviously, we're not supposed to be using none-Jobsian tools, though I for one like up to date posix stuff (openssl, etc.).
USD 4.99 probably just covers billing for this so it's difficult to work out the logic behind it - just enough to piss people off so that the servers are not hammered or part of a more elaborate strategy around building up the garden walls. Are the days of `make install clean` on Mac OS numbered?
After banning other runtimes are other GUI toolkits next on the list for Mac OS X?
Try reading the directive
Cookies that "are essential for the technical service" are excepted from the directive. However, I think this excludes cookies just being set by the application server. .NET and other environments will have to be patched not to set cookies when they are not required.
Link to the directive (woefully missing in the article) http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/information_society/l24120_en.htm
Note: the directive considers cookies and data retention as separate issues. User tracking is likely to be pretty much impossible if countries that implement the law in this form.
Also worth noting that the UK is not the only country likely to be late in implementing the directive in national law but this is quite common with directives. Initially this just means a rap on the knuckles for naughty member states with fines to follow - many countries are often years late on legislation. Problems for sites and users will arise once the first country does legislate because anything dealing with countries outside the EU will be handled by the Commission.
It's not all about addresses
IPV6, if done correctly, provides the basis for a more reliable and, in theory at least, a safer (for a a given value of safe) infrastructure. As this requires network admins who know what they're doing I'll agree that this is promise is unlikely to be fulfilled.
Anyway, botnets are the way forward. With or without quadrillions of addresses you can't rely on blacklists for them.
There are no technical solutions to social issues
Anyway any problem is less in the consumption of porn than its production.
I, for one, welcome our new Pornosaurus lords.
PS. Pornography is literally dirty, "dirty writing" if memory serves correctly. Whether this includes erotica and violence is a matter of mass debate.
Deal with the devil
He's handled the media brilliantly until he tripped over this. Now he's spat out his dummy and resigned from parliament. Whether this was out of pique or before he faces any criminal charges is not known at the moment. Personally, I think resigning your seat at parliament a gross abdication of responsibility to your constituents.
I don't think he was forced to resign - his popularity is such that he probably could have survived even being done for plagiarism. Well, except that he's also responsible for the two army universities.
But he did piss off a seriously large bit of the intelligentsia by trying to relativise his crime. Which is why Schavan said that she would have been "ashamed" and Norbert Lammert is not generally known for being gung-ho but quite early on was against Betrugenberg. There is still the matter of whether parliamentary service was used to write the thesis.
He flew high so he had harder to fall. His tv appearances and solidarity with the troops on the frontline did not necessarily endear him to the rest of the army and his protests about working so hard on the army reform is a load of shit that de Maiziere is going have to deal with, and put himself in pole position to replace Merkel if he pulls it off.
But back to the main point of the article the amount of slacktivists signing up to recall the minister. Hopefully this will hope to highlight how little effect such pages have and how little they have to do with democracy.
Open testing required
Android can probably make a virtue out of this by implementing some kind of testing infrastructure that checks applications automatically. An open process should allow best practice to be implemented quickly. We can only guess that Apple tests as much for non-Apple backdoors as they do for unsuitable content or stuff the just don't like.
Posted in Apple cures iPad buyer's remorse
Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs
While repetitive the stories are usually entertaining and I assume popular enough with those readers who can see ads that advertisers like them so it makes sense to write more.
I, for one, welcome our our tongue-in-I'd rather-not-say overlords. But I also can't wait for the first head-to-head reviews of Xoom versus iPant.
You forgot to mention
Opera added hardware support for Windows, drivers permitting, in a labs build on 28th February.
http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2011/02/28/webgl-and-hardware-acceleration-2
WebGL isn't likely to set the world on fire just yet unless Hollywood insists that webm 3d is the only way to go but hardware support for Open GL will make some things like overlays work a lot better.
Underwhelmed
Rosetta will probably still be available at least for the plethora of devices that (Canon, Oki, etc.) than package drivers with it. Otherwise a fuck of a lot of people will either not pay out or not read the small print and be fucking angry. Quite possible that a restricted set of Rosetta will still be around and available for download.
Some nice things in there but given that Snow Leopard was apparently only a minor update (with things like Grand Central and CUDA) and this will be two years after Snow Leopard I can't help thinking that something is missing. Support for the ARM toolchain is probably the elephant in the room so that "compliant" applications can be easily cross-compiled for Mac OS and iOS.
Mac OS is still a really nice platform to work with so I don't feel any pressing need to jump ship but I will be installing PC-BSD 8.2 on a separate partition and probably buy some kind of Android 3 based notebook once the teething troubles are solved.
Unforeseen consequences
I'm with Lester on this - cock-ups on this scale (sic) can have lots of unforeseen consequences. With such a slapdash approach to measurements more "accidents" like Ariane 5 are bound to happen as people work with different understandings of measurements. Portsmouth council is putting people's lives at risk!
A possible solution would be to equip the aquatic centre (make it sound fishal) with a relativity device which could cause space-time to warp around the pool to make up the difference.
Missing the point
The case is not about how to pay for services but about data protection and privacy. The implications of unnecessarily divulging personal information go way beyond bits or targeted advertising and the potential for abuse should really scare the shit out of any sane person.
Frames are only a partial solution and just as easily covered by the same legislation. Targeted adverts can make sense and can be done safely but anonymously. The advertising industry should concentrate on providing working implementations of it.
Not sufficient
Explicit permission requires a bit more than a button and "clickthrough EULAs" are not legally binding in Germany.
Regarding cookies the EU directive clearly states that they may only be used when essential for providing technical services. The German data protection body, known as the "Düsseldorfer Circle", are currently mulling over the necessary changes to the Telemediengesetz.
Not just concerned
"Both the US FTC and the European Union are currently concerned about Online Behavioural Advertising (OBA) in particular, and the tracking of individuals across the internet in general..."
The EU is more than concerned having issued a directive effectively banning all cookies without *explicit* prior consent in 2009 with a requirement for member states to enact legislation by May 2011. Of course, as is their wont few governments have actually passed legislation but they will be required to do so and then the lawsuits will come.
Limiting cookies to the current session is probably the minimum restriction that anyone can get away with but with more and more applications being "always" on that probably isn't enough and third-parties are probably doomed and trackers will only have themselves to blame.
In fact, if you look at what HTML5 offers then cookies themselves are probably on the way out - local storage and websockets are a good replacement and a browser-enforced solution is probably the only practical approach. "You need an HTML5-capable browser to use this website" notices could provide the necessary kick up the arse for the laggards. Except those millions stuck with IE 6 for reasons of compatibility...
Horses for courses
Light peak sounds more like next generation FireWire than USB. USB 3.0 is a mess for manufacturers as backwards compatibility means both a USB 2 and USB connection and children with sufficiently nimble fingers for the cabling are increasingly rare. Then, of course, there is the question as to whether USB is really suited for high-speed data as well whilst being able to deal with a plethora of devices with 1 or 2 kbps required by keyboards and mice. For the truly *serial* connections Bluetooth with some kind of NFC-based pairing is probably more attractive.
Goodbye USB, we won't really miss you.
How much?
That's what the final question will be, how much money does Oracle want. Preceded by how long? ie. how long can Google get the case to drag on before it replaces Dalvik with something that doesn't need Java at all. Something based on NaCl or Flash perhaps? Android has a lot of momentum and Oracle should be sweet-talking developers into using more Java and buying tools and training not antagonising them with threats. That's like kicking the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Oracle's PR is seriously fucked up at the moment. Which is fine as far as I'm concerned - Oracle fucks up MySQL and it's a win for Postgres, they fuck up OpenSolaris and it's a win for FreeBSD, they fuck up Java and it's a win for every other bytecode runtime. Adobe and Google tie up anyone? It's fine Oracle trying to improve the bottom line that Sun seemed to have forgotten how to monetise but increasing fees is one thing, totally screwing customers over quite another.
The power of precedent
AFAIK this is exactly the argument that German courts have already used when dealing with the resale of MS Windows licences: once purchased they belong exclusively to the purchaser and resale is allowed; and mod-chips for consoles and DVD-players are allowed. The click-through EULA has been declared invalid in Germany.
The producers know they haven't got much of a case but are determined to rake in as much as they can while they establish a new strategy of licence rental or SaaS. Limit the period of the licence and it quickly loses any value in resale.
Posted in Apple plots iPad 2 production reduction
Anything to stay in the headlines
Apple is desperate not to lose their iconic status for these personal media players and spinning rumours of impending new versions is essential to encourage people to "buy the original" or "wait for the next version" rather than buy from the upstarts who now have access to both hardware and software of similar quality.
So if, when the Xoom launches, the media are still talking about Apple then they will be happy. Apple's biggest fear is if the media simply debate which Android tablet is the best.
yeah but no but
Where does the LCD myth come from? I can't think of, which doesn't mean it doesn't exist, an EU regulation example that follows this. In fact EU rules are usually minimum plus, ie. exploiting the principle of subsidiarity for additional determination: order from Bulgaria, et al. but benefit from UK consumer protection legislation. Sounds good to me.
Uk behind the curve again
Government consults business for its response...
How about consulting consumers? Differences in contract law are a major PITA if there are ever disputes that need resolving. As with car import duty or phone roaming charges, harmonisation of the regulatory environment is essential for a level playing field.
Posted in Card surcharges face super-complaint
The UK playing catch up again
Ryanair had to drop all kinds of charges pretty sharpish in Germany as they were deemed to be unfair (the no-charge option is essentially not available in Germany), illegal (you cannot charge multiple times for the same service - one credit card debit cannot incur multiple charges) and anti-competitive (headline prices must include all charges). It's not a coincidence that growth in Germany is sluggish at best.
Interestingly other airlines offer considerable discounts if you do not pay by credit card (at least €10 with Lufthansa) and it's not uncommon to get a 5% rebate in smaller shops if you pay with cash or debit card.
Ryanair is the pennypincher's airline and as long are people prepared to be repeatedly suckered by its misleading offerings they will succeed.
Too much back-slapping
My, aren't we a clever bunch? We all seem to have such great strategies so that "password-stealing could never happen to me". Congratulations but that isn't the problem: passwords are the problem. Invented by people to lazy to come up with a reliable authentication system and forced on us mere mortals.
Because we're so crap at memorising the immemorable we nearly all have some form of password reuse. Even if we spice it up with our own salts. But we're still dependent upon developers implementing a secure backend to stop them being read as plain text. Even then we are at risk, even if not directly, when others are compromised: when someone robs a bank all customers lose out. Plus the whole predictability aspect of password reuse allows for more sophisticated profiling and the best scams are those where you don't even need to steal someone else's keys or password.
I'd hope that a public key infrastructure initiated with an SSL-encrypted exchange of public keys between browser and server might be an alternative. To register you would just allow your browser to send your public key to the server which would send you its public key. All further communication could run happily using public/private key encryption. Certainly not foolproof but a damn site easier to deal with.
Posted in Facebook tagged with $60bn valuation
History repeats itself
Once you get caught out with a Ponzi scheme you just create another one with a new name. We had the "new economy" dotcom fiasco which was replaced by a property bubble encouraged by too much liquidity. That went bang so the central banks just printed more money for the next asset bubble.
The GS "special investment opportunity" is probably the AOL moment of the current cycle. What will be the Enron?
Job done?
Startup with no revenue stream but huge membership base seeks buyer to pay off creditors. Right, where are the next group of suckers who need their wallets* lightening.
Maybe we could club together to close the shitstream down? Put me down for a fiver!
*Fortunately only a few credulous rich individuals are under threat of actually losing out. Most dollars are likely to come from the same banks and pension funds that so happily invested OPM in securitised credit card backed mortgages and other financial niceties!
Good for the economy
Whatever the cause this is exactly what we need to get the economy back on track: people who feel bad about themselves are more likely to indulge in persistent retail therapy or perhaps even expensive medical treatment.
This message has been brought to you by the Amalgamated Association of Shop Owners and Doctors.
erm, what's all the fuss about
This looks like a minor step forward to me. Still no TANs so once you get the login details you're laughing.
Does this keypad actually plug into the computer and secure the communication or is it external? In which case the authentication is still subject to MitM attacks. We're onto ones that encrypt the communication end to end here and have TANs for each transaction. All that and German online banking is still considered insecure.
Regarding call-centres: Nationwide usually routes calls round the branches which I've always found to be a pragmatic solution to the problem.
Embedded x86 as the future?
Seems to be the major premise of the article. I see your bloated x86 chips and raise you a cheap as chips ARM or MIPS that does the same job for less power so doesn't need as much cooling, is more resilient and lasts for longer on the battery. As others have noted hardware tolerances can be crucial for networks.
As regards open source strange to see the article plugging Vyatta but only briefly mentioning Juniper Networks, a staunch supporter of FreeBSD and sponsor IIRC of initial attempt to virtualise the network stack entirely. What have Juniper done to offend you, Mattt? A post that is ostensibly about open source turns into a vendor plug. Whatever the merits of the company or their product this counts as advertising in my book.
Posted in Sky loses pub footy case
The irony
Sky initially only had a licence to broadcast to Luxembourg. BSB thought it had a monopoly on the British satellite market but unfortunately signals from Astra satellites bled occasionally over the borders of Luxembourg to cover the whole of North and Western Europe. So Sky's position is doomed by its own precedent. Remarkable how long they've been able to milk it though.
The Great IPv6 Experiment
Still some way to go but most bugs seem to have been worked out:
http://www.h-online.com/features/The-big-IPv6-experiment-1165042.html describes a dual-stack approach.
Germany is going IPv6
Deutsche Telekom, the largest ISP, is due to rollout out IPv6 to all subscribers by the end of the 2011 with other ISPs likely to follow. IPv6 should in theory improve routing which is probably a more compelling reason for adoption by providers.
Posted in Canada? The computer vendor says no
Pocketbook IQ?
http://www.pocketbook-usa.com/products/pocketbook-iq/
Not the best spec in the world but only 500g and USD 140
Ticks all the boxes
Sounds like some incredible attention to detail in the UX followed by technical implementation and hopefully extensive testing. You've got to hand it to the Android team that they have gone from being an imitator to a leader in about 18 months.
Posted in Gates: Killing the internet is easy
Well said that man
cf. "The Net Delusion" by Evgeny Morozov
Those with the most resources to take advantage of the internet are the ones who have the most to gain. Net neutrality in its purest form.
Posted in US lawmakers eye internet 'kill switch'
Stop the rot!
Anyone who writes internet with a capital "I" is obviously a moron. "Cyber emergency", FFS. Methinks these people watch too much Caprica and not enough Wag The Dog!
Posted in CodeWeavers pours Wine for the masses
Is .NET supported?
I 've run quite a few things through Wine quite well. Unfortunately I recently tried something that needed the .NET runtime and that failed to install. Time to give CrossOver a try, I guess.
One nice thing about Wine is the ability to run stuff that may be infected with impunity.
Posted in Apple iOS app hunger swells
Compare and contrast
With the Adobe mobile experience study from last autumn.
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/201010/101310AdobeMobileExperienceSurvey.html
Similar sample size but much more open about it being skewed.
Posted in Seagate tells flash bigots to get real
What if...
Seagate is probably right in assuming that if current trends continue then SSD has a nearly impossible job of playing catch up with magnetic storage. And it's not as if magnetic storage is staying still, though investment in volatile magnetic storage may decrease.
However, will we continue to demand ever more storage of our portable devices? Music libraries probably max out at about 200GB but good synching means that most people are probably happy with a lot less on any single device as long as they have good access to the library. Video is, of course, what is driving demand for both capacity and mobility as the tablets become the PMPs we've always wanted and, thus, displace notebooks bought for this purpose. Even 64GB is going to look skimpy for a PMP when you take the kids on holiday. Do you hold out for more onboard storage or take 4TB disk-based library with you? Then, of course, there is network-based storage which is bound to become more popular as fast and affordable mobile networks become spread, though I suspect take up will be far from universal.
This may well mean that demand for notebooks slows or even decreases. Business users may start favouring speed over capacity (witness the popularity of the Macbook air in some circumstances). Reduced growth in demand and changing priorities will have a significant effect on the industry but the report is probably true to claim that the investment required to replace magnetic storage with SSD is too great for it to happen and additional SSD capacity will largely feed the demand for "other devices". It would take some kind of technological change which either greatly decreased the costs of SSD production (plastic chips) or another form of storage entirely comes along. In the meantime Seagate is probably right to pursue the Momentum strategy which promises the best of both worlds.
I've just replaced a nearly full 250GB, 5400 rpm drive with a 500GB, 7200rpm Momentum (4GB SSD and 32 MB cache) and performance is noticeably better even with the problems OS X 10.6 seems to have with concurrent drive access.
Posted in Plastic Logic scores $700m from Russians
I still want one
The Que is *exactly* the kind of reader I want and I'd be happy to pay a premium for it. But your main criticism that Plasticlogic couldn't compete on the global market for what has quickly become consumer devices is entirely valid. Licensing the technology to companies with the necessary scale is where they need to go. But it will be interesting to see the colour stuff they claim to have come up with.
Posted in WikiLeaks gets Swiss bank info
It depends
firstly on the laws of the land where any case is held. However, generally material obtained by criminal means is not accepted as evidence. But it can be accepted as a tip-off as to where to look for evidence that may be used in court or who to talk to. As to bank secrecy versus assistance in tax evasion or fraud there are usually limits on the amounts concerned when the authorities must be informed and bilateral agreements between countries usually explicitly forbid banks in one country from advising citizens in another how they made evade tax.
<rant>
Tax evasion is pernicious and crack downs are to be welcomed. If the rich buggers concerned actually paid what they siphon off tax rates for everyone could probably be reduced.
</rant>
Naked short selling is even more fun
You sell shares that you haven't even borrowed on the hope that you will be able to buy them in a lower price before you have hand them over.
Paying dividends is the best way to honour investor loyalty.
Posted in Lane Fox promises sub-£100 PCs
Bring back minitel
There's no margin in a refurbished machine for £100 it's difficult to see companies getting on board selling these unless there's a fat subsidy for it.
If you want people online it's better to give them some kind of updated minitel system for the "digital" town hall stuff. The new ARM-based stuff would be ideal for this but something piggy-backing on a Freeview set-top box might be even better, although I can imagine my mum, a refusenik par excellence, still having nothing to with it.
But, of course, this can't be done on the cheap. You can only hope to make the cost back on reduced costs for other services over time.
