Posts by Charlie Clark
1688 posts • joined Monday 16th April 2007 14:57 GMT
Page:
yep
E-mail, particularly IMAP, work great on Opera. In fact that may be my main reason for using it. Note, I don't do much server-side work as Opera automatically recognises mailing lists and other useful things. The new mail panel is fantastic for heavy mail users. The only thing missing that I occasionally need to go into Thunderbird for is PGP support.
Particularly encouraging to see the number of extensions out there. I'm not a heavy user of them myself but a script blocker that goes beyond Opera's built-in content blocker is nice to have.
Each to his own
NFT
Posted in Facebook homes in on world of Google
I feel sick
"a human algorithm"
WTF is this guy on? And the noun for social is society.
Posted in Street View hits 20 German cities
Street View is not a public service
The images are not being used privately and Google isn't being altruistic. It is a commercial offering funded by advertising. Permission of concerned parties must be obtained and any appropriate fees paid in such cases. This is possibly analogous to the YouTube fiasco with Google hoping to sit out anything legal battles but if anyone does sue and win you can expect some class actions to come thick and fast.
Posted in The Economist publishes iPad app
Listen to it
Subscription also includes an excellent reading of the issue, cover to cover or selected sections as you prefer, which is great if you're on the move. Far more important and innovative for me than any device-specific application.
And the point is?
I don't really understand this article. Is the point that Drupal's army of crazed supporters are waiting to support you if you drink the Drupal kool-aid? (Hat off to Neal Stephenson for the metaphor). If so this is equally true of many CMS, which are indeed eating into the enterprise CMS business now that it has become commodified? And from what I have recently seen of Interwoven the bar for being an enterprise CMS seems pretty low. Coming from the Python world Plone, Pylons and Django spring to my mind as doing much the same thing but with fewer reported security issues. While this is good to see for anyone who remembers the obscene licence fees that CMS vendors used to charge it's not really news. Maybe the more important point is dangling the carrot of being able to switch vendors fairly quickly which the article suggests the "Gardens" thing offers. Certainly being able to get your data out of a vendors clutch is interesting for enterprise customers but not the main thing as migration is *always* difficult and nobody believes in plug and play anymore.
What does Lord Sugar know about copyright?
Laws do vary between jurisdictions but I thought that 70 years after the death of the composer was standard for music. Of course, that still leaves other rights which might be running out but then Disney got them recently extended for the early Mickey Mouse stuff, didn't it?
Anyway The Beatles: YSB.
Golgafrincham, a planet formally known as earth
On the first ship go all the important people: hairdressers, telephone sanitisers, middle management, social network entrepreneurs, etc.. Nobody will miss them and they won't miss anything as long as they can plug themselves into the interplanet™ and go on about how amazing they are.
It seems to me that the proposed solution if of little scientific interest apart from in the social sciences: some people can't resist wanting to keep on pushing on west and that some people are more disposable than others.
Not
I think the high-level of integration between chip and chipset make this a bit of a non-starter. It would mean using the same proprietary connections as a Xeon and, thus, having to license them from Intel. Plus, one can assume that the actual ARM modules are quite a bit smaller than the Xeon's with their masses of cache.
As TPM says, real world benchmarks with comparative loads - web transactions with nginx and Postgres are likely to get tongues wagging. Can you build a data centre out of them without a cooling system?
Posted in Oracle cooks up free and premium JDKs
Really?
While there might be value in an premium, paid-for VM (Zend's PHP runtime might be an example for this) I don't this necessarily applies to the underlying programming language. Languages have to be taught, and as part of good CS culture, this kind of supports the peer-review culture that is integral to open source. Enterprise customers are most likely already paying heaps to run Java application servers with Oracle or DB2. They are happy to pay for good stuff but there are limits.
Will the runtime be so much more cost-effective than more iron? What will IBM offer them? You do have to wonder that if Oracle squeeze its customers too hard they might look elsewhere for something that they bought because it was supposed to be industry standard.
Posted in Devil's dollars drive open source
Open source and free software
Just because some critical userland stuff is GPL doesn't mean that it all is, which was the criticism. Free software doesn't get any freer when you write it with a capital "F", that just shows you've been sucked by the brand.
As for BSD/Linux the next version of Debian will ship with the choice of kernels: FreeBSD or GNU Linux. And the increasing use of non-gcc compilers such as LLVM/CLANG also muddies the waters. FWIW: Ballmer did not coin the use of viral with respect to the GPL. It is generally attributed to Craig Mundie of Microsoft but I have seen it used by pro-GPLers to promote the "sanctity" of GPL licensed code.
End users do benefit from more permissive licences not least because it means lower lawyer fees. One should remember that it was FreeBSD that was at the heart of the legal case with AT&T which inadvertently helped to kick start the adoption of the GPL. In the end, of course, the regents of the university of California were fully vindicated and so the BSD licence has continued to thrive.
You agree with a device?
"I agree with Apple's Iphone".
Wow, does it provide other useful for tips for like in the modern age?
Apple's approach has little to do with resource optimisation and lots to do with control. Flash means that Apple doesn't control the advertising and this is why they restrict it. On the "idevices" they can afford to do this as long as they provide acceptable alternatives (usually in the form of dedicated apps) for the user.
There is, in my experience, little difference in energy between Flash and "native" video as long as like is compared with like: hardware acceleration available or not for both being compared. As for animation most of the SVG implementations use more juice than Flash and only IE 9 really shines at HTML Canvas due to hardware acceleration.
Flash remains an extremely useful wrapper that allows lots of different clients to have the same experience. Over time as things like SVG and HTML Canvas become more widespread there will be less demand for Flash but that isn't going to happen overnight.
Indeed
Postgres has come on leaps and bounds in the last few years but still failed to get the media attention it arguably deserves. So very nice to see El Reg covering Pg West. And, whatever one thinks about McNealy (in my view it was his successor who made the really odd business decisions), he's certainly headline and I'm guess that many former customers will listen to what he says.
Back to Postgres: Enterprise DB's Oracle compatible version is fantastic for customers wanting to escape the kraken without too much pain. The MySQL migration tool looks quite good as well - need to give it a spin with a customers database to see how it fares - and is bound to reassure existing MySQL customers who may be looking to jump ship. Not that you need "Postgres Plus" for serious development but it is important to know that professional support is available if desired. I can't help thinking that the permissive BSD licence helps here: no lawyers required.
Maybe it's because Opera 11 is still "alpha"?
A bit odd in any case. I wonder if these are the tests submitted by Microsoft? Not heard of "foreigncontent" before in my readings about HTML5. Looking cursorily at the spec this I guess that this might have something to do with the contenteditable stuff which MS invented. I may very well be wrong.
Anyway I ran the tests on Opera 11 - there are some 404s in there but I the form to submit the results is broken: it is just a textarea with neither form action or button.
The tests are heavily skewed towards canvas with other stuff such as <time> not getting a look in. Still, even with these obvious deficiencies it will be nice to have a set of standard tests to measure some of the bluster by.
Stallman's delusions of grandeur
Has the GPL somehow mutated from a software licence to human rights legislation? All hail president Stallman?
Posted in US to fork $5bn+ into exascale supers
Missing the point
Europe has done very well largely by avoiding national or European "champions" that cannot survive without state funding. To complain about lack of computing power for the region that hosts CERN, launches Ariane and has some pretty impressive telescopes is simply disingenuous. In fact the budgetary constraint of not having a department of defence willing to write a blank cheque has encouraged the co-operation between research institutions. Not that the lack of cash doesn't cause problems or lead to underfunding - the current discussions about maintaining funding for fusion research and therefore cutting back on other areas being a case in point. There is more to excellence in the field of computing than how many computers you have in the Top 100.
Posted in Google Nexus Two 'lands November 8'
Samsung didn't just make the Galaxy S
The build quality was one of the reasons I went with the Wave which is beautifully made. The Galaxy Tab looks pretty good, too. I think the Galaxy S was just an attempt by Samsung to test the water.
Posted in HTML5 web video flashes past Flash
Please stop the false dichotomy
We know it. Flash made universal web video possible and it is that very universability which has led to the <video> tag. Oh, but the content owners and the browser manufacturers can't agree on the codecs so Flash *remains* the best way to deliver. The mobile devices thing is a bit of a red herring as you often can't tell whether you're on a web page or in an native app - this, after all, is pretty much the USP of the "app" approach which emphasises specialisation over generalisation. Frustration sets in when you get the "I'm sorry but this content is not available for your device" which is something no content owner wants their customers to see.
If Adobe can continue to provide tools for designers and developers to work with, and let's face it hand-coding a stage or a timeline isn't much fun, and can generate suitable code, whether it is Flash or "native code" for the target platform, then they will continue to do well.
Some do care
Having had a server hacked and a bot installed I can say that some ISPs do care. The bot was spotted quickly and the server shut down as a result. The ISP was Intergenia and the report that the bot was active came from 1&1.
1&1 has a *huge* data centre in Karlsruhe and many of the ISPs in Germany have pretty big data centres. AFAIK it's still a requirement in France to host .fr sites in France. Obviously the more sites you host the more C&C bots you will have all things being equal.
Posted in Sony hits stop on Walkman tape players
Bring back...
Bow Wow Wow weren't exactly brilliant but so much more interesting than some of the incredibly manufactured stuff out there at the moment even though it was yet another band put together by legendary ........ Malcolm McLaren. We all assiduously didn't lust after the "teenage sensation", Annabella. There was Claire Grogan for one....
Where's the "old and past it" icon?
Fantastic
The whole project. PARIS is obviously the future of air travel.
Profits
Ryanair's business model and thus profit is largely down to tax subsidies from governments desperate to see jobs in the province. As soon as an aiport loses the subsidy and they actually have to pay for using it they are off- Screwing customers and staff are just, er, added boni. So, yes good for their shareholders and arguably good for those who manage to get cheap flights close enough to where they want to go but generally shit for the economy as a whole.
Does this mean Win 7 on ARM is nearly ready?
If MS doesn't let partners use ARM hardware because of licence restrictions - "no, you can't put it on that device because the screen is too big" then how the fuck do they want to compete with Android? Tablets in particular don't need MS Office.
Posted in Everything Everywhere starts staff cull
No works councils?
As both Orange and T-Mobile are European multi-nationals I would have thought they would have works councils as they do in the other countries where they are present. I know that British companies are exempt from this requirement but I thought subsidiaries of companies from countries without the exemption were required to have them. Not that I think it would stop any redundancies which are dictated by the highly competitive and saturated market but it might improve the terms of any redundancies.
Well said, that man!
It's probably arguable as to whether Google need Java at all. Which is probably what has got Oracle all worked up in the first place. Then, if you don't need Java on the phone, you might not need it on the server. I'm not sure how many Android users know or care that Dalvik is a Java VM. I mean, what is one of those anyway? I smell lawsuits from Oracle about trademarks with Google walking away and saying Dalvik has nothing to do with Java™ and everything to do with Go, or something along those lines.
Posted in Twitter turns entire accounts into ads
How much
"How much, for instance, do you think certain parties (ad firms, political parties, etc) would be willing to pay for...?"
Not a lot is my guess otherwise they'd already be doing this. They may have just figured out that where you put crap in you get crap out. OTOH that might be suspecting the above of some degree of critical intelligence.
Burn, twitter, burn. Any more news of pink slips being handed out at the Twat Center (Merkin spelling)?
I think you meant
"But it's yet to be seen whether micro-blogging can indeed be transformed into a money maker."
Posted in Google open sources JPEG assassin
JPEG 2000 compression ratio
I get stuff to be about 50% smaller again then JPEG with J2000. But as JPEG is already pretty good I guess it was diminishing returns coupled with the patents that prevented take up. Pity, because it really does produce better quality at lower sizes.
Where's the joined up thinking?
"The trend toward creating and using APIs is driven by the economics of the long tail" - I know this a quote in the page but hasn't the long tail shit been debunked by über-geek Anderson himself?
Facebook has not only the volume but also some kind of value proposition to users, and, therefore, to companies wanting to use their platform and indeed the API may be key in this. Don't the games and shit (Farmville, Mafia Wars are names I've heard) encourage people to say on the platform and earn their developers money? You might get some advertising in at that level of engagement that you don't have with teenies working out what to do tonight. This is probably why Apple wants to pick the users up on the device and cut out the web altogether.
Twitter doesn't have a value proposition (SMS that you don't pay for) so it's fucked if no new money is forthcoming and my guess is that LBS poster children like Foursquare and Gowalla (what do they smoke to get these names?) are looking more attractive to investors who understand the AIDA principle: "crap, crap, crap crap ... ooh in the shop to your left we've got a special 2 for 1 offer for you blah blah blah trivia blah ..."
URL shortening for FFS. Make the damn things go away! Which is probably exactly what Apple is currently working on.
Posted in Google open sources JPEG assassin
What do we want?
"Gradual change!"
When do we want it?
"In due course!"
PNGs are now replacing GIFs, look at the comment icons on this site, around the web but they will never replace the legacy GIFs. This isn't a problem as you don't have to pay royalties to read GIFs only to write them. Actually, hasn't the patent already expired?
Same is likely to be true of a new lossy bitmap format. However, with C33-3 media queries that shouldn't be too much of a problem to implement. And if the savings of 30% per photo are possible then uptake is likely to be pretty good. Yes, I know this means storing two versions of the same image but disk space is less of a problem than bandwidth.
Posted in Google open sources JPEG assassin
JPEG 2000 is very nice* but
The patent owners have thus far refused to put it in the public domain. My guess is that JPEG 2000 is the benchmark for Google's new format which they might actually be using to encourage opening of the the JPEG 2000 format.
* JPEG 2000 is particularly nice if you have text in your images as text suffers so heavily from artefacts in JPEG.
Apple - Innovation first?
Having "tethered" mobile phones to notebooks for the last ten years, starting with serial cables and null-modems. I don't understand why this isn't standard for Apple. OTOH given how difficult it is to set up tethering via Bluetooth on Mac OS I shouldn't really be surprised...
Setting up my Samsung Wave to run as an access point is easy-peasy lemon-squeezy.
Only part of the story
Opera, probably because it also does NNTP, has had threading for ages. Sensibly you can set it on a per view basis. I find it makes sense for mailing lists but less for personal e-mail. Fortunately, Opera automatically detects mailing lists and lets you filter them away from personal e-mail. Best of all worlds because you should have a choice. And if that makes me sound smug it's because I am. The mail client is probably my main reason for using Opera.
Now, if only they'd fix personal certificates and add PGP support...
Confused
Not by this post but by the article. Had a chat with my brother last night along similar lines. I live in Germany and ISP costs are just not an issue. Nobody talks about them neither fixed line nor mobile. Fixed line services are nearly all completely unlimited flats and 16 MB/s downloads are standard for city dwellers and faster is not uncommon.
According to my brother, who works in the UK telco industry, everyone is making a loss on data. We couldn't square the circle but German companies did make extensive capital investment in the run up to privatisation of the telephone network in the 90s so there is abundant capacity - there are at least 4 independent glass-fibre loops in my city. I think this is one of the reasons why we have so many data centres here. Driving down costs and increasing availability are considered politically to be essential for ensuring competitiveness which is why the recent TV dividend auction was coupled with requirements to provide broadband to rural areas where DSL isn't an option. France has taken a predictably dirigiste approach with the government requiring France Telecom to build out new exchanges. But even there competition has both driven down costs and improved services.
The UKs privatisation of telephone network in the 80s is yet another example, along with the railways, of how not to do it. BT and C&W made a killing for years because there was neither regulation nor competition. But rather than invest the proceeds in improving infrastructure they passed the profits to "investors" and now everybody suffers. If prices do rise then business will be one of the main casualties.
Sorry, but this short-term approach is, to me, systematic of the British (probably Anglo-Saxon) disease. Of course, being a Brit, I'm just as slapdash as the next!
Mini media server
That's what I want a jail-broken one for. Install a DNLA server and plug in some storage and ta muchly, Steve-O.
Posted in Über-zombie cookies give us the fear
yawn
Fails on Opera in privacy mode even without a restart.
Not really the issue
My experience with MySQL isn't that extensive but I you can add indices to it with taking a table down. MyASM tables do implement pretty global locks but InnoDB is more traditional in this respect. Adding indices should IMHO lock tables for writing while the index is being written. Of course, a procedure that first checks that the data will be indexable, changes the schema and then updates the database it the way to do it for minimum disruption.
I think the news probably have set the champagne corks popping at Oracle who are probably planning some nice offers for Facebook as they wind down support for non-commercial versions of the MySQL brood. And, to be honest, if running Oracle means they don't have to worry about this kind of thing then it would be the right thing to do™. As it stands, the news is another indication of Facebook's sticking plaster technology. Amazing that they manage to get as much out of their systems as they do.
Despite the late hour
I'm refraining from my first epithet. Please don't confuse invention with commercialisation. There was plenty of invention in the Soviet Union.
Posted in Rioting lags demand women's tennis
All hail Lester Haines
Lags, malcontents and ne'er-do-wells all in the same article. Brilliant!
As for the IT angle - watching nubile young ladies panting and groaning certainly fits my job description and I work in IT.
Search engines
I've set Cuil to be my default search engine. It's not very good at technical stuff but I nice clean interface and some interesting additional stuff like timelines and vaguely related stuff. Cpedia is even more when researching.
Silly demo
No CPU suckage here on FF on Mac OS (different matter when running on FreeBSD 8.1)
The animation only seems to work with Chrome and FF with browser sniffing used on Safari and Opera. This is *the wrong thing to do*™ with HTML5 and it's also a pointless animation that adds very little to the page. But then again it's limited to the UK Google homepage which I guess doesn't get that many visitors now that all browsers have search boxes.
DVCS Wars
Moving from Mercurial to Git. Yeah, that really makes all the difference! NFT
Posted in US loses last chance for free wireless
Public goods and the public good
Spectrum is a public good which can be administered by the government for the public. There are initiatives in some countries where councils effectively set up local wifi networks for their citizens.
Is there a good technical solution to the free-for-all that would ensue with a general public-sourced mesh? A good analogy is probably the fishing industry which, apart from Iceland, has singularly failed to grasp the concept of a limited resource and bandwidth in any given part of the spectrum is limited. Markets, with the appropriate regulation (ie. goal setting), can be quite good at managing resource allocation.
When Sony lost the plot
Probably about the same time the content divisions started fiddling around with the hardware. Mini-Disc was unnecessarily encumbered with restrictions which meant that despite being great, affordable kit it remained a niche market. Ditto, DVD players.
Apple's great innovation was to encumber the iPod with just enough shit to keep content owners happy and continue. This left it free to fleece users with high-margin hardware updates.
Apple's recent rush to build walls around its platform is eerily reminiscent of Sony's (and others') earlier mistake.
Posted in Home Office unveils new UK passport
And the irony is...
"The troubles" remain the largest threat to UK security according to MI5 and anecdotally underlined by the recent spate of bombings (and evidence of church cover-ups).
Smoke and fucking mirrors: the UK and the IRA, Spain and ETA, France and the Corsicans, Germany and the RAF, etc.. Is there a pattern? Yes, you're at most risk from those born and bred in your own country.
Posted in Ten... Wireless Headphones
Missing?
Sennheiser's MM200.
Fantastic sound, very comfortable, multipoint and great battery life. Works fine for me with SE G900, Nokia E65 or Samsung Wave or MacBook. A mate's got one and says the iPhone occasionally has problems but I believe problems with that Bluetooth stack are known.
Posted in Paris Hilton tweets armed intruder drama
What a tw?t!
Is wanting to be in a bukake shoot with Ms. Hilton okay? Actually, it's not something that particularly appeals to me unless she was bound and gagged at the time. Even then she doesn't really float my boat. Wonder if there is a Japanese word for that?
Diddum's place got broken into! But it's okay as the place is surrounded by police all sniffing her tweets and who don't need to wait for the 911 call to burst in and use minimum force to restrain aforementioned miscreant who's going down and will serve out his full sentence.
Fortunately, dear Paris is survived the ordeal and is still able to be a full member of society: spend oodles of unearned cash on items of questionable value. Maybe the police should consider chiropractors and wellness spas for all victims of potentially violent crime?
Posted in Samsung bounces out Bada SDK version 1
Who knows?
I'm a very happy owner of a Wave but given its spec I'm not sure if the claim of an OS for "feature phone" hardware really rings true.
OTOH given the number of devices sold and the steadily increasing number of useful apps and widgets (usually multi-platform), it's obvious that the hardware is getting some attention. T-Mobile, E-Plus and Vodafone are all heavily promoting the Wave here in Germany, T-Mobile are even using it to promote their live, mobile streaming of football matches and the screen really is fantastic.
I guess it's obviously very difficult to gauge the take up in the far East while we Europeans and Americans are slobbering all over the latest Google and Appleware.
Passwords still a problem
Much easier to work with keys and certificates. Though I guess they do open a single of failure if the passphrase is cracked.
To answer your question: technically, nothing
But you've got to hand it to Google for the headline grabbing and marketing. Once we get video, JS and canvas out the way I guess the bragging will be about drag and drop and local storage. Support for the new form widgets and time elements would be much more useful.
On the negative - Chrome is very greedy. I'm trialling <video> which to play nice with the as many browsers as possible is
<video>
<source type="video/mp4"> # Safari on iPad "bug" means mp4 first
<source type="video/webm"> Opera and Chome
<source type="video/ogv"> Firefox
<object...> # fallblack Flash or WMV
<a href="">Download link</a>
</object>
</source>
Encoding issues aside the interesting thing is that Chrome will start downloading all video files not just the first it knows how to handle. Embarrassing bandwidth battering fail from the chocolate factory.
Great tag line, Kelly!
