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.

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.

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.

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.

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)?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

huh?

"Uttering naughty words within the earshot of a minor without that minor's parent's consent... may not be a criminal offense in most U.S. jurisdictions, but I see that as a pity."

How can words ever be naughty? You would like to see America's jail population swelled even more by people going down for trivial offences, would you?

Where's the redneck icon?

Memory and bandwidth

Chrome's trick of one process per tab is extremely memory intensive and some of the loading tricks depend on lots of bandwidth. Nice if you've got oodles of both but that is not the case for everyone. Particularly in a corporate environment bandwidth can be an issue.

Microsoft deserves recognition for the work they've put into IE9 and the implicit recognition of the failure of their previous strategy. They may be the first to hardware acceleration but all the others have slated it in various forms.

Browser competition and choice is good. But I think we all know that we're about to re-enter the browser wars of 10 years ago with particularly Google and Apple trying to offer up content that "works best on their browser". Apple through its devices and associates, Google through its properties.

Page 3

All hail the Moderatix!

"You're holding it wrong"

Apple's brand is still very strong and even with this design error customers are still very happy as the iPhone is currently at a fashionable sweet spot. This one engineering error won't ruin the brand or affect sales too much. But it's definitely a scratch on the brand. "You're holding it wrong" is already becoming associated with technical problems and is tied in with the Apple brand.

With the competition breathing down Apple's neck with similarly capable and just as easy to use devices costing less than half price, it is going to get increasingly difficult to differentiate and justify charging such a hefty premium for a commodity. Premium brands must be managed carefully. I guess it's arguable that Apple's smoke bomb - all phones have issues - might work until they can manufacture hardware without this *fundamental* error. But if that doesn't work Apple will have a job on their hands. People are already switching from iPhone to Android when they renew their phone although the churn is probably less than new users.

In a recent test c't magazin was able to give slightly better marks for phone reception to the iPhone over the Nexus and the Desire (identical apart from the second mike on the nexus) and the Samsung Galaxy. But all the droids wiped the floor with the iPhone when it came to Wifi, which is an issue for price sensitive users. And price will, at some point, become an issue for users. Interestingly the one area where the iPhone still shines is battery life but it wouldn't surprise me to see the droids catching up before the end of the year - a more aggressive strategy on multitasking at the OS level and bigger, Li-Polymer batteries would probably do the trick.

For full disclosure: I'm a happy owner of a Samsung Wave (multitasks quite well, wonderful screen and not too big but battery life could be better) and pay € 15 per month with 100 minutes talk time and unlimited data. I could afford an iPhone but cannot ,for the life of me, see why it is worth the extra money, especially as it has a fundamental engineering error - a phone that drops calls isn't a phone. But I am also a happy MacBook owner.

Scared

Why do I get the feeling from your comment that by "taking terrorism seriously" you mean mass hysteria, dropping bombs on people and years of imprisonment without trial?

Europe has its own fine traditions of terrorism: the IRA, ETA, RAF to name a few of the more prominent ones. But you're right, we don't take them seriously.

Well-known fact

Ireland is neutral so having an Irish passport helps a lot when visiting many Islamic countries.

As for Israeli-bashing - what people really target is the Israeli government or state rather than the people. It is insane to align statehood with religion.

Nice to see how data protection has come to mean "sharing it with as many as possible".

As for posting anonymously it makes pretty much no difference for Mossad on this non-https, Google-infested site.

Display

@Andrew you are right about the Pentile layout - horizontal lines have a discernible crenelation up close. However, I wouldn't say that this makes the display particularly of text any less clearer. Though I've yet to see one in the flesh, iPhone 4's display I can imagine that in some circumstances the difference is likely to be marked - c't magazine has said text on the iPhone 4 looks like it's "on" the screen.

But the mere fact that Wave is eminently usable outside in the sunshine is a killer. And on top of that the screen is very smudge resistant - it has that liquid shine to it that you think will be a fingerprint magnet and it just isn't a problem.

While the Wave seems to have some teething problems - battery life and GPS perhaps chief among them - and there will never be as many as for the Jesus phone, this is a lovely phone that fits easily in the pocket. It remains to be seen if Samsung can keep the Bada API close enough to Android to make ports or cross-development attractive for developers. At half the price of an iPhone 3GS it's a much better phone.

er

How do you expect the maggots to get onto such food? Any eggs laid are highly unlikely to survive the cooking process.

Besides the fact that before the maggots could hatch the smell of rotting protein is likely to have alerted or offended someone first. Anyone remember The Spark's stinky meat project?