I immediately triggered an idea of another application

at the other end of life.

This, I thought, would be just the right thing for care homes, so that they could have a monitoring screen in a kind of "service" office; not unlike the screen at the Tesco self-scan tills. If a red (maybe it should be yellow/?) light shows, the unit (resident) needs attention. This service agent (nurse) could then be automatically provided with the right size and type of product to be used, as well as an optimised route to service several incidents in sequence. This has a potential to lower the needs of training as well as the time spend on each task and the waste due to mismatched materials. Beancounters would love it!

But then:

Some care homes couldn't care less now, literally, so it's rock bottom already. No improvement possible.

That doesn't mean it won't be implemented, just wait . . .

I'm just waiting

for the Ubuntu haters to rant about how stupid Unity is (which would be totally pointless in this "anything-but-Unity-thread", but hey. . .), and that Shuttleworth is not very clever, and that Canonical is just ripping you off, and that and that and that . . .

I've never really seen the point in criticising a configurable OS for it's GUI; If yo9u don't like something, change it! Or let someone change it for you: enter Mint.

Most of the time GUIs are a very personal preference and you mainly stick with what you grew up with, thereby not giving a new GUI the chance to show it's strengths.

In my opinion Ubuntu is a great package, it's easy to install, runs with loads of hardware (even older stuff) and gives users a wide choice of GUI; all combined with an easy, reliable update solution and a ton of available software. I've got no problem of recommending it as a Desktop OS. I actually found that quite a few non-IT people handled Ubuntu/Unity a lot better than Win8/TIFKAM.

And I have to confess that I actually rather like Unity now.

If it does

(or already did) happen, would they tell?

But then, the people who propose this kind of lark have got no idea of the volume of data or it's complexity involved; they probably think they can keep a 3½'' floppy per day per ISP to browse through . . .

I would really like to know how the porn-filtering is supposed to work. Anyone?

This was (again) triggered by an article about Mr. Cameron and smut filtering. This time it was about public WiFi.

I still have tremendous problems in understanding how these filters are supposed to work. Will there be a whitelist (updated in real time?) of all web content that is not porn?

Otherwise how will anyone know that the packet transmitted does not contain porn?

If there's a website called knittingclub.co.uk hosting a file called scarf.mov, who knows that this file doesn't show some people doing a horizontal Mambo? Who checks every minute if the undoubtedly educational original content of http://www.classicalkitchenutensils.org/main/pictures/cookingspoon.jpg hasn't been replaced by an image of a transvestite masturbating on a skinned cows head?

Can someone tell me how all this is meant to work? Really, I'd like to know.

How would it work?

I still have tremendous problems in understanding how these filters are supposed to work. Will there be a whitelist (updated in real time?) of all website content that is not porn?

Otherwise how will anyone know that the packet transmitted does not contain porn?

If there's a website called knittingclub.co.uk hosting a file called scarf.mov, who knows that this file doesn't show two people doing a horizontal Mambo?

Can someone tell me how all this is meant to work? Really, I'd like to know.

Re - They should be shot

>

Any damn fool using a mobe while driving should be shot, right after they crash.

<

You're a Merkin, no doubt.

Mr Kim Jong-un will be shown later

>

Although Kim Jong-un normally likes to broadcast videos of himself trying out the latest Nork military tech, Pyongyang has not yet commented on the cyberattack claims.

<

North Korea's Intelligence Service has

(due to this article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/09/feature_ten_sexy_computers_roundup/)

found, that the formerly prepared propaganda video of their divine leader initiating the cyber-attack using a Sinclair ZX80 would be somewhat outdated. Photoshopping a Commodore Amiga 512 into the shots takes a bit of time, but once it;s done, we'll be able to be properly frightened by North Korea's IT-power.

I hope it will be done by the same director who did the Space video, which is now training material at the Bollywood Film Academy as an example that cheesyness can, in fact, be overdone.

Not the same industry, but just denotes size too:

>

Berns, however, notes that there may still be reasons to deny trademark protection to "iPad mini". For one, although Berns has found "no similar registered mark that would bar registration" (her emphasis), there may be similar marks in "prior-filed pending applications" that would bar Apple from gaining a trademark.

<

http://boots.scene7.com/is/image/Boots/10001345?wid=280&hei=343&op_sharpen=1

Paris, because she's a lady . . .

Apple goes green.

Awwwww!

There we go again...

I bet now that about 85% of the comments to this will go like:

"Why do they bother at all? There's already Android and IOS."

or

"This is too geeky**, it will never catch on."

or

"It's not perfect*, how does it dare exist?"

Like aborting your baby being 3 months pregnant, because it can't walk yet, and there's other babies already.

* Perfect is, of course, a bit subjective here, but generally boils down to: Just the way that my first mobile ever worked; in some cases that could be a convoluted mess of random keystrokes to invoke some profoundly arcane action that could be, if ever it would be needed at all, replaced by having a small pebble in your pocket.

** This could also be "not geeky enough", depending from which way you come. It could even be both, if you really don't know what you're talking about, but just need to have an opinion***.

*** A bit like me, that.

This is how that thing happened:

One morning Mr. Jobs walks through R&D and sees one of the minions with an "i <3 Alan Kay" T-shirt. He goes up to him and says "Have you ever met him?", and the techie says "Yes! I sat through a few of his lectures, he's a genius! Think of all his ideas!" So Steve says to him "You know, if they were all that good, he'd be richer. But nonetheless, he did think up a thing called Dynabook somewhen in the 70's that never came to anything. If you think he's so great, then build me one; You have 3 days and $2000. I see you on Friday.". As Mr. Jobs word is law the techie toddles off and turns up on Friday with this thing. Steve has a play with it and is somewhat intrigued. He calls the guy and tells him: "Now make it flatter, here's $200.000, I see you in 3 months."

The rest is known.

Right... Anonymous studios...

That probably wasn't Disney and Universal.

I think more the likes of Kluckenwurtz Films, an Alabama studio specialized in documentaries of bluebottle mating rites on local dungpiles and Inuit Flesh Flix Inc. , founded in December 2012 . . .

To use the word "proof" (even with a qualifier) in a study where no direct correlation is established is (in my opinion) nonsense anyway.

In the beancounter office:

Beancounter1: "You know this IT-department that we have?"

BC2: "Those guys who play with their computers all day and steal the bandwidth from my cat-pix downloads? Yep, know them."

BC1: "Do they actually make money for the company?"

BC2: "Not as far as I can tell, they only ever want some to spend on their toys."

BC1: "If we make most of them redundant, couldn't we put that towards a slightly bigger bonus? My wife's Audi Q7 is already over 10 month old, you know."

BC2: " Grand idea, old chap. Let's do that! And let's outsource the leftovers to some other company. There's all kinds of good deals to be had, if you get an interpreter to do the negotiations. And maybe an extra week in Bangkok on the firm. For the negotiations, of course."

It's a Developer Preview

I don't think they called it a finished product and charged anyone for it.

Developer Preview does not mean chav-proof OS-replacement, which some people seem to confuse.

Go try a WinFS developer preview from 2003 that still isn't on the market (and never will be, to the grief of Mr. Gates) and complain about that.

On the risk to get fanboi-slapped (go on, I know you want to) Apple Maps was supposed to be "brilliant", when it was handed out. SSDs were supposed to STAY faster than HDs (the first ones weren’t, were they?).

It was wrong of Shuttleworth to tell anybody about this project before it was perfect, because everybody nowadays expects that everything is safe if you can get it, warnings are allowed to be ignored. Like this the only open alternative to IOS, BBOS and Android gets talked dead before it's out.

It's like aborting your baby in the 3rd month of pregnancy because it can't walk yet.

A modest proposal V2.0

...for another strategy to sell to the poor.

Why doesn't the company offer a trade-in for a proper, shiny iPhone5? Poor people could sell a kidney, half a liver or maybe a cornea to Foxconn, who then re-sells these under the Apple brand to hospitals worldwide (well, the parts that are rich enough anyway.) The price of the phone could be easily recovered, lots of sick people who would die soon and stop being customers could be saved, and the brand would not just keep it's upmarket value, but also gain a presence in a new, exciting market: branded transplants!

This would be a winner all around, I think.

(Thanks to J. Swift for sparking this idea.)

Re: your question:

>

So: why on Earth use a place-name lookup on someone else’s map service to reproduce the information?

<

Because: "Apple. Hurhur. IPhone. Apple IPhone.Hurhurhur. Urg. Hurhur. Yeah. IPhone"

Because everything, EVERYTHING, has to be an IPhone app or be compatible with an IPhone these days.

Want to buy a torch to walk the dog? "Will it* work with my IPhone?"

"I want a kettle, but it has to have a Lightning connector."

"I was told to buy an 'AirPort', so that I wouldn't have any problems when I buy an IPhone in the future"

"I'm sure there's an app in the Apple AppStore to jumpstart my flat car over bluetooth."

The force of persuasion that the malic logo makes a product peerless is strong.

* Not sure if the dog or the torch . . .

WE . ARE . ALL . GOING . TO . DIE !!

yep.

Whatever the change will be,

it will be "revolutionary", "beautiful" and "amazing".

I'm starting to get used to it.

Yawn.

But

. . . but IOS and Safari are safe, they're made by Apple! So it can't be.

I'll have a skinny soymilk frappucino.

The open questions are:

- How does one apply copy protection to that?

- Do the rounded corners infringe patents?

- Is the encoder/ decoder Lightning compatible?

- Is it tweetable?

So this is

another *nix based OS with a bit of something on top.

Wow, that makes WinPhone8 almost look like a novel idea.