Yes they do

As far as I know yes. Under the DDA as I understand it this website is - if as inaccessible as described - illegal.

Companies have been successfully prosecuted for way less than this.

Re: Should be nice and hackable...

My non-techie friend who has a Z rooted it on day one with no problems at all. He's a little annoyed that he stuck with Apple for so long.

I just got an Xperia P and - like with my last Sony - unlocking the bootloader was a matter of moments, all nice and official, no shifty hacks needed. Sony's instructions are clear and understandable even if you're not a software nerd like I am. Fresh kernel, nice clean ROM - sorted. Easy as pie.

For some reason lots of people seem not to like them but in all my years owning Sony/Ericsson phones (first was an Ericsson t28) I've only ever had one I didn't like. That was the S60-running Satio, which was pretty dire although did have it's plus points.

Re: Cool...

Don't you mean shelf computing?

Re: tl;dr

There's certainly an aspect of that, and that's fine. Sure, if X doesn't do what you want, just go with Y - no complaints here. Give reasons if you wish. I'm not saying there aren't people doing that, that's being going on since as long as I've been using linux and probably before too. That's fine - it's how forks happen, how new projects get going and how new (or old, like MATE) projects get started. People moving around with their interests and requirements is part of OSS.

But there's a lot of entitled-sounding whinging too, which is new. This article - much more so than the comments - sounded very whiny, like somehow Canonical/Gnome owed the author what they wanted, not what Gnome/Canonical had decided to do. "It's our way or the highway" isn't strictly true, that Gnome does what it wants regardless of it's users isn't true either - just because someone has decided to not be an active part of the community doesn't mean a project is ignoring the community.

Also it wasn't very well researched, but then the Reg has never let mere facts get in the way of a good nerd-rage-gasm. I use Shell and I alt-tab, I minimise windows (not often, I switch desktops rather than minimise - it's faster and easier), I change GTK and Shell themes and more. I won't get into the difference between Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell as for some reason that not-so-subtle distinction seems beyond almost every tech journalist out there.

Re: Tablets are NOT e-readers!

"I personally don't suffer from eyestrain when reading backlit text, but I do find it easier to read ebooks."

So what you're saying is that you do suffer from eyestrain with transmissive screens - albeit mildly - because eInk causes less strain on your eyes? Don't worry, that's perfectly normal. Eyestrain doesn't have to mean sore eyes.

Reading in the 'dark' was one of those things long-touted as causing eyestrain, but recent research suggests it's not actually the case. I read "in the dark" with a little clip-on led light, just enough to see by but not enough to wake up the person sleeping next to me. My personal feeling is that the difference in the amount of work your eyes have to do with different screen technologies is to do with refresh rates, colour temperature and resolution.

Re: Bedtime reading...?

I used a little program called redshift on my ubuntu laptop to drop the colour temperature in the night-hours. I believe similar apps are available for other platforms. It makes a huge difference to eyestrain, haven't noticed particular impact on my (admittedly awful) sleeping patterns.

Broadly speaking blue light wakes you up, red light makes you sleepy.

Re: Well, sort of.

Media Centre? http://xbmc.org

That's all you'll need. It can be a frontend to Myth as well if you want PVR stuff.

Re: My parents...

"Maybe the tile thing is pretty good and us seasoned and bitter IT types just don't get it yet?"

Yup. I've been saying this since the first time I saw a screenshot. Nerds gonna whine (because we always bloody do), Normals will like it. They're the people MS test on, after all - it's not like they chucked Win8 out at random. My mum recently bought a new laptop with Win8 on it and didn't even mention the UI. She complained about how the case colour wasn't right, the keyboard was different, how the trackpad was confusingly multitouch, how her old screensaver didn't work and how she had trouble setting up her email - but not one complaint about TIFKAM.

I can see why Win8 might make a good media centre, but why not just run XBMC on top of Win7/Vista?

On topic, I have a rather nice 3M touchscreen kicking around waiting for something to do, so will watch this thread with interest for suggestions.

Re: Slightly odd?

Yes, of course. I use Chrome and I do use sync as well. Again, I picked Firefox as an example of a piece of software a recovering Windows user might recognise. If I'd said OH HEY MY KDENLIVE CONFIGS ARE ALL THERE it might have added confusion.

I softlink all my things like .fonts .vimrc, .bashrc and custom .desktop files in from a Dropbox'd folder, which also contains a script to make all the links and then install all my preferred apps, run a few gsettings commands and suchlike. So on a new install I install Dropbox, let it sync, run a script and that's install/setup done. Next stage is really a Puppet server, but I think that might be approaching overkill-land..

Re: Mint is great

> I'd find it very odd, and very uncool, if my configuration *wasn't* there after an upgrade. On every decent OS I've ever used.

Well played sir. Of course, with a proper modern operating system it's not that odd or surprising. I've been doing this sort of thing for years myself too. I was, however, assuming the OP was a recovering Windows user, in which case this kind of thing can come as a bit of a shock.

Re: Mint is great

Protip: When you next install, make a 20GB (or thereabouts, bigger if you want - make it ext4 and you can easily resize it anyway) partition for / and another much bigger one to mount as /home

Then when you reinstall the system to the small partition - don't format the /home partition, just tell the installer to mount it as /home - and when you boot up your fresh install all your files and settings (if not the actual apps which go with them, but that's easy to fix) will all still be there. It's slightly odd, and cool, installing a fresh copy of Firefox and booting it up to find all your bookmarks already there, even the tabs you had open before you reinstalled.

You can even have multiple systems installed sharing a single /home partition - I currently have a day-to-day-use Ubuntu, a messing-about Debian and a just-trying-it-out Fedora partition sharing the same /home partition on one disk. It's all fine.

Obviously keep backups of your stuff, but that goes without saying regardless of whether you're installing a new OS or now. Did I mention I make external hard disks which are perfect for the job of backups? http://etsy.com/shop/BeautifulComputers

Re: Mint forced gnome 3 guys to introduce .... Gnome 2!

You're not alone. I love Gnome Shell too. Didn't, at first, took a few days to get used to it but now it's so seamless and fast and responsive that Unity and MATE and Cinnamon all feel really clunky by comparison.

I use the Gnome remix of Ubuntu, just for laughs. I have used Mint in the past, and I particularly like their Debian edition - but on my current machine Ubuntu is a bit more happy for some weird power-management related reason I haven't bothered to figure out.

It's at the bottom end of the mass requirement to be a brown dwarf, but it's a bit too big which means the density is too low.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf#Distinguishing_low-mass_brown_dwarfs_from_high-mass_planets

Re: Obvious flaws

I've been reading almost exclusively on eink for at least five years now and the flash-blacking is such a non-issue. I don't even see it. Ghosting is why I have a Sony (page refresh on every turn) over a Kindle (page refresh every six turns), although even that was minimal. Because eInk involves a physical motion inside each pixel it's unlikely these issues are going away soon. We're on generation 5 or 6 eInk now and it's getting better but is still a problem.

That said, I'll take such minor issues with eInk over reading on LCD any day. Just because your eyes have never felt tired reading onscreen, that doesn't mean you're not straining them more on LCD than eInk. I don't feel tired walking to the shops, but that doesn't mean driving isn't *less* tiring (although, bad example, walking to the shops is obviously better for me). I can feel my eyes relax when I put my screen down and pick my book up.

Re: Has there been a paradigm shift and nobody told me?

@Vic - funnily enough, typing "the" gets you Firefox as the first result. The icon is orange. If you continue typing "the internet" Firefox is still the first result. It's almost like someone planned a system for - and tested on - low-technical-ability users. :)

@AC - 'discoverability' is a term well known in user interface design. You're welcome to think of a better one, just make sure you email the entire field with whatever you come up with and let us all know how clever you are. Maybe even put your name on, eh?

Re: Has there been a paradigm shift and nobody told me?

>How exactly is a novice user supposed to know that his video editor is called "kdenlive", his music player is >called "amarok", or his PDF viewer is called "acrobat"?

The point is exactly that that they don't need to know this any more. Typing "music player" or "video editor" or "PDF reader*" does the job, and in all cases on my machine I don't even need to get past the first four characters, and that's just the first time too. Typing "internet" or "web" finds Firefox. If you wanted to edit firefox.desktop to include the search string "the orange thing" then that would work too, but that does sort of defeat the object.

Also you can still browse the menu in the old style, by section, and the menu interface itself is way bigger and easier to use than the old-style start menus, so I would argue that discoverability is up. Not only are there multiple complementary - not contradictory - routes to find things, but the old menu systems have (imo) been improved as well. I hear a lot of techies complaining about big icons, but the fact is big icons and simple interfaces are easy to use. Personally, I like big icons, but that's just me.

* actually 'PDF Reader' doesn't work in Gnome. But in that case a user would be clicking on downloaded a pdf file or, even more likely, wouldn't know even they were looking at a pdf 'cos it had opened in-browser. "Document viewer" works.

Re: Has there been a paradigm shift and nobody told me?

In Linux at least you have that choice. Install Mint and run MATE or Cinnamon, uninstall Zeitgeist or whatever. It's your call. Pretty sure you can turn off indexing in WinX as well.

So let's say I want to launch a video editing app, something I do reasonably often but not often enough I have a dock shortcut (although frankly I've stopped making those because I never use them). My choice for video editing is KDenlive, and I use it fairly regularly. I can click a menu-opening button, navigate through one, maybe two levels of menu and click a thing (just checked, four clicks). Or, I can press a button, type 'K' and hit enter. I think the first time I launched it I had to type KDen, but Gnome has learned what I mean now and I don't have lots of apps whose names start with K.

In either case I have to know what the app is called, or at least recognise it's icon. Although in the second case I could just type "video editor" and still get the same result.

However, I can also type "video editor", hit tab and launch a google or wikipedia search for that term. Sure, I probably already have a browser open, but I might not. Same number of steps though, but it's all through one interface. My computer is not a web page, but web pages represent a lot of what I do with my computer and being able to hook into them painlessly is nice. It's not essential, at all, but neither is a lot of stuff we like to do.

A slightly better example is Stellarium, which I use a lot. That's Win-S-Enter now, but it can also be "planetarium" (it shows it's link alone after 'plane' on my machine). But where would I look for that in a category? Science? Graphics? The (n)ever-useful "Accessories" category? Then there are apps which create their own app categories. Thanks "Limbo", you really needed to make a top-level menu entry? Nested, categorical menus need sorting by hand. Search-based, learning interfaces don't - they sort and manage themselves based on use levels.

Just to be clear I use Gnome Shell, not Unity. I am a huge fan of how slick, easy and seamless it is compared to the old 2.x/Win95 UI style. I'm not in any way saying search-based UIs are better for everyone, but they are better for some people. They do very well in "normal" user testing, which is why they're appearing more and more - techies seem to like them less though. I have speculated about the reasons for this in the past on this very website.

Re: Has there been a paradigm shift and nobody told me?

Yes. It happened quite a while ago. First via apps like Quicksilver and Gnome Do, then later in with search being built into Windows (best thing about Win7 imo) and then Unity and Gnome Shell. No idea what MacOS is up to having not used it for a few years, but I expect it has something similar. Search is the default interface for everything these days. Makes a lot of sense to me. Did you also not notice that mainstream companies advertise domains less and search terms more? "Search 'blah product' online" is much more common than "Type blah-dash-product-dot-co-dot-uk into your browser."

Can't remember the last time I navigated a menu then clicked on an icon to start a programme. "Win/Super Key --> type a few letters --> hit enter" is how apps and files, launch these days. Every app I've used to do this kind of thing has been intelligent enough to get what I want for quite some time, at least by the second attempt. And yes, I still know what all my apps are and where they live and same for files - but I no longer actually need to. If I need my Mum to launch print manager over the phone, I don't have to guess my way through a menu, I can just say "Press Windows, type 'Print man' and press enter"

Search works better for me. Other things work better for other people, but isn't it nice to have the choice?

Re: despite the existence of perfectly-good laws on "due care and attention" already

So after a minor run-in with a speed camera recently, I attended a "Speed Awareness Course" which was actually a few hours of defensive driving. During this they said that there is no law against using your phone while driving in the UK and never has been. As you said, it's already been covered by due care and reckless driving. The recent "ban" was just pointing out that it's already illegal.

If you're involved in an accident, your phone records are checked by the police to make sure you weren't on the phone near/at the time. There hasn't been a single case of a fatal or serious accident where the driver on their phone hasn't ended up in prison (presumably when they weren't the fatality). Which makes exactly no difference to the person they've killed or maimed, but hey.

Re: "Press harder"

The screen on my Sony is so sensitive that on more than one occasion a large particle of dust or falling feather from the duvet has triggered a dictionary lookup on the word it's landed on.

I can't speak for other devices, but on mine you definitely don't need to worry about whether you've pressed hard enough.

Re: Time for a bit of Nooky?

I'm not a Kindle fan (Sony PRS-T1 here) but it's got 1.3GB of storage onboard.

At 500KB per book (size of the Iain M Banks latest on my desktop), that's 2600+ books. If you read two books a week and never ever delete anything, you'll need memory expansion in 25 years. You need a PC to load up the SD card anyway, so why not just plug the Kindle in and miss out a step.

I'd probably still buy the Nook, but not because of the storage options.

Re: If you're collecting them...

You know that's satire, yes? As far I can tell there is no Ian M Hurt, at least not one running for congress in Oklahoma.

However, the fact I had to google around a bit to find this out and that is was vaguely believable in the first place is damning enough.

Re: "When you play with someone's desktop, you are interfering with the way they do work..."

It's not really about customisation per se - the point I was trying to make was that we (the nerds) make things our own by customisation, but at a deeper level it's about control. My computer is a tool which I bend to my will, not a device I have to figure out to get something else done. Because I'm engaged with my machine on a deeper level than someone who just* uses it for spreadsheets/word processing/email/etc - then when "my" OS is changed, it can be more upsetting. Me, I'm not bothered, but some people are.

I can see what you're getting at, but I think most nerds in professional positions can manage a little more objectivity than the forum dwellers bleating (again, comes around at least once a year) about how this is the end for Ubuntu. Me, I don't use Unity - but I do recommend it to people. My Mum loves it, for example. I can make decisions based on what other people need not what I personally prefer. Ubuntu doesn't alienate me by making itself more appealing to non-techies, it just makes itself a slightly different tool in my toolbox - considering this is a toolbox which is quite well stuffed with almost-identical Linux distros already, a little differentiation ain't a bad thing. I may choose not to run Ubuntu for myself, but that doesn't mean it's not something I'll choose for someone else.

* just to be clear, there's absolutely nothing wrong with this. These people are applying their brain in different places to me. I can't do their jobs any more than they can do mine.

Re: "When you play with someone's desktop, you are interfering with the way they do work..."

I've wondered this very thing. The interesting thing about it is that it's true for us nerds. We customise, we tweak, we make things our own. But most users don't do that. How many non-techie people do you know who even set a non-standard desktop image, let alone adjust colour schemes, icons, set up custom launchers or keyboard shortcuts, etc. etc.

So for them - a group who represent the overwhelming majority of computer users - this kind of thing is less of a big deal. Much less of a big deal. Canonical do lots of user testing, they don't just punt stuff out at random. They've tested this and it's gone down well. The small - albeit very vocal - minority of nerds who feel this is a personal assault on their computing privacy are going to install Arch/Fedora/Debian/Whatever. But frankly it was only a matter of time until those people ragequit anyway.

But I think there's a great deal of people who don't post their opinions about computing on web forums are just going to say "oh look, it searches Amazon now, that's handy/annoying" and will then use/ignore the feature as appropriate. Canonical may bank some cash, and if so good for them. They are a business, after all. Personally, I consider the "mainstreaming" of Ubuntu to be a very good thing - ease of use and features like built-in search are things people like and will bring more users to the OS - and when/if it reaches the point that I'm feeling constrained by it, I shall just go and install something else.

Re: So what?

Reliant Robin.

Re: LLU win

Xilo are the single best company I deal with regularly. Not just the best ISP, the best company full stop. Their service and support is absolutely exemplary. They're not the cheapest but the extra couple of quid is worth every penny.

Not really. GiffGaff's unlimited is currently genuinely unlimited. If they restrict it, I'm sure they'll stop calling it unlimited. They are pretty good like that.

Personally I've seen better coverage and far better customer service* with GiffGaff than I ever did with Vodafone or Orange. My phone bill has dropped to the point that I'm already saving money on my outright handset purchase less than a year ago compared to the 'free' 18 or 24 month contract I could have got elsewhere. Other people's mileage will, of course vary. I do recommend GG to my friends and those who have signed up seem happy - and I can call/text them for free, which is even better.

* it's hard to have a call-centre phonetard mess up your seemingly simple request when there are no call centres. Same same for being on hold for hours being told every thirty seconds how important your call is.

40p a day, isn't it?

I'd happily pay that for 6Music alone. Anything else is just a bonus.

A friend of mine

Once got an email claiming to be from an Australian property lawyer investigating some land my friend had supposedly inherited (which he had no clue about). They wanted to sell it for him, taking a 5% cut.

Sounded dodgy as hell, but it was no cash up front - six months later he was holding a cheque for £27k.

He was very glad this was in the days before aggressive spam filtering.

Re: Crusty old wires

"All the cables from the pole to the cabinet and the cabinet to the exchange should be fairly modern anyway."

Depends on what you mean by fairly modern. When the BT engineer installed my new pole-to-house cable last year I remarked that "at least it's copper all the way from my front room to the DSLAM now" to which he replied that no, it wasn't. It's still aluminium from the pole to the cab and there on to the exchange. BT claim they don't have any Al cabling left, but according to this chap that's not strictly 100% true. Fortunately I'm only 300m from the exchange so it's not a big deal.

Me too. You're not EACOS, are you?

Re: I *need* an iPhone5

I'd suggest looking at Sony's Xperia range. The hardware is good quality, the design distinct, the camera tech is in a different league to anyone else and they even make a non-huge model for those of us who don't like carrying around huge slabs of glass.