Three

You did well - I survived one month, and then fought to get that money back. My phone constantly said I was roaming (related to their tie-in with... T-Mobile, I think it was) and they promised I wouldn't be charged, but then I was.

I shifted to T-Mobile only to find out that the "free Internet booster" doesn't include always-on phones (Android, iPhone, etc.). Apparently, they need their own special Internet (this caused a hilarious conversation with the customer support, as they didn't actually understand what I found so funny about their idea of "free Internet").

Anyway, I'm now with Giffgaff. True, no true customer support, but all of the issues I've had (related to connection) have been solved from a quick forum search, and I can leave whenever I want.

Your risk

"I'd rather take some extra risk than let others make my decisions for me."

And I'm happy for you to do so, unfortunately a car is a machine more than capable of killing and drivers need to have respect for how easily than can be distracted.

I'm not saying I agree with the OP's proposal, though I can understand the logic.

I don't think monitoring drivers is the answer, I think more stringent punishments; along the lines of weeks/months suspension based on the severity of the disregard of others' safety.

UAC

"elevated privileges, this should not be required for end-user software (and if it is required, then there is something wrong with the OS design)"

Completely agree.

I think Win7 has a pretty decent balance in this respect - I haven't found many apps that require elevation when they shouldn't. Mass Effect was the last oddity, that springs to mind.

However, I was playing with some USB debuggers the other day, so I had UAC messages every few minutes for install/start/debug/etc., and ended up clicking the accept button without even - this made me pause because I suddenly realised that I had no idea if I'd accepted it for the app I was even using...

I think the UAC screen needs two changes:

1) Drop the stupid fade effect on the rest of the desktop. It adds an annoying black-screen pause while I wait for my (high-spec) PC to display it. Or is this on purpose? Just seems pointless and annoying to me.

2) In contrast to point 1, either have a two-step process (an "I accept" checkbox to enable the "OK" button), or a couple of seconds countdown on the button (a la Firefox's addon confirmation).

The difference is that I can be reading the info on the app requesting elevated privilegs while I wait.

/rant

BIOS MBR write-protection

I haven't used this in years.

I enabled it on a XP machine that had been running fine for months, and it destroyed the MBR on boot.

Recovered the data and did a fresh install, but the MBR protection destroyed it a second time.

Living by the "fool me once" code, I've never bothered again; maybe I should. I assume either XP didn't like it or my BIOS had a fault.

Perhaps I'll ghost my boot drive and give it a shot... I'd say "it can't hurt", but see above.

Re: Hotmail

Hotmail? Have I missed something? Do they now offer photo-sharing services for non-Hotmail addresses?

I currently use Flickr for public photos and my NAS for stuff that's generally just for family.

The advantage I can see of this box is a dedicated external server, adding an extra layer of security to my NAS and being more hackable for custom services.

Letter and/or numbers

That was my thought, too.

The use of the word "iPhone" in this study is irrelevant, since they haven't declared the numbers for the same study of non-iPhone owners.

I'm assuming this is iPhone-centric because they only developed the app for iPhones? In which case, iPhone ownership was just a factor in choosing the study sample.

Usual quasi-scientific "research".

(not an iPhone owner)

Code

I think they're claiming that the copied code was from an earlier version, before the generics.

There's a blog around somewhere where the guy linked to both files being discussed.

This sounds a little like Google is clutching at straws - from what I've seen, Oracle haven't changed much at all...

The Google code looks very much like decompiled code, from the argument names. But I may be wrong.

Disclaimer: Android user

Beat me to it!

They're complaining that Microsoft are offering free applications to reduce the dangers from flaws in their own software.

If they were able to rebuild the OS in to a completely secure offering instead, what would these people do?

Agreed

I was a paying AVG user, but the last few versions felt so heavily bloated.

I tried MSE out on a whim and was amazed that it did exactly what it needed to, and nothing else.

It can be a bit slow to complete actions like "delete" and "quarantine" on files, but it seems to be proactive in finding the threats without draining free cycles.

Re:

"Core OS vulnerabilities will still need an OTA firmware update and thus the operators to pull their fingers out."

Another part of Gingerbread/3.0 is the dislocation (not the technical term, but I like it) of the UI from the OS, allowing OEMs to rebrand but not then requiring months of tech work everytime Google release updates.

Strangely, I don't think Google initially expected OEMs to make changes to the UI (HTC's first Sense was like a parasite on to the OS - in a good way), so these changes should benefit everyone.

True

But I think they were making exagerrated statements to the way Google do all of the work in private and then dump new APIs en masse for developers to get to grips with in a month, before they encourage OEMs to start using it.

I do think it's a bit far to say it isn't "open source", but it could be more open.

Hopefully with the modularisation of the OS in "3.0", we'll see this shift.

Can't believe I know this...

Almost all other countries are named after their ISO 3166-1 2-character code.

While I agree "uk" is a better code for the, well, UK, the ISO states we are technically GB.

And yet, Northern Ireland doesn't have even have their own 2cc... so that's not even an accurate code...

Framework

I've looked at a few frameworks that abstract the mobile platform, in theory allowing for iPhone/iPad, Android, Meego, etc., delivery with just a few compiler flags.

Unfortunately, Jobs' antipathy towards API abstraction and non-ObjC development means that iPhone/iPad support could disappear at any time... making it less attractive in that respect.

It'll be interesting to see how that plays out for them. I (as a developer) am not going to buy a Mac just to develop for one platform, representing a share (although significant) of the mobile market; I'm also not going to pay their developer tax if they're just going to arbitrarily block my apps from release without much explanation or chance of appeal.

I use Android but I do think Google need to drastically overhaul the Market (Gingerbread?) and provide a web-based alternative for browsing/purchasing.

Maybe...

I don't really get the memory-hogging complaints, unless your system has <1GB RAM?

Personally, I'd rather have a performant browser with 10 - 20 tabs take as much memory as it needs to (I have a 3GB system, though) and let it be swapped out if I decide to bring up TF2 and leave it in the background.

I jump between the Firefox 4 beta and Iron (non-Google branch of Chrome) pretty frequently. I have lots of extensions in Fx for web development that I miss in Iron/Chrome, but Iron/Chrome is just so much better at being swapped out of RAM and then continuing as though everything's alright (possibly due to the many-process aproach).

Chrome certainly isn't that much lighter on memory than my Fx instance, if you add up all the processes, but it performs so much faster.

Of course, this is ignoring the old memory leaks Fx used to suffer from - I haven't noticed anything obvious in Fx 4, so lets hope they're history.

</title>

I can't disagree, but I would hope WebOS passes on some genes. There are some things that WebOS does so much better than the others.

I agree

but I think what this does show is how people are starting to understand their needs slightly more.

<anecdote>

My sister (29) was going on about getting an iPhone for over a year (waiting for contract to end), and then she suddenly called to tell me she had a Galaxy S and was crazy in love with it.

Weird thing: she hadn't even tried one before. I'll never understand how phone shops expect to sell phones without letting people try them out, but they seem to do okay.

When I asked her why, she said that the Galaxy S did everything she needed. She had almost no understanding of what Android was (she thought it was something to do with the market), and that's possible Android's biggest strength.

Despite what people say about OEMs not being able to distinguish their product with Android, I don't think average consumers really care, as long as they're told that the phone does what they want it to do.

Not sure I understand...

While I get your point about the usual management reference to "how many lines of code is that?", I believe in this instance "pages" was of a document.

However, I can't access the link from work, so I'm not 100% sure.

Motorolla

Motorolla shot first: "Motorola filed against Apple on October 6"

This is going to be a real tit-for-tat fight; probably ending with them all agreeing to hate each other from a distance, while their lawyers count the dimes.

Re: Prior art

Even more than that, it might be the /use/ of multi-touch that they've patented (which, from the patent titles, seems likely).

You've patented "herding animals via GPS", but you can then also patent "herding sheep via GPS", etc., and decide which and how many of your patents someone has infringed upon.

My usual disgust for these things comes with how long a patent holder takes to decide they have been infringed (although, that's not relevant with this case as they were in talks), and how daft the "use" they've patented is - a computer is merely a way of taking input and giving output, while I can understand novel ways of taking input, how can anyone patent the type of output (in this case, apparently, status of the hardware is one)?

I also hate when companies say they're "grieved" or "suffered damages" and don't have to prove that any so-called "infringement" actually had an affect on them...

Not pro either company, just anti-stupid-patents.

But...

Networks can already block IMEIs, and they know which ones are marked as stolen, rendering reported lost phones useless already.

Creepy line

They cross the creepy line all the time and then apologise when they're caught (see El Reg ad nausum).

We need to start our own anonymous search engine... with black jack... and hookers...!

Not entirely true.

16:9 is great for document writing; I have it on my work PC and much prefer it than 4:3 - especially in portrait form (my screen rotates).

But...

If you're abroad, would you rather pay the extortionate roaming charges through your phone, or use the free 3G on the Kindle?

I have a Sony PRS-600 Touch and am considering the Kindle 3G because of the improved screen and the worldwide free 3G.

Calibre pretty much gives Kindle epub support, but it would be nice for Amazon to accept the standard natively.

Beep!

I often fail to tap in or out on the DLR, so I know what you're complaint is, but the tap-points do beep (twice, I think) to tell you if it was successful in reading your card, so you don't need to read the screen.

The one downside is if you don't know whether you're currently "in" or "out", as touching just reverses it.