Posts by Patrick O'Reilly

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And just how many of Google's Ubuntu powered machines were compromised?

Catching up with Opera you mean.

I think you may be mistaken, you mean catching up with Opera 10.5. As we saw before christmas, Opera's latest development release is faster than anything else out there.

Impressed

Got to play around with 10.5 yesterday and was very impressed, not only has the javascript engine improved the whole user experience seems faster, the only thing holding up page load was my crap DSL.

Opera has released "labs" builds previously with features that are absent from this and production builds, such as HTML5 video and the W3C GeoLocation API. Video was removed from this build at the last mintue due the developer responsible being on holiday.

Opera 10.5 looks very promising.

Queue the Opera Bashers *Yawn*

Bash Opera all you want they still make a great browser, giving users the same great performance not matter what OS or device they are using.

Sure they've been at it a long time and still have a relatively small user base, unsurprisingly given they are up against Microsoft's built-in browser and the marketing power of Google's Chome.

Opera Unite isn't for everyone but it is still only in it's infancy and could prove pretty useful in the not too distant future.

@Phil Endecott

It shouldn't be location locked. Google Maps is a global application.

Yes some features mightn't work everywhere, like Streetview, traffic and public transport but that would be the same for parts of the US also.

Coming soon.

Irish operator Meteor is launching the Hero on PAYG from November 1st.

The price tag will be €399

Here's some cotton buds, go clean out your ears.

how many times do we have to tell you, there is a linux version out there.

Finally

At last some TV station that us Irish have been paying to fund for years has finally given us equal access to their content on the web. Now if only the BEEB and C4 could do the same.

<air-quote>Notebook"</air-quote>

Can't they just admit it's a netbook? The worlds most expensive netbook!

IE in Firefox

But there's already a plug in for Firefox that is essentially IE Frame for Firefox, but I haven't seem Mozilla giving out about that.

Update Any Good?

I'm thinking of getting the Hero, has anyone who has applied the updated noticed a difference?

Hold out.

Why not wait for the HTC Tattoo and get a better touchscreen phone for similar money.

VHosts

Their URL http://monopolycitystreets.com shows an apache test page not the game site

A boy named SUE

Shouldn't the Linux Foundation be able to sue Microsoft for defamation? As you can see here they have debunked most of the issues expressed by M$.

I do find it interesting that Apple is missing from this list, shouldn't it be:

Windows: Great (because we own it)

Apple: OK too (because we own lots of their stock)

Linux: Bad (because we can never own them)

Another vote of support here for the Steve 'Fester' Balmer icon.

@Mike Hebe

You know if you can stick openSUSE, you can be damn sure that Ubuntu'll run on it.

Given the touchscreen I'd say it'd look great sporting the netbook remix.

I do see one drawback with the media centre PC idea, no DVD drive.

7Digital Rule

Like most people I had ignored the exsistance of 7Digital until last week when I decided to go legit and buy some hard to find music. (ok the real reason was it was impossible to find the songs I was looking for using the usual methods)

Living in Ireland we have a limited number of online MP3 vendors serving this country as iTunes dominates the market so much.

So I did some searching and saw 7Digital in the Google results, which reminded me that they are the music store of choice for the Songbird Music Library. Songbird is a great piece of cross platform software that mashes up the web and media in to one fairly robust offering. And it's developed using the Mozilla App framework, gStreamer and has some of the original guys from Winamp behind it.

So I fired up Songbird and opened the 7Digital store. The customer experience was fantastic, the song previews loaded within the local media player. The purchase was optionally storing my details to make the experience simpler next time. I added the songs to my basket and once they were paid for I was redirected to a download page. Once the download page loaded, Songbird started to instantly download the songs to my library automatically.

What is even better is that 7Digital remembers what song you have bought, so at any stage you can log into your account, go to "My Locker" and download again the songs you have already purchased. This is great if you have multiple systems in different locations or if your music collection somehow gets wiped.

Let's hope with HMV's backing 7Digital will start to eat up the dominant market share that iTunes currently has a hold of so that music is freed up for everyone. Legally.

Another Happy User

Opera's been my browser of choice for years now and with the standard of the current version it will continue to be for many more.

Under the hood Opera have been pushing themselves for years but with this release they have a new designer in Jon Hicks (check him out he's responsable for the Miro and Camio logo's also) who has done a lot of work updating the style of Opera.

The UI has been much improved, and it is now possible to hide the menu bar so that only the tabs and address bar are the only chrome onscreen, maximizing browsing real-estate. The visual tabs are also a cool new feature which I doubt FFF's (FireFox Fanboi's) will be able to copy too quickly. Altogther the new UI is really impressive, far better than the 9.5 skin, and should attract many new users.

As mentioned above Opera Turbo will also be another USP which at first I questioned but after been caught on overcrowded WiFi one too many times soon grew to love. The image quality does suffer some what but with overall loading times increasing between 3x to 6x thats a small sacrifice. This has been somewhat of a natural progression as Opera Mini does somewhat of a similar job for rendering websites a full size on mobile devices.

The new spell checking engine mentioned by Bit Fiddler is actually an open-source program called Hunspell, and is the same spell checking engine used by OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Google Chrome and various other applications.

As an Opera user my main issue isn't with websites that discriminate against Opera and it's users. E.g. Bing, which serves a screen that says the site won't work with your browsers, and sometimes Google's GMail and GDoc's have served similar pages. Sunguard's student offering does something similar, throwing an unknown error when it sees the Opera user agent but working fine when Opera spoof's FF. And the same thing happens with GoDaddy's admin panel, which only works in Opera when spoofing the FF ua.

I look forward to a day when the web is driven by standards and is truely an open platform where services are served irrespective of what applicaion or device is used to access it. When that day comes I'm sure Opera will be leading the way, until then Opera 10 is a strong browser with a really userful set of features.

Definitely worth a try.

Not difficult

"Taser describes the XREP as "the most technologically advanced projectile ever deployed from a 12-gauge shotgun"."

Not exactly a difficult thing to do seeing shotgun projectiles are normally lumps of lead or steel.

I wonder what this munition surpassed, a slug with an integrated quartz digital clock?

Airwolf

I can see it now, Hawk versus Evil UCAV's

Stench of desperation.

I think is serves as good proof that the "powers that be" still can't crack AES 256. And that the encryption products currently out there really scare them.

Mine's the one with the hardware encrypted USB key from Currys in the pocket.

Love tokens not accepted here.

As a longtime Opera user it is no surprise to me that M$ has done their best to hamper Opera users browsing experience of a Microsoft site/service.

The whole web app supported by specific browsers concept is rediculious. If all browsers followed the same standard and had to pass an offical test then developers could write apps to that standard and not have to worry about browser compatability at the user end.

It would be much better if M$ had come out and said if your browser supports HTML5, then this app will work and we'll back it.

Not just Windows

Google Chrome isn't just available on Windows anymore.

There is an almost complete version of Chromium available for Linux and I've been using it under Ubuntu without any issues for a few months now.

Despite warning on the start screen that enabling plugin support could cause crashes, I've had no issues at all. Flash loads and plays fine, so do media files.

For Ubuntu 9.04 it can be installed from APT using the following repository:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main