Posts by Matt Bradley 330 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007
Umm... HOW exactly? Its pretty trivial to fake a referrer header.
No. What's needs is for the CND to verify the credentials of the user requesting the image and their rights to do so, by means of the facebook session token, porbably (as suggested above) a random one time session based hash.
Disabling hotlinking is so trivially easy to bypass; it would be futile.
Matthew, Matthew, Matthew. The possibilities and applications for of HTML 5 have sailed right over you head haven't they?
This is about HTML5 APPLICATIONS - not static websites - lots of client side rich UI, local caching of data, local databases, etc, etc. Performance is quite important here, you see. It means you can do stuff like offline rich document editing, spreadsheets, databases, games.
Maybe "tech nerds" are the only ones who care about how the performance is delivered, but end users will appreciate the functionality that it brings with it.
How do you fancy paying as the same amount for your car insurance (minus no claims) as a 19 year old male?
As for the general priniciple of providing targetted services for different class / education / gender /ethnic / age groups based up statistical analysis of historical data... I'm starting to wonder why we're bothering with a national census AT ALL in this country if this kind of idea is fundamentally bad.
Oh I just KNEW somebody would post something like that!
Do insurance companies package products based on ethnic background as well? (I don't think they do in car insurance, maybe they do in life insurance?)
That's very dodgy territory, as we that can have social implications beyond just that particular field, if we're actively researching statistics which categorise and subdivide areas of ethnicity by behaviour and life expectancy, etc. That all starts to sound a bit morally questionable.
But I can't see what benefit is to be had from refusing to acknowledge established statistical patterns WRT gender. This seems like pure and simple denial, which just isn't healthy for any society.
this sounds like stupidest ruling in the history of stupid rulings.
Insurance companies have determined that statistically speaking, men are more likely to crash cars and cause damage / injury than women, and that women are statistically likely to live longer. However, they are not allowed to offer products which are tailored to the peculiarities of those groups of people. Instead, they must deny completely that any such differences exist.
In other words, the court is asking insurance companies to behave as if black == white and 2+2=5?
Well, I can see how this will be of HUGE benefit to society...
So the conclusion of this research seems to be that all smartphones suffer from signal loss problems when held in the wrong way.
I seem to remember Apple posting this exact same conclusion last year, with demonstrations on a number of phones...
Not sure how you've managed to spin this story into a criticism of Apple antenna design, given that it reaches exactly the same conclusion that they did.
I woud have thought this Apple subs T&C's requirement for prices on the App store be the same as elsewhere is a clear cut and dried case of price fixing and restraint of trade?
I for one defend their right to charge as much of a percentage as they like. Whatever they think they can get away with: that's how free market economics works. But attempting to fix the supplier price and eliminating price competition? That's not how it works.
I am confident that Apple will have to remove at least the pricing restriction, if not the in-app linking to external web based marketplaces restriction. They really must be on an extremely dodgy legal footing here.
Before I get pelted with abuse. I am very much locked into Apple's world at the moment. I have a double digit number of Macs and iThingys... but this recent development is making me wonder whether Apple has finally jumped the shark this time, and I'm actively researching alternatives.
The most important factor in the sonic qualities of a solid body electric guitar is the rigidity and resonance (or lack thereof) of the whole. In fact, a more dense and rigid, less resonant guitar will tend to have more sustain because of the knock on effect of not absorbing too much of the string's energy, and not trasnmitting any of the vibration to the pickups, where such vibration would compromise the electromagnetic process of picking up the strings note.
This is why carbon fibre, through neck guitars such as the tiny cricket bat shaped Steinberger guitars tend to sound closer to a big chunky Les Paul, for example. And why big body semis actually have quite a boxy, reedy sound by comparison.
If the construction techniques and rigidity of the materials in this guitar are suitable, the actual size and shape of the thing doesn't mean a damn.
I for one am more than a litle curious.
I bought an Advent Vega from PCWorld (spits) 2 weekends ago.
The Android flavour that came installed on the device was hideously locked down, and apart from not having a decent app store, it didin't support Flash or the BBC iPlayer App.
After about 15 minutes Googling, I found the MoCaDo ROM which replaces PC World's locked down Android with a more "full fat" version which includes Android Marketplace, some other goodies and... Flash 10.1
One hour later I had a properly fully featured Andorid 2.2 10" tablet
It works perfectly fine. the Flash player is perfectly stable. It is nice to be able to watch video content from iPlayer, news.BBC and 4OD on my tablet PC. Very happy.
And it cost roughly half as much as an iPad.
My iPad arrives when I buy a second hand iPad from ebay off an eager fanboi in April. ;)
That's why we all should keep up to date with our patches. The patching process exists to fix both publicly known bugs and internally identified bugs.
Why disclose a security vulnerability that you've already fixed? All that does is expose people who haven't patched yet.
It also ties up your internal developers with the job of constantly documenting every fix in the public domain, reducing the amount of time they can spend actually FIXING stuff.
This is kinda the whole point... and it has sailed right over your head.
Lets disregard the fact that this user DID have a backup of his photos. That's no the point either.
The point is that world+dog is talking about could storage and productivity / thin client solutions as replacement for conventional desktop smart client. If this is to have ANY value at all, we have to be able to trust such large cloud providers (such as Yahoo, for example) to properly backup and secure our data. And to restore it quickly when they screw up.
If they can't, then cloud is ultimately useless.
FWIW, I can guarantee than any decent cloud provider will have a much more robust and resilient data safety and backup strategy than the overwhelming majority of home users. Furthermore, I'd be prepared to bet that many times more users have lost their photo data from their desktop machines due to disk & backup failure / computer theft, than have ever lost photo data stored on Flickr.
Yahoo obviously have a decent backup strategy. The only problem is that it took the user to kick up a stink in the public press before they restored that backup. Which is a bit worrying.
"Supporting H.264 means supporting a de facto requirement for patented technology to creep into the open specs of the Internet or risk compliant video failing to play in compliant browsers."
<- THIS
This is precisely the point. Furthermore, if somebody with influence doesn't act, we'll be looking another generation of open source platforms / browsers that are locked out of HTML 5 video by simple merit the the fact that Apple and MS have used their influence to ensure that a patented codec is in widespread use, rather than an open one.
I applaud Google for have the balls to do this. As has been pointed out, it is in their interests, as they have Android and Chrome OS to consider, both of which will really need to default to WebM if their are going to remain open and also natively support HTML5 video.
From a wider POV, it is in all our interests. What ON EARTH in the point of moving away from a closed proprietary plugin (Flash) for video, to a close proprietary codec which has somehow infiltrated its way into an open standard?
That's going from bad to worse, surely?
So G = gravity and ms = time.
So 1500G/0.5ms means the drive can survive the impact of accelerating to/from 1500G to in a time of 0.5ms...
The time also indicate the minimum time the device requires to park any read write heads before impact, etc, which is why this number is larger for conventional moving head magnetic drives.
A device with a [n]G/2ms shock figure would be damage if the impact occured within 1ms - so changing 400G/2ms does not equal 200G/1ms, as the latter incident described would result in a damaged drive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Shock_resistance
"Simply put, attacking a major online retailer when people are buying presents for their loved ones would be in bad taste,"
Whereas attacking major card payment provider (Mastercard) when people are buying presents for their loved ones is fine, right?
I call BS on Anonymous' excuse. They have not attacked Amazon because any such attack was destined to fail. End.
Don't. Leave. Your. Laptop. In full view. On the car seat.
If this poor hopeless sap had just put the damn thing in his boot, this would never have happened.
I can understand walking away from the car inadvertently leaving it unlocked. But also to leave your kit in full view in the car. Under the easily breakable windows?
Oh deary, deary me.
Perhaps it was case of placing no value on the hardware, but not fully understanding the value of the data thereon? I guess its a common mistake these days amongst the non it literate. I do feel sorry for him. But only just.
If the banks shipped this client on a USB stick, this would also protect users from downloading trojanised versions of the client from dodgy phishing sites as well.
It would also allow the customer to use the client on any machine.
So rather than having to have one of those daft little keyring login key generators, or card chip reader, you would have a little USB stick, which when plugged into a machine and provided with your login details, allows you to login to your bank account.
Maybe it could even be based on a bootable mini linux VM, to protect it from any other malware on your host machine?
Actually, the killer fix would be for banking institutions to produce a native client app for Windoze / Mac / iPad, whatever, and only allow you to login to their services using the app.
The app would be hardwired to an SSL webservice on a specific domain. It may even use $browser's rendering engine to render pages fetched to the native client via the webservice. Importantly, there would be NO browser based alternate login.
Said bank then advises clients that if they invited to login to a web site, they should NEVER do so. They should always use their native client.
For added convenience, the client may also hash some of their login details for instant recall, so they only need to use a simple username and password combo which ONLY WORKS ON THIER INSTALLATION to login. Hence keyloggers also become useless.
"IF the US Government could run anything efficiently and UNDER budget, I would support a national healthcare system - but it cannot no matter which party is in control, they all talk out their ass."
I may be missing the point, but it strikes me that in inneficiently run, overbudget national healthcare system is better than none at all? You surely have to start somewhere. To argue that "the government will not deliver a perfect system" is a bit daft, given that the system you currently have is VERY far from perfect. To give up trying for such a system just because the healthcare corps interfere to block its proper implementation seem like a tragically defeatist attitude from a country that once prided itself on its inventiveness, entrepeneurship and aspirational qualities.
Maybe if the electorate actually all got behind the idea of improving national healthcare and providing a robust national healthcare system, then you'd get started on the road to creating one? Just putting your hands up and declaring defeat at the first hurdle is so utterly, hopelessy sad, that it strikes me as another syptom of the disease that will ultimately destroy US cultural and financial dominance.
The one thing that I worried about (aloud) after the success of the iPhone / iPad / iOS, was that Apple might decide that Mac / Mac OS-X might be more profitable if it were similarly consumer-ized.
I can see a future where Apple separates its product lines into "consumer" and "professional" divisions, with so called "professional" devices being more and more rarified, more and more geared towards providing iOS developer tools, and becoming more and more expensive.
I'm now fairly certain that Apple actively doesn't want to work with anybody else. Its closed ecosystem is very profitable, thank you very much, and as long as it doesn't get too big a market share nobody is ever going to challenge it on anti-trust type matters; all Apple needs to do is keep a comfortable < 50% of market by continually pricing itself out of the lower end of the market, and it can carry on locking its other users in.
With this in mind, an open, low cost, interopable and unrestricted computing platform is pretty much in the opposite direction to Apple's current strategy.
I'm worried. I only became an Apple user a couple of years ago, and have invested quite a lot in their tech in our business, but I'm now thinking I need to start moving away. Quickly.
Twitter's revenue generating efforts seem to be geared towards getting eyeballs on their website an serving ads there.
But with heavy users and mobile users almost exclusively using Twitter API clients, and with recent XSS exploints on the website encouraging more users to use an API client, I'm not sure who's going to be left looking at the website?
The API allows user to pick and choose which bits of Twitter's content the users see. You can't serve sidebar ads as a seperate API service, as no API client is going to deliver that content to the user anyway, which leaves you with having to serve commercialised content direct into the feeds / timelines themselves.
Whilst Twitter client software developers have been able to commercialise their efforts relatively easily, either as paid for licensed product or an ad-bearing sponsosred free download, I can't see what Twitter has which it CAN commercialise? It needs to monetize the API, and the only way it can do that is by polluting it with commercial / sponsored content, at which point it becomes a less appealing product all round.
It would be a bit like having your telephone calls interrupted evey five minutes by a commercial message, rather than just paying for a line rental and calls package. OTOH, nobody's going to want to pay a subscription / line rental package for Twitter are they? ARE THEY?
Or am I missing something?
Lucas has already destroyed the legend of his finest achievement by diluting it with round after round of awful makeovers / prequels.
I suppose all that's left now is to run completely into the ground for the last squeeze of profit, then retire.
In other news, plans are afoot to retouch the Mona Lisa now that pigment technology has improved.
No. VR glasses' day never came because they make you look a complete twunt.
For home consoling gaming, they make the whole experience very insular. Whilst this works for the hardcore of bedroom gamers, they don't work for social or casual gaming. They certainly don't work for ANY mobile application.
I'm sure if anybody thought they could actually SELL the damn things in any serious volume, they'd invest the R&D in finding ways to make it cheaper.
By smell sense I was oversimplifying, yes, they use their tongue and the jacobsens organ, but it amounts to essentially scent on the air which they are relying on. I was assuming that everybody knew that snakes "smell" with their tongues. :)
The key point is that heat, smell and movement are the key factors. None of which you'll really get with a cold dead mouse.
Snakes use their smell and heat sense more that they do their eyes. The eyes being unable to focus, they also find it difficult to identify prey unless it is moving.
In my experience, its hard to get snake to eat something unless it is warm and moving. Feeding my corn snakes at home required me to warm a frozen mouse corpse in warm water, the dangle it about in front of the snake's nose.
Dropping cold dead mice into the tree canopy is unlike to attract many snakes, if you ask me.
Good point. With road usage tax, I'll be able to run a massive 5l V8, and pay the same as somebody else running a 1.6
Unless of course, there's going to be some elaborate and complex way of charging based upon engine size.
Oh wait, hang on, don't we already have this with FUEL DUTY?
As I say. Logic fail.
This whole idea is somewhere on the far side of daft.
"No it isn't. That's a tax on the use of fuel. This isn't the same thing as road usage. A gas guzzler will need a lot more fuel to use as much road as a supermini, all other things being equal."
...So a bigger car (occupying more road space) will cost more?
Still sounds like a road use tax to me.
...And travelling a larger, faster, less congested road at higher average speed will cost less?
Yep. Still sounds more efficient way to charge for road usage than a huge network of cameras and ridiculous administrative / bureaucratic overhead.
Anybody calling for our troops to come home NOW should read up about what happened when the UN pulled out of Rwanda.
Maybe we shouldn't have gone there in the first place, but we're there now. The exercise now is damage limitation and mitigation of the worst atrocities. We can't do that by just upping sticks and leaving.
I'm not sure what Assange thought he was doing, but I haven't heard anything yet that gives a sound reason for putting people's lives at risk.
••••APPLAUSE****
A well written and emotive response. Couldn't agree more.
I'm sorry we got involved in these wars. It wasn't helped by the fact that the incumbent in the White House was a war-mongering shitbag who didn't care about the lives of his own people, or those in Afghanistan & Iraq.
BUT. We're there now - and it is our DUTY to leave these countries in a stable condition. Abandoning them now makes us even worse. We've bombed them into the stone age, and now we're going to fuck off home? Sorry: that's just selfish, irresponsible and downright evil.
Assange has demonstrated that he has no interest in anything other than his own self promotion: these documents put real human beings at risk. Some of them allied forces, some of them Afghan citizens. Responsible journalism isn't about killing people just to get yourself some more publicity.
We are talking about cheap, low end desktop machines here, right?
If you buy a piece of cheap commodity hardware, and it goes pop after a couple of years, you've had your money's worth, I would have thought.
Actually, scratch that: I think I might sue Wilko's for the iron they sold me which died after a couple of of years. Bastards!
FFS
See: I have a scroll wheel on my mouse. I tend to put the mouse well to the right of the window, away from the text I'm reading, so I can SCROLL with it without obscuring the text I'm reading.
Bet I'm not the only one.
All that said, once you think of something obvious, you might as well patent it even if your proposed implementation is useless; just so you stop anybody else doing anything genuinely useful with it.
Way to go USPTO. ....Hey that rhymes. Maybe we should put it on a shirt?
Seriously? There's no comparison here. I can build a component box for about £1500, Which would out-spec and out-benchmark a £2500 MacPro.
The reason I don't buy that generic PC box is because I don't want the OS headache of Windows, and MacOS is the best GUI available for *nix
But hardware wise. Seriously: you can get the same numbers in your HW spec for about 70% of the cost of a mac. Fact.
But
I'm not sure how much of this is reflection of how good Apple is, and how much of it is about how bad Vista was. I know that I personally have convinced 3 of my relatives to buy a Macbook in the last 12 months after years of being windows users. It was easier to convince them, as they were so frustrated with their last Windows machine.
In the same time frame, Apple merrily put UP the prices of most of its line, yet people still switched. Why? Vista really was THAT awful. And Apple knew it.
Apple don't want to be the majority PC supplier. With that comes awkward anti-trust questions, class actions and questions about dubious / unreasonable contract terms (like the iOS dev terms, for example) - they simply want to be very profitable. They are happier selling VERY EXPENSIVE devices to 10% of the population, that selling really cheap ones to 90% - I suspect if their market share goes up too much, they'll just put prices up again.
So Apple fans: don't wish for too much success for Apple, or your beloved machines will just get MORE expensive.
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