* Posts by Ole Juul

2726 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2007

Google makes 'proposal' to Europe on antitrust concerns

Ole Juul

The world's largest ad broker

In its general search results, Google displays links to its own vertical search services differently than it does for links to competitors.

The link quotes Almunia as detailing three more major issues. Offering Google a chance to find a solution is a reasonable approach rather than just coming up with a huge fine. If Google disagrees with the allegations they would probably be better served by saying why. Playing dumb does not make them look particularly intelligent in this matter.

Stanford boosts century-old battery tech

Ole Juul

Durability

I hope this is a step toward longer lasting batteries. The local electric vehicle association replaced the nickel-iron batteries in an old Detroit Electric and apparently they still worked but the case was giving out.

ICANN’s archery contest misses its target

Ole Juul

No Problem

. . . it will actually break a lot of legacy systems that check for a valid TLD and will refuse all these.

I don't think those legacy systems will be broken. They'll continue to work just fine and filter out useless domains.

Nexus 7 and Surface: A bonanza for landfill miners

Ole Juul

Wherever you go, there you are.

Why a tablet? Because I like to go outside from time to time. And there’s a whole world beyond my office walls to explore.

So there you are, exploring the world outside the walls of your office while staring at a tablet. Cool.

Governments probe domain land-snatch: many.gTLDs.suck

Ole Juul

Re: Stupid

I certainly cannot see the point of all these dot-verbose vanity domains...

I agree that the common TLDs are probably better. In fact they might become more desirable after all the "dot verbose" ones take effect. In fact the long ones might be a liability because, unlike dot com, one can filter them out with a possible worthwhile result.

@Stuart Longland: I just checked, and command.com is taken. However, I'm looking forward to a new .exe TLD.

Ethiopia: we are not jailing Skype users

Ole Juul

Monopolies

I realize that civil liberties might look different in Ethiopia, but the facts reported don't sound particularly different from what we experience in North America. All communications are highly regulated and there is generally a heavy crackdown on anybody that tries to circumvent monopolies.

Google claims Chrome is the world's most popular browser

Ole Juul

Does "how it works" matter?

. . . who gives a fk how many people use it. Its how it works that counts.

I couldn't agree more. It's really unfortunate that we live in a society where even (so called) technical people believe that a product's worth is directly proportional to the number of users.

Breaking: Megaupload seizures illegal says NZ High Court

Ole Juul

Re: Good news

Haven't they already frozen his assets and such like though? What about those...?

Not to mention the destruction of a business with a $4 billion dollar evaluation that was just preparing to go public and enter the US stock market with a multi-billion dollar IPO. Major auditors and world investment banks were apparently looking favourably at this so there should be some good evidence for a lawsuit to recover some of that. It's a bit of an international incident if you ask me.

Microsoft says tablets will trump PCs in 2013

Ole Juul

Re: Battling the UI

Microsoft are right to redesign their UI if it aids usability and makes their product more discoverable and accessible.

What aids usability the most is not changing the UI.

69,000 sign petition to save TV-linker O'Dwyer from US extradition

Ole Juul

Re: Civil vs Criminal

I think you'll find that this guy made quite a lot of money from this website.

citation needed

Facebook replaces non-Facebook mail addresses on Timeline

Ole Juul

Re: Fixed it!

Why in an article about Facebook is there always has to be someone who puts in the time and effort to tell the world he doesn't use Facebook rather than just not reading the supposedly irrelevant article.

It's educational and they are leading by example.

Ten Points About Facebook

Boffins demo 2.5 Tbps OAM-modulated light signal

Ole Juul

I have to ask

Are they putting a spin on how they are reporting this? It almost sounds like they want us to believe that they will be able to scale bandwidth indefinitely. Perhaps some of the brighter lights here can explain why this isn't just multiplexing.

UK regulators eye up Facebook's $1bn Instagram bid

Ole Juul
Coat

Competition?

Let them waste their money. I'm sticking with the Gimp - it's free.

Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show

Ole Juul

Re: New Jersey?

Using obscure units only known locally to the writer is code for saying it has no international relevance. However, I happen to know what he's talking about because I just got a new jersey and it's about a foot and a half across.

Ole Juul

Anybody want to talk about computers?

What is this kind of article doing here? Wrong subject. Wrong crowd. Wrong headed.

The Beatles Yellow Submarine restored

Ole Juul

I can't imagine

this being nearly as relevant as it was when I saw it the year it came out. I must be getting old.

Posner to Apple, Motorola: 'And don’t come back'

Ole Juul

Costs?

So you paid this judge to get a ruling you like? :-)

No, the taxpayer pays the judge to get the ruling. However, in this case I would like to see the plaintiff and respondent paying the bill.

Renewables good for 80 per cent of US demand by 2050

Ole Juul

Re: Magic thinking?

. . . but it's going to require:

4. A lot of stuff made out of plastic.

Out of idle curiosity, why is it that none of this "green" stuff uses natural materials? I'm not saying it's possible or even desirable, but it does seem odd. It makes me think that perhaps I'm not the only one who hasn't done the math.

No one watches TV, Nielsen, and you know it

Ole Juul

Re: Everyone watches tv .. the problem is with fake stats !

There's one right there. I haven't had a TV for 40 years now. I tend to get together with others who are the same, and I can tell you that there are lots of us in this parallel universe. I suspect that we are invisible to those on the other side.

Powering your iPad costs $1.36 per year

Ole Juul

Re: Meaningless

So really shouldn't the whole cost of the device be included into the study?

Yes.

Unless it was actually a psychological study - and they're testing us to see if they can get away with saying "powering your iPad costs $1.36 per year".

Ole Juul

Meaningless

The energy cost of replacing the batteries when they eventually wear out needs to be included in the "energy consumption". After all, people aren't running their their iPads off the charger.

Probably though, the attention span of iPad consumers is shorter than the lifetime of the batteries. In other words even discussing power consumption through the charger is irrelevant outside of the original engineering concerns.

Are you a hot BABE in heels and a short skirt? SCIENCE is for YOU

Ole Juul

Re: The hard sell

I doubt that kids from any time in the past 20 years, brought up on a diet of MTV and more extreme, would be the slightest bit affected by this video.

Indeed, advertising agencies first convince the client and if they manage that then they've made the only sale that matters to them.

There are so many wrong assumptions going on. For example, why do they insist that there are no role models? There are plenty. That's not the problem.

PS: I see the video is off-line now.

European vote hammers another nail into ACTA's coffin

Ole Juul

Just one battle - more to follow

Of course artists should be paid, but that is a false front in this battle. ACTA is just part of the war on material economics by those who don't produce anything physical. (You know who they are.)

New body to supervise as your NHS file includes more and more stuff

Ole Juul

Re: Accuracy??

When people report having to give their details several times it is down to this training as much as anything else. I don't know if this is still the mantra.

I recently went in for day surgery and can confirm that this approach is used here. When I checked in, they asked me what I was there for. I was then put under the care of a person who made sure that I had a ride and all other details and she confirmed what I was there for. On the surgery floor I was asked again, and once more in the operating room just before the procedure. It doesn't get any safer than that, and I was very pleased, indeed relieved, that they were following such a procedure.

Schneier spanks AV industry over Flame failures

Ole Juul

Re: Reactive broken model?

When otherwise air-gapped and vulnerable computers allow USB memory sticks to be plugged in (Stuxnet attack) then it starts to look like part of the reason the reactive model is broken is because it is not applied across the board. In other words, even in professional environments security is given a back seat.

Nice article, by the way.

Google in dock again over defamatory auto-complete

Ole Juul
Facepalm

Who's been searching?

It's entirely possible that the man has typed in the auto-completed words and phrases himself.

Facebook fesses up to Face.com face finder financing

Ole Juul

Re: not disclosed

Are they going buy every domain that contains the words 'face' and 'book'? What about '.com'?

I must say this fanatical obsession with faces is starting to wear thin. How about bumbook.com? And yes, they could probably use the same *.recognition technology.

(Skipping the Paris icon because I'm only half serious.)

Linus Torvalds drops F-bomb on NVIDIA

Ole Juul
Facepalm

Re: @AC

Many here didn't when he sweared at Adobe.

Some people are offended by bad English and some aren't.

Honeynet looks to trap USB malware

Ole Juul

Re: Ahhh so that's why...

Since Stuxnet, plugging in a USB key can probably be considered an act of war.

Ole Juul

Re: USB Malware ?

I guess that cp /tmp/virus /dev/da4s1 (or similar) should work once the mounting event has been detected, so even a non Windows machine could propagate even though it wouldn't run.

Mozilla plans multi-engine search results, native iOS browser

Ole Juul
Thumb Up

Just give the users what they want, at the expense of all other stakeholders.

Users! Users! Users! Users! Users! Users! Users!

Ole Juul
Trollface

That's it

I'm going back to Lynx.

'Jogobot' lures lonely lardies

Ole Juul

Re: I like the technology but what a fail.

Couldn't it be re-designed for taking the dog a walk ?

If they had a dog they'd have someone to run with - unless the dog was also lardy.

Ole Juul

Re: Wrong way round

It might be dangling a mars bar

Or your credit card.

Japan and Vietnam push on with rare earth mining plans

Ole Juul

10,000 tons

That seems like a lot to me, so I found this chart of metric tons of rare earth oxide equivalent per country.

1 China 125,000

2 India 2,700

3 Brazil 550

4 Malaysia 380

ITU to G20 leaders: Follow Australia's broadband policy

Ole Juul

Who's Economy?

Target 2: Making broadband affordable. By 2015, entry-level broadband services should be made affordable in developing countries through adequate regulation and market forces (amounting to less than 5% of average monthly income).

I don't know if Canada counts as a "developing" country but 5% of average income is 10-15% of low income which is probably not doable. Does the ITU have a plan B?

Facebook CTO jumps ship for new horizons

Ole Juul

Ransom

. . . unless they begin to charge a fee for access . . .

If FB were to start charging now, most users would have no choice but to pay up. They're stuck there, and it would take a long time before they could migrate their stuff.

Microsoft cosies up to China with Win8 weibo support

Ole Juul

Illusion of Free Speech

From the study:

Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content. Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future . . .

So, as it turns out they give the illusion of free speech by allowing criticism of the state. That part is similar to North America where I live. The second part is more subtle, but does ring a bell.

Mystery buyer scoops working Apple 1 at auction

Ole Juul

What will the next one go for?

Apparently there's a few more out there that we can expect to hit the "market" at some point. I wonder if the price will keep going up.

Apple adds gay and lesbian icons to iOS 6 messaging

Ole Juul

Re: My only question for the idiots against gay marriage is ...

But marriage means something in my book that does not include 2 people of the same sex living together.

I don't think you could find two people of the same sex.

Counting the cost of cloud computing

Ole Juul

What is driving this push to the cloud?

I just wonder what, or who, is actually driving this push to the cloud that causes all these discussions about vague and variable benefits. Are users asking for this service, or are there companies pushing to sell it? If the latter, then I'm suspicious.

EU gives Google till July to offer fix for search dominance

Ole Juul

What happened?

We are getting comments from people who haven't read the material mixed in with posts pointing that out. How very odd.

Ole Juul
Facepalm

Re: Interesting

The linked Reg article says: [The EU's competition commissioner Joaquin] Almunia outlined what aspects of Mountain View's biz might be characterised as "abuses of dominance".

I'll let you read the long list for yourself.

EU lurches behind copyright free-for-all landgrab

Ole Juul

Re: First they came for the photographers...

To video? Heck, might it already be considered to apply to video if it is approved in this form? What's a video, but a collection of still shots?

How about text? What's a web page but a picture? Just distribute it as a JPEG.

Intel to target TV viewers with facial recognition ad tech

Ole Juul
Coat

Re: Sell your soul...

Lots of narcissists and Facebook users will love it. Anybody have a TV in the bathroom?

Google Maps adds aircraft, tricycles and skiers to cover all bases

Ole Juul

Re: Useless retards

I submit the problems, they say "prove it", I send 'em a pic, and they say that's not good enough! I'm not your unpaid surveyor, bitches.

I doubt that they are paid either. I sent them information as well, but they didn't respond and they didn't fix the problems. I can only assume that they are using volunteer help since it doesn't make sense that they would have paid jobs where performance is irrelevant.

Ole Juul

Wrong direction

Pictures are great, but when they misname the roads and direct traffic into unused trails such as they do where I live, then their service borders on entertainment. I would like to see more effort put into the basics before they add more bling.

Music Biz: The Man is still The Man, man

Ole Juul

Re: Reality check

Why *must* we support musicians?

I was not clear. There is a problem with the word "music" these days. A lot of it is minimally creative and is purely industrial, and we seem to lump art music in with that. What I was thinking about is that we need to make sure that all creative arts thrive. Society needs to have a healthy dose of purely creative activity in order to seed the future and balance the present. I agree with you that there are many other cases where this can be the case. To my mind mathematics, philosophy, computer science, and other purely academic pursuits would be equally important in that regard. I agree with you that "musicians in general'" are not a special case. In fact so much of what gets referred to in the contemporary discussion about file sharing etc is so minimally creative and derivative that I feel that we should just let the market take care of it like any other product.

Ole Juul
Joke

Reality check

I respect that some (most?) people accept a recording as "music", but does anybody "play" any more? Many of us who have spent a lifetime learning how to actually manipulate a physical instrument in real time don't usually see a recording as having much musical worth except for study purposes - certainly not compared to the real world experience of hearing an actual performance or, even better, being part of one. I pity the poor people who are reduced to living with music coming through a speaker. That is somewhat reminiscent of pornography compared to a real relationship. It's not wrong, but it's not something to aim for either. It's time to re-evaluate what music is. I think it is about real people playing music and not about inferior and infinitely reproducible copies of the original event.

Now the problem of how we are going to support musicians (and we must) is certainly a real one, but to my way of thinking, collecting money for cheap recordings doesn't seem like a legitimate way.

Joke icon, because the current music business is a joke.