Posts by Ian Ferguson 1368 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Sep 2006
Leave your computer off for the day.
I don't quite understand the fashionable dislike of Google's AdWords though. If nobody clicked them, Google's business plan would fail, the theory disproven and we'd be back to paid search placements. And that would be better how?
Yes, free search would be nice, but nothing in this world is free.
I've installed and run Safari in WinXP and it gets as far as... opening. Almost. There is no text displayed - and I don't mean just on the web page, I mean in the browser UI as well - no menus, title, labels, nothing. I know this web 2.0 nonsense means text is being surpassed by images and video but this is going a bit far...
Furthermore to my previous point about no text appearing. I thought the whole point of a 'beta' was that you could provide feedback... but I can't find any information on the Apple website about doing so. It's possible that the Safari application has links to do so, but without it rendering text in the menus, I can't find out. If somebody is kind enough could they take a look for a feedback email address or something I can whine at?
While on the matter of betas, I think Apple have fallen foul of public perception of the word; so many businesses release nearly-perfect 'betas' nowadays (I'm looking at you, Google) that the perception of beta and live have merged. When somebody releases an actual beta, ie. an unfinished product, they get ripped to shreds for daring to release a product with bugs in.
I'm in the process of moving our company's branding from a .com address to a .co.uk address. Simply because we've found that our customers value the localisation. Less important with a business based around a website maybe.
In the early days of the internet, .com was a sign of prestige - and thus .co.uk cheapness, and so on (I once had a boss who said 'I never go to websites with .net at the end - it's all porn) - but I don't think this is the case any more.
More to the point, why do you have Reg Developer and Reg Hardware on separate domains? I find it intensely irritating that I follow a story from theregister.co.uk (or from my RSS reader) and there's no big obvious logo or link to take me back to the front page of theregister.co.uk.
I'm sure BMW would be allowed to advertise their cars as the 'best', so why not Intel? 'Best' is a subjective term, unlike 'fastest' or 'most efficient'. Advertising is all about building up your brand; if everything had to be quantified, only one type of car or washing powder would sell.
Did their last test occur just within Iranian waters, perchance?
Still, probably quite a wise military test, seeing how dependant they are on GPS nowadays (as are we - it seems we can't even take notice of a rail crossing or cliff edge nowadays without the GPS shouting at us about it)
"But if we're taking snaps for commercial use, where individuals are identifiable, there is no such exemption. We need to notify the subjects..."
Are you sure? I've worked in TV and when taking footage of the public, we got consent from people who we actually interviewed, but not those in the background. Is that any different? Could you sue BBC News for showing footage of you canoodling with your neighbour's wife in the background of a festival on the news?
P.S. If my cat was visible in Google Street View I'd be quite proud.
Too right I need to adjust the volume for ad breaks! Particularly on ITV channels. They are shooting themselves in the foot, as when the first advert comes blaring out painfully loudly, I mute the TV until the end of the ad break; if the level was comparable to the programme, I wouldn't find this necessary.
There's a difference between helping somebody who's being mugged and intervening in a robbery. The guards are professionals who were trained what to do: Hand the cash box over and don't antagonise them. When nobody is in direct danger, the only people who should be confronting armed criminals is armed police.
The irony is that BBC's Jam was something like this; free, professionally produced educational resources. And it worked well. Very well. Too well in fact, as 'unidentified private education providers' (read: textbook publishers) ran with their tails between their legs to the EU courts and managed to get the site taken down. A great nonsensical tragedy - and considering the state of American courts, it wouldn't surprise me if this project comes to the same sticky end.
The whole point of backups and archives is that you hopefully never need them, but you keep them just in case. If I knew exactly which files my business will need in six months time from the archive tapes, then I could reduce the storage capacity a thousand fold, yes. Waterford Technologies are more than welcome to provide me with a crystal ball that will divulge this useful information.
Paper is indeed shredded during the recycling process, but the problem is sorting - it is easier to separate paper from other materials (plastic, staples, cardboard etc) when it's in big sheets. Especially as most home recycling schemes give you one bin to put everything in - there is no mechanical way of separating small bits like shredded paper from the general junk.
The solution is to collect shredded paper separately - but it's not currently cost-effective, hence only a few councils offering the service.
It could be worse. I live on the Isle of Wight and they don't recycle paper at all - as there isn't the facility to do so on the island, and the cost of transporting it to the mainland outweighs the income from selling the recycled paper. So they burn it. (In fact, when I queried the council, the response I got was 'but we do recycle plastic and paper - put it in the normal bin and it's converted into fuel'. So environmentally aware!)
I'm betting Curry's next 'death of' press release will be in exactly six months, announcing the death of camera film.
I do still have occasion to use cassette tapes at work - for the sole purpose of providing information to blind customers. A cassette tape is logical to use (essential for elderly customers), easily to handle, and can be stopped, ejected and started later from the same position, which CDs, minidiscs and MP3s cannot.
I would personally prefer they subscribed to our podcast, but until somebody makes a elderly-friendly and blind-friendly MP3 player, there'll always be this minority demand for cassettes.
This is such a schoolboy error, especially when it's so easy to fix. Every page I code that takes credit card details or something equally private, I insert a simple check for HTTP, in which case it redirects to the same address over HTTPS. Then, even if I'm a muppet enough to link to it over the insecure address from somewhere else, it's still caught.
Mind you, short of the browser screaming at the user and bludgeoning them with a e-sledgehammer, it's very hard to get people to check for the secure link. Maybe browsers should start panicking and warn the user if they start filling out a form with credit-card-like details over an insecure connection.
As much as I agree with the anti-DRM sentiment, I can't help pointing out how this illustrates what a waste of time Digg is. All it adds up to is a mob-driven soapbox with no actual value or interesting opinion, driven by whatever is getting the crowds' backs up. A bit like the Daily Mail...
Sorry to be a devil's advocate here, but if customers sign up for something on See Tickets' website, and then are emailed BY See Tickets, that isn't a third party, surely? It's just an example of cross-selling. As far as I can see the data wasn't shared with the Latitude festival organisers.
Hotmail is not alone - I run a registration-based site and vital emails (password requests in particular) do not get through to BT Internet addresses, ever (and often not to Hotmail or AOL addresses), despite me jumping through many hoops to get it working. The major problem for us is that customers assume that we're at fault and put it down to bad customer service - so our business reputation is damaged because of the customer's choice of email provider. Painful.
It seems fine now - I did have a brief panic yesterday as I thought I'd lost my favourite links - but frankly, it wouldn't be the end of the world if I did.
And as somebody's said already, you can hardly complain when you're given something free that (on the whole) works so well.
I might start backing up my Google-hosted data locally, but I haven't bothered so far as I figure their backup strategy is going to be a hell of a lot better than mine.
Thinking like this that states "that suggests statistics of at least one civilisation per galaxy" always makes me laugh. Taking a single sample and attempting to extrapolate from it is utterly meaningless.
I think it was Douglas Adams that used exactly the same logic and stated that as space is infinite, and as there's a finite number of planets (one) known to have life, one over infinity equals nothing, so there isn't any life in the universe and any that you see is the result of a deranged imagination.
There's also a joke that I can't quite remember but I'll try my best.
Three statisticians were travelling to Scotland. As their train passed over the border, one exclaimed - "Oh look! A black sheep. All the sheep in Scotland are black!"
The second corrected him - "No, all it means is SOME of the sheep in Scotland are black."
The third thought for a while then announced - "You're both wrong. All it means is that at a minimum, there is one sheep in Scotland that is black on one side."
Since when does hacking into a computer result in rendering it worthless? It's not as if he physically blew every single military computer into smithereens. The only actual 'cost' I can imagine resulting from his actions is patching the security holes that they had; which they can hardly argue should be charged to him.
I wouldn't say it's like an airport metal detector - that suggests that it actually detects something suspicious. It's more like an ignorant airport security guard who strip-searches everyone Arabic because they might be a terrorist.
Naturally, now that spyware coders know this, all they need to do is call their executable pineapple.exe, not evil-spyware-installer.exe. Hardly taxing.
Should I protest the name Bluetooth because he probably chopped off a few enemies' heads in battle? I don't think it really matters if the name is generic enough, pretty much any name has some kind of political ramifications. As long as it isn't too blatant, like the Intel Hitler Supremacy Chip or something, nobody will really care, beyond stoking the fire (not that I'm blaming El Reg or anything)
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