Posts by EvilMole

Never mind the jetpack, where's my 21st-century Psion?

Re: Well we almost had it

You're conflating "perfect" with "perfect for me".

There were keyboard phones. People stopped buying them, because for most people touchscreens are better. If it had been a "perfect" form factor, people wouldn't have stopped buying them.

Anonymous takes down UK government websites in Assange attack

Re: Poor

Yeah, of course, because rape victims don't deserve justice.

You rape apologists make me sick to the stomach. You think that Assange doing a good thing gives him the right to rape women?

And that's leaving aside the fact that that Apache incident had been reporting in MSM *prior* to the cable release, and was already under investigation. But hey, that narrative doesn't fit with the deification of St Julian, does it?

Re: Poor

Except when you stood around and chanted, you didn't inconvenience a whole load of entirely innocent people just wanting information from a website.

DDoS is not free speech.

Re: Yawn.

They didn't shut down habbo. They closed the pool. Even then, their skillz were lacking.

Compulsory coding in schools: The new Nerd Tourism

Re: Tin foil hat time

That's actually a great example of teaching the application, rather than the principles.

Coding is just an example of approaching problem solving in a rational, logical way: it teaches you rational methods of approaching a set of specific logical problems.

What we should, be doing instead is teaching the basics of reason, rhetoric, and logic. Those are applicable directly to everything, from political discourse through to scientific argument.

Apple handcuffs 'open' web apps on iPhone home screen

Ummm

Reading through your sources, Cade, I think you've got this story a bit arse over tit.

Create a quick icon from Safari on your iPhone home screen and all that icon does is launch Safari at that URL. There's no difference in speed to opening Safari and typing in the URL, or using a bookmark.

However, Apple has provided custom bits of HTML which you can use to hide Safari's controls, if you want to use the full iOS screen (they've also added tags which let you do cool stuff like specify a startup image, which makes your web app even more "native-like").

For some reason, if you use the tag to make your app go full screen, Safari's new Javascript engine (Nitro) fails to work. This is pretty clearly a bug: If Apple wanted to kill off native web apps, it would be deprecating the HTML extensions and/or simply removing the ability to go full screen. Note that Android, for example, doesn't have equivalent extensions at all.

As for the whole UIWebView issue, again, this is a bug (or, more likely a security issue). As you note, some developers simply create native apps using HTML/Javascript and UIWebView, to sell through the app store. Why would Apple degrade that experience compared to online web apps deliberately, given that these apps deliver them revenue, when online ones don't?

Sorry

A billion downloaded native applications suggest that the war is over, and native web apps by and large lost. Google has been on a hiring spree for coders to build more native Android apps - they've got the message, so should you.

Oh dear

"Surely to have 2 javascript engines and choose between the based a url starting file:// or http:// is more work than not?"

That's not the way it works.

BT rolls out new, 'competitive' consumer deals

Correct

Totally right. However, it's worth noting that BT Openreach - the bit of BT Group which runs the infrastructure - sells all its services to competitors. So, in theory, any competitor can offer the same services as BT if they're buying them through Openreach (which they are - both TalkTalk and O2 are massive BT Openreach customers).

The existence of Openreach also means that as it rolls out its FTTC and FTTP services, competitors will be able to offer services using them, too.

Cable contention

Cable isn't uncontended - you're still sharing total bandwidth with as are connected to your local cabinet. That's why Virgin Media advertises its service as "up to" 50Mbit.