Posts by Buzzword 1030 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2010
The whole point of a flag is that you can identify the nation from a distance. That applies equally whether you're looking at the flag on a ship on the horizon, or trying to see your football team's flag in the corner of the pub TV on holiday.
New Zealand's complex new flag fails this test miserably. Mind you, their old flag was just as bad, and far too easily confused with Australia's.
I don't get this notion that they were "forced" to train their replacements. Option 1: they could always quit rather than do it. That might mean losing what little redundancy package they were offered, so option 2 is to train them really badly.
Option 3 (the most creative) is sabotage: corrupt the backups, rename rm to ls, mess with the monthly reports so that they always paint a rosy picture. It'll be a few months before they figure out what went wrong. Extra points for plausible deniability.
Yeah, I'd worry about the suitability of the recruits in Shoreditch. It's an area where having a loud personality counts, and the job description includes telling everyone who'll listen (and plenty who won't) how great your new TwatFace-integrated app is. That's not the personality you want in a top-secret agency.
So we've got a bunch of scientists in white coats determining the best road surface to use, taking into account durability, cost, repair time, weather-resistance, etc. Yet quite a few motorways in the UK still use concrete (the M25 southwest section comes to mind). Presumably the scientists' recommendations are ignored, as per standard UK government policy?
"Or perhaps they've made the mistake of building apps with tight coupling to particular services. Again."
Yeah, because every API upgrade can be made painless just by wrapping your code in an interface layer.
The more obvious reason is corporate budgets. This year's budget for Project Z has been spent; in order to upgrade the APIs they have to submit a new request for project funding, get the request approved, schedule a resource, etc. In some places you're looking at an 18-month lead time; even longer for government bodies.
"The one problem is the absence of an ambient light sensor so you will be regularly adjusting the brightness."
And thank goodness too. Ambient light sensors are a right PITA: the screen is constantly brightening and dimming itself because you've shuffled down the sofa and it now thinks you're in the desert sun, or your finger accidentally covered the sensor and it now thinks you're down a mineshaft. Since the Amazon Fire will primarily be used indoors, omitting the sensor was a wise decision.
The problem with putting kit in homes is that some homes are more affected than others. If you live within transmitting range of e.g. a local school, hospital, leisure centre, even a large pub, then your home ADSL will be knackered by schoolkids showing each other ISIS beheadings. Unless TalkTalk are planning to install fibre for such homes, it's a non-starter.
You can replace the battery on an iPhone - any dodgy-looking high street mobile phone accessory shop will do it for you for a reasonable price. One of the nice things about having an iPhone is the widespread support - most such shops will have batteries for the iPhone 4S in stock; whereas they usually won't have batteries for an old Samsung Galaxy S2 / S3 of the same vintage.
If the good people of California would just stop giving away 98% of their precious water to farmers. It takes about a gallon of water to grow one almond, and California produces 82% of the world's almonds. Yet residents are constantly badgered to cut down on water consumption. Go figure, as they say.
I liked the paper catalogue. You could flip to the page on e.g. TV aerials and quickly compare the entire range, see the different features of each, and generally bask in the information density offered by the printed page. Some pages had additional text boxes explaining e.g. the difference between Freeview and Freesat. All this is lost in the app.
It's not a huge loss, but it was a clear differentiator over Amazon. Now there's little to choose between them except convenience and price.
I can't in good conscience recommend a Windows laptop to students these days. If you have the money, and there's an Apple store in your university town, then buy a Mac: the ability to take a faulty machine into a shop and get it fixed or replaced quickly is worth the price tag. If you're on a budget then consider a Chromebook; there's less to go wrong.
Obviously those rules don't apply for computer-savvy students; but then they wouldn't be asking me for recommendations in the first place.
Why on earth do manufacturers persist in only providing 16 GB of storage? At least 4 GB belongs to the operating system; then you're just left with room for a couple of graphics-heavy games (Fifa '15 clocks in a 1.2 GB), a movie, some podcasts; and a few hundred photos and videos from that 20mpix camera. Yes you can stick in a MicroSD card, but that means faffing around with moving files to the card when things start to fill up. Ain't nobody got time for that!
The principle of geo-blocking is that you can charge higher prices to wealthy Brits or Germans, and lower prices to poor Estonians or Greeks. But why stop at national borders? Broadcasters could charge higher prices to Londoners and lower prices to Liverpuddlians; or even narrow it down by postcode, like car insurers do.
Heck, they could go the whole hog and demand to see your last three years' tax returns, and adjust the price according to what you can afford to pay. They certainly would if they thought they could get away with it.
On iOS Safari, when you open a website which has a corresponding app, it shows a "Smart App Banner" at the top of the page. This prompts you to run the app, or download it from the app store if it isn't already installed. Since Windows 8, 8.1, and 10 also have app stores, this ought to be possible.
> Update: I've checked, and it is indeed supported. Citrix, you know what to do.
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