Posts by HMB

ASA rules BT Wi-Fi service works with invisible routers

Creepier if...

Well the advert would have been creepier if the BT gang were surreptitiously wondering onto strangers front gardens in the middle of the night in a bid to pick up wifi signals on their devices. :P

AMD claims 'fastest graphics card in the world'

Shame about the Drivers

My Radeon still can't manage to output a clean 1080p signal over HDMI to a 1080p TV. The crappy ATI/AMD drivers insist on scaling the image up (badly) and then scaling it down again, making the pixels look like they've been through a train wreck. Latest drivers. Nothing's changed.

Patent attack on Google open codec faces 'antitrust probe'

Opera is small potatoes, not safari

When you're a web developer you look at market share as that correlates with client visitors.

Like it or not that means Opera is actually small potatoes (at 2%) with Safari at (5%) being Small-Medium potatoes with well over twice the share. Also since your client might have an iPhone or iPad, then your reason to do good Safari testing just went up past it's desktop market share value. Customers with money are not happy if your site doesn't work on their precious fondle slab. Those sorts of people think of fat women singing if you say Opera too.

If something is broken in Opera because Opera didn't follow standards or there's a bug (it happens) most of the time I will just ignore it. It's not worth writing fixes for.

(Source was gs.statcounter.com, worldwide share)

Solution found for climate change: Nuclear war

Don't worry

I too frequently mix up carbon free sustainable energy and global annihilation. It's a common problem.

Kaboomability

See I pretend to read the register for it's high brow, intellectual content, but really it's because you make words up like "Kaboomability",

I do like that word, but then they do say I'm easily amused.

Of course we could use nuclear power to end climate change, but no, that's far too damned *****ing obvious, and it gives us the willies. God forbid a technology gives us the willies.

Yeah you tell them!

You tell 'em Chales, those people with their stupid maths and science. Go anecdotes!

Google wheels (another) Trojan App inside Microsoft Office

Genius

I've got to hand it to Google, it's a Genius move. The user keeps what they're familiar with, with a gentle introduction to something else without being forced to move. It's also a really useful feature.

I don't think it's a loss for Microsoft either. I tried Google docs recently and while I'm impressed by it's functionality, sometimes I want to do something that Google Docs can't do, like use a different font! I hate not being able to go View > Fit to Screen or View > 150% either. Small things, but local client software is king... for now at least...

I'm still waiting for web based gmail that works like a real email application (scrolling lists that work in a resizable main window, ala Outlook, Thunderbird or Live Mail.). Live Mail 2011 is surprisingly good, lol, I use it as the front end for my gmail. :D

Reactions to iiNet's copyright win

Copyright Theft

It's not theft, it's infringement. It doesn't deprive the original owner of the original version, but then music pirates don't hold people hostage and kill them either.

We really do let copyright institutions abuse language something chronic.

Space truck docks with ISS

Top picture

I was reading through the digits and letters when I realised that O_Failure had occurred. I hope O wasn't important. :P

Fujitsu relieves Ballmer's iPad pressure

Press Release.. Eh?

"As enterprises struggle to keep consumer smart phones and tablets off their corporate networks to avoid security breaches..."

Oh, so that's what you need to breach security on Microsoft platforms? An Android/iOS device? How does that work?

Or does security breaches mean employees playing angry birds when they shouldn't?

In my experience most security breaches occur when infected Windows machines connect to corporate networks (Microsoft ones) without adequate protection mechanisms or architecture in place. See, that sounds like a reason to use an Android/iOS device instead of Microsoft ones.

I'm not anti Microsoft, I'm excited about IE9 and love Windows 7, but I really don't think they thought very hard about that comment.

Apple brings multi-touch, full-disk crypto to latest OS X

Re: Air drop

Come on, seriously, they're not that daft.

Intel throws Thunderbolt

Complementary Dear Watson

Complementary?

Why not? In the short to medium term everyone still has stackloads of USB devices that require support. Anyone who thinks USB will go away in a day and a night is sorely mistaken. I'd bet that in 7 years time that even if Thunderbolt is ubiquitous, USB will still be mandatory to support all those keyboards, mice and "USB sticks".

Eventually of course it will take over, but why ever not? I'm not sure how much I care about the politics when the technology is that good. It's a very clever design too. Expansion cards that you can plug in over PCIe? That's very neat. In fact, I look forward to the day when my monitor, mouse, keyboard and anything else all runs off the same cable.

Wait a minute, it is a sleek, slim and nice connector right? :P

Firefox 4 squeezes onto phones

Bread & Butter Fail

Why do one thing very well when you can do two things badly? :P

I want Mozilla to be successful but I'm astonished that they're still persisting with the mobile browser platform when they should have developers focussed on making their main product up to scratch instead.

As a side note the in built browser for Android is great. I've tried Opera and Firefox and I really can't see why anyone would want to use either of them in preference to the one Google supply. Oh yes, its' because Google are stealing all your information and reading all your personal emails, purely to be evil, I forgot.

Cellphone exposure linked to changes in brain activity

Hats can alter brain activity

Apparently hat's can alter the temperature in your brain.

I'm personally more worried about hat induced cancer.

iPad 2 launch could be delayed by two months, analyst says

Launching On Time

And if they did launch on time, there's no way the shops could meet demand, they'd sell out.

Apple would never do that though! :P

Mozilla ices Firefox 4 beta 12 release to nail final bugs

Hardware Acceleration

If Opera have implemented hardware acceleration:

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/10/operas-next-act-add-ons-hardware-acceleration-android/

Then it's awful in comparison to Firefox 4 or IE9.

4 in 5 surfers open to browser exploits from fixed flaws

Javascript

I'm so glad that it's just technical people who still disable JavaScript. It means that as a web developer, any fancy HTML5 will work for everyone except those people, who are enough of a minority for it not to be any problem.

Don't get me wrong, I write in a backwards compatible way, it's just that modern JavaScript has moved on from the oft-abused popup. You can do seriously great things with animation and UI with modern tools like jQuery. I wrote a Javascript shopping basket the other day and it's a joy to use as you click add and it's instant, no waiting for a new page from the server when BT are throttling you're internet conenction down to nothing because you watched 3 programs on iPlayer and BT says that's enough.

Why not just run a browser with JavaScript engine sand-boxing that gets regular updates? I've used chrome for ages and never had a JavaScript security issue.

FOSS maven says $29 'Freedom Box' will kill Facebook

Lovely idea, but...

What a really lovely idea, but most people don't see a problem with Facebook or gmail. Without them seeing a problem, why would they either spend money or time and energy setting this up?

I'm a huge fan of Google mail and you know, if Google use my mail to anonymously target adverts at me, that's a price I'm very happy to pay. I consider it a great deal.

Microsoft sends IE9 'do-not-track' tech to W3C

Better still...

Use carrier pigeon to relay the small scraps of paper with HTML written on it. Can't be too careful there. :P

IE9 Vs Firefox 4, Who gets out first?

My bet is on IE9. There's some absolutely amazing standards compliant, high quality rendered, super fast GPU compositing going on there. I'm quite amazed at how much they've achieved.

But...

No javascript history api yet, no CSS transitions and no idea as to how or even if this new version of IE will keep it's rendering engine and standards compliance up to date (mmmm... Chrome auto updates :D )

Oh yes, and one last thing...

Is it me or did the tabs get ugglier?

Mozilla plans four Firefoxes in 2011

Mozilla releases 4 stable Firefox builds and....

Mozilla does 4 stable Firefox releases this year and 90% of Fortune 100 companies will switch to using linux on the desktop for their staff. I also hear that they'll perfect cold fusion, cure the common cold and BBC News 24 will actually start broadcasting respectable news again, all this year :P

Chrome 9 debuts with WebGL, app store, instant annoyance

Not noticed these flaws then?

1) The inset image on a rotated element has jagged edges. Anti aliasing has failed to occur. This works properly in Firefox 3.6, IE9 PP7, Safari 5 and Opera 11 (all tested on Windows). This affects the latest Chrome 11 canary build as of writing. (Chromium Issue 36,902)

2) The inset image (when hovered) despite having a high resolution is blurry (it looks like the image was scaled down for main display, then the scaled down image scaled up for the CSS transform, instead of rescaling from source). This has been fixed in Chrome 10 I think, definitely by 11. This works properly in Firefox 3.6, IE9 PP7, Safari 5 and Opera 11 (all tested on Windows).

3) The z-ordering is wrong. If you make a few flickr postcards pop up and then go back, things overlap where they should not. This works properly in Firefox 3.6, IE9 PP7 and Opera 11 (all tested on Windows). Safari 5 is a lot better but not perfect (some small text has incorrect z-order but rest is fine). I think it is a web kit issue here.

I even tested the Ubuntu version of Chrome and it made the same mistakes. I must stress I do love Chrome, I pay particular attention to these issues hoping every time canary gets updated that the rendering issues have been resolved.

All I can say is it's a good job I am not employing you to do website testing :P

My favourite browser, but not perfect.

Chrome is my favourite browser and I've tried all the big ones, Firefox, Safari & Opera.

It's a bit disappointing that rotated images still have jagged edges, or that after the IE Test drive site having the flickr post card demo for so many months...

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/Transform2D/Default.html

Chrome still does a bad job of rendering it. (It's standards compliant, Firefox does it fine, just Chrome making a hash of it)

I'll be watching IE9 and Chrome with great interest.

Microsoft reinfects Chrome with closed video codec

That's a good reply!

I like your reply. I would agree that software patents are a festering pustule of law. They're wrong and shouldn't be around in the first place. I do think patents are important to a point, but you can't blame companies for abusing them, ultimately it's government's responsibility to get law right, and they're driven by the people.

Time to support the EFF and lobby.

While I'm very happy to hear about H.264 getting better support, I would really like to see people supporting both standards. Since end users don't pay, let the site developers choose whether they're costs are spent on licensing or extra bandwidth for WebM.

like Mozilla and Google are pushing their proprietary standard?

Like you say, since no standard is decided upon, so Google and Mozilla are just as guilty as Microsoft as pushing a proprietary one.

Wouldn't it be a nice world if all browsers supported both formats?

For those who bother to read...

...Microsoft's blog on the subject, it was really done rather well. They are supportive of WebM, but they've quite rightly pointed out that just because Google asserts that it's patent free doesn't mean people wont get sued by others for using WebM. Google choose not to indemnify others (protect them against being sued) for using the codec either. Might be a bit of a money and mouth problem there.

Not only that, let's not forget H.264 is a superior codec with higher quality for lower bandwidth. Politics aside, the engineer part of me wants the best technical product to succeed.

Google's Chrome browser market share hits 10% mark

Damned Statistics

Net Apps has is the most IE weighted statistics source I've seen! If you look at gs.statcounter.com then things are quite different. There's a surprising amount of variation going on here. What's behind it?

In that world, IE sits at 46%, Firefox at 30%, Chrome at 15% and IE6 at 5%.

It's also important to consider that with worldwide stats, places like Africa and China are IE6 happy and will affect the figures. (Uneven distribution)

I did give Opera a go but dropped it because it rendered some pages badly. I'm very happy with Google Chrome, which renders the same pages faster and perfectly too!

Virgin Media kills 20Mb broadband service

Motive No Brainer

Hmmm... Just there 20Mbps package? Why on earth could that be?

What's that Bob? BT Offers 20Mbps?

I'm no fan of Bar-steward Telecom, but this does seem like a cheap one-up-manship stunt by Virgin.

Mozilla reaches for almost perfect 10 with latest Firefox 4 beta

Firefox 4 eats Opera for breakfast

I'm really not sure what tests the anonymous coward did to compare Firefox 4 to Opera, but I've done a few. Including the great and very challenging tests that the IE 9 test site offers. Firefox 4 renders better and is substantially faster in the tests I've done. I keep finding rendering bugs in Opera when I try testing fancier websites in it (websites that work well in other browsers).

Firefox 4 will have huge adoption by virtue of the fact that Firefox already has enormous market share, and every one of those installations will prompt the upgrade to Firefox 4. Unlike Internet Explorer users, Firefox users are known for upgrading when a new major release comes out.

With CSS background SVG support, SVG animation, hardware acceleration, history APIs, CSS transitions and the like, Firefox 4 will be a huge benefit to the web, but. I still don't like it myself that much (Mozilla couldn't make their software look slick even if they dipped it in oil). I have been using Chrome, but I'm just being wowed by IE9 at the moment, we'll see if it adopts the technology I want before I think about moving to that though.

Still, Firefox 4 is great news, it's just such a shame that it's taken them so long. People are wondering if they can still keep up.

FAA to pilots: Expect 'unreliable or unavailable' GPS signals

Go on! Laugh...

Go on! Laugh... but I've already made my tin foil hat to protect myself :P

Mozilla slings out 9th beta for Firefox 4

Compelling, but facing stiff competition

There are wonderful features here that I'm very glad to see, hardware acceleration, a functioning history API, CSS transitions and a much better SVG implementation with support for SVG as background CSS. All wonderful work.

However the underlying architecture still doesn't compare with Google Chrome's tab per process stability and independence or IE's loosely coupled architecture. I would have liked to have seen improved tab handling too.

Some wonderful input that will make the Internet a better place for sure, but will I give up Chrome? Not sure yet. The biggest surprise is coming from the former village idiot IE9 that now seems to be showing everyone else how rendering is done. Things are certainly not boring on the browser landscape these days.

I might just end up switching to IE9 to get my high quality H264 vids :P

Ubuntu Wayland: Shuttleworth's post-Mac makeover

Not getting it...

There's some really aggressive ranting in there!

I'm sorry you don't get the whole single file menu thing.

I can't say I've ever needed to rapidly switch between file menus in around 20 years of computing, I don't know what you could be doing that requires that.

It took me 15 minutes to learn OS X. It's one of the easiest and most user friendly operating systems around. Personally I don't use OS X simply because I don't want to pay 3 times the price for a computer.

The number of programs that need a file menu which I use are in a minority. My email client doesn't need one, my web browser doesn't need one, spotify doesn't need one and neither does VirtualBox, certainly not on every VM anyhow. I welcome the changes in Office that tidy away that clunky file menu into something a bit more pleasant.

Sometimes it's just time to move on. There will always be people who don't want to change.

Microsoft opens playpen for 'unstable' web standards

Automatic, transparent updates...

Google's in a position where it can implement experimental parts without too much difficulty, because of their really smart and transparent auto update process.

If IE's renderer automatically updated, now that would be clever.

It's such ashame that Google abused the auto updater for a compulsory uninformed UI change when it hopped from Chrome 5 to 6.

Mozilla showers Firefox, Thunderbird with updates

I know that's a joke but..

On a serious level, at least IE9 and Chome have security sandboxing and process isolation.

Hear hear!

I heard the Thunderbird development team gave up and started using Outlook because Thunderbird is just far too ugly to look at in Windows 7 :P

I use Thunderbird and it's so ugly I have to put a paper bag over my head and one over the monitor, just in case.

I came close to using Opera's mail functionality but the fact that it will not work except in tabs and that it doesn't let you create tables in emails was just too much of a downgrade. The filters in opera are just fantastic and quite inspired, but it mystifies me as to why Opera seems to randomly create messy filters. If you delete these, they even come back by themselves!

WP7 vs Android: a struggle for supremacy

Actually, my Nexus One update was delayed by Vodafone's vetting process.

"For all its flaws, one attraction of Google‘s "carrier-lite" sales model for the Nexus One was that it freed users from the whim of the operator or handset maker when waiting for software updates" -

This is not true. I own a Nexus One in the UK and despite being assured when I bought the phone that Vodafone had none of their dirty mits in the software, it turned out that European Nexus One's (IE all the Vodafone ones) had a variant in the software/firmware revision. We even heard from Vodafone themselves that the software was held up while they reviewed it. I was pretty pissed off personally as I felt that I had been sold the phone falsely, but was somewhat relieved when nothing was altered in 2.2 from the Google stock. It did make me and other Nexus One customers wonder what took Vodafone so long to approve the new firmware. We were definitely kept waiting though, maybe 1 or 2 months behind the generic US release.

Microsoft's IE9 'nearly finished'

So far... wow... but I wonder if all the necessary features will make it.

I don't like what they've done with the tab bar either....

BUT...

Let's face it, IE9 has pushed hardware accelerated HTML onto centre stage. Both Google and Firefox are onto it (Firefox with V4 and Chrome with the supposedly upcoming V9). Microsoft have done the web a favour. Looks like Stalin, Hitler and Idi Amin can get their skates on and a build a snowman eh? ;)

I'm really pleased to see the 2D transforms get into IE9! I hope the 3D ones make it too, as traditionally it takes a very long time for IE to get an update, so if they don't make it now, goodness only knows when IE will get on board with that one. Same goes with history.popState() (it allows JS control of the URL without page reload for some very efficient and slick page transitions and stateful AJAX).

On a note to someone earlier, IE9 appears to have superb adhesion to HTML5 specs, I see no reason if things work out well to have to code "for IE9 as well". It should just be a simple job of build it right once, then cater for IE6, 7 and 8 ;)

Coalition tears up net snoop plan's £2bn price tag

SSL/TLS?

Great, so the government are going to intercept all my TLS/SSL encrypted communications to gmail servers, so how's that going to help them?

I know the German police have had issues with intercepting Skype communications before as they're end to end encrypted, perhaps Skype have changed their model to become more accommodating to law enforcement, but what is going on?

Hey, maybe if we can't provide our SSL key pairs, despite our insistence that it's not something we ever knew, they'll throw us in jail with the RIP act? :P