Posts by geoffbeaumont

UK may not hit goal of 95% mobile coverage, commons committee warns

Re: Devon

You really don't have to be in the sticks. Try between Preston and Blackburn, five minutes off the M6...in an area that officially has a "Very Good" mobile signal. Could be worse - SMS usually works, as does data albeit not that fast. But you need to be outside to make a call, and even then you may have trouble making yourself understood. If it rings at all... Which is a problem because the broadband isn't really good enough to support VOIP (worn out wires hung through trees - fibre only goes to the cabinet by the main road), lots of dropped packets mean very poor call quality. So when the old phone network is switched off next year we won't have a usable phone service.

Meet clickjacking's slicker cousin, 'gesture jacking,' aka 'cross window forgery'

Re: How does this work?

It's because the site they're opening in the hidden window isn't the one controlled by the bad actor - it's a third party authentication service.

'Wobbly spacetime' is latest stab at unifying physics

Re: Understanding

More like an adult making excuses to the ten year old to avoid having to try explaining something they don't understand themselves...

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

Re: Cognitive dissonance

Ironically, that site for me was the Register a few years ago. Some of the adverts would hang my browser for a few minutes every time I opened a page with them on (it wasn't a single advert - it was quite a lot of them). Every few months I'd disable the ad blocker to see if the issue had been fixed (I don't want to watch ads - but I do get that the content has to be paid for somehow) - but it hadn't and eventually I gave up. It made a lot of other sites more pleasant to use too, though I still occasionally come across one that breaks due to relying on code the ad blocker blocks - unless I really need to access them for work I just close them and move on.

Android engineer: We didn't copy Apple or follow Samsung's orders

"Lockheimer described how hard a small bunch of engineers and devs worked to build Android, outlining a "gruelling" schedule of 60- to 80-hour working weeks.

"We'd work really late at work ... all hours," he said, according to The Verge."

That explains a lot...

Explosion of DANGEROUS IT GEAR injures and CRIPPLES MEDICS

If you'd seen the sort of user interfaces most medical software has you'd understand why the RSI... Efficient and intuitive they aren't... Even relatively light use of most of them involves a lot of repetitive actions.

Of course there are other side effects to these dreadful UIs. They are slow to use, which means more time spent data processing (compared to paper forms) and therefore either fewer patients seen or less time spent with each patient (or a bit of both). In some cases they increase errors, usually because it's not obvious that after entering something you then have remember to go into a different bit of the system and approve what you've just done, or because a crucial bit of information about past decisions is hidden.

HP: PC industry has forgotten how to innovate

Ah yes, innovation...

"This included devices where the screen could detach to operate as a Windows 8 tablet."

And how exactly is that different from a tablet which you can plug in to a keyboard to turn it into a small laptop? Those seem to sell like hot cakes...

Google to axe IE 8 support, cuts off Windows XP lifeline

Re: Bad news for companies

Somehow, I doubt many companies with an IE8 only browser policy are seriously considering moving to a cloud based infrastructure...