* Posts by Julian Bond

202 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Feb 2007

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Half a terabyte in your smartmobe? Yup. That's possible now

Julian Bond

My ideal iPod Classic 512 gets a step closer. Now I need a music player that has the same battery life and ease of use of the old iPod Classic but that will accept and use a 512 microSD.

Bye bye MP3: You sucked the life out of music. But vinyl is just as warped

Julian Bond

M8!

320 or GTFO!

MP3 'died' and nobody noticed: Key patents expire on golden oldie tech

Julian Bond
Trollface

M8!

DO U EVEN CMPRS? 320 or GTFO!

Giant spawn hammer on Antarctica map. Thanks, Google Waze

Julian Bond

Uranus not mentioned in this story.

Two balls deep in Antactica's circle?

Cuffing Assange a 'priority' for the USA says attorney-general

Julian Bond
Black Helicopters

Deportation

So absolutely no chance of being deported to the USA (via Uzbekistan) the moment he steps outside the embassy, then.

Is! Yahoo! dead?! Why! web! biz! will! rename! to! Altaba! – the! truth!

Julian Bond

Twitter

Is there still time for Yahoo! to Buy! Twitter! before this deal goes down?

Top cop: Strap Wi-Fi jammers to teen web crims as punishment

Julian Bond

Driving with a phone

This idea clearly has legs and should be extended. For instance people convicted of using a mobile phone while driving should have to have a high powered mobile phone jammer attached to their car.

Name's BOND, JBOND: Igneous's ARM strap-on is for your drives only

Julian Bond
Trollface

You called?

Prez Obama expels 35 Russian spies over election meddling

Julian Bond
Black Helicopters

Assange?

The executive order is extraordinarily wide ranging. And it should make it possible to demand direct extradition of Julian Assange to the USA without going through Sweden and the "rape" charade. Looks like Assange is NEVER leaving that Embassy.

I'm sure the incoming administration will find both the order and the "Countering Disinfo and Propaganda Act" useful in the near future.

Japan investigating defence network break-in

Julian Bond
Trollface

"state-based"? That'll be 4chan then.

Meanwhile, in America: Half of adults' faces are in police databases

Julian Bond

Illegal Aliens

And then there's all the aliens having their picture taken as they pass through passport control. I wonder what proportion of the world's population is on the US facial recognition database.

'There may be no hackers' says Trump in Presidential Debate II

Julian Bond

Stay classy, USA.

Craig Murray has some choice words.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/10/blatant-neo-con-lie/

It is a plain lie that Russia was responsible for the leak of the Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks. It is quite extraordinary that the Obama administration formally adopted the accusation yesterday.

The US government cares so little about its relationship with Russia that it is prepared to launch completely false allegations at the Kremlin in order to influence a domestic election. The implications of that are chilling.

Lethal 4-hour-erection-causing spiders spill out of bunch of ASDA bananas

Julian Bond

Re: "So how long will those spiders be able to live outside their natural habitat?"

Do these spiders eat bananas? I think we should be told.

Facebook, Twitter and Google are to blame for terrorism, say MPs

Julian Bond
Trollface

But not Blackberry BBM

Because nobody uses it any more.

First order of business should be to shorten the counter terrorism unit to CTU and ensure everyone uses a recognizable ring tone.

Vodafone: Dear customers. We're sorry we killed your Demon

Julian Bond
Devil

It makes me sad

to finally see Demon go. And I only stopped using Turnpike last year when making it work on Win10-64 looked like just too much hassle.

Wannabe Prime Minister Andrea Leadsom thinks all websites should be rated – just like movies

Julian Bond
Big Brother

Maybe

God told her to do it. InSain sbury's.

FFS, Twitter. It's not that hard

Julian Bond

make it go away

Please just make it go away.

Shopping for PCs? This is what you'll be offered in 2016

Julian Bond

Windows 10 Drivers

Some proper windows 10 drivers that actually work would be nice. Looking at you, Dell-Realtek-internal microphone. It sucks that one of their most expensive laptops doesn't actually work properly with the recommended Win10 upgrade.

How Music Got Free and Creatocracy

Julian Bond

Spending money

I think the only money I spend on music now goes on overpriced alcohol at concerts (plus the ticket of course, when I can't blag that for free or at least get the super early bird version).

btw. Whatever happens to musicians will eventually happen to everybody. (c) Bruce Sterling.

Victims of US gov't mega-breach still haven't been notified

Julian Bond

Fix the systems that allow identity theft to happen?

A big part of the problem here are the systems that allow the identity theft to happen because they treat things like SSNs as a secret that authenticates rather than just identifies.

Dead device walking: Apple iPod Touch 6th generation

Julian Bond

Re: Hurumphhh

Yup, me too. So if not from Apple, where can I get a portable music player with >256Gb, good battery life and a quality output stage for not too much money?

I don't want apps or a big screen or connectivity, just want to play and carry large quantities of music.

Apple Music: First three months for free? We lasted less than 3 hours

Julian Bond

Re: Meh or just a me too service?

Apple has told you before. Will you please stop collecting music. What are you some kind of dinosaur[1]? The next thing you'll be asking for is a 1Tb iPod and there's no money in that. And if you keep collecting music, how are they going to get you to keep paying for access to the tracks you like?

[1]Youth in the 60s? Yeah, me too. ;)

Forced sale of Openreach division would put BT broadband investment at risk, says CEO

Julian Bond

Et Tu, Virgin

It's always puzzled me that the UK cable industry (sorry, Virgin) was built on the back of public money and subsidies but is allowed to run a monopoly. Where's Virgin's wholesale bandwidth and LLU requirements?

I'm sure there's a perfectly plausible answer and I'm just uninformed.

It's not easy being Green. But WHY insist we knit our own ties?

Julian Bond

Yes, but,

I'm not going to disagree with the main thrust of the argument. But I do think you're overstating it and using it to have a go at other social attitudes.

1) A big part of that increase in agricultural productivity from one person feeding two people to feeding 100 people is Promethean energy use rather than Smithsian productivity via specialisation. It can't be done without the increase in energy usage facilitated by cheap and plentiful fossil fuels. Yes, going against that specialisation is a bad idea, but the system is still broken and solutions still have to be found to create a sustainable version of late 20th century agriculture.

2) Just because there's a section of the Green, eco-aware movement that is into the stupidity of knitting yogurt into yurts doesn't mean that the Green, eco-aware movement can be dismissed totally as universally stupid. Repeating that too much begins to look like techno-utopian denialism and an attempt to smear attempts to recognise a real problem and look for real solutions to it.

Which is to say we need a Green movement that embraces technology, specialism and capitalism. But it still needs to be Green.

Increased gov spy powers are NOT the way to stay safe against terrorism

Julian Bond

"had the Charlie Hebdo murderers under surveillance until six months before". Can you name any terrorist outrage in recent years where the powers that be didn't have the perpetrators under surveillance already?

I'm amused by the Catch 22 here. If they say they weren't tracking them, we wonder why they aren't doing their jobs better. If they say they were tracking them, we wonder why they failed to take action and so weren't doing their jobs.

Toffee, Apple? U.S. fanbois get their sticky fingers on Nork-teasing flick The Interview

Julian Bond

Best Marketing Campaign EVAH!

Parliament: All's well with RIPA snooping, no problem here

Julian Bond

Re: Snowden award

I'm confused. Is Sweden wonderful because they want to give Snowden asylum. Or are they dreadful because they want to get their hands on Assange and then pass him on to the USA?

Google Chrome on Windows 'completely unusable', gripe users

Julian Bond

Not just me then. I kind of thought it had something to do with HTML5 video and facebook or G+ notification checks. So background javascript then. Win7, 32 bit. I was getting the "Aw-snap" about once a day, and then more recently I'd walk away to make a coffee and come back to find Chrome had crashed completely.

This stuff comes and goes. Frequent hidden upgrades are both a blessing and a curse. You do get quick fixes, but you also get quick borkens. Methinks their regression testing could be a little more rigorous.

Kryder's law craps out: Race to uber-cheap storage is voer

Julian Bond
Facepalm

Forgetting

The doubling rate for total data generation appears to be faster than the doubling rate in total storage. So we're actually forgetting more, faster, than ever before.

Tim Cook: The classic iPod HAD TO DIE, and this is WHY

Julian Bond

Alternative

I'm one of those strange dinosaurs who collects music and wants to take it all with me in a device with good battery life. So what I really wanted was a 1Tb iPod Classic. And by the usual standards of the electronics industry I should have had one by now. So when Tim Cook says "there were reasonable alternatives", I'd love to know what they are. And although a Sansa plus SD card makes a lot of sense, SSD is still too expensive in >128Gb sizes. I hit the limits on my 6th gen 160Gb about 5 years ago, so definitely want 250Gb and preferably 512Gb.

There are expensive and increasingly difficult options of taking a 2nd hand 5.5 or 7th gen Classic and fitting a 240Gb disk. But the firmware can't really cope as there are some hard limits you'd run up against.

Getting on for 10 years ago now I had a Creative Xen based on a 2.5" disk. I really wouldn't mind the extra size and weight of a 2.5" disk based device and that would mean it was that much more likely to survive into the future.

I know it's a small market but what is the alternative? Is there one?

Influential scribe Charles Petzold: How I figured out the Windows API

Julian Bond

The only guy I ever met with the Windows Logo tattooed on his shoulder.

Rebellion sees Chromium reverse plans to dump EXT filesystem

Julian Bond

Re: Surplus

all network filesystems were missing.

This is something that puzzles me greatly. I find it very strange that Chromebooks (Chrome-OS) can't support the typical home NAS. There does seem to be a project to integrate network file systems but it's happening very, very slowly. Which again is strange when this is mature stable tech in every linux distro.

I also understand the logic of the control freakery around the boot process and stuff like Dev Mode, but I still think these things should be general purpose computers that can be booted into an alternate OS without jumping through hoops. So I'm glad that the hardware in chromebooks seems to be resurrecting the idea of the inexpensive netbook.

Hey Brit taxpayers. You just spent £4m on Central London ‘innovation playground’

Julian Bond

Will the catapult help create Fliegende Kinderscheisse? fnord ...

CURSE YOU, 'streaming' music services! I want a bloody CD

Julian Bond
Unhappy

iPod

And then they went and cancelled the iPod Classic. Bastards.

City hidden beneath England's Stonehenge had HUMAN ABATTOIR. And a pub

Julian Bond

Re: Bah!

This doesn't seem so unreasonable to me, If you imagine Glastonbury running for 200 years, and then being discovered 3000 years later, we'd be finding the same stuff. The John Peel tent would have burnt down several times, been rebuilt as a permanent structure and then lost so only the post holes were left. And there'd be lost implements involved in the making of falafel buried nearby.

The earliest known graffiti on the stones dates from 700 years after it was built. I'd wager they'd already forgotten why it was built but recognised the solstice significance. And got back into the habit of having a yearly 3 day bender every mid summer.

Apple's ONE LESS THING: the iPod Classic disappears

Julian Bond

If not Apple

If Apple won't make the iPod Classic 1TB I want (with a quality output stage) then who will? And is there a realistic alternative even to the 160?

I feel like a dinosaur for having a big music collection and wanting to listen to it on the road.

Best shot: Coffee - how do you brew?

Julian Bond

The most important thing is the quality of the coffee. But if you really can't get anything decent, Tescos Italian, Lavazza Black and Carte Noire are remarkable for being wholly unremarkable while still perfectly acceptable. But then there's the Algerian Coffee shop and they sell online and deliver.

After that I think it's all about convenience. A cheap electric drip filter coffee machine for quantity and an Aeropress for single cups. Everything else just seems like obsession.

Chromebooks to break out of US schools: Netbook 2.0 comeback not just for children

Julian Bond

Re: WinRT

Except Chrome OS has no support for a NAS or network shares. Which is a complete mystery to me. It's not as though Samba and SMB/CIFS support in linux is exactly new.

fist-bumping is good for your health, says respected surveyor

Julian Bond

Not only that, but also,

While we're at it can we please stop the man hug and the air kiss. And when you've got flu, don't come in to the office, cancel the meeting.

Banning handheld phone use by drivers had NO effect on accident rate - study

Julian Bond

USA

Bear in mind this is California, where the most common accident is drivers driving into stationary objects.

Google's revenues swell yet again, yet big earnings elude it

Julian Bond

Profit? Tax!

So Google makes a profit. Why doesn't it pay tax then?

'Inaccurate' media misleads public on European Court's Google ruling

Julian Bond

Re: Not buying this "often-cited"

Then he ought to put more effort into SEO so that this result drops off the first page and his financial services company dominates the searches instead.

Wait a minute. An ex-bankrupt is offering financial services? Isn't Google doing the world a service by highlighting this?

Julian Bond

Re: Google-friendly?

I also don't see a lot of discussion about being able to demand (via the courts) that the site that actually hosted the data implements noindex, nofollow or a robots.txt suggestion to search engines for those pages.

It's so tempting to post another goo.gl short link here to the original source. But I won't.

Google to let Chromebookers take video content OFFLINE

Julian Bond

But no network shares

But where do you store it? Still no support for NAS and network shares. Which I find ridiculous. It's not as if linux support for Samba/SMB/CIFS/NFS is exactly experimental or new.

Apple: Scrubbing may not yet have cleansed iThings of BLOOD

Julian Bond

From the Scottish play,

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my iPhone? No; this my iPhone will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

Google ECJ case: No commish, it means we don't need right-to-be-forgotten rewrite

Julian Bond

I've been on the other end of this as sysadmin for a social network and had to deal with requests for allegedly libelous content too be removed that was posted by 3rd parties on our site and then indexed by Google. I don't believe this is Google's problem but rather that of the source and hosting site.

If somebody wants something removed they should inform the site hosting the information. The host should remove it, return a 404 with no index and no follow for that URI and then request a re-index of that page from google and other indexing sites that they allow via robots.txt. That includes archive.org.

The Internet Archive raises the issue of cached copies. This should also be dealt with via the 404-noindex-nofollow. Good caches should always respect the 404 and delete their cached copy.

This approach recognises that a piece of data on a URI may be copied repeatedly all over the web not just by search engines or by some future technology that makes that data visible. There needs to be a protocol for saying "It's gone as if it never existed". And sure enough, there is. It's 404.

There is a problem though that perhaps this EU ruling deals with. It's not normally possible for a 3rd party to tell Google to re-index a URI where they're not the webadmin as recognised for Google's webadmin tools. The source may have disappeared and 404 but google still has a record. It should be possible for the courts or a private individual via the courts to force Google to re-index that URI.

10 PRINT "Happy 50th Birthday, BASIC" : GOTO 10

Julian Bond

Interpreter

So what date was the first BASIC interpreter fired up? And how does that compare with the first interpreted language? I only ask because Sinclair Basic was unbelievably easier than compiled COBOL on punch cards, or FORTRAN on paper tape. Reducing the edit-run-fail cycle to seconds from days changed everything.

Look behind you, 'declining' sub-$5bn iPod. The iWatch has come... to EAT YOU

Julian Bond

Re: You can have my ipod when you get it from my cold dead fingers

Quite. So where's my 1TB iPod Classic, Apple? I know it's a small market but it's a real one. So if Apple won't make a pocket player that stores 1TB, plays FLAC, Ogg and so on and has a high quality DAC and output stage, then who will?

This changes everything: Microsoft slips WinXP holdouts $100 to buy new Windows 8 PCs

Julian Bond

Re: upgrading old boxes

Quite so. A free (or very, very cheap) copy of Win7 premium for the ancient laptop next door please. And a cut down version of same for the ancient eeePC 900 upstairs.

Anyway. If all I want to run is Winamp, Chrome, Thunderbird, why do I need to upgrade from XP? It just works. There are no kids in the house any more so no-one who's going to click on some dodgy porn or film download site. So what's the problem?

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