So it's cheaper to get them from Europe than from the US? That's a surprise.
My experience of trying to import electronics from the US into the UK is that very few online shops in the US seem to ship outside of North America, whereas the online shops in Europe tend to be happy to ship to anywhere in the world.
For us, it comes down to personal preference and nothing else. The Android seems just as dumb as iOS and I honestly don't see the advantages of Android over iOS, at all.
My partner has a Samsung Galaxy S2, I have an iPhone 4. The Android unit is nice, but I don't see any advantages of it over what Apple is offering, we tried using the alternative app stores on the Android and we found them lacking anything worth getting, aside from that I don't know what it's offering that the iPhone isn't.
My fiancee has just bought a Nexus-S to replace her lost iPhone 3GS. what it came down to was basically price. For what she uses it for, which I imagine is what *most* people use their smartphone for (making phone calls, sending text messages, a bit of web browsing, calendaring, the occasional silly app) there really wasn't a lot of difference between an iOS device and an Android device. The iPhone 4 is about £500 whilst the Nexus-S is £300 - the hardware is pretty much identical (the only bits of note are that the iphone 4 has a higher res screen, whilst the Nexus-S has a bigger screen, and the Nexus-S has NFC) which makes the iPhone outrageously overpriced.
Personally, I wouldn't buy an iPhone because I don't want to have a locked-down device, but for most people this probably isn't an issue. But £200 just to get an Apple logo on the back seems a bit steep and with that in mind I'd question the sanity of anyone who bought an iPhone without some specific reasons why they need an iOS device (such as requiring some obscure app that isn't available for Android).
Personally, I was happy to get rid of CRT TVs as soon as possible so I wouldn't have to suffer with the annoying high-pitched buzz that they all make. To me, none of them are "perfectly working", because they all have that design defect.
I used to hear that... I guess I'm just getting old and deaf now:-/
I got rid of my 19" CRT monitor some time ago too, this time because much larger and higher-resolution LCD monitors were so cheap, and also because the LCD ones don't take up so much space on my desk.
My secondary monitor isn't especially big (I don't have the horizontal desk space for anything bigger in addition to my reasonably big primary), which makes it not actually that deep. I wouldn't want the screens of my monitors further away from me so replacing it with an LCD would just mean a big empty gap behind the monitor that isn't used for anything. Besides, the cat likes to sleep on top of the CRT and a TFT would be significantly less comfortable for him:)
There are? It's not just geeks who have been buying flat-screen TVs for the last 5 or so years, they've been selling them like hotcakes at places like Costco, despite all the economic turmoil. The switchover to HDTV really spurred a new wave of TV-buying, and I think it's safe to assume most of those buyers got rid of their old CRT sets.
There are a lot of flat screens around, but I imagine the majority of TVs in households are still CRTs.
My TV is a CRT - I see no reason to replace it until it gives up (and no, I don't consider HDTV worthwhile - if I were replacing my TV then sure I'd get an HDTV, but I'm not going to replace a perfectly working TV just for that).
Similarly my secondary monitor on my workstation is a CRT, now 14 years old. Again, since it is working fine, why would I bother to replace it? The energy savings I'd get aren't enough to offset the cost of a new monitor so until it dies I'll stick with it.
Even a lot of households who have replaced their working TV with a flat screen have probably moved their old CRT into another room to use as a second TV rather than getting rid of it entirely.
30mb/3mb connection with Virgin. £27 a month with no need for a phone line or paying any form of "line rental" to BT, infact I dont even have a phone line in the building.
Unfortunately, to my knowledge they still don't offer static IPv4 addresses or small IPv4 subnets. (Yes, I know they do "mostly static" addresses, but having an address that *might* change without notice really isn't good enough). Also, I believe they have gone on record stating that they have no intention of rolling out IPv6 any time soon. So for now I'll stick with my dual-stacked connection over ADSL.
There's two different types of spam. One is commercial email that is sent legitimately but which you don't want
I would argue that if they autosubscribed me without asking, or actively ignored the preference I made when I signed up (both of which are illegal in this country) then it is not "sent legitimately". True, they tend not to fake the sender, but they are indistinguishable from spam sent from false identities (at least, not trivially distinguishable), and you therefore can't trust the "unsubscribe" link will actually unsubscribe you rather than harvesting your address (also, would you trust such a link if the sender had previously ignored your preferences anyway?).
In the other hand, in some cases there is a real problem with sending spam. I have in the past dealt with a bank (who I closed my accounts with then they started with this) who took to emailing me with marketing. The emails came from a domain that wasn't identical to their normal domain and instructed me to follow a link to a website which, again, wasn't their normal trading domain. The email told me that I could verify that it was legitimate because it contained some trivial PII (I think it was the first half of my postcode, or something similar... basically something that pretty much anyone could find out). So there are 2 problems here: 1. The bank is teaching people that they can authenticate an email based on some very spoofable details instead of securely signing it using a readily available, standard and widely supported technology such as S/MIME. 2. The bank is teaching their customers that it is ok to follow links in emails to random websites claiming to be their bank but being served from a domain that isn't recognisably the bank's own domain. Whilst the website in question was purely marketing and didn't ask for any personal details, it strikes me that it was a little too close to what phishing looks like and that teaching the general public that they can expect their bank will communicate in this way is a Bad Thing... A good chunk of the public don't have a good enough grasp of security to consider the difference between this and a phishing mail.
My inbox will contest that. I get spam from some pretty reputable UK companies, despite the fact that it is illegal.
These days whenever I hand out an email address I suffix the user-part with the domain name I'm signing up to so I at least know who's responsible for the spamming. I *never* tick the "please send me emails" boxes (and similarly I always tick the "please don't send me emails) boxes. Despite this, I do get a lot of spam from companies I've legitimately handed my address too - my response it always to set up procmail rules to forward the spams directly to the contacts listed in that domain's whois. I have no idea if this ever helps to educate people.. I do know that it resulted Devere adjusting their mail servers to completely block my server rather than removing me from their spam lists (a company I have never had any dealings with, and due to their apparent propensity to buying email lists from other companies and spamming them, they will remain a company I have no dealings with).
Additionally, when complaints are filed with the information commissioner, the result tends to simply be a sternly worded letter. It does seem to me that there is no point in having these laws (and no point in anyone respecting them) when the result of breaking them is nothing more than a slight telling off.
For example, Asda signed me up to their email lists after I bought something on their website, despite me unticking all the boxes saying they could do so. To make matters worse, their unsubscribe system was broken (I had signed up with an email address that had a "+asda" suffix. Their signup system accepted it as a valid email address, but unfortunately their unsubscribe system rejected it as invalid because it had a + in it). I contacted Asda and they ignored my emails, so I made a complaint to the information commissioner. This resulted in them getting a sternly worded letter and they removed me from their lists... but they weren't punished for any of these abuses.
Similarly, a more serious incident (not involving email this time) showed that the information commissioner's office is basically worthless: When I had been shopping around for car insurance quotes, one of the companies I got a quote from illegally sold my details to an ambulance chaser. I got a call from the ambulance chaser who basically repeatedly lied about why they were phoning me up (stating that they were calling from my insurer because they just wanted to clear up some paperwork regarding an accident that happened 2 years ago). Eventually it transpired that they wanted me to make a fraudulent personal injury claim regarding this accident. They refused to tell me where they had acquired my details from. So I complained about them to the information commissioner, who told me they had sent the ambulance chaser a sternly worded letter... They didn't help in figuring out where the data had been acquired from - they told me that I should make a data protection request from the company in writing. I didn't bother because I knew that the chances are that the company wouldn't respond to the request, I would have to complain to the information commissioner again who would send them another "sternly worded letter" and it would basically end up going nowhere... Honestly, what is the point of having these laws if no one is ever punished for breaking them? I'm sure if I broke into someone's house and nicked their telly I wouldn't just get a "sternly worded letter"....
This is very, very slowly getting through to the managers, though.
I had a boss not too long ago who simply assumed that everyone who ever bought a product wants to get our newsletter. I warned him that we might end up on blacklists, he chose to belittle my being a scaredy-cat and ignore me.
Last I heard is that he's fighting a losing uphill battle to get off the various spam blacklists because NONE of his emails get to their recipients anymore, and he noticed that it's not building trust in a company when you have to phone a possible business partner who has a commercial spam filter to tell him that he has to dig through his spam for your mail.
Unfortunately most businesses seem to realise this is going to be a problem, and rather than not sending spam in the first place, they just ensure it comes from different mail servers and a different domain to their normal operations.
its a battle between Apple -- which wants to dominate the mobile OS market and extract monopoly rents from it -- and everyone in the Android ecosystem, who want to do the exact same thing.
Fixed that for you. I'm sure the members of the Open Handset Alliance would be just thrilled if their 'ability to derive lines of revenue' was unimpeded by minor considerations such as competitors. And naturally they wouldn't take advantage of that at all with arbitrary price rises. No sir.
I'm not saying which side is right or which is wrong. I just don't believe that either have significantly different motives.
Not really... the members Open Handset Alliance are resigned to the fact that they will not become monopolies - so long as the Open Handset Alliance (or rather, so long as an open mobile platform) exists, the members will always have competition from each other. The existence of another vendor using another OS (i.e. Apple, Microsoft, etc.) makes very little difference to them in this case so long as they are playing by similar rules because they are just another competitor in an arena that is already full of competitors.
The problem at the moment is that Apple aren't playing by similar rules. Instead, they are going out and litigating against everyone else. That is what the counter-suits launched against Apple are trying to correct - they aren't trying to force Apple out of the market, they are just trying to get Apple to play fair.
I can't really see what Apple were ever hoping to get from kicking the hornets nest. I can't believe they ever expected to win (its common knowledge that for any non-trivial piece of technology, everyone is almost certainly infringing on a load of patents). Maybe they expected to be able to get small injunctions against other vendors but that was never going to be much more than a temporary stop to the distribution of a single model from a single vendor at a time and there are so many similar and competing devices in the market I really don't see how that makes a noticeable dent in the amount of competition Apple has to market against. In the long run I expect that the market will remain pretty much unchanged, a load of patents will have been invalidated, a load more will have bee cross-licensed and a bunch of lawyers will be a lot richer.
unbelievable, I know, but the courts are actually correct on this one
No they aren't - they are using a single data point to draw conclusions that are often not true.
You're still confusing "you received it" with "you read it" - as far as the courts are concerned, faxes provide proof that you received it, while email does not.
No. Faxes are proof that *something* received it and possibly stored it somewhere. As mentioned, they don't even prove that it ended up at the right organisation.
This is why the courts rule that if your system sent an ack, you go it - no excuses; it prevents this exploit that you want to do that is currently doable with email.
No, you don't get it do you. the ack simply says that *something* received it. The fact that the courts are assuming that it means something it doesn't is irrelevant (and would certainly deter me from ever publishing a fax number).
Correspondence between parties that may later be used as evidence during litigation need not be serviced by a sheriff of the court, you can use any of the processes that the laws allow, which include fax but exclude email
Maybe in the US. Here in the UK, I've seen log files from servers used to convict. I wouldn't want to rely on it if I was sending someone a document I needed to ensure they got for legal reasons anymore than I would rely on a fax, but it happens.
logs typically aren't unless collected by forensics people
Untrue. Organisations I've been involved with in the past have presented system logs collected by their sysadmin to a court and they have been upheld as evidence.
No, you don't. With fax, once you have a "RX OK" from the receiver, its a legally binding fact in court that the receiver got it.
I would hope that any reasonable court would not uphold a case on such a bogus piece of evidence. If they did then there is something very wrong with the legal system and an expert witness should be brought in to explain to the court just how bogus that evidence is.
You're right, there is no reason to assume that the intended recipient got it (whether it was printed or not), the point is that the organisation itself got it.
Not true. Certainly my organisation uses a third party fax gateway. The ack would simply indicate that the third party gateway had received it, from there on in it is delivered over SMTP across the big bad internet.
Like I said, you're missing the point - the system should, for example, save the file to a raid array before acking it; this prevents loss of a fax that was acked.
What good is storing the file in some directory on a raid array that no one is ever going to look at? If everything works then it'll be delivered by email, if things fail then no one will notice it broke and the file will never be seen. An ack only has value if it reasonably shows that *someone* connected with the recipient would've seen it. What you are proposing doesn't do that, so is worthless.
Furthermore, if what you are saying is true and that the courts would uphold this regardless, I would be inclined to do everything I could to ensure that the fax was *not* stored in this way since an expert witness would probably do a much better job of convincing the court that the fax hadn't been received if it had truly been lost. This now becomes about damage limitation - there is no value to me as the recipient in having a fax saved in this way because the only time it's going to be seen is under a court investigation. So at best the saved fax has no value to the recipient, and at worst it is damaging - best to get rid of it.
This is enforced by the courts in that they never entertain any claims of "well, my machine received it, but I never saw the paper in the tray, and then the receptionist accidently threw it away, and thats why your honour I never read it". You'll be laughed at if you try it.
And here in sane parts of the world, the courts require you to employ a process server to deliver legal documents and ensure they get to where they are going rather than just faxing and hoping.
the phone company proves that I sent *something* over to her attorneys at a certain date and time.
The phone company will also have recorded the date and time of the SMS you sent. Your email service provider will have recorded the date and time that the email was delivered to the recipient's MX (probably also the size of the email). All of these methods of communication involve third parties logging similar detail (the exception being that for email you may host your own smarthost and therefore not have a third party involved... most people do not).
In your case it seems that you presented the telco's logs to the court (which were accepted) but you presented other forms of communication without third party logs, even though such logs would've been available (and were, unsurprisingly, rejected).
There is nothing yet tht can replace the fax protocol; you may never need proof-of-delivery, but rest assured the rest of us (especially legal workers) do.
I have needed legally upheld proof of document delivery in the past. I used a process server. I certainly wouldn't want to trust it to a fax machine if it were that important.
Perhaps gp worded it poorly - the "transmission receipt" that is generated is generated once the receiver has signalled "Thanks, got it all".
Well, you basically get the same from email. Your email client gets a "yes I got it" response from the SMTP server it is sending to. The fact that this makes no indication as to whether it actually got to the recipient is pretty much the same as fax - all you know is that something received the email, not that the last server in the chain got it or that the actual recipient got it.
The court does not accept "well, my machine received it but I never got to read it" as an excuse
Umm, are you sure? Where the fax has been received by a server and redistributed via another technology there is absolutely no reason to assume that the recipient got it. I would be very surprised if a court held someone accountable for a fax they didn't receive in this situation.
If your fancy computerised setup is sending "RX OK" before saving the file somewhere, then you got a non-standard machine anyway.
Well sorry, but the only sensible way for fax to email gateways to work is to send an ack before the email has been read by the recipient. So you're saying that it is better to keep the phone line up until the recipient has read the document? Yeah. that'll work well...
receipt verification is the gold standard guarantee of undeniable success in the chain of communication.
The receipt verification only tells you that your fax was received by the remote fax machine, not that it has actually got to the intended human recipient.
The physical paper output assuredly enforces every fax must be ' handled' at the receiving end irregardless how much timeshift it pushes itself onto the receiver.
Not true. As the sender you have no clue whether there was a physical paper output at all. Faxes received by my business certainly have no physical paper output, they are simply received by a fax server and bundled up into an email, so you could've got the same result by just emailing me.
In the end it was both disturbing how easy it was for someone to use my credit card, and impressive how a couple of minor charges were so quickly and accurately detected as fraud...
On the other hand, the fraud detection systems on credit cards can often be a pain to customers because they get a large number of false positives. My cards have been disabled numerous times because the bank thought that I was making a fraudulent transaction, usually either when I made a card-not-present purchase over the phone, or when I was away from home and therefore not within my normal pattern of transactions and locations.
The bank's automated systems do phone me to tell me that they have detected fraud, but this isn't helpful if I'm away on holiday somewhere where I can't get a mobile phone signal - I could be left without access to any money for a week until I can get somewhere where there is a phone signal. Also, usually they require that I phone them back on an 0845 or 0870 phone number to confirm the transaction is ok, which is quite costly to me (but not to them - they get paid to receive calls on these numbers, which makes it not really in their interest to improve the system).
I'm also increasingly finding that the banks engage in security theatre, implementing systems that inconvenience their customers whilst providing no extra security. For example, to "increase security", one of my banks now requires me to remember about 15 random digits that can't be changed in order to log into the online banking system. They advise that I must not write down these digits... needless to say, I wrote down the numbers because I'm buggered if I can remember 15 random digits. Does this really increase security? If it were 4 digits then an attacker would require an average of 500 attempts to log in and I would hope the bank's login system would lock the account out long before that many attempts were made. In fact, making the login details impossible to remember actually decreases security because the user is forced to write it down.
Another example is the crazy 3Dsecure system, which involves the customer entering confidential details into a web page that is served from some random unrecognisable domain (it isn't the website they are purchasing from, it isn't their bank, it isn't visa/mastercard themselves, it is some random third party domain).
One thing I have found good is Santander's recent introduction of SMS OTP - if I make a money transfer via their web banking system, it will SMS me a one time passcode which I then enter before the transaction goes ahead. This works well for me because I pretty much always have my phone with me, and is much better than the other banks I deal with who have bulky "card reader" devices to generate keys, which are almost as big as my phone and I'm not going to carry them around with me so web banking suddenly becomes a lot less useful.
People's rooftops could be used as well. I heard of a program somewhere where they pay you a monthly rate to put energy back into the grid from solar panels placed on your roof. Requires a capital investment, though, which you earn back over the years (20 years IIRC). So unfortunately longer than the majority of people stay in one house.
There are companies here in the UK that do that (essentially you are renting your roof area to someone for them to put their panels on, and in payment they give you a cut of the money they make). It seems like a good idea to me because most individuals can't afford a long term investment like PV (which costs thousands of pounds and takes 10-20 years to break even). Unfortunately I've also heard that this is incompatible with most mortgages, so until those kind of problems can be fixed it isn't going to be very wide-spread. Here's an idea - how about the mortgage lender offering to shove PV panels on your roof as part-payment for your mortgage?
(with the shift stick in neutral, so the car doesn't brake on the engine)
On a modern car this is bad for fuel consumption - in neutral, the engine is burning fuel to idle, but under engine-braking conditions the ECU cuts the fuel entirely. So if you used the brakes (wasting kinetic energy as heat) and then put the car in neutral to avoid slowing down further, you wasted a load of fuel. Better to just let the engine brake the whole way.
For your example, have you looked at Our Groceries? My wife and I both use it on Android, but their website says it's available for iPhone, too. It's server-backed, so lists are synced across phones. Obviously I can't say for sure, but I imagine it would work between iOS and Android. http://www.ourgroceries.com/download
Thanks - it looks promising so I'll check it out. The only one I found before was Grocery iQ, which seemed like it would do the job but for some crazy reason the vendor has restricted it to the US (WTF?) - not a problem on Android because the MarketEnabler app will let you spoof a fake home network to Market, but I couldn't see a sensible way of installing it on the iPhone.
NASA has developed a software for that. It scans the surrounding area for nearby objects and projects a rectangular box with your car/plane in the middle. As long as you stay inside that box you're safe.
By the way, what is the standard sync application for Android phones? I honestly don't know and a simple search couldn't tell me.
There isn't one, because Android devices are not designed to sync with a workstation. Android has been designed with the idea that the data you want to sync with it is accessible over the internet, so they keep themselves in constant sync over the network. YMMV, but I find that works a lot better than syncing with a specific workstation - I don't have to remember to boot up a specific workstation, connect my phone to it and let it sync, it just syncs by itself constantly through the day. So for example, if I update my calendar over the web using a random workstation, those changes spontaneously replicate to my phone almost immediately.
That's like complaining your OS comes with a browser and a package manager. It makes no sense, those apps are part of the core use cases for the device.
No problem with them coming with the device, but why not let users replace them with something better or remove them entirely if that doesn't match *their* use case?
the more people use iOS, the more software development jobs are for iOS, and the more apps are for iOS -- and the more likely it is for a larger portion of these to be iOS-exclusive, and for at least one of them to be something I need...
Maybe its just down to the type of apps I use, but I've found the exact opposite really. I have an Android phone (a rather old HTC Dream that will need replacing before long) and my girlfriend has an iPhone 3GS. She sometimes gets annoyed that some free app I have on my Dream either isn't available (and seeming no equivalent app exists) for the iPhone, or that she has to pay for it whilst I got it for free. This latter point is more irritating when, not infrequently, the _same_ app from the _same_ vendor is free on Android and charged on the iPhone. On the other hand, I don't think I've seen anything on her iPhone that I've wanted and haven't been able to find the equivalent of for my Dream.
I do wish that apps were more cross-platform though - it is annoying to not be able to share data between an Android app and an iPhone app. For example, a shopping list app backed by a shared server would be really useful. i.e. myself and my girlfriend could both access our joint shopping list from our respective phones and tick off stuff we got so we don't end up duplicating shopping. There are plenty of stand alone shopping list apps for both platforms (i.e. the data is held on the phone, so no chance of automatically sharing it between the two devices) and there are a *few* server-backed apps that would do the job. Unfortunately, all the server-backed apps are "iphone only" or "android only" so it would be fine if we both had android devices or both had iphones, but since the same app isn't available for both (and they all use proprietary protocols) we can't use them. There are a few todo-list type apps that could be used for this, but generally they are complete overkill.
The days a child can take the computer they have for other purposes and just use it to pick up software development may also be numbered.
It can already be argued that modern computers have harmed the software development industry by hiding the dev tools away. When I was young, when you turned on a home computer, the *first* thing you saw was a BASIC command line. This "no effort" method of presenting a development environment definitely encouraged a lot of people to play with it and get interested in programming. These days, you have to actively want to develop some software and go find the dev tools because they aren't right in your face every time you turn on.
Of course, the modern operating systems are a lot more friendly for the average non-techie and we wouldn't want to go back to the old ways, but you can't escape the fact that we'd probably have more young programmers if the first thing they saw when turning on a computer each time was a development environment.
I think if a significant proportion of home-computers become locked down devices that you *can't* develop for (at least, not without an expensive development licence) then that's going to seriously backfire for the computer industry because that will pretty much eradicate new programmers - now rather than just having to dig around and find the dev tools, you have to pay for a licence and you can't distribute your silly little buggy application to your friends because the only way to distribute will be via the Appstore (and lets face it, when people first start coding, their applications *will* be silly and buggy, preventing them doing this is just going to put them off bothering to develop).
It would perhaps be sensible to invent a whole new layer model now that we have a lot more protocols. HTTP, for instance, should be a layer of its own, since so many things are now tunnelled over it. That would be sensible, though, so good luck.
Thinking of a fixed set of layers stops being useful as soon as you get moderately complex network setups because these days encapsulations tend to happen at all sorts of layers. Modern networks can probably be thought of more as a stack of protocols with the link layer at the bottom, application at the top and chopped up repetitive bits of the stack in the middle.
e.g. take for example a modern connection to a website and we probably see this kind of stack: HTTP SSL TCP IP PPP PPPoE Ethernet ATM VC-Mux ATM G.922.5 data link layer Physical ADSL
And that's just for a plain home ADSL connection. In more complex networks it is common to encapsulate stuff further, for example using GRE tunnels or IPSEC tunnels, and it isn't uncommon to see something more like:
HTTP SSL TCP IP IPSEC ESP IPSEC AH IP Ethernet GRE IP GRE IP PPP PPPoE Ethernet ATM VC-Mux ATM G.922.5 data link layer Physical ADSL
And you can keep adding encapsulation layers at pretty much any point in the stack.
It just goes to show that even on the internet you can get in big trouble. A lot of people are learning that you can't get away with "everything" on the internet anymore. I'm surprised these people actually used their name. Haven't they heard of the people that have gotten fired for posting things about their job from there?
I'd suggest that these people (and most of the other people involved in the riots) aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the box...
Nope, I hated Gnome 2 and have been using E17 for years instead. Just recently switched to Gnome 3 and really like it. Other than some lack of configurability (e.g. having to dig through gconf to turn off the screen saver - would it have killed them to stick a "Never" option in the screen saver timeout drop-down), I think my only real complaint is the insane OS X-alike modal application launcher buttons. (The launcher buttons change behaviour depending on whether there is another window from that application already open - if there is no other window open belonging to that app the launcher buttons open a new window, but if that application has other windows open, the launcher button simply raises all of them. i.e. if I have 15 terminal windows open and I click the terminal launcher button to get another one, it will instead raise all 15 of those windows to the foreground. This is totally nuts - as a user I don't want to have to look to see if an application is running before clicking a button in order to know what that button is going to do. If I click the application button it means I want a new window; if I wanted to switch to an existing window I would've used the window switcher; and I *never* want to raise all windows belonging to a certain application at once.)
I would like an quick way to switch between windows within an application though, Alt-Tab switches between applications and each application can be expanded for all the windows, but I would like a shortcut for switching between application windows.
Alt+` (the key above tab) does that. But one thing that I will say is that I don't understand the idea of grouping windows by parent application. It is an OS X feature I never got on with at all. As a user, I simply don't care what application owns a window - all windows should be treated equally. I don't need to know the difference between viewing a web page and viewing a PDF, as far as I'm concerned it is just content that I'm reading and I don't really care which application is being used to display that content.
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So it's cheaper to get them from Europe than from the US? That's a surprise.
My experience of trying to import electronics from the US into the UK is that very few online shops in the US seem to ship outside of North America, whereas the online shops in Europe tend to be happy to ship to anywhere in the world.
For us, it comes down to personal preference and nothing else. The Android seems just as dumb as iOS and I honestly don't see the advantages of Android over iOS, at all.
My partner has a Samsung Galaxy S2, I have an iPhone 4. The Android unit is nice, but I don't see any advantages of it over what Apple is offering, we tried using the alternative app stores on the Android and we found them lacking anything worth getting, aside from that I don't know what it's offering that the iPhone isn't.
My fiancee has just bought a Nexus-S to replace her lost iPhone 3GS. what it came down to was basically price. For what she uses it for, which I imagine is what *most* people use their smartphone for (making phone calls, sending text messages, a bit of web browsing, calendaring, the occasional silly app) there really wasn't a lot of difference between an iOS device and an Android device. The iPhone 4 is about £500 whilst the Nexus-S is £300 - the hardware is pretty much identical (the only bits of note are that the iphone 4 has a higher res screen, whilst the Nexus-S has a bigger screen, and the Nexus-S has NFC) which makes the iPhone outrageously overpriced.
Personally, I wouldn't buy an iPhone because I don't want to have a locked-down device, but for most people this probably isn't an issue. But £200 just to get an Apple logo on the back seems a bit steep and with that in mind I'd question the sanity of anyone who bought an iPhone without some specific reasons why they need an iOS device (such as requiring some obscure app that isn't available for Android).
Personally, I was happy to get rid of CRT TVs as soon as possible so I wouldn't have to suffer with the annoying high-pitched buzz that they all make. To me, none of them are "perfectly working", because they all have that design defect.
I used to hear that... I guess I'm just getting old and deaf now :-/
I got rid of my 19" CRT monitor some time ago too, this time because much larger and higher-resolution LCD monitors were so cheap, and also because the LCD ones don't take up so much space on my desk.
My secondary monitor isn't especially big (I don't have the horizontal desk space for anything bigger in addition to my reasonably big primary), which makes it not actually that deep. I wouldn't want the screens of my monitors further away from me so replacing it with an LCD would just mean a big empty gap behind the monitor that isn't used for anything. Besides, the cat likes to sleep on top of the CRT and a TFT would be significantly less comfortable for him :)
There are? It's not just geeks who have been buying flat-screen TVs for the last 5 or so years, they've been selling them like hotcakes at places like Costco, despite all the economic turmoil. The switchover to HDTV really spurred a new wave of TV-buying, and I think it's safe to assume most of those buyers got rid of their old CRT sets.
There are a lot of flat screens around, but I imagine the majority of TVs in households are still CRTs.
My TV is a CRT - I see no reason to replace it until it gives up (and no, I don't consider HDTV worthwhile - if I were replacing my TV then sure I'd get an HDTV, but I'm not going to replace a perfectly working TV just for that).
Similarly my secondary monitor on my workstation is a CRT, now 14 years old. Again, since it is working fine, why would I bother to replace it? The energy savings I'd get aren't enough to offset the cost of a new monitor so until it dies I'll stick with it.
Even a lot of households who have replaced their working TV with a flat screen have probably moved their old CRT into another room to use as a second TV rather than getting rid of it entirely.
30mb/3mb connection with Virgin. £27 a month with no need for a phone line or paying any form of "line rental" to BT, infact I dont even have a phone line in the building.
Unfortunately, to my knowledge they still don't offer static IPv4 addresses or small IPv4 subnets. (Yes, I know they do "mostly static" addresses, but having an address that *might* change without notice really isn't good enough). Also, I believe they have gone on record stating that they have no intention of rolling out IPv6 any time soon. So for now I'll stick with my dual-stacked connection over ADSL.
There's two different types of spam. One is commercial email that is sent legitimately but which you don't want
I would argue that if they autosubscribed me without asking, or actively ignored the preference I made when I signed up (both of which are illegal in this country) then it is not "sent legitimately". True, they tend not to fake the sender, but they are indistinguishable from spam sent from false identities (at least, not trivially distinguishable), and you therefore can't trust the "unsubscribe" link will actually unsubscribe you rather than harvesting your address (also, would you trust such a link if the sender had previously ignored your preferences anyway?).
In the other hand, in some cases there is a real problem with sending spam. I have in the past dealt with a bank (who I closed my accounts with then they started with this) who took to emailing me with marketing. The emails came from a domain that wasn't identical to their normal domain and instructed me to follow a link to a website which, again, wasn't their normal trading domain. The email told me that I could verify that it was legitimate because it contained some trivial PII (I think it was the first half of my postcode, or something similar... basically something that pretty much anyone could find out). So there are 2 problems here:
1. The bank is teaching people that they can authenticate an email based on some very spoofable details instead of securely signing it using a readily available, standard and widely supported technology such as S/MIME.
2. The bank is teaching their customers that it is ok to follow links in emails to random websites claiming to be their bank but being served from a domain that isn't recognisably the bank's own domain.
Whilst the website in question was purely marketing and didn't ask for any personal details, it strikes me that it was a little too close to what phishing looks like and that teaching the general public that they can expect their bank will communicate in this way is a Bad Thing... A good chunk of the public don't have a good enough grasp of security to consider the difference between this and a phishing mail.
Spam is a losing game these days
My inbox will contest that. I get spam from some pretty reputable UK companies, despite the fact that it is illegal.
These days whenever I hand out an email address I suffix the user-part with the domain name I'm signing up to so I at least know who's responsible for the spamming. I *never* tick the "please send me emails" boxes (and similarly I always tick the "please don't send me emails) boxes. Despite this, I do get a lot of spam from companies I've legitimately handed my address too - my response it always to set up procmail rules to forward the spams directly to the contacts listed in that domain's whois. I have no idea if this ever helps to educate people.. I do know that it resulted Devere adjusting their mail servers to completely block my server rather than removing me from their spam lists (a company I have never had any dealings with, and due to their apparent propensity to buying email lists from other companies and spamming them, they will remain a company I have no dealings with).
Additionally, when complaints are filed with the information commissioner, the result tends to simply be a sternly worded letter. It does seem to me that there is no point in having these laws (and no point in anyone respecting them) when the result of breaking them is nothing more than a slight telling off.
For example, Asda signed me up to their email lists after I bought something on their website, despite me unticking all the boxes saying they could do so. To make matters worse, their unsubscribe system was broken (I had signed up with an email address that had a "+asda" suffix. Their signup system accepted it as a valid email address, but unfortunately their unsubscribe system rejected it as invalid because it had a + in it). I contacted Asda and they ignored my emails, so I made a complaint to the information commissioner. This resulted in them getting a sternly worded letter and they removed me from their lists... but they weren't punished for any of these abuses.
Similarly, a more serious incident (not involving email this time) showed that the information commissioner's office is basically worthless: When I had been shopping around for car insurance quotes, one of the companies I got a quote from illegally sold my details to an ambulance chaser. I got a call from the ambulance chaser who basically repeatedly lied about why they were phoning me up (stating that they were calling from my insurer because they just wanted to clear up some paperwork regarding an accident that happened 2 years ago). Eventually it transpired that they wanted me to make a fraudulent personal injury claim regarding this accident. They refused to tell me where they had acquired my details from. So I complained about them to the information commissioner, who told me they had sent the ambulance chaser a sternly worded letter... They didn't help in figuring out where the data had been acquired from - they told me that I should make a data protection request from the company in writing. I didn't bother because I knew that the chances are that the company wouldn't respond to the request, I would have to complain to the information commissioner again who would send them another "sternly worded letter" and it would basically end up going nowhere... Honestly, what is the point of having these laws if no one is ever punished for breaking them? I'm sure if I broke into someone's house and nicked their telly I wouldn't just get a "sternly worded letter"....
This is very, very slowly getting through to the managers, though.
I had a boss not too long ago who simply assumed that everyone who ever bought a product wants to get our newsletter. I warned him that we might end up on blacklists, he chose to belittle my being a scaredy-cat and ignore me.
Last I heard is that he's fighting a losing uphill battle to get off the various spam blacklists because NONE of his emails get to their recipients anymore, and he noticed that it's not building trust in a company when you have to phone a possible business partner who has a commercial spam filter to tell him that he has to dig through his spam for your mail.
Unfortunately most businesses seem to realise this is going to be a problem, and rather than not sending spam in the first place, they just ensure it comes from different mail servers and a different domain to their normal operations.
its a battle between Apple -- which wants to dominate the mobile OS market and extract monopoly rents from it -- and everyone in the Android ecosystem, who want to do the exact same thing.
Fixed that for you. I'm sure the members of the Open Handset Alliance would be just thrilled if their 'ability to derive lines of revenue' was unimpeded by minor considerations such as competitors. And naturally they wouldn't take advantage of that at all with arbitrary price rises. No sir.
I'm not saying which side is right or which is wrong. I just don't believe that either have significantly different motives.
Not really... the members Open Handset Alliance are resigned to the fact that they will not become monopolies - so long as the Open Handset Alliance (or rather, so long as an open mobile platform) exists, the members will always have competition from each other. The existence of another vendor using another OS (i.e. Apple, Microsoft, etc.) makes very little difference to them in this case so long as they are playing by similar rules because they are just another competitor in an arena that is already full of competitors.
The problem at the moment is that Apple aren't playing by similar rules. Instead, they are going out and litigating against everyone else. That is what the counter-suits launched against Apple are trying to correct - they aren't trying to force Apple out of the market, they are just trying to get Apple to play fair.
I can't really see what Apple were ever hoping to get from kicking the hornets nest. I can't believe they ever expected to win (its common knowledge that for any non-trivial piece of technology, everyone is almost certainly infringing on a load of patents). Maybe they expected to be able to get small injunctions against other vendors but that was never going to be much more than a temporary stop to the distribution of a single model from a single vendor at a time and there are so many similar and competing devices in the market I really don't see how that makes a noticeable dent in the amount of competition Apple has to market against. In the long run I expect that the market will remain pretty much unchanged, a load of patents will have been invalidated, a load more will have bee cross-licensed and a bunch of lawyers will be a lot richer.
unbelievable, I know, but the courts are actually correct on this one
No they aren't - they are using a single data point to draw conclusions that are often not true.
You're still confusing "you received it" with "you read it" - as far as the courts are concerned, faxes provide proof that you received it, while email does not.
No. Faxes are proof that *something* received it and possibly stored it somewhere. As mentioned, they don't even prove that it ended up at the right organisation.
This is why the courts rule that if your system sent an ack, you go it - no excuses; it prevents this exploit that you want to do that is currently doable with email.
No, you don't get it do you. the ack simply says that *something* received it. The fact that the courts are assuming that it means something it doesn't is irrelevant (and would certainly deter me from ever publishing a fax number).
Correspondence between parties that may later be used as evidence during litigation need not be serviced by a sheriff of the court, you can use any of the processes that the laws allow, which include fax but exclude email
Maybe in the US. Here in the UK, I've seen log files from servers used to convict. I wouldn't want to rely on it if I was sending someone a document I needed to ensure they got for legal reasons anymore than I would rely on a fax, but it happens.
logs typically aren't unless collected by forensics people
Untrue. Organisations I've been involved with in the past have presented system logs collected by their sysadmin to a court and they have been upheld as evidence.
No, you don't. With fax, once you have a "RX OK" from the receiver, its a legally binding fact in court that the receiver got it.
I would hope that any reasonable court would not uphold a case on such a bogus piece of evidence. If they did then there is something very wrong with the legal system and an expert witness should be brought in to explain to the court just how bogus that evidence is.
You're right, there is no reason to assume that the intended recipient got it (whether it was printed or not), the point is that the organisation itself got it.
Not true. Certainly my organisation uses a third party fax gateway. The ack would simply indicate that the third party gateway had received it, from there on in it is delivered over SMTP across the big bad internet.
Like I said, you're missing the point - the system should, for example, save the file to a raid array before acking it; this prevents loss of a fax that was acked.
What good is storing the file in some directory on a raid array that no one is ever going to look at? If everything works then it'll be delivered by email, if things fail then no one will notice it broke and the file will never be seen. An ack only has value if it reasonably shows that *someone* connected with the recipient would've seen it. What you are proposing doesn't do that, so is worthless.
Furthermore, if what you are saying is true and that the courts would uphold this regardless, I would be inclined to do everything I could to ensure that the fax was *not* stored in this way since an expert witness would probably do a much better job of convincing the court that the fax hadn't been received if it had truly been lost. This now becomes about damage limitation - there is no value to me as the recipient in having a fax saved in this way because the only time it's going to be seen is under a court investigation. So at best the saved fax has no value to the recipient, and at worst it is damaging - best to get rid of it.
This is enforced by the courts in that they never entertain any claims of "well, my machine received it, but I never saw the paper in the tray, and then the receptionist accidently threw it away, and thats why your honour I never read it". You'll be laughed at if you try it.
And here in sane parts of the world, the courts require you to employ a process server to deliver legal documents and ensure they get to where they are going rather than just faxing and hoping.
the phone company proves that I sent *something* over to her attorneys at a certain date and time.
The phone company will also have recorded the date and time of the SMS you sent. Your email service provider will have recorded the date and time that the email was delivered to the recipient's MX (probably also the size of the email). All of these methods of communication involve third parties logging similar detail (the exception being that for email you may host your own smarthost and therefore not have a third party involved... most people do not).
In your case it seems that you presented the telco's logs to the court (which were accepted) but you presented other forms of communication without third party logs, even though such logs would've been available (and were, unsurprisingly, rejected).
There is nothing yet tht can replace the fax protocol; you may never need proof-of-delivery, but rest assured the rest of us (especially legal workers) do.
I have needed legally upheld proof of document delivery in the past. I used a process server. I certainly wouldn't want to trust it to a fax machine if it were that important.
Perhaps gp worded it poorly - the "transmission receipt" that is generated is generated once the receiver has signalled "Thanks, got it all".
Well, you basically get the same from email. Your email client gets a "yes I got it" response from the SMTP server it is sending to. The fact that this makes no indication as to whether it actually got to the recipient is pretty much the same as fax - all you know is that something received the email, not that the last server in the chain got it or that the actual recipient got it.
The court does not accept "well, my machine received it but I never got to read it" as an excuse
Umm, are you sure? Where the fax has been received by a server and redistributed via another technology there is absolutely no reason to assume that the recipient got it. I would be very surprised if a court held someone accountable for a fax they didn't receive in this situation.
If your fancy computerised setup is sending "RX OK" before saving the file somewhere, then you got a non-standard machine anyway.
Well sorry, but the only sensible way for fax to email gateways to work is to send an ack before the email has been read by the recipient. So you're saying that it is better to keep the phone line up until the recipient has read the document? Yeah. that'll work well...
receipt verification is the gold standard guarantee of undeniable success in the chain of communication.
The receipt verification only tells you that your fax was received by the remote fax machine, not that it has actually got to the intended human recipient.
The physical paper output assuredly enforces every fax must be ' handled' at the receiving end irregardless how much timeshift it pushes itself onto the receiver.
Not true. As the sender you have no clue whether there was a physical paper output at all. Faxes received by my business certainly have no physical paper output, they are simply received by a fax server and bundled up into an email, so you could've got the same result by just emailing me.
The vendor is not responsible anymore than a hammer maker is responsible when someone kills his spouse with a hammer.
Unlike a hammer, I can't think of a single legitimate use case for a *hand held* laser this powerful.
In the end it was both disturbing how easy it was for someone to use my credit card, and impressive how a couple of minor charges were so quickly and accurately detected as fraud...
On the other hand, the fraud detection systems on credit cards can often be a pain to customers because they get a large number of false positives. My cards have been disabled numerous times because the bank thought that I was making a fraudulent transaction, usually either when I made a card-not-present purchase over the phone, or when I was away from home and therefore not within my normal pattern of transactions and locations.
The bank's automated systems do phone me to tell me that they have detected fraud, but this isn't helpful if I'm away on holiday somewhere where I can't get a mobile phone signal - I could be left without access to any money for a week until I can get somewhere where there is a phone signal. Also, usually they require that I phone them back on an 0845 or 0870 phone number to confirm the transaction is ok, which is quite costly to me (but not to them - they get paid to receive calls on these numbers, which makes it not really in their interest to improve the system).
I'm also increasingly finding that the banks engage in security theatre, implementing systems that inconvenience their customers whilst providing no extra security. For example, to "increase security", one of my banks now requires me to remember about 15 random digits that can't be changed in order to log into the online banking system. They advise that I must not write down these digits... needless to say, I wrote down the numbers because I'm buggered if I can remember 15 random digits. Does this really increase security? If it were 4 digits then an attacker would require an average of 500 attempts to log in and I would hope the bank's login system would lock the account out long before that many attempts were made. In fact, making the login details impossible to remember actually decreases security because the user is forced to write it down.
Another example is the crazy 3Dsecure system, which involves the customer entering confidential details into a web page that is served from some random unrecognisable domain (it isn't the website they are purchasing from, it isn't their bank, it isn't visa/mastercard themselves, it is some random third party domain).
One thing I have found good is Santander's recent introduction of SMS OTP - if I make a money transfer via their web banking system, it will SMS me a one time passcode which I then enter before the transaction goes ahead. This works well for me because I pretty much always have my phone with me, and is much better than the other banks I deal with who have bulky "card reader" devices to generate keys, which are almost as big as my phone and I'm not going to carry them around with me so web banking suddenly becomes a lot less useful.
People's rooftops could be used as well. I heard of a program somewhere where they pay you a monthly rate to put energy back into the grid from solar panels placed on your roof. Requires a capital investment, though, which you earn back over the years (20 years IIRC). So unfortunately longer than the majority of people stay in one house.
There are companies here in the UK that do that (essentially you are renting your roof area to someone for them to put their panels on, and in payment they give you a cut of the money they make). It seems like a good idea to me because most individuals can't afford a long term investment like PV (which costs thousands of pounds and takes 10-20 years to break even). Unfortunately I've also heard that this is incompatible with most mortgages, so until those kind of problems can be fixed it isn't going to be very wide-spread. Here's an idea - how about the mortgage lender offering to shove PV panels on your roof as part-payment for your mortgage?
(with the shift stick in neutral, so the car doesn't brake on the engine)
On a modern car this is bad for fuel consumption - in neutral, the engine is burning fuel to idle, but under engine-braking conditions the ECU cuts the fuel entirely. So if you used the brakes (wasting kinetic energy as heat) and then put the car in neutral to avoid slowing down further, you wasted a load of fuel. Better to just let the engine brake the whole way.
For your example, have you looked at Our Groceries? My wife and I both use it on Android, but their website says it's available for iPhone, too. It's server-backed, so lists are synced across phones. Obviously I can't say for sure, but I imagine it would work between iOS and Android.
http://www.ourgroceries.com/download
Thanks - it looks promising so I'll check it out. The only one I found before was Grocery iQ, which seemed like it would do the job but for some crazy reason the vendor has restricted it to the US (WTF?) - not a problem on Android because the MarketEnabler app will let you spoof a fake home network to Market, but I couldn't see a sensible way of installing it on the iPhone.
NASA has developed a software for that. It scans the surrounding area for nearby objects and projects a rectangular box with your car/plane in the middle. As long as you stay inside that box you're safe.
Apple would probably sue them for that...
By the way, what is the standard sync application for Android phones? I honestly don't know and a simple search couldn't tell me.
There isn't one, because Android devices are not designed to sync with a workstation. Android has been designed with the idea that the data you want to sync with it is accessible over the internet, so they keep themselves in constant sync over the network. YMMV, but I find that works a lot better than syncing with a specific workstation - I don't have to remember to boot up a specific workstation, connect my phone to it and let it sync, it just syncs by itself constantly through the day. So for example, if I update my calendar over the web using a random workstation, those changes spontaneously replicate to my phone almost immediately.
That's like complaining your OS comes with a browser and a package manager. It makes no sense, those apps are part of the core use cases for the device.
No problem with them coming with the device, but why not let users replace them with something better or remove them entirely if that doesn't match *their* use case?
the more people use iOS, the more software development jobs are for iOS, and the more apps are for iOS -- and the more likely it is for a larger portion of these to be iOS-exclusive, and for at least one of them to be something I need...
Maybe its just down to the type of apps I use, but I've found the exact opposite really. I have an Android phone (a rather old HTC Dream that will need replacing before long) and my girlfriend has an iPhone 3GS. She sometimes gets annoyed that some free app I have on my Dream either isn't available (and seeming no equivalent app exists) for the iPhone, or that she has to pay for it whilst I got it for free. This latter point is more irritating when, not infrequently, the _same_ app from the _same_ vendor is free on Android and charged on the iPhone. On the other hand, I don't think I've seen anything on her iPhone that I've wanted and haven't been able to find the equivalent of for my Dream.
I do wish that apps were more cross-platform though - it is annoying to not be able to share data between an Android app and an iPhone app. For example, a shopping list app backed by a shared server would be really useful. i.e. myself and my girlfriend could both access our joint shopping list from our respective phones and tick off stuff we got so we don't end up duplicating shopping. There are plenty of stand alone shopping list apps for both platforms (i.e. the data is held on the phone, so no chance of automatically sharing it between the two devices) and there are a *few* server-backed apps that would do the job. Unfortunately, all the server-backed apps are "iphone only" or "android only" so it would be fine if we both had android devices or both had iphones, but since the same app isn't available for both (and they all use proprietary protocols) we can't use them. There are a few todo-list type apps that could be used for this, but generally they are complete overkill.
The days a child can take the computer they have for other purposes and just use it to pick up software development may also be numbered.
It can already be argued that modern computers have harmed the software development industry by hiding the dev tools away. When I was young, when you turned on a home computer, the *first* thing you saw was a BASIC command line. This "no effort" method of presenting a development environment definitely encouraged a lot of people to play with it and get interested in programming. These days, you have to actively want to develop some software and go find the dev tools because they aren't right in your face every time you turn on.
Of course, the modern operating systems are a lot more friendly for the average non-techie and we wouldn't want to go back to the old ways, but you can't escape the fact that we'd probably have more young programmers if the first thing they saw when turning on a computer each time was a development environment.
I think if a significant proportion of home-computers become locked down devices that you *can't* develop for (at least, not without an expensive development licence) then that's going to seriously backfire for the computer industry because that will pretty much eradicate new programmers - now rather than just having to dig around and find the dev tools, you have to pay for a licence and you can't distribute your silly little buggy application to your friends because the only way to distribute will be via the Appstore (and lets face it, when people first start coding, their applications *will* be silly and buggy, preventing them doing this is just going to put them off bothering to develop).
It would perhaps be sensible to invent a whole new layer model now that we have a lot more protocols. HTTP, for instance, should be a layer of its own, since so many things are now tunnelled over it. That would be sensible, though, so good luck.
Thinking of a fixed set of layers stops being useful as soon as you get moderately complex network setups because these days encapsulations tend to happen at all sorts of layers. Modern networks can probably be thought of more as a stack of protocols with the link layer at the bottom, application at the top and chopped up repetitive bits of the stack in the middle.
e.g. take for example a modern connection to a website and we probably see this kind of stack:
HTTP
SSL
TCP
IP
PPP
PPPoE
Ethernet
ATM VC-Mux
ATM
G.922.5 data link layer
Physical ADSL
And that's just for a plain home ADSL connection. In more complex networks it is common to encapsulate stuff further, for example using GRE tunnels or IPSEC tunnels, and it isn't uncommon to see something more like:
HTTP
SSL
TCP
IP
IPSEC ESP
IPSEC AH
IP
Ethernet
GRE
IP
GRE
IP
PPP
PPPoE
Ethernet
ATM VC-Mux
ATM
G.922.5 data link layer
Physical ADSL
And you can keep adding encapsulation layers at pretty much any point in the stack.
It just goes to show that even on the internet you can get in big trouble. A lot of people are learning that you can't get away with "everything" on the internet anymore. I'm surprised these people actually used their name. Haven't they heard of the people that have gotten fired for posting things about their job from there?
I'd suggest that these people (and most of the other people involved in the riots) aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the box...
Am I the only one who actually likes Gnome 3?
Nope, I hated Gnome 2 and have been using E17 for years instead. Just recently switched to Gnome 3 and really like it. Other than some lack of configurability (e.g. having to dig through gconf to turn off the screen saver - would it have killed them to stick a "Never" option in the screen saver timeout drop-down), I think my only real complaint is the insane OS X-alike modal application launcher buttons. (The launcher buttons change behaviour depending on whether there is another window from that application already open - if there is no other window open belonging to that app the launcher buttons open a new window, but if that application has other windows open, the launcher button simply raises all of them. i.e. if I have 15 terminal windows open and I click the terminal launcher button to get another one, it will instead raise all 15 of those windows to the foreground. This is totally nuts - as a user I don't want to have to look to see if an application is running before clicking a button in order to know what that button is going to do. If I click the application button it means I want a new window; if I wanted to switch to an existing window I would've used the window switcher; and I *never* want to raise all windows belonging to a certain application at once.)
I would like an quick way to switch between windows within an application though, Alt-Tab switches between applications and each application can be expanded for all the windows, but I would like a shortcut for switching between application windows.
Alt+` (the key above tab) does that. But one thing that I will say is that I don't understand the idea of grouping windows by parent application. It is an OS X feature I never got on with at all. As a user, I simply don't care what application owns a window - all windows should be treated equally. I don't need to know the difference between viewing a web page and viewing a PDF, as far as I'm concerned it is just content that I'm reading and I don't really care which application is being used to display that content.