As an experiment, I recently tried setting Chrome to keep cookies only for each session (ie delete everything when I close the browser). So far I have not noticed any substantial difference to my browsing experience - all the sites I go to still seem to work normally. It seems like a good compromise - if cookies are disabled completely, lots of sites do not work properly, and do not report why they are not working, and maintaining a manual exception list is a pain.
Our 2006 Macbook had a battery replaced under Applecare cover in about 2009. The second battery is now more or less had it. Of course, it is now old enough that the Applecare has run out, and I suspect an Apple store would not be interested in doing anything with it even if I was paying, for such an old (sorry, "vintage") machine. But other than the battery it still works fine, and I suspect will do so for some time yet.
Fortunately this machine was from the time when batteries were user-replaceable.
For better or worse, I could see this being liked by the general public. At present, government sites all require you to have a "Government Gateway" username and password. The password strength requirements are understandably quite strict, but what is really annoying is the usernames are automatically generated and completely unmemorable (mine is something like F093KHV894JMNB - I made that up, but you get the idea). If it was a site I access every day then I might remember, but once a year for to do my tax return, no chance. They even almost admit they are unmemorable, because they used to issue credit-card-sized pieces of paper with the usernames printed on them (which I would usually lose...)
The procedure for requesting new login details also involves phoning a call centre and waiting for details to come in snail mail.
For all the privacy concerns, I can actually remember my Paypal login, so chances are I would use this feature rather than go through all this once a year. In fact it would probably be easier to request a paper tax return.
I personally think it is not that the technology of Ceefax has finished, it is more the content. Digital Terrestrial TV services in the UK also offer various text-based services in a much more modern interface, however, there is just not the same quantity of content that Ceefax carried. Ceefax was a bit like a condensed newspaper, whereas the current "Red button" services are more like just the front page of a newspaper. But then again, if you are receiving BBC digital transmissions you also have access to far more channels than when Ceefax was launched, including a 24-hour news channel, so maybe it is not necessary. But for me what is more telling is the BBC have not thought it necessary to completely migrate the Ceefax levels of content onto the digital "red button" services. There was nothing on there that nowadays could not be found on the internet, after all.
See my comment earlier. No licence is required to own a television (with any sort of tuner in it) so long as it is not used to receive broadcast television.
Which therefore makes the enforcement of it ridiculous. We do not have a licence, and just to avoid arguments with the TV licencing stazi, the only TV we have in the house is disconnected from the aerial, all the channel presets de-tuned, and wrapped up in a bag where it cannot be used. But if I did have a set for watching DVDs etc, how can they possibly tell whether I use it for live TV or not?
TV Licencing do go round with "TV detector" vans, but I genuinely have no idea whether they really can detect TVs in operation or if it is just a deterrent.
It would be a lot simpler if there were some kind of technical means to stop non-licenced households watching TV - ie encryption with an access card, PIN code or something. I do not really understand why this is not done.
It also seems madness that I can completely legally listen to ad-free BBC radio, which is funded from the TV licence as well.
A couple of weeks ago I bought an OSX Lion USB stick from Apple online. I was staggered when I received a large-ish (A4-sized) jiffy bag, which when I opened it, contained another jiffy bag, about half the size. Then I opened this up and found my USB stick, attached to a piece of pretty white cardboard with a plastic blister. Yet the USB stick itself is one of the smallest I have ever seen. I wondered if they cut down on this a bit, they could perhaps bring the GBP£55 price down a bit...
oh, but they do have that but it's a bit hidden and it's only available via Apps for hosted domains. (even free apps has it). The way to set this up is to host your domain (or at least the mail receiving functions of it) with Google Apps and then you can set up the email service to accept wildcard emails, *@your-domain-hosted-on-google-apps_dot_anything.
Now whenever you give out an address just invent one on the spot @your domain and it will be valid. I do this and i got into the habit of throwing a date stamp and the name of whoever it is for into the email address itself so that if i start receiving spam for that address i know who leaked it and when they were assigned that address. Such an address usually looks like: mail-for-my-name-from-slashdot-org-20120524@example.com
And since my domain is set up at Gmail with a wildcard catch-all address, that will be routed to my actual mailbox (only if it passes Gmail spam filtering tests).
I do that, but it is limited in its usefulness because there is not a simple way of then killing off one of those addresses that you have made up on the spot. Eventually if spam to all these made up addresses becomes a problem, you have to turn off the catch-all address to stop the spam coming through. Which then means you have to actually set up another account or group in Google Apps each time you want an extra address, which is a lot less quick and easy.
The biggest problem is that in Europe, tipping is not expected or required. In the US, you can write the tip and walk away without the waitress watching you. If they go to table-top POS terminals like I saw in Canada, then you need to tip in front of your server. As an American, it was not very comfortable, although I suppose it is more profitable for the waitstaff.
In the UK many of the card terminals also allow the user to add a tip onto the amount deducted from the credit card, as the user enters their PIN. Particularly at chain restaurants, I doubt the individual waiters get the tips - though I guess even tipping in cash it might be pooled.
Not trolling, I'm trying to figure out what practical benefit Opera has for its users.
For me personally, for fairly normal browsing requirements on a 2004-vintage Windows PC:
IE7/8: far too slow. Takes about 5 seconds just to open a new blank tab.
Firefox: faster than IE, but still really struggles with lots of tabs are open. Especially annoying that if one tab is slow to load, it slows down everything.
Chrome: Much better performance than either of the above. However, seems to crash rather a lot, and seems to have a bug that means it intermittently does not respond to Windows' "Tile Windows Horizontally" / "Tile Windows Vertically" commands (right-click on the taskbar.) As I use this feature rather a lot, it is really annoying to have to reposition
Opera: Similar performance to Chrome, but doesn't crash and doesn't have the windowing bug.
So I use Opera as my normal browser, with IE or Firefox waiting in the wings if I find a site doesn't work nicely with it.
I managed to transfer some Acorn Electron tapes onto audio CDs once, and was also able to speed up the loading time by reducing the long "padding" beeps between the blocks (which I'm sure have a proper name..)
Oddly enough there was one tape that it just would not work with - though it loaded fine directly from the tape, so goodness knows what strange analogue copy protection had been implemented.
The Toyotas w/o the brake override system could be stopped if you were at slow speeds with a lot of effort on the brakes and emergency brake. At higher speeds, the breaks where not enough to stop the vehicle with only the brakes. They also tried turning the vehicles off which would stop the vehicle, but the driver had to manhandle the vehicle w/o benefit of power steering and power brakes.
Can power not be cut by putting the gearbox in neutral, thereby keeping the power steering and brakes working?
The real issue I have with the Google word processor is it does not seem to figure out page widths correctly, so when I come to print stuff, I find sometimes what should have just fitted onto one page / one line goes slightly onto two.
The last time I had this issue was when running MS Works 3.0 on Windows 3.1, so this problem ought to have been resolved by now!
PC World in the UK have recently been running some ads for some Dell laptops (IIRC) with Core Duo processors - the strapline goes something like "run multiple programs with the Intel Core Duo"... blah blah. My non-techie wife couldn't get over this - saying she's never seen a computer where you cannot run multiple programs.
It first came in with IE4's "Desktop Update" for Windows 95, which gave Win95 a sort-of halfway to Win98 look. Win98 was the first MS OS to integrate file browser and web browser without additional software.
I remember installing the IE4 desktop update on my 486/66 with 8Mb RAM, running original Win95a, and it made a BIG impact on performance - suddenly folder windows took 10 seconds to open instead of being nearly instant.
Interestingly, MS appeared to quietly drop it in later IE versions. If IE5 or 5.5 are installed on a clean Win95a, the "desktop update" is not offered as an installation option.
If the only way an electronic count will be trusted is by a paper audit trail, then presumably those paper printouts will still have to be counted by hand to verify that they get a result acceptably close to the result the computer gives. In which case, what have we gained in using computers to do the count?
If a manual count of the computer-printouts is not carried out, then how does a printed copy give me the voter any reassurance at all? It would reassure me that I'd not accidentally voted for the wrong person, but could not prove to me that my vote has been counted.
I can understand the argument that if the source code to the program is open then I could inspect it, but most voters are unlikely to have the expertise to do that.
About a year and a half ago we rented a small terrace house, at which we discovered the owner used to run a software company from.
We opened the cupboard under the stairs, and were greeted with more CAT5 than I've ever seen in a domestic dwelling in my life. Some of it was colour coded in some strange system using electrical tape, which must have made some sense to someone at some point, and lots of the connectors were connected some ancient-looking patch box, with the patchings between each plug hand-wired on the underside.
It took me some time to figure out what this was all about - the TELEPHONE extensions had also been wired up using CAT5, hence the strange patch box thing. So not only did I have to figure out which socket in which room they all went to (there were at least two network sockets per room), I also had to work out which one ended in a network socket and which one went to a phone. But even once I'd figured out where every phone and networks socket in the house went to in this cupboard, I'd still only identified approx 60% of the cables. So whether he'd wired up the loft, the basement, or had some wires going into the neighbouring buildings I never did find out.
In amongst all this, there was also about a dozen TV aerial co-axial leads going to different rooms of the house, also labelled using electrical tape which only made sense once I'd deciphered the network cables. Yet in spite of there being such a comprehensive system of aerial cabling throughout the house, the actual TV aerial on the roof was broken and incapable of receiving any TV channels at all.
After about a week of trial and error, I eventually wrote up my findings onto a couple of sides of paper, stuck them on the inside door of the cupboard, for the benefit of future tenants.
I find it amazing in my company how often I will send emails to get no response, retry several times over a few weeks, check the person hasn't left or gone on leave, and then send the email once more cc-ing someone important, and lo and behold, get a response within a matter of a few hours!
Slashdot Mirror
As an experiment, I recently tried setting Chrome to keep cookies only for each session (ie delete everything when I close the browser). So far I have not noticed any substantial difference to my browsing experience - all the sites I go to still seem to work normally. It seems like a good compromise - if cookies are disabled completely, lots of sites do not work properly, and do not report why they are not working, and maintaining a manual exception list is a pain.
I can only think of two individuals I personally know, who I could be confident would even know who Stallman even is...
Not just old OSes. It is quite normal for OSX updates to be in excess of 1Gb a piece.
Our 2006 Macbook had a battery replaced under Applecare cover in about 2009. The second battery is now more or less had it. Of course, it is now old enough that the Applecare has run out, and I suspect an Apple store would not be interested in doing anything with it even if I was paying, for such an old (sorry, "vintage") machine. But other than the battery it still works fine, and I suspect will do so for some time yet.
Fortunately this machine was from the time when batteries were user-replaceable.
For better or worse, I could see this being liked by the general public. At present, government sites all require you to have a "Government Gateway" username and password. The password strength requirements are understandably quite strict, but what is really annoying is the usernames are automatically generated and completely unmemorable (mine is something like F093KHV894JMNB - I made that up, but you get the idea). If it was a site I access every day then I might remember, but once a year for to do my tax return, no chance. They even almost admit they are unmemorable, because they used to issue credit-card-sized pieces of paper with the usernames printed on them (which I would usually lose...)
The procedure for requesting new login details also involves phoning a call centre and waiting for details to come in snail mail.
For all the privacy concerns, I can actually remember my Paypal login, so chances are I would use this feature rather than go through all this once a year. In fact it would probably be easier to request a paper tax return.
I personally think it is not that the technology of Ceefax has finished, it is more the content. Digital Terrestrial TV services in the UK also offer various text-based services in a much more modern interface, however, there is just not the same quantity of content that Ceefax carried. Ceefax was a bit like a condensed newspaper, whereas the current "Red button" services are more like just the front page of a newspaper. But then again, if you are receiving BBC digital transmissions you also have access to far more channels than when Ceefax was launched, including a 24-hour news channel, so maybe it is not necessary. But for me what is more telling is the BBC have not thought it necessary to completely migrate the Ceefax levels of content onto the digital "red button" services. There was nothing on there that nowadays could not be found on the internet, after all.
See my comment earlier. No licence is required to own a television (with any sort of tuner in it) so long as it is not used to receive broadcast television.
Which therefore makes the enforcement of it ridiculous. We do not have a licence, and just to avoid arguments with the TV licencing stazi, the only TV we have in the house is disconnected from the aerial, all the channel presets de-tuned, and wrapped up in a bag where it cannot be used. But if I did have a set for watching DVDs etc, how can they possibly tell whether I use it for live TV or not?
TV Licencing do go round with "TV detector" vans, but I genuinely have no idea whether they really can detect TVs in operation or if it is just a deterrent.
It would be a lot simpler if there were some kind of technical means to stop non-licenced households watching TV - ie encryption with an access card, PIN code or something. I do not really understand why this is not done.
It also seems madness that I can completely legally listen to ad-free BBC radio, which is funded from the TV licence as well.
A couple of weeks ago I bought an OSX Lion USB stick from Apple online. I was staggered when I received a large-ish (A4-sized) jiffy bag, which when I opened it, contained another jiffy bag, about half the size. Then I opened this up and found my USB stick, attached to a piece of pretty white cardboard with a plastic blister. Yet the USB stick itself is one of the smallest I have ever seen. I wondered if they cut down on this a bit, they could perhaps bring the GBP£55 price down a bit...
Good point, many thanks!
oh, but they do have that but it's a bit hidden and it's only available via Apps for hosted domains. (even free apps has it).
The way to set this up is to host your domain (or at least the mail receiving functions of it) with Google Apps and then you can set up the email service to accept wildcard emails, *@your-domain-hosted-on-google-apps_dot_anything.
Now whenever you give out an address just invent one on the spot @your domain and it will be valid. I do this and i got into the habit of throwing a date stamp and the name of whoever it is for into the email address itself so that if i start receiving spam for that address i know who leaked it and when they were assigned that address. Such an address usually looks like: mail-for-my-name-from-slashdot-org-20120524@example.com
And since my domain is set up at Gmail with a wildcard catch-all address, that will be routed to my actual mailbox (only if it passes Gmail spam filtering tests).
I do that, but it is limited in its usefulness because there is not a simple way of then killing off one of those addresses that you have made up on the spot. Eventually if spam to all these made up addresses becomes a problem, you have to turn off the catch-all address to stop the spam coming through. Which then means you have to actually set up another account or group in Google Apps each time you want an extra address, which is a lot less quick and easy.
The biggest problem is that in Europe, tipping is not expected or required. In the US, you can write the tip and walk away without the waitress watching you. If they go to table-top POS terminals like I saw in Canada, then you need to tip in front of your server. As an American, it was not very comfortable, although I suppose it is more profitable for the waitstaff.
In the UK many of the card terminals also allow the user to add a tip onto the amount deducted from the credit card, as the user enters their PIN. Particularly at chain restaurants, I doubt the individual waiters get the tips - though I guess even tipping in cash it might be pooled.
Not trolling, I'm trying to figure out what practical benefit Opera has for its users.
For me personally, for fairly normal browsing requirements on a 2004-vintage Windows PC:
IE7/8: far too slow. Takes about 5 seconds just to open a new blank tab.
Firefox: faster than IE, but still really struggles with lots of tabs are open. Especially annoying that if one tab is slow to load, it slows down everything.
Chrome: Much better performance than either of the above. However, seems to crash rather a lot, and seems to have a bug that means it intermittently does not respond to Windows' "Tile Windows Horizontally" / "Tile Windows Vertically" commands (right-click on the taskbar.) As I use this feature rather a lot, it is really annoying to have to reposition
Opera: Similar performance to Chrome, but doesn't crash and doesn't have the windowing bug.
So I use Opera as my normal browser, with IE or Firefox waiting in the wings if I find a site doesn't work nicely with it.
It did crash on the launch day! But seems to have been running well since.
I managed to transfer some Acorn Electron tapes onto audio CDs once, and was also able to speed up the loading time by reducing the long "padding" beeps between the blocks (which I'm sure have a proper name..)
Oddly enough there was one tape that it just would not work with - though it loaded fine directly from the tape, so goodness knows what strange analogue copy protection had been implemented.
The Toyotas w/o the brake override system could be stopped if you were at slow speeds with a lot of effort on the brakes and emergency brake. At higher speeds, the breaks where not enough to stop the vehicle with only the brakes. They also tried turning the vehicles off which would stop the vehicle, but the driver had to manhandle the vehicle w/o benefit of power steering and power brakes.
Can power not be cut by putting the gearbox in neutral, thereby keeping the power steering and brakes working?
The real issue I have with the Google word processor is it does not seem to figure out page widths correctly, so when I come to print stuff, I find sometimes what should have just fitted onto one page / one line goes slightly onto two.
The last time I had this issue was when running MS Works 3.0 on Windows 3.1, so this problem ought to have been resolved by now!
Please tell me I was not the only one who was expecting a railway signalling system....
PC World in the UK have recently been running some ads for some Dell laptops (IIRC) with Core Duo processors - the strapline goes something like "run multiple programs with the Intel Core Duo"... blah blah. My non-techie wife couldn't get over this - saying she's never seen a computer where you cannot run multiple programs.
I believe there are a handful of consumer routers out there that can also use their USB port as a printer server, which could be handy.
It first came in with IE4's "Desktop Update" for Windows 95, which gave Win95 a sort-of halfway to Win98 look. Win98 was the first MS OS to integrate file browser and web browser without additional software.
I remember installing the IE4 desktop update on my 486/66 with 8Mb RAM, running original Win95a, and it made a BIG impact on performance - suddenly folder windows took 10 seconds to open instead of being nearly instant.
Interestingly, MS appeared to quietly drop it in later IE versions. If IE5 or 5.5 are installed on a clean Win95a, the "desktop update" is not offered as an installation option.
Is this what you mean?
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/03/26/all_in_one_pc_cybernet/
As a naive Brit who's only ever voted on paper..
If the only way an electronic count will be trusted is by a paper audit trail, then presumably those paper printouts will still have to be counted by hand to verify that they get a result acceptably close to the result the computer gives. In which case, what have we gained in using computers to do the count?
If a manual count of the computer-printouts is not carried out, then how does a printed copy give me the voter any reassurance at all? It would reassure me that I'd not accidentally voted for the wrong person, but could not prove to me that my vote has been counted.
I can understand the argument that if the source code to the program is open then I could inspect it, but most voters are unlikely to have the expertise to do that.
Except in classic form, Office 95's default install location was c:\msoffice !
About a year and a half ago we rented a small terrace house, at which we discovered the owner used to run a software company from. We opened the cupboard under the stairs, and were greeted with more CAT5 than I've ever seen in a domestic dwelling in my life. Some of it was colour coded in some strange system using electrical tape, which must have made some sense to someone at some point, and lots of the connectors were connected some ancient-looking patch box, with the patchings between each plug hand-wired on the underside. It took me some time to figure out what this was all about - the TELEPHONE extensions had also been wired up using CAT5, hence the strange patch box thing. So not only did I have to figure out which socket in which room they all went to (there were at least two network sockets per room), I also had to work out which one ended in a network socket and which one went to a phone. But even once I'd figured out where every phone and networks socket in the house went to in this cupboard, I'd still only identified approx 60% of the cables. So whether he'd wired up the loft, the basement, or had some wires going into the neighbouring buildings I never did find out. In amongst all this, there was also about a dozen TV aerial co-axial leads going to different rooms of the house, also labelled using electrical tape which only made sense once I'd deciphered the network cables. Yet in spite of there being such a comprehensive system of aerial cabling throughout the house, the actual TV aerial on the roof was broken and incapable of receiving any TV channels at all. After about a week of trial and error, I eventually wrote up my findings onto a couple of sides of paper, stuck them on the inside door of the cupboard, for the benefit of future tenants.
I find it amazing in my company how often I will send emails to get no response, retry several times over a few weeks, check the person hasn't left or gone on leave, and then send the email once more cc-ing someone important, and lo and behold, get a response within a matter of a few hours!