There's no chance. Apple knows best and you'll do it their way or not at all. It's baffling, though, because the Mac desktop layout in general is perfectly geared up for focus-follows-mouse, whereas somehow in Windows it seems that every app wants to be run fullscreen, no matter what resolution you're running at.
Hell, I'd be happy enough if they'd let you resize windows by anything other than the bottom right-hand corner, like every other window manager since twm. It's immensely annoying that you can't stretch a window in just one dimension, and that you have to dig out one corner to change it at all. What's their excuse for that one, other than "it's always been that way"?
I've spent since February redesigning the European website for a Very Large Car Manufacturer. I completely agree with you that car websites use far too much Flash. Our forthcoming effort uses it, but only to enhance what's on the page, it's never a requirement to have Flash installed to get to any part of the site. We've tried to avoid using it as much as possible, because as you say, most of the stuff that people use it for can be done just as well in plain old HTML.
And by the way, it's perfectly possible to make Flash content just as usable and accessible as anything else, it's just that it tends to be really badly implemented. For example, for a long time I was under the impression that you couldn't use your mouse scroll wheel in Flash apps. Actually you can, it's just that most Flash developers don't seem to know how to do it.
Oh, please. There's only one place I know of in Europe where I'd say you're "very likely to be mugged", and that's Barcelona. It's easily counteracted by walking around with your hands in your pockets.
As for your other "points", I won't dignify them with a response.
London's got a hell of a lot wrong with it - it's overpriced, overcrowded, dirty, and dysfunctional - but it's not unsafe, unless you do stupid things, and you could say that of any major city.
Think about this (by the way, I'm from the UK, so things are a bit different, but I suppose the pattern's the same). My parents got married and bought themselves a three-bedroom semi-detached house with gardens front and back in a fairly nice area of town. My dad was 22 and worked in a factory which built industrial machinery, my mother was 18 and a pretty lowly office admin type. We were never well-off when I was growing up, but we never really struggled either - we had a car, we went on holiday every year, and so on.
Go back a generation further and my grandparents had that modern British middle-class dream and mainstay of daytime TV, a little holiday cottage in the countryside. And they really weren't well-off - my grandmother was a cleaner, for goodness' sake.
I'm older now than my parents were when they got married, and in a pretty good job, and adjusted for inflation I'd bet I'm earning somewhere near twice as much as the two of them put together, and yet I couldn't dream of affording a house like the one they bought right after they got married. Hell, I can't even get together a deposit to buy a one-bedroom shithole.
And I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, quite a lot of mothers didn't work, and the father's wages were enough to support the whole family. Nowadays nobody seems to be able to afford to do this (although childcare's so astronomically expensive sometimes I think they'd have more money if mother stayed at home, to say nothing of the benefits it would bring for the children, but I digress).
And they call it progress.
So what if we're able to afford more gadgets, when we can't afford the fundamentals of a half-decent standard of living, even when we're ostensibly far more prosperous? It's all bread and circuses, distracting us from the fact that, actually, modern life is rubbish.
If you want my opinion, they're just another highly visible reminder that Big Brother is watching you. They disproportionately punish ordinary, decent people for minor infractions, thus keeping them in check, and make a disproportionately big show of going after the Real Bad Guys, i.e. terrorists, even though to all intents and purposes they don't exist. Meanwhile, if your car or house gets broken into, you'll have a hard time even getting the police to call round. Because in our tsrget-driven culture, why waste police hours on difficult crimes you're unlikely to solve when you could be issuing fines to people in pubs for being drunk?
You're quite right that they do a good job of making law-abiding people stay law-abiding. But pardon me for thinking we've bigger fish to fry.
Just by the way, the "disgraceful" level of fatalities on UK roads is lower than any other country in Europe. One's too many, obviously, but we do pretty well compared to our neighbours.
Nobody elected them, and you should be thankful for that, too. The police are meant to be operationally independent from both the government and the judiciary. They're an instrument of the people, not an instrument of the state. The government makes the laws, the judiciary apply the laws, and the police enforce the laws. All of them make their own minds up what this means. In theory, because the police don't have to go looking for votes, they should be acting entirely in the public interest. So if the government enacts a stupid law (such as, say, setting the speed limit too low), the police will not apply it particularly strictly because it doesn't really do anybody any good.
Unfortunately, the flip side of this is that the police like having as much power as they can get, and being unelected, don't have to worry about being unpopular. Sadly, the government, who do have to worry about their popularity, are all too willing to give them the power they seek, which is why we end up with purportedly counter-terrorism legislation which lets them bully anybody they don't like the look of, and speeding cameras in completely unecessary places.
Presumably because they're only making twenty of them, they're budget-bustingly expensive, and Lamborghini probably wouldn't be too keen on their car being used in a cheesy TV show.
But that's not the point. I encode my CDs to FLAC, I can re-encode to any lossy or lossless codec I like without any degradation in quality. So it's perfect for archiving music. Or, indeed, buying downloads that I'm going to want to keep indefinitely. I see MP3s and other lossless codecs as something transient, an equivalent of cassette tapes - all right to listen to, but you wouldn't want to keep them forever.
I don't know, but really, stick to DVB for audio, it's of a far higher quality than DAB, which to my ears sounds absolutely terrible, and if you end up transcoding it into another format for a portable player, it's just plain unlistenable.
Fuck the fishermen. They're a bunch of nasty, greedy idiots. These dumb bastards have been bleating for years about the fishing quotas that have been put in place to protect what little we have left, claiming they're overly stringent and are threatening their livelihoods, but don't seem to have considered that nothing will threaten their livelihood quite like there not being any fish. And sure as hell they'd wipe them out overnight if we let them.
Interestingly, they've changed tack this year. Knowing that nobody can really argue otherwise, they're claiming that North Sea cod stocks have bounced right back since the last round of restrictions, and the fish are abundant. Now, let's think, why would they say that?
Frankly, if windmills stop these goons raping the sea any further, I'm all for it.
So, Bill, how do you square this with your charitable foundation's efforts to give the Third World a hand up? Because it seems to me like, between this and the Classmate, you'd just like to keep them hooked on Microsoft products, just like you've done with the developed world for the last while. And of course, they'll never get any ownership of the software you'd like them to use, you just want to keep them sucking the Microsoft tit ad infinitum.
A good friend of mine's just been out in Nigeria, seeing how the OLPC initiative's going down and reporting on it for the BBC. He said that the effect it has had on the children is amazing - they've taken to them like ducks to water, and they're hugely proud of them because for most of them it's the most precious thing they own. However, getting Internet access out into rural Nigeria is astronomically expensive (at the minute, over $10,000 per month for a 56 kilobit satellite connection) and he thinks this will be a major stumbling block.
He was also taken to a school which has been kitted out by Intel as a showcase for the Classmate. He said it was stunning - Intel had pumped a fortune into it and the facilities were better than most schools in the UK. Teachers had interactive whiteboards, there was WiMAX everywhere and a superfast connection to the outside world, etc. etc. He was bowled over. And so were the politicians that Intel showed it to, with the result that 1,000 schools are signed up to take delivery of Classmates.
So yet again, we have an organisation trying to do The Right Thing being trampled by big corporations with deep pockets, who see places like Nigeria as nothing but "emerging markets" to be brought under their yoke as quickly as possible, and who aren't prepared to let upstarts like OLPC take their market away before it's established.
When they did this in the UK, I was working for one of the companies bidding (although I had nothing to do with it), and we all got totally addicted to watching the game unfold.
The four incumbent operators (at the time, it was Vodafone, BT, Orange, and One2One) weren't allowed to bid on the biggest slice, so you had a load of new faces slugging it out for that one. These companies were also allowed to bid for the other four slices, but basically the four incumbents couldn't afford not to secure a slice, so everybody knew that one way or another they would end up getting them, and it was just a question of how much they'd end up paying.
So there were two rounds of bids every day, with the game ending when nobody made a new move for two rounds. So it was a bit like musical chairs - you never knew when the music was going to stop and you had to make damn sure you were holding a slice of the bandwidth when it did. Incredibly tense.
And when it all finished, it became clear that Vodafone had been stung hard. As I said, there were four slices that the current operators were allowed to bid on, one of which was significantly bigger than the others. Now, Vodafone had the deepest pockets, this was known by all playing. So once it became clear that Vodafone had decided they were having the biggest slice, it seems that the other operators took it in turns to outbid each other for it, forcing Vodafone to go up and up. And then once they'd pushed the price up to nearly twice as much as all the other licences, suddenly they stopped bidding for the big slice and settled for the smaller ones, leaving Vodafone high and dry.
Anyway, it looks like the US process is something similar, so keep an eye on it, it's top entertainment.
This is no longer true. Actually, Flash is pretty good on accessibility these days. The problem is that for the most part, developers don't make use of it yet, for whatever reason. Some of us are doing our best to make things better - I've been redesigning the website for a certain very large car manufacturer which I can assure you will be fully compliant with WCAG 2.0 guidelines up to AA standard, Flash and all, as long as the developers build it the way we've designed it. But for the most part, I think you're in for a long wait for things to improve - I mean, how many Flash-based sites can you think of that even implement scrolling using a mouse wheel?
1) The amount of water lost through leaking pipes in London in one day is equivalent to what would come out of your hosepipe if you left it running for two hundred years;
2) Since privatisation, the water companies have been quietly selling off reservoirs for property developers to build houses on. Higher demand, lower supply. It's not hard to see where that leads.
They'd like you to think it's your fault. It isn't.
I'll tell you a good one. With Beryl, you can set windows to become progressively more transparent the longer you've gone without interacting with them. So the one you're using is solid, the one before is a bit transparent, the one before that is a bit more transparent, and so on. What this means is that as stuff gets less relevant, it literally fades into the background, so that your screen looks less cluttered and it's easier to concentrate on what's important right now.
Sounds a bit gimmicky, but I think it's really handy.
It does occur - it's just that it's not quite an "L" as English-speakers know it. It's somewhere between an "R" and an "L". This is the reason why Japanese people find it hard to distinguish between "R"s and "L"s in English - it's the same sound to them. Similarly, to an English speaker, an unaspirated "T", for example (such as in the word stone) has the same meaning as an aspirated "T" (such as in the word town), but in many other languages these would be two distinct sounds.
So you can transliterate it as either an "R" or an "L" and you'll be equally wrong in either case:)
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There's no chance. Apple knows best and you'll do it their way or not at all. It's baffling, though, because the Mac desktop layout in general is perfectly geared up for focus-follows-mouse, whereas somehow in Windows it seems that every app wants to be run fullscreen, no matter what resolution you're running at.
Hell, I'd be happy enough if they'd let you resize windows by anything other than the bottom right-hand corner, like every other window manager since twm. It's immensely annoying that you can't stretch a window in just one dimension, and that you have to dig out one corner to change it at all. What's their excuse for that one, other than "it's always been that way"?
I've spent since February redesigning the European website for a Very Large Car Manufacturer. I completely agree with you that car websites use far too much Flash. Our forthcoming effort uses it, but only to enhance what's on the page, it's never a requirement to have Flash installed to get to any part of the site. We've tried to avoid using it as much as possible, because as you say, most of the stuff that people use it for can be done just as well in plain old HTML.
And by the way, it's perfectly possible to make Flash content just as usable and accessible as anything else, it's just that it tends to be really badly implemented. For example, for a long time I was under the impression that you couldn't use your mouse scroll wheel in Flash apps. Actually you can, it's just that most Flash developers don't seem to know how to do it.
Rest assured some of us are trying to do better.
Oh, please. There's only one place I know of in Europe where I'd say you're "very likely to be mugged", and that's Barcelona. It's easily counteracted by walking around with your hands in your pockets.
As for your other "points", I won't dignify them with a response.
London's got a hell of a lot wrong with it - it's overpriced, overcrowded, dirty, and dysfunctional - but it's not unsafe, unless you do stupid things, and you could say that of any major city.
So we can afford more stuff. Great.
Think about this (by the way, I'm from the UK, so things are a bit different, but I suppose the pattern's the same). My parents got married and bought themselves a three-bedroom semi-detached house with gardens front and back in a fairly nice area of town. My dad was 22 and worked in a factory which built industrial machinery, my mother was 18 and a pretty lowly office admin type. We were never well-off when I was growing up, but we never really struggled either - we had a car, we went on holiday every year, and so on.
Go back a generation further and my grandparents had that modern British middle-class dream and mainstay of daytime TV, a little holiday cottage in the countryside. And they really weren't well-off - my grandmother was a cleaner, for goodness' sake.
I'm older now than my parents were when they got married, and in a pretty good job, and adjusted for inflation I'd bet I'm earning somewhere near twice as much as the two of them put together, and yet I couldn't dream of affording a house like the one they bought right after they got married. Hell, I can't even get together a deposit to buy a one-bedroom shithole.
And I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, quite a lot of mothers didn't work, and the father's wages were enough to support the whole family. Nowadays nobody seems to be able to afford to do this (although childcare's so astronomically expensive sometimes I think they'd have more money if mother stayed at home, to say nothing of the benefits it would bring for the children, but I digress).
And they call it progress.
So what if we're able to afford more gadgets, when we can't afford the fundamentals of a half-decent standard of living, even when we're ostensibly far more prosperous? It's all bread and circuses, distracting us from the fact that, actually, modern life is rubbish.
It's not quite London, but I know there's one in Kingston, if that's any good to you.
If you want my opinion, they're just another highly visible reminder that Big Brother is watching you. They disproportionately punish ordinary, decent people for minor infractions, thus keeping them in check, and make a disproportionately big show of going after the Real Bad Guys, i.e. terrorists, even though to all intents and purposes they don't exist. Meanwhile, if your car or house gets broken into, you'll have a hard time even getting the police to call round. Because in our tsrget-driven culture, why waste police hours on difficult crimes you're unlikely to solve when you could be issuing fines to people in pubs for being drunk?
You're quite right that they do a good job of making law-abiding people stay law-abiding. But pardon me for thinking we've bigger fish to fry.
Just by the way, the "disgraceful" level of fatalities on UK roads is lower than any other country in Europe. One's too many, obviously, but we do pretty well compared to our neighbours.
Nobody elected them, and you should be thankful for that, too. The police are meant to be operationally independent from both the government and the judiciary. They're an instrument of the people, not an instrument of the state. The government makes the laws, the judiciary apply the laws, and the police enforce the laws. All of them make their own minds up what this means. In theory, because the police don't have to go looking for votes, they should be acting entirely in the public interest. So if the government enacts a stupid law (such as, say, setting the speed limit too low), the police will not apply it particularly strictly because it doesn't really do anybody any good.
Unfortunately, the flip side of this is that the police like having as much power as they can get, and being unelected, don't have to worry about being unpopular. Sadly, the government, who do have to worry about their popularity, are all too willing to give them the power they seek, which is why we end up with purportedly counter-terrorism legislation which lets them bully anybody they don't like the look of, and speeding cameras in completely unecessary places.
Presumably because they're only making twenty of them, they're budget-bustingly expensive, and Lamborghini probably wouldn't be too keen on their car being used in a cheesy TV show.
But that's not the point. I encode my CDs to FLAC, I can re-encode to any lossy or lossless codec I like without any degradation in quality. So it's perfect for archiving music. Or, indeed, buying downloads that I'm going to want to keep indefinitely. I see MP3s and other lossless codecs as something transient, an equivalent of cassette tapes - all right to listen to, but you wouldn't want to keep them forever.
I don't know, but really, stick to DVB for audio, it's of a far higher quality than DAB, which to my ears sounds absolutely terrible, and if you end up transcoding it into another format for a portable player, it's just plain unlistenable.
Fuck the fishermen. They're a bunch of nasty, greedy idiots. These dumb bastards have been bleating for years about the fishing quotas that have been put in place to protect what little we have left, claiming they're overly stringent and are threatening their livelihoods, but don't seem to have considered that nothing will threaten their livelihood quite like there not being any fish. And sure as hell they'd wipe them out overnight if we let them.
Interestingly, they've changed tack this year. Knowing that nobody can really argue otherwise, they're claiming that North Sea cod stocks have bounced right back since the last round of restrictions, and the fish are abundant. Now, let's think, why would they say that?
Frankly, if windmills stop these goons raping the sea any further, I'm all for it.
So, Bill, how do you square this with your charitable foundation's efforts to give the Third World a hand up? Because it seems to me like, between this and the Classmate, you'd just like to keep them hooked on Microsoft products, just like you've done with the developed world for the last while. And of course, they'll never get any ownership of the software you'd like them to use, you just want to keep them sucking the Microsoft tit ad infinitum.
A good friend of mine's just been out in Nigeria, seeing how the OLPC initiative's going down and reporting on it for the BBC. He said that the effect it has had on the children is amazing - they've taken to them like ducks to water, and they're hugely proud of them because for most of them it's the most precious thing they own. However, getting Internet access out into rural Nigeria is astronomically expensive (at the minute, over $10,000 per month for a 56 kilobit satellite connection) and he thinks this will be a major stumbling block.
He was also taken to a school which has been kitted out by Intel as a showcase for the Classmate. He said it was stunning - Intel had pumped a fortune into it and the facilities were better than most schools in the UK. Teachers had interactive whiteboards, there was WiMAX everywhere and a superfast connection to the outside world, etc. etc. He was bowled over. And so were the politicians that Intel showed it to, with the result that 1,000 schools are signed up to take delivery of Classmates.
So yet again, we have an organisation trying to do The Right Thing being trampled by big corporations with deep pockets, who see places like Nigeria as nothing but "emerging markets" to be brought under their yoke as quickly as possible, and who aren't prepared to let upstarts like OLPC take their market away before it's established.
I really hope they keep Windows off this thing.
When they did this in the UK, I was working for one of the companies bidding (although I had nothing to do with it), and we all got totally addicted to watching the game unfold.
The four incumbent operators (at the time, it was Vodafone, BT, Orange, and One2One) weren't allowed to bid on the biggest slice, so you had a load of new faces slugging it out for that one. These companies were also allowed to bid for the other four slices, but basically the four incumbents couldn't afford not to secure a slice, so everybody knew that one way or another they would end up getting them, and it was just a question of how much they'd end up paying.
So there were two rounds of bids every day, with the game ending when nobody made a new move for two rounds. So it was a bit like musical chairs - you never knew when the music was going to stop and you had to make damn sure you were holding a slice of the bandwidth when it did. Incredibly tense.
And when it all finished, it became clear that Vodafone had been stung hard. As I said, there were four slices that the current operators were allowed to bid on, one of which was significantly bigger than the others. Now, Vodafone had the deepest pockets, this was known by all playing. So once it became clear that Vodafone had decided they were having the biggest slice, it seems that the other operators took it in turns to outbid each other for it, forcing Vodafone to go up and up. And then once they'd pushed the price up to nearly twice as much as all the other licences, suddenly they stopped bidding for the big slice and settled for the smaller ones, leaving Vodafone high and dry.
Anyway, it looks like the US process is something similar, so keep an eye on it, it's top entertainment.
I think you're thinking of the Duke of Westminster. He's stinking rich, for sure, but not in the same league as these boys.
Now, your Rothschild family - they are incalculably loaded.
Resign? He should be retiring to the drawing room with his service revolver.
So should Blair, but that's another story.
This is my Samsung Z5 music player. I bought it new for £125, you can get it for a fair bit less now.
This is the Bang & Olufsen Beosound 6. Looks kinda similar, doesn't it? That's because it's the same player with a bit of a facelift. It's yours for £400 if you're stupid enough.
Sometimes you do get what you pay for, it's true. But not if it's B&O.
Nobody who's ever been to Milton Keynes would say it wasn't a problem.
One of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen was Milton Keynes by the rear-view mirror.
This is no longer true. Actually, Flash is pretty good on accessibility these days. The problem is that for the most part, developers don't make use of it yet, for whatever reason. Some of us are doing our best to make things better - I've been redesigning the website for a certain very large car manufacturer which I can assure you will be fully compliant with WCAG 2.0 guidelines up to AA standard, Flash and all, as long as the developers build it the way we've designed it. But for the most part, I think you're in for a long wait for things to improve - I mean, how many Flash-based sites can you think of that even implement scrolling using a mouse wheel?
The BBC have been broadcasting on an open circuit for seventy years. Bit late trying to close it down now, isn't it?
Two things:
1) The amount of water lost through leaking pipes in London in one day is equivalent to what would come out of your hosepipe if you left it running for two hundred years;
2) Since privatisation, the water companies have been quietly selling off reservoirs for property developers to build houses on. Higher demand, lower supply. It's not hard to see where that leads.
They'd like you to think it's your fault. It isn't.
Ah, but they had slaves to do the work. You rightly gave all that up some time ago.
I'll tell you a good one. With Beryl, you can set windows to become progressively more transparent the longer you've gone without interacting with them. So the one you're using is solid, the one before is a bit transparent, the one before that is a bit more transparent, and so on. What this means is that as stuff gets less relevant, it literally fades into the background, so that your screen looks less cluttered and it's easier to concentrate on what's important right now.
Sounds a bit gimmicky, but I think it's really handy.
Yeah, what's the postage charge on that low UID?
It does occur - it's just that it's not quite an "L" as English-speakers know it. It's somewhere between an "R" and an "L". This is the reason why Japanese people find it hard to distinguish between "R"s and "L"s in English - it's the same sound to them. Similarly, to an English speaker, an unaspirated "T", for example (such as in the word stone) has the same meaning as an aspirated "T" (such as in the word town), but in many other languages these would be two distinct sounds.
:)
So you can transliterate it as either an "R" or an "L" and you'll be equally wrong in either case