Discussions

5 hours ago, fanbaby wrote

@cheong:Very true. I have other examples, starting with C (with the bad hack of mapping \n to \r\n), ...

That wasn't a hack, nor was it bad: it was a perfectly compliant implementation of the C standard.

@spivonious: I had a chance to try the iPad Mini, and it's quite good for pretty much anything you would use the iPad for. Except it's a lot easier to carry around, which makes it a brilliant form factor.

If Acer got the same sweet spot in terms of size, this might be a good device.

@Bass: that's true, but I think this is more a matter of perception than privacy. The fact someone can take pictures on the sly doesn't make openly waving a camera any more socially acceptable.

39 minutes ago, cheong wrote

Maybe some day we'll see "No Google Glass allowed" sign on door of restrooms.

In case you missed it, someone already did and not just on restroom doors.

Might seem premature, but the problem is real. Aside of the obvious places, like restrooms and changing rooms, I can't think of public places where people would feel comfortable having someone pointing a camera at them.

2 hours ago, DeathBy​VisualStudio wrote

Gotta wonder how the folks in Oslo are taking this news?

I would think this was good news for Microsoft as an opportunity for those concerned to move away from the newly forming unknown.

According to the FAQ, Opera is also moving to the new rendering engine, so I guess they are pretty happy.

@figuerres: that's unfortunately the way things are. And we are just digging ourselves in a deeper hole by using (and abusing) old protocols in all sort of devices.

Mitigation is all we can hope for at the moment; for instance, I wonder if it wouldn't be a good thing to allow SMTP servers to reject messages unless they originate directly from one of the IP addresses of the sender's domain (something that is specifically forbidden in the current RFC). That alone would make the whole header spoofing business irrelevant and it would improve the effectiveness of blacklisting.

@felix9: ...and a seriously improved html5score, according to winbeta.org (320). Wonder what they added.

4 hours ago, elmer wrote

http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-blue-leaks

I'm guessing this won't be available for Win7

With a rumored release date just a few months away, limiting IE11 to Windows 8+ would mean confining it to a pretty small niche. I don't think that's going to happen.

8 minutes ago, GoddersUK wrote

@Blue Ink: Pah... the ISO can't tell me what to do!

@Sven Groot: You can't have little pictures in a date, silly!

Can it at least tell you to live in the right year?

26 minutes ago, GoddersUK wrote

@Ian2: The date today is 14.3.2012. No ifs. No buts.

No, it isn't.

10 hours ago, Craig_​Matthews wrote

*snip*

I think putting quotes around 'tablets' was really the way to go, actually. I think at this point, what we call these things is slightly a bit off anyway. We're trying to call something which does more than make phone calls a phone by throwing the word 'smart' in front of it to make 'smartphone' -- and calling anything bigger a tablet, but now we have the form factors meeting up somewhere in the middle around 5-7". It's really all the same thing now except for one little thing -- the one thing that's left, other than size (which IMO is meaningless now), that really distinguishes a "phone" from a "tablet" --- the appearance of a line item on your bill that says "voice." 

What happens when we're all using Skype/Facetime/VoIP for all of our calls? Moving toward that trend, at some point, when we're all using VoIP to make a regular calls, the one remaining vestige of "voice service" will probably be the ability to make a reliable and instantly traceable 911 call. It won't be called voice service anymore since we'll all be using VoIP for our calls, we'd only be using their "voice" service for emergency services. So it'll end up being called "emergency services" on our bill.

So at that point, will we distinguish between a "phone" and a "tablet" based on whether you can call 911 on it?

I think we should just call them all PDAs with different sizes for different purposes, small, medium, large, grande, venti, whatever.

Personally, I don't care about the items on my bill: I draw the line between devices I can use like a handset and devices that are too large for that. Devices in the first category are "phones" everything else isn't.

The reason why I think the distinction makes sense is that there are too many use cases where a "phone" is the best solution, either because of privacy, convenience or social acceptance. Just to make an example, video calling has been around for a long time now, and yet I don't think I've ever seen it used in the wild. Things may change in a generation or two, but for the time being there's still a place for devices that are mainly phones and can occasionally make do for other stuff.