Speaking as a British citizen, one with two small children (aged 7 and 8), my take is that my government is acting like a bunch of morons. They're allowing themselves to be led by the Daily Mail - a newspaper that has a long track record of spouting an ultra-conservative line that includes rabid xenophobia and plain and simple hatred of a significant proportion of the UK population. This move is not about making a rational choice, it's simply all about securing votes - the Daily Mail's readership are exclusively Conservative party voters, David Cameron's party.

I'm strongly against net filtering. Implementing mandatory filtering is the thin end of the wedge. It will not be long before there's complaints and campaigns by the likes of the Daily Mail complaining about inappropriate material that is not being filtered. How long will it be before Wikipedia gets banned? That site is packed full of very adult material that some will find objectionable. And what about the BBC News covering stories about pedophilia? And all the swearing in YouTube videos? Google searches can link through to objectionable material, complete with previews, so shouldn't that be banned too? Even without such encroachment into areas that rational people can see as being innocuous, filtering still ends up being a blunt weapon, filtering out sites that deal with issues such as contraception and abortion since they fall under the label of "sex". If kids can't do research into such things then the problems we have in this country of teenage pregnancy can only get worse.

As an example of such blunt filtering, I recently used a wifi network at a local church that had filtering enabled on their connection. They wanted to prevent childrens groups that met there from accessing things they deemed as being objectionable material. The end result was that almost every single link off of the church's own website was blocked. They saw the light after a few weeks and disabled the filtering.

If this move happens I will be opting out of the filtering. That in itself makes me nervous - some people will assume that because I've done that I must be a bad parent. That sadly is exactly the kind of false conclusion that an average Daily Mail reader will reach.

You know what tho?

The Episode 7 you just described - that's still better than any of episodes 1-3 that Lucas made.

It's not quite everything, exactly...

The BBC is running 26 different HD channels covering the games right now, 24 purely dedicated to the olympics (and another 24 simulcast in SD).

That's enough channels to let them cover every session of every event, and that's what they're doing. Of course many sessions have multiple athletes competing at the same time in different parts of the same arena, like badminton or gymnastics. With (usually) only one channel covering the session it's thus not quite everything.

Very nearly tho!

The BBC didn't ever use Silverlight.

That was ITV.

Unfortunately the BBC are now only covering half of the Formula 1 season live. Last weekend's race in Hungary, for instance, wasn't live on the BBC. Indeed, they couldn't even be bothered to put it on an HD channel, in spite of the fact that right now they're running 26 HD channels (24 specifically dedicated for Olympics coverage together with their 2 pre-existing HD channels - at the time of their race broadcasts there were probably 10 channels going free). The rest of the season is edited highlights on the Beeb - live only on Sky, a subscription satellite channel, part owned by Murdoch.

The BBC's live coverage of F1 is still good, but the evidence seems to indicate that they don't really care about the sport any more.

tvcatchup.com is clever and blocks access from various VPN networks it knows about.

Same applies to several other UK internet TV services, especially those run by broadcasters. The BBC are rare in not doing this.

I've just looked through a bunch of the games I've bought from Steam on my Mac.

Of the dozen or I looked at, only one of them was using cider, that being GTA Vice City.

Of the rest, one was using Mono, and the remainder were all first-class ports.

You are rather ignoring the fact that the author of the opinion piece has written a ton of open source code, released under a very permissive BSD-style license.

The guy is not against open source at all. Far from it. He's built a business on it.

I think you're being a bit optimistic.

Right now a very significant proportion of Android devices being sold, if not the majority, are still running Android 2.3.

It may well take until 2014 for the bulk of Android devices being sold to be running Jelly Bean or later. So the GP's estimate of 2017 for the majority of Android devices running Jelly Bean may be marginally pessimistic, but maybe only by a year.

Not exactly.

This post is about an opinion blog piece written by Matt Gemmell. He is not the creator of the crapware you're referring to.

The ARM chip inside the Wii is embedded in with the "Hollywood" GPU.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_system_software

I call FUD. 64-bit is only "what people are after" because of marketing. Nothing more or less. I mean, think about it, what really is the point of 64-bit?

64-bit integer maths isn't really a genuine requirement, and on the rare occasions it is needed the impact of performing 64-bit integer maths on a 32-bit CPU is not too immense. As for 64-bit floating-point maths, most ARM chips have come with this built-in for many years.

Then there's 64-bit addressing, which in reality is a myth, since no CPUs actually support 64-bit addressing. Nobody needs to access 16EiB of RAM, or will need to for several decades to come. I believe that x86-64 chips currently top out at 48-bit addressing, which is 256TiB. 32-bit ARM chips top out at 4GiB, which admittedly is starting to feel a little cramped and is arguably inadequate, but the Cortex-A15 introduced 40-bit addressing (1TiB) which addresses this concern.

The reality of "64-bit" for x86, and the performance advantages it has brought over IA32, has been that it's addressed deficiencies of Intel's old IA32 architecture. The main improvement derives from the addition of 8 new general purpose registers, bringing x86-64's tally to 16. ARM chips have always had 16 general purpose registers.

I'd argue that ARM have already designed cores that are capable of playing in the laptop space. Cortex-A15 MPCore seems up to the job to me.

If you're still not sold on my arguments that you don't really need 64-bit, ARMv8 was announced last November which is a 64-bit ARM instruction set. Applied Micro's X-Gene CPU is based on this.

Besides all of this, given that their business is designing cores rather than manufacturing it's not really down to ARM to push into the laptop space. It's down to their licensees to put ARM cores into laptop CPUs, and to manufacture them using processes that will allow those chips to run at clock speeds competitive with Intel and AMDs CPUs.

IMHO the use of vendor prefixes was the right thing to do, and remains exactly the right thing to do.

The problem instead is that the standardisation process is taking far too long.

2D transforms, 3D transforms, transitions and animations still aren't officially standardised. They've existed for years, and are now supported in all major browsers (if one includes IE10), and are all essentially compatible. There's mostly only been minor tweaks to them all since they first appeared. Yet these CSS3 features are all at "working draft" stage. Indeed, the 3D transforms spec is a working draft, dated March 2009, over 3 years ago. It's absurd.

The real solution should be instead to expedite the standardisation process. That way the vendor prefixes can vanish much faster.

Thing is though, there are so many software patents that developers usually will not know the approach they have taken was already patented. Developers don't spend their lives searching patent databases for solutions to their problems - if they did they'd be spending more time searching patent databases than writing code. So instead they just invent. They will re-think designs anyway as part of their normal software development process.

Give a dozen talented developers a complex problem, and it would not be surprising to see them come up with a dozen different solutions. If it's a problem that's been solved before then it wouldn't be surprising to find that most if not all of their solutions were covered by pre-existing patents.

I really don't think you get it. This is not about the "lulz", and it's not about making money. They haven't entered into this blindly, and they know it's unlikely to turn a profit on any reasonable timescale, even "playing the long game".

Ironically, given your sig line, I think the best piece of text to read to try to understand why they are undertaking this venture is (with one line removed) the following:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.