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Comment Re:I'm not British (Score 1) 160

Fortunately the BBC also transmits DVB subtitling.
However, the typical cable company does not relay it to the clients yet.
Maybe this changes in the future?
Right now, I can enable subtitles on my satellite receiver, but not on Ziggo digital cable.
(on analogue cable you are probably out of luck - DVB subtitling cannot be converted to teletext)

Comment Re:If it ain't broken... (Score 1) 160

One of the alleged problems of teletekst is claimed to be that everything has to be in a 24x40 character frame,
of which in practice only 24x39 is usable, and of course all the standard headers and footers further subtract
from that to leave maybe 20x39 available for each news item.

But while that is limited space and the youngsters undoubtedly would want more space to express the content,
those youngsters invented twitter and use text messaging, with even shorter messages!

I think it actually is a strength of teletekst. The editors are forced to condense their items into very compact and
factual text. Of course this shows the capabilties of the editors, which makes the NOS Teletekst so much
better than the competition from RTL or worst: SBS.

Comment Re:Firefox (Score 1) 302

I don't know what filehippo is or why you refer to it, but SeaMonkey 2.13.1 has been released 2 weeks ago and is
as modern (and is supporting as many standards) as FireFox 16.0.1
The patches of FireFox quickly make it into SeaMoney, which shares large parts of its code (and of Thunderbird).
It even sends Firefox as part of its user agent string, just to satisfy those that know about Firefox and not about SeaMonkey.

Comment Re:Driving style above 8bit (Score 1) 283

You seem to presume an unchecked environment where operations just continue with ruined data.
However, in a more professional runtime environment such an integer overflow is causing an exception which can be handled in more or less successful ways.
One would assume that systems used to provide evidence in legal procedures have the facilities to protect them against using invalid data because of variable overflows etc.

Comment Re:Why is the burden on millions... (Score 2) 166

The way it is implemented here in the Netherlands is that cookies required for technical operation,
like login sessions, store baskets, user preferences are allowed but cookies used for other purposes,
like tracking site visits and controlling ad placement, are not. (unless allowed explicitly by the user)

What is required now is an extra field in the cookies that conveys cookie intent, and a setting screen
in the browser to allow/deny cookies with given intent (as a default).
So users can opt-out of tracking and still be able to login and shop without having to confirm their
cookie acceptance for every site.

Comment Re:Dumb laws are dumb. (Score 1) 166

Of course whitelisting cookies by site is useless. Many sites send different cookies, you want to block some of them but not all.
Blocking by name is difficult because there is no name convention.
When every session cookie would start with SESS and every tracking cookie with TRK, it would be easy.
Now that there is no such naming convention, and no tools in place to do anything with cookie names, it is probably best to add
another field to cookies, to convey cookie intent. Then users can allow or block cookies based on intent. They can allow
cookies used to keep a login session, and refuse cookies used to track users.

Comment Re: Moar (Score 4, Interesting) 292

Today's content providers seem to jump through every possible hoop to defeat caching.
You would think that a video provider would use some indirect URL to first log the access attempt and then point to a static location where the actual video is provided, and that can be cached locally, but no...
In a new deployment, including a caching proxy probably is a waste.
E.g. our existing proxy now has a byte-% hit ratio of 11%, falling all the time.

Comment Re:Unfortunately the replacement service is far wo (Score 1) 211

So what you are saying is that today's equipment manufacturers are not as capable as the guys in the past were.
Even with all the CPU power and memory they have available they are not able to code a decently performing system.
They probably have different priorities than a fast and slick result, today.

With a capable design team, it should be possible to design a well working digital broadcast news system, even today.

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