considering that this is a wee bit of a non-story, we can rest assured that any sections on manipulating social marketing will be good.

Seeing as Bill Gates no longer works at Microsoft, I doubt they see eye-to-eye at all. Nor do they need to, or we to know whether or nether they are.

Now explained for the first time!

In fact, this could be seen as even worse for the environment than the current process. Seeing as we /are/ going to run out of oil/gas at some point, having a more efficient way of using them just increases the time before this occurs. The idea that these devices are more environmentally friendly is a false one, as they will have the same eventual net impact (having used the same amount of methane as would have been anyway). However, I'm sure that this incorrect idea is the impression the public will get, both from marketing and wishful thinking. This could lead to delayed development of genuinely green power sources as the public are fooled into thinking that they are no longer necessary, causing more damage in the long term.

Are excellent, though I have no idea how big they'll scale.

Their support is literally incredible: they replied to my question (before joining) within 7 minutes.

Also, see the article 'Finding The Best Web Site Hosts The Googalistic Way'---'s awesome.

A few days ago, most of us were still waiting to see if this story was in fact exaggerated and/or untrue: what about the school's side of the story?

But it appears that the initial impressions were correct: the school is in fact just scrabbling around for excuses ("It was a security feature, promise!"). This suggests that there was in fact no good reason or alternate story.

Which is good, because I can go and get properly angry now.

Slashdot swallowed my <table> tag.

Even worse, s!

It's 2010, and this was created by a company with $58bn revenue.

How on earth did this get past all the 'legal BS' (to quote AC below)? Accessibility?

This is true, but they won't just click on a random browser: they'll just close the ballot window and ignore the fact that it keeps popping up.

I see people every day open Internet Explorer and immediately close the 'please set up your browser' window, completely ignoring it and utterly oblivious to the fact that they could change that search bar at the top right ('oh, that's a search bar?') to something useful instead of Bing. When you tell them that they should probably just click through the extremely easy set of setup screens they look at you as if you're completely insane. I have also seen somebody installing FarCry on Vista, who, having ticked the DirectX9 box even though I told them not to, when presented with a message saying something along the lines of 'Um, you can't do that', had already ejected the disk and closed the installer by the time I could open my mouth.

This can be condensed into the first rule of interface design: people ignore everything you tell them, even if it is blindingly, patronisingly obvious. Yet, somehow, they still manage to click on adverts to install Zwinky.

Think you may have missed this one by some margin.

I signed up to the newsletter when this was first announced, thinking the thing would be out in about a month. The earliest email I received (entitled "It's the first ever LEGO Universe Newsletter!", fyi) dates from 6 September 2007.

Still, only out by 900 days. Better luck next time, ./.

I'm loving comment #115 on TFA:

This could lead to a fun photoshop content. I suck at it, but still: http://i944.photobucket.com/albums/ad288/mickmellen/lmsd.jpg

On one hand, I really hope Google want to give me ultrafast fibre access. I'm fed up with this rubbish 1.5mbit BT ASDL already. I mean, come on, it's 2010, we were supposed to have flying cars by now [and Terrafugia is only just getting somewhere]. It's not as if either BT or the current government (with their oh-so-ambitious plans of 2mbit for most people by some date in the distant future, and their other set of plans to remove anyone that large companies don't like from the net) are going to do anything vaguely intelligent.

On the other, I really hope they aren't partnered with the Tories, who annoy me. Intensely.

But still, compromises...

:/

!

I think the best solution would be a tablet that's specially designed to suit notetaking. Pen and paper is great because of its flexibility (as per article, ability to draw), and digital methods are good because the text can be retrieved as actual text later, rather than an image or a poor OCR.

So it seems that the ideal solution would be a capacitative touchscreen tablet with a deformable screen like the one that was rumoured to be a possibility for the iPad. i.e. where the screen can create raised and lowered areas to simulate, say, a keyboard. This is necessary because typing on glass, like I'm doing now on my iPod touch, is really annoying—one needs some kind of physical feedback to hit the keys accurately.

The reason for capacitivity (?) is that this would allow one to draw with a specially designed stylus: when I began to draw the screen would be able to detect my hand resting on the screen and ignore it, while the small point of the stylus would be recognised. Alternatively you could combine a resistive and capacitative touchscreen in the same way— capacitative sees your hand, resistive your hand and the stylus: the screen just draws the difference between the two.

The benefit of this setup is that it allows one to switch from typing (best for recording words) to drawing (best for drawng diagrams) without having to do anything but pick up the stylus: as soon as its presence was detected on the screen the keyboard would simply melt out of the way.

p.s. Feel free to make one of these and send me the prototype for free ;)

Unfortunately, the thread asking for Webkit in Steam at http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=861863 demonstrates how clueless the average gamer is about standards etc.

Some choice quotations:

"ie is fine"

"I'd rather not have steam bloated with redundant tech right now."

"Also W3C != Web Standards, and IE aren't the only ones not complying with the "standards", Firefox didn't comply with all W3C published recommendations either.(Don't know if that's still the case) [...] Microsoft is a business, and they don't want to take the blame because of a third parties inabillity to properly design websites. That is their design goal, and as the W3C isn't enforcable, as it's not considered a standard"

"It works, it is secure and it isn't that slow"

"IE is fine, and so was Windows 98."

"there is nothing wrong with the day-to-day performance of Trident."