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Comment: Re:Someone has to be looking for child porn (Score 1) 205

by Gadget_Guy (#46396477) Attached to: Child Porn Arrest For Cameron Aide Who Helped Plan UK Net Filters

But the police don't actually make the laws, so they don't need to do the research. And besides, the police have had plenty of drugs in their possession over the years, and they have actively sent officers out to buy drugs to gather evidence against dealers.

Now I don't know whether this is a case of downloading a few pictures to test the filtering system (or to work out how easy it was to do), or whether this was a large stockpile that went beyond any notion of research. But frankly, if anyone could possibly use the old "research" excuse it would have to be someone that actually had a need to do research.

And I say that as someone totally opposed to any form of widespread internet filtering.

Comment: Re:What do they expect it to say? (Score 1) 427

by Gadget_Guy (#46353965) Attached to: YouTube Ordered To Remove "Illegal" Copyright Blocking Notices

GEMA did not, meaning that it refused to license it's property to Youtube.

Did you miss the part in the they already had a license agreement, but that it ended because they Youtube didn't want to pay the price that GEMA was asking? From the article:

"In 2007 the entities reached a licensing agreement for YouTube to use works from GEMA's extensive repertoire. Two years later negotiations to extend that deal broke down when GEMA's long-term demand of around 0.12 Euro per stream was rejected by Google."

That doesn't sound like they were refusing to license its property; it just suggests that they wanted more money than Google was willing to spend.

Comment: Re:How compatible is it? (Score 1) 192

I think that it has enough description that you could take a stab at it, but if you don't want to worry about exactly how much extra spacing to use then don't implement the feature. This is not a core feature of the spec; it is a very rare bit of backwards compatibility for software that dates back two decades. I guarantee that nobody who complains about this tag possesses a document containing this feature.

If not knowing exactly how much white space to implement is going to be a major problem for you, then no standard office specification will be suitable. Look hard enough at any spec and you will find parts where they miss giving exact measurements. And if you don't do that, then the complaint will be that the specification is too verbose that it is unworkable.

And once again, it is amazing how seamlessly people can move from the argument that "there is no explanation" to "that explanation isn't good enough". It is just moving the goalposts.

Comment: Re:How compatible is it? (Score 3, Informative) 192

It is pretty uncalled for to claim zealotry when you are uncompromisingly demanding an absolute 100% accuracy with MS-Office documents before LibreOffice could be used.

There are plenty of businesses where pixel perfect accuracy is not required when sending documents outside the company. If people really need to read my documents with absolute accuracy, then I can PDF it. If I want to test a slideshow then I can use the Powerpoint viewer (it even works under Linux using Wine).

Even without changing the version of Word, a document's pagination can vary wildly depending on the printer driver being used. You don't even change your software for Word to go wrong.

Excel can be a problem if you use complex macros, but 99% of the ones that I see are just being used a glorified table editors with basic calculations. I constantly move between different computers, using Excel, Calc and even the shareware spreadsheet Spread32 (when I want to view something quickly) and it all works better than I had expected. The bigger problem that I have is when a package doesn't implement a feature that you are used to. For example, if I want to search for something spanning the sheets of a workbook I will always use Excel because LibreOffice disables the "Find All" button when you choose the option to span worksheets.

But even you there may end up being some problems, you should not dismiss the use of LibreOffice within any business environment just because you might have some formatting problem.

Comment: Re:How compatible is it? (Score 1) 192

Welcome to the world of document specifications. None of them really describe what you need to implement. Remember when people criticised Microsoft's ODF support because they implemented what the spec said rather than what OpenOffice actually used? (Fortunately the spec has been updated since then)

In the case of this tag, it is only going to be found in 18 year old documents that have been converted into XML format. I bet the number of times that it because the subject of complaint here on /. is way more than the number of documents that actually contain the tag. And then if you find the subset of the times where a few pixels different padding is actually noticed in those documents... well, I bet it has never happened.

But all this is moot, as the original claim was that AutospaceLikeWord95 was not publicly documented, where as it clearly does have an explanation - even if there may be room for improvement.

Comment: Re:9.1 (Score 4, Informative) 1009

by Gadget_Guy (#45944295) Attached to: Windows 9 Already? Apparently, Yes.

I think that a lot of people who love the Metro interface must have upgraded from XP to Windows 8, and so attribute improvements in previous versions of Windows to the Win8.

Power users should like metro better than the start menu. Once open, you just start typing and the app or file you intended to work with is ready to launch after about 3-4 letters typed. Its like a full screen graphical console.

That is not a Metro feature. It has been in all Windows since Vista (with the exception of the part where it takes up your entire screen). The difference was that Win8 split the results into files, apps and settings which then required more keystrokes (our mouse clicks) to get to the entry that you wanted. The 8.1 restored this functionality.

With metro the 5-6 applications that i use really frequently i can pin right in front of my face instead of digging through folders.

Whereas from Vista onwards, your 5-6 applications that you use frequently would be automatically shown on your start menu without having to pin them (although you do have that option too).

With 8.1 metro, my "start" area doesn't get bogged down with a bunch of bullshit just because I installed 1 new app - a BIG WIN in my book.

Once again, this is a Vista feature. Like Metro, you have to go into a different section to see the full start menu that we knew from the days of XP and earlier. But installing a new app will normally just add a single main icon to your start menu, and you click on "All Programs" to see the full group of icons. The difference with Windows 8 is that it is not obvious how to get to the full list of programs in Metro, although the 8.1 upgrade did give a small down arrow button to get to it.

Comment: Re:Current PCs are good enough. (Score 1) 564

by Gadget_Guy (#45924221) Attached to: PC Shipments In 2013 See the Worst Yearly Decline In History

I could be running a 2007-era Intel MBP right now and still use the latest OS version, binaries, etc. Let me read that to you in practical terms: I can be using the latest OS/apps on a 7-year-old Apple laptop.

When I wanted to first test Windows 8 without ruining any useful computer, I tried it on an 2006 Celeron-based desktop. It was a little slow to boot due to the old hard drive (which I later swapped with a SSD) but it worked surprisingly well. I hated the operating system, but I could not fault it for its ability to work with ancient hardware.

Given that this was a low-end computer in its day, I could easily see the latest Windows working on any mid-range computer from a year or two before that.

The one and only real issue I'd seen with Macs and obsolescence as per hardware? The switch from PPC (G4/5) to Intel, but evne that was smoothed over for a few years with fat binaries.

If the switch from PPC to Intel was the "one and only real issue" then why doesn't the latest OS work on all Intel-based Macs? The system requirements that you posted stops its supported platforms long after the switch to Intel. And even when you can upgrade your computer (for example, change the CPU to a 64bit version) then you still need to hack the platformsupport.plist file before the OS can be installed. This means that the supported models are baked into the installer rather than just letting it look for the features that it needs. At least the latest Windows can run slowly on old systems - it doesn't just refuse to work merely because of the age of the hardware.

Comment: Re:Windows XP still at 28.98% (Score 1) 470

Jobs like home video editing now that everyone, just about, has a HD video camera in their tablet or the phone in their pocket and an insatiable desire to put their cat's funny antics up on Youtube.

I still don't believe that the majority of people are doing video editing that requires more than 4GB RAM. It is a small proportion that upload videos to the Internet anyway, and of those that do I have seen way too many examples that desperately need editing but obviously haven't. It seems that most people just don't care to do these memory intensive edit jobs. They will dump the video to disk, maybe trim it a bit and then upload.

Even among the people who do need more memory - gamers - just over half have 4GB or less according to the Steam survey.


And nobody needs more than 640k of memory, right? That old quip always brought the house down as I recall...

Except Bill denies ever saying that. And I didn't say that nobody needed more than 4GB, but that the XP operating system didn't need more than 4GB.

More and more computing jobs do need more than 4GB of RAM or at least work a lot better if more than 4GB is available via a 64-bit OS.

Like what jobs? The majority of tasks performed on computers by the majority of people are things like the basic word processing, spreadsheets, databases, email, web etc. Most of the time, these activities do not need more than 4GB when using older (non-bloated) software. If you do actually need more than 4GB, then you would have already upgraded to 64bit Windows. But just because some people have found a use for more memory, it doesn't mean that the majority of people need it.

Comment: Re:Windows XP still at 28.98% (Score 2) 470

XP has a number of limitations that Win7 and Win8 supercede -- nearly all XP installs still running are the 32-bit version with a 4GB limit on RAM and a 2TB limit for disk volumes, and as far as I know XP doesn't support TRIM for SSDs. It also limits out at DX9, important for gamers and there are probably other limitations due to its age and end-of-support status.

You could turn that around by saying that XP just didn't need more than 4GB of RAM and 2TB hard disk space. And as for DX9, according to Steam's Hardware & Software Survey, XP use is at 6.35% so it appears that gamers have already figured out that they need to upgrade.

Obviously the people using XP now are still satisfied with the OS. It is a vicious circle that you need to upgrade to use more hardware (RAM/HD), when it is only because that you have upgraded your software that you need to access more hardware.

Comment: Re:OK, I finally had to look up "UX" (Score 1) 116

by Gadget_Guy (#45802513) Attached to: Winners and Losers In the World of Interfaces: 2013 In Review

You are right. For an article on the user experience, it really doesn't do much to help the user. Using terminology like UX was a bit silly, but even more so was the massive wall of text that actually told us nothing. For example, on the entire screenful of text about the Philips Hue Light Bulb, the only relevant text about the user interface (sorry, UX) was:

The only problem is that the app sucks...even the pigs in Angry Birds would not be caught dead with this app.

I came away from that article without much insight as to why these things are good or bad "user experiences". They say that a picture tells a thousand words, but in this case the graphic at the top of the article summarizing the product names was just as informative as the 5,000 words that followed.

Comment: Re:Disparities (Score 2) 135

by Gadget_Guy (#45766151) Attached to: Huge Pool of Ice-Free Water Discovered Under Greenland Ice

They are unable to predict the future though, and always have been.

That is a pretty unsupportable statement considering that the scientists are well aware of how much certainty their models have, and so give a large error range such that it was nearly impossible to get it wrong. Your claim that they all have been falsified by observations is a complete lie.

Comment: Re:Disparities (Score 0) 135

by Gadget_Guy (#45764467) Attached to: Huge Pool of Ice-Free Water Discovered Under Greenland Ice

If this slushy effect is real then update the model, recalculate the figures for the previous years data and see how accurate it is.
Don't waste everyone's time making predictions using a model that doesn't work on previous years data.

That is exactly how the models work; when new facts are found they plug that into their models and calibrate it against past data. They also compare the predictions against new measurements, and if there is a discrepancy then they try to figure out why - as was the case here. This is why the models are getting more accurate as the years go by.

Comment: Re:Technolog (Score 3, Interesting) 135

by Gadget_Guy (#45764435) Attached to: Huge Pool of Ice-Free Water Discovered Under Greenland Ice

Just another example of Man thinking he has everything figured out only to be made a fool of by nature.

Except Man doesn't think that he has everything figured out. This is even mentioned in the summary:

Other researchers believe this discovery may help explain disparities between projections of mass loss by climate models and observations from satellites.

Researchers knew that the models did not match what was happening and didn't know why. In fact, you can tell that they don't think that they know it all by seeing how they state their margins of error (which takes into account that there might be things that they don't know). Hell, even when they try to sound certain they can't quite bring themselves to stating things in terms of absolutes (hence the IPCC report saying that it was 95% certain that climate change was man made).

And think about it, if scientists came out and said that they had discovered everything that there was to know then they would be putting themselves out of a job.

Oh, so there you are!