Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle has an interesting post asking ‘if you have an obsolescence recovery plan for PC games?’ Thanks to emulators, games from 30 years ago can still be played on modern hardware. However he notes that: This unusually fortunate circumstance may not persist forever though. Technology will probably move on eventually to devices that are sufficiently different in form that even emulation is no longer feasible. Many are now predicting that mobile tablet computers will replace desktops and that closed architectures will prevail over the open general purpose architecture of current desktop PCs. Emulation may no Read More
Category: Opinion
The importance of being skeptical
Internet Explorer users have lower IQs than other browser users. It’s true. It must be. It was in all the papers, and on the BBC news website too, so it must be true. Except that it was a hoax. For many people however, that first ‘fact’ about ‘stupid IE users’ will remain long in the memory, regardless of the subsequent debunking. Get ready to correct ill-informed know-it-all’s at parties for years to come. The story ran that research had demonstrated that Internet Explorer users who completed an online IQ test were less intelligent than other browser users who completed the Read More
Bad IT day (the olympic ticket sale, PSN hack and optional alt tags)
Three IT stories came up earlier in the week that show how IT problems and decisions can adversely affect end-users – I’ve had a quick look at each in turn to understand the problems encountered and to try and learn lessons. The HTML spec making ‘alt tags’ on images optional for generated content The Olympics ticketing website overload at deadline day The PlayStation Network security breach and user data release
No Return – Facebook & StackExchange ‘break’ textarea expected behaviour
tl;dr Comments in Facebook and StackExchange sites now make enter submit the comment rather than enter a carriage return. In Facebook using shift-enter will force a carriage return. In StackExchange this will still be ignored as carriage returns aren’t rendered. Read on for full analysis of why these changes have been made and follow-on implications. So what’s the problem? Facebook and the StackExchange (SE) family of Q&A sites have both recently ‘broken’ the expected behaviour when typing in a textarea (a multi-line textbox). A notable feature of both sites is users commenting on questions or posts, entering their thoughts in Read More
Service disruption
The importance of data centre security and disaster recovery (DR) planning was highlighted following a recent incident at a Vodafone facility leading to a mobile network outage for customers in some regions for most of the day. The accepted version of events at the time of writing from Vodafone is that “We had a break in last night at one of our technical facilities which resulted in damage done to some of our equipment“. Disaster Recovery Reflecting on what happened brings a few interesting thoughts to wholesale jerseys mind. My first instinct was one of sympathy for Vodafone who didn’t Read More
Q: When is HTML5 not HTML5?
A: When it’s HTML. Confused? After the announcements of the last few days you have every right to be. I mentioned in my ‘about‘ page that I intended to write a series of posts looking at HTML5. To set the scene I had intended to start with a brief history of browsers and HTML implementations, working forward with detours into XHTML along the way before arriving at HTML5. Given the HTML5 publicity relating to the new logo, I think it’ll work better if I leap, Tarantino style, into the middle of the story, before a few flashbacks explaining the events Read More
Who owns your data? (Is the public cloud losing its silver lining?)
Who owns your data? A large part of the hype about Web 2.0 is about the ‘cloud’ i.e. allowing a 3rd party company to look after your data for you (e.g. Hotmail, Google Documents) and potentially add value by allowing you to connect socially with others (e.g. photos stored in Facebook or Flikr). Your data is always available to you, from any HaCk3D PC (or mobile device) no matter where you are in the world and you’re protected against losing your data if your PC has problems. This cloud is turning out to have a dark lining, brought to attention Read More