Posts by Jani-Matti Hätinen 10 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Sep 2011
Just buy another one on eBay while you still can.
I recently stocked up on used E71s and E72s (three of each). Didn't get the spare phones because they break, but because I keep losing the damn things. And in a year or so, even used ones will be almost impossible to find and I'm sure as hell not switching to a bloody touchscreen keyboard PoS with a 12 hour battery.
Levente Szileszky wrote:
"No offense but unless you are into some Mac-only (cr)application I am really not sure what kind of work you could do faster on a such an ass-backward GUI like OS X - I think Windows 7 is probably the fastest EVER generalist UI to get any work done.
And linux as a desktop... seriously?"
Ah yes. What horrors one must endure on the Linux desktop. Virtual desktops, middle-click paste, configurable fonts, configurable keyboard shortcuts, focus follows mouse, universal run&search dialog, multitudes of scripting options, an actually functional CLI, window management that doesn't completely break down after opening more that 2 windows, ssh and other remote protocols built into the system, session management that opens up all your applications on login so you can pick up exactly where you left off yesterday, and the list goes on.
It truly is a horrible environment for getting real work done.
Same with DB train ticket machines here in Germany. I always expect the print-out to say 'payment failed' or something similar, but instead find myself holding the ticket.
You can also pay for airline tickets online (well Air Berlin at least) by just entering the bank account information (number, account holder, bank code), all of which can be found on every single German debit card.
It really is mind-boggling.
I think the point of DNT as well as the W3C working group would be to establish what's considered to be ok among law-abiding service provides. Kinda like the EU legislation on data retention, which effectively caps the maximum cookie expiration to 2 years. So assuming that the working group gets something concrete hatched out, there's no question that EU directives and such will follow.
Doesn't help much with malicious service providers, but then again what does?
As for Opera and Google not backing the current version, they both sit on an insane pile of traffic log data and the technologies to gather more of it (Opera through Opera Turbo mainly on mobile devices and Google through well, everything I suppose) and they probably won't support any version of the spec which would classify their logs under the DNT protection.
"What's wrong with DNT? 8 bytes on each http request is probably as efficient as you're going to get"
Technically probably nothing at least on the protocol level. I would assume that the big question is what should fall under the DNT umbrella. Is it ok to include DNT users in your site-wide web analytics stats, or should it just apply to the massively cross-domain tracking methods that advertising networks, Facebook and Google use?
Then of course there's the question where to draw the line on hosted web analytics solutions such as pretty much all of the reasonably priced ones. Technically they can be used to track users across massive amounts of domains, but as far as the site owner is concerned they're simply used to analyse traffic within the site.
In my case I would (as I do now thanks to adblock) opt-in to web analytics tools because they're generally used to my benefit (as well as the site owner's of course) by improving the sites I visit. But on the other hand I'd opt-out of the massively spread tracking methods such as the Facebook "Like" buttons that you see everywhere, because that kind of tracking is absolutely useless to me (since I'm not a Facebook shareholder) and frankly more than worrying in terms of my privacy.
So if DNT is just a check box, should it work like my current setup, should it block all cross-site tracking methods or should it simply block all tracking including any server-side statistics that have a unique ID? And if you provide options in the DNT configuration what should those options be?
Then there's also the fact that the performance/watt trend of the last 5 years or so has once again resulted in PCs and laptops that actually last more than 3 years. (you know, like back in the good old 486 days)
During the Pentium 4 and Athlon XP era the power usage of the processor alone made sure that your motherboard (capacitors or memory controller) or your PSU would be dead in 2 to 4 years. Nowadays you can easily expect 5 to 8 years from both. Of course high-end GPUs still tend to die comparatively quickly, but the gamer market is too small to really affect the unit shipment figures (profit margins are a different story, of course).
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