pablobm

Of course there's always ways around things, but browser vendors have to (unless in specific cases) cater for the general public who don't know about personalisation. These are the people who need safe defaults most.

As power users, we tend to ignore the power of default settings. Their values have to be chosen carefully because only a small part of the public are even aware of them.

Several commenters here seem to imply that they shouldn't be the ones personalising their browsers. Turns out it's the other way around: they are the ones who know how to personalise it, whereas defaults should be about users who don't know how to do it.

pablobm

12 anni fadiscuss

  > Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned.
  > As a user, I don't want to have to make this
  > distinction, and it's hard to imagine most
  > users-on-street wouldn't find this confusing

Although a UI problem, this is actually a privacy feature.

As you type into the search bar, autocomplete queries are sent to the search provider. This happens even if your intention was not to search, but just to enter URL manually.

In simpler terms: you are telling Google what sites you are visiting even when you don't use Google.

(AndrewDucker mentions this on this thread too, but his comment emphasises the UI aspect, whereas I think the privacy aspect needs to be stressed).

pablobm

12 anni fadiscuss

I saw a similar tee elsewhere, but I like that in this case the proceeds go to OpenSSL.

Also, the fact that a t-shirt can be made out of this supports Patrick McKenzie's article [1] yesterday, commenting on how this bug (or rather, its announcement) has been a case of successful marketing.

[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-teac...

pablobm

13 anni fadiscuss

GMail does a pretty good job at blocking trackers. However, this is not enough to prevent users from triggering the tracking themselves.

As gyardley says, there's the option to enable images. I rarely enable them, but sometimes I decide that I gain more from seeing them than from avoiding the tracking.

Another mechanism is links: clicking on one will get you tracked too. Normally, if there's something that catches my eye I look it up on Google instead of clicking on the link. But sometimes I either don't care or don't see a benefit to do it.

Now, the above is my behaviour, which is that of a paranoid, tech-savvy, power user who, for example, wasn't surprised in the slightest when the whole Edward Snowden story came about. Think of how a normal user will behave instead.

pablobm

13 anni fadiscuss

Whether that comma should or not be there is actually not universally agreed. This punctuation is known as "Serial comma"[1], and some style guides require its use.

On that sentence though, I think it's different. The first part of the sentence is long enough that the comma is welcome as a natural stop (and breather) before delivering the second half.

By the way: I'm not a native speaker either.

[1] Also better known as "Oxford comma": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma

pablobm

13 anni fadiscuss

I have had two similar experiences with my Amazon Kindle. (This is in the UK, in case it's relevant).

The first time, it broke. I called on a Tuesday at 6pm, they acknowledged the problem, and the day after I had a new one at 10am. I can't remember exactly how I returned the broken one, but I think I did it myself on the following days, to their freepost address.

The second time, I lost it. A couple of days later, they contacted me saying somebody had found it and called them. They shipped it back to me for free.

pablobm

13 anni fadiscuss

I don't know the specifics, but my understanding is that the seemingly random string of characters is a crypto signature.

If I'm not mistaken, it makes the site safe from Man In The Middle attacks.

pablobm

14 anni fadiscuss

As for the detector vans: does anyone know if they actually exist?

Several times in the past I have looked up information on them, and all I find seems to be in the realm of urban legend -slash- marketing ploy.

What is the physical principle behind this tech? Does anyone have reliable information?

pablobm

14 anni fadiscuss

I don't really know what direction the site will take, but I think you are missing the point there.

The FizzBuzz test might be very easy, but you are assuming that these challenges will be for people of your own skill level. Probably the site will want to cater for a wider audience, from beginner to advanced, and FizzBuzz provides a good starting point for both.

And anyway, we have all read enough about FizzBuzz to know that even "experienced" "professionals" can fail spectacularly at it.

pablobm

14 anni fadiscuss

One interesting fact: even though they are explicitly looking for Python devs, no actual Python experience is required. This is the second instance I see of something like this in London (the first being the company I work for, http://new-bamboo.co.uk).

It looks like there's a lack of experienced developers in London, or at least in some technologies. Therefore companies needs must resort to finding "generic" good programmers who can be trained.

Of course I don't have any statistically significant data, only anecdotal experience. However it does resonate with the difficulty that we have had finding Ruby devs at New Bamboo in the last few months.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? I wonder if there's the same lack of supply of PHP devs.

pablobm

14 anni fadiscuss

This resonates with a recent experience. I'm working on a project where the PO is very keen to add integration to all kinds of third party services. This is in order to speed up development and provide simple but flashy features that he'll be better able to sell.

However, normally have a problem: when he comes to me with links to these services, I have great difficulty to see exactly what they do, because all I can find is marketing jargon. Technical documentation is often buried deep within the guts of the site, and I have a hard time seeing if the service is actually worth integrating.

pablobm

15 anni fadiscuss

Is it me or did Nielsen add an update on top of the article when he was hired by Macromedia, or something like that?

The way I recall it, it said something along the lines of "OK, Flash is not very good, but now we are working to address the issues mentioned on this article". I checked in archive.org, but there are no copies of the page there.

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