Interesting Links for 22-1-2011

[andrewducker]

• Things Real People Don't Say About Advertising
  (tags: funny advertising marketing)
• Does email address obfuscation actually work? (with graph!)
  (tags: email spam html obfuscation)
• Apple putting tamper-proof screws on iPhone to stop you changing your own battery.
  (tags: iphone apple OhForFucksSake)
• Meteorologists identify cause of cold and warm periods during winter (like the recent cold snap)
  (tags: weather meteorology stratosphere winter)
• Daily Mail lying about a politician's expenses, to make them look bad. Can you guess which party?
  (tags: labour DailyMail uk)
• The quest for a reliable lie detector test
  (tags: brains psychology lying)
• ID cards to be scrapped at midnight tonight
  (tags: identity government uk)
• First impressions are general, further impressions are contextual
  (tags: psychology social relationships)

Comments

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Apple putting tamper-proof screws on iPhone to stop you changing your own battery.

Wow, that's moronic on so many levels. Not least, unless it's unlike every other mobile phone I've had, on the rare occasion when it crashes and freezes taking the battery out briefly is the only way to fix it, since most phones don't 'dry boot' the way you can a PC.

*Cue a bunch of mac users telling me their computers 'have never crashed ever' and nor therefore will Apple phones*

[andrewducker]

Considering the number of times I've seen people complaining about Macs on my friends list is pretty much as high as the amount I've seen them complaining about Windows...

(Also, I haven't had Windows crash on me in forever, have you? I think that stable Operating Systems are pretty much the norm.)

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Not often, no. But it does just happens sometimes. I mean, I've even had my work computer crash on me once. But then, that's once in, what, a year and a half now? My laptop here occasionally grinds to a halt, but I have a feeling that's more about being underrammed and nearly full harddrived.

Speaking of which, 2 1GB RAM sticks were literally just posted through my door. Must power down!

[andrewducker]

Is it faster and more awesome now?

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Well, 'awesome' is possibly overstating the matter, and FF still took ages to load up, but general windows processes seem to be running faster. We'll see whether I still get the 'running out of virtual memory' alert when I run FF and Potatoshop at the same time.

[andrewducker]

Two things make FF load faster for me. Firstly, cutting down on the number of addons it's loading (I found a bunch of stuff I never used), and installing BarTab, which stops it reloading all of the saved tabs on startup (they're still there, but dormant until you select them).

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I tend not to bother saving my session. Also I don't really have many add-ons, although looking at it now I appear to have like a bazillion versions of Java Console. Might remove all of them and then presumably I'll be prompted when it becomes necessary to add whichever is the right one.

[andrewducker]

Just disabled all of mine. Starting FF now takes less than 5 seconds (admittedly that was when it had been open, dunno how long a cold start would take).

[marrog.livejournal.com]

It was definitely a faster restart than usual but as you say, hard to say for sure if there's been an improvement until I've booted it from a restart.

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

How'd you find all these add-ons you never used and get rid of them? Possibly I should do that...

[andrewducker]

Tools->Addons. And then go down the list clicking "disable" or "uninstall".

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

Ah well, nevermind; I was wondering if there were other hidden ones I wasn't seeing, aside from the ones I've installed; but I only have about four and I do use them constantly, so c'est la vie.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

"stable Operating Systems are pretty much the norm"

As someone who has to use Red Hat at work, I'd just like to say:

Ha


Ha


Ha

[andrewducker]

I seriously don't remember the last time my home or work machines hung on me.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

My home machine (Debian) only has problems when I run hugely CPU-intensive stuff that's also labelled "super-unstable never use under any circumstances ever testing software" or some such. My work laptop (Fedora) sometimes refuses to come back after sleeping overnight and has to be hard-rebooted. My work desktop (Red Hat) has to be rebooted approximately every month or so, and has an unstable version of GNOME that crashes losing my session info every couple of weeks. It also makes Firefox crash literally every half an hour, but that seems a machine-specific issue.

BTW with the 'guess which party' thing - Bercow is non-partisan now, and before becoming speaker was a Tory (albeit a left-leaning one, with a right-wing Labour wife).

[andrewducker]

Which goes to show how much attention I was paying...

My laptop wakes up every time. My work desktop runs happily for as long as the company will let me (they force intermittent reboots, for reasons that escape me), and FF just works on it. My home desktop has been sleeping or hibernating at night for (probably) over a month now without problems without being rebooted. Windows 7 seems to be utterly stable for me.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

I think the problems I see are Red Hat/Fedora specific (haven't used Windows 7, and only used Vista for two days when my wife got a new laptop before we could install Ubuntu on it). All the other OSes I use regularly (Debian, Ubuntu, AIX, Solaris) are fine...

[andrewducker]

So, stability is a _mostly_ solved problem, except for Red Hat, who suck for some reason :->

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

For me (aka, "anecdote") I'd say XP was stable after SP2 came out, save for one or two exotic issues on my first-generation UMPC that were ironed out in SP3.

Windows 7 has always been rock-stable on my desktop, impressively so given that it's home built by a hack-amateur like me.

Win7 does flake out on my third(?)-generation UMPC but that's likely because the hardware was built around XP and then modified to run Win7 by a third party. It'd be much more stable if the OEM would release a proper Win7 driver for the touchscreen... but they don't seem to have much incentive to do so.

-- Steve can see how "roll-your-own" OSes will retain stability issues long after others have solved the problem; so much more variability in hardware and OS configurations to take into account, it's a much more complex problem.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - crashes nowadays largely seem to be driver-related. I'm most impressed that Windows can nowadays replace a graphics driver while it's running without the machine falling in a big heap.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

I managed to make Windows 7 BSOD. I was proud.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

As a counterpoint, in my experience, the literature available to Mac users and the help available through communities of the same is far, far superior to that available for Windows. Whilst I've managed to fix every single problem I've ever had with the Mac OS, I've still not been able to get Windows Backup on Windows 7 to work despite repeated attempts at it, Google searches for the error code and description of fault and pleas on a variety of LJ communities (as well as my own journal).

I think the majority of Apple users are very vocal about what they perceive to be weaknesses in Apple products. I regularly sound off about how useless Apple TV is, and I also really really want better notifications and a customisable dictionary in iOS 5, and before the MacBook Air was rendered much cheaper I also used to rant about how shite they were. When you're a consumer who expects Apple to bring out a product that's exactly right for you every time they hold a press conference, it can be easy to be underwhelmed sometimes. (Although I confess I want an iPad a little more every time I go into an Apple Store.)

[andrewducker]

Yeah - some of the MS error messages are _completely_ opaque. Particularly the ones on Windows Update, which tend to tell you fuck all.

[skington.livejournal.com]

iPhones reboot perfectly happily. Possibly because you can't remove the battery, so there had to be a way of completely resetting the device.

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

Exactly that happened to someone at work last week. She was complaining that no matter what she tried, she couldn't get her iPhone to respond. Battery out, battery back in, problem solved.

[snarlish.livejournal.com]

Having enjoyed the fact that any pub I walk into the bartender does not card me here in the UK, this scrapping of ID card is, apart from the reduction of retention time, the best UK government news I've heard in quite some time.

[andrewducker]

Yup. Definitely one of the things I've been happy about with the government.

Now, if they weren't fucking up the disability benefit I'd be a lot happier...

[supergee.livejournal.com]

It would seem that e-mail obfuscation is like locking your house: It keeps out the lazy predators.

[andrewducker]

Which might be worth doing, if you're less lazy than they are.

My email address is far too widely spread to worry about that though. 7400 hits for it on Google. But I use Gmail as my back-end for email, and it seems to catch the spam pretty effectively.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure why the iPhone thing is news. You can't get into the iMac or MacBook beyond Apple-authorised changes, you couldn't get into /any/ of the iPods and you can't get into any of the non-iPhone 4 model iPhones, nor (I believe) the iPad. So why is it news that a company that doesn't like people opening cases has come up with a way to stop people opening another case?

It's like saying "Newly elected Conservative MP comes out as being in favour of the free market" and pretending that that's some completely revelatory piece of shocking news.