Jamiecon

<flippant>But par for the course for a consumer entertainment products company</flippant>

In my blinkered world, Google and Facebook seem to be the companies to beat in the area of security for consumer services. 2-factor auth, proactive account security such as geographic checks etc.

I can see how Apple's corporate mindset would find it painful to sacrifice user experience for security. Google, not so much.

As an aside, it's about time Microsoft offered 2-factor auth for their accounts.

Appreciate you're possibly joking, but the problem is that it is not possible to support the entire world in this manner.

Assuming we all share the goal of a famine free world, with its people living lives of relative equality, then the excessive consumption of meat in the west is a problem which needs to be addressed.

As the parent suggests, treat high quality meat like the luxury it is, and enjoy other foods instead. It's better for you, and better for your fellow humans.

I see a future where lab grown meat, and meat substitutes make up the majority of our consumption, and hand-reared, high quality meat is saved for special occasions.

Absolutely wonderful. I have been looking for something like this for a long time.

You may want to consider contacting some of the London / tube bloggers for advice or assistance if you haven't already:

http://london-underground.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/3d-tube-map...

http://london-underground.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/3d-london-u...

http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/

I suspect they'd be delighted to assist.

Also good to know we have a TFL rep on HN (@mcdowall). Promise I'll go easy ;-)

He's a successful and no doubt intelligent person - I'm sure he's thought it through and taken advice. As a live entertainment fan I hope he succeeds - just adding my thoughts.

Collection at box office can be quite chaotic in volume and, in the UK at least, there are often license restrictions as to how many tickets can be issued that way.

Another common problem is that people buy on a parent or friend's card who doesn't attend, or that the card expires before the show and is discarded.

Retroactively cancelling tickets is a non-starter. Labour intensive and prone to embarrassing false positives.

There are two simple, proven ways to avoid ticket re-sale. The first is to use "print at home" tickets. People are unwilling to repurchase these as there is no guarantee that they won't be sold multiple times. The second is to use a registration system and personalised tickets, ideally with a photo provided by the customer.

I wish Louis CK every success, but operating a ticket agency is a complex business. Not just the ecommerce side (which is a nightmare in itself given the bursty nature of the traffic), but marketing, fulfilment, customer services, reissue and an understanding of local rules and regulations are all essential components.

I'm in the UK where the market is more fragmented (and competitive). I do understand the frustration with Ticketmaster in the US, but good ticket agencies can and do add value to the process - and leave the artist free to concentrate on their art.

I work for a (non-TM) ticket agency in the UK.

Based on the job adverts I keep seeing in London for mobile and Xbox developers at Skype (and some common sense), I think it's fair to say that Skype will be a first class citizen on WP (and Xbox) in the future.

Skype is fairly poor on WP7.x I agree, but it does the job for voice calls in the interim while Microsoft work on making the carriers into even dumber pipes than they are already.

I think it would be wise not to underestimate Microsoft's vision, even if they do seem a little chaotic at times.

I remember Digitiser, it was wonderful. I get the feeling that Ceefax / Teletext was perhaps a redoubt for those who wanted to avoid too much editorial.

And, another use for the reveal button: Bamboozle!

> This post is going to baffle a lot of US readers.

I must confess, this may have partially motivated my submission ;-)

I also loved the style the article was presented in.

Does anyone remember 'Bamboozle'?

This.

Only partially related, but I'm sick of people coming up with more, 'better' ways to communicate which are then embraced by a subset of my friends and colleagues. My email arrives on my phone, on my laptop, on my (and any) PC, in an easy to read, indexable, exportable and simple format, wherever I am in the world, in near real time. I have had the same email address for ~ 12 years and with Google's spam filter I get zero spam. I actively manage mailing list subscriptions and have no problems there either.

Seriously, for people asking where their jet pack is - take a step back and think about all of that.

It's infuriating for me that my friends choose to use Facebook, Twitter DMs, any number of 'groundbreaking' proprietary messaging apps and a million other message transports (don't get me started on iMessage). Email is a message, in text format (with optional binary attachments), between a number of people. Nothing more, nothing less.

The world has bigger problems to solve.

Normally I'm the person who makes this type of comment. I'm not a fan of resistance to change, or contrariness in general - especially the particularly annoying and overly dramatic Internet Blogger brands.

However for me the crucial missing feature is being able to view and comment on your friends' shared items within Reader.

I'm completely OK with Google requiring me to have a Google+ account, and see the sense in the merging of the two 'social networks'. I'm also fine with my shares appearing on Google+. I'm happy to configure a Circle to handle my shares.

But there's no way for me to read the items that my friends who are Google Reader users have shared _within_ Reader, as either individual or merged RSS feeds. This is something I used to be able to do, and now I can't - with no replacement.

That's why the backlash is justified in this case.

PS - Google you could make me happy just by having a 'Friends shared items' menu item which aggregates Google+ shares from Reader. That's all it would take.

I'll have fond memories of pressing 'Shift + S', C, and typing a message to a small group of mates for a while though. Those were the days!

Conveniently enough, this article has a helpful graph of the most common screen resolutions on Windows:

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/08/26/improvements-...

Yeah, when you put it like that I see your point. Publishing the password was a silly thing to do. But I can't get angry about the reporter being non-technical. Most people are non-technical. To me, it was the responsibility of Wikileaks to secure the information, and to guide the Guardian to do the same. It seems they failed in that respect which, given their record of disorganisation and technical failures, doesn't surprise me.

A minor nitpick, but the author also breathlessly describes how he realises he was one of the "few people in the world" to have access to this information, in spite of the whole reason it is available in the first place being the breadth of its distribution within the US military. It seems that no one can avoid getting drawn in to the Le Carré-esque intrigue and excitement that seems to infest this whole saga.

I believe that they also told the Guardian that the password was "time limited", whatever that means. There was probably some melodramatic chat about it self destructing in 10 seconds. I don't see The Guardian as being on the hook for this.

Agreed. And not only does the ribbon increase accessibility for novice users, it also encourages advanced use by displaying keyboard shortcuts to a wide variety of functions in an intuitive way.

I've watched, and enjoyed, Top Gear for a long time now, since before they introduced the new magazine format.

I saw this episode when it was broadcast and enjoyed the electric car segment. The programme is an entertainment show and part of that entertainment is that the presenters repeatedly experience various 'disasters' during their filming. I didn't take the various incidents involving range particularly seriously at the time.

When they were discussing the cars slightly more seriously back in the studio, they actually acknowledged the inevitability of electric cars and went over the ways in which the technology was improving. They also correctly pointed out that current technology limits the utility of the models available now, and discussed mitigation ideas such as battery exchange. To be honest I was surprised at the maturity of their analysis! Overall, based on what I know about this area from other sources, I would not consider the piece to have been misleading.

Someone has already pointed out that The Guardian is a fairly left leaning paper and this particular article is a comment piece. Personally I think it's a bit silly for people to get so indignant about something so insignificant. They're just having fun. They're not out to get anyone. I don't believe they have a vindictive agenda. The presenters play caricatures of themselves.

Chill the hell out!

Onerous labour rules restricting economic progress in Europe?

I for one am glad we've moved on.

We're using ASP.NET 4 and MVC 3 in production. New features in both made it very worthwhile to invest the time in conversion.

We are not using Razor yet, but it's feasible they are. Take a look at this: https://github.com/telerik/razor-converter

I would imagine that they calculated it would be cheaper to scale up their application servers and backend caching than pay for the development resource to facilitate this change.

AppFabric Server is closer to Memcached than Redis. However since their persistence layer is SQL Server, they could have used AppFabric in place of Redis.

I'm guessing they didn't want to use a technology that is so recently out of beta perhaps?

Only for terms that are worthless.

There are better ways to make what is a valid point. Only geeks can forgive legacy baggage, but inevitably whatever MS do OS-wise is a balancing act. There's nothing new here.

I think the questions are more revealing than the answers. Interesting stuff whichever way you look at it.

I hadn't actually read that Q&A - very interesting and a reasonable point in his answer to the figurehead question (although I would suggest that Wikileaks could simply lower its profile and become an anonymising conduit, thus negating the need for verified comms with the public at all).

Keeping with my 'The Matrix' / Philip K. Dick geek fantasy rant though, check out the last few sentences from his interview:

"History will win. The world will be elevated to a better place. Will we survive? That depends on you."

Love the drama!

No worries, I wasn't clear.

Am I just cynical, or does anyone else get the overall impression that this is a bunch of geeks running around fantasising that they're in 'The Matrix' or something. And doing it thanks to the efforts of a single confused 22 year old (Manning), who is now screwed.

Some of the material I've read so far is interesting. Very little surprises me. None shocks me.

There is no technological achievement here, either in the original leak, or the distribution of the material. If anything, I get the impression that Wikileaks is fairly inept.

I'm not really against the leak - I've enjoyed reading the material. One of the things (genuinely) that I've found fascinating is the quality of the writing - I wish some of the people I work with could write as well.

Irritating people do get to me though, and I'm beginning to lump Assange in with Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia, and Wikileaks both have larger than life, seemingly egocentric figureheads. Both services depend heavily on the efforts and religious-level fervour of other people who often do things for free or near-free.

Weird? I mean, if I ran a web site that distributed material which might get a governmental back up, I would probably keep a low profile.

Looking forward to some robust comments on my thoughts!

It's a fairly accurate summary of British University, for many anyway.

And yeah in the UK it's cheap. I graduated with about £15k of low interest debt, and my parents probably spent another £10k

The Telegraph is not a tabloid, in either spririt or actual form factor. In fact, it's the only British daily remaining that is available exclusively in broadsheet.