inthewind

Excuse me if I state the obvious, but with something like a web page access, the meta data will be in part: your internet address, what time you accessed it, the referring url etc. A phone call's meta data could include the length of the call, which phone the call was made on, which mast was used etc.

Meta data is additional data about the data isn't it?

One assumes that you could then make telling deductions from that meta data. Like a persons movements (acquired from phone, financial and internet records). You can also draw a lot about their character: their interests, their political views, their cicles etc.

The meta data is very revealing in itself.

Backlit screens can still play havoc on my eyes, so for longer content, I just send it over to my eReader, to read later.

I prefer light on dark text - when I'm in a dark environment, and dark on light when I'm in a bright room. It also depends on the monitor. But each to their own.

The nice thing about taking the design into your own hands - is that you can bypass most of the author's styles - and then you can quit moaning. An author can't cater for all tastes.

Each browser has different ways to customise them, and it can be a bit of a fiddle, and sometimes you might end up breaking out into another browser to read something - but it _can_ be done.

Hacker news looks horrible to me without my styles applied. I strongly recommend taking control of your browser.

The post at least highlights that 'web design' is somewhat of a distraction.

There is so much (unnecessary?) labour involved in framing the content by posturing programmers (lost down some rabbit hole) and anal pixel pushers that you could easily forget that to many: the content is what matters.

Getting your head around HTML, publishing and hosting is still not that trivial. That's why people take to something like Facebook, or sharing photos via Instagram via their mobile phones.

That's not to detract from the beauty and the 'miracle' of web publishing.

I read it with my own style - so that it is just words.

A few issues I have with it, is the contrast, the bright background, and when you zoom in, the text isn't fluid so soon flys out the side of the browser.

And I have to restyle most of the articles that are linked from HN so I can read them too.

Any article of any length ends up on my eReader - which is particularly no frills but readable.

See also:

http://www.nature.com/news/simple-molecule-prevents-mole-rat...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22961694

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-mole-rat-prophecies/

(I guess it was clever of Flickr, to do something at least different, but the other web2.0 wannabe names feel like second rate copy cats.)

http://www.isracast.com/article.aspx?id=63

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cafe_Hon#.22Hon.22_as_a_tradema...

I should have said 'Great to see some checksums!'.

(I looked high and low for checksums for my Windows 8 download, and what I did find didn't match what I had. Gives you a little piece of mind after a 7hour download, and a crashed OS!)

This basically means that Microsoft will know exactly what you are playing, which machine you are playing it on, and when you are playing it. That combined with the connects camera is quite frightening.

The other point that I raised was that I suspect I'd loose my media centre upgrade - well I assume I would, which frightens me a little, as it was the main reason for grabbing Win 8 in the first place. But I digress.

You could spell out what a host OS is on a descriptive help text next to the form control.

Also noticed that there's no VMWare option under Linux - why would that be?

Plus the blue font isn't really dark enough to read.

Great to see some md5s though!

Another niggle, which I totally missed the first time is that if you select the wrong option navigate away from the page. And then use the back button - you are back to square one. Which is a good reason why this type of download page just doesn't really work.

Agree that it didn't help that it was a deep link.

(What I neglected to say, was that my first attempt failed also, in my 'reading' web browser. That eschews background images. But that's another issue. So I'd already repasted the link into a different browser before having further issues.)

I get the page now, I just had an issue when I first encountered it.

I actually think the second of my points was the more important - how do you trust the authenticity of the site?

The other thing that I failed to notice, was that this was actually a Microsoft site! Why not hang off of their domain name? How am I supposed to know this is official?

MS don't seem to have sorted the licensing model, to make it convenient with their OS, I have a copy of Windows 8, that I want to move from one machine to another at some point, and I'm sure it will be non-trivial. Not to mention that I'll loose Windows media centre most likely in the process. Even the install for Windows 8 for me was an incredibly convulted process at the time.

When DRM impinges upon usability, and convenience - it's just a complete pain in the backside.

I'm not following the sharing idea - can you share a title at no expense? Can you lend a title? That sounds great. Don't get me wrong, I'm up for a little added convenience - but as other's have said - downloading a few Gigs to play a game - is currently more difficult (and probably wasteful,) than just copying the game onto another medium and walking somewhere with it.

They really need to sort it out.

You've got more faith in the freedom of information than sadly I! Perhaps information will randomly go missing. Just like the spurious claim that the CCTV network was down on the London underground on 7/7 (really??)

Or you'll get it rebuffed under something like: ‘likely to prejudice the defence of the British Island’

http://peacenews.info/node/6840/remote-killing

Hot air from the Tories in 2010:

http://www.conservatives.com/News/News_stories/2010/04/~/med...

1. Never again be governed for years by a prime minister with no popular mandate. (Isn't that rather ironically exactly what we got!)

3. They'll expand on the freedom of information act.

7. They'll protect whistleblowers.

8. The right to data act, the public will have the right to appeal if public bodies refuse requests for data collected by the government.

When someone first described the idea of theming, as in something like CSS and HTML, I totally got it. Can't apps use a descriptive semantic language underneath and just have the OS skin most of it for you?

Swapping themes and making applications and the OS more accessible thereafter would surely be much easier. I know I'm simplifying things somewhat, but isn't this the next evolution in responsive design?

I'd find it someone hard to think that apple would eschew accessibility Perhaps high contrast mode will exist at the very least! Even Windows 8 has made a few inroads.

My experience of Windows mobile is Windows 8 on a tablet, and I had pretty much nothing but contempt for it. And failed to see anything stylish about it at all!

I want links/buttons/actions to stand out. That doesn't mean it has to look like a button. It could be text with a halo, a shadow, or an effect that comes into play as you begin to interact with the device so the controls jump out at you, or are overlayed or something. Don't just present raw text at me. Though having said that, I'm sure Apple will make it work, where others haven't.

iOS 6 looks pretty infantile by comparison, but the new screenshots and icons don't look that nice or that cohesive either.

(I was hoping that they might just drop the old school 'i' from iOS and just call it Apple mobile OS or something, it grates my ears and eyes, the name is like soo 1999.)

The thing that I notice from the stills is that the typeface appears quite weak. I had the same issue with Windows 8, my eyes just can't read it comfortably, I'm not sure why that is - and it looks more diluted now - and there is less contrast in general. Though perhaps it will look okay on a retina display.

Perhaps they don't like fiddling about on the command line, their IDE is too klunky, file managment is a pain, their version control interface is convulted, or they are not sitting at their computer with their codebase - who knows!

Either way they appear to find it easier that way.