Posts by James
45 posts • joined Monday 29th October 2007 14:19 GMT
Engineering
is about solving problems. How many people do you see sharing a crossword puzzle or sudoku unless they're stuck? It's the nature of the beast to try fix it yourself, for several reasons
1) you don't know if you can do a task, or if you'll need help, until you start to tackle the problem hands on
2) you might not want to piss people off with stupid questions
3) you might feel you can tackle the problem on your own and let everyone else get on with their own job
4) it's a creative process, people work in ways which may not be compatible with other people's ways of working
Anyway, the people sampled for this study aren't likely engineers, but programmers.
There's a difference, engineers rarely get to write code.
Fantastic
You couldn't make this shit up.
Good luck
Eclipse's support for other languages makes it a clear winner in this space. See Carbide from Nokia which, while buggy/limited by eclipse, is making it the clear leader in Symbian and plain C/C++ development.
Free will always triumph over paid-for IDEs. Game Over.
Posted in Safe signals in Perl
What the hell
Signals in Perl! Why?
If some colleague handed me a Perl script that had all this shit in it, it would never be used.
Meter Readings
When is the last time EDF sent an meter reader out to your house? I've not seen one in the 4 years I've been living in the UK. I have to tell them my reading.
And there go my plans for a cannabis grow-op in my shed.
Speechless
Jacqui Smith is doing more to damage freedom than any misguided Muslim.
This woman needs to go, preferable along with the whole lot of them.
Christ
@Bob Merkin
At last, someone who seems to understand how difficult it is to preserve backwards compatibility.
MS is really good at this, I can still run a Win95 app on XP. I work on an OS and everything is about maintaining backwards compatibility. It's a big deal
When I see people complain about how long it takes for MS to release a patch it's clear these people haven't a clue about what's actually involved. Even buggy behaviour must be maintained if there are 3rd party apps that rely on it.
Look at Linux - people complain about driver interfaces changing among releases
Symbian has BC issues too that people whine about.
We're not dealing with PHP scripts here, people! I'm absolutely sure that OS programmers would love the freedom to fix everything they know is broken, but they'd lose their customers before long.
Posted in Video iPhone coming in June?
Why is this newsworthy
Seriously.
Phone records video! It's been done for years.
Posted in Mole talks up Palm Pré... 2
Ha ha ha
They either really stupid or the first one is riddled with bugs.
Whatever, looks like it'll be something to avoid for a while.
I went to Uni
And I'm glad I went. Not only did I start on a higher than my fellow non-3rd level employees, I have progressed up the software engineering ladder faster than them.
But then, some people are happy to have a job that involves formatting drives.
@Steve Foster
Would you include dodgy paint, dodgy milk additives and dodgy pet food in that list of nefarious elements?
I don't know if this is true or not, but I seem to remember a story about the Chinese govt including brute-force decryption chips in Chinese TVs to help them crack encryption. I'd love it to be true.
Seriously
Who cares?
It's a web browser.
I'd be pissed if I bought an OS that lacked a browser.
Posted in Motorola paranoid over Android box
the mobile division has bet its future on Android
Ha ha, what future would that be then? Third OS lucky.
Mine's a thief returning a RAZR
Posted in Nokia's profits dive 90 per cent
@moylan
I think it's compulsory for camera phones to make a noise when taking a picture. Too many pervs out there.
Posted in IPCC U-turn on Tomlinson CCTV
"many hours of viewing and detailed analysis"
Can they not just Fast-Forward to the time of the assault?
Paris' assault beings at 2:34.
bollocks article
not one mention of nokia or symbian which at&t is very involved in. But hey, let's just pick hype from old articles and call it news
IBM, the natural choice
Don't they have lots of experience for building databases of people, something to do with Jews in Germany?
Posted in Palm opens up, and goes back in time
Exposed!
I knew it, the platform's not ready. There is no reason why Palm would make their developers jump through an embarrassing hoop unless the platform was immature. Sounds to me like this Pre is a last-chance for Palm, I expect this phone to flop.
Palm stock is 46% owned by shorters, let's not forget that.
Posted in Nokia plotting Symbian laptops
@Ian Chard
Symbian was never really allowed advertise it's existence apart from a line in an About box in the phone software. This actually really frustrated some people there as customers keep thinking S60 IS Symbian OS. It's not.
@Bit Fiddler
UIQ is dead and has been incorporated into S60.
@What
I have a pair of CX300s and they're crap. The only failure here is them.
Posted in Apple iPhone police censor South Park
Meh
One reason/excuse for Apple's behaviour I can think of is that the US thinks the AppStore is some magical service that will revolutionise the smartphone world. Apple aren't the first to do this sort of store but they're probably the first to get it right. It will only be seen as successful if they manage to keep the useless crap away from it.
I don't like Apple or own an iPhone
Posted in Nokia comes clean as Ovi bombs
@What's Finnish for fail
Sportstracker is pretty good, as is Maps. They could do with some touch ups, but hey, they're beta app after all, and free.
Posted in Motorola swings axe again
Not a chance Moto
By being OS whores they seem to blame their lack of success on the underlying OS they choose. Of course it has nothing to do with Moto engineers themselves.
And their shit UI.
Bye-Bye Moto
Is everyone missing the point?
She tried to stick with Linux but it wasn't for her. She's no different from the 99% of humanity who really don't give a flying fuck what their OS is, as long as they get to check emails and save Word documents.
Linux is clearly not ready for the desktop.
And for the AC @ 03:16, just re-read what you wrote:
"So you just right-click and 'repair' in Windows, huh? And about 14% of the time it actually fixes the problem!
Really, Linux isn't that hard... you may have to search online for some answers if you don't know how to do something"
How can you go online if your internet connection isn't working??? This women isn't the only idiot around here
Posted in Apple patents map mobile future
Zzzzzzzzzzzzz
Someone in Apple has been playing with Nokia Maps and Nokia Sportstracker then.
I hope he got his patent-filing bonus.
Posted in Nvidia forecasts massive Q4 revenue drop
Unsurprising
Did they really expect people to upgrade their graphics card every three months for ever?
No shit
Dell has been planning the move for years, with the help of Accenture. It's true that the recession has nothing to do with it. I've commented here before about Dell managers buying property in Poland to rent to future Dell workers there.
As for degrees, Irish universities are too busy in training up people for what industry wanted last year. The number of grads who are capable of innovating is quite slim in my opinion, the majority just know what they think they need to get by for a few years, before realising that they're in the wrong job and moving on.
Ireland has gone back to the 1990's within 3 months
Electrical Grids
Are these vulnerable even if underground?
Oh Lord
The armchair coders are out in force. Wow, you guys must all be really shit-hot.
@Eddie Johnson: Microsoft's KB and MSDN are fantastic, I don't do Windows development any more but I wish the docs for what I do code for now were of the same quality. It definitely beats man-pages anyway
@DZJay and Tim Brown: Developers come and go, chances are this code was written years ago, by a developer who has left, before everybody did fancy UML diagrams (which are largely useless anyway with the exception of sequence diagrams). There is bad code everywhere... I know there is bad code is some frameworks I work with, but it's not that easy to just go fix stuff. Just ask your manager, and product owners and customers.
@Rotacyclic: You've never written software in a commercial environment have you? (and doing web pages doesn't count)
Posted in Microsoft staff cuts due next month?
@Its about time
It amazes me that you knew all this about MS, but they didn't themselves. You must be a genius.
It amazes me that you think you know what you're talking about
@Matt Bradley
That's really great Matt, don't take your *mobile* phone out of range of your home WiFi in case you get raped by roaming charges. Awesome
Slam slam slam
I hereby lay down a challenge to journalists to come up with a verb other than 'slam' to describe this type of article.
DNA - In your Face Jacqui!
I will enjoy my doob later this evening, oh boy!
Wacky-Jackie Smith
That's how her name is stored on my database, it can never be changed, not even with a stern letter. I'd love to see journalists misspell her name and refuse to correct it.
Posted in How Chrome puts the skids under Nokia
What do people use the menu for?
To see what the shortcuts are!
@Huh?
You can get the latest firmwares for almost any smartphone at service centres. Nokia now allow users to download new firmware and flash their phones from their PC at home. These all contain bugfixes and new features.
Paris flashes in public.
Oh no!
There was a man painting a picture of a street scene in Wimbledon Village last week. Just before the tennis started! I thought nothing of it at the time but now I'm tempted to report him to the police.
Paris: Because she likes a big SLR
@Jason Hall
You know you can turn off the check that only allows signed apps to be installed? Sure, some apps *must* be signed by the developer but most don't. Signing means that the app doesn't need to ask you if it needs to do something potentially risky, turning this off means that you will manually have to give the app permission to do the risky stuff each time it asks.
There is a manual.
the only conclusion... Nokia doesn't think Symbian is suitable for internet tablet devices"
Or, you can conclude that Nokia doesn't think Linux is suitable for mobile phones.
Dollars!
Who wants dollars these days? Pay me in sterling and I'll develop for your fantasy phone.
Posted in Europe grows more (and more) GM crops
Meh
Most of these GM crops end up in animal fodder, so I'm sure farmers will be delighted their cows are on low-fat high nutrient diets. Grass is so 20th century.
