Posts by Mark Pawelek

Apply more scrutiny than top scientific journals give article submissions

Is it some kind of coincidence that US politicos, EU and UK bureaucrats are all considering patent and copyright 'reforms' at this time?

1. We need to free up the patent offices so that they can use their revenue to pay competent people, who aren't rushed, to only grant patents for actual inventions. Ideally each patent should be examined by a committee of experts, in much the same way that top scientific journals examine each article before publication; but with far more scrutiny.

2. All patent applications should be open to scrutiny when an application is made so that the application can be challenged by interested parties.

3. Given 1 and 2, I feel that the likely hood of bad patents being awarded will be reduced from 99% to 0.001% so I'm not too worried about a review and challenge process for bad patents. Still, something needs to be in place just in case...

PS: Being a software developer, I'm amazed at the number of good developers/entrepreneurs I meet who brought successful new products to market and sold out at the earliest opportunity. It's not only the City who are risk averse in the UK - it's a culture right through society.

Single threaded event queue servers + html5 WebSockets rule!

We don't need no stinking threads to do multi-tasking. We have Node.js running in only one thread.

All these guys slagging off JavaScript need to wake up and start living in today's world. JavaScript is Turing complete and can be compiled rather than merely interpreted. The limitation to 1 thread is an advantage because it forces multitasking via an asynch event queue + callbacks; thereby saving masses of RAM and letting us scale to millions of 'processes' with ease.

JavaScript can do much of what Ruby and Python do. There are ways to overcome the natural lack of namespaces and the unfortunate default of global variables. Use objects to enforce namespacing and make variables local to functions - which are, of course, themseleves objects. I'm recommending Douglas Crockford's 'JavaScript - the Good Parts'.

Html5 WebSockets rule especially when I can simulate VoIP with them! Html5 WebSockets will revolutionise the web more so than Ajax. We will, at last, gain the illusion of client/server apps running in real time - on a single-threaded server!

We have the technology now. We just need to write the apps.

PS

'Event driven' is not dependent on multi-threading. We are not simplifying multi-threading here. We are abolishing it.

Moonlight - will trail Silverlight by 6 - 9 months

Scott Guthrie said that the open source version - Moonlight - will trail Silverlight by 6 - 9 months.

It must've been sabotage

The only way this can be explained is that someone working for McAfee must've sabotaged this update.

The change that a virus would have the same "fingerprint" as a system file is minimal and the chance that McAfee would just roll out the update without testing is tiny. That leaves only one logical explanation.

But they all use too much memory.

As I write, I have 5 Chrome tabs open. Task Manager shows that there are 7 copies of chrome.exe running using a total of 150 Mbytes.

Can someone explain to me why it needs to use 150 Mbyes of of memory to display 5 web pages which, probably total no more than 2 Mbytes (including all graphics).

Firefox has a similar problem except it doesn't make multiple copies of itself. Even after I've shut Firefox down there's often a 75Mbyte (or so) Firefox process running in the background.

Give Chrome its due, it's fast.

Installing Safari and opening up 5 tabs resulted in 1 Safari process running, but taking up 175 Mbytes.

So there's not much to choose between Safari and Chrome. Both take up too much memory, Both are faster than most other browsers at rendering.

TBH, it's not speed which worries me. It's the reckless way these thing eat up my memory.

Speed is mainly dependent upon how the websites have been programmed and deployed. The browser is just a bit part player in the speed stakes.

Google's GWT uses Java

[quote]

Google does an adequate job of keeping out the troublemakers by restricting App Engine to Java or Python.

[/quote]

Seems a bit arbitrary to me. Is there a coincidence here? GWT (Google web toolkit) relies on Java - that couldn't possibly have anything to do with Google's policy could it?

PS: As for PHP - why would anyone waste their time with that when they could be coding in GWT or RoR?

Humanity's inventiveness never ceases to amaze

I'm sure they'll take care not to sue anyone who implemented their "invention" before they filed for it.

Environmentally safe!

I bet it was one of those modern 'green' fridges. They're called Green because the refrigerants are supposed to be environmentally safe. By 'environmentally safe' they mean safe for mother earth - as in not a threat to global warming or the ozone layer. They don't mean environmentally safe for the poor bugger who has to use them. They will be using hydrocarbon gases as refrigerants, which, when mixed with air, are explosive.

Too long for a comedy piece.

I agree with David Whitney. It was rather too long for a comedy piece.

On the strength of what people have been saying about it, I'm giving GWT a long close look. If all goes well, I'll be able to ditch the technology I'm currently using then I'll be just another Java coder. Then I won't need to write (or read) another line of JavaScript ever again because GWT does that for me. Oh, and the Java-to-JavaScript translator really does work (so I'm told). I bet Verity has never bothered using GWT to write actual applications.

Fine them 20% of their pay for burning our money.

I agree with the comment about iterative development. If you're making IT software and not doing iterative development you should sack yourself for incompetence.

Amazing that these Fujitsu employees want bonuses for burning my money! - the cheek of it. They should all accept a 20% fine in wages - not a bonus.

Greatness is measured by how much RAM it uses up.

@Webster Phreaky: "Once Mozilla releases settle down a few months later and many "fixes", they are great"

Ha, ha, ha. A web browser (ver. 2.0.0.14) with a memory leak that, that the point of crashing, is taking up 550 Mb of RAM is "great". No thanks I'll risk using Safari instead.

They should stop developing version 3 and try, to get just one version of 2 to work properly.

What do you mean by the 'fight against cybercrime'

"criticism from sections of the security community who reckon the fight against cybercrime is not getting the resources it deserves"

- Did you mean the fight against child pornographers?

I wasn't aware that there had ever been a UK fight against any other form of "cybercrime"

The debate is not over

Matt Stephens wrote: Clear code conveys the "what" and the "how", but not the "why"

- But the point at which XP began was that essay, in 1992 by Jack Reeves: "What is Software Design?"

The conclusion XP came to was that the code was the design, and, of course, comments are not part of the code therefore comments are part of the original design - which is not the current design.

Users aren't going to dump IE6 just yet

Just write code which supports the 'standard' - by which I mean cross browser compliant code for IE6, IE7, FF, Safari and Opera. Is that really too hard?

In my experience the problem is web developers not bothering to read up on the 'standard'. OK, maybe not the people here but those in some of the mum & pop stores.

As for Opera, FF and Safari supposedly supporting W3C 'standards', do the really? Do they support XSLT 2.0 yet?

GM plants are the way forward.

By the way, chemists against bio-fuel are not new. Just read what was written in sci.chem many years ago.

Bio-fuel could be made to work. First we need to improve plant photosynthesis - it is, perhaps, them most inefficient natural process known. The problem is that enzyme: Rubisco - it only converts a few molecules of carbon dioxide per second. It should be easy to create GM plants that grow at about tens times the rate of current plants. A few billion £ invested will sort the problem out. The GM plants created (using a Rubisco substitute) should also be able to grow using far less water so the world's deserts could bloom. These bio-fuel plants could be planted in what is now desert.

Make UML into a programming language

Matt Stephens last suggestion is pure bull. However I like the idea of being able to code using graphical+text code rather than just pure text. But the CASE tool should actually produce a working program so UML diagram makers need to concentrate on that aspect - on turning UML into a full featured programming language; anything in-between is not really worth having.

The point at which these graphical tools turn into programming languages will be the point at which they take off.

Don't bother with using UML to document your work; use it as Agile programmers do.