Re: Let's hope LM get the accelerometer the right way up this time.

Most well designed non-low level industrial electrical or electro-mechanical components are designed so that they cannot be fitted in an incorrect orientation. It's always possible to stuff up the original drawings but with modern circuit software and simulations if the part is correctly described then incorrect orientation should be flagged up very quickly. Unfortunately I've come across a lot of custom parts that don't stick with this basic principle and have seen a lot of destroyed components as a result, and have done some of this destroying myself. :)

One off pieces of machinery like these probes are largely assembled by humans and designing from the ground up on the basis that the assembling human will insert parts incorrectly given the slightest opportunity to do so is the right way to design. Unfortunately I have come across "engineers" who when faced with parts that didn't fit in the orientation that they tried bent or removed pins to force the part to fit rather than rotate the component 180 degrees therefore you can't always protect yourself from idiots but I'd hope that the NASA team employed better assemblers than these.

Competition is definitely good.

Improvements to IDEs for Android are also good as well, and while Intel's development tools don't have the wide scale use of others, they are very competent in places.

Re: Planned for 90 days, still going after 9 years...

Sounds like most "temporary solutions"...

Re: Nokia was right

Where does it show that other Android mobile makers aren't making money? They may not be making as much as Samsung, down to volume of sales for the quantity and volume benefits, but they can still make money.

Re: Hang on...

Completely. But sanity has nothing to do with this, but every one of these 3.2% definitely, absolutely, cost the media industry $millions each. That's $millions in sales they'd never have got in the first place.

Not to justify it, just to quantify against some form of reality.

Re: Oh Dear

Look at the current world's top smartphone manufacturer...

Does this company produce phones for different OSes, hedging their bets? Yes. They might not have a wide range of devices but they do have a wide range of OSes, therefore keeping knowledge and skills they might otherwise have lost. It also keeps the suppliers on their toes as they know they need to continue improving.

Does this company somehow manage to promote their brand over the brand of the Operating System? Yes. The platform / Operating System is the enabler, not the crutch.

Now look at Nokia. They have one smartphone OS and they trumpet this as a sales ploy.

Re: If only there could be "Silvermont"-based netbooks

Wasn't it Intel that purposely hamstrung netbooks by restricting what was allowable when using it's chips and chipsets? They could have been good...

Re: Not exactly...

Agreed. They are leaps ahead of what they were before. It's no longer a case of "argh, integrated Intel chipset with obscure set of digits that'll take a day to track down" and now "that's not so bad, it works ok now".

They're not speed demons, but at least now they are perfectly adequate for the majority of computer users' needs. i.e. Using a computer in place of a typewriter and browsing the web a bit.

Re: Gartner

...and at the very least put a disclaimer on the article stating that it has been "sponsored" by XYZ vendor who happens to foist / sell BYOD management services.

Re: Ahhh I wondered why Flash had gone!

A few years ago I had the misfortune to have to deploy the entire Adobe suite to a small design studio of 12 people. That's 12 people, 8 pieces of software, each of which had a 24 (or so) digit key to type in.

To make the job much more interesting, Adobe didn't bother to indicate which of the 96 keys was to be entered into which product. That's right - all I was given was a list of 96 keys and a couple of these were upgrade keys.

I rang the fuckers up and explained, carefully, why pirating their shit is such a good idea compared to trying to do it legally.

Re: IP profits lawyers and extortion style law suits

I hate feeding trolls, but...

Trademark: Usually designated by the symbol: ^TM. Otherwise known in industry to really be an abbreviation for "Totally Meaningless". Now Registered Trade Mark, well that's something else entirely which is why it has a different symbol: ®. Registered Trade Marks are meaningful and are worth something.

I have the copyright on a very large number of works. In fact, until now(ish), it includes absolutely everything that I have produced for myself and not for somebody else.

Re: So. Jobs was wrong.

From what I know from discussions with real designers of products like it, the exposed antenna was a pretty bad design in the first place. While there's always a need to not shield an antenna by casing it in metal, exposing it was a way round this however this meant that it could be grounded by contact with the user's hands. The models that didn't suffer from reception problems appeared to have a good quality coating that covers and insulates the antenna, the models that didn't either didn't have this coating or it was poorly or patchily applied.

Re: The widespread belief that lithium-ion batteries don't suffer from “charge memory”

From reading the engineering rags relating to this kind of technology, the most damaging thing to do to these batteries is over charging. There is a very big difference between the cheaper and and the more expensive charging control circuits.

To reduce the risk of charge memory (aka tide marks) the majority of modern software controlled battery management systems have a charge threshold where they don't charge a battery when it's past (e.g.) 97% full unless it started below that point. This prevents the device from charging to 100%, running down to 99%, then charging to 100% and so on.

The other big problem is judging the scale of battery capacity itself. The tech and monitoring for this has is still improving all the time and in itself requires quite complicated management software to track the changes over time and even consider environmental factors in order to reliably produce an even close approximation of the real battery level.

Re: @Anon 12:10

But she didn't "cost the majority of miners their livelihood."

Take an industry that is bogged down by tradition, hamstrung by unions and deeply unprofitable... what do you have? You certainly don't have a viable industry. Despite the opinions of some of the rabid few, these businesses didn't exist solely for the benefit of providing jobs for those workers that, in between strikes, were employed in it. While I understand that there were some mines that were profitable at the time and were predicted to continue being for a reasonable period, most were not.

While there is an element of "greater good" in such infrastructure there are points when it makes no sense to prop up failing industries. It's never nice or pleasant for those involved at the actual working (end) level, but these are the realities of life and have been for hundreds of years. Whole industries have grown and disappeared in this country since even before the industrial revolution, many of them fighting tooth and nail, sporting dirty tricks including laws through friends in power, the whole lot, but eventually things change. The biggest problem is that areas were so entirely dependent on one industry that when the inevitable happened, it caused wholesale change in the area. These problems were predicted far before this time, mines only have finite resources and have run many times before, but with growing specialisation and dependency the risks were higher.

Re: WHAT!

Seeing those funky clones reminded me of all the adverts I used to see in the computer rags of the time, featuring replacement cases for the Spectrums and similar. Giving them hard keys, better angles, all the works really while largely just moving the internals from one case to another.

Re: 4G - what is the point...

Not just Scotland, try such 3G-forsaken places as the West Country. Often you're lucky to get a voice signal with 3, and as they do 3G or nothing (no 2G) you just don't get data down there in a lot of places.

It's improving steadily but it's still a pitiful service outside of main conurbations and towns.

Re: 10 billion light years between interactions? Sounds good enough to me

As I understand it this is referring to a photon hitting "something" (solid). The article is relating to the traversal of photons through vacuum space and their interactions with fundamental particles that "pop in and out of existence". It's sometimes easier to think of "vacuum" as a zero state much like the surface of boiling water - taken on a wide average it's flat, but as you get closer to the scale of the boiling there are peaks and troughs.

Re: Upsetting luvvies...

I like Stephen Fry, but that doesn't mean that I accept what he says on technical matters as correct. Sometimes it's said in a tongue in cheek way and is plainly for comedy value, others it seems that he's just bullshitting out of habit which is more worrying as people do believe him - but then this does separate the idiots from those that might question what is said.

However he does have a lot of very valid points and is entertaining as well, which ranks him above a lot of other entertainers and miles ahead of the vacuous reality show "stars".

That's usually down to the different fonts. Microsoft have invested heavily in producing optimal fonts for their shell and applications and this work pays off as the rendering of the fonts and the fonts themselves are designed to work together.

If you own a recent copy of Windows and run Linux (for instance, dual booting), then you should be able to copy the system display fonts from Windows to Linux, set the font preferences and see the difference these make for yourself.

Re: RS232 is still relevant

You always need some way to get access regardless of how successfully you manage to stuff things up. RS232 is especially useful when you knacker the TCP/IP stack or somehow mis-type the configuration or not-so carefully mis-type it's IP address.

Been there, done that, probably have a few medals somewhere. It's actually quite hard to permanently brick modern embedded systems.

Re: @Nissemus & MdB: : ((

Too true. To deny that life exists elsewhere, in whatever form, is to deny that life exists here.

There are very reasonable hypotheses that Mars once sheltered life but the planetary environment wasn't stable enough to support it as a lack of an atmosphere is usually considered bad for life so it didn't last long nor was likely to have developed much past "slime".

As for Intelligent Life: Well, we're no closer to finding any of that anywhere... :)

----

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown, and things seem hard

or tough.

and people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,

and you feel that you've had quite enouuuuuuuuugh...

Just

re-

member that your standing on a planet that's evolving,

and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour...

That's orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it's reckoned,

the sun that is the source of all our power.

The sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,

are moving at a million miles a day.

in an outer spiral-arm at forty thousand miles an hour

of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars,

it's a hundred thousand lightyears side to side.

It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand lightyears thick,

but out by us it's just three thousand lightyears wide.

We're thirty thousand lightyears from galactic central point,

we go 'round every two hundred million years.

And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions,

in this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,

in all of the directions it can whiz.

As fast as it can go, that's the speed of light you know;

twelve million miles a minute, that's the fastest speed there is.

So remember when your feeling very small and insecure,

how amazingly unlikely is your birth,

and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,

'cause there's bugger-all down here on earth!

Re: First C Compiler

A while ago I had to take over code from somebody who thought that compiler warnings and hints were just a nuisance and therefore turned them off. It took me weeks to get his damn code clear of access violations, accessing objects after deletion, invalid type casts, memory trampling, out of range errors and doubtless a few other nasties as well. This was before I had to deal with merging the operational code with the user interface, a complete non-understanding of threading, serial bus protocols and error handling and a testing side of the application that used entirely different paths of code to the live side.

On other projects I have come across a couple of genuine cases where the warnings did need to be turned off for a small section of code, as the compiler was producing an invalid warning and coding around the compiler just to remove a warning is not an entirely sensible technique. This requirement was clearly documented in the code, which at least excuses the practice for the small section of code that it was required for.

Re: Sounds good in theory, but...

I think it's very good that these things are being tried. Features like this have been thought about, written into SciFi and just plotted for quite a while. Actually implementing it is something different entirely, and only through trying can you work out just how well it works or doesn't.

This is similar to the eye tracking feature that prevents the S3 from sleeping when you're looking at it. It works quite well on most occasions, but by putting it out there on real, live devices the performance can be judged, tweaked and improved based on real life usage rather than lab tests with those who are used to it. This feature can be disabled as well, so I see no reason why this couldn't be either.

You're definitely not the only one that finds WP outstandingly ugly (fisher price, poor UI design, lousy repeatability and consistency). Which is a shame really, as some of the underlying concepts are quite good.

If they had actually put a good looking UI on the phone (a skin really), tidied up the inconsistencies, not foisted sodding Bing and Xbox Live everywhere you looked it would be a good phone OS (not that Apple or Google are angels on this regard either). Yes, there are crashes and odd things that happen, but as long as you get a good build quality phone then these don't happen too often so they appear to be more spurious hardware related issues than direct OS problems. There are fundamental holes in the OS functionality compared to other phone OSes, as have already been pointed out here, and unfortunately the locked down nature prevents most of them being resolved by 3rd party apps, but this is also true of some other phone OSes as well. While Android is pretty open, some things need the kernel to handle and not at the application layer and while you can install complete custom versions of Android, this is beyond most users.

Re: #1 Reason to Upgrade From XP

@404

Alternatively we could run software that wasn't so mind-numbingly bloated and inefficient that it doesn't need 3GB of RAM.

Re: IT?

I now have a picture in my mind of extremely heavy, electrically controlled breast implants. Thank you.

Re: It's best to target each UI

Very good and nice and simple example.

And it's exactly why there should be a clean separation between presentation and content as this simplifies this process. A bit, anyway!

Precisely. I've specced and fitted switches like these with small businesses such as design studios. They need fast communications but don't need to spend the earth on corporate carrier class switches and their maintenance contracts.