Posts by Kristian Walsh

Re: Pure Genius @Graham dawson

"But why is HS2 so much more expensive than building the original railways in the 19th century, which connected up just about every village and hamlet?"

Those railways were very expensive for the people who invested in them... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania

I think if you include land acquisition costs into Musk's plan, the price advantage will shrink somewhat, but Musk's offer has a higher risk of overrun, or not working at all. Doing a proof of concept will help him get acceptance from people who are being asked to pay for it. Right now, you'd need to be insane to pour billions of taxpayers' money into an idea hasn't even been demonstrated as viable.

Re: @ I ain't Spartacus (let the flamewar begin)

Yup. There's no place in sausages for offal. (unless you're making something like leberwurst, of course)

"Cheap cuts" is not the same as "bad meat". Stews and pies use cheaper cuts with more fat, but a good pie needs those to come from good quality meat.

The fat in these cuts holds much of the flavour, so lean cuts like chicken breasts or fillet steak are bad pie candidates. And yet, many home cooks end up using these because supermarkets don't stock anything except lean cuts, and then get disappointed that their stews or pie-fillings are tasteless and rubbery.

Find a butcher. There's still a few of them about, and they're cheaper than you think.

(And I won't have a word said against vegetarian pies either: a good pie doesn't need meat, it just needs to taste good)

Re: 4 seconds?

Agree. Who thought that babies have such good motor skills that they'd be able to grip the sensor in the first place?

By the time a child can actually hold the thing reliably, they're old enough to shout for attention.

The most important function of a monitor is to detect if a baby stops moving, not to measure their temperature or heartrate, so you'll still need to shell out for a sleep monitor..

And as for measuring heart-rate in the first place, I'm reminded of George S. Patton's (paraphrased, and possibly apocryphal) quote: "just because you can measure something doesn't mean that it's worth a damn to know it"

"They still have to pay you for the time to do so, if you're an employee."

True, but in a development position, they're only paying for your time because they'll own the copyright on what you produce for them.

It's possible to make an argument that maintenance programmers don't fall into this rule, but you've then got to ask where the software to be maintained would have come from without copyright? ("Open Source" is the wrong answer, because that also depends on copyright to enforce the sharing of everyone's contributions)

Spike, Re: "greatest British comedian of all time "

"British enough to serve in the RA". Milligan was born in India, but his father's place of birth was in Ireland, then (1918) a part of the United Kingdom. The family moved to England in the 1920s, so as a British resident, he was conscripted into the British Army in 1939 and served for six years.

However, Milligan was never entitled to automatic British citizenship, and once India became an independent country, his automatic right to a British passport was cast into doubt, and he eventually became stateless. After a long, long battle around his refusal to swear the Oath of Allegiance (out of stubbornness, and the not unreasonable argument that six years service in the Army should count as prior proof of allegiance to the Crown), he exercised his right to Irish citizenship: Ireland's law gave him an automatic right to citizenship as the child of a British citizen born in Ireland before 1922, but British rules required him to have been born in the UK too.

Spike always considered himself Irish, but never lived in Ireland. However, his grave carries the Irish inscription "dúirt mé leat go raibh mé broite" ... "I told you I was ill" (the council refused to allow the English version)

Re: Fluff?

You don't need physical access to the laptop. All you need is access to the projector connector in the meeting room where its owner is going, and a small laminated card saying "Mac users: Sorry, but the projector doesn't hot-plug with Thunderbolt displays. You need to plug in the cable, then restart your laptop"

Re: As long as Bing searches Stack Exchange

The "Bing" name replaced Microsoft's previous search engine portals in 2009... a year after that post about Stack Exchange.

Joel is good, but he's not that good.

Re: One man's meat is another man's poison

A flame war is not harassment. Criticism is not harassment. This isn't a law against harsh words; it's a law against actions.

Forum arguments are not bullying: The forum posts are the record of the conversation, and the person being "abused" has the right of reply right there by posting a rebuttal. It's still free debate, even if it degenerates into abusive debate; also, reading the transcript, it will become clear who's being abusive, and who isn't, should the matter need to be taken further. Also, the ability to edit posts allows those people who type before thinking a chance to retract and apologise for their ill-judged remarks, and most forums are moderated to some extent.

This law isn't about someone making one or two nasty posts on a forum, it's about pre-meditiated, concerted actions to damage another person's career or reputation. "Cyber-Bullying" isn't someone getting annoyed because some other nerd thinks BSD is a better licence; it's someone nursing a grudge to the point where they're prepared to impersonate their opponent online, execute anonymous smear campaigns, spread malicious rumours and fabricate "evidence" for these. That, I hope you agree, is wrong, and should be a crime.

The reason for this consultation is this: while the current law makes running a smear campaign a crime, it does not explicitly mention the case where the instrument of that campaign is the Web.

The change in law is to make sure that if someone is accused of defaming or bullying online and there's sufficient evidence to bring a charge, that the wording of the law itself will not allow the offender to walk free on a technicality. ("But, Your Honour, when this law was drafted, publishing meant meant printing, and my client did nothing more than enter some text on a web server. My client had no idea that this information would be read by anyone")

There's no surveillance involved. If a complaint is made, the police will try to find evidence that will identify the suspect, just as in any other crime, but there's no suggestion at all of recording everything just in case.

People crying wolf? Well, this is a criminal offence we're speaking about, so offences must be reported in the first instance to the police. I don't know who'd go their local Garda station with a printout of a LKML thread where they've been called a clueless amoeba, but I'm pretty sure that if they did, the matter wouldn't go much further than the station desk.

The Dodge Dart is a very different car. It's wider, longer and --crucially-- much heavier than the Alfa, despite sharing its architecture.

Wait until Summer, when the 3-Series sized Alfa is to be launched: that will most definitely be sold in the USA. If you can't wait, well, there's always the 4C ;)

Re: @JDX (was: Yet another tens of millions of dollars of programmer-hours ...)

Any other text editor? Try SublimeText. Cost/benefit probably is in vim's favour, but it shows that there are alternatives.

As for IDEs, I keep hearing the "vim beats any IDE" argument, and then I see that the "project" put forward as proof is a gazillion lines of python, PHP, JavaScript or some other dynamically-typed language, where there's nothing that any tool could do to add value to the symbols in the source-code, because nothing is known until the code is executed.

I write my python and PHP projects in SublimeText; but for anything more than casual editing of my C++ and C# code, I'll end up turning to Qt Creator, Visual Studio or XCode. You'll notice I didn't mention Eclipse: that's intentional.

Re: No Doubt I Missed This...

Picture 1: Twitter Inc is trying to coax you into giving them access to your Outlook.com email account. (They want to find out which of your Twitter contacts are also known to you via email)

When you foolishly click "Yes", Twitter's server starts the process of obtaining an authentication token from Microsoft that it can later use to slurp your email info.

Picture 2: Microsoft is asking you to log in and prove that you are the owner of that outlook.com account. Once you do that, you will be asked to give permission for Twitter to grab your contact list.

There is no business connection between Microsoft and Twitter. If you had used a GMail account as your Twitter account's email account, then Picture 2 would show you the Google signin process instead.

Re: Prety cool demo

Diminishing returns set in once you get to the modern codecs, but there is not one of the sample images where the WebP image is of comparable quality. BPG is able to pull more detail out without the edge artefacts that mar the WebP images.

For example, on the Alfa Romeo 6C picture, http://xooyoozoo.github.io/yolo-octo-bugfixes/#vintage-car&webp=s&bpg=s , the BPG image allows you to see that the maker's badge reads "ALFA ROMEO MILANO", while the WebP image has obscured the word "ROMEO" entirely. (WebP doesn't have the horizontal green ripple below the top of the car grille, but that's the only noticeable difference).

At the other side of the frequency spectrum, BPG also excels is in its treatment of gradients and out-of-focus image areas, which is the weakest part of JPEG's block-based coder.

In fairness to the JPEG committee, they were primarily working to solve the problems of the photographic printing industry within the computational constraints of the late 1980s - the longevity of JPEG JFIF is a testament to how good a job they did.

Re: MS has it's data between a rock and ...

For whatever it has to do with this, LexisNexis is not US-owned, but part of the UK/Dutch publishing conglomerate Reed Elsevier, and has been for the last twenty years.

Incidentally, a credit bureau (or credit ratings agency) does not "decide how much credit you get", any more than TripAdvisor, Inc. decides whether a particular hotel is good or bad. They ratings agency only reflects the experiences of those companies who have either lent you money or sold you goods and services on credit in the past.

Re: The magic of silence

In the same spirit, on iOS phones, you can use the settings under "Settings > Notifications > Do Not Disturb".

Similarly, for Windows Phones that have Cortana, look under "Settings > quiet hours".

Both of these are time-based (WinPhone's version can also activate based on your calendar appointments) but time-based switching is usually good enough to guarantee some time away from callers. Both also allow selected callers to bypass the block.

Re: Nice try

" If the original 500 had an engine of only 479 cc what does that say about the 1.4 or 1.7 litre engines of the new car?"

The FIAT 500 and 500C models are available with an 875cc two-cylinder engine (but producing 85 or 105 bhp, because time has moved on since 1957), and it suits the car very well.

To my mind, FIAT's revival of the 500 is the best relaunch of a historic model by a manufacturer (and to be clear I'm talking about the 2007 model, not the X or L, which are different members of a family of models). BMW's MINI was always much bigger than BMC's original Mini: the original car was what we'd now call a City Car (A segment), but the relaunched model was a "supermini" (B Segment). The new one takes this enlargement even further to almost be a "Small hatchback" (C Segment). And I'd rather not think about the Countryman or Paceman.

"The new cars are not in the same class as the originals"

FIAT has at least kept their 500 in the same size category as its original: a city car. The fact that it's bigger than the 1957 car is more to do with 50 years of crash protection regulations and raised customer expectations regarding cabin noise and comfort, than any desire to bloat the model.

(Incidentally, the 2001 BMW MINI and the 2007 FIAT 500 share the same designer: Frank Stephenson, who now heads design at McLaren. Stephenson left BMW long before the MINI facelift that ended up looking like a Chinese car maker's knock-off of the first one)

As someone who proudly owns an original Mini, I'm sure you understand the idea of owning a car because it has character, even if it might be more expensive and less practical than the alternatives.

If you want the "car as a cheap utility" side of the old 500, FIAT will sell you its descendent: the Panda, a superbly useful and reliable car at an affordable price. The 2007 500 isn't that, and can't be that, because what customers want from a "utilitarian car" are so much higher now: hence the Panda's boxy space-maximising shape. The new 500 model was about recapturing the emotional bond that people had with the old 500 - and with the aforementioned twin-cylinder engine, it's got a lot of that same fun to it.

The 500 L and this X are not relaunches of any old model (although you might make a case for the 500L being a spiritual successor to the 600 Multipla, but it looks completely different). These two new cars are more closely related to each other than to the 500, both mechanically and in terms of size. "500" is now a sub-brand covering what you might call the "want" cars (heat over head); the FIAT brand will deal with the "need" cars (head over heart) like Panda, Punto, etc.

Re: Random TV question: 'juddering' in fast pans

My own thought is that, now that cinema presentation is mostly digital, there's no need to stick with the same frame-rate all through the feature. Certain types of action, particularly close combat, would definitely benefit from a higher frame rate, but that doesn't mean that the rest of the feature should be similarly high-rate. (Cinema projectors project each 24fps frame multiple times as it is, because this minimises the perception of flickering)

I just wonder if it's possible to do this change of display-rate in a way that won't provoke jarring changes in a viewer's perception.

Feel free to swap your IT industry salary for the matching percentile on the scale of what songwriters earn.

I definitely wouldn't.

Re: ...Yeah, but Steve Jobs Learned An Important Lesson

Just to clarify: I wasn't working at Apple in the Jobs/Scully era, and I wasn't in California - I'm too young and too Irish for that. All of those stories are other people's, and you can read them at the folklore.org site if you've an interest in the PC boom times of the 1980s or Apple in particular.

I did experience the slow death-spiral of Apple of the 1990s, the return of Steve Jobs, and the effect that it had on the company, and in my particular case, the in-sourcing of all tech jobs to Cupertino that resulted in what a friend had already described as "being made offer I could most definitely refuse".

I'd also note that the Apple that was dying on its feet was actually a fun place to work; and unlike today's industry-dominating behemoth, when you went home after work, you weren't still at the beck and call of sleep-deprived stress junkie in Cupertino who's forgotten what timezones are.

Re: Was that so hard?

"stupidity and laziness on the typical end users part"

There is such a thing as user stupidity, but it's very rare. Mostly, problems are down to developer stupidity in assuming that everyone who will ever use your software actually gives a shit about software, or computers. They pay money to developers precisely because they don't want to give a shit about this stuff.

To you and me, it's obvious that you need to explicitly disconnect the iMessage service, because you and I understand how it's likely to work, and can then ask ourselves "what would happen if my number is still in the lookup tables when I no longer have this phone?".

Apple's software should have automatically de-registered the device from iMessage when the holder of that device does a system wipe, or when the SIM in the device changes (I suspect it does the latter already, so why not the former?). Then, somewhere in Cupertino, a database process would spot that a given subscriber number no longer has any iDevice UIDs attached to it, and thus delete the iMessage record. That would be the simple, obvious and transparent process. Personally, I'd also age the records used to determine if a number is still in the service, so that a UID mapping for a device that hasn't checked in in a long time would be suspended until it reappears: that would [eventually] fix the problem of a phone falling overboard.

Apple's solution is a kludge, but its one that benefits them by making the problem look like it's not theirs ("Hey I can't believe your crappy LG/Lumia/Samsung can't even receive SMS - look at these I sent you yesterday, and you never got any of them. Man, you should have stayed with Apple")

Re: But that's not how it worked

It doesn't matter how it worked technically. Network TV broadcasts are provided under the condition that unauthorised rebroadcasting of the content you receive is prohibited.

Aereo was a system for rebroadcasting of network TV. (And, yes, parallel set of unicast streams is a broadcast)

It was a service based on the old saying that forgiveness is easier to obtain than permission. What that saying neglects to mention is that forgiveness is only one of the options you'll receive after your offending actions, and there's no guarantee you won't get punishment instead.

Using Xamarin would allow them to write the iOS, Android and upcoming Windows Modern apps in C#.

I suspect those Windows versions will arrive at the same time as the next Office release for Windows. Office 16 is due in Spring 2015.

Re: You may choose more EVIL now, or nothing

Run lots of applications, and starve the bastard of CPU time...

Re: Definition of "bug".....or definition of "defect"?

You've hit on the Achilles' Heel of FOSS projects. There usually isn't a business requirement to meet, so the code is free to go wherever its devs want it to. That's both good and bad, depending on whether you're a developer or a user...

The other problem I have with this is that using github as a source will over-represent the work of very inexperienced programmers. These days, everyone's "first code project" ends up on github. If the developer's own inexperience is the major limiting factor, how can you accurately judge the effect of the language they've chosen on the code quality?

Re: Just what were you running exactly???

I use both OSX and Windows, and have to say Windows is now far less RAM-hungry than OS X is.

I can understand the reviewer's mistaken comment about OS X being "leaner" than Windows, because once upon a time this was indeed the case (10.5/10.6 versus Vista). It's just that since then, Apple's middle-aged-spread has coincided with Microsoft's serious performance improvements in Windows 7 and 8.

Re: Who would have thought it...

I don't think any reasonably-priced infrastructure could deal with the sudden influx of 50,000+ devices (a modest average of 2.5 per attender; it's probably more like 3.5) all opening twenty or thirty connections to various HTTP-borne services.

And, because this is the Web Summit, I suspect many of the cries of "network is down" are really "network is up, just slow, and I'm too impatient to let the sessions establish"

Re: Love and Hate @dan1980

"Much if not most of the blame for it lies with the West and that is a subject of another discussion."

Bullshit. Blame lies with Putin and his band of crooks who have stolen Russia from its people. The Russian people don't realise that the root of their problems is not gays or Ukranians, and that Russia was already a great nation, is actually respected as such abroad, and doesn't need a circus strongman running the show to "prove" it. Putin is the abusive husband who convinces his victim that only he really loves them, and that they're worthless without him. The electorate really think that he's defending Russia.. but from whom? The only people oppressing Russians are their own leaders.

"The West" would rather see Russia run as a stable, democratic nation with a functioning economy. For the security and happiness of its people, and also "ours".

Didn't you hear? When you can deploy instantly, you don't need to test anymore. Just unit-test your scripts, and fix bugs as users report them.

A friend works for a company making and selling a class of online software engineering tool (I won't say what class of tool, but it's not testing), and they do not formally test any of their web backend code. My friend, who does mobile client dev, thought they were joking with him when they said this, but no, they just run the backend in constant firefighting mode.

And then, when the backend fix breaks the iOS client, they don't understand why users are annoyed that they've no service for a week while Apple approves the updated client...

Re: Why, exactly ...

These are definitely not my thing, but the UV monitor sounds useful to this Celtic-skinned reader, mainly because UV index is the one thing that your body doesn't tell you ... until the damage is done.

(That said, I'm sure jake has trained himself to develop extented-spectrum vision, and can see from the 5Ghz band all the way to gamma rays, but for us mortals...)

Incidentally, it looks like the accompanying app is being launched on iOS and Android too, not just Windows Phone (http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us - about halfway down).

Re: Chinese

Not quite: you can always understand the meaning of written Chinese messages - this is as expressive as any other written language, and a lot more compact than many. The problems arise in verbal communication.

Mandaran Chinese has a very small repertoire of sounds, compared to other languages, so the number of homophones is very high: cases like the English "red" and "read" are much more commonplace. The fact that Mandarin is actually a second language for most of the population just adds to this confusion.

So when speaking face to face, it's not uncommon for Chinese to make a "writing" gesture of part of the word that they're saying, in order to disambiguate a word that sounds the same. On the phone, this option is not available.

Still, it sounds like someone at Apple inventing an application for this watch, rather than them inventing the watch to fill a need.

Re: Perfect Ampere

http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0027426/

Re: Affordable flagship? Is that legal under the trade description act?

Did you not catch the bit about how people who make judgements based purely on specs without looking at the product are easily misled? The screen is superb, despite being 720p, and the phone does most things very quickly despite being on a "slow" System-on-chip.

The price quoted is SIM-free. What "flagship" mobile phone sells for £300 without contract or lock-in?

It's what it is: a good value mid-range phone whose performance is better than the spec-sheet numbers would suggest. Basically, the sort of "crap on paper, but really good in use" kind of phone that Nokia have always done well. The one thing they've never really done well was "flagship" phones...

Re: rivals?

Rivals, yes, but not from other music stores. Today's big "casual music listener" demographic is still there, but they've grown up in an era where you just don't pay for music: YouTube has given them a free, personalised, All-Requests, All-the-Time version of MTV that means you never really need to buy that song they like.. just keep listening for free until you go off it.

Music fans - people who enjoy music as an art form, and will sit and do nothing but listen to music - will still pay, but they are a tiny part of the music market. The casual listenership has almost completely fallen away, leaving only the core of people who actively enjoy music.

On the other hand, there's still money in back-catalogue; particularly in classical and Jazz - but they're not really part of the same "Music Business" that the tech media are so obsessed with, despite often being the same companies.

Re: Bah Humbug

"I am surprised this hasn't been married to a small electric drive. That's probably next year's iteration."

Pneumatic, actually. http://www.psa-peugeot-citroen.com/en/automotive-innovation/innovation-by-psa/hybrid-air-engine-full-hybrid-gasoline

Re: Windows 10

According to Microsoft's results , Surface is now a profitable business unit... considering the phenomenal writedown on the Surface RT last year, that indicates there's been a lot of interest in the much better 2nd generation and Pro3 models.

The Pro 3 in particular is a very nice computer, and I feel that my current MacBook Air will eventually be replaced by one...(I believe brand loyalty is for fools: I use mac, windows and linux for work, and already have a Surface 2RT for casual web browsing duties) I only use the macbook for mail, web, terminal and ssh,, so might be time to look into a linux VM, MinGW or Cywin (is that still alive?)

Re: not convinced

Here's one reason why gcc is losing mindshare:

*p++ = func(*p);

Guess when p is incremented?

... No, you'd think that, but apparently, because the C specification is silent on the matter, the super geniuses running gcc believe that gives them the freedom to generate this sequence:

++p;

result=func( *p );

*p=result;

Now, has anyone ever written code where that was the desired outcome? This kind of dumb pedantry is why clang is becoming popular. (This bug isn't mine, but I've been stung by similar gcc "technically correct, but bloody stupid" behaviour in the past)

Re: Allegedly

Nothing to do with German, a lot to do with this bit of .NET loveliness that's probably been lurking in corporate internal software for about ten years:

if ( Environment.OSVersion.ToString().startsWith("Microsoft Windows 9") )

{ // running on 98, not supported.

}

Yes, the "real" version number is also present in that string (after the product name), but it's a lot harder to parse that out and compare it than it is to just look at the stem of the string. Lets ignore that the chances of that code ever running on 98 are slim anyway - there's lots of code that has an initialisation sequence that's just old cruft and boilerplate, and not just on Windows: look at a typical Linux automake config for an example...

Re: Strap on time...ahem

Be nice, cite your sources: http://xkcd.com/612/

Re: confused

It's down to accounting,

Cloud services are expenses, and thus can be directly offset agains this year's earnings.

Buying servers is capital expenditure which can only be offset as depreciation, and that takes several years.

In the meantime, you have staffing costs (and if your workload only needs half the time of an expert admin, you'll find you've either got to hire the full time of that expert, or make do with an inexpert admin), maintenance and repairs.

Servers are now a vital infrastructure for pretty much any kind of business, whether it be in the technology field or not. Companies no longer build their own offices*, so why build their own IT infrastructure?

None of this applies to businesses whose business is technology, but even then, cloud-hosting is a low-risk way to protoype or trial new products and services - if the idea isn't a goer, you're not left with a pile of servers you don't have a use for.

(* Yes, yes, Apple, donut, folly, overrun, moneypit)

Re: Know thy data

The Bible letter-counters are a very good analogy. If your goal is to prove your theory, you can always find the data to make that happen.

Rigorous investigators try to find the data that contradicts their theory; frauds only look for the data that confirms it. (e.g. every piece of "scientific" evidence used to bolster every single conspiracy theory)