When did you try the DLNA stuff?

Because I agree it was a failure for quite some years, but recently I've been quite impressed.

Only quite impressed, not fully. There's some bug (protocol related AFAICT) that means my phone will only play one song at a time on the various audio renderers we have in the house, but it does mostly work now.

Errr.... DLNA?

Depending on your tv etc etc. What exactly do you want to do?

If you have a relatively recent smart tv then it probably has some sort of network awareness and some sort of DLNA mode. You then set up your pc upstairs as a DLNA server (minidlna, mediatomb, ps3mediaserver, windows media player?) and your tv should be able to see it and play media from it.

If your TV has a 'dumb renderer' capability you can control this all from your mobile phone, there are various apps like 'skifta' and 'allshare' that allow you to browse your server's media selection and push it to the telly. How well integrated it is depends on the specific tv. My 2010 plasma has a sort of receiver-mode you have to put it into first, whereas a friend's newer (2012) model is in receiver mode constantly and anything you send will interrupt what's on now. You can even (with quite some difficulty and a package called python-coherence) set up a linux box as a dumb audio or video renderer in this way.

Of course this only works for media files, if that's not what you meant and you need a more generic streaming mechanism you might need another solution.

Re: Optional

SCART was f*$%^*"%^ evil.

You could get the orientation right easily enough, but then you'd reach behind the tv and start sliding the damn cable around and about all over the place trying to get the thing in. All you needed was to be a fraction of a millimeter out and you may as well have been next door.

Inevitably, five minutes later, you'd have to pull the tv out and plug the damn thing in by sight. Worst Cable Evar.

Re: There's the Kool-aid...

"I might suggest the Linux crowd's focus on the technical side being the more important is one reason WHY they still have no market share, despite their product being very good."

You'll find a lot of people in the linux crowd who aren't really interested in market share unless it brings more developers in to develop the system. Not the cheerleaders of course, but the 'it's awesome for me' crowd. And it is awesome for me, I can make computers running linux dance for me in exactly the way I want. That said I wouldn't wish to confuse someone like my mother by changing the way she does things, she has a hard enough time telling apart the AOL client ("the internet" which I'm trying to ween her off) and Firefox ("the Google", because that's the homepage).

People like her are why MS has a *very* fine line to walk with its interfaces, because if they change things around too much then people like me will get sick of trying to retrain them and just go with linux instead.

Re: 'Nokia has started to deliver very attractive products again'

@ dogged - "How many Androids were sold in the first two years of the OS's life?"

The original G1 sold pretty well, IIRC, though not barnstormingly so. However this is not the first year of Windows Phone is it?

"Coming soon, new awseome phone OS! Look, all these bloggers say its the best thing ever for users and developers even though there's no way anyone has got one yet and we just announced it yesterday! And it's got so many apps! Look! Shiny! No of course the last one didn't sell very well, it was crap. But this new one is revolutionary"

Which then turns to - "Well yes, of course all these features you like from iOS and Android are missing, it's a new OS, give it time, Windows Phone has only been out a few months hasn't it? And of course the sales are slow, duh, new platform!"

Are we going to have to watch the same pattern with Win Phone 9?

Re: Hmm...

Apple will only sue if it becomes a threat. To become a threat they would have to sell some!

Re: WTF?

Because not all migrants will be doing their best to avoid government detection?

Obviously the ones who are going to be trying to avoid detection aren't likely to say yes, but I think you're confused about the meaning of the word 'migrant'.

Yes! And it sounds so .... enterprisey! That means it must be good, right?

Re: I suspect

I'm not sure if you think I'm on samsung's side or something, I'm just pointing out that there's more than enough material to keep this one dragging on for years.

It's true that I'd like to believe in a rational legal system. In a case in which the foreman of the jury admitted that he had ignored court advice, misinterpreted the law and instructed the other jurors to do the same, I'd like to believe that in the modern day and age we could look upon that as a miscarriage. I am aware that the world is not rational however.

I'm also aware that a multi-billion dollar international mega-corporation does not need the likes of me white-knighting for them, which I'm not.

Re: Not only can't MS sell tablets...

Chrome OS is not shit JDX. It's a perfect appliance OS, it boots in a matter of seconds and presents you with a web browser. That's what it's for and it does it admirably.

Think before you speak dear, I know how fond you are of toeing the company line, but it doesn't always make you look as superior and eloquent as you seem to think.

Re: "Customers played a wait-and-see game"

'xactly what I thought when I read that.

Customers (well potential customers) either didn't know or didn't care. The phrasing in the article implies a hoard of people just waiting to see if MS did good or released cheap enough. I can't imagine this was the case at all.

Re: All true

Very, very different business model though.

If you added up the money brought in by Samsung's chip division (exynos is licensed from ARM, at the instruction set level IIRC), Qualcomm's chips (likewise snapdragon), nVidia's (tegra), Marvell, Broadcomm, Freescale, Ti etc etc you'd get a fuller picture.

ARM are a chip-design firm, not a full on design/manufacture/sales organisation.

What we need to make real money in the UK from ARM, is a UK-based implementor-manufacturer. Should we make 2013 the year of the British Mobile Phone?

Re: For goodness' sake

When I've worked in Javascript I was thrown by the sheer number of options - for example there seemed to be about 8 ways to do inheritance, all of which come with their own pitfalls and occasionally need support (context binding).

As a language it's a real mess, IMHO. That doesn't mean you can't pick a decent subset and do great things with it though.

Re: Why not a Chromebook?

Because a lot of the stuff I want to do with a little linux box is pretty low-level. Partition editing for example. I also use my chromebook as a development laptop so python, the ability to install arbitrary libraries from the Ubuntu repositories and all that good stuff is what I want.

That said, yes, when I want (almost) instant-on browsing and mail with a nice bright screen, I use ChromeOS and it's great.

Re: I want a new netbook

Chromebook

I mean, if you're not wedded to windows ands prepared to do a bit of hacking. Samsung's ARM Chromebook (XE303), with ChrUbuntu hacked onto it on a MicroSD card. This is serving me very well at the moment and is so much more capable than my long-suffering eee901. And ChromeOS itself actually works really nicely for what it is.

The machine is thin, light, pretty and has decent battery life and zero moving parts. The casing is a little on the flimsy side but otherwise all is well.

If you're not up for a bit of hacking or do want windows of course, this solution is not for you.

Re: I see it slightly differently to that.

It's a sucky perception thing, and shame on Google for getting involved.

I pay my ISP to deliver packets to me as fast as it can, if they feel the need to demand more money for said service then they can ask me, not selectively ask people trying to get my eyeball-time to pay to get access to me. I am the customer, not the fecking product.

I'm so tired of being the product.

Re: Indistinguishable?

OK no, it's me that misunderstood, from reading the linked article.

They have managed to cram data into the silent packets, which then gets thrown away or ignored by the standard client, but which someone running their program can grab and decode.

If the skype packets are encrypted using half-decent encryption anyway, then the data they contain will already look fairly random, so substituting other encrypted data shouldn't look too suspicious to the casual packet sniffer.

Whether this is an effective method or not would seem (to me) to come down to how much validation is performed by any hypothetical skype interception program in use by the authorities that we suspect of listening, and whether they get the full stream or just recovered audio.

Actually I think I like my idea better...

Re: Indistinguishable?

I think you misunderstand - the messages are not put into the 70 byte packets, they are encoded using the sequence of silent and non-silent packets.

Think morse code only using silent and non-silent packages instead of dots and dashes, and then layer something like ssh/ssl over the top.

Re: Verified by VISA is horrible

The PIN is stored in the stripe?

What unmitigated bullshit!

It's not in the stripe at all. Anywhere, coded or otherwise. The stripe contains a very limited amount of data. If you're doing Stripe + PIN transactions the PIN is captured and encrypted then sent to the bank for verification.

Re: Don't bother....

Folks, your problems are crappy jobs. Get some experience, become a contractor/consultant, rake in the cash and have a new workplace every few months!

If you just sit in the corner being the underpaid geek, all the while hoping someone's going to hand you a pot of gold, then of course your life's going to seem miserable.

Re: Differentiating

Where are you getting your 5% from?

All I can find is references to 2.7% US and 1.9% global (Q3 2012). I can accept that the new lumia phones may have made a dent, but 5% seems wildly optimistic. Nokia is certainly the top dog, but of a very small yard.

I would buy a Nokia android device, but it would have to be competitive with other handsets on the market. Three or four years ago Nokia released the N900, which was awesome but already behind the field in terms of tech specs. The N9 was at least a year behind competitor's products, so despite apparently being pretty good they could have been so much better. I've no idea if the hardware specs of current-gen nokias are in line with the rest of the industry, but they used to lag terribly.

Re: Supply and demand

This is similarly true in software - while there are companies crying out for staff, compared to the international scenario the pay for software folks in the UK (even in London) is frakking awful when compared to the US, Australia and other western nations. Maybe we do need more STEM grads, but unless the money's there at the other end why bother?

The only way I can get close to what I was earning in 'stralia is by contracting.

Re: Wow, just wow!

I cycled a few miles at the weekend. So long as it's not actually raining there's nowt wrong with cycling in the cold. Just get yourself a pair of gloves and a lightweight jacket, you'll soon warm up.

And no, I'm not usually an advocate of old-fashioned getting out there and doing it, damn the weather etc etc, I only (re)took up cycling last year. In Australia where it's warm all the time. I've been genuinely surprised that it's pleasant to cycle here. Even in January.

Re: Libre/Open Office?

"Except they did? Internally Office Open XML files are just a load of XML files, with other bits and pieces, zipped up. The specs are standardised by three bodies."

Pffft.

MS crippled ISO in their haste to push this through, they stuffed the voting committees full of single issue voters and forced OOXML through as a standard, just so they could say they had one. The voters then stopped turning up, and ISO basically broke down due to non-attendance of a high proportion of members. Meanwhile the standard as published wasn't even supported by MS *and* contained many things that were ill defined so only MS could support them.

ODF is an open standard OOXML is a trap, and a deliberately confusingly named one.

Re: how compatible are these ARMs ?

Err, that's more than a little bit optimistic.

There certainly are different versions of the ARM instruction set out there, and not everything that will run on ARMv5 will also run on v4. There are also a whole load of differing extensions in areas like floating-point. So you end up with software distros like debian supporting the lowest common denominator and losing performance because of it, and other distros like raspbian (for the raspberry pi) that are tuned to single devices or chip categories.

ARM is definitely more of a heterogeneous than x86. And yes, there's not usually a device-discovery system or BIOS equivalent, so the OS needs code for the specific board its running on.

Re: sad to see them die

"When Netbooks were first introduced most came pre-installed with Ubuntu"

If only!

No, they came with Xandros, and it was set up in such a way that after about a month it would fill its system partition and start failing software updates. Also the desktop was very, very limited, you couldn' edit the menu structure, it was difficult to install more stuff etc etc. And it sometimes killed ipods if you plugged them in (for instance to charge).

Various *buntu, debian and mint distros popped up pretty quick, thankfully, and my eeepc 901 has been an awesome miniature debian/GNOME2 laptop for the last several years, though it does struggle at times. Yesterday I replaced it with a chromebook, which (AFAICT) is basically the same as a netbook, only with chrome OS and a slightly larger form factor. Soon, it too shall run debian!

Re: Lies, damned lies etc

The top end Samsung S3 outsells the iPhone 5. So all this nonsense about "low-end" and "default choices" and "couldn't afford an iphone" and whatnot is just hot air.

I'm sure Apple care dearly about their market share. More market is more money.

Re: I try to write clear code

No, they had the ban because they were less than competent. It was one of several arcane rules and was matched with a vcs cobbled together from glue, string and fear of progress.

I've been doing this for a dozen years now too, perhaps not as long as you, but I've come to recognise that there are a lot of very mediocre dev shops out there. I'm not a 'rockstar' but I am half decent at what I do and they were not. I've seen worse since...

Re: I try to write clear code

I withdrew my last comment as it could have been construed as a very negative review on current colleagues, not really what was intended.

Heartily agree that if people can't cope with the ternary operator they need to be taken outside and dealt with humanely...

Re: I try to write clear code

Self reply to clarify (and keep wittering 'cos the alternative is hacking at some terrible code).

When I say "Your definition and mine may differ" I mean our respective definitions of clear and sensible.

For instance I've worked in places where the ternary operator in C was not allowed in case it confused some (experience<1?"junior":"incompetent") developers. Whereas I find a quick ternary in the right place to be easier to comprehend than padding the code out with more standard if/else lines. And this is a trivial example, when it comes to structuring large volumes of code there are so many different approaches that can be taken, and so many ways to get it wrong, that you really often end up with something that seems to have grown organically rather than really been designed.

Re: Argh..

They're already relatively powerful. I made the mistake of standing in front of a loo with one of these jets, and as I was finishing my business I wondered "what does this button do?"

A nozzle emerged from the rear of the bowl and sprayed up, out of the bowl and all over my shoes.