Posts by Charlie Clark
1695 posts • joined Monday 16th April 2007 14:57 GMT
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More peanuts
The manufactured chips do not sell for much either so manufacturers like TI and Qualcom need huge volume for profits and chip factories are fiendishly expensive and becoming more so.
For a proper comparison you need to compare profits per employee rather than product volume. There you will find, I think, that Intel is quite a way ahead but Intel is one of the anomalies in what is increasingly consumer (low-margin electronics). While ARMs prices are low this is possibly one of the reasons why the market is turning towards them.
Watch the marketing speech
There is no such thing as "unstructured data" that would be noise. "unprocessed" or "uninterpreted" maybe but never "unstructured". Jokes about FB's data being little other than noise on the back of a postcard, please.
Anyway - no shit Sherlock - different chip architectures are suitable for light or heavy lifting in the data centre. Nice to know that they're becoming commercially available.
The things peope worry about...
"I've lost my job. They're dodecimating the workforce..."
"Surely, you mean octomating?"
"Put down the adverts for new jobs and pass me a calculator"
Literally lots of words change their meaning over time.
FYI http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/index.cfm?page=673903
Posted in Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Part One
@Captain Underpants
Not quite 7 new versions in 10 years but it seems you didn't read my post carefully - Apple can call the versions whatever they want. Maybe they're saving 11 for dolphins and whales because they're so pretty.
AFAIK the following were major: Leopard - dropped the classic environment; Snow Leopard - dropped native Power PC support and largely dropped carbon; Lion dropped x86-64 only (less of a problem) lots of networking changes. But YMMV especially if you were doing anything with low-level POSIX stuff. Snow Leopard and Lion have AFAIL broken compatibility without breaking much new ground which is why they were both relatively cheap. Lion is, of course, the entry to the "owned by Apple" world and this is where all the new features are.
I have a Mac and I haven't upgraded yet but I do sympathise with those who feel confused. I have worked with computers for over 20 years and there are still lots of things I don't really understand so I do sympathise with those who do not understand the difference between Power PC and x86 ("endianness", FFS!) let alone the x86 and x86_64 stuff.
It is the easiest thing in the world to offer users a compatibility test for Lion once they have installed the "migration assistant" that we got with 10.6.8. A little notice informing the user that the following programs/add-ons/drivers will not work with Lion and you can check this anytime from "About this Mac" or wherever would save so many problems. Parallels has this built in - it has told me I must upgrade to able to use Lion, why can't Mac OS do the same?
This still does not explain why Rosetta is not available. I also have Windows 7 which has a sandbox for 16-bit apps but it still let's them run. +1 to Microsoft to finally learning from IBM. What was it Winston Churchill said? "You can rely on the Americans to always do the right thing. After they have exhausted all other possibilites."
Prepare to be surprised
No reason for them to be that expensive. All the chippery is either the same or cheaper, less memory required, screen, chassis and ports the same battery life with a smaller battery, probably no fan required.
Or did I miss something?
Surely the Torygraph has more enough space for this kind of polemic? But if you are going to quote The Econmist, today's Bagehot post is an interesting read. http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2011/07/britain-and-eu
What really matters
The decision by the Financial Times to drop its Ios only app and create a cross-platform web app. The delays to the Android tablets have definitely played to Apple's advantage but the development speed of phones in 2010 and growth in marketshare could well be followed in the tablets.
IT departments want: secure VPN access; secure e-mail; remote wipe; private apps and they will pay Cisco, IBM and the rest whatever it takes to get this. Apple is actually playing catch up with the private apps which will only really work once Ios 5 is released.
Posted in Nokia reaps the Dilbert years
You've been right all along
The first time I remember was when you pointed out Nokia's glaring failure to put cameras in phones and then make such a fist of it when they finally did arrive. No point in having a Zeiss lens if the camera is a bitch to operate.
For touchscreen phones Symbian + UIQ with a planned migration to a QT based platform would have meant beautiful phones with low power draw and great applications.
RIP Nokia
Posted in Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Part One
@Andy 115
"Going from Snow Leopard 10.6 to 10.6.1 is an upgrade (in the same way Windows XP SP2 to SP3 is an upgrade)"
No, X.Y.Z to X.Y.Z1 is a generally considered to be a *patch* in the un*x world where this kind of versioning comes from was followed by programs like Firefox until recently. This usually means bugfixes and security patches.
X.Y to X.Y1 is a *point* upgrade and usually means new features but no break in the API.
X to X1 is a *version* upgrade and usually means new features and changes to the API.
Apple is, of course, free to do as it pleases but it would be helpful if it provided more information in advance. MS has, as far as I know, learned from past mistakes and brought out a program that checked for Vista and 7 suitability. I've gained some kind of migration assistant but nothing that has informed me that 10.7 could have problems.
As previously noted, retaining Rosetta as an optional install would make a lot of the pain go away. The changes to networking are likely to cause lots more problems.
Posted in Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Part One
Why people should wait
I gave Snow Leopard a couple of weeks and still lived to rue the install. Should have waited for the first fix pack and it looks Lion will have to wait even longer. I know I cannot do much with my printer or scanner on Lion because the software needs Rosetta, why this useful piece of software couldn't have stayed optional is beyond me. Yes, I would prefer Canon and OKI to release x86 software but I'm prepared to wait rather than buy new hardware. Curious as to what's happened with the APIs and the POSIX stuff. 10.6 contained Apple's infamously borked Python fork.
As I have a standby machine in case my Macbook dies on me (the fan on the old one did twice), I need to know whether I can still restore to another machine without a system disk!
And I need a tip - how can I get rid of the NASNavigator from my system? I installed it to be able to browse my brother's network but I can seem to get rid of it as it keeps telling syslog!
About your cunning plan
It's brilliant, fantastic just one slight flaw: how do you think billionaire's become such? By giving their more-or-less hard-earned gains away?
Kudos for Google for forcing up the price of something they never wanted.
Shareholder value
Can't see them taking this lying down. EGM and friendly takeover by Microsoft?
My heart goes out to the many hard-working and talented people at Nokia. Personally, I always preferred Ericsson's design and UI but there is no doubt that Nokia was largely responsible for turning an executive toy into something everyone could use.
wholistic?
Sorry, can't resist this. Are the new machines signed by Daltrey, Townsend and Moon? Do they all the Union Flag on them and prefer scooters?
Mine's the green fish tail, ta.
Wanker
"if it were not for Linux, Apple's proprietary OS would not exist."
At least get your facts straight: MACH kernel, FreeBSD userland but with BASH shell by default. all based on Nextstep which is older than Linux. Quartz is based on Adobe's postscript engine, oh, and Apple owns CUPS and now has its own SMB implementation.
Only half-right
You need the € 100 mini-display port to dual-link DVI for anything over 1900. I know I just had to shell out for one for the Dell U2711. Nice as the Apple screens are they, for desktop use the Dell (comes pre-calibrated and a nice certificate to prove it) is better, and, for films, well you can get a 1900 x behemoth for about half the price.
Interestingly the LED backlight doesn't do much to reduce the power draw on the screens with Apple's current 27" quoted as having well over 100 W when in user.
Technology
I've got a Wave and my brother has an Iphone 4. Next to each other I much prefer the AMOLED, especially outside in the sunlight. The resolution of the new Samsung Galaxy II is a big step up from that. Apart from the yield OLED is still struggling with energy consumption but for media consumption it is oodles better than the best IPS and I can't see Samsung being too keen on letting rivals get hold of this too quickly.
O rly
Given the quality of the OLED display in Samsung's most recent Android I'd be expecting to be focussing in on that rather than yesterday's technology. The bigger OLED panels are due out this year, I think, a monopoly on tablet ones (7" would be sufficient) would be a definite advantage for Samsung, who don't seem to have trouble selling the rest of their screens.
Drivers
AFAIK the big problem with multi-platform support on NT was largely around the drivers. The microkernel meant that supporting different architectures was pretty easy - and early NT releases for x86, MIPS and Alpha were synchronised. But "ISA" was a nightmare for the drivers as the rest of the hardware didn't have the abstraction necessary for easily porting. Put a cheap graphics card in an Alpha box and write your own driver from the documentation if you were lucky enough to have it. NT was never slow but I do recall some stuff being dropped into the kernel for later releases because x86 has such inefficient context switching. The MS toolchain made compiling and providing different versions of software for different architecture unnecessarily painful for both developers and users.
The approach was vindicated initally by Next and later by BeOS which changed architectures three times in five years (Hobbit, Power and x86).
To all the Linux fanbois out there who seem to think this article somehow vindicates the seemingly endless wars about the free-for-all approach, where are the GUI applications running on phones, tablets and desktops? GTK versus QT probably did as much as anything else to hold un*x back from the desktop because whatever the technical merits (and most of them are debatable) a non-unified desktop experience is going to confuse users. Then there is the libraries and userland shambles of debian, redhat, suse and the rest.
Too expensive for what it is
If this was 100 USD it might sell, crippled though it is. At 500 USD I can't see many people bothering.
Android and ARM based notebooks will do a lot more for less.
Award
Surely some kind of Fawlty prize for stating the bleeding obvious? Or does she pine for rote learning? Associative memory and documentation (as gerund) with an implicit division of labour are pretty key human traits.
I really must apply for a guest professorship at some US university so I can get on this gravy train (spending on US universities has far outstripped GDP for generations).
Blue or black screens
Doesn't really matter but it was NT that introduced the blue ones. Windows 3.x was still DOS and would crash if the wind changed. The error messages were pretty useless and based on the more informative OS/2 ones. You got no longing, but hey we had pretty colour icons.
The media
The media love all the social shit because it integrates so well with their own agenda. Thus, the oodles of free publicity encouraging people to "join in the conversation" or "follow us on...". The media loves to talk about itself and what better way of doing that than encouraging all and sundry to do just the same, and what's wrong with selling them advertising at the same time?. And isn't it wonderful how "social media" is so democratic? And if "everyone" tells you you're right, then surely you must be? The end of mass media, my arse! It's just the beginning of mass delusion as we all inflate our confirmation bias bubbles. This week's Economist Special Report is devoted to the new media, and while it avoids the really tricky issues, it's still worth a read.
Posted in Sony confirms e-reader update imminent
Sony already does wireless
But stateside only with the 9" "Daily Edition". Presumably negotiations elsewhere for the networks are trickier than for Amazon as Sony doesn't sell exclusively so has less of a chance to cover the charges through book sales.
I have 650 touch and I think it's ace. It fits snugly either into quite a few of my pockets and doesn't look ostentatious. I'm not that fussed about wireless as that eats battery time and copying books over by USB doesn't really take a lot of time, especially considering how long I tend to take to read a book. Plus, it takes both micro-SD and the littlest memory sticks which are even easier. Charges with the same cable as my phone, which is nice. Sound quality is excellent if you want to play music on it, though I suspect most people either have dedicated players or use the phone. Bluetooth would have been nice for that.
I could do with a slightly larger screen in the same size body - there's a good cm of casing too much around the screen. I don't use the touch screen very much but it is just very useful for things like looking up words by double-tapping them. A larger screen would also be good for the technical, ie. software, documentation but the PDF reflow almost entirely makes up for that. You only really how good it is when you compare the same file on different devices. Fortunately, Sphinx and other tools are making ePub common for docs so the problem will go away soon.
But the USP for readers over tablets - sunshine. Stuff just looks better and better in bright light.
Lazy
There is no such thing as the "SQL model". There is the relational model and ACID compliance. And then you optimise for the business case - reading, writing or both. The relational model is pure mathematics so it really can be about finding the best fit to hardware and a good database will use all available memory for optimisation.
All a buzz
People I've been talking to who are excited about Google+ are not the technological elite. There is a sense of quiet admiration of something that looks like it might be useful.
You're right that people won't shift systems unless there is perceivable gain, though for SEO the advantage is pretty clear. Whether Google+ already has this in its platform or whether it will take the inevitable data breach at Facebook to scare people away or whether it will need something else to come along.
However, having recently nailed your colours to the mast by suggesting Facebook's IPO should be around 10^12 USD, what else are you going to say on the matter?
Forgive me if you heard this one but
Isn't this just a massive radial fan?
Make it easier
1) Stop the stupid activation shenanigans. People will either buy it or they won't. I bought it, stop threatening me. If you won't give me an update because I haven't "activated" my install and I suffer as a consequence I'll sue you. In fact I might sue you for threatening me in the first place. Make it easy for people to upgrade and install and market share will drive the reluctant to catch up.
2) Make the upgrade easier. AFAIK you can't go from XP to Windows 7. Maybe that has since been fixed but if not it is the best way to piss off your customers.
3) Get out of the browser wars. Buy Mozilla Corp if you want but stop trying to peddle outdated software with proprietary extensions as state of the art. IE 9 is *okay* until you look at anything even slightly mobile. Dump "compatability mode" and offer to fix those websites that would need it.
I like Windows 7 much more than XP - have it on bootcamp - but it still has some way to go in terms of usability. Am I the only one who suffers with windows that get moved to the top getting magically maximised?
Posted in Is Facebook worth more than Google?
What a load of trollfodder
Matt, have you ever heard of the PE ratio? How about the Robert Shiller PE 10?* A PE of 20 is already above the historical average and you are suggesting a PE of over 1000.
All pre-IPO stocks are overvalued at the moment as with nearly zero interest rates there are lots of freshly printed dollars chasing returns. But valuations are not values which is why such trends are called bubbles.
* http://www.multpl.com/
More coal please
This is a message from the Chinese National Union of Coalminers and the American Coal Lobby
http://www.theonion.com/video/in-the-know-coal-lobby-warns-wind-farms-may-blow-e,20876/
Harping on about "global warming" was always going to lead to problems but it was also always more marketable than "human induced climate change" or electorally unpalatable discussions about the politics of oil.
Whether or not we understand the science of climate change, it's still probably too mindboggingly complicated for us to model properly. But that is not really a good reason for pollution as usual or sending more people to their deaths.
Anyway nice to see companies like Schneider Electric (re)introducing the "negawatt" to their advertising.
Posted in Do we really want 100Gig Ethernet?
Will no one think of the copper?
Anything that encourages fibre optic over twisted pair is to be welcomed with open arms.
What are the arguments for the install?
1) This will leave me without a backup machine, currently a Mac Mini
2) Neither my Canon scanner, nor my OKI printer will work
3) I get some new eye candy and some more Apple lock in.
Pretty compelling upgrade.
Lawyers will love this
Anything that has been FCC certified will have to carry on working. If not it's the FCC who are liable.
So, in the blue corner we have the telcos and GPS industry both with deep pockets and in the red corner we have a company with a dodgy business model and rapidly dwindling cash reserves...
Okay, I'll bite
"But the way we know [where a visitor is from] is by the cookies".
Mr Worstall has managed plumb new depths after the "standards" fiasco. This statement is entirely untrue, cookies are used for maintaining state and if you really want to know where some is from you can always use the HTML5 Geo extensions to ask their permission.
Is this the end of journalism on El Reg as we know it? Or just a cunning plan by El Reg to show us what we will have to read if we don't opt-in into snooper cookies?
A few answers to other questions in a possibly vain attempt to stop the spread of ignorance:
* LSO's are covered just as much as http cookies;
* If free analytics are really worth that much then why are they given away? Answer because visitors are unwittingly paying the price by providing lots of personal information about their browsing habits; there are alternatives
* Snooping advertisers are selling the information they gather on your customers to your competitors;
* Omniture already conforms to European data protection legislation. Same origin cookies would be preferable with scrubbing (anonymisation of the IP address) as soon as possible
* The legislation will not be the end of the world as we know it
Posted in US IT spending surge double-times GDP
"measly"
3 % GDP growth per annum is pretty damn good if you can get it. Anything above inflation, adjusted for population, is good. Unlikely for the US at the moment, though, with negative real rates inspiring various assets bubbles including tech stocks.
As the article suggests the predictions sound like a lot of wishful thinking. If investment in one area really does outstrip GDP for any period of time it can only mean either investing less in other areas or simply importing all the equipment. Also, how do such predictions square up with the cloud utopians who promise cheaper hardware?
Does Samsung really care?
Samsung electronics seems to be running at capacity and selling everything it can. Indeed, in some areas such as the gorgeous OLED screens it doesn't have enough capacity.
As for cachet - I'm not sure if other Apple competitors will want to be on the same books as such an "esteemed" customer, likely to get the best components both earlier and cheaper than they are.
Storm in a tea cup?
While somewhat undiplomatic Dotzler is probably entirely right. Corporates who really care should be submitting test cases to Mozilla and have a vested interest in upgrading regularly and ensuring their "enterprise requirements" are catered for.
The whole major, minor, patch release strategy has had a coach and horses driven through it by Google, who update your browser without your consent. Where's the hue and cry about that? Will Google provide LTS for its browser? Possibly, but it's just as likely to require regular new versions for working with its websites and applications and, as they are unlikely to work on Neanderthal Explorer, people will just have to bite the bullet.
Posted in Nokia's Windows phone outed on video
I didn't say Ubuntu on phones
But Ubuntu will, apparently run on Android tablets and netbooks. Wouldn't surprise me if some people hadn't got it working on phones as well but I imagined it to be less useful on them.
Weighty download
475 MB here and apart from avoiding the recent itunes update I already have them all. Is his Jobness distributing little Stevie horcruxes?
Hope the IPv6 fixes include something that repairs the broken firewall - worked in 10.5 but has been broken in all the 10.6 releases.
Posted in Nokia's Windows phone outed on video
The browser as on the desktop
Oh great, pity the user interface is completely different. Oh, it's IE9 which can do a bit of HTML5 (limited video support, no SVG animation, poor canvas, etc.) but is already outdated and outclassed by almost all other mobile browsers and as it's not cross platform no chance of synching bookmarks, etc.
Hardware looks okay but then it looks like just another windows mobile. Unless MS decides it's worth pissing off the other suppliers by giving Nokia exclusive access to feature it's got less room for differentiation than on Android. And if MS does decide it's worth pissing off other suppliers, it's easy to imagine how that might affect their other channels - the only OS running on quad core ARM netbooks at Christmas will be Android. Well, presumably some people will put Ubuntu on theirs.
The short version
IBM was getting stiffed by Microsoft for years before the split: IBM stupidly paid Microsoft to develop OS/2 for them and tried to marry it to the PS/2 line for too long. Despite the undoubted technical superiority of the microchannel architecture it was as much this strategy as anything else that put people off OS/2. In the medium term the customer lost out with the crappy VESA local bus but it was so cheap and we got sucked into the Wintel spiral of despair.
Memory requirements, providing you were running the unfortunately single-threaded Presentation Manager, weren't that bad and you pre-emptive multitasking, a fast file system with support for extensible metadata and peripheral sharing and a kernel you couldn't kill. This is why OS/2 was used in all kinds of embedded devices such as UPS tracking pads. The banks loved it, of course, because it had wonderful terminal emulation. Later on it ran Windows better than Windows - virtual machines known as DOS boxes with more memory than DOS could handle on it's own but this just encouraged more Windows development.
I do remember Lou Gerstner saying something* like he thought OS/2 could win the wars but it wasn't worth the cost. IBM then concentrated on making more money from Windows than Microsoft and bought Lotus and others. The companies who stuck with OS/2 seemed to have to spend less on system upgrades over the next ten years because they were able to do so much with the hardware.
* Source OS/2 Inside, I think.
Not worth the extra cost
The shuttle has proved this beyond all reasonable doubt: those features might be nice to have but make the whole thing less flexible, more unreliable and hideously expensive. Better to give the wetware parachutes or M&M certificates at least, or have something that can survive long enough in the ocean for pickup.
"wring inefficiencies"
I guess this is grammatically correct but surely you don't want to get even more inefficiencies from software development?
Openness is all well and good but this isn't necessarily a black and white, winner takes all situation. Apple still has a reasonable value proposition for both consumers and developers, as does Microsoft on the desktop. Google's success may well be less due to the openness of Android than the absence of licence fees plus the determination to put in the hardware support required.
Quietly getting on with the job?
Seems like ESA is getting close to "serial production" of the ATV but still a lot of missions still to fly to show just how good the ATV is and, presumably, before they send one filled with wetware.
Posted in NHS trust issues nurse jub flash alert
Okay, I'll bite
Scrunchies - you really don't want to know (because they are boring hair accessories)
The Dalai Lama joke is a pun on: make me (at) one with everything (in the world); and make me one (pizza) with everything (from the menu on it). Most puns are shit but I have to admit I quite like this one.
Some facts
Not directly related to this article, which is an admission of how the deregulated utilities have repeatedly been able to shag the customer, but about Lewis' favourite bugbear - renewables. The pharmaceutical company Pfizer, of Viagra fame and not renowned for its hippy tendencies, is currently operating its Freiburg plant with 93 % of power being supplied by renewables, because this is the cheapest and most reliable thing to do*. The move to 100 % is planned.
ROI within 2 years - http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/hintergrundpolitik/1481701/ (in Jorman)
I don't care that much about climate change. I do care about reliable power and that pretty much means you have to produce it yourself. Even with considerable capital investment that *does* pay off.
Posted in Microsoft squeaks on Google Nortel sale
Cross my palm with silver...
and I might tell you. On the other hand, I might come up with a third opinion! Don't lawyers lead a great life? :-)
I suspect the whole thing is up for negotiation - full details of what's on offer should be available from the administrator. Should be remembered that Google's bid is as much to get the ball rolling as anything else. Though it seems to have Microsoft foxed - maybe they simply prefer to overbid on patent-light companies (Skype) when there is no one else bidding? Note to self - set up company with "web scale" - is there a cream for that? - but few assets and just wait for the offers!
erm, yeah
"But does it have the will to buy the last-standing privately held database vendor?"
You have completely omitted that EnterpriseDB sells its own version of Postgres and that its business has been doing very nicely since Sun borged MySQL and Oracle borked the Sun acquisition; the Oracle compatibility certainly helps. Netezza is another Postgres+ (in the sense of added value) vendor. For customers there is a lot of sense in keeping things the way they are which may be why Postgres has been making such great strides recently, 9.1 is really going to get a lot of interest.
Privacy extensions
Anyone using IPv6 should enable the privacy extensions which prevent your local ip address from becoming unique. Instructions (in German) just choose the commands for your OS:
http://www.heise.de/ct/hotline/IPv6-anonym-1100728.html
Stage 1
Clearly network resources are currently not sufficient to do away entirely with local storage at the moment but the plan is very much to turn Apple into the gatekeeper of your data by pretending there isn't a file system that you can access independently. Once this principle is established the devices you sell can become simply by reducing or removing local storage options. A Macbook without USB for instance using Thunderbolt to license only storage systems which sync with online storage.
A mate of mine who has both an iphone and an ipad and loves them both finds the lack of a file system to be the biggest single problem and a good reason for not buying their eventual replacements from Apple.
