Knowing a smidgen more about these things (maybe?)

A few weeks ago we bought a Nook HD for £119 at JL.

As an ereader it is a bit of a loss (I would definitely buy a different product, probably the Kobo one), but the "great enabler" for this device is that it can boot from SD.

The first step was to get the Google apps onto the Nookified Android. A 4GB microsd card is needed - instructions here:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2062613

The result is pretty good, the only problem is that some Play Store apps are listed as not available - e.g. Evernote had to be installed from the B&N shop thing.

However there is an even better plan - get a fast microSD card (e.g. UHS type) and install vanilla Android on it, run the thing from the SD card:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2063968

That's working really well for me, all apps install happily (Evernote and Skitch included) and the device has a nice his-res screen that's bright enough to be usable in sunshine.

As a device it *does* have e-reader type limitations - no cameras, no GPS...

Exactly!

in due course there will be frustration at the reliability (or not) of those solutions and training gaps and the fact that different and incompatible solutions are used in various departments. Some bright spark will say "why don't we hire someone to take charge of this chaos". A couple of hiring cycles and a smidgen of empire building later later and the result will be indistinguishable from the much reviled It dept of old.

And some groaning user will exclaim "there must be a way that involves less red tape"...

Re: The music industry: @Mark Honman

> On the other hand, the sound quality was dreadful, commercial pressings of the most atrocious quality

You must be a fellow South African, then... one of the big benefits of visiting the UK in the early 1990s was to buy some decent LPs. On the other hand classical LPs were of brilliant quality (N.O.T. pressed in SA, obviously) and any warps were my own fault, really. What used to drive me nuts was end-of-side distortion...

There is the whole quasi-religious thing you describe, and it's hard to even guess at how much that affects the perception of sound quality (or one might put it, the index of overall satisfaction gained from playing an album).

Re: The music industry: Still late for their own funeral

Although I'm something of a vinyl luddidite, you still deserve an upvote.

But where are these cheap Chinese styli you speak of? Any self-respecting vluddite will spend as much on a stylus as the rest of the world spends on an iThing, and probably for the same reasons (an elevated life-form has descended to their plane and offers a tangible object thickly encrusted with magic pixie dust).

While like you I'd still tend to buy CDs for convenience and rippability, the weird thing with vinyl is that while objectively speaking it cannot match CD for sound quality, for most types of music the deficiencies of vinyl are less annoying than those of CD.

Re: PDP-8 any good?

Don't think so, I worked with PDP-8 derived HP1000s which had a totally different instruction set/register architecture to the PDP-11. Much as I loved the HP1000s, I have to admit that the PDP-11 had a much more elegant architecture.

Re: Why under?

The closer the vehicle is to the loop, the more efficient the energy transfer is.

What I want to know is why the electric trolley buses were done away with all those years ago...

Re: So it's partly the communcations overhead and the synchronosation that's the problem.

You're thinking of Transputers. Which were certainly the right idea for CFD, not so much on account of the architecture but because of the good balance between compute and communication speeds, and especially the very low communication latency. Low latency meant that relatively little time was wasted hanging around at the end of an iteration, waiting for data to arrive from neighbouring processors. But they had their problems too - especially absence of any kind of global/broadcast communication.

I don't know how things have changed since those days, but at that time there was a tension between algorithmic efficiency and parallel processing - the more efficient CFD algorithms coupled cells across the whole domain, which was generally OK to parallelise on a shared-memory system but was no-go on a distributed-memory architecture where less efficient algorithms could be used.

So... real kudos to the guys & gals, both system architects and software developers, who have pulled off the feat of building a system and a real-world application that scale across 1^^6 processing elements.

Re: Comment wisdom

@Gerhard

The 20 lines bit comes from the terminals of old - that's how much you can see at one go (60 lines on a printout page).

I've got to agree with the "wrapper" type of function, hat you've described. I guess my opinion comes from having done a lot of maintenance, and the frustration of following the flow of control in OO code that passes from one inconsequential little method to another. is a maze of twisty little methods, all alike.

On the other hand there were some shockers in the old days, 1000-line Fortran IV routines (don't get me started on common blocks) , and a supervisor who having discovered the Pascal CASE statement considered that it made IF... THEN.. ELSE obsolete.

OO shockers seem to be small, e.g. a simple "pure" function (no state, global references or side effects) that was implemented as a method, and the caller of this 8-line function was expected to instantiate an object of this class, call the method, and then throw the object away.

In fact there's a pattern here... it's so easy when one has discovered something new (COMMON blocks, CASE statements, object-orientation) to unthinkingly use this new shiny (or orgnisatoinally mandated tool/method) to solve every imaginable problem including those that can be more effectively solved the old-fashioned way.

As another commenter said, that is a common factor in poor-quality code.

Comment wisdom

It's so long ago that I can't give credit where it is due, but the best approach to commenting that I've found is:

* If you need to comment a line of code, that code is obscure - do it differently. (not always possible, as it may be a toolset restriction) - but line-by-line comments should be exceptional and are there to say "here be dragons"

* every module and routine should have a comment header that explains its purposes, inputs outputs and side-effects, and an easy-to-read outline of the steps that occur in processing

* write the header comments before writing any code

The rationale is that line-by-line comments generally make code harder to read because one can't see the totality of a routine on-screen. On the other hand the header comments are an expression of the programmer's understanding of the requirements and allow one to clarify how the problem is going to be solved before getting into the nuts-and-bolts of language and toolset specifics.

BTW the old rule on function size probably still holds - if it is less than 20 lines, it's probably too small, more than 60 definitely too big (yes I know OO results in lots of dinky methods... but too much of that results in lousy readability as one has to skip from one routine to another to follow the logic).

No time to refactor

and it was ever so....

One thing that works for me is to allocate some time for "while you're in there" refactoring when estimating development times. Then there is a bit of buffer when changes need to be made to some particularly manky old piece of code - by the time one has understood it it's not that much extra work to refactor it.

The biggest problems are that (a) I'm an optimist and (b) managers always try to compress the development schedule, so there isn't much in the way of buffer.

Re: @Mark H

Android isn't free to OEMs who want to offer the Google stuff - I guess the store is particularly important here.

Probably still cheap compared to the offical price for WP licenses.

What I'm getting at with that is that maybe WP8 is technically better than iOS or Android (as the MS fans on here would have it, but my guess is that the three will be very much of a muchness in terms of quality/stability).

I chose OS/2 anaolgy because, back in the days, OS/2 was technically way ahead of the MS offerings, was well thought through, had the might of IBM (then the 800lb gorilla of the IT world) behind it, and still failed to gain traction in the market because Windows was "good enough" and already there (for a fairly small value of "good", admittedly). I wonder how OS/2 sales compared to Mac, though?

So even if WP8 turns out to be significantly superior to the competition, my guess is that the same combination of "good enough and everyone knows it" and "expensive comfort zone" competitors will not leave any room in the market for it.

But if WP8 is truly based on the traditional Windows kernel I have a horrible feeling that it will suffer from traditional Windows problems.

In the case of Nokia, Nokia are paying full price for the WP7 licenses and then getting some kind of "marketing support" from MS that is set up to magically counterbalance the cost of the licenses. So MS can report revenue on WP7 while hiding the subsidy as marketing expenses. (See Nokia financial results for a glimmer of how the deal works).

Win-win for both companies, MS gets shipments & revenue, Nokia gets free software. No wonder it was a no-brainer for Nokia to go for WP7 rather than Android.

A side-thought there - given the history if internal feuding at Nokia, it's very likely that any Nokia Android would have taken a lot longer to get to market that the WP7 phones - the hardware spec of the latter is so locked-down that it leaves no room for turf wars over what the hardware will be and how much of a classic Nokia personality it should have.

Ironically I think this time round WP8 is probably in the spot where OS/2 was in the PC operating system wars, with Android 2.x/4.x in the role of Windows 9x/NT respectively.

Not forked, re-implemented

More accurately, the re-implementation is Apache's Harmony.

Re-implementation of Java is OK but you can't call it Java (see famous Sun-MS lawsuit).

Nicking other people's source code is wrong - and Oracle did find some test subsystem code that was present in Android distributions. That was removed as soon as it was brought to the Android people's attention, leaving the copyright focus of this case to be the Java API.

By definition a re-implemented API is going to look *very* much like the original (think SysV vs. BSD Unix header files) and it's hard to tell how much may have been copied vs. how much just has to be the same for that API to be useful.

Up til now nobody has thought it worthwhile to sue over APIs, so the rights and wrongs are not clearly established, but every dev who has worked on multiple platforms has probably seen the same basic API ingredients rehashed on each one - so probably not much hope for Oracle except where the APIs in question are uniquely Java-ish and not derived from something else.

Something like the time Apple sued Microsoft and HP over the appearance of Windows 3.1/NewWave - and got off on the basis that Apple had themselves based their UI on Xerox's work.

Re: Misconceived idea of Lewis' work

It's sci-fi as written by a professor of ancient literature, i.e. quite bookish. The plot of 'Out of the silent planet' is not unlike 'Avatar', i.e. greedy humans go and strip-mine alien planet for its wealth) and similarly has a great deal on how the alien society works.

However the third book, 'That Hideous Strength' is a fantastic read with broad English caricatures - very funny with its observations of human nature and especially that of ladder-climbers in large organisations.

All three of these are definitely written from a Christian worldview.

Of Lewis' novels for adults, 'That Hideous Strength' is probably my favourite, but 'Til we have faces' while quite a difficult read draws one into an other-world (based more on Greek mythology than anything else) which has the greatest emotional impact of any of his books.

Shannon's theorem applies to continuous signals

The Sampling Theory applies to continuous signals, rather different from the complex shapes of musical notes which have attack and decay - not just a bunch of frequencies, but contained within an 'evelope' shape.

There is also a practical problem with replay of digital audio streams, which is jitter - imperfections in the clock frequency of the digital stream.

Another lesser problem with signals resulting from D->A conversion is the sampling noise at frequencies above 22.1kHz - while inaudible to adults it may affect the performance of equipment that was designed on the assumption that the input signal contains only audible frequencies. Example: some metal-dome tweeters have resonances around 22-25 kHz.

But these three effects pale into insignificance when compared with the destruction wreaked by modern dynamic range compression.

Although the technical performance of CD is better than vinyl, the debate still rages - I think because the shortcomings of vinyl reproduction are less noticeable when concentrating on music. Perhaps because static click are essentially random, and surface noise is concentrated in the lower frequency range and therefore less objectionable.

the fuss

the fuss is that up til now BT have not been taking responsibility for the problem or being pro-active about it. In Oct our FTTP modem failed, but we first had to go through a ritual with the ISP (PlusNet) and BT technicians who fiddled with wiring in the DP thus changing an intermittent problem to a hard fault. Then as our phone services are purchased through a 3rd party we have to contact *them* to get BT to send a technician to fix the wiring - after which we were back to an intermittent brandband fault (well more like intermittently working). Eventually we were lucky enough to be assigned a BT technician who was aware of the root cause and simply replaced the modem.

The whole thing took about 3 weeks from start to finish and I've very glad we had additional broadband links to fall back on (supplied by Be). It wasn't the nature of the fault, it was the run-around that was so galling and we are now trialling a bonded Be service as a possible replacement.

Much better for the company and customers to send out a £20 router and save N site visits and unhappy customers.

Autowipe

Free remote wipe for Android 2.2 onwards. Also provides for wipe on SIM change, wipe on excessive "password" attempts.

As the other poster says, OpenVPN is at least in progress so AFAIK the only missing ingredient is local encryption.

yes, they can fail that often

out of 3 OCZ Onyx entry-level SSDs, we have one fail (total loss of data), had it replaced under warranty, and then had the replacement fail. The other two have been fine.

The bummer with SSD failures has been that it is a total loss of data, very rare for 'real' disk drive failures.

Or there's the ZTE Skate

Double-fail!

ZTE Skate (aka Orange Monte Carlo) has a nice 4.3 inch screen with an even better (and more useful) resolution of 800x480. Not as fast, of course - but fast enough.

Battery lasts 9 days with wi-fi off. very surprise to see some posters claiming that Android needs regular reboots, app killing, etc... all that is alien in my experience & that of the Mrs (who has a ZTE Blade). I guess that must be astroturfing?

Good advice!

Another happy punter here - just got an ex-corporate Finkpad with 1920x1200. It's 4 years old, but at £200 who's complaining? ... especially not after having fitted a 60GB SSD.

actually we flog it

SA does burn a lot of coal, but the best coal we export so that others can burn it... in excess of 60 million tons a year.

Not virtualisation, I'm afraid...

The SVSV and BSD syscalls were actually mapped to underlying Aegis calls - so it was really one OS with multiple personalities on the surface. And X was dreadfully inefficient when running in a DM window.

That said, it really was an amazing OS with particularly impressive features like the ability to host diskless clients having different CPU architectures (and hence executable files containing code for 2 different architectures). And the distributed networking stuff... and having 2 or more DM windows open on the same source file, all nicely synchronised...