Posts by John Latham
346 posts • joined Monday 4th September 2006 13:48 GMT
"Android today is like Microsoft's Windows 3.1"
From the end user perspective, Android is more like desktop Linux would be if Windows suddenly ceased to exist.
Android and iOS represent starkly different world views. Let the market decide, it's all good. Well, apart from the evil stuff.
Re: Must stop commenting on Apple articles
"$400 a share is still a lot of money"
The shares are $400 because Apple rarely does stock splits (three times since 1980 AFAIK). It doesn't mean much in isolation.
ZIRP fail
Apple is funding the "capital return program" using debt because it doesn't want to pay tax on repatriated profits.
FFS.
Re: Free investment advice from a recruitment consultant
I wouldn't pay a fund manager either, FWIW.
On topic: Apple is a massive cash generator. Nobody knows if they can sustain it.
Free investment advice from a recruitment consultant
Good luck with that.
Posted in Review: HTC One
No SD card slot, no removable battery
It's like they rifled through the iPhone spec sheet and picked the worst features to copy.
Re: Is this the start of the post-iPhone era?
I think the wider issue is that all smartphone and tablet makers are struggling to develop anything genuinely game-changing at the hardware and OS level, as evidenced by the fuss about phablets being the next greatest thing (really?).
Perhaps that's a positive sign of maturity and stability. The online world still hasn't totally adjusted to the death of the Windows-PC-as-primary-computing device yet. Many websites still don't work very well in a mobile browser, and there are banks (and the Irish revenue service) that still require Java to log in.
There have been many dead-ends in consumer electronics (my attic-crap-boxes are full of things like folding Palm keyboards and Xbox 360 HD-DVD players) but it seems like touch-based smartphones and tablets are here to stay.
Thumbs up for long-lived devices* and incremental improvement.
* unless your battery is glued
P/E: 25.49. Dividends: 0.
Sometimes I wonder whether Facebook is an elaborate ruse to make Google shares look good value.
Posted in Arise, Lord BONG
"A doctor is just a very well trained flow chart"
Ah, the "how hard can it be?" fallacy.
I volunteer to conduct free brain surgery on this idiot, and I will accept any number of flowcharts to assist me in the procedure.
ChrUbuntu?
http://blog.laptopmag.com/chrubuntu-transforms-199-acer-c7-chromebook-into-a-cheap-linux-laptop
Whatever about taxes...
...Facebook appear to have blown somewhere in the order of their entire profits on employee stock options.
Dividends, they've heard of them.
Contemptuous snort at "trusted brand"
Putting aside the historical meaning of torture-based cattle identification, "brand" is an entirely synthetic marketing concept developed by professional liars which deliberately separates meaningful things (products and companies) from each other.
A "brand" is essentially a substrate for growing lies, and every time a marketing droid uses the word God kills a kitten.
How anyone can trust a "brand" I have no idea.
Must this be hard?
I wonder whether CompSci might be easier to teach kids than software engineering or whatever, in the same way that F=ma is easier to teach than building a rocket.
I'd really rather see a physical Turing machine in the classroom than a Raspberry Pi.
This, for instance, is all kinds of cool....
http://www.legoturingmachine.org/
Re: Frameworks make life more complicated without any real advantage - IMHO
tldr version: you're doing it wrong.
Spring is a large framework and provides many nooses with which to hang yourself.
Taking one small part of your rant, the ORM bit, there are several programming models for querying within Spring/Hibernate, including Criteria queries, HQL, pure native SQL, and a sort of HQL-SQL hybrid which allows you to use entity syntax within an SQL query. Each of them has strengths and weaknesses.
Dekatron
Looked it up on Wikipedia. Want.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Dekatron.gif
Normalised homophobia is not a contemporary development
This is not a recent development.
Q: Are you a benny tied to a tree?
Y -> Hah! You're a benny!
N -> Hah! Benny on the loose!
British secondary school, circa 1980.
I must have missed the golden era of schoolboy tolerance and respect for diversity that Diane harks back to.
The Irish Revenue service requires Java
https://www.ros.ie/PublisherServlet/requirements
"ROS makes extensive use of Java applets in order to keep your data secure."
Oh, the irony.
Correlation != causation
That's all.
Linux audio...
....would turn Ghandi into a chair-throwing Ballmerite.
(in fairness I haven't used it for a few years, perhaps it's better now)
Re: Shame it doesn't work
It's a proof of concept, not a complete app. They haven't attempted to implement the whole of Facebook.
Whilst I don't buy into their central claim that HTML5 is currently in a fit state to supplant native apps (just check out the recommended Android version), it's nice that they've gone to all this trouble to crawl along the bleeding edge and document (albeit subjectively) their findings. The code is open to inspection, at least on the client side.
The login screen hung (infinite spinner) on the HTC One X we have here in the office, but worked fine on the older Moto Defy+. YMMV.
Seems overcomplicated
The bottom doesn't move because it's being held in place by spring tension, which is only released when the adjacent coils collapse.
Nice slo-mo though.
Graph fail
Unlabelled Y axis which doesn't start at zero.
Kill it with fire.
I don't understand the specific problem with patent trolls
If software patents were a socially/economically useful thing then companies which exist solely to fully exploit those patents could not be a bad thing.
To kill the software patent troll we must kill software patents. All of them. Or at least match the patent lifespan to the speed of technology development so that all obvious crap will permanently expire within a handful of years.
I don't buy the story pedaled by Google et al that they're just victims of a broken system forced to fight against their will.
Re: And still no overhaul of the patent system.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn965-wheel-patented-in-australia.html
Re: "Low yield rate"
Whether it's "shameful" or not rather depends on how low is "low", no?
FWIW there are some environmental ratings for the finished product here:
http://www.redmondpie.com/iphone-5-is-among-the-most-environmentally-friendly-devices-on-the-market/
"Low yield rate"
...is presumably manufacturing-speak for "we have to chuck most of them in the bin".
Can't be very environmentally sound. Out of sight...
Don't come crying...
...when you give birth to Magneto.
Waterboarding? Suicide missions?
I thought he leaked a load of low-grade junk that hundreds of thousands of people had access to?
Pandora's unboxing
Ho ho, very good.
I guess Raiders of the Lost Ark should now be retitled for YouTube "Ark Of The Covenant unboxing FAIL!".
Re: Agility requires robustness
My point was that the software engineering profession seems to have accepted that having a codebase that can be automatically proven to be no less broken than it was X days/weeks/months ago leads to a lower rate of defects AND greater development velocity, both initially and on a sustainable basis, therefore allowing the alpha finance types to trade, snort coke, shit on each others' desks or whatever else they do to earn their bonuses.
If there's some other approach that Excel hackers use to achieve the same pleasant outcomes, so be it.
Agility requires robustness
"Furthermore, the design and coding of a Java system is always significantly more involved than relatively simple Excel scripting"
Including the tests, right? You do have tests for your spreadsheet? Or do you prove it works by drinking Red Bull and thinking really hard?
...awaits the downvotes as a legion of Register spreadsheet programmers educate me about how to write unit tests for spreadsheets :-)
Posted in Skyfall makers 3D printed Bond's DB5
Fag-packet calculation
Apparently "The equipment costs $2.3 million with an annual operation cost, including depreciation, of $1.44 million". Based on 24x365 continuous operation, that's $164/hr.
Based on claimed speed of 75s per 300µm layer, I make that 69 hours to complete a full 1m-deep build, at the cost of $11-12k + markup.
You wouldn't want to balls up the 3D model.
'the verb "medal" (from the Olympics)'
Am I the only one to experience tightness of chest and breathing difficulty when reading that?
Getting that one in the dictionary would be a Big Ask.
Come back <blink>, all is forgiven.
If ever there was a use case for 100px red flashing text on a web page, this is it.
"Open source used to be about copycatting popular proprietary products"
I stopped reading at that point.
UD
...because terseness abuts godliness.
Lazy rant
"Baumgartner presumably wants to see NASA's budget (and with it that of the ESA etc) diverted into renewable power subsidies or some such money-pit"
Wow, what incredible journalistic insight you have. Maybe you should ask him what he means rather than leaping straight on to your hobby-horse?
Behold....
...AAPL closed at 666 the day before Steve popped his round-cornered clogs and it's been going to hell ever since.
Permian squirts
"In the dead zone, the tropics would have been very wet but with almost nothing growing, no forest, only shrubs and ferns, no fish or marine reptiles, just shellfish and virtually no land animals."
I'm not surprised the land animals were all dead with nothing to eat but shellfish served at 50C.
The death of curiosity
"Then, a short while later, you get absolutely bombarded with these really obvious terrorists. People looking up how to make acetone peroxide (a high explosive so sensitive it explodes spontaneously), HMTD, gunpowder, ANFO and the like."
Back in the 1980s, whilst the IRA were busy creating havoc on the mainland, I was studying chemistry at school and attempting (badly) to make small quantities of gunpowder in my back garden. I remember buying the ingredients from my local chemist, in Brighton, the same town where the 'RA failed to blow up Thatcher a couple of years previously. No one batted an eyelid, because it was screamingly fucking obvious that I wasn't a terrorist.
Christ knows what would happen if kids tried that sort of stuff now.
Teh interwebz have just had it easier for spooks to be lazy. Why bother leaving your desk to develop human assets if you can underpay a bunch of geeks to write search engines for you?
Re: Sauce for the goose...
Down with Freemasons! Up with The Ancient Mystic Society of No Homers!
Posted in 4K vs OLED: and the winner is...
Re: Ummn
"Widening the viewing angle a la IMAX is all very well and good but as with IMAX it would only apply to very large screens and would necessitate drastic changes in the photography and content."
Given that most broadcast TV requires using about 25% of one's brain, the obvious application is to display four streams of video at once on the same screen. The viewer would be monitoring all streams but only focusing on one at a time, each of which would be 1080p.
The remaining problem is for the listener to become accustomed to following four concurrent audio streams without going insane.
ADD for everyone!
"These two studies have yielded literally thousands of articles, almost all of little value."
Make that thousands and one.
Posted in Samsung Galaxy Note 2 review
"With a 1.6GHz...quad-core processor...the Note 2 has a superbly sweet and fluid UI".
6.4 gigahertzes to run a UI makes retrogrouch baby jesus cry.
SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!
The combination of Alien/Ghostbusters goo and frikkin laser beams is too much to resist.
Posted in Tablet and laptop sales neck and neck
@Black Plague
70% iPad.
http://www.reghardware.com/2012/08/15/ihs_isuppli_q2_tablet_shipments/
Data protection? Privacy?
But we only came here to dodge corporation tax!
Re: *blink*
China Daily reported that '"The case is complicated and involves a juvenile, so it's not suitable for us to disclose more details," Huang Wujiang, who works at the court, said on Thursday.'
But you don't need no complicated details, you have CAPS LOCK and a belly full of contempt.
Your insightful and sympathetic analysis rather assumes the kid received objective medical advice. Instead, he was probably coerced into it by a corrupt surgeon and some dude who wanted to pay off his gambling debts.
Perhaps they told him that it was a routine operation, he only needed one kidney and he'd get all proceeds from the sale.
Commentards
Are there so few living people to rip the piss out of that you have to turn to freshly deceased gamers?
There's something very important I forgot to tell you
Don't cross the streams.
