Posts by Paul Shirley
1045 posts • joined Friday 19th June 2009 15:36 GMT
what have they been doing?
FFS, they finally get the file and fork support C had in the 1970's? What's the point? What have they been doing? Why is a new library more important than fixing the bloody language?
The core language is still horribly crippled, riddled with short sighted decisions made long ago. Often simply to make the compiler easier to write, now frozen under layer after layer of bad kludges.
Just shoot the beast and start again. Get it right this time.
(And yes, I did waste most of yesterday realising that Java generics really are crippled and hardly better than cut&paste. All the pain, very little work from the compiler or even type safety and half the stuff I do in C++ won't work because they cant have statics in an interface)
Posted in Telcos: up your prices, lose customers
very bad statistics, overinterpreted
Without any hint to what proportion of the entire market are switching this tells us *why* *some* people are switching. It doesn't tell us whether tariff changes make significant numbers switch provider.
So interesting though the trends shown may be, it's impossible to say whether this confirms or refutes the "consumers are generally a lazy lot who don't shop around" meme. I'd guess that meme is perfectly safe though ;)
Posted in Google Go strikes back with C++ bake-off
and it's still low hanging fruit
You should probably go look at the code and see just how little they did to get that 15x. By my standards they're still picking off obvious low hanging fruit - how does any programmer not notice they could use a Vector and choose a Map? The code is now at about the state serious optimisation should be starting, good enough to use but still improvable *if needed*.
I think all this demonstrates is how dangerous adopting the idioms of a language+support infrastructure can be, it seems to stop programmers thinking about whether the component they choose is the most appropriate one for the job. ...and that GC is evil ;)
Posted in Google Go strikes back with C++ bake-off
another unbalanced comparison
Now optimise the C++ and try to back port it to Go.... which still wont be any fairer a comparison! FFS optimise the damn things natively or don't bother comparing them. One or the other. And if you aren't going to start with an optimised algorithm (ie no low hanging fruit) go get a job cleaning toilets, you aren't a crack programmer.
While I find the best way to optimise the Java I'm writing is to strip the native Javaisms and use the same strategies I would in C/C++, when it hits the 'extreme' level Java just can't express the evil hackery I resort to in C++ or assembler.
It's going to be the same in any pair of languages, a certain level of code tweaking simply won't be translatable.
Posted in Oracle: 'Google owes $2.6bn in damages'
"but those disputes do not provide a basis for a Daubert motion."
...but the judge didn't agree and the Daubert motion is going ahead. After reading how Cockburn came up with his figures it was obvious that would happen. If Oracle come out of that with 10% of that 2.6bil left it will be in the right ball park. Ready to be whittled down in parallel with Oracles claims being pruned or lost...
What's most intriguing is how low that 2.6bil figure is, considering their 'expert' tried so hard to inflate the figures. It's a figure so low, if Google lost completely and paid it all, it would still likely end not much more than paying licence fees to Oracle up front! Except of course this isn't about paying for Java, because Oracle are continuing Sun's policy of only licensing Java ME for phones, which is no use at all to Google.
There's a very good chance this whole mess will actually cost Oracle more than they can ever recover, *even if they win*. The numbers just don't make any sense. It really is just about killing Android.
@Destroy All Monsters
I find all those advertising supporting flashy sites do a bloody good job of stopping me finding what I'm really looking for. Usually so busy trying to look pretty they either forget to put any meat on or hide it under so much flashing crap it's not findable.
That 'circa 2000' bare web has a lot going for it. Perhaps if folk stopping pissing pounds away on graphics they could afford pennies on real information. And just maybe the more useless ones will just bugger off and stop polluting the web if the cookie ban fscks up their business plan enough ;)
Posted in Booze for wrinklies: Good or bad?
psychiatrists - amateurs spouting bollocks
Ummm, who to trust:
a bunch of psychiatrists (a trade barely 1 step above homeopathists on the delusional bullshit scale), who probably wouldn't recognise evidence if anyone could explain to them what evidence is
or
a bunch of psychologists (a trade at least 1 step above psychiatrists because they make some effort to be scientists), who read to evidence from real scientists and commented on it.
Think I'll carry on meeting my retired father in the pub as usual from now on. 11 units a day seems about right for my him ;)
Posted in Bitcoin collapses on malicious trade
gamblers, screw 'em
Without any real world guarantors bitcoin is little more than gambling.
Gamblers don't get to complain if they get wiped out, that's the nature of the beast.
buggy as fsck on Windoze as well
The only reason it seems less buggy on Windoze is Firefox sandboxing the crashy pile of shit! My PC essentially stopped crashing as soon as Mozilla locked Flash in it's own little jail. And it still manages to leak system memory that cant be recovered without rebooting.
Epic fail. No-one will miss it.
the MSFT upgrade treadmill
Still traumatised by the 1st .NETified Studio release, swiftly replaced by an 'upgrade' to an earlier, slimmer, faster, usable release. So bad it made Eclipse look good!
Looks like we're in the "we've got the Frankensteined beast working well again, let's break it" part of the cycle again. Better beef up your machines...
in phones it's block device storage, not RAM
The flash cells may indeed be randomly accessible *for reads*. They may even be configured for direct code execution, for anyone willing to take the several hundred times speed hit. They aren't ever actually individually write accessible, though the interface may pretend otherwise.
In reality 99.99% of Flash actually sits behind a controller that presents a block device interface to clients. Meaning they only provide random access storage in the same way that a disk drive is random access storage. In phones, it's all configured as block device storage, not RAM.
@Steve Evans
It's not so much the amount of Flash but how it's partitioned. 512mb is more than enough for OS+Sense+bundled crapware but the OS+Sense actually has to fit into the /system partition, usually allocated with only a little slop for it's initial shipping OS. There could be gigabytes of free space elsewhere, it wouldn't help.
Not a big problem if you're prepared to repartition the Flash but doing it non-destructively is challenging and it's risky enough you wouldn't want to do it on an OTA update. And it takes space from somewhere else, bad news if that's user space.
It might be more accurate to guess HTCs previous choices in partitioning made a normal upgrade impossible. I suspect a rough ride for many users unless HTC find some really good hacks. Freeing space is easy enough, just symlink things like /data/local to sdcard but its hard to avoid repartitioning.
even a G1 can run Gingerbread well
...for more perspective, my ancient G1 with 256M ROM and only 192MB RAM is quite happily running 2.3.4 right now, albeit a heavily tweaked version to cope with the low RAM. But it's pretty complete and fast. Not bad for a phone even CyanogenMod have abandoned.
It's even stable after I removed Google Maps 5.5 (AKA intrusive memory hogging malware).
Sense may be fat but its not *that* fat! HTC are telling porkies...
Posted in Dolphin Browser HD
OK, hidden not non-existent
I'm shitting on it because the 3 different descriptions of how to do it *issued by Dolphin themselves* all described different methods and none work on this release or reached the actual editable list. And maybe I'm dim but hitting a button labelled 'Bookmarks' when I'm already on a bookmark list makes no sense to me. Particularly when the creator tells me to look for one labelled 'Edit'.
Posted in Dolphin Browser HD
Dolphin never quite get their act together, always something serious broken
"For anyone with oodles of bookmarks, the facility to create nested folders for them is almost reason enough to start using Dolphin."
...and the complete inability to delete or reorder them is almost enough reason to stop.
This is pretty typical for Dolphin. I try it, I try to like it but they simply can't stop tinkering with the UI and never, ever bother documenting how to use the latest release. Documentation only needed because they keep doing things in non-obvious ways! So right now I can find several different processes meant to edit bookmarks, non of them supported or appropriate for this build, they even removed long press support present in the previous version.
It's massively improved over the 1st versions I had sitting barely used on my phone more than a year ago and in many ways it behaves more like a standard Android app than ever before. And it's still just broken enough to annoy me. Meanwhile I'll go kill that 'read sensitive system logs' permission it wants while I decide whether to dump yet another Dolphin release.
Real programmers (TM) hate to type.
...and we also love to see the whole function on screen readably formatted for 'eyeballing'. Not have some verbose syntax force it to overflow the screen on either axis.
the build process
"You should not need a separate file in a scripting language to build a large project."
*Every* large C++ project I've ever worked on contained a large number of external resources that needed format conversion, precompiling, packing or other processing and the final output needed some sort of packaging or resource binding. Why on earth would tightly binding that to the C++ component make any sense at all?
A tool like make is a pretty good solution to an opened ended problem like the build process, where there's no way of even knowing what tools a dev might need to run during the build.
Decoupling the build *process* from any of the tools invoked while building is exactly the right solution. Scripted solutions like make are one of the more powerful options.
Most of us assumed it already used S2
Big non story, I hadn't even realised they were using DVB-S for HD, since all the noise at launch time was about S2. I suspect only a few folk noticed it wasn't S2.
Motorola: flaky phones and no escape route
I wonder how many of those returns are really caused by Motorola's excessive lockdown policies, a significant proportion of Android users root their phones to mod them and Motorola go out of their way to obstruct that. It's common to see discussions of the best way to 'break' phones so they can be returned easily as faulty.
In reality Motorola have a reputation for flaky Android devices, great hardware let down by piss poor OS implementation. The lock down guarantees users cannot bypass that flakiness. That has to push up the return rate.
Even HTC have given up their short flirtation with locked bootloaders and returned to sanity, following Sony Erickssons lead. Motorola will probably never loosen the death grip. After all they have around 300,000 apps to blame...
It's like programming java with one hand tied behind your back.
No. It's like programming java with the other hand tied behind your back AS WELL.
CPU only part of AMD's lead here
AMD were already in a good position with the Fusion APU's compared to Intel, only now waking up to the inability of Atom to deliver in this sector.
AMD actually have a bigger advantage here though, they have stronger GPU tech and have been successfully embedding powerful implementations for a long time now. Intel continue to demonstrate complete incompetence with GPU's. 'Ultrabook's will need to compete with the strong media and gaming performance of pads to create a new niche, Intel have no viable solution for that.
One option available is supplementing or replacing x86 cores in Fusion with ARM. That would still leave AMD owning most of the silicon on the die. Almost all Intel's value is the x86 core (no one willingly chooses an Intel GPU) so its not as attractive an option. AMD have more choices here -> can adapt faster.
Stocked with popcorn while I watch Intel panic...
Now hopefully pro nuke lobbyists will face reality
"And stop the blind panic that comes from any mention of the words 'nuclear' and 'radiation'."
ROFLMAO!
So far the only noticeable blind panic has been the pro nuclear lobby rushing to defend their baby from a public that isn't panicking despite the best efforts of the gutter press. Rapidly *losing interest* in supporting a technology that can be cheap OR safe but not both at the same time...
Give it up. Break ground on a new reactor now and by the time it's running even solar voltaic has a good chance of being cheaper. Time has not been kind to nuclear as alternatives drop in price while nuclear can't avoid paying for safety (or bribing their way past it as some believe).
Posted in Nokia: When pigeons fly home to roast
problem was management not engineering
Nokia's problem in delivering smartphone platforms was 90+% mismanagement and competent leaders would dump the warring management to free the engineering talent get on with delivering products. Unfortunately Elop came straight from a monolithic dinosaur with it's own culture of warring management groups and doesn't seem to have even considered what was really going wrong or firing the suits responsible. Instead of freeing the talent to work he freed them to beta test Windows Phone 7 or look for better jobs.
That swathes of management will get caught up in the catastrophe doesn't help after the fact. Elop getting there 2 years earlier wasn't going to help, he's blind to the cultural problem behind Nokias woes and so are the people he works with there.
Still, there's a cosy reception waiting at HQ when Nokia becomes Microsoft's hardware business so what does Elop have to lose by being clueless?
Posted in Nokia: When pigeons fly home to roast
strawman arguments as usual
Nokia was certainly in trouble before Elop. But it wasn't dead, it took Elop to actually kill the company instead of curing it.
Right now it's a zombie heading inexorably toward total Microsoft control then ownership. Nokia as a company is dead. In Microsoft's hands Nokia the brand is tarnished and dying.
Posted in 4G interference will knock out Freeview
takes hard work to screw up this badly
Bugger. After switchover I'll be using C29,54-59 and 61. So that's 7 multiplexes fucked in 1 go. Since the stupid sods packed 3 of them into adjacent channels last month I've had crap reception, now they'll throw in interference as well? Idiots.
Also a little surprised, my transmitter is switching to use C61 in a couple of months. So assuming OFCOM aren't totally delusional there's going to be yet another channel shuffle after switchover, so none of us can even guess whether we'll be hit in 2013! OFCOM need a long time in the naughty corner.
Still, I look forward to seeing just how much expense I can run up with whoever ends up liable for fixing my reception. With 2 PVR's, 8 Freeview tuners in use (and some spares), mast head distribution amp and they'll need to install a new rooftop aerial, it ain't going to be cheap.
Oracle still hoping to take, take, take
One of the big problems before the split was Sun blocking many of the contributions that would undermine commercial sales of their own private versions. LibreOffice now has all those extras and that's a large part of why Oracle are wriggling so hard, they lost control and lost the commercial advantage.
Shifting to ASF doesn't help knobble LibreOffice or finally allow those important features to be imported into OO. OO is playing catch up and just removed any chance of quickly doing that from Libre source.
I'm inclined to think Oracle are just playing games here, saving face while giving away nothing useful. From Larry's POV the product is already dead, if they can con TDF into improving their product that's a pure win, if not there's no loss.
contention
The problem I see is contention. Too many users in my cell trying to share too few channels. The best signal quality cant give me bandwidth someone else is using. Poor S/N exacerbates the problem but is fairly obvious.
At some point you cant make the cells any smaller and still provide good enough overall signal quality at a reasonable cost. When making fewer users share stops working it's time for more real bandwidth. 500Mhz seems excessive though! Though if it allows much larger cells that could actually force prices down.
Pity none of our existing phones will be able to use it.
consumers have a real problem even if carriers are telling porkies
"though quite what customers are going to do with that spectrum isn't clear."
It's pretty obvious what they'll do with it. The move to smartphones in itself wont suck another 500Mhz but when data's cheap, smartphone users love streaming AV. Just streaming music instead of using analogue radio will hammer available bandwidth. It's hard to believe the networks want to sell cheap data though, more something they'll be forced into, kicking and screaming the whole way.
Do we actually need more bandwidth? Right now, as an unfortunate O2 user (via giffgaff) I regularly see full HDSPA connections that deliver sub GPRS throughput in the city and voice connections so rate throttled conversation is near impossible. More bandwidth is desperately needed just to deliver usable service at todays rated speeds - because in some places building enough repeaters or new towers just isn't viable.
For consumers this isn't about pumping ever higher headline rates, it's about delivering the speeds our hardware should already be getting. I'm sure the networks plan to sell any extra bandwidth they get as a higher speed, higher profit service but there's still a real problem to solve. The regulator needs to be heavy handed about what carriers get to do with anything they're given though.
remind yourself, does that other OS also have hidden files?
Would that be the OS that invented hidden files, anything starting with a period not showing up by default?
If you're going to take the piss out of Microsoft, please try harder to find something they've really cocked up. This is another one they just copied.
weirdly schizophrenic review
1.5 pages of apps vs cloud/net Apple bashing switches to a page of describing the lacklustre Playbook app support? Make your mind up! Or better yet, remember apps aren't just about consuming net content, the net isn't just about running cloud services or 'apps' and flash is as often the problem as any sort of solution.
Still, the whole ensemble does give a probably realistic view of a device with more value in the Blackberry logo than it's tablet implementation. RIM: must try harder.
they don't have a product for this market
Pure coincidence that Intel still don't have a CPU or SOC that hits the right power profile with the right performance for this market. Netbooks get away with poor performance but we all expect better from tablets, even if just to make the touch interface run smoothly. Looking forward to the frantic back pedalling when (if) they follow through on recent PR fluff about creating competitive processors... ;)
After checking out comparison reviews of AMD's Fusion E-350 product against Atom, it looks like Intel is firmly in last place in the race for low power devices right now. AMD will probably get there 1st. No wonder Intel are panicking so publicly.
O2 - no coverage,high latency, no throughput. But good fake numbers ;)
Ditto all the coverage comments - O2 have the worst coverage of all, I carry a "3" SIM for emergencies.
The speed claims don't match what I see. Out here in the suburbs I get good 3.5G and high *sustained* throughputs. But the latency is so poor browsing is near unusable and the image compression is shocking. In the city I get great signal strength, great rated connection speed but no actual throughput at all for extended periods of time.
At the best of times the latency on O2 is terrible and seriously harms browsing, at worst - well I've seen 30second latency occasionally and 5-10s is fairly common in the city (why throughput is so poor). I've had browsing sessions run faster on 2G than 3G at times, thanks to that shitty 3G latency.
What they measured has fsck all to do with what users actual need.
If O2's bastard child giffgaff weren't so damn cheap I'd be on "any other network". If I actually needed my phone I'd move anyway - luckily I work at home and my normal pub crawl has continuous Wifi coverage ;)
Posted in Groundhog day: more Sony breaches
same stack should make fixing easier
If they are running the same stack everywhere that should make rolling out any improvements easier. Congratulations, you just made the case that ongoing failures are due to Sony choosing to not roll out fixes to their entire business.
The reality is likely simpler, they have a jumble of adhoc sites and they have to deal with each individually. I'd suggest before that they need to remember where all the sites are!
It is noticeable that only customer information has been exposed. Hard to avoid thinking Sony knew how to protect themselves but didn't bother extending the same protection to users. Customer details should have been no more accesible than internal corporate data.
Posted in MS announces Windows Phone 7.1
It's always orange. Except when its hideously green.
Well, I can't remember seeing any WP7 media that doesn't feature heavy doses of orange (can't stand the colour) and green (only looks good on plants). Be fun in Orange tried suing them for stealing the Orange look&feel (errr.. that would be 'Orange' and 'crap')
;)
email only Microsoft software can even see
"you will be able to set permissons on email that stop people from forwarding or printing things"
Translation: you'll be able to wrap email up so tight no-one else can even read it.
Well, I suppose that might interest companies and drive some corporate sales from RIM to WP7... the tweeters, facebookers and other social media users don't seem to care about security or privacy and won't even notice this feature. So not much chance of attracting casual users.
And it still looks far too ginger.
Posted in MS announces Windows Phone 7.1
it all looks so.... ginger!
The ginger step child of the phone world ;)
do they even pay each other most of the charge?
Even stranger is the '10% of turnover' claim. My understanding is they don't even pay each other the termination charges, only the accumulated difference between in/out charges between each pair of networks. If any network got that difference at 10% of turnover they don't really have a business, unless that business is pissing away money.
so weak you don't need the stolen list
Email address+DOB pairs are one of the easiest things to guess or find, it's hard to think of a weaker validation scheme. That makes this a severe fault *even without stolen credentials*.
he's forgotten the market
The market has stampeded towards mobile devices and the lack of legacy app support hasn't been a problem. Microsoft have at least noticed that and realised they need an OS on ARM to even play in this game.
Intel have their heads in the sand. They have no stake in the new markets because they can't fulfil the power requirements. End users aren't going to sacrifice half their battery life just to run legacy apps and Intel seem incapable of building real low power devices - so that market is closed to them. Increasingly the server rack market will close to them on the power issue.
Intels argument collapses to: "you'll continue to be able to run legacy apps on desktop PC's". Wow. Non story and no upside for Intel. The only question is whether ARM catches up to x86 performance before Intel pull their collective fingers out and take power consumption seriously.
bye bye IP indemnification
They need to prove this has at least as much indemnification from Microsoft IP claims (patent and other) as Novell offered. Without the umbrella of patent cross licences Novell had it's going to be a challenge convincing the world their customers are safe.
Or more accurately, convincing the world they have an equally uncertain level of protection from Microsoft.
On a more personal level, this project needs to die. I'm forced to run .NET on my PC, a gigabyte of Microsoft bloat just to run a bloody PVR, this much bloat has no place on mobile devices.
scammers likes ads, Google likes ads...
Nothing sad about paid versions, the AdMob implementation can seriously screw up performance (Angry Birds is unplayable on my phone with it enabled) and done badly annoys the hell out of users. The number of requests for paid versions of apps from users is quite surprising.
Beyond that the price of data to actually fetch those adverts can be significant on some tariffs, especially compared to average app prices.
TBH while it's obviously Googles preferred option everyone else (*) treats it as a last resort, ads piss of devs and users alike.
(*) because of course the market is totally drowning in scamware/crap that do nothing well apart from forcing adverts and/or malware on the unfortunate users, usually off the back of badly pirated apps.
good news, less nvidia=less system bugs
Nice to see nvidia finally give up pretending they can make mboard chipsets. The pain these idiots have caused me down the years doesn't bear thinking about. Don't remember ever seeing one with all the advanced features working and too many with simple things like sata and basic nic buggy.
Their gpu drivers haven't been a lot better. The total unwillingness to fix PAL tv issues was a long running problem. Afaik they still aren't taking it seriously.
Posted in Official: phones sting bees
Yawn
So 20hrs of having a phone closer than any bee will ever normally encounter and they still couldn't be arsed actually swarming, just made noises about it. Struggling to see how this explains any real life colony collapses, unless bee keepers have started hooking their hives up to mobile.
The combination of power laws and totally unrealistic phone positioning screams 'red herring'. If bees are so sensitive to magnetic fields, the recent increase in shipping hives around the country (to pollinate some of the 5% of crops that even need insect pollination) is probably stressing the bees more than this.
Meanwhile, my gardens seems to happily pollinate everything without commercial help. But as usual the bee keeping business is more important than protecting the other insects that do the bulk of the job, there's money involved, not just pretty but financially worthless bumblebees ;(
interesting timing
Quite amazing timing (not really), Google Talk gains video and voice support on Android devices and less than a month later Microsoft buy Skype? Am I the only one sensing panic in Microsoft?
Yes, I know the Android support doesn't actually work yet but the timing is still 'interesting', especially with Google Talk video calling actually working well between Linux and XP PC's.
Given we only have Skype installed because none of the other Linux VOIP/video calling apps wanted to play nice with any other OS - including my SIP phones, Skype finally has competition to really worry about.
Posted in Sony’s sorry saga snowballs
very convenient timing
Late Friday they sneaked out an excuse - another threatened hack. A delay was then almost inevitable. If it was real they couldn't afford to relaunch without *much* more testing.
In my more cynical moments I might think they made the story up to cover not having the system fixed on time. The schedule was rather optimistic and this timing is far too convenient.
Perhaps the 1st sign they've hired someone with the balls to say no to management.
Playbook too crippled to help
"keep the all-important BlackBerry services intact by ensuring the PlayBook and BlackBerry are still viable devices with plenty of software."
I don't really see how shipping Playbook without BES built in is anything but failure. Needing to tether a Blackberry to get your mail makes the Playbook an expensive docking station, not a driver for BES. Worse yet, if BES does get opened to IOS,WP7 & Android, the Blackberry becomes redundant and there's no compelling reason to choose Playbook over any other tablet device.
Far as I can see Playbook is DOA with the public, not just developers.
Oracle dont own what their suing over, the rest doesn't matter
No, Oracle own a big pile of Java copyrights. They don't own Harmony copyrights. They dont own PolicyNodeImpl.java.
Unfortunately (for them) the law says you only get to sue for copyright infringement over copyrights you own. Not copyrights someone else owns and so far they've not shown convincing evidence Google has used anything Oracle actually own without an appropriate licence.
Oracles problem is they also can't seem to find any licenced use that would drag Google into their net.
There's a reason Oracle started with patents: they don't have much else and their structure and interface claims are doomed to failure in the AFC test.
Java ME: the ultimate Smartphone downgrade
Yes, that highly restricted toy OS that would instantly downgrade a Smartphone using it into a FeaturePhone...
court doesn't seem eager to play
Oh, it just gets better. Just seen the courts response to claims construction: there's a huge hint in there that the court will wait on the patent re-examination if Google asks for it. Along with the massive 132 becomes just 3 claims winnowing this is really bad for Oracle, the case could end long after winning has any value.
Also bad (for Oracle) because it tells us what the Judge is thinking, and what's he thinking is 'no bullshit'. This is the clearest sign yet that we aren't about to see SCO vs The World repeated, this time the courts are signalling up front they wont put up with that amount of evasion and delay.
...and that doesn't bode well for Oracles adventure in licence discovery, although it does show why Oracle were forced to go down that rabbit hole.
OO largely kept alive by delays in the Linux distro update pipeline
I think we're past the tipping point where OpenOffice has any value as a brand.
A large number of users have OO only because that's what their Linux distro bundled, with Ubuntu switching to Libre only last week a huge chunk of OO's market share just vanished.
It's a dying brand, let it go before the corpse starts smelling.
