Re: I'm not so sure....

"There are two words: ubiquitous and computing. You can look them up."

I did look them up, and that's how I came across a reference to Mark Weiser's work in 1988.

"When combined, surely you can make your own mind up as to what this means?"

I did my research and I made up my own mind, so mission accomplished.

Ah, and then we get to another nebulous phrase:

"the laptop since its lack of immediacy detracts from the portability in this respect"

Granted I've never seen 'immediacy' on any Laptop spec sheet, but then again that hasn't popped up on any phone brochures I've seen either. Please give us a definition of what "lack of immediacy" actually means in this context. The only clue we have to your interpretation of that phrase is "

"The early smart phones didn't make computing ubiquitous because users largely ignored the smart part."

I beg to differ on this point, because I happen to believe that stuff will still exist even if I was to ignore it. Despite my best ignoring efforts Microsoft, Oracle, Celebritards and Politicians still continue to exist.

You have been very lucky to survive crossing the road while computing ubiquitously with your phone all this time since the iPad was released.

Re: I'm not so sure....

"Apple invented ubiquitous computing with the iPad" earned a downvote on two counts.

1) Apple didn't even invent the tablet form factor, there is a substantial body of prior art, including Kubrik's 2001.

2) The term "ubiquitous computing" appears to be something that Mark Weiser came up with in 1988.

I sincerely hope that you treat Apples IP as respectfully as you treat IP belonging to others.

Re: Leaving, not because of Murdoch

Nah, it's not just you with respect to BE's QoS, I have had some very poor performance for about a month or so now to the point where I have given up on playing online games and watching online video. Sky's antipathy towards static IPs (to the point where the guy on the phone doesn't even know what one is) is forcing me to move.

As soon as I get a quieter week or two I'm going to be moving ISP, keeping my cash away from Murdoch's grotty pockets will be a bonus. It would be nice if folks running companies had some alternate strategies to the now ubiquitous make our product as shit as the rest one.

Re: Grizzly poop found in woods

Cretins also overlook all that IP that Samsung has developed to enable them and their licensees to fabricate the displays, processors, flash memory and DRAM that Apple re-badges and markets as their own invention. Ironically Apple are one of the few outfits that could afford to build some fabs and license the necessary IP, they choose not to do this, preferring instead to litigate against their suppliers.

If Apple were to start fabbing some display panels, or even a little bit of DRAM themselves I might give them some credit for effort on the IP front. Until that happy day they are no different from a bunch of lawyers paying a highly skilled competitor to put boxes together in the shape, material and finish they specify.

That kind of stupidity is special enough that I will allow Apple some credit for a unique invention for it.

Re: re: "cro-mo titanium"

"i know... titanium is soft and shit.. "

You appear to know very little about Titanium. It would be heart breaking to find someone taking you said seriously.

Re: What!

Sadly we didn't have any cash left to buy France because we gave it all to those jolly nice chaps that work in the banks. Not sure we could raise enough cash via tax either as we're now paying our pension companies to keep the property market inflated, and in return they are very kindly letting us rent the properties they now own at mortgage installment + 10% pcm. Hopefully they will give some of our money back when we retire, but I suspect we will die before that happens because the retirement age will need to be raised to 120 so we have enough time to earn back all the money we've given away.

Re: Sparc

"had their ass kicked by smaller x86-64 systems along with clusters of GPUs"

Looking at the Nov 2012 Green500 list, it looks like it was the BlueGene/Q boxes that did the ass-kicking of the K computer.

Re: @Tom 7

How about Microsoft sort out their piss poor file system I/O ? They have had a lot of money and time (30+ years) to do it, free to rip-off research + source code (eg: BSD) and so far they have failed to address their rubbish file system performance since I first fired up Win 3.1 donkey's years ago.

Personally I gave up waiting for them to fix it with NT4. I recommend that you give up the USB sticks and multi-billion dollar SSDs and give a linux distro a try instead. It'll save you a hell of a lot of time in the long run.

Re: 'tis good

I find that it is very hard to take notoriousbiggles@hotmail.com seriously.

Re: Article FAILS to launch

As a developer I can't honestly claim that I've had hassle with porting to account for OS & file system differences very often in recent decades. I've had trouble getting anything like reasonable performance with file I/O under Windows, but that's a problem with Windows rather than file systems as a whole.

Given that the languages and their runtimes have built in support for file systems and *not* object storage I don't see the situation changing anytime soon, and quite frankly for the majority of jobs out there I see little or no advantage in writing code that tickles object storage instead of file systems.

Newsflash: the unique filename problem was addressed by mkstemp(3) which has been around since 4.3BSD, nearly 27 years ago. It's not the worst case of NIH I've seen though, nearly everywhere I've worked reinvented syslog over and over and over and over and over again.

Re: Excuse me

I really don't see why would it focus their minds, after all they have employees they can send to prison on their behalf.

Sony owe *us* $1bn, let's see their money first (was Re: This is a bad decision)

No Sony employees have gone to prison or paid any fines for busting a few hundred thousand machines with their rootkit. That fine amounts to about $2500/hr in clean up costs. Allowing about 4 hours labour to repair each PC that Sony broke (that's a very low-ball estimate) that would equate to $10K per machine that Sony owes it's customers for fixing the damage done by their rootkit. IIRC that rootkit infected an awful lot of machines, but let's be kind to Sony here and say it was a mere 100,000 machines they fekked. By this judgement's arithmetic Sony owe at least $1bn to the poor suckers who bought Alicia Key's CDs.

That isn't even taking into account that the damage done to some of those PCs would have cost people lost business too... So that $1bn figure is a *very* low ball estimate, it could easily be 10 times that in practice.

Re: £250,000 fine for losing 77 million credit card numbers

Just a tip for the Astroturfers out there : defaulting to Anonymous destroys any credibility your postings may have.

"they were transformed using a cryptographic hash function."

Err, that is what people commonly call encryption (rightly or wrongly) with respect to password storage. Even ROT13 would qualify (despite being useless). You may not agree with the terminology but you should perhaps consider this usage before battering your keyboard.

"While the passwords that were stored were not “encrypted,”"

That does indeed seem to be the case.

"Creditcard details were encrypted and not likely taken."

That is a very weak assertion, which is no better than "we don't know - but we hope not". Either details were taken or not. If we don't know for certain then it is reasonable to conclude the security and monitoring were totally inadequate and it would be more prudent to assume the details were stolen.

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/04/27/qa-1-for-playstation-network-and-qriocity-services/

... and the supporting evidence for the assertion comes from an organisation affiliated to Sony that has a vested interest in keeping Playstation customers sweet on Sony.

As far as getting accurate independent evidence of credit card usage happening I very much doubt that the Credit Card companies and law enforcement authorities would publish enough details for you to accurately attribute who got whacked as a result of Sony's poor security. I doubt any such study has taken place.

This is a company that used CDs to distribute root kits on PCs. These same root kits actually impaired the lawful use of CD/DVD drives. Simply failing to secure customer details is relatively tame by Sony's usual standard of customer abuse, so perhaps they have improved on a little, but there is still no sign that they give a shit about their customers beyond taking their cash.

Re: Windows Security Patches + Anti-Virus considered Harmful

"I once had to install - I dread to say it - Redhat Linux - on my laptop. It was about 10 years ago. No modem driver available, no printer driver, don't even think Bluetooth or wireless mouse. I rest my case. "

I have suffered the same lack of device support problems with all of the versions of Windows (3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, NT 3.51, NT 4.0, XP) that I installed 10+ years ago. You have no case if you are trying to assert that Windows was somehow easier and more complete back then. My memories of setting up Windows boxes back then was carrying a large stack of CDs around with about 10 zillion drivers on them to get the motherboard up to speed... That hasn't changed much really - these days I have a USB stick stuffed with drivers that I've had to download instead.

Not so very long ago I came across 3 installs that failed the exact same way with 3 totally different combinations of PC (with pre-installed OS), Windows (XP,Vista,7) and all in one printer+scanner (HP & Kodak). In each case the unlucky user tried installing the drivers supplied with the all-in-one printer+scanner they found that the scanning functionality of Windows was irretrievably broken. In each case they tried vendor support and in each case vendor support tried blaming another vendor and when pushed still failed to deliver a solution. My part in this was plugging these all-in-one devices into my Linux box to see if they worked. All I had to do was plug in a USB cable and they worked first time without me needing to install anything on my Linux box.

There is no happy ending for those folks though, they either gave up or replaced their entire rig to get a solution because the vendors could not/would not fix their products.

In my view both Widows and Linux can fall short with driver support on occasion, but only in Windows land have I seen people forced to give up because there is no solution.

GG

Re: Bullet proof, but not B.S. proof.

"The difference is you have got so used to having features that other people have copied from Apple or after having them you now consider them obvious that you think it's ok"

Personally I've owned phones that detected stuff plugging into jack sockets since 1999. It's not big new or clever, so I wouldn't be using it as an example of defending innovation by Apple unless I wanted to come across as an ignorant history revising pillock who thinks that a brand somehow makes employees of said brand more intelligent and come up with more original ideas.

Get over the badges folks, it's the engineering that counts here in the real world.

Re: Backwards Compatibility

"They have also stated that the current phones are going to be upgradable to the next major version of Windows. So there is no issue."

I very much doubt that promise is in the EULA...

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but companies frequently promise stuff and don't deliver it (and that has been exactly how MS has operated since day one in the mobile sector). There is even a very old buzzword for it : "Vapourware".

... and how are all those WinPhone users out there are going to ensure they are held to that promise ? Complain in the strongest possible terms ?

Stop buying WinPhones ?

Spam message boards with complaints about MS's shoddy support and broken promises ?

None of the above seems to have worked out for the WinPhone7 crowd. I hope the WinPhone8 crowd has better luck.

Re: How about:

Ah, there's no way back from that. It's probably a skiddie brute-forcing your account. That isn't fixable in Microsoft land, you will have to reset your password every time you want to access your accounts, and hope the skiddie hasn't locked them out before you get to log in after reset. Best of luck with that.

Re: Stop moaning it's free

OK, I'll moan and I am entitled to because I paid for MS Hotmail (shocking, I know).

Many moons ago I was happily accessing my Hotmail account using POP3. Then one day Microsoft decided to stop supporting POP3, this bugged me so I asked their support people if there was anyway I could get POP3 and they said pay up on the understanding that they would not commit to maintaining POP3 in the future.

I paid my dues and everything was fine, they kept POP3 running (bless em) and all was well until a skiddie decided to brute force my password. Now Microsoft, bless them, think that 3 wrong guesses and lock out makes for a secure account, it doesn't, it just makes DoSing an account trivial. After a few weeks of enduring the long winded process of resetting my password every time I wanted to read my email I contacted customer support (repeatedly) and had absolutely zero response. Nada. Nothing.

Hopefully MS has made DoSing their accounts a bit harder, but I doubt it and quite frankly I'm not going to bother finding out, just as they didn't bother to reply to my emails to their customer support numpties.

Re: And the "Standard Model" is?

Warrior on the Edge of Time has some pretty neat bits in it, but I think you can go quite a bit further as far as "all-round trippiness" within the Hawkind catalogue - like their first album ("Hawkwind") for example.

My favourite Hawkiwind album remains Doremi... On some happy occasions I still get to read some old 2000AD comics while listening to early 70s Hawkwind - which oddly enough is what got me interested in Physics and then computing in the first place.

Re: Spearfishing?

Possible sometime after we've worked out how to make computers self-aware. ie: Not anytime soon. In the meantime I think there is scope for improving the "are you sure" dialogue boxes. :)

Using VMs to work around broken software & unreasonable restrictions on usage...

... removes the incentive for vendors to stop screwing you. In some cases it'll give them another revenue stream to milk (eg: HyperV). In my case I have found that using an alternative product that doesn't force me to use a VM to run it is more cost effective in terms of time and money.

License compliance is not free folks, I strongly recommend that you factor that into your purchasing decisions. ;)

Re: Garbage arch

Run some STREAM benchmarks side-by-side on x86 cores and ARM cores and see what the results are... Driving large chunks of external memory tends to burn a lot of power, this is old news. That said I think that x86s are overkill for a lot of apps, and ARMs will change the game over the long run. It's another iteration of the "Attack of the Killer Micros", except x86 is the big iron now. ;)

Re: Alpha....

"Why? Alpha was just a RISC design like PA-RISC and was hitting the end of the RISC development capability."

The Alpha architecture ran out of development budget, it certainly did not die because it was built on RISC principles. It would appear that EPIC is now facing the same end as the Alpha.

That said EPIC does have a fundamental weakness when compared to CISC & RISC. Folks who design cores for a living have pointed out that EPIC requires large (and consequently slow) register files that would ultimately limit the clock rate and burn more power. History has proven them to be correct.

EPIC doesn't fit into the real-world as well as *some* CISC & RISC architectures.

It would be nice if you stuck to the facts instead of making shit up.

Bad Wrapping spoils the present.

"Wrap all the low-level arcane C++ in classes."

While I noted your qualification there, and I certainly have an do indulge in a bit of wrapping myself, I am finding that it is less and less necessary now because std libs bundled with most languages are pretty mature now and there seems to be quite a bit of feature swapping going on (this is a good trend IMO). :)

Frequently I have found wrapping to be a major source of obfuscation and screws ups (this ain't unique to C++ either). Essentially you're adding functionally useless code to a system that is almost guaranteed to have bugs of it's own.

It's not uncommon to find multiple wrappers for the same stuff in a large and/or old project simply because successive generations of developers have decided they don't like what's gone before but are too lazy/time starved to change it appropriately. :)

Also with respect to Borland's AnsiString thing, I liked it too. But I quickly worked out that the << and >> were just as easy (for me) - and the best bit is that they are ubiquitous.

Re: C++ put me off programming

"But it wasn't until I had to read someone else's C++ code that I realised what an horrendous mess there is to be made with perfectly good code, and how hard it can be to turn that back into something you can understand."

The phenomenon also known as "You can write FORTRAN in any language"*.

I should point out that while I don't have any affinity or much experience with FORTRAN, I recall thinking a few bits of F90 were neat when I was exposed to some FORTRAN written by reluctant programmers. :)

It's possible to make a mess in any language. While you may argue that some languages make this less likely to happen, in my personal experience the major factors in the b0rk-level of some code as follows:

1) Aptitude of the developers

2) Level of dependency of dynamic linkage (the downsides are not unique to Windows)

3) Platform

4) Vintage of the code

With respect to 2) I'd like to dump on over usage of dynamic linkage - with specific reference to Rabid Dependency Injection (I have seen DI work well, once, that was the only DI app I've worked on that was linked at build-time).

1) RDI apps take significantly longer to start up (dynamic linkage is expensive folks however it's done).

2) RDI apps usually suffer from narcolepsy (reminded me of good old garbage collection when ).

3) RDI apps often crash due to failed linkage at run time (due to a missing DLL, or the wrong DLL, you have little chance of getting hold of the correct one as the end user of course).

4) There is very little chance that the entire set of libs used by a RDI app when it was tested will be the same as the set that the user has available, rendering the testing null and void as far as the deployed app goes.

5) As a developer working on an RDI app you will spend a large amount of time hunting for missing DLLs, which in many cases have not been checked in. In the worst cases, which are alarmingly common, the missing DLL won't be noticed for a long time because the dev box you are working on has about ten million versions of it that DLL littered through out it's path - OR (even worse) - the particular code path is hit very rarely - usually during the year end batch at 3AM local time (the guilty developer will of course be long gone, natch).

Re: Intel & IBM & MS

You need to remove UNIX & Linux from that list of things holding back 'parallel RISC SW development' because that is utter bollocks. In fact the UNIX community has invested a vast amount of effort into parallel computing over a very long period of time, here's four vendors off the top of my head that have shipped production boxes with a shed load of cores running a UNIX variant : IBM, SGI, Cray, Sicortex.

OTOH if you are expecting the mainstream/Windows community to "grok" it you will be waiting a very long time - many of them are currently following the fad of running one app per (multitasking) OS image and running multiple OS images on a box under VMs. The problem with our mainstream brethren is that they keep getting bigger faster single cores to play with so they don't feel the need to progress. Truth told that ain't really going to change - although single cores probably won't get a lot faster, but they will get smaller & burn less juice - so folks can get slimmer iPhones next year.

I think some progress has been made in my lifetime, it's slow though. There are a lot of distributed systems out there now, and the push to do this "Cloud" crap is dependent on getting distributed systems to work... Personally I dislike the Cloud stuff, seems like a waste of perfectly good hardware.

I'll get my coat, it's the one with the Transputer Instruction Set manual in it. :)

Re: Really?

I think people overstate the similarities between VMS & NT. Granted there are some superficial similarities at kernel level, but in terms of the OS they are nothing like. I went from VMS 5.5-2 to NT 3.51 and they were not remotely similar from the point of view of an application developer, system administrator or user. I was very disappointed by NT, it promised much and delivered sweet F.A. I suspect that if they had pitched NT as a multi-user OS rather than something that runs on a single-user workstation the security and resource management aspects would have been in much better shape.

It's a shame, Cutler & Microsoft had an opportunity to do something different and/or do something better, instead they copied an old OS and left all the good stuff behind. With 20/20 hindsight I would have like to have seen MS clone UNIX and put all their energy into making their UNIX the bestest. That was never going to happen because Cutler is quoted as hating Unix and on that basis I figure he would be unlikely to take the time to learn enough to copy the good bits and learn from their mistakes.

Mine is the one with the VAX11 Architecture Handbook (c) 1979 in the pocket. :)

Re: PHP , Python : legacy languages

Functional <= C++ on || code (IMHO). Ubiquity && Maturity.

Re: Surely some mistake, the Samsung Q30 was the first Ultrabook ;)

I am real. My "POS" "Toy" has been helping me earn cash since 2006. I bought it so that I could write code anywhere without running out of space for my elbows (eg: train seats, airline seats), preferably without catching fire or burning my nuts in the process. There were very few machines that met those criteria back in 2006. I did actually try a Sony Vaio X505 (maybe you reckon that looked nicer) but I hated the keyboard which is a big deal when you earn your living using a keyboard.

Re: Surely some mistake, the Samsung Q30 was the first Ultrabook ;)

Dunno why you got down voted - the X505 looks like a fair comment to me. That said I haven't seen a Vaio I fancied yet - but that's a personal taste thing rather than a technical argument. :)

Re: Quantity is irrelevant without quality

Women being treated as peers, and spoken to politely in an IT workplace is the norm in my experience. All the incidences of sexism in the workplace that I have seen have been perpetrated by people without technical backgrounds.

Re: Microsoft in full desperate mode trying to mimic Apple and failing completely at it...

"a version of UNIX" does not a server OS make. I would argue that OS/X is designed and tuned to be a Workstation/Desktop OS rather than a server OS (and this is a good thing seeing as OS/X spends the vast majority of it's life deployed on Workstation/Desktop style boxes). I doubt many people would confuse OS/X with Solaris for example (BSD vs SVR4 notwithstanding!). ;)

Re: Cell fail?

IIRC BlueGene predates Cell.

BlueGene L/P 's processors are embedded cores with chunky FP units attached to them. The aim was to balance memory bandwidth with compute power, something that Cell failed to do. Perhaps if they had use BG cores they might have been able to get away without adding a GPU to the Playstation. Columbia's QCDOC is closer in design to BlueGene/L/P than a network of PS3s... :)

The last time I checked the most efficient machine in *delivered* FLOPS/W was a Chinese box based on a derivative of the venerable Alpha, no GPUs there. AFAIK that Chinese box was a one-off, whereas you can actually buy BlueGenes and they are very nearly as good. Again no GPUs there either.

Looks like NVidia are doing something about GPU IO so maybe the equation will change again. Personally I suspect it won't change much.

Re: A puny $140m for Cray's interconnect hardware business...

I have got enough Internets for this rock thank you. Having even more Internets won't help me take more interest in Instagram.

Much as I think Dave Cutler is wrong about nearly everything

I do have some sympathy for him. He was sucking on Ken "Unix is snake oil" Olsen's kool-aid teat during his formative years, so seems likely that the Olsen kool aid was still in his blood stream when he went off to Microsoft to re-invent UNIX poorly^W^W^Wwrite NT.

Also I am pretty sure that Dave had nothing to do with putting "Win32" on top of the kernel, which seems to be where most of these fuck ups come from.

At the end of the day Dave Cutler et al could have saved everyone the bother by implementing POSIX properly in the first place, like Linus did.