Posts by Ommerson
75 posts • joined Thursday 10th March 2011 13:23 GMT
Re: Unix phone
You would. What fun typing all of this on a touchsceen would be?
Re: evidence that this is doomed
Simply because they *can*, and because they intensely dislike interacting with any other kind of interface. You'll probably find they eschew the built in mail app, and run Mutt instead. And naturally there will a choice between Vi and Emacs - neither of which i imagine to be fun with a touchscreen.
Re: Why does the good Lord tempt us all like this?
You kind of have to admit Shuttleworth for thinking big (Megalomaniacal tendencies perhaps?) - otherwise Ubuntu would be just another Linux distro with just the same stagnant - and increasingly in the consume space - obsolete business model. However, seeing that Apple, Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Google) are providing eco-systems, and deciding he wants to play the same game as well is possibly misguided.
Right now Canonical are building out a bunch of cookie-cutter cloud services to support their new family of devices, and it's precisely the kind of thing their existing customer base is going to hate.
Re: Why does the good Lord tempt us all like this?
I can. And that would be what the dog-food very soon becomes following consumption by said dog
Feedback from early UX testing (and yes, Ubuntu employs a huge team of UX experts at top $) was that the number 1 missing feature was ..... a console application. That is evidence enough that this enterprise is doomed.
They are readily available to rent with the right contacts. One hears from the press of the hire-charge being in the £100-200 range provided the weapon isn't fired. And if the intention is to intimidate rather than actually kill, an imitation is likely adequate.
Re: Takes me back to high school.
One of my mother's friend's sons was quite wayward and getting into all kind of trouble. He had already build a home-made chemical balance for the express purpose of getting the stoichiometric ratio for black-power *just* right.
Naturally he progressed onto making a projectile-weapons. His novel design used an empty (of gas) Sodastream CO2 cylinder which he packed with black-powder and a fuse-wire detonator. In the neck of the bottle, he placed a projectile carefully machined to be a tight fit.
He tried this in some woodland near his house. Results: Not much of the gas cylinder remained, but the bullet was almost precisely where had been. And the police got very interested.
Re: Rent
isn't this precisely what you friendly neighbourhood Hackspace or modelling club is for? Access to machine tools one wouldn't otherwise be able to buy ;)
Re: David, you missed the point
What might have escaped most of the people sucked in by the media hype is that a 3d printer isn't some kind of universal assembly machine, and that it can doesn't print double-sided 3d parts, or those with internal cavities straight off the machine's table - some kind of formwork is always required, and in the case of cavities, you're probably looking at a two parts that are then glued together.
Plug in USB-and-go this isn't.
Not totally useless....
....just mostly.
Re: but puzzling nonetheless
If canonical listened to its user-base, the default UI would be a console window. And apparently that's precisely the number one feature request when they did user-testing. I believe they added it too.
Re: "can survive a strike from a 110-gram ball bearing"
The scientific illiteracy continues with '50kg of pressure'.
Re: It was only a matter of time
This is also a sunset business because the retail of everything they distribute is as well (newspapers, CDs, DVDs, magazines). Retailing these good as well is surely putting all of the eggs in one basket.
WHSmith is a store I really dislike shopping in. Cluttered, overstocked shops with shite customer service.
Re: Wonder how much tax HMV paid
Amazon was avoiding pay corporation tax. This is a tax on PROFIT. HMV's problem is that it was nowhere near having any in the first place.
What Amazon *was* doing, was exploiting small consignment relief on imports of media supplied from the Channel Islands. For all I know, perhaps HMV was doing this as well for mail order? Just about everybody else was at the time. This loophole was closed earlier in the year, and that's done nothing for HMV.
would....
...having sex with both of them simultaneously constitute incest?
It is a requirement for any participant in a formal standardisation process to declare any patents they hold on the technology and agree to FRAND license. In the case of MPEG - so presumably H.264 - there is a patent pool arrangement in place.
The 802.11 standards are also formal standards.
Broken design
THe security of these locks is fundamentally broken, and if the hacker's paper is to be believed, the design is at best negligent, with all the hallmarks 'we know best' security practice - in particular the DIY crypto algorithm.
Onity's statement disingenuous: the hack is hardly complex - it involves little more than a lost cost micro-controller, a battery and a few passives - probably about $5 of parts. Schematics and full source-code are readily available. The report elsewhere that a pen-size lock-pick has been made is not at all surprising.
What surprises me is that this isn't already heading towards a class-action law-suit state-side - especially if the reports here that Onity is charging hotels for new lock components.
Re: One-trick pony
You seem to be falling into the trap that many others are doing, This statement is simply not true. Lots of QNX in embedded applications (also a lot of Linux and VxWorks too FWIW).
Whilst BB10 might be build with QNX at its core, you definitely not assume that devices using QNX have anything of the extra stuff that BB10 brings to the party, or that there is suddenly any kind of interoperability.
Your assertion is about as useful as saying that because Android is based on a Linux kernel, a Linux server must therefore have similarities or capabilities of Android.
Re: RE: code in C++
You *think* wrong.
If you'd ever tried debugging application in Android you'd know just how quickly java method calls find their way into native C++. Sure, there are performance critical things that you are better not implementing in Java, and which there are no C++ APIs for. A very small proportion of the software running on a Android phone is actually running in the VM.
Rather, the problems with Android have traditionally been a lack of coherent use of hardware acceleration and lack of bad behaviour of apps - in part due to the lack the strong-arm policy controlling what apps can and cannot do that Apple imposes, and Microsoft has copied for Windows RT.
For the sake of completion - it's worth pointing out that Objective-C is garbage collected and there isn't a direct C++ API for the GUI in iOS either (although ObjectiveC and C or C++ are toll-free bridged, and plenty of the APIs are in fact C).
Re: WP8
Porting an well designed and portable kernel to a new platform is a new CPU architecture such that it is functional is relatively straightforward. There is very little platform-specific code in a modern operating system. Go and look at the Linux or *BSD source trees to confirm this.
What will have been a lot of work is cracking the problem of power management - particularly as WIndows 8 is targeted at mobile devices. MS has achieved this for no fewer than 3 ARM SoC platforms - no small achievement.
Re: WP8
Whilst the the very core of the NT kernel certainly has leanings towards being a Microkernel - particularly in terms of modularity - it's about as monolithic as they come.
Re: If Ballmer and Microsoft think any professional would ever use Metro they are on crack
out of curiosity, have you actually *used* it?
He who fights monsters....
ZHC seem to have more in common with the EDL than they have differences. This seems to be a case Islamic fascism going after common-a-garden fascism.
The Anal-lyst strikes again
More pontificating from a professional speculator who - without breaking insider trading laws - has about the same insight as the rest of us.
Re: Not that readily
Asking for bigger ones is a lot less embarrassing than asking for smaller ones.
Re: UK/US
Larger sizes are readily available, even on the high street. For obvious marketing reasons condoms are not sold as 'small'. 'medium' and 'large', even though buying the correct size is of great benefit to those with diminutive tools.
This looks like a solution (and late, and not terribly interesting one at that) looking for a problem. Why on earth would customers be interested in this when there are already plenty of really good alternatives?
The fine line...
... between market analysis and insider trading.
What the Steve Brazier actually means is that's an era in which the cost of software is plummeting, sold direct and in which the channel has no part. Whilst Microsoft has successfully dumped a lot of legacy cruft (at last), it's definitely here to stay in the form of W8.
s/sensible/desperate/
$10k doesn't buy you very much developer time, and getting $1k of sales might be quite difficult as well.
Re: Could still be bad for Apple
I doubt it. The carriers are far more defendant on apple than vice-versa. The carrier that sticks its neck out can expect a pummeling from their investors.
Active-X
First direct (HSBC's internet banking offshoot) also makes some perverse choices.
They offer a downloadable money manager app to accompany their accounts. Windows Only. For security reasons it's implemented in Active-X. Other platforms apparently not good enough.
meanwhile...
... Apple thrashes all competition on sales volumes.
Posted in RIM doses PlayBook with 4G super serum
Lack of clue...
....being demonstrated the comment above.
QNX is a real-time embedded operating system - with a micro-kernel at its core, and POSIX-like layers around it. Which is pretty much same architectural choice as MacOSX/iOS's use of the Mach microkernel. There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that MacOSX/iOS are both very solid and fit for purpose.
What really matters for a mobile phone OS are the user-space, user-interface and middleware layers. QNX has very little to offer here, so this is all coming from RIM - and which they are having difficulty delivering in time. At the time of writing, these are an unknown quantity.
Just about the only things of UNIX origin in iOS are low level system libraries providing POSIX APIs, and some parts of the kernel.
There's probably a similar amount 'UNIX' in an Android phone too.
Posted in Pure Stream takes on AirPlay
An Apple TV costs £99 and does video too. A no-brainer if you already have iDevices.
More than use lip-service.
If the numbers of Google employees in the parade at Pride London last weekend was anything to go by, this is not a marketing exercise.
Better than EMT
The Wifi on ECML is actually quite reliable compared to the East Midlands Trains between London and Nottingham. Rubbish 3G as well along the line of route, so I guess we know how they're back hauling it.
The good news is that GSM-R is getting rapidly rolled out along the rail network for signalling and train control purposes. It's perfectly possible to use the spare capacity for mobile data.
Re: Openwound strike again!
By all accounts, NIMBYism is a big issue preventing rollout in some areas.
There's at least once case in London where there has been so much that BT has just given up - and I don't blame them for it. It might focus some minds and could just result in punishment for incumbent councillors at the ballot box.
Re: Hey Iran...
Probably also a good idea to have direct manufacturer's support for your SCADA system - a situation that is definitely not going to arise when the the system is bought through a 3rd country (due to sanctions) and components are possibly pirated.
Re: Self-service checkouts
As far as I know, it's a far more ancient WIndow NT-based system in use on these checkouts! And in fact the EPOS application appears to be running on Terminal services with the checkouts themselves being a thin (and slooooow) client. Hence the irritating recorded messages sometimes appearing several seconds after you've scanned the next item.
They all appear to be produced by the same manufacturer, and all shining examples poor software usability, Also apparent is that nobody at the supermarkets or manufacturer actually cares about this either.
What's the odds...
Possible that RIM aren't actually manufacturing ANY models and just slowly disposing of warehouses full of devices?
Posted in National Rail Enquiries
Re: Switzerland.....
This 'National Rail' application is in fact produced for the Association of Train Operating Companies, which is a private company limited by Guarantee, whose members are UK train operators. It provides passenger information services to consumers, including the National Rail Enquiries phone service.
ATOC has a track record of trying to monetize these services (its other funding stream is from its member companies).
Does rather seem to be me like double dipping. You might like to write to your MP and Justine Greening (secretary of state for transport) - who is currently in the process refranchising a large proportion of UK rail services - asking why unfettered public access to this data is not a requirement of all future franchises.
Re: Do what I'd do...
An employer coercing credentials out of a candidate and then using them against Facebook's terms of service may be committing a number of criminal offences.
Sometimes...
Jobs such as these are perhaps best left to the professionals.
Omissions
To say these reports are biased in favour of Wind power (despite both coming out rather negatively against) them is a huge understatement.
Balancing capacity - as indicated in the article - is the real biggy here. The grid will need as much spare - and reliable - generating (or load shedding) capacity as it has wind generation for the days when there is no wind. This will most likely be provided be gas turbine plants.
So in effect, we'd need just as many of these plants as we'd need NOT building wind-turbines, but they would run far below designed load most of the time, yet cost just as much to build and maintain.
Wind energy is simply not a scalable or realistic renewable technology for bulk generation. Neither is PV Solar. Hydro and Tidal schemes on the other hand can work.
Re: Replicant
You might recall that this was always Stallman's intention with a free replacement for desktop UN*X about 25 years ago. They started from the bottom upwards with shell utils and compilers.
The result of that process is essentially GNU/Hurd - which is not exactly ready for consumer use, and some parts (GCC for example) are suffering considerable code-rot and look likely to be superseded.
Obviously, in the mean-time, Linux came along, and computer architecture moved on, leaving a lot of the proprietary smarts in device firmware.
Not just from Google
The closed parts of these phones aren't just coming from Google - they also come from the chipset vendor.
There are often large of opaque code that interfaces with some highly proprietary features of Systems on Chips. This includes things such as hardware accelerated video for camera interfaces, face-recognition (used for autofocus on cameras), hardware accelerated media decode, and probably most crucially, OpenGLES graphics drivers.
Some vendors, such as TI publicly distribute the binaries (they're all done in user-space incidentally - to avoid issues with the GPL'd kernel) as black boxes. Others don't even do this. None of them release the source code, and you'll need an NDA for the documentation to build your own equivalent (and releasing any resulting source code would probably be a breach of the NDA).
WIthout these components, your open source phone is going to suck considerably - both in experience and on the battery.
CMS Hell
I think all too often the, the CMS used to drive these sites is cause of poor usability.
Obviously, a CMS brings with it benefits to the organisation, such as devolved the creation of website content to the relevant departments, but this often leads to clunky pages as those writing them have little knowledge of usability and are constrained by the structure of the CMS.
My local council (London Borough of Islington) has brain damage such as 'to search planning applications click the 'planning' button on the toolbar on the left' - rather than providing a direct link in the content.
Saying that, the pages where this leads (https://www.islington.gov.uk/onlineplanning/apas/run/Wphappcriteria.showApplications?regfromdate=05-mar-2012®todate=05-mar-2012&DispResultsAs=wphappsresweek1) is clearly not within the CMS framework, and is a vanilla database driven query. It is piss-poor, being practically impossible to use unless you know the precise street address or planning application number, and looks poor as well. The 174 validation warnings for 1 page of content suggest there are several *per line* of HTML.
Their page for applying for a resident's parking permit is similar bad, and buggy as well. This is a service I struggle to use on an annual basis.
Pretty poor show - probably driven by an inability of the Council to hire good staff to build these sites.
Re: Personal space?
I believe Ryan Air has already floated the idea already, and probably has the balls to try it too. Seems logical that after trying to eliminate baggage in the hold they should discourage on the passengers as well.
Naturally the disability/fatty's rights/elderly charities are going to complain bitterly about this. It may also already be illegal for discriminating indirectly against the disabled and certain ethnic groups with high prevalence of obesity - e.g. US citizens.
Had they done this, WinPho would have sucked just as much as WM6. The gulf between the two is huge.
