Posts by Ommerson
75 posts • joined Thursday 10th March 2011 13:23 GMT
Lost in translation
Although not reported here, the management change takes place on 1st April.
Which tends to suggest that the next month's sales will be dire as the effect of xmas presents to teenagers are removed from the underlying sales performance. These won't have been terribly profitably sales either.
Looks like the perils of the waterfall development process strike again.
The issue is that Android provides a high-level audio API (both native and bridged into Java) that is fundamentally not designed for this kind of application.
The phone vendor (or more likely chipset vendor) decide how they implement this API - in some cases, it's a thin-shim onto ALSA, but it doesn't have to be. You'd be an unwise if you made assumptions here.
There's also a lack of MIDI support - iOS on the other hand has CoreMIDI, which works just as it does in MacOSX, and device drivers for class-compliant USB MIDI devices. It takes about half an hour to plumb this into an application.
Finally, any performance critical real-time app - for instance a soft synth - is going to need to be a native app. Whilst the NDK is much better than it was, it's not a great experience to develop with.
Music Apps
One area in which Android has nearly zero market penetration is music creation/performance applications (think sequencers, software sythnetisers and so on). iOS is awash with them, and they are invariable premium paid-for apps or have in-app purchase.
The reasons for this? Various, but lack of device support (and lack of uniformity between devices) , lack of SDK support, and Android architectural choices all figure, but it's basically a royal PITA to develop these types of apps for Android.
For Windows Phone 7 on the other hand, it's practically impossible.
The government is currently trying to finish the job off and make civil partnerships marriages. And yes, this is coming from the (generally younger) leadership of the centre-right Conservative Party- although there are plenty of party members bitterly opposed to it (and a few in the Labour Party too).
One pragmatic solution is to make all unions civil partnerships and allow couples of religious persuasion to dress it up as they see fit.
More likely a function of the demographic who works at such companies: Devout belief in imaginary friends is not a common occurrence amongst scientists, software engineers and designers.
Or back to the dark-ages, which they seem to hanker for. No computers or Internet there, so no issues!
Posted in Crossley cops two-year suspension
Do you suppose he has much of a career has a solicitor (or indeed anything else?) ahead of him after this (after his suspension)? He's already financially ruined by all accounts.
Posted in Cops seek clues to $1.7m tablet snatch
Parallels
It strikes me that there are definite parallels between this theft and the Northern Bank raid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Bank_robbery) in Northern Ireland.
After the Northern Bank raid, the thieves were left with a van-load of cash that was practically worthless.
Seem
'because you couldn’t and wouldn’t want to fit a general purpose PC operating system core into a phone.'
Since the vast majority of the mobile phone market is doing precisely this, it's entirely reasonable - iOS is using the same Mach/BSP kernel a Mac OS X (and a fair chunk of the user-space layers as well) and Android is using the Linux kernel. Clearly in both cases, some features are compiled out, and some of the drivers are different.
Also bear in mind that MS is already committed to supporting a number of ARM SoC devices in W8, so it seems highly likely that the would avoid duplicating this (considerable) effort across the NT and Windows CE kernels.
Posted in Apple stores getting close to overload
Careful recruitment
I suspect, the customer service is also down to the type of person employed in an Apple Store - they are clearly recruited for team-fit, and for individuality rather than being a black-trousers-shirt-and-tie sales drone.
Slight edgy looks are clearly encouraged. This is just simple psychology - when the staff in the store appear to have the same kind of lifestyle and values as their many of the customer-base, it's no surprise that they seem approachable and relaxed.
If you want another example of this effect on the British high-street - pop into a branch of Waitrose to spot staff who really enjoy their jobs and want to be there, rather than just collecting their salary and sales bonus at the end of the month.
No. Apple already have a elegant solution shipping in products.
Their solution envisages the display as the docking station. The cable splits into two with a Magsafe power adaptor and Thunderbolt cable on the end.
This is considerably smaller - the laptop in any case needs both the Mag-safe and Thunderbolt/Mini-display port, so it consumes no additional real-estate.
Architecture fail
The extra connector shown in the pictures is huge - the article suggests that it's not just for power but for other signals as well such as ethernet.
The whole point about Thunderbolt is that it is fully featured multi-master peripheral bus - in much the same way as Firewire or PCI-e are. Therefore, the logical architecture is to hang peripheral devices such as ethernet and USB controllers on the other side of it, in the connected device. This is precisely what Apple does in its Thunderbolt displays, even providing a Firewire S800 port back-hauled over Thunderbolt.
Intel appears to be trying to route a load of other signals from the host system to peripheral devices, somewhat corrupting the architectural vision of Thunderbolt.
The other obvious problem with this connector is its size - any laptop manufacturer trying to match Apple on form factor is going to have big problems finding enough space for this arrangement.
Legal hazard
I'm fairly sure that today's litigious world, there are some candidates who would find a trip to the pub to be discriminatory. You might need to be careful who you invited.
A perfect reason to submit a CV as a PDF.
There are other reasons: with the proliferation of applications that read Word documents - with varying levels of fidelity - there's a good chance of CV formatting getting screwed up. It never looks good. Even setting a different paper size from the reader's default (or their printer's) can cause problems.
PDFs are much more robust.
You assume that crime is rational or even well paid. It's most likely neither.
Comparing apples with pears
You might have missed the point that Thunderbolt does quite a bit more than any of the other display connector standard. You can't, for instance, double head a laptop with a pair of these displays of this size using anything else.
It gets worse than this
The TI OMAP series of devices - found in lots of phones and tablets - have a first stage boot-loader baked into the device that reads a FAT partition in order to boot the system. It may be that this doesn't infringe by virtue of not using VFAT, but who knows?
I bet other devices work similarly. Do the hardware vendors license the VFAT patent on behalf of their OEMs?
Even if you remove VFAT capability from the device, you might not be able to escape it at boot-time.
Er.. no...
No they don't. What they do have is gold plating on edge connectors and some connectors.
The tracks on the PCB are made of copper and there's considerably more than 1g of metal on them.
It's all about the user experience
Simply because the user experience would suck horribly.
In addition, VFAT is ubiquitous in boot-loaders commonly used with ARM SoCs in most of these products. At least this is a problem that could be solved with a bit of engineering.
Posted in WTF is... 4K x 2K?
Solution looking for a problem
Since the human eye can't even resolve the pixels of a 1080 display in a standard living room, this is massive overkill that will satisfy consumers who believe that bigger numbers are always better.
Posted in Wind power: Even worse than you thought
Unless it's peer reviewed
research like this counts for nothing. It's just a PR exercise.
The compilers are open source
The tool-chain itself is either GCC or Clang - both of which are open source. You can always go and get them the old-fashioned way.
Similarly MacOSX platform headers and libraries are where they always used to be - and where GCC and its ilk will be expecting them to find them, so you don't actually need to use the platform SDKs that come with XCode - but you won't be able to build for specific platform versions. This is probably fine for open sourcers.
Where have we seen this tactic before?
So, the Icecreamists have taken viral marketing strategy similar to those used by none other than Lady Gaga herself.
