* Posts by Sander van der Wal

189 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

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Read The Gods of War for every tired cliche you never wanted to see in a sci fi book

Sander van der Wal

Re: I just realized...

Ah. I always thought that the TV series was a way to reuse the Lord of the Rings movie props.

Sander van der Wal

Re: Ian M

Perry Rhodan?

Blockbuster book lays out the first 20 years of the Smartphone Wars

Sander van der Wal

Re: And I say there screwed by Symbian

A bit harsh. At the time EPOC32 was conceived, they had no choice but to use some kind of Embedded C++. But by the time Symbian went into full swing, they should have dumped that old shit and started working with proper C++. The 9.1 binary break would have been the perfect time for it to do. They had exceptions by then, but the cleanup stack was retrofitted on top of it, and that was not smart.

Regarding Nokia, they were quite able to make all kinds of bad software engineering decisions completely by themselves. Just look at the way the did Maemo/MeeGo.

Symbian was one of those companies that was too early in all kinds of ways. EPOC32 was too early. Their build system was from the time before lots of tools were easily available from the Web.

Quit drooling, fanbois - haven't you SEEN what the iPhone 6 costs?

Sander van der Wal
Holmes

Re: Err...

Why on earth would any manufacturer sell the bloody things cheaper if every device they can make sells at the higher price?

The only reason most electronics gets cheaper very quickly is because almost nobody is willing to pay full price. There are always a few, though, so you start selling high to pocket that money.

Apple is an a spot every electronics maker wants to be. Good for them.

Apple's Watch is basically electric perfume

Sander van der Wal
Facepalm

This is pathetic. I know TV is now so bad that everything else is more enjoyable, but watching Apple product announcements for entertainment value is worse than a reality show addiction.

Why don't you people pick up a nice hobby? Something with tools that haven't changed for hunderds of years? Woodworking, something like that.

Apple's big bang: iPhone 6, ANOTHER iPhone 6 Plus and WATCH OUT

Sander van der Wal
Trollface

Hehehe. The Irish Tax Tweet is actually quite funny.

Anyways, pop bands way past their due date always went to Vegas to entertain the other dead people. Apparently that role has been taken over by the device makers. Nokia did it, now Apple's doing it.

Hawking: Higgs boson in a BIG particle punisher could DESTROY UNIVERSE

Sander van der Wal
FAIL

Hawkins isn't a stargazer. He's an astrophysicist, and such people couldn't find the Pole Star if their telescope alignment depended on it.

Limits to Growth is a pile of steaming doggy-doo based on total cobblers

Sander van der Wal
Angel

Re: Enery is the secret

"And they are no exception to this anti-development mentality: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point,” says climate change star Paul Ehrlich, “would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” Or, Amory Lovins: “If you ask me, it'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.”"

Sigh. Mischief to each other. Have these people heard of knives? Sticks? Stones? Fists?

Maybe, bit a bit of luck, a NEO becomes a HEO (Hitting Earth Object) and they will see some proper mischief.

You are here => Earth is in 'the suburbs' of an immense heaven

Sander van der Wal
Boffin

Boring is good.

Any particular reason it is not called the Local Supercluster?

Munich considers dumping Linux for ... GULP ... Windows!

Sander van der Wal

Re: More than Outlook

That's mental. People are free to use the O.S. they want, even in Germany.

And people have choosen Windows, for whatever reason is important to them. So the City Council needs to provide their services in such a way that all the Windows users are happy, because that is almost everybody. And all those people are voters too.

And you might have missed that I was explicitly talking about every file format but Office.

Sander van der Wal
Boffin

More than Outlook

The last paragraph of the article also mentions a couple of other issues

1) everybody else in Munich uses Windows, and that file compatibility is a problem.

2) getting missing functionality programmed is expensive.

Apparently a city council need a lot more than just Word, Excel and PowerPoint compatibility. Just a few examples: CAD files for buildings, financial reports from organizations that are subsidized, databases on all kinds of stuff to keep track off.

So when you try adding the missing functionality, which is possible because you have the source, then you find out that custom programming is expensive. Open Source was invented in organisations where having your own programmers around was the norm. But organisations do not employ their own programmers anymore in general. A city council s probably lucky still to have its own system administrators around, why on earth would they employ programmers then?

So you need to go contracting, and that is expensive.

Asteroid's DINO KILLING SPREE just bad luck – boffins

Sander van der Wal
Angel

Re: Bad luck...

The ones with a working flight program are doing just fine, thank you.

Cheer up, Nokia fans. It can start making mobes again in 18 months

Sander van der Wal

No money in smartphones...

.. unless you're Apple or Google.

Maybe the next big thing, something Internet of thing-like. Not holding my breath for announcement, though.

NASA: ALIENS and NEW EARTHS will be ours inside 20 years

Sander van der Wal

Re: A quote from Hawking

That would be the aliens too stupid to build a Dyson Sphere, or even a Ringworld?

iWatch 'due November'... Y'all know what time it is? Now you do

Sander van der Wal

Overhyped? By whom? Not by Apple, they haven't said a word.

The press is overreporting.

Think Google Glass is creepy? Wait until it READS YOUR MIND

Sander van der Wal
Alien

Mind reading, if it is going to work with sufficient accuracy and subtlety, is actually really cool. What you do NOT want is your mind state being transferred to Google.

PayPal says sorry: Fat fingers froze fundraiser for anti-spy ProtonMail

Sander van der Wal

Plausible deniability

That is the nice thing about it, because it exists everybody who makes a mistake is doing it deliberately.

'Sterile neutrinos' re-ignite 'we found dark-stuff' debate

Sander van der Wal

You probably mean "superclusters" when you talk about the largest scale structures in the universe. A galactic cluster sounds its a cluster of stars in the galaxy, like the Hyades and Pleiades.

REVEALED: Google's proposed indie music-killing contract terms

Sander van der Wal

Re: Must suck to be an musician in these days...

Lots of people wanting to make music and very few people being able to create attention for that music. Supply and demand.

The only way to get rid if that is to stop making music. Or be so good that everybody wants to listen to you so you can be The Man.

Higgs boson even more likely to actually be Higgs boson - boffins

Sander van der Wal

Re: Bad news for a lot of physicists

Steady State wasn't that old. People barely had proven that there were other Island Universes (what we now call galaxies) before Hubble showed that galaxies moved away from each other, the further apart, the faster.

More importantly, Steady State is the name for the theory that Hoyle invented in response to the Big Bang theory. So it has moving galaxies too, but in addition spontaneous generation of hydrogen atoms, to make new galaxies from.

Sander van der Wal
Angel

Re: Bad news for a lot of physicists

There are always careers in Theoretical Theology, or any other of the social sciences, for the people inclined to believe in the stuff they made up themselves.

If you do not like being proven wrong, stay away from physics.

EXPOSED: Massive mobile malware network used by cops globally

Sander van der Wal

Re: Nokia 3310

Need to make a call, but the battery in the phone. Done, remove the battery.

TIME TRAVEL TEST finds black holes needed to make photons flit

Sander van der Wal
Facepalm

Overly complicated

Just a bit of evolution will show that people killing their own grandfathers will not reproduce, them being non-existant. So all universes with evolution and time-travel have nice people in them, who will not kill their own grandfathers.

People will happily run malware if paid ONE CENT – new study

Sander van der Wal
Thumb Up

Demoralizing?

Excellent news!

Finally there's a way to make money while you sleep. Not a lot of it, but that is because computing power is not really scarce. And given the fact that FB et al already have downloaded your address book and whatnot, these guys are better than FB. FB didn't give you any money, didn't they?

On a more serious note, maybe the IT people should start to think of a way to have computers for other humans instead of computers for IT people? Companies are the only entities paying for your services, as the numerous complaints on these fora about having to give away free computer support for friends an family show.

Google Fit will slurp YOUR heartbeat, weight, blood pressure from gizmos

Sander van der Wal
Thumb Down

Re: Coming soon...

What data? The data they are making up themselves for everybody with a Google+ account?

We're ALL Winston Smith now - and our common enemy is the Big Brother State

Sander van der Wal
Facepalm

Google's money comes from advertisers, who believe that Google's information on people will help them sell junk to the same people.

Google can tell them all kinds of subtle lies about people and the stuff they are interested in. Who's going to know?

Report pegs Apple for October smartwatch release

Sander van der Wal
Facepalm

"Sorry folks: at least another four months of iWatch stories"

Only because you lot make them up and publish them

NSA: Inside the FIVE-EYED VAMPIRE SQUID of the INTERNET

Sander van der Wal

Re: Simple Counter-Measure

We already have that. It's called Facebook. And it is very easy to use too.

Glassholes beware: This guy's got your number

Sander van der Wal
Facepalm

Re: My network...

Seems to me preventing glassholes to video everybody on the premises is taking one's responsability seriously.

Secondly, he's only looking at the MAC address. He's not peeking into the traffic. Very hard to police for illegal stuff, unless of course certain MAC addresses must be prevented by law or court order from accessing publicly available networks.

Android is a BURNING 'hellstew' of malware, cackles Apple's Cook

Sander van der Wal

Re: Really?

You mean, making life-enhancing mistakes like installing some malware that sends premium SMS on your dime? The single experience everybody must have had to feel really, truly and utterly alive?

On this site, most readers think smartphones (computers) are interesting and worth tinkering with. But that is a minority standpoint. Most people want a cheap and reasonable phone, a big minority want to pay more and have a phone that some something extra.

And then there's the status. On this site tinkering with phones is status-enhancing, but that is also a minority view in the wide world. The minority buying iOS devices is a lot bigger. And willing to spend cash.

Linux users at risk as ANOTHER critical GnuTLS bug found

Sander van der Wal

Re: Open source was supposed to be secure

It was indeed. Open Source was claimed to be safe because everybody had already looked at the code and found nothing wrong. Note the past tense.

Now we know that nobody looked, or only the three-letter agencies looked at said code. And wrote exploits for it.

Now the other claim: everybody can fix it. This is partly true, everybody can run the patch and fix it in that sense. But almost nobody can look at the code, see what is wrong with it and create the patch. What everybody can do is look at the code.

I must say, I love the economics ans sociologics of this. O.S was meant to make the world a better place, and in some parts it did. What it also did was make the world a worse place. The three letter agencies got free and easy access, and all they had to do was look at the code, find the bugs and do nothing about them. And lots of the really smart people who also wanted to make money out of that smartness started serving ads, gathering data and making money, instead of writing closed source and making money.

Apple: We'll tailor Swift to be a fast new programming language

Sander van der Wal
Angel

Compound statements considered harmfull.

Who cares how a compound statement is formulated, when the problem is that it exists? Compound statements are actually the root all evil in programming, after the banishment of goto.

In Oberon it was done properly: statement lists. No BEGIN or {, except at the star of a procedure. A couple of keywords terminated a statement list, and END was one of them, next to ELSE and possibly UNTIL (forgot whether Oberon has a REPEAT UNTIL).

Apple plots HOME INVASION at WWDC

Sander van der Wal
Angel

Re: I'm still wondering...

A fully working AI is going to be a lot *worse* than your Mum ever was.

The Internet of Things helps insurance firms reward, punish

Sander van der Wal

Re: As has been pointed out by others

Why do you want those things in the first place?

Sander van der Wal

Reprogram the devices so that they tell lies about your habits.

Fanbois Apple-gasm as iPhone giant finally reveals WWDC lineup

Sander van der Wal
Angel

Not that familiar with Apple before the iPhone, but is Jasper H. implying that all those iPod announcements during the noughties were exciting?

Really?

So you reckon Nokia-wielding Microsoft can't beat off Apple?

Sander van der Wal

Re: I disagree in part

Android users invest far less in their app than iOS users. Which makes switching from Android cheaper.

Cloud computing is FAIL and here’s why

Sander van der Wal
Facepalm

Of course do we agree

that's why I am not in the cloud.

Apple, Beats and fools with money who trust celeb endorsements

Sander van der Wal
Childcatcher

Re: I think...

Indeed. Remember the Samsung smart watch thingie.

PEAK APPLE: Mystery upstart to hurl iLord from its throne 'by 2020'

Sander van der Wal
Angel

Famous for it?

This is the Fred Wilson who is famous for having correctly predicted the rise and fall of a whole Valley of tech companies?

You'll hate Google's experimental Chrome UI, but so will phishers

Sander van der Wal
Facepalm

Don't use Chrome?

Stephen Hawking: The creation of true AI could be the 'greatest event in human history'

Sander van der Wal

Re: Thinking about thinking

Mmmm. Given that humans are the ones coming up with these kinds of nasty applications all the time, the first thing a rational being will do is making sure the cannot do that kind of torture on him.

Please work for nothing, Mr Dabbs. What can you lose?

Sander van der Wal
Gimp

Re: Returning a favour would be nice

As I understand it the techies managing other people's home computer systems always put Linux on those systems.

Isn't that enough of an revenge?

Fix capitalism with floating cities on Venus says Charles Stross

Sander van der Wal
Alien

Sounds great. Seeing nothing but fog for the rest of your live.

OTOH, for Britons there would not be that much difference, wouldn't it?

EU antitrust bods: Motorola, Samsung too dominant to take on poor little Apple

Sander van der Wal
Angel

Indeed. Apple has less than 20% of the market by device numbers, so they are clearly not the dominant party on the smartphone market.

Who cares that they make all the money anyway.

What HAS BEEN SEEN? OMG it's a thing that looks like an iWatch

Sander van der Wal
Thumb Down

Clearly, the wrong things are being patented

Click-bait, for instance. If one-click shopping charts can be patented, why not click-bait?

The internet would be so much better.

Web cams pointed into hot young star's 'Ring of Fire' down under

Sander van der Wal
Thumb Down

The Sun is not a young star anymore at 5 times 10**9 years. And at 6000 Kelvin, is isn't hot either. Just an old-fashioned eclipse of the Sun by the Moon. And as people have known for 2500* years, solar eclipses get clouded out all the time.

* Thales of Milete.

Google's self-driving car breakthrough: Stop sign no longer a problem

Sander van der Wal
Angel

Would love to see that car trying to handle Dutch cyclists. Like in Amsterdam.

If it is going to wait for all cyclist to pass, it won't go anywhere. And not that anybody is going to signal a left turn.

That's right, MICROSOFT is an ANDROID vendor after Nokia gobble

Sander van der Wal
Angel

I'm sure they are crying all the way to the bank.

Awkward? Elop now answers to ex-junior Nadella as Microsoft closes Nokia buyout

Sander van der Wal
Gimp

Re: You missed one big bit

Nokia was loosing market share in Europe as soon as iPhone was released there. Look at the Nokia Group Annual accounts at this web page: http://company.nokia.com/en/investors/financial-reports/results-reports.

The interesting section in the reports is the top 10 market bit. Just compare the figures for the European markets year over year.

Nokia was still growing, but their key markets were collapsing as soon as the competition entered. At some point you will then stop growing. Which Nokia did, just before the famous Memo. Obviously, management already knew they were in trouble, and they tried something new. Fully aware that it might not work, as it did not.

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