Posts by Chris 155

11 posts • joined Friday 9th October 2009 04:07 GMT

Posted in Resistance is futile? Memristor RAM now cheap as chips

Posted Tuesday 22nd May 2012 06:31 GMT

Chris 155

Re: Endurance

People always look at this and thing "Oh, that's no good", but what that means is that with a half way decent controller, you can write the full volume of this disk 30000 times. So if you're writing the full volume of your disk every day(which would be high utilization it'll last approximately 8.2 years or about twice as long as your HDD.

There are really just very few cases where this level of rewrite cycles is even remotely an issue.

Posted in Microsoft to devs: Don't ruin Win 8 launch with crap code

Posted Monday 21st May 2012 03:41 GMT

Chris 155

Re: Meanwhile

This is just reiterating an old truth. If you use undocumented APIs they can and probably will change without notice. If you're the office or internet explorer team you will probably get told this is going to happen(with at least 5 minutes notice).

It's not about the APIs being bad as such, or about Microsoft knowing what they're doing, it's about change management. Published APIs require massive amounts of hoopla to change, and they generally have to keep the old APIs around in a deprecated state for the next 10 years so that legacy code works. Unpublished APIs on the other hand can essentially be changed at will, won't remain in a deprecated state and the first notification you as an outside developer will receive that these APIs have been changed is when your program fails.

This isn't new, nor is it distinctly Microsoft. The interesting part of this article is that Microsoft realizes that crappy third party software impacts their reputation.

Posted in If Google's only taking a COPY of your personality, why worry?

Posted Monday 16th April 2012 14:53 GMT

Chris 155

The problem we have is that insanity has come to rein free, and for all of the vitriol against "freetards" it didn't begin with them. We have reached a point in our society where in the telling of a single story can keep not only oneself, but one's children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren fat and happy for all time, and all indications are that if thing don't change soon, that this protection will extend out to untold generations. We have reached a point or soon will where the protection of an idea my outlast the civilization which spawned it.

We live in a society wherein the basic building blocks of life, our very DNA is being actively patented, this isn't fantasy, it's happening. It's not really all that much of a stretch to envision a future where the act of procreation violates intellectual property laws.

Yes, the idea that information wants to be free is ludicrous, information doesn't want anything. Yes, creative works deserve protection as do all manner of other ephemeral ideas. That said, how can we criticize people for taking a ludicrous response to a ludicrous system? How do we judge someone for believing their should be no property while condoning a man who believes that an idea which was based largely on the previous efforts of others should remain the exclusive holding of himself and his heirs through the course of generations yet unborn?

For better or worse there is no known or imagined enforcement mechanism for copyright or privacy which is both functional and allows for the existence of a free society. We simply cannot determine what information people are transmitting or storing without looking at that information which is, in many ways a worse violation of privacy than any of the evil done by Google.

Enforcement of intellectual property and privacy can only be done via the medium of the social contract. Society must believe that the free distribution of such information is a moral or societal wrong, and this simply can never be the case until we begin to until we begin to claw back some of the ridiculous gains achieved by the copyright lobby.

Posted in Google SHOCK! Snaps up Motorola phone biz for $12.5bn

Posted Tuesday 16th August 2011 08:11 GMT

Chris 155

Not too quick

Given how bad Symbian is and how much of that is the fault of the group developing it I'd say disbanding it happened too late not too quickly.

Posted in Desktop virtualisation: Yes, it's cheaper

Posted Tuesday 7th June 2011 08:52 GMT

Chris 155

And of course

Even if you had 250 applications per machine the math doesn't work.

Any serious software company isn't going to let you reduce your 2500 licenses to 1 just because you ran it on one machine. Maybe some dinky little outfit might let themselves get screwed that way, but none of the big boys are. You want to run 2500 instances of Office off one RDP server(which is insane to begin with) you'll pay for 2500 licenses as well as the 2500 CALs for the RDP. Want to run em in a virtual desktop, you'll pay all that plus the 2500 windows licenses.

You will never find a long term solution wherin you can drastically reduce your software licensing requirements unless you didn't actually need that software in the first place or you get a deal from the vendor. You might get away with it for a little while, but vendors who don't close those loopholes go bankrupt.

Posted in Why Nokia failed: 'Wasted 2,000 man years' on UIs that didn't work

Posted Monday 14th March 2011 09:50 GMT

Chris 155

For the same reason they've abandoned Meego

Open Source is about free developers, and prying free developers away from Android is going to be pretty much impossible. Nokia simply do not have the resources(or ability) to be sole maintainers of a mobile linux fork.

Posted in New Xbox 360 said to 'still scratch discs'

Posted Friday 18th June 2010 09:21 GMT

Chris 155

Audio CDs

With very rare exceptions, all audio cd players run at the same speeds they did when they first came out. There's only 700 MB of data on them at most and the corresponding music has a playtime of about 74 minutes. You don't need to spin very fast to draw a little under 10 MB a minute.

Your xbox 360 on the other hand is dealing with a disc with 4.5 GB on it, and at that same rate of transfer it'd take about 7.5 hours to finish reading that dis, which you'd find rather unacceptable. There are some differences in read methods for dvds which account for some of this transfer difference, but a lot of it comes down to rotating the disc substantially faster.

In short it's one hell of a lot easier to control something going relatively slowly than something going very very fast.

Posted in Microsoft's Linux patent bingo hits Google's Android

Posted Thursday 29th April 2010 08:20 GMT

Chris 155

Open Source != Free Software

Microsoft is at the moment at least pretending to care about promoting open source which runs on windows and doesn't compete with Office. It's in their best interests to do so as it enhances the Windows environment and makes their product more desirable. Open source is after all people doing development for free, and every corporation likes that.

As part of this, they are willing to coexist at least nominally with open source software which doesn't benefit them. They want to make a buck off it if they can, but they're ok with it existing even if they don't. This is mostly because trying to destroy it cost them more than it gained them, but Microsoft are a for profit company after all.

On the other hand, they would probably very much like the free software movement to cease to exist, which is perfectly fine since the free software movement would very much like to see Microsoft cease to exist. Free Software and Microsoft are fundamentally incompatible, and are likely to remain so for the forseeable future. There's still a war there, and there always will be.

Posted in Microsoft renews vows with JQuery Javascript

Posted Thursday 18th March 2010 16:09 GMT

Chris 155

Not a Surprise

You see, the thing is, karma is a bitch.

Microsoft left IE6 to rot for the better part of a decade, making the lives of every web developer since just the tiniest bit more painful and unhappy. The ironic thing is that now that they've realized they have to move with the times, the people who most want it to go away are actually Microsoft.

Unfortunately for them(and for everyone else) getting rid of that boondoggle is proving a lot harder than anyone might have anticipated.

Microsoft have to keep supporting it because at this point they really have no choice, if .NET applications don't work in their own browser they'e pretty much sunk. On the other hand they need to support real web standards these days for pretty much exactly the same reason. If .NET applications don't work in other browsers(as well as more modern versions of IE itself) they're still pretty much sunk.

JQuery is really their best way forward, they can distribute it and count on its libraries to sort the whole tangled mess out as much as is humanly possible MVC applications will now "just work"(for a rather wide definition of work) in all browsers including Microsoft's, and they don't get their new technology sunk by their old one.

Posted in 'Amateur' IBM brings down Air New Zealand

Posted Tuesday 13th October 2009 09:12 GMT

Chris 155

This is bad for IBM

IBM is a service provider now. It's what they do and it's how they make their money. You pay IBM money and they provide and take care of your systems for you. It's a perfectly sensible thing to do, mainframe experts aren't exactly growing on trees these days and IBM made the damned machine. If they did indeed screw this one up(and even if they didn't) this kind of failure isn't going to be good for their core business.

Outsourcing isn't always bad, I don't do my own electrical work or plumbing I outsource that to someone with the relevant expertise. It's not cheaper, but it's usually a lot better.

Certainly outsourcing normal business functions is stupid and generally bites you in the long run. Outsourcing things which you can't do to people who can isn't stupid though. Having enough staff on hand to provide 24 hour support to a mainframe is expensive, you essentially need four people to cover it fully. If you have only one mainframe it's generally not cost effective for the company or the staff. IBM has a lot of mainframes and can provide that support.

Posted in Coin-sized nuclear isotope battery minted

Posted Friday 9th October 2009 07:28 GMT

Chris 155

Nuclear != bomb

Why does everyone presume that because it's "nuclear" or "radioactive" it must be the same as a nuclear reactor or an atomic bomb. It's not. There are tonnes of things which are radioactive but not plutonium or uranium.

Your smoke detector is probably radioactive. Those little bags you put in camping lanterns are radioactive. Any number of things in your house are mildly radioactive.

That doesn't mean this stuff is safe, but it doesn't mean it's going to explode all over the place.

As for disposal. The thing about radioactive material is that when it stops giving off radiation(and in this case power) it's because it's stopped being radioactive. When your battery runs out of juice it's because it's not generating enough radiation anymore to power your device. It probably also isn't generating enough radiation to cause anyone any harm, and will probably stop generating any radiation at all within a fairly short period of time(just because the fallout from an atomic bomb lasts for a thousand years doesn't mean that this stuff will, the author is an idiot).

I'm not saying I'd be super thrilled to stick this sort of thing in my pants pocket or hold it up to my head until they've done a bit more research on its safety, but an isotope of sulfur is a long way off from Uranium or Plutonium.