Posts by JMcL

Re: Airbus & China

"Just trade wars?"

Well to be fair to him (sarcasm off), he was aware enough of the Vietnam war to avoid going there on 5 occasions

Re: ignoring the fact of Prior Art ?

"The US patent office generally takes your fee and grants the patent.

Prior art is left for the lawyers to sort out later.

If you're small fry, and can't afford a lawyer, sorry, you're screwed."

Just submitted a project proposal fur EU funding this week, and discovered on the patent search a whopping great broad patent claim has just been filled in the US asserting ownership of a bunch of IP which we already developed under a separate EU funded project 2 years ago. We looked at patents at the time, but decided there was no point as it was all software and mathematical methods

Re: As a dev system? No, startup biz!

@Cavehomme

"This article has reminded me that the same Motorola 68000 chip was used in the massively under-appreciated Sinclair QL! "

The QL had a hobbled 68000 with an 8 bit data bus and some other oddities AFAI recall, and its own err... Idiosyncrasies (microdrives anyone?). It was a capable machine for the time though which didn't really reach its potential given the 16 bit offerings from Atari and Commodore a year or so later

Re: Past meets future

"There's an adapter in the box, plug your old headphones in if you need to. If you're out and about you don't need the USB-C port for charging and if you're at home you don't need to use your headphones for music"

Deal breaker for me. USB-C port=fragile and device is hosed if it's damaged, 3.5mm port=robust (generally) I don't want to have something hanging out of my data/charging port when I've got the phone in my pocket. The more bits you put in a chain, the greater the chance of failure. Headphone technology is mature and there's something there to suit all needs and budgets - set of earbuds for a tenner, fine, want to spend a grand? be my guest.

Bluetooth headphones on the other hand are frequently meh from an audio quality perspective, more often than not lead to a pairing dance, and are yet another thing that needs charged (and are usually low in charge just when you want to use the damn things). The other thing about devices with batteries - the batteries are usually toast after a couple of years and are non-replaceable. Throw the headphones away, and buy new ones - kerchinggg. Meanwhile my 25 year old Sennheisers are still excellent and usable interchangeably with my phone, amp, etc

Re: Perspective

@jake:

"Probably took a full minute to decompress with the VAX ... Things sure have changed."

In uni in the late 80's we had an 11/780 in the lab. During the course of a lecture in public/private keys, the lecturer set us a challenge to find the factors of R11 (i.e. 11111111111). I set an overnight brute force batch job going on the Vax at lowish priority in the unlikely event anybody would get annoyed. After around 6-7 hours processing time it spat out the answers and I was £5 to the better (a good night in the pub back in the day)

Out of curiousity about 10 years ago I was playing around with multi-threading on a very bog standard Dell desktop and decided to see what effect multiple cores would have. Tried single threaded first to to make sure I'd gotten it right. Answer back immediately. Can't be right thought I. Checked it, it was right, the factorisation had taken approx 10ms.

In retrospect, looking at the number written out it shouldn't have been a surprise, but I still think it's a fine example of the advances over a 20-25 year period.

Re: I'm not worried...

Would ye all stop, you're only codding me

Re: Failure version 2.10.6

Speaking as someone who's used GIMP for over 20 years, and Photoshop almost as long, I'll always turn to PS for photographic heavy lifting (though I've relied mostly on Lightroom for the past 10 years or so).

The biggest barrier for GIMP as regards photography for me was always lack of bit depth - GEGL simply stagnated for years. Anything other than extremely basic adjustments would quickly result in a histogram like a wide toothed comb. GEGL support seems to finally be getting there in recent versions, so I may need to check it out, though awkward raw workflows remain an obstacle.

Sadly, photography remains really the only reason I still have to keep Windoze around - wish it were otherwise (and yes, I've given most serious Linux only options a go over the years).

Re: Conspiracy theory.

"And the argument 'get the latest Android first' does not appear to be convincing many consumers to take the bait either. AND it's available from other brands through 'One'."

Add to that chez Google products are EOLd in no short order. 2 years of Android updates for a Nexus 5 from release (meaning about 15 months after I'd bought mine) and a mere further 10 months of security updates. Add to which there was no upgrade path as Google had gone down the shiny-shiny Pixel path at that point. Kind of like generic vs big brand headache pills, I'm personally not interested in a 30% markup to support a marketing department.

Re: Who Done IT "Cluedo Data Law Edition"

"... so I suspect that the court may have been lent on by the Irish government"

Very doubtful, and it would want to be a particularly dumb politician that would try it (not that those are in short supply here). Constitutionally the judiciary is a completely separate arm of the state from Dail Eireann (the parliament). So much so that the government couldn't even reduce judges pay when everybody else got it in the neck when we were forced to cover the fsck ups of private business 10 a years ago. For any minister or civil servant to be seen to attempt to influence the supreme court would unleash the mother of all conditional crises.

Re: Not just national security

@Joe Werner

Strava have had it (privacy zones) a few years now, Garmin only recently

Re: dangerous policy

Phil Spector would seem to be a case in point - despicable as a human being, but hugely influential and responsible for some utterly divine recordings

Re: Optional

As a comparison, the ireland.com was sold to Tourism Ireland for €495k in 2012 (https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2012/1016/341838-ireland-com-domain-sold-to-tourism-ireland/) It had been registered as a domain by the Irish Times newspaper probably around the same time as M. Frydman registered france.com and they offered an email service as well as content from the paper (long since moved to irishtimes.com). They apologised for inconvenience to their valued customers (15k active at the time so value is some number <€33). With a population 15 times that of Ireland, yoyo for yoyo that would value it around €7.5m. Given that he wasn't cybersquatting and was actively promoting France, it doesn't seem that excessive for a long established business

Re: US$2,579.00

Very spendy alright, especially in light of the fact that a colleague picked up a Dell XPS 13 with very similar specs/performance (probably sports a few less ports) for under €1500 a few days ago. Yes, the X1 is probably all round a nicer laptop but not €1k nicer!

Some comments bemoan the lack of an Ethernet port, but this would impact on how thin the thing could be made, and I think a USB3 dongle is a perfectly acceptable compromise. When not on the road, it's reasonable to assume that a typical user of one of these will have access to a docking station anyway.

Re: "Should've gone with C++ and HTML for their App needs."

"C++ has a fuckton of developers, you just don't hear much from us since we're busy working and getting the job done rather than making a big noise about how we're so cool for using [insert trendy language of the month here]."

I wouldn't deny that at all,speaking as somebody who spent a considerable part of their career programming in C and assembly of various shades.C/C++ IS hard for most developers (ability to easily shoot oneself in the foot, different architectures, endianness etc). To illustrate, you only have to look at the horrorshow that was Windows software until they handed out the blunt scissors in the form of C# to the more plebian masses (there were other reasons of course, but Imho, this was a major one). Unfortunately from my experience, a lot of blame must fall at the feet of educational curiculums. Graduates more often than not have no meaningful exposure to C/C++, often only scripting languages, because this is what "industry" demands.

I'm firmly of the opinion that if you have gone through the experience of freezing the machine solid a few times through uninitialized pointers, buffer overruns, etc., you'll (hopefully) have a better grasp of the underlying architecture and fundamental computer science concepts, and this understanding will better inform any software you develop even in the Java, Node or whatever you're having yourself world.

"Try Oban. Pretty much zero GSM."

Who needs GSM when you've got whisky

Re: Hum.

Quantum Clippy. Be afraid, be very afraid!

Re: Oh, come on now!

@Tigra 07

"IMDB was hosted by a teenager in his basement before it became big and was sold on for big bucks."

It was actually hosted in Cardiff University and called the "Cardiff Movie Database" At one point in 1994 myself and a friend had discussed with the guys behind it setting up a mirror in Ireland (we were actively updating it at the time and were having increasing trouble with congestion). We'd gotten to the point where we had been sent the source code, but unfortunately never got round to actually doing anything about it.

Re: What's the point of all these anecdotal comments???

@cornz 1

"(some) Cyclists are an utter liability ATM.

Until the law requires mandatory HI-Vis clothing, lights and insurance my attitude towards quite a few of the two wheeled, lane hogging, red light ignoring arseholes isn't going to improve."

"Yet don't require insurance, an annual worthiness test, a proficiency test, to be visible at night and an understanding that red means STOP and green means GO"

Have a downvote nob, in fact have several, then go off and learn the actual provisions of the road traffic act or whatever it may be called in the UK - both from the perspective of motorists and cyclists

@Spaceman Spiff

"The language wasn't officially released by Sun until about 5 years later."

I beg to differ - I was writing Servlet components on top of Apache Jserv in 1998 (Java 1.2 I think), your 5 years would leap right into Java 1.3.

On the other hand, Java EE 2 where you had to hand code EJB stubs skeletons and all that malarky (unless you had deep pockets for Rational Rose), now that was a "life's too short" style abomination

Re: I don't know about lynx and w3m

@Charles 9

"Linux is not an option because I use Steam, and most of my library is Windows-ONLY."

Linux VM?

Re: Robert Downey Jr.

He also has the real life chops of actually having been a drug crazed, gun waving, loon

Re: 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 sha1 calculations

...or insertion of 000 for that matter!

Re: "City University New York has more than 100 affected. That's just one university."

@inmypjs

"So not quite as many as got murdered and wounded by a Muslim terrorist loon in Orlando. That's just one night club."

Or not as many killed in the Oklahoma City bombing by a Mus.... oh wait.... a New York born, Irish American, Gulf war veteran loon.

Re: Containers

What works for me is to put the data onto an OpenStack data volume which can be attached to an instance, have the DB engine (Postgres, Mongo, whatever you're having yourself) run in a container on the instance and mount the data directory from the volume as a container volume. This gives me the DB engine container which can be freely recreated at any time, the instance VM is also relatively transient as it can be easily recreated and the volume containing the data reattached to the new instance.

This is on OpenStack which just happens to be the environment I'm using, but similar approaches seem to be applicable on AWS, Azure etc.

The BBC website was still demanding I install Flash on my Android tablet when I tried to look at a news clip at the weekend. Good luck with that one (and I know there's an app for that, but I don't want yet another app taking up space for no good reason)

Re: Wait for reviews...

I originally had the keyboard with the case with built in light and it was great. I lost it unfortunately and replaced it with a Paperwhite which despite the screen and light being excellent, is touch to turn the pages, and given the rubbish sensitivity of the screen, sometimes means several touches. It's annoying and I'd have happily paid a few quid extra to have page turn buttons on the side. Even the Android app, with a proper capacitive screen, allows use of the volume buttons to change page

"Perhaps they could jazz it up a bit by making out he broke a 128bit encryption whilst getting a blow-job (with a gun to his head) ? Nah, no-one would be stupid enough to believe that."

Nah you're confused, that's the John McAfee biopic isn't it?

They do have an IMDBPro site as well.

Also the Denon DM38 is an excellent unit available for around the £200 mark (excluding speakers). Solid build, good sound, and the USB when used with an iPod/iWhatever will use the DACs in the Denon rather than those on the player.

I nearly plumped for this when looking for a system a few months ago, but while trying to source one locally, but in the end up got an offer I couldn't refuse on an Arcam amp (HiFi nerd in me came out), and decided it was time to go the NAS/FLAC + digital radio streaming route with a Squeezebox

..if you want to write C#, oh, and pay (I know there's a free version, but you're not supposed to develop anything commercial on it, and it's hobbled in quite a few areas so not that suitable for developing much beyond Windows console and forms apps.

Eclipse is a dog, there's no two ways about it. As an IDE I prefer Netbeans (or at least did when I last used it in the dying days of Sun). Unfortunately world+dog (Spring etc.) all seem to have Eclipse based dev environments

As the man said, don't expect customer service to improve anytime soon, since they've cynically canned almost 600 support staff that actually knew where the UK is. Wankers

Seems incredible, but that is a bit steep

I just bought a new kit last week with 16GB (4x4GB) for about €75. I have to pinch myself sometimes to put those two figures together!

Just for laughs, I went along to the Dell website to try to spec up a similar machine. To go from the base 4GB to 16GB they wanted €470! I think they were also looking for about €200 to upgrade to a fairly bog standard 2TB hard drive. I stopped at this point

Absolutely

The first two, especially the waterfall, are probably upwards of 2 stops overexposed. There's no retention of detail in the water whatsoever, and it doesn't demonstrate anything in terms of image quality.