Posts by Stephen Channell 328 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2007
The PR people will hype "the real steve jobs"; the press will talk about every new product; the make-over will be epic and...
The share-price will jump, and half the agitators will sell; then Bill can get on the serious business of finding and nurturing the real next CEO
I didn't do a Computer Science, but have written several NP-hard components {query path optimisation; query generation; swap solver; expression parser}. If Computer Science undergraduates are not taught how to approach complex intractable problems, how are they going to maintain systems that implement them?
A few years ago I worked on an Airtime sales/scheduling system where the users needed to pick criteria from across the database to filter slots; and implemented a query generator that would recursively search the meta-model to build a query without chasm or fan traps including all predicates. The review started with "it's impossible", moved to "it's non-deterministic in time" then to "we could use it to build the pre-defined/compiled queries", and went live in the TP system because it was faster than scanning a pre-defined list of all the permutations.
"NP-hard" is really not a helpful distinction: there are complex requirements and there are simple requirements... if you don't teach students to deal with the most complex requirements you know about; you're not teaching them terribly well
If I hadn't already bought a Lenovo Yoga 11 (at half-price), I'd probably buy one off-plan.
Putting an extra battery in the cover is a neat idea for business travellers who are used to swapping battery on long trips, and flipping the mouse-pad over the back should make it very resilient to being dropped.
While the Office licence is home/student, in practice that doesn't mean you can't do work on it, just that you must also have a regular PC licence.
Having RDP and Remote-FX makes it a neat terminal for full-fat Windows.. which is why Windows-RT is hear to stay
Wouldn't sell many, but great publicity.. combine a browser with a hardware KVM/firewall to render legacy XP apps in a Chrome window would eliminate most of the risk of running an unsupported OS. Add in ChromeFrame & ClassicShell hocks and many people wouldn't even know they'd been switch (untill they switched to web apps).. Got to be worth the cost of extra ports
The paper wasn’t so much FOSS is bad, but an admission that some of those “Open Source” Application Server and Database products have limitations that they know about, but will not fix unless you pay.
We all kinda know that Oracle doesn’t want MySQL to be very scalable, a little honesty is good, a lot of honesty would be better!
So Larry, which is less like a commercial DBMS: MySQL or MariaDB?
It's not for the special occasion when you really really must tell the world you like something!
No it to track you for adverts.. same as Google+, MSN, yahoo and a whole load of others. All of whom share data with the NSA, and that's without mentioning the ISPs who are tracking your every click-stream again for advertisements.
Maybe the answer is not to bitch about the evil profiling they've all been doing for years, but to lobby for a "cookie jar" option in HTTP, and allow us to choose if and where our cookies are stored.. it might be a cunning plan from intrusive advertisers, but it is also kinda nice if a travel site know where you live regardless of whether you're using a phone, tablet or PC
The EU sausage-machine has been working on this one for the best part of a decade. way back at the start of the process was euro-MPs who had separate phones for {Home; Strasbourg; Brussels} moaning about having to pack several charges or borrow ones when they'd packed the wrong ones. Way back then, every generation had a different charger with difference size pins and power rating (I had {2140, 3110, 3210, 6310} all with different chargers), and as Lars states, Nokia was happy to change.
When the EU started this process, the target was actually Nokia who produced a new charger every-time they changed the amps for each new battery. The EU consulted the vendors who unexpectedly suggested USB as the standard because all their new Symbian smartphones would need to connect to a PC anyway. After quit a lot of haggling they settled on micro-USB (I preferred mini-USB)
Apple wasn't in the discussion because even they didn't think the iPod-with-a-phone was going to replace real work phones.
As EU meddling goes, this has got to be one of those all-time great success stories.
The big difference is that Windows 8 allows multiple logons to the same device, where apple likes you to run the risk of in-app purchases every time you let a kid use your iPad.
A tech family will easily hit the limit with a PC, laptop & few tables without much sharing or any duplication.
like using the "\" key instead of "/" for file delimiters with PCDOS 2 to avoid maybe hundreds of people having to change their batch files..
What made Ctrl-Alt-Del special was that it sent a different interrupt to the PC that could implement a soft restart... Windows adopted it to mask the reset.
not wishing to detract from the Bill bashing, but... I think Bill wanted a button like the one on the AT&T 7300 Unix PC that had a soft restart button
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, would not be changing its name, and NO we'll not all be getting new UK passports to keep wee Alex happy.
They'll be no repeal of the act of Union, or spending the next 50 years amending all the legislation to keep wee Alex happy.. and not a chance in hell wee Alex will skip on a debt share of Royal Bank of Scotland or Bank of Scotland.
The flag won't change either (St Patrick's Cross is still in there), funny thing: the union jack blue is Royal Blue (from the Navy), not the blue in the Scottish flag.. but we could use a different white if it helps
Sorry, did I say Spain.. I meant Italy (with Lombardi), or was that France/Spain with the Basque country, or was it Belgium with Wallonia/Flanders or Germany with Norderstedt.
Try getting out of Kaliningrad without a visa! it's not about Schengen, its about illegal immigrants getting into Europe.
Poor wee Alex Salmon.. worst time in 300 years to go for independance
If Scotland chooses to leave the UK, it will be a decision for all the EU members whether they chose to let Scotland in on a fast-path (the treaties do not make provision), and Spain has already said it will object (mainly because of Catalonia, but also for economic reasons).. IF Scotland applied, it would have to take the Euro (thanks to the Treaty Mr Thatcher sent Linda Chalker to sign).
I'll take a bet from anyone who thinks the EU countries will allow Scotland to join the EEA (they have a choice), just because they don't want the euro... and outside the EEA the UK would be obliged to implement border controls.
"remaining the EU, but not at any price"... I think you'll find the price is really rather high.
and if they don't have provisional contracts in place, they'll just have to cough up what the vendors ask, and whatever licencing fee Westminster will charge the vendors but that is "small beer" compared to all the other systems that will need to be developed..
GCHQ will be one thing they'll not have to worry about... after freeing the Lockably bomber, there's not much change of them "sharing" US intelligence.
The biggest change though is likely to be the end of {RBS, BOS, Clydesdale} issued Scottish Sterling notes before they're forced (by Spain) to join the Euro when joining the EU...
Obama loved his Blackberry and overruled the Secret Service phone prohibition, but Blackberry was a no-no... so they gave him a HP Windows Phone 6 device complete with encrypted storage, because that's what they'd used for years.
Getting WinPhone 8 certification following {7,6,5} is not really news, and there is nothing special about BES.. it mostly sits in front of MS Exchange anyway. MS Exchange is the secret source that allows iPhone to get into corporates.
Don't listen to the NSA twaddle, FIPS security is primarily about stopping one part of the government spying on another
A hundred years ago, every pub of note had a “snug” with “priest windows” to protect the privacy of (priests, magistrates, police, ladies) who wanted an anonymous drink; attitudes to drunkenness changed & laws against drunk children put an end to anonymity. Many of the “snugs” that remain now have CCTV to cut down drug trading & prostitution. In a posh suburban pub you’re more likely to be invited to a swingers group or a spot of dogging than to use a prostitute, partly because the police veto on pub-licencing means the barman might report it, but also because we’re a much more open society now.
The answer to PRISM is not to add more security, but enable better targeting by more transparency: [1] IPv6 does away with the need for NAT & ISP proxy servers that hide end-points making it easier to filter raw traffic [2] more honesty on what search words will attract attention: assuming that a google-search for gang-rape or sarin should be more private than searching for it in a bar is naïve and simultaneously prudish & disgusting.
If you really, really, really want privacy, buy a global proxy-service, but don’t expect any search engines to help you find stuff
The SIGMOD presentation highlights the two big differences that drove them from MySQL: [1] global replication & distribution (with high commit latency); [2] google protobuf for record/row/object encoding & SQL extension to query inside protobuf hierarchical messages… not especially different from what most big global banks were doing with DB2 & IMS (for the hierarchical bit) 25 years ago.
The really big difference is licences fees, commercial DBMS are priced to make money from reliable storage of financial transaction data, not “which trucks have we tried to sell to a Manhattan flat dweller”.
Until google actually open-sources their technology, it’s all just guff about how they avoided paying Oracle for enhancements to MySQL, that all users could benefit from.
“Dress like a man” is a cleaver soundbite to distract from the real issue of sex in the workplace, which is not an especially IT issue. Sure taking sex of the table (by dressing like a man), focuses minds on technical aptitude, but begs the question “if a man’s judgment is impaired by a pair of beautiful, inviting, breasts; is he best placed to buy a product, if the salesperson happens to have the said ‘qualities’”. Aside from pure practicality (clarks wins over prada in any scenario with ventilation tiles) dress is more about fitting in with the team, than the gender issue (green & white stripes in a 3rd division Glasgow Rangers group is more a no-no than fish-nets).
Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family; if your firm doesn’t like your choices; choose a different one.
If Microsoft/Ballmer was found guilty of misleading investors over sales of Surface, there’s a good chance he’d be disbarred; every single MS director would have been asked if they’d take the stand for him and risk disbarment. A poker man would not go all-in on the cards he held, so he folded.
Making a bigger Lumia for browsing/editing makes sense for Nokia just like Samsung or even Blackberry, the question is whether to use WinPhone or RT? But given the kernel is the same, the question is really “should nokia follow the shi1e UI of RT or stick with something touch oriented? “ (we touch things, RT fakes gestures).
Safe to bet: [1] Nokia’s RT tablet will follow the clean UI of WinPhone [2] huge stockpiles of MS Surface will be “given” to students/developers, rather than sold cheap
With a cluster index data is organised as part of the index leaf, so there is no additional access, but it’s not always a good idea because the cascading effects of moving rows from page to page can kill concurrency. Compare that to a network DB where it was common to pre-allocate max space to avoid moving data & killing concurrency (CHAR(100) instead of VARCHAR(100)).. what to saved in IO scans you paid in IO reads.
It's not true that IBM was late to the Relational party, it is just that it had to reach a quality threshold before it would be allowed out as a program product. System-R is what Larry copied with Oracle (complete with Rule Based Optimiser).. it was not until Oracle7 that Larry's DB had a Cost-Based-Optimiser to compare with DB2 2.
Far from cannibalising IMS, relational was criticised as a wheeze to sell more DASD (disk) & CPU, but the competitors could not argue with the mathematical proof of relational algebra & calculus in set theory: there is no information that can not be represented relationally.
For a very long time IMS was much more scalable than DB2 (you could even mount IMS in DB2), but only for one use-case.. choose the wrong one, and DB reorganisation was a killer.
The trick to parallel optimisation is to treat data structures as immutable and then pack them into blocks that vector instruction can use, and multiple cores can work on without cache contention, that’s not easy with Java, because it has no struct type. To avoid multiple threads using the same indexers it is best to take a functional approach and not have “variables” either.
Sure, you can get Java to work on a GPGPU/MIC (just like Fortran or COBOL), but will the amount of changes justify the effort.. attempts at Java BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra) point to Java being an EPIC FAIL or evolving into a very different language like X10.
oh sorry for the confusion, Win 8 & 8.1 have three "control panels" {setting; pc settings; control panel} that each do bits of what you could do from Win7 start button & you can indeed pin two of them to start-screen and one of them to the task-bar.. plus powershell lets you do without all of them (& that too can be pined to start & task).
I have Windows 8.1 RT on my Lenovo hybrid, but couldn’t see the point of adding it to a Intel box.. it’s not as if anything important has changed. The gesture oriented interface (point to corner & swipe to charm are not touch oriented) is still shi1e on anything but a tablet.. and Outlook on RT is no killer app. Start-screen button is “meh”… frankly without a “control panel” button, leaves me wondering why they didn’t spend a WHOLE weekend on Windows blue.
Make-or-break will come with Windows-9 when we’ll either say “how did we ever do without these gesture controls & Kinetic” or give them an Agincourt gesture.. not all of us are supressed Sheldon’s looking to wave and talk to our computers.
most people who also have desktop Office licences are covered.. and my Office Pro Plus licence me.. but..
.. since I can't run Visual Studio or other dev tools on RT, it just provides another windows for docs/email/web.. while I work on another box.
I'm an RT customer, using {outlook,word,excel} on a laptop that's been running two days without a recharge.. I may be one of only a few customers, but I'm a pleased one.
This case will be all about getting Steve Ballmer out of the CEO seat, and getting Bill Gates to take over (at least in the short term).. with Bill in the seat they'll get a price bounce for all shareholding, and not just the ones traded in a relatively short window.
If "bouncing Ballmer" has got nasty enough to try SEC disbarment, heaven knows what's happening round the water-coolers.
When NT launched, it (together with IBM MVS, DEC VMS, SunOS) was the only the fourth multi-threaded, multi-processor OS. Scott McNealy described it as a mainframe OS for PC’s, and really not needed for the desktop. Scott also said it would take ten years before the multiprocessor performance matched SunOS.
The OS was very stable until NT shoved the device drivers into the kernel (with NT4) and allowed graphics to crash the box.. which is ironic because Kernel graphics is one of the reasons Linux is better for GPGPU & HPC (intervening Server updates switched off the GPU if not being used interactively)
Came with WinPhone 7.0, got better with 7.5 auto-update, and looks fine with 7.8. Been dropped several times over two years, but curved glass/case ensured no breakage.. best £100 phone I’ve had.
The one niggle is the internet tethering, that has to use USB (because Dell went for the first chipset).. Next time, I’m going back to Nokia
Some bight MBA student will have been tasked to write a book on Sin-of-sky “brilliant” strategy, delivery & launch.. and if they’ve got a good contract, it’ll still be published, and what a read it will make.
I have Windows 8.1 on my Lenovo RT slab (gr8 kit once discounted), and they still haven’t learned their lesson about touch vs gesture control: if you want a button/tile for search, you need to install google (the Bing button has gone (now its swipe to charm, then search)).. gesture control only makes sense if you expect people to buy Xbox-One.
25 years ago, I sent feedback on Windows 1.0 (on MSDOS 3.1) for left-handed mouse button-switch, they listened, and added it. W8 insists on syncing controls on all devices (unless you disable it), so touchpad buttons get switched to match mouse settings and sides of touchpad imitate screen gestures (on RT).. 25 years ago, we called this stuff bugs (& it was fixed).. now we have to wait for the shi1e to fail before they’ll fix it.
looks like the book about surface will make more money than surface.
“marked yourself as unreliable”.. ouch, Ok Win95 use of DOS was little more than PSP, but full-screen DOS mode still suspended other processes.. prompting Marc Andreessen (& others) to described Win95 as a glorified program loader. Free IE killed Netscape Navigator and its CORBA migration to NC.
MS did have a “24 months is critical” point, but that was ten years ago.
When tech historians look back at 1995, they’ll wonder how MS (with Windows 95 on DOS, no browser, and no TCP/IP stack (NT had one, but was too fat for Win95)) managed to hang onto PC hegemony.. they did that with sharp practices that they’re paying the price for to this day.
When tech historians look back at 2002, they’ll wonder how MS (with virus friendly WindowsXP, and leaky DCE TCP/IP stack) managed to hang onto the PC & file-server hegemony.. they did that with the Trustworthy Computing Initiative, that closed enough vulnerabilities quick enough to stop somebody trumping them.
Truth is “2002 to 2012” was always going to be a shi1e decade for Microsoft; that “the MS BASIC company” is still relevant is actually remarkable..
Ironically, Steve Ballmer’s problem is that he’s too timid (RT should never have been “Windows”, gesture controls on non-touch, non-kinetic PC should never have happened)..
I bought a Lenovo Yoga 11 when they dropped the price by half, but would have taken a Surface if it was priced to sell. I don't play games, so can't really comment on the quality/quantity of apps, but HTML5 web-apps work just fine.. and it is nice to have MS office on a tablet that runs for two days without a recharge.
The only thing stopping a proper price-cut, is the threat of "price dumping" from Apple lawyers, but that will come once it is firmly established that the market-price for WinRT is just a few dollars. There will be no walking away from Windows on ARM..
so now that "not a service pack" is on the way, what will the next "we've listened to our customers" version be called.. I doubt they go right to Windows Red(faced in shame).
The longer they leave it, the more likely it'll merge into Windows9 kinetic gesture control
Before GUI (Graphical User Interface), user interfaces didn't really have a name, you just had a bunch of things (keyboard, mouse, light-pen, touch, wheel, card-punch, tape switch...), and only used the ones that made sense. With the iPad touch has become the big input interface, but iPad & Android are still graphical, you still touch on-screen objects. Wi-8 is different because it is the first mainstream interface where the touch gestures have no graphical equivalent.
Swipe from right for charms bar, swipe from left to switch-app, swipe up for menu, point mouse to corners are all touch oriented, with no graphical equivalent, and it's all counter-intuitive because we've all become graphical oriented.. and won't go back 30 years to the CICS "this is the way it works, get used to it" world.
restoring the graphical "start-button" is a start, but also need to follow WinPhone "settings" app and "..." graphic for context menu... we're not luddites or thickies, it's not us, its them.. and they still haven't learned the lesson
only in New Zealand does a TUI make sense as the only interface
I've used (&developed for) every version of Windows since 1.0 (including ME & Vista), while they've been pretty good, IMHO 2008R2 was the best. I have a WinPhone & a WinRT hybrid (Yoga-11 @40% off) & put Wi-Eight on a touchscreen PC & dev laptop (for VS2012).. ironically the "charm" menu didn't work on the touchscreen because of the screen border.. and had to find the keyboard.
While OS/2 Warp is long dead, IBM's Windows licence does give them commercial patent cover for a Windows compatible shell.. put that over a Linux kernel and you've got an alternative.. the only question is "Can IBM rely on MS to be arrogant/abusive for long enough to justify the cost".. W8.1 suggest they might!
The Metro interface in WinPhone works really quite well; WinRT kinda works if you ignore the quirks & bugs, but Wi-Eight is unmitigated rubbish on a regular PC/laptop.
In the teeth of the greatest recession IT has ever known, the deranged leaders of Microsoft think they can force a wholesale hardware refresh just to work round their stupid design flaws (point at the corners is as intuitive as point to my imaginary friend).. It’s just not funny anymore…
If the nonsense goes on much longer, it really will be worth IBM dusting off their Windows-compatible licence to re-launch OS/2 on a Linux kernel with commercial Win32 abi.. could be the OS equivalent of AMD64
The problem with IP4 is that all those NAT & transparent proxies means you can't identify the source/destination by inspecting packet headers & have to look inside which means caching it. Any terrorist VirginMedia customer looking up the latest recipe for sarin will get their traffic mixed up with Facebook updates because all port 80 traffic goes through a transparent proxy.. It's a binary choice everything or nothing.
It is however a temporary problem because IP6 does away with the need for NAT, enabling the targeted monitoring of end-points.. Instead of getting excited by the drivel of attention seekers, we should legislate once IP6 is widespread.. and the place to legislate is the UK because the pacific rim & anchor damage (in the English channel) makes the UK a natural hub for global comms
It's not about to be discontinued, no it's priced to sell.. once you strip out the profit margin that they were looking for, it comes down to the market price.. it then becomes a question of whether they want to push a product they just don't make any money from, and that's still a yes.
MS can't afford to skip on tables (it's not like Zune) because today's PC will start to look like a mini-computer of yesteryear very soon and they're not dominating in Cloud services... now that the diversion is out of the way, we can look forward to "price dumping" claims from Apple and the inevitable race to the bottom.
What a spiffing idea, but why stop there? if all the bags are a standard size, you could skip on the heavy containers, and transfer content in light weight cardboard containers within the larger boxes.. you could then go one step further and decant boxes directly into a bureau.. you might not even notice that the {D&G, Gucci, etc} bureau is not the same as the one you packed.. but is there a market?
More hand luggage gets lost in airports than in baggage handling, so the (non-drug, non-terrorist) market is valuables, but privacy is the enemy of security (that's why FedEx, DHL, etc, have their own planes).
Maybe Airbus should skip on the blue-sky thinking and concentrate on planes that don't crash when french pilots panic in bad weather (447)
Has somebody been time-tripping back to the eighties to get the “news” angle on this announcement, the only difference is Exadata instead of Teradata (and that is news about disk capacity not software innovation).
It’s good that facebook is going to open-source its SQL-engine because the competition will drive down the cost of real SQL-engines, and after a few upgrades it might be good enough for “Tesco Scale” (One RFID tag that tracks a fresh lump of meat back to the abattoir is worth a million photos of spotty teenagers).
“facebook scale” is more like land-fill garbage dump scale.. breath-taking in scale, but few would cry if they just disappeared.
Shocking as Eadon (and other pontificates) may find it, but in 150 year history of Computing, the time dominated by men amounts to 20% - 30% of time... in statistical terms that is still short enough to count as a "blip". When electronic computers were introduced 50 years ago, it was thought that men did not have the diligence for computer programming, and only changed when the Apollo programme made computer programming a glamorous activity for Engineers.
Dell used to resell a baby super-computer called the Cray CX1-iWS that packed four blade servers with GigE, GPU and disk together with Windows HPC Server 2008 or SUSE Linux with beowolf, that was designed for heavy-duty engineering workstations.. this box looks like an updated replacement without the Cray fee for the sticker.
The large number of drive bays hints that they’ll be a SAP HANA announcement down the road, but a great box for startups
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
