* Posts by Jax

22 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007

Apple drives iPhone app developers to the brink

Jax

Bordering harassment

Gotta love that "bordering harassment".

No, they're demanding their moneys that are due. I doubt any court in the land regardless of the number of emails would consider that to be harassment.

YouTube blocks music videos in UK

Jax
Unhappy

@Simon Brown

You have 2 choices.

a) Gigs.

b) Get a "proper" job.

Seriously, b) is a good point. I'd like to do that shit all day, hell I used to breakdance in a big crew in the UK that won most of the stuff going but there was no money in it so I started programming. I still love dancing but I realised that it really doesn't pay.

Some industries are hard to make a lot of money in because a lot of people want to do it because doing it is fun. Pretty much all the arts (even game programming to a degree). Unless you're good enough and committed enough to build a following large enough to generate profit at gigs then i'm afraid it is going to be hard to make a good deal of money producing music these days.

I really like the fact you've posted, it's the best post here but what else can we do? There is no way in hell we can re-write the moral code of the masses or even find them all and hit them all with a stick.

Tiscali shares suspended on titsup fears

Jax
Thumb Up

Good

they were the worst ISP ever imo.

Cold-water treatment for Ballmer on Windows Mobile

Jax

WinCe / Mobile

A lot of us devs get a living out of solutions for industry so WMobile is the logical platform, IPhone is pointless as its just a consumer grade phone, it has no drop spec. What frustrates me is that WMobile is in a good position but it isn't capitalising. It could be so much better but always seems like an afterthought in the development process.

Always the focus on the desktop and then shabbily port to mobile. At what point are they going to start creating on the mobile and then porting to desktop? (which would be so much easier).

*sighs*

And this article doesn't fill me with confidence.

You need a "Sad Panda" icon.

Jax

@ Windows Mobile is dead

Seriously... no. Sure in your consumer world then maybe there are slicker alternatives but if you're working for industry just no.

What I want to know is why bother hating on WinMobile now? Back in the early 2000's it was TERRIBLE. I mean really bad. But now it's okay, if you wanted to bitch about it you shoulda done that years ago.

Main problem I find with critics of WinCE is that they don't understand how it is built. MS allow the OEMs to change pretty much all of the code but whenever anything goes wrong (which is commonly in the mods the OEMs have done or merges with updates they've messed up) MS gets the blame.

Developers more 'satisfied' with PHP than other codes

Jax

F#

Erm... I don't think that is a scripting language. It runs on the .NET CLR and is compiled into MSIL which then is translated into machine code.

Unless there is another F# that exists?

MPs vote to keep addresses private (theirs, not yours)

Jax
Coat

OMG

Good good, I will write a letter to my MP about this!

Now... what's her address?

Retro piracy - Should the Royal Navy kick arse?

Jax

Who cares about the tech angle?

I thoroughly enjoyed reading that. :)

How should software developers be paid?

Jax

Is it worth suggesting....

unexpected bonuses?

If they're predictable they can be gamed. So make them unpredictable and not tied to any particular action but just as a summary of line managers opinions. (shuold they get this bonus, they're due some goodness, do they deserve it).

McCain begs for YouTube DMCA takedown immunity

Jax

A title is required.

This has got to be one of the funniest things ever.... :D

Porn, abuse, depravity - and how they plan to stop it

Jax

Looking glass

Heh, society looks in the mirror and can't handle looking at the entirity of the reflection.

Are today's developers more creative?

Jax
Thumb Up

A title is required

I'm a twenty something or other and I think engineers in general HAVE to be creative. Whether it's creating a brand new build process or creating a file structure that will run on a system with hardly any disk space and will load fast, both of those require creativity of some sort.

You need foresight to design around roadblocks but creativity to elegantly handle the unexpected roadblocks or other phenomina (such as managing spiraling complexity of source code).

My point would be that it is is only the developers on the front line (of either performance or bleeding edge) that are being creative in the classical sense. Most others are just working within the framework provided or copying ideas off the web (although we all do this). However they may be being creative with UIs or requirements gathering or internal tools. There is a much larger field to be creative IN these days.

However I still think us young uns are fooling ourselves if we think we're more creative than our predocessors. Just read the documentation on the MS's Word file format! LOL!

How to stop worrying and enjoy paying for incoming calls

Jax

I wish I didn't always need to write a title.

So by the same token we should pay the postman for delivering the mail to us?

I disagree the person who wishes to make the transmission should pick up the entire cost,

it's irrelevant if that is technologically difficult, those kind of problems are why we are paid money to mess around with computers.

Hadoop: When grownups do open source

Jax

I only realised there was swearing

after reading the comments.

_Really_ enjoyed reading the article. More like this please! :)

As per the swearing, Stephen Fry knows more than _all_ of us about the English language and he thinks swearing is great. So yea!.... that.

Thales wins first UK ID card contract

Jax

I love typing in titles for one sentance posts. Now it is three sentances, w00t!

I hope Thale is reading up on http://highscalability.com.

BOFH: The all-clicking, all-whirring Roboboss

Jax

Because having a title is obviously really important

Well I thought that one was hilarious.

I lolled for once, usually I just smile when reading.

Silverlight 2 beta 2 - Go Live if you dare

Jax

I has a title

I wouldn't say that .NET on the desktop has failed to impress.

While usage statistics are difficult to get due to the applications not being online i'd still think that a huge number of WinForm apps are running successfully within a lot of business environments. I'd also suggest that Mac probably isn't gaining much ground in the business market which is where most of the custom .NET apps live.

GDI+ ain't perfect but it certainly isn't slow, granted, it's STA nature means it's not going to get any quicker seeing as we don't improve the performance of single cores any more, but i've never had any performance woe with it.

Infact I see a number of jobs for real-time trading with WinForm and .NET and that's probably as much as you're ever going to want to thrash the UI (unless you're doing some serious custom graphics stuff, but in that case use DirectX instead!). The default controls are reasonably primative but they are flexible enough to roll your own prettiness.

The main things that WPF solves are things like flow layout, some development issues (Dependancy properties help address conflicting properties mayhem), scaling and transparency.

Helps make things pretty but there is usually more money in just getting things done.

Courts slam Blair's 'abject surrender' to Saudi prince

Jax

Bribe war!

I think I read somewhere that this was part of the "bribe war" we had with the US, both wanted the contract and both started to give bribes to try to seal the deal (as this is perfectly standard way of doing business in places like Saudi Arabia, apparently).

It was a big old contract so the government didn't want to lose it.

To be honest I find it hard to find fault if the above was really the case, are you honestly telling me that it's better to walk away from a multi-billion dollar deal for the sake of bribery, especially if all parties are complicit? I mean if you do you've probably never worked in sales, which kinda underpins our whole economic system.

At the end of the day if the Saudis (the client) don't care about the bribery then who is this really harming?

The only issue is that Saudi officials have now started to attempt to bribe UK officials in certain instances thinking they want to play the same game!

Dump IE 6 campaign runs afoul of dump IE 6 campaign

Jax
Unhappy

You all should read

Joel's latest post, which is unusually good for his later stuff:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

Backward compatability IS good. You guys are essentially sticking your fingers up at people in the third world running old technology with limited computing knowledge.

Don't be so mean!

Filesharers petition Downing Street on 'three strikes'

Jax
Alert

Parliment Thorough?

What's with this belief that laws that pass through Parliment are thorough and subject to scrutiny?

Did you read the Hansard in the regards to the National Identity Register debate?

a) They pass motions to cut the amount of time debating the issues, stifling debate.

b) The important ministers (such as the home office) are absent during lots of these debates.

c) None of the debates matter anyway because Labour just bring out the whip and their majority means that too many MPs need to rebel for them to lose.

Thorough my ass. Open yes, thorough no.

IPFI chief says it's time to hose down the networks

Jax
Unhappy

A title is required

Nope, i'm still waiting for the middle men to die a horrible death.

The internet makes them redundant and all they're attempting to do is find a niche where they can still exist and leech monies.

I want to pay but I only want to pay the artist. So as a consumer i'm stuck in a catch 22. Ninety percent of my money goes to the gatekeeper who beats up the artist because they have the keys to the gates to mass market (MTV/Radio/etc).

As a consumer it is difficult to make the right _moral_ choice when considering this.

Do I give money to the price-fixing, gatekeeping, promoters of principally the music that makes them the most money? Can I live with myself if I do the 'right' thing and blithely prop up such a regeime with ITunes and CD purchases?

Can I live with myself as a consumer? We're still owed the discount from the tape->CD transition. At what point do we get the "you aren't buying a physical product anymore" discount? I don't see any concessions at all.

This is why I go to gigs as opposed to buying recorded tracks and will continue to do so unless I can find another means of directly re-imbursing the artist.

I don't think they get it. I know that I _owe_ the artists. It's the principle of repriocation that is inherent within human nature. The fact that through current mechanisms we pay the labels means that we don't care about stealing because there is no human representation there. We don't know the labels and we don't care about them. We owe the artists though and want to pay them direct.

Save the BBC - by setting it free

Jax
Unhappy

No freakin way

I have two words for you: Fuck off.

The BBC is pretty much one of the only current things that gives me a sense of pride in my nationalism.

It is the only provider of media that isn't trying to waste my time with adverts and it is our main cultural influence that we give to the world. I think it does us much more international benefit than the Foreign Office has ever mustered.

If the government or Ofcom tried to privatise it then i'd be marching towards their offices with banners, flags and as many other angry people as I could muster.

Leave the BBC alone, we need a media service that isn't dependent on raising finance.