Posts by vic 4

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu rockets up at enterprises

Re: Fair enough

How true, it's got a little bit better, but unless there is a big change by the time I have enough time to install, test and upgrade to something else I'm saying goodbye to ubuntu.

Re: Since when has linux been unix?

Given the choice, when I used irix, solaris and linux every day I preferred using them in that same order, at home there was never any choice (course now I've got some aging sgi and sun boxes I can't remember when I last powered them up).

But to be fair you are comparing apples to oranges, or maybe tangerines to satsumas?

Re: Since when has linux been unix?

oops, does that exclaimation mark make a double negative and thus claim GNU/Linux is Unix?

Since when has linux been unix?

Thought the N in GNU/Linux was not!

Why Windows 8 server is a game-changer

Re: For a moment, I almost felt..

> Linux ... desktop ... Microsoft server

Have I just entered the twilight zone?

EC: Apple claimed Motorola demanded ALL ITS PATENTS

Re: Hmm

Unless I'm mistaking motorla were asking for this in an attempt to negotate without resorting to legal action for Apples existing infringement. Apple said no so they decided to try the other route. Can't see what point apple are trying to make here other than the fact they felt the "settlement" being asked was too excessive.

Maybe Apple consider haggling too common for them.

Cameron denies personal Trident missile firing iPad app

Time to play angry birds

Wish I was in a position to have as much free time, although I could probably find something better to do. Thought running a country might have been more demanding.

Re: App?

> since those can have icons just like native iOS apps

Not excalty like them, the corners have to be non round.

Judge nixes Apple's bid to patent-bash bankrupt Kodak

Re: It is non-obvious

Some maybe something like a thumbnail? Maybe they should add the ability to embed a thumbnail image inside something like a jpeg, oh sorry, already there for exactly this reason.

'The new iPad' revealed: Full specs, rumor scorecard

Re: See one thing hasn't changed

Oops, turns out I can't read, thought it was $399 for the new ipad in the us, actually $499, doh

See one thing hasn't changed

See the £/$ conversion ratio remains at 1 :-(

One thing I like about new apple products, they keep the price of older versions close to the new ones. Makes it a cheaper upgrade path when you want to to ditch most of the "old" test equipment.

Apple to Google Maps: ‘Get lost’

Here is an idea

Allow the user the choice between which service they want to use!

MP allegedly cuffed after scrap in Commons bar

"drinks were spilled"

Didn't think this was much of an issue until I read that!

A couple of MPs being hit fair enough, but spilling beer :-( Hope they through away the key, especially if our tax money subsidised it

Court claim slapped on bloke via Facebook in landmark case

"number of employees were still friends with him"

Bet they aren't now! (Assuming he has read the message)

Survey: Android set to beat iOS in battle for coder love

@ThomH Xcode is still missing plenty of features

.. that I would like . BTW, I use xcode at least a few hours a week. Unless you are knocking together a few apps in your spare time for fun or some pocket money, you are not going to be as productive as you could be if you had a better integrated tool chain.

The things you mention are essentials, all it provides is the core tools, some UI design tools, coding, building and debugging tools. A tool chain is much more than a text editor/compiler/debugger if you want to be cost effective, and ideally every part of that chain should be swappable.

ADT is based on eclipse for a reason. ADT may not provide much beyond the core stuff for developing, but through eclipse it is immediately integrated with a rich eco structure.

Where is the integration from Jira/Trac/whatever my client is using, not forgetting my own trac instance.

Where is the rich support for unit tests and code coverage, eclipse will run unit tests for modified code in the background, telling me about failures or execution paths not exercised.

Refactoring? How many core refactoring patterns are there in xcode, you can't even rename a method/message name, never mind say turning the selected lines of code into a method or extracting a delegate and interface from existing code?

Drawing a few data structures hardly is up there for real useable data design. Do you really want your underlying data definition to be a diagram in a propriety tool only available on one platform? How can I put this into client facing documents, generate code from, create a database schema, generate entities/daos/early binding data models/user documentation, never mind reusing that in non apple apps.

Oh yeah, and eclipse/adt is not a 2-3Gb download every month to stay up to date and no need to repair your project settings every time you upgrade.

Feel free to down vote, sure plenty will do, but they probably stick a "Made with Notepad" sign on their web sites.

Deleted my reply

As I can't be bothered with the obvious replies.

Lets just say I don't consider a tool chain of semi aware text editor/compiler/debugger/ui designer and a noddy "data design" tool to be a enough for developing professional software in an _efficient_ way.

Downvoted!

Can't believe this was down voted. Someone stating they don't have problems with fragmentation, what is the problem there.

Was it "Apple's market fragmentation is just as bad, if not worse", that is true, if you want to use something new in the latest iOs you have to choose to ignore customers who can't/don't want to upgrade. I have "old" apple products that I can't get anything for nowadays.

And how many ios apps only work well on an ipad, ignoring iphones/ipods and vice versa.

Differing API versions and screen sizes, both issues on apple and android devices.

Nothing against Objective C

But you are right on the money about xcode being horrid, any time I have do any osx/ios development it's like jumping back in time 10 years. It's hardly a rich development experience, no doubt I'll get loads of down votes from people who have never used anything else, or at least anything recent.

'Space Monkey' craze: Texan students 'get high' by choking each other

RE: You're all kids

back in my day we used to cover each others gills, pass out and float to the surface

Microsoft blames poor Windows sales on PC slump

PC sales down

obviously means less new copies of windows being sold. How long before MS start trying to sell incremental updates to existing windows users.

Feds cuff coder accused of US bank source code swipe

"copying it threatened the security of vitally important source code"

not saying he wasn't wrong doing this. But if exposing the source code can threaten the security then it's because it's not very secure, hope they don't use this angle in the court case.

1TB USB stick shoved into Swiss Army knife

Knife == Dangerous Weapon

Many places do not allow you to take things in that could be used as a weapon, I've see penknives as examples cited on quite a few lists.

Health and Safety policy

in most places I have worked at would prevent me from taking this on site. Personally, I'd rather have a usb stick/cigarette lighter combo.

French court fines Google $65k over search suggestion

You mean 64K

Not that it makes much difference, still change from under the sofa to them

Somerset buses bin paper tickets, sniff journey-logging chips

Well done Somerset

You've caught up with the rest of the country. I've got one of these passes due to a disability that prevents me from holding a driving license, I've also used in on bus services in quite a few areas and buses have been doing this for some time now.

Assange: 'iPhone, BlackBerry, Gmail users - you're all screwed'

Ask them then

let us know how you get on

A friend told me years ago that "they" could hear you over your mobile phone,

Tell me something I don't know, I had to listen to that conversation.

Cheap-as-chips kit smashes Intel's HD video encryption

right not to call them selves a dr

Just thought I'd clarify, I gained this right by dropping out of my phd, after 8 years of being a student I needed to earn some money. Course if i'd been more intelligent/motivated I might have finished sooner.

"able to achieve this in the context of a PhD thesis"

WTF, have PhD's become as watered down as a-levels? While I'm not suggesting this achievement is anywhere near being worth a PhD, this comment seriously belittles the work anyone has ever put into gaining the right to/not to call them selves a dr unbelievable.

Last time I directly heard a phrase like "was built by professor X and graduate student Y" it generally meant one person did the work and the other scribed their name. Still not as bad as being married, when my wife says "we completely renovated our house", she means I did the work and she watched, but then again someone has to otherwise who can say it actually happened.

Spanish firemen grapple naked stairs sex Brit

"didn't beat around the bush"

Why oh why does the rest of english media think they have to hack peoples phones to give their readers what they think they want. Top marks to el reg for continuing the legacy of REAL journalism.

Rampaging Brit looters cost Dixons £4m

£4m in looting

Was that actual cost or did that include their huge mark up

Apple boots MacBook Air wannabes out of slim case fabs

If you can't sue them

Buy all the parts so no one can else can make something. \Obviously not intentional, or at least just yet, but wouldn't be surprised if Apple go out and but every HD on the market.

Galaxy Tab case tweaked to evade Germany ban

added an 'N'

How's that help? Did apple miss the letter N when they patented the alphabet?

Jilted man swaps engagement ring for Halo suit

long time obsession with acquiring Halo kit

Possibly he should have maybe spent more time with his partner than obsessing about a game and she wouldn't have gone elsewhere.

Equipping pre-teens with web mobes spreads beyond West

£1 I should have been so lucky

In my day we couldn't even afford pockets, never mind anything to put in them.

Google buys brace of start-ups to out-Facebook Facebook

social algorithms that improve people's online social interaction

As opposed to those that improve people's real life social interaction, maybe someone wants to buy my algorithm for this. while (sad) { turnOffTheInternet(); goOutside(); interact() }

Why your tech CV sucks

LaTeX maybe?

But you'd still expect a techie to be able to spell the technologies.

'Puzzling structures on surface' of YU55 spaceball

Add a bomb too

So if it comes too close in years to come it could be easily be deflected/destroyed.

Apple gets patent for ‘unlock gesture’

Prior art

Regardless of who else did it first they've been doing that since the ipod touch. I thought something had to be new to patent?

Apple shouldn't bother with TV...

Apple fixed that?

> Everyone knew what was wrong with MP3 players; the cruddy User Interface and the inconvenience of getting music onto them. Apple fixed that.

You sure iTunes makes this easier than the way things used to be done, i.e. copy a bunch of files via usb? There was loads of (free) software for doing that the last time i looked for my parents years ago. And don't forget you need windows or a mac.

Survey: Future IT guys will 'crowd-source' to fix stuff

code review is an overhead?

> In addition they would need people to review the code once completed, there is FAR too much overhead for this, in a real world software project

Are you suggesting code reviews are a waste of time? Automated unit tests and peer review are the two most crucial (in my eyes) 'overheads' for any software development.

Oracle: Java 8 will be revolution, not evolution

No doubt about it, after a period of probably around 10 years of using a "real" java ide and emacs, it's only the past couple of years I've spent more time in eclipse than emacs. Machines nowadays can fullfill the promises these ides can provide (not saying emacs can't, honest, still do a lot of typing, emacs + eclipse would be amazing).

But it is bloody good if you have a decent spec machine. From my point of view the reason people are choosing eclipse it is, as a platform it provides so much more and easier, and it's early backing of OSGI was a breakthrough, I;ve been poking about the eclipse 4 releases/source, pretty sure eclipse's popularity is going to improve.

As someone who uses both MS development tools (the paid for ones, at great expense) and eclipse I know what I prefer. Were MS tools are goood is tight integration with their software stack, try introducing something not produced by them and it all goes pear shaped. But even when MS tools are good, they still fall far from the tooling support the java world has had for years.

UUUUUF

As a long time lisp enthusiast I'd welcome this in java but I have to be honest I really don;t think they would add that much, we have anonymous classes which fill the void enough (ok, with a lot of extra verbage to create) and for the times where a functional approach is really the best solution you have plenty of options to do so to mix and match languages. That is true expressiveness, being able to do what you want with the best fit mechanism.

I would rather people concentrate on improvements with more added value. To me that is modularity (please just adopt osgi), improvements around improving support for non java languages and I can wish, AOP. We are getting there. One of the major unblinkering times I ever experienced was landing a job with bunch on unix developers many many years ago having only encountered dos and windows. They had this huge wealth of components and languages right under their finger tips, it influenced my whole outlook on developing software, after a couple of months I could do things in a hour or so that would take a week or even longer, just by having an environment that worked as a whole rather than attempting to corner the market in producing silver bullets that turned into hammers.

I remember having a conversation on an ACCU conference a few weeks after MS announced .NET and teh excitement a few people expressed about being able to mix and match languages was quite high, I tried pointing out you could theoretically do that with java but it just seemed like SGML/DSSSL vs XML/XSLT, i.e. not as trendy. At least java survived better that SGML.

Multiple language development is the future, we are already getting there with , need to apply some dynamic business rules, use a functional language, need to do some text processing as part of that, write it in (j)awk, do some database stuff with the results? then use groovy/gorm and of course java to bind them all into an EE. (BTW, im referring to multiple languages within the same component/app rather than a system with different to physically separate units in different languages)

Sorry, gone completely off the track there.

Integer Releases

One thing I wish oracle had kept was the trend towards dropping the use of Java X for version numbers. It's starting to bug me that everyone is doing this, e.g. chrome and mozilla, It's as everyone is getting spinal tap to come up with version numbers.

Microsoft gets trademark for retail store plans

attracted the attention of the Simpsons

And don't forget those pesky kids in south park, best episode ever!

four curved tabletops

I thought apple had copyrighted/trademarked/patented curves?

Old Napster guy’s fan letter to Spotify upstart

spotify is actually good

I've had a paid for account for about 2 years now and I'm still very happy with it, might change if they try forcinging me to get a facebook account.

> requiring a standalone native windows binary is a *good* thing?

WIth you on that one, although native apps do tend to be easier to use with a keyboard only (by native I mean not browser based).