Posts by Malcolm Melville

Apple iCloud: Same old cage, new height

Why do corporates worry?

As you point out cloudiness is just another step down the path of the great data lock-in. Corporates have been battling this for years - you put data into one RDBMS and the pain of moving it to another is incredible - you often have to rely on the tools provided by the target DBMS vendor to extract the data from the legacy and get it into the new world. (Ever tried recovering your data from an Oracle binary database file set without an Oracle license. It might as well not be your data anymore.) Looks like Apple have figured out the same path that IBM, Oracle walked us down and which held so much business captive and made these companies loads of money. The local file system was just a soft version of this where we had greater freedom to use 'our' data, No wonder the vendors want to be rid of filesystems and well known or open formats.

FAA to pilots: Expect 'unreliable or unavailable' GPS signals

Boscombe Down

In the UK there are often NOTAMs around Boscombe Down where similar tests take place regularly.

C++ Generic Coding vs. Java Frameworks

Tasking models

Java Frameworks often win because they offer a tasking model generic to the language. Something C++ has always shied away from. Having worked extensively in both languages, one of the biggest issues I have faced has always been how to ensure a portable tasking layer for C++. There are solutions out there. The lack of a standard though means that solutions to a lot of real world problems either mean you have to roll your own abstraction layers for tasking, or depend on someone elses. And some solutions are simply incompatible. Will be interested to read others take on this one and whether this is covered in later articles.