Posts by CadentOrange

12,000 chopped: Intel finds its inner paranoid

Re: Citation needed

Don't forget traction and stability control. They are so effective in preventing serious accidents that they were made mandatory on new cars in the EU.

Samsung starts cranking out 256GB mobile memory modules

Re: SSD

I think these are probably already in SSDs. The MacBooks with PCIe SSDs already have read/write speeds of approximately 1.4GB/s for the 512GB part.

Bye bye, booth babes. IT security catwalk RSA nixes sexy outfits

Re: Not worth going then

And primitives. Not everyone is using a new fangled language that treats everything as an object.

Influential scribe Charles Petzold: How I figured out the Windows API

I cut my teeth on programming in Win32 by reading Charles Petzold's book about 15 years ago. He made the Win32 API make sense to me, though I'm worried about Xamarin forms given that he's working at Xamarin and probably has some input on its design.

Do I really want someone who has spent the last 25 years on the Win32 API anywhere near the design of a new API? Even if he is Charles Petzold?

IBM boffins stuff 16 million-neuron chips into binary 'frog' brain

Re: Not Neurons

>> It might be modelling Perceptrons, which are actually useful for engineering.

> They are not very interesting because they are just classifiers handily described in a single equation. > This is not that.

Well, what is it then?

AWS hell no: Can Microsoft Azure sales beat Amazon's cloud?

Re: Embrace, extend and extinguish

Microsoft will betray you, me and everyone else. It's only a matter of time.

I think Google is worse. I've stayed clear of Google App Engine specifically because of the trail of dead projects left behind by Google. Doesn't excuse Microsoft though.

The British are coming! The British are coming! And they're buying Surface fondleslabs

Re: Acer

Asus made the Nexus 7, not Acer.

Not just websites hit by OpenSSL's Heartbleed – PCs, phones and more under threat

Re: Windows XP

It should read "...relied on it (OpenSSL) instead of the Win32 CryptoAPI". Brain fart.

Re: Windows XP

OpenSSL is not tied to Windows XP. It's a 3rd party component and I'd be surprised if anything shipped with Windows XP relied on the Win32 CryptoAPI.

How Microsoft can keep Win XP alive – and WHY: A real-world example

$500k per year to work on XP?

As a developer, sign me up! Even assuming that I get only half of that as the rest go on overheads and employer taxes, that's a stupidly good deal. Few software engineers in the UK outside of high frequency traders are paid that much.

Forkin' 'L! Facebook, Google and friends create WebScaleSQL from MySQL 5.6

I'll be even more excited about this when Amazon rolls this into their MySQL RDS offering.

Microsoft's SQL Server 2014 early code: First look

Re: Some questions

Thanks. I've just seen your post with a link to the features. SQL Server is starting to look interesting again.

Some questions

Is the insert performance achieved by reducing reliability? For instance, on Postgres you can speed up inserts significantly by disabling fsync, which means that a commit operation succeeds before the data is fully written out to disk. The article mentioned that this is now possible on SQL Server but does not mention whether the impressive numbers were achieved by enabling this feature.

Insert performance is only one aspect. Is query performance better? Not just simple queries that hit a single index or the primary key. Queries with multiple subqueries or joins will be interesting.

What about sharding? The cloud is all about scaling out and traditional RDBMSes are pretty complex to scale out while maintaining ACID compliance. Is this on the horizon for SQL Server?

Is Apple about unleash a cheaper 8GB iPhone 5C? O2 'leak' suggests: Yes

The 8GB iPhone 5C is depressing news if true. I was hoping that the Moto G would spur Apple to look seriously at making a lower end phone that's affordable. Not necessarily Moto G cheap, but somewhere around the £279 market would help them shift a lot more iOS devices.

Then again, Apple don't seem to be desperate for cash...

Sync'n'share firm Box secretly files for IPO

They've recently increased their free plan's storage limit to 50GB. I'm hoping that this drives Dropbox dot do something similar.

Wheee GDUNK! Panasonic's latest Toughpads ready to hit the streets

Re: sure

"Most of those control technicians in industry working largely on plc's and windows based infrastructure would make better use of an iPad?? Sysadmins?"

Aside from the ad hominems, you've obviously never worked on legacy Windows apps using a touchscreen. Those needs are better served by the Toughbook, which is legendary. Toughpad, not so much.

I've worked with the G1 tough pads and while they are interesting devices, they're nothing more than niche devices. They're too heavy and bulky for general tablet use, and they start at a stupid price. Most people with rugged tablet needs will be better served with an iPad and one of the militarized covers.

On the plus side it does run Windows...

Think your brilliant app idea will earn some big bucks? HAH. You fool

Re: odds and earnings

More importantly, that's £760 that's independent of location. £760 a day while living in the location of your choice? Yes please!

How Britain could have invented the iPhone: And how the Quangocracy cocked it up

Re: The Black Swan Theory

It's also the reason some companies make it big.

What's wrong with Britain's computer scientists?

Re: Comp Sci degrees were sold to many kids looking for a well paid job....

Or a CS graduate who enjoys programming.

This article has been deleted

Re: "If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear"

David Cameron has backed down from so many promises, any promise he makes in the future is worthless. Thus he needs to get rid of his old speeches in the run up to the next election.

Google's new broadband offer: 20-days of WiFi for a quid

Re: Must be the NSA @ratfox

A corollary of this is that you must ensure your opponents are using Apple's Maps. That's totally tilt things in your favour.

MacBook Air fanbois! Your flash drive may be a data-nuking TIME BOMB

Re: Interesting

It's generally hard to find SSD drives that fit the Macbook Air. They don't use the standard 2.5" drives. That's the curse of thin laptops, a lot of ultrabooks are the same. Upgrading to a 480GB SSD is going to cost you almost £500 once you factor in shipping and customs charges, if you buy it from these guys. http://eshop.macsales.com/search/MBA2010.480 I've not found a similar supplier in the UK.

While it's still cheaper than buying a whole new laptop, there's nothing like a good excuse to buy a new laptop :)

Intel uncloaks micro-microchip assault with Quark SoCs

Re: re Quark smaller than Atom

That just illustrates how revolutionary as opposed to evolutionary this new line of processors are!

Amazon tightens grip on cloud market, report shows

Unsurprising

If you're going to host your services in the cloud, going with Amazon is the obvious choice. They're cheaper and just as reliable as any other provider. The only customers I know who are using other cloud providers like Azure do so because they are big Microsoft shops and have been given huge discounts by Microsoft.

Ubuntu 13.04: No privacy controls as promised, but hey - photo search!

I have to wonder, though, what will 17.10 be called... will Ubuntu go back to A?

It'll be Arsey Aardvark.

Upstart $3bn forex trader dumps Oracle JVM for Azul's Zing

High performance Java

I've been to a number of presentations by the LMAX guys and these guys know what they're talking about when it comes to extracting performance from the underlying hardware. They're Disruptor design pattern is interesting and I've adopted it with much success. For a financial company, they're very open about the technology they use. http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com is a blog by one of their developers that I've got bookmarked.

Python-lovers sling 'death threats' at UK ISP in trademark row

Duplicitous or naive?

"Poultney claims he’s only interested in the trademark on the servers. “We are not interested in the trademark on the language,” Poultney told The Reg."

So, what does someone mean when they say "I have a Python web app"? Do they mean it's written in Python? Do they mean that it's hosted on the Python web servers? Hell, what does a Python web server mean? Do they mean something like Tornado which is a web server written in Python or do they mean a web server hosted by these guys?

Something doesn't sit right here. These guys are either being very duplicitous or naive.

Monty on broken MySQL promises: Oracle's going to fork it up

PostgreSQL

This is why I decided to go with PostgreSQL with new projects. I think it's a shame to see MySQL become so fragmented, but all is not lost as it's made many transition to PostgreSQL.

Avira 'fesses up: Our software isn't compatible with Windows 8

Re: Windows Defender

I'm surprised that other vendors still offer free consumer AV. Is there any reason to use anything other than Microsoft Security Essentials?

NHS trust: Not buying through NHS IT saved us £7m

Re: Well

"My other half is an ICU doc and loses (as in dead) tons of patients... "

For those of us who are curious, just how many patients are there in a ton and how does that vary by county/NHS trust?

Nikon D4 DSLR review

Too expensive for most

It's going to be hard for most photographers to justify the price of the D4. For just a little bit more (£5300-ish) you could walk away with a D800, and some very sweet lenses (Nikon's 24-70 and 70-200 spring to mind).