* Posts by Dinsdale247

186 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Apr 2014

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Stephen Elop and the fall of Nokia revisited

Dinsdale247

Re: Why can't Elop take credit for his achievement?

The N8 and E7 were my favorites. There was nothing else as beautiful on the market at the time...

Dinsdale247

Re: Why can't Elop take credit for his achievement?

"They couldn't release Asha, the update to make Symbian at least bearable until a year, 18 months after Elop took over."

If you read up on the history, the core OS of Symbian had flaws that didn't allow it to really take advantage of new screens and resolutions. It was designed for pre-iPhone type hardware. The internal teams that were tasked with fixing the problem fought each other for resources. I worked with a woman that was a Project Manager for Nokia at a team in Canada and she told me the nightmare stories about inter-office battles.

"MS could have invested sufficiently in Windows Phone, both in getting developers and keeping it updated."

I couldn't agree more. Corporate bungling.

Dinsdale247

As a Windows Phone Fan...

1) The carriers do not want multiple OSes to have to support. As Blackberry waned, the carriers only cared about having a foil against giving Apple a monopoly. BB couldn't do it (the storm and fire were flops) and MS pissed off all the carriers multiple times. I am also convinced Google and Samsung paid great sums of money to the carriers to keep Windows phone out of the market in the US.

2) While it's nice to try to pin it all on one person, the death of Nokia was a perfect example of corporate bungling: Great hardware, great OS with lots of features. What did I get for supporting Nokia and Windows Phone? Each year I received:

- Discontinued hardware (We had our Lumia 700's for 3 months when MS announced it wouldn't be bringing them forward).

- No new hardware or designs

- No new OS features. In fact, each upgrade they removed more and more of the great features we used. Each release was almost 2 years apart in Canada.

- No new look and feel - Come on MS, add some colors or themes or something. Did it really need to take 4 years to give us transparent tiles?

- Less apps every year.

All the while Android was getting more invasive... er I mean, more feature complete. Stephen didn't kill Nokia. Microsoft and Nokia were totally unable to keep existing users because they were more concerned about their bottom line than the users. The market never expanded because everyone that bought a Lumia wound up jumping ship a year later due to lack of many things that were basic features on other phones.

3) The death kneel as a user was when Netflix refused to support the platform. "Yes honey, Netflix can be streamed anywhere... except YOUR phone." Shortly after that the banks started pulling support for banking apps.

Are you an open-sorcerer or free software warrior? Let us do battle

Dinsdale247

@sisk

I do the same. The irony is that there is *so much code* out there in the wild now, nobody can even consume it all. Even if I did do something innovative, I don't think anybody would notice...

Dinsdale247

Re: "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"

@Sam Adams the Dog: Good doggy. Was the puppy eating a computer history book? Yes he was! Yes he was!

The groups supporting the BSD tapes specifically avoided GPL code because they wanted to be able to use the sources for business purposes. SUN Microsystems was started by Bill Joy by taking the BSD tapes and turning it into a proprietary product. Later, the FreeBSD license was created specifically in response to the GPL.

The LGPL was created because the GNU realized to get traction they need developers in businesses to use their software. What good is libmicrohttpd if nobody is using it for anything important?

Dinsdale247

Re: "But the latest version is incompatible with the one you've got."

I can't agree enough with the "kludey mess" comment. SO many people that argue about software don't know the first thing about creating it.

I'll also add to the discussion that if the format has changed, then hopefully the company has innovated the software and made it better. That means they spent time and effort to improve it. In the real world, developers must get paid (I know I like my paycheque) so yes, new features should cost money.

Now if said seller of software is abusing the customers by forcing them to do things they don't want to do or add features they don't need, then it's up to us to create new software and sell it at a reasonable price. Thus the free market gets two great products and another small company gets a chance to make money.

If it were based on GPL, then Google/IBM/Canonical/RedHat would give it away for free, then start making changes to the API so quickly that everyone had to use *their project* and they become the de-facto standard. Nobody but the big guy makes anything in GPL.

Dinsdale247

Re: GPL is not freedom at all.

I would go one step further and say that the GPL has the unintended consequence of supporting large businesses over small players because they don't have to innovate to stifle the market. They just have to ensure that nobody else can be more innovative than them and the GPL guarantees that. This forces the "communization" of all software and as pointed out, makes us dependent on large companies for our living.

My preference is for FreeBSD and MIT licensed code. There are few things GPL that cannot be replaced with more "limited protection" licenses. Big businesses don't use BSD because that means a small company or employee that understands the system better can innovate and cut them off.

Smart companies such as Sony and Nintendo (PS3&4 and Switch respectively) have used BSD license software to create fantastic new devices that are valuable to customers, and provide profitability to those that can innovate. I don't wear suites except to weddings so I like the sound of that.

Apple tells GitHub to fork off: iGiant steps outside DMCA law in quest to halt iBoot leaks

Dinsdale247

hmm...

I'm not a fan, but I can see the point Apple is making. Forks are pointers to the same code until someone starts changing things. Once a repo with Apple code is identified, Github should make efforts to not allow it to proliferate.

Either way, it's a good thing for Apple that there is only one way on planet to share code anymore. That could be read as irony over the shutdown of codeplex and the slow death of sourceforge, or as sarcasm about the fact there is now millions of copies of iBoot floating around in torrents and emails.

I'm eager to see if any of my previous posts about the break-ability of handheld arm computers rings true.

Apple's top-secret iBoot firmware source code spills onto GitHub for some insane reason

Dinsdale247

Too darn difficult for the FBI

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/09/fbi_boss_backdooring_encryption/

As I said in the comments to the above article: The gullibility of our society is *SHOCKING*. Perhaps I should have said depressing.

FBI says it can't unlock 8,000 encrypted devices, demands backdoors for America's 'public safety'

Dinsdale247

Re: I still don't buy it

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/08/apple_iboot_source_code_leaked/

The gullibility is *shocking*.

Dinsdale247

I still don't buy it

I'm telling you, this is a ruse.

Why would the FBI stand there and publicly tell everyone that wants to do something bad to use an iPhone and lock it with your finger print because "we can't get you"?

The gullibility is shocking.

Women beat men to jobs due to guys' bad social skills. Whoa – you mad, fellas? Maybe these eggheads have a point...

Dinsdale247

Re: Indeed

Your experience and your *opinion*. You may not appreciate some male behaviors, but that doesn't make those behaviors wrong or even less social. You have just failed to appreciate them.

Dinsdale247

Re: Indeed

Insight that men and women are constantly in competition for resources such as good mating partners and will take advantage of proximity and familiarity to get what they want?

It would be wise for us to look at the mating habits of other heard animals and cross reference the behaviors. It might be seen at some point that men are not *harrassing* women, but merely exhibiting the traits that most women desire and respond to. It's unfortunate that the line between sexual aggression and attempting to gauge a womans interest has been washed away...

Dinsdale247
Coat

Social Skills? Really?

The idea that somehow women are have greater social skills then men is more lefty "lets-make-something-up-that-sounds-affirmative" logic. Has anyone in academia ever picked up a history book? Us nuckel-draggers have been known to be social from time to time...

Either way, people that say s%it like this have never worked with a group of women or talked to a woman that works with a group of women. The catty, nasty, backstabbing things they do are no different than the things men do.

I am honestly embarrassed for women when people say ignorant things like "women are better at this".

How about this one instead: Women don't have children anymore and need to pay for their own damn iPhones because they can't be bothered to be in a long term relationship (because most men are self centered gits raised by a single parent home).

How did I conclude that? I looked around and made something up in my head. Then I asked my wife and my best friend what they thought and everyone agreed it sounds great. Isn't that how we do research now?

Terror law expert to UK.gov: Why backdoors when there's so much other data to slurp?

Dinsdale247

Re: Knows His Stuff

Exactly: The scary thing is the constant, realtime collection of every single thing you do, everything you say, and every place you go. History is replete with examples of abusive surveillance systems. Those that argue it won't happen "this time" are being disingenuous.

Either way, they don't need to crack encryption to do that.

Eggheads: Cities, don't woo rich Amazon with sweetheart HQ deals

Dinsdale247

Re: How do they get away with it?

ST for president.

Dinsdale247

Re: How do they get away with it?

It is not socialism, it is the opposite of socialism. Socialism is the practice of collecting funds that are then re-distributed among the population to even wealth and services distribution. The proposed tax cuts are the *exact opposite* of that. The tax cuts are a promise to alleviate one company of taxes in the *hope* of receiving other benefits from their entry into the local market. The distribution of wealth and services is a secondary *possible* benefit that is not guaranteed. The outflow from the common purse is a guaantee.

It is not socialism, it's a market distortion.

NASA finds satellite, realises it has lost the software and kit that talk to it

Dinsdale247

Re: It was also HARDWARE that no longer exists.

You'd still need decoding software. The binary formats would be very very very complex and just writing the software to do that isn't really possible without the background documentation (Inter-Communication Documents is what we call them). SO, you either need the original documents to re-write it, the original software that runs on the potentially very custom hardware, or you need the source code to rebuild it against a new set of tools and libraries. If the original authors relied on any hardware specific processing tricks, the software may not even be usable. If they relied on an open source package that may have changed, God help them (oops, that option doesn't exist in a modern kernel, sorry!)

And then there's the drivers to the hardware that talks to it...

Dinsdale247

I don't see what's lucky about spending years of your life preparing for the chance to catch a signal. You think he just accidentally had a receiver and decoders sitting around his house?

Google takes $1.1bn chomp out of HTC, smacks lips, burps

Dinsdale247

Re: What do you mean competitive portfolio?

Well said, except you didn't mention they make satellites, rockets, heavy equipment, and have an entire construction arm that is responsible for some of the biggest buildings in the world.

There is no company like Samsung.

Dinsdale247

Re: What do you mean competitive portfolio?

Well, yes. Of which they are the largest customer in the world so get them at a much lower cost. But, they have put their own processor in a number of phones now to test the waters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos

Dinsdale247

As I said..

As I said when Android came out: "Google is not your friend".

Every single phone vendor except one or two will wind up in the same place as HTC. Sony phones are not long for this world either. Google played the same bait and switch that Nokia played with the Symbian venture prior to Android (and in-fact, threw petrol on the tiny little flame that was non-google Android at the time). Samsung got stung on that one too so they're hedging bets with Tizen.

"Free things" are never free and big companies are not your friend. It's unfortunate that libhybris has faltered. It provided a shim layer for Android/Bionic drivers to run on a standard GLibc kernel. It was the only way out of this mess.

I'm sure glad my BB Passport is such a tank.

Timeout everyone. Y'all know that Musk's $500 'flamethrower' is literally a Boring blowtorch?

Dinsdale247

And the fact that the flame only shoots a few feet means the zombie has to get really close to you before you can flame it. Come on Elon, didn't you test this thing first? Sheesh.

PC not dead, Apple single-handedly propping up mobe market, says Gartner

Dinsdale247

Re: Can't do most of my work on a Tablet...

It's really a thermal thing. While the processors have become cooler due to die shrinks, the laptops themselves have also become thinner/smaller. There is just no way that a laptop can compete with a tower for thermal window and that will forever keep me on a desktop.

Speed kills, but will ultimately save the desktop market for many years to come.

Dinsdale247

Re: Not rocket science

Couldn't have said it better.

My mother is on a fancy new Android, my wife is on an iPhone, my kids have iThings. Funny that everyone wants a my Windows laptop because they can't really do much of anything except watch videos and surf (baring any web form, advanced search, or viewing half the sites on the Internet that don't render).

I suppose it's my fault. I ditched GNU/Linux and FreeBSD on bare metal and just run a Windows laptop with VMs for the "toys". Far more productive.

At least the Surface is an actual Windows workstation. iPads. Sheesh.

Cisco can now sniff out malware inside encrypted traffic

Dinsdale247

Re: Hopefully vapourware?

You don't have to break the encryption to know enough to make informed decisions about the traffic.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/27/nsa_loves_it_when_you_use_pgp/

(doesn't fit on one line, concatinate these two)

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/27/

nsa_loves_it_when_you_use_pgp/

Just because you encrypt the message doesn't mean they can't track you down and as the article above states, encryption makes your traffic stand out like a massive billboard. The truth is, when it comes to encryption and online security, most people will put a big padlock on their front door and then unknowingly leave all their windows open.

So great, use encryption. Did you surf Facebook on the same computer you sent sneaky encrypted traffic from? Ooops, got ya!

Did you upload something to Google Drive and then forget to sign out before you opened your VPN? Ooops got ya!

The list is endless, and if you're mom uses the a computer on the same network as you do... Oooops, got ya! (Only one external IP address...)

Dinsdale247

Re: Yes, there are concepts for that...

Cisco says "Who F'ing cares if it doesn't work? We just convinced hundreds of thousands of business to send their traffic through our servers and they've all signed agreements to LET us analyze their data."

CHA-CHING!

BlackBerry and Baidu buddy up on autonomous autos

Dinsdale247

QNX toolsets are the money

"In principal Intel could have turned VxWorks into the OS of choice for car makers."

The QNX tools built into their Neutrino OS and their development stack are second to none. They have built in real-time graphs that allow you to do things like align external signals with system calls across multiple threads. VxWorks has nothing like it as far as I'm aware. There is a reason BB/QNX can charge $25K US per seat for their development tools.

The Neutrino stack is miles ahead of everyone else. That's why Apple is playing nice with BB right now. And yes, building on top of QT for their graphics was a brilliant stroke from Mike Lazaridis. the BB10 UI is sooo smooth. (IMHO) Mike Lazaridis is as brilliant as Steve Jobs ever was and ten times the engineer.

You GNOME it: Windows and Apple devs get a compelling reason to turn to Linux

Dinsdale247

Re: Adobe Creative Suite on Linux...

I know your just trolling. But it's a great idea...

Dinsdale247

Re: Text wrangling on windows

"Notepad++

(I even have it on WINE on Linux, sacrilege maybe, but I'm pragmatic not dogmatically religious about SW)."

Interesting becuase both Scite and Geany are written using the same scintilla engine as Notepad++ and are natively supported. :-/

Dinsdale247

Re: Unimpressed by Gnome

GhostBSD 11.1 (FreeBSD 11.1) is a Gnome based release. TrueOS (FreeBSD HEAD/CURRENT) supports Gnome but I use their home-grown Lumina desktop (it's new software, it takes some time to get used to).

GhostBSD is nice and stable. I enjoy using Gnome but do most thing command line. I need three things from a desktop: A GUI web browser, multiple terminal emulation, and Geany (Yes, I can use vim. byte me). Everything else is fluff. If I want fluffy, I want wobbly windows so my preference is for KDE.

Yes, your old iPhone is slowing down: iOS hits brakes on CPUs as batteries wear out

Dinsdale247

Re: No, this was a stupid idea, or half of an idea at best

No, the fail is sealing in batteries and then claiming that disabling your device is for your own good. The duplicity is so complete you are actually justifying their position.

Dinsdale247

Re: Apple acknowledged the situation in an email to The Register

All the more galling that they claim they *have to* seal the battery in to boot.

Apple: We are obsoleting your device for your own good. We swear! You don't want to really be using those three-year-old-perfectly-good-processors because we *know* you want all the latest features even though 90% of you just want a damn phone. That will be $900 please.

Dinsdale247

Re: Apple acknowledged the situation in an email to The Register

"PS- Andrew O please explain to your colleague that it is not possible to use the word Apple and the word transparency in the same sentence"

Apple allows for window transparency in their OSX products.

:P

Ouch. Hey, stop throwing things at me!

Windows 10 Hello face recognition can be fooled with photos

Dinsdale247

Next Step

This is not face recognition. They measure features on a persons face and compare that to a previous record. It recognizes distances between points (and is probably a fuzzy match).

Find out what points of the persons face the algorithm is measuring and you don't even need a real picture to fool the system.

Plug in a usb device that claims it's a camera and start throwing patterns at the login subsystem.

Fun stuff.

Republican tax bill ready to rescue hard-up tech giants, struggling rich

Dinsdale247

Re: Hate much?

I worked in the Cayman Islands for 5 years. The entire world financial system is a disgusting abuse of, well, everything. Repatriation of funds is an inevitability; doing it on the books at least means there is a chance of re-investment.

Stop using banks, stop buying from corporations. That, or we should stop complaining because it's our own fault. (Don't give me smug European non-sense, I saw you drink that Coca-Cola while you were playing on your iphone).

2017 – the year of containers! It wasn't? Oops. Maybe next year

Dinsdale247

Re: Container == process

A chroot is simply changing the root filesystem for the process (shell) that you are running. A container is a process that runs child processes with a different root filesystem and limits access to system calls and resources based on dynamic criteria. Nothing more, nothing less. It's similar in nature to a debugger really. The trick for "containing stuffs" is mimicking the system calls without allowing process to escape and perform functions that will expose global resources.

In FreeBSD ALL process run in Jails. The main process runs in Jail 0.

Dinsdale247

I highly recommend searching for Computers For Cynics by Ted Nelson on youtube. While Unix is a fascinating implementation of Multics (once that I love using via FreeBSD), it was not new either and replaced mainframes that already had the features we are trying to bring back in "new technology".

I love his description of the PUI best. It's really quite depressing how limited and broken our technology is compared to what is possible.

BlackBerry won't kill BB10 until 2020, pulls regular Priv updates

Dinsdale247

Re: old Android OS not as big a deal anymore

As a BB10 lover, my sincerest condolences...

Dinsdale247

Re: I just got an update to my BB Passport today

Ha ha.

If it's a regular passport, don't let it get too hot in your pocket, the screens come unglued. It happened twice to me before I convinced the BB store partner to let me trade in for a Passport Silver.

Dinsdale247

Refusing to update their own software on their own hardware...

I wonder why a "software company" wouldn't offer software updates to their hardware after they made a deal with their new best friend TCL to support *their* handsets?

I'm glad my passport will be supported for a little longer, but I don't do much with BB10 apps. Mostly Android apps from Amazon.

The decision is rather disappointing given the emphasis BB put on offering updates. Even a paid for option would have been acceptable IMHO.

We shall see how long they support my mothers DTEK60 (gorgeous phone). Then I shall wipe it and put LineageOS on it...

My BFF has my OnePlus One with lineage on it. Runs great, always current and has an update engine. AOSP/LineageOS and the other non-Androids are the only solution to corps doing this to us.

Dinsdale247

Re: old Android OS not as big a deal anymore

"iFanbois like to talk about Android "fragmentation" but I have yet to see something that won't run on my four year old device."

Google reined in the fragmentation many years ago by forcing handset makers to follow strict UI guidelines if they wanted to use the Android name brand and integrated many of the standard Android services into their proprietary services. Not to mention many of the vendor app stores and applications never provided much income to the handset makers (contrary to what they were told when they signed on to Android).

Murdoch's Fox empire is set to become a literal Mickey Mouse outfit

Dinsdale247

Not Really

Mickey Mouse was known for waffling on decisions. Regardless of your opinion on the White House decisions; waffling is not what Donald Trump does.

Now Obama... That's a different story...

Dinsdale247

We empower these corps

Turn off your TV and send your kids outside. Stop buying toys from walmart/toys r' us/<big box store here> toys and watch these "empires" collapse.

Why should you care about Google's AI winning a board game?

Dinsdale247

Er, what?

So they have replaced a large brute force system with one that creates a subset of data to brute force and this is called machine learning. Not impressive.

People that talk about AI don't understand computer hardware and system calls. Nuf said.

Oh, and I'd put dollars to doughnuts that throwing a couple of moves every now and then would make this algorithm very easy to beat. But that's just me guessing.

FBI tells Jo(e) Sixpack to become an expert in IoT security

Dinsdale247

Or is it?

"The depressing thing is that every single item on this list is necessary and true, and nearly all of it is beyond the home user. It would, however, make a sound syllabus for some kind of certification, if anybody would study it, which they wouldn't."

How about a certification that vendors need to adhere too that validates their products provide all these items (in a simple, consistent manner)?

I think we have hit a level of complexity in computers that is far higher than even most "computer people" can handle and businesses have masked that complexity without solving it. The result is unmanagability.

SO we could continue this route, or look at changing the network to something that will protect users rights. If only someone had suggested a way to do this before...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

We should ask Google... er... I mean the Internet governing bodies what they think of that...

Leftover Synaptics debugger puts a keylogger on HP laptops

Dinsdale247

Re: YeeeeeeeeeeeeeHAAAAAAWWWWWWWW!!!

Or, more accurately arrest the Project Manager that told the developers to get the code done on x date or they're fired.

I can say with certainty there are few qualified software developers that WANT to ship shoddy code. But, if "the boss" says there is no budget for fixing problems and testing, then you get what you get.

There is never time to do it right, and rarely even time to fix it until the customers start suing.

Samsung starts cranking out 512GB eUFS storage

Dinsdale247

Waiting for the dev boards

Arm development boards have been contrained to SD cards and slow emmc that top out at 10Mbps. I can't wait to see the smaller versions of these start to show up on dev boards once the price starts to drop.

https://www.jedec.org/sites/default/files/HeeChangCho_Mobile_Forum_August_2016r_8.pdf

Investigatory Powers Act: You're not being paranoid. UK.gov really is watching you

Dinsdale247

Re: Yawn

Much worse, these laws can be changed at the drop of a hat and what was once a small fine can become a real offense.

Dinsdale247

Re: sort of confused ?

"In 2017 it is almost impossible to opt out of surveillance by one megacorp or the other (FB, Apple, Google, Amazon...)."

You missed every telco and internet service provider, every restaurant chain that lets you use their Wi-Fi (many now are part of larger systems that collect data and provides free internet services), every grocery store or gas station that you use your rewards card at...

All of this information is being aggregated. When they seek so adamantly to pin me to an advertising ID, I don't believe the "you're just a data point" line.

Until governments give us the right to control who uses our data (including meta data), our privacy will always be a thin veneer of lies.

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