Posts by Stephen Channell

uniformed tosh

"such as "only" prisoners of war being treated inhumanly instead of the Holocaust" is ignorant rubbish. 10 million Chinese died in that war, 99% civilian.. even the Germans complained about the brutality (note to AC:that's a historical record).

Japan got of lightly, because in 1945 the CCCP had more troops and more tanks than the rest of the world, and they were in Germany. America needed the war to be over, the H-bomb wasn't ready and they didn't have enough material to make enough A-bombs.

The best of the commemorations yesterday was the warm reception for Frau Merkel from the veterans, who know (being there at the time) that more German civilians died in the war AFTER it was officially over( dysentery,cholera,typhus, starvation) than Brits died in it... commemoration is about honouring the dead, not celebrating the victors.

Re: wrong type of regression curve

Safety, Security & rule-of-law have a market price.. in a liberal market economy a progressive tax system is cheaper than buying protection from gangsters, better to make informed decisions while you have choices.. hiding gold hoards in fields work as a tax-haven.. until somebody finds it

Where's the docking station?

Now that they've moved the USB, power & Display Port to the right hand side, they can do a real docking station, unlike the joke one they did for the Pro2.

With a flat/wedge dock, the screen becomes a mouse/mouse-mat replacement for a desktop experience

Sign of further maturing in the IaaS space

Wasn’t that long ago that Microsoft was running SAP R2 on an IBM mainframe for their ERP, and they nearly merged before MS bought Great Plains for Dynamics. MS only migrated away from SAP when Dynamics scalability was addressed. The mainframe MS used for SAP is less powerful than a standard Windows VM.

SAP HANA on Azure is more interesting challenge, because HANA won’t run on any old VM, but shows how mature Infrastructure as a Service is becoming.

more likely a dense fortran 4D array on an old 32-bit computer

My uninformed guess would be that flight plans are simulated as the points in 4D Space (3 physical + time) that the planes go though to check for collisions, and the root cause a 'minor upgrade' long ago to allow for busier airspace - half the collision avoidance time doubles the number of time points tracked.

My guess would be that the max altitude was never tested when changing time dimension, and not updated with a lower limit. I don't think this would use a real-time OS because you'd want to serialise each plan tracing.

my guess is [1] every busy airspace (like Heathrow) is regression testing altitude [2] game designers are offering smartphones with PhysX GPU as an upgrade to the mainframe.

pipedream

Getting to the US congress to agree would make the engineering look simples.. that's a place that can't pass a bill to complete an oil pipeline from Calgary to Huston or export natural gas..

but at least they can boast AMD64 compatibility for their main line of chips

nothing new

Microsoft might not be a top 20 Linux contributor anymore but the story has changed, as have the economics.. for very surprising reasons. Microsoft's "beef" with Linux was about the desktop, which was set to be decided with the 64-bit migration, which Microsoft has won with Windows 7.

on the devices front Android has won because every SoC/component developer builds for Linux first: performance/cost advantages have been institutionalized, and that can only change if Linus Torvalds goes soft and Linux kernel gets big and flabby for cloud coverage.

the next big story with android is going to be the unexpected decision for Obama and the rest of the US government to get Windows phones

the change is carbon fibre, speed & commodity prices

The new flywheels run upto 60000rpm with carbon-fibre disks and store much more energy, with higher potential with newer materials.. compare that with the increasing cost of rare-earth minerals for batteries and it starts to look like a good bet. http://www.economist.com/node/21540386

Re: please, not the start menu

I use Windows 8.1 for my main PC (I installed it for Visual Studio 2012 C++/CX), and I tried using the "Start Screen", but frankly it is shit because it is just not finished; doesn't work with big screens; doesn't multitask very well; with huge amounts of screen real-estate dedicated to looking good from ten yards away in shops.

When they get round to finishing it, it'll be more like Windows Phone and might well be pretty neat, but won't work much like the current "start screen" because that one is shit

still fundamentally flawed

When a tile on a large desktop screen is as big as a full screen app on a little device, it doesn't take a Phd to work out that a tile should/could offer the full app in part of the window.. But stupid "charms" prevent it.

the demo did not show left/right scrolling,because (without focus) it can't distinguish between scrolling the app and scrolling the "start" screen.. And they cant use the edge of the screen for start scroll because that is hard-coded to "charms".

gesture interface might make sense if/when we all have kinetic (xbox) controls, but for now it is as intuitive as Ctrl-Alt-Del without the onscreen prompt or the start button.. Epic epic fail

Re: S/360 I knew you well

S/380 was the "future systems program" that was cut down to the S/38 mini.

HASP was the original "grid scheduler" in Houston running on a dedicated mainframe scheduling work to the other 23 mainframes under the bridge.. I nearly wet myself with laughter reading Data-Synapse documentation and their "invention" of a job-control-language. 40 years ago HASP was doing Map/Reduce to process data faster than a tape-drive could handle.

If we don't learn the lessons of history, we are destined to IEFBR14!

two roles for RTF

Back in the early '80s IBM had a very brief leadership of PC word processing with DisplayWrite before being eclipsed by WordStar (ported from CP/M), WordPerfect (ported from Wang), MS Word (ported from Xenix). DisplayWrite was developed in a PC emulator running on MVS... was slow, memory intensive with a blockey UI, and larger files due to RTF, which was text based for transfer to/from S/370,S/36,S/38 versions which used EBCDIC instead of ASCII. RTF support in WordPerfect & Word started out as IBM compatibility.

For Microsoft RTF was a surprise saviour because it was the only way to share files between Word for DOS and MacWord which had incompatible.DOC formats due to big/little endian differences between 8086 & 68000.

IBM lost interest in RTF, because it had a better idea with GML (which it standardised & some contractor @CERN copied for his web-thing).

MS wrote-up the spec because mail-merge used to be a separate program, and is still used in document generators.

Re: Only 6 years after C#... and 3 years after C++

I respect (but don't like) the way they've implemented lambdas without proper type inference to ensure it is only used for anonymous classes and not functional code like Scala, C# and C++.. it reminded me of the incremental updates to COBOL.

Windows 8.1 is a fine half-an-OS

Once you add Classic shell and go through and disable all the chimes, it is not bad, but leaves a lingering taste in the mouth, and resentment that you've debugged, hacked & fixed something they could have finished so easily.

"it may very well slip into – caducity" is understatement (as anyone who's tried to follow MSF will tell you) caducity is the stage they're at already with windows, but MS is not a frail human body.. they have the power to rebuild it.. but can they be bothered?

Re: The man is a priceless treasure

The company he joined was a languages (interpreter & compilers) & tools company that had a nice shared operating system (Xenix). Sure they'd sold DOS to IBM, but that was just an upselling gimmick, like cheap beer in a Supermarket.

After 38 years with his leadership, the board decided the kind of CEO they needed was someone from a languages & tools background, with a nice shared operating system (Azure).

Re: JS is the new ASM?

somebody has clearly been the victim of one of those "lets use every pattern we can" Java systems designed to impress (recent) University lectures rather than customers and users... unfortunately it comes across like the reformed alcoholic looking for probation... Interfaces & stong types are not a problem, inappropriate ones are the problem.

The IFood example is telling because it is an anti-interface (doesn't taste awful).. you could (with experience) define IFood to exclude plastics, but would have trouble with human sausages.. don't try to rationalise meaningless "interfaces", concentrate ones that describe a finite set.

"Factorial (n) {...}" can be inferred to be numeric quite easily, but inference that a non-integer values result in infinite recursion is "tricky". What we need is optional type annotation for cases where type can not be derived from usage: e.g. "Factorial (n : integer) {}".. we'll end-up using TypeScript, regardless of whether we try Dart first

British & Irish isles, but Guinness/Stout/Porter is English!

The Irish American name now used by the British Loins Rugby (not ones for politcal corectness: Tripple Crown is for the Crowns of England, Ireland & Scotland).

Stout comes from old London Town, specifically Covernt Garden and only moved to Dublin for clean water

Re: Peter Tatchell being stupid again!

You kinda need access to the KGB archives to learn which cyphers the Russians used after the war, but we did provide the Russians with Ultra intelligence starting with artic convoys to relieve the Leningrad blockade and ending with the siege of Warsaw when the Russians ignored detailed intercepts of German orders and left the uprising to its fate. Lawrence Olivier did a great monolog on Russian complaints about allied intelligence officers with Ultra knowledge allowed to fall into the hands of the Gestapo in the ‘world at war’.

Turing would not be interesting to the KGB when he died because his operational knowledge was ten years old, and his mind was operationally useless in case he was a mole. Fun as conspiracy theories are, it is stupid to think the security services would rather kill him than answer the question when he asked Police to call.

Which is a better case for investigation: tenuous Conspiracy or very real Homophobia?

do be serious

The OS that run the mainframes used to be distributed as source (OS/360,OS/VS2,MVS), but customers didn’t want it, and bits of the IPL code that boots it is older than some pensioners. The code is not the issue, it’s the people. Fact is a 55 Systems Programmer can’t be bought with a promise of promotion; its cash or dash. A 40 C-something has no real understanding of what that guy does and doesn’t believe him anyway.

We’re about to get one of those lessons in what a promise is really worth to a bright 20-year on (UK) minimum wage looking for a route overseas.. meanwhile HSBC & Barclays will pay what they need, and we’ll never hear about it.

Re: cars & airplanes are not computers...wrong

Frankly, a distinguished aircraft engineer is better bet than some shmuck who’s pimped his butt round Silicon Valley or some fizzy-drinks vendor. Boing & Ford are serious engineering companies that under Mulally have gone to great lengths not to kill people (that wasn’t always the case). Microsoft needs to focus on solid engineering that nobody would want to replace; while scaling a large scale cloud that everybody could trust.

Given time Nokia phones & tablets will beat Apple by scaling solid engineering with clever quality supply-chain, which Boing & Ford have excelled at with standards.

2015 is not too long to wait for the right candidate.. and Bill can fill-in as interim-CEO until then

MIC likes Monte Carlo

for embarrassingly parallel apps like Monte-Carlo simulation of alternative futures Phi wins over GPGPU (which wins for fluid dynamics) with little code change, especially for portfolios that need virtual function dereferencing.

No shelling cash to M$ (Phi has an embedded Linux kernel), doesn't run Windows (which is a shame because it precludes .NET)

HUGE difference between data that is volunteered

When I started using: google, there were no ads (2000); the facebook, there were no ads (2003); Visa, there were no list sales; BT, there was no list sales.. at no time have I volunteered data, so I don't see a big difference between commercial or government snooping, given the warnings "searching for fertiliser bomb recipes may lead to police attention" or "facebooking in-a-relationship may lead to insurance being declined in 20 years" would help get a sense of proportion.

If I'd gone to Benghazi (Lance Corporal Gerald Fleming, Grenadier Guards RIP Salerno 22-sep-1943 was there), GCHQ would use every snoop to stop me being beheaded, but the facebook wouldn't even ban the video

Now's a good time to stop spending on Bing...

We seemed to have forgotten that Yahoo! search programs were setup when "the web" got too big for Jerry Yang to do it manually himself; and AltaVista continued to be a useful search engine long after HP got rid of all the staff (though mainly for babel fish). Web-crawling, indexing and search query has not moved on exponentially in fifteen years and would continue to work with minimal staff and electricity. They’d lose the edge in profiling people for targeted ads and maybe the SEO stuff sites use to avoid paying for ads, but now is a good time to say “Search has been cracked; we prefer privacy to profiling”.

Same pretty much goes for Xbox: amortise the costs and focus on synergies with other PC platforms & wait for Sony to go bust under the weight. Provided we don’t get obsessed by NSA/Facebook monitoring, Kinetic will be a big part of how we use computers in the 2020’s, properly amortised the Kinetic experiment with Xbox will save the desktop franchise.

One area ripe for change though is horizontal integration: Office on Android/Linux; Android-Java/Obj-C apps on WinPhone; .NET on other platforms; desktop apps on WinRT