Posts by Christian Berger

What I don't understand is...

If those officials are of the opinion that such fighter jets are important, why are they outsourcing it's development to private companies? Everybody knows private companies are inefficient.

What are the alternatives?

To use newer versions of IE you'd have to upgrade Windows to at least Version XP which is essentially impossible in most companies.

So what can you do? Switch to Firefox? Switch to Linux?

Why doesn't Microsoft go forward and offer their newer browsers for their own operating systems?

Wasn't the whole point of the iOS to make carrier concessions?

I mean why else would you include some DRM system for your software? Why would you make a closed software distribution system an lock out VoIP applications? It's all just to make concessions to the carriers.

That's why Nokia introduced Maemo on a device without a GSM module. They just bypassed the carriers with that.

I got a ZX80 with ZX81 ROM in 1992

Apparently there was a way to upgrade your ZX80 almoust to an ZX81. You got a plastic keyboard overlay and floating point math. However no slow-mode.

Well that little machine was where I had my first experiences in programming on. I also calculated some homework on it.

What we'd now need would be an equally clever BASIC on a microcontroller. Unfortunately current attempts either need an external compiler, or are limited to fixed line length. A single chip home computer would be a great teaching aid.

Different countries - Different tastes

I mean Charlie Sheen might be on the Z-list in most of Europe, but this is the US, a completely different culture. While "The Beatles" might be a very popular band in the UK, it's hardly known in the US. On the other hand, popular US band "The Shaggs" is essentially unknown in the UK.

Probably a step upwards

Once "Evil Steve" steps down Apple might have a bright new future. It might even make the step from a religion to a computer company again.

Department is under controll of the FDP

The FDP are the corruption party, so it's likely to have something to do with corruption.

Until now, the foreign office had the lowest cost per workstation, despite of having high demands like encryption.

I don't think anybody in German (except for Windows fanboys) believe it's a rational decision.

@What's wrong with Active Sync?

The time when mobile devices didn't have filesystems so you actually needed some bit of Software to get data onto them, should long be gone. Just think about it, if you need to sync your documents with your desktop computer before travelling, you might as well edit them right there.

Microsoft should have played it's strengths instead of just trying to out-apple Apple. Like a mobile OS with access to network file shares, an RDP-client and seamless integration with most VPN vendors could have been a success, as it actually fills a gap.

Delphi is dead, it's Lazarus now

Lazarus is the open source re-implementation of Delphi. It does many things and at work we are using it for cross-plattform GUI development.

I remimber back when the TomTom came out

Back when the first TomTom came out and people found out how to use it, they were speculating about adding a DVB-T receiver and using it as a TV-set.

The idea is fairly old and it only adds a few euros of cost. I doubt it's much use, but potentially communities could have DVB-T transmitters transmitting trafic information or updated maps.

Now to the next challenge

After Chess and Jeopardy. Let's aim for the next challenge: Numberwang!

Has the Reg becomming the new "Heise"?

Heise in Germany is a publisher of computer magazines with a website not unlike the Reg. Regularly, especially on Fridays, they publish controversial/emotional topics like this in order to boost click rates.

OK, can it do typical business applications?

Can I access the PDF-files on a Windows share, so I can read documents on the fly?

Can I open and edit Microsoft Office files from Windows shares?

Can I log into my desktop computer via SSH?

Can I execute Windows applications?

The point is, WP7 might be better than a lot of what's being offered today, however it's still far from useful.

Microsoft would have the possibility to just slim down Windows and port it to phones, adding an x86 emulator for standard applications. That would have had serious value in a business world.

There's something fundamentaly flawed

When nobody can implement a standard completely. Maybe it's just all to complex.

I never quite understood this

Why would you want to tie a video recording device to a service? You can just get the EPG data from the DVB-stream, or if you are mildly clever, from teletext pages.

What's the usage scenario?

Suppose I want to take a picture with the internal camera? I snap the picture, then I want to transfer it to my PC. Does SCP work? Does FTP work? Can I access shared folders? Can I use Bluetooth OBEX? Can I use USB mass storage? Can I remove the SD-card and put it into a reader?

Unfortunately the answer to all of those is 'no'.

There's nothing you can actually do with those devices. They are less useful than 'feature phones', but cost a _lot_ more.

root?

Can you get root on it?

If I worked at Nokia....

I'd try to organize for a larger group of engineers to leave and create their own new company. Nokia has the people, they just had horribly bad management. There is no way Nokia will need as much R&D as they do now, so it's best to just leave the sinking ship instead of being laid off.

At their own company, they can just concentrate on making the hardware. Then they can add a thin abstraction layer, so the software doesn't need to be ported to every model. Then they would port Meego to that abstraction layer, and leave the rest of the work to the community or system integrators.

Most importantly, they must leave out the network operators.

What worries me more...

That TV.-set seems to have considerable deflection problems, maybe caused by some slowly failing electrolytic capacitor. If it fails, it's certainly scarier than "sh*thead". (Those parts typically fail fairly spectacularly)

To bad there's no computer game version of Numberwang.

Such ideas are fairly obvious

But usually you only have 'radicals' like Alan Kay talking about them at first. Then when people in the forums talk about such a technology, and the first companies have brought out devices which are 60% right, Apple brings out a device that's 80% right, but missing some crucial points (like actual usability). Their products get popular thanks to marketing and everybody else copies them badly, again missing the important points.

One recent example is mobile computing. Early devices just stored a few kilobytes of appointments and telephone numbers and had to be synced via special software. A 2 line display made reading long texts nearly impossible.

Then later you had the Palm/WindowsCE era. Still nearly no network connectivity, but better displays and external storage. One crucial thing missing is a good shell so you can do some actual work on it.

Then came the Sharp Zaurus and the Nokia N770. Suddenly you had small mobile devices you could actually _do_ stuff on. And Nokia actually had distribution channels in Europe so the N770 quickly sold out, and they made the N800, the N810 and the current model, the N900. Those are devices which essentially are computers.

Then Apple brought out their iOS devices which finally could be connected to the network directly and featured a browser. The idea of a ApStore is so much better compared to the usual crude way of installing software on non-free systems, it took off. (Again, payment can easily be done independently of software distribution)

Still you cannot do anything with it unless you jailbreak it.

Confusing DRM with security

One of the main problems of Android/Blackberry/WP7/IOS-devices is that they confuse DRM with security. The idea that software that goes through a marketplace is automatically secure is just plain stupid. In fact DRM causes the user to "jailbreak" the system.

What is needed are "communities" instead of "market places". That doesn't necessarily mean that there is no payment, but that there is a group of people responsible for the software. And if you don't like the decisions of that group of people, go to another one. Essentially it's the "Debian" way of doing things. You have repositories, and if you can't find what you like in one of them, just go to another.

And then add real security. Don't leave a default root password in like on the iPhone. Take care of buffer overruns and similar problems. Enable the user to encrypt the flash if he chooses to.

Security which restricts the user to much isn't helping. Just like when you force the password to contain at least 3 letters and 4 numbers most users will have "Feb2011" as their password for this month, the inability to get a root-shell will cause them to jailbreak the device.

main problem, hardware plattform missing

Seriously, once you have some sort of hardware platform, maybe emulated with a hypervisor. The idea is to do it like in the PC world, distributing the OS and the hardware independently. So you'll get an SD card for your OS, you stick it into your mobile and maybe even copy it to your internal flash for speed reasons. If you want another OS, you install another OS.

Once this happens, the mobile business will get out of it's 'home computer' era.

BTW, seriously if you ever consider WP7, just look at this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP7#Features_removed_from_Windows_Mobile

It includes things like a file browser, or Bluetooth file transfer functionality. You cannot even use SD-cards or send USSD codes used by many operators.

The main feature of a Windows tablet...

is that you can probably just install any operating system on it. If you like Windows, just install your favourite version. Most people will probably just install some version of Ubuntu Linux. Then again, if you want to create your own system, just do it, the hardware is open.

I got such a keyboard 6 years ago

It came from a couple. The husband worked at a company making such paint jobs. The keyboard had a DIN connector so they didn't need it anymore.

The problem is not the backbone

The problem surely is not the backbone, in the 1990s phone companies all over the world laid fiber optic to every telephone exchange. I doubt they put less than 100 fibers per connection there.

Now 10 gigabits per second per Wavelength is nothing new any more. You can have about 100 wavelengths per fibre, giving you a terabit per second per Fibre, or 100 terabits per second per connection. Considering the exchange serves roughly 10000 people, each one of those still gets a _minimum_ of 10 gigabits per second, usually much more.

The big problem is the connection to the user. Telephone wires or cable television cables just don't have the bandwidth required for that. One would most likely have to upgrade the last mile to fibre. Perhaps another solution would be something similar like nano-BTSes on UMTS, only supplying a few people with fibre, and using MIMO technologies to service the rest. Of course nobody in their right mind would want to pay for something like that.

Real reason....

Nearly nobody in Germany has a credit card.

Uhm, Bittorrent and RSS?

Why not just use Bittorrent and RSS. Both technologies are already available. They are very efficient and it's what it's going to move towards anyhow.

If the broadcasters don't do it, the viewers will.

I'm sorry, but....

This is a device which receives bits on one end and transmits them again at the other. Wouldn't it make sense for a review to tell us about bit error rates at various signalling rates and cable lengths?

There are no people who only _know_ Windows

All of the people I've seen so far claiming to _only_ know Windows, in fact don't actually _know_ Windows at all.

Just ask one of those people how to change file permissions on Windows XP professional, then on Windows XP home, or whatever other version they might be having. If they are using 9x or 2000, ask them where that clock.avi file in their Windows directory came from.

More equipment porn

Well I guess some "equipment porn" might have made the article better. Just show photos of the devices you are describing.

Other than that it's not a bad article.

Spectrum is not the problem

The problem is how much you invest in your network. Thanks to technologies like adaptive antennas you can increase the capacity a great deal without having to have new frequencies.

The main advantage for Windows on ARM is...

The main advantage for Windows on ARM is that there will be some sort of homogeneous hardware platform. Since Windows is not delivered as source code, the hardware needs to be adapted to make the OS run.

This is where Linux comes in. Once you have such a platform it's fairly simple to adapt Linux to it, giving you the "install and run" experience you already have on PCs.

Can't they just overclock it even more?

I mean this clearly is a machine which would save society thousands of Euros for each second it's not working.

The point is simply...

...who controls the boxes. For example I have a networked "satellite receiver" which is essentially a Linux PC. I can record and store everything I want for as long as I want to. I can get both Freesat and normal FTA satellite reception. All recordings are normal files I can easily re-encode to just about anything I want. I could build an ITV to Youtube gateway, if I really wanted.

"Open Source" was just a marketing word anyhow

The more correct expression was "Free Software", but that's harder to Google for.

Free Software is now normal. If you buy a router, it most likely comes with a piece of paper with the GPL printed on it. Even though many computers are still sold with Windows pre-installed, the majority of them probably runs Linux by now.

For half a year the only way to get a working computer

At work we only have DOS-based word processing systems. To write my diploma thesis I seriously had to get my own computer to do the data-processing.

Later I got something which must have escaped a land-fill. A hideous conglomerate of non-standard low quality PC components. About as robust as an AMD K6-III overclocked, with bad capacitors and a VIA chipset.

Brilliant strategy

Assange, although being fairly unimportant, is now seen as a victim, perhaps even a Merthyr. That's also why he hosted Wikileaks on Amazon or used that swiss bank.

The guy who wrote the first usable portscanner in the early 1990s, and came up with the idea of Rubberhose is probably to smart for that to fall into those traps on accident.

http://iq.org/~proff/marutukku.org/

Even if Wikileaks fails, there's going to be clones.

Uhm... it's electronics

Semiconductor electronics easily can sustain temperatures from -50 to 200 degrees celsius. That's not actually anything special.

CPUs are not bug-free

What happens if there is a privilege escalation but in the CPU allowing you to gain kernel mode privileges from userland code? Who patches their CPUs?

The main question about MeeGo

The main question about MeeGo will be wether it's unlocked (i.e. you can get root easily and consistently) or locked down like iOS/WinPhone7/Android/Blackberry...

MeeGo is the OS for people who want to use rsync on their mobile devices. People who want to tunnel their IP through DNS because that's the only thing their hotspot offers. This may not be a large market, but it exists none the less.

I guess the reason is...

...that it doesn't make much difference cost-wise for Sony between integrating a DVD-Player and a PS2. But when integrating a PS2 they can charge more money.

So your phone company doesn't know what phonelines are?

If your phone company doesn't know ISDN and claims that you cannot get it any more, how do they provide phone service? Is it all VoIP now, or do you still use old dial phones?

IPv4 is legacy technology anyhow

IPv4 barely works for most people anyhow because of NA(P)T. For me it's just there as a legacy technology which I only use to communicate to people who don't have IPv6 yet.

I like to compare IPv4 to ISDN. Back then it was 'the big thing', but today it stales in popularity. Of course I have an ISDN line for increased geekiness, but I don't actually use it much more.

IPv6 will overshadow IPv4 in the same way. IPv6 will enable completely new possibilities like peer to peer web applications or proper VoIP.