Posts by David Hicks 1235 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2008
@I ain't Spartacus
The figures I found were sales too, they were Q3 2012 sales and Q4 *may* show something more interesting, but I think doubling the sales share is a touch optimistic. Could well be wrong
The N900 was a great device, but I'm not interested in what the OS *needs* for basic operation, I'm interested in what you can do with the available power. And the more the better as far as I'm concerned. Especially as I like to re-purpose devices and install non standard operating systems. You can say "Oh but the interface is sooo smooth" as many times as you like, but I'll still be miffed at someone trying to sell me last year's hardware at this year's prices.
No, I do not expect everyone to think that way, or that my opinion is representative of anyone but me.
@dogged
What are the sources for your numbers?
The 2.7% US figure I quoted comes from Forbes - http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2012/12/21/windows-phone-now-third-most-popular-platform-in-u-s/
And gartner says 2.4% - http://wmpoweruser.com/gartner-around-4-million-windows-phone-units-sold-in-q3-2012-with-2-4-market-share/
These are of course Q3 numbers, I can't find Q4, but the only numbers I've seen even in the same ballpark as yours are projections. For 2016.
Where are you getting your 5% from?
All I can find is references to 2.7% US and 1.9% global (Q3 2012). I can accept that the new lumia phones may have made a dent, but 5% seems wildly optimistic. Nokia is certainly the top dog, but of a very small yard.
I would buy a Nokia android device, but it would have to be competitive with other handsets on the market. Three or four years ago Nokia released the N900, which was awesome but already behind the field in terms of tech specs. The N9 was at least a year behind competitor's products, so despite apparently being pretty good they could have been so much better. I've no idea if the hardware specs of current-gen nokias are in line with the rest of the industry, but they used to lag terribly.
Folks, your problems are crappy jobs. Get some experience, become a contractor/consultant, rake in the cash and have a new workplace every few months!
If you just sit in the corner being the underpaid geek, all the while hoping someone's going to hand you a pot of gold, then of course your life's going to seem miserable.
My degree has been very useful to me. It's opened a lot of doors and more importantly it's given me a good grounding in a wide range of computer *stuff*.
You can talk your way past the degree requirements at a lot of places and you don't need a degree to be an awesome software engineer, but I've found it very useful for both thing. It's true that some of the best people I've worked with had no degree, but most did.
Being interested in tech? Hell yes that's a requirement.
To the OP if you're reading this - try to find some way to leverage your existing knowledge into a few steps up the ladder in IT and skip the helldesk stuff entirely. Find a crossover job where you bring the domain knowledge but you learn the technical ropes from some more experienced tech guys.
Also (and I'm going to get flamed for this) programming/software engineering is far more interesting than IT and networks!
This is similarly true in software - while there are companies crying out for staff, compared to the international scenario the pay for software folks in the UK (even in London) is frakking awful when compared to the US, Australia and other western nations. Maybe we do need more STEM grads, but unless the money's there at the other end why bother?
The only way I can get close to what I was earning in 'stralia is by contracting.
I cycled a few miles at the weekend. So long as it's not actually raining there's nowt wrong with cycling in the cold. Just get yourself a pair of gloves and a lightweight jacket, you'll soon warm up.
And no, I'm not usually an advocate of old-fashioned getting out there and doing it, damn the weather etc etc, I only (re)took up cycling last year. In Australia where it's warm all the time. I've been genuinely surprised that it's pleasant to cycle here. Even in January.
"Except they did? Internally Office Open XML files are just a load of XML files, with other bits and pieces, zipped up. The specs are standardised by three bodies."
Pffft.
MS crippled ISO in their haste to push this through, they stuffed the voting committees full of single issue voters and forced OOXML through as a standard, just so they could say they had one. The voters then stopped turning up, and ISO basically broke down due to non-attendance of a high proportion of members. Meanwhile the standard as published wasn't even supported by MS *and* contained many things that were ill defined so only MS could support them.
ODF is an open standard OOXML is a trap, and a deliberately confusingly named one.
No thanks.
I know most folks like the "free" phone model but buying up front lets you switch provider and call plan whenever you like. Far nicer.
Also the number of people I hear muttering about having made a terrible choice of phone and now being stuck with the damn thing...
Err, that's more than a little bit optimistic.
There certainly are different versions of the ARM instruction set out there, and not everything that will run on ARMv5 will also run on v4. There are also a whole load of differing extensions in areas like floating-point. So you end up with software distros like debian supporting the lowest common denominator and losing performance because of it, and other distros like raspbian (for the raspberry pi) that are tuned to single devices or chip categories.
ARM is definitely more of a heterogeneous than x86. And yes, there's not usually a device-discovery system or BIOS equivalent, so the OS needs code for the specific board its running on.
But if you root the phone and install an app called SDMaid (IIRC) you can delete the crapware, even if the system doesn't want you too.
I too have a German galaxy device, a Note I bought when I bought in Australia from a hong-kong vendor and have brought with me back to the UK. None of these places require a german taxi app...
No, they had the ban because they were less than competent. It was one of several arcane rules and was matched with a vcs cobbled together from glue, string and fear of progress.
I've been doing this for a dozen years now too, perhaps not as long as you, but I've come to recognise that there are a lot of very mediocre dev shops out there. I'm not a 'rockstar' but I am half decent at what I do and they were not. I've seen worse since...
Self reply to clarify (and keep wittering 'cos the alternative is hacking at some terrible code).
When I say "Your definition and mine may differ" I mean our respective definitions of clear and sensible.
For instance I've worked in places where the ternary operator in C was not allowed in case it confused some (experience<1?"junior":"incompetent") developers. Whereas I find a quick ternary in the right place to be easier to comprehend than padding the code out with more standard if/else lines. And this is a trivial example, when it comes to structuring large volumes of code there are so many different approaches that can be taken, and so many ways to get it wrong, that you really often end up with something that seems to have grown organically rather than really been designed.
With clear and sensible interfaces.
Part of the difficulty in getting this done is that requirements are barely ever exhaustive and are very subject to change (though once I got handed a multi-thousand page standard and got told 'implement this!). The other problem is other people - your definition and mine may differ significantly here.
I do wonder though as you draw a lot of your anecdata from the world of finance - Most of the best engineers I've met in a 12 year career (so far) wouldn't touch the city, and not just because they didn't like getting out of bed in the morning - do you think that this sector in particular suffers from big egos matched with decidedly average aptitude?
Also have to agree with the general theme - real world software problems are messy and don't often occupy the idealised domain that academics often tackle.
In politics, for some reason, people seem to like a strong, unwavering leader who commits to an idea and pushes it through regardless of silly things like facts or evidence. And then when whatever it is turns out to be an abject failure, they like to lambast the leader and force them to resign, or maybe something worse.
Those of us that like the idea of government that actually look at reality and changes policy in accordance with observed fact, we appear to be in the minority.
tl;dr - people seem to prefer an idiot with convictions over someone actually useful
Yup. Bugger the deletionists.
That page linked on editor trends was interesting, the conclusion seemed to be - "Current result: Non-vandal newbies are the ones leaving."
This is probably because the cabal of deletionist assholes delete anything these non-vandal newbies try to add, putting them off immediately so they never bother again. The deletion rules are entirely subjective and the people that make the decisions happily discard any and all arguments about notability/whatever as they see fit, and any arguments by the non-vandal newbies are dismissed with little more than 'LOL n00b!'
So it's no wonder everyone gets put off contributing.
"Judge Koh said that legally, Hogan's comments after the trial couldn't be used as evidence in a new trial"
I'm sure it will come up in appeal, but (IMHO) it should have been a huge red light to judge Koh. I suspect we'll just have to watch this play out over the course of several years like the SCO thing. For a billion dollars it's worth Samsung's while to challenge it for as long as humanly possible. Or however long lawyers can do it.
"Tell you what you should have been on the jury - but then again you prob work for Samsung PR. Second guessing this that and the other - got to love it."
Second guessing what? That quote from the foreman is plain as day and available on youtube.
No, I don't work for Samsung, and the only sense in which I'm being paid to post this is that I'm posting this when I really ought to be working...
He explained the process they'd been through to decide the issues of prior art. He explained how he had come to a decision on what constituted prior art. This decision was then given by him to the rest of the jury. This decision was wholly wrong. I would say that it is the judge and the court's responsibility to explain to the jurors what the issues are and how they are applied, especially in slightly arcane areas like patents. Either they did this inadequately or the juror in question subverted the court's instructions.
If there isn't a mechanism in law to recognise that what happened there results in a miscarriage of justice, then there ought to be.
I agree the conflict of interest is a minor issue, if an issue at all.
He introduced complete b*ll*cks into the jury room -
"The software on the Apple side could not be placed into the processor on the prior art and vice versa. That means they are not interchangeable. That changed everything right there."
It's not new evidence, it's a complete failure to understand what prior art means. Not that prior art is always given as much credence as us geeks think it should be given, but still.
The complete misunderstanding of the whole concept of prior art by the jury foreman, as evidenced by his own post-trial statements, and his admissions that he instructed everyone else to use his definition.
Conflict of interest or no, and I find the conflict of interest argument pretty weak, the things he said should be enough to rule the whole thing a mistrial.
That's right kids, it's illegal and therefore pointless to discuss it. You have been told. The law is never, ever wrong and you are a moral failure if you even consider breaking it.
How does a person come to think like you? So fearful of authority and so keen for everyone else to submit or be punished? So afraid of people who don't toe the line and follow every little rule unthinkingly? Is it a shortcut that avoids you having to think critically or examine life?
Rights and laws are what we decide they are. Discussion and debate is how democratic societies evolve and progress. You're not helping.
My solution to that is to have a folder labelled with the name of the company I'm working for. Anything not related to my immediate needs gets dumped in there. Re-org announcements, sales announcements, product news for products I'm not involved with, customer appreciation drives, financial results, any and all stuff not immediately relevant to what I'm doing now gets immediately dumped into the Company folder.
It's amazing how infrequently you need to go into that folder.
Corporation tax is a tax on profit, not on turnover, so it only comes into play if a company is already profitable.
What is ultimately paid by consumers is the cost of letting giant corps spirit money out of the country, because it creates a market distortion that favours the large multinationals over smaller, local businesses. This is why the loopholes need to be closed.
Those would be excuses not to cycle to work and do have some validity. I currently don't cycle to work because of the cycle path situation and also because it's 25 miles away!
But outside of commuting, I think folks would be far more up for using the bike as a general means of local transport and as an exercise activity if we had a decent network of cycle routes.
I'm like a broken record on this but - I reckon if some of that there olympics money had instead been used to create better cycle infrastructure, we would have had a much better return in terms of ongoing exercise in the population. Half of what puts people off cycling at the moment is that it's bloody dangerous out there on the roads.
The other half is (of course) laziness.
And the cold. The third half is the cold :)
I've done a *lot* of driving in Australia and it's pretty unnecessary to go that oldschool/hardcore.
Sure, a decent water supply and a couple of spare fuel cans (20L cans) are essential when you get out of the comparatively densely populated south east, just in case the worst does happen. But in terms of directions... there's usually only one road. You follow it until you get where you're going. Sometimes that takes weeks.
I did take a GPS on my travels there, a Nokia N900. Far from the world's best in terms of functionality, but you can preload the entire world onto those things for free. The only issue I had with the nokia maps was that they mapped too much. I've driven down some very steep and tricky forest tracks only to find out that the route I was planning on using to get back out to a main road became a 'management only' track beyond a certain point, and I had to find my way back out somehow.
Heh, looks like they've put cairns in Stewart Creek Valley...
Gorgeous part of the world that, I highly recommend grabbing a 4x4 and driving further up, past cape Tribulation and on to Cooktown via the Bloomfield Track.
Of course I highly recommend grabbing a 4x4, a water supply, extra fuel and some food before you follow Apple Maps anywhere in Australia!
@AC - "A TV is not a computer,"
When it's running linux on its multi-core ~GHz processor, has installable applications, a web browser, can stream media all over the place etc etc.... yeah, it is a computer.
Essentially a Smart TV is like an iMac with slightly more emphasis on the screen and less on the computer power, but they're much the same sort of deal.
"incredibly tyrannical US government"?
Holy moley do you need to recalibrate your sensors, unless by "incredibly tyrannical" you mean "It's hard to believe how tyrannical the US government is because it's not very tyrannical at all".
There are a lot of dodgy things going on in the western world with respect to individual liberty and privacy. There is abuse of power by governments. However Obama is not an arbitrary (unelected) or absolute ruler and the abuses by the state in the US, while occasionally heinous, are not that bad compared to ... say anywhere that actually has a dictator.
There is much injustice to be fought, but hyperbole doesn't really help.
You'd still be letting your link be used for this stuff, adding to the network capacity. Though perhaps you've just highlighted a potential attack on the system, if you had a lot of nodes and bandwidth that all flooded the network with nothing much and then requested it over and over again.
Either way I ain't touching that.
You can fit 5 drives inside a microserver easily, lets be generous and say he's updated to the latest and greatest 4TB drives, that's 20TB per microserver. A 2TB laptop drive could be crammed in at the top and connected by looping the eSATA port back inside the case. The internal USB slot can host a thumb drive, and there are another five externally for another 1.5 TB. With a suitable USB-3.0 card in the PCIe 1x slot an with internal socket and three external you could add another 4 of these for another TB.... you might be able to pick up and *maybe* fit in the case a PCIe flash card in the x16 slot for up to another TB, bringing us to ~25.5TB per microserver before we even consider external SATA or USB3.0 enclosures...
So with a decent budget and some determination you *could* do 100TB in four microservers I reckon.
Or a freenet node, or really be part of any other sort of darknet where you don't monitor stuff going over your own links.
Not because there's a legal risk, but because I'm damned if any network or computation resources of mine are going to be used to transmit child porn.
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