* Posts by David Dawson

467 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jul 2008

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Larry Page sees 'tragic' future for Google

David Dawson
Pint

The EU has none of those powers

Policing, currency and the like are controlled by governments. You could call them monopolies if you really want, like the 'monopoly on the use of force' that is reserved by the state, the norm in most countries.

Its not a valid comparison though, really is it?

Policing/ fire departments as a market? That was tried once, it led to competing fire brigades cutting hoses and burning down buildings.

So monopoly == bad is a bit simplistic. However the areas that work better as a monopoly are few and far between, and should be well regulated and understood.

I don't know of any commercial monopolies that are beneficial. Anyone?

David Dawson
Holmes

RE: too big

I think that you've missed the point of the legal finery around controlling monopolies.

The laws don't punish a company for being too good at what they do. They punish a company for taking a monopoly position and _abusing_ to prevent any else entering a market. Or use it to capture another market unfairly.

So, its quite the opposite.

Microsoft weren't convicted because they had the best browser and world governments didn't like that. They were convicted because they abused their windows monopoly to destroy netscape and establish a second monopoly in the browser market.

Similarly, if Google is taken to task by the worlds competition regulators, it will most likely be because they _abuse_ their monopoly position in search (which they have in some territories), or possibly online advertising (similar position) to attack the competition and exclude them from other markets.

They won't be accused of running a search engine that is too popular or having advertising algorithms that are too good.

Zombie mobile Linuxes mate

David Dawson

HTC Sense on android

is pretty good, better than stock (to me, anyway), and on a par with the others. I use CM7 generally, and while I generally prefer it, I do miss some of the little integrations that sense had.

Not seen another good implementation though.

And the orange one is shocking.

Facebook's complexity will be its doom

David Dawson
Trollface

unsubscribe

You know you want to.

1-in-3,200 chance* that a fiery satellite chunk will hit someone on Friday

David Dawson
Holmes

Well

This is all an abuse of statistics.

Now, I'm no maths genius, so please correct the glaring ommisions here.

As pointed out above, the 1 in XX chance of hitting someone means that the essential algorithm is reversed.

ie, if you were to transpose yourself from the lottery example into the satellite example, you would not be a person on the earth, you would be the satellite.

Calculating how likely it is to hit me is beyond my number crunching skills (I'm more of a logic cruncher).

However to take the lottery as a comparison.

There is 1 draw per week, with very long odds. However, _millions_ of people enter, so there is regularly a winner. If millions of satellites were to enter the atmosphere every week, then in all likelihood, someone would be hit each week.

By the same reasoning, if only a single person (and no one else) were to buy a ticket this week, then they would be less likely to win the lottery than be hit by this satellite (according to the above numbers that I can't confirm)

This is how you'd make the two equivalent. Essentially, a single, given lottery ticket winning is the valid thing to compare to a single satellite, not the entire lottery.

You see the results of this in the satellite odds themselves. The 1 in 3200 is the total system involved. The odds to hit someone, anyone. If you were to calculate what the odds were for someone, anyone, to win the lottery. I'd fully expect that they'd be in the same order as these. Maybe a bit lower, given that there is generally a winner each week or two.

Here ends the lesson, corrections sent to my good friend, Mr Don Kiddick or his special friend, Ben Dover.

Apple makes a hash of password security (again)

David Dawson
FAIL

RE: Compared to what?

Stop for a second and then realise just how silly that sounds.

Saying that "security is better than system XX and so thats alright then" is not a sound line of reasoning. It is certainly not a good basis for system design.

It should be a secure as is feasible, not as secure windows is plus a bit..

This smacks of clever people not doing a thorough audit after building in new features.

Not malicious/ thoughtless (as I would classify MS security pre 2005), just a bit careless.

Google reveals 'leap smear' NTP technique

David Dawson
Happy

Yes, we may be in the abyss

But I'm the centre of my universe, and that's all that matters

SAP coughs $20m to feds in Oracle slurp spat

David Dawson
Unhappy

Unfortunately, yes

It is just you.

SCO were a has been player that was becoming irrelevant and running out of cash.

Oracle is anything but irrelevant, and has money to burn for years to come.

UK, US ink boffinry pact on laser fusion 'star power'

David Dawson
Mushroom

Come on!

Its got frikin lasers people!

LASERS! THAT GO BOOM!

David Dawson
Facepalm

Snake oil

Amusingly, snake oil is actually a very healthy substance to consume. Its got lots of vitamins, minerals and fatty acids that help a person keep on ticking. Especially used an arthritic relief.

The 'snake oil == bad' thing came because quacks in the old west were selling random lotions and curatives to heal everything. Mostly bogus.

Their biggest competitor were the chinese immigrants, selling snake oil as an arthritis relief and general pick me up, which it will function reasonably well as. They started the 'that's snake oil' propaganda, which has carried on till this day.

So, snake oil is good, Cold Fusion is bogus. The world is put to right.

Google feeds patents to HTC for assault on Apple

David Dawson
FAIL

Are you being deliberately ignorant, or just wanting to stir things up?

Either way, you got a response, so, fair play.

David Dawson
Pint

Me

I'll do it!

Christ appears in phone advert, secular authorities act

David Dawson

Frustratingly

The central tenet of Christianity is a belief in grace/ mercy.

That story was a good illustration; after shaming the mob into sparing the woman, he then refused to judge her and showed mercy/ compassion instead. I wish I could be that strong willed.

In any case, judging/ moralising should be a totally alien concept to a christian.

Alas, humans are judgemental, and a thin veneer of religion doesn't seem to improve your mark 1 human, it merely gives them another thing to judge with.

The whole 'God is on my side' is a terrible thing to argue against.

Time for a drink.

David Dawson

As far as I'm aware

Depictions of living creatures is forbidden, god included.

Also, a bit of abug bear. Allah is a transliteration of an arabic word that means god. Can't we just translate that bit too? And say, god?

David Dawson
Thumb Up

Umm - re depictions of Allah.

Ok - enough trolling for now

--------------------

I think you need to practise your trolling a bit more.

More CAPS and less of the good reason please ;-)

Oracle uncloaks 'speedier' MySQL installer for Windows

David Dawson
Headmaster

Can't help myself.

But thats only apt based distributions. Debian, ubuntu etc.

And you might be suprised by how SME IT works in this regard. Which is where MS seems to have the field to itself.

If something is written that needs a database, its often the developer, or even the user (who might be the same person) who decides. Since the things they are making are often pretty simple and don't need a tuned DB server or any kind of DB admin, this will work fine.

Having a slick little gui to install what they need will make it easier to get it going in that initial decision stage.

So, the firewall people can talk to the sys admin and commiserate with DB admin about how wrong this is. Meanwhile in the 10 man office where none of these people exist, well, MySql might get installed on the office server.

Google dumps TV flop on UK

David Dawson
Coat

Jay Leno

He's a comedian? I never realised... :-/

I'm sat in shock.

My contribution to the debate though - Jeremy Kyle

Prize tool of the airwaves. lock a bunch of people with nothing better to do in a bear pit of a studio and whip them into a righteous frenzy before sending them out to loot and lynch in equal measure.

Well, thats certainly how it seems whenever I see it....

My coats the one with the smug superiority in the pocket ...

Hands on with the Samsung Galaxy Note

David Dawson
Holmes

Someone

Who wants something bigger than a phone, yet smaller than a tablet.

I'm sure there's a fair few.

Bury council defends iPads for binmen

David Dawson
Meh

Council does what?

As far as I'm concerned, the councils job is to collect the bins, repair the roads and educate the kids.

Anything else is secondary.

Based on that, they should be spending my money on collecting my crap each week, on roads that don't have potholes and pay the teachers.

This fits with my philosophy. Investing in an essential service doesn't strike me as a bad idea. If it really does what they say it does (ie, save money). If it doesn't then that would be a problem. tbh though, in the context of a council budget, £9k is not that big a problem to have go horribly wrong.

Imagine if they tried implementing SAP and got it wrong, causing all of their suppliers to be paid a year after invoice for ages; there by damaging local business who tried to work with the council, until they finally tamed the beast!

Oh, we laughed. (I'm looking at you Manchester)

The real reason Google bought Motorola

David Dawson
Facepalm

Really?

I thought it was way more complicated than this ditty little phrase suggests.

Oh well, silly me!

Antitrust nemesis accuses Google of 'WMD program'

David Dawson

Third option

Abuse all of your customers so they write lots of forum posts saying to avoid www.mydomain.com. Shoots up in the google rankings.

Some gent over in the states seems to do this, I forget where the source was.

One last production run for TouchPad

David Dawson
Coat

Come on! Its obvious!

1. Sell lots of products below cost

2. ?

3. Profit!

Easy.

Java arrives on Heroku code cloud

David Dawson
Mushroom

I was going slow

Jetty is a java enterprise container, equivalent to tomcat, which they explicitly mention as a target. Fair enough, is not a full implementation of the jee( you're right, that's the correct name now) spec, but it's an implementation of part of it. So i disagree with ' it clearly isn't'. The difference we are describing is between a jee application server and a servlet container.

I'd say they are both java enterprise containers, although different. You would not.

And why don't I stitch it together into a full jee (I want proposing to build it all myself, just switch it together from the different components, it can be done, i didn't say it should..)? Because that would be daft my dear fellow, i deploy spring based web apps like most other people in the field I'm in. To tomcat, or sometimes jetty, to which I'm partial. Java enterprise (well, ejb mainly) was bypassed years ago. It's got some adoption, but it's not been the default for ages.

I'm still of the opinion that they choose an unfortunate example for their new system, which looks nice.

Seriously, try and build a webserver in java. Use one of the off the shelf templating libs, or better yet, build the thing in groovy or scala. It'll be done in 20 lines, and will work ok for moderate lead. You don't need something of the complexity of a servlet container for many things.

So forget the weekend, I'd take half an hour.

David Dawson
Facepalm

Hehe..

I'm pretty sure I mentioned that it was a servlet container ....

Hold on..

Yep, I most certainly did.

JEE is a rebrand of enterprise java, nothing more. It came in with the switch from Java 1.4 to Java 5 (internally still called 1.5). JEE 5/6 is much nicer, but not that much nicer. Especially when (in my experience) most development is done using the many non spec frameworks around (spring/ hibernate being chief) for final deployment on Tomcat. And honestly, EJB? It was the wrong solution. originally, and only got a bit better by becoming a standardised version of hibernate, which is _still_ better.

Servlets are part of the enterprise java spec (whatever you decide to call it), so its right to say they are part of enterprise java. Jetty has been around in one form or another since 2000, similar with Tomcat, which was the original reference implementation for servlets.

I was discussing that its amusing that they rail against the Java 'containers' and then use one of them in their example. They explicitly mention Tomcat as something they want to move away from, however they fire up an equivalent. I could write code that starts up Tomcat in almost the exact same way as the Jetty example they provide, and in a similar amount of code.

As a side note, the 'annotation based facilities' are to a large extent available outside of the enterprise containers, although you need a container of some sort for a lot of it (spring/ hibernate with JDO would work).

I'm not having a go at their implementation, which seems fine. Its a managed JVM instance, not a container, so they are right in that. However their example does not fit the 'we are replacing java containers', since they use one.

A better example would be to throw away the entire spec, and write a little web server using straight sockets, maybe with a little integration of freemarker or velocity. That would give a web server, with a nice templating language, and could be implemented in 20 lines or so.

David Dawson
Headmaster

Ermm

Seems a bit odd to belabour the point on 'J2EE containers', when the linked example is how to start up a new instance of Jetty, which is ...

<drum roll>

A J2EE container (note the javax.servlet.HttpServlet references in the example if you don't believe me)

Despite what is discussed lower down, it is a full servlet container (not just a 'web server'), which is a portion of the J2EE spec, and forms the basis of most J2EE implementations, and all containers.

You can stitch a few things onto it to implement the full spec.

Its a lovely piece of kit, and is extremely good for embedding into another app, which is what is being done here.

So, after all this pedantry is done, this looks a nice environment to deploy into; given that you don't actually _need_ to deploy onto a J2EE container, but rather can fire one up if you want to, this does give you a lot of flexibility.

Bad example though :-)

BlackBerry handsets will be able to run Android apps

David Dawson

I wonder

It might not be quite that simple, I'm very curious how they've done it.

Bytecode is a halfway house already, they may have grafted a dalvik interpreter/ compiler into their jvm along side the normal bytecode one. Dunno if thats feasible, but if so and they've done it, it'd run things at the same speed as if they were java bytecode.

Certainly an interesting technical exercise. No comment on whether its a good idea....

AMD's new CEO bobs, weaves, says 'big' and 'fast' are good

David Dawson
Joke

yeah, he's obviously shit

Lets lynch him.

Or, alternatively, give him few months to get some of his own ideas in and running and judge those.

I'm torn, both have plus points

Brit men descend from mammoth hunters, not farmers

David Dawson
Pint

Well..

The rotating meat stick that makes a doner a doner looks kind of like an elephant/ mammoth trunk thats been roasted.

Maybe they were originally made of mammoth and you are harnessing your awesome genetic memory to recall when we had mammoth kebabs in the darkest paeolithic...?

Or, you might just like dirty, greasy food after a night out.

Windows Phone may be cheaper than Android - Inq boss

David Dawson
Headmaster

Great minds think alike ...

And fools seldom differ...

Always worth remembering how that saying ends.

No comment on the above really. Just saying.

HP's WebOS mess: When smartphone assets go toxic

David Dawson
Holmes

@AC Eh?

I'm a Java programmer, and I can tell you that Dalvik is not a straight copy of Java. That fundamentally misses the point of the whole thing. Dalvik is a VM. It uses the apache harmony class library.

Java can refer to 3 different things, its a language, a virtual machine, and a 'platform' (read, the VM combined with a class library)

Android uses some of Java the language, it does not use Java the VM.

It implements the basic syntax of Java, and also includes implementations of a subset of the core class library from java standard edition.

The fact that the android docs refer to Java doesn't mean its a copy, it means that you can use Java syntax. You can also (neatly) use the same APIs as well, which works nicely.

Use of these APIs is one of the problems (so I now understand). Java is a bit odd in that it doesn't actually have headers in the traditional (C/C++) sense. You take a compiled class file, and then you can introspect that to discover the available methods on the class that you can call. So, its much more dynamic than there just being 'header files'

I'll admit, I don't understand quite what the issue oracle has, as you can recreate the java API docs, and so all the 'header' information you need to code to the API, from the compiled rt.jar supplied with every jre/ jdk.

The patent issues are referring to dalvik, the copyright ones are in the class library that was mostly (there in lies the issue I think) derived from harmony

Ho hum.

HP: webOS will still run PCs and printers

David Dawson

Its a shame

It really did seem like a nice system. You can develop apps for it in a web browser!

Oh well.

Cabinet Office shuns open-source in IT-tracking deal

David Dawson
FAIL

Worth pointing out

£100k is quite a bit of money when compared to say, the price of bacon.

When you look at it in relation to what they might actually want, it doesn't really sound that sinister. They'll almost certainly be using off the shelf/ prebuilt software for this, with a reasonable amount of customisation, training and support.

£100k over 3 years works out at what? 1 person full time for the life of the contract maybe? That doesn't take into account any licensing/ other costs that might be involved (by this I mean to a third party, for OS/ hardware/ other software)

They'd have to front load the costs to a large extent to get the project developed and deployed, have any training done etc. Leaving a smaller portion to allocate for the on going maintenance over the next couple of years. There's going to be profit, of course, but it doesn't sound like there's room for crazy figures.

So, it sounds a reasonably sensible award. Just because they didn't use OSS doesn't mean its a bad decision. They said before that it needs to be a level playing field. If they then don't choose the side you want, that doesn't make it biased, it simply proves they aren't biased in your direction, nothing more. As said above, OSS doesn't equate to good. It might be good, or it might not.

Sneaky tracking code (finally) purged from Microsoft sites

David Dawson

Tee hee

Hats!

+1

Injunction suspended: EU can buy Galaxy Tabs again

David Dawson

Welcome!

to the Franco German steel union.

Son of Solaris raids Linux for KVM hypervisor

David Dawson
Facepalm

Indeed

Up to 50 times performance gain for a JVM?

The JVM is already reasonably nippy, is he really saying that through magic he can make my 100ms process take 2ms? cus that's seems to be the implication of that sentence ....

Sounds amazing, but waaay to good to be true. Maybe this is true is some bizarre I/O bound corner case; exaggeration on this scale doesn't inspire confidence.

DARPA drops another HTV-2

David Dawson

To be fair

This is advanced fluid dynamics at extremely high speeds.

If anything could reasonably be said to be unpredictable, this could.

If only because we haven't done all that much in that field before. Hence the need to do lots of investigations into how things act in that environment.

Neighbours cop an earful from screaming Swedish w*nker

David Dawson

@Stumpy

There ain't no such thing as mind bleach.

The only solution here is a brainectomy.

Pass the spoon!

Chinese government under cyber siege

David Dawson
Terminator

I've been to Denmark

A year or two ago, we drove around most of the central and south of the country.

They appear to have covered the majority of it in giant propellers.

I suspect they are attempting lift off, maybe with a view to moving to more southerly climes.

Although when combined with your new information, maybe its part of the grand master plan of Danish domination?

Google fights to hide incriminating emails

David Dawson
Happy

Hmm

Unless a US court/ trade body has suddenly gained jurisdiction over a Taiwanese/ Japanese/ European company selling in Europe/ Taiwan/ Japan then an injunction will only affect imports and sales into the US.

This is serious for the companies involved, certainly, but that doesn't stop Orange UK (for example) from selling android phones made by HTC.

Nokia survived for years as the worlds biggest phone company without any serious presence in the US. So its certainly possible to get by without a US presence.

I would also suspect that any injunction on US import would be difficult to enforce on android generally (rather than Google licensees) given that some of the manufacturers will have just downloaded the code and modified it to work without putting the google stuff on.

They aren't party to this case, so, (to my understanding) they wouldn't be bound by it. Follow on cases citing this one would have to be brought against those companies.

Also, given that Google manufactures nothing, with everything being done under license, its not as clear cut as simply banning google from import. Since they don't actually import, their partners/ licensees do.

David Dawson
Holmes

Am I missing something?

So, as I understand the case, this might not as bad for Google as it appears to be.

The case is for Oracle suing over patents related to the Java VM, not Java the language.

Oracle say that Google are violating these patents in the Dalvik VM, Google disagree.

The email says that they've come to the conclusion that they need to get a Java license. This could mean different things, possibly including the licensing of JVM related patents. It might not mean that, I have no idea.

Since Google have their own VM, and don't run Java bytecode on their VM, it can be argued that they aren't using Java at all on Android. The only Java part is the source code in use by the developer, which is then translated into dalvik bytecode.

So, there is no Java copyright violations, no use of Sun/ Oracle developed binary code, no use of the TCK (one of the main pieces of the Java license, see apache harmony) and no unauthorised use of the Java trademarks.

This is a patent case, pure and simple. These emails are wanted to prove wilful infringement, which increases damages; they are of no use to prove the infringement itself.

Whether Google win or lose this case will be decided based on what is inside Dalvik, not some email trail.

Kinect space saver on its way

David Dawson
Joke

bigger egoes?

To match.

Microsoft skewers Google's anti-Android conspiracy claim

David Dawson
Childcatcher

@Google needed the patents???

Then they should have invented something.

------

I read the first line of this and bristled, about to write that of course Google has invented things....

After reading the rest, I have to say, I've often thought along similar lines as having non transferrable patents. Makes sense to me, it'd still allow companies to get tech to develop by licencing rather than buying the patent.

This does conflict somewhat with an employees IP creations being automatically assigned to their employing company.

That said, I live in the UK, no software patents here thank God. Unfortunately, its easy to be deemed as doing business in the US and so sued for some violation.

Meh.

Linus Torvalds dubs GNOME 3 'unholy mess'

David Dawson

Pulse Audio

I've been using kubuntu for ages. I like it, and KDE4.

The Pulse Audio setup has worked out of the box for me on pretty much anything I want it to with no struggle (since 9.10 time if I remember right)

Even lets me do fun things like piping my currently playing spotify output down across a skype call; all via a nice gui control.

Much nicer than when using arts, direct alsa et al.

Bullfrog Syndicate

David Dawson
Pint

I seem to remember

Persuading a bunch of enemy agents as well making the most lethal conga line in the world. probably.

Good news: A meltdown would kill fewer than we thought

David Dawson
FAIL

Not really

Imagine a reactor in a moderately built up area, with maybe 100,000 living within 10 miles of it.

1 in 4000 in this scenario equals 25 people.

Add an order of magnitude so that 1 million live in the zone, and its 250. this is a city size really, not sure how many reactors are next to cities? (seriously, I don't know. Sounds a bit irresponsible to me)

This would be tragic for those who got it, but it doesn't equal a shit load of people.

Note to Apple: Be more like Microsoft

David Dawson
Headmaster

Persian empire

It was actually smaller than Alexander's, but it was longer lasting.

'Green' trans-Atlantic cable set to launch in 2012

David Dawson
Pint

As renewable as solar and wind

Both solar and wind energy are non renewable in that sense. Both are driven by the giant solar furnace that is the sun, and it will eventually burn out.

In the same way that the earth will lose its heat.

In the meantime, the regular flexing of the earth due to gravitational forces will keep it nice and toasty for a long long time.

I suppose that renewable should really be, lasts for longer than anyone has a reason to care about.

David Dawson
Coat

Connect them and they will come

That is all.

Shale gas frees Europe from addiction to Putin's Pipe

David Dawson
Joke

If only we could burn rocks

Oh wait ....

Apps overrated in mobile web wars

David Dawson
Happy

Video

I've found the 10.3 update to work well for video on my htc desire. 10.2 was a pain to get full screen, but that seems fixed now.

I don't play shitty games of any sort, I have work to do.

One of those things, yes it would be nice to have HTML5 video working, but hey, flash works now.

I customarily have it switched off for normal browsing, and switch it on when I want to watch sombre video or other. The handset gets quite warm when I'd running for a while, and yes, it drains the battery.

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