Posts by Paul Shirley 2284 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
Still traumatised by the 1st .NETified Studio release, swiftly replaced by an 'upgrade' to an earlier, slimmer, faster, usable release. So bad it made Eclipse look good!
Looks like we're in the "we've got the Frankensteined beast working well again, let's break it" part of the cycle again. Better beef up your machines...
The flash cells may indeed be randomly accessible *for reads*. They may even be configured for direct code execution, for anyone willing to take the several hundred times speed hit. They aren't ever actually individually write accessible, though the interface may pretend otherwise.
In reality 99.99% of Flash actually sits behind a controller that presents a block device interface to clients. Meaning they only provide random access storage in the same way that a disk drive is random access storage. In phones, it's all configured as block device storage, not RAM.
It's not so much the amount of Flash but how it's partitioned. 512mb is more than enough for OS+Sense+bundled crapware but the OS+Sense actually has to fit into the /system partition, usually allocated with only a little slop for it's initial shipping OS. There could be gigabytes of free space elsewhere, it wouldn't help.
Not a big problem if you're prepared to repartition the Flash but doing it non-destructively is challenging and it's risky enough you wouldn't want to do it on an OTA update. And it takes space from somewhere else, bad news if that's user space.
It might be more accurate to guess HTCs previous choices in partitioning made a normal upgrade impossible. I suspect a rough ride for many users unless HTC find some really good hacks. Freeing space is easy enough, just symlink things like /data/local to sdcard but its hard to avoid repartitioning.
...for more perspective, my ancient G1 with 256M ROM and only 192MB RAM is quite happily running 2.3.4 right now, albeit a heavily tweaked version to cope with the low RAM. But it's pretty complete and fast. Not bad for a phone even CyanogenMod have abandoned.
It's even stable after I removed Google Maps 5.5 (AKA intrusive memory hogging malware).
Sense may be fat but its not *that* fat! HTC are telling porkies...
I'm shitting on it because the 3 different descriptions of how to do it *issued by Dolphin themselves* all described different methods and none work on this release or reached the actual editable list. And maybe I'm dim but hitting a button labelled 'Bookmarks' when I'm already on a bookmark list makes no sense to me. Particularly when the creator tells me to look for one labelled 'Edit'.
"For anyone with oodles of bookmarks, the facility to create nested folders for them is almost reason enough to start using Dolphin."
...and the complete inability to delete or reorder them is almost enough reason to stop.
This is pretty typical for Dolphin. I try it, I try to like it but they simply can't stop tinkering with the UI and never, ever bother documenting how to use the latest release. Documentation only needed because they keep doing things in non-obvious ways! So right now I can find several different processes meant to edit bookmarks, non of them supported or appropriate for this build, they even removed long press support present in the previous version.
It's massively improved over the 1st versions I had sitting barely used on my phone more than a year ago and in many ways it behaves more like a standard Android app than ever before. And it's still just broken enough to annoy me. Meanwhile I'll go kill that 'read sensitive system logs' permission it wants while I decide whether to dump yet another Dolphin release.
"You should not need a separate file in a scripting language to build a large project."
*Every* large C++ project I've ever worked on contained a large number of external resources that needed format conversion, precompiling, packing or other processing and the final output needed some sort of packaging or resource binding. Why on earth would tightly binding that to the C++ component make any sense at all?
A tool like make is a pretty good solution to an opened ended problem like the build process, where there's no way of even knowing what tools a dev might need to run during the build.
Decoupling the build *process* from any of the tools invoked while building is exactly the right solution. Scripted solutions like make are one of the more powerful options.
I wonder how many of those returns are really caused by Motorola's excessive lockdown policies, a significant proportion of Android users root their phones to mod them and Motorola go out of their way to obstruct that. It's common to see discussions of the best way to 'break' phones so they can be returned easily as faulty.
In reality Motorola have a reputation for flaky Android devices, great hardware let down by piss poor OS implementation. The lock down guarantees users cannot bypass that flakiness. That has to push up the return rate.
Even HTC have given up their short flirtation with locked bootloaders and returned to sanity, following Sony Erickssons lead. Motorola will probably never loosen the death grip. After all they have around 300,000 apps to blame...
AMD were already in a good position with the Fusion APU's compared to Intel, only now waking up to the inability of Atom to deliver in this sector.
AMD actually have a bigger advantage here though, they have stronger GPU tech and have been successfully embedding powerful implementations for a long time now. Intel continue to demonstrate complete incompetence with GPU's. 'Ultrabook's will need to compete with the strong media and gaming performance of pads to create a new niche, Intel have no viable solution for that.
One option available is supplementing or replacing x86 cores in Fusion with ARM. That would still leave AMD owning most of the silicon on the die. Almost all Intel's value is the x86 core (no one willingly chooses an Intel GPU) so its not as attractive an option. AMD have more choices here -> can adapt faster.
Stocked with popcorn while I watch Intel panic...
"And stop the blind panic that comes from any mention of the words 'nuclear' and 'radiation'."
ROFLMAO!
So far the only noticeable blind panic has been the pro nuclear lobby rushing to defend their baby from a public that isn't panicking despite the best efforts of the gutter press. Rapidly *losing interest* in supporting a technology that can be cheap OR safe but not both at the same time...
Give it up. Break ground on a new reactor now and by the time it's running even solar voltaic has a good chance of being cheaper. Time has not been kind to nuclear as alternatives drop in price while nuclear can't avoid paying for safety (or bribing their way past it as some believe).
Nokia was certainly in trouble before Elop. But it wasn't dead, it took Elop to actually kill the company instead of curing it.
Right now it's a zombie heading inexorably toward total Microsoft control then ownership. Nokia as a company is dead. In Microsoft's hands Nokia the brand is tarnished and dying.
Bugger. After switchover I'll be using C29,54-59 and 61. So that's 7 multiplexes fucked in 1 go. Since the stupid sods packed 3 of them into adjacent channels last month I've had crap reception, now they'll throw in interference as well? Idiots.
Also a little surprised, my transmitter is switching to use C61 in a couple of months. So assuming OFCOM aren't totally delusional there's going to be yet another channel shuffle after switchover, so none of us can even guess whether we'll be hit in 2013! OFCOM need a long time in the naughty corner.
Still, I look forward to seeing just how much expense I can run up with whoever ends up liable for fixing my reception. With 2 PVR's, 8 Freeview tuners in use (and some spares), mast head distribution amp and they'll need to install a new rooftop aerial, it ain't going to be cheap.
One of the big problems before the split was Sun blocking many of the contributions that would undermine commercial sales of their own private versions. LibreOffice now has all those extras and that's a large part of why Oracle are wriggling so hard, they lost control and lost the commercial advantage.
Shifting to ASF doesn't help knobble LibreOffice or finally allow those important features to be imported into OO. OO is playing catch up and just removed any chance of quickly doing that from Libre source.
I'm inclined to think Oracle are just playing games here, saving face while giving away nothing useful. From Larry's POV the product is already dead, if they can con TDF into improving their product that's a pure win, if not there's no loss.
The problem I see is contention. Too many users in my cell trying to share too few channels. The best signal quality cant give me bandwidth someone else is using. Poor S/N exacerbates the problem but is fairly obvious.
At some point you cant make the cells any smaller and still provide good enough overall signal quality at a reasonable cost. When making fewer users share stops working it's time for more real bandwidth. 500Mhz seems excessive though! Though if it allows much larger cells that could actually force prices down.
Pity none of our existing phones will be able to use it.
"though quite what customers are going to do with that spectrum isn't clear."
It's pretty obvious what they'll do with it. The move to smartphones in itself wont suck another 500Mhz but when data's cheap, smartphone users love streaming AV. Just streaming music instead of using analogue radio will hammer available bandwidth. It's hard to believe the networks want to sell cheap data though, more something they'll be forced into, kicking and screaming the whole way.
Do we actually need more bandwidth? Right now, as an unfortunate O2 user (via giffgaff) I regularly see full HDSPA connections that deliver sub GPRS throughput in the city and voice connections so rate throttled conversation is near impossible. More bandwidth is desperately needed just to deliver usable service at todays rated speeds - because in some places building enough repeaters or new towers just isn't viable.
For consumers this isn't about pumping ever higher headline rates, it's about delivering the speeds our hardware should already be getting. I'm sure the networks plan to sell any extra bandwidth they get as a higher speed, higher profit service but there's still a real problem to solve. The regulator needs to be heavy handed about what carriers get to do with anything they're given though.
Would that be the OS that invented hidden files, anything starting with a period not showing up by default?
If you're going to take the piss out of Microsoft, please try harder to find something they've really cocked up. This is another one they just copied.
1.5 pages of apps vs cloud/net Apple bashing switches to a page of describing the lacklustre Playbook app support? Make your mind up! Or better yet, remember apps aren't just about consuming net content, the net isn't just about running cloud services or 'apps' and flash is as often the problem as any sort of solution.
Still, the whole ensemble does give a probably realistic view of a device with more value in the Blackberry logo than it's tablet implementation. RIM: must try harder.
Pure coincidence that Intel still don't have a CPU or SOC that hits the right power profile with the right performance for this market. Netbooks get away with poor performance but we all expect better from tablets, even if just to make the touch interface run smoothly. Looking forward to the frantic back pedalling when (if) they follow through on recent PR fluff about creating competitive processors... ;)
After checking out comparison reviews of AMD's Fusion E-350 product against Atom, it looks like Intel is firmly in last place in the race for low power devices right now. AMD will probably get there 1st. No wonder Intel are panicking so publicly.
Ditto all the coverage comments - O2 have the worst coverage of all, I carry a "3" SIM for emergencies.
The speed claims don't match what I see. Out here in the suburbs I get good 3.5G and high *sustained* throughputs. But the latency is so poor browsing is near unusable and the image compression is shocking. In the city I get great signal strength, great rated connection speed but no actual throughput at all for extended periods of time.
At the best of times the latency on O2 is terrible and seriously harms browsing, at worst - well I've seen 30second latency occasionally and 5-10s is fairly common in the city (why throughput is so poor). I've had browsing sessions run faster on 2G than 3G at times, thanks to that shitty 3G latency.
What they measured has fsck all to do with what users actual need.
If O2's bastard child giffgaff weren't so damn cheap I'd be on "any other network". If I actually needed my phone I'd move anyway - luckily I work at home and my normal pub crawl has continuous Wifi coverage ;)
If they are running the same stack everywhere that should make rolling out any improvements easier. Congratulations, you just made the case that ongoing failures are due to Sony choosing to not roll out fixes to their entire business.
The reality is likely simpler, they have a jumble of adhoc sites and they have to deal with each individually. I'd suggest before that they need to remember where all the sites are!
It is noticeable that only customer information has been exposed. Hard to avoid thinking Sony knew how to protect themselves but didn't bother extending the same protection to users. Customer details should have been no more accesible than internal corporate data.
Well, I can't remember seeing any WP7 media that doesn't feature heavy doses of orange (can't stand the colour) and green (only looks good on plants). Be fun in Orange tried suing them for stealing the Orange look&feel (errr.. that would be 'Orange' and 'crap')
;)
"you will be able to set permissons on email that stop people from forwarding or printing things"
Translation: you'll be able to wrap email up so tight no-one else can even read it.
Well, I suppose that might interest companies and drive some corporate sales from RIM to WP7... the tweeters, facebookers and other social media users don't seem to care about security or privacy and won't even notice this feature. So not much chance of attracting casual users.
And it still looks far too ginger.
Even stranger is the '10% of turnover' claim. My understanding is they don't even pay each other the termination charges, only the accumulated difference between in/out charges between each pair of networks. If any network got that difference at 10% of turnover they don't really have a business, unless that business is pissing away money.
The market has stampeded towards mobile devices and the lack of legacy app support hasn't been a problem. Microsoft have at least noticed that and realised they need an OS on ARM to even play in this game.
Intel have their heads in the sand. They have no stake in the new markets because they can't fulfil the power requirements. End users aren't going to sacrifice half their battery life just to run legacy apps and Intel seem incapable of building real low power devices - so that market is closed to them. Increasingly the server rack market will close to them on the power issue.
Intels argument collapses to: "you'll continue to be able to run legacy apps on desktop PC's". Wow. Non story and no upside for Intel. The only question is whether ARM catches up to x86 performance before Intel pull their collective fingers out and take power consumption seriously.
They need to prove this has at least as much indemnification from Microsoft IP claims (patent and other) as Novell offered. Without the umbrella of patent cross licences Novell had it's going to be a challenge convincing the world their customers are safe.
Or more accurately, convincing the world they have an equally uncertain level of protection from Microsoft.
On a more personal level, this project needs to die. I'm forced to run .NET on my PC, a gigabyte of Microsoft bloat just to run a bloody PVR, this much bloat has no place on mobile devices.
Nothing sad about paid versions, the AdMob implementation can seriously screw up performance (Angry Birds is unplayable on my phone with it enabled) and done badly annoys the hell out of users. The number of requests for paid versions of apps from users is quite surprising.
Beyond that the price of data to actually fetch those adverts can be significant on some tariffs, especially compared to average app prices.
TBH while it's obviously Googles preferred option everyone else (*) treats it as a last resort, ads piss of devs and users alike.
(*) because of course the market is totally drowning in scamware/crap that do nothing well apart from forcing adverts and/or malware on the unfortunate users, usually off the back of badly pirated apps.
Nice to see nvidia finally give up pretending they can make mboard chipsets. The pain these idiots have caused me down the years doesn't bear thinking about. Don't remember ever seeing one with all the advanced features working and too many with simple things like sata and basic nic buggy.
Their gpu drivers haven't been a lot better. The total unwillingness to fix PAL tv issues was a long running problem. Afaik they still aren't taking it seriously.
So 20hrs of having a phone closer than any bee will ever normally encounter and they still couldn't be arsed actually swarming, just made noises about it. Struggling to see how this explains any real life colony collapses, unless bee keepers have started hooking their hives up to mobile.
The combination of power laws and totally unrealistic phone positioning screams 'red herring'. If bees are so sensitive to magnetic fields, the recent increase in shipping hives around the country (to pollinate some of the 5% of crops that even need insect pollination) is probably stressing the bees more than this.
Meanwhile, my gardens seems to happily pollinate everything without commercial help. But as usual the bee keeping business is more important than protecting the other insects that do the bulk of the job, there's money involved, not just pretty but financially worthless bumblebees ;(
Quite amazing timing (not really), Google Talk gains video and voice support on Android devices and less than a month later Microsoft buy Skype? Am I the only one sensing panic in Microsoft?
Yes, I know the Android support doesn't actually work yet but the timing is still 'interesting', especially with Google Talk video calling actually working well between Linux and XP PC's.
Given we only have Skype installed because none of the other Linux VOIP/video calling apps wanted to play nice with any other OS - including my SIP phones, Skype finally has competition to really worry about.
Late Friday they sneaked out an excuse - another threatened hack. A delay was then almost inevitable. If it was real they couldn't afford to relaunch without *much* more testing.
In my more cynical moments I might think they made the story up to cover not having the system fixed on time. The schedule was rather optimistic and this timing is far too convenient.
Perhaps the 1st sign they've hired someone with the balls to say no to management.
"keep the all-important BlackBerry services intact by ensuring the PlayBook and BlackBerry are still viable devices with plenty of software."
I don't really see how shipping Playbook without BES built in is anything but failure. Needing to tether a Blackberry to get your mail makes the Playbook an expensive docking station, not a driver for BES. Worse yet, if BES does get opened to IOS,WP7 & Android, the Blackberry becomes redundant and there's no compelling reason to choose Playbook over any other tablet device.
Far as I can see Playbook is DOA with the public, not just developers.
No, Oracle own a big pile of Java copyrights. They don't own Harmony copyrights. They dont own PolicyNodeImpl.java.
Unfortunately (for them) the law says you only get to sue for copyright infringement over copyrights you own. Not copyrights someone else owns and so far they've not shown convincing evidence Google has used anything Oracle actually own without an appropriate licence.
Oracles problem is they also can't seem to find any licenced use that would drag Google into their net.
There's a reason Oracle started with patents: they don't have much else and their structure and interface claims are doomed to failure in the AFC test.
Oh, it just gets better. Just seen the courts response to claims construction: there's a huge hint in there that the court will wait on the patent re-examination if Google asks for it. Along with the massive 132 becomes just 3 claims winnowing this is really bad for Oracle, the case could end long after winning has any value.
Also bad (for Oracle) because it tells us what the Judge is thinking, and what's he thinking is 'no bullshit'. This is the clearest sign yet that we aren't about to see SCO vs The World repeated, this time the courts are signalling up front they wont put up with that amount of evasion and delay.
...and that doesn't bode well for Oracles adventure in licence discovery, although it does show why Oracle were forced to go down that rabbit hole.
Getting the feeling Oracle just started to understand you can't win a copyright case if someone else owns the copyrights. So time for the backup plan, licensing.
It's always been a licensing dispute, the long standing refusal of Sun (now Oracle) to license full strength Java for mobile devices, the ongoing blocking of Harmony, Google prescient avoidance of restrictive Java licences.
If Oracle believe they'll find Google admitting they're covered by an Oracle licence they haven't look hard enough at Google's past behaviour. What they'll actually find is the proof of just how carefully license issues were avoided. If oracle then continue with the attack, buy shares in popcorn, it's going to be hilarious watching the aimless flailing in court.
I think we're past the tipping point where OpenOffice has any value as a brand.
A large number of users have OO only because that's what their Linux distro bundled, with Ubuntu switching to Libre only last week a huge chunk of OO's market share just vanished.
It's a dying brand, let it go before the corpse starts smelling.
Using the data on/off toggle actually stops data. Turning off 3G just slows data down to GPRS or Edge speeds... and don't forget to disable WiFi as well.
...a bit extreme compared to just disabling the relevant sync and reporting options ;)
As is replacing system components instead of just configuring the built in firewall.
If anonymous had penetrated far enough to drop files they'd have dropped them all over every public facing server possible, not hidden so deep it took Sony days to find.
This was either Sony themselves forging an excuse, pissed off ex-Sony employees or the criminal hackers - who would want to avoid alerting Sony for as long as possible.
The worry is some US politicians really are stupid enough to fall for this obvious lie.
Does seem a bit lazy reviewing the 'best apps' if they don't make some pretence of comparing features with the closest rivals.
Last time I tried GO SMS it was even flakier than the built in SMS app and it just annoyed the hell out of me in general. But this is Android, where only the built in apps stand still and 'best app' is always a temporary thing. What I really need to know is: why should I switch from Handcent to this, why is it better than Chomp, what other competing apps are there?
The Reg review team need to up their game.
The mechanism of patent pools is to wrap a huge mound of worthless or irrelevant shit in a thin wrapper of gold. Then you tell the world they can only have the gold if they also take the shit. It's always an all or nothing deal and who actually owns what in the pool doesn't matter. Its the size the counts, not the quality. Size pushes up the costs of infringing, quality doesn't come into it.
In MPEG-LA's hands it's little more than extortion. Unfortunately it's a game Google now have to get into, the nature of pools means this says nothing about whether VP8 is encumbered or covered by their pool partners patents.
...and because you want one, the rest of the world must want one as well, because everyone has the same mindset as you.
ISO,Android,Symbian and WP7 all have their screaming fanbois. So that's the niche sales sorted. More interesting is the bulk of the public who really don't seem to give a shit what's running their phone, any story you tell them about WP7's supposed superiority will interest them less than how much it looks like an iPhone (not good for WP7), how cheap it is (Nokia+MS price gouging not good) or even what colour skins it has available!
The magic lure of Microsoft branding doesn't work on normal people like it used to...
I'm still trying to track down an article from Personal Computer World sometime in the 80s/90s with their idea of what a future pocket PC would look like. What the came up with was a glass fronted slab, same size as an iPhone, same shape as an iPhone, same grid of icons interface as an iPhone.
I believe they even mentioned convergence with phones which would make what they did actually an iPhone!
If anyone can find this elusive article it could easily destroy Apple's claims, leaving just the trade dress issues. Given Samsung seem to have dressed up the Android interface with iPhone graphics they're screwed on that lesser charge. Would be nice to end the rest of the bullshit though.
You've missed something obvious: OO *was already being successfully monetised by Sun*. They could do it because they were able to block inclusion of features in mainline OO, leaving scope for creating enhanced versions for sale.
While there were forks and 3rd party enhancements available outside the OO umbrella they remained minor players with little awareness. When the LibreOffice fork happened that changed, the enhancements started folding back into a fork with reasonably strong brand awareness.
Oracle gambled they would walk away from a fork with the better brand but forgot all the higher end features Sun's control had been blocking. From then on it was going to be a continual battle to stop their paying customers noticing they could have the same enhancements free from Libre Office.
The exact terms of surrender are going to determine whether anything comes of this. Closing down their other lines does suggest they've realised they cannot regain control, all there's left is appeasing pissed of developers.
Nice explanation of why the Symbian phone *should have better battery life* for the 2 readers who didn't already know that.
Care to move onto the actual point, why this Symbian phone has such a poor battery life? Why el Reg seems to think half the expected Symbian battery life is 'outstanding battery life'?
Don't remember seeing any Android phones with sealed batteries. Or any of the admittedly few feature/dumb phones I know about. Has the infection really spread that far from its IPhone home?
There's not the slightest chance I would ever buy a phone with a sealed battery. A spare battery's a hell of lot smaller than those emergency rechargers - mine fits in my wallet without bloating it too badly. I like having a working phone at night however hard I've misused it during the day!
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