Posts by Jim 59

Interesting graph

What the graph shows is the rapid churn in the market at that time, and that individual models dominated for short peaks of time. My beloved Dragon 32 was dominant in its heyday, but that lasted less than a year, before the market moved on.

This agrees more closely with my own recollection of the time, and contradicts the belief that a few machines topped the charts for virtually the whole 8 bit era. It was more exciting and fast moving than that. Your memory of the most popular computer depends on whether you are now 45 years old or 44 and a half, for example.

Apple Style

Apple sells on "lifestyle" and being cool, not technical ability. It's an effective marketing ploy but there is a danger that cool can become uncool overnight. Apple might suddenly cave in, but I hope not as the competition is healthy. If only Samsung and Apple could treat the workers a bit better.

Too good to be true.

Sounds too ammazingly amazing to be true. Rather like the bird that impersonates camers shutters - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjE0Kdfos4Y (1:50). Come on Attenborough, you expect us to believe that ?

Ideally...

All pr0n sites would be moved to ".xxx" domain which could then be easily filtered by parents or whoever. Not sure how possible that is though.

Perl

The "more than one way to do it" thing is great but includes bad ways too. Unmaintainable ways. So like every other language, the key is to keep things as elegant and maintainable as possible. Perl is strongest at doing what it was originally designed for, an admins language to supercede sh and awk. If you use it to write video games, don't moan if the code turns out cr*p.

As an admin, I love it, but improvements could be made - please make references not look like ordinary scalars, please eliminate some of the ultra-subtle failure mechanisms around auto-vivification, and just for kicks, can we have a snappier way to open files, without the ugly syntax ?

@PyLETS - Tempted to automate your Christmas cards ? Just say No! Some things must be unsullied by the digital hand.

Obesity etc

Might be something to do with the fact that we are all obese now, drink loads etc etc.

Tape

Good article. However...

"But in the world of Windows, Unix and Linux servers, D2D backup has decimated tape backup and relegated it to an archive medium."

Can the commentariat think of any large business where this has happened ? I can't.

Twitter campaign

...not a great idea since Microsoft are the inventors (or enablers) of the computer virus

Summary

OLED TVs - yes please

DAB - no thanks, it's a bit guff

Tablets - in the toy department please

Smart/IPTV - no thanks, it's a bit guff

reality/"jeopardy" TV - no thanks it's a bit guff

soaps - no thanks it's a bit guff

falsified telly setups - no thanks its a bit guff

Can I just have a decent Saturday night line up, eg. The Generation Game, Starsky and Hutch, premiership football then Parkinson. Hang on that was BBC1 in 1974.

"The government would have banned Thomas Edison's light bulb"

That would be Joseph Swan's light bulb, Mr Romney.

Forbidden Planet

What about that massive computer-machine thing that took over the whole planet ? In the bit where Dr Morbious is giving the other guys a grand tour, he explains that the clicking sounds they hear are relays opening and closing. Earie. Also earie is having effects that good in the 50s, and the whole "monsters from the mind" thing.

Register badge == wastes time at work

or so potential employers might think

Open

Companies should leave the system open / progrmmable, like Topfield. The public will then sort the UI to its liking, like "Mystuff".

Panasonic etc haven't got time to employ fleets of software engineers. They focus instead on just getting the next model out the door. As long as the UI looks okay in John Lewis, that's all that matters.

I have a WD TV Live. They are well thought of, but the usability sucks too, so much so I never use it.

Great wake up messages we have known

You are in a comfortable tunnel like hall

Hey Vodaphone

Just pay your tax

" ...but the Fedora Project board insists on a solution that works without the Microsoft key."

Er, in that case take as long as you like fellah.

PCW

After the "home computer boom" and before PCs became cheap enough for small business, Sugar man made a killing with the PCW 8256. With a built in word processor and able to run Sage accounts, it was an ideal product for running a small company. Apparently continued in use long into obsolescence.

Q: "Does one of the biggest-ever revolutions in software, open source, contain the seeds of its own decay and destruction?"

A: No.

The article runs counter to nearly all the evidence of the last 20 years. Linux has been a phenomenal success and continues to thrive with almost explosive vigour, and that pattern seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

"By the end of the 1980s, things were looking bad for Unix. AT&T's former skunkworks project had metastasised into dozens of competing products from all the major computer manufacturers..."

- And how is that "looking bad" ? In 1989 Unix was all over the datacentre like a cheap suit, also dominating the engineering, scientific and financial desktops, as well as the lower mid range market subsequently taken over by NT. Unix was obscenely healthy in those days.

"Microsoft hired DEC's genius coder Dave Cutler and ...the result was Windows NT ...enough time to get the new kernel working ...today it runs on about 90 per cent of all desktop computers."

And that kernel that has hamstrung Windows ever since. MS was so desperate to get NT out of the door they made the fateful decision not to implement proper protected memory spaces and execution levels. The system was prey to every user, process virus. And every version of Windows since has carried this fatal gene. Cutler must have been grinding his teeth. Had the decision been otherwise, our world would be quite different.

"But today's Unix descendants are large, complex graphical beasts, and so are their apps. Any significant modern application is a big project..."

Obviously Unix apps are graphical. They always were. The OS is not graphical. You might run a file manager, but underneath it is still all pipes and everything is a file.

Good article though.

Employment

Cash flow used to be the biggest challenge in running any small business. Not any more.

In the UK, the hardest thing about running a small business is employment law. It is geared *very* strongly in the employee's favour. Eg. It is almost impossible to fire anyone, whatever the reason. Your employee surfs the web 5 hours a day, pisses off customers and gets everything wrong ? Not a thing you can do about it. Your employee has become pregnant ? A happy event, but the consequences will will break your spirit and your company (the law even dictates how you may talk to the employee in this matter - that's where the soul-crushing comes in). A former employee has an "industrial" illness ? They can chase you fast-track for company-breaking compensation - even if there is no chance the illness had anything to do with their time with you.

So it's great for employees, right ? Wrong. It backfires. Nobody wants to hire anybody and we all end up unemployed.

Cosy

Says Lin Homer, HMRC chief: "... businesses can choose to some extent where some parts of their business are based and they can choose where some of their profits are based...”

... and HMRC could choose investigate, challenge and enforce the rules. But they prefer to deal with the megacorps through cosy relationships, meanwhile keeping the focus on the little people. Just you try diddling HMRC out of £100 and see what happens. Threats, fines, even for filing your tax return late.

How cosy do those relationships get ? According to Wikipedia, Homer's predecessor Dave Hartnett, "...was named by City University London in July 2010 as the most "wined and dined" civil servant in Britain, having been treated to corporate hospitality 107 times over a period of three years."

Internet

Think I remember downloading Doom via anon ftp before the web. Greedily copying the zip file floppy and taking it home.

Nah

Intriguing, but this article does not match my experience of the industry.

Unless your name is Linus Torvalds, you can't be so choosy about taking a job in a recession, or despise prospective employers. Not offering you coffee is an annoyance but should not be a deciding "signal" for taking the job or not. And what's so wrong with waiting in reception for 5 mins ?

"But few skills have more than five years in the sun". Really ? Many people have been doing Solaris for 20+ years. Ditto C programming. Linux is 20 now and even some web skills are long-lived. Oracle DBA ? SAP ?

"I was the first person in the UK to write a VisualBasic program" - how do you know ?

So IBM cut the coffee budget and later reported a loss ? Would you rather they cut jobs and kept the coffee?

"... [not] grateful that I spent 20 minutes coming to their offices..." - poor you! Such a long journey!

"But never ever lie to the HR droid." - Don't lie to anyone at an interview unless you are really stupid!

Pretentious ? Moi ?

I'm all in favour of chucking cold water on pretentious names and associated marketing guff, at least when describing drink sizes ("tall", "vente" etc.). However "Frothy coffee" already exists and is quite different to Cappuccino. Keep the fancy foreign names, I say. It gives us Android users some glamour in our lives.

The other big elephant in the room

"How does all this equate to economy and CO2 emissions? Officially the Plug-in returns 134.5mpg and emits 49g/km in plug-in mode and 76.4mpg and 85g/km in hybrid mode. "

Does that include the CO2 emitted by the power station in charging the car ?

Grid electricity generates about 525 g of CO2 for every Kwh generated. If the Toyota takes an average of 2 Kw for that 2 hour charge, that is 4 Kwh, or 2100 g of CO2. I don't know how these cars work but if you use all that charge in driving 15 miles (24 Km), you just "emitted" an extra 2100/24 = 87.5g /Km of CO2 at the power station, as well as the 49g that came out of your tailpipe.

Pit props

"if a hard disk starts going glitchy, I can usually back stuff off it before it's too late."

Bit like the old wooden pit props, which would start creaking before they snapped, giving miners time to get out of the way. They were replaced by steel props, which gave no warning and so weren't liked.

TI

Moving away from mobile into the car biz. Are they nuts ?

Abbas

Abbas said a stupid thing but the customer overreacted by posting it to a national magazine. Sky gave him an apology and comp, which seems fair.

Data size

When you manage to read an old format, it is a shock how small the data is. An entire mid 90s PC can fit into half a gig. Run an emulator and the window is tiny, because of screen resolution increases. Hundreds of floppy disk images add up to so little you hardly notice the space usage.

I made a DAT tape in 1994 and didn't re-read it until 2007. Because we used text files so much then, even for documents, the data is incredibly small.

Go Wing Commander Green ! That should brighten up 2013 with no Olympics.

"...when pilot Andy Green takes the controls at the Hakskeen Pan dry lake bed in South Africa next year"

Agree with the restaurateur.

If they indeed never pay a tip and just drink water, they should grow up and put their hands in their pockets. Only thing is - if it was that bad why didn't he bar them years ago ?

Not a bad idea

Intriguing concept but rather comlpex and difficult to envision. Raises many questions eg

- how many companies have loads of PCs but can't afford a NAS ? A 52 branch cake shop can afford a NAS. Smaller companies need to run a server anyway and so using it for storage is not an additional expense.

- The tricky issue of backups is dismissed with one word - "cloud". But the article also says potential customers don't like cloud for storage. So why would they like it for backups ?

beardie professors from The Open University

I can't be the only viewer who misses the OU. Those profs were brilliant at explaining calculus and other tricky abstractions. With their animated graphs, big writing boards and affable manner, they explained it all much better than my 6th form maths teachers (who were pretty good).

Snipping

Warning... an inaccurately snipped SIM could become stuck in the iPhone or any other phone.