Posts by MacroRodent

Re: iSuppli estimates

The same is true in any hardware company. The details of parts supplier deals are always deep secrets, because both the competitors and competing suppliers could take advantage of them.

Re: The real bug

>This bug is the sort of mistake beginners make

And experienced people as well, occasionally! I have seen bugs of similar stupidity level made by long-timers (me included). Sometimes in code that has been in use for years.

There is no room for any holier-than-thou attitudes in programming. Anyone can goof up, therefore processes must be in place to to catch and limit the damage.

What I want to emphasize is this starts at making sane specs that avoid unnecessary complexity (like the redundant length field).

Mel (Re: Real Programmers *and* Mythical Man Month?)

That Story of Mel link did not work (at least for me). I think the canonical reference is to the one inside the Jargon File: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

Re: remote management?

I wonder how often the remote management is on by default in these devices? The ADSL+WLAN router I bough several years ago had it disabled, and after some thinking I left it that way, not seeing any good reasons to enable it, just lots of risks. But I could imagine some manufacturers having a different policy, in which case those devices are probably pwned by now.

Re: I assume ...

>Second, doesn't UDF have a big memory overhead?

I haven't heard of it having any worse memory requirements than other non-ancient file systems. Surely larger than FAT, but that is also true of exFAT (which does not have much to do with the old FAT file system, apart from the name). UDF comes in several variants to handle non-overwritable media, but flash cards and USB drives would only need one, the simplest read/write variant.

Serious industrial spies will have no trouble getting hold of a binary blob to analyze, even if its redistribution is restricted (spies by definition do not obey the rules). Such redistribution restrictions hamper only honest users.

Re: Saving the Earth from a civilization-crippling asteroid impact: How exactly?

The prospect of extinction would be a pretty good motivation to start putting even remotely plausible theories in practice,and the cost be damned.

As they say, nothing clears the mind like the sight of the gallows.

Re: I wonder

Galactic magnetic field? Is that strong enough to matter, compared to the effects of the solar magnetic field and of course the terrestrial field?

Re: Why not just replace the last-end compression?

> hell it's not even Huffman! It's plain arithmetic encoding

Actually the JPEG standard allows both Huffman and arithmetic coding, and most JPEGs use Huffman, because of concerns about arithmetic coding patents (another case of software patents hindering progress!), and also because using arithmetic coding does not improve the compression very much, and is slower.

>It's plain arithmetic encoding, and anyone who knows their compression codecs knows plain old' arithmetic encoding SUCKS.

I suspect you misremembered the relative quality of Huffman and arithmetic codings. Arithmetic coding is considered superior to Huffman coding. Please see the Wikipedia article on JPEG, which claims files that use arithmetic coding are about 5–7% smaller.

Re: Yes I predict it will be exactly as terrible as Y2K!

Sorry to hear you had such a boring Y2K. Where I worked, programs were actually fixed, and vendor patches applied. Not a sticker in sight.

Re: Hybrid helium - hydrogen?

Carbon intensive? Are you serious? Hydrogen is cheap as water compared to helium, which really is a scarce resource and can only be obtained by cryogenically distilling large amounts of natural gas from some wells, which is at least as carbon-intensive.

Hydrogen is widely used in industry, so ways to store and manage it are well known.

The Germans ran completely hydrogen-filled airships for decades before serious problems, using materials and technology way inferior to what are available now.

Use fullscreen

I didn't see it until I watched it in full-screen mode. Must have been quite a puddle of molten rock to glow for so long after the impact.

Re: The browser

The Opera Mini does smart reflowing of pages, and also compresses them (Opera runs a proxy that does this). Small-screen devices actually are the ones where Opera Mini makes most sense. Touchscreen is not needed. (I used to browse a lot with Opera Mini before getting a Lumia).

Re: Legacy?

I wasn't cocky, just stating a fact about this particular IT segment. In some others (like desktops and laptops) Linux is almost nonexistent. Sure, Linux, Windows, Android, iOS etc. will get replaced eventually. So it goes. Personally I always try to write my code to be portable, and it has already paid off during my career.

Re: Philips

>I remember my auntie had a Nokia TV.

I still use one. Bought in 1994, works fine. Of course it now has to get its signal from a digi-TV box or DVD, since Finland no longer has any analogue PAL transmissions. Now and then I look at flat-screens in shops, but conclude that standard-definition TV on them looks worse than on the Nokia tube (the deinterlacing and other digital processing in flat-screen TV:s makes everything look cartoonish), and there is not yet enough on-air HDTV material here.

Re: power cords

Not sure if you read my comment, but I did note they reverted the decision to omit the power cord.

Re: we'd use far more energy getting there and back

> Convenient outer solar system refueling station?

Having seas of methane is of no use as energy, if you don't have a corresponding amount of oxygen to burn it with.

The N9 case and hardware is very similar to Lumia 800, the first Windows phone from Nokia. So much that people suspected Nokia rushed the Lumia out of the door by reusing the existing N9 design as much as possible . I wonder if Lumia 800 could also be converted to Sailfish.

Re: As with all Climate models

"Middle Earth has always struck me as just a set of scenes spatchcocked together as background for the plot [...]"

I wouldn't be that harsh. It reflects a Medieval European world-view, where to the West you have an apparently endless ocean, and to the east endless steppes from which invaders occasionally emerge. North is a cold wasteland, and South is hot, with Oliphants and other exotics. This is just how a Medieval knight would have perceived the universe, and neither he nor Tolkien had climate modelling in mind...

I don't see how the Earthsea geography would be better defined. It seems to say nothing what lies outside the archipelago, except I think one book hints you hit the land of the dead if you go too far in one direction. How would you model the climate of that? But I agree the working of Earthsea magic is far better defined than in most fantasy books, it is almost science.