* Posts by xperroni

557 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010

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Nokia loses $1.7bn in Q1, sales chief falls overboard

xperroni
FAIL

Re: About time?

> Maybe time to give Android a try eh Nokia?

Though surely those Microsoft payments come with some obligations attached? Things like not investing in rival OS'es?

And anyway, turning around now would mean a massive loss of face, not to mention writing off all the money invested (lost) trying to make the current strategy work. A corporation cannot change its collective mind about its overall direction every other year; for Nokia now it's make or break, and unfortunately it increasingly looks like the later.

Cameron 'to change his mind' on the one thing he got right in Defence

xperroni
Gimp

Re: Putting the boot in @xperroni

> To be honest, I couldn't really follow Lewis' arguments - the British-built

> Tornado is crap because it is old, so buy an F18 Tomcat instead?

From Lewis' comment on the defense review:

(...) Nor are they [the Tornado] appropriate for Afghanistan - an 8-figure Tornado is no more use than a Reaper unmanned roboplane which costs an order of magnitude less. (...) The Tornado was built for the Cold War mission of punching into heavy Soviet air defences in a (probably doomed) bid to knock out air bases or critical supply routes far behind enemy lines: it is insanely over-spec'd for what it is doing now in Afghanistan.

So his problem with the Tornado is not that it's old, or British, but rather that it's needlessly expensive for the kind of missions there are to fly today. There are alternatives (he argues) that could accomplish them just as well, and for a fraction of the cost.

xperroni
Mushroom

Re: Putting the boot in

> Lewis is as bad as any other biased member of the service, to him, anything in the RAF is

> 'crappy'. (Personaly I think the Royal Navy is a an obsolete waste of space, best replaced by

> airpower).

I've been reading Lewis' posts for a while, and for me his vision of effective armed forces seems to be something like this:

- Sod battleships, carriers is the way to go;

- Sod expensive "next-generation" aircraft, F18's and the like can perfectly do for the foreseeable future;

- Sod tanks, between helicopters and ground-attack planes they're pretty much redundant;

- Trident is king – nothing beats the prospect of submarine-launched nuclear death raining down on an aggressor.

I believe there's plenty in there to piss off everyone, regardless of service. In fact at times I wonder if he served at all – his ruthlessly objective, task-oriented view of the armed forces makes him sound more like an engineer than a serviceman.

Oracle v Google could clear way for copyright on languages, APIs

xperroni
Headmaster

The problem is...

Google would have been happy to give money to Sun for a license to use Java the way they wanted, but Sun would have none of it; they'd only license JavaME (think of Mini Me, only not as effective) for use on handsets, not the full-blown JavaSE.

So they came with a workaround where the programmer works in Java, but the handset does not: everything is translated to a different bytecode language prior to deployment, and runs on a non-Java VM.

Actually I'm kind of surprised this point doesn't come up more often: it should be the crux of Google's defense, since it effectively means Java is only used on the desktop, on development time, and no Java IP makes it to the device.

Quitting your job? Here's how not to do it

xperroni
Holmes

Re: Good advice as usual

Well, he did say that it's a "risky bet", that most "bought back" people end up leaving anyway, and that it's often due to the reasons for wanting to go in the first place not changing. He didn't mention the trust issue, but I'd like to believe most working adults would have that figured by now.

PlayStation Suite gets sweetener

xperroni
Mushroom

The real question in everyone's minds

How long until they get an Android SNES emulator to recognize Xperia Play's gamepad?

Boffins, tourists threaten Antarctica with alien invasion

xperroni
Holmes

Re: And that is bad

Sorry, when I wrote "that is bad", i really meant "that is bad *for us*". Of course the Universe doesn't give a sh*t whether we figure out some soon-to-be extinct Antarctic species, but for ourselves it might turn out to be a big deal.

xperroni
Boffin

Re: erm...

The problem is speed. Human presence often leads to much quicker change than other causes – for example, it's much easier for us to reach Antarctica, and hence deliver whatever is hitching a ride with us.

Colonizing life forms tend to dislodge indigenous species, often driving them into extinction. This almost always results in a net loss of diversity in the short term, because the colonizers are very much like their cousins back home, while the natives may be something else entirely (think Australia's marsupial mammals being driven off by Old World placentals). Of course the colonizers will stray away from their roots eventually, but it will take many thousands of years before the original level of diversity is restored.

You could say that's "business as usual", and might as well be – but there's no telling what secrets those gone species take with them. And for scientists that's a big problem, because we revel in discovery, but what if a newly discovered species is driven extinct before its habits can be documented? What if we can never get to grasp its biochemistry? What new medicines and chemicals could be lost forever, or postponed for many decades?

Zoologists and other natural world researchers are always struggling to hold back time, trying to keep their subjects as immutable as possible, so they can learn the most about them before they slip away, changed or killed off. And that's the extent of their powers, really: hard as they try, they can only slow change down, not hold it back forever.

So it's not that human-facilitated change is "bad" or "unnatural"; it's just that it is so fast, that it could disrupt research that could cope with other, slower change factors. And that is bad, because there's no telling what knowledge is lost in the process.

'We don't know if Google is operating outside EU law'

xperroni
WTF?

Quantum computing is here!

The funny thing is, QC is not "just-round-the-corner" – it's already here, available for anyone with deep enough pockets and nerdy enough nerds:

http://www.dwavesys.com

I understand why IBM boffins would prefer to ignore something they didn't invent themselves, but I expected more from El Reg – particularly because those news were broken here years ago.

Bone-bothering boffins build GIANT penguin from fossils

xperroni
Alert

Beaked terror

Y'know, the way those penguins are standing beside that stranded fish makes it look rather like they're returning to shore with their quarry in tow... Though of course no penguin would prey on something that big and menacing.

Right? I mean, right?

Death to Office or to Windows - choose wisely, Microsoft

xperroni
Boffin

Re: newfound respect for open source

It needed not be; and anyway that's not the point. The point is, if you could run Office on Linux (without fiddling with WINE, that is), then the Linux distro proposition would become that much more appealing for end-users – think Office pre-loaded Linux laptops and netbooks.

HP's Whitman suggests Googorola may close Android

xperroni
Facepalm

FLOSS'ed down

So that's HP brilliant plan for WebOS? "Open source" the platform and hope everything turns up good?

Man, are they in for a rude awakening.

By the way, have you heard of Boot to Gecko?

Hackers spunk 'pcAnywhere source' after negotiation breakdown

xperroni
Holmes

Not quite I guess

Read the article again. There was several instances where "Symantec" tried to trick the hackers into giving away information about themselves (IP, etc). So the whole "negotiation" thing was more of a pretext to keep them hackers talking until they could be caught, I think.

UK gov rejects call to posthumously pardon Alan Turing

xperroni
Facepalm

It's the symbolism, dude

Yes, the whole point of granting Turing a pardon – or a retrial, or the apology already given – would be symbolic: it would signify the government concedes that the "gross indecency" law was wrong, and this kind of thing should never be attempted again. The fact that it would seldom have any practical consequences at this point is precisely what has people baffled at the government's refusal to yield to Turing's partisans.

xperroni
FAIL

Eh?

"[A] pardon is not appropriate because he was found guilty of something that was a criminal offence at the time."

And what is a "pardon" again, if not the waiving of a sentence for a crime someone was found guilty of?

New Trojan routes your bank's calls to CROOKS

xperroni
Boffin

Oh, we could rebuild computers from scratch all right – technically speaking, that is. However, on the market side that would entail:

1. That we rewrite or otherwise replace every software still in use – not only off-the-shelf consumer software, but custom systems running inside companies;

2. That we come up with a definition of "security" all interest groups (industry and user groups) agree with.

Actually number (1) is somewhat feasible: start with a new market that still doesn't have a large legacy (say, mobile phones), secure a foothold, then slowly but surely eat back into the older, established markets. This is the strategy being employed by ARM on the hardware side, but unfortunately no successful mobile OS that I know has dared to truly break with the past and start with a clean code base on a modern language.

Number (2) is more problematic. We've seen some initiatives to get security bolted into computer systems from the ground up in the last years, but seemingly companies cannot resist to bundle some content management restrictions to the runtime security (hello DRM), so user groups tend to distrust them.

In the end I think the problem is economic: things mostly work, and insurances cover the costs when they don't, so there's little drive to improve. Perhaps if we embarked on a new Space Race, and the need to write complex and really trustworthy software increased, we could get this started?

Five ways Microsoft can rescue Windows Phone

xperroni
Stop

Successful businesses sell to *consumers*, not geeks

No.

What you are describing is not a successful product, it's a geek's wet dream.

Normal people are like the honey badger on "open" platforms, they don't give a sh*t .People _want_ a black box; they want to come into a shop and come out carrying a shiny gadget that they can turn on and "just work" with, no fiddling required. Most don't bother with mechanical keyboards anymore, the pidgeonspeak of instant messaging and Twitter has all but obviated the need for writing anyway. And they'll happily flock back for "upgrades" as long as you add some new gimmicks to each hardware revision.

I'm sorry, but what you propose is a recipe for disaster: it's the view of a hobbyist market that hasn't existed in any relevant scale for some 30 years now. Whoever tried to succeed in the mainstream market with a product like this would sink faster than you can spell "openmoko".

Plus is king now: Google shutters more products

xperroni
Stop

Dear Google, please stop fixing your system, there's nothing wrong with it

Actually Google's experience was "beautifully simple" and "intuitive" already; it's this mad gold rush towards social networks that's destroying it. There was a time, not too long ago, when the typical Google interface was functional, intuitive and unobtrusive, but now everywhere I look there's tons of buttons and slide-out menus, and not a label in sight.

Please Google, stop fixing what isn't broken. Rather than have Google out-Facebook Facebook, I'd better keep Google as the anti-Facebook – sleek, concise, user-friendly and heavily biased towards productivity, not pointless time-sink "games" and such.

Griffin plugs Midi for iPad musos

xperroni
Coat

Revenge of the MIDI's?

Given that portable devices have long all but estranged MIDI as a tune playing format, favoring MP3 and friends instead, I'm sure there's some kind of irony lurking around here somewhere. I cannot quite put my finger on it, but I know there is...

Deep inside ARM's new Intel killer

xperroni
Coat

Those big.LITTLE supporters...

Aren't a number of them also "supporting" WAC?

Just asking.

Google takes buzz saw to Buzz, other appendages

xperroni
Unhappy

Farewell Buzz & Code Search, miss you guys already

I know what everyone else think about Buzz; but I love it. The service is beautiful, with a simple yet engaging interface; really, it's Twitter for non-ADHD's. It makes Google's privacy snafu all the more damning that they did have a great product, but managed to screw up on launch.

As for Code Search, perhaps it never reached the undisputed success of Google's other search options, but it was very nice to have when needed.

Alas, farewell Buzz and Code Search. When you're gone, the web will be that much smaller for me.

Facebook SIM brings social network to dumb phones

xperroni
Stop

Cute, but kind of pointless really

Pretty much every feature phone sold in the last few years comes with a native Facebook client, or at least a mobile web browser. (I should know, I work for a mobile manufacturer and it's my daily job to test and debug these.) I doubt anyone who hasn't switched phones in the mean time – or can't buy into the just-very-slightly-more-powerful dumbphones that support these features and a halfway-decent data plan – will have much use for Facebook access.

Microsoft! touted! to! buy! Yahoo!

xperroni
Facepalm

"Microsoft is mulling the purchase of Yahoo..."

What, again?

Damnit people, just jump into the sack already and get it over with. This whole mating dance is getting seriously long in the tooth.

Why grill Google over web dominance? It has none

xperroni
Gimp

Perhaps I'm just not one of them cool kids...

...But I use Google a lot. Every day, every time. Google Chrome is the second desktop application I open at the beginning of each day, right after the file manager; and it goes steadily downhill from there. Not only I'll google up (via Chrome's omnibar) pretty much whatever I want to know at the moment, quite often I don't even bother to lookup links in my bookmarks, prefering to search for the websites I want instead.

Perhaps Matt is right in that even as Google enjoys the peak of its power, the future has already started to slip through its tentacles – just like happened to Microsoft 15-odd years ago. However we're still a long way from it having "none" dominance over the web.

Oracle: Java 8 will be revolution, not evolution

xperroni
Headmaster

It's the apps

Oh, I know you cannot throw a dead cat to the air without it landing on top of a JME-enabled feature phone; then again, Flash Lite is just as widely deployed. The problem is, installed base does not necessarily equal market relevance.

xperroni
Angel

I want to believe!

Could Oracle really make JavaFX happen – and in the process turn JME into a relevant platform for once?

Samsung reveals release for 5in tablet

xperroni
Trollface

"people weren't keen on what is essentially an oversized smartphone"

Unless, of course, it was an oversized _broken_ smartphone, and it was called iPad.

Zombie mobile Linuxes mate

xperroni
Black Helicopters

What's with mobile and good development stacks?

What's with mobile that makes it so hard to cram a good platform into it? It's not just the countless Linux ports; pretty much every developer-wise decent proposition – Qt, SavaJe, WebOS, you name it – either failed to get much traction or just plain foundered, the exceptions so far restricted to Android and iOS. Meanwhile non-descript feature phones, their OSes an horrible mess of plain C code compiled on off-the-shelf ARM compilers, spred like the pest. Somehow I can't believe it's down to incompetence only...

Oracle looking for $1.16bn, not $2.2bn, in Java patent case

xperroni
Headmaster

"Google really could have gotten the licence [from Oracle] some time ago for $100m"

Except that the license terms wouldn't have allowed Google to use Java SE on a mobile device, and we'd be stuck in a courtroom just the same.

HP dumps Apotheker for Whitman

xperroni
Devil

"Carly Fiorina".

That were the first words to come up in my head.

Does it qualify as male chauvinism?

HP may NOT spin off PC biz

xperroni
Trollface

I agree to the "time will tell" part, anyway.

xperroni
Facepalm

Is this the International Year of The Corporate Cock-up or something?

First Nokia sent their entire OS R&D operation down the toilet to hook up to Windows, then Google paid the bucks or the husk of Motorola, and now HP stumbles about as if hit in the head with an iron pole... Has the IT industry decided to take the year off and compete on who comes up with the worst blunder?

Ballmer: Windows Phone can win third place in mobile!

xperroni
Thumb Down

"third ecosystem"?

More like turd ecosystem, really.

French officials: 'Don't worry about fatal nuclear explosion'

xperroni
Alert

We're all so going to die

So the explosion was in an oven used to burn low-danger waste, in the middle of a facility long devoid of any active reactors?

OMG THIS IS WORSE THAN SHERNOBILL!!!1!!!1!!1!1

HP's UK PC boss: We're going nowhere

xperroni
Trollface

"We're going nowhere"

Finally a PR burt I can take at face value!

Marriage makes women get fat, divorce does same to men

xperroni
Facepalm

Jumping to conclusions?

Just because marriage (or divorce, for the men) and weight gain seem correlated doesn't mean one causes the other. Without further data we have no way to tell whether it's the other way around - say, fattening women looking for a man to hook up to, and then dumping the bloke when he's grown too fat and ugly? - or a third, unknown factor is causing both.

Then again, they're sociologists. It's not as if, you know , getting how statistics works was their job or anything...

Good news: A meltdown would kill fewer than we thought

xperroni
Alert

The evil that one man does

Of course.

Because the whole nuclear industry is a conspiracy of evil men intent on destroying the planet – nothing else! – all led by Lewis Page.

And surely we all know nuclear technology is inherently Evil(TM), therefore any and all reports purporting to demonstrate it's any less than a total, utter, irreparable disaster waiting to happen were no doubt forged by said conspirators.

Good thing we have the Eco-Fighters(C) to save us from the harms of nuclear energy, and lead us to our true, windmill-powered future!

xperroni
Thumb Down

"[The USC] remains unconvinced by the draft report."

Of course they do. The data must be tortured until they confess.

Intel: Apple has online app sales exactly backwards

xperroni
Facepalm

Totally agree to it

Not only that, I think Apple should heed any and all advice coming from Intel regarding consumer market strategies. Just look at who between the two has had the most success at directly reaching consumers!

Oh, wait...

Oracle coughs up Java 7 release candidate

xperroni
Flame

Think beyond the language, little grasshopper

It's the JVM's long-standing ambition to grow beyond the Java language, and become a platform over which multiple languages (particularly scripting languages) would be implemented and interact with each other. Of course, years of mismanagement on Sun's part have held this dream back, leaving it to Microsoft – of all companies! – to realize that vision with the CLR.

But the JVM remains a fine virtual machine, even if its security record has been somewhat tainted by a recent history of multiple buffer overrun bugs; projects such as Clojure and JPython attest to that. Oracle's new release further provides the kind of support that makes the JVM not only a viable, but a convenient target for such projects.

And as for Java, for all the ill will generated by generics and other poor decisions, I'd say it remains a largely straightforward language, leagues ahead of C++ in terms of convenience and productivity.

Tablet fever cools as e-readers heat up

xperroni
Gimp

I'm curious

What would the figure for netbooks be over the same period?

Ballmer leaves investors speechless in Seattle

xperroni
Windows

It may have its compensations...

But surely being Steve Ballmer is no piece of cake. Who else has to confront disappointed looks after showing up US$ 26 Billion in profits?

Moderatrix kisses the Reg goodbye

xperroni
Joke

Oh Sarah, I hardly knew ye...

...though I might be better of that way?

The freakonomics of smut: Does it actually cause rape?

xperroni
Facepalm

Hentai FTW?

Substitute drawn / animated children for the real thing and children harm drops to zero.

Of course, the current "PAEDOS ARE COMING FOR OUR CHILDREN!!!11!!!1!" collective hysteria has pretty much outlawed any form of erotic / pornographic depiction of underage humans; in practice, owning a drawing of unexisting children involved in sexual activities has become akin to raping real, actually existing children yourself.

Wonder what the mid/long-term effects will be?

Sony says virtual reality is virtually a reality

xperroni
Gimp

Age of the dorks!

Looking like a dork isn't a problem ever since the Kinect came out – no more than jumping around and waving your arms like a crazy chimp, that is.

Lo and behold! For the age of gadget-fueled dorking is upon us!

xperroni
Boffin

Think of the FLOPS!

I'd counter that hardware has always been the issue. Software-wise the 3D worlds promised by VR have been possible for as long as the headpieces existed. The problem was the hardware required to render them in real-time, and as we know, the VR hype died off long before it could ctach up. That, I believe, is the "evolution" the Sony guy is refering to: now that both hardware and software are able to produce interactive virtual landscapes of engaging detail levels, it's time we take another shot at VR.

xperroni
Headmaster

What's in a name?

Actually, "virtual reality" as it's historically conceived is pretty much just that: a head-mounted display showing first-person-view images. Of course there's some trinkets attached – the headpiece should include an accelerometer so the images change as the viewer tilts their head about, images should be 3D to further enhance the illusion of "being there", some sort of controller should be available to enable navigation around the virtual landscape, etc – but that's it essentially.

I reckon that were you to have invented the term "virtual reality", you'd have set the bar somewhat higher. Alas, you haven't; therefore any bloke who comes up with an accelerometer-enabled display and a good 3D feed is free to call the kit VR, and no one to say otherwise.

Apple's new Final Cut Pro X 'not actually for pros'

xperroni
Trollface

Problem, fanbois?

Apple sticks it to their user base with an "upgrade" that completely disregards users' needs and/or requests!

In other news, the sea is wet.

Honestly, this kind of occurrence is hardly news anymore. People should just make up their minds on whether they want to get stuff done, or indulge in Apple's "experience" and damn if (when) critical features are suddenly pulled from under their feet.

Nokia unveils Contractual Obligation Meego Phone

xperroni
Mushroom

Might as well have thrown it into the sea

You obviously have no experience with Accenture hacks.

The KILLER MUTANT FUNGUS in YOUR DISHWASHER

xperroni
Black Helicopters

Impossible? Inevitable!

Of course, since fungi were found feeding on the radiation leaking from Chernobyl's abandoned reactors, it's hardly surprising they would eventually conquer the relatively favorable conditions of a puny dishwasher.

I wonder, since fungi are prone to engage in symbiotic relationships, how long it will take until they mingle with humans to produce a race of super-resistant, radiation-immune beings – who will no doubt proceed to exterminate the "inferiors" around them?

Burn all dishwashers! It's us or them!

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