* Posts by xperroni

557 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010

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Jobs confirms iCloud's murder of iWeb

xperroni
Facepalm

So glad I've dumped Apple

People who put up with Apple's shit have a problem; I can tell, I once did.

Back in 2006 I bought my one and only iStuff, a black MacBook. I was put off almost immediately by Apple's decision to deliberately lag behind in Java updates (back then I was very much into Java, both on- and off-duty). Having been bitten by the fanboi bug, tough, I persevered for two years, resorting to the likes of MacPorts and half-baked Mac OS X ports for software I could much simpler and more efficiently run on Linux, if only I'd let go of my Apple obsession. Alas, I just couldn't.

Then in 2009 I bought a Lenovo netbook in Taiwan and, not willing to bog it down with Windows XP, installed Ubuntu's Netbook Remix; long story short, I soon dumped the MacBook for a Dell PC with Ubuntu. And now, every time Apple screws their consumers with sudden portfolio letdowns, I just point and laugh.

Intel switches ARM stance from 'No' to 'Maybe'

xperroni
Holmes

The way in for Intel?

Intel has repeatedly tried to break into the low-watt / mobile market, so far to little avail. However where fabrication is concerned they have no peers – in fact it could be said that x86 has lasted this long solely for their ability to flawlessly implement even passable designs. That's certainly a skill an established mobile player could put to good use.

Could this become an escape route for Intel? Instead of dominating the mobile market directly by shoehorning x86 into a small power envelope, they could channel their engineering might into someone else's (presumably more mobile-friendly) ISA and architecture, getting a healthy cut in the deal.

Otellini: ARM servers 'ain't gonna work'

xperroni
Boffin

That bogus "legacy" argument

I always find it most amusing when (pro-)Intel float this argument that applications would have to be "rewritten" for ARM. Surely they have heard of C and other so-called "high-level languages" - you know, the ones that allow programs to be effortlessly ported across architectures, provided the necessary tools (compiler, interpreter, etc) are available?

Of course, if we're talking about a massively parallel architecture, then most probably a rewrite will be in order - but that would be due to legacy applications often not scaling well to multi-processed environments, and have nothing to do with the underlying instruction architecture.

I can only conclude Intel must be very scared of something, to so viciously turn their FUD barrage against ARM. I wonder what that could be?

Otellini: 'Intel won't build ARM chips'

xperroni
Paris Hilton

"Intel won't build ARM chips..."

...again. No, serioulsy.

Of course, Apple was not moving out of PowerPC and into x86 or building a phone, nor was Google releasing an office suite, or an OS (or two). Until they did.

Smartphones eat games handhelds and cameras for lunch

xperroni
Boffin

The curse of "good enough"?

Smartphones seldom make for good cameras, and they generaly pale in comparison to proper handheld gaming devices. However for the average hack they may be just good enough.

Besides, smartphones do have a definite advantage: they're a single device to carry – and one the user is most likely to have on them when they stumble on something interesting to photograph, or get some idle time for playing.

Wind power: Even worse than you thought

xperroni
Thumb Down

Nuclear fallout!

There is something I don't get: this article is about *wind* power. Why is everyone talking about nuclear power and the Fukushima situation?

What? Aren't the forums for the Fukushima articles filled of enough flak already?

Vatican hails hacking culture, Wikis

xperroni
Alert

Warhammer 40k For The Win?

So the priests are cozying up to the hackers? Wonder if we're not witnessing the beginnings of Wharhammer 40k's Technopriesthood...

Now if only we can get that Mars colonization project started!

The new killer app is … MMS

xperroni
Gates Horns

Wrong demographic I guess?

Sir, you need only ever date a teenage girl to learn by whom and for what is MMS used.

Though there may be legal issues involved, depending on your age and country of residence... Nevertheless I highly recommend it.

Sega Mega Drive gets micro makeover

xperroni
Dead Vulture

Nice, but quite pointless really

Nice hardware, but apart the videogame fetishism, what's the point of it?

You see, I have a Mega Drive emulator loaded to my Nintendo DS, and ROM's can be found on the interwebs by the bucketload. I can play virtually anything I want, wherever I want. What good an actual console would make?

I loved my MD, but the sad truth is, today it serves me better disembowed.

Fukushima fearmongers are stealing our Jetsons future

xperroni
Stop

Think of the children!

Of course, the fact that nuclear power posits a far smaller risk to children (as well as anyone else) than what we currently employ is not the point.

The point is that we should abandon all semblance of rational thought and behave as rabid luddites at the remotest prospect of harm to "the children".

Sigh... I think I'm never going to be a good father. Somehow I can't picture myself standing against something because I have children and somewhere, thirty years ago, more due to gross mismanagement than to any inherent danger, 15 children died.

Nokia: Keep codin' for Symbian and Qt!

xperroni
Stop

Just shoot it already for God's sake

You know, every time I hear of Nokia encouraging Symbian / Qt developers to Keep Calm & Carry On, touting all the brilliant updates it will ship presently, I get this mental picture of a pet, sick and wounded beyond all hope – yet its owner refuses to put it down, insisting on pointless interventions that only prolong its agony.

Damn Nokia, just get your act together and end the pain!

Fukushima scaremongers becoming increasingly desperate

xperroni
Stop

Tokyo tap water

Funny that people in Tokyo would need being told not to drink water from the tap. Folklore has it that Tokyo's water supply was never very clean to begin with – allegedly the city is the biggest consumer of mineral water bottles per capita in Japan. Moreover, Tokyonites in other sites I visit commentted that, due to the shopping stampede in the quake's aftermath, water bottles were already absent from market shelves long before that recommendation came out.

So yeah, quite the non-story this thing about the water.

Fukushima: Situation improving all the time

xperroni
Go

Safe fossil power?

I totally agree to you. That's why I say there is NO thing as safe fossil power, and challenge the pro-fossil lobbyists to design and implement:

1. A working device that can neutralize hazardous oil contamination (such as can be found at the Gulf of Mexico);

2. A device which can stop any combustion process 100% cold within a short time. Currently putting down a fire can take days to complete.

Then, and only then you can say fossil power is 100% safe.

By the way, when you're being bombarded by cosmic rays in inter-planetray space, send a prayer to all us poor earthlings!

xperroni
Joke

I wanna be a journalist!

After following the Fukushima story the whole week through The Register, MITNSE and WNN, and then glancing back at the mainstream media's treatment of the subject, I've made up my mind:

I wanna be a journalist!

It's gotta be real fun, ditching anything remotely factual in favour of your own apocalyptic fantasies, cherry-picking keywords from official reports to apply a veneer of legitimacy all over the fraud – and then watch the general populace gasp and run around in fear! Boy ain't that living.

Yes Lewis, you should me ashamed of being a reporter – but not because of your peers. How dare you disrupt an otherwise beautiful ballet of overblown reports, negligent misdirection and outright lies with your pesky "facts" and pedant "experts" (MIT boys, I'm looking at you). You should have learned long ago the lesson of that bastion of journalistic integrity, The Sun:

Never let the "truth" get in the way of a good (as in "mass hysteria-inducing") story!

Duke Nuke goes misogynistic for multiplayer

xperroni
Go

Misogynistic Duke Nukem SHOKER!

Duke Nukem features misogynistic twists!

In other news, the sky is blue.

You know, though I have long bored of FPS's, I might try this game just for its gleeful male chauvinism. Really, it's so over-the-top, no-one could take it seriously for a moment – right?

Dell Inspiron Duo

xperroni
Paris Hilton

Think I'll get a Latitude 2120

I've had mixed feelings about this concept ever since it was announced: nice trick, but is it worth it?

I guess we can all figure it by ourselves now...

Oh, well, think I'll get a Latitude 2120. That large bottom is so sexy!

Twitter ad play chokes third-party devs

xperroni
Boffin

Re: You pay for texts?

Yes we all pay for text messages – the operators don't route them through their networks out of goodwill. In some markets this is hidden in the bill as a "package" of X messages allowed every month (and of course you pay the whole "package" whether you used it up by month's end or not); other times it's an "all you can eat" proposition. But the MNO's do sell this to us as a service – and anyone making an appealing case as to why we should care to buy it could reasonably expect to make a cut.

You don't have to clamp down on third-party clients to charge manufacturers for bundling them into their handsets. "By all means, bundle whatever client you want, third-party, homebrew, you name it. But if it gets out of factory Twitter-enabled, you pay." It would be relatively simple for Twitter to block non-complying handsets (by checking the UAS / UAProf on HTTP requests), just so the makers couldn't call it bluff.

As to the value in this proposition, imagine you're a manager in a manufacturer and decide this is ridiculous: "sure we can simply ship your handsets without a Twitter client, letting the task of installing one to consumers!" Then, the following month your competitor launches a properly-licensed, "Twitter-ready" model, and makes a beautiful marketing case out of how you can "just turn on and start tweet'ing!" Pesky competitors, eh?

As for the third idea, I was not talking about "promoted" anything, but of charging money – a monthly service fee, if you will – from businesses that use Twitter as a customer channel. This would be done in a way similar to how some softwares are "free for personal use" – private Twitterers enjoy it for free, corporate Twitterers pay up. You could even give them some sugar (e.g. support, extra customization options, etc) just so they don't think they're getting ripped for nothing, but the basic idea is that mostly everything remains the same, except that now it costs money.

xperroni
FAIL

The 140-character business plan

So after years of consideration all they could think of was force-feeding a billboard onto their users? Damn, I can think of three better business plans right now:

- Drum up txt'ing as the "natural" way to update Twitter accounts (the 140-character limit was originally meant to comply with SMS), then approach the Mobile Operators and ask for a cut from the increased messaging revenue. Or perhaps do it the other way around - strike a deal with the operators, then promote txt'ing updates?

- Charge handset manufacturers for bundling Twitter clients into their software, offering to provide / develop the client;

- Ever so slightly charge businesses for using Twitter as a customer channel (they're using the platform commercially, it's only fair they share a cut from their revenues).

What these three plans have in common is that they're unobtrusive, and don't jeopardize Twitter's user base. Also they mean going after real businesses and asking them for money, which of course takes some guts to do - perhaps the reason for falling back to an ad-based model in the first place?

HP promises App Store and Microsoft love in webOS world

xperroni
Headmaster

Er...

Don't you mean "oxymoron"?

xperroni
Troll

Shock revelation!

"The technology we will be using for cloud infrastructure is going to be based on a certain number of technologies."

So they're basing their technology on a number of technologies?

Why, who'd have guessed!

Fukushima reactor core battle continues

xperroni
Boffin

These are the facts, if you don't like them I have others

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Possible_damage_at_Fukushima_Daiichi_2_1503111.html

(via http://mitnse.com/)

"Confirmation of loud sounds at unit 2 this morning came from the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA). It noted that 'the suppression chamber may be damaged.' (...) Also known as the torus, this large doughnut-shaped structure sits in the centre of the reactor building at a lower level than the reactor. It contains a very large body of water to which steam can be directed in emergency situations. The steam then condenses and reduces pressure in the reactor system. One effect of this is that the water and steam in the torus will exist alongside a range of gases produced by the nuclear processes in the reactor.

"The pressure in the pool was seen to decrease from three atmospheres to one atmosphere after the noise, suggesting possible damage. Radiation levels on the edge of the plant compound briefly spiked at 8217 microsieverts per hour but later fell to about a third that.

"In line with the theory that non-condensed gases in the torus will be released fairly promptly and not replenished at the same rate, it is possible that the radiation release - at least via this route - will dimininsh and stabilise.

"A close watch is being kept on the radiation levels to ascertain the status of containment. As a precaution Tokyo Electric Power Company has evacuated all non-essential personnel from the unit. The company's engineers continue to pump seawater into the reactor pressure vessel in an effort to cool it."

"A message recieved from Tepco at about 5pm said the primary containment vessel around the reactor and secondary containment provided by the reactor building 'show no significant change.'"

So yes, more radiation has leaked this time - but still it's irradiated water. The reactor's containment remains in place, and the cooling work continues.

xperroni
Flame

One in three is no bad at all

So yes, one reactor may still kick the bucket. However that's one in three - and even if it does go down, it will quite likely not be the nukapocalypse mainstream press is alluding to. I think that under these circunstances Lewis' account is still pretty close to the truth, much closer than the Beeb will get you anyway.

Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now!

xperroni
Flame

Re: 56 deaths = your average holiday roads' death toll

Here in Brazil, the roads' death toll for last week's three days-long holiday of Carnival was upwards of 200 people. So if you tell me a nuclear facility exploded and 56 people died as consequence, I'd say that as grievous an occurence as it is, consequences overall were fairly limited. The fact that Chernobyl was deserted is also of somewhat small significance - the city pretty much existed in function of the reactor, so with it (mostly) shut off, there wasn't much reason for folk to stay around, radiation levels notwithstanding.

A further 4,000 people dead by cancer and almost 50,000 people forced to move away, that I'll concede was a pretty big mess, though I'd still like to size it up against the surrounding region and overal Ukranian population at the time. Anyway, other than being a colossal PR blunder for nuclear energy, I'd dare agree to Lewis when he says Chernobyl had litle physical impact in the world at large.

Dim Brits think TARDIS IS REAL

xperroni
Paris Hilton

Re: Yes they can be that dumb (was: Worst Article EVER !!)

Well, Hoverboard.org.uk *does* feel it is necessary (on the "Marty’s Hoverboard" page) to stress their replicas don't hover. You think it overkill?

Actually I stumbled upon that other website once, which also sold hoverboad replicas. I couldn't find it now, but I vividly remember how the seller went to great lengths stressing his wares couldn't actually fly; he even maintained a "Hall of Shame" for specialy gruesome complaints - some blokes would argue that at $ 100.00 odd the hoverboards were too expensive, even as they believed the thing would, well, hover (as if any machine capable of carrying a man would sell within the three-figure range).

So no, I don't think this is too stupid for mankind.

Giant 5-year-mission aerial wing-ship to fly in 2011

xperroni
Boffin

Those pesky numerals!

You see, theirs is Vulture I ("Vulture First", as per the conventions for reading numbers in roman notation), while ours is Vulture 1 ("Vulture One", again by convention). Though I'd love to hear what trademark lawyers would have to say about this...

Intel boss searches planet for post-Nokia MeeGo spouse

xperroni
Black Helicopters

Intel & The Curse of Mobile

You can almost feel sorry for Intel. First their StrongARM unit goes belly-up; then WinMAX is sidelined by Qualcomm; and now their mobile Linux project, their best hope to cram x86 into the handset market, is shunned by Nokia.

Clearly there is some conspiration involved. I'm sure it's all the fault of those damn Europeans, scheming to keep an honest-to-God American company from granting consumers their deserved Freedom(TM)!

Nokia's developers wait and wait for Windows Phone

xperroni
Dead Vulture

Dissenting Nokia shareholders stop throwing toys from pram

So I guess this is the end then.

By the way, why aren't comments allowed on the newest Nokia posts? It isn't as if readers have been particularly mutinous on this or anything.

xperroni

Re: It makes a lot of sense. [Except when it doesn't, which is quite often.]

Until last week Nokia invested heavily in R&D, owned its software platforms, and was betting its future on a Linux-based platform.

Now Nokia is cutting down its R&D investments, flushing its own platforms down the toilet, and betting its future on an OEM partnership with Microsoft.

I don't know about you, but that sounds like an about-turn to me – whether it was long in the making or decided on a whim is another matter entirely.

xperroni
WTF?

Locked in Traudl Junge's dream

You know, ever since last Friday I keep expecting to wake up and find out this was all a silly dream. "Of course", I picture myself thinking, "there was no way Nokia would dump years of investment in Qt (and lately MeeGo), just as it was all months away from paying up, and go back to square one with a half-baked platform from Microsoft!"

It's not even that I am particularly influenced by Nokia's about-turn; it's just that the whole thing fails so badly to add up, and is getting so much more surreal so fast as it trudges on – I might as well question the reality of a world where such an absurd is purported to be the outcome of ponderous, lenghty consideration by competent professionals who know what they're doing.

Just like in the words of Traudl Junge's character in Downfall, it all feels like a dream, only that we don't wake up, and instead it keeps going on and on...

UK, Oz won't get latest AMD ThinkPad

xperroni
Heart

Remember the S10!

I don't know about their earlier offerings, but I bought an S10 in 2009 and I love the thing. Specs, size and battery life are just right, the keyboard is very confortable, and the design is just beautiful, in a geeky industrial way. It has been acting a little strange recently, after I almost killed it by unadvertently shoving it into my backpack turned on, so I have been looking for a replacement – but try as I may, I just can't bring myself to buy one of the current breed of glossy-cased, girly-looking netbooks.

xperroni
Unhappy

Passive / agressive relationship, PC-style

In some senses Lenovo is the Apple of PC's: great kit, but blissfully oblivious to consumers. Before catching wind of the impending x120e I was looking for a x100e, and no matter what I tried, couldn't get Lenovo – or any of their certified sales partners – to shift me one. Apparently it's marketed as "business-only" around here in Brazil, so it only sells to companies – no private people need apply, no sir.

While I had lost all hope on official channels, I was confident I would in time be able to get a x120e on the gray market, and on a reasonable price at that – but now I'm not so sure. The x100e is at least officially sold around here, so I figure any bloke can open a company (even if just on paper), help themselves to some, and then flush the things on online auction sites – a sort of "light gray" market, if you will. But if it will only be available abroad, then it's serious gray – and serious price.

Oh well, what are Dell's offerings for this year again?

Operators launch anti-Google WAC

xperroni
Terminator

Now it's anti-Google?

It just occurred to me – last year, when the WAC was officially launched, it was nominally intended as an alternative to Apple and the iPhone App Store. But now the Androids are the enemy... What a difference an year makes, eh?

xperroni
Heart

Why so sluggish?

I am actually quite confident about WAC's viability as a development platform – just look at Google Docs and all they accomplished, without access to the sort of wide-ranging platform optimizations open to mobile vendors – but I'm a bit disappointed in this release. What do you mean no access to local PIM data? Isn't this the kind of support that separates WAC from standard web apps?

Still, it's been quite encouraging to see how WAC's website evolved over the last year, from generic collection of PR utterances into an actually relevant, functional resource, with documentation, SDK downloads and even sample projects. It was also very clever of them to have to have Android support available from day one, even before most WAC-enabled feature phones hit the market. I just hope they have thought about updating first-generation handsets to the upcoming specs – having three incompatible generations spawned in 12 months simply won't do.

So, while there's still plenty of room for disaster, for now WAC keeps steady, if a bit sluggish. Let's wait for the next chapters, then.

One third of Russians say Sun revolves round Earth

xperroni
Big Brother

The other two thirds...

...of course know it's the Earth which revolves around Prime Minister Putin.

Your mind's '.brain' jpeg-like picture file format probed

xperroni
Boffin

Brain research is not for the faint of heart

Yes Pahhh, much of this kind of research is done on living animal subjects – mostly monkeys and cats, due to physiological similarities to humans – and they often involve painful, crippling interventions, which no rare lead to the subject's death.

If you want to get really scared, look into how it was determined that neurons in the visual cortex mirror the retina's log-polar mapping. It's one gory tale of forced eye fixation, brain injections and posthumous tissue extraction – repeated multiple times, of course, since in science you cannot rely on one-time data.

Nice dreams! ^_~

First WACy handset goes widget mad

xperroni
Heart

The little platform that could!

There's a lot to love about WAC: it's an industry-wide, multi-vendor, multi-OS, standards-based, web-oriented application platform. It could, in theory, translate at instant consumer market at one end (with all the feature phone makers furiously churning WAC-enabled phones) and instant industry support at the other (because it's programmed in HTML and AJAX, every web programmer is a potential WAC developer).

I just hope the mobile industry has learned from its past failures with WAP, BONDI and JIL. Nothing will happen unless people (in particular, developers) get interested, and for that to happen industry players must remain actively committed to it. Unfortunately that isn't a common trait among feature phone makers - new models are completely forgotten almost as soon as they are released, and ISV support is anemic, when at all present.

However, if industry support is good enough, or WAC keeps developers and users interested long enough for companies to catch up, then it could become the universal mobile application platform we've dreamed about for so long.

Boffins sex pterodactyls at last

xperroni
FAIL

Re: it must be female

Actually, most often what happens is something like this:

Boffin: "Based on currently available paleonthological dara, we've created a computer model of the T-Rex osteomuscular system. After running some tests, we estimated the T-Rex wouldn't be able to run very fast, or for very long. That places limitations on the kind of prey it would be able to pursue, leading us to believe it would be obligued to at least complement its diet with carrion."

Press: "OMG T-REXES NOT HUNTARS!!1!!!1!1!!"

That is, some boffin publishes a paper describing research which is still ongoing, with conclusions full of 'but's 'if's and 'could's, then along come the journos and completely misreport it. To be fair, El Reg usually does a good job of relaying the nuances, and this particular case seems pretty open and shut – but the general press couldn't be found dead reading a scientific paper, they just look for the headline grabber.

Online sync'n'store services

xperroni
Paris Hilton

Oh Google, where art thou?

Funny that Google wouldn't be anywhere in this list... And rightly so, as their main cloud storage offering (Google Docs' "file upload" feature) is still too cumbersome for everyday use. Perhaps – specially considering that Google Docs now allows arbitrary file upload – it's about time to revisit the concept of a Google Docs filesystem? It could very well prove a Dropbox contender, particularly among Google whores such as myself.

Paris, because of them goggles.

BBC kills off WML site

xperroni
Unhappy

Not dead, just deprecated

Of course, even WAP has forsaken WML for some time now: version 2.0 of the WML standard is just XHTML Mobile Profile with the WML 1.x tags shoved into a separate namespace, and marked as deprecated.

Alas, such indignity to a fine platform. WML 1.x and friends (WMLScript, WBXML, etc) were the first to advance the idea of the web as an application platform, and were much more friendly to this vision than their desktop equivalents – and in some senses, still are. Their only crime was becoming attached to the first, failed generation of the mobile web, when nobody knew what to do with it, and even if we did there was hardly any infrastructure to make it work.

Google Apps battle spam with auto email signing

xperroni
WTF?

DKIM for The Win?

If DKIM is such a good idea and has been around for about six years now, why aren't we all using it already?

Google Docs offline feature to return wearing HTML5 overcoat

xperroni
Boffin

On the case for offline Google Docs

"Why not just build an actual desktop app in the first place?"

If:

1- Your company is choke-full of highly skilled web developers;

2- You already have a well-regarded Office web suite;

3- You want to screw MS Office.

Which one of these is easier?

1- Hire a team of desktop developers and waste loads of time and money rewriting your web suite as a desktop app;

2- Waste loads of time and money retraining everyone in desktop technologies, then waste loads of time and money rewriting your web suite as a desktop app;

3- Bolt offline support into your Office web suite.

Sony sells Playstation-packing TV

xperroni
Pint

Only in Japan

In Japan most successful consoles were eventually built into TV's – e.g. after the C1 NES TV Sharp released the SF-1 SNES TV, with a built-in SNES – but these rarely get released in the West. Perhaps the companies feel they're appealing only to the Japanese, due to the smaller households... Or perhaps they just don't bother to market them outside, the domestic revenues being handsome enough.

Anyway, cheers for making me return to one of my favourite topics, Nintendo memorabilia.

Oracle asserts non-existent open source trademark

xperroni
Alert

Savage indeed

Every time I read news of Oracle screwing up with a FOSS project they inherited from Sun, I remember Gosling's remark on how Sun's management considered selling out to IBM, but ultimately decided for Oracle on the grounds that IBM would be harsher on lay-offs, even though Oracle would be more "savage" in managing the company's assets.

Now I don't know how Oracle have gone about those lay-offs; but I do hope they've been extra-light on it – because they're not holding back nill on the "savage" department, and I'd hate to learn it has been all for nothing.

Why Microsoft is Acorn and Symbian is the new CP/M

xperroni
Troll

Matsushita Sony X

Wrong. The MSX standard was conceived by Kazuhiko Nishi, and commercialy led by Matsushita and Sony; purportedly "MSX" was an acronym for Matsushita Sony X ("Cross") – that is, a cross-over between the otherwise bitter rivals – though Nishi himself conceded in an interview years later that "MSX" meant nothing in particular, and that he sometimes came up with different meanings to appease the various companies involved with it.

Microsoft did take a part early on in the project by providing an MS-DOS port, which became known as MSX-DOS – but apart from that and undeservedly taking credit for the whole project, just to deny it later when it lost interest, MS had little to do with MSX. It certainly wasn't nowhere to be seen by the time the MSX2's and MSX2+'s reached the market, and had long forgotten about it when the TurboR's arrived.

Opera, Oracle and Qualcomm join WAC ranks

xperroni
Thumb Up

Go WAC go!

It's heartwarming to hear the WAC is getting support at such a wide scale. I have recently spent a couple weeks working on a proof-of-concept mobile widget for the BONDI platform (the other mobile applications standard borged by WAC alongside JIL), and I loved it. As it's mostly web programming with a couple extra Javascript API's, there is virtually no learning curve; it's also very portable, as whatever extensions you use can be abstracted into a Javascript file and swapped out when you want to run it on a desktop browser (which I actually did, as a shortcut during development).

Since both BONDI and JIL managed to get shipped into actual feature phones before their somewhat forceful merger, I'd say there's a definite chance we'll see WAC-enabled phones in the wild sooner or later - and I say the sooner the better.

MySQL price hikes reveal depth of Oracle's wallet love

xperroni
Linux

Going solo?

One angle the article didn't cover: as MySQL is open-source, what are the odds of customers deciding to ditch Oracle's support and go solo with it – or perhaps turning for independent, more reasonably-priced support providers?

Moon Macrosystems' market keeps growing!

Google punts url shortener to world+dog

xperroni
Stop

Cute, but so far no TinyURL killer

At least, not until they add the ability to provide custom id's, as TinyURL allows. Also it would be nice, since shorteners are bound to user accounts, if I could edit and/or delete them (God knows how many dead links I've left in TinyURL over these years).

Oracle to webify mobile Java against Android

xperroni
FAIL

The ghost of releases past!

Sure it's a noble goal to try and update Java ME – but with the majority of JME-enabled devices being non-upgrading feature handsets, does it even matter? It's kind of like Microsoft and Windows XP – no point in developing for a newer platform revision when everyone is still shackled to the old one.

On the other side, a new JME targetting new devices could find steep competition in carrier-endorsed WAC, which would certainly appeal a lot more to the current generation of web-savy developers, should an implementation ever see the light of day.

If Oracle is serious about its mobile offering, it ought to do better than simply crank away at new releases. The mobile world is ahead of JME as it is, and it could get a lot farther in the near future.

Custom superchippery pulls 3D from 2D images like humans

xperroni
Boffin

Close, but no cookie

I took a peek at the researchers' website. <snob>As a MSc in Computer Intelligence with interest in Artificial Vision,</snob> I think they have some really nice ideas going, and some of them may well come together into a very good autonomous system eventually – but right now they're nowhere near delivery. Actually that's the problem with most AI research: everyone has a wonderful proof-of-concept to show, but actual products – stuff you can take to the field and solve real problems with – are few and far between.

Much of it, I believe, has to do with differing standards of success between academia and industry. Whereas a commercial project, to be considered successful, must produce something that can be readily sold (ideally by the hundred thousands), a research project can "succeed" by providing a "solution" that leaves out practical usability concerns, by "solving" only part of a large problem, or even by posing interesting new questions about the subject, without actually solving anything.

I once worked for a small ISV that attempted to create a commercial product out of academic research in Artificial Vision. At first we thought we'd only write some user-friendly GUI interfaces around the research system; however, as soon as customer requirements came into play, we realized we only got one piece of a pretty big puzzle, whose overall complexity the original research had conveniently chosen not to deal with. Trying to complement what we got with results from other research projects brought us much of the same – stuff that was great under carefully controlled test conditions, but couldn't on its own live up to the harshness of production environments.

Over time it became clear that far from the usual contractor projects we were used to do, we'd first have to invest real money and real time – years, probably – to turn that pile of academic papers into something approaching a real solution, and only then hope to attract any customers. The project was subsequently put on hold, pending the granting of government research funds; soon after I left the company for a job in another city. Last I heard of them, they did got the funds, but still weren't nowhere close to delivering an actual product.

Mind you, I'm not saying that academic research isn't fruitful. We owe academia a lot of useful stuff, from RISC machines to the search algorithms used by Google and Bing, and much more is yet to come out of it. However, researchers alone can rarely pull it off; it's the industry players who most often make the bridge from promising research to usable products. Research announcements are useful to get the gist of where academia is headed, but unless they're backed by a business partner, it's unlikely they're going to bring something to the market anytime soon.

Google search index splits with MapReduce

xperroni
Terminator

The voice of World Control

Sure as Hell I do. Colossus' closing speech replayed in my head all week long:

"This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied dead. The choice is yours. Obey me and live, or disobey and die."

Just wonder whether GFS2's kill switch is conveniently placed on Google's CEO office's desk, or buried inside an armored mountain?

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