* Posts by xperroni

557 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010

Page:

Nokia, Moto, Sony phone wing of Foxconn is soaked in red

xperroni
Flame

Re: Nokia?

Yes, but not for very much longer.

HP to spin off webOS division as Gram stealth subsidiary

xperroni
Facepalm

HP still haven't found...

...the correct chair arrangement to keep Titanic webOS afloat.

Microsoft: It was never 'Metro,' it was always 'Modern UI'

xperroni
FAIL

It isn't even funny anymore

It was kind of amusing at first, watch Microsoft stumbling about trying to find a replacement name, all the while trying (and pathetically failing) to make it look like it was all part of the plan. But now it's getting kind of depressing, seeing how a grown-up company who should know better cannot come up with a good moniker for its most important technology in years.

Please Microsoft, just admit that you screwed up, give away some cash for the rights to use "Metro" and move on. This has got embarrassing enough already.

Nokia straps Qt into ejector seat and hits the shiny red button

xperroni
Boffin

Re: At least it's not Accenture

Symbian is still owned by Nokkers, Symbian maintainence is carried out by Accenture

And that makes things better because...?

xperroni
Flame

At least it's not Accenture

So I reckon Qt will fare rather better than Symbian – i.e. it can still hope for a future.

Deadly pussies kill more often than owners think

xperroni
Paris Hilton

"cats are likely killing more than four billion animals per year..."

Wait, four billion?

I know that small creatures compensate their short life-span with larger numbers, but isn't that a tad too high?

Jimbo Wales: Wikipedia servers in UK? No way, not with YOUR libel law

xperroni
Mushroom

Re: "world's largest unreliable collection of factoids"

I don't really care about people, living or otherwise; I often go to Wikipedia for programming references (the articles on the multilayer perceptron and the Shunting-yard algorithm are very good) and the odd science article. I took a look into H2G2 and it doesn't have near the same depth in either; so you can keep your "Wikipedia done right", I'll have Jimbo's Wonderland over it any day.

Why women won't apply for IT jobs

xperroni

Re: still, as office jobs go

> I doubt there's seldom anything more demanding.

Either you work for a very poor employer or you have had a very sheltered life!

Then enlighten me: which office jobs are more demanding than IT?

xperroni

Re: seen job adds lately ?

IT is sitting in a chair in front of a keyboard; it's not the SAS.

Bit of hyperbole, sorry if I sounded too literal. Still, as office jobs go, I doubt there's seldom anything more demanding.

xperroni

Re: seen job adds lately ?

It is better to choose people on the basis of their technical ability than their ability to deal with aggressive people because their technical ability is ultimately what you want from them.

Agreed. However, having to put up with unpleasant work conditions, unreasonable people, overblown position requirements etc. is a recurrent problem for most IT workers. Why it's such a disaster only when women are involved? It's not that we don't all get our own share of crap – and we don't give up and blame it for failure.

If you find that the environment makes something unrelated to technical ability a factor - e.g. ability to put up with prejudice, then better to change the environment so that it is no longer a factor.

I'd love to, but I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future – not for IT, and not for any field of human activity. Technically talented people still have to cope with stressful and unreasonable situations if they want to build a career, be it in IT or elsewhere.

Do you really think it is efficient to filter out technically gifted applicants because they don't want to put up with sexual inequality or prejudice?

No, I don't. Actually I'm asking for the opposite: instead of whining at the sidelines, how about enduring through and promote change from within? Landing my first IT job wasn't easy either, regardless of prejudice. I'd love it if we could work only with agreeable people, but I still want to work in IT even if that's not the case.

xperroni
Mushroom

Re: seen job adds lately ?

I'll get flamed up the *** for this, but what the hell.

Back in the previous century, when women decided they wanted a more active role in society, they fought nail and tooth for the rights to vote and work outside of home, rebelled against unfair laws that placed men (particularly in the role of husband) above them, and forced their way upwards in society.

But for some reason, when it comes to women in IT, they are always portrayed as defenseless victims of us Evil Men © and our prejudicial ways. "Oh, if only IT pros weren't so sexist", the people who purport to talk in their name whine. Never mind that men aren't exactly free from abuse from managers, clients and the like...

And now I hear that job ads are the problem? WTF?

Dear women, if you really do want a career in IT, and if people like me really do make the industry so women-unfriendly, feel free to push your way through. Who knows, I might not even be so hard to change, if you just give it some heart. But don't expect me to extend the red carpet and ask pretty please with sugar on top for you to come – IT is a ruthless industry, no matter who you are; the weak and fickle need not apply.

New target for 419 fraudsters: Struggling 'weak' banks

xperroni
Facepalm

Though I'm not sure how far they'll get this time. After all, between their poor English and barely-coherent tales of fleeing far-land rich men, they've only ever managed to fool excessively gullible people, the kind who believes wealth will just pop out of thin air and...

Oh.

If Hotmail was a person it could have kids now. But it would be a crime

xperroni
Boffin

Re: My bride uses hotmail...

As her one and only e-mail account. No, really.

Actually there's a lot of people who got a Hotmail account so they could sign in to MSN Messenger * and kinda stuck to it, even long after instant messaging lost its cool. So I guess tying services together really does work?

* I know, you don't really need a Hotmail account to get to Messenger, but MS does everything it can to make it look like you do.

WikiLeaks punks The New York Times with op-ed hoax

xperroni
Paris Hilton

Re: Follow my new twitter feeds

Actually there's something that has got me thinking. How much of this ruse's success was due to the fake article putting up a convincing impersonation of Keller's writing style and opinions, and how much could be attributed to people's unwitting trust of online services?

Did people fall for it because the article really sounded like Keller's, or just because it was linked from a credible Twitter account? Had the naming of the fake Twitter account not been as clever, would people still have fallen for it? Had fake Keller written in l33tsp34k, praised the deep philosophical insights imparted by My Little Pony cartoons, or announced his conversion to Islam, would people still believe he wrote that? How far can you mangle an author's style before readers notice something's amiss?

xperroni
Coat

Re: Wait.

Yes brother, I hear you. "Is there no God?" indeed.

xperroni
Facepalm

Wait.

The guy retweeted an article attributed to himself that he didn't write?

And he didn't notice anything wrong with it until a while later?

Some little detail such, as, oh I don't know... "Hey I don't remember ever writing that!"?

Are all NYT journalists as clever as Mr. Keller? Because that would explain a lot.

Never mind Azure: They BROKE Twitter!

xperroni
FAIL

Re: Shooting Google+ in a barrel

So how is working [sic] for Google, xperroni?

Why, I didn't know How is working for Google. Perhaps I should ask for a recommendation?

By the way, what about your English classes? Not going very well, I gather?

xperroni
Coat

Shooting Google+ in a barrel

Actually I prefer Google+ to Twitter or even Facebook. I rather like its microblogging feature, even if it's a step down from Buzz.

Besides, what do they say about dead horses?

Streetfighter 2: The World Warrior

xperroni
Pint

The Turbo Hyper Fighting SNES version was the definitive SFII for me. I spent countless afternoons on that game, sharpening my skills until I could finish the one-player "story" mode on the maximum difficulty and speed levels without losing a single round (a special screen would appear then, congratulating the player for having "mastered" the character he played with).

Contrary to most SFII players I knew, who tended to gravitate towards Ken or Ryu, I specialized in controlling Guile. I would jump over their fire balls from just the right distance, teasing them into delivering a Dragon Punch - and when they missed, I would greet them back with a hard punch, followed by a lowered hard kick (Guile was unusual in that his "lowered hard kick" consisted of two consecutive attacks, so many a player would block the first kick, then get up in an attempt to counter-attack and unwittingly get hit by the second swing), a Sonic Boom (which most experienced players blocked, but served to keep them on check) and another lower hard kick. At this point the bloke usually tried to jump over Guile's head, only to be sent back by a Flash Kick.

After the SNES phased out I pretty much stopped playing games, so in my mind SFII remains the apex of the fighting genre. I still replay it on emulators from time to time, and I always get amazed at how easily my reflexes return, even after so many years. The mind may have moved on, but the hands never forget.

Java won the smartphone wars (and nobody noticed)

xperroni
Gimp

Re: A little bad rep goes a long way

It's alright. It's not like I'd want to use it or anything, but I worked on a C# project a few years back, and as far as Microsoft products go, I found it particularly hard to hate – harder than VB6 at any rate.

xperroni
FAIL

Re: Accenture working on bug fixes

Has it been made ABSOLUTELY CLEAR to them that by 'fixing bugs', it is meant that the bugs should be corrected so that they do not occur, as opposed to improving the bugs so that they do more?

You mean them hacks could actually correct bugs if only management told them in clear terms that's what's wanted?

Either way it's hopeless.

xperroni
Boffin

A little bad rep goes a long way

Early Java programmers were kind of over-excited with this inheritance thing, and tended to overuse it, as evidenced in many books and frameworks from the time. Today the Java community favors composition and interfaces (which enable much more flexible architectures) over class inheritance – but I guess that for those who haven't kept up, the damage is already done.

I agree that Enterprise Java is hopelessly cluttered with buzzwords and decrepit FUBAR frameworks (hello TIBCO), but I have always found the Java language and its base API very straightforward. In terms of ease of use it runs rings around C++; performance might not be as good, but as in the case of scripting languages, it's often good enough that having something that works now trumps having something perfect later.

Darth Vader is a pansy

xperroni
Mushroom

Because black is too mainstream?

Black is functional. It maximizes contrast to key glyphs, indicator lights and the like.

Colored kit look like toys. I loved netbooks when they were black and square; now that they're all smooth textures, curved lines and sissy colors I can't stand looking at the things.

But if you're really pissed with the prevalence of black kit, don't worry: for better or (in my opinion) worse the market always oscillates between all-black and all-white kit, so sooner or later it should swing around.

Hubble spots ancient spiral galaxy that SHOULD NOT EXIST

xperroni
Unhappy

"with virgin cocktails in hand"

Virgin cocktails?

I knew there had to be more to this boozing thing than alcohol!

If only I'd been told before! My youth could have been a lot different – and less sober.

McDonalds staff 'rough up' prof with home-made techno-spectacles

xperroni
Holmes

Re: Motives?

But then again, it was public-ish place, and to my knowledge he wasn't trying to enter any restricted areas. So it begs the question, why go through all the trouble of kicking him off, ramifications and all?

Wouldbe Apple App Store killer WAC disappears into GSMA

xperroni
FAIL

This is why carriers can't have nice things

Political infighting... Substituting executives for engineers... Languishing in stagnancy while the world at large soldiers on. No wonder they've been driven off their own market by the likes of Apple and Google.

I have been critical of the "dump pipe" vision for data networks on technical grounds (I'd rather have Quality of Service than over-provisioning), but the more I have of the carriers' utter incompetence, the more I feel it serves them right.

Raspberry Pi used as flight computer aboard black-sky balloon

xperroni
Paris Hilton

Re: Wind blows in wrong direction.....

Actually I have a serious question about this.

Are we allowed to launch these hydrogen-filled balloons anywhere, without asking for permits or otherwise telling anyone? What if it gets in the way of a plane, lands on a factory or something like that?

US deploys robot submarine armada against Iranian mines

xperroni
Thumb Down

Re: Police?

I have been skimming through this discussion, and it's not like I agree to h4rm0ny's every point – but damn it boy, are you even paying attention? The opening sentence of that NYT article reads:

The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

So while it may not confirm the point about refueling jets, it does confirm the bomb shipments, which is just as damning.

I have to say that your tendency to mockingly disregard contrary arguments as "fail" whenever they don't address your every single little point is rather unnerving. So now it's all down to whether the US refueled Israeli jets or not? And when that is confirmed by some not-easily-disregarded source, what else?

I agree to h4rm0ny's main point that were Israel to get itself into a war (and by that I mean a proper war, not a three-week skirmish) with a major Middle East country, be it Iran or whoever else, it would be hard for the US to not be dragged into it – not out of any particular love for the nation, but rather due to economical, political and yes, military ties. You can point that it never happened, but then again, I don't know that Russia had ever come into any war in order to support France before 1914 – but when it did it set the world in flames.

Patent trolling cost the US $29bn in 2011

xperroni
Facepalm

Breaking news: the sky is blue

New research from Boston University suggests that “patent trolling” is a very expensive business, (...), and that trolling reduces the funds available for innovation.

To think it took only 20 years for them to turn their eyes up.

Atari turns 40: Pong, Pac-Man and a $500 gamble

xperroni
Thumb Down

Not the Atari I knew and loved

Atari continues to make games (...).

No they don't.

Infogrames bought the Atari name, and then proceeded to market its games under it.

So while we may have some company called Atari marketing games now, the real Atari of my youth is well and truly dead.

Raspberry Pi to skipper microship across Atlantic

xperroni
Mushroom

Re: Itanium

These days on my job, when I want to say we should get rid of someone something, I suggest we "wrap it to an Itanium server and throw it to the river".

Python wraps its coils around the enterprise

xperroni
Devil

Re: Python talks to everything

I'm curious. Just *when* did you try i++ and see it fail?

When I tried it on Python, which is not C, and therefore has no obligation to support it. And indeed, it doesn't.

So, realizing that i++ was not possible (on Python), I never bothered to try ++i either (on Python), and therefore never stumbled on whatever baffling results it produces (on Python).

On C / C++ I don't do much ++i either, because the kind of one-liners where it makes a difference are often too obscure and error-prone, and by the time I break them down into something safer and more readable, the relative order of the read and increment operations make no difference any longer.

xperroni
Angel

Re: Python talks to everything

I have used Python for both personal and in-company projects for the last four years, and I don't know a think about what you guys are talking.

I have known C/C++ for much longer than Python; the first time I tried i++ and it failed, I switched to i += 1 and never looked back. I don't remember ever trying ++i, playing with the order of increment and read operations is bad form anyway – for God's sake, that extra line of code you're trying to avoid isn't going to break the Internet.

It's also nice to know that integration with C/C++ is possible and not that hard to achieve, particularly if you rely on wrapping tools such as SWIG; though I've yet to use it myself, the interpreter's performance being good enough for my needs so far.

I've heard there are Python zealots somewhere, but have yet to meet any. Then again I'm not a very social coder, most of the advice I need can be found on reference docs, tutorials and forum threads (mostly from Stack Overflow) started by people other than me.

As for "dick-waving"-prone features, I've used some of them here and there, but "basic" Python is almost always enough – and I do a lot with it, from text file processing to COM interfacing with Windows applications, web pages and AI research on NumPy / SciPy. It's a matter of good-sense, knowing that just because you can do something, not necessarily you should do it every single time.

Overall what I enjoy most about Python is how it encourages writing clean, concise code (though of course you can mess it up if you really want); the speed with which you can slap together a proof-of-concept and then rework it into a practical solution; and the variety of packages and projects that make it a readily-available option for most things one might want to do. That you almost never have to do any changes to run programs on different platforms doesn't hurt either.

Facebook set to file motion: Will blame NASDAQ for IPOcalpyse

xperroni
Paris Hilton

Protecting people from themselves

While it's hard to take much pitty on people who'd think they could get something for nothing, governments exist largely to protect people from themselves and each other, so Facebook, NASDAQ and the mafia underwriters shouldn't really be allowed to just walk away from this either.

Unfortunately punishing the crooks almost necessarily means providing some sort of compensation to their victims, so you end up, if not rewarding stupidity, then at least softening its effects...

'You don't have to take Prozac to work at Capita - but it helps'

xperroni
Devil

"Redundancies have still not been confirmed"

Redundancies.

Such a nice way to refer to dismissals! It almost sounds as if it's something good in itself.

Really, HR people are the poets of the channel.

Microsoft 'mulled Nokia buyout, ran away screaming'

xperroni
Thumb Down

Re: Nokia should stay the course and concentrate on Feature phones.

> The Nokia Asha range has a future.

Those kinds of handsets may very well have a future, but not inside Nokia I think.

Asha is the Symbian platform's last breath, before it's <del>cemented to a concrete block and thrown into the sea</del> outsourced to Accenture.

Perhaps its feature/price balance may live on, in some other manufacturer, through some other platform – Boot2Gecko maybe? – but for Nokia it's too late, for better or (more likely) worse they're headed towards being a bloatphone-only company; for how long it's anybody's guess.

US secret spaceplane will come back to Earth sometime soon

xperroni
Gimp

Paranoia isn't just a sport, it's a way of life

But then the Iranians call toilet paper a secret, American imperialist plot to take butthole prints of the peace-loving Iranian people.

Then again, who's to say it isn't?

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't actually after you!

Crazy Geckos: Nitot on Mozilla's post-Firefox mobile crusade

xperroni
FAIL

Boot2Gecko and The Infinite Indifference

Of course, there already is a web technologies-based platform with which to fight Apple's iron grip and Google's fragmentation. It's called the Wholesale Application Community (WAC): it's got a Javascript API, a W3C-compatible application packaging model, an infrastructure for operator-local app stores, the support of a string of carriers, model manufacturers and IT companies – and is going nowhere but down.

Did you know that Android is, on paper, the product of the Open Handset Alliance? That's a consortium of more than 80 companies – yet Google seems to be the only one actually working for its progress, while the others do little more than port the software to half-baked reference hardware and slap their logos on top of the things.

Technology is not the problem, lack of compromise is. Players in the mobile industry will gather to draw up (and sometimes even implement) standards all the time; getting any one of them to promote its use afterwards is another matter entirely. The whole mobile industry is terribly inertial: that's how they got driven off to the borders of their own market by Apple and Google to begin with. That's why WAP languished for years until being crushed under the rise of the mobile web, why WAC is stillborn, and why IMS will ultimately prove irrelevant.

The reason Boot2Gecko just might succeed is not technology, Telefonica's support or the increasing marginalization of carriers. The best thing it's got going for it is Mozilla's role as the driving force behind the platform. Just as with Android and Google, they've got the will to keep promoting it long after other involved parties have lost interest (which if experience is any guide, will happen within seconds of the 1.0 release).

If Mozilla can attract developer mindshare and drag the carriers and product manufacturers to provide consistent support, then Boot2Gecko may realize that vision of a web application platform which goes back all the way to WAP. But I'd not bet a penny on it, I've seen such promises made many times over and so far it's always ended in abject failure.

Microsoft corrects itself: 'We expect fewer people to use Windows 8'

xperroni
Coat

Microsoft corrects itself?

But I thought Microsoft was never wrong!

Surely some mistake?

Insect vision a template for computer ‘sight’

xperroni
Facepalm

This just in: bees can make sense of their own sensory inputs

Why, who'd have guessed!

Also in news: the sky is blue, the sea is wet, and Windows 8 stinks.

Stuxnet ≠ cyberwar, says US Army Cyber Command officer

xperroni
Facepalm

Never thought I'd come to hate the word "cyber"...

But there it is.

Funny thing is, in my teens I'd get saddened by the thought that we'd never get the Internet to be called "cyberspace" – but now that IT and security pundits can't stop their traps from blurting "cyber" every other second, I can't stand hearing it being called that. Guess we should really be careful with what we wish for...

Jolly rogered

xperroni
Black Helicopters

Re: Walled garden anyone?

The "walled garden" scenario I came up with was just a thought experiment on how Internet censorship / "parental control" could ever be made to work, and what the consequences might be; I don't in any way promote or support it. I thought the "Big Brother" icon would be enough indication of this – perhaps I should have gone with "Joke Alert" or "Black Helicopters"?

Bur anyway, since you've mentioned the likes of Google and Facebook: ISP's would just love to sideline them, what with the ISP's paying for the data pipes and ad-brokers raking in all the money. In fact mobile carriers have been trying to do that for a while, only their approach is technological. So far it hasn't worked – but perhaps if the heavy arm of law gave it a little push...?

xperroni
Big Brother

Walled garden anyone?

The only way I can see censorship controls of this kind working is by the use of a whitelist – in other words, everything is pr0n until proved otherwise.

It wouldn't be too hard for the ISP's to compile a list of the 1,000 or so top-access sites, decide which ones are "safe", and block access to anything not in this list unless requested otherwise by customers.

The long tail could be covered by an online form for people to suggest additions to that list; this could grow into a service where, if you wanted your site to "whitelisted", you'd pay your ISP for continued certification of its contents' safety.

What about Facebook, blogs and the like, you ask? Why, the ISP's could just spin their own versions of those services, all continually reviewed for guaranteed family-values-compliance.

And there you go, your sanitized Internet in a nice and tight package. It's not unimaginable that the ISP's could spin it as a "service" – I can already hear the ads about "a leaner, cleaner, better Internet", safe for work & play, and free of any harmful images or contradictory truths...

Suppressed data on mutant H5N1 human-killer virus PUBLISHED

xperroni
Mushroom

Re: Might as well let the flu kill them

Researchers have found that eating KIMCHI will kill off the virus when eating large amounts.

Of course, eating "large amounts" of kimchi will kill any mammal of size up to and including a grizzly bear, so it's hardly a solution.

Intel came a-knockin' for Cray super interconnects

xperroni
Facepalm

Re: People are talking "millions". I hope they count in centîmes...

How does that compare to a billion dollar for a photoshop filter and assorted commodity hardware?

I made the same point on the earlier story about this deal. It boggles the mind that real tech like Cray's interconnect architecture can command at best a bunch tens of millions, while the dullest fanboi start-ups can sell themselves off for far more.

Intel reels in Cray's supercomputer interconnect biz

xperroni
Paris Hilton

Re: A puny $140m for Cray's interconnect hardware business...

As for Instagram WTF is it and why should I care ?

Why, by all means, pretend you don't know.

Either that, or how'd you like some nice Internet connectivity for that rock you're living under?

xperroni
Coat

A puny $140m for Cray's interconnect hardware business...

Meanwhile, Instagram fetches $1 Billion.

Let that sink in for a minute.

DARPA overjoyed that its hypersonic glider came apart, blew up

xperroni
Gimp

Re: How?

The test plane has to be launched from a rocket but, so what?

So... It hasn't brought anything new to the table, as far as escaping the gravity well is concerned.

And if what you want to do is just send stuff around the Earth real fast, sub-orbital rockets can already do that; why don't go the extra sub-orbital step, if you're going to use a rocket anyway? What bothering with "gliding" on the higher atmosphere and all related problems (heat etc.) buys you?

This is an honest question. If there are economical / tactic advantages to gliders over sub-orbital launchers, I'd like someone to enlighten me.

xperroni
Coat

How?

(...) hypersonic technology (...) could be useful for (...) truly re-usable and economical orbital spaceplanes.

I can't see how.

I mean, if the thing still has to be launched from a rocket, how is it any better than current launcher vehicles and the retired space shuttle?

What kind of LOSER sits in front of a PC...

xperroni
Gimp

The best e-reader...

Last year I read 7 books on my 3.2 in smartphone, all part of the Dune saga. Other than having to "flip" pages more frequently than I'd do on a physical book, I didn't have any problem with it.

In the end, the best e-reader, like the best camera, is the one you have on you when the opportunity arises.

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