Posts by Gulfie

How about:

Cancel outright NHS IT, ID Cards, IMP, implementation of variable speed limit zones on motorways, child protection database. I'm sire we can add to this list. Anything that is hubris, pointless or an unneccesary invasion of privacy.

Mandate the purchase of open standards compliant systems, rather than mandating purchases from specific suppliers.

Build teams of freelance IT contractors instead of consultancies (daily billing rates halved immediately) and retain cntractors based on their individual performance (so the chaff does get kicked out)

Stop all PPP/Outsourcing (short term pain for long term financial gain)

Close all national and local government indexed linked final salary pension schemes, replacing them with money purchase which is what the majority of us have. Eat your own dogfood!

Add new mandatory contract terms to all national and local government contracts:

- 0% of the work goes overseas

- all company income from the UK taxed within the UK

Make it so, Mr Data.

Paranoid, Toi?

Having seen Avatar I think the story can be applied to a multitude of such situations. US foreign policy. Modern capitalism as operated by large multinationals. And yes, China.

I guess the truth hurts. Aside of really enjoying the film it certainly made me think about the almost total disappearence of ethics from modern business practice.

Hur hur hur...

In other leaks... Windows Mobile 7 hurriedly renamed Windows Mobile 6.6 while dev team run around in headless chicken mode...

Shame...

... clearly cuts no ice with this man. Let's hope the video doesn't cause this behaviour to snowball, or they'll all be on thin ice.

Sorry, but code reviews are SO boring.

Me Likeee

as my co-driver in DiRT keeps saying. I want one!

Apps...

A couple of years ago, 10,000 apps for a phone would have been viewed as remarkable. Right now, 10,000 apps for Android is still very good and not to be sniffed at. Remember that a significant percentage of iPhone apps are either (a) crap or (b) 'lite'.

The bigger problem is the post-launch news. I looked at ordering a Nexus One for development purposes the day after launch, and decided to wait until I could order something that ships from within the UK.

However I've shelved that idea indefinitely because of two reasons: fragmentation of the OS makes developing software that works on all versions a nightmare, and problems with the firmware.

This is a very public fail for Google and when you add in the internet-only availability and clear lack of timely customer support it would not be surprising if people ran a mile from the handset - or at least until all these problems are publicly acknowledged and clearly fixed.

Makes the iPhone troubles look trivial by comparison.

Please, no more pointless hybrids...

... I want a pure leccy 5 door hatchback.

Oh the irony of using Java syntax

I'm not sure of the technical detail here (I'm sure somebody will correct me if required). Android software is written in Java syntax and compiled down to something that the Dalvik VM can run. Tru java is late binding, so with some defensive coding it would be relatively trivial to abstract out the Android 2.1 API usage into separate classes. This would allow developers to write 95% of their code to run on any Android platform, and then to only offer the extra 5% of functionality if the handset reported Android 2.1.

You could use this approach for all phone-specific and android version-specific functionality, allowing a 'lowest common denominator' application to be written that simply was more functional on some handsets / versions of Android.

That there are so many headaches with applications across the different Android phones implies that this cannot easily be done. No late binding. But of course, if Google had adopted Java wholesale - VM and all - this would not be a problem. Google's desire to control has well and truly backfired on it here.

You WHAT?

No, I'm sorry, I don't post every detail of my life, however interesting it may be, and I never will. Privacy is important to a small but significant percentage of net users; it should be important to all - but then, like Google, Facebook's business model wouldn't work in a world where people kept stuff private.

Given the reaction to the recent Google statement in this area, I'm surprised Mr Z even went there. Another case of believing your own hype, I guess - either that, or he's full of something, not sure what...

How about this...

I'm not sure of Google's licence terms, but how about we take the open source OS layer from Android, port OpenJDK 6 to run on top of it and just (re)write all the phone software in pure Java desktop? Adding Java Mobile would be difficult as the code isn't open, you'd have to implement something from the JSRs and even then you'd probably have problems getting it certified.

Just a thought.

What's Next?

Well, that's got to be obvious. If Google are building their own networks, how long before they start selling access?

Roll up, roll up for your Google high speed internet service with free Google Chrome laptop (terms and conditions apply; The phrases "who's my bitch", "all your interwebs belong to us" and "suck on that, a**hole" are Google trademarks. Google reserves the right to leverage every last byte of information it holds on you if there is even a 5% chance of making money off it. Remember, folks, Google does no evil).

Anyone tested the market?

...erm... only a small handful of my friends and work colleagues have blu-ray, and an equally small group actually believe that 3D films are worth the hype. The cross-over is, understandably, even smaller. I lost sight of the relative purchase rates of DVD and blu-ray after Toshiba dropped out of the HD format war, so I'm not sure that my experience is typical.

I don't see any large-scale interest in blu-ray, and personally I have zero enthusiasm for 3D telly. I'm sorry, but I just don't see the market here. I think it is compounded by the fact that you can't really upscale or 3Dify the old films that would warrant the effort, and the overwhelming majority of recent films are either complete dross or just not remarkable/distinctive enough to buy once they are released.

So, who's going to buy? And why?

I want one...

... to sit alongside my iPhone and to develop for in Java. I can then port apps across to the iPhone using a cross-compiler. Result!

I for one welcome...

... a new interpretation of a fantastic novel.

The '84 film was good in some ways (Sting) but a complete dog in so many others. Weak dialogue, crappy special effects, and so much storyline was skipped. Wonder if they're going to have a go at the whole 11-book series? If they can script it as well as the guys that scripted Lord of the Rings, it could be fantastic.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure "witer Josh Zetumer" is actually a writer - unless he's taken up where Michael Jackson left off...

"the tablet's display technology wasn't all it was cracked up to be."

I saw what you did there...

I'm with AC on this one...

As a Java architect/designer/developer I've only had problems working with poorly written user code. One of the beauties of Java is its simplicity. Provided you can grok OO.

And as for Google Collections, it's not exactly new, you know. It's been kicking around for some time. Although perhaps not as a 1.0 release, probably more as a beta.

Your comments are Insensitive and ill-judged

OK, the reason that this news is receiving prominance is because the Boscombe Down documents were not made available to the enquiry or subsequent repeats thereof.

The original board of enquiry ascribed blame to the pilots in part because there was no evidence to support any other conclusion. Chinooks don't carry a black box so there was no record of the aircraft's behavour in the moments before the crash - so the investigation was able to ascertain what happened (a general idea of speed, aircraft attitude etc) but not why.

Introduce these new documents and you have just changed the balance of probability between pilot error and some other cause.

Disclosure: I'm an ex private pilot. The point here is that two experience pilots were in charge. It is not, contrary to your opinion, easy to fly into the ground when flying at low level, even in poor visibility. Easy for a non-flyer to believe it can happen, plausible for a solo pilot to be distracted and make an error, but far less plausible for two experience pilots to both fail to spot what was going on/ about to happen.

What concerns me is the blase way that you are saying "FFS move on". The accident could be re-investigated and the conclusions remain unchanged, and if so, so be it. This isn't (now) about the fallability or otherwise of the Chinook. It's about the impartiality of the investigation, the availability or otherwise of all the evidence that the level of certainty applied to the derived reason for the crash, and subsequent treatment of the airmen and their families.

Everybody deserves justice. Even if the eventual outcome is unchanged, this is new evidence that, given the source, should not be lightly ignored. Perhaps a short public enquiry to expose the report, the defects in the software that were not fixed in the Mull of Kintyre machine, and the possible effects thereof. If there is nothing to find, then the verdict stands. If anything significant is found then the investigation should be re-opened.

Fail, fail fail...

And this is why I will never by an Apple netbook/tablet/thingie. With the iPhone, Apple replaced several small walled gardens with one larger one of their own; one so big (once the app store arrived) that most people could ignore the walls altogether. With the tablet however they are producing at least a netbook equivalent (possibly more powerful) and it would appear taking control away. I won't buy a device of that kind of power if I don't have the sort of control I have over my current desktop and laptop computers. I think it will sell in the US, it may do well in education markets, but there is no way I'd buy one for personal use with an iPhone style lock-down.

With regards to the question "who wouldn't want a desktop computer free of malware" the answer is again, for the average non-tech user, if the walled garden is big enough that you can't see the walls, who will care about the restrictions? I would expect most 'hands dirty' developers to be extremely reluctant to go down this path though because of the degree of freedom that is being sacrificed.

This is an excellent example of Apple's core business practice - build a device that does something well, but also has a built in source of downstream revenue. The real question is, can they get away with this level of control in the area of the marketplace they are entering?

Finally, I'm a keen OS X fan but any attempts to move this into the hardware I use will be met with an immediate and irreversible move to Linux. Although hopefully still on Apple hardware. OK, not that hopefully.

Oh really?

"People have made numerous journeys around Europe using their identity cards and this seems to be an isolated incident."

Photos please, Home Office, or it didn't happen. Or at least some damn lies, sorry, statistics. The evidence for this is what exactly? This sounds like a significant percentage of the 2,000 Mancunians are also Europhiles for 'numerous' journeys to have been made. I don't believe it.

Uh?

As somebody with no axe to grind (or cross to wave, as it were) there is an obvious flaw in the man's argument. He's approaching a scientific subject from a non-scientific direction. From a scientific point of view I'm sure there a re all sorts of reasons why angels - people with wings - can't fly. Muscles (lack of), weight, ability to not drink and fly...

But God, if you take the position that He exists, simply imbues angels and cherubs with the ability to fly. Physics just wouldn't come into it. If God had to obey the laws of physics, please explain the parting of the Red Sea, Walking on Water, Water into wine...

ROFLMAO!