Being a human, it's a given that everybody will be wrong at some point of other. Listening to authority on a certain subject, you can only adjust down the probability of them being wrong. Words are, after all, just words, and the only measure is verifiable experiment.
Well, I've flashed bioses, firmwares and roms for 20 years, and never once bricked anything. Maybe that's because I usually read the instructions carefully and follow them religiously. I say this is the case of RTFM.
I've found nirvana with Nokia N9. I get root access shell without breaking anything. ssh into the phone. apt-get at leisure. Phone feels great, works a treat as a phone, camera is cool, battery lasts long and I'm not wanting for features or apps. Survived many a fall to tarmac or concrete. Knocking up apps in Qt is a doddle. I know it's not going to last, but for now it's as good as it gets.
There are ways to instigate a change without being loud about it. When you write your code, write it pretty, well documented and with great unit tests. When you are releasing, write good release notes. When you are in charge of a feature, do good code reviews. Make code review templates. Write good documentation. See what happens.
If you really want to put this on the corporate agenda, you need to convince the person making technical decisions. If this gets on his or her agenda, things will happen. Beware when approaching this person - you've been thinking about this for weeks or months, while it may be quite a new idea for them. It may take a while for things to sink in. Don't expect it will happen quickly, or even the way you think is right. Plant the seeds and tend to them as they grow. Be prepared for resistance among coders too - writing docs, tests and releases are rarely seen as very compelling work, especially with tight deadlines.
Before doing anything though, you need to think about how important this is to the business. To you, it may seem like a very important thing and a complete no-brainer. However, you may not have all the information necessary to make this decision for the business. To the product and business people, the opposite may equally seem like a no brainer. All they care about is that it does the job and hits the market when they need it. Tech leaders are often enslaved to this kind of stuff.
Also, in my experience, many times a rewrite / major refactoring ends up costing too much and producing little benefit in the long run. Old idisyncracies are replaced by new ones and key sections of the code - often most critical to the business - end up scarred by changes around them and not better in any way. Be prepared to encounter people with similar experience and perhaps a bit of resistance along those lines.
Why do you keep referring to the latest release as a patch and a bugfix? The only change was in configuration - while before you could run unsigned applers, now you can only run signed ones. No patching / clever bugfixing was involved.
And in response to commenter suggesting putting Java-in-browser out of misery, the last 'patch' was designed to do just that. The only way to decently run an applet is to have it signed by expensive code signing certs.
This post is horrendous. Apart from plugging in several links that fail any notability test, the case is not notable either as there are much cooler and much more expensive cases around, the video is cropped to oblivion and player controls don't fit in the video frame either. If only I could fathom why did I waste another minute on commenting???
Copying other people's ideas is not necessarily a bad thing. Claiming the ideas as your own, without crediting the sources is
So, how about crediting the ideas to the right people?
Technologies like this are very expensive to develop, test and prove safe, and then also commercialise on a large enough scale to pay off the huge initial investment. There is perhaps the analogy with our use of silicon in electronics. There are some cool alternative technologies with huge potential, but we still use silicon because we have invested in capacity, and tech has been honed by 50 years of continual, global investment in R&D and fabrication.
I've been following the thorium story for years. I'll believe it's time has come when large industry players announce commercial reactors. I don't believe for a second that a startup or a small lab can sustain the level of investment or have scale of capability to commercialise technology like this one.
After pj's opened nearby, my kid wanted to try their pizza. I included my mobile in the online order because we were on our way home - in case delivery arrives before we do. I was completely unprepared for the torrent of messages that has ensued. It took me weeks and many calls to get messages to stop. I only bought their pizza 2 or 3 times since, always in shop, always refusing to provide any details no metter how adamant they were (they want it all btw) and only paying cash.
Just finished re-reading the Time Machine by H G Wells today, which romanticises along similar lines - as far as the future is concerned.
While decay has been assumed for a while (not least by MJ's Idiocracy) I suppose the novelty in this paper is extrapolation to the past. Nice one.
Most organisations - commercial and governmental - have to conduct business under certain rules. I don't like being on CCTV, but here in London they have become a part of life through reducing insurance to businesses and yes, reduction in street and public transport crime.
Joe Random on the street with a camera is a different proposition. A much more menacing one. First, you immediately know you are dealing with a nutjob, who's focused on you. Second, you don't expect any scrupules from said nutjob, or that he'll lose his job or get in hot water if he misuses the footage - a reasonable expectation for CCTV camera operators.
The difference is accountability.
Cheap car-cams are all over ebay - for about £30 + sd card, you can get motion activated, hd cams with substantial lithium batteries and a range of features. Some are crap, some are awesome - use common sense when sorting through ebay...
Most can also chop (e.g. 1 hour blocks) and cycle (e.g. auto-delete oldest). Depending on your quality settings, sd card size etc, you may be able to leave it until there is something dumped (as long as you check and recharge / replace battery occasionally).
Beware of trees though - wind can trigger motion sensors and easily eat up batteries.
How about Nasa and Google ( or another interested business/third party) come together and make a complete, consistent, as-detailed-as-hubble map of the sky? Like Google Sky, but with consistent snaps of the quality that would surpass any ground based telescope?
After the first run, do a second and third scan, with perhaps a year or two between runs. With a bit of analysis - software or otherwise - it should be possible to develop a detailed _dynamic_ picture at various scales.
This would essentially present a huge opportunity for both, professional and amateur astronomers. Almost like everybody having their own hubble?
Ok, first for 50 people you may be in a good place to take up managed filtering. Check out Postini, MessageLabs and Email Systems to name a few. These are professional top quality managed filtering services. This is $2-4 per user per month and includes anti-virus, anti-phishing and such. This is also extremely easy to set up and remember, somebody else is running it for you. This is utter bliss really.
I am personally using my own mail server and I did the simplest possible thing - every incoming connection is checked against dnsbls: sorbs, spamhaus and spamcop (all three allow you to look up addresses for free). This blocks nearly all spam and after nearly a year I've never had a false positive.
If you are into setting up and running something yourself, you can use spamassasin (free oss). This is not terribly hard to set up, but worried about false positives I never really used it. I am filtering for a small number of savvy people using Thunderbird...
Speaking of which, thunderbird has a reasonably decent filtering feature. It takes a while to 'learn' but it has been quite useful in filtering out the few leaking spam messages from dnsbls.
There are countless commercial packages and I bet somebody else will cover that.
Hope this helps
Not the first time not the last. Just the tactics - spread FUD and pinch a slice of the market. Year down the line, do it again. That's a cunning and ruthless corporate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaselweasel for you.
On the funny side, note that wikipedia article on weasels is compromised by 'weasel words':)
First, the ship would be constantly moving because of waves. This makes it a tad harder to heat up one spot to igniting and means that the spot would have to be fairly large for this to work. Bigger spot means that we need more mirror surface to heat it enough to ignite.
Second, solid mirror would have fixed focal distance. That means such weapon would have fairly limited range.
Interesting comment. Glad to hear from people that know what they are talking about.
Few minor corrections though:
> It is hard,... to run exactly the same software on all phones
Indeed it is but this has never been a goal. Due to simple fact that most phones will have different screen size etc, applications are typically written for wither a particular phone or platform (series60 or UIQ)
> Java on the phones is so crippled (e.g. not being able to open a file) due to their security fears that it is useful only for games and trivial applications.
This is only true for some early models. Java released in Symbian 8.0 implements full JSR-075 PIM and File connection. The problem was rather that standard was incomplete and implementation could not be released under such circumstances (e.g. no compatibility tests etc).
Cheers
The Arc-chart article is factually wrong and assumptions made based on these 'facts' are very close to being rediculous.
I don't really have the time to dispell all errors in the article but I must address a few.
First, porting Series 60 user interface, and especially Nokia's base applications to linux is implausible - more likely scenario in that case is a complete rewrite due to heavy use of Symbian specific features such as comm/file/... servers, active objects, IPC and finally security.
Java VM sold as part of Series 60 is Sun's CLDC HI ported and maintained by Symbian, not 'written by Nokia' as the article claims. In addition to core MIDP2 features, most other major features such as PIM and file access (JSR-075), multimedia, bluetooth (JSR-82), location API, access to SMS and MMS are all developed and maintained by Symbian. Nokia does have a considerable Java resource but to my knowledge most of them work on integration, future (possibly CDC) and of course Series 40 (Nokia's non-symbian OS and UI).
Nokia has put in £50 million over it's licensing fees in 2004 to help Symbian and that was at the time of the Psion sale. The suggestion that Symbian license fees are something troubling Nokia is really really out of place because a) Nokia owns close to 50% of the company b) Nokia has ~$20 billion idle in the bank.
Symbian phones constitute 10% of Nokia's sales - Nokia has a large set of non-symbian technologies such as Series 40 - for their mainstream phones. This explains why has Nokia licensed ActiveSync and Window Media DRM directly, rather than through Symbian - so they can actually use it in non-Symbian phones.
Finally, using the announcement of 770 to draw conclusions about N-S relationship will not lead us very far. Following the same logic, if hotmail was using freebsd (at some point at least) would that mean that Microsoft is ditching Windows?
That's exactly my point. This is not a tech news site nor are most of it's readers reasonably intelligent and informed (moderators included). Had that been the case, F-Secure et al that know viruses would have entertained this dumb rant.
Funny though, even when you feed people knowledge on a teaspoon they keep throwing up crap.
Trying to infect Prius with a Symbian "virus" is like trying to infect a tree with a choc chip cookie . Hey I can come up with a better one - it's like trying to infect shampoo with a book on eating disorders (now go picture that in your head for a second).
Slashdot Mirror
Being a human, it's a given that everybody will be wrong at some point of other. Listening to authority on a certain subject, you can only adjust down the probability of them being wrong. Words are, after all, just words, and the only measure is verifiable experiment.
Well, I've flashed bioses, firmwares and roms for 20 years, and never once bricked anything. Maybe that's because I usually read the instructions carefully and follow them religiously. I say this is the case of RTFM.
I've found nirvana with Nokia N9. I get root access shell without breaking anything. ssh into the phone. apt-get at leisure. Phone feels great, works a treat as a phone, camera is cool, battery lasts long and I'm not wanting for features or apps. Survived many a fall to tarmac or concrete. Knocking up apps in Qt is a doddle. I know it's not going to last, but for now it's as good as it gets.
There are ways to instigate a change without being loud about it. When you write your code, write it pretty, well documented and with great unit tests. When you are releasing, write good release notes. When you are in charge of a feature, do good code reviews. Make code review templates. Write good documentation. See what happens.
If you really want to put this on the corporate agenda, you need to convince the person making technical decisions. If this gets on his or her agenda, things will happen. Beware when approaching this person - you've been thinking about this for weeks or months, while it may be quite a new idea for them. It may take a while for things to sink in. Don't expect it will happen quickly, or even the way you think is right. Plant the seeds and tend to them as they grow. Be prepared for resistance among coders too - writing docs, tests and releases are rarely seen as very compelling work, especially with tight deadlines.
Before doing anything though, you need to think about how important this is to the business. To you, it may seem like a very important thing and a complete no-brainer. However, you may not have all the information necessary to make this decision for the business. To the product and business people, the opposite may equally seem like a no brainer. All they care about is that it does the job and hits the market when they need it. Tech leaders are often enslaved to this kind of stuff.
Also, in my experience, many times a rewrite / major refactoring ends up costing too much and producing little benefit in the long run. Old idisyncracies are replaced by new ones and key sections of the code - often most critical to the business - end up scarred by changes around them and not better in any way. Be prepared to encounter people with similar experience and perhaps a bit of resistance along those lines.
Why do you keep referring to the latest release as a patch and a bugfix? The only change was in configuration - while before you could run unsigned applers, now you can only run signed ones. No patching / clever bugfixing was involved. And in response to commenter suggesting putting Java-in-browser out of misery, the last 'patch' was designed to do just that. The only way to decently run an applet is to have it signed by expensive code signing certs.
This post is horrendous. Apart from plugging in several links that fail any notability test, the case is not notable either as there are much cooler and much more expensive cases around, the video is cropped to oblivion and player controls don't fit in the video frame either. If only I could fathom why did I waste another minute on commenting???
Copying other people's ideas is not necessarily a bad thing. Claiming the ideas as your own, without crediting the sources is So, how about crediting the ideas to the right people?
Technologies like this are very expensive to develop, test and prove safe, and then also commercialise on a large enough scale to pay off the huge initial investment. There is perhaps the analogy with our use of silicon in electronics. There are some cool alternative technologies with huge potential, but we still use silicon because we have invested in capacity, and tech has been honed by 50 years of continual, global investment in R&D and fabrication. I've been following the thorium story for years. I'll believe it's time has come when large industry players announce commercial reactors. I don't believe for a second that a startup or a small lab can sustain the level of investment or have scale of capability to commercialise technology like this one.
Aggressive bitches. What about Nokia 920?
Maybe they'll finally discover who dealt those farts (methane) on mars. Just hope it's not "he who dealt it smelt it" like in 1974.
After pj's opened nearby, my kid wanted to try their pizza. I included my mobile in the online order because we were on our way home - in case delivery arrives before we do. I was completely unprepared for the torrent of messages that has ensued. It took me weeks and many calls to get messages to stop. I only bought their pizza 2 or 3 times since, always in shop, always refusing to provide any details no metter how adamant they were (they want it all btw) and only paying cash.
It's got electrolytes.
Just finished re-reading the Time Machine by H G Wells today, which romanticises along similar lines - as far as the future is concerned. While decay has been assumed for a while (not least by MJ's Idiocracy) I suppose the novelty in this paper is extrapolation to the past. Nice one.
Most organisations - commercial and governmental - have to conduct business under certain rules. I don't like being on CCTV, but here in London they have become a part of life through reducing insurance to businesses and yes, reduction in street and public transport crime.
Joe Random on the street with a camera is a different proposition. A much more menacing one. First, you immediately know you are dealing with a nutjob, who's focused on you. Second, you don't expect any scrupules from said nutjob, or that he'll lose his job or get in hot water if he misuses the footage - a reasonable expectation for CCTV camera operators.
The difference is accountability.
Cheap car-cams are all over ebay - for about £30 + sd card, you can get motion activated, hd cams with substantial lithium batteries and a range of features. Some are crap, some are awesome - use common sense when sorting through ebay... Most can also chop (e.g. 1 hour blocks) and cycle (e.g. auto-delete oldest). Depending on your quality settings, sd card size etc, you may be able to leave it until there is something dumped (as long as you check and recharge / replace battery occasionally). Beware of trees though - wind can trigger motion sensors and easily eat up batteries.
How about Nasa and Google ( or another interested business/third party) come together and make a complete, consistent, as-detailed-as-hubble map of the sky? Like Google Sky, but with consistent snaps of the quality that would surpass any ground based telescope? After the first run, do a second and third scan, with perhaps a year or two between runs. With a bit of analysis - software or otherwise - it should be possible to develop a detailed _dynamic_ picture at various scales. This would essentially present a huge opportunity for both, professional and amateur astronomers. Almost like everybody having their own hubble?
I am personally using my own mail server and I did the simplest possible thing - every incoming connection is checked against dnsbls: sorbs, spamhaus and spamcop (all three allow you to look up addresses for free). This blocks nearly all spam and after nearly a year I've never had a false positive.
If you are into setting up and running something yourself, you can use spamassasin (free oss). This is not terribly hard to set up, but worried about false positives I never really used it. I am filtering for a small number of savvy people using Thunderbird...
Speaking of which, thunderbird has a reasonably decent filtering feature. It takes a while to 'learn' but it has been quite useful in filtering out the few leaking spam messages from dnsbls.
There are countless commercial packages and I bet somebody else will cover that. Hope this helps
Not the first time not the last. Just the tactics - spread FUD and pinch a slice of the market. Year down the line, do it again. That's a cunning and ruthless corporate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaselweasel for you.
:)
On the funny side, note that wikipedia article on weasels is compromised by 'weasel words'
There are good sides to this... At least we know who's snooping...
Two points I haven't seen anybody raise.
First, the ship would be constantly moving because of waves. This makes it a tad harder to heat up one spot to igniting and means that the spot would have to be fairly large for this to work. Bigger spot means that we need more mirror surface to heat it enough to ignite.
Second, solid mirror would have fixed focal distance. That means such weapon would have fairly limited range.
Interesting comment. Glad to hear from people that know what they are talking about. Few minor corrections though: > It is hard, ... to run exactly the same software on all phones
Indeed it is but this has never been a goal. Due to simple fact that most phones will have different screen size etc, applications are typically written for wither a particular phone or platform (series60 or UIQ)
> Java on the phones is so crippled (e.g. not being able to open a file) due to their security fears that it is useful only for games and trivial applications.
This is only true for some early models. Java released in Symbian 8.0 implements full JSR-075 PIM and File connection. The problem was rather that standard was incomplete and implementation could not be released under such circumstances (e.g. no compatibility tests etc).
Cheers
The Arc-chart article is factually wrong and assumptions made based on these 'facts' are very close to being rediculous.
I don't really have the time to dispell all errors in the article but I must address a few.
First, porting Series 60 user interface, and especially Nokia's base applications to linux is implausible - more likely scenario in that case is a complete rewrite due to heavy use of Symbian specific features such as comm/file/... servers, active objects, IPC and finally security.
Java VM sold as part of Series 60 is Sun's CLDC HI ported and maintained by Symbian, not 'written by Nokia' as the article claims. In addition to core MIDP2 features, most other major features such as PIM and file access (JSR-075), multimedia, bluetooth (JSR-82), location API, access to SMS and MMS are all developed and maintained by Symbian. Nokia does have a considerable Java resource but to my knowledge most of them work on integration, future (possibly CDC) and of course Series 40 (Nokia's non-symbian OS and UI).
Nokia has put in £50 million over it's licensing fees in 2004 to help Symbian and that was at the time of the Psion sale. The suggestion that Symbian license fees are something troubling Nokia is really really out of place because a) Nokia owns close to 50% of the company b) Nokia has ~$20 billion idle in the bank.
Symbian phones constitute 10% of Nokia's sales - Nokia has a large set of non-symbian technologies such as Series 40 - for their mainstream phones. This explains why has Nokia licensed ActiveSync and Window Media DRM directly, rather than through Symbian - so they can actually use it in non-Symbian phones.
Finally, using the announcement of 770 to draw conclusions about N-S relationship will not lead us very far. Following the same logic, if hotmail was using freebsd (at some point at least) would that mean that Microsoft is ditching Windows?
That's exactly my point. This is not a tech news site nor are most of it's readers reasonably intelligent and informed (moderators included). Had that been the case, F-Secure et al that know viruses would have entertained this dumb rant. Funny though, even when you feed people knowledge on a teaspoon they keep throwing up crap.
This is really good, you guys are killing me.
1 486620).
Trying to infect Prius with a Symbian "virus" is like trying to infect a tree with a choc chip cookie . Hey I can come up with a better one - it's like trying to infect shampoo with a book on eating disorders (now go picture that in your head for a second).
I won't go into debunking this as I have already done that (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=137390&cid=1
But this is so sweet - it takes one dumb kid with too much time on their hands and one even dumber kid to moderate at voila! you get slashdot "news".
Don't you love it!
> ... Europeans were somewhat hypocritical in their
> objections to Wolfowitz.
Now please redefine hypocritical so I can see how...