Phone, Tablet and Gizmo Thread #0x02

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 18 Jul 2013 09:05

looks like I need to get with the pgm. imported all chrome bookmarks into FF yesterday. need to recheck all got pulled in and sort them back into proper lists before cutting over this weekend.

"the few the proud" can continue in college computer lab mode with everything in beta subject to their red bull + free backrubs + vodka fueled creative thoughts .... I am too old for that sort of gig now.

member_23651 · Post by **member_23651** » 18 Jul 2013 09:16

Singha wrote:getting disappointed with Chrome. many a time after its open for hours and many tabs are opened and closed, it fails to open a URL as a new tab and will just sit there with white or black screen. when that happens sometimes even the other tabs dont work. a process restart is needed.

I am thinking of crawling back with bandaged musharaff to Firefox (like starscream always runs away fast when in danger, but crawls back to show his undying loyalty to megatron later) ... has old school looks but never had this issue. just need to figure out how to import all chrome bookmarks and its time to play faithful all-lie in TSP style.

Chrome is such a memory hogger.. keep open few tabs in chrome for some time, and see the damn thing consuming memory, which is amazing. Firefox is better but only slightly. Good old days when chrome was fast light browser seems to be vanishing fast

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 18 Jul 2013 09:35

people seem to have taken the "free 1TB of cloud storage, forever" motto into the RAM world and coded along those lines

the people who could code C or assembly in very constrained and fault intolerant environments are on verge of retirement or displaced 'forest tribes' chased out of the top dog consumer facing cos into some poisonous niche like remote sensors or military avionics.

the field it would seem is open to the next gen munnas and their new philosophies

they learnt programming using java or c++ and want to run everything out of a browser. if it fails , gee just close the tab or app and start over again.

ArmenT · Post by **ArmenT** » 18 Jul 2013 10:18

saip wrote:How do you wake up a sleeping computer? My desktop is wired and the card is set to wake up the computer. I can wake up the computer within my home network but not from the internet. I send a magic packet while logged into my home network and it wakes up but if I am logged into say my neighbor's network it does not work.

Yes, but is there a firewall between you and the outside internet. The breath-of-life packet might not be routed in from outside.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 18 Jul 2013 17:41

Raja Bose wrote:
niran wrote: so my dread of "micky will conquer the world is getting true"
Mort tau ko buray sapne mat dikhaiye hakim saheb!

No bigee. If Sinofsky was in charge instead of Ballmer, there may be reason to have that worry.

Here's the deal as Vinaji has been saying. MSFT is the IBM of the 1960s & 70s. They are big and can do a lot of things. When you have solid profits coming from corporates & government, why take risks? Yes, you can do stuff like Scurface, Xbox, WP, Kin, Zune, etc. and some of it may stick, which is all great. It is about choice, for corporate use MSFT is great, but for personal, hobbyist and creative use, not so much. IBM in computing has been around since post WWII over 60 years and the company is still older than that. I expect MSFT to be around for more than 60 years as well. There was a time when I needed to have IBM DoS to be happy, similarly the same is true with Windows.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 18 Jul 2013 17:52

has the device and gadget wars reached the times where i can expect a true, plugin to any carrier, standardized interfaces to storage device, std camera and display, std. data exchange from one device into another without having any network issues, any technology adapter - cdma/gsm/, no locking devices, no plan based use, etc..?

prahaar · Post by **prahaar** » 18 Jul 2013 17:55

payment issues to rahenge na Saikji. Different providers do not always bridge. At least not globally.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 18 Jul 2013 17:59

aah! tell that to any gujju, he will get you setup on a b2b framework! seriously gujjus are realistic enterprenuers. they will get their cut/share/commissions to increase their waste lines, while the back end business folks can toil to integrate. /joke.

what i am saying is payment should not be a problem

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 18 Jul 2013 18:29

Mort Walker wrote: No bigee. If Sinofsky was in charge instead of Ballmer, there may be reason to have that worry.

Hamara takniki hum se hi churay ho

Koi baat nahin, hum comment ko NOT gate se pass kara dete hain.

saip · Post by **saip** » 18 Jul 2013 18:44

ArmenT wrote:
saip wrote:How do you wake up a sleeping computer? My desktop is wired and the card is set to wake up the computer. I can wake up the computer within my home network but not from the internet. I send a magic packet while logged into my home network and it wakes up but if I am logged into say my neighbor's network it does not work.
Yes, but is there a firewall between you and the outside internet. The breath-of-life packet might not be routed in from outside.

But you can change the firewall settings so that it allows certain traffic in. For eg I can access my desktop remotely if it is on even from India. RDP is allowed in by the firewall. But the WOL (wake on lan) does not work. My desktop uses 70W when it is running and 4W when it goes to sleep. I will be in China in a few days and as far as I know RDP is the only way to access BR from China! How else can I get my daily fix of BR?

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 18 Jul 2013 19:59

Raja Bose wrote:
Mort Walker wrote: No bigee. If Sinofsky was in charge instead of Ballmer, there may be reason to have that worry.
Hamara takniki hum se hi churay ho Koi baat nahin, hum comment ko NOT gate se pass kara dete hain.

I don't recall when you said that, but ok, I'm happy to acknowledge it's your idea. Khush haamare pyaare?

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 18 Jul 2013 21:03

^^^arrey rakh lo tau. aap buzurg hain....aapki khushi mein hi hamari khushi hai

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 18 Jul 2013 21:40

Retailers prep store shelves for new Nexus 7, 32GB version arrives next week for $270

Personally, I would wait until its been out for 3-4 weeks before getting one. GOOG has had trouble with their Nexus products in the first batch of production and the 2nd has been better. This does not hold true for the Samsung produced Nexus products. Those have been pretty reliable. When the Nexus 4 came out last November, I bought it along with several friends and 3 of 6 had to be sent back due to issues with the build quality or bad battery.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 18 Jul 2013 21:44

Mort Walker wrote:This does not hold true for the Samsung produced Nexus products. Those have been pretty reliable.

You mean like the Nexus 10 which sold less than even the "has no apps" and "has no free storage left" 32GB Surface RT?

Considering every Nexus device Sammy has put its grubby hands on has been a major flop, Chacha would be well advised to stick to more sincere partners like HTC or Asus.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 18 Jul 2013 22:09

Raja Bose wrote:Hamara takniki hum se hi churay ho Koi baat nahin, hum comment ko NOT gate se pass kara dete hain.

On that note, I made up an Ajit ke phatta:

Ajit: Is bande ko "Rum" pila ke NOT gate main dal do.
Sidey: Boss, par kyon?
Ajit: Arrey bewakuf, yeh to "muR" jayega.

nachiket · Post by **nachiket** » 18 Jul 2013 23:50

saip wrote: I will be in China in a few days and as far as I know RDP is the only way to access BR from China! How else can I get my daily fix of BR?

You mean BR is banned in China? So where do all the cheeni dlones log in from?

SS_sharma · Post by **SS_sharma** » 19 Jul 2013 04:19

nachiket wrote:
saip wrote: I will be in China in a few days and as far as I know RDP is the only way to access BR from China! How else can I get my daily fix of BR?
You mean BR is banned in China? So where do all the cheeni dlones log in from?

accessing BR gives issues from atleast 2 countries that i know of.

saip · Post by **saip** » 19 Jul 2013 04:26

Pakiland the other country?

vina · Post by **vina** » 19 Jul 2013 05:40

Lo Ji. With the price cuts, Mickey S$T took a massive inventory write down on the Surface tablets in stock! Stock cracked of course. Office franchise is slipping along with Windows.

Are' Kalia, ab tumhara kya hoga ?

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 19 Jul 2013 06:36

Their enterprise business is quite stable. Remember that unlike the consumer market, change is very slow there. Amidst the hoopla of PC shipments falling, people havent noticed that their servers & tools business and business division have mind blowing margins.

I feel change in the company towards Infrastructure-as-a-service and cloud-based productivity apps are coming from these divisions. The windows division on the other hand, doesnt seem to know where its head is and where its musharraf is. They sold windows Vista and later windows 7 almost by default, because they didnt have any real competition. Now they have to earn their money.

Nokia's handset hardware are top notch, comparable if not better than the fare dished out by FruitCo and various Androids. Surface RT hardware is top notch hardware-wise. Results from both GB and from M$ with its $900 million write down of SurfaceRT seems to indicate that they are not selling as well. The blame can be laid squarely on the software and services powering them and not on the hardware.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 19 Jul 2013 06:52

have to say the lumia chassis from 520 upward looks like solid pieces of work. more sturdy looking than galaxy chassis or the crowd of me-too chipanda 4-6" glass panels. the colourful cases round off the sturdy chunky look.

vina · Post by **vina** » 19 Jul 2013 06:58

Anujan wrote:Their enterprise business is quite stable. Remember that unlike the consumer market, change is very slow there. Amidst the hoopla of PC shipments falling, people havent noticed that their servers & tools business and business division have mind blowing margins.

In Inglees, what you are saying is that Mickey Enterprise tools & business and software is the new IBM MVS/VM/DB2/IMS/CICS/IM and other franchises, which too have mind blowing margins and a "stable" market , even today , in fact more so today than any other time in history, now that any lingering competition in that franchise is gone (last being CA and their tools).

Welcome back to the fyoochur ji.. Welcome to 1982!

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 19 Jul 2013 07:03

same thing happened in storage, networking, asics ... a few behemoths dominate the forest and there is a lack of small "mammals" rising to challenge the reptiles. will need a yucatan type "event' to change playing field like suddenly VCs pour $1 trillion into some sector like they allegedly poured some $750b into networking/storage startups in 1990s.

for now the reptiles rule.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 19 Jul 2013 07:29

Vina ji
> MVS/VM/DB2/IMS/CICS/IM

(What is IM - IMS? but you already listed that

) I still remember some of this stuff even today and can start programming in COBOL, PL/I, or FORTRAN - even BAL. Then there is CSP - remember? - that used to net $120K in NYC back in 1987-88, or AS.

What is the going rate today? ISPF, REXX ...

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 19 Jul 2013 08:08

^can be proven wrong if someone by the handle "China" IEDs a breaper.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 19 Jul 2013 08:12

vina wrote:
Anujan wrote:Their enterprise business is quite stable. Remember that unlike the consumer market, change is very slow there. Amidst the hoopla of PC shipments falling, people havent noticed that their servers & tools business and business division have mind blowing margins.
In Inglees, what you are saying is that Mickey Enterprise tools & business and software is the new IBM MVS/VM/DB2/IMS/CICS/IM and other franchises, which too have mind blowing margins and a "stable" market , even today , in fact more so today than any other time in history, now that any lingering competition in that franchise is gone (last being CA and their tools).

Welcome back to the fyoochur ji.. Welcome to 1982!

Aapne woh kahawat suni nahin....History repeats itself!

In terms of cloud, all of Mickey's services are cloud based now and have same UX as their native birathers - this is important to keep the faithfool to continue to use them.

BTW that ~$700m out of the $900m write off is mysteriously for the MS Office part of Surface RT, not for the device. There's some madrassa math going on for tax purposes there too which I am not totally clear on.

Chacha needs to ditch Motor Oil and gobble up someone actually skilled like HTC or Asus. Motor Oil just keeps dragging their otherwise good results down. When Sammy decides to act like the boss, its doubtful if Motor Oil will provide Chacha with the hedge it needs. OTOH HTC certainly can and I would think so can Asus given their long history in CE.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 19 Jul 2013 08:27

Raja Bose wrote:
Mort Walker wrote:This does not hold true for the Samsung produced Nexus products. Those have been pretty reliable.
You mean like the Nexus 10 which sold less than even the "has no apps" and "has no free storage left" 32GB Surface RT?

Considering every Nexus device Sammy has put its grubby hands on has been a major flop, Chacha would be well advised to stick to more sincere partners like HTC or Asus.

Sammy segments the market and the Nexus 10 is just one of many Android and Windows tablets. It sold 20 million in 2012 and is still going gangbusters, but I don't know how many this year. Perhaps you can tell me? I do know that Sammy is over 15% of all tablet sales worldwide. I'm waiting for their dual boot tablet, Windows or Android ATIV. Sammy's net profit is more than Micky too.

I know you hate Sammy, but their Nexus h/w is pretty reliable. Asus is hit and miss, and HTC? Woh tho murgaya hai. Or one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 19 Jul 2013 08:56

Sammy Signs New Deal with Apple for 14nm SoC for iPhone 7

It shows Sammy manufacturing strength.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 19 Jul 2013 09:05

Has anyone seen this? Are there alternatives to it?

TILE

vina · Post by **vina** » 19 Jul 2013 09:14

matrimc wrote:Vina ji
> MVS/VM/DB2/IMS/CICS/IM

(What is IM - IMS? but you already listed that )

I don't remember the name of the TP monitor before CICS, it was IM something? Oh. Thanks to Google Chacha it is was IMS-DB for the database and DC for the TP monitor.

I still remember some of this stuff even today and can start programming in COBOL, PL/I, or FORTRAN - even BAL. Then there is CSP - remember? - that used to net $120K in NYC back in 1987-88, or AS.
What is the going rate today? ISPF, REXX ...

No idea. But , think of it. You write stuff on one of these things, it runs no problem o, no memory leaks, no "garbage collection" garbage that runs somewhere, a 16 bit processor with processing power of orders of magnitude less than a today's desktop (why I think the processor on the IPhunwa would be more powerfool) supported thousands of users and tens of thousands of transactions with incredible reliability , switch it on, and then switch it off only after 25 years to send it to the junkyard..

Compare that to the systems today. The cr*p keeps breaking down more often than Sienna Miller, stuff freezes up because some anti virus or some garbage keeps running or some "upgrades" are getting downloaded and applied.

Unix was crap compared to the IBM MVS and DEC VAX-VMS, but because it was free, it caught on, Windows was crappier , and now it is scary that mission critical stuff is now being run on Unix which is considered "reliable" (with all that pointer arithmetic and memory manipulation code in C and C++) , with now running Java junk and Mickey S*t is now an "Enterprise" company (the irony of it all), considering that IBM gave a leg up to Mickey saaft as a toy for the computing enthusiast hippies.

ArmenT · Post by **ArmenT** » 19 Jul 2013 11:03

saip wrote:
ArmenT wrote: Yes, but is there a firewall between you and the outside internet. The breath-of-life packet might not be routed in from outside.
But you can change the firewall settings so that it allows certain traffic in. For eg I can access my desktop remotely if it is on even from India. RDP is allowed in by the firewall. But the WOL (wake on lan) does not work. My desktop uses 70W when it is running and 4W when it goes to sleep. I will be in China in a few days and as far as I know RDP is the only way to access BR from China! How else can I get my daily fix of BR?

Yes, but have you changed your firewall settings to support wake on LAN. Most of the cards I've seen that support Wake on LAN use UDP packets for that, whereas RDP uses the TCP protocol to work. You need to configure your firewall so that it routes packets sent to UDP port 7 or 9 (depending on card model) to your desktop.

vina · Post by **vina** » 19 Jul 2013 12:42

Also, I could never get my arms around this multi threading business in the hands of programmers in Unix and Windoze and Java and all that. Just write a plain jane program , like "Hi Dude", if multiple copies are run simultaneously, just run it under a civilized TP monitor such as CICS/Tuxedo etc and let that do the heavy lifting and scheduling and interleaving and all that, WTF do we trust a bunch of wet behind the ear DOOs allowed to muck around with Mutex and other semaphores and rubbish to make their programs thread safe and then get a kick out of "multi threaded server programming" skills? That kind of crap is the first thing that crashes. Everyone and his mother in law has seen Oracle instances crash/ freeze and get killed multiple times.Ever seen a DB2 instance crash? And at the end of all this, you need a separate monitor and sanity check to account for runaway threads/ open threads and memory leaks and stuff to cover the Musharraf with armor for the mess the DOOs made with terrible programming !

Atleast from what I see (correct me if I am wrong), in Web and App Servers, the CICS/IMS like TP monitor functionality /infra is available and DOOs dont get to muck around with it. Thank goodness.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 19 Jul 2013 12:55

without threads how do you implement things like tabbed browsers or servers that need to handle a series of incoming client requests? sharing between threads is much faster & easier than between separate processes as they share the same data storage.

bad programmers will find a way to murder anything they do, so its a not a problem specific to threads. the pool of programmers has increased hugely, so avg quality has gone steeply down.

vina · Post by **vina** » 19 Jul 2013 18:04

Singha wrote:sharing between threads is much faster & easier than between separate processes as they share the same data storage.

No no.. That is not what I said. Read what I wrote carefully. All I am saying that giving it to a DOO to code the threading and it's management, why not just expose it as a service /facility, that is outside a DOO's control, like what would happen if the same program would run under a TP monitor like CICS. If multiple copies are loaded, CICS does all the thread management and communication and transaction integrity / threadsafe etc. Why give it to a DOO and risk a blow up ?

bad programmers will find a way to murder anything they do, so its a not a problem specific to threads..

True. So what you should do is minimize the chances of scr*w ups. So don't give a precision laser to a butcher!

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 19 Jul 2013 20:17

What?

Okay here is a solution. Why do all this and pay money when you can run two programs on two separate computers and use the other if the first one crashes?

Or even better have two different databases. That is the only sureshot way of not having to use Mutex.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 19 Jul 2013 20:49

and who will pay for dedicated military style computers?

times have changed . munnas want to run everything on tablets and phones including virtual machines. corners have to be cut from the days when only high priests with years of training were allowed into the temple sanctum. in most large shops the dynamics of the swarm form a natural evolution unless distorted by org politics or mgmt ineptitude/lethargy- the hardest problems get done by the best engineers , the best engineers will gravitate into the groups that solve the hardest problems with the highest rewards for their creativity and hard work. the worst engineers will move in other direction, not that they are not needed , someone needs to do the tons of relatively mundane work too. good orgs are those that make sure the right guys are in the right areas 80% of the time and take corrective actions .... once you get the right pilots behind the wheel of the pakfa, mgmt needs to do little except richly reward success because personal drive and naturally meticulous work ethic takes care of so many things...good people have a "flair" you can detect it by just 10 mins of interaction...no more. and I have noted this inspite of any cultural background or education - MIT (in boston) or MIT (muzzafarnagar insst of tech), yahudi, swahili, yindu, kalahari bushman...quality has some common facets.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 19 Jul 2013 21:03

also, there is tremendous capabilities lies in non-blocking i/os.. os controlled, one could do 1000s of process using this approach. ideally done by containers of services and process/threads that needs to wait, and free up cpu for other works.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 19 Jul 2013 21:32

Anujan wrote:What?

Okay here is a solution. Why do all this and pay money when you can run two programs on two separate computers and use the other if the first one crashes?

Or even better have two different databases. That is the only sureshot way of not having to use Mutex.

saip · Post by **saip** » 19 Jul 2013 23:10

ArmenT wrote:Yes, but have you changed your firewall settings to support wake on LAN. Most of the cards I've seen that support Wake on LAN use UDP packets for that, whereas RDP uses the TCP protocol to work. You need to configure your firewall so that it routes packets sent to UDP port 7 or 9 (depending on card model) to your desktop.

Yea I did all that. What is happening is the computer wakes up during the first minute or two. But after that it does not. Which means the packets are coming through. Obviously there are different stages of sleep. The computer seems to go into deeper sleep (just like humans) after a few minutes and nothing from the internet will wake it up.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 20 Jul 2013 03:40

Wikipedia page on CICS doesn't seem to be very kind.

Multiple-user interactive-transaction application programs were required to be quasi-reentrant in order to support multiple concurrent transaction threads. A software coding error in one application could block all users from the system.

Writing thread safe code is a pain. Writing reentrant code is a pain in the mushrraf.

Unfortunately, many of the "rules" were frequently broken, especially by COBOL programmers who might not understand the internals of their programs or fail to use the necessary restrictive compile time options. This resulted in "non-re-entrant" code that was often unreliable, leading to spurious storage violations and entire CICS system crashes.

Partition level memory protection instead of thread level protection.

The entire partition, or Multiple Virtual Storage (MVS) region, operated with the same memory protection key including the CICS kernel code. Program corruption and CICS control block corruption was a frequent cause of system downtime. A software error in one application program could overwrite the memory (code or data) of one or all currently running application transactions. Locating the offending application code for complex transient timing errors could be a very-difficult operating-system analyst problem.

Apparently you needed to be a TFTA to even touch it.

Top-quality CICS skills were in high demand and short supply. The complex learning curve was shallow and long. Unqualified novice developers could have a major negative impact on company operations.

And guess what? They provide support to enterprise Java beans. Probably because GC was improved much. I am aware of the work of David Bacon who worked on project metronome at IBM.

Are you sure that systems of old were really that awesome? I mean the reason I find it hard to believe is because CS has made significant advances in memory consistency models, address space protection, and programming models that hide things like requirement to write renetrant code -- all in the past decade and a half. Or is it just a case of "In my time, we walked 10 miles uphill to go to school and another 10 miles uphill to come back home"