It has been interesting to delve back into coding again and after a couple of days I found myself back at home inside the Pascal language using the still superior Borland IDE. Delphi is still a much easier way to write programs even when compared to the all but latest versions of Visual Studio. Since I have yet to open Visual Studio 2010 I’m not sure how that has been improved from the version I am using today.
Delphi always suffered from having to get a new version of the components for each version of Delphi something I found both annoying and more of a money making exercise for component developers that something that was really necessary to implement. Like most languages any differences come down to syntax and the objects available to be used in the development process.
Programming is also a very time intensive process. It is very easy to get lost in the code as the hours fly by. Many other work activities allow the individual to take regular breaks as the focus shifts between different processes. A gnarly programming problem can really focus the mind and the attention so that all external distractions are filtered out. This process also tends to leave me at least mentally exhausted after 9 straight hours so when I get home anything, like my blog, tend to be forgotten as I collapse in front of the TV to unwind.
Why am I telling you this? If you work with or supervise programmers then the above is a reminder of what many programmers experience on a daily basis. It also highlights that the work to play ratio is very high for programmers while for most other job types it averages out at around 6 : 2 for a normal eight hour day, i.e. expect to get about 6 hours of real work from an employee. Programmers (the good ones) tend to be closer to 7.5 : 0.5.
Industry News
The Windows Phone 7 operating system was introduced to solve all of Microsoft’s problems with mobile phone sales, the smarter versions at least. Sadly for MS it has not worked, in the US at least. They are now about eight percent of market share down from nearly ten three months ago. Android is now number 1 finally moving past RIM (Research in Motion) for the first time to hit 31.2 percent. Microsoft itself has not provided their own sales numbers and these figures come courtesy of comScore.
The results show that phones with Windows Phone 7 did not do well over Christmas but to be fair there were not very many models out back then. Even today only Asus, LG, Dell, HTC and Samsung have models with the OS installed partly because of the restrictions that Microsoft has put in place for the hardware configuration requirements.
At the same time Samsung and HTC have been getting very busy with Android models with more on the horizon. It is also difficult when you start will effectively no market share in the modern market. It looks like Windows Phone 7 will not be the savior for Microsoft in the smart phone market and this could see the send for the software giant in this field.
If you have a Honeycomb Android phone and are prepared to do a bit of work you can probably connect yourself to the Google music cloud service. You need to install the latest build of the music player, not yet officially supported by Google, and sync your music tracks with the cloud that can them be streamed right back at you. While all this really does is give you more internal phone memory and many are betting that Google will soon have a desktop version of their product that can be used to receive the music to multiple sources. Some from the Hacker community have also modified Gingerbread’s player to do the same thing.
The real question, as always, is how the media providers are going to view this technology from a copyright perspective. In some countries the fair use provisions will allow purchased music to be used to way by the owner. In other places, notably the UK, such provisions are not allowed so expect the copyright holders to grump their way into your life because they are so far behind the times when it comes to digital music.
Ipv6 is here
You’re right I can’t just leave it at that. If you remember a while back I wrote explaining how the Internet was running out of address space. To fix this a new type of IP address was defined to allow for more sites to be created. This is known as IP version 6 or Ipv6.
The present protocol is IPv4 which can support 4.3 billion addresses. With smartphones spreading in places like India and China it is easy to see how such a range can rapidly vanish. IPv6 pushes the limit to 3.4 with 38 zeros after it. Given that there are an estimated 1 with 19 zeros after it insects on the planet at any given time I’m guessing that this will be the last time we have to change the IP protocol. It is interesting that while all the IPv4 blocks have now been allocated it is estimated that around half of them are not actually in use. This means that the IPv4 marketplace will be active for a few years yet.
The new protocol is not all good news however. Consider a function like Spam filtering. This normally works by keeping a list of known bad IP addresses that has been built up over time. This is not the only method used in the filtering process but it is often a significant one. The introduction of IPv6 reduces the ability of such a process and will require a new approach. As the number of possibilities expands so does the ability to scan and check all the new possibilities. This will making defending networks, search engines and other things more difficult.
Imagine a spammer now having access to a few billion addresses. The would be able to use each one only ones making the filtering option impossible If the number spread is random enough. There are enough new addresses that they could even send a single e-mail from a single address foiling the e-mail limits currently in place.
Initially it is expected that ISPs will apply some fairly tight controls in incoming messages from an IPv6 server and IPv6 networks in general. For the time being mail is working just fine across the existing IPv4 networks and initially it is expected that mail from trusted sources only will be received. IPv6 mail servers will also need to support IPv4 for quite a long time. On the plus side IPv6 might also make it a bit harder for the hackers because port scanning becomes more difficult.
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