New iPhones...

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Just ordered the XS MAX in Gold :)
We're opening up a bookies line how long it will be before you break the screen on this one..;);)

I keep all my old phones and pass them to family members. Liar, Liar pants on ..charge?? You told me you broke at least 3 with your FA.. how did you give them away??:p:p
 
But you are right of course. All these little improvements add up. I've been working 14-16 hour days these past couple of weeks trying to cut 30ms from a search algorithm, but the starting point was 60ms, so that 30ms is a big deal. And once you've experienced speed, it's difficult to go back. I suppose all these things are grouped under the same term -> responsiveness.

In the words of the great Sir Dave Brailsford, it's all about marginal gains.

I'm hugely intrigued in what you do now because that's how I spend a lot of my time too. I didn't realise you're also a software engineer. :)

Ps you don't need an iMac Pro for iTerm and Sublime Text. :p
 
I don't use Sublime. It's notepad, or notes and have always followed one simple rule - don't go anywhere near a computer until you've designed the code in your head.

  • MAXCredit, the world's first real-time cloud based credit engine. sub 10 sec. credit decisions (business acquired)
  • Commercial credit card for captive corporate finance programmes. Apple, IBM, Compaq (business acquired)
  • Investor trade logic for IPMA Match. Global Bond Markets trading platform (business acquired)
  • Structured product sales and marketing platform
  • Automated universal credit scoring algorithms (Big Data before Big Data!)
  • Original distribution channel for 3D Studio + Animator Pro in UK and Eastern Europe
  • High End graphics distribution - Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland
  • Commissioning Engineer, govt. installations - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Hong Kong etc

These days I keep the wolves at bay designing video interfaces for VFX clients - think Netflix web, but with more features.

Separately I am investing in community software, in particular search driven content - with the aim of increasing written yield, e.g. ensuring site members get to see as much content as possible, in the shortest amount of time. Content is machine classified and sits behind a service similar, but better than ES. Think sub 50ms page builds, with user drilling down to for example, to self help youtube videos showing how to fix X or Y literally in the blink of an eye. Hope to be launching soon, but I've learned in the past that everything needs to be thought through twice and then twice again. So I keep scrapping and reengineering. But it's getting close.
 
but better than ES.

Elastic Search?

That's the backend to the search we're now using since Google discontinued Site-Search last year.

With that career history I'm surprised you still get your hands dirty with the work yourself. I guess if that's what's always worked for you, why would you change a winning recipe.

Awesome, thanks for sharing.
 
I don't use Sublime. It's notepad, or notes and have always followed one simple rule - don't go anywhere near a computer until you've designed the code in your head.

  • MAXCredit, the world's first real-time cloud based credit engine. sub 10 sec. credit decisions (business acquired)
  • Commercial credit card for captive corporate finance programmes. Apple, IBM, Compaq (business acquired)
  • Investor trade logic for IPMA Match. Global Bond Markets trading platform (business acquired)
  • Structured product sales and marketing platform
  • Automated universal credit scoring algorithms (Big Data before Big Data!)
  • Original distribution channel for 3D Studio + Animator Pro in UK and Eastern Europe
  • High End graphics distribution - Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland
  • Commissioning Engineer, govt. installations - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Hong Kong etc

These days I keep the wolves at bay designing video interfaces for VFX clients - think Netflix web, but with more features.

Separately I am investing in community software, in particular search driven content - with the aim of increasing written yield, e.g. ensuring site members get to see as much content as possible, in the shortest amount of time. Content is machine classified and sits behind a service similar, but better than ES. Think sub 50ms page builds, with user drilling down to for example, to self help youtube videos showing how to fix X or Y literally in the blink of an eye. Hope to be launching soon, but I've learned in the past that everything needs to be thought through twice and then twice again. So I keep scrapping and reengineering. But it's getting close.

I simply plumbed in a toilet yesterday! :p
 
Did you manage to get it for delivery on the 21st alps?

So it says :)
 
Elastic Search?

ES answer via PM

With that career history I'm surprised you still get your hands dirty with the work yourself. I guess if that's what's always worked for you, why would you change a winning recipe.

It's my strength. I would no longer consider myself a professional coder - but prototyping my own stuff keeps me ahead of the curve. I spend my days researching new tools (tool selection is vital) and then seeing if I can utilise these tools in innovative ways.

This book btw is awesome. Algorithms to Live By. It totally smashed a number of paradigms I'd adopted. Recommended for anybody who works in I.T. Great sections on Exponential backoff, caching, multi-armed bandits etc.

Oooh err, I've gone all dizzy. :D
 
This book btw is awesome. Algorithms to Live By. It totally smashed a number of paradigms I'd adopted. Recommended for anybody who works in I.T. Great sections on Exponential backoff, caching, multi-armed bandits etc.

There's a lot of dogma out there - plus plain short sightedness and wastage ...... and then to be fair - some personal foibles and short sightedness mixed in.

I still have a softspot for The Mythical Man Month and Programming Pearls.

When I started out the assumption was by now that we would have different processor and database paradigms. We don't really. What we have is the same paradigms with more computing power thrown at them. Linux is based on late 1960s operating system ideas. OOXML is still grounded in late 80s word processing. And x86 ..... based on a stop gap 16 bit CPU from the late 70s. Arm based on an early RISC CPU from the mid 80s.

I really thought by now the underlying platform technologies and programming techniques would have developed and evolved more.

What we do have is greater application. In that regard Phones are an amazing example of a device that take a bunch of off the shelf technologies it all and integrates them into applications and services that become a ubquitious part of daily life and interaction with people and organisations.
 
What we do have is greater application. In that regard Phones are an amazing example of a device that take a bunch of off the shelf technologies it all and integrates them into applications and services that become a ubquitious part of daily life and interaction with people and organisations.

I've always felt alone in thinking that Jobs did nothing special with the iPhone, apart from releasing it, and until this day gobsmacked that Nokia and Blackberry didn't get there first. Although Blackberry were first to market with haptics - a horrible moving screen device that clicked when you touched it.

When I started out the assumption was by now that we would have different processor and database paradigms. We don't really. What we have is the same paradigms with more computing power thrown at them. Linux is based on late 1960s operating system ideas. OOXML is still grounded in late 80s word processing. And x86 ..... based on a stop gap 16 bit CPU from the late 70s. Arm based on an early RISC CPU from the mid 80s.

I think, as you imply, progress has come from speed and code libraries, not new patterns. Unless you consider path access to DB blobs as progress. I don't. I'm all for multi level normalisation. Else, you have to wrap data in logic. They do regularly upgrade TCP though after, for example, having found that routers and modems were shipping with gigs of input buffer ram, which exposed upstream congestion issues in the original protocol.

I read with interest in the previously mentioned book that in 2014, 10% of global Internet return traffic, consisted of Netflix video packet acks. Incredible really when you consider it. Some talk of adding separate ack lines running along side main pipes, similar to relief roads - that should go some way towards avoiding bottlenecks caused by control packets.

I'd be veery interested to hear more of your tech background. There's a few of us here that could share some interesting experiences I reckon. Recently dubbed the Old Boys Computer Club in another thread.
 
I've always felt alone in thinking that Jobs did nothing special with the iPhone, apart from releasing it, and until this day gobsmacked that Nokia and Blackberry didn't get there first.

The iPhone was just integrated off the shelf bits and in itself evolutionary - but special because of the vision of the ecosystem it was to be part of and because Jobs and Apple moved the airtime providers forward..

One of the reasons that the iPhone was a success was that the air time providers and handset providers had plenty of tech and infastructure but basically messed about penalising anybody who tried to use it outwith their remit. Nokia and the likes of Sony-Ericsson were too subservient to the airtime providers. Blackberry were the one standout - they got some of it very right but were a bit off at the margin.

Apple got a bit lucky - Blackberry were a bit off at the margins and Nokia had plenty of clever stuff in its toolbox and some imagination but seemed subservient to the existing service providers in a way that Jobs with Apple was not.
 
The iPhone was just integrated off the shelf bits and in itself evolutionary - but special because of the vision of the ecosystem it was to be part of and because Jobs and Apple moved the airtime providers forward..

One of the reasons that the iPhone was a success was that the air time providers and handset providers had plenty of tech and infastructure but basically messed about penalising anybody who tried to use it outwith their remit. Nokia and the likes of Sony-Ericsson were too subservient to the airtime providers. Blackberry were the one standout - they got some of it very right but were a bit off at the margin.

Apple got a bit lucky - Blackberry were a bit off at the margins and Nokia had plenty of clever stuff in its toolbox and some imagination but seemed subservient to the existing service providers in a way that Jobs with Apple was not.

I'd read a fair bit about the early days of circuit v packet switching and the battles that ensued between the copper carriers and those wanting to move packets over radio and cable. But didn't realise Jobs' nothing to lose, outsider, attitude, played such a big part in Apple's eventual handset domination.
 
This book btw is awesome. Algorithms to Live By. It totally smashed a number of paradigms I'd adopted. Recommended for anybody who works in I.T. Great sections on Exponential backoff, caching, multi-armed bandits etc.




Something else to share on the subject: The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley

It's quite a while since I read this, but I was struck by the single mindedness of Noyce and others at the formation of Silicon Valley, and in particular work that led to the invention of the microchip, prior and during his time at Intel. Lots of fascinating stories, but these two stick with me.

The first is Noyce's and Moore's attempts at a newly formed Intel to build the perfect 'mix'. The base ingredients that chips are made of. They finally cracked it and had a huge tub of it in the lab. Chips yields rose to economically viable levels, but for the life of them, they couldn't remember how they'd made it. So they topped it up with the base ingredients, bit by bit, unsure of the correct ratios, experimenting and testing as they went - until they finally had the recipe. But not until they'd exhausted themselves, convinced they'd lost the formula forever. The irony of course is that these days they could analyse the make up of the mix in the lab, but the kit they'd use, was dependant on what they were in the process of inventing!

And the second is of the man himself. Not only was he considered a physics genius, but he was also a great man generally, and did much to help kick start Silicon Valley. His party trick at dinner parties was to invest in fledgling cash starved start ups. He'd pull his check book out of his pocket and write a cheque on the spot, taking only a hastily written IOU in return. On his death his wife found dozens of these IOUs, uncashed, sitting in his dresser at home. A story that sums the man up perfectly from what I understand.

Highly recommended. A great biography, but also a fascinating account of the earliest days of the microchip.
 
It is quite amazing really. Early in my career an Apple was something you did high-end cad on.

Then my work took me from vines, Novell to Windows and apple faded from my view.

Then all of a sudden they are a trillion dollars company. Fair play to them.

I'm all about the backup and recovery now and everything's bloody cloud this and cloud that. Bah.
 
Well it’s done. I currently have the 7 so when the X appeared last year, I though £1000 for a phone...you are having a laugh.

Anyhow, I chewed the cud for a couple of days over my renewal and in the end pre-ordered the XS. I never thought I would spend that much on a phone, but there again I never thought I would spend so much on the car and house.

I keep on surprising myself!!!!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
XS Max arrived :)

84_F56_EF7-5936-4_F08-_A97_C-68415_DBAB865.jpg
 
Well it’s done. I currently have the 7 so when the X appeared last year, I though £1000 for a phone...you are having a laugh.

Anyhow, I chewed the cud for a couple of days over my renewal and in the end pre-ordered the XS. I never thought I would spend that much on a phone, but there again I never thought I would spend so much on the car and house.

I keep on surprising myself!!!!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I’ve got en extra row of apps!

It amazes me just how seamless it is to set up a new Apple device when you have an existing one.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

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