Why geeks shouldn't fix other people's computers

“But XP works fine” – that drives me absolutely mad, that said my sanity is probably in question anyway!

;-) I’m using XP. Partly because my ancient computer would struggle with anything else, partly because a piece of hardware I use fairly frequently only works on XP, and partly because I see no reason to change at the moment. I don’t visit p*rn sites and I am pretty strict about what I allow the browser to do (third party cookies rejected, FSOs deleted at session end, everything blacklisted by default). Won’t make me immune nor invulnerable, sure, but it is better than (and I quote an actual living person) “I don’t need to use any antivirus, my computer isn’t sick”…

…This was the same person that washed her keyboard… under a tap! She is also one of the reasons I just don’t do computer support to the ex-pat crowd. I got to see her computer after everybody who thought they had a clue had been at it; I offered to take a look at it in return for a cup of tea; and when I told her the machine was such a mess now (stuck in 16 colour VGA, for instance, with half a dozen different graphics drivers all broken) that the best thing to do would be to reinstall everything again from the beginning… I got badmouthed. Well, hey, I installed the basics on my P4 box one evening, including all of HP’s weird drivers. Wasn’t hard.
Sometimes the best option is to start again instead of patching a very broken thing, and it isn’t as if she had any data to save, just some photos with the originals still on the camera. I suspect reinstalling would be better/quicker than fixing the mess. But I guess she just didn’t want to hear that. Like I’d pop over, type some mystic incantations, and suddenly everything would be fixed.
So I’ll fix people’s computers on-site only for €85 per hour. Think that price is over the top? Read this for why: http://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20141102

Oh, and just to clarify, the person I’m talking about above isn’t the same person/computer I’m talking about in the blog article. But that was another messed up machine… <sigh>

But I guess she just didn’t want to hear that.

Short tale:

Check newly advertised intranet page, note that top three links do not work except in IE¹ and decide that a short walk to the “dev” office two down is useful.²
Describe situation and am advised that “policy is that we only support IE”³ to which my reply is “Some users have to use non-IE for their speciality apps, besides two links work, three don’t. The code is inconsistent, use the same wrapper for all of them and it will work for all users”
Droid mode was fully on so the IE mantra was repeated.
I pointed out that repeating an incorrect statement didn’t make it true and left.

I was visited within minutes.
“Policy is to only support IE” to which of course the only valid reply is “continually repeating an incorrect statement does not make it any truer. If you want to do something useful, you could try fixing the broken code – assuming you’ve mastered copy&paste”

I really don’t understand why advising someone that a change is required so that they don’t end up looking like dicks is received so poorly.

¹ I routinely use Firefox since half the network support GUI’s don’t work in IE, plus I think IE sucks.

I thought even Microsoft thought IE bad and put it to bed.

Any webdev with a clue should, by preference, use neutral markup/scripting that isn’t browser specific.

Given the reply, I wonder if the person even knows why the links are different; or if “we only support IE” is a comfort blanket to hide behind.

Just to clear up exactly what I meant. I’ve no problem with people still using XP, if there is a good reason and the risks are accepted, but people who still use it then moan that X,Y and Z don’t work and I should fix the problem because they are running unsupported and out of date software.
It’s the I want everything and want it for free mentality, the exact same issue with doing any kind of desktop support.
Your blog is depressingly true.

For intranet sites and the like, I read “we only support IE” as we are incapable of learning html and have no skill what-so-ever, I have to admit the IE only excuse makes my blood boil.
If they were honest and just said we can’t be bothered, that would be fine, but trying to take the high ground by saying that just shows their IQ levels….I’d better stop before I burst a blood vessel, I can feel them pounding right now!

But at least in the “real world” – i.e. the commercial one ;-) the answer is fairly simple.
I have had a few people occasions where peoples sites don’t work in firefox because of broken html.
There initial response was “we only support IE” – then pointing out, OK fine, but you realise you are probably losing at least 20% of your sales does tend to re-focus people

Also how “hard” is it (assuming you can actually get documentation etc.) to write hardware acceleration for video?
Does anyone know?
Just wondering….
I assume it’s not quite as simple as something like “cat /home/malcolm/fluffy_kittens.mp4 > /dev/video_decode” (yes that is me being silly)
And does the Mali stuff make this any easier by unifying anything, or was that just my dream….

I’ve no problem with people still using XP,

I have both XP and 7 at my desk. Some of my utilities haven’t yet had Win7 compliant replacements, plus I like to be able to reproduce the user experience and we still have a mixed estate.

For intranet sites and the like, I read “we only support IE” as we are incapable of learning html and have no skill what-so-ever, I have to admit the IE only excuse makes my blood boil.
If they were honest and just said we can’t be bothered, that would be fine, but trying to take the high ground by saying that just shows their IQ levels….

It probably depends on who you ask. We have a few different internal sites and if you ask the helpdesk then you will indeed get the “we only support IE” blanket statement. If you ask one of the devs (me!) directly for details then I’ll tell you that it’s because we get Active Directory integration “for free” with IE. I’ve actually come up with a code sample that makes AD work in Chrome and Firefox too, but I don’t think we’ve implemented it in any live sites yet…

Any webdev with a clue should, by preference, use neutral markup/scripting that isn’t browser specific.

I’m periodically testing my latest in-progress public site in NetSurf just to see how it’s coping… but the designers haven’t come up with how it’s supposed to look yet so the plain HTML is passing with flying colours at the moment :)

Edit 1 minute later: Or not! I’ve just tried the latest build and NetSurf is trying to display the mobile version instead of the desktop one. The mobile one does depend on “fancier” things like JavaScript and SVG because most smartphones can handle those. NetSurf… not so much.

I assume it’s not quite as simple as something like “cat /home/malcolm/fluffy_kittens.mp4 > /dev/video_decode” (yes that is me being silly)

It’s both easy and difficult. For the Rasberry Pi, there is a very usable OpenGL approach. But it does mean something completely different for the desktop. Like a compositing engine for example. Something highly incompatible with the Wimp (too many windows).

For video… hum, it depends. Of course GPU acceleration is cool, but a lot can be done with VFP and Neon too. And a good use of the CPU provides benefits more easy to port on new platforms. The same with 3D. That’s the RISC OS way. An OS where even with no GPU acceleration, desktop is quite fast.

Linux is not so optimised, but make a good use of GPU. Conclusion: it’s very slow on motherboards where GPU driver is not present (AKA on all new motherboards).

and I should fix the problem because they are running unsupported and out of date software.

Extrapolation – no need to make stuff compatible with Select? ;-)

It’s the I want everything and want it for free mentality,

GNU is thata ways…

I read “we only support IE” as we are incapable of learning html and have no skill what-so-ever,

So long as you stick to simpler stuff (keep the smarts on the server and user the browser to display content – its intended purpose), it isn’t that hard to make something that works across browsers. Things are a lot better now than they were a decade ago, even IE8 looks more or less the same as Firefox (etc etc).

Me? I stopped supporting IE the day it stopped supporting XP. I have enough testing with NetSurf (RISC OS), Opera (Android), Android stock browser, Firefox (PC), Safari (iOS) and Dolphin (iOS). If things look more or less as intended on all of those, then if another browser differs, it’s the browser. That’s my line and I’m sticking to it. ;-)

I’d better stop before I burst a blood vessel, I can feel them pounding right now!

I have the opposite reaction. The blood flow ceases, my brain switches off. I guess we’re opposite ends of the idealism/cynicism scale? ;-)
The good thing about being cynical is idiotic stuff doesn’t surprise, incompetent stuff doesn’t enrage, and ridiculous stuff doesn’t faze.

Also how “hard” is it (assuming you can actually get documentation etc.) to write hardware acceleration for video?

The “hard” part is that the GPU is closed (you simply won’t get documentation), it is handled under Linux by the company releasing a binary blob that talks to the GPU. I suspect one or other of the Pi’s boot code is the GPU’s operating system.

Sometimes I wonder if the path of least resistance would be to make something for RISC OS (not RISC OS itself, GPL) that is capable of loading Linux modules and exposing their API in a similar method to Linux itself.

An OS where even with no GPU acceleration, desktop is quite fast.

That’s because RISC OS is a fairly plain looking UI. Draw a box, tile a sprite within, draw some lines, plot some sprites for the window furniture, then kick the rest over to the app to draw.
We don’t prat around with rounded windows, transparency, and all those things that take lots of processor time. Furthermore, many of the system facilities are provided by the kernel (or low level parts of RISC OS). An error happens? You get a beep. No fancy jingle in 5.1 surround. The Wimp wants to know where the mouse is? It asks the kernel (which is periodically informed by the low level driver responsible).
There isn’t an incomprehensible stack of interacting frameworks and libraries. Just a few basic SWIs. Hell, we can even plot VDU text into windows (!Edit as standard) for that epic retro feel. ;-)
Simplicity is our speed.

Funny thing is, once you’ve used it a while, you start to wonder how much time is wasted on a pretty looking UI and special effects that aren’t really necessary.

Or, put it like this. What takes SparkFS or BZUnzip2 (sp?) hours to decompress, my oldish netbook can do in under a minute. I know my 1.6GHz Atom can wipe the floor with the Pi’s 700MHz ARM at raw number crunching. Even an ancient copy of WinZip is blindingly fast.
So why does RISC OS feel faster than Windows?

Linux is not so optimised, but make a good use of GPU. Conclusion: it’s very slow on motherboards where GPU driver is not present (AKA on all new motherboards).

?

Ignore the PC world for the moment – video cards require drivers and some have not fully embraced Linux; not to mention their “intellectual property” needs to be protected to the driver will be in binary form to a specific ABI (which means it requires a compatible version of Linux; may (probably?) not work with NetBSD, etc etc).

Look at the ARM SoC world. It is different. The three major operating systems on the ARM are arguably Debian (in some manner), Android, and iOS. We can forget iOS as that’s a world unto itself. Android is spiritually similar to Linux and is arguably a base line – if your new ARM board can’t run Android, it’s not worth the packaging it is wrapped in. As such, the manufacturer themselves will probably supply drivers for Android these days.
Linux/Debian is also supported as the manufacturers understand that for embedded devices, it’ll probably be a hack of Debian (say, with Busybox) and not Android. Plus, the current crop of ARM boards are pretty cool. Just look at what a basic original Pi can do with RaspBMC. Tape the thing to the back of the telly, power it off a USB port, instant $50 media centre that kicks ass over boxes you can buy for three times that. Accordingly, any sane manufacturer will also make a compatible GPU driver available.

What you won’t find is any documentation regarding the GPU. The (loquacious) OMAP documentation describes the “frame buffer” and doesn’t say anything about the GPU. The (woeful) BCMxxxx documentation omits any mention whatsoever of the graphics system, and barely covers the ARM-GPU mailbox interface (though it has to to a degree as the BCMxxxx is unusual in that the ARM is practically a co-processor).

There is talk of an open source ARM GPU. It’ll be interesting to see how that turns out.

Just to give a hint, referring to the TMS320DM320 – the chip inside my PVR. It was designed in a pre-GPU era, and it was designed to handle SD video. A lot of the codec work (video encode and decode) is handled by setting up a DSP as required. I wouldn’t be surprised if a GPU wasn’t like a massive NEON processor with a big DSP bolted on.

However, the thing to note is that there were a number of “alternative co-processors”. I don’t have the datasheets on the iPad any more, however from memory:

• One could analyse a scene and determine sharpness (used by inexpensive auto-focus on cameras) and white balance levels.
• Something about Huffman tables – dedicated hardware to do quickly what would take a long time as code. Refer to JPEG/MPEG; as this stuff is above my mathematical comprehension.
• Image resizer – on the fly (and realtime) resizing of video.
• Multiple display layers; the lower (two?) able to render resized video in realtime with minimal interaction from the processor; hence my PVR can display the live video behind the menus (slightly darkened so the menus are easier to see) without requiring a lot of processing in order to make that happen.

These days, you can pretty much assume that there will be some support for H.264 in hardware and it works for video in much the same way as it works for IIC – the host can just say “here’s some data, do something” and let it get on with it while the host does other things. For this reason, no amount of clever software can replace a GPU whose job it is specifically to deal with video/audio and who’ll have a host of custom functions to aid in that task.

Or, to put it another way, we are playing MP3s with a software module. You can get chips that can do all of that for itself, all you (as the host) needs to do is say “here’s some data, do something” and it’ll do it, periodically prodding you when it wants more data. Heck, the Pi’s GPU is extremely likely to be capable of playing MP3s (and AAC, etc etc) by itself. We just have the means of telling it how.

Android is spiritually similar to Linux and is arguably a base line – if your new ARM board can’t run Android, it’s not worth the packaging it is wrapped in. As such, the manufacturer themselves will probably supply drivers for Android these days.

Yep, but Android support does not imply desktop Linux support. Many ARM boards (to be honest, almost all boards) suffer from this: a good Android support, but no way to get correct rendering speed from Linux.

I’d say there is no need to go out of your way to make things compatible with select.
If you can, then that is a good thing. But a line has to be drawn at some point.
Of course the line all depends on the target audience, persuading them to update is the key. I won’t even go into that one!

As far as GNU, it’s not something for nothing. The “ideal” is that people contribute equally – it’s the communist licence in a way.
i.e. it would work perfectly if people/companies didn’t take the **** and weren’t lazy.
That’s probably another topic that should be left as well, it could go on forever.

As far as GNU, it’s not something for nothing.

I meant from the point of view as a user – the operating system is free, the applications are free, internet access is pretty much the same as “free” these days…

…movies are free¹…
…music is free¹…

…it sort of fosters the idea that a person doesn’t really need to pay for anything if they don’t want to.

As you said:

It’s the I want everything and want it for free mentality,

¹ Not legitimately, but what use is that when the next blockbuster² that hasn’t even been released in your country is a click-n-download away, and the songs you could buy off Amazon or iTunes are on YouTube for free?

² Although, arguably, it is us who should be paid for sitting through a Michael Bay film…