* Posts by Mikel

2643 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2008

Windows 8 'penetrated' says firm which sells to world's spy agencies

Mikel
Windows

This

Is my surprised face:

China's Goophone unveils US$99 Android iPad Mini clone

Mikel
Thumb Up

A neat plan

Get advance notice of the new product specs, build and patent it in a few days. Run it down to the patent office before the Apple units are ready. Get design patent protection ahead of Apple.

If they cared they could probably express freight some prototypes to the US and Europe as well. These plants have the rapid design cycle down so well they can do things like this. Apple can't without revealing in advance what their new products are going to be.

AMD to 'reset' goals: servers, embedded, ultra-low power

Mikel
Unhappy

No more Windows-only chips

Start with that, to convince others you can read a trendline.

As deep in debt as AMD is, this is going to take some magic scrambling. Good luck indeed.

Everybody who wants to own a 32 core dually this decade should probably buy it now while they still can.

Salesforce CEO Benioff: Win 8 is 'the end of Windows'

Mikel

That is the Windows 8 plan

The problem is execution.

Mikel

Re: How?

Disintermediate means to cut out the middleman; to remove something from between two other things.

Intel CEO: PC market slogging along at half speed

Mikel

90 days

No doubt that time will fly by.

Apple to drop chip-baking partnership with Samsung?

Mikel
Go

Re: are they bothered?

Samsung actually needs that fab capacity to produce silicon for their own retail products, which are ramping sales volume unexpectedly. Since the margins on that are far higher than Apple offers for wholesale chip fab, Sammy probably couldn't be happier.

Flashboys: HEELLLP, we're trapped in a process size shrink crunch

Mikel
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Dimension Z

When you run out of X and Y, you have to build up.

Big Blue bigwig: Tiny processor knobs can't shrink forever

Mikel

dimension z

They're working on it. Modern soc packages include cpu, gpu and RAM layers in one package. Just one more leap to stacked multicore cpus for a cluster in a package.

That horrendous iPhone empurplement - you're holding it wrong

Mikel
Meh

Sensor saturation

The purple hue is a dead giveaway. It may be possible to fix it or at least improve the situation in software by adjusting the light meter to exposure time calculation for bright light - assuming they aren't already at the minimum exposure time limit of the sensor. Or as others have said, use a lens hood.

This is probably a byproduct of being so secretive you don't test the product outdoors in broad daylight. The new campus will have a delightful open air central park where such things can be done without fear some fool will forget the prototype in a pub.

Network boffins say Terabit Ethernet is TOO FAST

Mikel

Retail specs and standards

It's important to note that these standards are for retail products that must be universally compatible. If you own both ends of the fiber and can engineer and manufacture the switching technology like Google can do, then terabit IP networking is available now. It's not standard and it's technically not "Ethernet" but it puts the bits down the pipe.

Intel: Behold the TABLETS of our partners, proof of Win8's MIGHT

Mikel
Windows

Windows 7 designed for touch

This post is just a reminder that we had a big hoopla about Windows 7 being designed for touch from the ground up: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/features/touch but it didn't sell.

And that there was a big hoopla about Windows tablets at CES 2010, and the outcome was so dire that PCWorld disappeared their own slideshow: http://www.pcworld.com/article/186361/tablets_dell_hp.html but the underlying article remains: http://www.pcworld.com/article/186281/dawn_of_the_tablet_pc_ces_2010_roundup.html but none of that sold well.

And that Microsoft has been trying to sell tablets with Windows for 17 years with no success, with everybody they can get to build with their ware. For all involved it has been a money loser the whole time, including Microsoft. It has destroyed more relationships with customers than any other Microsoft product, except Vista and ME. Many billions have been burned on this fire.

This dog won't hunt.

Intel launches ARM battery life Windows 8 Atom chip

Mikel
FAIL

Windows only of course

No Android or Linux for this one.

Intel CEO thinks Windows 8 isn't ready, insider claims

Mikel
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It's ready enough

Windows 8 will complete the greatest technology migration in modern history. It is ready enough to do what I want it to do. Damn the torpedos! Full speed ahead!

Now Apple cuts back on Samsung displays

Mikel
Thumb Up

I like my Sammy gear

Got quite a bit of it too.

NZ spooks acted unlawfully in Megaupload wiretap

Mikel
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The new service looks interesting

Have to give it a look when it launches.

Microsoft issues IE 10 Flash flaw fix for Windows 8

Mikel
Facepalm

Trading Adobe's security for Microsoft's

Ah, rest easy now then.

China plots 2017 mission to plan MOON COLONY

Mikel
Alert

off topic

I'm celebrating 1500 El Reg thumbs up today. Go ahead and thumbs down this one.

Win8 tablets may cost MORE than iPads – AND LAPTOPS

Mikel

Three Nexus 7's

I love the pricing on these. This looks like a grand plan. They should be able to sell hundreds.

Ballmer: Win8 'certainly surpasses' Win95 in importance

Mikel
Trollface

Transition states

When we went from Windows 3.1 and Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, those few of us involved we knew our situation was dire and we wanted change. Now, however, we have a computer in our pocket finer than the first Cray that lets us do video chat with grandma - and everybody is involved. To provide that level of quantum leap today I'm afraid W8 is going to have to invent something new and relevant that takes us not just a bit above, but to an entirely human new dimension. It's going to have to involve a new realm of physics.I just don't see that happening.

Opportunity finds new patch of 'berries' on Mars

Mikel

Already in the berries

Full speed ahead!

Windows Phone 8 stands a chance as Apple, Android dither

Mikel
Happy

Simple math

AAPL is up 200x since 1997, so that would be $30 billion or more than 10% of Microsoft's market capitalization.

HP plots tablet comeback to penetrate biz world with slab

Mikel
Windows

Own words

]Bradley said HP's tablet will be the "only serviceable tablet there is" and claimed "it is expandable". But what it won't be is a consumer device, which is a brave - some may say foolhardy - move given the trend toward employees buying their own devices from shops and bringing them into the office.

Might as well shut this entire line of inquiry down right now before you waste more billions of dollars. You started 5 years after the race began, on a different track, headed in the wrong direction.

HP boss Whitman: 'We have to offer a smartphone'

Mikel
Alien

Re: you watch...

While that is what I expected also, leaked benchmark app data suggest a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor running Android 4.0 and named "Bender". http://androidcommunity.com/hp-bender-android-smartphone-leaks-in-benchmarks-20120914/

That didn't take long.

Microsoft keeps Win Phone 8 under hype-boosting wraps

Mikel
Go

WP8 is late

Let's not get fancy. At this point it needed to have as many developers as possible for the Christmas buying season. But it doesn't, because WP8 is not ready for wide release. The ship date has slipped, perhaps until after the Holidays. But they don't want to admit that yet, or you might by an iPhone or Android. They're not as dumb as RIM.

Mikel

Slipping the ship date?

Is that what that means? That would crush Nokia.

Smartphone sales to new users 'have peaked'

Mikel
Coat

New customers

Every time the price comes down the number of people who can afford a smartphone goes up. Prices have a ways to go yet, therefore there remain a large number of people who haven't get got a smartphone who will.

Intel debuts 'Haswell' chippery: from tablets to servers

Mikel
Windows

Not to throw a damper on this lovefest...

But the Haswell platforms employ Microsoft patented technologies for video. They are Windows Only. Direct X. No OpenGL, no Linux, no Android, no BSD to fully implement to technology in these chips. Intel has finally caved to Redmond and given them their Holy Grail: an Intel platform that best only runs Windows.

Do I have to say it's not for me? OK. It's not.

Never was the icon more appropriate. I was a HUGE Intel fan, but am quick becoming apostate.

Intel, if submitting to Microsoft is what I have to do to love you, then you don't love me back.

Google declares success for Kansas City gigabit broadband

Mikel
Thumb Up

This is going to be huge

KC is going to kickstart something very interesting.

UK ice boffin: 'Arctic melt equivalent to 20 years of CO2'

Mikel
FAIL

Re: how about this.....

Nuclear power is cheap if you don't count the cost of the long term risk and the cost of waste disposal - which is how we're accounting it today. The risk is borne by the public, waste disposal is deffered until it disappears from the accounting because accounting rules don't understand half-lives of fissionables. And we're supposed to accept that is OK, because the books balance. Eventually though the cost of replacing 100s of square miles of land, the cost of quickly replacing it when it proves untenable. Men seem incapable of managing this much risk. Japan is in this spot now, and the current estimate of when they'll be able to complete their cleanup of Fukushima is at least 30 years hence. Maybe 50. Until they've secured the vast amount of spent fuel stored there in something approaching secure storage we cannot even begin to estimate the cost. They're counting themselves lucky though, because the outcome could have been much worse. But not for some brave souls who stayed at their work despite certain danger, and a favorable wind, almost half of Japan would now be uninhabitable for 100 years. Has any major Japanese nuclear operator got a plan for a major Fuji eruption? No. Such a thing is not possible.

And now despite the obvious dangers with recent precedent, and the imminent eruption of Mount Fuji, Japan is telling its people that they cannot afford to cease nuclear power immediately, no matter how high the risk because they lacked the forethought to save some of the dividends of cheap nuclear power to have a replacement ready should the promise sour.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a HUGE fan of the potentials of nuclear power to provide electrical energy in appropriate places where cheaper riskless alternatives like geothermal aren't available. But if we're going to let people play with fission we have to be able to trust them, and they have to consider the whole lifecycle including disposal of waste in the cost. And we have to be able to trust them to execute to plan and dry cask that stuff instead of stuffing cooling ponds until they're almost undergoing spontaneous fission without an adverse event. That is not too much to ask. If they won't even figure taking out the trash in the cost they don't seem trustworthy to me.

Mikel
Stop

Really? This is what you've got?

Christophe Kinnard et al, the source of data in this graph, used "terrestrial proxies" to gauge arctic sea ice extent for 1500 years. That's absurd. That's the quality of extrapolation we've come to expect from Warmists, that they can look back 1500 years and know how thick the ice was at the north pole in August of each year based on tree rings in Russia. Of course the error bars on the graph cover a huge fraction of the area. With all of the modern science at our disposal today we cannot estimate the current summer sea ice extent based on measurements taken from land ("terrestrial") within the error bars of this graph, and to rely on trace evidence of "proxies" is to be even less definite. We may as well put these "scientists" in a set with "One Tree Briffa." If this is science, so is Homeopathy. While they were at it why didn't they try to reconstruct (er, "model") a 100m year history of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico based on the fossil record of New York mollusk populations?

The graph does, in fact, disagree with the historical record of exploration and colonization of North America. It is provably untrue. That you hold it out as evidence to prove your point is quite bizarre. Are you trying to discredit AGW theory by holding up weak arguments? If so, you're doing a stellar job.

Let's see some Arctic Ocean sediment studies before we figure this. Ocean sediments provably vary when ice is overhead and when it is not due to the presence or absence of insolation above them, thus varying the type of algae and other detritus that settle - and they stay where they settle forever, stratifying in discrete layers that vary with the seasons that provide a method of counting the clock in time with C14 dating, with major eruption ash and asteroid impact layers to provide the major beats. And doing so we may as well go back 250 million years or 500 million since the data is right there on the seabed. We even know most of how the seabed moves over time, thanks to plate tectonics.

In short I'm calling your graph a bunch of garbage that should not have been published in a self-respecting publication like Nature. You need to not bring this weak stuff. If you're going to call what you're doing science, then do the science. Don't rely on terrestrial data published by others as "proxies" to extrapolate things that are almost certainly not relevant when you can go out into the arctic, drill the cores, and have proof. Or at least beg the cores from Exxon or BP, who would are already drilling them anyway and would probably give up a slice of them up for free to improve their public image. A doctorate degree used to mean something.

Mikel

RE: Let's get fracking

>Gas 2.2p, Nuclear 2.3p, Coal 2.5p, Onshore wind 5.4p, Offshore wind 7.2p

Enhanced Geothermal is even cheaper than gas, is often discovered accidentally while searching for other resources, and also can involve fracking. And it doesn't involve burning hydrocarbons.

So frack away, and maybe you will find some of each!

Mikel
Thumb Up

Go Canada!

Looks like Canada and Siberia are about to get a lot more cropland.

Why I've got a sync'ing feeling about Amazon's new Kindle Fire

Mikel
Thumb Down

They Binged it up

They came with this ridiculously inexpensive cool technology, and then they had to integrate Bing. Why? Why would you DO that? Was drool-worthing right until then.

Hold the chips: Apple axes Samsung RAM order for iPhone 5

Mikel

So fine

Samsung can use those parts themselves. Get more margin that way.

Apple Java update fails to address mega-flaw – researcher

Mikel
Facepalm

Water still wet!

To the Romerocopter!

Patent flame storm: Reg hack biteback in reader-pack sack attack

Mikel
Stop

Patents prevent progress of science and the useful arts

That's what they do, that's what they're for. They're bad and should be abolished.

'Immortal cancer' found in Australia

Mikel

Re: Reverse the polarity of the Neutron flow.

I guess we could ask Henrietta Lacks.

Global strategic maple syrup reserves hit in Canadian mega-heist

Mikel
Happy

Re: Burn the heretics!!

Clearly you have never heard of Wright brand "Steak Cut Bacon". 1/4" thick slabs of bacon goodness. http://www.wrightbrand.com/products

Delicious.

Thanks ever so much Java, for that biz-wide rootkit infection

Mikel
Unhappy

So sad for folks who have to deal with this

Switched to Linux years ago though, so not a problem here.

Windows Phone 8: Microsoft quite literally can't lose

Mikel
Thumb Down

Fragmentation

Google doesn't control Android very much. It's open source, and the OEMs can and do change it quite a lot. All of the manufacturers offer considerable variety. Fragmentation is an Android strength that prevents it from being a stagnant monopoly. You may as well be concerned that all phone vendors use plastic or glass, and insist on a wood third option. A third option is not needed here because if Google got rude any phone vendor could fork Android.

But having compatibility with all of these other manufacturers offers the benefit of a huge ecosystem with a half-billion unit installed base to attract developers and an immense software library, so Google would have to get _really_ rude for that to be attractive.

Mikel
FAIL

Hiding the numbers

They've done a better job of hiding the actual sales numbers than any other consumer product in recent memory. How can they be so good at that and so bad at everything else?

Facebook shoves your face in Microsoft's Bing thing

Mikel
WTF?

Why?

Why would you post to the Internet photos you don't want to share with all the world?

Samsung chucks 'free' Galaxy S III at dragon sketcher

Mikel

It's a happy story

And the dragon and kangaroo did get national press coverage and 500,000 views.

Reddit is tearing it up right now. President Obama did an open "Ask Me Anything" interview on there today.

Samsung fights to stay on US shelves as Apple calls for ban

Mikel
Thumb Up

Re: eh

This is the pace of mobile today. By the time the suit gets to court, the products are pretty much obsolete.

Jury awards Apple $1bn damages in Samsung patent case

Mikel
Meh

Re: Hope Apple has a new supplier.

This was one of my first thoughts. While the components and mobile divisions of Samsung are very separate, this matter has become serious enough for the corporate head to get the various divisions to work together. It's the mobile division that's the breadwinner.

Police mistake reveals plan for Assange's Embassy capture

Mikel
Gimp

He's a douche

But he's a useful douche.

Mikel

Re: the police

Let me remind you that despite our "war on drugs" not only can the US not prevent its citizenry from acquiring prohibited substances from the far reaches of the world, we can't even keep them out of our most controlled spaces: our prisons. If we can't keep heroin, Meth and Marijuana out of a prison, what hope have we of keeping it out of a Middle School, Junior High, or High school? None.

I don't care for any of these substances myself, but I know stupid when I see it.

Mikel
Stop

I'm not sure about you

But this whole episode makes me more comfy with Ecuador acquiring nuclear weapons.

Google names names in amended 'shills' list

Mikel
Thumb Up

Oh Wow

It's a laundry list of people I love, who I trust to look after my interests. If these are Google's shills, more power to 'em.