Posts by Charles Manning

Re: Which is why

"On the 11th day of September in the two thousand and first year of our Lord."

See if Siri screws that up.

Royalties

" start charging you foreigners royalties" which would then have to be paid to the other languages English stole/subcontracted various words and grammar from.

Better than royalties would be an EULA.

By opening the wrapper People using this English Communications Technology (herein refered to as English) agree to......

Oh, how the mighty have fallen

Anyone remember the times of old, when Microsoft made reasonable software and OEMs loaded piles of shite into the PCs which gave the purchasers a bad experience.

It seems that MS are having their revenge and have fallen to makers of bloatware for other people's OSs.

"That's entirely possible. There's lots of people in tech who don't understand the basic tech."

Any of them will be used to abuse by now.

"but seems to be picking up nicely"

Ah yes, yet another member of the "give MS a fair chance to catch up" brigade.

MS are not the late comers to phone space that need a chance to catch up. MS got into phones in 2001 or so and have been in phones twice as long as Google and Apple.

In 2001 they pretty much had the phone space wide open to them (except for BB doing the corporate thing). They took their lead and just dicked around. They made another go of it in 2008 or so with the Kin phone which was withdrawn after 2 months.

Over the last couple of years we see companies with a huge commitment to Windows CE space getting very skittish and making a break for Android.

(d) Don't need another one

I really think the marketing people at PC companies are thick.

They're used to decades of people upgrading their PCs every second year. It was worth it back then, the PCs were notably faster and more functional all the time and a two year old computer was looking a but tired.

That meant anybody could sell PCs and think they were bloody good sales(wo)men.

Now it's not like that any more. Computer speed/function has pretty much plateaued. What's the point of doing an upgrade? I can use a 4 yo computer just fine. How are you going to motivate me to buy a new one?

Now the PC sales(wo)men can't figure out what's going on. They know they're bloody brilliant marketeers (since they've sold stuff so well for the last 15 years). It must be something else....

Combat is safe

Nope. Drone flying really is going into a fight. Perhaps even worse.

It is really easy for the armchair experts to dismiss drone pilots as cowards etc because they can cause so much damage without putting themselves at risk and that "real soldiers" go into "real fights".

The biggest dangers for any Western soldier's life (I'm using soldier as a catch-phrase for all military personnel) is suicide. At least twenty times as many US soldiers commit suicide as die in combat.

When you're in real combat it is way easier to justify away killing someone with "it was him or me" and everyone will give you a pat on the back and tell you that you did the right thing.

Not so easy for the drone pilot. That is one of very few extra stresses placed on drone operators apart from daily flipping between civvy and military life. No wonder that drone operators experience as much PTSD, but without as much understanding and support from their peers and society at large.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_veteran_suicide

"There's s theory his job was just to stop Nokia launching an Android phone"

Why would MS do that? They've made more money off their Android protection racket than of Windows phones.

"You are much less likely to vomit over your PC with optical tracking."

Yeah, but anyone else in the room is still likely to vomit over you!

OR would seem to take Glasshole to a whole new level.

Re: Signal to noise ratio

Sad to see Blighty falling apart just like all the ex-colonial countries in Africa. Sounds like you need to be recolonised by the Romans for a few years.

At least here in NZ we can blame the earthquakes.

... or maybe...

Samsung has agreed to pay the protection money to MS, so long as MS make life hell for other Android vendors.

Time machine?

I figure one of the most important things aspiring boffins do is write reports.

We all read, and laugh at, stories about PhD students losing their life's work due to a disk failure etc. Some have even lost stuff because they overwrote a good version of a thesis/report with a crap version.

Apple's Time Machine backup system is easy enough to use (even for social scientists) and does the backups even if you forget. That has got to be a winner.

Many of them are on grants, so they're spending other people's money.

re: "You soured your goodwill by your time with big W."

Nope she's a grown up.

She managed to damage any goodwill she ever had all by herself.

Re: Lack of imagination when thinking up things that can go wrong.

At an embedded software engineer (and file system developer) of over 30 years, I see numerous problems with this.

Even with the most high reliability file system, I would not store critical configuration data in a config file. Of if it really has to be in a file, it should at least be in a read-only file system that cannot be corrupted by other file system activity.

Checking is OK, so long as it only happens at specific times (eg. at power up) when the system is safe. If config data etc is not found, then the system needs to provide some sort of default software as a backup.

Unfortunately far too much of this software is designed to crash when unexpected conditions occur (that's what something like an assert or an exception typically does). That's what caused the Ariane 5 crash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5). Basically an unimportant variable in a process that was not important at the time went out of range and the Ada exception mechanism shut the software down.

"Don't see the harm"

These beacons use BT Low Energy, also called BT 4, BT Smart and a bunch of other names. THis has a range larger than classic BT.

Although low energy, these devices can communicate up to 100m or so depending on how good the antennas are. The devices I've experimented with were able to communicate over 10m even with poor antennas and low signal strength.

So, one of these near the front of a shop in a mall can easily see a large area. One of these every 5 or so shops and you have the mall 100% covered. You can throw away your FitBits, Facebook will know how fast you're walking, whether you stop, will sell back that info to shop owners ("Well your window display is working this week. We found that men aged 20-35 stopped outside your shop window.") and maybe to you.

"So long as it isn't grabbing information on people who have that stuff disabled, I don't see the harm".

That logic has been with us a long time now, but it has been incremental. Ten years ago people "didn't see the harm" in having a cell phone, but would have been really upset that someone like FB runs a dossier on them, knows their likes and dislikes, their friends,... and knew exactly where they were all the time.

I wonder what the threshold of "don't see the harm" will be in another 5 years?

And why would you believe them?

Since Microsoft admit back-dooring some versions of Windows ( and who's to really say they have not back-doored all versions), what's there to stop SSD vendors from back-dooring an SSD?

Then of course you could just go whole hog and backdoor hardware. For example, an ethernet controller can typically access the whole address range of memory without any software support. That allows a maliciously designed ethernet controller (or video card, or ...) to do some very interesting things.

Use of air power

The US (and West) has exactly the same problem they had after 9/11.

All those huge aircraft carriers etc are designed to take on a national military in a conventional war and are fairly useless at winkling out small groups of guerillas hiding amongst friendlies. That was very frustrating for GWB, hence the need to fabricate WMD so he could use his toys against a bigger target.

ISIS are pretty much the same. Too small a target to use those big war machines against.

Doing a poor devil out of a job?

Let me guess...

* You still use telegrams instead of email.

* The lamp lighter still lights the gas lamps in your street each night, then turns them off at 6am.

* You only wear hand-woven, hand stitched clothing.

Things are always changing. That's just life. The drones must adapt too.

Yup, this will be an annoyance for the sort of person that does not DUI.

Meanwhile the habitual DUIer will keep a box of disposable gloves under the seat and know to wind down the windows before starting up.

There really is no substitute for personal responsibility. There is no way to prevent stupid/criminal behaviour with legislation.

"Thing is, older people can be hidebound: stuck in ruts. Young people aren't burdened by experience so are more likely to think outside the box,"

Thing is, younger people think it is all new: thinking they're up against new problems. Older people have been around the block a few times and understand that the answer is seldom in the box.

You can write this up either way, but it will be bollocks.

A few years back I was involved in a project that involved reverse engineering/hacking the firmware in an embedded system. At 46, I was the youngster on the team. The oldest was well into his 70s. Nope, the 70 yo didn't need a nap every 15 minutes. Nor did he get lost on the way to the bathroom.

Individuals are all that matters, not age groups.

Nope, not arse about face

The value in publishing papers is not in the content. If it was, then the journal would pay the writer for the paper.

Nope, the value is in **being published**. That's what gives the swots kudos, street cred and value. This is part of the measurement used to reward both staff and secure funding. That's why university profs need to keep publishing - quality be damned.

Please consider the upside

If you're a BOFH, or training to be one, you can write off your SCUBA training and equipment as a business expense.

Re: Traffic offenses?

This was not a "few speeding tickets". This was driving 149km/h in a 50km/h residential zone.

That shows gross disregard for the safety of the people you're hoping to receive you as a fellow citizen.

Buggered if I know how he escaped immediate arrest.

Re: Whatever happened to 'respect'???

The adults are no better. Kids template off their parents, so guess what - the kids lose respect too.

Yesterday I had an electrician come around for 10 minutes to look at what needs to be done. During those ten minutes he cut off the conversation 6 times to answer his phone and talk to someone else. As a result we had to repeat parts of the conversation twice and I'm pretty sure he made some mistakes in the notes he took.

I realise his time is important, but guess what: so is mine. I had to take time away from my work to talk to him. If he had just turned off the phone we could have been done in 5 minutes.

If one business is getting a subsidy, then it just means some other business is paying more tax.

Doing it as "tax" just legitimises what would otherwise be illegal - taking someone else's stuff.

If I take a $1000 tax break then my neighbour - a baker - must pay $1000 more tax.The nett effect is the same as me going over to his place with a few tough mates and taking his $1000 bike by force.

The only real difference is that the "transaction" is sanitised by having the state apply the force.

Those subsidies might make some darling industries more economically viable, but they make other businesses less viable. Musk's flash company makes billions, Joe's Bakery goes bust.

Legal or not, there is still a level of morality to taking subsidies.

democracy

Democracy is ultimately doomed because stupid people outnumber clever peoplee

Many people believe all sorts of bullshit.

That is particularly true in places like China where there is close to zero press freedom and where rumour is often a more reliable source than anything else.

It's easy to verify.

Since the spooks are not using the massive centres to play doom, the power usage will drop massively if they've stopped sucking up meta data.

Power demand down in Utah? Nope, I didn't think so.

Which brings to mind a different point. If Obama really believes this Global Warming stuff, then he should shut down these data centres. That would save more power than the whole of USA switching to CFLs.

"Reserve Your Free"

Having to reserve something is trying to make it sound like this is a scarce and precious commodity. They should really have just said "sign up for"

But, hey, people are stupid and MS is primarily a marketing company....