Posts by Charles Manning

Re: Old news

Tin foil on special in Isle 3.

Believing is bullshit. It is just feeling with no evidence.

Re: Nice

What a disservice to your child. You're setting him up with the template that you must just shut up and put up.

If the boss says to do something inefficient and stupid... well Dad taught me to just shut up and do what the boss says.

There are many things you could have done to make this better: eg Ask the school to just let him do some other, more useful stuff during that time (eg. python programming).

Any teacher worth anything does not just want compliance - they want their kids learning. They should support alternative education.

Any teacher that just wants compliance is out of date unionised scum unfit to be dealing with the future of kids.

A distressed cow just runs.... fences mean nothing.

About three years back my neighbouring farmer went away for the week end and two of his cows decided to go walkabout (leaving me to try sort it out). The cows were distressed having just been taken away from their calves and moved to a different farm. They broke through 7-wire fences like you would walk through cobwebs, smashed up about 15 fences and ended up many farms and about 7km away.

Once they were settled down though it was easy to drive them home, just walked along behind them giving them a nudge now and then.

Hence the need to get up high.... this wasn't just daisy munching buttercups in the field.

It seems to be undisputed that he killed himself.

Only whether or not this was intentional is contentious.

Hey, are you...

Al's sister?

3d printed commentards

Using 3D in the headline seemed to have worked on both accounts:

1) It got you to read the article. Tick.

2) It wound you up. Tick.

Anyone half savvy realises you could have made the bracket faster & cheaper & more durable from a recycled baked beans can with $5 of hand tools.

It does not have to make sense...

The Power Wall is a status symbol. It is something for the e-hipster to buy.

The numbers don't have to stack any more than the numbers have to stack up for buying any other status symbol. Why buy a BMW-i8 when a Hyundai can provide the same - if not better - functionality at one tenth the price.

Re: I don't understand how, please explain

The Reg text is very misleading when it says "boffins have learned it if 4bn years old"

What was said is:

" We infer a lower bound on the average age of magnetization of 3.7 to 3.9 billion years."

What that means is they gathered some data and stuffed it through some mathematical models they have and got the numbers.

Like all mathematical models, these are based on assumptions about how processes work and that it is valid to, say, use a model derived on one planet with data coming from another planet.

They really haven't learned anything.

Times have moved on

Making a porn movie or a fly fishing video... no difference unless kiddies were involved.

50 load cycles a year

Sounds like the key customers are in Blighty.

Re: That explains that then

Even if they gave you a free toaster and free bread, you'd likely still be losing on the deal.

Why I don't want to be their kind of "tech enthusiast"

I am not a luddite. I have been developing software and embedded systems for over 30 years.

I **like** software. I **like** new software when it enables new things to be accomplished.

However sw is a TOOL. It must be useful. Just changing sw for the sake of change and for no good use is not exciting.

Their type of "tech enthusiast" is the sort of person that gets a stiffy from knowing that ALT-CTRL-X does something on Win8.x that. They're the sort of people who do case mods and their script kiddy mates think they are technically awsome.

For 90+% of people, PC software is a TOOL. It must function and must do it's job well.

You can take away my hand screwdriver if you give me something that is functionally better and easy to learn (eg. a battery screwdriver). What MS have done is take away my screwdriver and replace it with hammer and told me to stop using screws and I must now nail everything together.

Have the breakers been disabled?

"I'm not sure if the 787 has a breaker for each GCU to completely remove power from the unit. As I recall, some A/C do and some don't."

Since the German pilot crashed the recently, there has been a scramble to disable stuff so that pilots can't turn things off when they want. I wonder if preventing GCUs fits into that?

All biz units are independent

Many years ago (1995 or so) I had some connections deep within Microsoft's OS group who were working on Windows NT. They were dual building their code with both Borland and Microsoft compilers and the Borland compiler way producing better output.

The story I was told was that the MS compiler crowd were not fixing compiler bugs and Dave Cutler finally threw a wobbler and said if MS didn't fix its compilers, then MS compilers would be dropped.

Big organisations are just umbrellas.

Well of course it would double....

They counted both the number of transistors in the CPU and the CPU transistor count.

But seriously... the trend is also going the other way. Look at the ARM Coretex M0s they're bringing the transistor count for 32-bit CPUs to unprcedented lows.

Got it all wrong

"I think some people confuse punishment and revenge, the real question is which would be most effective in getting the criminal to engage with society correctly?"

The way things work now, this has flipped over. No longer doees the criminal need to adjust to fit back into society, instead society must adjust to fit in with the criminal.

Most criminals have a very poor understanding of the badness of their behaviour. They don't blame themselves, they think it was just bad luck they got caught.

Good punishment helps to clear up the confiusion: society is highly pissed off with your actions. We'll make things very unpleasant for you so you maybe think twice before you do this again.

Just loving on the crim and asking them about how his mother was an alcoholic is not enough. The crim comes away with the message that every time I do something bad, nice people love on me. So why not just keep offending?

Committee from hell?

Nope. It sounds like the next greatest trough for the research snouts at universities etc.

The more outlandish your claims and "vision" the more you'll get funded.

Re: But wait...

Yes, the victim must be compromised after that the data can be transferred in various ways...

In this case, they used heat to send data via the victim's temperature sensors. You could also use all sorts of other methods.

A BT keybopard for instance.... If the host was to disconnect/reconnect a BT keyboard and the victim was listening for traffic - that would work as would pretty much any form of sensor.

Even LEDs can be used as sensors. A little known thing about LEDs is that they are also light sensitive and LEDs driven by microcontrollers can also be used as light receivers.

But, hey, once you've compromised a compter, just assume all bets are off.

Re: Suckerfish

oooh... shiny thing over there... lol... Did someone say something about Lenovo? I forgot already.

Nobody remembers anything any more. It won't hurt them for more than a week - if that.

Re: OR, OR...

or put the box on the freeway and the wave function will become planar pretty smartly.

Re: WTF

" Free LANCE eh?"

I see what you did there. In a rant against the cock joke, you managed to slip one in.

Well done sir!

His last web effort

Getting NZers to sign up and pledge to vote (preferably for his party).

432 starry-eyed people pledged. Dotbomb predicted tens of thousands.

His predictions are likely way off this time too.

Online comms is very crowded. Having to deal with both Skype and Google is already too many.

You can't realistically add more players unless they inter-operate like phones do,

The analogy is entirely broken

The oil price has not plummeted because fracking oil has come online. It has fallen because OPEC has fallen down. The fracking is just coincidental.

OPEC colluded to keep oil prices up and supply down, but these cartels rely on full cooperation between the players. This means they all have quotas to keep to. Then somewhere along the path someone wants to sell more than their quota so steps outside the lines. They sell more, then the agreement is off and the cartel breaks down.

If anything, this threatens fracking.If there's plentiful main well oil on the market there is no point bringing relatively expensive fracked oil to market.

To bend that back into the original analogy.... We're still all using mainframes, but mainframe prices were held high by IBM, ICL, CDC and others colluding to keep supply down and prices up. Then one day IBM decided to sell more computers at hallf the price... The fledgeling PC market gets wiped out because it is cheaper to use mainframes.

Indeed. We get the same crap about "poverty" here in NZ too.

Having grown up in rural Africa, this notion of Western poverty riles me no end.

I'd love to load a bunch of beneficiaries on a plane and send them to live in Africa for a week. Or, perhaps, to give them the full experience, send them by small ship in steerage.

The worst off 10% of people in UK, NZ etc still live easier lives - with more material wealth ans social support - than 90% of the people in the rest of the world.

Re: Intel never really got the "new embedded"

"Early embedded chips were just old desktop devices with narrower buse".

Sorry, I've been developing embedded systems for 30 years and I must disagree. If anything it is the other way around. Some embedded CPUs were used to make the first desktops.

Sure there have been some x86s put into embedded service, but they've never been more than single-digit-percent players.

Intel have dabbled in the embedded market often, but then dumped the industry - leaving them high and dry.

The part that really stumps Intel is how to make money from embedded and other low margin parts. The Intel corporate DNA is constructed around the concept of spending hundreds of millions to develop a new desktop/server chip, then sell them for hundreds of dollars each. This is a very high margin business.

Embedded systems and phones are a low margin business. 8-core ARM-based smartphone SoCs (eg. Allwinner) sell for about $10. You need to sell millions to break even, then millions more to be profitable.

Re: The solution is always...

If the answer isn't "we need more toys and funding", then refine the question....

Even though physiciast are on the quest for truth, they are still human and are desirous of an ego-rub, nice houses etc.

Re: Not a panacea

"Network can help develop rural economies..." said by a person that' probably never been to a third world country and understands the obstacles.

I've lived in some of the more remote areas of rural South Africa - which is many rungs up the ladder from other third world nations. My sister still runs health clinics there, paying for everything herself.

Programs like providing tractors to help plough fields fail, because nobody can service tractors, fix stuff,... Within a year ot two all the tractors are buggered. Lots of money spent and the only accomplishment is a bunch of rich donors feeling good that they did "something".

When you don't have even the basics like water covered, fancy stuff like twitter access is pretty low down on the list of useful tech.

Where's the BOFHery going to come from? If you can afford to send them a BOFH etc, then it would make a lot more sense to send them a few rolls of PVC pipe instead so they can get water going.

Really, really, basic stuff changes these people's lives, not fancy shiny stuff.