* Posts by Charles Manning

3509 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007

Pay to play: The hidden cost of software defined everything

Charles Manning

Re: And this differs from, say, what Microsoft have done for years .. how?

Exactly right. Nothing new at all. I've been in the electronics/software industry for over 30 years and it has always been thus.

Back in 1982 or so I worked for a company that used ICL kit. We had a huge line printer that came in two speed grades. We'd bought the low speed option and paida lot to get a speed upgrade.

The technician opened the case pulled out a jumper and closed the lid, leaving with the jumper in his pocket. Job done.

Does it really matter what the technician did to speed it up from 300lpm to 600? Nope. We saw value in the faster printer and were prepared to pay for the value. If this had been achieved by pulling a jumper, changing formware or installing new meachinery makes no difference.

When you buy a scope or whatever, you're buying a feature set, not hardware or software. How the manufacturer chooses to deliver the feature set is their damn business - not yours.

Chipzilla gives birth to a TINY comms chip

Charles Manning

Re: Looks big to me

"They could have used PoP for at least one pair of chips."

They do. The MCP thing at the bottom is essentially an PoP.

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/product/mcp/overview.

Microsoft boots 1,500 dodgy apps from the Windows Store

Charles Manning

From where I sit...

It seems like everyone is going the other way... running from Windows CE/phone as fast as possible.

In the early 2000s, Windows CE was the platform of choice for mobile handheld profressional products (eg. top-end GIS producst like ESRI's ARCGIS). Now..... welll... nothig. They've switching to iphones and Androids. Many still have Windows phone support, but that's certainly no longer the conerstone of the mobile strategy.

I've been in this game a long time - since WinCE 1.x.. It's been all downhill since 2007/8.

China building SUPERSONIC SUBMARINE that travels in a BUBBLE

Charles Manning

Re: Why use the military?

Yes, the US National debt is mostly owned by its own citizens.... $10T out of $17T.

However,...

* only a paltry $7T is owed to foreigners, of which $4.5T is to China.

* The citizens are themselves in a hole greater than what Ucle Sam owes them. Sammy owes them $10T, but the citizenry owe $17T in private debt. Thus the citizens themsleves are in no position to dig a bit deeper.

* And then Sammy has a whole bunch of unfunded liabilities (eg. social security) which it owes (ie has promised) but has not yet had to pay, so don't yet show up as debt. That's $118T...

All in all, China could tear up their note and it wouldn't make any difference to the trajectory US is on. Any wonder that the Chinese don't want to trade in USD any more -even if they have a pile $5T high!

Charles Manning

Why use the military?

Why would China want to use the military to whack USA?

They can just sit back and watch USA destroy itself financially. Much easier than getting that messy red stuff all over you!

Anyway, it seems the Chinese have been able to get where they want for 7 years:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-492804/The-uninvited-guest-Chinese-sub-pops-middle-U-S-Navy-exercise-leaving-military-chiefs-red-faced.html

Women-only town seeks men

Charles Manning

spiders

No doubt lots of spiders to kill.

Galileo! Galileo. Galileo! Galileo frigged-LEO: Easy come, easy go. Little high, little low

Charles Manning

Re: They may be usable in these orbits

They're still usable in ANY orbit.... so long as they are predictable.

Pseudolites - fake satellites - are even positioned on the ground to help provide exta "satellites" when there are insufficient real ones in view.

Why has the web gone to hell? Market chaos and HUMAN NATURE

Charles Manning

Tolerating Intolerance

If you don't tolerate intolerance, you're just back to where you started:effectively going back to the past where the church or the BBC or whatever were the gatekeepers of society.

Those who have the mindset of thinking they should be in a position to tell others what to do seldom seem contented with a backseat approach. Instead they slowly get more and more intrusive into other people's lives.

It is why government intrusion is always increasing, never decreasing. It is why we have crap like home owners' associations.

Charles Manning

Re: "teenagers hogging the phone line "

BY2K

Government report: average Oz user will want 15 Mbps by 2023

Charles Manning

Sure.... want away

But are they prepared to pay for it.

As the old saying goes: want in one hand and crap in the other and see which gets filled first.

Brit Sci-Fi author Alastair Reynolds says MS Word 'drives me to distraction'

Charles Manning

Fool me once....

shame on you.

Fool me TWICE, shame on ME!

You are a victim of your own thinking, not a victim of Microsoft.

Silly whiny-pants author. Don't like it? Don't use it!

The police are WRONG: Watching YouTube videos is NOT illegal

Charles Manning

Yup it is down to interpretation

(e) transmits the contents of such a publication electronically;

Now that's getting close to the wire.

You could argue that by clicking the link you are causing the transmission, but causing the transmission is not illegal, just transmission.

But you could also argue that your equipement does transmit the publication:

Your NAS/ADSL modem tranasmits it to your Wifi AP.

The Wifi AP transmits it to your computer's wifi module.

That transmits it to your CPU

Which transmits to your screen.

...

They could clarify this by a slight change to (e):

(e) transmits, or causes transmission of, the contents of such a publication electronically;

In that case, clicking a link would get you on the wrong side of the law.

IT blokes: would you say that lewd comment to a man? Then don't say it to a woman

Charles Manning

Booze is often a trigger

Note I said trigger, not CAUSE.

Often the booze coming out shifts the gear from "work mode" to "club/social mode".

The biggest hassle is that the people at the conferences have been drawn together by a mutual interest in IT, or whatever, and are now thrown together in a completely different mode of operation. They would never normally socialise together.

The dickheads that would grope someone probably tend to socialise in an environment (eg. clubs) where it is common for people to grope eachother etc. They make the association that booze & music ==> singles club party.

Then there are the people who enjoy a drink, a few laughs and intelligent conversation with zero groping etc.

Mix the two and you have problems.

US Copyright Office rules that monkeys CAN'T claim copyright over their selfies

Charles Manning

"you have framed the shot as you want it to be" "did not frame the shot or have any real creative input into how the shot would come out. He even claimed it was a lucky accident."

In any action photography (of animals and sports) you're typically taking many pictures that don't come out. They are all "lucky accidents". A wildlife photographer once told hme he's lucky if he gets one good action shot out of 50.

Pedals and wheel in that Google robo-car or it's off the road – Cali DMV

Charles Manning

Re: Not such a big deal

Your insurance premium is based on the risk (or at least the perceived risjk) of a payout.

If you tell the insurance company you want a GBP10M policy that covers you being hit by an asteroid. You''l probably pay less than GBP 50 pa.

Then ask for the same cover for base jumping and rock climbing.

Same deal here. The insurance people expect a larger chance of a payout, not just because of the chance of a crash, but because they know the lawyers would be onto this as fast as anything and the courts would award a huge payout.

Charles Manning

which should be the default more-reliable case in the event of conflicting input?

One of the biggest headaches with designing any of these systems is handling the hand over from the computer control to the "backup" meatsack.

When everyhting is going well, the computer will, generally be able to do a better job of driving and will even handle extreme control situations better than people do. For example, this is why some fighter jets that are far too unstable for a human to control are flown fine when the computer is working.

Unfortunately the Plan B for almost all automated systems (autopilots, ...) is to disengage and hand back control to the meatsack.

This introduces three major dilemmas:

1) Loss of situational awareness: The meatsack has not been involved in the control and is not sufficiently aware to take control. In the case of an autonomious car, the driver has probably been reading a book, LOLling on twitter or whatever. Suddenly the controls think everything is too hard and dump control in the lap of the driver who is not sufficiently informed to take effective control. By the time the driver works out what is going on it is too late.

2) Exceeding human capability: Computers can cope with some control situations than people can, most speficially they can operate faster and with greater precision. If the computer is giving up, then the chances are a person is incapable of taking effective control. Bad things happen. This happened in an Air China crash some years ago where a thrust controller had kept tweaking things until if was forced to give up. As a result, the meatsack had no chance of recovering the plane and it crashed.

Thus, the control system has to be set up to give up when the meatsack still has a chance of coping - largely negating the benefits of the computer.

But is that the right decision? The compter is likely more skilled and probably more likely to recover from the situation. But if the computer tries more and then really does need to hand over, the pilot is in an even worse position.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Not at all easy to come up with a good decision.

3) Confusion of the control surface: As soon as there are more than one controllers (two people, or a computer and a person), there is the opportunity for some control to fall through the cracks.

A classic example of this is the driver using cruise control for the first time. There have been more than one occurrance of rear-ending the car in front? Why? Well in the criver's mind they hve handed over speed control to the cruise control. Part of speed control is braking when required. Unfortunately the cruse control does not brake when required. Drivers have literally watched the crash happen over a period of seconds dumbfounded that the computer did not slow down.

Of course it all makes sense in the clear light of day, but under the stress of the event, the driver's brain shuts down some of its thinking ability. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_pit for an explanation why).

In short, mixing human and computer control is a bloody nightmare.

The only people that will definitely benefit are the lawyers who outnumber engineers 5:1 in California.

Red Hat: ARM servers will come when people crank out chips like AMD's 64-bit Seattle

Charles Manning

Sorry Jon, not true

While I know Jon and generally respect his opinions, I don't believe he is entirely correct here.

The differences between boards is all int he drivers and device tree. That can surely vary between boards.

This does potentially make it harder for people like RedHat to roll out distros, So, from the point of view od a ditro vendor trying to do everything on their own he has a reasonable point.

However if the board vendors and the distro vendors work together then this does need to be problematic.

Galileo, Galileo! Galileo, Galileo! Galileo fit to go. Magnifico

Charles Manning

Re: Yes, yes, but

Since satellites from multiple constellations can be used in one fix, they actually augment eachother.

It is possible that you don't have enough GPS or Galileo satellites in view to make a fix from one sert alone, but together you have enough. Or, even if you have enough for a rix, then adding more gives you a better fix.

Charles Manning

"EU GPS"

Saying Galileo GPS is like saying Dyson Hoover.

The generic term for sateliite nav systems is Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS).

There are many such systems: GPS, Galileo, GLONAS and Beidou.

Some receivers can receive signals from more than one of these.

Some receivers can even use satellites from multiple systems in a single position solution, but one satellite from each extra set is required to fix the clock, roughly speaking.

ie. a position calculated from 5 GPS and 3 Galileo satellites is more or less equivalent to a position calculated using 7 GPS satellites.

Charles Manning

Re: The good news, of course, being...

Please send me your snail mail address. I will send you a few rolls of tinfoil.

As others have said, GPS, and GNSS in general, are passive. Untrackable.

Your cellphone is trackable, with our without GPS or any other GNSS.

In general, you do not need another antenna to track Galileo. The frequency is close enough to GPS that a single antenna and front end will work for both.

Your Bitcoins aren't money – but it is barter, so we'll tax it, ta ... says Australia's taxman

Charles Manning

Re: A fair cop

The tax must be paid in $ though.

Your barter income might be in eggs and carrots or having your car fixed, but the taxman wants the $ equivalent for those too.

Is it an iPad? Is it a MacBook Air? No, it's a Surface Pro 3

Charles Manning

Dear Microsoft Humour Department

Most jokes only work once.

Second time you might still get some laughts from the slow people.

But three times never works.

Tell the one about the new Microsoft CEO who goes into a bar and....

Hear ye, young cyber warriors of the realm: GCHQ wants you

Charles Manning

Re: Nominative determinism or in-joke. You decide.

Norman or not, Vasive sounds very foreign. Better keep an eye on him.

Get them to serve borscht in the canteen and see if he takes a bowl.

Charles Manning

Do games really get the message across?

I offererd to take my FPS-playing son to the shooting range to fire some real guns. Not interested.

Some people people want to blame games for all the violence in the world, yet we actually know the world is a less violent place now than any other time in human history. I'm certainly not crediting games with the reduction in violence, but it sure has not made things worse.

From that we can say that what people do in games has little to do with what they want to do in real life. It is just escapist fantasy.

Will any of the GCHQ pixel-warriors actually want to spend their whole live in spooksville? I doubt it.

Get ready: The top-bracket young coders of the 2020s will be mostly girls

Charles Manning

"Maths is not your strong suit Jasper"

If he was any good at the tech stuff, he'd be doing it - not writing about it.

Need a green traffic light all the way home? Easy with insecure street signals, say researchers

Charles Manning

Re: Why the different standards?

"IMHO the real double standard is that programmers aren't held to such high practical standards as civil engineers during the design and build phase. We can write shit code all day long and only ever be called on it when/if something goes horribly wrong."

Really??

Roads get pot holes in them. That is a civil engineering failure. Traffic lights fail for electrical reasons, as do power grids. Every mechanic in town currently has a car or two being repaired because mechanical stuff failed.

It always comes down to a compomise between costs and features. We could make roads for $5bn per km that would never get pot holes o break during eathquakes but we don't. We could make $5000 water pumps for cars that would never wear out, but we don't.

Same deal with software: in this age of 99c apps, nobody wants to pay $5M to develop a nuke-proof traffic light system.

The only real difference is that Joe Sixpack can understand that roads will fail and that mechanical stuff wears out, but the failure modes of software are far less obvious. What they don't understand, they don't make allowances for.

Really good software engineers are as skilled as top-end surgeons and certainly more skilled than bottom-of-the-barrel lawyers. The skilled surgeon will get paid $800/hr or more the crap lawyer will get paid $300/hr. Yet a really top sw eng will not be getting a quarter of that. Why? Same reason.

Software is invisble. You can't see software duct tape. People do not appreciate the difference between working and working well. As a result people will not pay for it.

Charles Manning

Why the different standards?

While this might be technically feasible, it is as illegal as stealing stop signs - something that got people long stretches in prison.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/21/us/3-are-sentenced-to-15-years-in-fatal-stop-sign-prank.html

What we're seeing here is the expectation that electronics be held to a higher standard than what it is replacing.

Nobody hassled the stop sign makers for having bolts that could be unscrewed. Why did they not use "security" bolts? Why did they not weld the signs instead of using bolts? Were they negligent in making signs that could be disassembled?

This is one of the really hard parts of embedded design. People are relatively forgiving when cables snap , but get all lawyered up when electronics and software fail.

Hello, police, El Reg here. Are we a bunch of terrorists now?

Charles Manning

"Once governments begin dictating edicts to the people, you no longer live in a democracy."

Well you voted for them, so it is a democracy.

Parties only develop their policies in response to what the public gives them feedback on by voting. Like any other manufacturer/service provider, they sell what the punters buy.

Intel's Raspberry Pi rival Galileo can now run Windows

Charles Manning

"I wonder if they know where the sources are for NT3.1"

Some of it is in Windows CE (or EC as it is called now).

Charles Manning

Re: Windows fans?

x86 gets hot.

Fans required.

Charles Manning

Meanwhile....

I work with a lot of ARM embedded systems. I often use buildroot for smaller projects. A full Linux build from source, including fetching the code, building Linux, u-boot, rootfs, and generating the final binaries. will take you less 10 minutes. It takes under 2 minutes once you've fetched everything.

Even on my crap old laptop and internet connection.

These boot into a running Linux application within 2 seconds. Maybe 5 seconds for a fat-arsed application that needs to load a bigger footprint (eg. Qt).

Charles Manning

Because

We all want our washing machines to be able to tweet the fridge.

Even if it means the washing machine take 2 minutes to boot, except when it's a Patch Tuesday and it takes 20 minutes to do all the updates.

Better keep the antivirus up to date too.

I think it is all an evil hippy plot to cut down on water use because nobody will want to do their laundry any more.

Uh, Obama? Did you miss a zero or two off Samsung's Chinese supplier 'fib' settlement?

Charles Manning

Limited by the law

These are fines, not civil damages. As such the amounts cannot be set on a whim.

The amounts specified probably were reasonable for other cases, but are out of whack when applied here.

This'll end well: US govt says car-to-car jibber-jabber will SAVE lives

Charles Manning

Universal maintenance too

If these things are talking to eachother and giving eachother hints, then this opens up a whole lot of interesting issues.

Currently, the reliability of your car depends largely on things you can control: what you buy, howe well you look after it, etc etc.

Now some other bloke's car is telling your car what to do. The firmware he forgot to update is DOSSing your comms with other vehicles or sending bogus "I'm braking" messages which are confusing your car.

Adding complexity and obscuring responsibility is a bad thing. People will just put their foot down and hope the computers all sort it out.

Bugger this... I'm walking.

Cargo truck crammed with garbage explodes IN SPAAAAACE

Charles Manning

Re: The big problem up there

"Expect some stuff is in a polar orbit, and some is equatorial orbit."

Space is 3D.

The stuff in a polar orbit does not fly at the same altitude as stuff in an equatorial orbit or a LEO.

It won't hit you.

Don't think you're SAFE from Windows zombies just 'cos you have an iPhone - research

Charles Manning

Re: iTunes is pretty much malware under Windows anyway.

"but surely it's USB that's inherently insecure"

USB is just a communications path - a bit of wire. Just as you don'e expect to get security from thernet, you should not expect security from USB.

What is fundamentally broken (security wise) is the design of the interaction between itunes and ithings.

Even if the exchange between the two was over tinfoil-wrapped encrypted Wifi or whatever it would not make any difference.

What it really comes dwon to is that Apple treats the itune connection differently than the rest of the world via wifi. itues is always trusted, rest of the world is not.

Detroit losing millions because it buys cheap batteries – report

Charles Manning

Re: Only a complete idiot...

Actually, you'd be using a step down converter (ie. buck switch mode power supply). Using something like that is routine.

That the thing is running off 9V and fades suggests it is running from a linear regulator which is turning most of the battery energy into heat rather than useful work.

This suggests it was designed by a beancounter's electronic hobbyist brother wanting to scoop some municipal gravy.

Charles Manning

Replacing with solar cells is a CRAP idea

A design this bad should not be retrofitted with solar cells.

It should be completely redesigned - from the ground up.

Redesign to run off AAs - economically - would need a board replacement.

Redesign to run off solar cells would need a complete mechanical refit too, since solar cells hanging of the side would get smashed in minutes by people wanting free parking.

Charles Manning

Only a complete idiot...

would design a product like a parking meter to use a 9V battery.

Heck, even 4xAA would have been much better. They're cheaper and have more capacity.

But anyone that designs with a 9V would also have designed crap electronics. Most likely unbelievably inefficient too. A well designed parking meter (probably cheaper than a crappily designed one) should run for well over a year on a pair of AAs.

Time to move away from Windows 7 ... whoa, whoa, who said anything about Windows 8?

Charles Manning

How many zeros?

How much does Gartner get paid by MS to write this stuff?

Surely having an XP event once every 10 years is way better than the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of upgrading every release.

Click on a Facebook ad on your mobe, then buy a thing on your PC ... Facebook remembers

Charles Manning

Why don't they track useful stuff?

Like where the hell I parked my car last night.

Snowden leaks show that terrorists are JUST LIKE US

Charles Manning
Headmaster

Triangulation

"munin @munin

@thegrugq @empiricalerror Not sure I buy that. Cellular triangulation doesn't strike me as being the thing they're defending against w/ that

"

The problem with fancy-pants technical words like triangulation is that they often don't mean what people think they do.

Cellular triangulation would be hard to do since uses angles and therefore requires directional antennas.

Trilateration, OTOH, is perfectly feasible. It measures distance (ie. flight time of radio signals). That is the basis of GPS, LORAN and such and it does give pretty good location information.

Charles Manning

Hah!

They can still get to you through the fillings in your teeth.

Best wrap your head in tin foil!

Charles Manning

Re: The overlooked bit....

"From an operational viewpoint,this will create headaches. . For example, there can't be much easy communication between different groups/units/teams using different methods."

It is perfectly fine if different groups/cells use different encryption. You don't want them communicating or listening to eachother. Keeping them ignorant of eachother is basic operational safety.

Same deal for the French resistance people during WW2. The last thing you wanted was for a member of one cell to be captured and spill the beans on how everyone worked.

Hollywood star Robin Williams dies of 'suspected suicide' at 63

Charles Manning

Depression

It is a terrible thing. for the person involved and the people around them. Fortunately it can (mostly) be managed and (at least partially) alleviated.

Unfortunately there is a stigma. You'd get help for a broken leg so why not for a broken brain?

If you have depression, please get some help - for yourself and those around you. Just hiding if for "shame" is not worth it.

WinPhone's Halo hottie Cortana to hit desktop in next Windows – report

Charles Manning

Re: Prior Art

It's not just the vague idea, it is actually the method for making the thing work that is patentable.

Sure we have holographic transporter portals in scifi novels, but if you actually made one that worked then you'd be able to patent that.

Voice recognition has been around as bot an idea and as algorithms for a while now, however you could still come up with a new improved way to do VR and that could be patentable.

Charles Manning

Most frequent request

"Cortana, please ask Google [insert question here]"

Stephen Hawking biopic: Big on romance, not so much with the science?

Charles Manning

Re: Hollywood Doesn't Understand

Yes they do understand.

Chick flicks sell.

Science documentaries don't.

US 911 service needs emergency upgrade and some basic security against scumbags

Charles Manning

The flip side to saying the cops should protect you is this: the police are your employees, as an employer you have an obligation to provide them with a safe working environment for your employees.

Sure you'd hope the police get it right, but that is not always going to happen. Real life does not have an Undo button. These incidents are not scripted. Nobody really knows who's the good guy and who's the bad guy. Hence the standard way of doing things is to just supress everyone (good guys and bad guys) to give a safe environment in which the real story can be figured out.

It sounds like the Oz cops you mentioned went way beyond what they needed to do to achieve that.

Charles Manning

Don't give it a name

As soon as it gets an "internet name", people think it is cool to do it for a while.

It isn't twerking, it's waving your bum/fanny around.

It isn't swatting, it's being a dick.

Hopefully "swatting" will just go a way like flashmobs and other "memes".