Posts by Charles Manning

Surely only the dumbest are surprised by this?

The writing was on the wall when Elop joined.

It was on the wall in BLINKING FULL CAPS when MS started their buying bid.

Frankly, if you were then surprised to be losing your job you're brain dead.

Big deal

I am opposed to mass survelillance, but surely UN has bigger rights issues on it's plate than this?

Women/gays being stoned to death, soccer playing Palestinian kids being straffed by Isrealies,...

The 5 eyes nations are all reasonably democratic, with citizens who are reasonably empowered to act. It is not like they're in dictatorships where the citizens have no control over the issues.

It is far more important that the UN help those who lack the power to help themselves.

Playmobil logic

Playmobil or it didn't happen.

No Playmobil, therefore it didn't happen.

Well duh

Engineering is the art of compromise.

Different problems need to be tackled in different ways.

If you're building millions of something then it pays to spend a 100k or more optimising the code so it can run on a 20cent CPU vs a 50cent CPU.

If the code is going to be run once then speed of writing the code and being confident in the output is far more important.

Hence actuaries doing one-off calculations us APL or matlab or such while embedded programmers use assembler, C or whatever.

Call cost/benefit supply/demand analysis economics if you want, but to an engineer it is just normal decision making.

Bunch of bloody whiners

I'm 6ft6 and I have size 14 feet and a crook knee. I can wedge myself into an economy seat without too much fuss or discomfort and without disturbing my seatmates.

Tall people are used to living in a world designed for gnomes, so aircraft are really no more uncomfortable than sitting in a BMW (where by shoulders touch the ceiling) or sleeping in army beds (where my feet + ankles stuck out the end).

It seems to be mid-sized people that whine the most.

If the developer is stressed

They're probably reading some rather hairy code

or

they're under excessive management pressure to get the work done

or

they're trying to use Visual Source Safe.

But... native people have an affinity with nature

The Native Americans lived in peace and harmony with nature for tens of thousands of years, just killing enough to survive and always being respectful of nature and saying prayers of thanks. It was only the evil white man and his destructive ways that damaged USA.

The same too of the NZ Maori and Aboriginal Australians.

Gotta love PC revisionist history!

So...

80 hours of charging and 50 hours of driving to travel the 5000km route.

Seems insane when the cities are probably already connected by China's amazing rail network that whips along at 350km/h and does the same distance in 15 hours.

Anything! to! keep! Yahoo! in! the! news!

Bugger the PDFs...

Playmobil or it didn;'t happen.

Our Mission

is really to make money!

The real challenge is that they cannot sell the actual space itself, they can only sell the info that there is a space.

That means the current parker has no legal claim to the current parking spot and cannot choose who he sells it to.

If a third party sees a person about to pull out and wait for the space, they can have it even if someone else has "bought" it.

Since only the information, and not the spot, can be sold, that introduces a whole opportunity for parking trolling. As you walk along the sidewalk and see someone about to pull out, you could "sell" their spot. There is nothing limiting the seller to being the current parker.

That means there is nothing stopping multiple people selling the same spot, nor is there anything stopping someone selling non-existent spots or selling a spot that someone else occupies.

Net result: lots of pissed off people, road rage, fights,...

SF are doing the right thing nipping this in the bud.

To think...

747 was largely designed with a few slide rules and printed tables with maybe a bit of FORTRAN thrown in for the aerodynamic calcs.

Now we have TFLOP data centres doing the calcs.

No wonder the 747 was designed in 16 months and modern aircraft take almost as many years.

The Lungs of the Earth

Rainforests are often given nice emotive names like this.

Sure, it would be a shame to see such wilderness trashed, but that is prely an emotional response.

From a CO2 absorbtion POV, that is perhaps not valid though.

CO2 is absorbed in direct proportion to the amount of photosynthesis that is happening, which is governed by:

* The availability of water, CO2 and other nutrients.

* The type of plant.

* The amount of light.

* Other conditions such as temperature etc.

The size of the plants does not matter. Wheat, grass, soy etc can photosythesise as well as, and often better than, rain forest plants, soaking upo that CO2.

What is a bigger concern is the change of water vapour (though our CO2-fixated greenies are ignoring this). In areas where I used to live there were lush pastures that were lightly grazed. Farmers then increased the stocking levels and grazed harder (but put on more fertilisers too). Result: shorter grass which holds soil moisture less, leasing to a change in the valley microclimate.

Cutting down rain forests would do the same.

Contraceptive patch

Microsoft gives this a completely new meaning.

PS Where's the Playmobil?

Cornering the unicorn feed market

profit?

It comes down to power supply efficiency

It is pretty much impossible to design a switch mode power supply that is efficient at both low and high powers. Thus, most of the effort goes into designing a power supply that is relatively efficient when used at high power (ie. On).

When in standby, either the same power supply is used, and efficiency suffers badly, or you have a second power supply that is there to handle the standy power levels. That obviously drives up circuit complexity and costs a bit more.

These days there seem to be directives to keep standby power low. Still, if you have a house full of 8W LED bulbs each chomping 0.5W 24/7 in standby mode, that is still quite a bit of leccy.

Will he really make a huge profit though?

He has promised hats and shipping out bites of potato salad. Multiply that by a few thousand and the wad of cash isn't all that high any more.

Can't beat them, join them

I've said this before and I'll say this again.

Labouring youself with x86 is like trying to race dragging a trailer behind you. The only way Intel have stayed halfway competitive with their mobile Atoms is by being streets ahead in process.

If Intel were to dump x86 and make mobile chips on a level playing field (ie. ARM) they'd be ahead of everyone else by a long way.

Except of course that Intel will struggle to make money. Their whole corporate culture is geared to high margin products (x86s that sell for $hundreds). The biggest challenge for Intel is adapting to the market where quad-core ARM socs cost less then $10.

Stupid laws kick in...

I don't know how the driving-while-using-phone laws work elsewhere, but in NZ they specifically disallow cell phones.

As I said back then, even to some MPs, it's a dumb law because it is tech-specific. It doesn't cover VoIP phones.

It would seem that using VoIP + Wifi hotspot you can phone+drive all you want without falling foul of these laws.

Nobody wants storage

We just want to be able to access our stuff on demand.

With perfect clouding etc, there would be no need for storage at all, beyond a few kbytes needed to boot a device.

Finding a scapegoat

These people are naive in thinking the USA tech industry industry is crumbling because of the spying and that it might have been " an issue that needed to be addressed but might blow over ".

Nothing happens in a vaccuum. The US tech industry has been losing ground for ages and has been doing so perfectly well without the spies dragging them down. All the spying has done is erode the FUD that was keeping the market going for a bit longer. Net result, the spying has only changed timescales by a few months - a year at the outside. The outcome has not changed.

But big biz leaders never want to admit the rot of their industry. They always want something else to blame. They did it in 2001 and they're doing it now.

Exactly the same thing happened in 2001 with dot.bomb. The US market imposion was largely blames on Sept 11. However the industry was on the skids already. Sept 11 might have accelerated things by a month or three, but the trajectory was already set.

We've seen the upsurge of Huawei etc for a few years now. That they were coming along to eat everyone's lunch was obvious long ago. Microsoft has been rolling about in its own excrement for years.

All of this predates spies, but the spies five them a nice little scapegoat when the share holders get uppity.