* Posts by Charles Manning

3509 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007

MtGox finds 200,000 Bitcoin in old wallets

Charles Manning

"the outfit was not very organised. "

Or maybe they were far more organised and the shambles is just a front.....

Seems to me it would be entirely possible to "lose" a whole lot of bitcoin to a hole in the transaction protocol, declare bankruptcy, then go live off the "lost" BC.

Even at $10, 200k bitcoin can be a huge temptation and bitcoin is surely the easiest "currency" to pull a fast-one with.

Intel details four new 'enthusiast' processors for Haswell, Broadwell

Charles Manning

Re: Secret thermocouple compound

Low wattage is only part of the picture. Most of the low wattage demand is in mobile. There, price is very important too, meaning very low margins.

When you look at some of the ARM slicon out there, you wonder how anyone can eat on it. The AllWinner dual SoCs with graghics etc cost around $10 in low volume, less than that at high volume. The quad/octo core parts cost a bit more.

Intel is a company that geared to building high margin parts. They spend up large for new cutting-edge fabs, but make it all back with high margin chips.

Intel cannot afford to direct their new fabs to low margin chips because they will just lose money.

So the question is: Can Intel be profitable making sub-$20 multi-core SoCs on their most expensive fab?

Charles Manning

Re: Worrisome...

Dear Nigel. Please ask your mum if you were dropped on the head as a child.

"they thought that dumb would be good enough when they got the clock up to tens of GHz". You will find that Intel employs these people in white coats that are called "physicists" who study and understand "physics". They, together with 30-something years of experience would have made it very obvious to them that attaining high GHz was not a breeze.

I am impressed by your collection of buzzwords. I will be even more impressed when you can assemble them into meaningful sentences.

The x86 architecture does, indeed, limit what Intel can do and it is really quite amazing what they have achieved given that limitation.

Kim Dotcom extradition: Feds can keep evidence against Megaupload mastermind a surprise

Charles Manning

Re: Worn out his welcome in New Zealand, has he?

Yes he has worn out his welcome, but that is not relevant.

The judiciary is largely above public pressure.

Microsoft exec: I don't know HOW our market share sunk

Charles Manning

This, from an Exec?

Surely it should be a MS priority to understand loss of market share. It has been going on for a long time now.

If the executives have not yet figured this basic question out, then the shareholders should fire them all and get a fresh batch that have a clue.

Any executive that can't figure this shit out is not worth keeping.

Charles Manning

Re: What language is this?

", I can't put the adjectives behind the why," he told The Channel."

Well perhaps that's because Ballmer only bought "verbs".

Charles Manning

re: ?

FUD maybe?

You can have engineering innovation. You can have product innovation. You can have marketing innovation.

Why can't you have FUD innovation?

Microsoft alters Hotmail policy amid blogger inbox probe outcry

Charles Manning

Re: Never happen here

"a judge ruled they could do what they wanted on their own property"

Must have been a crap bunch of lawyers...

A housing analogy would be that of a landlord searching through a tennant's stuff on his property. I doubt that would be acceptable in Blighty.

'Arrogant' Snowden putting lives at risk, says NSA's deputy spyboss

Charles Manning

Of course NSA puts USA at risk

Rewind to the 1980s or so, and USA had great international goodwill. Fast forward to late 1990s and the wheels started to fall off the bus, Now any goodwill is well and truly shot.

Yes folks, there was once a time when American backpackers in Europe would have a US flag on their backpacks and not the Canadian flag!

If 9/11 had happened in the 1980s, most people in the world would have been outraged. When it happened (2001), far more people could see the opposing point of view. If it happened now, probably most people would consider it nasty, but pretty much "ah well, you had that coming to you".

Now, I am not promoting terrorism or anything, but merely pointing out how far the old Stars and Stripes has slid down the flag pole in the last two decades or so.

A great part of that erosion of goodwill is the way USA arrogantly wades in where it does not belong, including making war for bugger-all reason, spying on everyone and screwing over everyone they can.

When they do this, they increase the hostility towards themselves and thus increase the likelihood of attacks.

Thus, what the NSA does certainly increases the risks the USA faces, particularly now that the USA's international power is fading and it's ability to enforce its bully tactics is decreasing.

The only way out is to start rebuilding the goodwill:

* Start playing nice with the other kids.

* Stop spying on them.

A good starting gesture would be to

* completely disband and purge the NSA.

* hold some public enquiries to find, and prosecute, any criminal acts by NSA.

* bulldoze that monstrous data centre in the desert.

Google wearables: A solution looking for a rich nerd

Charles Manning

Re: Once again

Having been in the electronics/software industry for 30 years, it would be hard to put me in the luddite camp. Yet I do not pack my life with tech stuff.

Indeed I have a "dumb phone" that I only use for one or two calls a week and maybe 1 or 2 texts a month (all in CAPS because I can't be bothered finding out how to turn CAPS off). This thing runs for 2 weeks on one charge, nobody would ever steal it and I really don't care if it gets lost. I had a phone Google game me, but I don't use that any more.

After you've been pummeled by wave after wave of tech promising to change your life forever, you get to realise that almost all consumer tech over promises and under delivers. That is true of 8-core smart phones, Blue Ray,... or any of that other gotta-have stuff.

For most of us, most consumer tech "innovation" ends up being a brief distraction until the next bit of tat comes along. Very little of it provides true utility.

Charles Manning

Re: Wearables could still be attractive if you have a smartphone

The newer products only took off when they replaced the old version.

Nobody carried a pocket watch AND wore a wrist watch. The wrist watch replaced the pocket watch.

Very few people had a laptop and a desktop. Laptops only really took off once they replaced desktops.

A smart watch will only work once it replaces a smart phone. Given that the smart phone trend has been to larger screens etc,, it is hard to see how all that can be squished into a watch form factor.

Charles Manning

A nice watch says you're a poser who thinks rolling a turd in glitter will fix it. Please ignore what matters, just look at my bling!

Real professionals, the ones people trust, are confident in themselves and don't need shiny ego-armour. They will wear casual clothes and they will use whatever they have to tell the time; they prefer function over form.

GIANT FLESH-EATING DEVIL CHICKENS roamed North Dakota

Charles Manning

Re: Heresy

Next frame: Cockosaurus saves the day.

Microsoft frisked blogger's Hotmail inbox, IM chat to hunt Windows 8 leaker, court told

Charles Manning

Re: So many WTFs!

But Obama is stealing all our bullets to make an EMP-proof cave for himself and all the other Lizard People.

And don't forget PEAK oil!!!!!!!

Charles Manning

Re: Win 8 trade secrets

s/millions/billions/

That's the bit that gets stock holders pissy.

Pretty much all OS expenditure since XP has lead to products that customers want less than XP. Surely $10-20bn of expenditure* should actually improve product desirabliity.

(*) Based on Vista being around $6bn .

QUIDOCALYPSE: Blighty braces for £100 MILLION cost of new £1 coin

Charles Manning

Re: "it has 15 faces (12 bevels, obverse, reverse, outer edge)"

Each 3-atom triangle gives you a face. There are billions of em.

Bing accused of out-censoring the Great Firewall

Charles Manning

Who cares?

It's Bing.

Planes fail to find 'credible' candidate for flight MH370 wreckage

Charles Manning

Re: If it flew with the pilots disabled

@Jon: Steve Davis must have been making a crap joke that didn't work. Nobody could really be that stupid.

I would not make a call from there because roaming charges are a rip off in Australia,

Monkey steals iPod touch, loses interest in minutes

Charles Manning

Simian would do better with Symbian

No wonder it was disappointed.

Google, Microsoft tackle climate change as IBM seeks cancer cure

Charles Manning

My buzzwordometer exploded...

Who's going to pay to fix it?

WOW! Google invents the DIGITAL WATCH: What a time to be alive

Charles Manning

"The future is both."

More likely "the future is neither".

There is really nothing compelling about smart glasses or smart watches except for twat appeal.

All this info is already available on smart phones which people carry around in their pockets and can glance at in seconds when they need to.

Very few people now even wear wrist watches - they go to their phone for the time.

The idea seems to be that a smart watch is not so much a device in itself, but is instead a remote slave device to the smart phone. This harks back somewhat to the old (failed) tablets which were seen as portable extensions of PCs. ie. you uploaded data into them for remote use, but the computer was the "real" device.

ROBO-SNOWDEN: Iraq, the internet – two places the US govt invaded that weren't a threat

Charles Manning

Re: Iraqi wasn't a threat - wow!

The real threat to America: just look in the mirror.

Arrogance on the international stage is the biggest issue and comes in many guises:

1) Double standards:

a) prepared to invade other countries at the drop of a hat, but bleat when Russia plays similar games.

b) Point and laugh at EU being a bunch of different countries trying to work together, yet USA is itself 50 different states - with different laws and cultures - held together by federal duct tape.

2) Expecting everyone to trade in USD and taking it as an attack on USA currency when other countries trade directly.

3) Screwing over free trade agreements etc.

4) The whole "leader of the free world" swagger, when USA rates poorly on pretty much any freedom index you choose to mention.

Sure, USA rates better than Zimbabwe of China, but surely one that self-identifies as "leader of the free world" should be number one or two in at least one of:

* Press freedom index: 46th

* Economic freedom index: 12th

* Democracy Index: (doesn't make the top band).

Charles Manning

Iraqi wasn't a threat - wow!

Well we didn't need to listen to a robo-head from Russia to tell us that.

The threat was in Afghanistan which is a prick of a place to invade, but Bush wanted to do something ASAP after 9/11. Iraq is easy to access, and pappy had been there so why not just follow in the old boy's footsteps?

To the average westerner they are all just places out east so either served the PR purpose.

But they are 3000km apart.

It's like bombing UK because you hate Russians, or Canada because you hate Mexicans, or NZ because you hate Australians.

CSIRO breaks Australia into 90m x 90m grid to map soil carbon

Charles Manning

“innovative prediction methods”

Baseline data is DATA. The real gathered stuff.

Here they have gathered some data, then filled in the blanks with remote sensing (ie using mathematical models and proxies) and “innovative prediction methods” (ie. mathematical models).

Of these, only the first is actually DATA.

What is really dangerous is then using models on top of models - which they will be doing if they use this model generated "data" as a baseline.

From this we will see scientists of the future making sweeping 90%-certainty predictions.

Facebook security chief: We're not encrypting everything between our data centers just yet

Charles Manning

Surely this is simple to do.

Just using VPN would be a big step up from what they have now.

Anyway, NSA can surely just come through the front door and get access to anything they want. They don't have to crawl around splicing cables and getting dirty - they just hand FB a note saying "record everything and give it to us", and FB just delivers the data on the media of their chhosing.

NSA spies recorded an entire COUNTRY'S phone calls for a MONTH: Report

Charles Manning

Better numbers.

Pick a smaller country. People like to do digital experiments on New Zealand : population 5M.

Let's say everyone in NZ spends 5 minutes on the phone a day (10 sounds too much). Sampled at 8khz, 8 bits.

That's 360TB. With half-decent compression -> 100TB.

Charles Manning

Re: re Lionel Baden

"had actually thought it would of been a better quality "

Since the phone signalling itself is 8kHz you can't be doing any better than that.

They would be recording the digital stuff, straight off the T3 connections. They would not be storing analogue.

Charles Manning

Most likely format...

8k PCM, either raw or as a WAV file or ADPCM (.vox).

These are what are used by computer telephony etc, so will be the most immediately available data.

ADPCM is a bit lossy and introduces white noise. It takes half the space, but recording quality does down.

Romanian 'ransomware victim' hangs self and 4-year-old son – report

Charles Manning

"Intentions mean nothing, it's the results that matter."

You're letting your emotions get the better of you.

In murder, intention is EVERYTHING.

Even if you pull a trigger and kill someone, that is not necessarily murder. It could be self defence, it could be mistaken identity and end up as manslaughter.

Have a look at the ongoing Pistorius case. That is in South Africa, but most jurisdictions will have similar laws.

Satya Nadella's first act may be to launch Office for iPad

Charles Manning

Poor bastard

While they probably make it worthwhile down at the bank, this poor bloke drinks from a poisoned chalice.

Gates (and Ballmer) both think Ballmer did a great job. That means Nadella won't be allowed to spread his wings properly or implement the serious changes Microsoft needs.

He certainly will not be allowed to "do a Jobs".

Think drone delivery is hot air? A BREWERY just proved you wrong

Charles Manning

Nope

Flying is thirst work.

Shuttleworth: Firmware is the universal Trojan

Charles Manning

He's right... and wrong!

Like with most things in life, the truth is somewhere between the extremes.

Yes, firmware is increasing becoming a potential vector. These days we have gone far beyond system designs where the CPU does everything and the OS is the gatekeeper of the CPU and thus what happens in the system. We now have increasingly sophisticated peripherals which are bus masters in their own right. They range from ethernet/serial/communication subsystems to graphics subsystems and lots, lots, more. Since many of these are bus masters, they can access any memory or peripherals in the system. Naughty firmware can very easily expose your whole system to the network. Thus, the threat is more than just technically feasible.

So full marks to Shuttleworth for identifying a problem. Nothing new in this though - people have known of this for ages. It has even been discussed in hushed, and less hushed, voices in Reg commentardsville. Due to lack of originality we'll give him a C.

But the solution... He doesn't know what he's talking about.... I've been in embedded system design for over 30 years now and I wish it was a tenth as simple as he makes out.

Firmware typically needs to be incredibly responsive and run on very cheap hardware. That will always mean that people writing firmware will push the envelope. Pie-in-the-sky solutions seldom deliver anything. And, at the end of the day it is still code and needs to be written by people who are not aware of the full implications of what they are doing.

So shuttleworth gets an F for that part of the paper.

Proper boffins make your company succeed, even if you're not very technical

Charles Manning

Why you only have 2 cents

The problem is that tech people do not sell themselves well...

There are two sides to being profitable:

A) Increasing revenue.

B) Reducing expenses.

Sales people are on the revenue side. Sure, they cost money but they bring in the customers/contracts. More/better sales people ==> more revenue. Most sales people know their numbers. They can say things like "You paid me $200k last year and I brought in $2M or revenue."

On the other hand most techies end up on the expenses side of the ledger. Cost is bad, we try to reduce cost. Sure they are needed - just like we also need chairs and paper clips. We shop around for a good price for paper clips let's get the cheapest techies too.

If you say things like "60% of IT stall in my position are paid more than me", then you are selling yourself based on cost. Management start thinking: "40% of the staff out there are cheaper than this guy. I should try to find some of them!"

What techies need to do is shift themselves from being seen as cost, to being seen to be adding value (by reducing cost or increasing revenue). For example:

* "Last year I designed the software that allowed us to use cheaper electronic components. That saved the company $5M in parts last year."

* "The new network monitoring system I developed reduced down time of the retail website by 10 hours. That gave us $2M of extra online sales this year."

Basically, unless you can articulate your value to management, don't expect them to see it. Certainly don't expect them to pay you for it.

Flying Toaster screen savers return on GitHub

Charles Manning

Burn in was easy to achieve

We had a lot of burned in monitors at one place I worked. These were mainly due to running the same software for extended periods. eg. the monitor for the access control system.

'Catastrophic' server disk-destroying glitch menaced Google cloud

Charles Manning

Re: This makes no sense

".right, because we all know once you hit "delete" all that data is just irreversibly and irrecoverably gone .."

It depends very much on the file system(s) they are using as to whether the data is gone or not.

They certainly are not running FAT with it's little undelete feature.

Charles Manning

"why would they be aggressive about deleting stuff"

Well for one reason, customer privacy.

If a customer wants to run everything through the shredder, for whatever reason, then Google cannot hold onto copies to be viewed by the spooks or whatever.

The customer has said to delete the data so Google must do it. End of story.

Is no browser safe? Security bods poke holes in Chrome, Safari, IE, Firefox and earn $1m

Charles Manning

Run them in a chroot jail

If you ran the web browser within a chroot/FreeBSD jail it could surely do what the hell it liked and not hurt anyone.

'Amazon has destroyed the unicorn factory' ... How clouds are making sysadmins extinct

Charles Manning

Don't be too smug

"I do not see cloud as a threat to my job." I would.

As the cloud displaces other sys admins, they end up in the market circling for other sys admin jobs, including YOURS.

At the least, other sys admins will start accepting lower wages and your employer will wonder why they're paying their sysadmin 50-100% more than the median sysadmin rate. That will put pressure on your future wage increases.

Markets are highly interconnected. When buses came along, people walked less, so shoes lasted longer, so cobblers had less work and many were driven out of business.

Charles Manning

Re: as one of those unicorns

> Oh I dunno, when the cloud supplier goes bust or has a major failure

So having a BOFH in the house prevents failures does it?

A company down the road from me runs their own servers. A couple of years back the servers failed. They then found their back ups were not working properly. They lost a whole lot of source code + important business docs.

Sure, Google or other clouds can go offline, but most of them do a better job of doing backups and provide more 9s than you can do yourself.

> saving a few pennies

Joking right? Look at your pay packet + server costs + leccy bill + cost of renting the space. That likely adds up to more than "a few pennies" per employee.

For larger companies, it might make sense to run your own but for for smaller companies (most companies are small), clouding is (a) way cheaper and (b) way more reliable than they could do themselves.

Charles Manning

Differnt organisations need different solutions

I can fully understand the BOFHs having a negative knee-jerk reaction to clouds. Just like electric street lighting put the gas lamp lighters out of business, this will impact the BOFH market. It won't eliminate the BOFHs though.

For a small company (say up to 20 people) cloud is great. If you're spending $20 per person per month on clouding then that's $400 per month. That's not going to get you much BOFHery or hardware. Clouds are going to be cheaper and will do the job better.

One small consulting company I deal with has around 15 employees. They're mostly programmers and could do all the BOFHery themselves. But they've pushed pretty much everything into the cloud.

What they found was that the BOFHery (fixing crap, updates, backups etc) was eating 2-3 man hours per week. That was 2-3 less hours they could bill out or around $250 per week/$1k per month, not even considering the cost of hardware, storing backups, tripping over boxes etc. They replaced most of it with $200 per month of cloud, keeping just some low-maintenance stuff that is harder to push into the cloud (license servers etc).

Women! You too can be 'cool' and 'fun' if you work in tech!

Charles Manning

El Reg have this all wrong

This is actually a razor company trying to promote armpit shaving.

This city's smog is so TERRIBLE, people are told to stay indoors. Beijing? No – PARIS

Charles Manning

Well it does raise some interesting issues...

How many of the temperature sensors used in climate change models are within these smog islands?

Even when the smog levels are not this bad, the smog is going to be distorting the data used in any models. Garbage in, garbage out.

Amazon wants me to WEAR NAPPIES?! But I'm a 40-something MAN

Charles Manning

"inexhaustible supply of dusters, napkins etc"

Mug's Law ensures that as soon as you re-deploy the old nappies you won't need any more, the stork visits with an unexpected blessing.

Huawei: We'll sell a dual-boot Android, Windows 8 smartphone because, well, isn't it obvious?

Charles Manning

Good idea

It only costs them a bit of extra flash.

No doubt this will attract a lot of attention from those who are curious about WP, but not prepared to take the risk of buying a WP phone.

This will finally put WP to the test on an even playing field and will call MS's bluff.

In a short time Huawei will be number one.

Nipper rolls up at nursery with 48 wraps of HEROIN

Charles Manning

"Mac'n'Cheese

Ooh, fancy Scottish food!

Charles Manning

Them sane old days

I too was at schol in the 1960s and seventies.

Around 1970 (primary school) we made "letter openers" during woodwork class. These had 6 inch blades which were sharpened to a fine point and would be considered an offensive weapon today. Nobody batted an eyelid.

Pretty much all the boys, and some of the girls, carried knives. The teachers would borrow them from the kids to cut string or whatever it they had left their own at home. If a knife was blunt, some teachers would help you sharpen them.

Around 1973, our class teacher decided to have some battle re-enactment for history. Almost all the boys brought air rifles to school. A few didn't have them so girls borrowed air rifles from their brothers.

In 1979, my last year at school, the class went away for a 3 day "history field trip". The teacher said there were likely to be some hunting opportunities. Those that had firearms were encouraged to bring them. I could not go, but I brought my .22 rifle and about 200 rounds of ammo to school to lend to some mates.

No lock downs, no therapy sessions and nobody got hurt.

Brawling neighbours challenge 'quiet' cul-de-sac myth

Charles Manning

That downvote

I doubt it was a chav, or cat for that matter, that down voted.

I think I'll just go back and downvote for the depressing victim attitude.

Don't like living in a chav infested cul-de-sac? Well move out! Leave another house open for the chavs to move into.

It is better to have the chavs all lumped together than spread about the whole city. Rather like cat turds in a way...

Tiny heat-sucker helps keep Moore's Law going

Charles Manning

What about diamonds then?

Diamonds conduct heat many times better than copper, yet are for all practical purposes perfect electrical insulators.

Heat conduction does not require electron migration, just the ability to transfer the thermal energy (in layman's terms - pass the heat "vibration" from one atom to another). Strong, rigid bonds do this well, hence diamonds perform pretty well.

As a side note, this is also why ice has better thermal conductivity than liquid water.

Charles Manning

24% bah!

To have any promise (ie. game changing), you need technologies that give hundreds of % increase. 24% is piddling. You get way better than 24% by doing a process shrink.

This is about the same as pure silver which is way cheaper than fancy copper/graphene mixtures.

We already have heat pipes that give us 250x (ie. 25000%) the conduction of copper. That is 200 times as good as this graphene/copper sandwich.

This is only news coz it has graphene in the press release.