Posts by Charles Manning 3509 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007
I certainly know what TAPI was supposed to do, but what it actually does is SFA.
TAPI was one of those crocks-of-shit that came from Microsoft's most arrogant period. A few people in the computer telephony industry - the company I worked for at the time included - try to get MS to put together a better API for telephony, but those bumble-butts at MS thought they'd tell the industry how it should work - even though they had no experience.
USA is, according to its own PR, "Leader of the free world".
If it was we'd be surely comparing USA with some countries high up on the various freedom indices
But here all people can say is: "Well USA is arguably better than Nazi Germany or Stalinist USSR".
For example: http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2013,1054.html . USA at 32, UK at 29. Well after many former Warsaw pact nations (Poland, Czech Republic).
How's that First Amendment working for you now?
Back in 1985 I worked on an Apollo workstation with a squeaky coil in the power supply. You could hear the squeak change pitch/volume as the load changed (eg. looping etc).
But to recreate keys from that sounds like a stretch, except in highly contrived hardware assembled to support a theory.
Most power supplies etc are very well decoupled from the coils. There are also caches and other loads playing havoc with the load, so it is hard to believe that exact CPU instructions can be determined.
The other part that makes this sound iffy, is that most CPUs are multi-core, executing and GHz. The phone microphone is bandwidth limited to a few kHz. It just does not have the bandwidth to convey the amount of data implied by decoding instructions that fast.
Many, many thousands of "FB Invesduhs" just bought shares because it was a trendy thing to be part of FB and have a share certificate to show to friends. Now FB is getting a bit meh and those FBtards are feeling a bit sheepish and want to blame someone else for their rashness.
The truth is that none of this class of invesduhs did any due diligence or analysis, so it would be completely disingenuous to say they were mislead. They would have bought the shares at pretty much any price.
Sure, there are many others with a slightly more substantive case, but face it folks, FB IPO was pretty obviously overhyped and anyone expecting to make a killing on the IPO was foolish.
It stuns me that FB has actually been able to recover from the post-IPO tank. I wonder how long the current love will last. But, hey event Y! Shares! have doubled during the last year!
I've been in the game for ~30 years. I've mentored many. There are also many I have not even tried to mentor.
The first step to mentoring is that the person has to want to be mentored. You cannot mentor someone that is not receptive to mentoring. It is a waste of time to try.
I know an Olympic-level sports coach who refuses some pretty skilled players because, in his words, they are "uncoachable". Even if they are good, they won't improve if they are not going to listen to a coach.
The problem with violating trust, is that it is a hard thing to win back.
Nobody on the outside, and likely very few on the inside, really knows how deep the Intel tretchery goes, if there is some at all.
At one extreme, Intel are complete NSA/Isreali bedfellows and every thing they touch from code to compilers and SSDs should be suspect and shunned.
At the other extreme, Intel is completely innocent and Snowdon is making it all up.
The truth is likely somewhere between these two extremes.
No wonder Google is considering baking its own ARM chips. Apart from getting the architectures it wants, it then know what went into the device.
I hunch though this adds yet another hurdle to Intel when it comes to getting design wins for their mobile chipsets.
I'm a Kiwi and I laud the common sense.
However NZ is a tiny country and it is not worth developing a product for NZ markets alone. If the product is even marginally successful, just about everything will be exported and he's going to have to win this battle in the importing countries.
It is the same as the battle for software patents. NZ might have made software patents obsolete, but most NZ software gets exported and that means the software is still effectively bound by US/whatever patent law even if it is being developed in NZ.
So who would expect the NSA, FBI, CIA or any other 3-letter entity to?
The people in these organisations likely start out with a very well defined sense of right and wrong.
Pretty soon they start to play in the grey area where sometimes you need to do some illegal stuff for the common good. This is easy to justify to yourself (a bit like speeding to get to a hospital, or telling tiny white lies to reduce conflict with the missus).
After a while this gets to be normalised and the transgressions get bigger, still justified.
After a few months or years, depending on the person and level of immersion, there comes a total detachment for society. The organisation comes before the public it is supposed to be serving. The organisation, and the people involved, feel they are above the law.
When things have got to the last stage, a judge does not have any chance of reigning them in. The only way to restart is to throw the whole lot overboard and restart. Cancel all their funding and projects. Restart a new organisation, from the ground up and first principles, with none of the same people in play.
There are a lot of things they could have said without overstepping the mark:
1) They could have said their Chinese business had taken a tumble - with no explanation.
2) They could have said "due to concerns after accusations made by Snowdon". They don't have to make a statement as to whether the NSA statements were correct or not.
As for breaking the law or not... if it is being held before a jury, they just have to paint a picture that makes IBM and NSA look bad enough for the jury to award damages.
This case is going to raise some interesting issues because it links the NSA secrecy to damage of a capitalist darling.
Like any company doing a lot of research and looking towards the future, of course Google is looking into what it would take to shift from Intel to ARM. No doubt there is even an evaluation of switching to MIPs or even SPARC. Why not? There are potentially huge wins to be made by switching architecture.
A switch to ARM would allow Google to go beyond just multi-core. With a good interconnect system they could essentially build supercomputers in chips,or building blocks for those. That's the difference with ARM... pay the license fee and you can design the chips YOU need. With Intel you have to take the chips they decide to make.
Considering there are at least ten ARM systems running Linux for every x86 system running Linux, it is not at all suprising that Linux is getting rather mature on ARM.
Most universities are run the same way. Thaat's why you end up with all sorts of ridiculous rules, and a bias towards art/humanities bollocks instead of engineering etc.
What can someone do with a PhD in history but teach/administrate in a university? End result is that you get rules made by these people, for the benefit of these people.
At the university my son attends, the primary criterion for getting a teaching job in ANY disciplie (even Comp Sc) is having a PhD. No PhD means you can only teach first years - no matter your knowledge or ability.
Although the engineering dept ahs tried to rally against it, the University (ie. history grads etc) force this rule to feather their own nests.
"lacking in CPU power to run a fast touch based UI"... only because one leg was chained to the floor by WinCE.
I did a lot of low level WinCE work back then and I still struggle to knoow how they could turn a fast-for-the-time CPU into a Z80.
I did some tests running WinCE at lower speeds to see if we could do some power savings (mainly to reduce heat). Below 8MHz, WinCE could not enven keep itself going, let alone run any software.
It is very material if the price is in BC.
If I'm buying something then I want to be able to translate the price into my local currency so I know if I'm paying £1 or £1000 for a loaf of bread.
It would be immaterial if the BC was just an immediate conduit. I see a price in £, click buy, it turns into BC, then automatically turns back into £/$/whatever at the other side. But as soon as BC is exposed as an actual currency, people will hoard it, speculate in it, save it just like with £/$.
With a high volatility BC, the pub selling beer in BC needs to change prices every day to make sure they are still going to be covering expenses.
If you're running a web business you need some stickiness to keep your customers(*) in place otherwise they wander off to some other service.
Yahoo mail is pretty much the only sticky service that Yahoo have. Yahoo groups is slightly sticky, but does not engage the customers(*) much so hardly generates any revenue.
So if Yahoo screws up mail badly, to the extent that they motivate customers(*) to move away, then they lose their customers(*) and go down the pipe.
(*) Of course the customers are not really customers. They are the product they sell to advertisers etc.
But hey, let's go tilt that ! a few degrees more and see if that changes anything.
If you have a half-hour outage, it is a hardware problem.
If you have a one day outage, you have a problem with the competence of your IT department.
If you have an outage for 4 days, you have a problem with senior management.
The outage is just a symptom of poor management.
Marissa should be spending less time buying party dresses and tilting !s and should rather be running the company.
Yes, babies need stimulation to develop their brains, but at that stage of development everything in the world around them is new and stimulating. They really don't need an idev to provide stimulation.
The second part of brain development is having lots of down time to process the input and form the connections. Much of that happens during sleep, but a lot also happens during non-stimulated time when the baby just sits there. Putting an idev in the baby's face will wreck that.
"Not being allowed to discuss ongoing court proceedings is an automatic restriction; you don't have to be told, although your lawyer should have mentioned it."
That only applies to jurors.
Unless the judge explicitly suppresses details, everything can be made public. Big PR efforts are quite commonly used to sway public opinion and thereby pressure decision makers.
Right now US still has some financial muscle and can throw their weight around, but that strength is decreasing rapidly and they won't get taken seriously much longer.
Pacific countries are, however, getting to the stage where they can form a TPP that could still function without the USA. USA can play with the other children, not just tell the others what to do. It might however take the USA time to adjust to the concept of no longer being able to force their position.
Although I have never tried it myself, I am assured by some that have that Microsoft installion is a complete Dog. Attempting to install anything but the Windows pre-configured for your PC (right drivers etc) will lead to an absolute mess.
If Joe Sixpack was to try installing some free Windows download, he'd have a big chance of shagging his PC. If that happens then it would surely only spread MS hate.
> "assumption that humans can be modelled in reductionist materialist terms"
To have some success, the AI engine, for want of a better term, only needs to do some pattern matching to make some conclusions. That's how spam filters work or http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/
They don't have to model everything, nor do they have to figure out everything to be very useful to an advertising machine like Google or FB.
The spooks might use this, but they are less motivated to pry into your life. The people who ARE very motivated, and are already doing this to you, are the advertising engines.
You are not Facebook's customer. You are Facebook's product. They sell you to the merchandisers.
Specific skills are not enough and it is pointless for universities to try to teach skills in readiness for industry.
All that piece of paper says is "this person can learn techy stuff".
What is far more interesting to employers is demonstration of actual work done. Since universities are generally pretty contrived, that does not count.
What does count though is experience. Yes, you CAN get experience while at university. Just sign up with an open source project that grabs your fancy and contribute to that. It carries a lot of weight with employers.
When it comes to running a company, the basics of business analysis are really not much different whether you're making computers, cars or fizzy drinks. You're still dealing with customers, marketing, product development etc.
But if you still insist that computers are different, then comsider that these days most cars are just networks on wheels with tens of CPUs in them. Software development makes up a considerable part of any new car development and software issues are a big part of the car maker's market & legal issues (eg. recent Toyota issues).
Viewed that way, Ford *is* a software company, the only difference being that people take it more personally when the software crahses.
"If the energy stored in the capacitors could be recycled somehow."
Well that's a problem... The only way to get charge out of a capacitor is to run it down to 0 volts. Now some of that could be discharged into some other capacitor at a lower voltage, but the rest is going to end up turning into heat.
It is appealing to think that the energy can be "pumped out" and stored in a supercap or such for future use, but then you're really making a perpetual motion machine and there are some laws of physics ready to spoil your fun.
The heat in chippery is not due really caused by resistive losses but is more a result of capacitive losses.
Each "bit"/transistor holds charge and is, in effect a small capacitor. Every time a bit state toggles from 1 to 0 or 0 to 1, the capacitor must charge or discharge using up energy according to E=0.5 x C xV^2. Toggling billions of those / sec results in the power consumed by the chip.
Changing the resistance of the conductive paths within the chip has little direct impact on that.
"I thought the figures showed that women have more crashes overall, its just that men have more bigger crashes."
I think you've probably nailed it.
If you add up all the little fender benders, parking lot dings and other "crap parking" style crashes then the women probably take the prize.
Crashes that end up in police statistics (ie. involving serious damage, injury or death) probably belongs to the males.
"at this rate it"
MS has been doing smart phones for twice as long as Apple and Google. Over that time they have not really shown any serious market share.
In the beginning, MS were third place to Nokia and Blackberry. Now they're third place to Google and Apple.
Not much change in 12 years...
I was a teenager growing up in South Africa back then. My holiday job earned be about 1 GBP per day.
I could afford to buy ETI magazine and could sometimes afford to buy some parts for a project.
I remember drooling over the micro boares - including the SC/MP... and also that girl on the ETI cover with the disco lights project in it.
I eventually got an HP29C in 1979. Learned to program on that.
They need a business guy. Someone who understands concepts like customers, competition etc.
A perspective from outside the software industry is refreshing. It helps for asking those fundamental questions about the business. MS has lost its way and it needs someone that can ask the big questions and not just roll out a bunch of buzzwords.
"competition is good for everybody"
True. Microsoft has been in the tablet market since the 1990s and the phone market since 2001.
Thank goodness for competition or we'd still be stuck with their shite.
I think what RealFred was trying to do was play the "Give Microsoft a chance" card. Well they've had all the chance they need (almost 20 years in tablet space and about 5 or 6 generations during that time). They had the market stitched up but blew it.
If it runs on x86 and needs PHP, it won't threaten home routers or IoT. None of these use x86 or PHP.
It would be interesting to dig deeper to understand if the threat could even theoretically manifest of other architectures or embedded systems, many of which lack the resources (both software and hardware) for some exploits to happen.
"The Windows kernel already scales down to for example mobile phones (and is more efficient and less memory hungry than say Android)..."
Having spent years working deep in the Windows CE OS and in Linux (writing drivers etc for both), I can assure you that Windows CE might be able to run with less memory, but is incredibly inefficient in CPU usage.
Windows CE is also very stunted. It is not scaled down Windows but an entirely different kernel that lacks most of the Windows services and has a completely pathetic security model.
Well at least during the Ballmer era anyway.
Instead of putting the immense resources available into trying to make better products that the competitors, MS, well Ballmer anyway, spends more time trying to body-slam the competition than outplay them.
He laughed at iphone. Instead he should have pulled his arrogant head out of his donkey and tried to build something better.
He has had a complete obsession with taking the fight to Google. Instead he should be ignoring Google and trying to make better services & products.
The bully-boy mentality has always suited the kid with muscle but no talent.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
