Posts by Charles Manning 3509 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007
Why would stuffing cause food poisoning?
Assuming you stuffed the bird just before roasting, the stuffing itself should not breed and bad stuff. Any bad stuff is going to come from contaminated meat inside the cavity which is still there whether or not you stuff the bird.
And yes, I've hunted, killed, cleaned plucked, stuffed and eaten a few birds too.
No doubt that is correct.
Quite likely patent examiners work to a quota where they have to complete n patents per week. Come Friday afternoon a whole lot of patents will get a free pass.
There is no pressure to change this. USPTO/.gov get paid regardless of the quality of the patent. It is less work to OK a patent than to reject it. Therefore the pressures are on the system to allow through really poor patents,
If, however, the USPTO was to be held accountable for the quality of their patents, things might change. If a business could sue the USPTO for lost revenue, that would make things interesting....
But, as I said before, any change would be decided by those who have a vested interest in the status quo. Therefore no change.
Tenured professors with incomes for life don't mind speaking their minds because they are unaffected by what they have to say.
But the current cock-up that is US patentt law is a healthy money spinner for for the actual lawyers practicing patent law. Forget expecting them to change any more than asking turkeys to ask for thanksgiving twice a year.
The lawyers make a lot of money filing patents. If it was harder to get patents, less people would file and the lawyers' business would be cut by many %.
But the real jackpot does not come from filing patents but from patent litigation. Crap patents are more likely to end up in disputes. Therefore it is highly desirable for the patents to not only be many, but more importantly, they must be crap.
So if USPTO was to ever undergo significant review, the experts being called upon to give legal wisdom to the proceedings will be the actual patent lawyers themselves. Foxes and hen-houses; they will just say it is all functioning fine as it is right now.
Furthermore, the USPTO is one of very few govt departments that is self-funding and actually makes a little profit for Uncle Sam. Nobody really wants to mess with that.
Thus.... status quo.
All the best talent must have left long ago, before Marissa even started there.....
But that was not enough. Marissa cut telecommuting and offers less maternity leave than Google et al. That must have taken the best of what was left.
Now forcing people to use Y!Mail. Who is going to be left? Those that can't get a job elsewhere.
Perhaps Marissa is on a mission to push Y! over a cliff and keep it dead.
Yup, just like people knew a long time ago. Observations like this were made at least ten years ago, if not 20 years ago.
Same goes for analysing the bumps on whale fins to study fluid flow.
It seems someone has run out of original ideas to secure research funding and has been dredging up old papers looking for "motivation".
That's one of the real problems of computer science.
Very, very, few of the people who enter the world with a computer science degree end up doing computer science. They end up programming and doing software engineering.
Computer science is actually a really poor education for someone who is going to develop software. CS is an academic subject and the industry wants practical people.
Sure, FP is interesting as is how shift registers work and NP-completeness or whatever to anyone who cares. However these are completely irrelevant to people who develop software on a daily basis.
What the industry wants is programmers, not Computer Scientists. I've been in the industry 30 years and don't think I've really done much Computer Science per se.
Good programmers will be drawn to programming no matter whether the cool kids at school think they are nerdy or not.
Good programmers will also be drawn to programming whether or not it is taught at school. Good programmers need to be resourceful and if they have to be spoon fed by teachers they will likely be crap programmers. Give me the kid who taught himself to write Visual Basic over the kid who only knows what was downloaded into him by formal education.
Joining this industry is a commitment to life-long learning. If you can't teach yourself, then give up now.
As for "1) Chicken & Egg: Employers want experienced staff.", that's not entirely true. Employers do indeed want experienced staff, but it is not a chicken and egg problem. Now, more than ever before, students have opportunities to flex their programming muscles before they graduate.
Internships abound. There are also thousands of open source projects where a student can get stuck in and learn something new and actually contribute. And prove themselves.
Give me a "B" graduate with an interesting bunch of projects on github over an "A+" graduate who only focused on their coursework.
Leadfree solder is just another constraint to take into account when designing a board. Any compentent bord designer should be able to handle this.
Cracking solder joints need either thermal cycling or flexing. Both of these can be mitigated by good design.
Blaming "new" tech that has been around for about 10 years now is disingenuous.
Intel has had a long list of dabblings with other business units, processors etc. So far they have ended up dumping everything that isn't x86.
8080, 8051, 80251, 960: All "killer" architectures in their time. But what does Intel do? They cut these off at the knees meaning that the companies that built product on these were left high and dry (except for the 8051 where other suppliers were licensed).
They had a great StrongARM/PXA line in ARM. They were king of the ARM pile.... and sold it to Marvell who stopped further development.
Same pretty much for their flash, ARM and other tech.
Unsuprisingly, designers are hestitant to design in Intel. Many would consider it gross negligence to leave a company exposed to Intel changing its mind and abandoning a CPU.
They only design in Intel to be able to run PC-like software. If Intel came up with a new wonder chip for embedded, it would have to have some very compelling features or nobody would touch it.
But as we all know, the science isn't settled, there's no consensus, etc etc. So Eric Schmidt's disastrous 2 meters of sea level rise by 2100 is entirely plausible and a worse case scenario that needs to be planned for."
By that logic we should also allow for the case where the earth is only 6000 years old.
What's more of a question is "Why do they still make dumb phones?"
Ten years ago dumb phones were still profitable. But now? Margins are razor thin and everyone and their dog is in the game. Huawei et al might still make a profit out of them but Nokia probably can't feed many expensive European engineers just on dumbphones.
Both Apple and Microsoft fell on their arses, but there the similarity ends.
Apple stood up, learned from their mistakes and went forward to make some outstanding products.
MS, OTOH, still produces WinCE -based "phone operating systems" based on 15-year old tech. They crapped their nappies and are getting a nice warm feeling from sitting in their own excrement.
"Their options are to win mobile or die."
Considering that MS have been pouring money into mobile for at least 15 years, they are not doing well at all. They have been both ineffective AND damaging to the industry.
Those that say to give MS a chance forget that MS have been in the smartphone busiess twice as long as Apple or Google.
I really think that aince about 2001, Bllmer has had a complete Google obsession. Rather than put energy into winning customers he has, instead, been trying to beat up Google by buying "verbs", Bing, Kin phone, etc.
What Ballmer is doing here is some sort of falling-on-the-sword act which really costs him little He has so much stock that any up-tick he can generate will make him a boat load of money.
But Ballmer is not "the problem", he is only the SYMPTOM of "the problem". Shooting the chief clown doesn't stop the circus from being a circus.
The problem is the set of forces in Microsoft that allowed them to install people like Ballmer. Mostly, it comes down to two things:
1) Supreme arrogance. We're Microsoft so we know what's best for you.
2) Such shockingly largeincome from some business units at they can execute really badly in other areas without market forces coming into play. They've been able to run huge losses trying to prop up their dabblings with mobile for 12+ year. In that time they have damaged/destroyed many companies with some pretty good ideas by drowning them.
Pity really. From all that amazing potential, you'd hope the world would have gained more.
I love the smell of sensationalism in the morning.
On my desk there is a copy of Dr Dobb's Journal from April 1990 with the big banner: "Neural Nets Now"..
In the 1980s I studied neural nets at university and Wonkapedia tells me these date back to the 1940s. Since then we have various other similar self-learning systems such as genetic algorithms (dating back to the 1950s) and Bayesian filtering.
None of these systems has a formal logical algorithm and thus no programmer can actually explain why a specific decision is being made. All we know is that they somehow often do perform rather well.
Sorry folks, but it is not yet a case of the machine being smarter than the programmer.... but like me, you clicked. That was the whole point of this sensationalist article: click generation.
US domestic flights have had on-board credit card gobbling phones for years now. Many years ago I flew from SFO to LAX sitting next to a lawyer you talked on his phone the whole way, no doubt billing his clients for every second in the air. It was no more disruptive than sitting next to someone playing a game or watching an in-flight movie.
Nothing new, what's the fuss?
"Only got themselves to blame" takes a very simplistic view of how things work. Even in the most paranoid of institutions, people need to be able to have some trust or they would not get things done.
When I was in the army, I worked some time in IT. The generals kept forgetting their passwords, so we ended up assigning the generals passwords which were printed out and kept on a list for everyone to reference. For a while, we made it easy for ourselves by assigning them all the same password.
Now as it turns out, pretty much nobody doing IT was vetted at all (I certainly wasn't and would have failed miserably - being associated with various "known" people - including a guy who was in jail for espoinage). And I had all the generals' passwords.
You can guarantee the same happens in ALL government organisations, spooks or not. It probably happens in most banks too.
Whether you love Android or hate it, you must surely agree.
Windows etc: Controlled by MS, released on only a limited set of architectures and SOC options.
iOS: Apple make all the decisions.
Android: Anyone can port it to any CPU architecture that will support Linux. Heck, it even runs on Xilinx MicroBlaze.
That has completely shifted the powerbase of who gets to make decisions and who gets to play the game. That is surely the definition of "disruptive".
Why do so many put the US constitution on such a pedestal?
It was an attempt to capture some ideals of some people, subject to their biases and interpretations and their woldview (including their technology).
At the time of writing, "Freedom for all" didn't mean for women, native americans, blacks and slaves (otherwise there would have been no need for the 13th, 14th, 15th and 18th).
"Freedom of religion" meant free from inter-Christian persecution. It didn't mean other faiths.
Since then it has had 27 bug-fixes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution), of which some are contradictory (18th and 21st). It should thus hardly be considered a foundation for a legal system.
The constitution guarantees nothing. At a stroke of the pen, the 28th amendment could be introduced which undoes the 1st or 2nd (just as the 21st undid the 18th). Given that the second half of the 1900s was the most active period of changes, it would seem that another flurry of changes is well overdue.
Of course these spook talks are just posturing. The Bad Guys have known for a long time that the spooks are watching them, and the spooks have been admitting it for years. No doubt spooks with something really worth talking about have been using reasonable cryptography for ages.
But where all the publicity really hurts is that now Joe & Jane Sixpack are getting concerned about uncalled-for observation by the the spooks and are starting to use encryption for mundane conversations.
Although the spooks *can* break encryption, that is likely to only come at high computational cost. Munching on an encrypted email is expensive whether it contains terrorist target information or cute kitty pictures.
That surely increases the size of the haystacks that the needles are buried in, which reduces the spooks' ability to be effective.
A very articulate summary, but I think you over estimate Tesla's battery technology.
From Wonkapedia "The [Model S] lithium-ion battery consists of more than 7,000 battery cells for the 85 kW·h pack." so that's not immensely different from a shed load of llaptop batteries soldered together.
According to posts on the tesela morom forum: , the battery is covered by a warranty with this clause: "The Battery, like all lithium-ion batteries, will experience gradual energy or power loss with time and
use. Loss of Battery energy or power over time or due to or resulting from Battery usage, is NOT
covered under this Battery Limited Warranty"
Not startlingly different from a laptop then.
I suspect that part of the EU vs USA supply decisions are that they can get away with more favourable warranty deals in EU than they can in California.
IoT might actually make the iWatch useful. Though of course the function itself might not be.
But Intel is never going to be a player in this market. 50c microcontrollers are already overkill and overpriced for stuffing into lightbulbs and toasters.
The microcontroller does not live in isolation either. They need power supply circuitry etc. Many, if not most, 8-bit microcontrollers can live very happily on really shitty (and cheap) power supply circuits with a wide voltage range. I have an AVR here that will continue to work fine when powered with anywhere from 1.5V to 6V. That's headroom for a lot of ripple. 3 cents of components and you're done.
Most 32-bit micros (including cheap ARMs) need 3V3 and, maybe, 1V8 supplies with less than 100mV or so of ripple. Atom are even more onerous, never mind the space needed.
So why are Intel playing the whole IoT game? Well they have to be seen to be doing the up-to-date buzz-wordy stuff or Wall St will punish them.
While Ballmer has certainly been sub-standard, it is naive to think that a change to anyone will make things better.
The paying public really don't enter into the equation at all. What matters really are the business owners ie the stock holders. They ultimately have the say and they are the people asking the big questions.
Any new broom will have to sweep really clean to pick up stock holder confidence. That will mean some radical changes. I would expect that MS will shed a lot of business areas and employees.
"No. But because we are here."
So by the same logic, there should be multiple Eiffel Towers.
There are billions of people on Earth, a few million of whom have the capability of designing a tower. Eiffel managed to build one, therefore other people must have too.....
But there is only one (well apart from Vegas etc).
It is all very simple. Sales people & managers are good at selling themselves and articulating their value, engineers are not.
Sales people are seen as revenue generators. They bring in sales which are on the "income" side of the spreadsheet. Companies like to increase income so it is relatively easy for companies to think that by spending more they will be getting more.
Engineers are typically seen as expenses. They always turn up on the "costs" side of the spreadsheet. Costs are BAD we want to reduce those.
The trick is to be able to tie your actions to the bottom line of the company. For example, if you can show that last year you identified and fixed problem that saved the company $5M then you have a much stronger case for pushing for a larger salary.
MS huge income from some business units allows them to keep some really bad stuff alive.
Take for example, MS's foray into phones and other Windows CE activities. This should have died a death in 2001. However the infinite MS cash mountain has allowed these products to be kept alive with vast marketing budgets. This has caused confusion in the marketplace.
" Whereas nearly every windows install requires gathering sound/motherboard/proper graphics/wifi/touchpad drivers from the manufacturers website. "
Nothing wrong with that if you're in the computer/software supply chain. Most people are too scared to even try. Instead they just buy a new box. More revenue for the suppliers.
Remember if it ain't broke it don't get fixed. It ain't broke from the suppliers' point of view, so it will never get fixed.
So why is Linux different? Well 99% of new punters are adding a Linux partition to a Windows PC or tre-gutting a discarded Windows PC. It has to be seamless or they hit cancel and never try again.
They shamelessly screw around with the numbers to support their pre-conceived conclusions.
Include architecture, lawyering and teaching to construct one side of your argument then cutting them to make the other half of your argument seems perfectly acceptable to "social sciences", but gets you ridiculed in any real sciences.
Frankly, I don't even want these incompetents to flip my burger.
University press releases always over-hype these discoveries to get their stuff notices. After all the wolf crying, nobody expects them to be generating anything useful any more.
Where I call BS here is that the capacity of any caps, including supercaps, is dependent on area and "hiding" the capacitor inside a chips takes up space that would not otherwise be there (ie.. the chip would be far smaller if it didn't have the extra space needed for the caps).
Now it is also a given that chip construction is pretty darned hard. Different types of circuit work best with different construction and metalization . Analogue circuitry is best achieved on slightly different processing than digital or flash. Wen you pull these all together onto single chips (eg. single chip microcontrollers with analogue, digital and flash all on one chip, you end up making some compromises - particularly in terms of speed, fabrication cost and power consumption. This is a large part of the reason why larger devices for power sensitive applications tend to have different chips for flash, digital and analogue circuits.
Now add a different type of circuit (supercap) to the mix. Putting those on the same chip as the rest adds its own challenges and makes the rendering of the digital and whatever less efficient than it would be if it was just digital.
Sure silicon might make a great material for supercaps, but then putting these into supercap specific "chips" is probably the best way to get a good overall solution, as well as applying the solution to existing chipsets.
When the xenophobic anti-Chinese position was politically astute it made sense to do anti-Huawei posturing. No doubt the recent NSA controversies have made people more concerned about products supplied by USA and the anti-Huawei position sounds less reasonable.
Also, at the end of the day, Huawei likely have better prices and it becomes harder to justify the difference.
MS has often tried to pitch tablets at professionals such as medical workers around in hospitals or surveyors working on contruction sites.
To do that you need a minimum battery life of a shift. Sure, people could work around this issue by recharging during breaks, but being able to do a whole shift without a recharge is a significant psychological hurdle for any such tech.
Most "embedded" use of XP (eg. industrial machinery) actually runs on regular XP boxes. Very few run XP Embedded. Thus extended support of XP Embedded is pretty meaningless.
The industrial systems are expensive. Having to upgrade all your fully functional industrial systems just because of an OS change is going to be pretty hard sell.
Much of that hardware runs software that only runs properly on XP.
Heck, even Microsoft's Windows CE developmpent environment does not run properly on W7/Vista.
Most businesses only like to spend money if it increases revenue. Just spending money for no benefit is galling. Many companies are going to take a hard look at this and ask the big question. "How did we end up here and how can we avoid it in the future." The clear answer is to fund an alternative where some huge corporate giant does not lead you around by the nose.
Perhaps the Neanderthals were actually intelligent etc, but were defeated by hostility and/or dieseases in the invading foreigners, just like Europeans did to the rest of the world in the 16th-19th centuries.
After all, living in the cold of Europe meant you needed a level of technology (clothing, shelter, food storage) a cut above what was needed to survive in Africa. Being a boffin would help.
Us. (Well Western Europeans anyway).
Whereas modern humans has more African roots, the mixing in of some Neanderthal likely gave much of the distinctiveness of Europeans.
For a modern day reenactment, you might have a look at NZ where there has been very few racial stigmas and European and Maori cross polination have been happening for a long while.
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