Posts by Charles Manning

The other flaw...

Every second woman was either Cleopatra or one of her hand maidens.

"See, today the number of people alive is bigger than the number of people dead since the beginning of history". Sorry, but that is just a bollocks factoid that seems to have emerged in the 1970s or so. It might work if you start the human clock at 6000BC, but using any credible numbers (~150-200k years), would suggest that there have been at least 50bn humans.

Re: FFS, more Qualcomm?

"blah, blah, MediaTek, blaah, blaah",

No, they would do better by opening up the bottom end of the stack so that it can be easily ported to any device.

MS really need to learn that you do not improve sales of an OS by putting in constraints that don't need to be there.

They really screwed over people with WinCE. IIRC, the fisrt version supported MIPS and SH3. The next version supported MIPS, SH3/4, x86, PowerPC. The next version dropped PowerPC but added ARM. These random roadmaps do not build any confidence.

"ndeed - take a look at GDP and unemployment stats for the US vs. the Euro zone since we started doing QE, and see where it got us! :D"

Yep, only a trillion or so deeper in debt.

Re: What a dim-witted plonker.

"Yeah, but then he would have to deal with some Bay Area traffic."

Helicopter?

It's all in the details

Visa/Mastercard just know you bought $20 of stuff from the supermarket.

The loyalty card tracks your actual purchases. The supermarket sees you bought more condoms than usual, a bottle of wine and a bunch of flowers and can figure you might have a new girlfriend.

FB KNOWS you have a new GF because you post all those pictures which can be picture linked to a new person and you changed your status.

Diffrent strokes for different dogs

Pointer dogs are natural pointers (well, natural to the extent they have been genetically selected for the task).

That is why you choose different breeds for different hunting purposes.

As an example, a beagle is good at tracking and flushing, but tend to be very excitable so it is hopeless for pointing or getting it to sit still until commanded (so they are crap retrievers). Yes, you probably could train one to point or retrieve but that would be an uphill battle relative to other breeds.

The same applies to sheep dogs. Different dogs have different skills. Talk to shepherds and you will hear terminology like "heading dog", "eye dog", "huntaway" etc.

Two big problems with any of these systems

Sure, they might save people's lives some of the time, but they have two major downsides:

(1) They confuse responsibility. The driver should always be responsible for all actions and outcomes of all acts in the car. Now were confusing that picture by stepping in with technology. Instead of checking there is no kid crawling around on the driveway, the driver takes a chance that the technology does not work. It won't always work.

(2) Even though a device might save 999 for every 1 it kills, that 1 will get the car makers and the engineers in court and get their pants sued off. The 999 that were saved are non-events. That 1 that dies is a newsworthy event that the media and lawyers will feast on.

A glaring example of this is Therac25 which, over a period of 2 years or so, nuked 6 people, killing three and earned itself a place in the cock-up hall of fame/shame. This cost the makers millions in legal fees and damages and no doubt tainted the engineers involved for years. Nobody remembers the fact that during the same two year period thousands of people were treated and their lives were saved.

Sound bites for Wall St

"Hey MS, how them Surface sales going". "We're sold out. They're buying them as fast as we make them."

Ballmer surely wants to make anything look positive so he can kick the can far enough down the road that he retires before he has to fix it.

Apart from the cost of device development, all the advertising as well as opportunity costs must make the Surface on of Microsoft's worse mistakes. Even worse than Zune.

Most of these Surface devices will be bought by corporates who just buy one of every new gizzmo that comes along for evaluation. That's a rational thing to do even if you are highly skeptical.

But the challenge for MS is convincing enough of these corporates that the Surface is the "killer IT appliance" that will radically change their business for the better. That will be far harder to do.

Even the USPTO operates that way

I was recently involved in a case to overturn Microsoft's claim that some software I had written violated their patent.

One thread of the attack was to show that MS's claims were not novel and the patent was thus invalid. I was shocked to discover that the US courts would not accept "foreign" prior art as evidence against novelty.

No sirree, new in USA is good enough.

Re: meanwhile back in the real world...

"I seriously resent your use of the term "mentally disabled" in relation to Aspergers."

Why the resentment?

If it is limiting your ability to get on with a "normal" office environment and "normal" personal interactions then it is surely a disability.

I have some of these traits too, as well as mild dyslexia.

I used to be a rude arsehole at school and intolerant in the workplace to the extent that there were people who refused to work with me. I understood some areas of physics better than the science teacher and would loudly yell "Bullshit" from the back of the class when he made even a slight mistake (eg. saying "x weighs 5kg" instead of "x has a mass of 5kg"). [And that was in a society which still allowed boys to be caned for misbehaviour.]

I figured out though that pulling the victim card was pointless. To compensate for the dyslexia, I would proof read everything I wrote three times. I would have to actively moderate my behaviour and learn how office politics works.

Indeed, office politics, the law, and even people, can be made understandable if you consider then a bit like a CPU with a really weird instruction set. Do X and Y happens. It does not have to be intuitive, you just have to learn the way it works. Luckily us techy types can learn this easily if we set our minds to it.

If your "career plan" is to piss and moan and expect the world to conform to you, then you will just get nowhere.

Re: WinPho is definitely starting to look interesting

"WinPho is definitely starting to look interesting and with the immenant death of BB there will definitely be a gap in the market for next generation of business phones. "

Well MS *did* have a reasonably strong position in the corporate phone market with 6.x and lower.

Then they tried out Kin (for kids) and threw it all away except for keeping the tiles UI for WP8.x. Microsoft phones now try to look like consumer devices covered in social media eye candy. They no longer have that corporate look and feel. MS is acting erratically. They run warm/cold to phones and no longer caters to their mainstream phone market: corporates.

Any wonder then that Apples and Androids are getting uptake?

Already?

"So they are already 3rd - and are about to overtake Apple in markets like Germany.."

That statement might make sense if Microsoft had just entered the smartphone market. They have not and it is disingenuous to play the "give MS/Nokia a chance to prove themselves" card.

Microsoft have been in the Smartphone market since 2003 or so. That is twice as long as Apple or Google.

Nokia was once, well, NOKIA (yes, they were deserving of full-caps).

Both held positions of strength in smartphones. By shear incompetence they have thrown away that advantage to be completely upstaged by Apple and Google.

Re: I don't think it's fair...

"I expect that firefighters would know better than to use water on any vehicle fire electric or internal combustion."

I expect that most firefighters would have a better understanding of the general principles of firefighting than some armchair interweb commentard.

Water is actually a damn good at putting out engine fires because it cools things down very quickly. The most important thing to do in a significant fire is to get the heat out. Once a big hunk of metal such as an engine is really hot, then flame suppression (eg. CO2) is not enough. As soon as the CO2 dissipates, a very hot engine will just burst into flames again. You need to get the temperature below the flash point and water does that very well.

This is not an effective method on a lithium battery fire (which is really a chemical fire rather than normal combustion).

It is easy to make the mistake. Very few people cruising up to a fire would see it as being different from any other car. Perhaps Teslas should be fitted with chemical hazmat stickers identifying the fire risk.

No doubt vehicle firefighting training will have to progress with the upsurge in EVs and hybrids.

But...

Would you have clicked the link if it just said methane?

Remember folks, it is click-whoring that pays the ElReg bills.

How soon they forget

"I think you will find windows in a LOT of critical environments - Warships, "

USS Yorktown was towed back to port multiple times due to software glitches.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_%28CG-48%29

Who are "the people responsible"

It is easy to blame the politicians for not signing up to infinite spending, but at the end of the day the people responsible for this are the US voters who vote for people them.

Re: Amazing video

The point that was being made was about bullet stability. The flight of the bullet does not care whether or not it is being used in target or combat shooting. Firing bullets in combat won't suddenly make them unstable.

It is pointless making a deliberately unstable bullet as it will be incredibly inaccurate and will also lose energy faster.

If there is a difference between UK and US bullets that cause stability issues then it is likely in the bullet weight. and the rifling twist. You need a faster twist to stabilise a heavier bullet. The standard NATO twist was increased from 1 in 14 to around 1 in 8 and according to what I read about the SA80, the same was done there. IIRC, this change happened when the 5.56 bullet weight was increased to 62 grains.

Yes, I do know a bit about this... Got both a 223 and a 308 in the safe.

Read behind the press release

Don't just read the overview written by someone who doesn't understand milliwatts form megawatts. To get anywhere near reality, you need to dig deeper.

I am highly sceptical of outlandish predictions made by tech companies. They have a history of over promising and under delivering:

* Fission nuke power: It was going to be "too cheap to meter", but ended up being 5x the cost of coal.

* Super conductors: Absolutely no impact, except from a few very niche applications.

* Flying cars...

* Robots...

Until proven with a significant demonstration, including all lifetime costs, all hyped promises should be treated with a healthy dose of meh.

Perhaps that explains everything

A niche joke product for cartoonists. Once every cartoonist has one, the market is saturated.

Win8 Surface RT/Pro are at least MS's 4th tilt at the tablet platform and thus far they have all been absolute disasters.

Upping the specs for the next range of tablets will do nothing. It isn't the MHz or Mbytes that are wrong, but the whole ecosystem.

In the past attempts, Microsoft were hoping to make great inroads into big organisations with people that need their data on the move. A classic case of this would be hospitals with a huge computerised record-keeping system and the medical staff having tablets where they could pull up patient records/drug info as they need. Of course such a system would use MS from the back-end to the front end.

Web-based data presentation has largely killed this dream. Once large data systems got a web front-end, pretty much any device could be used. Why would anyone choose a product from a company with no commitment to its non-core products?

Re: Colourblind

While most mammals are colour blind and are specially attuned to detecting movement, , they still see patterns and can tell shades of grey.

Run a black sheep in amongst a flock of white sheep that has never seen a black sheep before and they will all run like hell even though it still smells exactly like a sheep.

Re: "Oops. Did hitting that mess something up for you?"

IIRC, BREAK was more like CtrlC than the CtlAltDel

Re: False economy --> different customers

If you are a huge corporation then running your own servers makes a whole lot of sense.

If, instead, you are one of the small/medium sized company (say up to 100 employees), then it makes a whole lot more sense to outsource the storage and BOFHery to someone else. Paying $20 per month per employee for a bunch of services is way cheaper than spending thousands per month keeping a BOFH in the corner, buying servers & software and keeping them all up to date.

claim != evidence

"Pure claims to do 256 AES and heavy de-dupe so you appear to be wrong."

How many debunked cold fusion claims are out there?

No more Jobs factor

Let's face it, Jobs was a large part of the whole Apple hype/cult that created fanboi-ism. Jobs could sell a turd in a bun if he wanted to.

The loss of Jobs has severely diminished the fanboi-ism and customers are starting to be vaguely rational in their purchases.

Re: @IGnatius

Wouldn't it be fair to say that if that person starts asking on the kernel mailing list they'll just get ridiculed and optionally insulted for not understanding the module they're commenting on?"

If someone did spot something they would get a fair audience if they could demonstrate the issue or give a reasonable explanation.

They would get ridiculed if they continued to press a point that could only be explained by six rolls of tin foil.

Re: Not legal

It could come down to a pedantic definition of what "foreign" means.

If "foreign currency" was interpreted to mean the national currency of some other country, then that could be a problem since BC is not a national currency.

Of course the whole law seems a bit wionked, since Australia seems to have, or have had, many "alternative currencies" eg. LETS http://www.lets.org.au/, Baroon dollars and other eco-greeny-communy style trading tokens.