Posts by Charles Manning

Re: Backup? What's that?

The stupid old sod is lucky he got paid 5 grand for an education in data security.

If the phone had just died he'd have got nothing.

Re: Symbain beats WinMobile

" incorrectly detect my Winmobe"...

Nope, the Winmobe is telling the site what it is.

Why is a WinMode so ashamed of what it is that it pretends to be an Android?

"developed a glitch"

Do you mean it had a hardware failure or that the software stopped working due to the infrastructure it communicates with changing?

Smart Meters are a great wheeze. Get the numptie government to push them through at huge expense.

When they fail to deliver promised benefits, show them V2 which really is so mush better. Fit those.

Rinse and repeat with V3, V4, ...

Re: Bild am Sonntag

More research required.

Just link it to global warming and you'll get your funding.

Re: 5 years is a long time

Microsoft were saying "within 5 years" about pen tablets in 1995.

When the released a few Windows CE devices a few years later they said: "See, we told you!"

Verification is easy

These data centres chew through a lot of power.

If/when they turn them off, you'll see a massive reduction in power usage in Utah etc.

re: But why?

Plenty people do pointless stuff for fun.

Consider morris dancing.

Re: Well....

" If two engineers can put their heads together and make changes that get implemented on production motors..."

Prepared to be shocked... I would not be surprised at all.

I've been developing embedded systems for over 30 years, much of that as a consultant, so I've seen what goes on in scores of embedded systems projects.

I've seen a few (let's just say more than one) project where one engineer holds sway over critical bodies of code that could kill people, be that in moving machinery, vehicle control or power systems.

It is comforting for the Great Unwashed believe the embedded systems that go into safety critical devices are thoroughly audited and double or quadruple checked. Not so. At the end of the day it just boils down to one or two engineers touching the code that goes into these safety critical systems.

Of course a whole lot of paperwork gets generated to provide certification, but that's done the same way as your tax bloke prepares your accounts to give to the tax department.

It's pretty easy to see what could have happened here without needing a from-the-top conspiracy. Here's a perfectly plausible scenario:

The team working on ECU firmware get some feedback from the QA folk that the latest version of software they're testing has slightly worse emissions than the last version. Last time it was just passing, this time it is just failing.

One of the engineers is assigned to look at this.... Now the emissions test in the QA process has been an ongoing thorn in the teams side forever, so our clever-clogs engineer decides to deal to the problem forever and puts in a few lines of if... then ... to detect an emissions, test sneakily tweak the engine and get the monkey off their back.

The "fix" works. QA never complains again and eventually the software goes live.

Mortein... dumb move!

Mortein will knock down insects (eg. flies) fast.

Spiders have different organs (eg. book lungs) which means it takes a long time for insecticides to work on them.

Should have gone for the thong (australian flip flop) instead.

Re: Ale or GTFO

" attending bona fide private functions"

So how does this Bona Fide bloke get to hold his private functions there?

Maybe since Carly Fiorina, HP is run by the Mob.

Re: Overpriced

"It could be an Arduino killer if it wasn't for the half a minute boot-up time and the risk of corrupting the SD card if the power supply is pulled without a proper shutdown."

Well that's largely due to the standard Pi software images which are whole desktops.

A minimal system built with buildroot etc could boot in under 3 seconds and can be configured to avoid all the SD card corruption issues (eg. by using a read-only squashfs rootfs).

This started a long time ago...

Ever since the web browser became a front-end for software, the device OS started becoming irrelevant.

Client software in offices (for Big Iron backends) is all but dead. Instead it all runs on browsers these days and the client OS is not even visible (exxcept when it crashes).

To an extent the Big Iron machines are similar. Once they have Oracle or Apache running on them, they're Oracle or Apache machines and the OS underneath is largely irrelevant.

Microsoft tried to reverse this with things like Silverlight that tied the middleware to the OS to try get them some lock in. That has not worked.

"Get around the majority of ways users are blocking"

Surely if Microsoft actively find ways to get around a user blocking them from doing something then that is a cybercrime/computer sabotage/whatever.

If a user (or BOFH) takes measures to prevent MS from forcing updates, but MS find a way around this, then that is sabotage. They have wilfully accessed a computer without permission. They have altered the computer's behaviour without permission.

Surely MS has enough lawyers giving them advice that this is illegal.

Rinse and repeat...

This is exactly the same thing that happens with all technologies. As they improve and get easier to use, people lose touch with how the stuff works.

In the old days of lighting, you used lamps. Lamp lighting was a skill that involved understanding how to trim wicks and set them properly so that they burned evenly without charring the wick. Now, just flick a switch and you have leccy light. With LED lighting you don't even need to know how to change a lightbulb.

Until the 1970s you needed a rudimentary understanding of how a car worked to be able to use one. Sparkplugs fouled after a few thousand miles (in the beginning even less than 100 miles). You had to dick around with chokes, check the oil and water at every refuel, check for sparks and flat batteries were common. Now... you just drive for ten thousand miles and most people don't even know their cars have spark plugs or how an ignition system works.

Owning a valve (tube for USAians) radio was a deligh, but valves blew all the time. Owning a valve radio required knowing how to open it up and replace the valves. Transistor radios: just turn them on and magic happens.

So is anyone really surprised that the sprogs don't know how electronics and computers actually work?

Engineering used to be just everyday practical common sense, now it's a black art.

Re: Values? Country?

The values are still there and are still valued by many.

However in this day and age you just open yourself to vitriol and abuse for expressing them.

Express a wish for a low crime society based on a bit of respect and decency and you'll soon find yourself being labelled a racist/somethingist/tory twat/*

Point out any facts like single motherhood and welfare programs being closely correlated with crime and you're sexist/nazi/*.

It isn't that

"Ask the US military - they clearly explain that GPS has a built-in error for civilian GPS units"

You're talking about Selective Availability where the pseudoranges are stretched to "move" positions. That was turned off over 10 years ago. That can be easily eliminated with any correction source such as WAAS.

Having worked with GPS receivers (including code therein) I can assure you you have the wrong end of the stick.

This extra distance is caused by the accumulation of random movement, since that tends to add distance rather than remove it.

The suggestion they gave is to integrate from velocity. That's a fair way yo do things.

Different GPS receivers from different vendors use very different calculations (especially in filtering) to measure position and distance. The cheapie receivers in cellphones etc are particularly poor.

Top end receivers (commercial - not military) can get positions as good as 20millimetres.

Australian Consumer Law??

WTF has that to do with police purchases? Consumer law only applies to purchases for private use.

The real fail here has been in the BOFHs who did not screen and check products before hooking them up to the corporate network....

Or maybe by your logic BOFHs should just sit back with their feet on their desks and wave the consumer law in the bosses face when the system gets a virus or something breaks.

Not my fault the system is infected: the computer company should have supplied computers with no malware on them.

Not my fault the backup is useless: the tape company should have supplied good tape.

Well I thought Google had hit the top peak of hate attraction with their Glasshole glasses.

Looks like their driving is even worse.

n_pipelines != n_pipelines

Just like MHz is a useless measure of CPU power between different architectures, so is pipeline depth.

x86 is a horrendous instruction architecture that needs amazing complexity to execute fast. No wonder we're seeing 20 + stage pipelines.

ARM is relatively simple and thus can execute really well on short pipelines.

That was pretty much my grandfather's way of doing things back in 1940s South Africa.

In winter (dry) the horse would get him home from the neighbours no matter how drunk he was.

In summer (wet) he's run the car down the muddy road until it formed deep enough ruts that acted as a Scalextric track to get him home if he just hoofed the petrol.

In the morning grandmother would find him passed out in the stable or garage.