* Posts by Charles Manning

3509 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007

SCO keeps dying, and dying, and dying

Charles Manning

Fruitless? I think not!

The huge expenditure on legal fees was very fruitful from the perspective of the SCO CEO Darl McBride and his family.

SCO's lawyer is Kevin McBride: Darl's brother. The job is only done when the last SCO penny has been diverted into the family coffers.

High Schools putting kids off IT careers, deepening skills shortage

Charles Manning

ICT teaches computer use, not industry skills

With the stuff they teach in schools these days it is like complaining that driver education does not encourage the right people to become diesel mechanics.

Look at the stuff they teach in most schools: a bit of word processing, spread sheeting, how to find stuff on Wikipedia then copy/paste etc.

That, and their proficiency in fiddling with the settings in their Facebook profile, is about the limit to their exposure. From that most kids, their parents and school system give career advice.

"Johnny, you're so good at making the computer do things. You are a computer whizz. You will do great at Computer Science."

No wonder computer science has one of the highest first year drop out and failure rates. The students have no way to measure their aptitude before starting at university.

Curiosity success 'paves way for Man on Mars by 2030s'

Charles Manning
Boffin

Makes some sense

MTBF and all that.

Some parts will fail long before their expected (ie. mean) lifetime.

As soon as a critical part fails, the whole machine fails.

Therefore, if you want a gizzmo to survive for, say 1 year, you build it out of parts that are expected to last a lot longer.

Woz: Cloud computing trend is 'horrendous'

Charles Manning

Oh bollocks Woz

Anti-cloud comments are to be expected from Woz. He after all pushed micros and personal computers in the age of Big Iron.

His opinions will get lots of up-votes from BOFHs etc who have a vested interest every company having its own servers and thus lots of employment and gravy for sys admins etc.

But is he right? Only sometimes.

The Cloud is certainly not for everyone. Big organizations, and those with very high security requirements are probably better served by having their own systems.

But for most small companies, The Cloud typically provides a better solution. Sure The Cloud can have data outages etc, but a small company without dedicated, capable, sys admin staff will lose their data and have system failures far more often.

Google, or whatever, perform a far better sysadmin job than the average small business owner who would rather be doing things that profit the business than running around fixing servers, doing backups etc.

Oz regulator tells telly-makers to mind their language

Charles Manning
Thumb Down

Oh tosh!

It is possible to make globalised wireless-ready products. It is however both costly and challenging.

Those companies that actually *do* take up the challenge and invest in the development to actually make gloabised wireless products should be able to call their devices "Wifi ready" and use this as a differentiator in promoting their products.

Those that have not figured out how to do this should be limited to the more limp wristed claims.

Nokia shutters Qt Brisbane office

Charles Manning

OTOH

Backwater shmackwater... If it has roads, an airport and internet it really doesn't need much else.

Brisbane is a compelling location for junket visits. Get your flights paid for by the company and tack on a week of leave to visit the Great Barrier Reef etc.

Microsoft had a dev office in the general location too. Dunno if they still do.

The high value of the AUD is certainly going to be a factor given the need to sharpen the corporate pencil and focus on "core competence" (or "core incompetence" if you see it that way).

Hobbyist builds working assault rifle using 3D printer

Charles Manning
Stop

Actually... 5.56 != .223

Yes, the actual bullet is the same, and they are mechanically interchangeable, but a 5.56 round is not the same as a .223. The 5.56 is a higher pressure round.

http://www.humanevents.com/2011/02/15/223-remington-vs-556-nato-what-you-dont-know-could-hurt-you/

The same applies to 7.62 vs .308, but back in my army days a lot of 7.62 fell off the back of army trucks for use in .309 hunting rifles.

Forget 'climate convert' Muller: Here's the real warming blockbuster

Charles Manning

But there are too many low quality stations

Even given a small weighting, low quality stations are so numerous that they will still end up distorting the numbers.

It is unfortunate that there are so few high quality stations with a long history.

Airports have always recorded temperatures because temperature is an important factor in calculating take off weight. But unfortunately airports change with time.

SFO started off as a grass runway in an old cow pasture. Now it is a few square miles of concrete and asphalt with air conditioners belting out heat. No useful data in that.

Zynga plays BLAME GAME with Facebook as stock tanks 40%

Charles Manning

Google != Facebook

The difference is that FB, and particularly gaming on FB, are hardly valuable services. While it might have been fun to plant purple cabbages and mink your pixel cow in Farmville for a while, even the most devoted follower must surely get bored and stop playing.

Google, OTOH, provides search, email, maps and other v useful stuff. Sure MS Bing could theoretically fill the void.

One could argue that Google (and lesser search engines) actually provide the true "semantic web" where you can use human readable text, rather than URLs to access the www.

FB, and Farmville in particular, are voids that do not really need filling. If all the purple cows vanished the pining would not last long.

Stuxnet: 'Moral crime' or proportionate response?

Charles Manning

Re: "civilian infrastructure"

The end target was not civilian infrastructure, but civilian infrastructure, and many civilian PCs were used and infected to get Stuxnet to its final destination.

Is it OK to use civilian machines and infrastructure like this?

If you think so, then you are condoning the press-ganging of Aunty Mable's laptop.

Surely from the other side's perspective, that then makes Aunty Mable's a potential part of the aggressor military establishment and fair game for hostile acts.

CSIRO seas how Oz could wave goodbye to dirty power

Charles Manning

2050: free flying cars for all and World Peace

It is always easy to make promises that you don't have to deliver on.

Devs can't be bothered with Nokia's Windows Phone – report

Charles Manning

For how long?

So W8 will run W7 apps. For how long? Likely W8.1 will drop that support.

That's the game MS have been playing for years. Give enough flexibility to attract the punters, then lock them in to the new changes. Once people start committing to customers on the W8 platform they will have to rewrite to new APIs to keep going.

They did this with NT years ago. To break into the server market, MS provided a POSIX layer to attract developers away from Unix land. The NT platform was attractive because it was lower cost than the SCO or whatever equivalent. The POSIX interface made it easy for vendors to move their code.

Once vendors had NT-based products, they nuked the POSIX support. Vendors had to rewrite parts of their code to use Windows APIs. The bridge was burned.

Likely the same will happen here.

Chemical giant foils infected USB stick espionage bid

Charles Manning

Good realtions between IT and others

You won't get good results where the IT people call the users clueless numpties and the users think of the IT department as arrogant draconian wankers. Instead, the user will pick up the USB stick and just use it.

The first step to good security is to make sure that everyone sees that they are on the same side trying to reach the same goals.

Being polite helps security.

US mulls outlawing rival product bans using standards patents

Charles Manning

Patents were originally monopolistic

These days patents tend to be thought of only in terms of IP, but the term and the concept goes on for much longer than that.

In the olde dayes, a patent was just a license to perform some activity. For example in the days of QEI, patents were given to privateers, Virginia tobacco farmers and such. People without the patent were subject to harsh legal penalties.

In the 1800s, the US homesteaders were given patents to their land claims. These were not titles per se, because the ownership was only granted later. Instead the patents were a conditional right to the land (you had to actually set up a house and farm it for n years before you got ownership).

Then patents were applied to ideas....

Oz asteroid-hunt at risk as NASA cuts funding

Charles Manning

Who cares?

Can't do a damn thing about it if one of these asteroids goes postal, so why worry and why spend huge bikkies looking out for them?

NASA was WRONG on arsenic-gobbling aliens, claim boffins

Charles Manning

Media dumb it down for their readership

Nowhere is this done more than with statistics. A credible scientist will state confidence levels, standard deviations and other measures to qualify their findings.

The journalists strip out the "boring stuff" and reduce the contents to what their readership understands. Fist to go are confidence measures and other qualifications. Next, medians become averages.

All that is left is enough pap to stand a snappy headline on. "Microbes Lick Lips for Arsenic"

BAE proposes GPS-less location

Charles Manning

That just takes you back to square one

Step one: flood airwaves jamming all monitored channels (2.4GHz etc)

Step two: Apply GPS spoof.

To use any satellite, Wifi router etc in a positioning solution you need a very good idea of (a) where it is and (b) its clocking.

If a new solution relies on, say, signal strengths of Wifi routers, then all Johnny Terrorist needs to do is mount a few Wifi routers on planes / trucks and move them around. That will confuse stuff.

Microsoft sets the price for a Windows 8 upgrade at $40

Charles Manning

More important

What is the cost of an upgrade from Win8 to XP?

Sozzled Americans nagged by talking urinal cake

Charles Manning
Unhappy

We were nagged by Womankind

Exactly the reason I went to the pub in the first place!

Now the urinal is nagging me...

Where too now?

War On Standby: Do the figures actually stack up?

Charles Manning

Make noise about the small stuff, ignore the big stuff

The carrier bag issue is a big one. Sure, plastic bags are bad for sea creatures etc, but they have been part of a greenwashing campaign in the last few years.

The supermarket chains tell us to be a new eco-shopper by taking your own bags and feeling smug. What they don't say is that over 99% of the environmental footprint (carbon, land use, whatever measurement you make) is caused by the contents of the bag. The eco-guilt of consumption has just been attached to the bag. Nice way to keep the shoppers consuming and take the focus away from the real issues.

By far the worst though is the Greenpeace Black Pixel project www.greenpeaceblackpixel.org which suggests that setting a few pixels on your screen back will save power on some screens. Even on the worst offending screens (ie giving them the best benefit of the doubt), the saving might be 50mW or so. You'd do better to take one less shower in your lifetime.

Charles Manning

Nah, just put *her* on standby

Switch her on when there's nothing on telly.

Texan team paints batteries onto beer steins

Charles Manning

This is the new exciting Green Economy at work

Don't come here with that naysayer mumbo-jumbo about current!

To the Great Unwashed this looks like a break through. Just plug your air conditioning into a a beer mug and keep drinking! Plug in your beer fridge too. That will keep you endlessly supplied with beer.

Of course in a few months we will never hear about this again. It will have been suppressed by the Evil Oil Empire - just like Brown's Gas.

Where's the "Bah! " button?

Half the team at the heart of the RBS disaster WERE in India

Charles Manning

xenophobic witch hunt

Half the team were in India.

So half the team were in Blighty then. What were they doing?

Patent trolling cost the US $29bn in 2011

Charles Manning

partially bollocks

While I fully detest patent trolling, it is hard to see that this is direct cost.

The trolled parties pay money and lawyers so they lose money . The trolling parties gain money, as do the lawyers. Apart from the money the lawyers spend on cocaine etc, the companies gaining from the exercise can then use the money to spend on R&D.

There are some indirect costs though:

* Skilled people have been engaged and their time has been taken up and no value was generated.

* Patents often prevent the best arrangements of technology from happening (eg. FAT file system issues prevent a nice new product from coming to the market). That reduces the potential value of new developments.

Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show

Charles Manning

Believe?

"I believe..." Leave the Bible at home. Show me.

1) Antarctica is warming. Perhaps, but show me. And one or two sensors is not enough.

2) "the data is available". No it is not. Here in NZ I tried to get raw data, but it was not available. All public data had been "normalised" or "corrected" by the same people that employed Jim Salinger, an IPCC author. Other data sets available world wide have also been filtered.

2') The available data span is too short to be usable.

3) While we put 5% CO2 into the atmophere, nature puts even more in. Our CO2 output is only a fraction of the carbon cycle.

4) Even if warming is happening, this does not necessarily mean dead crops. Many areas of the world would benefit from a few extra degrees.

5. "Life is hard". Not as hard as it was 100, 50, or even 10 years ago. Perhaps that is the real problem. As life gets easier we start to stir up problems where they don't exist.

Charles Manning
Boffin

To be scientific, warming and temperature rises are not the same

Warming, in the context of a body with ice, liquid and gaseous forms of water around, means the increase in energy. It does not directly mean increasing temperature.

Start with a pot of ice + water on a stove. You are adding heat, but the temperature change is marginal. Stop adding heat and it soon returns to melting point of water. What is happening is that the melting of ice soaks up heat. Temperature changes only happen on the fringes.

Average temperatures mean nothing. particularly when only very few measurements are being taken around ice and many are being taken around heat bubbles like cities.

That is one reason why the CRU models just don't stack up. Their code directly attempts to model temperature changes. If they modelled heat instead then they would be a lot more scientific.

Renewables good for 80 per cent of US demand by 2050

Charles Manning

Because ir burns and rots.

In the Olde Dayes we didn't have this flame retardant plastic covered muck. We had cotton covered wires we could use hemp now.. Of course we cotton covered wire burns like a bitch and was responsible for burning down many houses and killing many people, but the planet is overcrowded anyway.

And we need to find some magic green way to make copper wire.

And of course we don't need any steel girders either. Organic bamboo. That's the ticket. Biodegrades every year and needs replacing. Pretty good for some Eco-job creation.

US govt asks Huawei and ZTE for more answers

Charles Manning

s/Korean/USAian/

So why should we trust any of that kit made in USA?

Of course this is all FUD. Anything half decent is going through encrypted pipes etc anyway. No competent company/govt service is sending clear text over long haul networks.

This is just sabre rattling from morons that don't understand technology. Some while back one of these idiots said that a secret satellite was still transmitting while the friendly receiving stations were down. The transmissions must still be going somewhere, so if the friendlies are not listening then it must be the enemies.

Not anon coz if they wanted to they would have got me already,

Microsoft's Surface proves software is dead

Charles Manning

An un-shipped product proves nothing.

Until this Surface thing has shipped and been responded to by the market it proves nothing.

It is not even as relevant as Zune or Kin.

Are you a hot BABE in heels and a short skirt? SCIENCE is for YOU

Charles Manning
Paris Hilton

No need to paint science pink

Quite right.

Over the last 20-odd years, girls are taking over in chemistry, medicine, biological sciences and many other areas, This is happening without stupid lipstick intervention ads.

Just leave things be. The right thing is happening without intervention.

Nokia after the purge: It's so unfair

Charles Manning

Symbian open source never took off

I spent many hours dabbling in, or at least attempting to dabble in, Symbian.

Yes, in theory it was open source in that you could download the code, well most of it, and build it. But in practice this was not effective.

It only built on Windows (yes there was a sub-project to try to also support Linux building).

Building was very arcane and needed two or three different toolchains that worked in different ways.

There was no real online community.

The only people that ever really got engaged in this were phone vendors. General hackers, the real backbone of open source, might have sniffed the tyres but then walked away and went back to Linux, *BSD, whatever where it is far easier to get involved and be productive.

Basically, nobody at Symbian really seemed to take on board that there is more to open source than just making a server public. Effective open source requires input and mentoring.

Charles Manning

Why does MS need to try?

Mobile space is all working pretty nicely for MS. They're gouging enough Android vendors enough to be making a pretty tidy profit.

But to play this game effectively, MS need to show damages. That is best achieved by having an offering, even a token offering, in the phone marketplace so that they can demonstrate damages.

Change only comes from motivation. The current scene is making money far better than WinPhone/MoPho versions 1..6. have over the last 12 or so years.

Hunting is harder than farming. Much easier to keep shaking down the other vendors than it is to make a real product and compete for customers.

ARM unleashes 8-core Mali 450 GPU, heads down both forks in road

Charles Manning

ARM dominates PCs and laptops too

Even if you have an Intel PC, there are still likely more ARM cores in it than x86 cores.

Typical hard drive has 2 or 3 ARM cores.

Typical Wifi card has one or two.

Typical Bluetooth card has one.

...

Fatties are 'destroying the world'

Charles Manning

Just trying to sound scientific

Instead of saying x% of the fatness he instead used the buzwordy biomass.

That promotes the article from a scandle magazine article to a "paper".

'Kindness of America' snapper shot himself in 'act of self-promotion'

Charles Manning

Give thelegal system time

They're still laughing too hard to write up charges.

They know who their guy is and he is no danger to anyone else. Let them take their time to write up the correct charges.

Likely this bloke will claim insanity or such, so they need to get the charges written up in a way that they stick.

'Jogobot' lures lonely lardies

Charles Manning

Novelty factor

Sure, for a few days there might be some novelty in being buzzed by a drone while you jog, but the novelty will surely wear off and you'll be wishing for a huge fly swatter or a 12 gauge.... or only giving it half a charge so that it packs in before you do.

Microsoft plots entry into tablet trade

Charles Manning

Zune was a fantastic success

When compared to the MS Kin phone.

Unfortunately Kin infected the MS mobile folks. Kin is what spawned the whole tile nonsense.

Facebook CTO jumps ship for new horizons

Charles Manning

Can't blame him

I too would jump ship, but to a yacht in the Bahamas.

Stephen Fry's Pushnote goes titsup

Charles Manning

He's just a brand

Fry is just a brand.

He is sufficiently IT-literate to be considered so by his fanbase. That does not mean he understands anything about the innards. Many parents consider their kids are computer wizzards because they know about CtlC/CtlV.

He writes books that are sufficiently entertaining to his fanbase. That does not mean he writes literature that has merit in the RealWorld.

Nokia's Great Software Cleansing scrubs off everything since the '90s

Charles Manning

Clasping

Nokia is clasping to MS. MS is clasping to Nokia.

Individual rocks sink, but together they will sink faster.

Is losing Nokia too much of a sacrifice to get MS out of the phone industry?

Blighty's new anti-bribe law will do more HARM than good

Charles Manning

You miss the point of anti-bribery training

The main point is not to actually train the staff. The purpose to give the company an out: "We did everything we could, but ..."

The incredible shrinking NAND: I'm MEELLLLTING

Charles Manning

128-bit CPUs

The physics is severely against you moving NAND to tighter geometries, particularly when coupled with more bits/cell.

To get 1 bit per cell requires 2 voltage bands. That gives a reasonable amount of margin for a few electrons to leak or get trapped and still give a reasonable bit value.

2 bits per cell requires 4 voltage bands and 4 bits per cell requires 16 voltage bands. That means far fewer electrons need to leak for a state change.

When you shrink the cells, each cell stores less electrons and leakage and electron trapping becomes easier. That makes it easier for state changes to happen.

Everything is conspiring against higher density flash.

There is a continuing market for small players though. As all the big players more towards less robust flash, this opens up a small but growing market for higher reliability SLC flash.

Many people need this stuff for booting and higher reliability systems and are prepared to pay a higher price for the more reliable flash.

Volkswagen Up!

Charles Manning

Wrong punctuation mark

Shouldda been called the Up?

Mobile chip firms ditch feature phone biz for smartphones

Charles Manning

More than jst handset price

Non-smart phones have other benefits too.

They don't need use huge amounts of data and are thus much cheaper to operate.

They don't need daily charging.

Facebook changes data-use policy despite 87% poll opposition

Charles Manning

Since when does the product have a say?

On a farm, even Farmville, the sheep get no vote. The farmer and his customers have the say.

On the supermarket shelves the baked beans don't have a say. Only the supermarket and the customers do.

On FB, *you* are the product. Why should anyone listen to you?

Police called after Romney's email and Dropbox accounts cracked

Charles Manning

Re: Republicans just can't win

It really does not matter who wins even though so many people, including media, seem to think it does.

The actions of the political parties on offer in USA are not materially different. All that seems to really differ is the marketing hype that surrounds them. Just like Coke vs Pepsi, a taste test can't really tell them apart and they have no nutritional merits over the other. The only real difference is in the marketing.

Charles Manning

Republicans just can't win

Republican's accounts get accessed: Dumb Republicans too stupid to understand security.

Democrat's accounts get accessed: Evil Republican scumbags break into Democrat's account.

Intel phone boss: 'Multi-core detrimental to Android mobes'

Charles Manning

Misdirection

Snake Oils Sales 101: Always divert the attention from the real defects in your product and make the story about some advantage - even if you have to make one up.

Nobody cares about single vs multi-core efficiency. All we care about is whether the damn device is responsive enough. With time Android and other OSs will become multi-core friendlier making his point moot in the next year or so.

Intel still suck at battery life. That is much more important.

ARM is multi-vendor. That is much more important. That allows for far better innovation as anyone can make new cool SoCs with ARM cores. Intel is single vendor: you only get the SoCs Intel chooses to make. No competition and the industry stagnates.

Imagine if Intel had cornered the phone market in the 1990s. We'd still be walking around with brick phones.

1930s photos show Greenland glaciers retreating faster than today

Charles Manning

Plus alll your food

Agriculture is a BIG CO2 generator.

Here is NZ our Greenies give us hell because our per-capita CO2 is high. But most of that is due to agriculture which is exported (eg. 90% of NZ milk is exported). That allows some hipster living in Europe to live a low-CO2 life and still eat.

The only fair way to do any CO2 accounting is based on consumption. If you buy Chinese goods then you are contributing to China's CO2. If you buy NZ food, then you're contributing to NZ's CO2.

China overestimates 3G numbers by HALF

Charles Manning

My favourite pedant too

What do they mean when they say "reduced speed by 5 times""?

If they said a 5 times reduction in velocity, that's easy. If they started out at 20 metres per second forward then they'd be going backwards at 80 metres per second. Not the 4 metres per second many would be hoping for.

But speed has no direction, so a reduction of speed by 5 times is impossible unless you started off stationary.

I tried a little rant like that when answering an exam question at high school which lost me a few percent. Sometimes there are more important things than marks.

I've got a lot more tolerant of human foibles as I have grown older.