* Posts by Charles Manning

3509 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007

Ballmer reprises 'developers, developers, developers' chant

Charles Manning

I've retired with millions

<sarcasm>

I made all the money I need through Microsoft's Zune store.

</sarcasm>

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me five or six time (lost count now) then shame on me!

MS just does not understand mobile space and has always tried too hard to push their agenda and force the market to work their way. Anything changed to suggest they provide a working model this time?

UK, US ink boffinry pact on laser fusion 'star power'

Charles Manning

Except....

The ICE got from fires and almost self rotates to actually being a viable power source in one or two years invented by a bloke in his spare time who didn't promise world peace. By the time Joe public became aware of the ICE it was working.

This fusion malarkey, OTOH, has been over promised as just around the corner for 60+ years, has soaked up insane billions of research funding and has been over-sold to the people that fund it.

I am not at all against research, but how about putting some of it into technologies that have more promise. LFTR perhaps.

Google brings out new programming language

Charles Manning

I beat you to it.

I said exactly the same thing in the 70s.

Ya don't need anything more than Fortran, COBOL and Algol.

Al Gore wants to borrow your Facebook and Twitter accounts

Charles Manning

those carbon credits....

which He bought from Himself and were used to pay Him to fly around the world spreading His message.

Of course this is not a conflict of interests. A really dedicated person will have all there interests invested in The One True Cause.

Microsoft inks new patent pacts over Android...and Chrome

Charles Manning

"there may be some merit to them"

Not necessarily. Sometimes it is easier to just pay the money.

The problem with patents is that they stand until overthrown by the courts. That means MS could easily block the import of HTC, or whatever, devices until the courts have determined the matter. This could take years. By the time it gets resolved, it is too late. The opportunity and the market is lost.

Far easier to just pay the protection money.

Microsoft delivers 'copy Apple' Windows 8 message

Charles Manning

Strange logic

If WP7 looks like My First Smartphone, then won't the same UI on a tablet look like My First Tablet and have the punters avoid it?

Microsoft have tried, and failed, with at least 4 thrusts into the tablet market, partly because they tried to push the desktop UI onto a tablet architecture.

Another part of the failure was demanding high licensing costs and resource usage for the software. This forced the tablets to be expensive and heavy.

Since their last attempt, Windows resource requirements have increased further. Tablet makers have other options available (eg. Android). What would motivate anyone to buy a Windows tablet over an Android tablet?

Couple can sue service that monitored their net sex

Charles Manning

Not so fast

She bought it from a student. In some countries if you buy something from a minor and it turns out to be stolen then you are at fault.

Any teacher with half a brain would deal with a parent and not enter into deals with her students.

Oz teachers lugging obsolete lappies

Charles Manning

So what if it is obsolete, so long as it does the job right

I guess that could apply equally to teachers and laptops.

Graphene photocells could mean hyper-speed internet

Charles Manning

... or maybe not

All these new breakthroughs get way overhyped. It is only very seldom that we get to see even a quarter of the theoretical possibilities.

Anyone remember the superconductor hype of the 1980s? Superconductor everything. Well superconductors only showed up in very few niche applications.

Pre-paid Chinese users still anonymous despite new law

Charles Manning

Tin-foil hat wearers

It always amazes me how all these people yelling for anonymous SIM cards, no national ID etc will still get in their cars with number plates.

At least your SIM and ID card are reasonably controlled by yourself. Your number plates are completely public.

Doesn't make much sense to me.

Nokia dishes out $10m in developer prizes

Charles Manning

Make up your mind

Nokia biz model:

1. Pull plastic bag over head of living OS.

2. Simultaneously putting on a short skirt and red lipstick and go out dating a dead OS.

2. Remove plastic bag from OS you're trying to kill and give it CPR.

3. Whereto now? Go back to 1?

Elop clearly belongs in a nut-house.

Stephen on Steve: The most important man on Earth

Charles Manning

That's Fry's brand

He spouts his views on everything and his fans lick it up.

Clearly though he is completely disconnected from the real world where boring stuff like finding food and surviving disease is far more important than shiny pixels.

Mobile operators: US quake proves we need more spectrum

Charles Manning

More spectrum == more shite

People need to understand the need to reduce their communications usage during times of crisis to allow more important comms to get through.

Just adding bandwidth does not fix the problem. All you'll end up with is people flooding the capacity with HD video instead of tweets and internet traffic.

AlertMe network power-meter kit: Suitable for techies?

Charles Manning

And Noddy has a big hat

Don't go believing everything you read.

If you're sufficiently motivated, drag them in front of the advertising tribunal and demand your money back plus pain and suffering for the humiliation of waking a wally o yourself on the interwebs.

New GPL licence touted as saviour of Linux, Android

Charles Manning

Moving to GPL3 would need a re-write

Thousands of people have contributed their efforts under GPL2. To move that code to GPL3 would require the OK of all those contributors. That is a huge effort and would probably force a rewrite. Nobody wants to waste effort like that so it just won't happen.

Anyway, GPL3 will not stop the patent nonsense. Nor would moving to BSD or any other license.

When MS attacks Motorola it is for supposed patent violation. Copyright has nothing to do with it and no matter what header you put at the top of the code the patent issues will be the same.

HP: webOS will still run PCs and printers

Charles Manning

Have HP hired Elop??

Sure looks like it.... and they never really recovered from being Carlied.

And I'd give my left nut if they made a decent calculator. My HP48s are getting a bit long in the tooth. Progress.... Bah!

DARPA shells out $21m for IBM cat brain chip

Charles Manning

Clearly a game of cat and mouse

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/07/rat_brain_flies_jet/

The cat is for use in a new hunter-killer plane.

I do wonder why there is all this interest in a digital human brain. The meat variety are smaller, cheaper to feed and way more fun to make.

Android app logs keystrokes using phone movements

Charles Manning

Will a tablet really be better?

Sure on a tablet the buttons can be bigger, but the angular acceleration is not. ie. button size/ distance is about the same.

Further, the mass is larger so the acceleration will be reduced (a= F/m).

As for killing this off, it might be enough to just add noise and degrade the accelerometer/gyro while the keyboard is active.

Google's Moto move spells iPhone doom

Charles Manning

Theft?

Legal; copying is not theft.

But you miss the whole point. OSX has very little to do with the kernel underneath.

Even though I'm a kernel developer, I don't think the kernel gives OSX its advantage.

Apple chose xBSD because it is solid and provided the best option at the time.

The part of OSX that people interact with could have been built on top of any kernel: Linux, xBSD or even Windows. The kernel is irrelevant. That is where Apple add value.

While there certainly are people at Apple that work in kernel land, they are few. This is not Apple's competitive advantage.

Dynamic Languages Conference: it's an Edinburgh thing

Charles Manning

RMS-WTF?

I really fail to see the relevance of having RMS speak at an event like this. He gets plenty of opportunities to soap-box and does not need another one.

With there only being a day for talks on Dynamic Languages it seems a shame to go off-topic for an hour or more.

London rioters should 'loose all benefits'

Charles Manning

Send them to Australia...

... and in a few years the Australians will be beating the Poms at rapping and Playstation too!

Sony distribution centre engulfed by fire

Charles Manning

Exactly...

Loot what you can fit in whatever transport you have, then burn the rest to prevent other looters taking more goods to flood the market.

Them chavs got business sense too you know!

Charles Manning

Insurance

It's you, me and everybody else paying.

The only people not paying are the looter scum.

Unfortunately since the police have had their teeth removed there is really no effective way to sort out a mob like this.

10-year old hacker finds flaw in mobile games

Charles Manning

Well then my son trumps her, and my cat too!

When he was a few months old my some would mash on the keyboard causing DOS to get hung up. The cat jumped on a keyboard and did this too.

Both caused the software to act in unintended ways.

Linus Torvalds dubs GNOME 3 'unholy mess'

Charles Manning

KDE4

Gnome 2--> is just KDE3-->4 all over again.

KDE4 caused me to switch to Gnome 2.

Google claims 'bogus patent' conspiracy against Android

Charles Manning

Giving away other people's IP?

All the "other people's IP" that Google gives away has already been given away through GPL or whatever. If Google picks it up and packages it into Android then so what.

Google actually invest quite a bit of time and money in improving many of these products.

It would help if Google added their muscle to fighting silly patent claims though.

#disclaimer: I wrote some of the software that Google gives away. I have no problems with that since it was already released under GPL.

Microsoft man saves drowning woman

Charles Manning

I doubt he was a Microsoft Man

He was a security guard. These functions are normally outsourced to security companies.

iPad maker to replace 1 million staff with robots

Charles Manning
FAIL

Silly moral outrage

Most of the electronic assembly work is already done by robots and has been for the last 20 or so years.

Most of the manual effort in electronic manufacture was taken away by surface mount and pick and place machines, each of which replaces dozens of workers.

So it you really wanted to save jobs in the electronics industry you're already twenty years too late.

Of course the flip side to this is asking yourself whether you'd be prepared to pay an extra $500 for an ipod so that it could be made by meat workers rather than robots.

World o' data centers burns less juice than expected

Charles Manning

1 server core per 6 people on the planet?

Golly. Crunching the numbers, that stacks up to about 8W per person.

Allowing 50W per server core + ancillary devices, that works out to approx 1 server core per 6 people.

That sounds a bit high.

Nokia's cheapies strategy bombs

Charles Manning

Commentard fail!

How does an article on Nokia low-end devices (ie. candybar non-smartphones) get hijacked for a rant about Android and iphones?

Low end devices have very little margin and never really made Nokia much money and since everything is based on price-rather than features- China etc can kill Nokia easily.

'Missing heat': Is global warmth vanishing into space?

Charles Manning
Thumb Up

Heat != Temperature

Correct.

That's why all models naffing around with temperature are broken.

I spent a while searching throu all the UEA code that was "released" searching for heat - particularly latent heat - modeling. I could not find anything.

Unless climatic models are modelling heat (and not temperature) they are of no scientific use. All they are is providing fake evidence for the great unwashed who don't understand the difference between heat and temperature.

PLCs a prison vulnerability: researchers

Charles Manning

Yet again.....

Anyone putting SCADA on a public network is an idiot.

SCADA etc should be running over VPN, ssh or whatever.

But are prison security systems really built with over-the-counter PLCs? I'd have expected them to be controlled by access control systems.

It might just be enough disrupt comms or power to the security system. By default many access control systems automatically open the doors as soon as comms is lost. This is a safety feature to prevent people being locked in during a fire or whatever.

DIDO: snake oil or wireless salvation?

Charles Manning

It works! It uses this compression breakthrough!

http://drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=228700344&siteSectionName= (*)

Anything claiming "infinite" anything or claims to break known laws of information are clearly bogus and are a scam.

(*) That guy didn't end up in court because he didn't understand CS but because he was deliberately defrauding investors.

It's official: IE users are dumb as a bag of hammers

Charles Manning

More likely

The sun came out so the IE users started to photosynthesize.

George Lucas defeated by Stormtrooper helmet man

Charles Manning

A reasonable millionaire...

... would have thought it great that someone was helping to build his fan base. He should have been happy about all the ego-rub.

No, instead he gets vindictive and chases the money.

'War texting' hacks car systems and possibly much more

Charles Manning

Go back to wired modems...

...because it is impossible to climb a pole and connect to the telephone wires.

Seriously folks... anyone doing SCADA on a raw link without a VPN, ssh or whatever is a complete moron.

OCZ samples twin-core ARM SSD controller

Charles Manning

3 bits per cell an "enticing feature"?

Bits per cell is one area where more is less.

The more bits you stuff into a cell, the less margin to distinguish the bits. That reduces reliability and also makes writing and reading slower.

Higgs Boson hiding place narrows

Charles Manning

Worse still for scientists

Seeking and never finding isn't all that bad because you are never proven wrong.

It is much harder for those scientists who built a PhD and a career on a broken theory and have their life's work trashed by someone who figures out a better model. These poor buggers tend to get cantankerous and obstructive (far beyond just playing devil's advocate).

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. " — Max Planck

As for the lifetime of theories... They only stand until a better one comes along. Newton was at least humble enough to state that his theories were limited by his observation powers and he expected there to be improvements. Thus, Newton was never wrong.

It would be highly dubious to claim that Einstein "got it right". In 500 years will we still say that?

Your mom, girlf, boyf: Spying on your phone and email

Charles Manning

Awww rubbish

You don't have to be rich to be a good parent. I know excellent caring parents who are on the dole.

On first day, Apple sells 50 Lions for every lion

Charles Manning

There would be more lions

Except that lions are even more genocidal than people. They will kill the offspring of other prides if they can.

Nokia posts massive loss, blames 'ambiguity'

Charles Manning

This time it isn't overhang

The problem Osborne experienced is called "overhang". That's where you pump up the market about what you're going to be bringing out in a year or more and the market stop buying current product as they wait for the new stuff.

In Nokia's case I don't think it is overhang. How many people are really waiting for Nokia to bring the Winphones?

Nope. Most people who were firm Nokia fans have just walked away to Android/iOS.

Go ahead and spy on customers, says judge

Charles Manning

Why is "rent to buy" disturbing?

Until you have fully paid for the computer, it remains their property. Surely a company has the right to run whatever they like on their computers, so long as they tell you they are doing so.

Don't like the terms & conditions? Go somewhere else.

Yahoo! loses! revenue!

Charles Manning

Ya Who?

I thought they were already road-kill on the information highway.

Scientists snap amazing technicolour dreamtoad

Charles Manning

My camera did this too

After a bad fall, the CCD must have been damaged and the colours all came out weird.

Maybe the scientist can send the camera back under warrantee and just pretend he has been treating it properly.

Rebekah Brooks quits - Murdoch accepts this time

Charles Manning

Translation...

"The reputation of the company we love so much, as well as the press freedoms we value so highly, are all at risk," ---> "Damn. We've been doing this for ages and getting away with it. WTF happened this time?"

Coke cans used to build sound-wave 'superlens'

Charles Manning

Ultrasonic version of phased array radar?

Is this just http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array_ultrasonics?

Yahoo! reads! your! emails!

Charles Manning

Yahoo does not deny the right

Yahoo does not take away the right. You can still get private correspondence elsewhere.

You may enter into an agreement with yahoo whereby you are allowed to use their service and they are allowed to read your mail.

Aussie carbon tax in actually-makes-sense shocker

Charles Manning

Severely broken more like!

The whole idea of carbon taxing is to encourage industry/society to move towards other energy sources or be more efficient. The Oz policy just makes carbon into a general taxing mechanism that defeats any hope of changing carbon usage.

So if I know the government is going to want to tax me $x, through either carbon or income tax, what's to motivate me to shift off carbon? Might as well just keep polluting.

Carbon tax should not just be another tax stream. Carvbon taxes should be ring-fenced to support research etc into a carbon light future.

And then of course CO2 from poor people is special. It is only rich buggers' CO2 that actually creates environmental problems.

#disclaimer. I think the whole idea of carbon taxing is bollocks. But if they really **must** do it, then do it in a way that is actually is going to put pressure on people to change their behaviour.

Apple patent: 'Pour' your data from iPhone to iPad

Charles Manning

DEC Itsy prior art

Designed with an accelerometer specifically to do research into gesture based interfaces:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/downloads/crl/itsy/index.html

Microsoft patent points to Skype snooping

Charles Manning

Easier still

Since skype is just an application it can read pretty much anything on your harddrive and monitor what you're doing.

There is no need to go to the lengths of listening to keyclicks when you can just record keystrokes.