Posts by Charles Manning

LFTR maybe?

All the pros of current nuke with almost non of the cons.

http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2009/12/01/how-a-liquid-fluoride-thorium-reactor-lftr-works/

Naah

Whales use low frequencies which travel far. Ultrasound does not travel far and will be reflected or absorbed within a short distance.

The 50W is not getting radiated out into the ocean if it is being harvested for use by a device. There will be leakage none the less. Likely that amount of ultrasound within a room would be quite obvious to some sensors.

Look at what they've written and published.

An OSS developer, even if not one of the high profile people, can at least give you some URLs showing their discussions, code etc.

A typical interview question goes something like: "Tell me about a problem you worked on and how you worked with other people to solve it." If the discussion was on a mailing list then you can provide backup showing how you communicated with others and did that work.

I strongly suggest involvement in OSS to anybody. trying to improve their employability.

Dump existing market, try break in to new market

That seems to be MS's plan.

MS had a reasonable standing in the business smartphone space (alongside RIM). It was a good sell to corp customers: buy all your servers, PCs and phones running software from one OS provider. A nice comfortable decision for the risk challenged (ie. those that call MS the sensible choice).

They also has a product for consumer space - Kin. That crashed and burned.

Now MS seems to be stripping corporate space (where they have had moderate success and few competitors) and are throwing everying into consumer space where they lack all the features that would make them successful (cool image, etc).

Self sabotage at its worst.

Lasers jammed in Blighty

Being under perpetual cloud and all.

If the Brits made it....

it would leak oil. Until the internet leaks oil the Brits will be mystified.

Just about all great Brit brands have been bought out by their competitors and will probably make more money under new ownership. Perhaps that will one day happen for ARM too.

Windows optimisation

Seems to be geared towards making a dual core look like an 80386 and making 4G of RAM look like 512M. That, and being tightly linked to x86, prevents it from being a serious tablet contender.

I call BS on your laws of physics though. Funny though how Mac and iOS can use fundamentally the same OS codebase, as can the wide variety of Linux devices from routers to super computers.

An organization with the resources of Microsoft should have been able to pull a capable mobile OS together by now. And no, WinCE does not count.

Surely that was the point

of the whole article.

Perhaps SB has too many layers on. Need to fan yourself dear!

Just stay away from the pool table

You might get confused with a cue ball and end up with little round blue chalk marks on your head.

More importantly

1) Who is going to back these up? When I cloud my data backup gets done by someone else who knows how to do it. Joe Sixpack will not be able to make a useful backup strategy.

2) Security: Without proper administration these will soon become the world's biggest botnet.

It is always easy to solve problems if you ignore the hard parts.

Steven Knox got it wrong

Your argument fails because you assume that distances can be measured exactly.

Those 4 20m measurements will really be scattered about 20m. ie something like 19.950, 19.987, 20.003, 20.334

When you're dealing with non-integer values mode has pretty much no meaning at all.

But your main point is correct. The std deviation and characterization of the curve are more important. You could get a 20m average out of ten samples if one was at 200m and the rest were at 0 m.

No problem

Through vertical and horizontal leverages stratification.

He just threw out a buzzword to make the question go away. It didn't need to make any sense.

WP7 is a commoditising platform. Getting Nokia on-board gives it some street cred. It also gives LG et al an easy prime target to undercut.

Of course Ballmer doesn't care whether Nokia survives or not.

Why?

The Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in sooner for a mobile device than a laptop or desktop,

Most phone-style platforms have limited memory bandwidth etc because of the limitations of size and low power hardware. Amdahl's Law kicks in sooner too.

Since very few people are going to use their mobile devices for running web servers or compile farms it is hard to think what 4 cores will achieve on a phone platform that 2 can't.

4 cores probably only makes sense on a tablet or greater. Where they will likely make the biggest inroads is in netbooks and servers (think server racks that don't need air conditioning).

Why not?

"They can't possibly get a WP7 device out at all this year,." The phone platforms can run just about any OS you'd care to try: Symbian, WP7, Android... dropping WP7 onto the phone should be pretty straightforward.

What they will lose are all their 3rd party developers. MS surely hopes that 3rd party developers are so wed to Nokia that they will crank out apps that will then be available for all WP7 phones.

Perhaps more likely is that any 3rdparty app developers will realise that now that Symbian has been torpedoed they need to find a new platform to work with. Expect more to go with iOS or Android.

First release effect

There are two ways to read that 2%....

Optimistic: It's new and unknown and was only on sale for half a quarter. Therefore 2% is really quite good and if we grow by 2% every half of a quarter well have something like 20% market share by the end of the year !! and by the 2015 we'll have 150% market share!!!

Pessimistic: We advertised the hell out of it and some people have been waiting for a while. That 2% was the mad rush of punters wanting the device. Now that they've bought theres is anyone else going to buy?

I expect reality is somewhat closer to the latter. Just like Zune and Kin.

iSelection

surely

Well they still do

Digital electronics is just analogue electronics driven to clipping. That is a very important point often ignored by the less experienced electronic designer.

Sounds nice but...

The Android UI is heavily tied to the Dalvik VM. That currently makes use of some features provided by Linux and other POSIX OS, but not by Symbian. No doubt the fine people at Symbian could bodge the support into Symbian if need be.

Relative to the Linux kernel, the Symbian kernel is a bloody nightmare to work with. Its build system is arcane and based on a mashing of various bodgy scripts etc including stuff which still keeps it wedded to Windows development. Been there got the scars to prove it!

It's a cat

but until you check it could also be a dog.

Nor is it a coincidence that...

NASA == National Aeronautical and Space Administration.

NASA is a no a scientific organization but is run by the administrators for the administrators.

He should just buy a mirror

C'mon folks... Is it really possible to have 4000-odd photos that need "valuable" meta-data? That definition of "valuable" is surely less meaningful than Facebooks definition of "friend".

If this block is so up himself he'd do better to put a mirror in the corner to watch a live HD video feed of himself.

Who cares

Sure some people do care....

But the article was written by a Facebook user, so does his opinion still count?

The soldiers put themselves in danger

I could buy the "idiots at the top" argument except that:

1) There have always been idiots at the top. Never has there been a time when there have not been idiots at the top sending soldiers into unnecessary battles with deadly outcomes.

2) Signing up for HM Armed Forces is voluntary. The soldiers can read their history books and figure out that they will end up in conflicts, many of them planned by complete bozos who don't value them like mum does.

What third world shit-hole do you live in?

I live in rural New Zealand. The only way to get broadband where I live is via a wireless provider using microwave infrastructure to cover the last 65km from a city.

I pay for a 2Mbit/s link. Most of the time I get over 3Mbit/s.

E)

#) Ballmer

Since he took over MS has not done anything really interesting.