* Posts by Charles Manning

3509 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007

Obama critical of Bush regime's bioterror fearmonger gap

Charles Manning

@Dave Bell

You forget that the citizens are now sow cowed that they will all line up in an orderly fashion and each take one, and only one, carefully measured dose.

Just remember that these people are selling fear, not information. The bigger the numbers. the more the fear. Saying "might kill a few and make a few more sick" will hardly win them airtime or a position at the big table of power.

Also, these people have no real reason to fix the problem. If the problem goes away then their power goes away. All up, it means they have a vested interest in making the problem seem bigger than it is.

Oz man cracks one off while speeding in drug-packed car

Charles Manning

Why can't NT grow their own?

Driving dope to Darwin sounds like taking coal to Newcastle. Surely NT is ideal for growing dope?

I don't smoke dope, but friends do. The last transaction I saw was some years ago in South Africa in an area formerly called Transkei. City boy asked for approx 10 quid of dope, expecting a few joints, and the local guy bought him two plastic shopping bags full and promised to drop the rest off the next day.

And for the unit fanatics: 1 hand = 4 inches = 101.6 mm

Ex-Googlers reinvent web search

Charles Manning

@Sarah Bee

A search for "Sarah Bee" also kicked up some bloke-on-bloke.

Sarah.... is there something you're not telling us?

Charles Manning

Rubbish info

I think the UI has potential, but the results are rubbish. About half the searches I tried (all technical - honest!) returned name squats and really stupid pictures with no bearing on the subject matter.

Pictures only inform if they are relevant. If not, then leave them out.

Cuil claims to search more pages than Google. Perhaps, but quality is far more important than quantity.

Microsoft slams 'sensationalist' Vista analysis

Charles Manning

@Peter Gathercole

How many PCs are newer than Vista?

Quite a few actually. Many people held off buying XP machines so that they could buy the most flashy Vista machines. Many of them got burnt and grumble or switched to XP.

Microsoft readies XP for One Laptop Per Child computer

Charles Manning
Thumb Down

XO: dumb idea

Got AIDS, famine and bad water? No problems: what you need is broadband and some shiny pixels.

Tech support? No worries. Let them use Linux so they can fix their own problems.

The cost of an XO or two and a year's internet connectivity is enough to dig a well for a village or buy all the books and pens that a small school needs.

XO is the expected outcome of a geek-centric view of the world. Sure, there were some government minister types from some third world countries that contributed to XO but they were there for the gravy and have little concern with the people on the ground.

Screwgle™ - Google's new ad revenue model

Charles Manning

So what

Advertising, via any medium, has never been easy. Whether you're putting up bill boards, taking newspaper ads or whatever, there has always been a need to figure out how much you're going to spend and what actual advertising you will present to the population.

If you're a mom-n-pop shoe store then you're insane if you take a google ad. Most of your clicks will be from far away places that you can't serve. It only makes sense to advertise to people that you can sell to.

If you live in a city with one major newspaper, then expect it to cost a lot to place a huge ad on the front page or next to the page 3 girl. Same deal with Google: it costs big money to place ads that get lots of hits.

Nothing has really changed, except that many people have excessive expectations of the internet. Too many people think that all they need is a Google ad and the customers will come rolling in. Sorry people, there is no magic. You need to understand your market and what sorts of advertising will work for them.

Free for all on London Underground

Charles Manning

Just make the underground free

Rather than having some very ineffective revenue gathering mechanism, make the underground free and fund it from some other source.

US Air Force may allow killbots to be flown by non-pilots

Charles Manning

Drones piss easy to fly?

Dunno about these drones, but a while ago some drones were already being designed to be dirt simple to fly. Onboard software prevents most of the deadly conditions for which you need any piloting skill (stalling, slipping etc). Just command in a "climb" or "turn left" movement and the drone software does all the complicated rudder/aileron/whatever manipulation. That makes it easier to fly a drone than drive a truck.

Drive-by download attacks menace UK.gov

Charles Manning

@Graham

"tech savvy blighty"

Bah! Poms won't be able to make good websites until they can figure out how to make them leak oil.

HP packaging madness continues apace

Charles Manning

@JT2008

I think you forgot the bit where they fly all the environmental officers from around the world to some location to discuss ideas. On a monthly basis. Then send everyone in the company a coffee mug saying "THink of the environment"; individually packed in 1ft cubed boxes, one per pallet, and delivered by Fedex,

Ubuntu man challenges open source to out-pretty Apple

Charles Manning

@Colin fcukin Morris

Technically, hardware tweakery is not really the fault of Linux. I have a laptop running Ubuntu that does not display the problems you mention (using it right now). If your laptop vendor made the appropriate Linux drivers etc, then these problems would go away.

But, from a practical perspective, it does not matter who is at fault. Ultimately you cannot make your laptop work with Ubuntu. From a Joe Sixpack perspective, the laptop works with Windows, but not with Linux. Therefore Linux is broken.

The real problem is disconnect between how techies view the problem and how users see the problem. Also, those that could fix the problem are not very motivated to do so.

Now hardware vendors typically have a hard time keeping their heads above water supporting drivers etc just for Windows. Why would they want to more than double their work just to support Linux - with 1% or so marketshare? That just does not make business sense for many.

I expect it will be a few years yet before the end user experience with Linux is as slick as it is for Windows.

Climate protestor claims glued self to UK Prime Minister

Charles Manning

Water does not work

When I was at university I used to use super glue to fix my diving gear - particularly rips in the rubber on my fins. It would not last forever, but would manage a few months of intensive usage (playing underwater hockey twice a week and scuba diving three times a week) and would then need to be redone.

Convicted spammer goes AWOL from federal prison

Charles Manning

@Andy

"21 months is ridiculously little, considering the number of people he's annoyed - and the amount of money he's got from it."

... and Gates walks free????

Police told: Delete old criminal records

Charles Manning

@Syd

Yup, the ultimate crime is is to break the 11th commandment:

"Thou may act as thou chooseth so long as thou doest not get caught."

NASA: The Moon is not enough

Charles Manning

re: Playground needs new toys

Not really. They want more budget.

Remember folks, NASA a an **administration**, run by administrators for administrators. Their power/fun/egorub comes from playing with vast project and vast sums of money. Actual scientific output is of lesser concern.

Scientists ponder future Moon mission activities

Charles Manning

Don't need fleshbots

The Russians got this right from the start: send machines.

Assuming, for a second, that 1960s USA had technological equivalence to the Russians, there were no technical reasons to send people to the moon. Sending people to the moon was purely political.

The Russians were still able to take photos and return them as well as scoop up samples and send them back. ie. Achieve all the science that the NASA missions did.

The only benefit in sending humans is to play low-g golf and bring back some posterboys to divert a nation's attention from Vietnam.

So why send more people to the moon? Sending robots to Mars does not even make the news any more. Surely sending a few to the moon is the space equivalent of driving to the Chinese takeaway and asking for a No.37 with extra rice.

Robotic missions are far easier to engineer, cost far less and can use much more experimental approaches. Crash a robot, as the Russians did a few times, and there are no weeping widows. It really does not matter if you try something and it does not work first time.

NASA eyes Japan's ISS supply vehicle

Charles Manning

Remember folks, NASA is an administration...

.. filled with administrators. The name is even a giveaway: National Aeronautics and Space Administration . There's no mention of science in that.

As such, expect a an organisation run by administrators for the benefit of administrators.

As AC says, the best thing that could be done for space research would be to get rid of the administrators (many of them are political appointments anyway) and ask the scientists to figure out the best way to achieve the science that they want to achieve.

Researchers release 'cold boot' attack utilities

Charles Manning

@Nigel

Doing it at the chip level is the best bet, and should have the following inputs: hard reset input, refresh loss or repowering (ie getting good power after a power loss).

As soon as any of those are detected then all the DRAM cells get wiped, likely by a single inversion of a in-chip power rail or a slight modification to the refresh logic that does a wiping in the first refresh cycle or similar.

This would make the DRAM immune to all hotswap nasties.

DARPA plans soldier-tagging system for US troops

Charles Manning

re: flash thunder

Flash and Thunder might have worked pretty well if you can tell a Brit accent from a German one.

It probably won't work so well with electronic stuff. Remove the unit from a soldier, or swap it for cash/drugs and you have a perfectly working reply.

Of course RF emissions are nothing new. Soldiers have radios and other electronics which are readily detected.

In warfare, everything is about percentages. A new technology does not have to be flawless, it just has to give an advantage.

Researchers show up deniable file system crypto leaks

Charles Manning

User perception

Joe Sixpack thinks:"I took the TrueCrypt pill now nobody can read my porn."

As many have pointed out, it is technically the apps that are broken, not the encryption per se.

However from a user's perspective it is the encryption that is broken: he took the pill and he's not getting the results he expects. All the technical talk is mumbo-jumbo.

Sony Ericsson sees profits tumble, turns on workers

Charles Manning

300M/2000staff

= =150k euro (==240k USD) per employee.

Sure, much of that is going to paper clips, coffee and buildings, but still that's quite a bundle.

AMD confirms 'Atom-smasher' chip on its roadmap

Charles Manning

... or use an ARM

Sub watt and no {point of compass} bridge required.

Get rid of poxy x86 and see how small/light/cheap mobile hardware can be.

Dutch university can publish controversial Oyster research

Charles Manning

Does it really matter?

So long as nobody thinks this is fully secure there is no problem.

Various systems work fine with less-than secure identification.

*Barcodes, for instance are used in all sorts of situation and can be readily duplicated with a photocopier or a pen and paper.

* Physical keys can be easily duplicated using a file. Locks can be readily opened by "bumping".

Being able to fool some technology does not make it legal.

Volcanoes fingered in oceanic mass extinction

Charles Manning
Flame

64 Zimbabwean dollar question more like.

Who the fsck cares how the dinosaurs died.

They're dead and gone and finding out how they dies will not do anything useful in the world except keep paleontologists busy (useful because without bones to play with they'd probably meddle with other more important things).

Icahn Yahoo! writes! a! letter!

Charles Manning

Yahoo's worth is eroding

Yahoo's value to MS has been eroding. MS is not willing to pay as much for Yahoo now as it would have in March or so.

Why? Ballmer saw that (MS+YHOO marketshare)>Google and wanted to acquire YHOO to be (temprorarily) bigger than Google, or maybe make a last effort to dominate. Since then both MS and YHOO have lost market share and Google has gained market share. That means that the above formula no longer work.

MS is not "flip-flopping". They realise that the window of opportunity is rapidly narrowing and thus are prepared to offer less and less as time goes on.

Microsoft eyes AOL takeover

Charles Manning

The real reason

This is just a third-grader move to try make Yahoo jealous.

More seriously, it is likely to cause the YHOO stock price to drop and put more heat on Jerry and make Yahoo more amenable to being bought.

ISS expands parking capacity

Charles Manning

Tradesman's entrance

For the plumber to park up when he comes to fix the bog.

HP's white trash data center is up for anything

Charles Manning

@Pete

Pete you have a good point.

Crims are able to steal all kinds of stuff fairly easily. When I lives in South Africa some people even stole a few hundred tons of piled up road grit from the side of the road during a long week end.

Stealing a data centre would be easy once you have physical access. A quick paint job and slide it onto a container ship and it is out of territorial waters on its way to Nigeria/wherever within hours. Who needs to go ATM surfing/phishing when you can steal identity/credit card details etc on such a huge scale?

Global warming to stone US kidneys

Charles Manning

A few degrees

GW is supposed to make a change of just a few degrees. Surely air conditioning should be banned.

Microsoft questions Google's plan to save the world through ads

Charles Manning

@@Charles Manning

Nobody has refuted my point that from a user perspective one search engine is far better than many small ones.

As for the issue on advertising. Well maybe advertisers will get their low cost/high penetration advertising feed cut off. Perhaps they will have to pay more. Ultimately at some point there is a choice that companies can make. When people stop buying advertising the prices will stabilise, just as it has done in print media, television, product placements etc.

I say so what! Why should I care if advertising is adversely effected? For the most part, advertising is brainwashing: "Coke is life"... yeah right! It is a mix of Co2, sugar, caffeine and other crap which are not condusive to life.

If the advertising industry is dealt a setback I'm all for it!

Charles Manning
Thumb Up

One is better in search

Who wants to hit 5 search engines to find what you want? Nobody!

From a search user perspective, one vast search provider is far better than many smaller ones. There is only one real provider and that is Google. All the others are losing share and only have a presence due to other portal activities or because they sell software preconfigured to hit other search engines.

For a click ad buyer (ie a vendor), one player also makes a lot of sense. I'd rather buy click ads from just google than try buy them from multiple vendors. It does not help to have "me too" providers who are not getting any real traffic.

Sure, as Google builds a dominance they might lift ad prices. So what. There is still healthy competition from other advertising channels: print media, billboards, TV slots etc. That prevents Google excessive gouging.

And so we begin the tech sector's journey into the Heart of Darkness

Charles Manning
Flame

Economics is all wrong

Economists measure bullshit indicators like GDP which are easy to measure, but are poor indicators of true economic performance.

One of the largest industries that drive the US GDP is the health industry. By these measures, the health industry is making the US rich.

But, hang on, surely high health care spending should be made possible by a healthy economy. Healthcare is a drain on the true economy and should not be a prime driver.

"We are rich and can therefore afford to spend on healthcare" makes sense.

"We can afford to buy food, cars and houses because we spend so much on healthcare" does not.

What is making the USA appear more productive is the high cost of USA healthcare relative to other countries. An operation that costs $1000 in India costs $25000 in USA. Therefore the USA is 25 times more productive (as measured by GDP) than India.

Tech stocks might fall, but they will be replaced by stocks in healthcare and other areas.

With such out-of-whack indicators and measurements, is it at all suprising that the bean counters don't see a shift in the wind?

Patent violation, prosecution, acquisition: pick your top open-source project

Charles Manning
Gates Horns

@No better way to invite unwanted attention

Bollocks! MS has enough weasels and lawyers to find everything they want to, plus a lot more! Remember Bill is a law school drop out, of lawyer stock.

Missing Webroot founder found dead

Charles Manning

Manic depressives

Being manic depressive does not exclude other obsessions. Instead, other delusions and obsessions can help to trigger manic depressive behaviour. Mental illnesses are hardly ever well defined. Instead, if you rack up enough points on a list of symptoms you get to wear the label. Thus not all manic depressives are equal.

Microsoft kicks Ubuntu update in the hardy herons

Charles Manning

The client perspective is all that matters

I run Windows, Ubunta and OSX machines.

The OSX machines have given me no problems in the download department.

In the last three month I have had one instance where Ubuntu updates seemed to be offline and that was most likely because I had disabled mirror access and am still looking at "hardy-proposed". No problems though: I could keep working and the updates worked fine the next day. My other hardy machine (main hardy) has had no problems).

The friggin Windows machine auto rebooted my machine twice in that time. I'm pretty sure I'd told it not to reboot my machine during updates. Bloody annoying since I was once running overnight downloads and the other time I was running a long running a week long stress test that got killed after 3 days.

Microsoft urges resellers to play it straight, beef up revs

Charles Manning

Copying != revenue loss

Yes, copying is illegal and wrong. People should not use sortware that they have not paid for.

However, it is a fabrication so say that MS and other vendors are losing serious revenue.

MS only loses revenue if the user would have bought a legal license if they had not procured a bootleg. Not so! Most bootleggers would not use the software at all if they could not get a bootlegged copy.

Built-in browser expiry proposed to fight botnet menace

Charles Manning

@Dial up

Who cares about dial-up bots!

They're too bandwidth constrained to contribute more than a few % of botting.

Also, most people would soon twig that their PC is dialling and blocking their phone line and either turn it off or unplug the modem.

Botting is almost entirely due to people that are connected to broadband (so they have high bandwidth and don't know their PC is busy yammering away on the internet) and too lazy to turn their computers off.

An off computer can't bot. Period. This is a security model that the daftest person can understand.

Very few people have a need to leave their PCs on the whole time (yes, there are P2P-ers but not many).

Some say that turning computers off breaks them. I say bollocks. I very seldom leave a computer running over night (unless I'm doing long-run software testing). At the moment (winter) I'm powering them up at sub-freezing temperatures in the morning. In summer I often power them up at > 40C. Nothing is breaking. Been doing this for 20 years.

Boozers rejoice - it's the USB wine tap!

Charles Manning
Flame

Of course you'd say it is fake!

You bastards don't even accept global warming is true!

I think there is a conspiracy here. You guys all have shares in the beverage market and don't want to see them undercut by this cool invention. No! You'd rather just dis this product without researching the facts. You're just a bunch of crybabies wishing you had invented this. Well guess what buddy the Truth is out. You can't stop progress even if you try.

I think it should also come in a British version that serves piss warm beer. Just run the beer through the CPU cooling to warm it up.

UK and US agree biometric heavily vetted trusted traveller deal

Charles Manning

Facial recognition

Any bets that all it measures is the amount of reflected light...

Pasty faced pom: the glove.

Dark and swarthy: the glove.

Healthy Californian tan: fast lane.

Wife-slaying Linux guru may have 'developmental disability'

Charles Manning

Surely all crims are off their trolleys?

Every crim has some sort of maladjustment or they'd be regular clock-watching tax-paying citizens.

The trick seems to be that you need some shrink to invent a name for your "condition". Then it is no longer your fault.

"He's not a thug at heart, he actually quite gentle for someone that suffers from I'llFuckYouUpItis. Please be kind to him: he's the real victim here!"

Are the ice caps melting?

Charles Manning

Scientists lying... that's scary!

is not the details (ie. whether or not Global Warming is true/false; whether or not ice is melting; whether it is caused by soot or CO2) but how these scientists are changing their stories.

Changing your story in the light of new evidence is perfectly acceptable, but now we have these climatologists making barefaced lies and discounting evidence.

We expect Al Gore to tell porkies: he's a politician and movie maker.

But scientists are supposedly feeding us the objective truth. Clearly they're practicing "truth management" and are only puppets being manipulated like terrorist hostages to say "the right thing" in front of the camera.

Who the hell is pulling their strings and why?

If we can't trust the blokes in lab coats, wtf can we trust?

'HD TV gas' 17,000 times worse for planet than CO2, claims boffin

Charles Manning

Numbers done properly

Comparing global CO2 vs global NF3 is pointless, except for patting the alarmed citizens on the head.

What is more important is looking at the effect on a per product basis: If 17200*NF3 used to make flat telly < CO2 saved by using flat telly then usingNF3 is a winner. Perhaps not green as grass, but less grey.

... assuming you buy into the Global Warming thing.

@Drew: Thanks for not including pictures.

Asahi premiers pint-pulling robo-barman

Charles Manning

Since most "beer" is so crap...

I'd rather the robot just drank the stuff for me.

If this thing wants tips it better get a rack mount.

Telegraph falls to the Tw*t-O-Tron

Charles Manning

@ Joe K

"This country is fucked, will the last sane/intelligent one to leave please turn off the lights."

Lights???? I thought the yobs smashed them long ago!

Bill Gates has gone, what's his legacy?

Charles Manning

re: delivering on the vision of a PC in every home

WTF???

MS has never delivered a single PC to any home. They have never made any PC hardware. MSDOS did run on non-IBM compatable PCs but it was really only when IBM compatability emerged with IBM and cheap clones that computers started to get more popular. All MS did was do some shady deals buying MSDOS (though not yet called that) and onselling it to these vendors.

There were a lot better architectures kicking around before the PC and a lot better since and it is a pity that these did not emerge.

US hackette ponders jub-powered iPod

Charles Manning

Jubs Hah!

With my beer belly I could power a ghetto blaster!

As Gates strides into the future, we wallow in the past

Charles Manning

@Thomas

Don't worry mate. Your disease can be cured.

Granite Jesus, blessed be thy gneiss

Charles Manning

Think eBay

How much is "hooded stoner with boner" going to fetch?

Or course it has to be a biblical image to get top dollar. And that's not a boner... it is a loaf or fish or something!

19-year-old p2p botnet pioneer agrees to plead guilty

Charles Manning

Don't drop the .....

http://www.w3.org/TR/soap/