* Posts by Charles Manning

3509 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007

North Carolina will pay IBM $750,000 for 10 jobs

Charles Manning

re: Local spending

Make sure the execs and strippers are local too!

Charles Manning
Thumb Down

The data centre won't work

Ten employees being meddled with by 1000 execs per year? That's 20 execs visiting per week per employee all expecting meetings and PowerPoints and other general ego-fluffing.

Let's hope the exec spend all their time at the strip clubs and golf courses otherwise the poor bastards won't get any work done.

Yahoo! counts! the! reasons! it's better! off! without! Microsoft!

Charles Manning

Ill advised for whom?

The choice seems to be:

A) Take the Borg route, sell out to MS as they make hostile takeover purchases even if it is not as sweet a deal as it might have been a few months back.

B) Take the moral high road and slowly watch your YHOO share certificates turn to toilet paper.

Investors buy shares to make money, not to earn karma. They will go with (A).

San Franciscans prep monument to US prez

Charles Manning
Thumb Up

Can't flush from here

But they have a postal address. Maybe they take contributions. Don't know what I'll write on the customs declaration: "Tribute to GWB", maybe!

Daewoo's laptop is child's play – literally

Charles Manning

Tykes and computers

Why?

What the hell do kids really need computers for? Certainly not for education.

In my interactions with school age kids it is getting obvious that research skills are getting worse and kids are falling into the trap of just believing the first Google hit they get, doing a cut and paste and they're done.

Rare Mac Trojan exploits Apple vuln

Charles Manning

Here's a Linux/Mac Trojan

#!/bin/bash

sudo rm -rf /

Once you run any untrusted software with admin privs you're open to problems.

Cardiff 'copter coppers give chase to UFO

Charles Manning

UFOs are impossible

Further to what David Gosnell said,

UFOs are impossible.

As soon as a UFO is identified as a UFO then it is no longer unidentified, so is no longer a UFO.

Therefor all UFOs all disappear in a puff of logic.

Microsoft should buy Rackable instead of building custom computers

Charles Manning

Fix whats broken first

Right now MS should be focusing on getting the ship afloat rather than obsessing about Google. Fix the bread and butter money earners: Vista etc. Once these are on track, then start thinking of expanding into other segments. Right now a loss of focus will only cause MS more damage.

Unfortunately (for MS) Ballmer is obsessed with Google and wants to attack Google in any way he can: buying advertising eyeballs (via Yahoo) or trying to take on Google Android (via Danger). It does not look like he has any time and energy left to take care of core business. MS has an appalling history of getting most acquisitions wrong. Purchase by MS == kiss of death.

Even when MS gets back on track, purchasing Rackable does not make that much sense. The talent is in the employees and, like Yahoos, Rackable's people would probably leave in droves if Borged.

Yahoo! email! fans! get! more! domains!

Charles Manning

What innovation!

Is this the remarkable user experience improvement that Jerry said YHOO had up its sleeve?

Google must be worried!

British Columbia stray foot tally hits six

Charles Manning

@toby powell-blyth

Cut off?

She was grossed out, yet she inspected it closely enough to know that it was cut off vs rotted off? She's a trained pathologist that can tell the difference?

Eye witness soundbites are mostly bullshit: people saying stuff that they don't know anything about. "It sounded like a bomb going off!"- how many people have really heard bombs going off?

Devil dog laughs in the face of Taser

Charles Manning

Chav or dog

How could they tell the difference? Shoudduv popped 2 caps

1,076 developers, 15 years, one open-source Wine

Charles Manning

One very good reason to use Wine

I use Wine to run Cygwin.

Is it safe to download al Qaeda manuals yet?

Charles Manning

Charge me with rape!

I've got the equipment.

CherryPal out sweetens Apple with 2W, ultra-cheap PC

Charles Manning

2W + monitor > laptop power

2W is one thing, but you need to look at the system power. Add a monitor and you're using more power than most laptops.

Still, good to see another company that is not wed to Windows. The only reason EeePC uses x86 is for windows. Going with ARM, even a PPC gives far better power figures and pricing than any x86 - even the Atom.

Break from x86 and low power/cost is much easier. For instance, the Atmel AT91SAM9G20 (400MHz ARM) only uses 80mW and costs $7. Add more power and cost for the RAM, flash etc.

Google keeps killing penguins for money

Charles Manning
Flame

Ashee pissiness yet again

Why should Google, or any company for that matter, give away its trade secrets?

Honda, Toyota, and all other engine manufacturers have trade secrets about the efficiency enhancing aspects of their engine designs and hybrid designs etc. Do you expect them to just publish/share those trade secrets?

If you figure out Google's power use per user then it will likely be way less than anything you are doing at home/office. Using Google to store your data will likely be far more power effective than running a NAS or server of your own.

If you really want to save power as a computer user then:

1) Shut down your computer when not using it (I've heard bitching that temperature cycling breaks computers but I don't see it. I run 5 or so computers that get shut down most nights and I often power them up at below freezing and run them above 40C. I have never had one break from doing this in over many years in the biz).

2) Don't use flashy GPUs.

3) Use a laptop rather than a desktop.

4) Get the industry to move away from power hog x86 to ARM.

Info on missing White House emails to remain missing

Charles Manning
Unhappy

I think it was better

when you could satisfy these megalomaniacs with a few blowjobs.

'Humvee of the Skies' robot air-car design unveiled

Charles Manning

re: What's the point?

The point of any of these projects is to get funding. It does not have to work in the real world, it does not have to give the troops an advantage. It just needs to impress the holders of purse strings.

Ransomware Trojan code break 'impractical'

Charles Manning

Crack the crooks!

It would be cheaper for a few interested individuals to hire a bunch of ex SAS/SEALS to go visit the crooks.

That, my friends, is how to do brute force decryption!

NASA previews future astronaut threads

Charles Manning

Need wider appeal

If NASA really wants to be attractive to future generations then they need to improve their image.

They need the gangsta suit: one where you can put the helmet on backwards.

They need a pink one coz they don't want to shut out the girls. Oh.. and a black one for the emos and goths too.

Ex-Sun chief to fight Davis in '42 days' by-election

Charles Manning

@Ferry Boat

You're just a tardtard (one of those tards that must label everyone else an xtard).

Microsoft: 'We will save America from foreign domination'

Charles Manning

White space does have a purpose

The space between channels is required for automatic tuning circuitry to be able to tell where the signal is. If the spaces are stuffed with signal then many receivers cannot "lock on" to the valid signals.

British pilot makes first supersonic stealth jumpjet flight

Charles Manning

6 months from production to first flight?

Yeah I know military paperwork is bad, but really!

That's why wars are so good for aviation progress, there's significant motivation to get things done. The Mosquito was less than a year from concept to flight and flying sorties a few months later. Many other planes got going faster than that: the Me321(ok, only a glider) was approx 2 months.

Red tape be damned!

IBM 'advises' staff to opt for a Microsoft Office-free world

Charles Manning

Who sends out documents anyway?

In general there is very little reason to send out editable docs (*.doc, *.odf etc). Most of the time it is better to send a pdf, which is very easy to generate from OO etc.

Disgruntled admin gets 63 months for massive data deletion

Charles Manning
Dead Vulture

Blame a Kiwi!

With a name like "kuku" I'd be looking for a New Zealander. I've worked at two places where the servers were named with Maori bird names. Kuku (also Kereru) is the NZ wood pigeon.

SCADA security bug exposes world's critical infrastructure

Charles Manning

It's all about good design

There is nothing wrong with hooking up SCADA networks with others, so long as it is done through proper gateways. That allows data collection for business purposes and even remote monitoring (so that you can wake engineers at 3am and ask them to take a look on their web browser rather than have them drive in to the factory etc).

On a micro scale, the same sort of partitioning also happens in CAN networks in cars. Critical stuff is on a different network from the body electronics (windows, lights etc). Both feed into the dash. With bad design, you could have a situation where a faulty light switch might overload the network and kill the brakes. With external networking (traffic info streams etc) in theory theres a network path for a hacker to kill your brakes. In practice very rigorous system partitioning makes this impossible.

Windows Vista has been battered, says Wall Street fan

Charles Manning

"You can't buy that kind of coverage"

Yes you can.

US bars ID refuseniks from planes - but not ID losers

Charles Manning

@David Wiernicki

Many, perhaps most, of those bitching would seem to be American.

Anyway...

The whole purpose is not to prevent people from flying, or even keep the skies safe. It is to feed the customers with the warm fuzzy that they are being looked after, while also giving the TSA some extra tools to smack down complainers.

Anyone halfway analytical would realise that:

* TSA fails a huge % of pat-down audits.

* Any real terrorist will have pretty good ID; either an excellent fake or legit driver's license etc. and won't refuse to show it.

Country mice oppose Yahoogle

Charles Manning

Microhoo or Yahoogle or nothing: same outcome

There would be no difference in the outcome if we preserve the status quo, have a Microhoo or a Yahoogle.

status quo: MS and Yahoo continue to slide and will both be footnotes in internet history within a couple of years. Google is left stronger than before.

Microhoo: Microhoo will kill Yahoo more humanely than status quo. MS will have burnt a lot of cash for nothing. MS will continue for a bit longer in this space but the attempt to absorb Yahoo will kill it. Google is left, stronger than before.

Yahoogle: Goggle will ingest a tasty snack and then still want a real meal a few minutes later. MS will live on for a short while same as status quo. Google is left, stronger than before.

Painting by numbers: NASA's peculiar thermometer

Charles Manning

NASA's long term goals

NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

It is an administration, not a scientific body. It oversees some scientific stuff, but is ultimately an administration made of administrators, being run by administrators for administrators.

Like any administration, the long term goals are to keep the administration alive and prosperous (for the administrators). Science, truth etc are less important.

If NASA can be equated to a big pyramid selling (sorry, I mean multi-level marketing) organization like Amway, then science is just the soap powder that makes it all legal.

Like any funded organisation (including universities now), NASA - and by extension their contractors - need to keep publishing funder-friendly findings. The whole world is now programmed to hear the global warming message and to nay say global warming is poor PR. Heck - even oil barons like GWB are with the program.

Asus announces 10in, HDD-equipped Eee PC

Charles Manning

Resourcing for Windows

You just have to see x86 on the spec sheet to know that they are targetting Windows. Same with OLPC. As soon as that had x86 in it, then it was obvious that a Windows sell out would happen.

Linux runs fine on ARM. In fact there are more ARM Linux systems than x86 Linux systems (I'm counting phones as "systems" and for every Linux server there are ten or more Linux phones). From a technical point of view, ARM is the only sane choice for a Linux mini notebook. ARM-based systems use less battery power, are smaller, lighter and cheaper. All the attributes you want in a low cost sub notebook.

Anyone remember the Psion 7? That was a cute wee mini notebook that ran pretty well on a 100MHz ARM. The modern 600+MHz ARM parts would give it a lot more grunt.

Acer punts £199 Linux laptop

Charles Manning

A bit like the Linux Acer 4315 I'm using right now

Here in NZ we've had these for a while. Preloaded with Ubuntu. Work fine for most things.

http://www.dse.co.nz/cgi-bin/dse.storefront/4845c1960098d8e6273fc0a87f3b0719/Product/View/XC5822

NZD 559 (after cashback) == approx 230 quid.

Yahoo! bitchslapped Ballmer's $40 a share offer

Charles Manning

@Power to the people

Kangaroo court. Lynch mob. Guillotine. That's the kind of power the Yahoo share holders will be exercising.

Yahoo refused $40 a year ago. The value to MS went down a lot since then and continues to do so.

Shareholders will want to cash up before the stock turn into toilet paper.

Chinese crackers blamed for US power blackouts

Charles Manning

Untrimmed trees- hah!

"the failure to trim trees under the powerlines, they didn't trim the trees, the power lines were under heavy load running aircon..."

Yes, but the aircon was cooling Google servers being accessed by Chinese hackers, so it is still the Chinese hackers' faults!

See! Still their fault.

Bonce-antenna education downloads foreseen in 30 years

Charles Manning

School == daycare, not education

School is more about daycare for dual income families than it is about education.

Remember class: hours of waiting for the dumb kids to understand. Maybe a two minute pearl once every day or two. Hardly a wise investment of time and effort.

If you want a real education for your kids then pull them out of school and let them study what they want to.

Fitting chips in kids brains so that they learn while being at home defeats the main purpose of school - corralling the kids while the parents go earn money to buy appliances and crap that they don't need.

At least kids are getting *some* education and real world experience under current school systems. The chip thing would just bypass all that. Basically a huge step backward from where we are now (which is not that great).

Deadly Oz snake bites tourist's todger

Charles Manning

@Gumby

Each continent seems to boast the most poisonous snake. Which kills you deader?

Having grown up in mamba country, I reckon too many years with the dole have made the Aussies soft and even a grass snake could kill them.

Still, I did know a bloke in South Africa that got bitten on the leg by a black mamba. Within 5 minutes he was feeling very poorly and had blurred vision. Although this was at a small holiday settlement far from any hospital, the next door neighbour was a doctor and kept him alive. He spent a few weeks in hospital but survived. They reckon the mamba must have recently had a kill and thus only had a small amount of poison on board when it bit him.

Personally, I think I'd prefer to be bitten on the todger by a neurotoxic snake. You then live or die. If you get bitten by a cytotoxic snake (eg. puff adder) then even if you live, bits drop off.

But that's easy for me to say, now living in snake free NZ.

Aussie droid planes in Barbados hurricane probe

Charles Manning

Downdraughts

Since you have no passengers and meat pilots to spill their drinks etc, and the AUVs have a short wingspan, they should survive being tossed around very well.

Recalling my scuba diving days, you can get very close to rocks with huge swells rising up against them without being ground up. While gathering mussles etc, we'd get within touching distance of the rocks and be in a 3 metre crest-to-trough swell. The water must go somewhere and if you become one with the water you just flow with it. Similarly, when an AUV flies in turbulent air it will be thrown around, but the down-draughted air must go somewhere... ie sideways.. and so long as that AUV stays in that air and does not lose its airspeed and bearings too badly it should not crash.

Microsoft urges developers to tag sites for IE8

Charles Manning

@bws

"Get out of the browser business". Perhaps "get out of the software business" is better.

It has been years since they produced any really good software or actually made the software development landscape a better place.

Teen battles City of London cops over anti-Scientology placard

Charles Manning

N*ggers!

The law is about preventing hate speech.

The same law is used to prevent you waving a big "Niggers" poster.

Is this censorship or preventing hurt? You be the judge.

US and Romania dredge up 38 phishing suspects

Charles Manning

Fake bank cards

Very few places are using chips yet. The mag stripe thing is easy to write (you can buy mag strip writers quite easily).

You don't need pretty pictures and holograms to fool an ATM.

Airbus jets could be converted to fuel-cell propulsion

Charles Manning

PR Bollocks

The extra weight won't help. Rather use an external tractor to drag the aircraft around. The weight stays on the ground and there are no compormises of size/weight etc that need to be made. An electric ground tractor can be more efficient than anything they can put in the plane itself.

It's all just PR bollocks for an industry falling over itself to greenwash itself.

Boeing raygunship fires first blasts in ground testing

Charles Manning

Don't fire through dust, clouds or smoke!

Because in these conditions the laser energy will get absorbed by the air instead of the target.

Good thing battles only happen in clean environments.

Can Microsoft 'do' open source by 2015?

Charles Manning

2015: MS RIP

Remember Sperry, DEC, ICL, Univac, Borland,....... MS will join the club, perhaps by 2015.

MS are certainly doing nothing to aid their longevity.

They're blaming Vista's failure on user stupidity. Perhaps they are no longer capable of designing software with people in mind.

They have failed at all attempts to create a service industry. They've bought various companies, then let them rot (hotmail, ...).

The only real question is how long their momentum will last.

Microsoft! offers! Yahoo! less!

Charles Manning

Yahoo have eyeballs

That's all Ballmer wants.

Ballmer is Google -obsessed. He does not like it that MSN < Google.

(MSN + Yahoo) > Google, therefore Ballmer wants that to happen.

Of course, both MSN and Yahoo are sliding, while Google is growing. Therefore the above equation only works for a while. When it gets to the stage that (MSN + Yahoo) < Google, then Ballmer won't offer 50c per share for YHOO, let alone $25+.

Mobile phones cause bad behaviour in kids - report

Charles Manning

Of course it isn't Science

Science is very boring stuff that only white coats get turned on by.

To get government funded reasearch grants, you need to come up with some trumped up study proposal that aattempts to show some correlation between some disadvantaaged persons (poor dumb kids, poor criminals etc etc) and some potential cause.

There is no need to follow scientific methods (and indeed such boring practice is discouraged). It has to be grockable by some social sciences type person.

Perhaps the Chavvettes (??chav girls??) can blame the phone for making them preggers too? After all, most of them only got pregnant after using a phone.

But, being fair, even keen medics, who really want to make a difference, have insufficient statistical training to make proper cause and effect studies.

Five misunderstood Vista features

Charles Manning

Display Driver Model???

Granny does not understand the DIsplay Driver Model and is having probs with her Vista machine.

This is not Vista's fault. This is Gran's fault for being stupid and not understanding the Display Driver Model. She should have paid more attention during her computer science lectures.

As Ubuntu and other Linux distros move more towards "Just works", MS are expecting their users to become more technically astute.

Sorry Ballmer, you need to try harder than that!

OLPC and Microsoft punt Windows-only XO laptop

Charles Manning

@ Here's a thought

Spot on!

Most of the Pro-OLPC crowd have never really experienced the third world but have this bizarre idea that putting a laptop in every kids hands and rolling out broadband will make everything sweet.

A few hundred years ago our forefathers sent them missionaries and bibles.

As you say, most people in the third world have zero disposable income. If they had any spare cash it would soon be used buying clothing etc.

Although I'm more or less a geek (kernel programmer etc), I grew up in rural South Africa. Although I had a priviledged white upbringing, I interacted a reasonable amount with Xhosa speakers living in the rural Transkei area where there is no electricity or phone system. For the most part these people don't even have bank accounts or mechanised transport, and a trip to Lusikisiki (Google Earth will find it) is considered a huge deal. These people don't really need or want electricity and could not afford to pay for it or buy any appliances. A laptop does not fit into this equation at all.

Then there are the urban poor. A laptop might make a bit of sense here, but it is way down the list compared with other basics. Being able to IM an "internet pal" on the other side of the planet is hardly useful.

Anything like a laptop also needs a sophisticated support structure: people that can fix laptops, figure out networking problems, etc etc.

Many a misguided aid program has failed because the whole package was not delivered. Some Swedish government program sent a bunch of tractors to rural Africa. Within a year most of these tractors were dead. Why? They did not send support and spares for their Swedish tractors. This was Massey Fergusson land and MF spares were readily available. The Swedish tractors needed spares to be brought in from Sweden. Same deal with OLPC: the laptop is only a small piece of the puzzle.

Phones 4u accused of misleading customers

Charles Manning

What! No customer protection?

It seems the UK needs some sort of cutomer protection like we have in New Zealand.

We are well protected against false or misleading sales tactics.

We also have a "cooling off period" where you can get out of "cold called" contracts for various reasons. If you got sold something over the phone you can return it and pay nothing.

These are not just protected by civil law. Companies that rack up enough complaints can be fined etc.

Intel: future iPhone to be Atom powered

Charles Manning

It's a moving target

By the time Intel get x86 down to current ARM power levels, ARM would have moved on to the next level. x86 will always be playing catchup in this space.

As another poster said, most software porting is a matter of setting compiler flags. It is not the software that is keeping designed committed to ARM, it is the fact that ARM uses less power to do the same job.

These days most higher-level software is close to being CPU agnostic: Linux, BSD etc. That's why Ubuntu can roll out an ARM version with a bit of effort.

Most x86 lock-in is forced by Windows. Anyone rolling out portable x86 systems (including EEPC and OLPC) are doing this so that they could keep the door open to run Windows. If these devices were ARM based, you could have better battery life (or smaller batteries), simpler circuit boards (less power being converted, higher chip function densities) and less cost.

Royal Navy warships could run on sunflower oil - if fresh

Charles Manning

@Mr Grundy

They're still producing just as much oil. Nobody is actually going thirsty for the stuff even though demand is increasing.

All they've done is drive up prices by threatening to cut supply. This forces oil traders to buy up oil futures at inflated prices (to ensure their supply). Once the oil traders have paid high prices they must pass these costs on to their customers.

Of course some large companies (Shell, BP, etc) produce much of the oil that they refine. They are not really buying the oil at inflated prices (where they are buying from themselves) but pass the stuff on to customers at the high-oil prices, the argument being that if the end customer did not buy it they could sell the oil on the open commodity market and make more money.

Bulletproof quantum crypto dinged by implementation weakness

Charles Manning

Cat litter

The turds are only in the litter if you look!