Posts by Charles Manning

@Patrick

What are you on about?

Im my last 6 AirNZ flights the video screen could be turned off - completely no backlight bleed.

I agree though that the UI is very sucky and slow due to the box-of-shite software that runs the entertainment things.

Why didn't they pull the plug this time?

Last time they pulled the plug on SP3 because it conflicted with an application that very few use. One could almost forgive them this little oversight because of the small userbase.

This time they screwed up far better than last time but don't pull the plug.

In the words of my Great Aunt Hattie: WTF?

@@@Another Skiddie bites the dust..

Tits-a-jiggling? Most botted folk don't wave a "come bot me" flag and most don't even know they've been botted.

There is a very low-tech solution to this:

Turn yah computer off then you're not using it. Apart from saving power, an off computer can't bot.

Yeah I know there are some torrenting folk etc, but for the most part they are not the people being botted.

ISPs could surely also take some effort to identify botting and warn the botted.

I've heard people say that turning computers off/on breaks them. I don't believe that. I have 7 computers here that get turned on/off once a day (the laptops more often) and in 15 odd years I've never had one break due to powering up\/down.

The point of homework and research....

is to teach people how to do research. You know, look things up in various sources, patch the factoids together and make some judgement when things don't fit (ie. develop "reasearch skills").

Just copying the contents of the first Google hit, or cutnpasting a wikipedia article hardly constitutes reasearch. Learnt today: click, click, type "frogs", ctlC, click, ctlV.

I homeschool our kids and encourage them to read many sources and believe nothing from one single source. Get some books out of the library, go to the river and catch some frogs. To this end we have about 3 different sets of encyclopedias including a very old Children's Britannica (eg. the entry on India is cringingly colonial and has a section on how many coolies you need when planning a tiger hunt).

Wikipedia is fine for a quick overview of a non-controversial subject (so is an up to date Britannica), but neither should be used as exhaustive references in PhDs (or even homework for that matter).

250GB is huge

Unless you're a middle to large company doing lots of multimedia what the hell do you really need 250G for?

That's over 8GB per day or 800MB per hour @10hours per day.

I have 10G and do more than fine on that including telecommuting, Ubuntu updating, mac updating, pulling Linux kernels and the odd iso, wwwing, youtubing, podcasting and much more with 7 computers and 3 other people helping me.

Solid state a lot older than that

Hats off the the transistor bods, but they were not the first to make solid state amplifiers.

Negative resistance amplifiers (basically tunnel diodes) were first discovered in the 1920s. Read http://home.earthlink.net/~lenyr/znrfamp2.htm for a kick off.

The equivalent valve technology (toooobs) were discovered around 1906.

Of course you would not want to use tunnel diodes in logic circuits because of their stability, but then you would not want to use a regular transistor either. All modern stuff uses FETs which came about a bit later.

@Jeff Held

You make a valid point that YHOO has gone from $18 to $25 by doing nothing. Even more so if you consider that in the technology sector you're actually losing ground if you do nothing so without MS, YHOO would have decayed to $15 or so.

Thus, MS has really given YHOO a $15 to $25 boost.

But shareholders mostly have a very short attention span. Most will only see the $35 to $25 drop due to Jerry.

As others have said, the show ain't over and everyone is expecting the shareholders to slap Jerry around and MS to come back with another, lower, offer. That's still keeping YHOO inflated but not as much.

Gates' "We don't need no steenking YHOO" is bollocks trying to drive the price down. Only a month or so back he was saying that MS absolutely needed YHOO.

@Do you suppose...

Once you've had a few beers such measurements are pointless.... you're going to hit on her anyway.

To make the big money they just need to make some link to global warming and the government agencies will buy it.

Bloke vs bloke

Has the author of this article never seen to blokes "oh yeah, oh yeah"-ing eachother?

The extra $2 per share that Jerry wants might could like chicken feed on top of what Ballmer has already offered. Ballmer will never accept because then he'd lose his tough player image. Toughness is about all Ballmer has to offer to MS shareholders.

It is far easier for Ballmer to "walk away", let the shareholders chew up Jerry, then come back and pick up the negotiations with the left overs. Ballmer gets a better deal and reenforces his tough guy image.

@Finbar

This is such a small thing in a huge wave of stimuli and media reaching kids that most of them will get bored before they've even filled out the web form.

Once the moon had been reached and walked on (Apollo 11), interest in NASA dropped off remarkably. Apollo 13 only became newsworthy when things got dramatic.

They don't write the ECU but...

ECUs are often connected to other computers via CAN bus bridges etc. Effecting a denial of service attack is very easy on a CAN bus and is something you can do inadvertently.

As for those that think it will be OK because this is WinCE and not Vista. Dream on. WinCE is no more reliable than Vista.

@Dave Bell

Part of making a successful system would entail not just detecting the object, but also calculating its wake effects etc ("Hmmm we have a 747 at 20000 ft doing 347 knots...) .... just like a meat version of a pilot must do.

Just missing an object should be relatively simple: take "hit it" software from a missile and just put a minus sign in front of it.

Calculate wake effects for extra credits.

The hardest part of any automated system like this is ensuring system stability and correct behaviour when the sky is full of these robot pilots. For example, how do you ensure that they don't dodge into each others paths etc.

Then, there's ensuring system stability when each vendor's software will behave differently and each different plane has different performance capabilities...

Basically a control system test nightmare, but a gravy train to keep engineers and programmers employed for the next 20+ years.

@Zed

That takes me back a bit... to the 1980s.

A friend in the military had taken an 8inch floppy disk to the range and shot it up with a 9mm. It must have had about 5 or so holes through the disk. He took this back to the office and pinned it to the wall. Some visiting general saw the disk and asked about it, so he concocted a story about how they were designing a fault tolerant file system so that computers could contine to function even after hit by enemy fire. The general was very impressed and even made reference to it in some speech he made a few days later.

Up and down sides for MS

This can be interpreted in many ways:

MS won't be pissing $45bn into a hole in the ground: Good for MS.

MS lose the chance to get at all those yummy programmers that they can't hire on the open market: Bad for MS.

Yahoo management: Get to moon Ballmer. Must feel good

Yahoo management get minced by shareholders: Pain, pain, pain.

Google don't have to face a consolidated opponent: Google might have had a short term problem there, but in reality MS+Yahoo were both sinking anyway. Google wins.

MS and Yahoo would have dragged eachother down: Google looses.

The only people who have definitely lost are the YHOO! shareholders.

With a search warrant it is OK

Just like asking for the keys to a safe.

THose "won't use a killer's fs" posters

I hope none of you drive Volkswagens.

As others have said: suck out the juice and spit out the pips.

New sensors in rural areas won't help much

The NASA press announcement says that new sensors will be placed in rural areas because the urban sensors are meaningless. Wow. Great we have the white lab coated PhDs help figure that out! Anyone with half a rock for a brain could tell them that urban areas have changed remarkably in the last 100 years and that taking temperature measurements in urban areas is not going to be indicative of the rest of the planet.

Before going into rural areas, I hope that they talk to farmers. But they probably don't want to get their lab coats and Cray keyboards dirty and won't. Rural areas have undergone large environmental changes in the last 100 years and continue to do so. Land use patterns change the temperatures. Thick lush meadows of yesterday get grazed shorter - meaning less moisture is preserved in the ground and higher temperature fluctuations. Changes from grazing to cropping change the land cover and temperatures. Forests come and go.

Thus, to get good info they should really be making measurements in pristine areas. Wilderness (including sea and ice) make up the bulk of our planet and probably are the best places to measure.

To get any useful data requires an apples-to-apples comparison. Unfortunately there is very little historic data from unchanged areas.

Stop bitching!

Those of you bitching about losing your cushy job to a person who will work for less and bitch about the employers should consider how they are benefitting from this.

Those nice red Californian tomatoes on the shelves at the supermarket. Good value eh? Thanks to screwing down the wages of the Mexican farm labor. Are you prepared to pay for full price fruit and veg and employ an American at proper American wages?

That PC you've got. Assembled in China with Korean RAM. How about supporting American workers and paying American labor prices for assembly and RAM? $6k for a PC might be fair.

Same deal for those Nikes you're wearing, etc etc. It's all fine to see blue collar jobs go in the name of cost, but why should you really get any different treatment?

Nothing new

They've been going through your bags forever, looking for illegal objects and trying to slip an exta bottle of duty free in.

Why should your e-baggage be treated any differently?

Of course permanent storage of your data is a myth. They just don't have enough raw storage (nor, if the Whitehouse is anything to go by, the experience to execute the job properly).

Low level government employee gets 419ed

No news in that.

$1.5bn?

For 10k staff. That's $150k each, though I doubt it will be evenlly spread.

Still, that shows that MS are expecting to have to compensate for a lot of bad karma.

Of course this assumes the blogger/reporter has it right.

10 minutes or less?

Errr, not including the 20+ minutes to set up the hardware and 2+ hours to install Solaris.

And they end up with a huge power hungry machine that keeps the house cozy in winter.

The little NAS box under my desk took 5 minutes to set up (including screaming at the kids to bring back my bloody screwdrivers that they had stolen) and lives off the sniff of an electron and is more than adequate for a home server. It cost less than the 5G or RAM that they put in their machine to keep ZFS happy.

If you want to bond with your son then take him fishing.

Collectable failure

Get your spotwatch now to show off to your grandkids. Cheaper than an Edsel.

Lost sheep and shepherd?

Dunno about bot sheep, but the meat variety we have here in NZ don't try to find their shepherds. The bastards will avoid you if at all possible. I've spent too many afternoons running up and down hills chasing them. If a sheep willingly approaches you, look for signs of foam about the mouth, or a cameraman lurking in the bush filming a sequel to Black Sheep (something I hope is never made).

14.5 W is huge.

Want something lower Wattage? Any Linx box with a network connection can be presesed into service as a "data center" and if you don't need too much storage, you could run a small ARM Linux board with flash memory etc and get something going for less than 3W.

The smallest web server I've seen is http://d116.com/ace/ and only uses a few mW that it can steal form the RS232 wires. You could fit a few thousand of those in a shoebox. Of course this stretches the definition of "data center" somewhat.

@vincent himpe: You mean a thin client?

Infection mitigation is a huge reason why some organisations use thin clients. It centralises servers too.

Sygar is OS agnostic

Putting Sugar on a box is somewhat like putting a browser on it: once the Sugar's on top you don't see the OS anymore.

For those fanbois that feel burnt by this: OLPC has never been a Linux project. It has always been a Sugar + OS project. Negreponte has always considered both Linux and Windows as alternative. That's stupid because it forces some dumb decisions like x86.

It they'd made this machine ARM based it would have been cheaper and lower wattage. Linux runs perfectly well on ARM (there are more ARM Linux systems out there than x86 Linux systems). But then they'd have had to drop the Windows option.

Aggressive strategy?

Large and lumbering, but lacking teeth. Beached whale more than aggressive.

If they're going to play the big -chunk-of-storage-online card, then why pick 5GB when Google offers ove 6GB? Most people will not be using all their storage so this is really just a tick-in-the-box cpomparison number. Again, hardly aggressive.

Unless Ballmer has been to the furnature shop, there is no aggression in MS.

Another Seattlement?

Google and Y! must be scared sleepless. NOT.

If the DOJ's handling of MS is anything to go by, the DOJ watchdogs have rubber teeth and nothing will happen until the EU does something.

LaTEX

only requires that you treat the document as code if you look at the source. Same deal with OOXML, HTML etc. A LatTEX-eating WYSIWYG word processor would hide that all from you.

Personally I find OO does everything I need. I generally send out PDFs (no need for clients to modify the docs). If the client does need to modify the docs, and they are WinTards, then I'll send out one of the retro .doc formats that OO supports or html.

Encryption won't work

There is no real difference between customs asking to see the contents of your bags (searching for illegal stuff and smuggling) and asking to see the contents of your laptop for the same reason. They can also check your ipod for bootlegged tracks (or suspect bootlegged tracks).

Encryption is no different to padlocking your luggage.

Refusal to unlock luggage or passwords is likely to get you the Glove Of Love, tazering and being put on the next plane home or to your favourite terrorist vacation accomodation.

MS has big problems here

1) The biggest. Internal leaked emails show that MS's own senior management and OEMs were suckered by the Vista Capable labelling. If they knowly went ahead with this labelling then they were intentionally misleading customers.

2) They made a big deal of discontinuing XP to force people to select XP. Remember when they said an XP SP3 was not possible and XP would be terminated? They have since (or are about to) released SP3 and still sell XP.

3) Monkeyboy has publicly stated that Vista is work in progress. How can they sell it then?

Class actions have floated, and have won, on far more pathetic grounds than this.

Sure MS has faced class actions before, but just from a few disgruntled folks. Never before has there been such a big groundswell of anti-Windows feeling.

MS have made a noose for themselves here.

Power supples should have thermal safety

They should be designed for stupid users, being accidentally covered or the cat shedding on them. etc. Designing for safety is pretty simple. Polyfuses (resettable fuse thingies) can be used to kill power within the unit when it reaches, say, 80 deg.

What I want to know though was if the person was running pirated games? Perhaps this was a new form of DRM.

@Dave: updating

One repository is perhaps not a good idea, but a centralised mechanism is. That way you can add repositories to to the mechanism and control where you get updates from.

Fuel for a class action?

If Ballmer says Vista is work in progress, does that mean that those people that bought Vista have been mislead, or might have reasonable grounds to say so?

If so, expect a nice class action to start in USA.

Where's the money?

Like OSS, money is not the issue. TV programs want to be free. Content might be limited to shows about bearded blokes with sandals trying to get us to use Hurd.

But then, NBC is working on this new advert/show idea where they go further than product placement. The advertisers get to partially direct the show. Essentially the show is just a long ad. This model will work for the advertisers & show writes no matter the distribution mechanism.

As many have pointed out, Mobile TV is really a solution looking for a problem. It appeals to far too small a segment of the population (mainly non-driving commuters) to warrant large investment. The exception might be sports highlights snippets etc.

Same codebase != same binaries

The "same codebase" only means that the source code is common. That source code likely has many conditional compilation switches and other configuration parameters that can vastly alter performance of the resulting binaries.

For example:

* Different buffer sizes (maybe some server drivers/stacks are configured with bigger buffers).

* Turning various features on/off (caching, DRM, etc etc).

Bleeding eyes?

Didn't the tampon help?

Embedded != x86

Relatively few embedded applications use x86. Most use ARM (for 32 bits).

With a bit more effort this could have been wireless

Just solder an antenna-looking thing onto onto each end of the cable and you could say to the sucker:"Gee I wonder what range it has" and get him/her to walk a few hundred metres away to test it.

Hollow promises

It is always easy to make predictions based on some highly controlled lab experiment, but it is a lot more difficult to develop a technology to the point where it is realiable, and cheap enough, to be used in consumer appliances.

It is much, much, easier to make rash promises for 20 years out (whether that's Bush's global warming targets or technology). By then people would have forgotten and lost interest (like those queuing up for flying cars for the last 30 or 40 years).

NAND flash was first shipped in 1988 but only got cheap enough to be used on a grand scale (multi-gigabytes) in consumer devices since 2005 or so. That's an 17 year ramp-up. Likely NAND flash was in the controlled lab stage a few years before that and it is based on relatively sound technology.

Ferrous RAM, bubble memory,... the tech highway is littered with breakthrough technologies that didn't make it. Call back when you have something promising.

Clicks are not down

Grundy & Miami: RTFA.

Click rates are just climbing slower, but they are still increasing. As others have pointed out, maturation and saturation will tend to do that.

Miami Mike: Perhaps the trick to making good business is to be careful about the target phrasing you use. Undoubtedly some businesses are less suited to click advertising than others. If you got the clicks for 2c each, they were probably pretty low quality.

@Grundy

Your point is well made for us greybeards. However it does not work for the youth.

Rewind tape to the 1960s when Sony brought out transistor radios. Crappy sound. Everyone said they'd flop because they're just nowhere near valve (US:toooooob) sound. But trannies were very popular amongst the youth who liked having a portable radio (they were listening to 60's pop and stoned, so quality did not matter).

The youth of today are more likely to want to embrace converged technology that gives instant gratification: sending messages, pictures and sound to eachother. The kids of today don't want to wait 20 minutes until they get home to get the latest music that their friend played them. No they want to download and listen to it **now**.

That was one of the appeals of the Zune's squirt music sharing model, but the Zune burned because it was just too uncool.

For this market, quality has to be "just good enough". Ease of use, and particularly speed, are the most important factors.