Posts by Charles Manning

@Butch

Getting patents hooked to standards has been successfully employed by many. MS FAT and SmartMedia; Bosch CAN and J1939/ISO1184 etc etc.

Standards bodies that try to apply patent waivers generally don't work in the electronics industry. The patent holders tend to be the bigger players and if they don't sign up then the standards body becomes a huddle of second-tier players that are ignored by the major players.

@Peter

Your call centre mates might actually find a proper job here in NZ, but we're also at least partly on the dumbing-down bandwagon.

From what I see this is largely a result of two things:

* More performance measures on teaching establishments. The establishments get funded depending on the number of grads they pump out. It is far cheaper/easier to pump out burger-flipper grads. You don't need specialised staff and equipment to generate BAs in media studies, just tell the little tykes to email/chat their friends and write a few essays about the experience. Extra points for writing it text speak or submitting a youtube rap instead of a boring old essay. Research and science is a lot harder and more expensive to teach and generates less money for the organisation, so those classes get dropped and pressured by the administration.

* Less performance measures on students. No more failing because you're not good enough - nope that is all negative and destuctive to the students self-worth. Now it's all "Not Yet Achieved" etc. That's fine for people doing a BA in Coffee Studies (how serious is a bad cup of cofee -- really), but do you really want a "Not Yet Achieved" style person servicing aircraft ("Ladies and gentlement, your aircraft was serviced by Not Yet Achieved Services - please remain seated otherwise you might make the engineers feel bad about themselves") or designing bridges etc?

Of course, there's also the money part of the equation. A truck driver/builder can make as much as a scientist and can start when he's straight out of high school w so where's the financial moitivation in going to university for many years?

So NZ might have the same problems as Blighty, but at least the fishing is better.

@Morely Dotes

Surely the whole idea with sending someone to prison etc is that the courts have determined a punishment and once that punishment has been served then the person has paid their "debt to society" and they should be accepted back into society with a clean balance sheet.

Is there really any justification for some vigilante deciding that the court's punishment is insufficient and they need to add their extra bit?

That does not only apply to murdering ex-cons, but even to those that just run the bloke out of the trailer park.

Pens vs pencils

Well the real reason is probably marketing and not technical. Remember we're talking about the 1960s when anything to do with space was just the mustard and kids & parents would snap up anything to do with space. Every second kid had some NASA poster on his bedroom wall and an Apollo model hanging from the ceiling.

Business plan for many companies was:

1. Associate Brand X pen, cornflakes, toilet paper, toothpaste with NASA/space.

2. Advertise: "Hey kids, why use a crappy Brand Y product when you can use the same one as [insert iconic name here] and be one of the team".

3. Sell shed loads of Brand X to every kid out there.

Technical superiority does not enter into the equation [except to make some differentiator and promote novelty].

One way that this stacks up

Sure, the code is most likely owned by the company if developed in company time and most likely they can do what they want with it.

There is is a possiblity though that this might not be the case. If the programmers were hired into the job with a promise of this being open sourced, then that might be binding on the company. ie. the employee might have attached some value to the opensoured-ness of the project and by changing this the company are violating the agreement with the employee as much as if they only paid half his salary, or promised him free coffee and then gave him decaff instead.

Of course any sensible company well staffed with lawyers is unlikely to commit themselves without a rash of get-out clauses in their favour.

Upside down

In the Southern Hemisphere you have to hold your phone upside down otherwise you void warrantee. Everyone knows that!

Why bother?

Because ultimately you get written up in the history books and your grandchildren and their classmates will read about you. The poor little brats need some shreds of dignity to cling to.

Then too you need to have something worth talking about in chat shows and ghost-written auto-biographies otherwise its going to be a long retirement sitting on the porch in a rocking chair.

Not much

410 Mlitres per day is not very much. That's only approx 105 l per day for Melbourne's 3.9M population. Australian domestic water use is approx 300l per person per day (+ commercial etc). So this desalination plant will only provide 20% or so of their needs.

"Does everything" does not apply to applications

It is only really the kernel that "does everything". The phone applications are different from the desktop/supercomputer applications. Even the command line tools (ls, echo etc) are typically different: GNU vs Busybox.

Fragmentation across platforms (phones vs desktops) is not much of a problem. Fragmentation within a platfform is much more of a problem, with two main fragmentation issues:

* Distro configuration differences: These make it very difficult to deliver add-on binaries, drivers etc. Installing printer drivers is a real pain when different distros use different printer configuration methods. Installing USB devices is a pain when different distros use different usb handling.

* Dilution of effort: Instead of having a choice of 10 applications that are 80% there, I'd rather have the choice of 2 applications that are 99% there.

@Kothar

The big trick with randomising is to not use just variables etc to hold state otherwise the sequence can be predicted once that state is known. Shake it up a bit by adding other randomisers: time, time between user input/network access etc. A little imagination goes a long way...

It's for language study

As Anon says before, the most likely reason he wants to do this is as a way to learn English relevant to his line of work.

Here in ( the still pretty screwed-on-headed) NZ, I know quite a few Chinese etc people who came to NZ with post graduate degrees, but then went to university/polytech for a year doing a lesser course. The primary reason to do this was to learn the jargon. You cannot learn this in most English as Second Language schools where some dippy language grads are trying to teach "Hello please may I buy a pound of onions" and "When does this bus get to Frulbgate?". To learn words like "titrate" or "compile" and you're far better off in a technical environment. Besides, when you crack an A in your subject it helps underline the fact that your degree is probably as good as a local one.

Moon broke off from earth?

Like most things to do with space, there is no proof that the moon broke off the earth. This is a hypothesis that currently has some popularity. There are other hypotheses too, including the "capture" hypothesis where the moon was formed independently and was captured when it came close to the earth.

Give it another 20 years and likely other hypotheses will emerge or a different one will become fashionable.

Are "real disabilities" real?

Some say that drinking is a choice but missing limbs is not.

Sure, physically missing the limbs might not be a choice, but the person's attitude - and thus if it is a real disability - sure is.

I've met various people missing limbs and other body parts or the ability to walk etc who don't let this get in the way of the rest of their lives: running companies, working 60 hour weeks, partying up etc.

Many people with dyslexia etc, learn to work around these problems and make successes of their lives.

Perhaps it is wrong to classify alcoholism as a disease, but if it is well managed then it need not be debilitating either.

Big bang isn't proven

In science nothing is ever proven. There is no such thing as "proof by observation/demonstration". All you can say is that a theory is consistent with observations/demonstrations, allowing one to be reasonably confident that you're on solid ground.

And no, I'm not being anti-Big Bang. The same applies to gravity et al. In theory gravity applies to all objects with mass. The observation that brick released from hand falls on toe does not prove gravity, it merely demonstrates it. Perhaps there is some mass out there that is immune to gravity and the reason we cannot find it (and why it does not amass into planets) is because it needs gravity to form into planets and we use gravity to detect mass.

The Big Bang is just a model. A model (a parable for people in white coats) draws together various observations and theories and makes them seem consistent (I say seems because I have not personally checked out Big Bang and I expect there are some out-of-focus bits that need hand waving to explain).

Before we get all uppity and defensive of science, it is worth noting that science goes through phases of making up models, finding a lot of support for those models, then finding a weak spot and watching those models crumble.

For example, up to approx the 1960s, plate teutonics was rubbished by the scieeeentists of the day as a very stupid idea, yet we (mostly) accept plate teutonics now (40-odd years later) and look back at the pre-teutonic folk as if they were flat-earthers.

It is really naive to think that many of our pet theories of today won't get trashed within the next 50-odd years. To think otherwise would suggest we've reached as far as science can - that would be a sad thought.

@Andy

I made the decision to leave over 15 years ago. It was easy: the cost of buying a good pistol for the missus was about the same as airfares out of there.

And yes, you're right. It is nice to live in a place where changing letter box colours from red to blue is a major issue.

@Sam ... or is it little Sambo?

Perhaps you've been reading too many stories of bally hot bwanas on lion hunting safaris and little pikaninis running around naked fetching gin and tonic.

Africa is not all sunshine. Even if it was, PV is just too expensive to produce to make it worthwhile for everyone.

The main thing to achieve is a simple low cost solution for personal/domestic use. There is no need for lighting up garden ornaments etc. When you have nothing then very simple lighting would be very useful.

One or two LED lights give ample light for cooking/reading etc. I have a small wind-up LED torch/flashlight that provides approx 20 minutes of reading light from a 1-minute wind-up. It has a small (??20mAh??) rechargable battery in it. This cost me approx $15 retail - so make that $2 ex-China.

It would be very easy/low cost to make something a bit bigger and more robust with a slightly bigger battery (say 1 hour run-time) and a bigger hand crank to make the winding easier.

Linux users: come out of the closet and be counted!

All these people that use Firefox etc and ask it to lie and say they're using IE don't help matters at all. They just keep the Linux stats artificially low and help maintain the status quo.

If only 3 people in UK claimed to be gay, how much time do you think they'd get in parlament etc? Using much of the logic expressed here the discussion would be: "Why are we wasting all this time talking about gay rights when there are only 3 in UK? Let's rather spend the time discussing stuff important to the 99.9997% straight folk out there'

So, be proud to fly your Linux colours. If a site does not work (because it is not compliant).... complain to their webmaster. If is is a large public concern then bitch to their PR.

Calibration

The thing with radar gubs etc is that unless they use some very accurate external reference they require calibration to be known good. Then they need to be operated well.

GPS is in essence "self calibrating" since clock error is one of the things that GPS needs to calculate to keep tracking them garbage-cans-in-the-sky. If the GPS clock error is wrose than a few hundred ppm, then the GPS will not lock onto the signal and it won't get a position etc.

Not all GPS receivers use Doppler, though the best do. They won't use doppler all the time and don't always provide up-to-date info particularly if there are trees etc.

It is very easy for the young fellow to have got a false low reading on his GPS, as follows:

1. Drive along at 35mph.

2. Go under trees (or cover antenna with hand/metalic item etc).

3. Accelerate to 50mph while under trees/hand over antenna.

4. Brake like hell before leaving tree cover/removing hand.

5. Leave tree covered area/remove hand at 35mph.

Many GPS systems would likely show 35mph with no over-speed events.

MS - the big internet advertiser?

Selling ads... How low they fall! If that is MS's great new breakthrough strategy/product then they're doomed. Google always had advertising as a core revenue, but for a product-pusher like MS that's quite a mind shift.

I guess we'll kno MS is fully screwed when they start selling us Viagra.

"DC does not go long distances"

Actually many very long lines and ties between grids are done with DC. DC can go further than AC because you don't have to worry about inductance etc.. Using DC also means you don't have to bother with synchronisation.

AC, however, is far more useful for reticulation mainly because this can work with transformers which provide a very efficient, compact and cheap way to step down voltage. With DC you'd either need local generators or some far less efficient conversion strategy.

But still, Edison was the Bill Gates of his day. Liar, cheat etc.

Where's the control?

This carbon nano-stuff isn't very clever. What happens if an airplane wing decides to "heal itself" into a golf club in mid flight?

MS made Joe Public aware

As Hedley Phillips says, this time Joe and Jane Sixpack do know that it is Vista and that the sugar is only pixel deep.

Why? Well MS went to such pains to make sure that everyone was aware of this new shiny Vista thing. Since approx Win98 it has been pretty hard for most punters to really tell the difference between Windows releases. No difference, then no compelling reason to buy the new one.

But this time MS shot off the foot. People are getting more savvy that software is prone to "issues". If they had said something like: "The same, but better and shiny" they might have convinced people that Vista is an incremental improvement. But no; instead they take great pains to say it's all written from scratch. That makes people a bit nervous.

Basically, they're the victims of their own overhyped marketing machine.

Olymic-size bogs

Since we're talking US kiddy-size gallons (3.7854 litres or 1.5 sheep bladders in El Reg units), a 1.6 gal flush == 6 litres.

But since the US bogs are long , wide and shallow vs British/Australian/NZ narrower but deeper ones, 6l does not build up much pressure and thus is less likely to force blocking material.

Decimantion + interest!

All those pednatic fools that point out that decimation meant knocking over 10% of items.... well that was back in Roman times. You forgot inflation.

Even the most inflation resistant economies have inflated by more than the requires 8 times to make decimation be 21/26.

Media bias is fickle

They try to back the bloke (or blokette) most likely to win.

Why? Well if you piss off the White House you'll get those scoops and little bits of gossip a bit later and they'll be a bit slower returning your calls. In this age, media need to groom their news sources and you don't do that by being investigative.

Same goes for grooming the military too. Who was that journalist that got fired for annoying the military by interviewing "the other side"? His bosses knew they'd get cut off from the nice chewey news if they let him stay around. Instead of sending beak news feeds from a reporter embedded in a fighting unit they'd be sending back footage watching grunts washing trucks down at the transport depot.

No wonder mainstream investigative journalism is dead in USA.

Arre the stupids really that clever?

"the stupid are encouraged to fsck like bunnies so they can bring a dying population up to pay for the massive increase in O.A.Ps.."

That sounds far to rational a chain of thought for a stupid to put together. More likely it was just could that they cannot figure out how to open a three pack.

Anyway, most stupids would SCANDISK, not fsck.

Should have ARM, not x86

Then you'd have a reasonable battery life.

Jesus

He didn't exactly get off with a warning did he? Maybe Judas ratted him out for feeding the homeless.

@Steven Hewitt

Ah yes, the "eat shit 50 trillion flies can't be wrong" argument.

Sure MS had a huge marketshare but that has not been achieved trhough providing great software.

Like Leo Maxwell, we run a Linux household with two dual boots for running iTunes and a few shoot-em-ups and such.

However, Linux certainly is not all champers and roses.

If you're emailing, web surfing and writing a few docs, then Linux is perfectly easy to use.

If you're using wierd hardware (dual head monitors, scanners, tablets etc), then Linux is not very user friendly. Recompiling kernels, hacking X config files etc is certianly more than mom & pop can do without a tame geek on-hand. To get proper desktop uptake needs effort to make all these things easier to do.

Different levels of distraction

Is talking really that distracting? If so, how is using a phone any different from using CB radio or yelling at the kids in the back?

In my own (limited) experiments and observations, the actual yackering seems far less distracting than making a call (looking at the screen and selecting a number). Still, that is not any more distracting than finding and loading a CD and flicking through the tracks.

Texting while driving... now there's a bad thing. Probably a huge contributor to teenage road deaths here in NZ.

So why ban it in the teenagers? Well firstly they're the real text-heads. They also do have less road-savvy. When was the last time you saw a 40 year old cutting through the traffic while texting?

Evidence?

Generally price fixing produces static l **high** prices.

NAND prices have continued to drop at a huge rate since 2000 or so. NAND prices have dropped faster than any other computer related technology in history. Where's the price fixing in that?

I'm with the others on this: OPEC is primarily a price fixing body and the rest of the industry dabbles in politics to keep its interests alive. Very little suprise that the dual Bush&Bush presidency spent most of their time in office manipulating the oil market.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbusto_Energy

I don't believe a word of this...

until I read it in Wikipedia!

Not easy to find

Even though 10,000 sq miles is far smaller than the UK (a factor of 9 or so), it is still a very large area (a circle of radius approx 58 miles). Crash into/under a tree and there's nothing left to find.

A few years ago, my brother discovered a plane that had crashed in the Drakensberg (South Africa). The crash area was pretty well known (within approx 5 miles or so) and a significant search effort found nothing, though helicopters flew within a few hundred metres of the crash site.. My brother discovered the crashed plane more than a year after the crash. It was up a rvaine, but otherwise clearly visible from the air.

That just shows that a search effort is easily thwarted.

Still, Fossett has absolutely no excuse to have got lost like this. He knew better (well should have!) and there is absolutely no reason to make flights without taking some precautions.

Nothing really new here

Proper coulomb counting technology has been around for at least ten years and is commonly used in most laptops, PDAs, high end phones etc. These do require good testing and calibration firmware but unfortunately this is often not done well.

What about UFOs?

Will the message be sent out to the whole universe?

Hacking votes is nothing new

Back in 1980 I was at Univeristy of Cape Town. Student body election voting was done by punch cards. The puch cards were then run through the computer which tallied them all up.

Since it was a Univac, the end of a data set was specified by a card marked with @EOF. Of course a reasonable % of computer science students punched out this pattern which meant that only a few cards would be read before the end of the data set was reached.

It would typucally take quite a feew iterations before all the @EOF cards were found and removed, making a half-hour exercise into an all-nighter.

Time for another Ballmer one-word rant!

Patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,patching, patching,

Yes, they are truely inspirational!

Nothing new

As a kid growing up in South Africa I would often wake up at 3am or so to listen to shortwave radio (Beeb, VOA, ...) using crystal sets that I built or an old valve (US: tooooob) set that I fixed. That was 35 years ago.

Not very consistent

How can the court expect her to keep her word and act rationally when she's simultaneously trying to use insanity as a defence for her actions?

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4182593a12.html

Sounds 100% perfect

"...prosecuting any threats..." makes it sound as if they have a 100% success with stopping the flow of drugs into USA. In reality they are probably closer to the other end of the scale and only prosecute very few threats.

re: Solution to the overcrowded prisons problem

Sell the prisoners' time on ebay as slave labour.

That way they will contribute to society and pay their own way (for once).

They won't need 3 meals a day (govermnent savings), won't need internet to keep them occupied (more bandwidth for the law abiding) and they will be kept fit and occupied so won't need the TV and gym equipment (these can be sold on ebay for a nice tax refund).

.... and this lifestyle might be a better deterrant.

Dust and smoke

Anyone of these armchair laser designers been on a real battlefield? Anyone thought of dust, smoke etc?

If you try fire a laser through smoke or dust all that yummy energy will get soaked up in the air between the firer and the firee.

This will have two effects:

(1) leave the target pretty much unscathed.

(2) make defensive armour very simple. Just head down to the local bazaar and stock up on incense sticks.

re: Logic fallacy

By Karl's reasoning, it was a bunch of stupid babies in the womb that caused Chernobyl.

Accuracy is not just about instruments

It is also about measuring the same variables under the same conditions.

No matter how white your lab-coat or how thick your specs, or how fast your super computer, accurate measurements under the same conditions are required to perform any meaningful science.

Where were the historic measurements taken? Under what conditions? Are these even documented? Are the modern measurements done under the same conditions?

For example: Weather records for the 1900s on often come from measurements taken at airfileds/airports where such info is important (temperature has an impacty of fuel density, take-off weight etc etc) and well recorded. In the early years the airports were more correctly airfields. Grass and clay etc with grass between the runways. Transpiration from the plants would cool the air during summer. Now most airports are wall-to-wall concrete and asphalt with large buildings dumping airconditioner heat etc. I've even seen airport weather sensors mounted right on airconditioners! Hardy an apples to apples comparison.

Rat brains beats em all

Put some cheese additive into the fuel and ...

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

Just the wrong spin

I thought it was a chav exercise video...

Amazon != Lungs of the planet

It is emotianally appealing to think of the Amazon as the lungs of the planet. In truth, algae do far more but it is very hard to get worked up about green slime.

Of course it only makes sense to plant carbon sinks in areas that can support them in a sustainable way. If you have to fertilise/water them then it makes little/no sense.

Carbon sinking alone is probably not enough to fully offset mankind's carbon footprint, but it is at least doing **something**. Enough different mechanisms can make a difference together.

"Calculator phone"

The HP48 was probably the finest calculator ever made. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-48. An HP48-based phone has some appeal.

With built in RPL the phone would be programmable and be able to provide interesting UI and add-on software features. RPL already has rudimentary database capabilities - enough to store address books, PIM stuff etc.

Operating the phone in RPN would have a huge coolness factor.

5551234 DIAL <ENTER>, but of course you could make this rather boring by setting up suitable soft keys.