Posts by Charles Manning

Re: No more loading of apps?

What you're talking about is NVRAM.

The article talks of read time and writing algorithms, so this does not sound like NVRAM. It is still flash-like.

It is also not clear if the devices would support random access (like NOR flash) or page access (like NAND flash). I suspect it will be page access like NAND flash.

NAND flash takes a while to read because the read command has to wait until the read logic settles. This can take a reasonably long time with the long NAND chains. After that there is still the overhead of doing the actual data transfer.

Having been deeply embroiled with flash for the last 20+ years, it is interesting to see some competitors emerging.

Re: Actually, a success for consumers, I think

Nope. Intel has a parallel tack of acquisition and divestment that is almost as bad as Microsoft's

They bought StongARM from DEC, developed that into the fantastic XScale range of processors, then sold it to Marvell.

They developed then dumped a wide range of embedded CPUs.

The same for flash - both NAND and NOR.

The same for USB chipsets.

Now they wonder why the embedded industry is shy about designing anything with Intel in it. As soon as you start shipping, they'll make the parts you depend on obsolete.

Re: How about construction then?

The main point I'm trying to make is that these gender biasses are just natural and we'll break things if we try to force then to obey some idealogical ratio.

Back in the 1960s, medical doctors were almost exclusively male. Until then there had certainly been a socailly driven gender role bias that made medical doctoring a male profession. By the 1980s there was a large % of females in medicine. When I was at university in mid 1980s my gf was a medic. Around a third of her class were female. Now over half the medical graduates are female.

From that you can see the effect of Western women's lib which opposed gender bias in the late 1950s/ early 1960s. There was a lag for the changes to be felt, and the early 1980s was when the change came through.

So why did the same happen in engineering? It would be absurd to say that medicine was given the nod, but the patriarchy held on to engineering as a male domain.

Nope, the restrictions were removed. Engineering etc just has less appeal for women as a group.

GDP is a severely broken measure

It does not distinguish between production (which strengthens an economy) or consumption (which weakens it).

Nor does it even see subsistence economies like parts of Africa where a large % of people feed themselves, build their own houses, without any money changing hands. and economically live on thin air.

Re: Code Conjurer's ...

register rogerer

Re: Won't work...no women will go.....

Not that NASA would allow them to pack a 1400 year supply of anti-wrinkle cream.

With carry on baggage for a 1400 year flight there won't be much room to buy stuff at duty-free either.

Re: OK, let me get this straight..

You're getting down votes because suggesting people might consider Google Apps threatens the BOFHs.

BOFHs think every small company should have their own IT department because that will keep them in gravy.

For anyone that thinks having your own BOFH will lead to better security of your company just remember this:

Snowden was a BOFH and that didn't work out so well for his employer's data security.

Re: On the contrary.

Well at least it should not take any effort from Microsoft.

The rumour is that their spider/crawler/bot is just a bloke in a room typing urls into spider.txt.

All they need to do is not type your name in. Job done.

Re: Lottery for idiots

"I pray he never wins"

Praying doesn't help either.

Counting phone sales was probably Ok.

ARM goes into hundreds of different devices from those costing less than 30 cents to those costing hundreds of dollars. For each of those, ARM gets royalties.

Clearly they're not getting much for a Coretex M0 in a 30 cent device. I would be surprised if they get one cent.

They'll be getting a lot more per unit for the top-end devices: mullti-core parts with GPUs etc. Those have historically mainly gone into phones.

Now, however, the top end devices are going into a wider range of devices, so phone numbers alone are not enough.

Re: Congratulations on repeating exploits before they can be fixed

The only way to fix this is to ban Twitter.

Re: Priorities

"In case you didn't know, Pakistan has more than a few nukes."

And unlike the west, they've shown enough restraint to not light one off yet.

The America dubious justification for nuking Hiroshima was that it cut the war short and saved tens of thousands of lives.

If Pakistan was to follow that same logic they'd have fired up their nukes long ago.

Re: Eat it, fuck it or kill it

Ignoring, or denying, the fact we're wired this way is not constructive.

I am not trying to denigrate men. I am one. I am not trying to condone acting on this wiring either. We learn to moderate the urges so we can have a civilised society.

One of the few times we really let the lizard brain loose is playing FPS games. We can unleash the killer - even if just in fantasy. Unsurprisingly, the other lizard brain elements emerge too. Boys will eat more during/after FPS, energy dense foods in particular. So any surprises then that fuck part emerges too?

In our lizard brain wiring we classify things into the three distinct piles: threat (kill it), food (eat it), women (be nice to them for breeding). If they're in the threat pile they don't get treated nicely.

Men in the threat pile are still threats, but not as bad because they fit with our understanding of the world. Men are supposed to be virile champions. Even when they are the enemy, we still see them as being great.

What we don't like is our classification system being messed with. These threat-women that confuse our lizard brain classification system get lashed out at. It's the same for blokes wearing dresses.

Re: Horrible Research

The climate models I've looked at (yes, I even looked at the code!) didn't even have latent heat modelled.

That's broken, but entirely understandable since most of the things that we need to look at are not understood well enough to model.

"It doesn't have to be perfect. It has to be better than humans."

Except in the court rooms.

Re: No smoking gun?

"Have you read this about Toyota's ECU software?"

Yes I have. I've also read the stuff written by Michael Barr (the main and most convincing litigating expert witness).

They found a whole lot of software that looked badly written, but they never actually demonstrated the software failing. Basically the argument was that the code looked ugly and had programming errors in it therefore it likely failed.

They never managed to actually make it fail though.

Re: They need to fix the bugs

"Surely, you mean 'cheaper' one."

No, it is a cheap one. He still paid a lot of money for it though.

Re: This is not new, and its not original research

"This is not new"

But it still got them funding. Mission accomplished.

Neighbourhoods work, to an extent

Neighbourhoods work like small villages when the "haves" and "have nots" are spread about randomly and the people interact. But in most cities, the haves are in one neighbourhood and the have nots are in another. Village effect breaks down.

Welfare is hard to re-localise once the government has stepped in. The government welfare programs give anonymity to the transaction. You're getting welfare from "the government", so you don't feel any moral compunction to the bloke next door who's paying through taxes. This feeds a feeling of entitlement.

From the other side, the anonymity also makes the beneficiaries a faceless group. No longer is it the community gathering together to help Old Pete. It's now faceless taxpayers vs faceless bludgers - many miles away.