Posts by Charles Manning 3509 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007
I'm sure the owner doesn't want to sell too much beer through BC.
BC transactions currently take too long to confirm for any over the counter selling. That means waiting (many minutes) to get payment or putting up with some bad transactions.
That is really not viable as a mainstream payment method when the trend is towards NFC payment because even swiping a card is too damn slow.
A hundred years ago, leccy streetlights were amazing and advancing rapidly and country folk would go to town to see them. Now a switch to LED or whatever modern technology brings goes unnoticed by Joe Punter.
Same deal for smart phones. When the market is young and technology is advancing rapidly it is easy to innovate. After a while, that curve flattens out, people get used to what was once amazing and there is just no room to innovate any more. People don't respond to the "ooh shiny" stimulus any more and the market saturates.
100W would assume 100% efficiency. Not on your Nelly will you get that! To actually deliver 1W iof useful leccy is going to need perhaps 3 times that or more. We're pretty much talking about a microwave oven with the front glass smashed in.
If it is anywhere near 2.4G then watch out. That's where microwave ovens sit specifically because that's in the water absorption spectrum. 100W of 2.4G is going to cook a lot of kittens. Call me a Luddite if you will, but I'd rather use wires than get that warm sensation all over my body.
"I guess he meant only in the overfed Western world and not the undernourished country's"
Oh bollocks with the Western guilt self flagellation.
In the last 50 years the 3rd world survival rate has rocketed, as has the 3rd world's access to food. Both thanks to western input. Even throwing AIDS in the pot, Sub-Saharan Africa has longevity twice what it was just 40 years ago.
Sure there are still some pockets of malnutrition and disease, but these are caused by local corruption and wars - not the Demon White Man. They are a small fraction of what they were just a few years back.
Right now, obesity is far more of a problem world wide than famine.
The fundamental laws of evolution still apply: changes in attributes are filtered to favour certain attributes above others depending on the "fitness function".
All we have done is change the "fitness function" - the function that weeds out poor candidates and allows better candidates to continue. To be clear, that is poor/better as judged by the fitness function, not by any moral judgement on my part.
We've changed the fitness function through various means such as medicine and social engineering.
People that would have died due to various medical defects are now kept alive to lead normal lives and procreate. Genetic dead-ends such as infertility are now reversed. Women with conditions that would have caused death during childbirth are now kept alive and can breed to pass on their genes.
The move towards smaller families was a result of medicine. No longer did you need to have 10 kids to keep the next generation around. Now you need 2.3 kids to do that and the "fitness function" changed to prefer having fewer kids and investing more in them so that they can get ahead with better education and the like. This put them ahead of the families that had 10 kids but could not afford to educate them.
In many countries social engineering has changed that yet again. Free education & benefits mean there is no longer a penalty for having many kids. The state (aka the taxpayer) will pick up the bill for education, feeding them, etc. This change to the "fitness function" now favours the families with 10 kids again.
Valuable survival traits such as being able to run fast are superfluous thanks to transport. Being big and strong - no need, I have a gun. Surviving heat - replaced by air conditioning. The list goes on.
Evolution never stops, it just changes direction.
It surely depends on how you are mixing in the sources.
If the attacker knows one of the sources, then you can just say that source is always zero (or whatever fixed value).
If you are mixing in sources by something as simple as an XOR, then you are XORing in zero - which has no effect.
With the correct mixing algorithms entropy can only be increased, not decreased, by mixing in other sources.
Where the Netscape issue came from was probably that they started off with some really crappy sources then combined them and saw a statistical spread that made them think they had a good result.
I call you out on two points sir:
* "one can run a battery of tests". These tests are limited in what they can produce. They are useful for testing simulation-level randomness for mathematical modelling, not security.
* You assume far too much when it comes to the seek times of disks being predictable and SSDs being even more predictable. SSDs have flash inside which takes a variable amount of time to write/erase. Interrupt times have a large jitter due to other stuff happening on the system - even memory caching has an impact. Network cards still have an impact because servicing them adds jitter (ie entropy) to other interrupts.
I hunch that what DeRaadt does will not just be motivated by the technical aspects but also by his ideology.
Very few people would be able to access the inner workings of the instruction to make an informed decision on how it works. Those that reject the instruction just because they don't know how it works are acting "on principle" and likely not with a sound technical analysis.
Where Kyle Condon's argument falls down is thinking that the magic instruction can undo entropy. Even if it was hardwired to emit 0, it would not compromise the additional entropy sources.
To an extent you are right.
I am old enough to remember 100MHz transistors being amazing and GHz transistors being unthinkable. Now they are all meh.
The biggest limitation is propagation. We can lift transistor performance, but we're limited by the physics of high frequency RF. The whole point of Wifi in a domestic setting is that you have a single gizzmo to plug into the fibre modem and get wifi anywhere in the house. My current wifi struggles. WiGig just would not work.
Japan first made crap toys that broke the day after Christmas, rough cheap cars and cheap tinny transistor radios. Now, quality, quality, quality.
Same for Korea who have moved from crappy brands to top end stuff.
No doubt the same will happen in China, but just faster. Huawei started making candybar phones and less than spectacular cell/networking equipment. Now they're producing reasonable smart phones and have gone up a few notches in infrastructure gear. Within a year or so we'll start seeing top shelf product.
The only time you have to edit Xorg.conf is when the desktop tools and built in smarts don't get it right - which is seldom. I have various PCs with various dual screen set-ups dating back to when granny was a girl and they all work fine with no xorg.conf twiddling.
Mir surely has some sort of config files. When the Mir tools don't get it right, then you'll have to edit those. Instead of being the well known xorg.conf format they'll be some new bastard format in XML or some such.
"How he can be considered as a good manager is beyond me,"
That's because you are looking at it from the wrong set of eyeballs. It is about power, not money.
Ballmer has a Google obsession. Ballmer wanted to give Google a bloody nose, no matter what the cost. Though Elop failed at that, he gave it a good try. Elop is one of Ballmers elite hitmen/lieutenants.
But now that Ballmer's got his pink slip, MS will likely be changing back towards looking at money again. Elop will no longer enjoy the protection of Ballmer and, no doubt, his days are numbered.
"so why waste time doing 'MSphone running android' when that is the same as bringing your own beer to a 'free beer' hotel bar????"
Because the free beer is only a sip from every glass, but with your own you get to chug the whole glassful.
Besides, the real issue is this: to get good licensing agreements it helps to show that MS's business interests are being harmed. For this to happen. MS needs there to be a solid brand selling Wphones. The only way to keep Nokia on-side was to buy them.
The idea that a crack will eventually be discovered comes from a supposition that some algorithm can be found.
Number/computational theory can be used to prove that some problems don't have solutions (for example, there is no O(n) or O(1) sort).
I don't know what the theory is behind encryption, but it isn't inevitable that a cheap solution can be found.
Perhaps the encryption has been "cracked" and a cheaper solution has been found to the extent that messages of interest can be decrypted in minutes or hours. That is way different from the encryption being "shattered".and decryption being so fast that huge traffiic volumes can almost be treated as clear text.
None would be employees, but most would, in some way, be benefiting from having a cash fountain up on the hill.
And no doubt many would have a negative feeling towards Californians who are kicking around their local boys. Nobody likes that feeling as they move from top-dog software state to underdog software state.
The poms must have felt the same thing when they taught the colonies rugby and then got thrashed.
I'm not an Australian, but here in NZ we have a similar government program that pisses tens of millions of dollars against the wall.
Sure, they do get some achievements but the same money could achieve far better outcomes if spent differently. There are many small companies that could generate amazing results with just 1M or so of funding. That money could enable 20 or so small companies to do good stuff rather than one large government organisation soak up the funding and achieve standard government outcomes (ie. not very much).
Perhaps a new CEO who does not have ego tied up in a crap decision will come up with something better.
The buig question though is what this will do to customer confidence. Too many U-turns will make the punters giddy and they'll want to get off the Windows ride for anything else.
With the majority of newer corporate applications being deployed over web interfaces, the actual OS/desktop is less of an issue. All the punters need is a desktop -- any desktop -- that has a web browser.
One might be tempted to argue that there should be no IP conflict because Apple isn't making wine.
But the French are arguing that using the champagne name attaches some extra value to the unit.
Putting the shoe on the other foot, Apple would likely get very pissy if a French wine company called its product iPhone wine.
So when the two front runners are getting 30% or more of market share and the third gets 5%, that is now considered "performance" and a serious contender.
Based on that metric, an unfit fat bastard like me is a serious contender for the 100m sprint at the next olympics because I can run 100m in less than 1 minute.
I just need the right spin-doctor.
This does not show commitment. It shows desperation.
If I jump out of a burning plane with a parachute, it is through desperation to stay alive, not through a new-found commitment to parachutes.
People forget that is not Microsoft's first ownership of a phone biz. In Feb 2008 they bought Danger for $500M. That gave MS the Kin phone which they strangled a few minutes after birth. Kin does however live on in the new MS fascination with tile UIs.
Buying up Nokia is no more a commitment tpo making phones than buying Danger was. If Nokia phones go tits-up that still leaves MS with a healthy bunch of patents to roll into their real only real and profitable mobile cash cow: extortion of licensing fees from Android
"you can sell software from anywhere". Perhaps that could work for pure software products. No doubt USA would make it illegal to trade with these sites like they do for offshore gambling.
However it won't work for embedded systems etc where the software is just a small part of the product and needs to be physically imported.
II am a New Zealander, working in the software sector. This might be a cute symbolic gesture, but it really has no significant impact.
It really does not matter whether you think patents are good or bad, ultimately all that matters is what is legal where you try to sell product.
NZ is a tiny market, therefor almost all of the software developed in NZ has to be suitable for export (the exception being the small amounts of software being developed only for internal use eg. government stuff).
To be exportable, it has to meet the laws of the importing nation. That makes the NZ laws just posturing at this point.
For example, I work in the embedded system space, developing products for sale world wide. The boss would not be happy if I wrote software that means the product could only be sold in NZ. That would not pay the bills. The same goes for pretty much all the embedded systems organisations, as well as the larger software houses who write stuff primarily for export.
Stuff being developed for internal use is, for the most part government or large corporation payroll/organisation software. This is very rarely of any novelty and is very seldom going to be anything patentable.
I couldn't disagree more.
There are already a few projects using MIPS. Many OpenWRT devices use MIPS because it is very common in routers.
ARM was a smash hit long before RPi. 99.9% or RPi hackers are programming in C and the ARM connection is irrelevant.
ARM succeeds because they make it really easy to design ARM into chips, the debugging is common (one debugger covers you from $1 micros to top end multi-cores), cheap per unit cost, and they have a very good story for power etc. On top of that ARM are healthy and are a safe bet.
MIPS needs to beat ARM convincingly on most of those fronts or they won't get a look in. It does not help if they are 10% better on power if the chip makers don't find it easy to integrate or people worry they will be out of business in 5 years.
ARM has the lead and chip makers will need a damn good reason to change.
The original MIPS design rationale was to exceluded anything from the CPU that could be done in the development tools.
For example, the original MIPS cores had no pipe interlocks which mean you had to be careful about how you accessed registers. You had to wait enough pipeline steps before the register values would be valid. That time was to be filled with other instructions and it was the compiler's job to make this all work.
This made MIPS assembly very hard to write, in fact it made it a real bastard.
More modern MIPS cores step away from that minimalism and now include interlocks making it easier to write assembly. There are still some odd-balls though: the instruction after a branch gets executed, making MIPS code pretty hard to undersntand when you first pick it up.
But by how much?
gcc is continually improving and Intel even helps to make gcc better. That makes the difference between proprietary compilers and gcc smaller as time goes on.
Unless you're doing some obscenely computationally intensive tasks, the Intel compiler isn't going to make a jot of difference other than scoring Intel a tick-in-a-box. Not really worth all the signing up.
Flies buzzing around two turds perhaps?
MS bought Skype just as it was losing its momentum. Skype had some brand loyalty and seemed to be going places.... until MS bought it and squashed all life out of it.
Lync? Never used it, never will and don't know anyone that has. I expect that sums it up for most other people too. Now who is going to buy a Lync license when the market price has already been set by the competition: zero.
Both Skype and Lync were bought at vastly inflated prices, then just chucked on the heap to stagnate. Those two transactions alone should get SB fired, but in the grand scheme of things these are just insignificant in comparison to his other cockups.
Since you can also get tablets that run full fat Windows 8 you have a very confusing situation:
Normal Windows 8 on a PC.
Windows 8 running on a tablet.
Windows 8 RT
Windows Phone 8
Now what runs on what? Can they run older Windows applications?
It's perhaps more confusing for Joe Punter than the Vista cock-up.
People get confused by this and end up looking at products with a model you can understand better.
Or if you're USAian, don't piss in the pork barrel.
Huge government (or almost-government) projects are dripping with highly paid gravy. Very few people working on these projects are willing to hit the big red button. Whether the project ultimately works or fails matters less than that they continue to get paid for it/keep their job during a downturn.
Very few people want to kill a golden goose, even if it is laying pear-shaped eggs.
When a whistle is blown, the rest of those with a vested interest soon swoop in to unruffle feathers and keep the highly profitable status quo.
This is particularly true for consultants who can make a lot of money and, if the project fails, say "Oh well, I did what they asked for.". Well I guess it is also true for regular 9-to-5-ers who just enjoy that the management is taking the heat when things don't deliver on their promises.
No doubt if you unpack a lot of large projects gone wrong (eg. Denver airport) you will see some of the same.
As a consultant I try not to work on projects tainted with the smell of death. I have also noticed that when you are not part of the organisation, it is really easy for you to be prevented from fully airing your concerns. As a result, those brought in for expert knowledge are often overruled by those who want to try some cool tech they like, or want to grow their job title.
You need an example of open source dominance and you choose Apache?
Sure Apache has huge market penetration, and surely cuts a huge slice out of Microsoft's ability to bite into the server pie, but that's not where the numbers lie.
For every machine running Apache, there are likely well over a hundred phones, ipods and similar running either Linux or BSD. That is what really cut Microsoft out of the future.
In times past, commercial operators have always been part of the government spy system.
This is most obvious in the way organisations like the Dutch East Inda Company etc operated. As part of the deals they got to explore and trade, they would be required to report back to the intelligence agencies of the time.
Exactly the same happened during more modern times with large companies that had offices in foreign lands. They were all riddled with both commercial and governmental spooks. These helped before/during WW1, WW2, cold war,...
So to think that the spooks are not deeply embedded in the large corporations of today, particularly those providing software, software-based services and communications, would be absurd. Human nature does not change that fast and intelligence organisations would not walk away from such resources - even if commanded to by the govt.
Pretty much all info worth gathering is in computers. As with drones, there is no need to expose humans to threat. Just bury spying deep in the computer and you can remotely access just about anything from anywhere.
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