* Posts by Charles Manning

3509 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007

Windows Phone 8 support to end in 2014

Charles Manning

What does "works" mean anyway?

More than likely it means W9 really needs a quad-core + GPU + 1G of RAM (or whatever huge amount of resources are available in next gen phones), but will limp along providing a limited and crappy experience on re-OSed W8 phones.

Microsoft Surface Pro sales CANNIBALIZING Surface RT

Charles Manning

...or... 2

The RTs were bought by developers for testing and IT departments to test out these new fangled devices. Now they are buying Pros for further testing.

Perhaps neither is getting much real traction in the market place.

Nelson Mandela's island prison hell to become game

Charles Manning

Games are never realistic

They are not educational, they are entertainment.

A "realistic" Robben Island game would be as boring as hell. 27 years of breaking rocks (clicking the mouse) is not going to be fun. They'd have to insert so many off-script modifications to make it fun that it would no longer be realistic or educational.

The same pretty much goes for all FPS games. Real war is generally very tedious and only a tiny fraction of soldiers get to fire a weapon in anger and then only very few will get a kill. Again, a "realistic" FPS would be so damn boring nobody would buy it.

Infinite loop: the Sinclair ZX Microdrive story

Charles Manning

The past is always rose tinted

I hated my time in the army, bu I can look back with some fondness 30 years on.

Similarly it is nostalgic to think of the excitement and heroics of working with punch cards, limited memory and whacky C compilers that would crash if you deleted a magic comment from a source file.

But really, the world is a better place now, Our software is far more robust, source control stores code far better than boxes of cards, and the Good Old Days actually sucked badly.

Attention, CIOs: Stop outsourcing or YOU will never retire

Charles Manning
Thumb Down

Re: I'll say it again... Bye Bye IT (support)

So you get a Computer Engineering degree.

Then for the next 20 years all you do is some shitty IT support job that pays GBP24k after 20 years.

Then you blame the industry and have the audacity to call CS grads dropouts.

You are a dropout from life. If you want someone to blame then look in the mirror. With such admirable qualifications you should have done something more than helpdesk.

You only get paid for the value you add. If you had a PhD in chemistry and took some crappy job washing test tubes for 20 years do you expect to be paid as a PhD or just a step up from a restaurant dishwasher?

Your 20 year old degree is worth nothing any more. People who succeed in this industry only need their degree to get a foot in the door. After that they keep learning.

Sitting on your arse and your 20 year old degree is not going to get you anywhere. People like you disgust me.

Charles Manning

Having hired many grads...

Most companies want someone with some real world experience and street cred. Most grads lack that. Gone are the days when people signed up for a 30 year career with one company, so naturally the companies are reluctant to make the investment of a year or so while grad is only very slightly productive.

When I hired grads I always looked for people who had done something extra and had exposed themselves to the real world. This shows some real passion for the industry as well as demonstrating that they have actually done something.

If you are a grad wanting to increase your chances of getting a good job, then do something noteworthy. Join an open source project, sort out the networking for a church/charity.... just prove you are capable.

Far too often I saw people who just focussed on getting good grades and didn't explore outside of their assigned coursework. I never hired them.

I hunch that those 17% of grads that didn't get employed are either crap, or just lack passion.

Take a temp job in Oz and become office pariah

Charles Manning

There's a flip side to that too...

Long version: It would be great to work in Oz for a few years and enjoy the sunny outbacks and beaches etc etc and get away from cramped and damp Blighty, but we really don't want to have to deal with bloody Aussie government heat.

Short version: Australia would be a great place if there weren't so many damn Australians.

Face it people, there are pros and cons to every choice you make. and whether or not you want to go anywhere really depends on how you weight the various criteria.

If you go, then make the most of it and ignore the bullshit.

If the bullshit is too much for you then stay home. Australia already has enough bloody whingers.

Curiosity succeeds – Mars was wet enough for life!

Charles Manning

So... what happened to te water?

If Mars did have water what the hell happened to it?

It is possible that Mars' gravity is too weak and the water molecules (or parts thereof) slowly drifted off into space,. But that would then just pose the opposite question:...

If Mars is not a stable environment for water, then how did it form in the first place?

Microsoft backs law banning Google Apps from schools

Charles Manning

Anyone else disturbed by this?

I find the idea of Ballmer "Thinking of the children" pretty creepy.

Uni profs: Kids today could do with a bit of 'mind-crippling' COBOL

Charles Manning

Why worry what languages a programmer knows?

I did some commercial COBOL programming, and as the previous poster said, it was not that awful.

Sure, it isn't very powerful and you would not really want to write a compiler or such in COBOL, but it is pretty good at COBOLly tasks.

What worries me is all this bollocks about what language schools/universities should teach.

This is an industry that is forever changing and absolutely requires that people can continuously teach themselves. Any half decent programmer can pick up COBOL (or C, ADA, Pascal,...) without a university course.

Speaking in Tech: Ya-boo! Marissa! Mayer! how! COULD! you!?

Charles Manning

Having telecommuted for the last 12 years....

I think it is a mixed bag.

Sometimes you slack off, but so do office workers. The difference I think is that at home when you slack off, you actually do stuff which might recharge your battery. When you slack off at the office you end up mouse wiggling - trying to look productive, but actually doing SFA - and not recharging.

Sometimes you actually work harder without having the general disruption of co-workers.

Sometimes it is good to have co-workers around to help fire enthusiasm.

Most (valuable and useful) employees are able to monitor themselves and want to be productive and giving them flexibility to come in some days and not others pays off. Those that need to be kept under a thumb and meekly put up silly rules probably are not worth having around.

Short answer is that there is no short answer..

Charles Manning

Deadweights and Yahoo

Sounds like they go together.

Yahoo is dying. Marissa is just doing the humane thing and putting it out of its misery faster.

Seattle drinking den bans Google Glass geeks

Charles Manning

Or... more likely ...

Their major clientele are Microsoft employees who need all the ego-preservation they can get.

Mark Shuttleworth: Canonical leads Ubuntu, not 'your whims'

Charles Manning

Re: 1337?

Anyone that knows this surely can never be taken seriously.

Charles Manning

As a Xhosa speaker....

Ubuntu is Xhosa (as well as a few other nguni languages [ie very close African languages like Zulu]) and can be loosely translated into "of the people".

Xhosa-speaking societies tended to be very democratic and included the inputs of all men. Like almost all traditional democracies, the point of view of women was ignored.

BTW: Since Ubuntu is Xhosa, it should not be pronounced "you-bun-two", but something closer to "ooh-boon-to". And Xubuntu should be pronounced with the Xhosa click : not "ex-you-bun-two", but "<click>-ooh-boon-to"

Charles Manning

Sound Ballmerish

"We're in the dominant position so just STFU and drink deeply of our KoolAid."

Even though most Ubuntu customers don't pay anything, they are still customers and behave as such. Piss them off enough and they will find an alternative. It is a bit of a hassle to switch distro, so once they've shifted they won't come back.

Yahoo! webmail! hijacks! are! back!...

Charles Manning

This is caused by telecommuting

Marissa is right to stamp out telecommuting.

</sarc>

Study: Megaupload closure boosted Hollywood sales 10%

Charles Manning

... or maybe ...

Perhaps the movies produced in 2011/12 were less shit and people went to watch them.

Perhaps people are less freaked about the GFC and are spending money again?

Or maybe they really are right.

The only way to tell would really be to turn megaupload on/off for a year at a time and see if the Hollywood sales also follow the square wave pattern.

First C compiler pops up on Github

Charles Manning

#deine is C-s "Killer feature"

No matter what BS says, one of the main reasons C continues to thrive - particularly in embedded system - is that it has an embedded macro language (#define et al).

Like any tool, #defines can be used poorly or well. Slagging off #defines just becuase they are sometimes used poorly is plain stupid.

Used judiciously,the C macro-preprocessor can simplify code, improve abstraction and do a lot of stuff that is impossible to do in other languages.

Honk if the car in front is connected

Charles Manning

Who needs a cell phone?

When NZ introduced its cell phone laws, I wrote a submission saying that it was stupid to explicitly ban cell phone use while driving. I said that in a few years we could expect wireless hotspots in cars and people could use VOIP handsets that were not cell phones and thus not impacted by the law.

In this fast-changing world you should legislate against behaviour, not specific technologies.

Now as for safety... Bah! There is one and only one major contributor to safety in a car: the meat-sack behind the wheel. As soon as technology starts to take over safety, the driver abdicates resposibility to the technology and bad shit happens.

When bad shit happens, the motorist will obviously try to duck the blame. That invariably means a bunch of well paid lawyers starts dragging engineers through the courts.

Sparkfun takes roadtrip across US in campervan full of electronics

Charles Manning

Gateway electronics

First you get them to blink an LED using an circuit with two transistors and a few passives - no micro.

Next you get them to program a small micro (AVR/PIC)

Soon you have them flying drones and stuff.

Chinese officials wring hands over Google's Android dominance

Charles Manning

The borrower is slave to the lender

No doubt China could get a deal on IP law changes by threatening to take away USA's pocket money.

But then again, a stressed out, and generally xenophobic/war mongering, USA are likely to become belligerent if cut off from their infinite spending and the Chinese are right to be concerned that the USA could use software stacks as a way to mount revenge attacks.

It is only the Android stack itself that is foreign. The Linux kernel etc are multi-national and are not part of the US

Canonical announces Mir display server to replace X Windows

Charles Manning

A second chance.

Don't fuck it up this time!

TGF Xubuntu.

Storage glitch sends Curiosity into safe mode

Charles Manning

Bad software design

One of the fundamental rules of high reliability systems is to partition flash memory to prevent file system foul ups like these.

One recent system I worked on had no fewer than 8 flash partitions including roll backs. This prevents runtime data screwups from bricking the entire system.

File systems are a real bugger too. Other system state (drivers etc) gets reset by a reboot - file system data not so.

Apple 'insider' explains why vid adapter hides ARM computer

Charles Manning

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!

Who to blame here: the screwer or the screwee?

Apple never held a gun to a person's head to sell a product. If you feel screwed then remember you lubed up and spread them.

Looking for someone to blame? Look in the mirror!

Sony: Can't beat Apple and Samsung, so let's be the Other Guy

Charles Manning

Huawei: don't discount them

Huawei is on a near vertical trajectory. It does not matter if they're currently third, fifth or tenth. They are coming up so fast they'll be number 1 soon while Samsung and Apple have their little playground scrap.

Huawei have already eaten out the infrastucture market (where fashion is far less important than functionality and price). It will obviously take them a while to break through brand loyalties - especially in the west.

But Toyota managed shrug off the Johnny Foreigner stigma, as did Sony, Hyundai, Kia and Samsung.

Huawei can do it too.

My prediction is that by Huawei is going to be number 1 before the end of 2014.

Canadian cyborg says Google Glass design is cracked

Charles Manning

Emersive vs augmented VR

There are basically two type of VR: augmented and immersive.

Immersive VR takes away your normal eye-to-real-world optical stream and replaces it with a video stream.

Augmented VR is more of a heads-up display that paints images on top of normal sight.

In the photos Mann is clearly wearing immersive while the Googleboy is wearing augmented (since you can see his real eyes).

Augmented VR suffers registration issues (ie. it is challenging to sync up the projected overlay with natural sight) but it does not interrupt normal sight.

Mann's immersive VR does away with registration issues, but shifts your view.

The brain is very adaptive. People with glasses manage to cope fine with changes when they take glasses off (or put them on). My glasses have both magnification and realignment (ie combination of lenses and prisms) and I can happily take my glasses off or put them on while walking/driving etc with no disorientation.

I am sure Mann is making more of this than he needs to and is defending what he feels is his turf.

Health pros: Alcohol is EVIL – raise its price, ban its ads

Charles Manning

Nanny can't fix it

It is the way of the nanny state to try to legislate against stupidity. Regardless of the outcome, it feels good to do something... anything... even if it has no effect.

I guess it is only natural: parliamentarians play with law making and so see that to be the solution to all societies ills. IT geeks think handing out computers (OLPC etc) will fix the world. It is just the old saying that a man with a hammer thinks everything looks like a nail.

It is the unfortunate reality that these programs seldom have any useful outcome amongst the people they are targeted to help. Instead they just impinge on the freedoms of responsible users.

World+Dog don't care about climate change, never have done

Charles Manning

Geothermal is very limited

There are just few places in the world where geothermal is economical. And it isn't infinite.

Wind has some huge appeal because it is very visible. This allows the politicians to tell the voters they are doing something (being interviewed with a windfarm in the background).

Charles Manning

They can't measure our contribution

All they can measure is temperature etc. They cannot measure how much is due to human causes and how much is due to natural causes because there is no way to tell them them apart.

So that is why they bang on about their models. The models they build are supposed to model what is happening and thus allow them to figure out the contributions.

Unfortunately nature is far more complicated than any model.

Scientists are people too and are thus prone to confirmation bias - tweaking the models to support their pet theories.

Ready or not: Microsoft preps early delivery of IE10 for Windows 7

Charles Manning

Care or not: Microsoft preps early delivery of IE10 for W7

Fixed that for ya.

John Lennon's lesson for public-domain innovation

Charles Manning

re: Use of copyright law

You can't apply a law "just a little bit". You apply it or you do not. Copyright law is what gives GPL its teeth. No copyright law and GPL basically becomes BSD.

As much as FSF calls itself "free", the GPL is pretty draconian. It allows only one interpretation of "free": the RMS interpretation. This very much limits the use of the code. You have to sign up to RMS's version of free to use GPL

The hijacking argument is bogus. If Microsoft/Apple use BSD code that does not take it away from anyone else. How can that be construed as "hijacking" is beyond me.

Intel takes on all Hadoop disties to rule big data munching

Charles Manning

First Intel expand, next they will shrink

Intel operates in waves, as dictated by Wall St.

Intel diversify into all sorts of effort then as soon as they cock up a few quarters, their investors tell them to pull their heads in and "focus on core competence". Intel then sheds all their non x86 efforts and stays x86 focussed for a year or so then starts to build up again...

That has been the Intel Way for years and there is no reason it will be any different this time.

During the late 1980s Intel had a massive tilt at embedded computing. 8051, i960, etc etc... Then in the 1990s the got into StrongARM and xscale which they then sold off to Marvel.

They have invested, then cut flash memory efforts many times.

Why should it be any different this time?

Nexus 1 put in orbit to prove 'in space, no one can hear you scream'

Charles Manning

You won't hear the Nexus 1

But you will hear from the Million Moms complaining about space-homo-filth.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/26/porcine_rumpus/

Intel throws open chip ovens to Altera - but who's next: Apple?

Charles Manning

Altera makes sense, others less so

Altera makes sense. They do not compete with Intel.

Apple does not. It is hard to see Apple making themselves vulnerable to Intel. Apple definitely like to be the boy on top and Intel is unlikely to want to play a subservient role.

US insurer punts 'bestiality' to wide-eyed kiddies, gasp 'mums'

Charles Manning

They are taken seriously because they are organised

A million moms may only be 1-2% of the moms in USA, but they are organised and that is what makes them reasonably influential. The remaning 98% who are not offended say nothing so their voice is not heard.

One of these people told me what he and his organisation does. Every month, his wife buys Penthouse, Playboy etc magazines. She then cuts out the nude girls and passes the rest of the magazine to him. He then compiles a list of all the advertisers in the magazines and sends out an email to his group of a few hundred comrades. They all then post letters to the advertisers saying that they will not buy from them because they advertise in offensive magazines.

Look out! Peak wind is coming, warns top Harvard physicist

Charles Manning

Re: thermal energy

Even if you extract the energy from the wind (and thereby its resulting thermal energy) it will mostly end up as thermal energy anyway.

First off, a huge % will be lost as friction on the tower, and the blades, generator, etc, Friction directly converts kinetic energy into thermal energy. The wind downstream of a turbine will be slower, but slightly warmer.

The rest leaves the tower as electrical energy. Some of that will be lost along the way as resistive and inductive losses - thermal energy. Some will get lost in transformers - thermal energy.

Eventually it will get used and (mostly) end up in thermal energy. Even light from the most efficient LED lamps mostly gets absorbed and eventually released as thermal energy (the only part that doesn't is light escaping into space).

The only real difference is that we end up using this for our own needs somewhere along the way.

It begins: Six-strikes copyright smackdown starts in US

Charles Manning

Where does the carrot go?

I see a lot of stick in this, but not much carrot.

Official: Cloud computing invented by two technophobic old geezers

Charles Manning

The difference is obvious

Hipsters in tight pants and trendy specs. You know, the 30 year olds that invented everything.

Hipsters have spoken: Microsoft is 'hip to be square'

Charles Manning

Sixty-five percent of all PCs go to the consumer

Those will be the Home Editions of software with really shitty margins. MS has always depended on the corporate customer for a healthy bottom line.

What the grown ups in Wall St care about is revenue, profit, etc.

Chasing coo lis fine, but MS should not abandon their corporate customers - and traditional profit base - to join the race to the bottom which they will fail at. Unfortunately for MS, they have chased coolness too hard and are cutting themselves off from their traditional strong markets,

Microsoft: Office 2013 license is for just one PC, FOREVER

Charles Manning

Don't like it, DON'T BUY IT!

MS have the right to impose any restrictions they want. You have the right to refuse to purchase.

If MS told you that you needed a special upgrade to use Office on Sundays and public holidays - fine.

FIFA stages shoot-out between British and German goal line tech

Charles Manning

The British System

will work if they can figure out how to make it leak oil.

Wind-up bloke Baylis winds up broke, turns to UK gov for help

Charles Manning

Why does he deserve anything?

This has never been a fair world and never will be. "Deserve" is just entitlement thinking.

Many people have made millions, and some even billions, with crap products and ideas. Many have brought great products and ideas to the market and never get to be rich.That's life!

If you expect the government to hand out money to everyone with a good idea you better have deep pockets.... and remember, there is no government money - just taxes. Are you prepared to pay more tax so these people get what they "deserve"?

Charles Manning

"Patents on rounded corners etc"

These are most often design patents (patents on the look and ornamentation) which are different to utility patents (which patent the idea).

Me thinks the bloke protests too much. A wind up electically powered gizzmo (including a radio) is not sufficiently novel for a utility patent.

Consider the flip side to this: If he was given a patent for the first radio this would have cut off all the other wind-up radio inventors/innovators who made radios far better than his.

That's some of the badness in patenting, giving protection can stifle competition which, in turn, stifles better ideas/implementations from seeing the light of day.

Brand-new black hole found in supernova remnant

Charles Manning

Got to be careful....

Remember that many of the people who vote on their funding think the universe is only 4k or whatever years old. Don't want to say 26k and piss in the feeding trough.

Microsoft exec: No 'Plan B' despite mobile stumbles

Charles Manning

Microsoft is not entering the market

They've been playing in tablet space since the 1990s.

They have been playing in the handheld computing space since about 2000 and phone space since about 2006 - twice as long as the iphones etc have been around.

What they have not been doing is taking the space seriously. For instance the team that works on Windows CE is tiny and always has been.

Microsoft cannot play the "we're a new player, give us time" card.

IDC: Android, iOS now own 91.1% of global smartphone sales

Charles Manning

Lies, damn lies, statistics...

and then there's IDC.

If they don't even know that Android is Linux based, then how do we believe anything they make up.

Spanish boffins increase GPS accuracy by 90%

Charles Manning
Boffin

Having spent years in the industry...

I worked for one of the companies doing high accuracy GPS for 12 years.

With RTK GPS, you can get 20mm - yes folks - less than an inch accuracy and we could control the steering of tractors etc down to better than 150mm (6 inches). With DGPS sub-metre has been possible for many years too.

These are absolute accuracy, but when you're controlling a vehicle, drift is far more important and you re-reference from other cues.

Modern self driving vehicles would never use just GPS. Instead GPS is just one of the sensors being "fused" into an effective solution.

New Zealand court hands out second peppercorn downloading penalty

Charles Manning

Re: On a point of accuracy...

I think you will find that it is not OK to download material that you know to be illegally shared and might be considered along the lines of receiving stolen goods and covered by other laws.

To extend your robber analogy: If a bank robber steals from a bank and throws the money into the street and you pick some up, you can't keep that.

Charles Manning

Re: If you are a kiwi...

I think the RIANZ person was probably very careful in the wording they used so as to give him/herself a loophole against slander.

Just having a BT client would not get you convicted, but if RIANZ had their way it could be used as sufficient evidence to treat you as suspicions and have a search warrant issued.

A parallel might be how NYPD treats a woman carrying condoms as evidence of prostitution - not enough to get a conviction, but enough to support deeper suspicion.