Posts by Charles Manning

$/W is the only meaningful measure

The primary limiting factor for high PV uptake is cost per W. As the parent says, so what if it is 10x the size, just tile the roof with the stuff.

Of course PV is in itself only part of the equation, It has already got to the state where the inverters etc cost 50% of the cost of a grid connected system. Bringing down cost of the support electronics is going to be the next major issue.

Even if grid connected PV was to provide 100% of daytime power generation, you'd still need power stations to provide dark time electricity. Battery technology is far too primitive to do the job.

But you miss something

"So actually, if you wrote an MBR virus that was aware of modern operating systems, you could actually hook into the BIOS entries for disk access and when Linux is booting the kernel you return an infected version on the fly."

That would require the virus load up a whole kernel and make sure that works with the modules in your rootfs. Theoretically possible, but hugely challenging.

The cop out clause is that if the virus loads a complete kernel then you can hardly say it is "running Linux".

Not that easy...

"It's easy to code a loop waiting for "su" or "sudo" at the beginning of a character string." But how do you get that code to run and how do you get that info out to the USB device?

The only way to do that would be by attacking the keyboard where the data is available.

"No OS is safe against this because it's a hardware-level attack." It is not a hardware level attack, but an OS level one. If you were using a software environment that only ran a specific application with no ability to start a new shell etc, then this would not work.

Good and bad

Good:

* Like the rest of the world. Having one rule to determine patent precedence is important.

* Can't be fiddled by creating bogus claims of inventing it earlier.

Bad:

* Bigger rush to generate patents. Perhaps more people will file crappier patents. However you can file for a provisional patent which gives you more time.

Other points:

* A patent still has to be novel. If you can show prior art then you can still get a patent overturned. That prevents anyone from seeing your idea and patenting it and suing you for using the idea.

* Any changes to the system have to get past the USPTO and the patent industry at large. Since they primarily have their own interests t heart you can be assured there will be more patents and patent litigation than there was in the past.

* The new rules are

Open Source is easy, successful open source is not

The title is really wrong.

As you say, making a project open source is easy enough. Just upload to sourceforge or whatever and you're done.

However, making a **successful** open source project needs the investment of time and effort to provide community leadership, project direction etc. That's a lot of work that is hard to justify if there is no corporate benefit.

What did Joe do last week? He spent two days merging in changes to make the software work properly for Company Y.

Without this nurturing, an OS project soon becomes abandonware.

Nokia was an innovator

There. Fixed your typo.

As a customer or developer, I don't really care what a company did ten years ago. I care what they do now and what they are going to do in the future.

I don't care if they switch to Meego, or whatever, so long as they show me a reasonable roadmap showing some commitment to the platform.

"Studies show that juries, on the whole, usually get things right"

What studies?

Seems to me that it is pretty much impossible to know if the jury got it right.

The real problem with a jury is that they are easily misdirected.

If I was ever to be tried, I'd rather it be by someone that actually understands the law rather than the random sweepings from the street.

Nor do many other CPUs

Basic ARM doesn't have a stack either. This doesn't really make life hard.

If you're saying defense...

...you've been overrun. Defence!

If Nortel was a verb

They'd have bought it in seconds.

So what if it doesn't work

It would still be great fun!

More food than ever before

We now have more food per capita than ever before. We're nowhere near starvation.

WHO reports there are now more obese people than hungry people.

We (Westerners) eat about 4 times as much meat as we did 50 years ago and people in Asia have increased their intake of animal protein even more. Meat production is incredibly inefficient with something like 15 food units of input per food unit of meat output. To support this, grain etc output has increased immensely. Meat production is largely a way to keep grain consumption high.

All specialised languages use special syntax

Pretty much every specialist language has an archaic syntax. Look at mathematics, music, chemical formulae.

Writing English does not make it easier. If anything it makes things way harder to read, just as it would be harder to play music written in English instead.

Some people think that Python is cool because it has no braces etc. But in reality python still has a syntax - based on indenting. This is far worse than braces etc because you can't see them. Get spaces and tabs wrong and you can screw up a program.

The Last One

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_%28software%29

I remember back in the 1980s seeing programmers quaking in their boots because automatic software generators were going to steal their jobs.

Yeah, right!

As for device drivers (or which I have written many), the challenge is not in accessing the devices but managing their state. For example most of the complexity in a USB driver is handling all the state transitions and building a robust state machine. Is that really something an automated driver can do?

So.....

No solar panels. Fit some.

Power hungry systems... Much of those are not needed. No need for guidance etc. Turn these loads off. Replace other loads with lower lower stuff.

Your average LED-fondling greenie can show you what to do.

Guys pays for a woman's clothes...

It is only a ruse to lave a legitimate reason to perv out the undies.

Once married it is the other way around: the woman is in charge of keeping the blokes undies draw stocked.

Fast code is very important

Whether that be in :

Embedded devices - where fast code can achieve more with a small micro reducing product costt.

Or mobile devices (phones & laptops)- where fast code uses less clock cycles and therefore the battery lasts longer or you can use a smaller and cheaper battery.

Or data centres where fast code means more work can be done with less CPUs and less power consumption, therefore reducing costs and power consumption.

Userbase of one?

Then a shoebox with index cards would be cheaper and far more robust.

Who cares about *.docx?

There are plenty of open document formats too. Nobody needs to use MS propritary protocols.

Unfortunately some people do use proprietary protocols and interacting with them is impossible if you just stick with open protocols.

Bad car analogy

If the poor little lad had bought the parts from Apple you'd have a point. He did not. He bought the parts from Foxcon.

Apple can't really pursueFoxcon in a US court, but they can pursue the tyke because he is selling illegally branded parts.

If Ford had their door panels made by SheetMetalPressers and you bought Ford panels from them and then painted them and sold them, Ford would too.

Shameless pumping up stock to shareholders

Remember that shareholders are not interested in profitability. They want increased profits. They want to believe they are putting money into something with huge returns.

If Intel's profits start reducing then the share price will go down and the share holders will want to see heads on platters.

Or..

Intel is not making design wins over ARM parts. It is the other way around.

Soon Intel will realise that getting a small slice of something is better than getting a huge slice of nothing.

Intel will change their tune. Perhaps not this quarter, but it will happen soon enough.

"And if Intel refuses to build ARM on 22nm then were else is that vendor to go for 22nm?" So what. Intel needs to be cutting edge on process to stay in the power game. ARM one step behind still outperforms Intel.

Another open source issue

When people hear open source they expect stuff to be free.

Trying to convince most people to pay for software & services in an open source environment (eg. Linux) is challenging even though the same people would readily pay for the same software & services for Windows etc.

As one manager said to me:"... but the whole point of Linux is that is free. We can't go paying people to write Linux software."

It is only with maturity that people realise that the "free stuff" is only free because someone pays and that they can do their bit.

It will take a lot longer for AppStore shoppers to get used to the idea of paying for Open Source apps.

ARM would

give you a longer battery life (or same life with a smaller/lighter/cheaper battery)and would be smaller/lighter/cheaper due to having less heat sinks etc.

Having to switch between web and video is nothing to do with ARM. That's a decision in the design of the ipad.

I can assure you...

The only reason your Windows installation was so seamless was because the vendor had done the job of packaging up all the drivers and configurations your particular PC needs.

If you'd tried a "one size fits all" version of Windows you'd have had more grief than any Linux distro.

I've installed Ubuntu on many different PCs and have personally only once had a "didn't install" problem due to a networking chipset that was new and didn't yet have a mainstream Linux driver. That was available a week later.

The idea is fine

But overzealous predictions of success are not. It seems that any such breakthough gets spun for all it is worth, ignoring the other 99% of technology that has to appear to make usable products. No wonder all the conspiracy theorists end up thinking the government/Big Oil/THEM supress technologies.

The predictions we see here mirror those for high temperature superconductors around 1990. Low loss cables across the country (ignoring for a bit the trivial detail of building a 1000 mile refrigerated tunnel and the power required to keep it cool). Over 20 years on and high temp superconductors are still limited to a few very niche applications. Same too for a whole raft of "breakthrough" technologies from optical computing to EV batteries.