Posts by Charles Manning

What's on TV?

Nobody really cares about politics and elections and all that crap. Most people are just glad to have all the talking heads off the box for a few years and have them make space for sports, Survivor and the really important stuff.

Walking down the street it is almost impossible to tell the difference between Clinton, Bush or Obama America. Most voters can't really tell their day to day policies apart and around 50% don't even vote.

A bit of fraud? Well who cares.... it would not have really impacted on the outcome. If the Diebold junk had caused the wrong person to be voted off the island then you can expect people to care.

Wall recharging in 3 to 4 hours... bah!

This is going to be just like those network bandwidth numbers all over again.

You'll be able to recharge in 3 to 4 hours so long as you're the only one on the block doing it. The grid won't be able to cope with everyone getting home between 6 and 8pm and plugging them in. Like water heating, these will have to be powered through some grid controlled mechanism to only charge a few at a time. Result: 10+ hours of charging and sometimes a black out which will leave you stranded.

As for the 1kW fuel cell... yeah right! That's not enough as a primary power source. Like the 340W PV panel it is there for show rather than as a practical measure.

A breakdown in the school system

People make mistakes. That's one of the most basic things you need to know about the world. It seems that these kids just followed what the teacher said like a herd of sheep. It is unbelievable that at least one did not read the instructions and challenge the teacher.

Still, they've learned that now! Won't be just listening to the teacher in the future.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't

To those that bitch about corps bowing to the governments, consider what options there are:

1) Say fsck you to the government in question and refuse to nobble your product. Product gets banned. You lose revenue and citizens of said country don't get the technology. Some citizens will smuggle in the technology but will be relatively easy to spot and will gfet persecuted.

2) Don't sell into the country. Same outcome.

3) Sell a nobbled product. You get revenue, citizens get some technology. Some citizens will smuggle in full featured products and get the benefit of those. With time, said government might lose their fear of these features and let them through.

Underpriced?

Bah!

If this stock was printed on soft paper at least you'd be able to use it to wipe your bum.

Nothing new at all

SARS: Big FUD, international conferences,... lots of money to be made.... few deaths.

Bird flu: Big FUD, international conferences,... lots of money to be made.... few deaths.

Climate change is pretty much the same all over again.

@@Soviet-style Cronyism

Anyone that thinks scientists always speak the truth, or their perception of their truth, is a fool. Like almost everyone else in this world, scientists don't bite the hand that feeds.

The censoring is often self-censoring. There's money to be made by scientists too. Just link your study area to GW and you can easily get funding.

@Chris Shewchuk

SMSs get through when voice calls won't.

In very marginal reception areas, eg. where I live, and perhaps the arse end of the Congo, it is easier to get a coherent text through than a voice call. SMSs either get through accurately or not at all and the system retries until the SMS gets through.

A voice call could have gone something like:

" [garbled] cut [garbled] artery"

"Sorry did you say cut the artery or don't cut the artery?... and which one?"

"[garbled]unless [garbled]"...

SMSs would be far more likely to be accurate.

No more jokes

Fangs for not making any jokes.

Us grateful readers will remamba you for that.

Very good proof reading, there were no tipan errors.

But...

@yeah right

Sure open source blaah, blaah but in reality loss of compatibility will break the "Batteries included" benefits of python. If you have a lot of old python code and want to extend it with new stuff you're likely going to have to do some porting.

One of the reasons C is quite successful is that even the latest most wizzy versions of C will still compile and work with the most rank and smelly K&R C from when granny was a girl. That might or might not be a good thing.

Nokia's biggest problem

Nokia still have a growing market share, but that is mainly in the bottom-end low-margin phones. They've really lost market share at the more profitable top end to the iphone etc. and unles they get on the Google bandwagon or something like that they are unlikely to turn that trend around.

The Christmas celebrating countries have pretty much been saturated with cell phones so there are not going to be many under the Christmas tree, therefore the Christmas sales bump can be expected to flatten off.

Pacman

Does that still run on Windows?

Own the code, set the license

If you own the code you get to set the licensing policies and conditions.

If Apple don't want to sell software for use on other machines, then why the hell should they? Don't like the conditions? Well then don't buy the product!

Apple are still far from having a monopoly (yet) so they can hardly be accused of anti-trust(yet).

Magic Watts

"10 most power-hungry websites in Hansen's study, he saved .1 amp and more than 11 watts, the same needed to run a 40 watt compact fluorescent light."

I can see how 0.1A converts to 11W by using that half-arsed 'merican power, but how does a 40W light only use 11W?

Efficiency

To get the full efficiency numbers you need to multiply up all the component parts.

The actual motor is approx 85% or so, but the motor controller is not 100% efficient and nor is battery charging or battery power delivery. Multiply all the factors together and you end up with something around 55% efficiency from power coming out the wall socket to delivered mechanical power.

If you go one step further and start from hydrocarbons, then you end up with a longer chain:

* Hydrocarbons to mechanical in the turbine: 35% or so.

* Mechanical to electricity: 90%

* Electricity delivery to wall socket: 95%

* Wall to mechanical: 55%

Multiply those all together and you're down to less than 20%.

Taking a whole world view no longer makes the gas guzzler seem that inefficient.

The braking recharge "miracle" goes through a similar cycle and only 30% or so of the mechanical energy is recovered. Still better than zero % on a regular vehicle though.

While plug ins might be an option for a few fringe users, it is not realistic for a large % of people. No industrialised country has enough spare generation capacity to double or triple electricity consumption (which is what conversion to plug in EVs would require).

They don't need a new CEO

Soon they'll just need bankruptcy trustees.

Taxes don't really help

It will just widen the gap between those that can afford the taxes and those that can't.

John Travolta will continue to fly a 707 for fun and poorer folk will move from driving Minis to catching the train.

Warning: pdf

Guns don't kill people. pdf's do!

Reg: get a hold of yourselves. There's probably a pdphobia 12-step program available.

Turn them off!

A computer can't bot if it is off!

There is almost no valid reason for **most** people to leave their computers on 24/7.

Sure there are a few torrenters, but really, how many.

Computers that are left on just chew power and provide little botvilles.

Some folk think that turning computers on and off causes premature failure. Bollocks. I have 6 or so computers which get turned on and off a couple of times a day. They are sometimes even powered up around freezing and are sometimes used at 40degC. In 20-odd years of computer ownership I've yet to have one fail in a way that could be linked back to power cycling (and only two or so failures all up).

Need some limelight

After years of commies and then Arabs behind every bush, the FBI, CIA etc are feeling a bit annoyed that the economy is getting the front page. Unless they can keep the threat alive, they lose their power.

Blame the Chinese!

More interesting is the following:

http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso

USA accounts for more than numbers 2..7 combined!

USB wine was a bigger flop

Bad market research. Most geeks prefer beer!

@@100mW TIm 5V @ 500mA = 2.5W. Just warm enough to provide a nice habitat for bread mold.

@@AC @ me

The difference...

MS got knocked because they have a monopoly on the PC and were using API locking to keep out others.

The iphone could hardly be considered a monopoly at approx 1% of phones.

Moores law also means the same for cheaper

You can ride Moore's Law both ways:

* The PC way: People are prepared to spend $1000 on a PC and will get more CPU/RAM.

* The embedded way: Microcontrollers are getting cheaper and cheaper.

We're already seeing sub-50c microcontrollers used in all sorts of toys and other applications. Coding for a micro which only has 512bytes - or even zero bytes - of RAM is challenging, but is required if you want to be able to build that hair dryer within budget.

In embedded space there is also another reason for efficient code: bloaty slow code needs more cycles which means more power consumption. That results in more expensive batteries

Thus far, Moore's Law has been the "get out of jail" card for crappy (inefficient) programming. A doubling in CPU speed (adjusted for RAM etc) should give you better a doubling in program execution speed, but nope - instead the extra speed just gets soaked up by bloat.

Anyone remember Turbo Pascal? Now that was some fast software! It compiled at thousands of lines per second on a 386 and tens of thousands of lines per second on a 486. Why can't all software be like that? I have not fired it up on a more recent machine, but it should deliver something pretty amazing.

@Duncan Hothersall

The difference is this...

The computer has many legitimate uses and is not sold under an ad saying: "Buy a computer and hack* the world".

If these people had sold the device under some more legitimate advertising they'd probably be OK. eg as a drink dispenser for hen parties or as a halloween gag. The real advertising would be some blogger on a dope forum saying "hey I found these nifty party gags and used one to pass a piss test.".

Then when told that their devices get used to fake tests they could act suprised.

Footnote:

(*) Screw all you hacker vs cracker tards.

How many cycles?

So we can see a display that can be folded gently at room temperature through a few cycles at a trade show... There are a significant number of hurdles to making a shippable product that can be flipped open at freezing and hot temperatures, 150-200 times per day for a 5 year product life

I know bugger all about XSS

But I smell bullshit in the air.

With any news event, "experts", "consultants", etc will always go look for some spin to make some sort of ruckus to get themselves and their services/products in the news.

Clouds for them

If you are too small to have an IT department and associated BOFHery then outsourcing the backups, security, etc to a Cloud is the easy and safesty way to go.

Sure there are theoretical risks associated with going to a cloud supplier, but they are a lot less than the risks of trying to do them internally with inexperienced and overworked staff.

Sure there are theoretical risks with Google docs etc, but I'm sure Google will set things up far better than the boss's 15 yo son.

Don't want the M word

Google has got to >50% in search and will continue to grow. They don't need yahoo and acquiring yahoo might have just given them a month or tw's boost.

Of course if they had acquired yahoo then they would have attracted attention from DOJ. They will anyway and don't need to put even more fuel on the M-word fire.

Balanced up, the small potential benefit from acquiring yahoo would have been much smaller than the extra problems it would have done.

I still reckon the major thing that Google wanted to do was to bait Microsoft into upping it's offer.

Just like minutes

I envisage some of those iphone-style 7000 page itemised invoices.

Drove 3 metres $0.01

Hit brakes $0.02

Drove 5 metres $0.01

Hit brakes $0.02

Turn left $0.05

...

@Simon C

To support your conspiracy theory, Ballmer would have to see some value in Yahoo. What could that be?

Ballmer has a Google obsession and will try to beat Google if he can. At the start of the year MS + yahoo were bigger than Google in search and therefore an aquisition would give him an opportunity to yell: search, search, search...

But move on a few months: Google is now bigger than everyone else combined. There is absolutely no benefit for Ballmer. Why acquire to draw attention to the fact you're smaller?

@Frymaster

Good faith?

The first goal of any research establishment is to secure your funding channel.

Anyone getting funding due to GW needs to keep GW alive.

I really doubt that they can make effective apples-to-apples comparisons with data more than 50 years old. Sensors at airports have seen a shift from small grass airfields to mega tarmac jobs with air conditioners etc. Sensors standing in cities are now surrounded by air conditioners pumping out heat. Sensors standing in agricultural land have seen change in land use. How many of the sensors actually stand in places that can give a sensible reference point?

Nokia market share keeps improving

A rephrase of an earlier posting that I made, but was rejected because the article author took the hump at being compared to a blogger...

Nokia's market share continues to grow and they probably are not going to sell fewer handsets this quarter than last year, though the industry as a whole will.

Nokia's biggest problem is that the vast bulk of the handsets they sell are at the cheap end with very low margin (1100/1200 series).

The higher end makes money and there they are losing market share to almost everyone.

If this trend keeps up, the high end will stop being profitable. Quite likely a lot of those cost cutting measures will be linked to reducing costs related to this swing away from top end phones.

Selling squirrels

Perhaps not red squirrels, but there seems to be a roaring trade in grey squirrel meat.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7347828.stm

Fry the CEO too

Silly bugger should not be giving out info. The only reason for giving "heads up" info is to allow Cuban to act on it.

Goatse back window

Lots of back end collisions for this machine.

Battery vs batteries

Customer: "Do I need batteries for this gizzmo?"

Salesman: "No sir, you need a single battery."

Customer: "Hmm, the box says 6 AAs."

Salesman:"That is correct sir, you need a single battery compromising 6 AA cells."

Customer: "Kids, lets get outta here. This guy's mad!"

There is a big difference between common usage and what the industry considers correct. To the greater unwashed a hacker is not a good programmer but a criminal who intrudes illegally.

If the PC brigade are offended, then perhaps we should get the lawyers to invent a suitable term: "Intruding American" or perhaps "access denied challenged individual" so that the jury feel compassion.

A Google opportunity?

Google can already pull email from a mail server. Surely there is a way to make a "wizard" to pull all your email from hotmail and mail out change of address emails to all your contacts.

Of course you need a truck

This is Arizona where you need a minimum of an F250 to take yourself + lunch to work.

7 TB is about the size of lunch, therefore you'll probably still need the truck.

re: Windows rebate scheme?

But then you'd have to use it!

re: Would you describe HP as a "calculator manufacturer"?

Not since they started making their modern non-RPN crap.

Yes, I know HP still make some RPN calculators - and I have one (+ a few older ones) but these are now second class citizens and RPN is only a "mode". Gone is the big proud ENTER key.

Sure give them guns

But require extensive firearms training first.

Switzerland has very high gun ownership yet has very low levels of gun problems due to high levels of training.

Hand outs gone mad?

How far should the state go to offer people corrections for perceived birth defects?

I'm a millionaire born in a pauper's body. Would Sweden give me a flash car and a yacht as a health benefit?