Posts by Charles Manning

Re: On the other hand

"If only a few benefit, then we're ahead."

That is the broken logic we see behind the typical politicians response: do something... anything...

A few might gain from this, but the majority will not.

Instead there's been a nice little pork-barrel program that allows the politicians to put their name next to something but really achieves nothing.

These are just sideshows which muddy the water. The distract from addressing the real problems.

The major hassles these kids is not lack of resources. It is the environment they're in.

When you grow up in an environment where academic success etc are spurned, that becomes your template. Kids who show aptitude are put down by their peers, their parents and everyone else.

Typically successful environments are just the opposite. Parents and peers encourage each other and get engaged.

I've known a few kids who have turned that around. They became the first in their families to go to university. Getting there was had work though. They had to cut ties with their loser mates. Every Christmas Uncle Fred gets drunk and rants on about "You think you're better than us do you? We're proud to be working class..."

I've also known some kids with the potential to make the move but have not. One was damn good at maths, yet left school at 16 to work on the vege isle in a supermarket. He'd engage you in civilised, intelligent conversation but as soon as his mates were in earshot he'd start talking gangsta. His parents approved of his choice too: "He has a job", "a job is a job". Bloody waste.

Sure, there are a few kids who will benefit and will be made into posters to show the success of the program, but this really does not get to the main reason why so many kids reach their potential.

It might be a hardware issue.

This could really be a hardware issue being fixed in software. In over 30 years as an embedded software developer I've fixed all sorts of electronic and mechanical defects in software. Heck, I've even fixed lubrication problems in software.

What we have here is a component overheating due to being switched to fast. Most likely it does not happen in every car. Due to component variance, a part that works fine in 99% of the cars might have problems in 1% of cars.

So they work around the problem by changing the software.

Have they really failed?

The car is not scrap. Just drive to the local Toyota dealership and they'll zap in the new firmware in 5 minutes while you have a coffee.

The bastard shat in my favourite country.

Well maybe North Island isn't really part of NZ.

AC you're right, but for the wrong reasons.

It is the poor that will get the pain from what the AGWists propose. It is the rich that would generally not be impacted by what the AGWists propose.

If we enter an age of energy and carbon austerity that the AGW-ists want us to, the people that will be most impacted by the lack of low-cost energy are those low income people in Africa.

Low cost energy is one of the major factors why we are now able to support 9bn people - better fed and with better life outcomes than in the 1960s when we had 3bn people.

If we do the right thing (according to the AGW-ists) and increase the cost of energy, the people that will suffer most are the poorest.

This also ties in with the AGW-ist claim that we should use the precautionary principle. If the science is unsettled then we should reduce energy consumption. That would threaten the poorest.

The real use of the precautionary principle is that until the science shows otherwise, we should keep doing what we're doing. It is keeping people alive.

Re: So how long will it be....

"How long will it be before the jobs come back to western countries?"

You're jumping the gun aren't you?

First you need to spend three decades selling ethnic (ie. Western) street food in Delhi, then work up to a small restaurant that sells pub nosh.... then maybe we'll talk.

"wifi comms across a 900MHz backhaul was innovative or interesting at all - much less why he was fiddling about adding a raspberry pi to the mix."

It didn't have to make technical sense. It just needed enough buzzwords to bamboozle the invesduhs.

AGW == poetic justice

To many greenies, modern living is evil and should be attacked. There is no need to attack it rationally - just attack it via any mechanism available: AGW, occupy Wall St, taxing, cell phones, pesticides...

It does not matter whether or not AGW stacks up logically, or is scientifically sound, modern society is evil and if it gets attacked via the wrong mechanisms, well that's just poetic justice.

Unfortunately getting it right does matter if you're actually trying to find any engineering solution to a problem.

The hype around AGW is so large that it has completely swamped other real environmental issues which we understand way better and have the ability to actually fix with far lower expenditure.

Obama has said that AGW is the biggest threat out there, yet surely there are far larger issues for both mankind (long term economic prospects) and the environment (degradation in some areas).

No matter that during the last 50 years our consumption of fossil fuels has increased, yet much of our pollution has decreased. There are now fish in the Thames River again. New Jersey rivers don't catch firs any more. Nobody worries any more about acid rain eating the buildings in Europe.

Re: Universal Apps

But isn't everyone turning away form the concept of Universal Apps anyway?

Websites have different views for phone browsing vs PC browsing because people tend to use the platforms differently.

Presentation and consumption/usage tend to vary on the device you're using due to where you are, graphics footprint and whether or not you have keyboard & mouse or touch.

Hence the most successful multi-platform player - Apple - have iOS and OSX.

The whole one-size-fits all idea is fundamentally broken, yet MS have been trying to make this work since they launched the retarded-and-quickly-killed Kin phone. They took that one feature (that could perhaps be a good idea on mobile) and tried to make it work everywhere.

Previous to that they tried using the Start Button UI everywhere on desktops and WinCE devices.

Somehow the obvious - that different platforms have different usage models and need different UIs - seems to have escaped them.

... or...

The Malaysians with machetes that just take your fingers...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/04/fingerprint_merc_chop/

The largest security measure ever taken (and which is clearly visible from SPAAAAACE) is the Gret Wall of China. It was defeated by bribing gate guards.

Ultimately there is no security that will resist a strong enough and capable enough force, but that'sw still no reason to not try.

Re: Gas?

The Reg is a UK-based corporation and therefore it, and all its international subsidiaries, are subject to, or at least morally compelled to abide by, UK workplace laws.

By not providing Left Pondians sufficient training in spelling, El Reg is exposing its LP workers to ridicule and harassment. This constitutes a cruel and worker-hostile work environment in contravention of worker safety law.

El Reg is thus formally notified it needs to address this shortcoming within two months or face the wrath of HM.gov.

Re: Year 7 = 11 years old

"basically a programmable badge"

Something like an AVR butterfly: http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-40597/l/avr-butterfly-evaluation-kit.

Just like glassholes

The "oooh shiny" people will buy this shit.

Then after finding out it does SFA, and charging it every day becomes a drag, they'll just leave it at home.

Some will fake up a nice rash and get a refund. Others will store it and hope to sell it on ebay in 20 years as a collectors' item. The majority will just be embarrassed and try to put the whole episode out of their mind.

Re: Much fuss over nothing?

"and thus there are 51 (including DC) sets of rules"

Then there are various municipal by-laws pushing the number up to many hundreds.

Re: "...absorbing solar energy (and thus removing heat from the sea)."

Well that's true, if not well written.

Any solar energy entering the water column either gets reflected back out, absorbed by plants and converted in some way or turns into heat and warms the water.

Thus, if phytoplankton are absorbing the solar energy and converting it, that energy does not turn into heat. It's not very much though.

The major limitation to photosynthesis is how much CO2 is available. Plant life is basically starving. Inject CO2 into a greenhouse and watch the plants grow.

Basic physics... Don't argue with me, just argue with the laws of thermodynamics.

Moderately tall whingers

I'm over 6ft 5 in the old money and I still manage to get to sleep on economy seats.

After a lifetime of travelling in school buses, army beds, doing a 1500km trip in a BMW 3 series with the back of my head against the ceiling and other evils of a world designed for gnomes, economy seating isn't too bad.

If I get an isle seat I just leave my feet in the isles and get shinned a few times by the service staff with their trolleys. Otherwise I push my feet under the seat until they sort of "click".

That said, the newer style seating they have on Air NZ economy these days is just bloody luxury. Lots of space under the seat in front to stretch out.

Re: F*%&wits

"In short, it's a government scheme for transferring public funds to private industry"

There is no need for a conspiracy theory.

After all the hand-wringing caused by the climate change doom-mongers, the governments have to be seen to be doing something... anything..., but also something that voters are going to accept.

Voters will not give up their cars or heating their homes or anything like that, so it has to be some grand program that still makes it look like they're doing something.

Politically, smart meters are the perfect choice. Hey, we've done out bit, now it is up to you.

Is the software really broken?

The whole point of machine learning software is that it gets fed input, does a classification and generates output.

The software is not broken, it just has not been fed with good data. It clearly needs more black people in its learning set so it can tell the difference between a gorilla and a black person. This is no different from the recent NSFW classification by, IIRC, FB that classified pictures of girly bits as butterflies.

But no, the numpties think there's racist software that goes

if (image_property.black_face) printf("gorilla.\n");

These classifications come from what people type in. As black people can call other black people "nigger" without the PC alarms going off, we'll also see these classification engines generate outputs like "nigger", "bro"... and no doubt the technically illiterate will think Google added more code that says

if (image_property.black_face) printf("nigger");

Re: NASA inefficiency: The hint is in the name

We're not talking about the NASA of 1960s, we're talking about the NASA of today.

The 1960s NASA was a very different animal than today's NASA. They were driven by a very specific goal.

It was the ENGINEERS that really drove the pace and achieved the goal. The administrators just provided support.

After Apollo 11, that goal was gone and the real administrative overheads kicked in, trying to make huge programs with lots of management to keep their jobs alive.

If you've read any of the reports on the aftermath of the SRB failures, the cover ups and the general shit deflection you see the real depths of an administrative quagmire. Engineers know there are problems and try to fix them, but the administrators inflate the reliability numbers and stifle everything.

Basically people like these would rather spend a week making sure they could not be blamed for anything rather than spend 5 minutes to actually fix the problem.

For a good read on the disconnect in NASA between engineering (the people that actually solve problems and put people on the moon) and administration (ie. managers who shuffle paper and make up bullshit) read: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt

"Your system also learns that it can be nice and cheap at night"

You don't want the system to "learn" anything because it will "learn" bad habits.

Far better for the energy supply co to tell the customers when the power is cheaper and when to run.

That has been achieved by ripple controllers for at least 60 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_management

Re: 12,000 km at, for example, 0.4 dB per km

"Learn the difference between logarithmic scales."

Except he did do the calculation correctly,

The whole point of using a logarithmic scale is so that you can do what he did. If each km causes a 0.4dB loss then 12000km will be 48000dB of loss. That's far too much and needs amplification.

Re: Not realistic enough for gaming?

Nobody would buy realistic games.

Consider an FPS... In a realistic game you'd be sent to some hole, then spend days and days doing nothing. Chance of discharging a firearm... close to zero. Chance of getting a kill even less.

Where's the fun in that?

Re: The richest pragmatist in the world.

"Green subsidies have nothing to do with the environment - they are a way of taxing poor people to give rich homeowners a tax break."

No, it's more about letting the eco-smugs feel good about themselves while flying their private jets to the next speaking engagement where they will tell everyone else to reduce their living standards.