Posts by Charles Manning

Re: Where their next six-pack is coming from

Well it is fizzy, hoppy liquid but it definitely isn't beer!

naked bodies are sick??

Is it really healthy to believe that a naked body is a perversion?

He was documenting his thinking.

It seems he was documenting his thinking, rather than doing an objective post-event analysis.

You can forgive a person, even a physics PhD, for not pondering the finer points of phase change while he's <echo>DROWING IN SPAAAACCEE</echo>.

Sublimation or not, the net result would be the same: the latent heat loss would quickly cause ice formation which could make for a bad day.

Re: Australians, cheeky buggers

Great to see the spirit of Ned Kelly lives on!

The one way this could work properly

Assange has always asserted that he can't turn himself in for the rape charges because he will then get spirited away by USA.

Right now that looks to many like a smokescreen to escape the rape charges. To get his credentials back, Assange needs to face those charges to clear his name.

The one way this could all work well is:

* They send out their 400 gigs of backmail data.

* Assange turns himself to face the rape charges.

* If Assange gets spirited away, then they crack the lid on the data.

No you don't need a youtube app....

HTML5 would be good enough.

If MS was really trying to sell their phones, then they would be trying to make light of this: "Pah, we don't need some shitty Google API. We have HTML5 and can provide you with the Best Phone Ever! Roll up, roll up..."

But no, their product has tanked, so now they want to make excuses. You don't make excuses to the market (because very few buy products out of pity). You only make excuses to shareholders etc when your job is on the line.

As I said above, this is a ruse to peg Google as the scapegoat.

Come the next MS shareholders' meeting there are going to be a lot of angry share holders demanding answers.

The One Microsoft re-shuffle will help to obfuscate the company performance, but they need to have some excuses too.

Are you sure???

"My grandson and I met a docent at the Air Force Museum in Dayton who had been an SR-71 driver."

I met Abe Lincoln at a historic park too.

Did you tweak said SR-71 driver's beard to make sure it was not just elasticated?

Anyone remember BBC micro?

The BBC would modulate software over the TV audio. Record it onto a tape and you had software for the BBC micro.

Unfortunately...

He's probably on the right track... Some of our evil brothers don't quite use the same brand of logic as normal people.

The morons DDossing github probably think that attacking github is a way to have a go at Linux and git, and, maybe even Google (coz they use git and Linux too).

Completely wrong UI paradigms

There is a vital step you missed.... MS's dabbling with the Kin Phone.

Kin tanked completely, but lives on in the form of the tiles UI. This is a UI first designed for teenagers - not for serious businesses used to beige. The teens didn't want it.

Rule #1 of business is to keep your bread & butter customers happy. MS pissed in the soup when they went to W8 showing no path for corporate users.

I tried watching part of a presentation on W8, but was forced to give up when some UI elements were called "charms". Seriously... CHARMS!!!!

I can understand having things called charms if you're making Pink Pony OS for pre-pubescent girls.

How is anynne supposed to take something with "charms" seriously as part of their corporate infrastructure?

Pity the poor IT help desker trying to keep a straight face while talking about charm bars.

Re: Never be practical.

Works fine though if you live near those lovely old transmitters that belted out many hundreds of kW of AM if any of them still exist.

Re: "What? So we still use dinosaur bones today?"

No. Coal comes from plant matter.

Re: Teach how to learn

Exactly right. Specific skills are obsolete by the time the text books and curriculum are written. Any school/university system that pumps out graduates with specific skills is pointless in a tech world.

My punch-cards + COBOL + Fortran stuff I learned at uni are pretty useless now. The stuff I have taught myself (C, kernel programming, electronic design...) are useful, so long as I spend at least 20 hours a month keeping up to date.

Selfish, maybe

It will not be the old folk that buy these things for themselves.

It will be the guilt-ridden professional sons and daughters who will buy a "companion" so that they don't feel too bad about not visiting their parents as often as they might.

Sort of like the parents that buy their kids all sort of crap, just generationally reversed!

Re: In this case the distinction would not have mattered

What assumptions? http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html

The IRS has a right to take your assets if you don't stump up with the $$$.

It is up to you as a taxpayer to disclose all your income and assign a fair value to barter income. If you don't then the same laws apply as hiding cash transactions.

You might not like that, I might not like that, but that is the law.

Talk is cheap

MS fans and others will often say they will buy new tech X, but it is quite another matter when it comes to actually extracting the folding stuff from their wallets.

If I was to pull GBP200 out of my pocket, I'd be wanting to be damn sure I was getting something that actually had a whole lot of apps and had a reasonable track record.

You'd be wanting it to be less than half the price of established platforms to make it worth taking the punt.

Apart from XBox, all MS hardware has been a disaster.

Ahh, Blighty

cue loads of massive clouds as usual.

There. Fixed that for you.

Do we actually need MS's support?

If MS walks away from this, it sounds like a potential for some other service provider to step in and make a lot of money.

Sure, you would not be allowed to sell more licenses, but there has got to be a market for keeping the current user base running.

Re: Dear Marge

I've drilled with 3 weapons: L1A1 aka FAL aka South African R1, Lee Enfield 303, and a South African R4.

The L1A1 was the best for any drill work by a long way. Well balanced, and a confortable rifle to carry.

The 303 bolt handle would often snag in your shirt or even flesh right around boob level. I can see the 98k's bolt handle doing pretty much the same thing. I wonder whether people doing extensive drilling with old LE 303s would have the same problem?

There is middle ground too

I don't believe the NSA denied everything that Snowden has claimed. NSA are just claiming that there has been no abuse of data.

It is possible that some of what Snowden has said is true and that he could be prosecuded for that.

It is also possible that some of what Snowden says is a fabrication to bolster his position. For that he can't be prosecuted.

Likely the rest of us will never know the real truth.

Ill-conceived laws

We have exactly the same situation with the anti-cell phole laws. Here in NZ and in many other countries. Laws are written around technologies and not behaviours.

In NZ we had a law introduced that bans fiddling with your mobile phone while driving. It does not matter what you're doing: texting, calling, playing games... you'll get pinged. However the law does not apply if you do the same things with an ipod which is running exactly the same software and does everything else an iphone can do except the phone stuff.

Now some car makers are bringing out wifi access points in the cars. With these cars it will be legal to use skype over Wifi while driving, but not make a call over your cell phone. Now that is bad law!

Technologies change too fast to keep up. Most countries already have laws that forbid driving while distracted. These are surely enough to cover all bad behaviour with cellphones/glasses. Why do we need more (poorly structured) laws?

There is some fighting, but it is easier to give in.

Well at least Moto (now Google) fought back and won against some of the patents.

But most companies just treat it as protection money. If you didn't pay the five bucks (or whatever it was) then you had the strong possibility of MS having your products held up at customs or being taken off the shelves for long enough to miss a key sales period like Christmas or screw up a product launch.

These court cases go on forever (years and years). Nobody wants their products and revenue under threat for that long. In the end it is just a lot easier to let MS take your lunch money and get on with life.

Embedded people

Having been an embedded developer for 30 years, I would say that what people **might** use this for is as a reference design.

If you just wanted to put a bunch of Atom boards in boxes (as you might with a RPi, ATX form factor board or whatever), then there are cheaper options.

The minnow board is pretty cheap when compared to its direct competitors: reference designs with schematics etc. The cheapest I could find elsewhere is around $500.

Yeah, for how long?

"Trimble, Motorola, Symbol, Philips and Casio all actively produce and market Windows CE devices for commercial applications"

Yes they are. Most of them are likely investigating how to switch to Android.

That's what democracy is all about

We give the punters one person one vote. There is no need to prove that you are capable of selecting the politicians that have their head screwed on right.

Therefor the politicians that get elected are those that provide policies which the Great Unwashed think sound right, or desirable with no valid reason for thinking the way that they do. The politicians who say stuff that is scientifically validated or has the best outcomes do not get votes.

Therefore, in order to get votes, politicians ignore the scientists and experts. They just do what sounds good to the voters.

Net result: crap laws, countries going broke because the voters don't want the merry-go-round spending to stop and funding for stupid social programs which have public appeal, but the scientists tell us are pointless.

Isn't that the point of SETI?

Identify a protein source in outer space.

re:Increased TTD theory

This theory certainly holds water and not just with phones but with cars and kids too...

First kid: Parents treat them like they're made of glass and keep them away from power points.

Second kid: They can play with the power point, but not with a metal object.

Third kid: Meh, hope he doesn't fuse the house... I'm watching TV over here!

Re: Always on culture

"Does not compute. It may be an erroneous act, but it definitely is not "selfish" as no personal advantage accrues at all."

You do not have to actually gain an advantage to be selfish. Many non-selfish acts result in gain, and many selfish acts result in loss.

Selfishness means you were motivated by an apparent personal advantage to be gained while disregarding the loss incurred by others. Big difference.

Of course there is an apparent advantage to be gained here. The person was suffering some sort of anguish which he thought would be alleviated by ending his life,

But I already have that.

I have a phone.

I have a laptop/desktop. They share all the data that needs sharing in the cloud.

Merging them seems a bit artificial.

I don't need all my development source code on the phone.

And, anyway, 128GB of storage is too small to hold all the stuff I need in a laptop/desktop (development tools,...),

This thing is vastly underspecced to replace a laptop, yet overspecced for normal phone use. Seems pretty pointless to me.

Re: Eh?

This is the drive through....

All sorts of liability issues if a pedestrian/cyclist gets crushed by a car.

Add lawyers and common sense goes AWOL.

Re: 15 to 16 Mb per lap

"So now I'm thinking, just how do they transfer the data from car to garage?"

The answer is that they don't transfer all the info - just some of it.

A few years back I had some dealings with a racing team that shall remain nameless. They were gathering more than 1 MB per second which they were storing onto NAND flash arrays for post-drive analysis. This is way more info than what they could use in real-time.

Ballmer is an egomaniac like Jobs. Niether of them have/had any time for Devil's Advocates or anyone but complete yes-men.

The difference is that Jobs could actually hit the ball.