Posts by Charles Manning

Fear of the new

Whenever a new technology comes along, every blogger and politician wants to make his mark by yelling about its dangers.

If knives were invented in modern times, kitchen knives would only be bade of foam and sold through controlled channels. They would come in boxes covered in WARNING-SHARP OBJECT labels (rather than the current one which says "Warning contains a plastic bag which the young tykes might swallow or pull over his head").

Beer would not be allowed by the FDA because they fed some lab rats beer and they got sleepy/violent/pregnant.

Thankfully brewing, knives and fire were invented long ago before PC was invented. If the FDA was any good at its job they'd ban PC for causing irrational fear.

Career fast track

No need to go to university or college....

No need to spend up big on an education....

Bypass all that boring unproductive crap.

Just learn to be a script kiddy and get hired by one of the big ISPs or anti-virus outfits.

Utility patent or design patent?

There is certainly sufficient prior art to prevent this being a broad-based utility patent (one for the basic idea). Individual and prioritized volume controls have been around for ages in all sorts of kit.

What they can likely make stick is a design patent (one that protects the ornamental appearance) since most OSX stuff has a distinctive "Apple look".

Saturation?

After 18 month, surely most of the people that want an AT&T iphone would have one by now. Sure there will be upgrades and replacements but the market does saturate after a while.

The connector isn't so important

Standardizing the voltage and current are far more important because otherwise if you drive up to the wrong voltage and plug the thing in you will get poor results (no charge, fire, whatever).

Connector wars are easy to rectify with adapter cables like the power -to-SATA-power cable or the things you buy when traveling overseas.

@AC re:Small size - not a problem

Look at insects?

Sure, but have you ever tried soldering an insect? I suggest opening the windows first!

@AC re: More accurate GPS

Naah, sorry mate, you need to understand a bit more about how GPS works.

Current GPS accuracy is not constrained by the clock. GPS accuracy is constrained by variance in the propagation delays due to ionospheric disturbances etc.

Current commercial RTK receivers can give you approx 20mm of error. At those accuracies even the earth tide starts to show up.

Improving the clock is not going to make any measurable difference because the clock is not the current source of any significant error.

Atom is a bad idea

Familiarity for current netbook providers is exactly the wrong idea. There is absolutely no point in encouraging the status quo.

Atom + PCI gives you huge power consumption which leads to massively overweight, over cost and pathetic laptots.

Want something that is light, cheap, and has reasonable battery life? Gotta go with ARM.

Generation and reticulation

Steve Jones only identifies a small part of the generation & distribution problem. The assumption made above is that the car recharging can be spread evenly over 24 hours.

In reality that's going to be hard to achieve. 1M cars all get home somewhere between 6pm and 10pm and all get plugged in simultaneously and all want to be charged ready for the morning. That compresses the power consumption into approx an 8-12 hour period meaning that the required generation and reticulation capacity needs to be scaled up by a factor of 2.5 or so.

Sure some "smart grid" thinking can spread the charging a bit, but the cars still need to be recharged in that 8-12 hour window.

Power generators hate peaky power consumption because they have to keep building generation for the highest demand and have them sitting idle during low consumption periods. That really sucks from a use of capital perspective.

Hardly a new idea

Since the 1980s some anesthetists have been using toy telephones rigged with a walkman and nox. Get the kid to 'talk on the phone and they get knocked out cold.

re: (Untitled) AC

"can indicate" is the right phraseology. All the software can tell is that it can't get proper communications with some chip.

There are many things that could be broken: It could be the chip itself, power to the chip, a soldering joint, a broken track, some other chip corrupting the bus,.....

XP does everything

What businesses really need anything that Vista or 7 provide?

Surely if you're wed to MS then XP is enough for every business application. The only motivator to move off XP is planned obsolescence by MS (or by hardware vendors with their arms twisted behind their backs by MS).

If you're going to make a change then may as well break for freedom. Ubuntu et al are now sufficiently mature that you don't need to feel geeky to use em.

Why?

It made sense for the Google-obsessed Ballmer to try buy Yahoo when

Microsoft + Yahoo > Google

Ballmer could have looked in the mirror and claimed he had more search inches than Google even though both Microsoft + Yahoo were losing ground and Google was gaining ground.

Now,

Google > world + dog

so Yahoo no longer has that ego-enhancing value to MS.

Ballmer will be reduced to trying to make a business case for Yahoo based on pure financials - a lot less viable now that there is no ego benefit.

@ Fihart re: MS mouse

I refuse to buy them, but the last MS wireless mouse I looked at had a reset button.

wtf with that? Can't even make a moutse that doesn't BSOD!

Scruff up for a tech job

A few years back you were supposed to not shave or shower for a few days then wear a stained T shirt to "look geek" at interviews. Nobody believed that a well scrubbed person was any good at tech stuff.

Has that all changed?

If I was in middle management, I'd worry that the neat bloke with a silk tie, manicure and gold cufflinks had his eye on my job and would feed him to the wolves ASAP!

The iceberg effect

What plays out in public is just such a small part of what is going on.

Does Google really pay those claimed bandwidth costs? I don't know and I doubt any self-proclaimed analyst does either.

Windows fears limit netbooks

So far all the netbooks (except the One True Psion Netbook) have had x86 because the manufacturers wanted to back both horses.

Doing an x86 Netbook completely misses the point.

To really appreciate what a netbook **can** be, needs the manufacturers to drop x86 and go with ARM. Getting rid of the x86 has numerous advantages:

* Cheaper. ARM parts are cheaper than x86 parts.

* Smaller. They are smaller too on an individual basis, but also on a system basis.

* Lighter.

* Less power consumption. Therefore less heat therefore less heatsinking and a smaller power supply circuit (which feeds back into the smaller/lighter/cheaper) thing again.

* Longer battery life and/or smaller battery. Smaller, cheaper,lighter again.

When these netbooks emerge, the Windows ones will die out.

@Michael Fremlins

Why come up with something too innovative and new when the current paradigms work pretty well?

I don't so much care for something that is new. What I care for is something that is easy to use and gets the job done.

The only "innovation" in UI I've seen recently is KDE 4.x and that is a horror to use. It is far too complex and is far from intuitive to learn to drive. Lot's of swirling pixels that do nothing for the user, just show off the programmer's skill "Look mom, I can swirl pixels!"

I am not at all knocking UI reasearch, but I think KDE loses the plot with KDE4 by pushing out their new stuff that is a step back in usability from what they had previously.

UI design should not be thought of as features, but as accessibility. ie Don't think "add feature X", but "remove barrier Y".

Get real kids...

Broadband is cheap.

Find something more important to bitch about.

Need some creative thinking...

Poor crims... I'm sorry... Freedom Challenged Persons (FCP).

If they really want to call their families then how about setting up some sort of 800 number for the each FCP which gives them a personal dial out to some designated numbers: wife, kids, mom and dad... and have that account automatically credited with a prepay.

That way the crims don't have to carry around as much money to be "borrowed" and also less opportunity to make calls to their associates or be coerced into making calls for others.

Sure, that's not perfect but it is at least a step forward.

What would Google get out of this?

Twitter, free standing, is just a big money pit with no real business model.

Twitter coupled with other Google services could make more sense. For instance, by watching what you tweet could serve you ads next time you use the www.

But of course it all comes down to branding and owning eyeballs. Twitter has no patents etc and has little longterm traction. Google could easily replicate twitter functionality and probably gets little benefit from buying twitter.

Of course doing this would get Google some negative points from the Twittards. Far better PR to wait until Twitter dies of natural causes (no more money), then be seen as saints for providing an alternative service for twitter junkies.

Microbiology experiment

Just watch for an increase in microbiology experiments (aka home brewing).

Real Greening is cheap

The absolute greenest thing anyone can do is to grow their own food and cut back on agribusiness consumption.

Cost of creating job: spade, seeds, sack of compost... maybe $40.

Even if you go for the government gravy train option it can't cost more than about $15k.

@Brent

It's about harvesting votes.

Besides, ARM processors make a hell of a lot better choice than x86 for most personal computing devices.

re: Laws of physics

Sure those laws of physics do exist, but they are not the limiting factor. Other factors are far more important.

[Car analogy: the speed of light limits how fast a car can go, but issues like wind resistance come to play far sooner]

Size matter because it is all a matter of scale. Smaller lenses and lens to sensor distance need more precise mechanics and more precise surface finishing. That makes making small, cheap lenses quite a challenge.

Wiki search....

The only search that allows you to type in the results of the search. You are free to find what you want to find.

That is true freedom.

You will get more degrees like this

Universities are funded through cranking out graduates and the returns are better on media studies courses than engineering etc.

If is far easier to provide degrees in media studies etc than engineering etc.

Media studies don't require much specialized knowledge beyond understanding how to operate a remote. No need to understand Laplace transforms or NP complete or any of that old fuddy-duddy stuff.

No need to buy complex lab equipment like oscilloscopes etc which cost loads, get broken/obsolete.

These degrees appeal to yoof too. Tonight's homework: watch some TV. Extra credits if you submit your report via twitter or as a rap on youtube.

Not Chuck!

It's Tim-the-Tool-man Taylor. Sent to make silly gags while adding more power to the toilet.

Why not just go piss outside?

@Jeffrey: They're on 24hr video surveillance and when they get back to land they might not be directly punished but just find they get bumped down the pecking order a bit.

People take risks

People drive to a perceived level of risk. Automating stuff and giving them airbags and other safety gearreduces the perception of danger so people drive faster and more recklessly.

If you really want road safety then you need to change that perception of safety. The road is a potentially dangerous place and you need to keep that fixed in the driver's mind. To that end, take away the driver's airbags and seatbelt (but leave them for passengers) and mount a 6 inch steel spike in the centre of the steering wheel.

Sure, accidents are not always the driver's fault. But in most cases the driver could have taken evasive action to compensate for other drivers or pedestrians making errors.

The bacteria are there for a reason.

Cows probably don't just carry around bacteria just for the fun of making greenhouse gas problems. The bacteria are there to aid fermentation and digestion which is how ruminants manage to be reasonably efficient at extracting nutrients from their food. [A goose eats more than a sheep but produces far less meat.]

This fish oil malarkey inhibits the bacteria which likely reduces the effectiveness of their digestion which means they need to eat more which means that more rain forest needs to be chopped down to grow more soy to feed the buggers.

Sounds penny wise but pound foolish.

AK47: prefered weapon of everyone

The Prof makes a bit of an assumption that AK47 == enemy. Just shooting up all the AK47s will probably kill a few of your own too.

Many western combat units have redeployed captured AK47s to either blend in better with the landscape or because they are typically more reliable than government issue.

@Nick L

Old Cost of sofware equivalent to Windows + Office: 200 quid.

Cost now (Ubuntu + OO): zero

Average stuff like that in and it is easy enough to fiddle the numbers to anything you want them to be.

Pots, kettles

At least waterboarding keeps them nice and clean.

Looks like a baleen whale

Maybe they can't call it Free Willy for TM reasons.

@Graham Bartlett

RMS and GNU have produced lots of useful stuff... but, as you point out, HURD is still very much GNU-fart. Much of the reason Hurd is not going anywhere is because Linux fills that slot (GPLd OS) and it is a lot easier dealing with a pragmatic Linus than a flower-powered RMS. Thus, HURD lacks drivers and all those other useful stuff that makes it actually work on a real machine.

RMS is an idealist and puts freedom (according to his definition) ahead of anything else. That's fine, but the rest of the world does not have to buy in to his ideas.

No easier or harder than any rootkit

Surely installing any rootkit requires physical or root access so reprogramming the bios is no more challenging than any other rootkit.

Sure you have to program flash, rather than just accessing a disk, but that is hardly difficult if you have the correct info available.

re: Death to software patents

Why single out software patents for death? There is very little distinguishing software patents from any other patents.

I've heard the argument that mathematical equations cannot be patented and all software can be written in a mathematical form, therefor software should not be patentable. But that argument can also be applied to mechanical contraptions. As your friendly CAD package knows, any mechanical device can be expressed as a set of numbers - loosely a mathematical equation.

I've heard the argument that software is just comprised of layers of pre-existing ideas. So too are any mechanical contrivances held together by screw or manufactured using drills etc.

With more and more embedded systems it is getting really hard to distinguish where the software begins and the hardware ends. That makes it even harder to draw a line between the two. Should a mechanical musical box be patentable, but a full software simulation of the same idea not be?

Surely software IP is as worth protecting as hardware IP, or conversely both should go. I've yet to see any rational reason to say that software patents should go while mechanical ones should stay.

Wake me up....

when they have Songsmith for mobile. Perhapw WM customers could get fanboi about that. DeepZoom just isn't enough to get excited.

Very, very few people but WM devices for personal use. They're really only bought by business customers.

It is very hard to see the Deep Zoom providing enough benefit to business customers to make it worthwhile. Deep Zoom isn't enough to make people buy personal WM devices.

@Stephen Hunter

You forgot the machete method. That's real hacking: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4396831.stm

USB keyboards not immune

... Its just that these blokes have not identified a hack. In principle hacking USB is not really different to PS2.

Getting PS2 keystrokes should be relatively easy since the PS2 keyboard sends a clocked data stream. That should be relatively easy to pick up so long as there are few other noise sources nearly. Of course, like with any RF or magnetic signals, it would also be almost trivial to design a jammer that just spits out a stronger RF signal sending out "Mary Has A Little Lamb...", perhaps there is a maket opportunity for selling jammer keayboards or dongles to the tinfoil-hat brigade.

Rich wanker's toy

Those grumbling about how impractical this thing is are missing the point. This is not supposed to replace your car for commuting, nor a real plane for long trips.

It is intended as a toy for tooling around and does not have to be practical. Look at microlights etc they're not practical planes, but people buy them for weekend fun. This is much the same except it is probably more comfortable and gives you a ride to and from the airfield.