Posts by Charles Manning

Samsung slurps up full charge in 30 seconds with bio-battery

What about heat?

Sure size is a factor.

So is getting rid of waste heat.

Battery charging is, at present, a highly inefficient process, which generates heat, which is why batteries heat up while being charged. If their process is still as inefficient as current battery technologies, then these batteries will have to dump all the heat generated during a charge in 30 seconds. That's generating 50-100 times the heat power of current battery technologies. That is going to be hard to get rid of and will cook electronics.

To make something viable they will have to crack this nut and reduce the waste heat by at least an order of magnitude, if not two. So even if they only end up with brick sized batteries, they might have something useful for the alternative energy sector just through having far more efficient battery technology.

I'll be skeptical, but hopeful, until some independently verification shows this process can work.

Right now it looks like a delayed April Fool's joke, or VC scamming.

Time is on their side: NIST's new atomic clock accurate for 300 million years

Impressive.... but needed?

Yes you do need an accurate clock to be able to decode/send various signals. That does not necessarily mean you need to carry around an accurate clock source though.

In most settings you can re create the clock from the signal itself using some sort of phase locked loop (PLL) or similar trickery. This allows you to correct for all sorts of clock errors such as poor clock sources, Doppler and such.

For example, a GPS receiver needs to be within a few ppm to track the signal from a GPS satellite. You can get those tight tolerances by using very precise temperature controlled oscillators, or you can use a relatively cheap crystal oscillator and the GPS signal itself as a high precision clock source.

Re: Synchronous Power Grids

The clock gets messed up by loads

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_frequency#Frequency_and_load

Organic food: Pricey, not particularly healthy, won't save you from cancer

unnatural=Poison

This sort of "information" is often twisted in some sort of morality framework by linking modern pesticides and fertilizers to war. An easy thing to do since many fertilisers and agricultural chemicals are made from similar ingrediants to explosives,

What they fail to mention is that many of the worst poisons out there are perfectly natural: botulism, the arsenic in wells, etc.

This is how we end up with a million people dying every year of malaria for want of a bit of cheap, safe, DDT.

White House blasts Samsung for tweeting Obama-Ortiz selfie

If he was in the privacy of his own home, he'd have a right to privacy.

When he's standing around in a public place, setting up a PR shot, the expectation of privacy rings a bit hollow.

Obama's PR folk set the record for constraining how the president's image is managed. They even hand out "official" photos to be used of press conferences etc. They set this selfie up as a PR stunt. They wanted to manage the image and its use. Unfortunately for them it got away.

All they can do now is make a song-and-dance about it so that more people see it.

Not curious at all

Create a controversy around it, therefore more people retweet it and more news sites link to it and more people view it.

I would not have seen it if it was not for this article, nor would 99% or El Reg readers.

Sheer brilliance from the White House PR people!

Five-year-old discovers Xbox password bug, hacks dad's Live account

Takes me back to the 1990s

I had Win3.11 on PC that the kids would use on occasion for playing games. I thought they were playing too many games, so I enabled the login in stuff and added a password.

The next day I saw the kids playing without me having logged them in and was both annoyed as well as impressed by how a 5 year old could have cracked the security.

It turns out all you needed to do was hit the escape key....

Your files held hostage by CryptoDefense? Don't pay up! The decryption key is on your hard drive

That's the sad bit

NSA surely has the capability of nobbling these bastards, and doing so would surely be of benefit to the citizens who pay their wages and buy them shiny new data centres in the desert.

Yet they do nothing.

Remind me what purpose the NSA serves again?

Lego is the TOOL OF SATAN, thunders Polish priest

"stepped on one while going to the loo"

Due to his pledge of chastity he should surely be in a reasonably Lego-free house.

Greenpeace reveals WORLD'S FILTHIEST CLOUDS – and the cleanest may shock you

Greenpeace bah!

Well here's a bunch of bullshit on the www they can shut down themselves if they actually cared...

http://www.greenpeaceblackpixel.org

I was an avid Greenpeace supporter for 15 or so years, but no more... they have lost their way.

Money? What money? Lawyer for accused Silk Road boss claims you can't launder Bitcoin

Chewbacca defense

The lawyer is trying to confuse the issue.

The whole idea of money laundering is to take money or other financial instruments, shovel them through some path that anonymises the value and "clean" money cones out the other side.

The bitcoin does not have to be a currency to achieve this. The money laundering process begins when the bitcoin was bought (or money changed hands for the goods that were then traded for bitcoin).

Money laundering can happen with or without the bitcoin being considered currency.

Yahoo! keen! to! slurp! news! video! distie! site!

You mean like Barney?

"a cool dinosaur that everyone loves"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFQfM-pLmL4

... or an annoying purple has-been

Intel's DIY MinnowBoard goes Max: More oomph for half the price

Why?

Why would I want a Minnowboard for more grunt when I can get a dual core ARM board for about half the price... right now... no heatsinks.

https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXino-MICRO/open-source-hardware

By the time the new Minnowboard actually ships, the quad core variant of this ARM board will probably be shipping.

Can you tell a man's intelligence simply by looking at him? Yes

Can't tell with a woman

No wonder. We never look at their faces ... well that's what I keep on being told anyway.

Snowden files latest: NSA and GCHQ targeted German satcomms

Re: How long before normal companies....

"Will you volunteer to be the first to protest by not paying taxes?"

Nope, this is not something the little guy can do at all effectively. A big corp on the other hand is a different matter...

Corporates regularly use their tax payment as leverage. Apple, Microsoft and others often threaten to take their toys away if cities or states don't do what they want.

Airbus USA could easily do the same.

How long before normal companies....

... say stuff it, no more tax for you!

What both NSA and GCHQ are doing goes way beyond serving national security interests.

They are both destroying international good will. That puts nations and their citizens at risk. 9/11 didn't happen because Bin Laden woke up in a grumpy mood one day - it happened because people got sick and tired of heavy handed US aircraft-carrier diplomacy.

They are both spying on anyone they choose - including it would seem doing industrial espionage.

The whole purpose of paying tax into the public purse is to allow the government to do good deeds for the nation. There is clearly a lot of money going into funding organizations that are not in the best interests of the citizens, but actually to their detriment.

How long before tax payers realise their tax dollars/quid are enabling this? I would not be surprised if we soon see some people/companies refusing to participate in funding this hooliganism.

Inmarsat: Doppler effect helped 'locate' MH370

Re: doppler shift is one of the things *all* GPS signals have to account for.

For all practical purposes, that gravitational difference is zero. We're dealing with a few ppm, not pptrillion.

Atmospheric distortion will have far greater impact that gravitational effects.

Re: doppler shift is one of the things *all* GPS signals have to account for.

"What's surprising I think is that Inmarsat actually collects that much fine detail about the signal, as well as the messages it transmits and receives."

No, they just collect the precise frequency the signal was received on. That is useful for any diagnostic etc and is enough for doppler calcs.

Doppler is not just something GPSs have to account for (ie. it is not just something that gets in the way), it is also a very useful signal.

The doppler measurements themselves are a better source of velocity data that doing differences between positions. Doppler is also a useful input into filtering algorithms etc.

To the layman, measuring to 0.08% sounds pretty amazing, but GPS etc require far better than that to track satellites.

Mt Gox staff tried to warn CEO of Bitcoin loss risks – reports

$1500 a day?

That's not enough to pay costs for 2 employees, let alone keep the boss in flash cars.

Meet the man building an AI that mimics our neocortex – and could kill off neural networks

Re: Let a thousand flowers bloom

Thanks for a highly informative post.

I am suprised that anyone would think that a neuron has a single-bit output. Surely a neuron isn't just On or Off, but also somewhere in between?

Some of those WNN ideas look like they could fit well in FPGAs.

I agree with you 100% on private companies driving this rather than academia. Private companies are far more motivated to make useful stuff, while academia are far more interested in pursuing pet ideas - whether or not they are fruitful.

Re: model a neurone in one supercomputer

"If you feed a computer program with the same inputs, it will always produce the same outputs. A brain is not like that."

Nope, that's where MEMORY comes in.

The whole idea with any machine learning is that it is **learning**. In other words, experience makes it better, which means it is not going to give you the same result with the same inputs and in other words it has memory + the ability to adapt.

While some see the whole point of machine learning as trying to replicate the human brain, others (generally the slightly more practical folks) see this as looking at how the brain works to inspire ways to design algorithms to solve problems.

For example, we have machine learning methods like regression and Bayesian classifiers that learn, are used every day, and can work very well if they are used correctly.

Neural nets (NN) are very simple neuron models. They don't need much to implement. Indeed you can implement one with an op-amp and a few discrete components, though using digital logic (eg a microcontroller) makes this easier.

You certianly don't need supercomputers. A $5 microcontroller can easily run a 20 neron NN at an update rate of many kHz.

NNs are very simple (way below the true functionality of even a fly's neurons) but can still achieve useful tasks.

From what I have seen so far, the Numenta nerons take NNs one step further by adding time. In theory this could still be achieved with NNs by adding shift registers and more nerons, but the Numenta algorithms are a closer approximation to true brain function and are likely easier (ie faster) to train.

Will this actually yield fruit that NNs and other simplfied models cannot? Time will tell.

+1 for not mentioning the Turing Test

Just about every article on AI manages to jam in a reference to the Turing Test, out of context.

This article managed to be very informative, mostly because it does not fall prey to low-brow journalism.

Machine learning != AI

The stuff Andrew Ng teaches is deliberately called "machine learning" and not AI. Google uses machine learning, not AI.

Machine learning does not attempt to learn the way people do and the algorithms involved are certainly NOT the way ta brain works. At most, ML can be said to be inspired by the way the brain works rather than trying to replicate it.

There is nothing inherently right or wrong in either ML or AI. The only real difference is the motivation. ML is practical and is in use right now, full-blown AI is still way out of reach and cannot be used today.

Zuck: Web drones, not balloons (cough, cough Google) are way forward

It is great when they help the world.

It is NOT great when they claim the brownie points for saving the world when they are really just pulling a PR stunt and achieving SFA.

Re: @ Charles 9 - FB & Google...

Very coherently written.

I went to university and got a post grad qualification in Computer Science. I emerged thinking I could do a whole lot for the world (the arrogance of youth). I suppose I have done quite a bit for the city living tech world, but I've done bugger all for most people out there.

I also grew up in rural Africa and can speak 3 African languages. In many of these areas there is no clinic, no phone and the people don't even have bank accounts, let alone mobile phones and twitter accounts.

These hypothetical examples of sending pictures of rashes are bollocks for most people. What the people need is way lower level than that. Access to a nurse once a month who teaches basic stuff, has very basic meds and just a stethoscope would be a huge step up, and easy to achieve.

My sister (a nurse) is currently trying to set up a charity-funded clinic in rural South Africa. At present she does stuff off her own bat (her free time and when she can afford the petrol etc to drive 400km round trip). If it gets off the ground, that clinic will run for 1 week per month - with just a couple of nurses - and serve about 5000 people. Cost: around $40k per year.

That's the sort of stuff that actually gets things done in the Third world, not drones and other rich-boy toys.

In most of these places there is no infrastructure to service the technology. As a result much foreign aid just ends up wasted. Foreign aid and medical support fails to get through because the trucks break. A Sweish aid program supplied Swedish tractors that were all broken within 3 years because people only knew how to service Massey Ferguson tractors.

Unless drones etc come with huge service teams and a BOFH in every village, they will just end up littering the countriside.

Far better to spend a tenth of the money on stuff that really matters.

Play Mario using just your EYES as Google Glass gets JavaScript

How it's different

Thick glasses, skinny,... these were your genetic cards handed to you so most reasonable people will cut you slack.

GGlasses.... your choosing.

That is the diference.

Judge rules Baidu political censorship was an editorial right

Or Evil Fox News/CNN/Huffington Post chose to promote one story that fits their agenda over another which does not.

Or http://www.homeopathy-soh.org choosing to only reference pro-homeopathy research.

Or $CarMaker not linking to consumer reports showing it was not Best Car 2013.

If news sites can choose which stories to publish and which to supress, surely it is no different for news aggregators, special interest groups or search engines too.

The lawyer likely does not actually confuse the two.

Remember that lawyers are biased. They work for one side or the other. They deliberately spin everything they can to bolster their case, and forget to mention everything that detracts from their case.

China's rare earth supply crimp plan ruled to be illegal

If the shoe was on the other foot...

USA, in particular, has a history of showing the UN and the rest of the world the middle finger.

China are now in a position where they can ignore the WTO and the ROW will just have to lump it.

Facebook taps up NASA boffins to launch drone fleet, laser comms lab

Please fly lower

It gives those of us with a shotgun a sporting chance.

Spooks vs boffins: MIT bods say they've created PRISM-proof encryption

Re: Wouldn't work in the UK

So you show them the blank 10G partition. Most plods, especially the computer forensic kind, look at the hard disk, see it is 1TB, and can figure out that there's 990G or stuff that you're hiding from them.

Heck they probably have a batch file/script which detects this and they don't even need to do the mental arithmetic.

Molyneux: Working at Microsoft is 'like taking antidepressants'

I asked and here is what I got

Dear Field:Sir_Madam

Field:Full_Name worked for us for Field:Service_Period. During that time Field:he_she was a valuable team member contributing to the success of our fantastic products.

We are sad to see Field:him_her leave to pursue other interests.

Regards

Field:Team_Manager

Original iPhone dev team was 'shockingly small' - Apple engineer

Re: @David W.

As my grandfather used to say:

"Learn to suck out the juice and spit out the pips."

Re: It didn't need a big team

"The best way to do any product is a small team. Or several very small teams working on unrelated aspects."

Bollocks. Things are never unrelated. In order to write good software, or design good hardware, you need to understand the context it is being used in and the trade offs worth making.

At one company I worked for, I was nominally developing software but spent a good 10% of my time hanging out with the hardware guys to make sure that they understood the software impacts of their decisions, so that they could make better decisions, and to take the info back to the software people to discuss with them and make sure all the drivers etc would work.

Another example, there might be two ways to write an algorithm: fast but using lots of RAM, or slow but using little RAM. Unless you have adequate knowledge of the RAM footprint, RAM costs etc, you can't make the right call.

I worked for Apple for a year. The inter-group secrecy was stifling and certainly slowed things down.

Re: The most successful projects I've worked on...

"you can't build an iPhone's hardware and software from scratch with just one person"

That wasn't the case in Apple either.

The development Greg is really talking about is that of the key UI features, not the full OS.

Even those working on the OS never got to see the real UI, just a faked-up UI that used the OS calls. That allowed the OS folks to develop OS features without seeing what the final product would look like.

Hold on, everyone ... Prez Obama thinks he's cracked this NSA super-snooping problem

Re: NSA has no boundaries

"but you think this all started when Obama took office?" Nope. I neither think this nor said this. Please read again.

"Really?" Nope, it's all in your mind.

You do however raise an interesting point: NSA's ability is largely powered by increases in technology. For that reason, NSA has gone from a small threat to a large threat during the Obama years. That is not to say Obama started the NSA though.

NSA has been going for long before Obama, but he's deluded in thinking he can fix it as easily as he says.

This is just political rhetoric not much different from Guantanamo Bay. Obama didn't start that either, but he promised to shut Gitmo down within a year and nothing of consequence has happened... and that was almost 6 years ago.

What he's doing with the NSA is just talking some talk. There is no evidence that he really wants to put them on a leash. There is certainly no doubt that he is not really able to control them.

Until the NSA is actually shut down, or at least publicly audited, nobody will believe they have been constrained.

NSA has no boundaries

Give them an inch they will take a mile. Just wagging a finger will change nothing.

If they are only allowed limited surveillance, but they have piles of toys giving them capabilities to watch the whole world then what will they do? Put all they toys on ebay? Doubt it!

There are only two ways to address this:

1) Take away all their toys, then make their budget public record. That will prevent them from growing again.

2) Investigate them in public and criminally prosecute any that have gone beyond the law, then shut them down.

So far Obama has failed to leave a favourable Wikipedia entry for future kids to look up. He is desperate to leave a positive legacy, even if it is a one-liner.

You TWITS! Facebook exec erects billboards shaming texting drivers

Handsfree is no better than hand held.

Passport PIN tech could have SAVED MH370 ID fraudsters

Government decision making is seldom data driven

This is a sad outcome of democracy. Everyone has a vote and all feel their opinion matters the same whether it is based on hard facts, feelings or from reading tea leaves, bibles, or other erroneous inputs.

Politicians have to pander to the masses. Those that don't get voted out and don't get to make policy. Thus, we get stupid laws and government policy because the great unwashed hold more power than critical thinking, rational, informed people.

Schoolkids given WORLD'S CHEAPEST TABLETS: Is it really that hard to swallow?

You're going to get downvoted....

The technical elite think everything can be solved by giving people tablets and 1gbit internet.

I know different, but then I've actually lived in a third world country for most of my life and can speak 3 different African languages. I know people living in some of these places and I know that all my software skills cannot really do anything concrete for these people. Many of them have subsistence lives, no bank accounts, no assets to speak of, no phone, running water or stuff like that.

My sister though is a nurse and is able to do real stuff that helps them improve their lives.

Re: Some African countries are overflowing with unemployed university graduates

The South African case is special and is not really a good benchmark for any global extrapolations.

South Africa has absurd levels of affirmative action that prevent people from contributing to society/economy.

In the apartheid years, about the lowest level work a white person could get would be working for the post office installing cables. This meant that he sat in the truck reading magazines while black blokes, mostly more intelligent than him, dug the actual trenches and brought him cups of tea.

In a society like that, everyone loses because the white bloke only gets the job because of his whiteness and the black bloke is prevented from contributing his resources into the economy and society.

Now we see just the same, but the colour has changed: black bloke in charge with black people filling the key positions - skilled or not.

While that might seem "fair", the whole society continues to lose...

As WinXP death looms, Microsoft releases its operating system SOURCE CODE for free

Re: What was 2.0 really known for?

The big problem was that some MSDOS commands used / to introduce flags. That made parsing flags & file names problematic.

Stuff like:

FOOBOX /F a:\file

Dotcom's Mega looks for a backdoor onto NZ stock exchange

NK$

I thought North Korean money was called won?

Typo maybe?

The plot to kill Google cloud: We'll rename Windows Azure to MICROSOFT Azure

X-Cloud

It worked for the Xbox when they put that in front of the naming focus group.

Reg unit of caring

giveashits.

How much do you care about Azure? 0.39 microgiveashits.

Michelle Obama speaks out against censorship ... in China

Re: Fuck you all.

I think the thing that annoys many people is the complete arrogance of the US. They proclaim themselves "leaders of the free world" and think they have the moral authority to everyone else what to do.

That might be justified if they were, indeed anywhere near being "leaders of the free world", but they fail on pretty much all fronts:

* Press freedom index: 46th

* Economic freedom index: 12th

* Democracy Index: (doesn't make the top band).

Perhaps when they get to the top 5 or so, and hold that position for a few years, they have some of that moral authority.

The words would be far less hollow if they can from the leaders of Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, etc.

Bletchley boffins go to battle again: You said WHAT about Colossus?

Tail wagging dog

The BP people need to pull their collective head in.

If I one day travel to Blighty, visiting BP is on my "must do" list, but that is only because of the old number crunchers.

Sure, it would be nice to see them in their "natural environment", but really, a warehouse would do too.

All the other stuff at BP: swans, rotting stables and gift shops with marmalade and tea towel, I can see in thousands of locations. I can even get a reasonable example here in New Zealand.

BP needs to realise what the real attraction is, and work with that. Seems egos are getting the better of them.

TEN THINGS Google believes you believe about Glassholes and wishes you didn't

I don't believe AC was trying to entirely rid the world of tech. Instead, he's suggesting that it is occasionally a good idea to take a break from technical immersion.

Looking everything up all the time is a borderline OCD. You're not going to experience much of this adventure called "Life" if you're doing it through Wikipedia and looking up pub ratings on the fly.

So, to use your examples... Yes, let the kids use calculators, but let them do a bit of mental arithmetic too. I grew up in an age where we used slide rules (and calculators) at school and university. Slide rules do not do the whole calculation, you still need to figure out the order of magnitude in your head. That also gives you a degree of error checking. The yoofs who have only used calculators miss this and will blindly accept the numbers spewing forth.

Interview: Cisco's security supremo on the Internet of Everything

Base Camp One on Everest?

With IoT we don't even know which mountain we're climbing, let lone which camp we're at.

All the network bods and the people trying to sell components etc. All the buzz on IoT is from vendors pushing solutions. Unfortunately the problem has not really been identified yet and there's no real value in it.

Sure, there is value in a whole lot more sensors monitoring traffic, weather, and other real time data but that is only a tiny fraction of what the IoT industry is pushing.

Where is the value in your washing machine having a network connection? Is it going to tweet its mates about how many undies it washed this week?

US saves self from Huawei spying by spying on Huawei spying

xenophobic turf protection

The anti-Huawei talk might have some slight legitimacy, but it is mainly a smoke-screen to protect US kit providers.