Posts by Randolf McKinley 52 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Oct 2007
It never ceases to amaze me the ways people come up with to compromise stuff. And more so that, once they've been pointed out by someone else, most of them become pretty obvious and are simple in concept.
It must be a right fun job, thinking up these exploits and implementing them. I just don't have the imagination.
And certainly, as others have pointed out, the immediate practicality doesn't matter. It's the awareness of the possibilities that matters, because being aware of the possibility means you and others can mitigate against it. And to remember people who come up with these things don't all work for the good guys. If any of them can be called good guys.
Huh, yeah, I've got vague memories of fixing illegal Unix filenames with a byte editor too, but I can't remember what, or the context. It was something to do with creating a file from a program with characters in the name that made it inaccessible from the shell or another program (like '/' would be). You edited the current directory "." or the inode or something and replaced the illegal character in the name.
Arr, no, wearing gloves just stops fingerprints being transferred onto other things. Not the same as fingerprints being read through a glove by a magical button on a laptop or whatever.
Seriously, it's really depressing that supposedly technical people can't put themselves in the place of people who aren't. That's why so much bad design happens, and we're surrounded by so much poorly designed crap.
It's not really all that fair to call someone an idiot because they have no clue how a finger print reader works. You might know, I might know, but there's no great and compelling reason for a non-technical person to know it needs skin contact or optical visibility of the finger to work. I bet you could use a number of very expensive and generally impractical methods to detect a fingerprint through a glove, there's no reason to assume, unless you know better, that they generally can't be read through a glove.
Ah, yes, but we're not talking the definitions of the words, we're talking grammar. Those two do not always intersect. In grammar you have a "number of things you can count" but an "amount or quantity of stuff you can't count". However a number can be both an amount or a quantity (34 pounds is a large amount of cash but a large number of pound coins). That's English, one of the least logical grammars in existence.
Pixels are countable, they come in "Number of pixels", not "Amount of pixels"! Water comes in amounts, so does sand, unless you're talking about atoms of water or grains of sand, then it's number again. I suppose you could have said "Amount of pixel needed ..."
Anal? Moi?
Yes, but only in one sense. Apple doesn't let the carrier screw with the OS - err, I mean "customise" it. And (OK, two senses) updates are not dependant on the carrier releasing a customised version for their phone.
Personally I'm philosophically attracted to the Android ecosystem (and had one for a while) but I'm practically more attracted to the iOS walled garden. I got fed up with O2 being a version behind at least on my Galaxy compared with Samsung. Yes, I know I could have jailbroken it, but why should I need the hassle. I'm 53 you know ...
I still have and use most working days my HP41CV calculator I bought new when they first came out in 1981 or '82 in the last year or two of my engineering degree. Reverse Polish like all good calculators should be. I still have the magnetic card reader and the printer that went with it although I've not used them for a long long time, and a bunch of the plug-in ROM packs with pre-written programs for advanced maths and circuit analysis and stuff. Of course they don't get used any more because anything more complex than a bit of a sum gets done in a spreadsheet or a real program, but in those days it was the peak of engineering programming, and you still can't beat a good calculator for doing simple maths.
Sadly got a HP41 simulator for my jesusphone too. It's pretty good, but the phone display is a bit to small to do the original justice.
What I don't understand (tax issues aside) is why the shareholders don't demand a goodly-sized cut of the $100bn cash reserve as a dividend? Why does the company (looking at is purely as a business) need such a large reserve?
Looking at it another way it's 4 years' profit so perhaps it isn't as enormous in relation to that as the raw number seems, but is it usual for companies to retain that much cash? I don't know the R&D spend to bring out a new product, but it's surely a fraction of that?
Yep, I agree entirely, and for that reason I'm doing another flip from Android to iOS with my next upgrade. I've found myself doing that for the last three upgrades - first Android, then iOS when I got fed up with that not quite working, then Android again when the Apple hegemony became too much for me, and now back to iOS again! At least the Apple stuff just seems to work properly on their hardware.
It's a bit like Linux and Windows - I used Linux exclusively on he desktop for years (at least 10) but I finally got fed up with stuff not quite working properly on my hardware (mostly high-end laptops), and have given up with that for now too. Like it or lump it, if you but a laptop with Windows installed it just works these days (mind you, that hasn't always been the case!). Still use Linux on a lot of stuff, from servers to embedded systems, but not the desktop.
I use LiPos extensively for model aircraft electric motors. Even at a few degrees above zero their performance is very noticeably degraded, and they're useless below zero (although I'm taking one or more 10s of amps from them, so YMMY but I suspect not). These days I keep my LiPos in a "cool" box with a hot water bottle to keep them toasty.
Spinning metal is on the way out permanently anyway, as inexorably as punch tape and the floppy drive did before it. The price and capacity and lifetime differences are shrinking all the time, and it's inevitable that flash will eventually dominate, and I'd not be surprised if that was within the next few years, 10 at the most.
We flew Cathay Pacific UK to Oz this year and their seats reclined in a slidey-forward manner so the seat back rear face didn't move at all (the bottom of the front of the seat back moved forward). Excellent idea, it meant that the seat in front didn't move backwards at the expense of a bit less leg-room when you recline your own seat.
It's the capacitors. The routers all run too hot, the caps just end up dying. The two I've had I've ended up replacing all the electrolytics after a couple of years when they started going flaky (Dropping ADSL connections and even dropping Etherent-side connections), and they were right as rain after that.
Yeah, but it's not heave compensation. That just has to keep a load in one place in space, which is an entirely simpler problem to keeping a load in one place relative to a moving point (the other deck). Firstly you have to sense the deck and secondly you have to accelerate the load around to make it stay in the same place, particularly laterally, which isn't easy on the end of a cable. Also you probably need to adjust the plane of the bottom of the container to match the receiving deck, which is probably what the gubbins on the crane head and the extra lateral cables are for.
So, simple heave comp it ain't.
I've been using goScreen (www.goscreen.info) for ages now with Vista having been used to virtual desktops on Linux for years. It works pretty much as well as the Gnome version (for all the things I do with it, YMMV) and can be configured to use keystrokes to switch screens too like Gnome. The only thing it doesn't do that I used on Linux is alter windows' system menus to add "Put this window on Woxkspace X", but there are keyboard based workarounds for that.
The technology is all used in electric model helicopters, but has one important drawback - it can't autorotate. Lose one motor, the whole thing crashes and burns. The "Powerful 3-phase motors and 3-phase speed controllers" are in everyday use in model aircraft and helicopters. I have, umm, 9 model aircraft using them sitting right now in my garage. A motor the size of the ones in the "UAV" costs about £40, the speed controller a similar amount and the LiPo battery (they had one per motor) about £50, all bought from my local hobby shop. I even have a video camera I can attach to any of my models, and in our club there is at least one remote telemetry video camera.
The only different thing is the control board that coordinates the motor thrust to give speed and directional control. Big deal. You can but something that'll do that as a toy (with 4 upward-facing props) for less than £100 on the high street. It ain't rocket science.
It's not even a UAV in the commonly accepted meaning of the term, it's remotely controlled. Most UAVs have some autonomous flight capability - if you take your fingers off the transmitter this one will crash and burn. All it is is an RC aircraft that is in fact inferior to an electric helicopter (because it can't auto rotate).
For goodness sake, it's complete rubbish - these days there are even plenty of model aircraft hobbyists who have mounted cameras on gimbals on their aircraft, wear goggles with head-tracking software that controls the gimbals, and they fly their models out of direct sight using the cockpit view (Of questionable legality in the UK, mind).
€5000? Rubbish. £1000 absolute max.
Bloody students just wanted their university to pay for their model plane.
Oooh, look, I've had a rant!
"... really no excuse why they haven't built a centrifuge into the ISS"
Well, except for the complexity, the space requirements, the expense, the fuel requirements to overcome the effects of friction in the bearings and counter-torque while accelerating it to and from speed, the somewhat more pressing needs of carrying out the station's primary mission, the cost of lifting it and installing it on the ISS, etc ...
In the 63 years since WW2 ended, despite them being in the country since before I was born, I can still run round the streets, (and I do, a lot,) , surf the net for filth, (and I do, a lot,) , criticise the government, (and I do, a lot,) Vista, and practically everyone else, and not once have I been sat on by an elephant or eaten by a tiger.
It is therefore with some regret that I have to conclude that all these elephant and tiger trainer type people are pretty successful on the whole at protecting my wife and kids.
Thank goodness, eh?
Paris, because she's just as stupid.
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