Posts by Flocke Kroes

Revealed: ITU's deep packet snooping standard leaks online

Do not need DPI to detect malicous content

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt

Adobe demands 7,000 years a day from humankind

I do read the terms and conditions

BSD is really short. GPL V2 is clear and simple. GPL V3 is longer and more complicated, but those three cover the vast majority of software I install. Years ago, clicking on a document activated a network install of Microsoft Office. I decided I was not authorised to agree to the terms on behalf of my employer, so I clicked the "Disagree" option. It installed and worked fine.

If you want some really good terms and conditions, try a porn site. If you accidently subscribe twice, you get charged double. To stop this can call the premium rate number and listen to the prerecorded message. I assume the message says something like "We got your money and we are keeping it". To unsubscribe, fill in the web form and wait for instructions to arrive by email. They should arrive within a decade.

The first place to look in a contract is how to end it. If that bit is missing or complicated, you know it is time to go elsewhere. The other fun clauses:

"If any conditions on this contract are not enforcible then the remainder of the contract will still remain in force." This means: "Many of these conditions are attempts to fool you into thinking you do not have statutory rights."

"This software [a C compiler] will work broadly in line with the printed instructions". The printed instructions were a small card explaining how to install the compiler. Started the installation in Friday morning, and it was still going on Monday morning. Nothing in the 'printed instructions' said installation would complete in under a year.

Free software: automatic no hassle money back guaranty. Proprietary software: If negligence or malice or our part causes your computer to explode and burn down you house or office, damages are limited to the cost of the software or a replacement CD.

WANTED: Actual HELPFUL info on price-comparison websites

Other good phone number ...

I use the web site's customer complaints phone number. If I cannot find such a number then it is time to look for a different vendor.

Google avoids tax with ‘Double Irish Dutch Sandwich’

Tax efficiency is required to stay in business

If Microsoft were not efficient about avoiding taxes then they would be less price competitive with Apple. If governments magically become competent at wording tax law and get the big search engines to pay more tax, then the price of advertising rises, the advertisers make a little less profit, pay a little less tax and pass some of the pain on to their costumers. The business customers make a little less profit, pay a little less tax and pass some of the pain on. Finally real people pay a bit more for their goods.

If you think Google paying more tax will reduce your tax bill will make you better off then you are living in a fantasy world. A government with increased revenue just finds more daft ways to waste it. I am sure politicians are well aware of this. All this talk about multinationals paying very little tax is just tactic to distract us from the latest expensive failed government initiatives.

Microsoft dragging its feet on Linux Secure Boot fix

Not any non-Apple hardware

I have yet to see Windows for MIPS (I have three MIPS boxes). How about Windows for Raspberry Pi? (Windows RT requires a later generation of ARM CPU.) One of my other two ARM boxes could in theory run RT - but that would use all of the internal flash.

I have one Intel box left. When it dies, Microsoft have given me an excellent reason to replace it with an ARM - and I doubt the RT will be around that long.

Ex-Nokians fish MeeGo out of bin, launch Sailfish OS

Cell phone bars

I thought the number of bars a cell phone displays was one more than on the nearest competitor's phone in the hope that it will influence a purchase decision. People claiming to know what they are talking about have posted some alternative theories:

http://ask.metafilter.com/60227/What-do-cell-phone-reception-bars-mean?

As far as I can make out, the bars could show useful information while a call is in progress, but unless their meaning gets standardised, don't bet on it.

Apple: Sure, here's the HTC patent pact. WITH numbers blanked out

Samsung did come up with its own damn design without copying Apple

http://www.apple.com/uk/legal-judgement/

Patent trolling to go under anti-trust spotlight

I am not a well funded company PR department

Innovation continues despite patents, not because of them. Getting a patent takes years and defending one in the courts takes at least £250,000. Startups do not have the time or money. What they do have is first mover advantage: by the time someone else has copied their product, the startup has released version 2.

Patents are most valueable to established companies who do not innovate. They can use patents to keep startups out of the market.

Patents are supposed to increase the rate of technological progress by rewarding inventors with a monopoly in return for publishing details of how their inventions work. In the real world, people only read patents when they are threatened by lawyers. This is because:

*) Patents are written in patent language which is difficult for non-patent specialists to understand.

*) Reading a patent almost never helps you implement a product. This is most obvious with software patents because they do not include source code.

*) Thousands of new patents are awarded every month. It is impractical to search through all that junk for a useful patent.

*) Reading a patent leaves you open to triple damages for willful infringement.

As inventors no longer read patents, they entire reason for the patent system disappeared decades ago.

Sun BELCHES twice, mighty plasma loops miss Earth - NASA vid

Wrong equation

If you start at the sun, pick a random direction and fire something tiny, like the moon then the chance of hitting the Earth are about 1 in 2 billion. Coronal mass ejections are big - similar to the size of the sun when they start. They spread out. I could not find an decisive figure for how much they spread out. The closest I could find to a useful number was 0.25au long. If we pretend that CME's are 0.25au wide when they pass Earth orbit (1au) then the chances of a hit are about 1 in 250.

If someone knows a vaguely sensible number for the diameter of a CME when gets 1au from the sun, please speak up. I have almost no confidence in that 0.25au guess.

Brit retailers tell Amazon and Google to pay their taxes

If the public were angry, they would not buy from internet multinationals

This 'public anger' sounds like astro-turf to me. If the government wanted fairer taxes, they would not be giving tax relief to patent trolls:

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/ct/forms-rates/claims/patent-box.htm

Another Microsoft Trojan? Sinofsky might just want a RIM job

RIM are not the threat

When Elop joined Nokia, Nokia had the highest market share. They had more of the market than Apple and Samsung combined (no 2 and 3 at the time). Things are different now. For Sinofsky to do an Elop, he has to become CEO of Samsung.

'You can say I'm paranoid about it, but they will kill me'

"We're not accusing you of being illegal, we're accusing you of being immoral"

Who much have these MPs claimed for expenses?

Toshiba readies feature-pruned, profit-boosting Jelly Bean tablet

Does it have a service manual?

The post is required, and must contain letters - but I would prefer parcels.

Sinofsky OFFSKI: Is Windows 9 now codenamed 'Defenestrate'?

Nokia has been dealt with

Do Microsoft need someone to run HTC into the ground?

Industry in 'denial' as demand for pricey PCs plunges

The Pi's have it

Raspberry Pi gave a clear warning about the direction that the market wanted to go. Intel could make a Debian box twice the speed for twice the money and it would sell - but every sale would cost Intel the profit on something five times the price. PC World could distribute Debian boxes, but each one would cost them the profit on the sales of some antivirus software and Microsoft Office - not to mention crapware revenue.

The real shock to me was PC World distributing Chromebooks. I got the first one that my local PC World had seen (the only other source is Amazon). When the salesman read the sales script, the anger in his voice was clear: "We cannot sell you any software. It has to come from Google" (I got the impression he would have put less scorn into "Bailed out Bankers" than "Google"). I am sure the only reason PC World distribute Chromebooks is because Microsoft are doing their own App store.

In a couple of years, the masses will find computers between phones and cameras in the supermarket and you will find the traditional PC vendors rushing to follow Micro Anvika.

Plastic screen outfit teams with Epson to offer screen on your plastic

Half way there

The other half is putting the key pad on the card. With the current system, a display you have no reason to trust tells you who will be paid and how much. You give your account details to a reader that might log them and type your pin on a key pad that could have a key logger attached. Whoever came up with that clearly put some thought into removing as much security as possible.

I would love to see a card that shows who is getting paid and how much on a screen I can trust. Even better, add a keypad so I can be confident that no key logger will be sending my PIN to India. If they really want to go overboard, add an off switch so the card does not spew my ID to every RF-ID reader in a shopping centre.

Samsung turns screws on Apple, hikes A6 processor price 20%

Only if you can find there was a first hoax and prove this is another

I have no evidence that Samsung threatened Apple with a lack of LCDs. What I saw were rumours that Apple were planning to reduce orders of Samsung LCDs:

http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/11/07/apple-sharp-2b-investment/

At this rate, the only people who will trade with Apple are the ones who are really desperate.

Intel plans Core i7 bare bones mini-PCs

Has a big advantage over a Pi

My local bus station has a blue screen of death display terminal. You cannot get anything like that with a Pi. For a proper authentic BSoD you need Intel and Microsoft. Surely that is worth an extra $300.

Intel NUC: 65W, active cooling

Raspberry Pi: 3.5W passive cooling.

To be fair, I think that 65W includes power for 2 mini-PCIe cards and full power out of the USB connectors. It is not a in any way competitor with a Pi. If you really need PCIe and Windows 8 then a Pi wont fit, but Intel have a long way to go to get near Pi price, power and silence.

Tech support blog removes Toshiba manuals after legal letter

Streisand

I did not know that the maintenance manual for my old laptop was available for free download all over the internet. Thankyou Toshiba for pointing it out.

The GPL self-destruct mechanism that is killing Linux

A few more lumps of confusion in the article

The Linux kernel has forked: Android. Android had design features that worked well on a mobile phone, but were not appropriate to a cluster. Google considered merging back with Linus's Linux to be sufficiently valuable that they have been recoding bits of Android to scale better. Some of the new code has been merged. Linux and Android are getting closer.

Forks are good in free software. If you are Microsoft, you have a few programmers. To achieve anything, you must pick a direction and herd your programmers that way. If you picked the right direction, all well and good. Celebrate and have a beer. If you guess wrong, you end up with Windows ME, Long Horn Vista or Winphone. Free software has many programmers. It is practical to let all of them code in different directions. The result is lots and lots of editors, toolkits, GUIs, and so on. Some of them are tripe. Some of them are not your cup of tea. Some are outstanding and there is almost always something that gets the job done.

Business friendly is a Microsoft term for code they can embrace extend and extinguish. They labelled the GPL as not business friendly because if they used it, they would not be able to keep their customers locked in. Any other business that actually reads the license finds that the GPL is really friendly.

The pipes are still there. Start an xterm/gterm/konsole/LXterminal, read man bash and info coreutils then pipe away to your heart's content.

You do not need a virtual machine to mix languages. GCC can mix C, C++, fortran pascal (and probably a few more) with a little effort. I write lots of things in python and replace bits with C if speed is a problem. The advantage of Java is you can write once and run on one of several well maintained virtual machines. The advantage of Mono is that if you make a profit Microsoft can change the license and sue you for patent infringement.

Habitable HEAVY GRAVITY WORLD found just 42 light-years away

Several g is about 2g if HD40307g has the same density as Earth

Seven times the mass means seven times the gravity only if the plannet is the same radius as Earth. That would be impossible because even osmium - the densest element - is only about four times the density of the Earth. If we pretend the density is the same as Earth then the radius is ³√7 times that of Earth. Gravity decreases with the square of the radius. 7 / (³√7²) = ³√7 ≈ 2.

Chronic exposure (23 generations) to high gravity (2.5g) has been tested on chickens. See: "Great Mambo Chicken & the Transhuman Experience" by Ed Regis.

Desperate broadband minister in Brussels cash splash dash

When is the pay-back?

Lend £500million of tax payers money to BT for fibre installation. BT rent access to the fibre to tax payers. BT use the rent to pay back the loan - oops, missed out that bit. BT keep the fibre and the rent and never pay back the loan. Lets hope Joaquin Almunia can explain Noddy's Guide to Business to Maria Miller.

Widow lost savings in Facebook stock, sues all concerned for $1.9m

Asking for the same same thing twice twice twice?

She claims $1.9m:

a) $105,000 in compensatory damages,

b) $500,000 punitive damages

c) $1m for "pain and suffering"

d) $315,000 in treble damages, awarded in instances of fraud

Total: $1.92m

I can understand either (a) or (d), but not both added together otherwise it would be quadruple damages not treble. While we are at is (b) and (d) look like duplication too. If this is right, shouldn't there also be claims for $350,000 for suffering and $650,000 for pain?

Snake-fondling blonde nude punts Polish coffins

Deliberate Streisand Effect?

I thought the mock horror was an attempt to slow the church's continuing slide into irrelevance.

Kyocera boffins make on-screen buttons feel real

Moor accurate tiepin ...

... does knot mean their will bee bettor spelling.

Nvidia heralds Steam for Linux debut with 'double-speed' drivers

Tripple buffering

Imagine you graphics card is sending frame buffer 1 to the display. While it is doing that, it starts drawing the next frame on buffer 2. If your card can average 600 frames per second, it will complete that task well before frame 1 has been sent. It could sit idle and save some electricity, or it could start drawing a new frame in buffer 3. When the card has finished drawing in frame 3, it still has plenty of time, an no real use for the data in frame buffer 2. It can start drawing another frame there. Eventually, all the data from buffer 1 will reach the monitor. When that happens, the graphics card can start sending data from frame buffer 2 or 3 - which ever is complete. If buffer 2 was complete, the card finishes drawing in buffer 3, then starts drawing in 1, then 3, and so on until buffer 2 has been sent to the monitor.

Triple buffering has many wonderful advantages:

*) It provides extra profits for electricity companies.

*) It makes you fan spin so loud that the neighbours can hear it over the noise of exploding zombies.

*) You can boast about how many frames per second you £5000 graphics card does.

*) The gaming engine looks at your controls once per graphics card frame rather than once per monitor frame.

That last one can make a real difference to how laggy a game feels.

Windows Phone 8 will be 'less than explosive' - HP bigwig

Burning platforms

"declining [Windows] PC industry" and the unique selling feature of a Windows 8 phone will be "how the phone and [Windows] PC operating systems will work together."

Planned obsolescence is supposed to kick in after the warranty expires, not before the customer makes a purchase.

You know who else hates Windows 8? Hackers

UEFI could have provided some security

If I could wipe all the keys and install one of my own, then I could be confident that only kernels I sign can be booted. As it currently stands, the manufacturers install Microsoft's key, and whatever other keys they choose or are legally required to boot CIA signed malware.

Tesla Model S named '2013 Automobile of the Year'

Estimating environmental impact never that easy

Electric cars have regenerative braking. At a wild guess, about 50% of the energy required to make the car accelerate gets back into the battery when it stops. That will approximately equal out a petrol car which is about half the mass but has 0% efficient regenerative braking.

The national grid is about 80% efficient. I do not have a figure for the amount of fuel required to distribute fuel.

Greenness of electricity depends on how it is generated. France is 80% nuclear. The UK still does not have a practical plan for low carbon electricity.

The materials and construction cost should be offset the the costs and benefits of recycling.

I think you are probably right about a Detroit gas-guzzler being more environmentally friendly in the UK. I think they would be about equal in France, but I do not have the required data to prove it one way or the other.

Apple must apologise for its surly apology on its website on Saturday

Judge Birss explained

Apple sued in the UK. That made the UK court into a (European) Community Court for this case. Apple later sued in Germany. That was very naughty. The whole idea of a community court is to avoid getting different verdicts from each member state.

UK iPad Mini FRENZY: Queues stretch SEVERAL FEET from till

Apple's choice

If you had a big expensive high margin product, would you want your customers to know that you also make a smaller cheaper low margin product? I can understand Apple keeping quiet about the iPad mini and only mentioning it to customers who say a full sized tablet is too big.

It's official: No 10 mandates 'open systems' options for Sir Humphreys

Who's definition of open?

Microsoft have a really inclusive definition of open that includes all their lock-in software and file formats.

For that matter, what counts as 'considered'? How about "We considered using open source but were told that is was frightening, uncertain and doubtful".

AMD, Samsung must be ARMed to the teeth to oust Intel servers

Easy: religious faith

He has no evidence to support his theory, but has complete faith.

Intel are very good at performance. They are getting tolerable at power consumption. I cannot see them competing on price. I am sure Intel will produce some excellent high speed low power chips with their next generation super expensive manufacturing process. ARM partners will do the same with the current manufacturing process which will be cheap as chips by then.

2001 Linux has AMD64 support working on a simulator

2003 real AMD64 CPU's for sale

2005 Windows XP Professional x64 edition (AMD64) released

200? AMD64 Windows drivers and applications

Anyone going to hold the breath until Windows RT64?

Ballmer claims Win 8 sales strong, WinPhone to follow

Samsung have absolutely killer hardware

Google/Samsung have gone to a lot of trouble not to give their best laptop a name. "The new Chromebook" is going to be really confusing when the newer chromebook is released. I mean the series 3 Chromebook with the ARM CPU that is half the price of the Intel ones. It is model number XE303C12.

Here is how to install Ubuntu on an XE303C12:

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome-os-devices/samsung-arm-chromebook

The instructions put the Ubuntu on an SDHC card, but you could put it on the internal eMMC chip by typing different device names. Someone has reported success with openSUSE. I will be installing Debian this weekend. The bumps I expect to meet are:

Samsung's kernel will work fine. Debian's default kernel will probably be missing some device drivers. I expect compiling the latest stable kernel will fix most of that and the rest will get fixed within about two stable kernel releases.

The hardware should be able to run armhf, but I suspect armel will be easier to get working. armhf uses the floating point hardware, but armel does not.

The opengl library is not open source. The vendor supplied one will be either armhf or armel. The Mali 200 and 400 GPU's are being reverse engineered (see project Lima). The XE303C12 uses Mali 600.

TalkTalk to Ofcom: 'Talented, lovely monopolist' BT must be reeled in

When do we get the £680m back?

So tax payers buy some fibre for £680m. BT then rents the tax payers own fibre back to the tax payers. Then BT pays back the £680m when erm err ... never.

I could understand buying some fibre, then tendering out some maintenance contracts to the lowest competent bidders. I cannot understand giving the fibre to a monopoly.

Oldest unreadable alphabet yields to 'tablet' computer

Re: Translation

It says:

I for one salute our Achaemenid Persian overlords. I'll get my coat.

Hong Kong's lucky mobile number hawkers revealed

Four worth less than 3 and 5

Numbers on a row of shops: 1, 2, 3, 5, ...

Whoever owned that row of shops clearly believed he would not get as much rent for a shop numbered 4.

Nokia puts Symbian out to pasture ... why not release it into the wild?

What are smoking?

There is no way that Elop will release Symbian into the wild. It would continue to outsell Winphone.

Google rolls out new, cheaper Chromebooks 'for everyone'

Interesting hardware

If I wipe off chrome, install Debian and add some USB3 storage, this new chromebook is better that what I am using now.

Apple loses UK 'Samsung copied us' appeal: Must publicly GROVEL

other use for that money

They could have doubled the pay of Foxconn workers.

The sad thing is that Apple have quality products that fanboys love. They do not need to mess about in the courts. (I am a dyed in the wool penguinista. Even if Apple ban every competing gadget I will still not buy Apple.)

Users grumble after Adobe cancels Acrobat X Suite

Lock-in + segmentation is old news

The suprise is that people are still falling for it.

UK.gov spunks £500k to create jobs in startup marketing businesses

How to qualify for some PR pork?

Come up with some positive spin on the government burning £250 million on a one off hand out because our energy intensive industries 20% powered by wind mills will never be competitive with the same industries in France 80% powered by nukes.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/10/energy_subsidy/

When cookie spewers single you out, it IS personal, barks watchdog

Could be worse

Imagine you have chosen: Accept all cookies, treat all cookies as session cookies and disabled flash, java and javascript. Despite making the effort to show a clear policy for cookies, there is a gray bar wasting 8% of your LCD panel that will only go away if you accept the (changing) terms and conditions from several different companies and a cookie.

The gray bar is there because of an eu directive.

Study finds file sharers buy more music

Ad hominem

People often accuse others of the crimes they would commit themselves. Say whatever you like about the people who collected the data, but bare in mind how many will interpret what you write.

If you think the study results are caused by bias, conduct your own study and publish the results - even if those results are not the ones you want.

Engineer designs glass slipper on Quora

Read carefully

Snopes says that glass is not a mistranslation from French to English because the French source for the English version of the story uses verre not vair. The word vair was no longer in use when the story was transcripted from oral accounts, so whoever told the story to Perrault probably said verre. Going back to the oldest know version of Cinderella (from China), the slippers were gold. Somehow during translation and being passed by word of mouth, gold became glass. I am sure the slippers were made from many different materials before verre. Perhaps vair was one of them.

Global notebook sales tank in recent months

The problems are segmentation and bundling

If Acer, Asus or Toshiba thought that there were a few customers waiting for Windows 8, they would arrange a deal with Microsoft for a Windows 8 license to be included in the purchase price. Customers could buy a machine now with Windows 7 and upregrade for free later.

I got my current laptop cheap because it could not run Vista. Windows 8 is a dissapointment because it does not promise to make several models of potential Linux machines a reasonable price. The thing that annoys me most about the laptop market is segmentation. To get the (cheap) features I want I have to buy something with expensive features that have no value to me.

If this laptop breaks so badly today that I cannot fix it again, my best choice would be to put a π in a briefcase with a monitor, battery, hub and some USB peripherals. If I need a big CPU, I already use my desktop via secure shell. I will always be able to get spare parts for a π in a briefcase, and I will be able to upgrade piecemeal instead of having to buy a new LCD, battery and box just to upgrade the CPU.

How Nokia managed to drive its in-house Linux train off the rails

Easiest product to manufacture: excuses. Elop fires his blamethrower

Elop did his best, but he did not bury Meego deep enough. Despite being limited to a few small markets, it outsells Winphone (and makes a profit). At least he put Nokia's patents in the hands of a troll so Android will get a bit more legal hassle. Even that won't save winphone. Another year as CEO of Nokia, then he will go back to his current employer - Microsoft.

40,000 sign petition to oust Rep. Paul 'pit of hell' Broun

@sabroni: Buddhism

Siddhartha Gautama was a prince who lead a sheltered childhood. When he escaped he saw suffering peasants and knew in his heart that this was something that he wanted to change. He tried out some of the religions of the day. His experiments supported the theory that starving yourself and holding your breath does not alleviate suffering. Full marks to Siddhartha Gautama for testing the theories of the time with experiments and publishing results that would have been unpopular with the authorities.

Plan B was to sit under a fig tree for days until he worked it all out. When he knew in his heart that he understood how to prevent suffering he started his own religion to spread his theories. For about 6(±1) centuries his teachings were passed by word of mouth. About 19 centuries ago, these teachings were written down. Modern flavours of Buddhism disagree about which texts are accurate, which have been embellished and which were made up.

The tests of truth used in Buddhism are "I read it in a book" and "I know in my heart that it is true". Unfortunately, using science to reduce suffering has problems. When you try to test your theory either you experimental group or your control group will suffer and complain about being used in experiments.

New British tax-cuts-for-patents scheme criticised

What plannet are you living on?

The most obvious reason why small businesses have difficulty in this country is they get clobbered by patent litigation. The entry fee for patent litigation is at least £100,000 so small businesses get nothing from owning a patent until the liquidator sells the patent to a troll.

By all means let the Chinese sue each other into bankruptcy to feed their patent lawyers. The way to grow the UK economy is to tax the trolls, not let them off taxes. I want the names of the people responsible for this 'tax cuts for patent trolls' scheme.