
Re:My HTC must be broken
No, your *Universe* is broken. E-mail God, CC Hawking...
1257 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2007
Works on so many levels. Just how efficient are these things? No gain over the theoretical isotropic radiator (dBi) would be my guess, much less the usual +2.3dB halfwave dipole reference (dBd)
I'm also sick of hearing about "shortable." Even with a coat of something insulating, hand capacitance would do the job at these frequencies. A lot of people (including his Steveness) have it in their empty heads that covering it up with a rubber band or varnish is enough. It isn't. Your hand is still going to be in the near field, meatbag.
Add that to the fact the RSSI (received signal strength indicator) calibration between phones differs wildly and we have a pool of bovine excrement that could drown an elephant, which is simply indicative of a much wider problem within the industry in general: Form over function.
Not that the RF performance of most modern phones is anything to write home about. Epitome of antenna design on a mobile? Ericsson T28 (R320 and R520 don't count; they were more or less rigid T28s), without question. That thing's ERP was proved to be head and shoulders above anything else available at the time.
Phones with internal antennas are always going to be a compromise. Putting said antenna on the outside of the case in an area where people will be holding the phone (moving the near field even closer to the salty meatbag to the point that the user becomes part of the antenna system)? A step further into the realms of madness, which is why Apple are being singled out.
Oh, and for the amateurs amongst us: Q-Tek Penetrator, anyone?
...because of all the paradigms, synergies and leveraging. In all the years I was a member, I can count on one hand (even after the accident with the tape safe door) the number of interesting technical aspects of membership but I'd need to be a conjoined twin from Norfolk if I wanted to tot up the touchy-feely, team-building, self-improvement blurb. Don't we all get enough of that crap taking up valuable time at work?
What you've quoted there is the Free Software definition. Open source and Free Software are two very different things. Despite what Phipps says, open source is not dependent on the OSI. It's whatever code access conditions the copyright holder wants to set and that's what burns RMS' backside more than anything, because he can't dictate that the code /remains/ open. If you get open access to the source code, it's open source.
Not only don't you get it back, you also have the privilege of paying a bit of the fine when you next buy memory. Isn't that just great? The EU really are looking after consumers.
I really do love this idea of fining large corporations huge sums of money to "protect the consumer." It's glaringly obvious that they'll just treat it as OpEx and then pass the hit on to us.
Obviously the alternative is to block sales for a while, but that also screws the EU's revenue stream by not getting the fine and losing out on taxes. I think I begin to see the motivation...
Double balls. Any self-respecting Staffie would knock itself cold trying to get through a door at full pelt with the centre of the pick axe handle in its mouth and the rest stuck out either side. Trust me on this, I've yet to meet a Staffie that has any idea of its own width or that of whatever it happens to be carrying, which is one of the reasons they're widely known as "comedy dogs" to those in the know...
Ain't ambivalence a bitch? On the one hand there's privacy and on the other there's a huge kick up the arse for the patents-in-standards mob.
Well done, Google. Even I can't knock this move.
Troll, because there will surely be some kicking around brandishing patents before this is all over.
...to the ridiculous. This cult is getting ever worse. It's especially telling that they equate someone trying to buy a $500+ consumer item as a "child ['s face] when their new toy isn't in stock." They obviously think all of their customers are eight years old.
Still, one must take one's comedy where one finds it. I, for one, continue to ROFL at every story published.
This here's the Internet. It was built and designed with mutual co-operation in mind and was never intended to be "monetized," whatever the hell that is. The *only* exception to this is the pr0n industry.
There are other news information services. I really do hope more and more greedy sods do the same as it'll remove the dross from the web and we may be able to get some search results that really are sharing information rather than just trying on the hard sell. Next thing to deal with: Comparison sites.
Nothing of value (except perhaps Jeremy Clarkson's Sunday rant column) will be lost.
Problem is, blocking of withheld CLI (I'm assuming you mean System Y's *227 blocking) does NOT stop international calls coming in without CLI. This makes it next to useless as a countermeasure against marketing companies.
Fail. That, along with not being able to selectively block outgoing premium rate numbers without losing other functionality is about the most retarded idea imaginable.
...but remember this: Once you've given your privacy away you can't just take it back again, especially if you have given it to an obsessive data mining and retaining outfit such as Google.
As an aside, I can't help thinking that this apathy towards online security and privacy is the continuing evolution of the Geocities "DIG ME!" type people sans clue who think they know everything but, in reality, have very little idea of what goes on in quiet corners of the Internet, let alone the consequences of their actions online and all the little ways their habits get noticed. It's also perplexing that they see loss of control as a small price for everyone to pay and extol the virtues of a privacy-free society before they have even the least idea of how big that bill is going to be when it lands.
Your faith in human nature is touching. Naïve, perhaps, but touching.
You can also use Scroogle (SSL) as an anonymising proxy if you really need all the Google results such as shopping pages for the item you've already got that you're Googling to unbrick. There are search plug-ins for most major browsers over on Mycroft ( http://mycroft.mozdev.org ).
Use the SSL variant. It makes man-in-the-middle snooping rather difficult (not impossible, but you knew that already after the recent MITM attack on OpenSSL using renegotiation).
...which feud will erupt from a mailing list discussion about the colour of the paper used for members' bills, at which point everyone will fall out permanently and the project page will become yet another unpopulated orphan with 0 files in the repo and a perpetual alpha status.
Don't try to deny it, you know it's true.
What comes out the other end may not be the original, but it'll be a pretty good quantum facsimile...
/me reading far to much Chris Moriarty and maliciously introducing into the collective commentard consciousness the old debate regarding teleportation and souls.
Linus is not an a-hole. He's a bastard (as in BOFH) and you can ask him yourself if you don't believe me. Linus' function is to oversee the kernel code repository and be a single point decision maker in the event of disputes. If Linus wasn't a bastard with power the LKML would be full of arguments and nothing would ever get committed.
This is one the strengths of Linux: Without an overall "benevolent dictator" it would be rule by committee, which we all know is a recipe for disaster. So, I'll go so far as to say Linus' function is essential for the smooth running of the kernel development process. Linus occasionally delegates power to other sub-bastards for the same reason. Yours is not to reason why, yours is just to enjoy the results. If you think you can do better, why, just fork it!
"Microsoft and Apple are also doing it, so what exactly is your problem ?"
Just this: The hypocrisy. Do as I say, not as I do. There's enough of that about without infecting open source with double standards.
What part of "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer" do you not understand?
Relicensing is NOT an option. BSD code stays BSD licensed. Extracting strings from the Windows XP nslookup binary proves that Microsoft have fulfilled their obligations. Relicensing BSD code under GPL, however, is not compliant.
But who cares? It's only BSD, right?
Part of the problem is the misconception that you show in the last sentence. It really is possible to live without Google (and by that I mean completely, YouTube, Blogspot, DoubleClick, Google*). The reason they're so powerful and, by extension, dangerous is because people refuse to look at alternatives.
I've had their entire IPv4 and 6 space blocked both ways long before the majority realised what a dangerous behemoth Google was becoming and I can still function on the 'net.
Is PoS equipment the same sector as consumer electronics? IIRC, for a Trademark to be violated, the use has to cause confusion. As much as I am loathe to stick up for Apple, this time I would suggest that they're not the same markets.
As usual, the only people who will get rich from this are the land sharks.
Have you ever tried to compile the Moz source on Windows? It's unbelievably convoluted, needs bits of this, that and the other IDE and fails more often than not.
Fine for us freetards (since the build against GTK2 and GCC is simples), but the Windows users will inevitably be using pre-compiled binaries.
== batshit crazy. Continue to take anything he says with a truckload of NaCl. The only people this may affect is AMD, and even that could go both ways. Until JHH sorts out Fermi, this constant, pitiful, desperate practice of renaming existing cards as new ones and, frankly, shuts the fuck up and stops making an arse of himself, nV will continue to be a laughing stock.
Branson's Ransomware. Did this thing originate in Russia, by any chance? AntiVirus 2010 has detected malware on your computermabob and is requiring much wodka to be fixing him.
Joking aside, if this becomes a legitimate practice, how do we expect the lusers and n00bs to spot the real ransomware before it's too late?
Because, Dan, if they did that in the way your text seems to suggest, all hell would break loose with people calling Microsoft silly names and kicking off a whole new round of "Microsoft is EVIL for replacing my default search."
MS have to tread carefully, being in the sights of so many government agencies.
If you mean "Add Bing" on the dropdown when visiting Bing's landing page, similar to the way Cuil does, then that should present no problems.
Yes, I know Mozilla are in between a rock and a hard place. I don't want to be unfair with them, but I value privacy and. even without taking into consideration Eric's little rant, I do not trust Google. You're right about Chrome, too. All it needs is NoScript and AdBlock-alike plugins and it'll start to take market share right and left and privacy be damned.
Still, configuring a custom build isn't that onerous on FreeBSD. I just have to maintain parity between the official port and my local one and not call it Firefox.
It's all well and good to direct people to other search engines, but what about the crap that's built into the browser? Safe search, geolocation, the "awesome" bar, search plugins, mail handling via Gfail and so on. Each and every one of these is a potential privacy leak.
Please, Mozilla, remove this dross from Firefox. If I wanted Google to have a record of my browsing sessions I'd tell them myself. As it is I'm stuck compiling a custom build of Shiretoko just to evade this rot.
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ look for scroogle ssl, install it and delete the rest. My custom build of Shiretoko has this by default, without the rest of the dross that comes with Fx. You'll also be wanting to disable "safe" browsing and geolocation to stop that reporting back to the mothership, too. There's also a search plugin for IE/Camino on there that works with IE8.
Rocket science it ain't.
We are the Gorg. Your lives, as they have been, are over. Your species will adapt to service us. We will add your web searches and interests to our database. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
Yes, and we all know how that turned out last time, too. It was confounded by Data (both times) and it can be again if they get too cocky.
What, no Borg icon? Ah well, terminator will have to do.
"Like Firefox, we will move to a more rapid release cycle - where we can provide incremental improvements"
Sounds reasonable so far...
"while leveraging the platform,"
Ah, tl;dr or, alternatively, too full of weasel-words; didn't read. It's just another load of old marketing bollocks that nearly broke my bullshitometer. Drop all the Google crap and start talking like a human being, then perhaps I'll start listening again. Firefox and Thunderbird used to be no-nonsense applications that won on less bloat and more control. Now it seems Firefox is yet another data-gathering app for Google, Thunderbird has stagnated and Mozilla has lost its way.
Let me know when the project is going to get back to its original goals and I don't have to build a custom version of your browser just to retain control. Otherwise I really couldn't care less.
All you need is access to a local *account*, not physical access. This is in the same league as the (now fixed) NULL pointer dereference vulnerabilities of a couple of months ago. Coupled with another vulnerability in, say, Apache (this is just an examplia gratia) that can inject executable code, you can get owned remotely. We really need to come up with a better term than "local" for these types of vulnerability. IMHO, "potential remote" is a more accurate fit.
What I can tell you is that the emergency patch does indeed stop the published exploit code dead (frantically tested on my testbox at 6AM with a very quick and dirty regression test set). Whether it patches all cases of this vulnerability remains to be seen, but at least it guards against cut/paste s'kiddies for now.
We do. The responsible and established method of reporting vulnerabilities that potentially affect a large installed base of machines is to report via the relevant project's security contact. In this case, all the information you could possibly need to report in a responsible manner is here:
http://security.freebsd.org/
The FreeBSD secteam always credits researchers who report responsibly with finds, so I see no reason why the researcher in this case chose to make public full exploit code without giving the project a chance to mitigate this issue first. Ego or mischief? You decide.
"Har har, you're not a secure as you thought you were" isn't very constructive, especially when the FreeBSD community is much more amenable to the idea that bugs exist, nobody is perfect and the best direction to expend effort is in finding and fixing them.