Posts by stizzleswick

California takes a shot at mobile 'killswitch' mandate

Funny old thing...

Back when I was forced to get my first cellphone because of my job at the time, the thing was the size of a brick and could actually be turned into one by calling the supplier's hotline in case it was stolen. That was in 1994. The thing couldn't do text messages or anything, really, other than making phone calls... but you could have it bricked.

The question I have is why current "smart"phone manufacturers do not offer that feature today, since obviously it is trivial enough to have been implemented 20 years ago on a budget cellphone.

Twitter may sue US government over right to disclose snooping orders

To get around the muzzling orders...

...the solution would be simple, really: move headquarters out of the U.S. Heck, move the entire business out of the U.S; that's the good thing about the internet: it does not matter where you are based except maybe for tax reasons. So, if Twitter were based in, say, France, let's see what happens if/when the NSA demands to get free access to user data w/o notice to the public. Could be worth a few chuckles. Or move the headquarters to Sealand; that might yield some interesting actions, too...

In the long run, if U.S. data-collectors like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, etc. were to move their headquarters out of the U.S. in order to evade the IMHO ludicrous way the rights of their users are being mishandled there, this would have a rather heavy impact on the U.S. economy. I wonder how long it would take, in that case, for the U.S. Senate to finally get on the job it is currently neglecting, i.e., overseeing the secret services...

Check, please... mine's the anonymised coat...

Microsoft takes InfoPath behind the shed, says successor will be better

Good riddance.

During the few years that I was admin in a Winslows Server-driven shop, InfoPath/SharePoint were the major bears I had to, er, bear administering (I managed to talk the management out of continuing with Hyper-V after a catastrophic failure brought on by a "security" update...). There are far better solutions out there which are far more flexible and easier to administer...

Go ahead. Flame me. Mine's the asbestos-lined one...

Optical filters head to Germany for Solar Orbiter build

Re: Don't understand

"If the accuracy is 1/30th, why give us the wavelength down to 1/10000th?"

Simple. That is the nominal wavelength the filter was designed for. The accuracy is + or - one thirtieth nanometer. So, we have a theoretical value for what we're shooting at, and the accuracy is, as said, plus or minus one thirtieth nm. Meaning that while the design value is accurate down to 1/10000th, the actual value achieved may be anywhere near there within plus or minus those 1/30th nm.

Re: Interesting, but

Er... nope. Solar irradiation is a major factor for several reasons, including generation of atmospheric water vapour, which is a greenhouse gas. So is methane, which is about 20 times more efficient than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

Mind you, the quote from the article was not about global warming models, but about climate models. I.e., what they use to make long-term weather forecasts, among other things.

Boeing bent over for new probe as 787 batteries vent fluid, start to MELT

Most efficient in a class of one

"which is touted as the most fuel-efficient airliner in its class." -- that should be all right, since until the A350 starts being delivered later this year (hopefully), it is the only airliner in its class, making this kind of distinction rather easy to obtain.

What I do not understand is why Boeing are not learning lessons from their previous failure (i.e., the well-publicised battery desaster). Part of the reason for the delays of the A350 is that EADS are checking their options on what can be done safely concerning fuels, batteries, etc.; maybe Boeing should take the time, too. Costly, yes. But necessary, it seems.

Oh well... I'm only a lowly technical editor writing operating and repair manuals (obviously not for Boeing... or EADS--need a good TE, you guys, I'm available...) with an engineering background. But until you've fixed your plane, I won't get on it...

Chinese Moon rover, lander duo wake up after two-week snooze

"According to the old stories, the rabbit is constantly pounding herbs on the lunar surface to give to the gods."

Wonder what "herbs" those are, considering the gods' recent behaviour...

</joke>

Seriously, well done those guys. Here's hoping for a lot more pix and data from lander and rover--cheers!

Asteroid-hunting beauty AWAKENS, takes cheeky snaps of neighbours

Re: What I can't make out - why oh why was it ever put into hibernation?

Quick check on Wikipedia; source link to NEOWISE official homepage followed, hence to this press release giving the reason for the hibernation:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2011-031

To cut a long story short, they couldn't think of anything for NEOWISE to do after its extended primary mission was over, so put it to sleep until they could think of something.

Facebook to BLAST the web with AUTO-PLAYING VIDEO ads

No I don't think servers etc. are free. But I don't use facebook either, so... *shrug*

Microsoft: Anonymous hacktivists DDoSed us? Really?

Considering MS' track record with such statements...

...it probably wasn't a DDOS, it was a feature.

D-Link FINALLY slams shut 'Joel's backdoor'

"Only turning off remote administration would protect the device."

For a SOHO bit of kit, I (being an admin/consultant) would not even connect the router to anything except the machine I'm using for initial setup, let alone the internet, without turning off remote admin--truly small offices (and home users) quite simply don't need that bug feature. And in my personal opinion, using most D-Link offerings in a larger setting would be akin to suicide anyway.

So... it may be a backdoor, but for anybody who knows the very first bit about security, it would be turned off anyway. Sort of like people using "passw0rd" as a password tend to have their systems hacked into more often than those who use actual passwords. Hence, very limited news value in this article from my point of view. There's a bug in a router. Not going to be the last one. It can be switched off, but most users won't. Their problem. If you don't know how to handle your own kit, hire a pro. My hourly rates are reasonable...

I want to play with VMs

How I do it

Two scenarios: first, occasional use of a different OS needed. Second, several different OS needed a lot of the time.

First case

I prefer using VirtualBox for my own use-case (got two pieces of software that require XP--not any versin of NT/Windows, but XP specifically); it's FOSS, relatively lean, easy to handle and pretty flexible. Good driver support for guest OSs, too. I have it running on both my main workstations (one on MacOS X, one on Debian GNU/Linux) for that quick access to the special bits, and for testing Linux and BSD distributions I plan to install on my own or my customers' machines before doing so. Need something with good tech support, I'd go for VMware.

Second case

I'd suggest a full hypervisor running on a dedicated machine with lots of RAM. Lots and lots of RAM. From experience, I recommend Xen. Got that up and running for a customer in 10 minutes flat. I'm not kidding. Installer disc in drive, fire up machine, ten minutes later I was importing the first set of VMs from the customer's failed previous hypervisor (Hyper-V. Big failure, as in, several VMs trashed in the process and customer as well as administrator swore never to use the product again). Alternatively, use Zen. Both are free and are Linux-based; Zen comes with some goodies from the SuSE project and optional tech support.

NASA shines a light on rehab plan for crocked Kepler probe

Not all that sci-fi.

After all, successful tests have been conducted (though rather smaller in scale) on the theme of lightsails etc. So, science: yup, it's science. The method has been demonstrated to work. Fiction: it used to be fiction, but isn't any longer. They're putting it into practice.

I love it when a plan comes together... and my Kudos go to the likes of Asimov, Heinlein, Hildebrandt, Clarke, L.N. Smith, et infinite al for having seen the possibilities decades before we could do it.

Guess which major US telco ISN'T cracking down on premium SMS spam?

Re: PSMS scamming only exists in the US and Canada, @AC 18:40 GMT

Had not been aware of Brazil also having the problem, and as I have since learned, also Australia. Thank you for pointing it out, have an upvote!

Funny thing there.

Interestingly, it seems the practice of PSMS scamming only exists in the US and Canada--where the telcos charge people for incoming calls and SMs. In most of Europe, as far as I am aware, it is strictly "who initiates the call, pays for it." I may be ignorant, but a PSMS "feature" does not seem to exist in my home country, because of that very simple principle being enforced by according law--nor in any neighbouring country AFAIK. If I err here, please feel free to correct me.

I find the article to be a little ambiguous on whether the ban is on the SM being sent by the scammers, btw, or on the content: is the fraud perpetrated by sending unwanted SMs, or is the damage done by the recipients of said messages replying to them?

In the latter case, I would have to ask why they are replying? The only way to eliminate spam/cram is for everybody to simply not respond, thereby removing the economic basis for spamming.

You can't have that many! China scuppers US, EU tech tariff talks

"They will soon get the point."

Would be nice if it worked, really. Back in the 1960s, the U.S. imposed heavy tariffs (90 % says one source) on European steel products (targeting imported cars specifically, but they didn't want to go ahead and say it outright). The European Community answered by imposing a 79 % tariff on U.S. produce, driving the price of pipe tobacco and bananas up noticeably. Most European car manufacturers responded by manufacturing cars in the U.S. and in countries nearby on which the U.S. did not impose those ridiculous tariffs.

Both the U.S. and the European tariffs are still in place 50 years later. Guess nobody learned anything from the whole episode, except that that the state, being the man in the middle, can fill its coffers with most consumers not noticing that it is at their expense.

PANIC OVER DROOPING house prices hits MEMBER-shaped estate

City planners...

...must have been able to see this before the streets were even built--you don't need a satellite image to see the shape of this if you have a map--, so I will assume the responsible architect had a good chuckle when he drew up the plans for this development.

Rogue trader gets 2½ years for BILLION-dollar Apple share plot

Re: Bring back the stocks

" Bring back the stocks "

For a moment there, I thought you meant he should return the stock certificates... and that there were too many of those involved already.

Deep beneath melting Antartic ice: A huge active volcano

"*I* think that that's kind of a funny story."

Wait 'til your feet get wet, then re-think the comedy value :P

And yes, I take the entire global warming thingy with a few grains of salt. But I do keep up with the actually happening science as opposed to the political garbage being spewed forth by the various political parties the world over...

Mind you, where I am, I'll probably not get wet feet, but frozen ones. You see, Global Warming is a global average thing, as in the global average temperatures go up. That means that the temperatures go up more than they go down, in general, over the entire globe. But that is only the average development of temperatures. Which means that it is entirely possible and even likely that while on average, temperatures rise on a global level, in many places, the temperatures are still going down. World-over average, see?

And unfortunately, I'm in one of the areas that get colder while much of the rest of the world gets nice and cozy... oh well, I'll get to do more skiing, at least...

Schiller: 'Almost everyone' at Apple works on iPhones - not Macs or anything

Re: Pure gut feeling

Point well made, and taken.

I still wouldn't cry a single tear if the parasites lawyers could be laid off...

Have an upvote :)

Pure gut feeling

But you know, I really think Apple and Samsung should get into bed and make a couple of babies, so to speak, putting out the world's next smartphone-to-beat. Together they could do it; their current patent spats are going to be fruitless, what with most of the patents involved being ludicrous for lack of any technical innovation, in my personal opinion--as the holder of two patents myself --in my estimation they both would profit by collaborating, and much more importantly, two boatloads of lawyers would be laid off.

That alone would be worth it.

Sony's new PlayStation 4 and open source FreeBSD: The TRUTH

Re: And this is news? @Kebabbert

"Back then, they all suddenly jumped shipped and bet heavily on Linux, that was very immature back then"

Funnily enough, some then-large and some still-large players originally went BSD instead, like Sun Microsystems (Solaris), IBM (AIX, though admittedly with a UNIX source license in their pocket), HP (OSF/1, later rebranded as HP/UX), NEXT (and consequently, Apple, who still use FreeBSD on a MACH kernel as the base of their OSs). All of those companies have contributed hugely to the BSD flavour of their choice.

IBM and HP hedged their bets by supporting Linux and contributing to that project, too. As have many others. So, no news, agreed. But I don't share your conspiracy-theory point of view there.

Stratfor email, credit-card hacker Hammond thrown in cooler for 10 YEARS

Honestly? Good.

Having been a victim of CC fraud myself (and proud owner of one of the two cards that actually were instrumental in catching the culprit in my case--not this guy, though), I note that until very recently, this sort of crime seems to have been regarded as something of a "gentleman thief" thingy. You're doing it in the name of Anonymous (a movement I at least partially respect because they do bring up and make public real infringements on my rights, though I don't necessarily agree with their methods), so stealing innocent and non-involved people's hard-earned money is OK? Doesn't wash. Stinks even if you do wash it.

Lock 'em up, melt down the keys, throw resulting slag into ocean, etc. Meanwhile, I'm off for a nice pint; I finally, after two years of struggling, got the stolen money refunded to my bank account. Minus fees etc.

Dell orbits Linux a third time with revamped Sputnik notebooks

<rant>Actually, from the point of view of an end-user (many of my customers are end-users), I'd want developer machines to be restricted to about 640k of RAM to enforce proper coding instead of the memory-gobblers that even relatively simple applications like PIMs have become these days because developers just chuck in libraries without end which have at most one single function that is actually used in the application.

A point in case being the wordprocessor/page layout crossover Papyrus, which in its latest version needs about 50 MB of hard disk space and a negligible amount of memory, yet has all features 99 % of all people need out of a wordprocessor plus quite a few that go into page layout. I wonder why it is that, say, Quark XPress and Adobe InDesign need more than .5 GB each on the disc and won't run on less that 2 GB of memory these days. Let alone MS Office, or, not to be too picky here, also OpenOffice.org. Half a gig for an office suite? WTF?!?

And yes, I know most coders have little to no choice because of time constraints; they have to deliver something that somehow works on time. But if they didn't have machines that allow them to do things 95 % of all consumer PCs can't do (because of lack of memory and CPU oomph) and would be restricted to those constraints, that would IMHO lead to more consumer-friendly applications.

As sysadmin, I have seen too many instances of companies having to upgrade their complete end-user hardware just because the latest version of whatever-it-is needs ludicrous amounts of memory and HD space despite adding little to no new functionality.

</rant>

Rant aside (sorry, that one has been building inside me for years...), I laud every effort, even if overpriced, to give consumers choice other than between W8 Home and W8 Professional. Or whatever the editions are called these days.

Boffins agree: Yes we have had an atmospheric warming pause

Re: higher levels of UV rays

The thing with the elevated UV irradiation is that UV gets transformed to infrared upon hitting any of a large number of possible irradiation targets, like glass, concrete, sand, water, etc. by being reflected with a slight energy loss.

Infrared is, perhaps fittingly, also popularly called "heat radiation" because irradiation of the skin with it causes a feeling of warmth and it can transport energy such as "heat". More importantly, the energy the UV radiation loses in the transformation heats up the media irradiated. If you want to know how unbelievably efficient this mechanism is, get into a car that has just sat in the sun for a few hours (granted, not all of the heat melting the skin off you in that car is directly caused by direct UV irradiation, but a good part of it is).

Hence, more UV irradiation = higher temperatures.

Microsoft's so keen on touch some mice FAIL under Windows 8.1

"Mouse movement is not to scale even after acceleration is turned off"

Funny thing there; when I was making most of my money by doing high-quality pixel graphics some time ago, this is what I noticed the most about my customers' Windows machines I was supposed to do my work on. The mouse tracking (and the graphics tablet tracking, at the time, too) was not nearly as accurate as it was on those overpriced, underspecced machines by that unloved vendor.

By now, LXDE, Gnome, KDE etc. do a better job of mouse tracking than Windows ever did, right up to W8.1. No idea why that is. But maybe Microsoft should review their priorities, seeing as they are trying to market a graphical user interface...?

It's a bit early in the week, but I'll have a stiff one, thank you.

Apple scrambles to fix buggy Mavericks apps

Fixes are out already, it seems

At least, I got the iBooks and Mail fixes installed today. No idea what they were fixing, because like a few others above have noted, I haven't experienced any bugs. From my point of view, Mavericks and its associated stack of applications is one of the smoothest OS releases in my lifetime, and I started out on MS-DOS 2.1.

WD slips bullet between teeth, gets ready to hand $706m to Seagate

Re: Quality drop, @Nigel11

Interestingly enough, I have used a lot of Maxtor drives through the decades, as well as all other large brands; the Maxtors were never the fastest drives, but I have never had one fail. I remember the controller problems from the early 90s (couldn't use a Maxtor on the same bus as a Conner), but that was about it. Want a brand that really sucked? Quantum... remember the Fireball desaster?

These days, btw, most of the disc failures I see are Samsung. Having no problems with either WD or Seagate, but then I'm not buying their consumer-level discs either.

OS X Mavericks mail client spews INFINITE SPAM

Agreed, OOo works fine, as does LibreOffice. Had a few hiccoughs with Aperture though (since fixed).

NORKS cyber mayhem cost South Korea £500m

"Pretty impressive for a room full of VIC 20's."

I know it's a joke... but one should remember that NK has the largest percentile spending on military in the world. Their crackers probably have access to better hardware than MOSSAD, and that should be going quite a long way.

Just because NK is an operetta kingdom shouldn't blind us to the fact that they're a bloody dangerous operetta kingdom.

Rumoured rain can't dampen sun-racers' spirits

Re: Bullet holes.

Er... it's Australia, not the U.S.

Space boffins boycott Kepler 'scope talks after US bans Chinese guests

The last time a country introduced this sort of discrimination...

...of scientists, it lost a major war. WWII, to be exact. You see, most of the really good scientists left the county and started working for its opponents... the few that remained couldn't get anything serious done because they didn't have enough competent colleagues any longer.

The Vulture 2: What paintjob should we put on our soaraway spaceplane?

The fun and games notwithstanding,

there are reasons why most suborbital and orbital vessels are painted glossy white. Has to do with reflection of infrared wavelengths so as to prevent excessive heating through solar irradiation.

Ubuntu 13.10: Meet the Linux distro with a bizarre Britney Spears fixation

Re: Anonymized search implemented they say

Actually, it'll be sent to the NSA. And CIA. And Google. And even worse.

Re: I don't want any of this.

Actually, I do want most of the under-the-hood things Canonical are doing. What I (still) don't want is any GUI that has me jump through hoops just to fire up an application that I would otherwise start up from a well-sorted menu, or from a well-sorted folder.

The biggest news is, of course, the display server. X.org is getting to be a little long in the tooth these days (again--I still remember the times when XFree86 was the go-to display server because X.org was stuck firmly in the early 1990s). I think it's a good thing that work is being done on a modern DS.

My biggest no-no is Unity. The thing just simply keeps me from getting work done, that's why I am using Kubuntu. Otherwise, I find very little wrong with Canonical's efforts.

Travel much? DON'T buy a Samsung Galaxy Note 3

No matter the intention...

...the regionalisation (and I apologise for the unwarranted word-coining here) of any device or medium has so far been proven ineffective, to say the least. Point in case, the DVD; please bear with me for a moments, there is a point to it all at the end...

When I buy a DVD medium anywhere in the world, I buy a license to view its contents. The problem being that the manufacturers had decided way back when that DVD media intended for the US marked should not be able to be played in, say, Europe. By European copyright law, that's a no-no. I bought the right to playback, and that cannot be removed by moving to a different country, or continent. Not even planet. So the European copyright bods never did anything about things like, say, the VLC, which outright ignores Region Locking on DVDs and BRDs. Which is a good thing.

Now... if you have a global market in mind, which all cellphone manufacturers/distributors have, any attempt at region-locking is, by definition, suicide. You see, I bought this phone. Paid for it. Simlock-free. And now they want to tell me I can only use SIMs from one particular area? Bad move... guess what, I'll buy from _honest_ people instead. Even if it costs a little more.

Apple: Now that you've updated to iOS 7... YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK

Wonder why I can still revert my iPhone 4...

...to works settings, i.e., iOS 5? Thought the article said that can't be done any longer?

Apple blings up new iMac with latest Intel chips, next-gen Wi-Fi

The new MacPro, most likely.

Re: CD/DVD drive

For all those saying DVDs are a thing of the past, I have to disagree; I need both DVD and BluRay burners regularly (read: daily) for my business (so the iMac is out for me anyway; can't reasonably expect to burn BRDs via a USB connection). The CD/DVD drive would be minimum spec for my expectations. So I side with those who agree that without an optical drive, it's not an all-in-one.

Canadian family gives up modern tech to live like it's 1986

You're missing *WHAT?!?!?!?*

"I kinda wish I could just grab that iPad," she told the Toronto Sun, adding, "You're missing seasons of Big Brother."

Since I cannot imagine anybody equipped with anything even remotely remeniscent of a brain missing "Big Brother," I guess that outs the experimentalists as... well... fill in your own word here; if I did I might get castigated and/or banned. Sorry... there it is. I prefer to think about Real Ale and good cheese, and really, really could do without the likes of "Big Brother" and other entertainments for the brain-dead... I prefer my brain cells to be killed by *really* good Ale...

Intermedia's Exchange hive goes titsup ... and no one's answering calls

@sureo

"I'm glad I'm not the sysadmin that typed in the wrong unix command that brought the whole thing down!"

This whole thing is about an MS Exchange service. Guess what... runs on Windows only. And right now, I'd hate to be the foot you shot yourself into with your comment.

This sort of thing is exactly why...

...I keep telling my customers not to go cloudy. Today all I could tell one of them was "I told you so" when he called me about this outage and asked me what to do.

It's official: Apple sends out invitations for September 10 event

Re: Think of the fanbois - El reg.

"It wont make my coffee in the mornings or wipe my bottom."

That would be expecting a little much from a smartphone, wouldn't it?

China confirms plans for first Moon visit later this year

I honestly do not care who does it...

...but I do believe a permanent settlement on the Moon--or in a circumlunar-orbit space station--would be a huge benefit in the long run, for a bunch of reasons. If NASA can't get the funding, I don't really care whether the Chinese, the British, Burger King or Walgreen's do it. So long as it's done.

Yes, I know it's a huge amount of resources. So let whoever has the money do it, and hope they're nice about it: remember the USSR and the US played nice even during the cold war, sharing each others's space labs (though the USSR actually put more effort into it than the US did, if you consider MIR).

This is about the future of mankind as a whole. Hopefully, the Chinese (if successful!) will realise that and act accordingly. Think about the possibilities.

Tencent offers 10TB of free cloud storage for all

Thanks, but no thanks.

Any data storage scheme that I will use for my customers' data, let alone my own, will have to be set up and handled by myself. Because I quite simply trust nobody any longer, and that goes back way before the NSA scandal. If I can't see *all* the possible settings, i.e., have root-level access to the storage medium, I won't let my customers use it unless they really, really insist after several rounds of warnings.

Back to the topic. After having had one customer complain that parts of his work had been patented in the US by a different company not known for expertise in the same area roundabout the time patent applications were being filed in Europe by said customer, I decided to add a disclaimer to my contract: I won't be held responsible for customer stupidity. Now, putting business data of any kind on a Chinese-run cloud, that is customer stupidity. Same level as an U.S.-run cloud service, really.

I have started to ask around for the possibility of having a storage server placed in Sealand...

Germany warns: You just CAN'T TRUST some Windows 8 PCs

"privacy without good security".

So to ensure privacy, MS suggests to completely remove privacy without raising the grade of securiy in any noticeable manner?

The problem with that is that MS and the partners in the TCP group are not laying open the way the TPM works, so it is impossible for most people to check what all they can do to me. How about an Opensource alternative? I might go for that after sufficient peer review...

EXPLICIT VID: Man filmed trying to bang brand new 'budget iPhone'

Re: It's plastic

I have to agree here; the noise audible in the video shouts "plastic!" Maybe ceramic-coated?

Bug-finder chucked for posting to Zuck

Re: Pay the guy!

And re-instate his account, of course.