Posts by Herby

Microsoft: You've got it all WRONG. It's Apple's iPad playing catch-up with our Surface

If I wanted a laptop...

...I'd buy a laptop. NOT a silly surface goodie. By the time you add all the necessary things to make it "laptopable", it ends up being more expansive than a laptop.

Sorry, the device I want is a simple things that allows me to "consume" information, and the iPad is very good at that. If I want to play solitaire, I can do that as well. I have no need for a flappy, clicky, disconectable keyboard that dancers on board room tables want to play with.

Of course if I could load Linux on the beast, I might have a different attitude, but there are already android tablets for that function.

p.s. A touch interface is MUCH different from a mouse interface. Please do take note.

How to spot a coders comment

If you were in the 60's

C Comments would

C Have 'C' in column 1.

C If you needed to elucidate the operator, it would be something like:

10 FORMAT(17HTHIS IS A COMMENT)

C ALL UPPER CASE OF COURSE!

C

C I'M SHOWING MY AGE

DARPA slaps $2m on the bar for the ULTIMATE security bug SLAYER

Pretty easy if you ask me...

Analyze code: Boot up system

Find defects: Is it Microsoft Windows

Fix defects: Remove Windows, Install Linux.

Do I get the reward?

Microsoft boffins test rival 'Google Glass' geek goggles, say insiders

But I'm far sighted!

Slowly advancing presbyopia is making itself know to me and I need +3 glasses to even see the monitor I use frequently. I talked with a guy who uses his pair of Google eyes and he indicated that the focus problem is one they need to deal with.

I guess this is for the young at heart!

Seagate: Fibre Channel? RAID? SATA? File System? All RUBBISH

Approaching write once storage.

With the cost of "secondary media" dropping so much, and its density decreasing as well, the industry may soon approach the condition where everything is written out only once and it stays forever. You just buy more and more drives as you write more and more data, keeping all the "old" data as you go.

Sure there might be problems when going to higher density drives where you copy the larger physical storage media to the smaller one that has more room, but it comes close to the "what me worry" type of storage. You get a history of the data for free.

Of course keeping it all sorted out may be another matter, but that is just "programming".

RUMBLINGS: Apple pondering 'Touch Cover keyboard' for iPads

Prices are interesting!!

Most of the mentioned keyboards appear to be less costly that the Microsoft offering. Maybe they have something there!

11m Chinese engulfed by 'Airpocalypse' at 4000% of safe pollution levels

And Laws of the USA/Europe are going to prevent this?

I strongly doubt it. Yes, the pollution is pretty bad, but out well intentioned wonderful environmentalists here complain about the pollution we are creating here in the USA, and hobbling us with rules that will make the "clean" air just a little bit "cleaner" (think of the children!). They should expend their energies where it will do more good in those places (China among others). The problem they have is that China could care less, as the story pointed out, because those "in control" have their nice air filters.

Message to Al Gore: Expend your efforts in China NOW! We here in the USA have done quite a bit already.

US Veep's wireless heart implant disabled to stop TERRORIST HACKERS

The range is pretty small

The design of the ICDs is pretty simple. They use VERY old technology (the one I worked on used CMOS 6502's, and that was 10 years ago), so they really aren't that sophisticated. The price they charge for them (I recall it was around $20k or so) usually includes a laptop for the doctor to communicate with, "thrown in". My understanding was that the communications between the laptop and the implanted device was done by an induction coil, necessitating a VERY close contact (less than an inch).

While it makes for a great story, reality is a bit more far fetched.

The use of "old" technology (around 25 years old) is because they are "medically cleared" and well characterized. They also need to have VERY LOW power requirements which limits their complexity as well. Over half of what is implanted is the battery, and it must last over 3 years!

Microsoft pulls Win 8.1 RT code which upgraded Surface 'slabs into BRICKS

Testing, I've heard about it.

Apparently Microsoft hasn't.

I suppose they have the same attitude regarding security.

Apple's top bean counter: New spaceship HQ won't emit 'one atom of carbon'

People forget...

That passing gas emits Methane, which is a more powerful "greenhouse gas", and includes Carbon as well. Combined with the emissions (noted above) of alive breathing humans, there is going to be a bunch of "hot air" emitted.

One can presume that this is "balanced" by some greenery that will be planted around "Spaceship Steve".

So much "flustering". Must be Al Gore on the board of directors (in his do as I say, not as I do mode).

Mac fans: You don't need Windows to get ripped off in tech support scams

One way to cure this

Just add a line in your hosts file to make protection.com point to 127.0.0.1. Then call them and see what they do.

Even better would be to have a computer sitting next to this one that is in the hosts file as protection.com which you can turn on/off ping responses. Then when he tries, it fails, and when you try it, it succeeds. That would really fluster the guy!

Fun with scammers. In some places it could be considered a "sport". Simon, are you listening?

Leaping SpaceX GRASSHOPPER ROCKET jumps 2,500ft, lands safely

It could be (but probably isn't)...

A shot of the rocket going up for a while, then a nice reverse of the movie. You can be sure it goes back to the correct place when you go forward for a while (until it disappears) then run the movie in reverse.

No, it doesn't look like that, as the up shot is quite different from the down shot, but you never know.

D-Link: Oops! We'll slam shut that router backdoor by end of month

Now if D-Link would...

...Give out the code for those routers that they consider "obsolete", we would all have a win. There are several router/firewalls that are perfectly serviceable and do their job quite well.

Alas, I am dreaming.

MS Word deserves DEATH says Brit SciFi author Charles Stross

Then there is EMACS

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it. I believe that it includes a kitchen sink somewhere, so it must be capable of doing some nice "word processing" somewhere!

Then again, I think about it a little bit more, and wonder how I ever passed 8th (2nd form) grade typing class (I had a nasty cut in a finger which got me a 'B'). We used these nice manual typewriters. They included a nice new '1/!' key which some older typewriters didn't.

I suppose we really never learn.

Who here needs to explain things to ELEPHANTS?

The nose knows!!

What everybody should know!!

Do-it-yourself Dropbox: Western Digital's My Cloud 2TB NAS box

Does it do Linux??

From what I read on the WD site, the data is stored on the drive formatted as NTFS. All fine and good, but it might be nice to have it formatted as EXT4 (probably better, please argue elsewhere). I'm sure that is OK, but if you have FTP access (among other things) and the processor is a nice ARM chip, maybe it is easier to get a Raspberry Pi and use one of its USB ports to attach a drive, and be done with it.

Of course, if they DO run Linux, one could always fiddle with the source and get it fixed properly! (now where is the serial port?? Probably on 3 pins inside the box.).

Video thrilled the radio star: Tracking the history of magnetic tape

VHS vs. Beta....

One of the reasons that VHS won out over beta was that its recording time in normal (1x) mode was two hours. Given that number, you could put a nice movie on a SINGLE tape.

By the time Beta increased its playing time, VHS had movies lined up and working.

The marvel of the helical scan boxes (U-Matic, Beta, VHS) was the mechanics involved in "threading" the tape. You open up a U-Matic machine and watch it go through its threading and it is a wonder to behold.

The nice 3/4 inch U-Matic machine I've got is somewhere in the garage. I believe it still is operational for NTSC signals. I'll need to plug it in to make sure. Such fun! The nice thing about that machine (it is a JVC one as I recall) was that it could video process sync signals very nicely and re-record those pesky "copy protected" tapes I got from the video store.

But life goes on, and now the TiVo box does most of the recording now.

White House promises glitch fix for Obamacare website

Wait, wait, wait.

Welcome to government run (anything).

RIP charging bricks: $279 HP Chromebook 11 charges via USB

Re: Mmmm.... ChromeBooks!

Yes, after a quick install of a FULL operating system they ought to work quite nicely. Just al long as they don't have the UEFI garbage.

Oh, does Microsoft get paid for computers that don't get windows installed on them??

Wheels literally FALL OFF solar race contender

Loose Wheel?

Haven't they heard of LUG NUTS?

Cue the Kenny Rogers song:

You took a long to to leave me Loose Wheel (Lucille).

DEATH WATCH counts down seconds to wearer's demise

Borrowed time?

So, if you have an accident and succumb, will you ever know that "your time is up"?

Of course, if I give one to my mom (who turned 95 last month) will it be accurate?

It seems to me that all one needs to do is have it count down form age of 100 years, and hope for the best. It would give me another ~40 years to go

Universal's High Fidelity Pure Audio trickles onto Blighty’s Blu-Ray hi-fis

Has anyone characterized the human ear?

With all this wonderful "high definition" stuff, one needs to find out EXACTLY what the ear can hear. I strongly doubt that an ear can go beyond 20kHz and 96dB SNR. A normal CD has a nyquist limit of 22.05 kHz upper limit and 16 bits (96+ dB), and that ought to be enough.

Of course simple tests would be out of the question for true Audiophiles, as they always know better.

p.s. Constant exposure to loud music and time have a detrimental effect on hearing ability, so keep the volume down, and stay young!

Poor miserable Ballmer's pay SLASHED to a measly $1.26m

Musical Chairs.

Enough said.

Down with Unicode! Why 16 bits per character is a right pain in the ASCII

Could be worse?

We could all be using a Baudot coding scheme. They use 5 bits per character and include LTRS and FIGS shifts. Only the alphabet was encoded in the LTRS shift, and "special" characters were encoded in the FIGS shift.

A total of 26 LTRS, 26 FIGS, and CR, LF, FIGS, LTRS, SPACE, NULL.

A nice total of 55 actual code points, as you couldn't count FIGS, LTRS, or NULL.

Of course if you go back further, you were limited to a 48 character set for such mundane things as coding in FORTRAN. The character set had 26 letters, 10 digits, space, and '@', '=', '(', ')', '*', '$', ',', '.', '/', '+', '-'. Sometimes you replaced '@' with a single quote (').

If it was good enough for FORTRAN, it was good enough for me.

You put up with CRAPPY iOS 7. You can put up with Obamacare too, says prez

Wait for it!!

All this health "service", we will have a lack of MDs (my wife is one!). Then they will institute wait times for "services".

I suspect that there will be waits of about 9 months for pre-natal care coming soon.

Something to remember: "Life is a terminal disease!".

Icahn to Cook: 'Buy back $150bn of Apple's stock, or tell me why you won't'

Why?

Because!

That is the proper answer for Mr. Icahn. No more, no less.

Me? I'd love to have the value of my stock increase.

Curiosity keeps on trucking despite government shutdown

All theatre!

All the workers will get back pay, and life will go on.

I note that it takes the same effort to make a website say "closed" as "open". No money saved here.

Microsoft Surface 2 fondleslabs finally get off ground with airline order

It will be an interesting comparison!

So, Delta uses Surface tablets for its EFB stuff, and other airlines (American for instance) use iPads. Let the war for mindshare begin.

Pilots (even from different airlines) socialize together. They are a tight group. If there are features lacking in one platform, or bad things like crashes of software, EVERYONE will know about it.

The original "EFB" software is/was developed by Boeing (a subsidiary Jeppesen) where I did some contracting work a bunch of years ago. It was THE hot thing for reducing paperwork and all that stuff. The pilots seem to think it is OK, and since there are two editions in the cockpit (captain, and first officer) it should be OK as well for redundancy.

Time will tell if this really works. My friends make note that it was the touch interface that made it all work (replacing a laptop). The keyboard just gets in the way.

Scientists to IPCC: Yes, solar quiet spells like the one now looming can mean Ice Ages

Meanwhile...

On Mars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars

The more things change, the more they stay the same. YMMV.

US.gov - including NASA et al - quits internet. Is the UN running it now?

Who knows...

Maybe it WILL save money after all. Kinda like the ticket takers that salaries are more than the tickets sold (French Metro??). In that case, letting everyone go for free saved money by not having ticket takers (it could be a silly rumor).

In some regards, be careful for what you ask for, you may get it.

Observation: It costs just as much to have a web site displaying "Closed" as it does to have one open for business. All politics.

Windows Phone market share hits double digits in UK and France

Even better sales numbers if...

Someone hacks the Nokia phone to run Android.

Could happen, you never know!

Now where was that $200 rebate?

SpaceX Falcon boosts to glory from Vandenberg space force base

Will LOHAN dock?

Obviously this is the next thing to do!

At the moment, not a bunch of cargo but that is only a matter of scale :-)

BlackBerry Messenger to launch on Android, iOS this weekend

Observable omission

Windows Phone 7/8

Maybe this tells us something!

Microsoft's swipe'n'swirl pic passwords LESS secure than PINs, warn researchers

Re: Choose a picture Dozens of POIs

Yes, a picture with LOTS of points of interest doesn't exist. The WHOLE POINT of a picture is to have a small number of points of interest. Why else would you take the picture in the first place?

As for the obvious attack, my nice tablet has LOTS of finger prints where I play solitaire. They have become pretty obvious when the screen is dark and light reflects off of it. It doesn't take long after a cleaning before it becomes greasy again.

Yes, potato chips (crisps) speed up this "marking" of the glass face.

p.s. If you have a 4 digit pin, the best one is chosen by someone else. That way it isn't easily guessed. I suspect that '8520' is a pretty common self generated one.

Life … moves … in … slow … motion … for … little … critters … like … flies

Humans...60Hz...

Now I know why we have that as a power frequency.

Maybe the French started when they were a little older, thus 50Hz.

Then again, Americans are a little quicker on the draw?

Microsoft no longer a top Linux kernel contributor

For the same reason

That IP addresses do not have leading zeros. The number(s) separated by periods are distinct, and not decimal fractions.

p.s. Leading zeros in IP address might be considered octal, or hex if prefixed by '0x'.

Nice, but we will NEVER know...

What the stats are for something like Windows. It would be interesting to see exactly what is going on there. How many lines of code are changed in the product? How many are left over from the MS-DOS days?

I suspect that there are some from both catagories (probably a small number). But we will never know!

London Underground cleaners to refuse fingerprint clock-on

Sand Pebbles

Just saw this movie on the TV Saturday. I draw some conclusions in regards to "cleaners".

YMMV.

Yes, I don't like unions, outlived their usefulness (especially in the public sector here in the USA).

'British Bill Gates' Lynch laments HP's Autonomy 'botch-up'

Boy, do I need to study business!!

"In case you're confused, in the novel 'Catch 22', the cook bought eggs at a rather high price, then sold them cheaper. It later was revealed that he was running a con using the camp food budget to buy the eggs... from himself, and then resold the eggs to the camp kitchen for less, again using camp funds."

Yes, I am confused!!

Want to sit in Picard's chair while spying on THE WORLD? We can make it so – ex-NSA man

Bad choice of commander!

Should have picked Kirk, not Picard.

Kirk had all the right moves ("Poker, not Chess Mr. Spock!").

Yes, I did watch the series when it was "first run" Thursday nights in the 60's.

Microsoft announces iPad amnesty for fanbois

Re: has anyone actually USED a Surface?

"iPad is for kids, grannies or people with no tech savvy."

It seems that you don't understand marketing. This is the target audience, and it is QUITE LARGE.

Most people don't need people dancing on tables, or magnetic keyboards. They want something that does the simple tasks that an iPad does quite well.

Play solitaire?

Senator halts Google's taxpayer-subsidized executive jet fuel deal

They could always...

...start an airline. Maybe charters only or some such.

There are fewer direct flights from SJC to Hawaii, and none to nice Caribbean destinations that I know.

I can see it now: Fly Google.

Psst.. Wanna Android all-in-one PC? We have the chip tech, says Intel

That big of a screen...

...is a bit "unportable". Look, if you ARE going to do it then you should "go big". Make a desk with a nice full screen embedded in it, complete with touch screen. Call it the "executive desk" and let marketing have at it. Sure you might need to enlist some furniture maker for the wood parts, but bigwigs would gravitate to it. You would escape the need of having a screen on the desk as it would BE the desk. No need for a blotter.

To those in product development: feel free, and good luck.

Windows 8.1: Microsoft's reluctant upgrade has a split-screen personality

Let the Dancing begin...

Now we will have more adverts that show people dancing around and flipping screen icons. Then the attack of magnetically attaching keyboards.

Shades of "West Side Story". Choreography breaking out in a vacant lot. *GROAN*

Steelie Neelie calls for TOTAL BAN on EU mobe roaming charges

Good thing I live in the USA!

The vast majority of people can wander around without funny "roaming" charges. We have a bunch of major operators (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile), and if you can get the signal, "long distance" is basically "free". Sure you have to pay for the call time (and your mobile's friend pays as well), but most plans have "unlimited" minutes.

Bandwidth? Well, it always bothered me that about 1 second of an audio transmission (phone call) is about as much data as a multi-thousand character message. Unfortunately the message gets charged more. Then there is data (web browsing, etc.) which is limited in the course of a billing period and costs dearly if one goes "over". Simple things like using your phone for a radio can do that for you.

Good thing we don't have 50 different jurisdictions fighting each other.

Me? I use a limited cell-phone and a pager. Allows me to ignore those calls/pages I really don't like. Saves on battery charges as well.

First rigid airship since the Hindenburg cleared for outdoor flight trials

Simple solution to this Helium problem.

Just get a Helium generator! Get something that emits lots of alpha particles, and wait for them to grab a few electrons. Seems pretty simple to me!

Easy Peasy!

Declassified documents show NSA staff abused tapping, misled courts

Then there is everyone's take on the subject.

For example, see Dilbert this week.

Backups? We don't need backups, somebody else already does that for us.

ICAHN'T with this guy: Activist investor gives up battle with Big Mike

Next weeks headline...

Dell is getting out of low margin businesses. The former PC maker said that the business of consumer PCs was not worth doing anything about.

In a related story, some other Silicon Valley companies seem to be doing quite well with "professional grade" PC's

Enterprise storage: A history of paper, rust and flash silicon

Storage Desnity...

Just remember that today one can easily hold 1Tbyte of a disk drive in the palm of their hand, and it costs less than $100.

Compare that to disk storage of the 70's when 1TByte was a dream everyone had, and it took up a room quite large. The monthly bill for power and air conditioning was more than $100 (in dollars of the day).

Times have changed. Some of us do dream in punch cards and paper tape still, and have capabilities for them as well.

The REAL winner of Microsoft's Nokia buy: GOOGLE

With Microsoft buying Nokia...

Will ANYONE ELSE make Windows phones? I suspect not since a competitor is making them with lower cost basis (licensing fees being "internal").

Sure lots of people do Android, but the fees are the same no matter what hardware vendor you buy from.

As for Microsoft and its fees, I suspect that the FAT patents will expire soon, and Redmond will be out in the cold.

Yes, watching a collision in the making. Watch right here.