Posts by Cliff

Scientists demo light-controlled semiconductor

New class of materials?

When an unusual response to stimulus like this occurs, it isn't always obvious how to exploit it, but 'twas doubtless the same is early semiconductor work, early superconductor work, and certainly early bucky ball/nanotube work. At school I was taught about graphite and diamond and that's it. The other forms did not exist as far as we knew. Now look, were starting to find applications we never imagined before.

Discover a previously undocumented interaction, optimise it, play with it, make it repeatable, then leave it for the engineers to apply it in the world.

Put down the (cod)piece and step away: Artist cuffed after sculpture cockup

In fairness...

It is styled somewhat like a gun, no? And the guy 'planned to exhibit'the following week but perhaps hadn't thought it through, like by telling people for instance. "I'm going to open this box now, it contains a piece of at which looks like a gun so don't panic". What gallery takes submissions the week before, and would consider exhibiting a pseudo-firearm without protective measures?

To me, between the lines, modern artist thinks it'd be a wheeze to shake people up and get reaction to his teenage angst art by shocking people into taking about him. Any kicking he got was probably well deserved.

Assange fails in bid for election to Australian Senate

Re: A small miracle.

He was. He failed. His motivations were impure and selfish, this is not the grounds for public life and getting people to view for your integrity.

Australians aren't stupid.

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

Re: Good on them.

The '80's might seem idyllic from a distance, but rebuilding the Berlin Wall and going through the Poll Tax, miners strike, battle of the beanfield debacles again and it seems less exotic. In the UK at least.

UK investor throws £14.8m at firm that makes UNFORGEABLE 2-cent labels

physical implementation of a hash?

Fairly intrigued to see how this works. I guess I could look up the patents, but apparently I'm not intrigued enough until someone smarter than me does and translates them for me. But if it's the equivalent of a hash, some kind of one-way process which I can use to verify and authenticate a medicine for instance, I'm interested.

Android malware spotted hitching a ride on mobile botnet

...wise to steer clear...

Bit of a victim of its own success in that sense. I started with a G1 when you could count the apps in android market as it was in the time it took to make a cup of tea. It was a minority platform so not really worth attacking.

Now if you want that, you go winmo. Ironic that it's the Linux-based platform that's the bigger risk than the windows-based one, and a bit of one in the eye for the /. twonks who spell Microsoft with a $ symbol slagging off their engineering. Apparently vulnerability is not inherent, just what happens when you're the most popular platform.

Now we know why UK spooks simply shrugged at SSL encryption

Re: I bluff my encryption

ROT10, how asymmetrical of you!

I use ROT26 for faster (instant) decoding.

Smartwatch craze is all just ONE OFF THE WRIST

Re: The big thing about digital watches

I bought a cheapo digital watch once - it strayed by 15 minutes/day.

The opposite of useful!

Tor traffic torrent: It ain't the Syrians, it's the BOTS

Tragedy of the commons

People acting with selfish interests on a shared resource means it will almost inevitably ultimately be degraded. If you have common grazing rights, why would you graze 10 sheep if you could graze 100 for the same cost? So everyone grazes 100+ sheep, land is degraded as it isn't infinite. Same applies to TOR. The benevolence of the node hosts is abused.

For more on this...

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

Continuous delivery: What works (and what doesn't)

Re: CD = Colision Detect

They're into undocumented and probably hence inconsistently implemented "agile", are they? Whatever you do, make sure you're nowhere near those projects in about 2 years when they implode. They will, and it will be messy. Claret all over the walls kind of messy. Scapegoats fired kind of messy.

Luckily there's no documentation, so nothing with your name on it ;)

Rollback

Every deployment needs a reversion plan. Any change may break another part of the system, increasing exponentially with application age and complexity. Facebook, who cares if you can't find out the mood of your 500 friends for an hour, day, week? But an actual useful system needs to have a big red button to revert application changes but still keep (or rebuild) the data that happened in between. This is either wasteful having engineering teams writing reversion plans full time, or engineering teams on standby to dig you out of trouble.

This is where IT departments are unpopular, defending the business from itself. They love the idea of continuous deployment and delivery, they also get to point the finger when the sky falls in. The idea of having to provide that level of support when you can bet IT budgets are having downward pressure makes me shudder. Not the business users fault, they don't understand the incredible complexity of their phones, let alone massive asynchronous redundant transactional data systems.

DON'T PANIC says Hynix, China fab explosion is no big deal

It's China, of course the setback is minor

In the country where the government's face is all that counts, of course it is just a minor blip.

Give us a break: Next Android version to be called 'KitKat'

Milka

Cadbury's and Green and Blacks are also just Kraft sub-brands.

Somewhere there's one big cement mixer blending vegetable oils, cocoa dust, cement dust and varying quantities of poundland nightlights to serve different markets.

Re: Am I the only one who quite likes Hershey's?

Go to pound land, they do boxes of 48 crayons, differing colours so you can tell yourself they're boutique flavours of Hershey chocolate. Shit crayons, mind, only good for eating.

Hershey and ilk

My first association was brown crayons.

I know British newsagent chocolate isn't generally in the league of European-style posh dark chocolate bars (Lindt and friends), but still way ahead, and somewhat moreish!

'Peeping while you're sleeping' NSA parody T-shirt ban BACKFIRES

Re: " which infringes upon the intellectual property rights of National Security Agency,"

The breached IP in question was actually the NSA's "peeping whilst you're sleeping" motto.

But it's only wafer thin: Skinniest keyboard EVER is designed by Camby biz

Rolling diameter

That's all I care about. Assuming it works relatively well, that is. Bought a thin flexible graphics tablet the other week, but the ruling diameter is not much better than flat, no point really. If this can go into a smarties tube it could be good for portability, if it is rigid and snaps/fails like thin glass, less useful.

Be interesting to see in real life.

Techie Crotty will put £1m in Bletchley museum's kitty ... if you do the same

Wealthy person A, will you match-fund?

OK, that seems reasonable...

Wealthy person B, will you match-fund?

OK, that seems reasonable...

£2M overnight ;-)

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

Awaiting magic and revolution

Be great if there really is some real revolution as opposed to another mid-market phone with a premium pricetag and a pile of woowoo from their marketing department.

Be my pleasure :)

Compact Cassette supremo Lou Ottens talks to El Reg

Re: OT:But BBC "reporting"

Just like EVERY SINGLE OTHER NEWS SOURCE. As it happens, the BBC's remit is a lot more balanced than many (Fox, Daily Mail, Sun, etc)

Re: Interesting

Agreed. Engineers talking through case studies to other engineers is always fascinating. Maybe the Compact Disc next?

Anything will do, as long as it goes into some engineering deep pith and discusses the trials and joys and the journey along the way. Even notorious failures which took a novel chance would be very welcome.

WIN a RockBLOCK Iridium satellite comms module

MILEY

Mile-high Irridium Location Establisher Yielder

Apple to accept iPhone trade-ins at US Retail Stores

Holds value

'Value' is such an interesting term. Does the secondhand value vest mostly in the brand name, as a knackered out lump of phone gubbins can't have a high residual material value?

Microsoft cans three 'pinnacle' certifications, sparking user fury

Certification devalued

Perhaps it's the flood of boot camps churning out qualified but hopeless candidates that spoiled the value of certification. We all now know the MCSE as the Minesweeper Certified Solitaire Expert, after all.

Fandroids blow $200,000 on secret PANIC BUTTON for their smartmobes

I think the novelty is in the application

In both senses, applying a resistive switch to the audio I/O on the device, and the application to poll/monitor for presses and register the click pattern.

Actually, rather nice idea

Especially the user configurable click patterns - it allows for the basic things you want *now* to be to hand.

Mother/daughter team jailed for million-dollar internet dating scam

of anyone wants to learn more or take a stand...

Scamwarners.com and 419eater.com welcome one and all.

Are you for reel? How the Compact Cassette struck a chord for millions

Fascinating article

Thank you :-) The Cassette Tape was as much a part of my youth landscape as smartphones are now, how times change

Apple tops target list for litigious patent trolls

Re: You're suing us wrong

^^^ Lost me at 'sheeple'

When it's used in an argument, it makes the user look a bit extremist (and a little bit mental) which then devalues anything else they follow it with. Just a tip for the future.

As

Apple tries to trademark the term 'startup'

misreporting?

This surely has to be bollocks? Someone somewhere has got the wrong end of a stick and this isn't really a balls out land grab to control a whole perfectly good English word?

I have some very choice Anglo Saxon words for you if you would like one dedicating all for yourselves.

ISPs scramble to explain mouse-sniffing tool

Usefulness of the results?

I have a hunch that the resultant data is pretty useless all in all. However some marketing agency has convinced their client that this is extremely useful information and will now generate a bunch of bullshit reports to justify exactly that.

Then they will make reccommndations based on those reports based on that meaningless data.

Then they will charge for those changes based on those reccommndations based on those reports based on that meaningless data.

It's possible to have data at too low a level to be useful. A city map of London with actual tube routes, sewerage tunnels, gas mains, etc doesn't add much for the pilot wanting to land at Heathrow. I think in this case it is CEO's being told they need 'big data' crystal balls. And being sold a load of balls.

Star Wars revival secret: This isn't the celluloid you're looking for

Re: Future Digital

Film has very real grain. Film responds differently to different light frequencies than digital sensors. Digital can emulate those attributes perfectly well if needed.

Film, however, is elitist as progressing is so darn expensive and all the labs have tooled down. Probably more of a symbolic act in this case purely as a way to distance from the CGI overload in parts 1-3.

War Horse, one of Spielberg's most recent big budget movies was shot on 35mm, no fuss, no press releases, just the tool chosen for the job.

Wall Street traders charged with stealing company code via email

@Pascal - swears, actually I agree

And indeed I normally show my vulgar tongue here without reserve. There is only one word which is still generally considered brutal enough to be considered socially unacceptable even in most adult company. That level of brutality was the only fitting abuse I could think of at the time for that bunch of crooked sociopathic fucking wanknut arseholes upon whom I wish only ill.

When everyone surrounding you is a greedy self serving...

It doesn't feel such a crime if you're surrounded by ***** who will happily screw over whole governments and populations in the name of greed and bonuses.

Chinese authorities say massive DDoS attack took down .cn domain

bureaucracy

This is what happens when all paperwork must be completed in triplicate and stamped, including DNS requests.

An autopilot the size of a postage stamp

open source Paparazzi project

Very cool device but the project name does suggest it may be open to abuse by every Herbert who wants to invade privacy. Want to quickly case a property for valuables to see if it is with burgling/where the safe is/etc? Run a cheap chopper up to the window and have a nose around?!

Top 10 Steve Ballmer quotes: '%#&@!!' and so much more

Re: I realise this is totally childish, but ....

Isn't a part of the GPL that you can frequently choose the version?

Ballmer's emotional farewell to Redmond: I LOVE THIS COMPANY

Say what you like about Ballmer...

...but he really did give MS a hell of a lot of energy and really did believe in it. Last of the IT management passionates

Bradley Manning is no more. 'Call me Chelsea,' she says

Re: Whistleblower == outsider?

People behave consistently. I guess one of Chelsea's 'things' is about wanting the truth to be known/being tired of keeping massive secrets. The leaks were a form of coming out by proxy.

Re: Whistleblower == outsider?

Good point, takes someone who already feels an outsider to act outside the proscribed framework.

China's Baidu builds new type of App Store

What is it?

Are the apps just run server side in which case the currency exchange and similar apps could simply be calculated by Baidu directly? Much like Google does if you ask it certain questions? Or are these maybe the equivalent of HTML5 apps that just skin a web service? I'm not clear from the article exactly what the proposal/offering/newsworthy thing is?!

Mystery of Guardian mobos and graphics cards which 'held Snowden files'

>>You're assuming the people from GCHQ are in some way competent

>>You're assuming the people from GCHQ are in some way competent

I suspect if you go head to head with GCHQ you'll find out they're perfectly competent, and stand a rather respectable chance of outcompetenting you (and pretty much the rest of us TBH).

I rather fancy their chances of reading your emails than the other way round, for instance.

3D printers stroke LOHAN's shapely midriff

Here's one we printed earlier...

Here's one we printed earlier...

;-)

'Hacked' estate agency Foxtons breaks glass, pulls password reset cord

You shouldn't be allowed to collect PII

Unless you can prove you can manage it properly. Including NOT STORING PASSWORDS AS CLEARTEXT!

This isn't postgrad-level stuff, this is basic 101 stuff.

This is what you get when the 'business' doesn't want to pay for paranoid, in-house corporate IT to secure their assets but goes to some Shoreditch outsourcing agency. There's a reason why IT departments are not popular, it's because they don't let you get away with spewing 10000 punters (multi-use I'm sure) passwords all over t'web.

Oz sawbones extract fork from old boy's todger: Gents, start your wincing

Cucumbers? Glue?

I am clearly getting something very wrong.

Wow, the future is HERE: Charge your phone (wirelessly) in your CAR

how much?!

... invested $5m in powermat ...

Holy crap, that seems a lot for an unsupported format.

Comcast court docs show Prenda copyright trolls seeded smut then sued

Re: Fascinating case, more on popehat

"It's the lawyers... "

Yes, but the lawyers own the companies that own and distribute the Frankie Vaughan. The only bit they didn't likely do is run the camera or take it in the wrong'un.

Fascinating case, more on popehat

Popehat (.com) have some long, in depth posts about this case, it really does seem every inch as cynical as you'd ever dream up, but then doubles down and adds one for luck.

Hard to believe pornographers would be so sleazy.