Posts by E 2

Timing attack threatens private keys on SSL servers

Maybe a fix is

for openssl to sleep() for a brief random period after doing the ECC thing, thus obscuring the time interval that the attack is trying to measure?

Cray XK6 super mates Opterons with Nvidia GPU workhorses

How to program

MPI and your favorite MPI language binding perhaps?

Fedora 15: More than just a pretty interface

Maybe

take away the Gnome developers smart phones. Especially the iPhones.

Gimme a break

"After all, GNOME 2 borrowed much of its UI design and basic interface concepts from Windows 95 – and it's been a long time since Windows 95 was cutting-edge."

IIRC Win95 introduced pop-up start menu idiom as main interface to the OS. 98 kept the pop-up idiom, as did Me, as did 2000, as did 2003, as did 2008, as did Vista as did 7.

Things got more bling encrusted as time passed but the basic idiom never changed.

Qua UI, I'd say Win 95's idiom has weathered the past 16 years very well indeed. It's hardly changed at all.

Open Sourcers should perhaps stick to writing some of the best s/w the world has ever seen and leave the marketing babble to M$ & co.

Military set to lead on US domestic cyber-security

It will be OK

The USA is still a labour intensive economy. If all the IT infrastructure went away the damage would not be a severe as most think. Mostly it just would be irritating and inconvenient.

Dell intros world's thinnest 15in laptop PC

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

It can be had with a 1920x1080 screen. Very nice.

Linux Foundation chief dubs MeeGo 'unstoppable force'

"unstoppable force"

So, apparently is dark energy, but it manifests at something like 73 proton masses per megaparsec.

Maybe Meego will win in the end.

Nvidia dollars lifted by Intel's Sandy Bridge ramp, payola

Different card/GPU

You can ask the GPU how many cores it has using a CUDA API function and then choose the correct number of threads accordingly. Which is not to say that knowing the correct number of threads does not involve a bit of black magic.

Canadian kid uses supercomputing to cure cystic fibrosis

Which is why

he will probably go south of the border. IP commercialization in CA universities is pretty crap.

Simply viewing Apple kit provokes religious euphoria

@Roger Varley

Pointing out the deficiencies in eg MRI is just as valuable as designing MRI in the first place.

If they can measure a dead salmon's responding to pictures using an MRI, that implies we may be taking MRI a bit too seriously.

@Citizen401

"...logic and mathematics (both neurobiologically determined precepts)..."

Incorrect. As determined by empirical studies.

You have no apples. I give you an apple. I give you another apple. You do not give away the apples I gave you. Do you now have more or fewer than two apples?

Try it. Repeat as many times as you wish to. You will always have two apples.

1 + 1 = 2. Your 'brain' has nothing to do with it.

It's a rondo

Maybe God exists and put those holes there deliberately.

Also - of course Apple has an office where they study ways to fulfill peoples' need to elevate. All serious retail crop have such an office. It is called the marketing department.

My boxes are all black

And they are beautiful too.

WTF?

@Denarius

"... Well designed and engineered stuff just looks right compared to imitiations. ie Concord vs Concordski. Irony is that the cheaper imitiation often survives longer as so often better optimised (sic) for markets real requirement. Usually that means cheaper and less efficient ;-< ..."

Thus my Linux systems which work perfectly well but which are housed in plain black cases are imitations, cheap and inefficient?

Apple makes beautiful cases certainly but the hardware inside is bog standard Intel platform, the OS is UNIX and the Finder makes it difficult to move files around compared to Windows Explorer or KDE Konqueror.

You conclude that good case design makes a better computer? Will my machines work better if I move them into top shelf Lian Li cases?

Interstellar space 'full of Jupiter-size orphan planets'

Yes

I think it would stop being dark matter.

Another thing... if weakly interacting massive particle essentially do not respond to electromagnetism but do respond to gravity, then what stops all the dark matter in the the galactic halo from collapsing under gravity to the center of the galaxy?

Nope

Dark matter is just dark and hard to see. The boffins came up with WIMPs and such because they couldn't find enough baryonic matter. But now maybe this guy has found a big pile of previously unknown baryonic matter. Whether he has found enough remains to be seen.

Mumsnet founder: Our members are 'very keen' on PORN ...

I fail to see the point

Qua porn the horse already left the barn. Also, what exactly is wrong with sex anyway?

Eureka! Google breakthrough makes SSL less painful

Irrelevant

Traditional SSL handshake takes an amount of time on the order of a single packet transit btwn browser and web site. This is perhaps around 100 mS (pinging theregister.com from western Canada).

False Start might cut that down to 70 mS - not exactly a revolution! Can *you* see when a page loads 30 mS faster? I cannot.

Israeli couple dub sprog 'Like'

40/100

Conversely the statistic implies that 60% of his FB friends either dislike the new child or are at best ambivalent towards it.

Mozilla to shift 12m surfers off 2-year-old Firefox 3.5

Fail

FF 3.5 is more functional than FF 4. If I could get a traditional status bar in FF 4 then it would be a more acceptable browser.

Freeman Dyson: Shale gas is 'cheap and effective'

Burning shale gas

... is still burning gas. How exactly does that reduce carbon dependence? All natural gas is a hydrocarbon, no?

ICT classes in school should be binned – IT biz body

Guess what else does not belong in universities?

Business schools do not belong in universities.

GNOME 3: Shocking changes for Linux lovers

@Anonymous Coward - Common UI

No!

No no no!

What works on a 24" monitor+keyboard+mouse does not work well on a 4" touchscreen monitor. That does NOT mean what works on a 4" touchscreen monitor should be the default for 24" monitor+keyboard+mouse.

Imposing a common UI on vastly disparate user interface *hardware* is a ridiculous, blind, dogmatic, pig-headed thing to do.

@Thad

Hey Thad - about 50% of my Linux time is actually spent using an xterm. BASH auto-complete is my best friend!

@Havin_it

OpenSuSE

@Rod 6

"I just want menus to open so fast I can't see them open."

Fuckin' eh! I could not have said it better.

I can only conclude the author is being ironic

"For example, there's no way to quickly open a document in a different program, rename a document, move a file or ..."

Well those features are the biggest ***WINS*** in 25 years of GUI desktop research!

KDE4 Backlash

The backlash against KDE4 was not because it introduced radical and deeply questionable changes to the GUI.

The backlash was because KDE4 did NOT change the GUI metaphor very much at all - but it broke or removed almost all the customization options present in KDE3.5.x.

Even now, with KDE4.6, the only added really new features still are widgets and Vista bling.

KDE devs explain on the KDE site that a major rewrite was needed, I do not recall the details go look at the site. Some major behind the scenes subsystems were found by the time of KDE3.5.x to be insufficient to go forward. Well and good. Redesigning the guts of the UI did not require the bling blast and gutting of the UI's customization options.

This is a problem because (for example) I still cannot set the task bar to be a nice easy to read low key non-shiny light grey color with black font. I find the KDE4 black task bar hard to read - which genius dictated that such ergonomic details were not important to end-users?

Clutter?

Where exactly is the clutter in a pop-up "Start Menu" style interface?

There is none!

KDE3.5

... is stil available as add on repo for OpenSUSE 11.x and latest Fedora.

With any luck the current UI design fad will soon die the death it so richly deserves.

@Greg J Preece

But I like to manually place a window at the top of the screen or the left side of the screen. It's a radical concept but I use it to arrange windows sometimes.

I really do NOT need Win7 or KDE4 maximizing the window when I move it to the top. It is an insanely irritating default behaviour.

Is the top of screen idiom better than double click the title bar to maximize? Fact is it is not - because it mixes the move-window action with the resize action and is confusing.

First ting I do when I have to use KDE4 is editthe personal prefs and turn off all the "intelligence" of KDE4.

"...you don't need to open menus or drill through categories..."

I really do not like the spin about UI from Gnome and KDE. Are they worried about who will 'win' the *NIX desktop?

Opening menus is a very difficult difficult activity?

Do I really need power tools or great diligence to navigate categories?

These things are not difficult.

Drop down menus survived from 1995 to 2011 because they work and are easy to use.

Nothing wrong with trying new UI ideas. However all the screen shot of Gnome3 shows me is a full screen list of big icons. What if I do not want all that crap on my desktop?

Facebook, HP, and OpenStack join Linux patent shield

Irony

Given Sony has banned Linux from the new PS3 I find it ironic that Sony is a member of the OIN!

Japanese gov makes Fukushima evac zone compulsory

The fat lady has not sung yet.

What I said in the title.

Amazon cloud sinks, smothers Web 2.0 darlings

@AC 21st April 2011 19:17 GMT

You can script AWS (esp. EC2) such that failed instances will trigger new instances being fired up, those new instances can be invoked at other AWS locations. So single point of failure charge made at AWS is not entirely fair.

And, well, you have all your infrastructure in a server room at your head office - that room or it's network connections can fail too. That must count as a single point of failure!

The best sci-fi film never made: Also-rans take a bow

WRT Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert will be remembered 200 years from now as one of the strongest writers and most subtle thinkers amongst 20th century sci-fi writers.

Which is exactly why none of his books can be made into good movies - his books make sense only when the reader reads between the lines. Movies do not excel at presenting the stuff that lies between the lines.

Google Linux servers hit with $5m patent infringement verdict

Holding head in hands

The bullet points listing the infringements describe a linked list and the operations one might want to perform on it as far as I can tell. I learned linked lists in 1991 in a Pascal programming class at Uni, they were hardly new then. Where is the new art in the patent?

Now if the patent holder had a way to search a linked list without using a key value, or to delete entries without using a key value then the patent holder would have something!

Officials scoop up bacteria bubbling away in Playboy hot tub

Legionella & Barbarella

Legionella is Barbarella's little sister... I hear that she is more into femdom than space ships.

"...end-of-show party cum fundraiser ..."

Congrats on using the word "cum" correctly with added double entendre!

Brussels threatens to name ISPs with 'doubtful' market practices

Brussels' heart is in the right place

There are problems though.

Whether ones' high speed connection is in fact provisioned at the rated speed is difficult to measure.

In Canada the ISPs advertize speeds "up to" the advertized speed. The ISPs I've dealt with have a web app to measure the speed - it pumps data from a source in the head office to my computer using HTTP. This is fine.

Whether an ISP is secretly rate limiting certain kinds of traffic (can we say Bittorrent?) is more difficult to measure. Again the Bittorrent example - how does one measure a torrent swarm's speed in a manner acceptable in court, much less prove whether the ISP has a (possibly undocumented) traffic tier policy?

CA ISPs are not AFIAK regulated by laws wrt traffic prioritization or app level protocol traffic throttles. It is known that many of the larger ISPs want to rate limit certain kinds of traffic... it is not known if those ISPs comply with CRTC 'recommendations'.

Fedora's Lovelock Linux is beta ready

Gnome Shell

There is something to be said for Luddism.

NASA funds commercial Shuttle-replacement spaceships

Age of consent

No way - she looks at least sixteen!

Cheese capsule?

I can imagine what the trip would be like if someone farts!

UK is fifth free-est nation on the internet

The report has a serious flaw

It lists only 30 countries, most of them known to have illiberal politics.

In a study of internet freedom I would think a country like Canada might have been included!

Ellison's Oracle washes hands of OpenOffice

Now I know...

why the OO in my recent OpenSUSE 11.4 install is called "Libre Office".

So, what's the best sci-fi film never made?

@Mike Flugennock

No arg wrt Star Wars.

In the general category of dystopic futures, THX1138 was terrible!

Problems with THX1138:

- Where exactly did the drone guy learn to drive futuristic Lamborginis like a professional driver and handle handguns like a pro?

- In such a tightly controlled society, why is access to the underground roadways he escapes into not limited?

- At the end of the movies the drone guy escapes to 'outside', but we never see what is outside!

THX1138 lived up exactly to Lucas' low standards. It is 90-odd minutes of loose ends and unanswered questions.

THX1138 was a knock-off effort by Lucas merely playing on California nanny-state.

Robo-warship sub hunter: Free DARPA crowdsauce game

Non-nuclear subs

Who is using non-nuclear subs that the USA is worried about?

Is the USA planning to start tailing Canada's navy?

Russia, NASA to hold talks on nuclear-powered spacecraft

Do it already!

I was talking to an astronomer and a solar-system-specialist physicist a while back about a proposed spacecraft that would be sent out to edge of the solar system. Most of the conversation was about the limitations imposed by spacecraft's power budget.

I asked why they could not just bolt a, say, 50MW nuclear reactor onto the side of the space craft and have lots of power. They told me that at this time the regulatory frameworks in effect in the USA and internationally have made it such that it is very difficult for new spacecraft to be equipped with even nuclear-thermo power. Mainly because production of the radio-isotopes used in thermo generators is very tightly controlled, and there is not a lot in stock.

IMHO this is silly. If there was ever a good place to stick a nuclear reactor it is far away from here, in outer space.

Else in Lewis Page's basement bwahahaha!

Steven Moffat promises 'darker' Doctor Who

Those are the current Dr. Who characters?!

I admit I only ever watched the show in the 80's or maybe very early 90's. The then Doctor was rather tall and had a big head of hair and was eccentric - very much a Brit. it was a fun & funny show.

That guy in the cowboy hat reminds me of Micky Knox, for God's sake!

AMD gases up Bulldozers for Intel push back

@the-elf

Yes indeed, I do agree! I guess my beard is not as venerable as yours must be though ;-)

The claim that programmers are only now learning multi-threaded programming (and that it is so terribly difficult) is laughable.

I wrote my first threaded program in 1998 using solely M$DN for reference, produced a completely stable and problem free Win32 service app that ran two work threads and a control thread on a dual socket Pentium Pro box. It took me 1.5 working weeks to learn how to write a threaded app.

This stuff is not rocket science, it just requires attention to a few more details.