Posts by Henry Wertz 1

Google seeks interwebs speed boost with TCP tweak

Spot on

@Eric Kimminau TREG, spot on. In a nice clear network, having a huge congestion window speeds things up. In a "not-nice" congested network, having a huge congestion window leads to high latency and perhaps congestion collapse.

Watch where you're treading

Not to rub it in...

Not to rub it in, but here in the states, free roaming is the norm to fill in those areas they don't cover themselves -- AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile have free roaming (but if you roam more than 40% for AT&T, or 50% for the others, 3 months in a row your service can be terminated). Verizon doesn't even have the "50% rule" -- you can roam 100% and they won't do a thing about it. This is of course within the US, but I can go like 3000 miles coast-to-coast and not worry over roaming charges.

International data? Verizon's got unlimited international data for $65 (versus $30 for unlimited smartphone/blackberry data within the US). Steep, but no worries over unexpected huge bills. To be honest personally I would likely just shut off my data internationally though.

iPhone 4: Perfect for everyone, except humans

Jobs?

"A deliberate plan by Apple seems a stretch to us, but it's hard to see how such a widespread problem got missed during development."

Probably didn't get missed. I've heard several seperate anecdotes where Jobs has decided EXACTLY how he wants some product to look (including where some major components fit in), sound, etc., and will not compromise a bit for engineering realities. I've heard of at least two Mac designs were a problem came up during development (it needed a quiet, temperature controlled fan, or 1/4" more space for cramming in all the parts, or whatever), an engineer tells Jobs this and he is just "Hell no, make it work". So result? Engineers do lots of extra work and do get it to work, but result is a mac that ran boiling hot straight from the factory, or is almost impossible to work on due to the parts being shoehorned in, or whatever. (Before fanbois flame, most models weren't like this, but a few definitely have been). I would guess an engineer knew the band antenna was crap, but by then Jobs insisted on a metal band antenna.

Mozilla mimics Google's native code demo in JavaScript

compiler versus compiler

@tom c, in general I would have agreed. However, what you actually have here is a Javascript engine that uses a just-in-time compiler to turn the javascript into assembly before it runs it... and "native code plugin" that takes C code and turns it into assembly before it runs it. I doubt the C compiler is going to have agressive flags turned on (ala gentoo) so it won't be generating SSE code or anything even if the CPU supports it.

Google scores major victory in copyright fight with Viacom

illegal dmca notices

under the dmca, it's not up to the isp to do this, but the poster whose content an improper dmca notice was filed against. there *are* still penalties for this, and i am quite shocked nobody has gone through the process of extracting cash from people that are filing in clearly improper cases like public domain stuff, cases were some company assumes everything whose title contains a certain phrase is dmca-worthy with NO human verification, and so on.

Google claims Wi-Fi slurp legal in the US

Fair game

I agree with Google that what they did wasn't illegal, and to be honest it shouldn't be illegal anywhere. Unencrypted wifi is quite simply fair game, every access point supports encryption, secure web sites support encryption as well.

The "your doors were unlocked" analogy is really not correct, someone is still then entering your personal premises and taking your stuff, and at least in the US that would still be theft and trespassing, although not breaking and entering (since there was no "breaking" in as such). This is radio so a physical analogy is poor, the fact of the matter is it's broadcasting out into public space, and although every access point supports encryption, and has instructions to make sure to turn it on, that they didn't. If you insist on a dodgy physical analogy though, I'd think it's like blasting your radio out the window, then claiming anyone in the street who listens to it is eavesdropping on you. Or maybe the pigopolists blasting radios and trying to charge some kind of listening fee to anyone who hears it.

Google, SHAME ON YOU for trying to blame a "rogue programmer". Really? You put software that NOBODY *EVER* tested and saw what it was logging into a bunch of cars? I really don't believe that.. but either way, either there's a massive Q&A failure of not checking ONCE what the software actually did, or a failure of knowing what it did but not thinking this excess logging was a problem (which, isn't as bad a failure since honestly unecrypted wifi should be fair game).

Windows 7 Backup gets users' backs up

Pretty slow!

Regarding compressions lowing down backups.. well, that's pretty slow though! This guy with the 900GB backup started out (at the fast point) at about 2MB/sec. I can beat that on my Athlon XP 1800+, while using bzip2, which is know as a VERY slow compressor (there are compressors that'd be MUCH better suited for backups, and should most likely be disk I/O limited, and perhaps actually INCREASE backup speeds if the disk you are writing to writes slower than the read disk). Plus with quad cores, could the backup software not crunch on four files at once? Finally, it seems like poor design that larger data sets would slow it down -- I mean, obviously, twice the data might take twice as long, but it seems that Microsoft, and users, are saying the MB/sec drops off precipitously as the data set to be backed up increases in size. This isn't good.

iPhone mag-stripe reader stalled

Chip & Pin and reader

As a few people said, Chip & Pin is not really used in the states. I've seen *one* card in the last 10 years with it, and it may have been someone from Europe with that one. The big problem though, that little cube thingy, it'd look VERY hard to get the card to read without anything to keep the card swiping straight. Heck, with a proper reader I still have to try several times on a lot of cards.

Apple accused of hushing up security update

PR verus full disclosure

"This is a Trojan right? So it doesn't exploit any flaw in the OS, it just misrepresents itself. What are Apple supposed to be confessing to?"

"What is it you think Apple is hiding?"

If they have trojan/virus detection software and update the signature, the update list should mention the signature is updated. Which it apparently doesn't.

"What exactly is the beef here?"

A list of updates should, you know, list the updates. Not leave out ones that are inconvenient to mention for PR purposes. I do think this was blown out of proportion a little, but some Apple fanbois are conversely far too easy on forgiving Apple's mistakes, usually with the excuse that "Well Microsoft does it even worse" -- they do, and they are held accountable for it too.

Copyright wally of the week

Opinion page

"He was asking permission, to get around an onerous requirement by a local publisher"

Really it's not that onerous. The opinion page on papers here in the States is where locals write in, well, opinions on various topics. It's really not intended for reposting other's work -- not because of some copyright issue, that's just not what that section of the paper is really for.

Anyway, *shrug*. I don't really have further opinion on this, he asked and was told basically "no". He's not profiting so if he publishes it anyway I don't see it as deserving of a $150,000 fine for sure, although it wouldn't be cool.

Google risks OEM wrath for unified Android UI plan

ui performance?

puhleeze. I think it's as simple as, get a low end android phone and the cpu is slower and screen is smaller. Get a higher end one, certainly google can match apple on ui performance. I've seen an iphone, that bar is not as high as ppl like to think.

i think this is smart of google. They shouldn't add any roadblocks to skins, but making the google ui as nice as possible is smart.

Microsoft unveils – wait for it – another mobile OS

moving to winmo 7?

@eddie johnson, spot on. @everyone else, how'd you miss the elephant in the room? Relabelling winmo is no big problem. However, why would anyone develop for winehma now, when ballmer promises it'll be moved from winmo 6.5.3 to windows mobile 7 shortly, and 7 is incompatible with 6.5?

Speed cameras slide out of LibCon budget

Second solution

They're putting these cameras in the next town over from me. My solution, if they get any closer, is to fit an lcd panel to my plate. If the 5-0 are looking, flip a switch and it's clear. If i go to camera-land, it's pitch black. I don't object to speeders and especially red light runners getting ticketed. But these cameras don't take road conditions into account, and the red light ones are well known for ticketing people for *legally* coming to a dead stop then turning; in addition, most areas that have gotten red light camera, the yellow light has been set below the legal minimum so people can enter the intersection when it's just flipped from green to yellow (i.e. Too close to the intersection to safely stop), and then either get nicked for red light (since the yellow is too short) or speed up and get nicked for speeding instead.

Microsoft offers iPhone devs Windows Phone 7 cash

convert feature phone users?

not likely. Verizon has a mandatory data plan for smart phone users, at&t has one -- and it's like $25-30. sprint has one, maybe t-mobile allows for "no data" still. I think Most ppl who are willing to shell out that much extra already have.

Of course, i suppose they could churn out more phones like the Kin -- which has an early winmo7 prerelease but is not a smart phone, just has a canned like twitter & facebook app on it. But i doubt they'll sell 30 million of those either.

Ubuntu v iTunes: the music playoff for Applephobes

Nice article.

@J 3, good to know, I wondered about that... Ubuntu is pretty decent with a P3 with 256MB, it is usable (but not snappy...) on a P2, and can be run with 192MB although not too well (Xubuntu shaves a bit off the RAM usage past that.) As a consequence, for me as a Linux user "low end" is like a P3... Whereas, I've seriously heard Windows users now say a machine is uselessly obsolete if it's not a dual core!

Good article! I haven't looked into Linux music players in a loooong time, and it's nice to have an overview of what's available.

Google's Wi-Fi snoop nabbed passwords and emails

Not a contradiction

google's statement that they only collect fragments doesn't contradict them collecting e-mails etc. 1500 byte packets, in 1/5th of a second, about 1MB of data could be collected.

DoS attack stuffs Turkey's internet censors

3 words

movie classification board

in other words, turkey is being stupid, but britain is not free and civilized either.

Hacker charged with threatening US VP using neighbour's PC

What a bastard

a) What a bastard. Really though this does sound like the kind of thing I could see the BOFH doing to someone who particularly pissed him off. But he wouldn't get caught at it, his boss/beancounter/guy at the pub that pissed him off would just disappear one day.

b) Good on the SS (Secret Service) on finishing the job and finding him, and not just stopping at the point of the access point itself.

Legionnaire's Disease linked to driving, screenwash

A/C

@handle, seems logical but in reality, car A/C systems used to have a lot of problems of having musty, moldy odors. In some cases the system was redesigned so the condensate is drained out instead of building up. In other cases, on the newer computerized A/C systems they will run the climate control to help make sure it's all dried out.

As for Legionaires being uncommon, indeed I think it's not particularly virulent so there has to be an extraordinarily high concentration for it to be catching.

I wouldn't dream of using water here, that's for sure! It has gotten down to -40 here (-40F=-40C btw...) and gets down to 0F (about -20C) almost every winter, I'd be mad to even think of it.

Ubuntu 'more secure' than Windows, says Dell

Historical perspective

@AndrueC, maybe. But with any version of Windows I've seen, dodgy *drivers* are also an issue -- I've seen hardware that crashes with Windows (and they NEVER seem to come out with a working driver..) but works with another version of Windows, or works with Ubuntu. Since Vista & 7 dropped support for most older hardware this probably isn't the issue it used to be, but I wouldn't claim someone's doing something wrong because their box is blue screening.

Anyway, *shrug*. Everyone else has said enough that I don't have more to say really.

But for historical persepective, UNIX did have poor security back in the day. For Windows, probably NIMDA brought things to a head in 2001, in the Windows XP era. UNIX? The Morris Worm, 1988 -- it spread to Sun3 and VAX systems; it was supposed to stop replicating after some generations, but didn't due to a programming flaw, so it overwhelmed systems as more and more copies were running and either "crashed" networks or slowed them to a crawl. This worm only ran in memory (it didn't write itself to the hard drive), so the initial "solution" was for every shop worldwide with a networked Sun3 or VAX to arrange a 1-hour window where they simultaneously powered off their boxes to make sure there were no copies of the worm left floating around. Then they patched the holes the Morris Worm used and began the process of hardening system security that still is ongoing. I'm not claiming UNIX is 13 years ahead, but they had a big head start in taking security seriously.

BBC wins go-ahead for Freeview HD content controls

Huffman and broadcast flag

@Tom Chiverton 1, "Is this not *horribly* vulnerable to a simple* known-plain text attack (because you know it'll say "2200, BBC 1, News" somewhere), and as such anyone else can reverse engineer the tables and publish them for anyone to use without signing a freedom-reducing licence with the BBC ?"

I like I like!!! What would be even BETTER would be to just publish code that uses a plain-text attack to DERIVE the tables at runtime! Then, nobody's code has any naughty tables in it. Since it's UK-specific looking for "BBC" is probably fine, but looking for "The", "is", etc. would be more generic. (After doing some googling)... maybe not. I hate to say it, but the Sky box for instance has stuff like the whole word "Comedy" mapping to a 14-bit value, it is probably not something that'd just be found by a fast computerized search.

Regrading broadcast flags, well at least here in the US there's a simple "solution" to that. Stations that were supposedly prohibited from using the broadcast flag (until 2012 I think?) just "forget" or "have technical difficulties" and set it. Windows Media Center and Tivo users both have been complaining for years that they'll randomly not record shows, record them but with a very short time to watch (as little as 90 minutes) and so on. I'd guess Auntie will not be able to get away with it but ITV and other digital channels? Well, who knows.

Finland mulls legalizing use of unsecured Wi-Fi

Too complicated...

@Alan Thompson, you're making it too complicated. If APs shipped from the factory with a "PUBLIC" SSID, you'd just have clueless lawmakers claiming "Well, they didn't mean it, they just didn't set up their access point", just as they claim now (although not in Finland apparently.) I've seen so many buggy as hell APs, I'd rather companies focus on making sure the AP works than trying to do 3 SSIDs at once, traffic shaping, captive web portals, etc. DD-WRT does all of this if the user wants it.

sensible

this is perfectly sensible. If the user cannot trouble themselves to at least put on wep, i think they are de facto signalling they have an open access point.

i disagree that it's hard to monitor for unauthorized users though. My wrt54g with dd-wrt lists clients right out of the box, and a lot of stock aps do too. But of course if the user can't even trouble themselves to set a password, they won't be looking.

Aussies face 10 year browsing lock-up

IPSec

"plus applying crypto to messages etc."

The solution has been around for quite a while -- people REALLY should start using IPSec. The main advantage being it's at the IP layer, so the crypto is essentially transparent. "They" will still be able to record what machines you are connection to, and possibly the port, but the http headers and junk would all be encrypted. The ISP probably couldn't even play "man in the middle" because the CPU load would rapidly become too high from handling all that crypto.

This wouldn't help for E-Mail, of course, but there's already crypto available for E-Mail, plus the possibility of just not using your ISP's E-Mail server.

Google geek slammed over XP exploit

"usual protocol"

First, note to John Oates -- "tell the company and wait for a fix to be ready for download before telling the world" is NOT the usual protocol. That may be what Microsoft wants, but consensus among security researchers is to tell the company, wait 30 days, release to the public. Although a sizeable portion argue (I think convincingly) for open disclosure -- the flaws are ALREADY being exploited anyway by spyware, viruses, etc. anyway, so releasing to the public immediately is just fine. In reality, though, I'm most unconcerned about this -- as an Ubuntu user, open disclosure is the default, then a security update comes out usually within 1 or 2 days.

Susan Bradely is wrong and Ormandy is not. When she finds a security flaw, she can get pissed and play E-Mail tag all she wants. This isn't a bill that he's trying to get Microsoft to fix, this is him doing them a favor by reporting a flaw to them. He gave notice, they didn't even trouble themselves to even acknowledge receipt after almost a week. I might have waited the full 30 days, but I would expect a TOTAL of 30 days to fix, if they hadn't even replied in 5 days... well, frankly, Ormandy is probably right, they probably were planning to just sit on this flaw -- they have been caught sitting on known security flaws for YEARS multiples times -- someone will release an exploit, Microsoft says "naughty naughty, that's not responsible disclosure", and then whoever wrote the exploit points out a report of the EXACT SAME flaw from 5, 10, 15 years ago, that Microsoft never bothered to fix.

Microsoft rejects porn, iPad protesters fake it

Betamax

@Dana W, quite being such a damn fanboi. Banning apps and not bundling apps with the phone are two unrelated things and you know it. (Second sign of fanboi'ism, you are defending Apple for banning porn when the article is about Microsoft being Jobsian this time.)

"Its like being mad because a company that makes DVD players won't pack in half a dozen porno DVDs with each unit"

No it's like buying VHS instead of Betamax, because Sony banned porned on Beta. Which Sony did; and even customers who never actually bought a porno tape, bought VHS instead. It was one factor that led to Beta's demise even though it was a technically better tape format. I'm SQUARELY in that camp -- I wouldn't buy a porn app, but nevertheless would buy a phone that doesn't restrict my choices over one that does.

------------------

Anyway... This is dumb, since the browser can pull up unlimited porn, other than videos -- which, despite Jobs denying it, are often flash. Along with everything else on that "banned" list. They (both Apple and Microsoft, and Google if they haven't already) should just stick it in some "over 18" section.

Microsoft bares Steve Jobs' Flash rant claptrap

Intentionally deceptive

"We'll leave it up to you, dear reader, to form your own opinion as to whether Jobs was naïvely mistaken or intentionally deceptive"

All I will say is, Steve Jobs is not one to let a little reality get in the way of how he thinks things should work.

"And, how difficult can it be to move to Cocoa? I'm not a mac developer so don't have any idea specifically but assuming the main logic is separate from the UI (as it should be) it can't be that hard surely? OK, maybe it's not quite the same scale but I've moved .NET stuff from WinForms to WPF easily enough - and AWT to Swing in Java."

VERRRY difficult. First off, Cocoa uses ObjectiveC, not C or C++; you ported a .NET app and a Java app to a .NET app and a Java app using different toolkits, you did not port to a different language. Secondly, Office is an unholy mess -- there are bloggers that have posted over the years that worked on the Office code, there's code going back to the 80s (not fragments but whole swaths of code), there were some modules written in assembly language code that they found they didn't have the source for any more, it's a serious serious mess, and I doubt it'll EVER be Cocoa.

Welp, enjoy your fruit phones, I'm off to Android.

Microsoft sneaks Firefox add-on into Patch Tuesday update

Yes it is Microsoft's fault

Don't shift blame away from Microsoft, so firefox has a method that the extension system can be abused. It is still fully Microsoft's fault for abusing it. Oh well, just makes me glad I am Microsoft-free.

Bug gives attackers complete control of Windows PCs

Linux isn't what it used to be...

and Ubuntu in particular. Expanding a bit on what yossarianuk commented on... I have some Ubuntu and some gentoo boxes and used to run slackware, I've been using Linux since 1993. As recently as 2007, I would recommend Linux just to technical users, it was much *better* than Windows but I would not say it was easier.. Ubuntu 7.10 (October 2007) was close. By Ubuntu 8.04 I found most things could be done strictly via the GUI, and I recommended it to people. Each release since has gotten "slicker" and easier to use while retaining the speed and power. The recently released Ubuntu 10.04 is VERY nice, and I've found a GUI method to do everything I've looked for so far, I would say it is easily easier than Windows to use now.

Google mobile ad chief fires back at Apple lockout

Oh Jobs...

"How about Google artificially promoting companies that pay a fee to the top of search results."

How about it? Google doesn't refuse to list everyone else, there's merely a paid results section on top of the real results. This has nothing to do with Apple locking out competing ad networks.

@DZ-Jay: Whatever. The "important" sites are not kow-towing to IPhone restrictions, and the "important" *users* are going to Android phones.

"Sorry to have to point this out... but while it may be YOUR DEVICE, it's not YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM OR SOFTWARE. You have but a license to use it."

Well, that's a good reason to get an Android phone. *Your* device, *your operating system or software*. Google lets people modify Android how they want and redistribute these modified copies freely. They have told people they cannot put a few of the Google apps into a mod'ed OS image, but have provided a utility so the user can back up these apps off their stock phone, put on the mod'ed OS, and then put those apps back on. I'm not saying Apple should be forced into this, I just wonder why people keep buying devices with so much artificial crippling crammed into them.

Sadville founder lays off 30% of staff

Open-ended environment and staff cuts

@Dave 52, Who the hell names something "sadville"? The Register, because it was at one point used almost exclusively for gambling and pornography (well, just like the wider internet, I suppose.. but it seemed I guess sadder to have an open-ended virtual reality system and find it was STILL used mainly for that). (Note the gambling has been banned for a while) A lot of it was (and I'm sure is) just empty islands, malls, night clubs, etc., since anyone could buy land and build whatever they wanted, and there was a lot more space then people to use it. Linden Labs calls it "Second Life". It's like how they call the Itanium the Itanic.

To be honest SecondLife is quite innovative, being completely open ended. There's plenty of online MMORPGS and such, but in them there's a canned list of items and that's what you can get -- in SecondLife, any user can create new items and many do, they can create buildings, via scripting they can give items behavior, and the Havok phyisics engine is incorporated. One illustrative example, lets say a gun (note I don't think they are that common in SecondLife but...). It's not "a weapon that does 20 damage" like it would be in most online environments (that have weapons)... no.. it's basically a tube that a projectile shoots out of at high speed. And clubs that ban guns, they have a detector to detect objects capable of flinging high speed projectiles (since it's open-ended it can't just look "gun" up on an item list), and warn the user and teleport them out. (Note, it's up to the land owner to allow injuries or not, but even without injuries it's annoying to get shot since you'll be pushed back a bit by the bullet.)

Anyway.. what doubletalk and lies from that spokesmen.. canning people may have been a necessity to be able to afford to pay everyone, but making it sound like cutting people will help SecondLife onto the browser and such is ridiculous -- the only thing it helped is the cash flow situation.

China net addicts' great escape foiled by taxi drivers

Probably is...

Being forced off the computer, out under the cruel natural light of the daystar (oh how it burns!) to exercise? I guess that could be boring and exhausting 8-).

I'm most amused by the cab driver dropping them off at the police station when he realized they didn't have money 8-).

Wikileaks' US army 'leaker' arrested

not enough information...

Regarding tas's post, if that is a fair assessment, that he rather indiscrimnately leaked classified info to wikileaks and such, then I'm with Lamo on turning him in. It's just not a good thing to be leaking classified info.

However, if he was a true whisteblower (and in the case of the Iraq video, he was, this is a certain case of whistleblowing) then Lamos reaction was lamentable, and the US gov'ts response was also lamentable although unsurprising.

I just don't have that information on what type of information he leaked (other than the Iraq video itself) so I'll reserve judgement on this one.

Verizon leads race for (the real) iPhone 4G

Doubtful, and addressing Lance3's bad info

There've been Apple fanbois on howardforums for like the last year or more. News report: "Verizon is not in talks with Apple at this time". Fanboi: "OMFG!!1! They said 'at this time', that means they'll be talking to Apple any second!!!1!!one"

Verizon is not interested in the revenue split Apple has had in the past, and are not going to let a vendor dictate changes to networks, as Apple did with IPhone (they added special equipment or at least software just to handle Visual Voicemail). Furthermore, AT&T uses WCDMA/GSM and Verizon uses CDMA and EVDO, so if AT&T ever gets to rolling out LTE, they'll have LTE in common, but not enough coverage to make it reaonable to have an LTE only phone. An LTE/CDMA/GSM phone is possible but IMHO not terribly likely. The other big GSM provider in the US is T-Mobile, and they do have plans for LTE. Therefore I expect the second vendor to be T-Mobile.

---------------------------------

Regrading Lance3's misinformation:

"Verizon doesn't have a better infrastructure."

Yes they do. Their network holds up better when there's unexpected traffic spikes, it's held up better in cases of hurricanes and other natural disasters, they have more 3G, and fewer dropped calls, compared to AT&T, as well as being larger and having a much much MUCH higher percentage of the network with 3G.

" AT&T has a larger network"

No, it's much smaller. Verizon's was a *little* bigger before Verizon bought Alltel, and Alltel had a HUGE network. Verizon's overall network is several times larger than AT&T's now.

" and verizon uses a patchwork of various technologies and CDMA (not WCDMA) doesn't really build upon itself."

Well, you could say AT&T uses a patchwork, between plain GSM, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSPA. But in reality, AT&T has EDGE with some HSPA (and a bit HSPA+), Verizon has CDMA and EVDO.

"The orginal CDMA was pretty much voice only and data was done through dialing into a USR modem pool."

As was the original GSM data, both had Circuit Switched Data at 9600-14400 bps.

" Then you have 1xRTT; which provided 144kbps."

Yes, and all the CDMA network supports this now, there's no non-1X areas left.

" Then EV-DO Rev 0 and Rev A. Most people think that EV-DO is 3G but 1xRTT is also considered a 3G technology. So when Verizon talks about a larger 3G network; while true, it is not. EDGE can be considered a 3G technology, but was never marketed that way. So when Verizon talks about their 3G network, they are including 1xRTT which has between 80 and 100kbps. You can get that same speed from EDGE and then some."

Absolutely false. When 1xRTT first came out the CDMA carriers thought of claiming it was 3G but gave up on that like 10 years ago after realizing it technically met the 128kbps requirement of the time, but just wasn't fast enough to hype as 3G. Verizon's 3G network is 3G, it was 100% EVDO Rev A before they bought Alltel; Alltel had a little Rev 0 left, but they were upgrading this to Rev A and it is likely all Rev A again by now. They've got about 5% coverage that is still 1xRTT only (way out in the sticks, likely they could not get 1mbps of backhaul to these sites...) They do not show this coverage on their 3G coverage map since it's not 3G.

A note on speeds -- 1xRTT is 144kbps down, 144kbps up, but 60-80kbps typical. EVDO Rev 0 is 2.4mbps down, 144kbps up; EVDO Rev A is 3.1mbps down, 1.8mbps up. Typical EVDO speed is about 600kbps-1.2mbps, although I've seen well over 2mbps at times. EDGE is 220kbps, although 80-120kbps is more typical (on AT&T's network). HSPA is 1.8, 3.6, or 7.2mbps depending on how up-to-date AT&T has it; people have gotten over 5mbps, but 1-2mbps is more typical.

The people that think the US is backwards networkwise are looking through a blinder of using only GSM phones -- the GSM coverage in the US is not up to par, but this is simply because CDMA is more dominant here. I did not complain about the lack of coverage in Spain and Morocco because my CDMA phone did not work after all. I have been on 1000 mile road trips, on one trip I only had 1X for about 20 miles, on another trip only about 5 miles, with 3G the whole rest of the way. If I'd used GSM, based on the coverage map I would have had about 30 miles *of* 3G with EDGE most of the rest of the way, with a bit of GPRS and "no service" thrown in.

Google tells staff to snub Windows after China hack snafu

smart

this is a smart move. Win7 may have better security than, for instance, xp, but is still less secure than the competition -- both due to it being a bigger tsrget (as so many will argue)

and do to ongoing design flaws that make it a softer targtet. Unless one has "legacy software' that requires windows (and won't run under wine) there's no reason to still use windows.

Apple picks death not compliance for open source iPhone game

"not a big deal"

To paraphrase steve jobs "let the submitter turn off the 5 device limit. Not a big deal." to you guys who say this restriction is ok, it is if it's your own code. But this isn't. It's gpl, which requires the source to be available and no redistribution restrictions. Quit the Apple fanboiism, they *could* allow this but they don't. Which is within apple's rights for sure but don't make excuses for apple about it.

As for being incompatible w/ commercial products -- a lot of libraries use lgpl, you can link that code in without having to open your source. For gpl, tough shit. You are expecting something for nothing. If you are reusing gpl code for free, your product is bound by gpl, deal with it, use bsd code, or public domain, buy code, or write it yourself. Some gpl projects are dual license so you can use code for free & gpl your product, or pay up and not open your source.

Ireland debuts Fone-a-Freetard lottery

repeat offenders

what are thr chances of a repeat offender? Very high if it's handled the way mediacom did it. They shit mine off last year, and told me why when i phoned in. Not happy but whatever, fair enough. Then it kept shutting off *even though i stopped using p2p*. It appears that either the customer<->ip mappings are screwed, or they knowkingly send false notices to hope heavy users just go away. That's what i did, i cancelled. I didn't tell them my suspicion regarding a corrupted ip database, since i hope they just lose customers instead.

second, splitting hairs, but it's *sending* a copy that's considered infringement, not the download itself. (of course, p2p software does both simultaneously.)

Zappos.com's little sister loses $1.6m in pricing cockup

How much is a bag anyway?

How much does a bag cost? If they sold them at $49 apiece, and still lost $1.5million, they must be some hellaciously costly bags.

Color ebook reader for 200 clams? Yup

Geez guys...

Geez guys, pretty demanding. This isn't earth shattering, but really.. you could buy 2 of these for the price of the ipad, with cash left over; or spend more to get a black-and-white reader. It's nice to have less expensive competition. The battery life sounds pretty bad, but presumably since it's that long reading that means with the backlight on and all that.

BMC reveals 'free money' mainframe and DB2 tools

"Extortion"

"After spending millions on a platform which legally now belongs to you why on earth must you pay IBM a tax for usage."

1) Some mainframers in fact lease the machines, they do not own them.

2) The OS! Not justifying what IBM charges, but if you want to get all legalistic, I don't think IBM could do a thing to prevent you from using the machine you legally own, if you run your own OS on it. You don't, you are using IBMs OS, which they don't sell, they license to you as long as you make your payments to them.

Are mainframe prices out of site? Yeah. Are they worth it? I think so. The machines are rock-solid reliable, scalable, and well-supported; they are expensive, but I've read about plenty of instances where a company either spent like 20 years of mainframe fees on a project, which then failed to replace the mainframe.. or successfully replace it but find the replacement cost more than the mainframe did.

ISP slapped with $807,000 fee for 'groundless' spam case

Not opportunists

These companies are not opportunists, other ISPs are simply not collecting money they are allowed under the law to collect. The FTC does not do it's job of pursuing spammers at any realistic rate, so a few ISPs make it a point to do so. Spammers, guess what! If you don't spam, they will not sue you!

As for this judgement, it's a shame, but really if no information turns up they should have given it up and let that one get away far earlier.

US wireless not competitive enough - FCC

competition

Building on what Dadz says: Only huge carriers could afford to trategically reserve bandwidth to shut out smaller competitors. "

In fact it's worse that that. There are clear cases of companies buying up spectrum solely to sit on it -- not just carriers where they may use it some day, but in one case a consortium of cable cos. They reportedly bought a bunch of AWS (1700/2100) spectrum SOLELY to sit on it, so they would have fewer competitors to cable high speed internet.

In terms of blah-de-blah regulations, the only one I would call for is a "use it or lose it" provision of sorts. The cellular band had this, and in fact it was used to take cellular licenses back from companies that didn't build them out, and hand them over to companies that would. There used to be a fixed mhz cap, but Verizon AT&T etc. argued with increase customers, and usage, that they may need that many mhz just to operate. This allows them to have as many mhz as they want, as long as they are actually using them. It also increases competition, since so many owners have huge swaths they have no intention of using. Since these swaths are opened up for others to use, it at least lowers the barriers to competition. If there's still no competition, well, natural monopolies do exist (that is, a monopoly where the company isn't blocking out competitors, there just aren't any.)

Techies slap Go Daddy with class action lawsuit

common here in the states

this kind of thing is common here in the states -- sales quotas, time limits, etc. etc. Having them as such is normal, but what companies will do is set them higher and higher to make sure few if anybody actually gets a bonus. Like "oh you made $2000 in sales? Well, the minimum's $2100, no bonus for you, better luck next time"

and then they wonder why employees aren't "loyal" to the company.

Atlantis spacewalkers complete ISS battery swap

zero gravity

i don't know that this battery swap takes longer than an iphone; i'm guessing an iphone battery swap in zero g would go pretty slow 8-)

Google halts deletion of Street View Wi-Fi data

Information leakage

@McMoo: because that is destruuction of evidence. In cases of data leaks in the us, covering it up makes fines and penalties FAR larger than coming clean.

In one sense I agree that anyone using unecrypted wifi is aking for it.. *BUT* don't argue that *anything* receivable outside is fair game!! Between infrared, "millimeter waves", and equipment sensitive enough to pick up window vibrations, you are in fact saying you are fine with anyone watching and listening to you at any time 24/7.

Sergey Brin: 'We screwed up' on Street View Wi-Fi grab

Nope!

"Anyone starting to suspect that Google caught wind of the fact they were about to be busted wide open, so moved first to look like an honest company throwing its hands up at its error?"

Nope! Frankly I am not. I think if someone had wanted to whistle blow they could have done it a month ago. I think at least enough people at Google do believe in Google's "Don't be evil" motto that they decided revealing this mistake of excessive data collection is better than trying to keep it closed.

IANAL. But, I know for data breaches here in the US, the penalty is usually far higher if a company finds a breach, and just crosses their fingers that nobody finds out, versus a company disclosing any breaches. This is more an improper collection of data than a breach, but I wouldn't be surprised if a few jurisdictions have a similar policy.

ISP shuttered for hosting 'witches' brew' of spam, child porn

Tech support logs

To me, it sounds like the real nail in the coffin would be the allegation in the linked article of logs of them providing tech support; they could have at least feigned ignorance otherwise (unconvincingly...) that they just sell colo boxes and virtual machines, and who knows what goes on on them? But that throws that right out the window.

Dev goes 'Wild' with H.264 Firefox

gstreamer's the way to go

"The idea is to start with the current stable version of the Firefox open source code - version 3.6.3 - and modify it with a new decoder. Posch tells us the project will include the open source GStreamer media framework, and this will likely handle H.264 decoding via the open GST ffmpeg codec."

This is the way to go. This sidesteps the patent problem -- open media frameworks are not patented, H.264 is. And indeed, distros that want to be strict do in fact ship with gstreamer but without H.264, DVD crypto support, MP3 support, etc. It's then up to the user to 1) Decide they are in a patent-free country or say "F" you to software patents, and get these codecs from 3rd parties (like medibuntu for ubuntu) or 2) Buy them from Fluendo -- and yes, they are available as properly licensed codecs from them that plug directly into gstreamer. My Dell Mini 9 included Fluendo codecs.

The other reason to use gstreamer, the ffmpeg implements many codecs (including vorbis and theora I think), and it's implementations seem to speed up with almost every release. So, you'll end up upgrading ffmpeg and having vlc, mplayer, and every other player *except* firefox speeding up if they throw the libs into the main executable.

Canadian mobe firm sued over disappearing husband

don't blame us..

don't blame americans on this one. Some think canada is the 51st state, but in fact it is not. 8-) thanks.

Grow-lamps roast Yorkshire dope farmer in his sleep

That's only 100 degrees...

Almost fainted stepping in on a warm day? What a bunch of pussies.. you guys and your mild summers. Seriously, it gets up into the mid to upper 90s (about 36) here every single summer with high humidity too, and I don't almost faint every time I step outside. It got up to 120 when I was in Las Vegas (that is 49 celsius).