Posts by toughluck

Apparently we have to give customers the warm fuzzies ... How the heck do we do that?

Scottish Water used Rant & Race’s Sentiment Engine to analyse customer feedback in real-time, producing what the firm reckoned was a 29 per cent decrease in customer complaints.

Ok, suppose they have a thousand complaints per year (Reasonable? Maybe). They went down to 710. Sounds good. But for those 710 people, it doesn't matter -- they still had a reason to complain. That complaint may have been that SW's heavy equipment once drove past their house on the way to an incident, or it may have been a customer that has no other choice (due to their natural monopoly) and had their water pipe break for the fourth time that year. To that customer, no amount of WTFX is going to help, they want their problem fixed -- permanently -- or at least a plan how this is going to be fixed.

Boeing just about gives up on the 747

I flew on the 747-8i with Lufthansa in November on the way to US and on a 747-400 on the way back. I'm sure the 748 is a great plane. But to be honest, 744 is just about the same in terms of comfort. I'm sure the economy with the new engines is better, but I suppose it's not enough to offset the cost of the plane. I didn't notice any advantage in terms of cabin noise on 748, which was touted as one of the key advantages. Next time, I hope I can pick an A340-600 to fly on the way there and a 787 on the way back, but air travel on widebodies is just as underwhelming as it was on relatively short trips I made before (other than the ability to actualy stand up).

Murderous necrophiliac kangaroo briefly wins nation's heart

Re: Natural behaviour

Actually, the fact that homosexuality occurs in nature (Bonobo chimpanzees spring to mind) was one of the arguments raised in favour of homosexual relations between people.

If you look hard enough, you'll find a natural justification for pretty much any behaviour.

Aircraft now so automated pilots have forgotten how to fly

Re: The human pilots just do the easy bits...

From this perspective, you gotta love Luftwaffe's operating practice.

The Luftwaffe? That would certainly explain the guns on their planes.

Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers!

Re: The drive's a Seagate...

You mean the inside tracks or the outside?

Assuming it was running constantly from 1997-03-01 to 2016-01-01, a 5400 rpm disk would have made 53.5 thousand million revolutions.

This translates to 25.6 million miles at the rim or 6.6 million miles at the spindle.

Engineer's bosses gave him printout of his Yahoo IMs. Euro court says it's OK

Re: Will this mean the death of BYOD

@kwhitefoot: Absolutely. I can't understand why people are apparently okay, or even ecstatic with BYOD where the 'YO' literally stands for "your own," as in "what you personally bought and use." I could imagine a smartphone vendor implement a BYOD strategy where they demand all prospective employees buy a specific ($2000+) model that is then enrolled into BYOD, and with that, you lose all rights to it and relinquish it at time of termination. Loss, theft, failure, etc., are all covered by employee. They could run a very profitable scam for quite a while (7 billion people to go through), and it would probably be legal in a lot of places.

FWIW, BYOD is okay(-ish) if the employer allows you to choose the device, but only if they are the ones who actually foot the bill.

Periodic table enjoys elemental engorgement

Re: Extreme Marketing Opportunity

Elements are named so that they remain somewhat sane. Researchers are free to name the element they synthesized with the caveat that the name needs to reflect the origin of the element or honor an important physicist or chemist.

However, if IUPAC took this advice, they could subvert it. By all means, name your element Googlium or Iphonium. Aw, it looks like you're not the ones to have discovered it. Hmm, maybe if you invest money into your own research center, complete with researchers and equipment and synthesized your own new element?

Re: If you played the original X-COM game

Hear hear!

Happy new year, VW: Uncle Sam sues over engine cheatware

Re: Ah, let me tell you about the EPA.

So, it's a European company that was trying to run a business in the US and ran afoul of the law. That's a recipe for disaster. Whether it's protectionism of local business, revenge against a foreign national is irrelevant. VW are being sued for breaking the law. If you break the law in the US, you're in deep shit, and unless you can lie or legislate your way out of it, you won't get away.

It also has to be said that it's better that EPA is actually doing something that is in their mandate rather than the alternative, which would be to let everyone just break the law and emit anything they want from the tailpipe.

In the EU, most countries are really slow to initiate any proceedings against VW for the simple reason that there are too many hands in others' pockets (or around others' throats) and they're not sure what's going to happen if they start the ball rolling. In this particular case, it's the Europeans that are too slow.

Assuming other manufacturers are clear of any cheating here, VW had undue advantage over them by means of lower costs and it's almost certain they would have lost many sales to competition if they followed the same rules as everyone else.

Apple had more CVEs than any single MS product in 2015, but it doesn't really matter

Re: As a Mac user I often wish Apple could do better.

So would I. Except the sales numbers are probably telling him that he doesn't have to be.

I would say that the sales numbers are probably telling him that he is already serious about quality.

North Korean operating system is a surveillance state's tour de force

Re: One thing is mind-boggling

Oh, I understand that totally.

However, the plebes have no access to computers, let alone any networks, therefore there is no need to spend any effort on an operating system. If you break the law by owning a personal computer, why would you go to the lengths of installing a state-sponsored OS on it?

Also, certain pieces of the OS (watermarking files to track their ownership) are aimed strictly at data sources at government level.

One thing is mind-boggling

If the anti-virus deletes files that contain any officially disallowed terms, that still doesn't work against pig latin (or its Korean equivalent), and at the same time, it cripples the government. Maybe that's a good thing?

"Punishment for John Doe is death."

*ping*file deleted*authorities notified

Any official army documents that mention fighting (as in strategy)? File deleted.

Official document to prevent starvation? File deleted.

And so on. How about a virus that appends any of the naughty words to every file? Everything deleted?

Re: A serious question...

Internet cafes in NorK? Seriously?

Airlines won't allow the laptop to be checked because of lithium batteries. Same goes for any other reasonably recent/modern gadget.

To be honest, your anecdotes concerning the African bush don't really translate to any 'normal' situation. And if you lost a laptop to an elephant, I don't think anyone would get any use out of it. Same goes for monkeys monkeying around with your stuff.

Seriously, if you have some seriously important stuff on your laptop or whatever and you wouldn't kill an animal over it, I honestly don't think it qualifies as important enough (although I do realize some would kill another person over their gadget sooner than an animal).

DEAD MAN'S SOCKS and other delightful gifts from clients

Re: Interesting

There you go. It's pretty clear that the Conway document you mentioned uses MS Word default settings and when applying them to WP (either kind), you end up with more data that needs to be written (vs Word which has this by default).

What I'm shocked about is how the two-word document is so huge in Word. With default settings, all three documents should be largely the same size (cf. RTF generated by anything, and especially an unformatted text file), but they're not.

After zipping, you can see how much redundant data (in its own context) there is in all of them. Word Perfect compresses ca. 1:1.3, Word Pro 1:1.8, and Word a whopping 1:14, indicating that way too much of its data is redundant (not only in its own context, those are probably duplicated default settings which the word processor should have no problem applying from templates).

Re: Interesting

Ok, that piqued my interest.

1. Are the Word Pro and Word Perfect documents indeed ASCII, or are they binary?

2. How much space do they occupy after compression with Z (compress), zip/gzip, bzip2 and lzma (7z)?

3. Have you tried to create a pretty much blank document, only typing something like your name in each editor with default settings?

The fact that the format is binary doesn't mean much. If you open it with ghex, you'll see that your text is in there (look towards the end), although each character is separated with a 00 byte (for some reason, Microsoft decided that saving in UTF-16 by default made sense even where there is not a single non-ASCII character used -- where UTF-7 would be already more than enough to encode everything).

Uh, no. Word's .doc format was ASCII+one character for the body text and a lot of headers with redundant information and version control. All the way until Office Open XML (.docx) format which zips the base xml files into one. The zip compression is what actually makes the files smaller, the uncompressed XML is vastly larger than even the old format.

Death Stars are a waste of time – here's the best way to take over the galaxy

Seven-shot weapon, that Starkiller

[*spoiler warning*]

So Starkiller is basically able to destroy just seven targets (six Republic worlds) and D'Qar in the Ileenium system before completely draining the star. After draining its star, it's completely useless and needs to be evacuated. It cannot move, there is no mention of any engines on that thing, and not enough energy left to move it, anyway.

Don't even get me started on how the beams are visible all over the galaxy at the same time. It's not about visibility itself, since these are not lasers, but if they move in hyperspace, they shouldn't be visible at all. And certainly the destruction of the six Republic worlds should not be visible from anywhere but just that one system (unless the galaxy is really tiny, in which case you wonder why they need hyperdrives in the first place).

Rounded corners on Android phones cost Samsung $548m: It will pay up to Apple after all

Doesn't matter. LG Prada and Samsung F700 may have been featurephones with a touch UI, but same was true for the original iPhone, which was just a featurephone for over a year since its introduction (App Store was added with version 2.0 in July 2008).

Re: How can anyone patent radiused corners?

But these are trademarks, not patents. There is a clear difference -- a trademark is something that your brand or product is associated with and if others were using it, it would diminish its value and illicitly prop up the knockoff.

If Apple patented touchscreens with the original iPhone (just to be clear: that would be another one patented long after other manufacturers released their own), would people still defend Apple's validity of the claim? Of course they would. It would still be just as silly as this one.

Ok, rounded corners. So what? Others had them before, and iPhone's shape is in no way unique, iconic or instantly recognizable. If it was, it would have been a trademark, not a patent.

If iPhones had an asymmetric shape where one corner would have a different radius, or maybe not round at all and others copied exactly that -- they might have a point (except prior art from others exists, but let's skip that for the sake of the argument) and it could have been not only patentable, but also trademarkable. And then Apple would actually have a valid claim.

Re: How can anyone patent radiused corners?

Next up, Apple is going to sue the governments of countries around the world that dare to have rivers flowing through them for infringing on their patent on rounded corners.

Re: The difference between Apple and Samsung

And Apple paid how much exactly to Xerox PARC for copying their GUI and mouse?

Re: Samsung has a long history of ripping off Apple designs

I knew I shouldn't have made the comment during US daytime hours.

Samsung has a long history of ripping off Apple designs

Such as their F700, shown in 2006, released in February 2007. Samsung was ripping off Apple even before they showed the original iPhone!

Oracle ordered to admit on its website that it lost the plot on Java security

Re: To fix this problem...

You get the bin, extract it to /opt/java/##/jre_$version (where ## is 32/64 depending on the version).

Then you set up /etc/alternatives/whatever to follow /opt/java/##/jre_latest/bin/whatever (where whatever is java, javaws, jControl, etc.) and a symlink in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libnpjp2.so to jre_latest.

For older versions, you make launchers directing to the specific java version with the specific program.

Furthermore, you can set up more symlinks (for 1.7latest, 1.8latest, etc.).

This always worked for me and to be honestly speaking, I don't see why you would bother with RPMs or DEBs when you know that this can break dependencies and that this will not be enough since you'll always need a specific Java version at some point.

Skilled workers, not cost, lured Apple to China says Tim Cook

Re: If so skilled

Their particular skill is being able to survive on the pay they're getting, duh.

Rack servers drive $120bn data centre infrastructure market

Shhh

Hush, you! Don't tell them that! Cloud and virtualization were supposed to be used for their inherent efficiency and in case of virtualization, the idea was to consolidate hardware so much that you'd have needed less of it. Well, that's only true if you can eliminate overhead.

If your staff never cared about using available resources effectively, switching to VMs won't change that.

Worse still, they will simply spin up new VM instances at a whim, effectively raising your costs, not lowering them.

If you already had good sysadmins, your infrastructure was already running at high efficiency, and switching to virtualized workloads would only add overhead, licensing costs, require retraining and possibly hiring, all of which costs money.

And at the end, your bare metal is running the same workload as before (equivalent of x servers) plus hypervisors (equivalent of y servers) plus middleware (equivalent of z servers) plus you have to account for overhead (n>100%) as it invariably turns out to be not as effective as before. For positive values of x, y and z, n×(x+y+z) > x.

That's something that people making purchasing decisions fail to understand, for some reason believing that new x is smaller than old x, y and z is negative and overhead doesn't exist.

Spectralogic CTO talks up hybrid flash-tape cartridge. Welcome, tape robot overlords

Right now, cartridge memory (CM) in an LTO tape is 16 KB. That's how much you need. The tape will read the full inventory in the header on load, which takes only a second or two, and quickly space to the proper point along the tape.

If anything, increasing the capacity of CM to 1 MB would be possible and would solve some 50% of problems with low capacity of the CM (although would introduce another one -- it takes bloody ages to read that CM chip due to low throughputs involved). NFC with Bluetooth could probably solve that throughput problem, at the expense of power required. Adding a second chip for redundancy wouldn't hurt, either. Cost would go up, and that might not be appreciated.

As I see it, though, there's just no need for extra connected memory. If you want to index the tape contents, do it at the host level. That way, you're making the index easily accessible to all applications, you can quickly rebuild the last known good index to tape without having to re-read most of it and you don't have to rely on a mechanical connector that's prone to breaking.

Okay, reductio ad absurdum:

If adding a small amount of memory makes sense, adding more would make even more sense. Why not go the whole hog and replace tape in the cartridge with flash memory, then?

Food for thought: You could fit thousands of micro SD cards in a single 4×5×1 tape cartridge (or hundreds of USB sticks, etc.). Then add a beefy connector at the front (like aggregated 8 USB 3.1 ports) and off you go. With USB 3, you could get away with using the slowest sticks in the "cartridge", have 8×USB 3.1 hubs and putting all sticks in it in a RAID.

I wonder if there's someone making all the decisions, reading this and deciding: Hey, that's actually a good idea, we'll build it.

Motorola’s X Force awakens a seemingly ‘shatterproof’ future

About OLED/AMOLED durability

I had a Samsung Wave for four years now. The display broke off in a corner, and the glass broke apart in two streaks. It didn't shatter, though, so that's okay.

The display is still crisp, and I still have it at the lowest brightness, which is more than plenty. At maximum brightness, it's reasonably good in the sun and way too bright for indoors.

However, I have three qualms with the display: the black isn't black, evenness isn't even and burn-in happens.

When supposed to display only black, the screen still is lit, if ever so slightly.

Worse still, there are splotches visible (clearly visible when it's pitch-black around).

Third, burn-in happens. Around the top and bottom of the display (status bar and basic icons), the burn-in is clearly visible even at mid-brightness (it's obvious when completely white).

--

That said, the phone is still usable after four years (to an arbitrary definition of 'usable').

Huawei: Hey, storage bigshots – we're coming for your top 3 spot

May I ask for slightly smaller and more compressed badly exposed graphs and charts next time? The top one is almost completely illegible, but I can still just about make out a couple of words on it, but I'm mostly abel to decipher the bottom one -- sloppy job.

If I may, here are a couple of suggestions: make sure the image is not in focus and make sure that you shake your hands a bit when taking the picture to make it all blurry.

Thanks a ton in advance.

Sysadmin's £100,000 revenge after sudden sacking

Re: Late to the thread, but with an idea...

Could be, but they could have also been calling to determine if they had any grounds for accusing him of sabotage by means of a poison pill, so slamming the phone or giving an unfriendly response would have worked against him.

Since it was already after the ISDN contract could be cancelled, he could explain exactly what was the problem and how it was meant to be handled. I suspect his manager knew all about the project, but since he was given the boot at the same time, there was no possibility of a handover to anybody higher up the chain. And even then, it was probably documented, but nobody was arsed to look at that since everything was working.

Re: SImilar thing happened to me

Absolutely not a dick move. They were the ones who completely severed all ties to you. They contacted you unsolicited. You had a different job at that time and they could not have known your T&C. For all they knew, your new T&C could prohibit you from ever contacting or working for your former employers.

Besides, you handed over as well as you could. It's absolutely not your fault, they did that to themselves. And whatever money they offered, well, don't you feel it was too little? You didn't know the extent of their problems and it could well turn out that even the obscene amount of money was too little for the trouble.

Report: VW execs 'knew' about fuel economy issues last year

Re: Does anoyone really believes the "rogue engineers" argument?

@Green Nigel 42:

PSA Peugeot Citroën bled 5 billion euro two years ago. France tried to help them, but that was shot down by Germany. In the end, France was only allowed to provide a smallish short-term loan, and PSA had to sell off assets to continue. Expect exactly the same to happen to VW, where France, Italy and UK would definitely team up to shoot down any effort to help VW.

They're not too big to fail. There are at least a dozen car manufacturers lined up and ready to buy up factories with people, machinery and all the lovely patents. Okay, if the patents are for circumventing legal testing methods and if people are only able to design cars and car parts while in cheat mode, I admit that's not very useful, but at least the machinery and people at the assembly line are worth it?

You could drop off your VW at the dealer's. You wouldn't like your car after it was brought up to spec. And they'd only refund what it's actually worth, claiming you got good use out of it.

Outsourcer didn't press ON switch, so Reg reader flew 15 hours to do the job

Re: Floppy drives?

@TRT: Check if both PCs have the same settings for the parallel port in BIOS/EFI. Check that Windows has parallel port with exactly the same settings on both machines. Confirm that the OS sees the dongles. If not, check that they are screwed in (or clasped) properly. Swap the dongles if it still fails. Swap the hard disks if the error is now that the serial number doesn't match.

Almost certain it's a parallel port off or failed, or one dongle failed. Very unlikely to be any other cause.

Researchers say they've cracked the secret of the Sony Pictures hack

@conscience:

Okay, let me try to follow your logic here:

Distrowatch tracks 272 "popular" Linux distributions. Should I add up these distributions with 119 vulnerabilities in the kernel? Are you suggesting that Linux has 32,368 vulnerabilities (or more)?

If Microsoft is fixing a vulnerability common to several different versions of the OS, the patch gets ported to all vulnerable code portions, regardless of the version. Again, if Microsoft releases a patch that fixes the same issue on ten different OS versions, does it mean they squashed one bug or ten? What if there's a Linux kernel patch -- does it fix one bug, or does it fix 300?

Aircraft laser strikes hit new record with 20 incidents in one night

Here, have a downvote.

It just takes one.

Thin Client Devices Revisited

Thin client hardware?

Cheap low-end commodity hardware today is usually faster than a mainstream desktop ten years ago. Add instruction extensions and HSA and for some tasks it's faster than 10 year old high-end machines (e.g.: full HD playback, not to mention 4K).

And all that at significantly lower power consumption. You can't get thinner than that. Load it up with custom software and you can call it whatever you want, it will be a thin client, but also one that allows doing much more than old hardware did.

Got a time machine? Good, you can brute-force 2FA

Re: No news

Even better: Why aren't the codes expired as soon as they are used? Or after 2 or 3 uses? There's no legitimate need for more uses of a single code at the same time unless you're willing to compromise security (by broadcasting the code and asking anyone interested to make use of it).

AMD sued: Number of Bulldozer cores in its chips is a lie, allegedly

Re: A bit of a Dickey move

Larry may as well have them, but Jonathan Schwartz might or might not have. SPARC T chips date back to 2005, which was well before Oracle took over.

Linus Torvalds targeted by honeytraps, claims Eric S. Raymond

I'm confused

Womens groups retort that a culture that permits such abuse is not welcoming to anyone, and especially hostile to women.

I don't understand this. On the one hand, womens groups insist on equality, and on the other hand they say that abuse is especially hostile to women? Note that nobody said "misogyny", only "abuse" in general.

Could someone explain this to me in plain simple English, please?

How much do containers thrash VMs in power usage? Thiiiis much

Would it kill you if both graphs had the same scale on vertical axes?

The post is required, and must contain letters.

Now VW air-pollution cheatware 'found in Audis and Porsches'

@AC one hour ago

I'm not sure whether I should address you by your proper name, Mr. Horn, but I guess I shouldn't.

That "minor excess exhaust emissions exhibited in the VW Diesel engines" is 40 times higher than the limit. It's worse than NOx emissions of most engines 25 years ago when there were no emission standards limiting nitrogen oxides.

Re: An internal investigation suggests between 10-20 people involved

But what does that imply? That 10-20 people can effectively bring down a company with over half a million employees worldwide?

That would mean terrorist organizations would be far better off training and injecting engineers in key positions at various companies across the globe in a concerted effort, which would produce much more mayhem than downing a few aircraft.

Dieter, that's understandable, but on the other hand, adding new terms to cover software cheating would make it possible for Volkswagen to weasel out on the technicalities since software cheats were not expressly forbidden when the cars were first tested.

As it stands, the proper umbrella term for these is 'defeat devices' which is what actually enabled EPA to have a case against VW.

German ADAC (or maybe TÜV) tried to finger Nissan and Citroën and accused them of cheating on the tests, but they actually never presented their data, and apparently managed to do a comprehensive test among all makes and models within a week, since they presented their flawed findings on 2nd of October, which was less than two weeks since the scandal erupted.

Not to mention that they would not be able to replicate the tests fully. It's possible they managed to trap some cars in a loop that had them emit too high NOx, but they didn't present the methodology nor actual findings.

Wrong. Last year when CAFEE first tested (at the behest of ICCT) a Volkswagen Jetta and Passat to demonstrate that it is possible to achieve lower emissions than Euro 6 mandated, to push the EU for even tighter regulation, they did so alongside a 3-litre diesel BMW X5 and found that the BMW does not exceed emissions, whereas the Volkswagens did -- by 20 and 35 times, respectively.

You might not like it, but other manufacturers appear to have managed to meet the emissions goals just fine. Handwaving by Volkswagen Group, such as claiming that the testing is not representative of real world driving, will not help if other cars meet the regulations without issues. And even if they failed to meet the emissions goals in real world driving, they did not cheat to meet the goals during testing.

Re: Pumping excess air into exhaust and petrol catalytic converters

Short answer, not doable.

Long answer, all of the air goes into the engine already. In theory, you could bleed air from the turbocharger. Now, VW exceeded emissions some 40 times. You'd need the turbocharger to supply 40 times the amount of air, use just a little of it for burn and then exhaust all of it. Basically, I've just described a turbofan engine.

--

As for catalytic converters -- that's for naturally aspirated engines that use stoichiometric petrol ratio. If the ratio was too lean, you'd wreck the converter quite quickly.

TSI, TFSI, and to a lesser degree, FSI engines use a lean petrol ratio. That markedly improves fuel economy, but at the same time precludes the use of classic three-way converters, and requires the use of catalytic converters for diesel engines. And yes, the implication of there being too many nitrogen oxides also holds true. Don't be surprised to see AdBlue SCR in next generation of petrol engines, too.

BTW, this is what held back the development of lean burn petrol engines up to somewhat recently -- Volkswagen led the charge. We'll just have to see at what cost, and quite soon.

Volkswagen: 800,000 of our cars may have cheated in CO2 tests

Re: A German lawyer acquaintance with a BlueMotion Passat diesel...

France was barred (mostly by Germany) from bailing out PSA Peugeot Citroën two years ago when they posted a 5 billion € loss. PSA had to sell some assets (notably GEFCO) and also sell off an 18% stake of the company to Dongfeng.

France would be the first in line to prevent Germany from trying to bail out Volkswagen. Expect a fire sale of VAG assets, including patents, factories, and personnel.

Opera Jon's sparkling Vivaldi proves the browser isn't dead

Re: Welcome back

I paid for Opera back when it was ad-supported (premium version had no banner, that was the only difference), I think version 6 or 7, and I recommended the browser to everyone.

I see no problem paying for Vivaldi now.