Posts by John 137

Super-stealth FLYING CAR prototype seen outside GOOGLE HQ

"seen near google" = "it's at Moffett Field"

You know, the airport.

Now you can be the NSA: Snoop on a Google Glass hipster with a QR code

Re: Am I the only one

All together now, one more time: Glasses do not make an "AR view". They do not fully superimpose over your entire vision. You get a screen in the upper-right portion of your visual field, where the display device sits. It is not physically capable of changing the things you see around you; it could only display a modified version in one small portion of your vision.

Google seeks to calm facial recognition furor with app block for Glass

Re: Time for the I'mGlass (tm) Burka of Invisibility

Did a Ctrl-F to find the inevitable twat talking about "punching Glass wearers in the face hurr hurr" and was not disappointed.

Google's Glasses: The tech with specs appeal?

want to clear up a few things

I got to wear a pair for a bit back in the summer. First, they're extremely light. They sat lightly on the bridge of my nose, much like my regular glasses, and the electronics+battery package was sufficiently well-balanced that it didn't bother me or feel in danger of slipping off.

Second point, it doesn't really "superimpose" anything on your vision. It's more like if you look at the appropriate place, there's a screen there. Unobtrusive but convenient.

Boeing plans super-secure Android smartphone for top echelons

Re: "won’t be a mass-market device"

Here's Sally's review on Amazon after purchasing the phone:

"i bought the phone bcuz i heard you cant get viruses but now i cant install angry bards (its like angry birds but better!!!!!!!!) the phone keeps saying stuff like this software is not approved and that its malware. this phone sucks!!!!!!!1"

Sugar content now to be measured in Cadbury Creme Eggs

Re: For the record ...

God I hate chocolate snobs. Why don't you just go shovel some cocoa beans in your mouth, you pretentious fuck?

Encyclopaedia Britannica - Ah, the memories

"After being pounded again and again by Britannica’s sales jackals, my mom [...]"

Oh my...

Google guru blasts Android virus doomsayers as 'charlatans'

I think it would be a mistake to assume you've solved your infection by deleting the user. Once you have a login of any sort, privilege escalation is possible--here's a couple options that were posted on one site, within the last month: http://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/17932/ http://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/18105/

Have you killed off every process he started, even the ones that hide themselves? Did you remember to look for cron jobs? Running services? Scheduled "at" tasks? Maybe some other user left his .bashrc world writeable, so now the next time he logs in it'll launch a backdoor-type service and your attacker is right back in.

I saw a very interesting demonstration once. Using something like Flashrom (http://www.flashrom.org/Flashrom), you can reflash the bios while the system is running, needing only root access (and sometimes not even that). In the demonstration, they reflashed the bios with a slightly modified version; everything worked normally, with the added "feature" that if you booted the system with a file named "xyzzy" in /tmp, the BIOS would read your filesystem and make it SUID root. There's a local exploit that will not go away no matter how many times you re-install Linux.

Nuke (from orbit), because that's the only way to be sure.

As iPhone 4S battery suckage spreads, fixes appear

the Apple fix

So, a software update that will make the battery meter display at no less than 50%, right up to the point where it runs out of juice?

Canonical ARMs Ubuntu for microserver wars

I have a Smartbook

It's fun for fooling around on IRC and as an SSH terminal. You can also just barely use it for web browsing, if you install NoScript. The first thing I did was eliminate GNOME, though, and switch it over to running Xmonad, because cycles are precious.

According to Genesi, their GPU *can* do HD playback but I have been unable to play a video at full speed even in sub-HD resolutions. I don't think their X drivers are quite up to snuff yet.

Google Go strikes back with C++ bake-off

quoted

"we are not skilled at writing efficient programs in either of those languages, so the comparison would be unfair" - Russ Cox

If only Hundt had come to the same conclusion before trying to write a Go program.

Top500 founders talk big

and it's rubbish

Linux is far, far too big to run on supercomputers. Take a look at some of the research that's been done, you'll see that Linux is a huge, noisy system compared to the other options. The problem is that people think that Linux and MPI (preferably with FORTRAN and Python in the mix) are all we'll ever need for supercomputing, even at exascale.

Cell phone supercomputing, anyone?

Really?

You ask if this kind of low-power computer can take off--it already has, with the IBM Blue Gene. The nodes are not particularly fast and don't have massive amounts of RAM. I and other people in the FastOS projects work on getting operating systems that *won't* devour all the RAM and cycles. So yes, it's viable.

Platform clusters Windows HPC with Linux

@zenkaon

What kind of amateur uses Red Hat on a cluster?

Video games linked to ADD? Say it ain't ooh butterfly

knee-jerk

Oh god they're saying that performing the same action daily for years on end may have some result on the brain, but I *like* that activity! Argle bargle "fail" yarble "research" mrar rabble "Yanks" guhh PERSONAL ANECDOTES!

By god, they've been completely refuted! Way to go, commentards!

Blind one-legged man wins arse-kicking contest

Let me get this straight, commentards

A drunken man is brandishing weapons in his front lawn, apparently in a threatening enough manner to warrant a call to the cops. When the cops arrive, he threatens them and, it seems, goes to attack them. The cops then use the least lethal method they have for stopping him without getting stabbed.

Your response? ARGLE BARGLE AMERIKKKAN COPS, TASER BLARGH TOTALITARIAN POLICE STATE. Bravo, commentards, bravo.

Also, @g e, the guy's legally blind, I don't think hitting him in the eye would change much... Also I'm going to guess he was shot in the *back* with the Taser, probably as he was facing (or trying to locate and face) another officer. It's not particularly hard to flank a blind man.

Oxygen-from-Moon-dirt passes vomit comet test

hydrogen

Gentlemen.

It would seem that hydrogen is not a particularly big problem. The abstract available here: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1988lhfp.rept..115G (just google for "lunar hydrogen") seems to indicate that by simply heating regolith, sufficient quantities of hydrogen can be obtained.

The problem these scientists were working on was getting oxygen from moon rock. If hydrogen was already a solved problem, there's no need to re-iterate the solution.

Wipe the rabid foam from your lips and move on.

Most gamers fat and miserable, finds study

@Steve Swann

You're right... if it were about Britons, they'd have also found that gamers have bad teeth and eat bland food!

Also, at the other commenters, I agree that it's a rather silly study, but your anecdotes about being a thin 20-year-old happy gamer do not magically make the study invalid--it's statistics, droogs. The study is invalid if they decide that, obviously, playing games makes you fat, depressed, and old; drop in the old C-is-not-C phrase here.

Microsoft's Azure cloud price pipped by Amazon's Linux

@paul 97

Linux is not scaling to 18,000+ processors in your Roadrunner example. An individual Linux is running on each one of those nodes, which then communicate through higher-level software like MPI. Also, the general impression of Roadrunner is that the hybrid design was a mistake--everyone I've spoken to about it says it was very hard to program for Roadrunner, in part because of the general crappiness of Cell.

Linux is not the answer for HPC. It's pleasant on the desktop and it's good in servers, but it doesn't belong in petascale, especially now that we're focusing on cheaper slower processors, where Linux may eat up a significant fraction of processor time.

Google's vanity OS is Microsoft's dream

@Dave Ashe

Running code over the network is the future? It's also the past. You can talk about running the code remotely and accessing it locally, or fetching the code from a remote server and executing it locally; both have been done for decades. All the way back to the first timesharing system in the first case.