Posts by Tom 38

Android upgraded to be more resistant to hack attacks

Yep, I meant Honeycomb. Act in haste, repent at leisure.

Fact: No SE 2010 phone is scheduled to get ICS.

Bra size.

Oooh, its coming "soon" is it? Can't wait for "soon" to get here. Do you think it will be the same "soon" that the Gingerbread source will be available "soon"? (then "maybe", then "never")

Did you even read the links you posted? Rather than prove your point, they backup mine:

"Beyond Gingerbread 2.3.4, we plan to upgrade our 2011 Xperia smartphone portfolio to the next Android platform made available to us"

2011 phones are new phones. 2010 phones are not new phones. Not new phones are not getting upgrades from SE. Has this made it any clearer to you?

Contrast with iOS, the latest version of which could be installed on the 2009 version of the phone (3GS), from the moment it was released.

How is that FUD? If it isn't FUD, when/where can I get the ICS update for the ZTE Blade/Orange San Francisco?

Oh wait, no source, no new firmwares except for new phones. Colour me shocked.

Top general warns of cyberspy menace to UK biz

Blame the Chinese

Every time 'industrial espionage' is mentioned, it is nearly always blamed on the Chinese. Whilst I don't doubt they are 'at it', I would have thought that almost everyone else is as well (and we are at them). Trying to scare people with the yellow menace is a regression.

WikiLeaks on verge of financial collapse, founder says

Julian, my heart bleeds for you

Poor guy, stuck away in his mate's country house. All he wants is to tell the world the truth (and get paid), stick it to the man (and get paid), be worshipped as a demi-god* (and get paid) and philander his way through Europe (and get paid).

The Anonymous fellas seem pretty adept at releasing information without requiring £1.75m a year to do so.

* You should have seen him at St Pauls the other week, to certain portions of the population it seems he already is a demi-god.

UK shamed in high-speed broadband study

Lets see, typical "dont talk to each other modern family" use case:

1) Mum in lounge, watching 'Enders on iplayer - 1.5Mb/s

2) Dad in study, watching cricket on Sky Go - 3 Mb/s

3) Spotty youth #1 in bedroom, watching 'adult educational' films - 1 Mb/s

4) Spotty youth #2 in (different) bedroom, downloading movies from itunes - 10 Mb/s

5) Pre-spotty youth in bedroom playing Wow - wants pings below 50ms

I don't doubt that 2Mb/s is enough for an office of 5 people, who probably rarely stream content over the intertubes, and mainly read email/web pages. 56k was enough once upon a time.

I live in one of those aforementioned large apartment blocks. BT have fibred up the entire area, and whilst every single typical 2 up/2 down terrace in Newham has fibre available, the ostensibly simpler apartment blocks are being ignored - I'm stuck with 'rubbish' 17Mb/s.

Apple updates MacBook Pro laptop line

They won't do a swap

They might give you an itunes voucher if you ask persistently enough.

Netflix announces UK debut

Use a decent ISP. My ISP couldn't care less how much bandwidth I use.

Dell Vostro V131 13.3in Core i5 notebook

Business laptops with widescreen panels

Title + Icon

Domain registry touts dot-surnames for $500k

One word

Cocks.

This whole any TLD idea is stupid. It was clearly thought up by marketing rather than technical types.

iPhone 4S: Our *hit list

I understand your concerns, but if you live somewhere with decent net connections, you really can store most of your music content in the cloud. All of my music comes via spotify*. I have about 20GB cached for offline play, the rest I stream directly from spotify. I also don't have to fire up itunes or connect to a pc to sync music, just flick a switch in the spotify app. I can do this just fine over 3G, and it takes a couple of minutes to synch an entire album,

I get through about 10GB of 3G data a month, mostly spotify, which is all covered within my plan.

The only content that I need to store on my phone is videos, which itunes collects automatically from an RSS feed and synchs to my devices.

* Well, apart from the few artists who aren't on spotify.

Report: Hacking forum is a cybercrime academy

It sounds good

However they are talking about stackoverflow.com

Samsung, Google whip out Android 4.0 Nexus

Source?

Will we get the source for this yet?

Apple iOS 5.0 downloads drive all-time UK net traffic high

Well, technically speaking almost nobody would have actually hit Apple's servers to get IOS 5, all but a few will have been served from one of Akamai's edge caches.

Running your own CDN is just daft these days.

MacBook case fabs kick up a right stink

one hundreed meeelion

100m RMB is about £10m pounds. So a decent wedge, but not Dr Evil sized.

Google takes buzz saw to Buzz, other appendages

Direct access to Google's search results

I get this from the homepage. Silly academics.

Apple, tech titans lead US brands to world domination

On the other hand, its probably more due to the fact that from 1920-1933 all alcohol production was illegal in the US, and the vast majority of breweries were permanently shut down.

Spotify 'sold soul' to boy king Zuckerberg

Native linux client

Yeah, it looks pretty nice, however it uses Qt (I'm a Gnome man), and it is, as you say, a native _linux_ client, and I'm running FreeBSD and don't fancy trying to locate all the necessary Qt libraries to run it under linux emulation.

I've been using despotify for now (also needs a premium account).

Not only have they sold their soul, but the bastard version of spotify with facebook integration now crashes when you run it under Wine. Bastards.

Microsoft whips Apple with global Xbox TV deals

"""Apple and others have tried to do is work with content creators, but against existing content operators"""

Precisely, and its an utter fail. The kind of person who would buy an AppleTV (or a gTV for that matter) is going to want it instead of a STB, not as an additional one. Imagine a Sky box/AppleTV combo - or for that matter a 'Freeview' version.

I've been predicting the homebrew PVR to go mainstream for several years, perhaps this year will be when this actually happens.

Down but not out: Flash in an HTML5 world

Eeek

Adobe are planning web-loadable native code plugins for AIR. I can't think of anything more scary than an Adobe implemented version of ActiveX.

If Adobe stuck to creating tools that produced open standards compliant JS and CSS the world would be a better place. It would be better for Adobe as well, as they would stop being the first entry point for all targeted phishing.

Stevie J wasn't right about everything, but with Flash he was bang on - it needs to die.

Google loses battle for goggle.com

I like how goggle.com loads its jquery from the google supplied caches :)

Viz Profanisaurus

Also on itunes

Oh wait, snap.

Spotify's rising revenues gobbled by royalties blackhole

Record company greed?

I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but 90% of the time, the reason a band's music will disappear from spotify is that they get in a huff and demand it to be removed.

A good example of this is Bob Dylan, who had a monster entire back catalogue on Spotify when I joined, but a few weeks later withdrew 99% of it, leaving one 'best of' album.

I'm sure record companies are more than happy to thrash the last few pennies from any material they can lay their hands on.

The other 10% of the time music will be missing because the artist sold their rights early on to a third party who doesn't have a deal with spotify. A good example of this would be Oasis, who sold the UK rights to their music very early on. The company with the UK rights either refuses to license them to Spotify, or is asking way too much. Oasis tracks are on Spotify if your billing country is not UK…

iPhone 4S pay-monthly tariffs compared

"""The pick of the bunch for me is Three's One Plan"""

However, you don't point out that Three do not offer visual voicemail - where you can see a list of the voicemails you have received, who called you, when and how long the message is.

Instead, you have 90s style voicemail - "Press 3 to delete this message, press 7 for the next message, press star to accidentally override your greeting with 'erm, what did I just press?'".

Well, it pissed me off after I switched from O2 to Three. AFAICT, only O2 and Vodafone have visual voicemail.

Three coverage

I've found it pretty good - much more 3G coverage than O2 for example. Driving from London to Plymouth a few weeks back, I had 3G on Three right down the M4/5 corridor, where as my old man on O2 had only GPRS except when we went past a big town.

TDK fires up LASERS to double hard drive capacity

Sir

You're having trouble writing at GigE speeds? 125MB/s is not exactly superfast, I'm surprised that even a single spindle can't keep up with that.

Even so, if you need more speed, you need more spindles. I'd recommend something like ZFS with a 3 x 2 disc mirror (3 mirrors, striped), using 15k spindles, with a couple of mirrored SSDs as a cache device. Should get you close to around 10GigE speeds.

Deduplication: a power-hungry way to streamline storage

@Phil

And that's exactly how it does work. Now work out how much RAM you need per TB of deduped data.

Deduping is not free, it requires masses of memory to keep checksums in, slows down disk writes and is often a false economy. Unless you are expecting dedupe rates of >5, you probably are going to spend way more on RAM than you would on having much more disk capacity.

Given a choice between a 2 x 6 x 3 TB deduped raidz server with 128GB of RAM and a 8 x 6 x 3 TB unduped raidz with 32GB of RAM, the latter will perform faster and have more capacity.

Premier League loses footie decoder case

Narrow beam satellites

Sky are broadcast over Astra 2D, which has quite a wide, unsophisticated narrow beam - you can pick it up in Spain quite easily -

Astra 2D will be replaced over the next few years by 1N, 2E, 2F, all of which will have much more sophisticated narrow beams. In fact, 1N is currently moving to 28.2E, and has a much tighter narrow beam that solely covers the British Isles, and will be used by ITV's HD channels when it gets into position.

1N has three beams, see this page for maps of the beam footprint.

http://www.astra2d.com/astra1n.html

I suppose all the down-voters expect that magical option 4 will happen, where unicorns and puppies frolic in the sunlight; all broadcast football is cheap and with Greek commentary; PL, Sky won't raise their prices as a consequence; and QPR/Wigan/Norwich don't become the next Pompey.

Not right

The Premier League should be able to maximise revenue from their assets, by selling viewing rights to the UK (its major market) and then by selling it to any other markets that want to access it. It is a quirk of how satellite TV is broadcast that European channels (Greek, In this case) can be accessed outside of their market.

I can see three outcomes from this:

1) PL combine UK and Europe into one market. The cost for UK users (Sky subscribers) will rise, as the PL will want to raise the same money as before, but from just one market.

2) PL only license the content to broadcasters using tightly targeted beams, so that only a single country/area is covered (or not covered).

3) PL incomes drop as they refuse to sell to Europe.

So, all so that a pub landlady can publicly display footy at a competitive advantage to other pubs in her area. She's no martyr, she's attempting to fleece the rights holder to make money.

Don't bother with that degree, say IT pros

So when exactly did Larry Page, BSc, MSc and Sergey Brin, BSc, MSc become drop outs?

Jeff Bezos, Princeton graduate, Wall Street programmer - drop out?

Yes and, at the same time, no.

Someone having a CS degree does not immediately make them a good developer, and I know many excellent developers who do not have CS degrees.

However, at some point the depth of their knowledge usually fails. You can't* talk to them about efficiency using O() notation, and they won't know GoF design patterns, or the ISO/OSI 7 layer model, what a B-tree is, etc etc

I've expressed this as absolutes, obviously some people will know more than others, and some very special people will know it all, but the bottom line is if you want someone with a grounding in computer science, the best place to look is at graduates from decent universities who have spent 3-4 years studying it.

If you're just looking for code monkeys to operate from a well produced plan and design, then bedroom coders can be fine.

I'm slightly jaded though, we had a bedroom coder come on and join us for a couple of years. The libraries he worked on work perfectly well from the outside, but the innards of the libraries are full of horrible indirection and NIH-inspired code, and are so unmaintainable that we've deprecated them and rewritten them.

Mighty trash-bag balloon cluster soars above Nevada

Not just the cities, the entire country is pretty much in grid pattern. Scary.

Telcos cough mobe tracking habits

I <3 how none of this makes it through to TV/Movies, particularly crime based ones.

"Do we have his location yet?"

"Keep him on the line a bit longer, we haven't got a location yet"

"Ah drat, he hung up before we got a location"

Linux Foundation merges MeeGo into Tizen

Android is successful because Google has spent billions of dollars making it that way. If billions had been spent on Meego, it would also probably be pretty good.

Boffins prove Queen ballad 'world's most catchy song'

How did this get past the Editor?

No mention of 'trick cyclists' at all. Have I accidentally wandered into the BBC?

Anonymous hacktivists turn rapper on YouTube, iTunes

Once this hits the charts, radio stations will by law have to play it

Every day I find a new reason I'm glad to not be in the USA.

Faustian descent into backup hell: A play in two acts

Wow

dd if=/dev/da0 of=/tank/snapshots/laptop.img bs=8M

Amazon intros $199 movie Kindle

Giant fuck off web proxy

Sounds like one of my design specs - I like it.

Taxmen extend biz record check pilot

Some other stuff we did without in 1798

Sanitation

Healthcare

Roads

Free Hospitals

Free Schools

Benefits

About the only constant is that we are still fighting in Afghanistan.

Panda Security axes jobs, gets new chief exec

Aaaw, you can't diss the awesome quality of Panda products like that.

Pick two from 'cheap', 'fast', 'reliable', the saying goes. With our range of Happy Shopper servers, you can only pick one from 'cheap'.

Brit ISPs shift toward rapid pirate website blocking

Four words

IPSec VPN to Amsterdam.

CERN's boson hunters tackle big data bug infestation

Dijkstra: Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs

Oracle rushes out emergency Apache DoS patch

In journo-talk, you simply add another 'D' if its really really bad.

DoS == Bad vulnerability

DDoS == Double bad vulnerability

NASA: Beam me up some power, Scotty

190 gigawatts is surely unbelievable

Any fool knows that you only need 1.21 gigawatts to travel through time, 190 gigawatts would surely mean the entire planet would travel back to the late 50s.