Posts by Chris 86

Former CIA and NSA head says Huawei spies for China

Conflicted much?

If this was entitled "Motorola Solutions Board Director says Huawei spys for China", then the credibility of the source might be better assessed...

Australia's alternative NBN plan: some taxpayer-friendly questions

How does the coalition propose to extract 25Mbps performance from hybrid fibre coax, when many users report it seldom achieves that speed and is unreliable?

DOCSIS 3.0 - I'm on rock solid 30Mbps, and if I wanted to I could play another tenner a month for 100Mbps. More than enough for simultaneously running a large trading platform whilst running a skype conference call, streaming the cricket to my laptop via Foxtel GO and listening to the TMS feed from the UK and downloading (ahem) linux image torrents.

what I'd like is for the cable to be available wholesale in order to introduce some price competition - $90/month is ridiculous. And for less techtopian nonsense and trick cyclism from the reg...

Oz Bank share price dives after reveal of IBM/Oracle plan

NAB was actually down 1.87%.

CBA was -1.7%, WBC was -2.12%

I really don't think that this had anything to do with the well trailed IT update, more to do with UBS calling the top in the Banks yesterday morning.

Turnbull says NBN Co could offer FTTN with optional fibre-for-cash

prohibitively expensive for most australians? We're spending c 38bn on it - that's $1500/pop. BT offer 76mpbs down/19up for 35quid a month. http://business.bt.com/broadband-and-internet/fibre-optic-broadband/pricing-and-plans/

I'm paying Telstra the equivalent of 70 quid a month for 30 down/1 up. Even if you halve the 'up to' bt numbers, that's still good enough for almost any usage. The quicker you can get a reasonably priced FTTN network up and running, the better for competition, and the sooner the NBN will get a return on investment.

If you are one of the 15 people in australia who need a 1GBps connection, why not pay to have it run from the local pit?

China's rare earth policy backs Apple into a corner

It's not getting worse. Molycorp and Lynas are both expected to bring large amounts of REO into production within the year, and the price of a basket of rare earth oxide prices (for use outside china) published by Lynas has fallen 75% from its August 2011 peak.

Whilst it is still double the intra-china price, added supply from the many projects due to come on line over the next 3 years should sort that out.

Shareholder demands RIM sell itself or spin off patents

Jaguar financial

A company worth CAD 7m, trying to get some free publicity.

Amazon refudiates Apple 'app store' trademark suit

More foot shooting from Apple

On the latest conference call Tim Cook, the COO said:

“We continue to believe—and even more and more every day—that iPhone’s integrated approach is materially better than Android’s fragmented approach, where you have multiple OSes on multiple devices with different screen resolutions and ****multiple app stores**** with different rules, payment methods, and update strategies.”

http://www.cultofmac.com/choice-tim-cook-quotes-from-apples-stunning-q2-analyst-call/91358

Android phone auto reverts jailbreaks

subsidy = control

If you accept the operator subsidy, then this is the price. If you don't want to cede control to the network, buy sim free & unbranded. That subsidy is there for a reason, and the operator has every right to protect their investment.

Mac sales tripled since 2005

Intel

Seems to coincide with the transition to Intel chippery and boot camp. Could the secrets of apple's laptop success lie in --- Windows??

Google pushes new multitouch onto Nexus One

Multitouch

Just call it PolyFondle. Sounds much better anyway.

Wikileaks pledge drive hobbled by PayPal suspension

Alternative

You can use https://tipit.to/wikileaks.org to continue to donate

Full-body scanner blind to bomb parts

Not quite

The English speaker was the MD of a body scanner firm. He said in an airport environment the scanee would have had to remove his jacket (which contained the thermite in a pocket), AND there would have been a profile scan - the scanner works by detecting contrasts between the body and concealed objects - the side pocket wasn't on the guy's body from the scanner's perspective so no contrast. He did however say that it couldn't detect anything in the mouth.

Of course thermite (Iron oxide and aluminium) would have been detected by the metal scanner that everyone has to pass through.

So the conclusion to draw is that if you can conceal enough thermite in your mouth (whilst retaining the ability to speak) and manage to avoid passing through the metal detectors, you might be able to make a small hole in an aircraft.

'F-22 Raptor stealth coatings are crap' case goes to court

f15 <> raptor

@Neil 7 - your link refers to the typhoon besting 2x F15s, not f22 raptors.

Tory landslide inevitable - maybe

Kinda but no

The resolver model is based around a specific part of the ICM survey. ICM ask respondents how the voted in the last election, and then how they will vote in the next election. This gives a much better idea of how voters move in between parties from election to election, and therefore provides a much better template on a per constituency basis for analysing the potential result.