Posts by Ammaross Danan

It's ALIVE! Broken Russian Mars probe finally answers calls

Yep

"this is the first signal Earth has received from the probe since it launched on November 9"

Perhaps it was just running Windows and finally finished booting on the Atom processor they sent up in it.

Knew I should have put it on an SSD....

Superhero oil-burping algae will save the world

@dr2chase: Problem

"but it's a heck of a lot easier to cover out consumption if we first cut it by 50 or 75%"

The problem with people saying "we should just cut our usage in half!" doesn't understand why the automobile industry is growing. It's not that people's cars break down and they discard them to junk yards. It's that their children come of driving age and require a vehicle now as well. We've quite likely DRAMATICALLY reduced our consumption of various Bad Things (tm) on a per capita basis, but population growth likely shrouds such cut backs. Perhaps someone should give us per capita energy use, polution, etc, etc and trend that out rather than just spouting how many Googl-tons of CO2 pumped out by the human race each year....

/Mines the one with the bike lock key in the pocket.

3m iPad 3 'retina' screens sent to Apple by month's end

TV Resolution

TV resolution has been lagging behind for quite a while. NTSC or PAL has had sub 640x480 quality since inception, however, most computers have had minimum of 640x480 since 1990. It wasn't until 720i and the like rolled along that we got anything better. The nice thing was the push for TVs to be 1080p (and LCD) that killed CRTs and improved computer resolution for the mainstream from the old 1280x1024 (at best) to a more default 1366x768 (cheapos) or the 1920x1080. Still not the optimal (for now) 1920x1200, but it is still better than what we had just in 2001.

Kindle Fire: An open letter to Jeff Bezos

Rooted

The Fire has been rooted. Install base Android on it. Easy.

Samsung v iPhone 4S French entrenchment: 'TOTAL WAR'

Unclear

It's unclear whether "device" refers to the iPhone itself, or some chippery in it. Even if it is the iPhone itself, 2-4% must be common, since it is REQUIRED to fall within FRAND.

LHC results may solve riddle of how universe can exist

@Sir Spoon

Sure. An atomic bomb tends to follow the equation quite well. We already *know* that both a particle and anti-particle *completely* annihilate each other, which would mean 100% conversion to energy (be it heat, light, etc). Does it make a boom? Sure. Likely makes a fancy light display too. Do we have enough antimatter to test with? Nope. But just because I'm not outside to see that the sky is blue, my knowledge of light refraction tells me it likely is.

E=Mc^2

"Do we *know* that matter anti-matter collision results in a bang?"

That is all.

PETA claims anti-Mario campaign was a joke

"Leather"

"Leather *and* lamb skin..?"

Yes, Leathered lamb skin. Leathering is a process (well, Tanning, but too many would think that means sunbathing...), and can be applied to many types of skins.

PETA

If anything, this shows something about PETA, in that everyone EXPECTED them to do stuff like this, thus had no problem believing their "joke."

Boffins build bionic battery

@James

Next to none. It was 4 years ago we read about similar revolutionary battery tech and was also compared to Li-on batteries. Why don't such techs make it to mainstream? They're expensive to replicate. Didn't we have flat-panel displays on trash-bag plastic that could be rolled inside of a pen and used on the beach a few years back? Yeah, didn't get far either.

Fedora 16: A GNOME lover's paradise

Furthermore

"Tau of Unix" is actually "Tao" or variously "Dao" (which is still incorrect, but closer to the pronunciation).

As to why they're starting to integrate rather than run in pieces? They have to compete against highly-integrated competitors (Apple and Windows). If they continue to toss Joe User's usage habits to the wayside, they won't appeal to the general desktop market, and get drop-kicked like ChromeOS. Next you'll see MyFaceTwitSpaceBook notifications and email rolled up into the chat/IM to make a "unified messenger" utility in the status bar.

Mozilla stirs netizens against US anti-piracy law

Mozilla

Because Mozilla made their "welcome to Firefox" start page display info about this Act.

In other news, what will Tankspot do without Project Marmot???

Nvidia: An unintended exascale-super innovator

@Alan

"...simply because I can expect driver updates on zero day release for major titiles, and, well just superb regular updates in-between"

There's a problem with that. AMD releases gfx driver updates monthly (consistantly), with beta builds available (and well announced) for zero-day games. nVidia releases new drivers less frequently, about once every 2-3 months. Not sure on zero-day, but I'm sure they do "beta" builds for new games too. I've just been in the Radeon camp for a while.

Google serves up Ice Cream Sandwich code

Android trunk

@Giles

Android is Open Source. Yes, not Open Development because Google codes it. However, we are free, at any time, to FORK the code if we so choose. Look at CyanogenMod. If someone started hacking around with iOS and decompiling the code and rebuilding parts of it to making some frankenPhone (ignore the complexity of such due to iOS being closed source), they'd get shot with lawsuits. Not so for CyanogenMod and anyone else who wants to give it a go.

Android itself is Open Source. Releasing the code for ICS the day before the Nexus release (they original slated it for a few weeks after from what I understand) is a good step forward for them. At least they're "don't be evil" mantra seems to hold more true than in the iFandom.

Voyager 2 finally agrees to a long hard thrust

Simpler

Just upload a bit of code (oh yes, code...silly command line person you) that do all the if (fail) then exit() checking on the craft. Then it's a simple bit of sending the commands all at once and let the craft fail out if any commands do not successfully execute or have a status failure. This includes the code to revert to original state if required.

See? A bit of a burst, but surely not requiring the 28hr round-trip per command line.

NASA working on nuclear rocket for manned Mars trips

Economics

Apparently someone missed Economics 101. Essentially, these projects create jobs, put money into circulation by buying materials et al. Slash these projects and people go jobless (think of how Lockhead-Martin is squirming with other private rocket startups on the horizon), industries that produce the materials for these projects flounder as no one wants to buy their stuff (who needs blast shielding designed for rocket tests anyway???), etc, etc.

Where the cuts need to go is in budget mishandlings (you know, the $200 for a pencil stuff) or the obvious war-related things (such as being at war to begin with). However, war historically has been the means of recovering/avoiding an economic crisis. It doesn't seem to help this time due to unprecidented bailouts.

NEWSFLASH: Chips cheaper than disks

In the Industry

For those who don't know, or don't have the position to know:

We use mainstream SSDs in our HP servers here. (well, half of them, we're transitioning slowly for obvious reasons). No SSD failures yet, and we've been running them for a year on our heavy-load production servers. The others are lighter-weight, so don't demand the I/O performance yet.

We've been "refreshing" our 3+yr desktops with little 50GB SSDs. Why not HDDs? Because we are replacing the disk drives currently in the machines as their performance tanks and internal error rates go up (which is usually a sign of immenent failure before SMART finds it). The machines run like night vs day, running the exact same image as the old machine had loaded. For the machines with <2GB of RAM, we drop in a bit of RAM and no need to refresh the hardware for another few years. Workers clamour for the old Core2duo (or a Pentium D in some [IT] humorous test-cases) rather than the newer quad-core 4GB+RAM machines. They just know "it's faster."

Failure rates among these desktop machines? None so far. Only been pushing them out for a year or so though (about when SSDs became viable price-wise for wide deployment). We now track new machines and have upgrade paths for them to get an SSD at their year-mark. Will we get failures? Sure. But we had terrible failure rates with the old spindle disks too (especially in our laptops).

So, you can argue about your MTBF assumptions, or reading a "4000 post forum!" which collects the disgruntled people who often repeat-post, and I'll continue deploying and being a satisfied SSD customer.

Apple's cloud music service 'WIPES your iPHONE'

Google

I'm surprised no one commented on "Arch-rival Google, which spends more time lobbying about copyright than creating new and interesting music services – and is falling behind as a consequence – looks set to unveil its own offering in Hollywood tomorrow night"

So, the lobby group does programming and futurecasting now? Not to mention "falling behind" means releasing their offering just a few days/weeks after Apple, even though the article seems to be pushing as if Google were sitting on their hands...

What's that sound? It's PC sales plummeting into abyss

Old Computers

Take an old dual core system and slap an SSD in it and you'd think you had a new computer. If you have more than 2GB of RAM, you're even better off.

Hard drive supply hitting zero will likely cause the next couple of quarters to report very bad numbers.

The fact we're teetering on another economic decline doesn't help much either.

Thai flood ripples set to impact entire world PC market

Drives

Scooped up the last 2TB WD Green drive from Best Buy (bleh) for $80USD last week. Cut it close on that one. :)

I'm just hoping this will cause component prices to drop since I plan on buying Ivy Bridge next year....

OFFICIAL: Last Western Black rhino snuffs it

Powdered

In case you missed it, it is usually traded in powdered form as an aphrodesiac. Once again, sex sells.

Is Apple nobbling iPhones to avoid more patent misery?

@MrCheese

"We're not allow to bundle this but do visit our forum for instructions ;)"

Things like the Lame MP3 codec for encoding MP3 audio for instance falls into this category. The idea of converting to an MP3 (process and resulting file) are patented, therefore Linux technically can not ship a "free" OS and include such a feature. However, there are groups (such as Lame) that have reverse-engineered how to encode an MP3. These people did not steal the encoding code, nor know before-hand the process to get the job done as patented by the MPEG group. However, just as Apple can manage to patent a device with rounded corners, they can not even give their product away for free, except for "educational purposes." Thus is the state of patent law.

Yelp update ridicules Republican (ex)-hopeful Rick Perry

Perry brain-fart it seems

Perry brain-fart it seems. People have them. Unfortunately, his was televised. Shame the democrats aren't errecting another candidate to get the "not Obama" votes....

iOS upgrade swells iPhone battery-suckage grief

Apple

Yep. > /dev/null for them, just like The Reg's requests for comment or support for the AntennaGate issue.

World of Warcraft subscriptions slip

Blizzard

"2019 is probably looking a good bet."

They'll announce it in 2019. It won't be finished until 2022.

Cheap gas is a 'crisis' for Greens, but not for us

Nuclear

You must also note that nuclear doesn't get subsidies to the extent that "green" windfarms and the like do. If you want to talk about "non profitable" nuclear, try looking at the windfarm books with the government subsidies taken away. Currently, with prospective gov't cost cuts to the renewable energies, we're starting to hear the cries of how unsustainable they truly are without gov't funding....

Hitachi, LG admit fixing disc drive prices

Nah

There's no anti-Apple angle. They just chose not to put any new tech in their kit, but sell it like it had some....

For the iFans, here's a quote "We all know Steve Jobs does not want Blu-ray to be on Macs. He famously referred to the licensing rules for Sony's format as a "bag of hurt.""

Russian probe engines crap out on way to Mars

Any Fule Kno

Ask as "space engineer" and they'll tell you that that there is no such thing as a "rocket scientist." It's a layman's term for mass media use.

HTC prepares quad-core smartphone for 2012

Remember

Ah, the old days when computers couldn't multi-CPU very well at all....who on earth would have needed TWO cores in their computer??? Now we have EIGHT core CPUs...how will we ever use all of those?

</sarcasm>

The hardware has to come first before people can write software that will use it. Imagine if Modern Warfare 3 had been written back in the N64 days... I'm sure they would have loved to do it, but no one could have played it.

OCZ exposes bulging solid disk for 2012

"normal joe"

"I mean, hard discs aren't forever but the ordinary Joe doesn't usually fret about the actual lifetime."

Normal Joe still doesn't have to worry about SSD lifetimes. Current MLC drives can take quite the hit. A 120GB SSD with perfect wear leveling (5000 writes per cell), heck, let's drop that to 4000 for "imperfect" wear-leveling, can write 480TB worth of data before having troubles (cells no longer able to be written to). That's 263GB/day for 5 years. 182MB/min of continuous writing. Normal Joe won't do that. If we half that (fair guess TLC will have 2500 write endurance), then it's only 131GB/day. If Normal Joe does more than that in a day, they're not Normal Joe. An Enthusist (or higher) should know better anyway and have a few TB HDDs for their torrents or video processing anyway.

Massive PC shortages to hit this Xmas

RAM

RAM has already taken a nose-dive well before the hard drive floods. However, I'm hoping this will cause a slump in demand when Ivy Bridge comes out. You can still upgrade your mobo/CPU/RAM without having to get a new HDD (or SSD for the new system in this case...)

Thin Computing

In case you missed it, mobile toys such as an iPhone or a tablet have to draw their content from somewhere. And since iTunes isn't hosted on a iPhone5 and websites aren't hosted on the CEO's tablet, there has to be disk storage somewhere. And no, Netflix doesn't host their streaming media on RAIDed Android media players.

Hands on with the Motorola Xoom 2 10.1in Android tablet

At a loss...

"WTF is the point if it doesn't have Micro SD card slot."

In case you missed it....read the last little bit of the article again....(there is an SD card slot)

"So bascially it's similar to the Galaxy tab 10.1 - but looks crapper."

This one, you have the USPTO to thank for that. Well, that and Apple for patenting a square(ish) tablet device with rounded corners.

Apple iOS 5's hidden 3D revealed

Android

All the Lintard and iTards want to know why the Android ecosystem is "better" than the Apple Walled Garden? Now you know. Features for the sake of features is Androids motto. Apple's is features us to cut everyone else out, and just enough for the end-users to use to make our product sell.

Report: Popular CAPTCHAs easily defeated

Fail and fail again.

First, if a website is going to be targeted (like GMail or the comments form for a WordPress page), it is first going to be viewed by the programmer to extract the basic requirements and makeup of the page. Sometimes this can be automated if your program can sniff out <form></form> tags and interpret. However, if the program isn't aware of the particular CAPTCHA method used, it can't effectively defeat it. The CAPTCHA could be cat and dog pictures for all the program knows. It, at best, would find common CAPTCHAs such as reCAPTCHA and the like, based on basic elements, such as external links or structure/naming.

Next, your CAPTCHA is good for your corner of the internet, but if you roll it out en masse, it will fail. Automated attacks using the fore-mentioned chatter-boxes (Wolfram Alpha, et al), or even easier: brute-force collection of your questions and a few hours of simple answering for an automated catalog. Security by obscurity fixes some. It's similar to those who think their self-grown encryption is actually better than AES or the like.

Apple admits iPhone battery suckage, promises fix

Right...

"Shocking it may be to you but it's not the first time Apple admits to a bug, especially in a .0 release."

You're just holding it wrong.

Seagate flings twirling terabyte platters at world

GPT and UEFI

That is all.

Seagate rep

It's a Seagate drive. That should have been warning enough.

Illicit Bitcoin miners steal resources from infected Macs

I agree, the malware is the news here. That's a pretty impressive kit, even it was a Windows virus. That is targets Macs makes it all the more delicious for the Windows camp, but if you're mining bitcoin, wouldn't you want to target a demographic that is guaranteed to have a decent GPU (as opposed to Intel GMA) and also guaranteed not to have an AV installed?

ASUS: 'We run out of hard disks at the end of the month'

Numbers

Unfortunately for everyone in the tech biz, consumers (read: mass sheeple) do not buy a product because it's labeled as "fast" or "gamer edition," they lie to themselves they know what they're looking at and buy the item with the biggest numbers. 2.53GHz is better than 2.1GHz. 6GB of RAM over 4GB of RAM. Webcam vs no webcam. And the kicker: 1TB (1000 GB) over the 120GB SSD. This is why SSDs don't do well on the Best Buy shelf: uneducated masses thinking it's worse because it doesn't have a big number. They have no idea what "sequential write speed" means, let alone "IOPS."

If you want something less grey-area to argue with, SSDs are still far more expensive per GB than HDDs. Even if a 1TB drive costs $120, that's still $0.12/GB as opposed to $1.25+/GB of SSDs. Horses for courses and all that.

Ultra

"Ultra" as in "ultra portable." They run a low-power x86 CPU, such as a severely underclocked mobile i7 chip to eek out as much battery life as possible, but the primary drive is portability and long battery life. The transformer comes close, but it is quite underwhelming in terms of processing power and likely gets lumped in with "netbook" at that point.

Steve Jobs' last words: 'OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.'

He saw the Light

He saw the glow as he ascended to a Windows icon surrounded by light....

Apple shifts Lossless Audio Codec to open source

Patents

Either they didn't patent ALAC, or their patent is nearing expiration.

AMD CEO vows 'maniacal' chip-baking fix

@TeeCee

"A load of enthusiast sites grab one, run a load of lightly threaded desktop/gaming benchmarks over it and find that, er, it's not very good at that sort of thing."

Actually, they ran a variety of heavy multi-threaded applications as well, to judge benefits of the "8 cores" vs the "4 core / 8 thread" of the i7 series chips. AnandTech is just one example. The sad part is that Bulldozer pulls close to the i7-2600K, but still falls behind the i7-980X (6 core, 12 thread). The even worse part is the i7-2600K can be OCed substantially with little effort, which then easily beats Bulldozer, which is already clocked so high as to only have another 200MHz of OCing headroom on air.

Therefore, it is not "execution" issues that have failed, it's their technology that isn't keeping up. Here's hoping their new tick-tock policy will keep them closer to Intel at a decent price-point. Sure, they're not grabbing the high-margin top-end, but volume and mid-market is where the revenue is at, which is where their supply issue comes into play. Unfortunately for AMD, where they're a K-series chip within range of an AMD chip, the K-series will win out easily for anyone willing to overclock, even by just 400MHz. A few of the locked-down chips still perform on-par or better than their AMD counterpart for everyday tasks, and meet or beat threaded performance as well.

Bulldozer was supposed to save AMD, but it hasn't. It's still clock-for-clock the same as a Phenom II, hidden by their high GHz settings, but has a better ability to multi-core and power gate. If they can compete price-wise by bringing costs and retail down, Bulldozer is strong enough to make AMD sit well in the bottom half of the market, which may be where they wanted to be all along. Performance crowns are expensive to keep, but if you can do nearly as good, but at a lot less cost, why not?

Samsung making over half its cash from its mobes

Even...

Agreed. Samsung has some nice products. Even though the Droid Charge is still running Android 2.2.1, it still looks nicer than an iPhone4, not to mention the feature set. The Galaxy Nexus easily stomps the 4S in RAM and screen resolution, but unfortunately has a 5MP camera instead of 8MP. :( Oh well, the joy of the Android ecosystem is that if a phone has some shortcoming you don't like, wait 3 months and buy the next device or pick a different handset from a different manufacturer. With the iPhone, you're stuck on the 4S specs for another year, waiting for the iPhone 5 to come out with it's woefully bog-standard feature set compared to other smartphones of the time. At least my phone comes with HDMI out and an SD card. :)

Inside WD's flooded Thai factory

Prior Art

"When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp."

Samsung gets fast-track appeal on Tab injunction

Apple

"...which will be outdated in 6 months (max),"

You, sir, don't follow Apple very well then. They take a full year to outdate their iDevices. In the Android world, phones go out of date within a few months.

Insulin pump hack delivers fatal dosage over the air

Let's not forget that the company blatently dismissed this guy's warnings too.... (read the Aug 25th article)

PC shortages 'inevitable' says Gartner

Samsung F4 drives

Samsung's F4 drives are one of the best drives I've used recently. I hope they ramp up production, selling at the current high-water mark, and make a tidy profit providing disks for the demand. Oh the joys of not having to deal with Crapgate drives in consumer PCs....

That said, I think it may be time to invest in an SSD....

Apple gets patent for ‘unlock gesture’

One would wonder....

I wonder if a touch-screen security keypad (you know, the type that randomizes the grid of digits to press) infringes on this patent, since it shows "images" (of numbers) indicating the "gesture" (sequence of digits) one must enter in order to unlock a device (door). Obviously entirely NOT the original object of this patent, but can easily encompass based on the language.