Posts by GotenXiao

World may be short 70 MILLION disk drives

Whoops

I think your sarcasm detector is broken.

Google speeds Chrome JavaScript engine with 'Crankshaft'

That may be true

But if it is, why would you use a toy language like Silverlight built by a company who do not like, want or support platforms not their own? It's the antithesis of the web's portability.

New wave of superphones poised to challenge iPhone 4

More keyboards please

Can we please, please, PLEASE have some high-end handsets with landscape sliding keyboards please? With decent layouts? Ideally a 5-row.

There hasn't been a good followup to the G1 yet. The MyTouch 3G Slide has next to no performance improvement, the latest swathe of HTC handsets are all touch-only, the Droid 2 *might* have a decent keyboard (but it's a 4-row and thus has no dedicated number row). Using SSH with an on-screen keyboard is painful. And it's one of the biggest reasons I will never buy an iPhone, besides the massive list of restrictions Apple dictate to its users.

Google halts deletion of Street View Wi-Fi data

Bah.

And it is impossible to know whether the signal that just activated your antenna contains a packet addressed to you without first intercepting, decoding and parsing the data. And guess what, the data that Google were *actually* after (i.e. access point beacons) are address "To Whom It May Concern". They're broadcasts. "Snooping on someone else's radio conversation" is in fact what all wifi cards do - they always receive all packets*, and then discard the ones that they think are not theirs unless in promiscuous mode.

The mistake made was in the inclusion of capturing *all* data, not just beacons. The reason they wanted the beacons was to build a location database that give you a reasonably accurate position based on a few AP MAC addresses. Which is legal. Anyone can do that if they so wish.

* All packets of sufficient strength etc

Herschel 'scope peers into 'truly empty' space hole

Disaster Area

"It's so black! You can hardly see it. Light just falls into it."

"It's so black. Everything in it is just totally black!"

"The weird colour scheme freaks me. Every time I try to operate one of these weird black controls, a small black light lights up in black to let you know you've done it."

Once again, Douglas Adams did it first :P

Virgin Media to trial filesharing monitoring system

They said it best in Serenity...

Can't stop the signal, Mal.