Posts by A Known Coward 228 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Dec 2009
I'd assume this is pretty standard for all companies giving devices which depend heavily on paid content to reviewers. Are they expected to spend their own money buying content to test the device. The Fire Phone (and iphone), but particularly the Fire phone, is all about purchasing apps, books, music and watching subscription videos from Amazon, how can you really review them without doing those things?
I don't use twitter, why is knowing the character limit important and who cares?
Who the hell is Sheryl Sandberg? Internet leader?? Non-entity more like.
Again, I don't use Facebook, I don't care about Facebook or it's history. I saw "The Social Network" but I guess it was a forgettable film as I don't remember much about it.
The iPhone answer was just a lucky guess. What does that have to do with the the 'Web'?
So does that make me an internet ingnoramous? I mean I'm apparently one of just 9% who used Mosaic in the early nineties, but I know less about the internet and WWW than someone whose total experience comes from the Twitter and Facebook apps on their iPhone?
Where are the real questions? These are just trivial fluff.
The other way around surely?
I think it was the early 90s when I visited. I seem to recall the visitors centre being moderately interesting, but the dishes were the main attraction. I was lucky though, I grew up close to Jodrell Bank and saw those dishes regularly and they dwarf 'Arthur'. The Lovell telescope is three times larger.
It's the obvious answer, surely?
The electrician helpfully noted that those cables are normally shielded, but if they've been damaged then that shielding is compromised. London is experiencing a lot of problems with underground power cables lately, with multiple explosions as water gets into damage connections. This would then explain why they are now digging up the street and why they turned off power to the street while doing the work.
Assuming you are doing more than 30mph, an airbag alone won't save you from potential lethal injury. If you don't believe me google it, there are a few youtube videos showing the result of no seatbelt + airbag, plus the odd article/paper on the subject. All airbags are designed to work in conjunction with a seatbelt, not as an alternative to wearing one.
Assuming you don't sustain a head injury, there's a high risk of neck, back and leg injury as you slide off your seat and into the footwell, something that's only made more likely because of the airbag.
e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEkV70Pl5c8
> This seems like a compelling argument... until you remember that the basic human nature would prevent 99.999% of those who paid $8.95 for it from mass-producing them and giving them away for free.
Yes, but then it only takes 1 person to put a drm stripped copy on bittorrent from which a hundred thousand (or more) copies are made. While basic human nature makes us less likely to give something away free when we've paid for it, it also means we are less likely to pay for something that can be had for free.
Forgive me, but if you're in $FOREIGN_COUNTRY you're not going to be shopping online much are you? Services are a bit different, but it still seems like you're being a bit pedantic.
I'm not really in favour of using phones for 2FA either, but the original posters comment about a PAYG sim being a 'rip off' just seems like complete rubbish. It's only expensive if you use it a lot, but the original poster clearly wouldn't use it very much since they manage to get by without a phone at all.
How is a free PAYG sim from Three a 'rip-off'?
Moreover how are calls charges of 3p a minute, texts at 2p and data at 1p/MB a rip-off either? Assuming you ever use the thing? I put £10 on mine months ago and despite periodically checking my emails via 4G and making the odd call I've still got over £7 on there.
In fairness to the BBC, it seems a lot of sites are confusing the issues. Many are referring to the TLS bug as 'Winshock' however it seems that name was first applied to the more critical buffer overflow issue in Internet Explorer CVE-2014-6332 (severity rating of 9.3 out of 10). Some articles even acknowledge that they are different issues but still imply a link between them.
So you're suggesting that this bug in Windows code arose because Microsoft were copying an open source TLS implmentation in 1995? Yes, the bug is that old. Why isn't the open source TLS stack that they copied also vulnerable?
If, as you allege, Microsoft have been just copying their code from free open source projects since the mid nineties, then why are you paying for Windows?
They pretty much have already stuck up two fingers to the committee by telling everyone where they can find uncensored pictures and then lampooning the whole censorship issue with their 'redacted' image? What better way to point out the stupidity of the D-Notice than to completely subvert it without actually breaking it?
For PCIe you at least need access to the inside of the machine, which isn't the case for firewire or thunderbolt. It would be a problem for an external express card slot on a laptop.
I wonder why four people down-voted, there's nothing inaccurate about saying the DMA of firewire is a huge security risk. It's hardware level access which cannot be disabled by software, and cannot even be disabled by the BIOS on some motherboards. Apple fans maybe?
It's the console you see at the top of the picture, it folds away there to allow easy access to the seats then swings down in front of the two forward seats where it's reachable by the pilot and co-pilot.
There's a video of Elon Musk demonstrating it at the unveiling a few months back
Well? Can it move the chair and bin out from under the desk to vacuum there? Can it pick up the laundry basket or the rugs so as not to choke to death on the frilly edge? Can it climb stairs or clean beneath the cushions on the sofa? Well of course it can't, so you'll need to go around after it with a second vacuum cleaner to do all the bits that it missed.
I guess if you've got lots of money and little time for chores then it's a great idea. But if you've got the money why wouldn't you pay someone to come in and clean instead? It creates a job in this country instead of China and a human being has none of these limitations, plus they can do whole load of other jobs too.
Dick's work explores ideas, it's philosophy which uses the freedom of sci-fi to create impossible scenarios in which he could pose 'what if' questions. The short story Minority Report is intended to provoke questions over the ethics and morality of the scenario. Exactly how are they going to play that out in an on-going series without it wearing thin?
My gut is that we'll get yet another mind numbing police procedural with 'a twist' with one of the protagonists ever so slowly starting to question whether what they are doing is right. Either that or the movie take on the story, which was basically just The Fugitive.
I'm sorry but I can't see how this can end well, much as I dearly want to see some intelligent and thought provoking sci-fi on TV (there's so little of it), I can't see how they can make this work.
I'm going to guess that it doesn't require anything like 500GB for the OS, but it recommends at least that much free space to install games into. After all with just 250GB and with some games running to 20+ GB you'd only be able to install ~10 games at a time.
Look at this way, a full linux desktop with email, openoffice etc can be installed into a parition of few gigabytes (if you're really careful about what you install far, far less). The linux steam client is a few MBs in size. There's no way that the SteamOS can consume 500GB, that has to be for the partition it will install games to.
Of the 91 steam games I own, 53 run on linux. Currently playing XCom: Enemy Unknown (Enemy Within) and Metro Last Light.
Debating whether I'd enjoy the X3 series (Terran Conflict, Albion Prelude, Reunion), loved the space combat aspect of X-Wing vs Tie Fighter back in the day, but not sure whether the whole accounting/trading side of X3 would be fun.
Will definitely be buying Metro 2033 Redux when it's released and may buy Witcher 2 when they've shaken out the bugs. Looking forward to all the games (including AAA titles) which are due to arrive on the platform, especially since so many of the AAA engines have been ported to Linux in the past year.
"Iceape isn't a 'spinoff' ... it's Seamonkey with Mozilla's (trademarked) branding removed."
And they were forced to remove that branding because ...
Yes, that's correct, they modified the code. It's a fork of Seamonkey, a spin-off, it's a knock-off, it's not the genuine article.
Speaking as an open source developer who is about 5 minutes away from requiring Debian to stop using a trademark for the same reason. Their buggy, broken packages which apply unauthorized patches are damaging to the reputation of many software projects. That's when they aren't introducing huge security flaws (SSH keys etc).
It's going to be interesting to see how that encryption works. TLS requires the use of trusted certificates, certificates that cost a hefty amount per year for an individual running a small two page website.
If HTTP 2.0 isn't going to create a two tier internet, one for the masses which provides no default protection against snooping (HTTP 1.0) and another for corporations which does (HTTP 2.0), then they'll also need to rethink the certificate system. At the very least making cheap ($1) certificates possible. Perhaps requiring them to be issued along with domain names as a complete package, your domain registrar issues a basic cert, they have all your details anyway and know you are the registered owner of the domain.
Exactly, this is no different from what Europe wants to do to prevent the US snooping on their citizens. With Russia it's automatically assumed that they just want to increase control over their citizens, but that Europe is just acting to protect it's citizens?
Sure Putin isn't a good guy, but then not everyone in Europe is convinced that the motives of the European leadership are entirely benign.
"You even need to "export" to get an H264 file???"
Sigh. No, you need to export to get an MP4 container. The default encoding is H.264 in a standard MPEG-TS container - the type used for blu-ray, DVD, many cameras and broadcast TV. If you're still confused I suggest you google for the difference between a video codec and a container.
I would have thought the mechanism was obvious from the images in the article if not the text, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just missed it.
"Configuration is much the same on both units, consisting of simply connecting HDMI or component cables from the console into the gaming PVR. The HDMI output from the gaming PVR goes into the TV. "
Both devices operate as a man-in-the-middle on the HDMI cable, passing though the signal to the TV in real time while simultaneously passing a copy to it's onboard video encoder. Since your computer is only acting as a storage medium (optionally, since the Rocket can operate without a PC, with storage directly attached) there is no slowdown. These things are mainly designed for use with consoles, but there's nothing stopping them being used with PCs as well or indeed anything that uses HDMI (but not HDCP, so that rules out your STB or Blu-ray player).
Or, to look at it from another entirely plausible angle, spending 4 times less money will mean their budget being slashed by three quarters which is something they definitely don't want to happen as there will be less loose change to spend on their pet projects. Just because you aren't spending the money this year doesn't mean you won't want it in next years budget. Plus the larger a budget, the easier it is to siphon money from it without anyone noticing.
This is why every year local governments in the UK go on a spending spree just before their budget is reviewed, if they haven't spent all the money allocated to them for the past year they get less money for the coming year. So suddenly they care about fixing all the potholes that they've ignored for the preceding 11 months. They'd much rather have too much money than exactly the amount they need.
"OpenBSD is included in a number of popular third party packages that include SQL Lite, BIND, Sendmail and the Lynx web browser."
Err, you mean the other way around? OpenBSD includes those packages (by default), they do not include OpenBSD.
Not that those packages are specific to OpenBSD. It's a bit like saying "Windows is included in Skype" when what you mean to say is "Windows includes Skype".
This discovery actually puts a dent in the theory that the NSA were relying on this weak random number generator to crack SSL encrypted traffic. If they had been so reliant, they would have spotted early on that OpenSSL implementations weren't vunerable despite including the flawed generator. Yet they never reported the bug to OpenSSL, even though we are told it should have been in their interests to do so.
So can we conclude that either the NSA have more than one 'backdoor' into SSL and so they didn't need Dual EC DRBG working in OpenSSL, or the rumours about them exploiting Dual EC weren't true to begin with?
The Snowdon leaks have played into the NSA's hands in one respect, if terrorist feel they cannot trust the internet they'll go back to the old method of using trusted couriers to communicate and that is great news for spies. They can't simultaneously watch all internet cafes, hotels, libraries and other locations of public internet access to follow subjects back to their hiding places, but they can follow a man from A to B. It's a cheap, reliable and very well rehearsed bit of spy craft, they were doing it throughout the cold war.
Isaac Asimov suggested that human form robots were ultimately the most practical and versatile as they could use human tools, drive human vehicles and navigate human environments. Although ultimately more complicated to design, a human form robot could be used for almost any task currently performed by a human without redesigning our whole world around it (at incalculable expense).
Big Dog serves a vary narrow, niche purpose - it can't pick up and fire a weapon, drive a car, dial a phone or even turn on a light switch. In fact, last I saw, it couldn't even perform all the tasks of a dog - it cannot fetch, it's more of a Donkey than a Dog.
The rule is that you must file for a patent before you tell anyone else about the idea. Apple didn't do this, he told the whole world about the idea then waited five months before filing his application.
The logic behind the rule is to prevent someone sharing an idea, perhaps even encouraging them to implement it, then snaring them in a litigation trap by filing for the patent once they are about to bring a product to market.
If you tell people without first having applied for a patent, the law assumes that you are happy for others to copy the idea - you've had a good idea and want everyone to benefit from it without seeking to make a profit from it.
