* Posts by Wanda Lust

205 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jan 2010

Page:

BT and OneWeb deliver internet to rock in Bristol Channel – population 28

Wanda Lust

Achieved the objective, coverage about the coverage.

As others have noted, there are alternative means to achieve the connectivity. Perhaps, this will spur alternatives to jump in.

However, I do hope BT (other ISPs are available) and OneWeb develop a more affordable solution to X’ey boi.

Scientists use dead spider as gripper for robot arm, label it a 'Necrobot'

Wanda Lust

'Necrobot' monetisation

Arcade claw machine and hall of horrors rolled into one.

MH370 airliner MYSTERY: The El Reg Pub/Dinner-party Guide

Wanda Lust

Re: "The satellite would thus know to keep one of its receiving assemblies aligned..."

Fail #2: the satcom equipment isn't in the 777's MEC (main equipment center), it's all in a equipment bay above the passenger cabin. I'd be interested to know if the AIMS units fall back to VHF if they fail to talk to the SDU, VHF won't be much use out over the sea. If you check SITA Aircom's VHF coverage maps, it's apparent where VHF coverage is avalable, MAS is a SITA Aircomm (rather than ARINC) customer. Inmarsat & Iridium provide satcom coverage to SITA (and ARINC).

Last year Boeing issued an Alert Service Bulletin concerning corrosion and cracking in the fuselage skin around the area of the satcom antenna (the aircraft has two, a high gain phased array for voice and data and a low gain 'shark fin' for low bandwidth data only). After months of discussion the service bulletin has been now issued by the FAA and EASA as a full Airworthiness Directive. That AD goes effective in April (next month).

I'd replace the fire scenario with a gradual depressurization scenario akin to the Helios Airways incident. My hypothesis is the mid Gulf of Thailand turn was instigated by the crew aware of something going awry, switching the a/p out of FMS control to action a simple heading demand but failing to complete it before being overcome. I don't buy the further right/left zigzag over the Straits of Malacca - it just went straight out over the Indian Ocean.

I read today that some old biddy on a remote Maldive atoll has told her local news website that she saw a big old 'jumbo jet' [sic] screaming over her roof later on Sat 8th March.

Microsoft buries Sinofsky Era... then jumps on the coffin lid

Wanda Lust

Re: What we want to know is...

Ah, Ragarath, it's a brave man who speaks favourably of Modern UI and its start screen and denigrates the legacy 'Start' menu. You have no care for downvotes.

@Nigel11: I, too, have used the analogy of the car and its controls many times, however, I don't consider the technology industry is at a place where the steering wheel and the pedals are yet defined.

As for the idea that its not possible to be creative or productive without a keyboard and a mouse: we were (mostly) all born with fingers to point and touch, pencils (yeah, yeah, and chalk and crayons) were the first tools for recorded communications. The keyboard will probably have its place for a long time but its my experience that pen like stylii are developing fast and should replace the mouse.

I am surprised that Microsoft is screwing up here, maybe their transition is misplaced and they should've followed a path with less radical desktop OS changes and brought together a merged 'mobile' strategy with RT and WP faster. But, hey, somebody else did it that way.....

It's true, the START MENU is coming BACK to Windows 8, hiss sources

Wanda Lust

Re: I had to Google how to find the Control Panel...

Try leaving the mouse aside, hit the start/menu key and type c o n t r o l

Much, much faster.

You want a File Explorer window, hit the start key and type e x p, that'll even get you IE.

And so on.

HTH.

Wanda Lust

Re: Had enough of Microsoft.. start menu whingers

It's not about choice, I don't get to make the design decisions, I only get to use what Microsoft, Apple, Canonical, et al, decide to provide. At some some point in the evolution of their products all those vendors have to make a change & we consumers are obliged to accomodate those changes (by accepting or moving on)

Microsoft have had to make significant choices in order to stay relevant (maintain share) in the onslaught of mobile & cloud, their entrenchment as the legacy owner of the desktop workstation OS drove something radical.

From a productivity perspective, I have always found the Windows Start menu & selecting items from it to actually be a hinderance. I developed my use of keyboard shortcuts, the Windows 8 app selection process is very easy: hit the start key, type a few unique characters of the application name & you're there.

I'm disappointed that posters resort to personal insults while describing their point of view against others. I don't think that's necessary but a little profanity (in an adjective form) or terseness should be excused as we don't all have the time to post in verbose form and, really, is commenting that serious an endeavour?

Wanda Lust

Re: Had enough of Microsoft.. start menu whingers

They definitely deserve to be stuck in the past.

Please, please, STFU about the start menu. Android, iOS, OSX, Ubuntu (”stock") are all just fine without something similar.

Samsung uncloaks 'industry's first' one-terabyte mSATA SSD

Wanda Lust

Open the box

Last time I looked Crucial's mSata and 2.5” form factor units display exactly the same specs at each capacity. I do suspect that the 2.5” form factor is just a 9mm box providing mSata to full SATA interface. Why produce two electronics designs when one will do?

iSPY: Apple Stores switch on iBeacon phone sniff spy system

Wanda Lust

iSpy with my little eye

.... someone who's out to harvest page views rather than write a good story.

If the writer would just take a little time out to read how a technology works then it'd be obvious that the punter has to opt-in to this by loading an app on the iThing.

In effect the punter is advertising, through the app, back to Apple's cloud service, 'Hi, I'm in your store cos I've just received an iBeacon ping & tell me about anything interesting."

So not exactly spying if the punter is fully involved.

The beacon itself is passive, merely broadcasting an identity. Yes, more complex & capable devices can act as a beacon but retail likes cheap so they're hardly likely to go that route.

Oz Government: TPP papers will stay secret

Wanda Lust

Re: Democracy?

I thought the 'major news outlets' are mostly owned by Murdoch, if so there's the answer.

We're not destroying the music biz: Spotify

Wanda Lust

Spotify stakeholders

I've read that Spotify's stakeholders are primarily the big 4 record companies & its the least rewarding channel, for the artist, to have their music aired.

No surprise there then....

Dude, relax – it's Just a Bunch Of Disks: Our man walks you through how JBODs work

Wanda Lust

Instructables

Maybe this article should be filed under Instructables rather than Data Centre > Storage.

Check out the Windows Server Cluster HCL before building a frankencluster, clusters provide high availability & if it's not on the OS vendors HCL then you're on your own when it starts spluttering, say, after a OS patching session: no longer available.

One of the best infrastructure nightmare stories I know involved a frankencluster, no vendor in the mix could risk stepping into the fray & the users critical systems were down for over a week.

Shares plunge as Violin posts $34m loss

Wanda Lust

Saturation

Niche, filled, sales plateau?

There's only so many use cases for these 'blazingly' fast storage systems.

FCC: How we'll RIP 'n' REPLACE OLD phone system for new IP tech

Wanda Lust

Re: Worrying.

Not sure I'd say time consuming & difficult.

Strowger & Crossbar were circuit switched in the exchange & very early on, circuit trunked between exchanges so tapping would've meant getting directly to the suspect's line circuit - a physical intervention & easy but not too covert. Tapping a multicore trunk would've meant getting into every pair of the trunk as call selection of each circuit was purely by availability.

TDM on trunks has been around for a long time, even before circuit based switching was replaced by time domain switching, predominantly with microwaves, then optical trunks. Recall an El Reg story recently that described how there are no longer any microwave antenna on London's BT Tower.

So leeching traffic off a TDM trunk is quite straightforward as you have the control channel and the traffic in one, possibly, two streams (too long ago, can't recall the signalling systems used). Again, there was an alleged example of UK intelligence services intercepting microwave traffic between Rep of Ireland and UK with their own tower built in the line of sight between the telco's microwave repeaters.

An optical intercept is straightforward too, just get an appropriate device inline & you're good to go.

The cold war threat of EMP kept a backbone of Strowger in service for some time but I do suspect that's been retired by now.

Macy's: Now with Apple's Minority Report ads system that TRACKS your iPHONE

Wanda Lust

Re: fanbois can opt out by [...] not installing the ShopKick app.

A responder to my comment on this subject, earlier in the week, suggested that I might find the reporting on Ars Technica more to my liking. He may be right, this sort of sensationalist crap is more Daily Mail than tech press.

The iBeacon technology relies on the smartphone having the ShopKick app (or other similar app) installed: the BLE beacon transmits a code sequence that's recognisable to the app on the phone. The beacon doesn't harvest data & stream it back to some big data platform, it's self powered and relocatable.

So the phone picks up the beacon's transmission, if it's an iOS device with an iBeacon compatible app installed, the app will do something which involves contacting it's back-end service, passing the identity of the beacon which results in a message from the beacon's sponsors. How's that different to using a fkin web browser on a PC and seeing the result of tracking cookies popping up relevant for y'all to read.

The utility of the iBeacon service is user instigated.

Winamp is still a thing? NOPE: It'll be silenced forever in December

Wanda Lust

Re: Can anything else play random Albums in FLAC?

Serviio, a DLNA media server, will play random albums or random tracks from FLAC source, but then one would expect a shuffle play feature. Serviio will also real-time transcode if it recognises a client needs, say, AAC.

I prefer the server based model as I can access it from just about anything: the TV, my iThings with MediaConnect app, Android apps, etc, plus anyone in the household may share the server concurrently. The benign availability of 'quality' music might just, eventually, wean the pre-teen off 1D but, in that, I digress....

Nokia's phone division burned us so badly we HAD to flog it, says CEO

Wanda Lust

Re: Ah, but why did they sell the dumb phones?

When the competition arrived with something else, more desirable to the masses (note I don't say better), the massive portfolio of Nokia phones became a liability not an asset.

They simply couldn't get past the mindset that brought those early phones to market. I was enamoured enough with a Nokia Internet Tablet (the N770?) in 2007 to buy one & while it was 'fun', it really didn't have a serious use as the software was left to the opensource community. Everything just fizzled out when an application became near usable. I recall they also built a netbook, while pretty in a MacBook sort of way, it was underspec'ed and overpriced.

A disaster of under commitment to some really good ideas.

Nothing to SNIA at: Not dissing storage specs now, are ya?

Wanda Lust

Snake (oil)

ViPR would be that reason, I'd hazard a guess. Bridge the control plane across EMC's myriad platforms plus as many others as possible if there's standards in place.

iSpy with my little eye: Apple wants to track your every move

Wanda Lust

Expectation

I'd have expected the author of this article to provide the details of the iBeacon feature, how it works, what benefits it may give to either party ( the beacon deployer and the iThing user ) and what the downsides might be.

In the absence of that information, as a few others report, its a BLE solution enabling the phone to pick signals from 'beacons'. In most cases the beacons will be relatively passive, simply transmitting an identifier when another device is in range and require the phone to have an app deployed to identify the beacon. The phone would then use a web service to provide 'utility' to the user: e.g. in a store where an individual as a loyalty card & associated app installed, the individual may be 'guided' to something of interest. Even more simply, the beacon could be transmitting a URI for a cafe's free WiFi.

BLE range, at 3-4 mtrs, is much more useful than NFC.

Sure the objective is to promote (sell you) something but it's not about tracking, 'they' can do that already as you're more likely to have WiFi enabled than Bluetooth.

Whovians, your Doctor needs you: Take back the Day from One Direction

Wanda Lust

Schmarketing & manipulation of adolescents

Simply top grade manipulation of hapless child sheeple. I don't believe, for one second, that this a mere unintended coincidence of events.

What could be more successful in driving total idolatry for the Dr Who/1D event than creating conflict between siblings and classmates at an age where arguments rarely extend beyond, 'my (fill blank) is better, ya-boo'.

Hackers steal 'FULL credit card details' of 376,000 people from Irish loyalty programme firm

Wanda Lust

Surprised, oh, no.

Only surprised that it's taken this long for such a slurp to take place in .ie land.

First the Yanks, now us: In-flight mobe use WON'T kill us all, say Eurocrats

Wanda Lust

Re: Danger!

I know of a filling station where a street lamp style cell tower & equipment cabinet is sited immediately in front of the forecourt. Now, how did that get past planning?

AIR TIME! Our expert cosies up with the new top-end iPad

Wanda Lust

Re: Older models

I can't help thinking there's some large, somewhat unseen, user of many iPad2s whose needs make it worthwhile to just keep its manufacture going.

Backup software for HDD and Cloud

Wanda Lust

Replicate and Archive

For photos and the like, what is often called 'fixed content', the traditional backup tools aren't that smart - i.e. copy stuff, ad-infinitum, somewhere else & then trawl through a horrendous catalogue to get stuff back.

Replicate off your PC/Mac using one of the cloud sync providers, pays your money and takes your choice from Google, Amazon, Dropbox, etc, all of whom will sync a simple folder structure to their cloud.

Archive bundles of images, e.g. when your SD Card fills or monthly folders if your photo sync software organises its library like that, to Glacier - there's quite a few utilities that'll do that for you. The idea is that Glacier's the insurance copy.

My personal opinion of the backup world is that it's rarely fit for purpose but, hey, that's a whole other debate.

Google's Nexus 5: Best smartphone bang for your buck. There, we said it

Wanda Lust

Nov 8th?

It arrived on Monday (the 3rd).

VMware reverses decision to kill off standalone ThinApp

Wanda Lust

Murder most foul

The kill of the ThinApp, a murder most foul.

Google and Samsung bare teeth in battle for LANDFILL ANDROID™

Wanda Lust

Comparison of openness

I'd really like to see a comparison of openness between these leviathons, Google Android & iOS (& I'm not suggesting any allusion to FOSS).

I've been using iOS for some time & it hasn't forced me down any roads I don't care for.

We've a Nexus 5 coming into the household next week so maybe I'll get to work that out for myself.

How to stop intruders without knocking out the workers

Wanda Lust

eMail fail

Get rid of email, it's a productivity sap and communication minefield.

Or at least get rid of all the ‘elegance' and attachments - simple messaging, sms-like stuff.

When you find yourself hitting your head against a brick wall, repeatedly, it's best to find a path that avoids the brick wall.

Smile for the cops! Sexy Snapchat selfies' self-destruct scrubbed by search warrants

Wanda Lust

Kids?

When will the kids learn that there's no such thing as a free lunch ( or maybe I should've just left the mis-spelling: lynch )?

Murdoch calls for world+dog to 'expose' Google

Wanda Lust

Unattended octagenarian

Sad old codger, Wend's gone and his nursemaid must've left the room. Probably dribbling as well as twitter tweeting.

Canadian operator EasyDNS stands firm against London cops

Wanda Lust

Just wait.....

The next part of the story will portray the 'Internet' as being beyond the law, as evidenced by the inability of UK police forces to enforce UK copyright laws (applicable only within the borders of the UK, just in case that wasn't obvious), and therefore DavCam will be canvassing for heavier web filtering to be mandated for UK based ISPs. Other topics to follow.

The intent is to make the internet as mundane as ITV3 or Channel 5.

NSA tactics no better than a CYBERCRIME GANG, says infosec'er

Wanda Lust

Continuous manipulation

I appreciate the efforts of the EFF and Bruce Schneier to describe how they believe the intercepts, etc, are being effected. I use 'are' because no-one says they've stopped.

Worse now, on the government's part here in the UK, the propoganda backlash seems to be moving into play. This week we've had the great and the good, including the Liberal Democrat coalition lackeys, making statements/seeding stories to the media that Snowden's material is worse than the 'great' spy leaks of the Cold War and all the material is greatly aiding Moscow and Bejing's cause.

But we don't have the great axis of evil communism anymore, pivoted between Bejing and Moscow, we have two large nations with whom the world trades freely and, certainly in the case of China, without whom the rest of the world would have near empty shops. High tech companies frequently have R&D and manufacturing outposts there too.

So I don't see who these governments are 'fighting' with this mass surveillance. The terrorists don't need the Internet, they're not real-time; more traditional crooks, maybe; snooping on the competition, likely; but I can only conclude that they spending the citizens taxes on wealth generation scheme for the corner of big business that sell these services.

Maybe it's simply the fact that that Snowden was a little too smart, saw through the scripts he had to follow and the fallacy of the whole thing.

MI5 boss: Snowden leaks of GCHQ methods HELPED TERRORISTS

Wanda Lust

Internet's not for ter'sts

The terrorists don't need real time communications and tweets and books of faces.

They just need to send a little group of sleepers off somewhere to blend in with the locals, or even stick out like an amiable foreigner to the locals, before the sleepers execute their intended act.

No VPN's, no TOR, no emails, maybe just a post card from Great Uncle whatyamacallhim in Whatzistan at the end.

The ones pratting around on the Internet are just creating noise to fool the likes of this new boy at the top (and, of course, the Americans).

The LUN must DIE. Are you with me, storage bods?

Wanda Lust

Not Storagebods, DBbods

It's DB bods who are the problem. persisting with that claptrap they got on their DBA education where the elements of a database need to be partitioned across different sizes and protection/performance compromises in storage. Many I have encountered, even recently, still don't get the virtualisation that a LUN brought 10+ yrs ago nevermind the virtualisation that automated storage tiering, etc, brings to the game now.

Universal's High Fidelity Pure Audio trickles onto Blighty’s Blu-Ray hi-fis

Wanda Lust

Re: Try Qobuz

What a totlally f*cked up industry, stuck in the dark ages of territorial segmentation. Tried that Qobuz s(h)ite: not available to purchase/download in your territory (UK). HDtracks.com encumbered by the same crap from the big labels - small ones don't care, they'll take the revenue wherever you live.

Now, I do appreciate that such practices will no doubt be premised/excused by the myriad paths to reimburse artists for unit product sales and publishing rights but I suspect it's more to do with some ego bollox & job protection being exercised at the top echelons of the big labels.

Wanda Lust

Disks, so old skool

HDtracks.com, highresaudio.com and Linn Records have been selling higher bit/sample rate lossless downloads for some time, I guess Universal think there's a niche in the market selling the same on disks.

If you want the media, fine. I'd much rather they put the effort into publishing old skool LP quality sleeve and liner content in PDF/eBook format.

Nielsen-Twitter axis, Facebook to brief TV lords on what online gobshites think of telly

Wanda Lust

The kids

But the kids all watch YouTube, wtf, omg, lol!

TV's so old skool, K?

Google will barge into enterprises as IT titans squabble, Apple snoozes

Wanda Lust

Visions

Nightmare visions tend to be the stuff of fiction & scaremongering.

I've seen businesses where Google mail, docs, drive, app set is being used & have to admit I was surprised. In one significant ( must remain nameless ) business I was very surprised but do suspect a bit of corporate mutual backscratching as the user was a likely very high volume suppier to Google.

I'd really expect Office 365 to be putting clear ground behind itself on the online productivity/collaboration thing.

This guy at Canalsys seemed to be talking about hardware. Google ship minimal amounts of hardware, other vendors ship their hardware with Google's OS but the downside is many unique UIs layered on top, variance is something corporate IT typically likes to avoid. Anyway, Google's more interested in the habits of the masses not a load of corporate wonks.

Sorry, but his argument doesn't seem to hold up.

Hong Kong's data centres stay high and dry amid Typhoon Usagi

Wanda Lust

Du.l

Dual is used in the context of two, duel in the context of a conflict.

Congrats on MP3ing your music... but WHY bother? Time for my ripping yarn

Wanda Lust

Queuing up....

'Queuing up outside HMV on the day GnR released....'

There will never not be an opportunity to queue up for something: witness iPhone & GTA5 releases of the last few weeks or a visit to the dark, pleasantly odourous, labyrinth of a new Hollister/A&F store.

Marketing wonks will coninue to create desire & neediness among the disposably incomed.

As to ripping, gather as many drives as possible & rip away. Not that difficult to batch up.

Facebook reveals plan to WIRE THE PLANET

Wanda Lust

Re: "Allowing", Tom Samplonius? Really? (was: In otherwords ...)

...and that lack of any spare cash is exactly why no inexpensive/cheap iPhone appeared last week. If they can't afford the phone they certainly can't afford the apps, tunes, ebooks, magazine subscriptions, movies, epay lattes, etc.

Wanda Lust

Alt approach

Alt method to reduce the chatter to mobile devices:

Reduce, or selectively filter out, updates fed to mobile devices.

Oh, too late, Farcebook's doing that already.

iPhone 5S: Fanbois, your prints are safe from the NSA, claim infosec bods

Wanda Lust

Chill

The fingerprint thing is just to stop the parents looking over the kids shoulders & reading their PIN codes in order to find out what naughty activity the little 'uns are gettng up to on their iThings.

I'll have to drug the little blighters now so they sleep more soundly and I can grab their fingers and touch the sensor or else hope there's an alternate/backdoor PIN.

Wanda Lust

Pinky

Bruce Schneier got it about right with the point of it being a good compromise between security and convenience, typing PINs is such a pain in the ass.

Worrying about NSA, etc, is a bit moot because everything on the iPhone (except the fingerprint, of course) is in the clouds and accessible by them plus however has your iTunes credentials.

I suggest using a 'pinky' finger on an iPhone5S: thumb and forefinger much more likely to be impressed elsewhere! Now, there's the start of something.

Modular smartphones floated by Dutch designer chap

Wanda Lust

Compromise....

I've thought for some time that braking the IP gateway & radios out of a phone would be a pragmatic idea. So, you'd have a shared MiFi-like black box stashed in a pocket or wherever.

The myriad of portable, personal devices would just communicate through it.

It might be good business for the device makers: more, smaller & cheaper devices, shorter refresh buying cycles and more formats (trad phone format, pen, wrist, tablets, etc).

Network providers might like the idea less as there's fewer SIMs/contracts to sell.

Startup claims 1W wireless charging at 10 metres

Wanda Lust

Schmokin'

Reminds me of a story about cattle behaving strangely in a field adjacent to GEC Telecomms transmission systems research unit at Binley. Early Microwave test transmissions were being beamed across a field between a dish mounted on the team's ubiquitous garden shed and a small tower.

Farmer contested that his cattle became sterile.

Maybe these devices are the answer to the world's need for population control.

Swiss space plane to launch robotic orbital debris destroyer

Wanda Lust

Re: Nice idea but is it the best way?

Does really matter whether it's the best way, the story ties in nicely with the imminent movie release starring Sandra Bullock.

Seagate parades spinning skinny model to oust flash from fondleslabs... almost

Wanda Lust

Re: It's not like this is a new concept

Errr, it certainly didn't work for the early iPod w HDD.

While running with the iPod for entertainment, the iPod would hang after about 20 minutes. That's all it would cache before needing to refresh the cache. Too much jiggy and the disk wouldn't be spin up again to reload the cache. IIRC, putting it on an arm band rather than a waist bag reduced the jiggy & all was well again.

Bin half-baked Raspberry Pi hubs, says Pimoroni: Try our upper-crust kit

Wanda Lust

Re: Insufficient USB power

Indeed, Belkin has also advertised one their hubs as being multi TT capable, they termed it 'turbo transaction translator technology'. I've used this model exclusively on a number of PCs/external device combinations for years without any issues.

It's not something that many manufacturers highlight so I've worked out out whether it's ubiquitous or the exception.

Google Nexus 7 2013: Fondledroids, THE 7-inch slab has arrived

Wanda Lust

Narrowness

Specs & performance aside, when in portrait orientation I don't find the narrow display width comfortable to read/view esp as an eReader. When I recently looked, the Kindle app doesn't offer collections which is a real deficit when you're carrying a large eBook/PDF collection.

I do absolutely agree that the iPad Mini needs a better display but, overall, IMHO the iThing ergonomics/UI is preferred.

Page: