Posts by cyberdemon

Nokia lops UK Lumia prices ahead of Win 8 phones

What is AT&T U-Verse

And why does it need a double-sized button on that UI shot?

Vandals break into congressman's office, install Linux on PCs

Re: Mainstream Meida Take away is

Nut jobs? No - commies! Far worse.

Re: What is the

It is Latin for "Yes"

A single web link will WIPE Samsung Android smartphones

Ouch.

I feel sorry for Samsung, but seriously, WTF.

TBH, this almost sounds like one of those deliberate backdoors requested by spooks/spies.

I wonder how many more phones have them lurking as-yet undetected.

Mine's the one with the N900 in the pocket.

Resellers eye up £60m-a-year UK uni software deals

60 million a year??

Did anyone else watch panorama last night?

Ten external battery packs

amprere hours

Figures in mAh are pretty meaningless when the things have various different output voltages.

Unless all of them have a single 3.6v Li-ion inside and use boost converters, which is not clear and pretty unlikely (some of them must use more than one cell)

Please quote the energy capacity in watt hours. It would be much more useful.

French Skyper freed after accidentally hacking bank's phone system

What? Really?

I've not seen that one.. Do you have a link?

Sophos antivirus classifies its own update kit as malware

Where's Graham Cluley's angle?

The article doesn't seem to include a comment from Graham Cluley. I thought that was mandatory.

HP boss Whitman: 'We have to offer a smartphone'

Re: If Only..

Not sure a tizen phone is going to cut it, from the sounds of it.

Maemo: Debian/Qt

Meego: RPM/Qt

Tizen: RPM/HTML5-based UI

Maemo had everything I wanted, and I still use the n900 but the hardware is starting to feel slow for today's applications, and the maemo community is starting to die as few people develop for it anymore, since it's a sinking ship.

The death of Nokia looks to be a big blow for Qt, since it's such a brilliant GUI API but nobody wants to use it anymore because it's tied to Nokia.

Nokia's demise is either a tragedy of bad management, or some really nasty tactics from Microsoft.

If Only..

they would buy Nokia, ditch WP8, and resurrect Maemo.

I can dream.. :P

IMO if the Ballmer Boys hadn't come in and drowned it at birth in attempt to perpetuate their own pile of crud, Maemo would've saved Nokia as a company.

Wales: We'll encrypt Wikipedia if reborn gov net-snoop plan goes live

The trouble with HTTPS

Is that all browsers seem to think that an out-of-date or self-signed certificate is _WORSE_ than loading a page in plaintext.

Personally, I would prefer a warning at the top of the page, that simply tells me what is wrong with the certificate, so if my bank suddenly starts using a self-signed cert then I can phone their fraud department, while if wikipedia or the reg have an out of date cert, I can simply prod their admin by email and continue browsing. Of course if every page on the net suddenly goes self-signed, I can pick the appropriate tinfoil hat.

That would be much better than simply point-blank refusing to load the page unless I either manually trust the dodgy certificate or load the page in plaintext!

Of course if a bank's "login to online banking" link mysteriously changed to HTTP instead of HTTPS, most users, possibly including me, might not notice. There is nothing in browsers to protect users from accidentally loading a page in plaintext, but for using an untrusted certificate they could be forgiven for thinking they'd committed some sort of crime, the way browsers scream about it.

Torvalds bellows: 'The GNOME PEOPLE are in TOTAL DENIAL'

Gnome??

I can think of much better reasons why Gnome is a pile of cack, than its API.

But then KDE isn't much better these days.. I find myself using Trinity. :(

New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD

Argh.

Fukushima was not a disaster. The TSUNAMI was a disaster! That killed 100,000 people!

Fukushima was a TRIUMPH for nuclear safety. Natural disaster killing hundreds of thousands, nuclear reactor, though crippled, didn't kill or apparently maim anyone.

I wish people would remember that.

Woz: Cloud computing trend is 'horrendous'

Short of becoming admins on our own servers?

Become an admin on your own server. :)

It isn't as hard as it used to be. And if companies like Apple were spending their energies on software to run your own server, then it'd be easier than wiping your arse.

But companies like Apple don't want to give YOU control of your own data. There's no profit in it.

THEY want to control the data, so they can mine it, analyse it and decide what you want for breakfast next week.

That's the trouble with the cloud - all the advantages seem to be on the service provider's end.

If you're an end user, then your cloudy services can just evaporate with no recourse.

Not so bad if it's just a personal webpage you put on geocities in 1999, but if it was an email service that disappeared you'd be fairly pissed off. Especially if you're a business.

Apple seeks whopping $2.525bn Samsung patent payout

25 Years

Personally, I think the main thing wrong with the patent system is the length of the award.

25 years might have been appropriate in the age of the phonograph, as the time it takes after thinking of a novel idea, to implementing it, manufacturing it, marketing it, profiting from it and then moving on to the next iteration.

But these days, if someone thinks of a novel idea, they can get it to market and start working on the next product within a year. The speed of research and development has come on leaps and bounds.

I think software patents, design patents, and all the rest of the dubious, troll-y patents out there would be quite acceptable if they only lasted 2.5 years instead of 25.

Apple perhaps deserve some sort of a headstart over the competition for being first with innovative UI features and certain snazzy design concepts, but once they have had time to capitalise on them, others should be free to improve on the concepts while they think of something new (and patent that if they so wish)

Overly long patents stifle innovation. Spurious ones I think do to a lesser extent.

Firefox 14 encrypts Google search, but admen can still strip-search you

Please Don't Track Me

How the hell is that going to make any difference?

It's as worthless as the Telephone Preference Service etc. All it means is you filter out all the -scrupulous- marketeers, and end up being targeted solely by unscrupulous ones.

We'll punish crims faster... with lots of shiny new tech - minister

Kangaroo Courts?

I can't of think anything worse for judicial reform than to make riot style fast-tracking the "norm".

You just have to look at the Fortnum and Mason trials.. Too many people for one trial, so they split them up.

Group A were who the CPS decided were "organisers", group B was apparently anyone holding more than 20 leaflets, and the CPS won't say what the charging criteria was for group C.

Group A had a reasonable judge and were all let off after the main witness retracted her statement that the group intimidated staff, after CCTV showed that what she said had happened, infact didn't.

The Group B trial was later, and they were convicted on the same statement that had already been retracted in the group A trial, although one got off because she was later found to have only been carrying 16 leaflets instead of the required 20!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/mar/13/uk-uncut-activist-case-dropped

http://brightgreenscotland.org/index.php/2012/03/fortnum-and-mason-trial-b-the-farce-rolls-on/

If justice is blind, she should stick to walking pace I think.

At last! The Wi-Fi chip that'll beam video from mobe to telly

The reason why DLNA doesn't work

Of course is because most codecs are proprietary, so the TV manufacturers will only buy a license for one or two if you're lucky.

Standards and Imaginary Property don't mix.

WTF is... Li-Fi?

Replace HDMI?

I can see how this would be useful say for streaming HDTV off a NAS/DLNA without a gigabit ethernet cable, but there's a slight flaw..

You turn off the lights to watch the film.. Oops?

Massive DDoS attack blasts 123-reg offline

We know we are a prime target. We are still in the process of resolving this.

Easiest way to stop being a prime target seems to be to get whacked.

Zuck weds self to lady friend in surprise ceremony

I wouldn't like to be negotiating THAT prenup!

Actually scratch that, I'd love to be.

Kerching.

'Dated and cheesy' Aero ripped from Windows 8

Reminds me of PC games

Modern games on the PC have similar interface problems because the designers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmoneymen want to release simultaneously on consoles but don't want to change the interface to make it more sensible on a PC.

E.g. the second and third iterations of Deus Ex. Absolutely disastrous.

As for Linux - I agree Unity and KDE4 are absolute horrors, but that's why the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) was created. It's basically an optified fork of KDE3.5, which can coexist with a KDE4 installation and run KDE4 apps.

Currently running it on Debian Sid. Very handy.

http://www.trinitydesktop.org/

Microsoft to devs: Don't ruin Win 8 launch with crap code

Re: Are Microsoft implicitly admitting...

Shitty indeed!

Apple would never do that!

Pints under attack as Lord Howe demands metric-only UK

I'm an engineer

But I like to stick to pints for my beverages, and miles for my long distances.

But at the same time I think those bloody yanks ought to use metric for their engineering units.

Sadly though, it seems to be the other way round. Electronic engineers over here end up having to work in mils (thousandths of an inch, not mm) because it's the standard.

You need standards if you need precision. In engineering, it's vital that the world standardises, and I wish they'd use metric.

But for colloquial use, the status quo should remain. Messy or not.

The whole point of colloquial units is that everyone understands what they mean, i.e. the great unwashed. It's the same reason why large areas are often expressed in terms of hundreds of "football pitches" rather than square kilometres.

So get your grubby french hands off my Quart.

UK's '£1.2bn software pirates' mostly 'blokes under 34'

"Anyone who uses software they haven't paid for should face hefty consequences"

That'll sort out those blasted Linux users!

Russian upstart claims BitTorrent-killer

Bah

There I was thinking that they had come up with a way to let people pay for the content that they are downloading...

But no, as usual they are just trying to magic away piracy and protect their walled garden.

Personally I tend to use BitTorrent when:

- I want to pay the full price for something (because it is good and/or I like the company) but the DRM they use makes the commercial version worthless to me (usually games)

- I want to pay the artist for their work, but the evil middlemen are taking almost all of my money, so it ends up overpriced for what it is

- I am unsure of the quality of the product and I would prefer to pay for it AFTER I have downloaded it.

The world desperately needs a system where people can download stuff but still pay the content creators IF THEY WANT TO. This would of course kill off all the middlemen (HMV, EA Games etc) which is why they are trying their best to make sure this never happens.

Yes of course this means that people COULD still download stuff for free, but I believe that most people would prefer to pay what they think is reasonable, and this is better than the current situation where people CANNOT pay for what they have downloaded outside of the distributor's intended business model.

TBH i think the whole notion that "nobody would pay if there was an option to have it for free" is just scaremongering perpetuated by these content cartels.

Evil plot to control souls via Wi-Fi thwarted

Publicity stunt?

They were just trying to make a ruckus!

Battlefield Earth ruled worst film EVER

Can't be a very good poll...

Where's DOOM ?

Extreme weather blown away from unexpected direction

Knots?

I have never seen energy measured in Knots^2 before!

Knots is a unit of velocity, if I'm not mistaken. Surely there needs to be a mass term for it to equate to an energy? ie 1/2mV^2?

Otherwise a tornado would end up as having the same "energy" as a hurricane, if the wind speed at the edge is the same?

Ten... Freesat TV receivers

@DrXym

For the Humax HDR-Fox-T2, which is practically identical to the Foxsat only it has a freeview tuner instead of freesat, there was a recent firmware update which fixes the blocking delete behaviour amongst a few other things. Files are now queued for delete, the delete process being handled in the background.

I believe the Foxsat has the same firmware upgrade.

Also, I never received this update over the air. But all I had to do was download a file, bung it on a USB stick and plug it into the box when it boots.

Overclockers UK swallowed by private equity firm Afinum

Another one bites the dust

How long before there are no independent UK businesses left that haven't been gutted into "brands" for foreign marketing companies?

I know OCUK haven't been turned into a "brand" shell just yet, but now the Krauts have them over a barrel they can do what they like!

Open sourcers urged to adopt dancing poultry license

Copyright?

Sounds like Werner Thomas could sue a lot of would-be software licensing lawyers for Copyright Infringement!

Japanese nuke meltdown may be underway

Chernobyl

I wish people would stop going on about Chernobyl and TEH OMG WTF WERE ALL GOING TO DIE

There were a hell of a lot of things wrong with chernobyl: The main one being a positive void coefficient. This meant that the reaction sped up when coolant disappeared, because the coolant itself (heavy water) was being used to control the speed of the reaction. (imagine if your CPU decided to overclock itself because you turned the fan off)

When chernobyl melted down, the melted fuel just got hotter and hotter and didn't stop until the material itself starts to vapourise, and then you're REALLY in trouble.

The control rods in chernobyl were made of graphite, which after the pressure vessel ruptured, caught fire and were impossible to extinguish. The fire carried radioactive materials such as ceasium 137 in its plume.

But (in contrast to what some people seem to be saying) even the accident at chernobyl was nothing like as extreme as a nuclear bomb. A nuclear bomb releases all its energy in one instant. Chernobyl was more like a great big fire compared to a bomb explosion.

This reactor has a negative void coefficient, which means the reaction slows down when there is no coolant. It can still melt down, because the reaction will slow but not necessarily stop entirely. Even if it loses containment, then it will be just some radiation released. The Nitrogen-16 released so far has a half-life of 7 seconds, which means it has zero long term consequence. If the containment is breached, then some longer-lived isotopes could be released, but certainly nothing even remotely on the scale of chernobyl, and whoever thinks there is going to be a nuclear bomb blast is a complete moron.

All in all, i think they have bigger things to worry about.

Verizon iPhone 4 jailbroken – already

@anon 22:25

I don't know about Cameron, but this is precisely why I DON'T buy any consoles, or buy software from any vendor.

Jailbrakers _ARE_ gits. Buy a N900.

Private browsing modes in four biggest browsers often fail

simples

Just stick your firefox profile on a ramdisk. On Linux that's as simple as symlinking to or mouting a tmpfs at ~/.mozilla

something like:

mount -t tmpfs tmpfs ~user/.mozilla

This has the added advantage that the old .mozilla will reappear as soon as you unmount it.

For the truly paranoid, you could create a new user with their entire home directory on tmpfs, which gets created fresh whenever they log in, just incase something like flash writes to its own directory.

You can even use the sux program to run firefox (or any other browser) as that user without logging out of your own account or closing your non-private browsing session.

Adobe warns over unpatched PDF peril

Linux vulnerable?

Seriously! Who uses Adobe products on Linux? (ok, except maybe flash.. :/ )

If this affects KPDF I'll eat my hat!

Entire UK will be on ID database sometime in next 3 millennia

The back door

While we are all laughing at the failure of the national ID cards scheme, few people have heard about the next front of attack: The NHS RiO database.

This is a database that was on trial in London, putting all GP and hospital records on one central system, but it is now being rolled out across the country. It is due to go live in the Hampshire trust next week.

Big Brother isn't daft when it comes to this sort of thing. There are centralised citizen databases coming in all sorts of different guises, and the winner will be extended to cover everything.