Posts by sisk

Apple badmouthing of court's monitor proves it NEEDS him - judge

What this reminds me of

"But Daddy, I don't want a baby sitter"

Seems the court's response was the same as mine. "Tough cookies kid, you're getting one."

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

Re: I know everyone likes to rag on Apple but...

I'd assume it's down to a couple of things, basic things

I'd assume that its down to they started with a solid foundation that they got from open source and built up from there. Everything else you said is spot on, but that proven BSD base that they built on should not be discounted. The hardest parts of writing an OS were done before Apple ever started, at least for OSX.

Re: Talking computers

Yes, why has the use of lightpen/stylus not caught on?

Because most people have absolutely atrocious handwriting that a computer would never be able to learn with current technology. Our handwriting is just way too inconsistent. Perhaps someday, but right now we would need a very clever person to write some very clever code to teach machines to deal with our chicken scratches.

Still more to it

I'm not sure what the 'more' is at this point, but if all you needed was a common API across all devices and interfaces that suited each then some major vendor would be shipping Linux in force and leaning on the likes of Adobe to release Linux versions of their most popular products by now. It's had the common API since way before someone decided to turn the Linux on a toaster jokes into reality and appropriate UIs for each device nearly as long, all freely available for the taking.

Then again Linux has a serious lack of marketing muscle. Maybe that's the missing piece of the equation for it. In which case the common API and differentiated UIs might just be enough to save MS. Regardless the desktop is in no danger of extinction. It may become a niche market, interesting only to businesses and gamers, but it's not going away any time soon.

MANIC MINERS: Ten Bitcoin generating machines

2 comments

First, as the article says these ASICs are paperweights if the bottom falls out of the market tomorrow. That's why the smart money (in my opinion) is in Litecoins. You can mine those with high end graphics cards and likely will be able to till they're all mined. They're not worth near as much (around $30/litecoin last time I checked), but you get a ton more of them. I've got a friend with mining rigs for both kinds of coins and he makes far more money off his litecoin rig with two GPUs than his bitcoin rig with two ASICs (though, to be fair, one of those ASICs is absolutely tiny). The bitcoin rig barely pays his electric bill (all of it, so he's doing a little better than breakeven with them). As an added bonus if the bottom falls out of the market tomorrow he can put his graphics cards on Ebay and get almost all his investment back out of them. If the bottom stays firmly in place for another month he won't even need to do that as they'll have paid for themselves.

Second, Butterfly Labs. Here we have a company that is owned by a convicted fraudster. Their rep is well earned I think.

I don't mine coins seriously. Once in a while when I know my computer's going to be collecting dust otherwise for a few days I'll fire up a litecoin miner. I think I've managed to make about half a litecoin doing that since November. Still, litecoins make much more sense right now than bitcoins.

Clink! Terrorist jailed for refusing to tell police his encryption password

So in the UK you can be forced to hand over your encryption passwords or you're presumed guilty? Let me guess. Someone said that if you're innocent you have nothing to fear, right? Terrorist or not I think that's a violation of human rights as currently recognized by international law.

Also....why did they not try the password they already knew he had used in multiple other places? Seriously, that cannot be asked enough. What kind of 'expert' misses such an obvious password?

Dusty old supernova could reveal answer to life, the universe and EVERYTHING

I'm fairly certain it will take 42 such supernova to reveal the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Fanbois, prepare to lose your sh*t as BRUSSELS KILLS IPHONE dock

Re: Vladimir Plouzhnikov

If you moonlight as a DJ, you'll also know that the punters on the dance floor probably don't care about the 20khz ceiling for 44.1khz digital audio, that probably isn't very audible amongst the groundshaking bass being pumped through a bunch of Peaveys or Kenwoods anyway.

Indeed. That's why my DJ rig and the several hundred gigabytes of MP3s it contains in no way resembles the equipment you'd find on a true audiophile's entertainment system.

However, quality wise, a 128kbit mp4 probably exceeds the quality of a 12" EP or LP, and you can fit a whole ton of those on a CD

Actually the record itself has perfect quality, at least the newer ones do. They perfectly capture the sound in the recording studio with modern equipment. The problem is that getting that quality back out requires very high end equipment. That's why true audiophiles tend to have things like $1500 turntables. Personally I'm inclined to settle for the slightly lesser quality that I can coax out of my phone or computer with the above mentioned $20 headphones.

I've heard the high end equipment and I have to admit that it is crystal clear. Believe it or not an LP on a $1500 turntable with a $2000 amp and $750 speakers sounds better than a live performance. Even so you'd have to be just a little off your rocker or insanely wealthy to have a $4250 stereo in my opinion.

Re: Vladimir Plouzhnikov

Digital can be higher fidelity than analog.

Yes it can. And it only takes about 200mb per song to do it, so you can fit 3 or 4 songs on a standard CD.

I'm not an audiophile by any means, but I do moonlight as a DJ and I do understand music. Here's the truth of the matter: for the maximum listening enjoyment you need high end analog equipment (usually with parts they quit making decades ago), but realistically most of us won't be able to tell the difference between that and what a phone with decent (by phone standards) sound hardware puts out to a pair of $20 headphones.* Just whatever you do don't mix high end equipment with cheap headphones or plug a phone into an high end analog amp. Doing that is what sounds like crap.

*You can do it with earbuds too, but because my ears are funny shaped the things hurt me. As such I have no idea what an equivalent pair of earbuds cost.

Re: Meh

This legislation is the result of the likes of Samsung never releasing two phones with the same connector.

If that's the case they're about 7 years late. There are two types of charging ports on new phones right now. Guess who the one stubborn company that refuses to conform to the accepted standard is.

Re: The world does not revolve around Apple

They could, of course, choose to offer the lightning connector forward as the connector for all phones etc, patent and royalty free.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

*gasp*

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

*deep breath, pick myself up off the floor*

Hehehe, Apple, offer something they made royalty free. Good one.

Re: Not sure about this

or else the companies each make their own chargers and sell them for 20 times the cost with no competition

Only Apple does that. Pretty much every other phone maker has standardized on micro-USB with no law telling them that they have to. I'm not sure if it's market forces or just that rare beast of corporate responsibility, but it seems that none of the other manufacturers need to be slapped upside the head and told to get with the program.

Realistically what I expect is that Apple will go to phone designs that have two ports. One will be under a hard to see cover, never mentioned by Apple, and follow the new requirements. The other will be a lightning connector exactly where you expect to find it.

Apple CEO Cook breaks YEARS OF SILENCE, finally speaks to El Reg hack

Apple's silence to El Reg for all these years has been because you had the audacity to point out that Jobs had a bad hairstyle??? I'd assumed it was because you didn't sing their praises. I didn't think even Jobs had an ego that big.

Harvard kid, 20, emailed uni bomb threat via Tor to avoid final exam, says FBI

Re: You're hardly a kid at 20

Given that our brains aren't fully developed until we're 25 I think it's appropriate to call a 20 year old a kid.

Also, given the same fact, fathers throughout history have been correct in their assessments that their daughters' boyfriends haven't had a full share of grey matter. A bit off topic perhaps, but it's a fun little tidbit.

Ghosts of Christmas Past: Ten tech treats from yesteryear

Looking back at the Quicktake really makes you realize how far camera tech has come. Not long ago I bought my daughter a "toy" camera (as in it was sold as a toy, but is a real, if sub-low end, camera) that stores 25 640x480 pictures. Aside from the higher storage and a more camera-like/less binocular-like profile and a well known cartoon character on the side instead of an Apple logo it has pretty much the same specs as the Quicktake. It cost me $10. I'm guessing that's a little less than what the Quicktake cost in its day.

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

So we have one interface for a desktop with a keyboard and mouse and one for mobile. In other words they're doing what anyone with a lick of common sense would have done to begin with.

Chinese gamer plays on while BMW burns to the ground

Re: Not just games

I could make all kinds of jokes about hot sex or the heat of passion here, but I'll refrain out of propriety.

Ok. That's a lie. I just can't choose which of the cheesy puns that jumped through my heads as I read your post to use.

To be fair it's rather difficult for someone inside the car to know that the undercarriage is on fire until the flames are licking their feet through the floor boards (or the gas tank, in which case the people inside the car likely still won't know the car's on fire as they pass into the great beyond).

Oh no, RBS has gone titsup again... but is it JUST BAD LUCK?

Re: Right, and not right.

What people really have to understand is that the management act to maximize their own short-term profit, not the best long-term interests of the company.

No, that would be what bad managers do. Good managers realize that long-term company interests equal long term profits for them to. Sadly we have more bad managers in the world than good ones.

Pretty accurate. It's a problem even at small businesses. The scariest one I've seen is a local jeweler. His customer database won't run on anything newer than Windows 98 and there's no way to export the data anymore except as a report. Exporting the actual database requires a separate application that seems to be extinct. (I've no idea where he got that system, but I can see why the company that made it isn't around anymore.)

BlackBerry rejected Justin Bieber as brand ambassador

Blackberry had to have already been in decline if Beiber was already popular when this happened. The kid hasn't been around the red carpets all that long and the beginning of the end for BB was 7 years ago.

'Copyrighted' Java APIs deserve same protection as HARRY POTTER, Oracle tells court

Google’s argument was akin to an author copying the chapter titles and topic sentences of an advance copy of a Harry Potter book and then paraphrasing the rest and claiming it as fair use.

No, it's more akin to copying the technique used to put ink to paper. At best it'd be like using the same font for chapter headers.

But here's the frightening thing about this: the people deciding the case are essentially clueless. They don't realize that an API is nothing more than a basic set of instructions. With their ignorance and the hot air that Oracle's blowing up their tailpipes it's entirely possible that this nonsense will go Oracle's way.

Yep, I'll have nightmares about the future state of the industry if they manage to set THAT precedent.

NSA sez NO to prez: Spooks ban Obama from using iPhones

Fox style headline:

President Obama Has No Idea How Much A Phone Bill Costs You

The article would contain a scathing criticism of how Obama is out of touch with the average American.

NBC style headline:

President Obama's Phone Most Secure In The World

The article would contain praise for how Obama persevered against a corrupt NSA that would deny a black President the right to use a smart phone.

NPR Style headline:

President Obama Continues To Promote ACA

The article wouldn't mention phones.

On the matter of shooting down Amazon delivery drones with shotguns

I do know a guy who claims in public to be able to bring down pigeons out as far as 100 yards with a .223 rifle. And he can back it up. Mind you this guy can also reliably hit a dime at 300 yards and makes a fair bit of money doing so whenever there are new gun club members gullible enough to bet he can't. Any normal person wouldn't have a chance. I don't know how he learned to shoot like that, but I've never seen his equal.

Then again, he's also likely to slap you if you suggest that you might be firing a gun at drones -- or anything else -- in a populated area, so I highly doubt he's going drone hunting any time soon.

What is thy bidding? Han Solo’s shooter goes under the hammer

Do I get to shoot first if I buy this?

REVEALED: How YOU PAY extra for iPHONES - even if you DON'T HAVE ONE

Aren't these exactly the sort of contracts that just got Apple in trouble in the ebook market? I don't see much difference between "You can't give anyone else a better price than you give us" and "You can't subsidize anyone else more than you subsidize us".

Apple snubs discounts, sprays Black Friday zombies with gift cards

Ugh....Black Friday

I personally can't stand Black Friday. People let the crazy hang out on that day. Every year it seems someone gets trampled to death* by the crowds and fistfights over merchandise are common enough that no one's really surprised when they hear about it. If only the big boxes would follow Apple's example maybe we could get a dose of sanity into the biggest shopping day of the year. After all, who's going to get into a fist fight or trample some kid to death for a $25 gift card?

*For the first time in a long time I haven't heard of anyone being trampled to death in the weekend news, but I spent the weekend basically offline. I haven't really gotten any news about much of anything since Wednesday until this morning.

Weird PHP-poking Linux worm slithers into home routers, Internet of Things

Re: @ alleged legion of AC trollops (eg: 11:51)

And that they specifically are due to vulnerabilities in Apache, Linux and BSD, and not incompetent administration

In my experience most successful attacks are due to bad administration, regardless of the platform. Any platform can be locked down pretty securely these days.

The one in the article is a pretty good example: it attacks PHP apps that can't grok the query strings properly. Personally I regard that sort of vulnerability in this day and age as an incompetent or lazy web developer. Honestly it's stupid easy to escape special characters in query strings in pretty much any language that would be dealing with them.

My servers have come under SQL injection attacks several times a day for several years now and never been compromised. Why? Because I teach my apps how to cleanse their input so the attacks are stripped out of the input before it goes into a query. I consider this to be as basic as using whitespace in your code.

Or Windows Server for anything Internet facing. Both have far lower vulnerability counts than a LAMP stack....

First, that's only true if you count the vulnerabilities for every package in a given distros repository, which is the equivalent of counting every single vulnerability in every single application available for Windows. No system runs every package in it's distro's repository. In fact even attempting to do so would be an exercise in frustration. Try having two wireless management systems that compete for the same resources for example.

Second, even if it were true of just the core files needed to get a Linux system off the ground a vulnerability count is a meaningless number when taken on its own. More important factors are severity, access, and time to patch. Go learn a little about security before you try to comment on it.

Thai man reportedly dies clutching his scorched iPhone 4S

This really doesn't make sense to me. Either these cheap chargers are feeding the iPhones with AC power or they're pushing an absolutely insane amount of DC power. The AC power would fry an iPhone in very short order (negating the need to talk on it), and anything pushing the kind of amperage it would take to electrocute someone with DC would not be using 'cheap knockoff' type components. How is this happening?

US senator asks: Will Bitcoin replace Swiss bank accounts?

Re: Off line

Unlike gold, the technology is just about here to make diamonds cheaply.

Technically diamonds should be cheap already. Da Beers artificially inflated their price via marketing and monopoly for over a century. From the documentaries I've seen on the subject the last couple years it looks like the monopoly is just about broken finally, but the prices haven't come down yet.

Re: Off line

I can assure you that the only people who feel miserable about drug taking are those who miss out on the fun

Tell that to a heroine addict who can't get clean. Or a parent who lost a kid to an overdose. Or the innocent victim who happened to be too nearby when a couple gangbanger dealers decided to open up on each other. Or the poor sap that the above heroine addict mugged to pay for his hit. The list goes on and on.

Drugs are a bad deal man. They always have been and always will be. You could possibly make the point that treating them as a social problem rather than a legal one would make things better (that's my feeling on the matter), but to say they don't cause misery is ignorance of the worst kind.

As for getting currency across borders, I'd go for rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and the like. It might take more of them than diamonds, but they don't have near the controls to work around.

Re: Yes

I don't believe there had been any evidence that bitcoin is used by money launderers or terrorists.

Common sense (to me, anyway) states that they will use bitcoin just the same as they use any other currency exchange that they can. Frankly I'd be surprised if they didn't use bitcoin, at least up until the powers that be noticed it and started paying attention to it.

Re: Yes, HSBC Bank.................

Senators are duplicitous, hypocrites

In other news, water is wet.

My name is NOT Dread Pirate Roberts: Silk Road accused's fam'n'friends stump up $1m bail

Re: Solitary Confinement?

iirc silk road was running off a hidden service, so no exit node was involved.

That could be. My knowledge of TOR is pretty much limited to the fact that I keep tracing attacks against my web servers back to exit nodes.

Re: Hope the Feds have better proof......

Drug laws weren't created illegally. They exploit a loophole in the interstate commerce clause (the same loophole that's been exploited to the death of the 10th Amendment, but meh). I would also argue that not all of the politicians behind them had racist or religious agendas. Public health is the motivation for some of them. Look into how and why the FDA was formed ('elixir of death' is a good Google term to use) and you'll see what I mean.

In others, including this one... I'm not so sure.

If he did put out hits on his rivals then some of them probably put hits out on him as well as soon as they learned who he was. Or worse, some of them are probably in there with him.

Re: Solitary Confinement?

This was only pursued to attack copyright infringement.

Um....no. Silk Road, AKA the Amazon of illegal drugs, is not a Pirate Bay-esque operation. This has nothing to do with copyright infringement. The specific charges filed against him are murder for hire and narcotics trafficking. He may have just been running a TOR exit node or he may have been running the entire operation*, but he wasn't offering downloads of you're favorite movie.

*I'm not familiar with the evidence in this case and not commenting on his innocence or guilt, but running a TOR exit node would explain why he was fingered if innocent. Though for that to be the case the FBI would have had do have done some very spotting investigative work indeed.

3D printing: 'Third industrial revolution' or a load of old cobblers?

Re: Yes, a "solution looking for a problem"

Neither do sharks with lasers of the "frikkin" variety.

Don't be ridiculous. Of course sharks with frikkin lasers count. But then so do the BluRay player and two consoles I own. Oh, and my 'death ray' that I use to amuse my kids*. More practical applications are range finders for surveyors, etching in things, eye surgery, and blasting missiles out of the sky.

*Apparently the ability to pop a balloon and light a match at a distance qualifies it as a death ray, though I'm not quite sure why. My kids think it's the coolest thing since sliced cheese though. I'm sure that in a pinch I could use it to start a camp fire, but I think it'd be quicker to use one of the friction methods of fire building I know.

Samsung v Apple: Titans await jury verdict on damages of MILLIONS

Re: I know this'll bring on a world of hurt but ..

I would argue that many of the elements that Samsung copied shouldn't have been patentable in the first place. Rounded corners? Lock screens? Come on, these things are obvious.

This whole thing, to me, reeks of same the kind of legal jiggery as when Miracle-Gro sued Terracycle for having green and yellow packaging.

Re: How much MORE the damages will be

patents that Android violated.

Such as?

PlayStation 4 BLUE LIGHT OF DEATH blamed on power cords, TV sets, butterflies in China

Re: Seriously...

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?" That's their first piece of advice.

Work tech support for very long and that's ALWAYS your first advice. It seems obvious, but few people try it before they call for help.

c'mon, it's always the user

Not always, but more often than not.

I'll be over here, thanking God that I managed to get promoted away from the hell desk way back when.

XBOX One SHOT DEAD by Redmond following delivery blunder

Re: Again with the PS4 ad?

What's wrong with the Wii U? Anything in particular, or is it not significantly better than the Wii?

I get a sore neck just thinking of looking back and forth between the tablet controller and the TV, for starters. That and Nintendo just doesn't seem to be getting the top titles anymore, apart from their own that is. Not that they did with the Wii, but they had an innovative interaction that changed the whole industry. Who didn't love actually swinging Link's sword? I don't see anything that compelling in the Wii U to make up for it's lack of titles targeted to the 30 something audience that the other consoles target (you know, the first-generation gamers that the industry has grown up with, such as me).

If my kids were a little older it might be different, but they're young enough that they wouldn't know the difference between the Wii games that are about to get a whole lot cheaper and the much more expensive Wii U games, so why spend the extra money for games I won't play and they won't enjoy any more than what I have now?

WHO ate all the PIs? Sales of Brit mini-puter pass 2 MEELLION

Education work on year-ahead schedules. This year it's launched and a few teachers notice, next year it's brought to the attention of the curriculum/exam boards, they consider it for the next year, then they announce it will be an option the year after that, then schools start to buy them.

Spot on. As a tech working in an educational environment, that's exactly right. It takes a while for the people who would want the tech to notice it. Then, before anything can be implemented a plan for how it will be used must be written. You'd be shocked at how long that can take, especially when it comes to anything that's going to need to be budgeted. Finally it has to go to the school board for approval, and you know what committees of elected officials are like.

Google SO CAN scan ALL BOOKS onto its sites - judge

Re: Running out of hands

Full disclosure: I've never even tried to have something published, though a poem I wrote was copied and published by someone else under their own name. I never pursued the matter since the lawyer would cost me far more than I could ever hope to get in royalties from it. Besides, its not like I was ever going to publish it myself. (In case you're wondering, yes I was angry, no I haven't talked to that 'friend' since, and no the poem wasn't any good. Quite how they got someone to publish it is beyond me).

Anyway, it would seem to me that net sales are probably higher as a result of this service. I would imagine it would be similar to how music sales when up when Napster was in its infancy. Most people were still on dial-up internet then, so downloading more than a few megabytes worth of music was impractical. They'd get one or two songs and then go buy the album because they liked them and didn't want to tie up their phone line all day to get the rest of it. It's the same sort of thing with what Google's doing. You read a chapter and want to read the next one so you go buy the book.

If a university were doing the exact same thing that Google is no one would bat an eye at it. The only reason this case exists at all, as with a couple others over the past couple years. Remember how people whined when Google bought Motorola and didn't change their licensing policy? No one said a word when Motorola was using the exact same policy, but everyone lost their minds when it was Google.

Not that they don't commit their fair share of corporate sins, but they seem to have become sue-bait.

Re: Wrong on so many levels

In my example I could scan a 500 page textbook, and every day of term put up a different 5 pages , being careful to remove the previous day's pages. No one can honestly tell me THAT is the intent of fair use.

You could, but that's not what Google's doing.

Dr Wolfram touts coding language to revolutionise mankind ... just like Wolfram Alpha did

Alpha is, by the way, used by Microsoft's Bing search engine and Apple's voice-controlled personal assistant Siri to look up information.

Neither of those is a promising example of what it can do. Just saying....

Apple, for one, welcomes its ROBOT factory OVERLORDS

The jobs listings show Apple is also looking for an expert in "restricted substances and green chemistry", which isn't as dodgy as it sounds.

What do you mean dodgy? Pot's not considered dodgy at all in California anymore.