Posts by Willy Messerschmitt

Ellison wrestles Google to strangle 'unofficial' Java

Google's Retaliation Plan

Looks like this:

1.) GSQL Server: Announce that all MySQL work within Google is being stopped. Instead announce a PostGresql Enhancement Project that will scale from one PC to hundreds of thousands of PCs. A lightweight layer above the PSQL engine will do the trick. Name it GSQL and release with BSD license. Announce it with a list of fortune 500s who are part of the beta.

2.) Rip out Dalvik, replace it with http://golang.org/. Fits the bill, hurts Oracle.

3.) Block all Oracle IP addresses for Google Services. That is going to shock all of Larry's minions.

All of that is certainly only a Maskirovka and needs to be implemented only to scare the nice Mr Ellison until he stops the legal bitching. SDI was never near completion, yet it destroyed the Soviet Union and thereby achieved its objectives.

OpenSolaris axed by Ellison

Muhahahahahhahahah

You are so funny. Could you please throw more salt into the wounds of the Slowaris Greybeards ?

The tombstone is in reality a Salt Dispenser.

Oracle outlines Ellisonized Sparc roadmap

No - Sentimentality

Oracle thrived on being a "horizontal" company like Intel, MS or Seagate. Their RDBMS would run on virtually every commercial Unix and a number of mainframe operating systems in the 1980s, when DB/2 ran only on expensive IBM hardware (S/390 and AS/400).

Had IBM made DB/2 available on all major platforms, Oracle would probably not be in the IT conscience. Larry would fly a MS flight simulator.

So the "rationale" that they "need" to vertically integrate is not plausible at all. They have excellent relations with HP and many other hardware vendors. Every IBM sales rep is happy to push POWER boxes to run Oracle.

MySQL is also not a good reason, as it is GPLed as much as Postgresql is BSD licensed. What next ? Hire all PSQL developers and put them on a pointless dud project ??

Airbus does not buy Cessna because the latter are "highly successful" (in selling 100 Hp Piston-Engine planes). They might buy them because the Airbus CEO is a chummy of the Cessna CEO and does not want to see them fail. Especially if Cessna has made some key components for Airbus.

Larry has a sentimental attachment to the Stanford University Network and he thought buying them will count as a Good Deed whenever he knocks at Petrus' door in 30 years. "See, I helped my chummies who were losers and soon would be unemployed. Please reduce my time in hell to 10^15 years. 10^155555 years is clearly doing injustice to a nice American Criminal Tycoon like me !"

Fire burning in The Eternal Hell.

Economics Will Kill SPARC

Since the mass production of the 80486 processor, SPARC has been largely pointless. SPARC never had a performance edge over x86 since then (it was actually slower for long periods of time). The only remaining argument could be "enterprise" features in SPARC which x86 does not have.

I seriously doubt these features could not be delivered with a custom chipset "around" the CPU.

The core problem is that SPARC R&D expenditure has to be amortized over a small number (less than 500 000/year) of CPUs and a limited business of a few billion dollars per year. AMD and Intel CPUs are a component of a market which generates well above 100 billion dollars revenue.

A much more rational strategy for Oracle would be to negotiate with Intel and AMD to get all required enterprise features added to the high performance x86 CPU cores of these two suppliers. AMD is currently cash-strapped and buying a 30% stake would be easily possible for Oracle. They could then virtually dictate AMD all the enterprise features they needed for a "Enterprise-x86".

Oracle just donned the millstone and now jumped into the water for a long, long swim.

Google finally pulls Gmail contacts tool into line

Can you say "National Security Letter"

See this:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/08/nsl-gag-order-lifted/

Google CEO Schmidt:

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2010/08/11/google-ceo-predicts-and-embraces-end-to-online-internet-anonymity.html

I suggest this here:

http://www.torproject.org/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2275/

and

http://www.gnupg.org/

It is no coincidence that Obama's minions recently stopped and questioned a TOR developer for a few hours when ingressing to the Land Of Merkins. They also confiscated his cellphones without court order.

Stopping using Google without TOR. Clean your browsing history often and early. Don't forget to remove the Adobe Flash cookies.

Message written from a firefox communicating via TOR.

Elon Musk plans new Mars rockets bigger than Saturn Vs

Elon "PORKBARREL" Musk

Mr Musk styles himself as an entrepreneur "taking spacelift into the private sector", when in reality he is just the next generation of US government contractor.

Here is a real Commercial Space Lift Service Provider:

http://www.arianespace.com/

Compare this

http://www.arianespace.com/news-launch-logs/2000-2010.asp

to that:

http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php

You are going to see that spacex is a receiver of USGOV PORKBARREL, mainly. All the non-USGOV launches are from chummies of USGOV and probably subsidised by a USGOV backdoor. Arianespace is actually doing commercial launches besides some minor Eurogov launches like ComSatBw.

Can you say "Beltway Soap Opera" ?

Unpatched kernel-level vuln affects all Windows versions

I suggest

..you first get yourself a proper education and then check back in three years time.

FAT / Windows Process Rights: Google Chrome tries to remove virtually all privileges from an html rendering process or a Flash plugin process. This works for NTFS, but not for FAT, because of an MS implementation quirk. Consequentially, your harddisk is safe, but a virus may suck data from your USB stick.

You are talking about security of a system when the attacker has physical access, which virus writers normally do not have. And even if you encrypt your file system, it must be accessible in unencrypted form during computer runtime to be useful, which potentially means a virus can read it.

And YES, running as a non-Admin or non-Root when reading documents is a very basic security measure. Because thereby only the currently executing process can be affected. Of course also files residing on the harddrive can be read, changed or deleted. A system like SE Linux or AppArmor can even remove that threat to a large degree - for a normal user of course.

BUT the virus cannot fiddle with the operating system nor can it change IExplore.exe, Firefox.exe or any system-installed dlls. It CANNOT INSTALL A ROOTKIT. Maybe you can remember this phrase for your future life as a "system administrator".

Running as a *normal* user, browsing http://sweetgirlswithbigboobs.ru, clearing history, logging off, logging on again and doing https://bankofamerica.com will give you a fresh browser instance where you can have high confidence it is not owned by some Russkie Criminal. If you don't understand this, maybe you should apply with McDonald's.

That viruses can indeed destroy documents is true. IE8 was supposed to sandbox that can of worms called Flash, but apparently the sandbox and UAC is more a kind of Box With Many Ratholes.

The only proper security thing Windows contains is the privilege reduction of a norma user. UAC and the IE8 sandbox are apparently not stopping criminals.

MS Fanbois, UAC FAIL

Maybe the MS fanbois can simply admit Windows is much less secure *in the real world* than Linux, BSD and MacOS X ? Zero virus/botnet problems with the latter group seem to indicate exactly that.

Microsoft screws up *conceptually* all the time. For example, their process permissions concept would be very good if it also worked with the FAT filesystem (which is "just" used for USB memory sticks). All the time they compromise on security if the slightest inconvenience can be expected for their lUsers.

A friend of mine is a windows expert who maintains internet cafes, including SHELL32.DLL hacks. He recently discovered the glorious IE8 cannot defend against Flash Exploits. IE8 is supposed to be "heavily fortified" and to contain the Flash player crap and all of its exploits. Instead, a process called "Skypenames2.exe" shows up when you look at sites like viporn.com. And that process will do a royal screwup of your Windows XP machine, which no virusscanner can detect right now.

Of course, this only works if you run in Admin mode - which most lUsers and internet cafes do. Because they are lazy suckers, certainly.

MS is botching it because they are lying at their customers when they claim IE8 can "secure" a system. Browsing with a locked-down, normal user account can do that, but apparently not the much-hyped IE8 sandbox.

UK.gov finally kills ContactPoint

Yeah, But

..they have wasted 230 millions on IT consultants, project managers and a bunch of 100 other drones.

Instead, they could have paid 1000 social workers for one year to look into broken familie's houses, but never mind. At least they tried to do something !!

You know, at least BMW benefited from that because the IT drones could buy shiny new cars from the 230 MILLION POUND PORKBARREL.

Classic Case Of European Waste

Indeed someone from Brussels distracted Gordo so much he confused 230 000 with 230 000 000 Pounds. Heinous french-communist-napoleonic-bastards !

Seriously, this demonstrates fully that local governments are much more wasteful than anyone in Brussels can ever be.

I have more than ten years of enterprise systems development experience and 230 MILLIONS are just outrageous for this kind of system. What they basically need is a systeom of entering a report, assign that to a person and manage access of social workers, police etc to this person's records. Slap in an open-source fulltext search engine and DONE.

I guess one could even implement the basic functionality with the Google Search Appliance and ActiveDirectory. Cost: 10000 Pounds for consulting, 100 000 Pounds for the servers. DONE. FINITO.

If they really need a relational database, my most expensive consulting cost estimate would be 1 man-year and that's 150 000 Euros for an experienced enterprise developer. Then add 1 million for a servers running Postgres, a fulltext search engine (Lucene ?) and Apache. DONE.

Users of the system would just use their offical PC and log in by webbrowser to https://cansomeonethinkaboutthesweetkiddies.gov.uk. If they want to secure it, print one-time login numbers on paper and send it to the social workers. No electronic tokens required whatsoever.

This demonstrates the waste in national and local governments and secondly I doubt this kind of monster database is required at all !

Inflated billions hide cloud’s cash potential

Economics: GO !

As with any new technology or method, the naysayers are at the ready to explain why the Cloud will never fly - especially pointing out the security risks.

I would like you to step back a little and ask yourself

* When was the last time you filled up your Diesel generator that provides "secure" electricity ?

* When did you hand a letter to your own mailboy to deliver a letter to your other office 700kms away ?

* When did you put your own fibers into the ground to have the assurance you have a "secure" telecoms network to that 700km-distance office ?

* When did you last time dig up a well to have "secure" water supplies ? Ya know, the commies at the water utility could Poison You Bodily Fluids !!!!!!

I could go on with police, firebrigade, schooling and many more.

Fact is, we rely on a large number of externally-provided services to function nearly perfectly and we are happy to entrust it our deepest secrets. The same Economics will make the Cloud a raging success. Why hire&manage sysadmins if you can just buy an Email, Groupware, ERP, File Storage SERVICE over the internet ??

We all know the current state of IT is messed up so much because sysadmins must be Jack Of All Trades in most shops. The quality of their service is consequentially shoddy and has an extremely bad price/performance ratio. The free enterprise system will drag all of us into a Cloudy Future, regardless of all the people who scream and kick.

Stealth fighter in Canadian Wikipedia brouhaha

Not True

"Catapults need steam, which means reactors, which means:"

Please Google for my previous posts: "Willy Messerschmitt USS Kitty Hawk".

No, I am doing it for you:

"The Brits claim they haven't and Rolls-Royce tells the illiterates of the Royal Navy that this means you need pseudo-VTOL. That the Kitty Hawk class launched F14s, which are the heaviest naval fighters of all, invalidates that argument completely. USS Kitty Hawk is also named Carrier Vessel 63 (CV-63). A nuclear carrier would be a "CVN-XX".

I venture to say that The Royal Navy would operate a cheaper and three times more powerful carrier force if they dumped the three midget carriers and simply bought USS Kitty Hawk and the FA 18E/Fs. And then five frigates of the size of USS Vincennes, rip out the weaponry and convert them to fast oilers. They would also serve the role of "Exocet Decoy Target"."

If there were a single competent Engineering Officer left at the Royal Navy, he would cut through that Rolls Royce Jumpjet Bullshit and call "USS Kitty Hawk". Apparently the time of Nelson and properly schooled British Naval officers is long over and the MBAs have taken over this organization, too.

My Gymnasium-level physics demonstrates the "Catapult means Nuclear Reactor" argument is simply WRONG. Look it up.

13kgs of Kerosene burning. That's what you need AT MAX to launch a fully armed, fully fuelled Rafale with a catapult. Probably just two kgs, if the steam generator is efficient..

Stealth Fighters Protecting Estonian Airspace

See Here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWBf-lwGHRA

Oh wait, it's a Luftwaffe Eurofighter. Sorry. The F-22 will show up in 2017, I am sure.

F-35 can do Catapult launches

Here is the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGSAPoe7De4

(It's the french F-35 variant)

Why don't the British and the Canadians just talk to Mr Sarko and Dassault ? I am sure a nice package of nuclear carrier&Rafale are on sale *right now*.

Most work could certainly be done at various BAE sites. And the result would be much more cost effective than F35&midget carrier. But it would certainly cost the pride and carreer of some jumpjet guys.

Then france has some real industry left and makes their own SLBM and the corresponding submarine. More scope for Entente Cordiale industrial cooperation.

Adobe confirms remote code-execution flaw in Reader (again)

Not Entirely True

Buffer overflows can happen even in C-type programming languages even if you have a program which is only supposed to be a "viewer". Even vi, less and more could theoretically have buffer overflows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_overflow

On the other hand, it IS possible to run untrusted executable code securely, IF you have a proper sandbox around that. Javascript, Java and .Net prove that (through user-level software mechanisms). In addition to that, mechanisms like SE Linux, AppArmor, BSD Jails or the Google Chrome Security Architecture intercept and validate system calls using the Memory Management Unit and the Operating System. IE8 is doing something similar.

One could also argue that proper Operating Systems like Unix, the WNT Kernel and things like VMware or Xen have proven that secure execution of untrusted code is indeed possible.

The problem of numerous buffer and integer overflows will persist, though. That means sandboxes are exactly the right thing to do.

For me, it is Ok

I am not in the printing or graphics business and PDF is totally OK with me. There is a PDF standard explicitly chosen for long-term preservation of documents (think of aircraft manuals, building documentation etc). As far as I know this is the major standard for this kind of application.

I don't care if it is not 100%, pixel-by-pixel the same on different PDF renderers, I care that my brain thinks it is the same. And I also don't care about the kind of criminal abuse you describe.

What would be the alternative ? GIF ? TIFF ? JPEG ? Rather memory-intensive, I would say.

All Future Acrobat Reader Patches In One Package

This procedure wil make sure:

1.) Uninstall Acrobat Reader

2.) Download the Develper's version of Chrom

3.) Enable the built-in PDF plugin

4.) Right-click on a PDF document and set Chrome as the default viewer

The result is secure and very, very fast. No difference to viewing html at all.

To all those who don't like PDF I suggest to differentiate between Adobe Acrobat Reader (clearly a pile of poo) and the PDF format itself. It is well-documented and in my opinion one of the few formats computers will be able to render correctly in 50 years time.

Conficker's 6m strong botnet confounds security probes

Not really Conjecture

TheReg reported that a USGOV contractor is taking over botnets and exploits them for intel gathering. The next step would be to actively create botnets, if the existing ones are no longer sufficient.

Why Don't They

..use facebook, myspace, wired.com, youtube and all the other sites that allow for unmoderated comments to perform command and control ?

That would take away the need to set up domains and the consequential C&C vulnerability.

The messages would be gpg-signed commands, obfuscated through some sort of steganography.

IBM launches zEnterprise 196 'data center in a box'

Hmmm

That would imply they can perform some sort of translation inside the CPU. Transmeta did this, but they could apparently not compete with "real" x86 processors. Also, their technology included some very sophisticated software performing the translation and I have never heard of that with Power or S/390 CPUs which are part of production systems.

My guess is that IBM reuses ALUs, caches, branch predicition logic etc from Power CPUs in S/390 CPUs and the other way around. Microcode can only be used for infrequently used instructions, as that makes them *really* slow.

What I suggest is very similar to Apple's CPU transition strategies. The successfully supported 68K code on Power and the Power code on x86 with acceptable performance penalties.

I/O, Emulation

Indeed I/O performance is one of the major strong aspects of the mainframe. CPU throughput has never been impressive; the "Seymour Cray One Man Show" beat the hoardes of IBM engineers on a regular basis in terms of CPU performance.

But I/O is actually the easiest to virtualize/ translate. A POWER system can have exactly the same I/O facilites (I/O Processors/Channels, DASD, Fibrechannel, Infiniband, 10G ethernet, DMA etc) as a current mainframe. What I am suggesting is to just remove the S/390 CPU but not necessarily all other mainframe hardware components.

My point was that it does not make sense to develop a POWER and an S/390 CPU at the same time. As POWER is the fastest CPU architecture around, even translated CISC programs would have excellent performance. Various projects at HP, DEC, Apple, Transmeta and now QEMU proved this. Some even argue that Translation can optimze code "on demand" and based on a real workload and achieve higher throughput than a statically optimized program. It is well-known that profile-driven optimizers achieve best results.

DEC achieved competitive performance with their Alphas emulating (actually dynamically translating) x86 CPUs using FX!32 technology.

Why Don't They

..use/adapt QEMU and emulate S/390, x86, SPARC, PA-RISC, Itanic and all that on POWER. Emulation/Translation now approaches Native Speed.

The S/390 CPUs are artificially overpriced to pay for total system R&D costs anyway. They are a kind of dongle for the mainframe software. Just adapt the POWER/QEMU pricing so that it results in a competitive MIPS/$ rate.

IBM could then say

"We run ANY operating system (zOS, AIX, OS/400, VM, Windows Server, Linux, Solaris, HPUX, BSD, MacOS X*, Haiku,...) on our hardware."

"You can use each and every processor for any operating system and workload".

The current solution is the typical kind of hodgepodge which only The Pointy-Haired invent.

*at least technically. Legally they would have to talk to His Royal Highness, The Steve of California before doing that.

Illumos sporks OpenSolaris

Well

At least the SUNWspro debugger has an alpha-quality GUI made in Java. dbx itself is great, but the GUI is just killing a developer's time and increasing the cleaner's workload because of all the torn-out hair that must be wiped away (around the places where SUNWspro is used).

I have also heard about something called "Java Desktop System" and from the name alone I imagine it is used by Merkin Intel in Gitmo to torture inmates who have stated their profession as being programmers.

According to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris_Desktop

it actually does not contain Java in anything critical, rather it seems to be a kind of Gnome Desktop. So that's all perfect, but if they have slipped in the Java cancer - don't touch it if you care about the cleaner !

Solaris, Linux, x86, GNU tools, Croos-Polination

I have several years of experience developing in C++ (and minor Java) on Solaris, Linux and Windows. Recently I worked on a C++&Solaris-based system which is a rather critical part of German Finance.

In general, Solaris is considered a very good platform by everyone involved. The institution currently operates their systems on Solaris SPARC, Solaris x86 and VMS. They are very happy with that, except that the VMS solution does not scale and the next generation system will be completely based on C++&Linux. No Java or .Net, except for demo clients.

My personal experience is that the Solaris dbx debuggr is excellent, but the Java-based GUI is utter crap. I simply used dbx only. Also, the Sun tools like grep and find are vastly inferior to GNU grep, find.

Also, x86 is very fast and SPARC is a slug.

I suggest the OpenSolaris people use as many GNU userland tools as possible, as the Sun equivalents are simply ten years behind. Maybe other stuff like NFS and file systems could be adapted, too.

Certainly the Java-based crap should be removed completely, as it is not just slow and memory-devouring, but also extremely buggy.

In general, my feeling as a developer is that Solaris is a very good OS and that was also the consensus with my colleagues there. It just has to be rescued from the pointy-haired at Oracle/SUN.

Pay-off or lay-off: HP calls on 700 staff to heed redundo plea

HR drone speak ?

"in India cheaper than you, they are better too."

They are definitely cheaper to perform routine tasks, but most of them have zero creativity when it comes to develop new ideas and technologies.

Countries like Denmark (MySQL) and Norway (Qt) contribute more to the IT world than India, at least intellectually, despite India having about 300 times more inhabitants. That's of course if you don't take into account the routine work specified by western customers. There are much less codemonkeys in Norway than in India, so if you have a ton of routine work to be done at the lowest acceptable quality standards, India is "bestshore".

If you need the best solution to a new problem, go to Norway. Or Denmark. Or Finland.

Suggestion to HP Employees

First a little bit of historic perspective: HP was founded soon after the Great Depression with the clear objectives to do something innovative and to respect employees. This meant that hire&fire were unacceptable and the company went great lengths to find work for employees who were at one point redundant. During the oil crisis, HP reducing working hours and pay by 20% but did not lay off people.

HP was a great innovator in measurement and IT doing things like microwave measurement instruments, medical devices, portable atomic clocks, one of the early RISC processors, one of the early Unixes, invented inkjet printing, a pioneer in laser printers etc.

Bill Hewlett was with the Army Signal Corps during WW2 and Dave Packard was at one point deputy Secretary of Defense.

But after the death of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard the MBA types took over and firmly destroyed this Great Company. First they split off Agilent, which further disintegrated into Philips Medical, Avago and more funny plastic-names.

Then Super-Saleswoman Fiorina gave the remaining HP computer/printer business a royal beating, but failed to be financially successful. After that Hurd continued the strategy to messing up the remaining HP by treating people like dirt, but at least he delivered good numbers.

Now HP is a boring company with zero innovation, something like XEROX. They still have a lot of elite engineers and scientists, but their ideas are routinely binned by the MBA drones.

To retaliate, I suggest the best HP engineers simply send their C.V. directly to Google:

stevengrant AT google.com

Steven is always grateful for receiving applications by good engineers who can do more than just the MBA blabla. Be prepared to know the complexity of quicksort and Matrix multiplication along with counting words, doing histograms etc in the most efficient way.

And please do it through HPs own email system, so that the drones wake up to their incompetence.

Googe is a great company where innovation and people are still valued. I am not affilated with them or have financial interest, but I once was an HP employee and I hate the guys who have taken over.

EC launches formal probes into IBM's mainframe biz

Superdome is a Mainframe

I do think an HP Superdome can be considered a mainframe, as you can run large databases from Oracle or IBM, have virtualization and a lot of management tools.

An S/390 system might have even better reliability/availability statistics, but if you use all available tools like HP Serviceguard and Fiber-attached disks, you have an excellent alternative to S/390. HP has a "mainframe alternative program" for a very long time now and Serviceguard/DASD-like disks is also an old (and probably rocksolid) product now.

I have never worked as an S/390 or as a Superdome admin, though.

I am sure Oracle, Fujtsu and NEC can come up with something similar.

WTF ? Ever Heard Of The Term "Free Enterprise" ?

IBM does have the right to make product pricing and licensing decisions as they see fit. Apple exercises exactly the same right by requesting you to run MacOS only on Apple PCs.

Running it inside VMWare is illegal, though technically possible, as I verified personally.

IBM is totally correct in saying that they spent huge sums into the whole system and according to the commonly accepted rules of the Western World it is completely their property, so they have the right to determine how this property is used by other parties.

The Hercules people are just economic parasites who want to exploit the particular structure of IBMs pricing scheme. IBM has the legal and ethical right to deny this, as they employ thousands of highly skilled and paid people to develop the Marvel that is OS/390 and the S/390 system (I hate the meaningless a/b/c/z/i/k/mOS labels). Hercules only created an S/390 CPU emulator and now they want to use IBM software on that, which is vastly more expensive to develop.

The only exception to this rule would kick in if IBM were in a market-dominating position, which they are clearly not. Nobody is forced to buy a S/390 system - HP (e.g. a Superdome server), Oracle, Unisys, Teradata, Fujitsu, Groupe Bull, NEC and others provide very credible alternatives to IBM products.

Others like Google have proved that, given the right software architecture, one does not need a mainframe at all. Just a large set of cheap PCs can handle enormous workloads (say all of Europe's flight reservations) as reliable as a mainframe at 1/10th of cost. It does not matter that PCs have a much higher failure rate.

The basic idea is to split up a large problem and "map" the individual slices to the PCs. For example, each PC would handle just five aircrafts and the system would automatically route users to the correct PCs to make reservations. Harddisks would be mirrored with something like the Google File System and another PC would automatically take over and use on of the three mirror disks to continue operations. The GFS would also run on a PC cluster. All of those PCs are networked using standard 1GBit Ethernet switches and routers.

For a moderately sized mainframe, you can buy more than 500 High-End PCs, including all networking and run a much larger workload, assuming your software supports this system model.

Wikileaks creaks under demand for Afghan war logs

Now The War Is Completely Unwinnable !

Before, it was only "simply unwinnable".

Face it - the Vast Majority of the Population supports the "Taleban" as much as they can. Supplying food, providing shelter, intelligence and weapons/ammo from caches.

Short of a policy of Torched Earth and Ulimited Fear this war is unwinnable. And because we cannot stand the pictures of hundreds of villages burned to the ground with their population killed (because they haven't warned us of a planted IED or of enemy combatants), this option is only theoretical.

Get out of the land of crack and secure your borders properly. Much cheaper and very effective. I am sure the German Ministry of International Cooperation can provide courses to train American Police in Effective Security.

And all the money dumped into this war could be spent to pay American policemen properly, so that people with more than three brain cells would be attracted to become a merkin policeman.

Google Apps rubber-stamped for use by US gov

Why Would People Entrust Their Secrets

..to the Telephone Cloud (aka "Public Switched Telephone System") ?

Apparently all sorts of business and private secrets are happily communicated IN THE CLEAR over the telephone system. Mobiles only encrypt until the signal reaches the next tower.

Cloud Computing has so many economic advantages attached to it - think of getting rid of lots of sysadmins and a ton of management headaches - that it must succeed. Hundreds of thousands of sysadmins currently perform the same complex tasks, make the same mistakes and create the same problems in tens of thousands of IT departments.

All of that is much more economically performed by a 1/100 of those people working in centralized Cloud Service Providers. Companies need Email, ERP and Website services, they don't really want to know the nuts and bolts of Exchange, AIX HCMP or the twists of ORANET. Neither do they really want to employ and manage an Oracle DB admin.

Or fiddle with the DLL and Registry Hell of Windoze. All they want is an appliance like the telephone system which is managed by a service provider. Think of the Chrome Browser running Javascript Cloud Apps.

Google tests (semi) HTML5 YouTube embed code

HTML5 ROCKS !

Just as people have discounted many Google "Beta" projects I am sure it will eventually turn out to be a big thing, despite the naysaying.

Adobe is a bunch of people who have missed the flight to their retirement homes in Florida. All their "security" is rooted in the hacks of the 1980s, when they created things like Postscript. It didn't matter when a printer burped on a bad PS file, but it does matter now when a browser is subverted by a malicious Flash ad.

I already removed Acrobat Reader from my PC and use the developer version of Chrome with the Chrome PDF viewer instead. Flash will be the next thing to be axed, as soon as all of youtube can be viewed with HTML5.

All the HTML5 videos on youtube run very well with Chrome, so I expect this to be a great success.

Mozilla prepares second Firefox 4 beta launch

URL To Final Firefox Version

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/de/landing_win.html?hl=de

It got much faster and is way more secure !

Raptor over Blighty: Watch the stealth fighter in infrared

Quote Correctly

"If stealth is not required, additional missiles can also be carried externally on underwing pylons. The F-22 can be equipped with four external pylons, two beneath each wing. These extra hardpoints are intended primarily for ferry missions, but each can be configured to carry two AIM-120 or AIM-9 missiles on a LAU-128/A launcher. This extra carriage capacity provides room for an additional eight air-to-air missiles, allowing a maximum of 16 between the internal and external loadouts."

Note the "These extra hardpoints are intended primarily for ferry missions".

What this means is that these hardpoints can be installed, but this takes time and is probably one of the exotic features everybody hates because it has never been properly developed. Like the C-17 landing on a grass field. Theoretically possible, practically to be avoided at great cost.

All the stealthiness goes away if you mount (unstealthy) big missiles and bombs externally. If the whole system (plane and weapons) had been designed for stealthy external-carriage, they might have reached the objective off high load and stealthiness.

They never tried and now it is way too late to do that. So the F-22 is definitely just a air-dominance weapon and only a minor ground-attack plane, if stealthiness is required.

Definitely what Lewis needs when he is stuck in the mud Trying To Enlighten People At Gunpoint.

Check Su34

And then think again about the F15 "dominating" airspace. The Mig29 (much less capable than the Sukhoi) is clearly much better in dogfights than the F15. Excercises proved that. Plus they have the thrust-vector Vympel AAM, which can only be matched by weapons like the IRIS-T.

In the meantime I am sure the Russkies have developed a proper long-range RADAR and the corresponding missile.

As a historic note, the German Army was under the stupid impression that they were not just Übermenschen, but that they also had Über-Panzer. It turned out the Russians had successfully developed (and hid) the best tank of the world - the T34. The Vympel AAM is a very similar story.

Only because Stalin had killed the majority of his senior officers (colonel and above), the German Army could advance so far. In WW2, the Russians simply had to train a new generation of senior officers; they got a very, very realistic training. If it hadn't been for that Russkie madman, the German madman would have seen a T34 knocking at the door in 1942.

Actually, How Many Raptors Are There In Afghanistan ?

The F-22 does not have hardpoints (as they would diminish Stealthiness) and that is exactly what you need in the land of Crack: Lots of ammo hanging on a long-enudurance plane with a proper targeting system.

The most economic solution would probably be an sensors-beefed-up Mig23 (IAI could help with that), as the opposition has zero technology to attack a fast-moving plane. Or maybe an A320 with sensors and a bomb bay ?

Anyway, the Eurofighter is definitely better suited to help in Afghanistan than the F-22.

Also, if you would like to see how the Merkin Miltiary Industry is doing Delays and Cost Overruns, read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_C-17_Globemaster_III#Design_phase

"In April 1994, the C-17 program was still experiencing cost overruns, and did not meet weight, fuel burn, payload and range specifications. It also failed several key criteria and tests that had been conducted to evaluate its air-worthiness.[22][23][24] Airflow issues caused problems with parachutes and there were other technical problems with mission software, landing gear, etc.[25] In May 1994 a proposal to cut the aircraft's production numbers to as low as 32 planes emerged, but was rescinded.[26] A July 1994 GAO document revealed that to justify investing in the C-17 rather than in the C-5, Air Force and DoD studies from 1986 and 1991 had claimed that the C-17 could use 6,400 more runways outside the US than the C-5; it was later discovered that this study had only considered the runway dimensions, but not their strength or Load Classification Numbers (LCN)"

IBM wrings more profit from revived IT market

GooglePC / POWER Strategy

My plan would be

1.) create a Reference PCB Board Design which is free for all, including the Initial Program Loader

2.) Adapt the Google Linux to the Reference Design

3.) Contract with TSMC to build low-cost entry-level Power CPUs. Pricing must be competitive with AMD, including the chipset (also to be made by TSMC).

4.) Higher-end CPUs to be manufactured by IBM

5.) Invite World&Dog to copy the Reference Design and to purchase the CPUs from IBM/TSMC.

6.) Hire a competent marketing company to hype it up along the lines of the first Google Phone.

PowerPC For Google PC !

"IBM's Microelectronics division, which makes and sells chips as well as intellectual property, had a 23 per cent sales increase in Q2."

Now that ARM is attacking Intel from below, IBM should team up with Google to provide a PC using the POWER architecture. IBM should let Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co produce the entry-level chips (upt to 2 GHz) and make the high-end stuff (2-4GHz) in their own fabs.

With Linux there is no reason to use x86 - with Javascript even less so. Also, Google engineers can certainly come up with a good solution for a multi-ISA build and code distribution system.

Continuing development solely for AIX, AS/400 and gaming does not proide the revenue streams the need.

Adobe to fortify widely exploited Reader with security sandbox

Not True

Google Chrome and IE8 use the Windos NT permissions in their sandboxes. Adobe is a follower.

Unfortunately Microsoft hasn't done the job properly - there is no way to deny a process accessing FAT file systems. You know, all those USB memory sticks use FAT.

Also, Linux and BSD have very strong mechanisms like LSM and Jails. AppArmor and SE Linux use it. And they also work with FAT, btw.

And The Ultimate Fix Is

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=mac

After installing Chrome (can be done on corporate PCs w/o admin rights, too), go to

chrome://plugins/

and enable the PDF viewer.

Then go to a PDF file, right-click and go to "open using" and select Chrome as the default PDF viewer.

The result is a lightning-fast PDF viewer which also renders HTML. And it has the same "airbags" Adobe has now bolted on.

The Register comment guidelines 2010

Rejection Reason

I agree with other people here that We The Commenters spend a lot of time to write comments - and many of them are clearly contributing very good information. Some of them are pretty nasty, that's true.

What I find completely inconsistent is that is permitted to dump as much excrement on Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer as possible, but a certain religion is virtually untouchable. And I do think this is a real issue, as Freedom Of Speech and Human Rights (of women for example) are at stake with quite a few religious extremists. Steve Ballmer might be a stupid guy, but he does not inhibit the human rights of women any way !

I do think you could have five buttons below each submitted message, like "OK", "libel", "religious feeling", "personal details" or so and use them for moderation. Other sites like Economist.com do exactly this.

Secret sub tech hints at spooks' TEMPEST-busting bugs

A Glorified DSL Modem Hooked To a Transducer

...that's what is.

DSL modems have successfully solved the problem of transmitting high data rates through crap channels with lots of impedance mismatch. This occurs when there are cheap connectors, coils etc in the channel.

If you go into the ultrasound domain, two different materials adjacent to each other can be thought of as an impedance mismatch.

All they most probably did was to hook a DSL modem to a power amplifier and that to a piezo transducer. On the other side there is just a piezo transducer which will make the ultrasound an electric signal again. The DSL modem wil handle all the signalling and bitrate distribution to the individual frequencies and the transmission characteristics of that specific frequency.

For power transmission, they probably use a more narrowband peizo crystal that accepts lots of amplitude. Ultrasound is already used in industry and medicine to project lots of power into small volumes. One application is ultrasound-powered welding (!).

The BAE guys just hooked up some of their sonar transducers to a modem.

Firefox joins Microsoft in uncool kids class

Chrome PDF viewer

Google also kicks Adobe's butt by integrating a PDF viewer into Chrome that allows for a html-like viewing experience.

No more stupid error messages and all the Adobe-Security-Fails. Remove Arobat Reader and use the builtin PDF viewer of Chrome. Currently only available in Chrome developer versions.

Go Chrome, Go !

First, those who complain about Google collecting urls on them should monitor Firefox traffic at a firewall/proxy in between FF and the internet.

They will see that FF also contacts Google for each and every URL you type "in order to make sure it is not a malware URL". That information is exactly the same as Chrome delivers to Google.

All of that can be removed both from FF and Chrome, as they are both open source.

Technologically, Chrome is a huge improvement in terms of speed and security. Google engineers are almost always top-notch and it shows in their products and services. The Chrome security architecture is conceptually much better than FF and on par with IE8.

Javascript performance of FF is hilarious; Chrome is at least three times faster. Which matters to all the people doing big JS applications to perform serious tasks.

THE FUTURE

..will bring you secure and native-speed NPAPI applets with the Native Client technology.

..will bring you secure and native-speed applets of a third-party technology that is currently under development

Email hack Labour councillor stays after suspension

Deviants Who Betray The Proletariat

...must be fought by whatever means appear appropriate !

Feliks Dzerzhinsky would be proud of the modern-day British Labour Party

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Dzerzhinsky

You know, the Worker's Paradise must be established at the cost of eliminating those who are blind to the benefits of this utopia.

Communists all around the world are the same - totalitarian bastards addicted to all sorts of nasty methods to get rid of those who could pose a problem. In this case the "suspect" was acting 100% legal - he informed a member of the British government (the labour MP) about some political news- but he was suspended of the Labour Party for doing that. One of the exemplary cases of the Ulgy Face Of Collectivism.

Futurologist warns of malevolent dust menace

ANTENNAS ??

For any antenna to be effective it must be dimensioned in the range of 10*WL to 0,1*WL, with WL being the Wavelength.

In the air

c=WL*f

with c=300000000m/s (speed of light)

and f being the frequency

That means

f= c/WL

f=300000000m/s / 0.00005m == 600 GHz

Mobiles have just 2 GHz, satcom less than 80 GHz. I doubt there is much RF power "in the office air" between 60 an 6000 GHz. So the only option you have is to put a tiny battery on the "dust" (which might be OK for a few minutes) or flood the space with your sophisticated 600GHz gear.

And you don't get a 600GHz transistor at Radio shack...

ANTENNA-FAIL

"Arrange to have a listening point outside (or even inside) the building using a WAN network technology such as 3G to pass the information on."

WL=c/f== 300000000m/s / 2000000000Hz == 0,15m

That means an effective antenna must be between 1.5 and 150cms. Hint: look at the size of your cellphone. They don't shrink the antenna to below 2cms. (about one inch for the Land Of The Merkins People)

Blighty's stealth robojet rolls out a year late

Sarkozy ??

I know of the arch-enemy syndrome that continues to poison Franco-British relations, so that implies some hatred towards the french president.

But last time I checked he was busily trying to appease the Russians who were furious because one of Americas Little Dictators had started an offensive war against their territory. They were determined to root out that little bastard and his Merkin-Trained minions and it was Mr Sarkozy who saved their backsides and the Americans from a major embarrassment.

I do not remember Mr Sarkozy to randomly start a war based on forged intelligence, either.

Certainly

..nuclear carriers are the the cheapest and most flexible option IF you have the reactor design and the money for the material etc.

The Brits claim they haven't and Rolls-Royce tells the illiterates of the Royal Navy that this means you need pseudo-VTOL. That the Kitty Hawk class launched F14s, which are the heaviest naval fighters of all, invalidates that argument completely. USS Kitty Hawk is also named Carrier Vessel 63 (CV-63). A nuclear carrier would be a "CVN-XX".

I venture to say that The Royal Navy would operate a cheaper and three times more powerful carrier force if they dumped the three midget carriers and simply bought USS Kitty Hawk and the FA 18E/Fs. And then five frigates of the size of USS Vincennes, rip out the weaponry and convert them to fast oilers. They would also serve the role of "Exocet Decoy Target".

Does not cut it

"for in flight refueling. you don't generally launch an aircraft fully fueled and armed from a carrier"

So a Rafale might be loaded with just 1500 kgs of fuel because the mission will not require more. That does by no means invalidate the observation that the 2-13kgs of Kerosene for the catapult operation are negligible.

I guess even the midget Harrier does not launch with less than 1000kg of fuel for any kind of real mission.

IBM preps z11 'system of systems' mainframe

It is not the Cache

"The world still runs on mainframes and its unique cache architecture which provides the highest transaction throughput of any architecture."

I guess you meant the I/O subsystem and it's IO processors ? POWER would blow the zProcessor out of the water, as much as it does with x86 and everybody else. IBM does not publicize SPECmarks for zProcessor, instead they use their "MIPS" benchmark. Guess why...

(I did some Integer benchmarking in 1999 on a cheap PC and a current S/390 CPU at that time; the results were more or less the same. I don't think this has changed)

DEC had an emulator/translator running x86 code on DEC Alpha at nearly native x86 speed (of the fastest Pentium at that time). IIRC it was called FX!32. I can't see a reason this should not be possible with the S/390 ISA and POWER.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32