Posts by swschrad

Dish: With these restrictions, FCC, you are totally crippling us

actually, industry, metrology, shipping, etc. would howl

5 MHz is the frequency of WWV, the stable master-clock radio beacon used for numerous purposes such as calibrating test equipment, some time sync applications, and the like. you'd start a war sitting on that.

5 GHz, the X band, is heavily used for earthy microwave links as well as satellite links. phase and polarity are important here, so that's why Dish thinks they might get away with putting some omnidirectional cell phones in the middle. but because it's so widely used for campus data links, remote broadcast, security, and of course commercial satellite, uncontrolled use would start a riot, not a nice little setpiece war.

echoes of Lightsquared... some character wants to make extra money with no regard for what happens to long-standing licensed frequency usage. and like Lightsquared, this should be slapped down hard.

John McAfee blogs for help, offers $25K reward for neighbour's killer

he needs help, all right

what's the number for "first call for help" services in Belize? at this point, he needs a 473-step program.

One in four don't clean their stinky old browsers - especially Firefoxers

it's a conspiracy!

if those fum duckers don't bother to upgrade their browsers for still-live platforms, they should stop whining. I'm on PowerPC OS/X 10.5.9 at home, and all the whining and spitting from websites is nonsense, as they won't give me a "modern" browser.

AMD to decimate workforce several times over?

IBM has a golden chain to its fabs

IBM also has a secure trusted DOD/government fab in East Burlington, and their Special Clients would have a huge say in the transfer or discontinuance of that facility. huge say. the other facilities in Fishkill are reasonably expected to be supporting the Vermont works, and since they still have a great need for Germanium on Silicon at IBM, I don't see them becoming fabless. if Big Blue has Intel x86 licenses, I don't see why they would want AMD in the first place for something they already have. this sounds like another "analyst" looking for multi-millions for basically doing nothing stoking the rumor mill for business.

IMPHO getting to be about time to start totally ignoring the "market analyst" on Wail Street, since mostly they are playing the old Pump & Dump.

FCC to TV broadcasters: Ready, set ... give your spectrum up

go where the waste is, you FoolCC

98 percent of all spectrum is tied up in government allocations, particularly the military. go after the good stuff and leave the TV industry alone.

Vodafone phone and mobe biz service goes titsup

for themselves. do your own.

if it is critical to stay on the Wacky Wacky Webbiepoo, for instance, the savvvy operator will have multiple vendor redundancy. if it is life critical, say an airline's operations office, they really should have dual entrance points for those multiple vendors, with absolutely nothing in the network duplicated in the same CO, duct, or on the same side of the building. this can be engineered. it is costly as bringing the moon home to the kiddies. but this is considered full redundancy. smart companies have their crown jewel databases in multiple cities on live replication, so a tsunami or a bomb in one place simple means the inputs stop to the other databases until one of the redundants is made the working DB, and business carries on from another ops center. the business that has no internal backups is the business that needs one or two workers.

Police mistake reveals plan for Assange's Embassy capture

we already knew this from media statements

the bobbies long telegraphed that they would stop at nothing if Ass Angie stepped out of the embassy to put him in cuffs. there is nothing new here at all. it's a stalemate, and it's not going to end until Assange walks out the door. at least the hotheads who wanted to destroy the concept of envoy immunity got read the law in time.

Cook's 'values' memo shows Apple has lost its soul

really?

you know, Apple got their start making blue boxes, and after being roughed up one night, Steve Jobs decided it would be more fun and profitable to make a computer. first out of the box was a bare board machine. second was nothing less than the all-in-one computer, although the monitor screen and tape drive did not fit in the case. with 16 pure colors and a few more dithered ones.

that provided the financial muscle and industry acceptance to get a view inside Xerox PARC, and the Lisa and Macintosh.

they weren't all just copy, unless you consider using Chuck Peddle's 6502 processor copying.

Beak explodes at Samsung's evidence leak in Apple patent spat

not so.

evidence has to meet certain legal criteria, and once denied, is not suitable for further court discussions. Samsung not pulling out the folder until after evidentiary hearings are concluded means they goofed big.

second goof is to deny orders of the court, and on that, a judge is absolutely top dog in the universe. if something is denied as evidence, you can't turn around and wave it in front of the cameras saying the judge was an idiot. this is contempt of court. remedies can include jailing responsible parties until the trial ends or until the judge's term ends (depends on the legal severity of the case), dismissal, or a bench ruling for the other side.

in other words, Samsung's media genius could get them out of the smartphone business in the US. and it could be used as a factor in other international trade commission cases.

look for a flurry of firings in traditional Korean style... .

RIM 'pondering sell-off of hardware biz' to focus on messaging

the world's in a terrible state

but not like that.

RIM needs to just go away. the hardware business is zero. the brand is zero. Messenger might have been hot once, but the network is massive overkill. messages can be encrypted and transferred safely in publicly-standardized methods of transfer.

plow RIM under.

Microsoft 'mulled Nokia buyout, ran away screaming'

asking too much? for an OS code base?

mon, you slay me. it's called "forking." download, change the name, go your own way. initial development costs of nothing.

Nokia was truly in a world of hurt if "nothing" is too dear.

then again, they were, and Microsoft paid them to be their demo vendor. we all know what happens to Microsoft demo vendors in a couple years.

Researchers find backdoor in milspec silicon

One suspects the presentation will be cancelled

for well over a decade it has been suspected that Fab Nation this and Fab Nation that have left little doors and little keys in their complex silicon. in fact, the folks who might be most suspicious, the DOD, have a very small list of security fabs in which all of their most special silicon is built, and in which the security weasels themselves can have trouble getting in. the old Bell Labs, aka Lucent, now IBM fab in Vermont comes quickly to mind... used to be they made custom chips for all comers, network and modem makers alike having the complex bug in the middle of the board fabbed at IBM. no such, any more.

Apple, RIM didn’t infringe Kodak patents

click. click. click. hey, this is a blank roll!

must be a zombie, Kodak is not leaving an image.

prior art

the viewfinder in my Nikon F1 had rounded corners.

Facebook unfriends 19-inch data center racks

Re: US telecom form factor maybe

which form factor is 24 inch wide racks, heights of 6,7, and 8 feet standard. but add in supports in class-3 earthquake areas and such, and the racks could easily be extended to 16 feet. the "battery" busses are positive-ground 48 volts nominal, which means 53 volts in the rack.

the kit is standard, stocked, 100 years old and all the costs are amortized already. you have heat, power, cooling, density, weight standards already.

your cost to adopt: zero.

getFacedbook obviously hasn't done any research.

Samsung hauls Apple into court over emoticon patent :-(

idiots! prior art exists.

it was in the early 80s on CompuServe that I first downloaded a sheet of emoticons onto green-bar paper. they were older than that. both these outfits should be barred from importing electronics until they grow up and get wise. this krep is getting way, way old.

SCADA vuln imperils critical infrastructure, feds warn

NEVER. Assume. Anything!

that is a violation of Rule #1 on any list.

it is axiomatic that anything significant in controls must NOT be accessible from outside, must NOT be operating on anybody's commodity hardware or OS, that there are no documented back doors, there should be no undocumted back doors for security, and the equipment should not be assembled where Sneaky Petes run wild in the streets.

so far, SCADA seems to violate half the rules, and typical implementations (hey, boss, why can't I troubleshoot a process problem in our nitroglycerin plant from my iPhone at the roadhouse?) violate all the rest.

these things, and I include the "smart grid" boobytrap for society here, should be on systems similar to 1980s car electronics, in that they are specialty devices manufacturer-specific, no hardware docs, no external access, oddball access protocols, and designed as real-time VSMs instead of apps on a commercial OS.

WD cleared to gobble Hitachi GST

not a problem

sell the flooded plant in Thailand to somebody for a buck, and use the facilities that formerly-hitachi wanted to dump. note how they renamed global storage technologies as soon as a merger appeared possible?

oh, and the EU gets a say because if you don't get their OK, your products don't sell there. no pressure.

Mystery radioisotopes in Czech air are not from Fukushima

round up the usual suspects...

Windscale has been mentioned... the French reprocessing/service industry has not.

but my money is on Italy for creating bad Czechs....

Intel mad for power, but stacked-up dies keep MELTING!

prior art exists

the Cray II, I believe it was, had chips three-deep in the processor. that's why they had to run it submerged in flowing cooled freon. try that on your laptop.

Righthaven may have to file for bankruptcy

bar. stards. die.

Microsoft COO: Our greatest enemy is old Windows

Microsoft apps dead? hey, market survey time!

so the MS environment is dead, and they don't have new stuff? hey, corporate america, it's Market Survey Time! check out all the competition!

Ellison drops iceberg in front of HP's unsinkable Itanic

it's just another Oracle catfight. why not just leave them behind?

Larry wants to strangle HP. he also wants to strangle the open sourcers over Java, Open Solaris, and Open Office. he thinks now that he has a vertically integrated shop, he can demand the whole dollar, not just the software piece. and that's always been the highest cost per seat in the database arena.

time for two things. one, SQL applications need to stop sucking up to database vendors, and write to SQL query... let whatever machine answers do its own thing. two, lots of other outfits have strong databases that scale from DC to daylight, including DB2 open or commercial, and Sybase. plenty of value-add software houses would like to underbid Oracle in your shop, too.

so do it. you don't need a dozen SunServers and Oracle to have distributed databases synchronized.

if the people don't follow Larry, he's not a leader any more.

Skype's mega-FAIL: exec cops to cause

also familiar to us ancients who had VAXclusters

simply put, there was a small flaw in the architecture there. if the cluster controller went away, the rest of the cluster looked for a new arbitrator. DEC had determined and enforced that the earlier a MAC address you had, the better qualified you were to serve as the cluster controller, since of course it would always fall back onto a classic VAX.

until.... the physical MAC address pool ran out, and they needed to start reusing hardware MACs for PC controllers.

if you've had a VAXcluster fall onto a 286 PC as cluster controller, you'd know empirically that you have to define a class of trusted systems that you always look for first.

way too early for the Sky Hype guys, although they could have read about it.

WikiLeaks re-taunts feds with US Amazon mirrors

The Community appears to be dealing with WikiLeaks

in fact, there are a bunch of self-appointed tin-star sheriffs with a PC and a modem doing what governments cannot... DDOSing the 'Leaks and taking them, and their hosts, down.