Posts by PghMike

Why I just bought a MacBook Air instead of the new Pro

The thing is, I like OS/X. But I have to admit that I'm also disappointed with the choices Apple made. I've using a late 2011 MacBook Pro, which I've upgraded to 8GB of memory. I've been holding off putting a new SSD disk in it, since I was hoping I'd be able to get a really light MacBook Pro 15". And I guess I can -- the new 15" model is 1.6 lbs lighter than what I'm using. But it's expensive, and I still have to see how badly they've messed up the keyboard. And I need dongles for everything.

But I'm half tempted to go down to a 13" display, and if I do, I'll go to the one that doesn't have a touch bar, and save $300.

But I think I'm also going to have to at least look at what the Linux ecosystem looks like these days.

Mobile data is getting slower, faster

Re: India LTE Coverage

These guys almost always talk, when you read the fine print, about covering N% of the population.

T mobile US speeds

Sitting here in a building in Pittsburgh, and measured 49Mbps download (T Mobile). Yesterday got 33Mbps at this location. I almost always get LTE speeds > 15 Mbps.

T mobile has a smaller coverage area than some, but I certainly don't see speeds like 2 Mbps; measured speeds are way higher.

Apple crumbles: Mac sales slump while Dell, HP Inc, Lenovo shift PCs

Apple's #s should be dropping

Everyone knows that the current Macbook Air / Pro machines are due for a refresh. I'm typing this on a late 2011 machine Macbook Pro, which works fine; there's certainly no reason why I'd buy a replacement for it now when I expect a new, lighter, version within 6 months.

I *should* buy a large SSD for it, but have been holding off, thinking that perhaps the next rev of the Macbook Pro will be cool enough to make it worth upgrading.

If Apple wants its sales to improve, it'll have to ship new hardware. And not just a home use machine like the (relatively) new 12" Macbook.

Flying Spaghetti Monster is not God, rules mortal judge

Made up religions

I'd like to see the judge's take on Mormonism, Moses's burning bush, or the virgin birth, for that matter.

Mud sticks: Microsoft, Windows 10 and reputational damage

Windows 10 -- why so broken?

I don't use Windows very often, but my wife calls me in when there are problems with her work machine. I was surprised by how badly Windows 10 handles the basics: it is far more buggy than I would have expected. To wit:

1 -- We haven't been able to configure it to run two displays at once. She has a largish Acer VGA display that worked fine with Windows 8, but when plugged into Windows 10, didn't appear to work, at any resolution. As a matter of fact, you can't even see the display in any of the configuration programs (why are there two?)

I assumed I needed a specific driver (but why not get a default configuration from a *VGA* display). However, by accident we booted it with the cover closed, and then it used the big display! But stopped using it when you open the cover.

Really, supporting a laptop screen + a VGA display shouldn't require any special configuration in 2016.

2 -- My wife has had to install printer drivers nearly a half dozen times, just to print on an HP 6180 ink jet printer. Again, is this rocket science?

Her personal macbook required zero manual configuration to use either of these devices.

Why Tim Cook is wrong: A privacy advocate's view

Apple is mostly right

You portray Apple's position as black and white, but it really isn't. Apple is being asked to spend their own money breaking into their own OS. No matter what they do, there'll always be *some* attack that can work against even future phones, even if it requires taking the phone apart atom-by-atom.

Apple is saying "No, we won't do this," and wants to stop now, even though the costs are probably not prohibitive today for a single iPhone 5C.

In other words, Apple doesn't want to be ordered to spend their own money to subvert their own security. It will *never* be *impossible* for them to get keys out of a phone. But it will be increasingly expensive, time consuming and likely have an increasing likelihood that an error will accidentally destroy the data on the phone.

Confused as to WTF is happening with Apple, the FBI and a killer's iPhone? Let's fix that

bad precedent

I think Apple's most concerned about setting a bad precedent that it can be ordered to work to remove the security protections it inserted in iPhones. Right now, the request is that they generate firmware that sends keys to a piece of hardware without extra rate limiting. In 5S and later phones, there's a secure enclave that makes it much harder to do the passcode testing, since the enclave itself performs rate limiting.

But in the future, Apple MIGHT find itself ordered to make use of any bugs it later discovers in the enclave, or even to physically modify an enclave, to allow the same types of attacks on a more secure phone. And they might be required to turn over the resulting firmware to the FBI to use on other phones (along with keys to allow the FBI to sign it for other phones). Apple no doubt wants to stop from even starting going down this slippery slope.

Also, note that although the keys used to encrypt flash data are highly random AES keys, those keys are protected only by the passcode, and for most people, those passcode are way too small (4-6 digits). So, while someone who's really careful could make it very hard for the FBI to break into a phone, even with Apple's help, a novice (99.99999% of Apple users) would use a passcode from a much smaller space, conceivably small enough that with Apple's help, and a few bugs in the enclave here or there, the FBI could break into the phone.

Most significantly, this level of detail is way too technical for nearly everyone following this story. To them, the question is going to be a very simple "Are iPhones secure from the government, or are they not?" Apple wants the answer to that to be "Yes, they're secure."

Boffins' gravitational wave detection hat trick blows open astronomy

how do you measure a change of 1/10,000 of a proton diameter with a laser?

Optical lasers wavelengths are in the few thousands of angstroms (angstrom = 10^-10 meters). But a proton is 10^-15 meters in diameter, and 1/10,000 of that is 10^-19 meters, or one billionth of a photon of visible light.

So, how can you use such large photons to see such a small change in length?

Also, how do you know the size of the black holes involved, at such a distance?

T-Mobile USA’s BingeOn is a smash hit. So what now?

Binge-on obviously doesn't violate net neutrality

The 480p that video gets reduced to is still better than decent quality, and it's very nice to be able to watch Netflix or whatever even when your hotel Wifi is crap.

No one is being held up for cash to get binge-on's benefits, and users can disable it if they want. As far as I can tell, it is just an automated tool to do something that I used to wish to be able to do anyway: reduce the bandwidth used by a video stream when using 3G/4G/LTE.

The risk of violating net neutrality is that smaller companies might not be able to afford to pay off someone like Verizon for good access to its customers. That's not a problem here -- anyone can participate in Binge-on, and it doesn't cost the server's company any extra money.

Now VW air-pollution cheatware 'found in Audis and Porsches'

Discovered by the EPA

Wow, so VW didn't come clean about the Audi and Porsches, they waited for the EPA to discover the same software was running on these other cars. Did VW really not realize that all VW owned brands will be tested?

Honestly, VW should have its imports banned for sale in the US for 5 years, just for stupidity.

Internet daddy Vint Cerf blasts FCC's plan to ban Wi-Fi router code mods

Re: VHS vs Wifi

This is a pretty foolish argument. Anyone who's prepared to do all of that can just build a radio.

Bozos at the FCC know that these are just one form of computer, right?

I hope those bozos at the FCC figure out that routers are just low power computers. If someone really wants to violate the FCC regulations, they can just buy at small PC, Raspberry Pi, a dumb storage appliance, or pretty much anything, and drop their own kernel on it. All they're doing with these regulations is making life harder for people just trying to get some decent router software.

The FCC should concentrate on people who actually violate their regulations, not worry about "pre-crime."

Google Chromecast 2015: Puck-on-a-string fun ... why not, for £30?

Love my chrome cast (V1)

I use it with Plex for ripped DVDs, Netflix, Hulu (Plus), HBO Go, Amazon Prime videos (via Chrome tab casting, which works quite well, even with a 2011 Macbook Pro doing the casting), CBS.COM (for Colbert, also via tab casting), FXX and Vudu purchased videos.

It's cheap, it fits into a TV that has no other reasonable connections, and it works well for everything but Apple media. So, I don't buy Apple media.

Of course, those losers at Amazon don't provide a native iOS casting app, but tab casting works well enough that I really don't mind.

Rights groups: Darn you Facebook with your 'government names'

I've never seen this

I've signed up for FB accounts with made up names by linking them with gmail.com accounts with the same name, and I've never had to provide FB my "real" name.

I can't be the first person who thought of using gmail.com emails with FB.

Bezos' BAN-HAMMER batters Chromecast, Apple TV

Chromecast still the winner to me

I'm still pretty happy with Chromecast. It works fine for Netflix, Hulu and Youtube (of course), along with Vudu. There are a few things on Amazon I like to watch on the big screen, and tab casting work better than ever these days, so that's just what I do.

It isn't that hard to buy a Chromecast from a Best Buy (in the US). So, I doubt Amazon's behavior will have any effect, except to make people wonder how crappy the FireStick must be if Amazon feels this will materially help it.

CHEAT! Volkswagen chief 'deeply sorry' over diesel emission test dodge

lawsuits on the way, no doubt

I'm guessing that the recall will significantly hurt some aspect of the cars' performance -- otherwise why do the hack in the first place. So, I'm guessing that there'll be a bunch of civil lawsuits against VW for this.

Conceivably, even the US DoJ might file criminal charges, but I'd be surprised if they do -- Obama's DoJ seems to think that crimes committed as an executive of a large corporation don't merit prosecution.

NetApp falls into loss-making territory as yearly revenues drop 10 per cent

7 mode vs. C mode

It isn't surprising that current 7 mode customers aren't migrating to C mode -- it requires a full data copy of any volume switching modes, last time I checked. That's way too much upheaval to put a working storage infrastructure through.

C mode sales are pretty much all new sales, and NetApp directs the same customers who would have been buying 7 mode systems to buy C mode systems for their new filers. The real question is how the sum of 7 mode + C mode sales are growing, or shrinking. That tells you how NetApp's traditional business is doing.

Pretending it is good news on its own that C mode sales are growing is silly: of course C mode sales are growing; the sales are starting from a relatively small installed base.

Virtually no one is using Apple Music even though it is utterly free

Apple Music still very confusing

My old way of using iTunes involves having a bunch of music local to my iPhone and Mac, and streaming anything not present from iCloud. All that still comes for free -- you can stream the music you've purchased on any iDevice.

When Apple Music was released, the streaming option disappeared until I signed up for Apple Music. But even today, a lot of my ripped CD music in my iTunes library now shows up as "Apple Music" even though I don't have iTunes Match. Fortunately, it appears that this "Apple Music" isn't DRM'd (at least, VLC can play them); some are even MP3 files!

The iTunes store app on the iPhone is a nightmare. My youngest (sharing the same Apple ID) bought Taylor Swift's 1989, and iTunes shows the songs as downloadable on my Macbook, but on my phone, the iTunes store app doesn't seem to know that I own it. The phone's Music app offers me an option to "make available offline" but I don't know if that means downloading a DRM'd version that'll go bad when I drop Apple Music, or if it is downloading the iCloud version. I guess I won't find out until the subscription runs out, at which point I suspect Apple's support phones will be ringing off the hook.

Finally, what's the deal with the "Beats 1" radio station? Does Apple really not know that there are literally hundreds of thousands of free Internet radio stations, many of which are more interesting?

Moronic Time cover sets back virtual reality another 12 months

don't care if he's rich

I'm not sure that being a billionaire is sufficient compensation for having that picture distributed around the world. And while I realize that I'm over 50 and so can no longer judge the ages of youngins, he doesn't look like a dorky 22 year old, he looks like a dorky 12 year old.

How did Oculus marketing ever let something like that happen?

So what the BLINKING BONKERS has gone wrong in the eurozone?

Re: HOW IT WORKS *

The US has *political* union, which the EU does not have. The Germans hate sending their money to others; that's why they're refusing any debt reduction to Greece.

In the US, OTOH, the bluest states have citizens who, for example, are fighting politically to expand Obamacare, which will pump more money from the richer blue states to the poorer red states.

So, much as we make jokes about Alabama and Mississippi, we're trying to give, not loan, them money. Call me when your typical German *wants* to do that for Greece, Spain and Italy.

Crap crypto crackdown coming as FBI boss testifies to US Congress

Re: Why am I reminded of this?

Nice! And a perfect example.

Comey's an idiot

Comey couldn't even make it through the Diff, Rivest &al paper? It was written specifically for a guy like him with no technical background. He's an embarrassment to our government.

Cupertino GIVES IN to Taylor Swift, will pay Apple Music royalties

Well, as Jerry Garcia once said, "Well, you can't please everyone."

I think Apple saw a pile of bad press about how a company with $200 billion in the bank decided it had to screw some musicians out of 3 months of revenue.

Kudos to Ms Swift -- her statement pretty much guaranteed lots of bad press for Apple if they continued their plan to rip off musicians.

Taylor Swift boycotts Apple Music over no-pay-for-plays shocker

I'm with Ms. Swift

Apple has something like $200 billion dollars in cash sitting around. It's a shame that they want to refuse to pay royalties to artists, effectively asking the artists to subsidize Apple's frontal assault on Spotify and other streaming companies.

So why the hell didn't quantitative easing produce HUGE inflation?

color me skeptical that fiscal stimulus is irrelevant

You wrote: "Simply on the basis that this is the first time anyone really tried that unconventional monetary policy, that QE, and it does seem to have worked."

I suspect that fiscal stimulus would have helped a great deal more than QE. QE, after all, makes loans cheap, but when demand is missing, offering to loan companies money on the cheap isn't particularly compelling -- I think the expression is "pushing on a string."

Creating demand, i.e. fiscal stimulus, by having the government either spend directly, or give money (in the US) to states to spend, is a much more direct path towards getting money circulating in the economy, and increasing V.

And it would "obviously" have helped (well, as much as anything in economics is obvious). We have in the US still too high unemployment, and we also have piles of infrastructure tasks that need to be done, from expanding high speed internet into the hinterlands, to repairing bridges and roads, to hiring teachers to teach overcrowded classes. I suspect it would have been relatively uninflationary to take people who were out of a job anyway, and hire them to do jobs that needed to be done, and that they could have done.

Instead, those people sat on their hands, and the corresponding investments never got made, all due to lack of fiscal (not financial) stimulus.

Elon Musk's $4.9bn taxpayer windfall revealed

Re: how capitalism is supposed to work??

The last line of the article was "But it is possible to have a vague feeling that this isn't quite how red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism is supposed to work."

It was that statement, and the overall tone of the article that somehow these subsidies were remarkable in size, that I found either naïve or disingenous. We have nothing remotely like "red in tooth and claw capitalism" in this country, and solar and EV subsidies aren't close to the largest subsidies you find.

how capitalism is supposed to work??

The author seems remarkably clueless about the role of government in capitalism, even in the supposed wild west of the United States.

Virtually every business exists in the context of laws, rules, regulations and subsidies, and these are at least as valuable as the solar and EV subsidies that Musk's companies are collecting

I'm sure you've heard how corn subsidies effectively lower the price of corn products in the US, resulting in much better candy in the UK than the US.

I'm personally pretty familiar with the US DMCA. It grants compulsory music licenses to internet radio stations, effectively raining free money to radio stations in exchange for their following certain rules. It also defines what types of material are subject to copyright. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that, but it certainly isn't a libertarian paradise. And the DMCA actually defines copyright, which isn't a naturally occurring property right, anyway.

Boeing got started by selling planes to the military and then turning around those same designs for commercial aircraft, quite an effective subsidy. You may have heard of Airbus -- I remember reading vaguely that they too may have received some subsidies.

Here in the US, the nuclear power industry gets liability limitations that make it much more economical to run nuclear power plants. The fracking industry has exemptions written into the clean water act allowing them to dump poisons into the water supply of people surrounding their drilling operations.

Some of the above are reasonable, some are criminal. But only a fool would truly believe that only Elon Musk benefits from governmental subsidies.

Windows and OS X are malware, claims Richard Stallman

Re: So what did YOU do then ?

I agree that the GPL is a much less useful license than the Sun / FreeBSD style licenses, when simply looking for code to incorporate into your own projects.

But for tools like g++, gdb, &c, GPL is fine, and the GPL license for tools like these really don't hurt things.

Re: A fool without money will soon be ignored

Mach was basically BSD + a new VM system and some message passing primitives.

Re: Shut it you tedious old windbag

No, you're underestimating Stallman's contributions here. Independent of the legal stuff, Stallman basically rebuilt an immense amount of infrastructure, without which Linux would have just been a toy. Gcc, gdb, more Unix utilities than you can shake a stick at, and Emacs are just the tip of the iceberg. And leading by example, he motivated lots of others to contribute their work as either GPL or really free (Sun-style) licensed tech, such as Samba, Apache, and lots more.

And the stuff is very good quality. I don't remember the last gcc bug I encountered, nor the last Emacs bug.

He basically started off in the late 70s or early 80s saying that he was going to rewrite everything AT&T did, just to show them. At the time, it seemed stone cold bonkers, but amazingly, he succeeded, well beyond any sane expectations. All the legal rulings in the world would have meant nothing if there was no actual useful free software. And we owe RMS a big debt of gratitude for providing that big initial burst.

And it might be nice if he listened more graciously to other opinions (and I know, I had argued with him lots years ago), at this point, I think it is fair to say that Stallman is Stallman. He's not going to start listening to others *now* :-)

Carry On Computing: Ten stylish laptop bags for him

and then you get on the plane

And you discover you don't have enough room to open the laptop.

A gold MacBook with just ONE USB port? Apple, you're DRUNK

Actually, maybe the way to look at this is as an iPad with a keyboard, and a very high price.

I couldn't believe that there's only one port on this box. Is Apple going to reserve one announcement date per year for joke products that are pretty, but useless, like the people who are expected to buy them? Why would you go through all the effort to build a product like this, and then piss it away by making it impossible to charge!?

Microsoft's Azure goes TITSUP PLANET-WIDE AGAIN in cloud FAIL

planet wide Azure outages

I figure either they have some serious network routing problems affecting their private inter-city links, or they've designed something idiotically. Or both.

It is surprising, however. After all, large intercity routers must misbehave all the time, and the currently deployed routing protocols must have some way of avoiding bad routers (even Byzantinely bad routers that claim to be working). So, it is somewhat of a mystery how MSFT manages to get these gigantic failures.

Why has sexy Apple gone to bed with big boring IBM?

Apple should work with IBM

One thing that always amazed me is how poor Apple's service is for businesses. They'll be happy to pay a little more to be able to bring in a laptop to the Apple store and get someone to fix it right then and there, or swap its drive into a new chassis.

Teaming up with IBM, which understands business service much better than Apple, is a good idea.

It *doesn't* mean that Apple is losing its cool. To me, it means that Apple noticed that it is leaving a *ton* of money on the table by being obtuse to the needs of businesses.

I'm still much happier with my family iPhones, which never get viruses, than I would be with an Android phone whose store is littered with malware. And there's no way I'm buying a Windows phone -- ever. Microsoft has achieved that rare combination of banality, incompetence and arrogance that would prove instantly fatal to a company that didn't have a constant income stream from desktop Windows. I'm certainly not going to inflict their system on anyone I care about.

'Arrogant' Snowden putting lives at risk, says NSA's deputy spyboss

Why does the NSA continue to lie?

I don't know why they bother to say stuff like "[T]he agency only slurped the communications of targeted individuals." It's clear that's untrue -- it's clear they record everything, and then (theoretically) only listen to stuff that they're interested in.

The real information that Snowden exposed is that those things that you knew were theoretically possible to do, but didn't seem worth doing, they *are* doing. Whether it's recording everything, or putting in sufficient backdoors to break any standard encryption algorithm, they're doing it.

Global Warming is real, argues sceptic mathematician - it just isn't Thermageddon

Didn't realize that the direct CO2 contribution was so low

One thing I learned from this paper was "It is almost universally accepted that by itself the equilibrium warming effect of a doubling of the carbon dioxide concentration is slightly more than 1◦C," even though the models are predicting 3 degrees C.

For years, I've been assuming that the global warming estimates were due simply to computing how much more energy the atmosphere would absorb given the additional CO2. I didn't realize that the majority of the predicted warming is due to feedback effects, where the models are somewhat more (or if this article is to be believed, significantly more) uncertain.

In other words, probably still time to design and deploy some safer nuclear technology.

Tech titan Bill Gates: Polio-free India one of the 'most impressive accomplishments' ever

For the first time, I don't feel quite so bad for having bought Office 2011.

iPhone 5S: Apple, you're BORING us to DEATH (And you too, Samsung)

Apple's had two things going for it all of these years. First, a much cleaner user interface, which makes using their systems much more fun (and the systems are cleaner internally, which makes it harder to write viruses).

More importantly, they've had various unique services that are increasingly less unique. Their iTunes music store was pretty cool when it was the only legal way to buy music downloads. And it no doubt is still going strong, even now that DRM is gone, since it is much simpler to keep buying music from one place.

But they've been unable to do anything really innovative with music or video downloads or streaming, thanks to the copyright holders. And of course, there are lots of video and music streaming services today, and Apple controls relatively few.

The author has it pretty much right--they're just one more purveyor of glass rectangles through which to view the Cloud.

Ethernet at 40: Its daddy reveals its turbulent youth

IBM's standards setting abilities

Ethernet no doubt contributed to IBM's loss of standards setting abilities, but I always thought that the real hit was when IBM couldn't come out with a 386-based system fast enough, and Compaq took over defining what an IBM PC-compatible system was.

That being said, IBM's token ring, and associated SNA technology, certainly deserves the scorn heaped upon it. My first full-time job was writing a driver so that a Sun 2's serial chip could operate in SDLC mode so we could send LU6.2 verbs to an IBM printer, and thus print on an IBM SNA-based printer from a Sun 2 workstation.

Why? Because our University got free IBM printers at the time.

Being a skinny is much more unhealthy than being fat – new study

Study not corrected for serious illness?

I read the referenced paper, and didn't see any correction for serious illnesses, such as cancer. Since having cancer (for example) tends to cause both increased mortality and decreased weight, I'm not sure that there's any content in this paper at all.

As a matter of fact, the authors say that they purposely excluded people with BMI between 18.5 and 20.0 from normal, since people in that category are more likely to have "concurrent illnesses" that increase mortality, and they didn't want those ill people making normal weight people appear more ill and thus hide potential relative negative health effects of obesity.

The study was careful to exclude sick people from the normal weight group, but it did so by moving them into the underweight group. So, I don't think the study says anything meaningful about being underweight, only about being overweight.

Dear US gov: Stay the hell out of Silicon Valley

Ignorance

Gee whiz, didn't the Federal government develop something called the Arpanet, which I recall some folks in the Valley managed to exploit commercially in some way or another. Face it -- the US Federal government has always contributed to the success of the Valley, and to pretend otherwise shows a great deal of ignorance.

People weren't even allowed to use the ArpaNet --> Internet for commercial purposes until the 1990s, when the Clinton administration (guided here by Al Gore, I believe) changed the rules. Before that you had to have some connection to a DoD contract to get a computer connected to the Internet at all.

The author's real argument is that capital gains taxes should be reduced so that pre-IPO share profits are taxed less. That's pretty much a self-serving argument, and one that's unsupported by any serious policy evidence. Back when the peak tax rates were 49%, a 28% capital gains rate looked pretty good, and today, with a peak rate of 36%, even a 20% capital gains rate would still likely provide plenty of motivation for starting companies.

In short, this article is as moronic and ignorant as those people who tell the Federal government to stay out of Medicare. Frankly, I expect better from The Register.