* Posts by Voland's right hand

5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011

Microsoft's ARM blunder: 7 reasons why Windows RT was DOA

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Devil

Re: Linux nerd downvoters

You clearly have not used HP thin clients + altiris as well as many other Linux based VDI solutions out there. In fact, on the "terminal" side Linux running a Citrix client is probably a majority, not minority of VDI.

Playboy fined £100k by Blighty watchdog for FLASHING SMUT at kids

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Devil

Re: but why are they paying pb....

"Oh, BTW, Porn sites, bit of a waste of time having thos share on facebook widgets don't you think?"

You misunderstand the function of the widget. It is not to share - it is to allow advert brokers who use FB to correlate your browsing behavior. As long as you are logged into FB going onto a site with the widget ends up in FB "snoop" files (ditto for other similar Web2.0+ lowlife). So an advertiser can after that use that to try to peddle you stuff.

Razzies set to torpedo Rihanna's Battleship

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Devil

Re: I do not want to sound like

Quote:"I think you mean Kelly Brook in Piranha 3DD was nothing short of Lovely! :)"

That depends on your orientation and gender. You or me may be more interested in the beautiful cough... cough... "eyes" of Miss Brook. Other people may have other ... cough... cough... interests...

Time has already run out for smart watches

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Devil

@xyz - Good idea in theory

In practice - not so much. You need a battery per device and they will all run out at different times making it royal PITA to use.

The watch had a golden opportunity - the time when sub-3 inc size was the norm so people looked at a 4-5 inch screen in the phone spec and asked "Are you out of your mind".

That time has passed. My technophobic SWMBO used to show a set of venomous fangs at the mere mentioning of something bigger than a mid 2000-es slider/clamshell. She laughed at me when I got my Arc S a year ago. She is now happily carrying an Xperia J which is the same size as an Arc and she is not alone in that. People are holding 5 inch blowers and happily using them as phones (or to be more exact "as we use phones today"). This pretty much kills the rationale of a second display outright for most users.

Dad hires online assassins to slay game-obsessed son

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Devil

I do it myself

If junior is overdoing it, I take on him mano a mano Doom with monsters set to nightmare on the house LAN. Or a strategy game of his choice. He is quickly reminded exactly how much does he yet have to learn which usually has the desired effect for a couple of months - namely him doing his homework first and games after that.

Sky watchers prep for early 2013 asteroid fly-bys

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Happy

Re: wait isn't Apophis...

Not really.

From the "guy" category (Anubis does not really qualify here) Sokar is probably the ultimate badass. Baal second and Apophis a distant third. More of a pompous looser than a real bad guy

Where do old supercomputers go to die? New Mexico

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Devil

Re: In before...

It may. If you put GPUs in it.

According to spec one of the possible blades going into Altix ICE has 16 x PCIe for "networking". You cannot plug a FAT GPU into it, but a "thin" GPU (workstation class) should fit nicely.

So it depends which blades have they got. If they got the oldest ones (which have the slot) they can upgrade it at a very low cost to a very decent machine.

'SHUT THE F**K UP!' The moment Linus Torvalds ruined a dev's year

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Devil

Re: Err...

"This kind of management behavior just serves to alienate other employees or potential employees "

Sorry dude you just broke the stupidometer by driving it off the scale. Since when does Linux employ the people working on the kernel?

Welcome to the world of community based development. When you are employing someone you can fire them. When they are "volunteering" their incompetence (even as a part of a company sponsorship) in a community driven project you sometimes _HAVE_ to make them leave. Even if this involves deploying the F* word. C'est la vie. In fact, in many cases it would have been easier to employ the poor guy - in that case you can fire him.

Browser makers rush to block fake Google.com security cert

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Devil

You sir, have hit the biggest weakness of the current system

Revoking the intermediate certificate will be grand. If someone was checking the revocation lists of course.

The biggest problem of the certificate system is the positive thinking when designing it: it is good in delivering the positive message "trust me" and sucks royally in delivering the message "do not trust this one". CRLs have to be distributed to endpoints and no one uses OCSP. Even if it was used, it can be blocked which makes most implementations default to "I will trust this one".

Frankly it is time we relegate the current cert system for offline uses only (it is quite good for that) and switch to DANE for internet/online trust. This puts the "trust me" message into the hands of the domain owner. The only third party trust involved are the root signing key and the TLD signing key above your domain. That is 2 parties in total for most domains instead of a 100+ list (half of which we have never heard of) of certs which can spoof anything (not just something in their "zone").

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Devil

Re: ?

On linux you need the signing key for the packages and that is in a completely different trust chain - the gpg chain of the distribution you are using. On other OS-es it will probably be no as well - the certificates and keys for the packages are chained under the OS vendor root.

In any case, it just goes to confirm one more time how many of the certificate authorities do not belong on the trusted list in the first place.

Ubuntu for smartphones aims to replace today's mobes, laptops

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Devil

Re: Great idea!

It is not the UI which makes Android what it is. It is the IPC paradigms and specifically the whole idea of intents and activities. That allows loose coupling and interaction of applications without them having to run each other in an "embedded" fashion like the accursed Microsoft OLE.

That is actually already present in modern Linux both KDE and Gnome3 are built around that concept. In fact they are more "mobile-ready" than Win8 by far. Once this foundation is in place (and it is), adjusting the UI via a theme is a mere technicality.

In any case with 60%+ of the devices out there having a ready and available linux kernel getting this done is a mere technicality. It is also not quite "entering the crowded space". The space is crowded consumer-wise. It is not that crowded from a hobbyist/developer perspective.

Tibetan monks lose their TVs as China's censors raid monasteries

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Devil

Re: My karma just ran over my dogma

"The problem with eliminating religion:" - you missed the point.

You replace it with "Верой в светлое коммунистическое будующее" Тranslation: belief into the bright future under communism). That is the first approximation.

That is usually not good enough so it morphs into: "Вера в светлое коммунистическое будующее под мудрым руководством товарища Сталина/Мао Тзе Дуна/Ким Ир Сена (ненужное зачекрнуть)". Translation: belief into the bright future under communism under the wise guidance of comrade Stalin/Mao Tse Dun/Kim Ir Sen (scratch out the unnecessary).

While the Manifesto and the first volume of Das Capital kinda make sense, there is no way you can follow the drivel in volume 2 or 3 or Lenin's mad syphilitic interpretation of it unless you believe in it. With fervor.

This is something which most people in the west fail to understand in their perception of communism. It is a _THEOCRACY_. It's sole reason to persecute religions is that it perceives them as _COMPETITION_ (and rightfully so). This is what all of this is about.

Steve Jobs' Apple yacht freed after family settles the bill

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Devil

Re: €13.5m

Gotta be in the right place, at the right time and have the right connections ya know.

Same as with real designer dresses. Just look at the stuff being worn at the Oscars or Cannes. A significant portion of it (>20% on average) looks like sh*t, does not fit the person who wears it and suffers "wardrobe malfunctions".

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Devil

Re: That yacht looks terrible

Well, what do you expect. It is _NOT_ done by Sir Jonathan Ive. It is owned by Apple (actually not even that now) not built by Apple.

Kickstarted mobe charger 'kicked to death by Apple'

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Devil

Re: Licensing terms

Charging is subject to standards, at least in the EU.

In fact Apple should have been taken to task and _NOT_ given Eu certification for any of its new devices.

Cameron defends U-turn on web filth ban, leaves filtering to parents

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Devil

Re: Yay!

More importantly, last time I checked you and me vote for MPs so they can select a government. We do not vote for DMRs - Daily Mail representatives.

The amount of pampering the Daily Beobachter gets from this government is frankly sickening.

AWS stops some EC2 servers without warning

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Devil

Re: Nothing to see here

Exactly - you should have bought elastic storage, put a copy of your data on elastic ice and elasticated yourself in all other relevant elastic paraphernalia.

Oh, did that just double the estimate you had for how much would running your business on EC2 cost? Tough - too bad.

AMD plunks custom Opteron into SM15000 microservers

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Devil

Probably under 25W

Quote: It is hard to say how much lower the wattage can go

Not really, we live in the days when you can control it in software. You can test it ya know :) Last couple of frequency steps tend to nearly double the power envelope so pushing it back from 3.6 to 2.7 will probably halve it (at least). My educated guess (based on my own experiments and tuning systems with other AMD chips) is that we are looking at sub-25W here (if not even 15W).

North Korea's satellite a dud, say US astroboffins

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Devil

Re: Failure?

Growing food does not contribute anything to controlling your own population. The rocket launch sole purpose was to ensure that the outer world gets pissed off and demonstrates its dislike. NK TV gets some authentic material to show its viewers how the world "hates" the "supreme technological achievement" of the "freedom loving people".

In order to understand NK you have to study Stalin who invented this ruling style. It is a form of perverse theocracy pretending to be communism which can exist only while the country is "on a state of a alert". So if you do not have a natural "state of alert" you end up having to create one and maintain it. Stalin invented enemies outside and enemies within by the dosen on a daily basis. This gave him the pretext to gain and maintain control over everything and everyone. All of this was combined with a cult towards his own personality.

In his case the driving force was rabid paranoia. I hope that in the NK case it is carefully calculated strategy. When Stalin's "stroke" was organized by Beria, Malenkow and Molotov we were 6 months away from WW3 - he ran out of pretexts and invented enemies.

'Metadatagate' fails to bring down Oz pollie

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Devil

@Paul Crawford

I would expect to see a server in UTC. There is no benefit in having it in local TZ.

So as far as the parliament PFYs having extra work for Xmas to reconfigure servers to local TZ - that it is stupid, counterproductive and against operational best practices. I used to reprimand PFYs working with me for doing that in the days when my job desc said BOFH. Too many badly written pieces of software out there which use localtime when they should not and do stupid things after a change to daylight savings time.

Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030

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Devil

So who told you that fossil is not subsidized

Fossil is heavily subsidized too. We invest trillions annually in maintaining "stability" at gunpoint in fossil fuel producing regions around the world in order to keep the prices sane. We build and maintain infrastructure to transport the fuels. We build infrastructure to refine the fuels, we build... None of that is listed versus the cost of fossil fuels used for comparison with "subsidized" renewables.

Grinchy Google to shut down another batch of services

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Devil

Re: Seems that by dropping ActiveSync, Google dropped a bomb on Microsoft

Not just windows phones.

It also nukes all those Symbian holdouts. That is what I used to use in the days when I was still carrying an E71 around.

Frack me! UK shale gas bonanza 'bigger than North Sea oil'

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Devil

Re: Who cares about f*** gaya, it is the building style which is the problem

Quote: "while we have to buy more expensive houses!"

Not really. There is very little cost difference between laying down foundations in a ring for walls only and just pouring a nice earthquake-resistant plate at once. In fact the latter is probably cheaper. The cost of putting columns at regular intervals at the outline of the current inner wall may actually lower the overall cost of the house, not increase it because you no longer have to stick the odd concrete brick here and there and can do the whole internal wall out of foam in an afternoon. Concrete is _CHEAP_. Cheaper than brick + bricklayer labor.

Same for going American and building out of prefabricated wooden panels. That is cheap too. As a matter of fact, besides being total sh*t on earthquake resistance the current UK building style is also perversely expensive. If you use the continental methods you can build a house on the same footprint, same insulation levels, better earthquake and subsistence resistance etc for ~ 60% of the price. I looked at that having my house extension 4 years ago prefab-ed in Eu and shipped and built on site and nearly did it. End of the day I decided that wasting two years of my life to fight planning (the useless external decorative brick) and building control is not worth it and got it done according to custom. It cost me 50% more. By the way, this is not just my observation - there was an episode of grand ideas where they built a house "the German way" and it cost them half of what the local builder quoted. They had to spend half a year fighting building control too.

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Devil

Who cares about f*** gaya, it is the building style which is the problem

The biggest problem for fracking in the UK is not the pollution, environment, etc - it is the building style driven by what building societies and banks agree to give a mortgage for. If anyone wanted to make a building deliberately earhquake unsafe they would have found no better way to do so than taking the UK standard building practices.

An average UK building built after the 1960-es has two sets of walls with _NO_ vertical structural elements, no horizontal structural elements held together by 2mm metal wires. Its stability to any earth movement is zero. Zilch. Nil. Even the gentlest shake and the wires will get ripped leading to outer or inner wall collapsing on the heads of the occupants.

As a matter of fact we got lucky so far - the Quadrilla quakes were in areas which have seen little recent development so the buildings hit were pre-1950es solid double-brick wall tied by a garden or flemish bond. That style can take a local 3-4 richter scale tremor without any problems. In fact the older ones have taken them on a regular basis during the times when such tremors were induced by mining on a near-daily basis. With these -at the very worst you will get a damaged chimney somewhere. Even those will happen only because the genius who did them initially laid them with non-fireproof mortar out of non-fireproof brick. So they are a hazard anyway and should have been redone long ago.

The yanks do not have that problem - their buildings are built out of wooden panels bolted to a frame so they flex a bit, shake a bit and still stand. The rest of Europe does not have that problem either because they do not have a band of idiots in banks and building societies which have declared reinforced concrete an "item preventing the issuing of a mortgage". Their building code specifies and mandates that the inner construction has reinforced concrete pillars in key places. So their buildings may get a few fractures in the outer wall here and there. The wall is not structural (the pillars are) and, you slap a few trhowels of fresh mortar and plaster on it, it still stands, move along. And most importantly - they have proper foundations - the foundation are poured as a solid plate so the whole building moves instead of being put only under the walls (and crack).

So in the long term if UK is to frak (or mine again) it needs the banking and building societies to understand the difference between a fully encased concrete pillar which is inside the house (and will not rust) and badly done "pre-baked" happy-soc concrete panels reinforced with easily rusting high carbon steel (which did rust all over the UK). These are not the same things. The builders will also need to learn a practice which European builders are well familiar with - retrofitting structural columns into an existing building. The same style as in the UK was quite common around south-eastern europe in the 50-es and outfitting it with columns before overbuilding additional floors on top is by now a standard well developed procedure. It is not that expensive either. Granted - it never gives the same stability as a proper new building but should be enough all the way to 4-5 local quake.

Dying to make greener batteries

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Devil

Re: Dying to make batteries?

They already die to enable the fashion process. On the positive side - another crop for (sub)tropical farmers to grow. On the negative side - cobalt is the least of your worries in terms of toxicity in a Li-ion or Li-poly battery. It is the Lithium itself which you need to worry about.

Girl gang targets Microsoft's Seattle stores for $5,000 theft spree

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Devil

re: But who the hell are they going to sell the stolen goods to?

If something is worth stealing, it may be worth buying.

I smell a PR RAT and a big fat one too.

'UK DNA database by stealth' proposed in £100m NHS project

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Devil

GATTACA

Quote: I belonged to a new underclass, no longer determined by social status or the color of your skin. No, we now have discrimination down to a science.

Welcome to the new tomorrow...

AMD bites bullet, slashes chip orders

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Devil

It is not 500M worth of chips - it is wafers

Slightly different.

When the channel knows there is surplus inventory they can and will twist your arm into discounting it. When the channel knows that WYSYG they have considerably less leverage to force you to discount.

So they buy 115$ worth of wafers to make chips from but will sell them at near list price. That is better then buying 500M of chips and selling them for 115$ and establishing a "permanently discounted" low price in the channel so they expect that you will continue to do so with your next chips and so on.

Long overdue if you ask me. They should have done that long ago. Disclaimer - I have managed to use the glut time to get a whole raft of HP Microservers for development as well as a few Fusion based desktops and laptops for test/day to day work. The discounts of the last half a year were beyond stupid. Laptops were being discounted into ~210£ territory and Microservers down to ~80£. That had to stop - it was unsustainable.

Republican staffer fired for copyright reform suggestions

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Devil

Re: @TaabuTheCat (was: There is only one answer to Washington's issues:)

There is a third way. The Mehmed 2nd the Conqueror's way.

Stop salaries to _ALL_ bureaucrats and make them put a price list for their services on the door. Makes things nice and clear.

That approach got the Ottoman empire across half of Europe to the doorsteps of Wien and the Empire started to decline only once one of his successors reinstated the salaries.

Food for thought...

'Build us a Death Star, President Obama' demand thousands

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Devil

Re: It's a joke

It is a running gag: http://tshirtgroove.com/death-star-urban-regeneration-program-t-shirt/

China admits $10 BEEELLION tech trade deficit

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Devil

Too much blood in the coffee subsystem this morning

OK, call me an idiot, but if everyone has a trade deficit and is pretending to import more than export where is all that sh*t manufactured?

I smell something something fishy... Like the smell of massaged stats early in the morning to have an excuse to continue sabotaging other countries economies by artificially adjusting the yuan exchange rate...

Microsoft claims £3.6m piracy scalp in China

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Devil

I need to have my eyesight checked

I think I just saw Lucifer driving down my street on a snowplough.

Saucy Star Wars strip show - sorry, burlesque - to tour Down Under

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Devil

Re: Sad

May I ask Why? The original artwork for New Hope had a very feminine C3PO. So nothing particularly offensive about that.

Otherwise, the dancing (both in terms of choreography and execution) is pretty lousy. It is a burlesque all right - but a burlesque from the worst days of this genre when adding a few t*ts and some stripping was supposed to make anything funny. Definitely not burlesque at this level: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRTmvjXs1i0 (by the way, Google sticks MSFT sufrace advert to this video at least for me which is hilarious in itself).

New laws to shackle and fine the Press? We've got PLENTY already

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Devil

Re: red herring

"but I would expect from Mr Cameron to inspect where enforcement came off the rails"

That was one of the jobs of the Levinson enquiry. It failed miserably at that.

This should have been something to be debated in the commons, not the proposed mechanism.

US software firm hacked for years after suing China

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Coat

Re: @Voland

Re: Seriously

I am trying to tell you that the amount of resource a country of 1.4 billion with 11.3 trillion USD has actually spent on it is not likely to be anywhere near proportional to these numbers.

Further to this - the company has 0 online presence, a low volume blog in Chinese and an email address box. That leaves their one person "inbox" and their 8 people corporate network as the sole items to defend.

That is something which a content filtering system is supposed to do for a living. It is called EAT YOUR OWN DOGFOOD.

If they have failed in doing so, well that says everything that there is to be said here. Me coat...

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Devil

Re: So a company sues the Chinese government and gets targeted by Chinese hackers?

So a company which writes content and security filtering software is incapable of defending its network.

Right... I thought the science fiction section was on the second floor...

Chevrolets to get 'Eyes Free' mode for driving with Apple Siri

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Coat

Re: Hands free... eyes free... what's next, brain free?

Phones - who cares. Now cars...

Google plans touchscreen Chromebook for 2013 - report

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Devil

Re: A bold prediction

If they end up running Android instead of Chrome they may actually do better.

Driverless trucks roam Australian mines

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Re: Not to mention...

Oh, they do.

Just the raise is called differently: "Software upgrade", "Old model obsolete", "Increase in the cost of parts" and goes directly to the manufacturer.

Asteroid miners hunt for platinum, leave all common sense in glovebox

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Devil

Re: Is there any Titanium up there?

There is plenty of titanium down here too.

Titanium is not rare, just a total pain in the arse to refine and work with same as Aluminum used to be before we discovered how to get it electrolytically.

If memory (from my chemistry days serves me right) you have to clorinate Ti02 into TiCl4 first (ugly and expensive as making Cl2 out of salt takes lots of energy), then purify that by distillation, then reduce TiCl4 into Titanium foam using Sodium (again ugly and expensive and costly). The Titanium you get from that has to be smelted into usable form with Sodium removed (I forgot how that one was done but that was painful too). The thing people forget is that the reason for a lot of Titanium properties as a material is not Titanium, but the thin coating of TiO2 which it forms immediately in contact with air (or any oxidizer). You cannot smelt or weld Titanium in a normal atmosphere - it will oxidize. You have to do it under Argon - once again lots of money, especially for smelting.

Most of these processes are not realistic in space. Clorine, Sodium are expensive (due to energy required) but abundant on Earth. Up there - not so much.

So even if we find a couple of rocks with a usable TiO2 content up there we need to figure out a whole new way of getting Ti out of them. If we do so, we might as well do that on earth - TiO2 is not rare (and not expensive either).

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Re: But there is no concept of private property.

You may not care what UN says, but that has a shiny forecast of ending up with UN dragoons, TANSTAAFL and rocks being lobbed at the Cheyenne Mountain.

Sailboat cracks 100 km/h for first time

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Devil

Re: As a sailor, that's hardly practical.

SFO bay? SFO bay does not have the wind field for this baby.

That thing has Playa de Jandia and Costa Calma written all over it. You get some very strange conditions there - the island shields the area from the Atlantic and you get 20-30knots steady wind from the desert. Psychotic kitesurfer paradise. I have seen them go at 30-40 knots on a regular basis (one of the reasons why they do a leg of the world championship there). They cart someone out with something broken on an ambulance at least once a day there during the season - at 40 knots falling on water is like falling on concrete.

I suspect that the place in Namibia where they tested it was similar - desert + a shielded bay. SFO does not have that so you are not likely to get it anywhere near the speed at which it becomes "interesting".

'There may come a day when Hobbits promote slot machines ...'

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Devil

Re: Minus dots

That book has now been removed from orbit. Not surprising - they can expect a lawsuit. Same as the author of the "Last Ringbearer".

Frankly, the Tolkien family is overstepping the line by far here. It is a venerable tradition to build on other people's works in world literature. Examples - Christopher Priest and "Space Machine" vs Wells and "Time Machine", Volkov's Emerald City series vs "The Wizard of Oz", etc. If we go further back in time we have Decameron & Canterbury Tales vs Aesop's fables.

Evildoers can now turn all sites on a Linux server into silent hell-pits

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Devil

niginx is not that "popular"

To start with - nginx is not that popular. Now if this was squid, apache traffic server or pound...

Dead Steve Jobs was dead wrong on Flash, bellows ColdFusion man

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Devil

Re: Apple makes even Microsoft look good.

Vector graphics, video and other multimedia support.

HTML was a little too late to offer it with HTML5.

It does not matter is flash good or bad. It has taken 99.9% of the market before any alternative solution (and no, java is not an answer, java is the question and the answer is no) and has retained it for half a decade. It is entrenched. It will take years before any alternative has a market share worth mentioning.

Apple seeks cooling fan patent for iPhone, iPad

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Devil

Re: not sure about the clutch

It will be an "everlasting wonder of maintainability" for a different reason.

If you think that iPhone/Pad/Whatever was bad on water contact before, just watch how bad it will become when it has a fan. A special contraption to splatter the water evenly across all components in the casing and ensure it is dead outright. LOVELY IDEA...

Smartphone biz shocker: Nokia sells fewer devices than Lenovo

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Devil

I am not surprised

I have two xperias in the household and the next raft of upgrades will be Xperias too.

The latest and greatest software is not everything. In fact, I would rather have _NOT_ the latest and greatest, but some level of quality assurance on whatever is shipped. The amount of bugs I have encountered on my "fleet" is inexistent compared to some of what I have observed on "leading edge" Samsungs (and iDevices for that matter). Hardware is similarly excellent. Compared to HTC or RIM it is a "no contest". You take one, you take the other and you walk out of the shop with an Xperia in hand.

My only gripe with the Xperias so far has been that they are very picky on what they connect/charge from.

So Sony overtaking the other also-runs is not surprising. Just get an Xperia for a few months and you will understand why (as well as why it was one of the very few Androids to hit a 90%+ el-reg review rating). I hope they keep up with this level of commitment to quality in the future.

Chinese e-cars to turn London cabs green

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Devil

Re: 186 miles?

It looks like the taxi ranks will be getting charging sockets which IMHO is an unfair subsidy.

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Devil

Re: EuroNCAP first

Not 240 - 180. The important thing is the difference - the taxi was going at 60+ and the GTR rear-ended it incoming at ~ 240. The difference in speed was 180. After that it careered off the road (still going at ~ 60+) and whatever was left of it impaled itself on a tree short-circuiting the battery distribution system and smashing some of the batteries in the process. The report is unclear if it was the taxi that also hit another taxi in front during that or that was the remains of the GTR.

All in all, I am surprised the batteries did not explode outright. A similar smashup with a petrol car (rear end collision followed by impaling the "tank" area on a tree) would have caused a tank rupture and a "Pinto Redux".

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EuroNCAP first

I would like to see this car undergoing a proper EuroNCAP first.

Second - "proprietary battery technology" is all nice but it requires similarly "proprietary" recycling facilities. Does BYD have recycling facilities in Europe? If they do not, they are not compliant to Eu directives on car waste so they can take it and sell it elsewhere. Leaking end of life batteries with "proprietary" chemistry - definitely NIBMY.

Reading the accident report I have to agree - everyone in the car was dead on the spot, before it hit the tree. No car could survive a direct hit from a Nissan GTR traveling at (estimated) 180km/h at the moment of the collision.