Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

Apple, if you want to win in education, look at what sucks about iPads

Apple making things easier

So you tried to install High Sierra but nothing happens? The installer has the old "dirty unmount" bug so hfs_fsck is busy fixing your boot disk while the installer is looking for it. There's an easy fix.

Download the High Sierra installer over and over until you get the full 4+ GB version. Insert a USB stick and reformat it. Find the secret terminal command to convert the installer to a bootable volume on the USB stick. Back up your hard disk using Time Machine. Remove the factory hard disk and install an SSD or very fast hard disk. Boot your base OS DVD and install onto the new boot disk. Boot into High Sierra from the USB stick and update the boot disk. Reboot and restore from the Time Machine backup. Run Software Updates repeatedly for the next several hours until it's up to date.

So easy! Only needs a few days of work, an expensive new hard drive, and about 15 GB of downloads.

Why you shouldn't trust a stranger's VPN: Plenty leak your IP addresses

Kiwix

An offline copy of Wikipedia is nice if you want to kill time reading about unusual knowledge without worrying that it's going to be picked up by advertisers or snoops looking to fabricate justification for a new budget. (I just fired up the BitTorrent client to help you download the Kiwix snapshots)

SpaceX has a good day: Successful launch and FCC satellite approval

Re: CNN clickbait

I've been using BBC too. Hell, even Buzzfeed is starting to look good compared to CNN.

More please: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/13/buzzgasm_listicle_about_pliers/

Tesla crash investigation causes dip in 'leccycar firm's share price

Barriers

I think Caltrans is trying to enforce a one car, one idiot, one barrier replacement ratio. The gore point used to have the usual water buckets but they were continuously being destroyed and replaced. You could say that there should be motorcycle cops there writing hundreds of tickets a day, but they'd get run over too.

That section of road was my commute nightmare. When one highway slows down, drivers swerve into the other highway past the split and might not always have a place to merge in - two cars doing this at once will crash into each other. There are also cars trying to get around Toyota and Gbus drivers going 40 MPH in the fastest lane of 65 MPH zone (this is the carpool/fast lane exit). Many of those same Toyotas and Gbusses got into the fast Hwy 85 exit by driving diagonally across 5 lanes of traffic from a nearby onramp while going half the speed of traffic, rather than continuing in the normal Hwy 85 exit. Finally, a lot of people just don't pay attention to the mile of exit signs and half mile of exit striping.

What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

It's a feature

This will make closing a Microsoft account both easy and satisfying.

Fatal driverless crash: Radar-maker says Uber disabled safety systems

Re: Cause of Death: Ostrich Algorithm

Jaywalking is ignoring a red light, short-cutting a crosswalk (painted or implied), and not yielding to cars/bikes already in your path. Crossing the middle of a road is, of course, legal if it's clear when you started. You can't fault somebody in AZ for walking in the middle of the night either, given that some days are hot enough to kill you.

Others driving the route at night (without artificially dark video) have shown that a pedestrian should have been visible long enough to make a graceful stop. Besides, it's against the the law (and common sense) to drive at a speed where can't avoid an obstacle in the road.

Huawei joins Android elite with pricey, nocturnal 40MP flagship

Die bad phones! Die!

No microSD card, no replaceable battery, and no headphone jack yet there's room for FOUR CAMERAS.

Java-aaaargh! Google faces $9bn copyright bill after Oracle scores 'fair use' court appeal win

Re: Still reeling

Big APIs are hard! Take at Apache open source projects, PHP, or any of the hipster languages du-jour. You get inconsistent naming, inconsistent parameters, data structures that don't pass from component to component without translation, and language syntax hacks that make future changes impossible. Java isn't perfect but the effort shows.

It seems reasonable to protect a good API with IP laws but the amount of money involved here seems offensive to the Sun engineers and armies of outside developers and researchers that contributed too.

Uber's disturbing fatal self-driving car crash, a new common sense challenge for AI, and Facebook's evil algorithms

Gamma tweak

Follow-ups on the Uber crash have shown videos by others driving the same route at night. It's actually a brightly lit urban area with good visibility. The harsh shadows are unique to Uber's video evidence.

Corking story: Idiotic smart wine bottle idea falls over, passes out

For any wine maker needing to replace their Kuvee system

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+to+create+QR+codes

US Congress quietly slips cloud-spying powers into page 2,201 of spending mega-bill

Re: Paperweight

Only a government worker would print 2.2K pages. That's the mix of antiquity, showmanship, and impracticality that can spend trillions of dollars with not much to show for it.

SpaceX blasted massive plasma hole in Earth's ionosphere

Re: Yawn

I think the tone of the article is that the effect was somewhat unexpected so we should aim lots of scientific instruments at the next launch to see why our modeling was wrong.

What a hang up: US big box biz Best Buy kicks Huawei to the curb

Re: Huawei has no Brand Recognition

The "copy Apple" design is going to slaughter cellphone makers and they deserve it. There's no point carrying 10 models brands of the exact same phone. Stores will decide on price and which one produces the fewest customer returns.

Whois? More like WHOWAS: Domain database on verge of collapse over EU privacy

but why is?

Last time I checked ICANN, it required a responsible contact for a domain name, not your personal info. You can hire a third party to be the contact, create an LLC, use a friend, use your ISP (some offer this service), or whatever.

The '.eu' TLD isn't even under ICANN.

Crypt-NO-coins: US city bans mining funbux on its electrical power grid

Re: Can't speak for the states

This is pretty much Silicon Valley since the 1990s. Big power users have long term contracts to make financial planning easier. This means the new power hog on the block needs to wait for the grid upgrades to be completed or there'd be an outage. So far there's no end in sight with neighborhoods getting rewired to support electric cars.

Phone-free Microsoft patents Notch-free phone

Deja Moo

Didn't Apple file the same patent? The patent office needs to be directed to refuse all patents that are obvious and trolling another company's future R&D that would make such designs cost effective.

MailChimp 'working' to stop hackers flinging malware-laced spam from accounts

Re: Good

Cartel? I run my own mail server and it works perfectly well. You need a static IP address, reverse DNS, valid MX records, SPF record, and don't spam. That's it.

Chemical burns, explosive fires, they all come free with Amazon power packs

Six? Six hundred?

The counterfeit/substandard white-label products on Amazon get rebranded at least 100 times. There's no way that only six SKUs share this defect.

Tutanota blames Comcast block for March 1 outage

Garbage ISP routers

I have yet to see an ISP router that works correctly. ICMP packets are dropped so MTU discovery and some IPv6 features don't work. Comcast routers don't pass fragmented packets either. If Tutanota turned on jumbo frames, every Comcast customer using "automatic MTU" would vanish.

Get tooled up before grappling with Google's Spanner database

Throw a spanner in

Spanner is an interesting data store. It works great where you have billions of things and each of those things has some small varying number of other things related to it - this is the nested tables trick. Parent and nested child tables are stored together so there's no I/O seek penalty for getting them all together. For other cases it's not relational even though a flimsy SQL interpreter makes it look like it is. Updates are transactional with a compare & set type of operation, which can be done in MySQL too.

The real question is if you trust Google. My experience is that recoverable glitches happen several times a day, momentary failures happen almost every day, and there's some significant screw-up outage at least once a month. Google believes they're perfect so Spanner comes with absolutely no monitoring dashboard.

In my test between Google's hosted Spanner and Google's hosted MySQL 2, Spanner won by an enormous margin. Their MySQL 2 instances always seems to be abnormally slow so it's a biased test. I'd never host data on Google unless there was a real need for it.

Sneaky satellite launch raises risk of Gravity-style space collision

This space mesh thing

The TLDR is still pretty long: The Earth is much bigger than you think so you need to liberally sprinkle some zeros on the end of your satellite count. You need thrusters to prevent solar winds from turning your space mesh into a space clump. Radiation glitches on satellites with thrusters is messy. Space agencies don't want your space junk. There are things in orbit that governments don't want you potentially looking at.

Got some broken tech? Super Cali's trinket fix-it law brought into focus

Re: Hoorah !

SMD boards are pretty easy to fix if they don't have any heat sensitive components that were soldered on by hand. Laptops may have some but cellphones are just too tiny for such work. Rework stations are small enough and inexpensive enough that, with a skilled user, they could show up at a mall phone repair stand. It's a programmable hotplate and small programmable hot air wand. The hotplate is set a few degrees below the solder's melting point and the air wand a bit above it. Any component under the hot air wand can be added and removed with tweezers. Maybe a bit of flux and solder paste is needed on the new parts. After that, it's booting the phone with the secret button pinch to put it into low-level firmware programming mode to restore any data missing on the new chips.

Of course, phone makers can ruin this by using those RF shields that are both mechanically latched and soldered.

Surprise: Norks not actually behind Olympic Destroyer malware outbreak – Kaspersky

It's practice. This one appears be specifically testing whether or not the victim can be made to waste effort fighting the wrong opponent. Economies have regular up and down swings. Say Trump deregulates every greedy mega-corp in America and then starts his trade war. You'd have a combination of a collapsing economy with American core businesses engaging in high risk and fraudulent activity. Now hack the hell out of everything - publish trade secrets, wreck farming hardware, drain bank accounts, knock out power, fluctuate inventory, and use propaganda to obstruct recovery and misplace blame. The results could be bad enough that the US needs foreign investment to sustain life. Countries that once viewed the US and oppressive or competitive would now be using it for profit.

Nokia transceiver bakes years of demos into superfast optical chip

Cinderblock shacks selling for $1.6 million

Can we use this for telecommuting yet? Silicon Valley is proving that cramming all of the world's tech jobs into a single point isn't really a good idea. Step one is giving towns easier access to enormous low-latency bandwidth. Step two is improving videoconferencing software. Step three will involve changing day-to-day routines so that there's a balance between disruptions and isolation in the new way of working. It's hard, but not so bad compared to continuously increasing the population density.

British clockwork radio boffin Trevor Baylis terminally winds down

Re: Maybe not the time to bring it up, so I'll keep it short.

I have to agree that his expectations of wealth were too lofty. Generators already existed. He added a spring and got a patent. Somebody else changed the governor and got a patent. Somebody adds a battery and gets a patent. Another hack made a salt and metal powered radio. You have to keep making improvements keep the money flowing. His electric shoe must have frustrated a hundred other inventors who tried the same trick but decided that such a poorly performing device needs more work before jumping to patents, media, and gathering investors.

Reg man wraps head in 49-inch curved monitor

Might as well supersize the vertical too

I have a giant 3840x2160 monitor with the same dot pitch as a normal 1920x1080 monitor. All the stuff that would normally get tossed onto a second monitor can go in the corners of this one. I've tried full-screen coding but I have to sit at the left side of the monitor and roll my chair sideways to read long lines. RAW photo editing is amazing. Fixed-width websites like Facebook and The Reg read like cash register receipts.

Java EE renamed 'Jakarta EE' after Big Red brand spat

Do-over?

Java EE is a mixed bag. It got started back in the dark days of "we should replace code with XML" so parts of it are incomprehensible configuration gibberish. It lived through the "abstract the abstractions" darks days so it has factories for factories and objects so completely abstracted that they must claim to do nothing at all. It seems like a lot of "EE" could be frozen for legacy apps and replaced with more modern libraries for new apps. RMI would be a good place to start since microservices are all the rage now.

It's begun: 'First' IPv6 denial-of-service attack puts IT bods on notice

Re: IPv6 is a mess

NAT means we're all slaves to commercial portals for serving data. No f'ing thanks.

IPv6 consumer devices are a dumpster fire

ISPs and IoT makers have set the stage for huge IPv6 DDoS attacks that could take years to fix once they've started. Half of IPv6 devices have zero security and half of them are WAN hardened for peer-to-peer connectivity. Routers from ISPs make that difficult or impossible to manage. At best, they require you to create custom firewall rules for inbound IPv6. No doubt the most popular solution is going to be the wildcard-to-wildcard ALLOW rule that non-technical people can copy & paste. At worst they have one big "on/off" switch and it needs to be "on" anyways because the firewall is buggy. This mess has been building up for years and it won't get fixed anytime soon.

Hypersonic nukes! Nuclear-powered drone subs! Putin unwraps his new (propaganda) toys

Re: Little reactors?

The real question is who volunteered to build and test these rockets. They're a bit harder to turn off than kerosene jets when something goes wrong.

Us? Reverse engineer HoloLens? No way, not us, nuh-uh – Magic Leap

Like those dreams

"That was a year of hard work but 5 million Magic Leap Ones are ready ready to ship!" <realizes that goggles are on and nothing was built in the real world>

Boring. The phone business has lost the plot and Google is making it worse

iJunk

It's obvious why phones suck. Everybody is copying Apple, and Apple is making phones that only a few fanatics want. The headphone jack is gone, replaceable batteries are gone, moderately rugged bezels are gone, memory cards are gone, high resolution screens are gone, buttons are gone, and MHL is gone. Phone makers are actually copying the fucking notched screen for lack of anything better to do with a completely featureless rectangle. The one good thing that Apple has is the large number of supported LTE bands, and not enough makers are copying that.

Stop us if you've heard this one: Ex-Googler sues web giant claiming terrible treatment. This time, sex harassment

Re: Don't Play Well With Others

It's Google's responsibility to maintain a professional environment. That means helping people who need help and firing people who are simply not safe to have around. HR departments are supposed to have a process to skip the chains of command when there's a critical problem. Google claims they have that but there's a lot of chaos in a company that's essentially the northern halves of three (soon four) densely populated cities.

Paul Allen's six-engined monster plane prepares for space deliveries

People who know told me

This doesn't save much fuel because lifting the rocket is nothing compared to bringing it up to orbital speed. It's about being able to build and ignite the rocket anywhere. The second part is important because people get very NIMBY about lighting up a rocket that could incinerate an entire town.

Chilly willies: Swedish nudie nightclub opens in -11°C to disgust of locals

"depression and broken souls"

Somewhere there's a Swedish heavy metal that needs your help writing lyrics.

IBM gives Services staff until 2019 to get agile

Hold on

I admit that I've never seen Agile function well, but it seems that laying out 18 months of plans is not the right way to get started on it.

Mobile industry wants less regulation, mooooar radio spectrum

Whatever

Headphone jack, microSD slot, and enough LTE bands to travel or I'm not buying it. You can get rid of the headphone jack when I can play music all day without it sounding like garbage or some battery going dead.

Google gives mobile operators a reason to love it, and opens rich chat up for business

Invented by the Marketing Department?

"RCS upgrades SMS with branding..." and then I stopped reading Google's description due to a sudden lack of interest.

IBM Java CTO: Devs shouldn't have to learn Docker, K8s, 30 other things to deploy an app

What, some common sense?

Somebody shouts "Cloud computing!" so you have a Java virtual machine in a virtual container on a virtual host in a virtual datacenter. On top of that, somebody shouts "Microservices!" so now you have that whole stack multiplied 10 to 30 times, with each piece using 5 database connections, each running the client library for every API of every other piece, each generating 1 TB a day of junk monitoring statistics, and each using 4GB of RAM each to do pretty much nothing. Next comes the complaints about how it's too expensive, it hurts the DB, it's too hard to debug, somebody always messes up deployment, the firewall is letting in hackers, and API changes are impossible. The proposed solution is then more layers of process!

Java in the "cloud" went down a very dark path. Kill it and try again.

Ayyy-EYE! Google code 'predicts heart disease' by eyeballing retinas

The web will be like TV on a weekday afternoon

I suspect that Google will soon deprecate fingerprint scanners in favor of retina scanners. There's big money in pharmaceuticals.

The e-waste warrior, 28,000 copied Windows restore discs, and a fight to stay out of jail

Re: Linux Mint is free

It makes no difference unless you build your own computer or purchase it from a handful of places that sell bootable computers without the Microsoft tax. Replacing Windows with Linux is still paying for Windows.

Oi! Verizon leaked my fiancée's nude pix to her ex-coworker, says bloke

It's catchy

The "mobile gisnt" typo actually sounds pretty good. I say keep it.

A computer file system shouldn't lose data, right? Tell that to Apple

Error handling is hard - let's not do it!

Unless something has changed recently, MacOS doesn't handle media write failures. The kernel logs an error but it doesn't bubble up far enough to properly abort an operation. The first symptom is corrupted files or volumes once the unwritten data flushes from cache. Drobo NAS don't handle media write failures either.

Magic Leap's staggering VR goggle technology just got even better!

Silicon Valley is getting too crowded anyways

Another year will pass and then they'll announce that their R&D produced solid results but the price point doesn't yet match the market. <poof> Gone. The tech (evidence) will be sold off to a brand new LLC that guards it as if it contained secrets that will change the world.

I don't have to know anything about Magic Leap to be extremely suspicious. AR and VR tech is awful. If a magical AR/VR device appeared now it would take at least two years before worthwhile content arrived for it. Consumers won't wait that long and neither can a cash burning startup. If Magic Leap had a real product they'd be giving crude prototypes to developers as fast as they could to accelerate the content development process.

You're decorating it wrong: Apple HomePod gives wood ring of death

HomeDesk

It's only approved for use with Apple home furnishings. Losers with non-Apple shelfware shouldn't even be looking at this.

Winter Olympics website downed by cyber attack

It's also quite probable that South Korea is a victim of their own botnets. 20 years of not giving a crap can take its toll when you actually need something working.

Home taping revisited: A mic in each hand, pointing at speakers

Didn't hack it?

I used to wire up RCA jacks to the clockwise pin of the volume control pots of my equipment so I'd have line-out jacks. The best spot for line-in was usually trial and error by touching another device's line-out to anything that looked like a DC blocking capacitor near the microphone amp. The same soldering iron used for that wiring would be used to burn RCA jack mounting holes in the device too. I didn't have a lot of tools.

Wow, MIND-BLOWING: Florida Man gets an earful from 'exploding Apple AirPod' bud

That would be a lithium iron phosphate battery in a golf cart. They're tougher, good for 10x the charge cycles, less flammable, and less prone to thermal runaway compared to LiPo. It's definitely the preferred chemistry when energy density isn't critical.

Beware the looming Google Chrome HTTPS certificate apocalypse!

Two way street

This is a good move but it needs to happen in both directions. I'd like to see businesses block Chrome because it sends sensitive URLs, page thumbnails, and hardware usage metrics to Google. Maybe they can block Android WiFi for leaking passwords. I'd like to see GMail and Google Groups blocked more because Google makes them easy to use by scammers. Google might be helping consumers every now and then but they're still quite evil and they'll never stop abusing their market dominance without pushback.

Tech bad-boy Uber crafts tool to make staff follow the rules in future (er, coding rules, that is)

Of all the things to worry about

Most IDEs can automatically flag suspicious code and obvious inefficiencies. More advanced linters are REALLY HARD to design. I have a deep hatred of the garbage that Checkstyle forces people to write because it doesn't understand scope, visibility, and project expectations. Making a new linter doesn't seem like it should be high on the list of really hard work that needs to be done at Uber.