Posts by Kevin McMurtrie 3553 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2007
The complexity of building a refueling robot, especially one that doesn't make incredibly explosive mistakes, makes inventing new propulsion seem like a good idea. Maybe a way to ionize the air to reduce drag or add a bit of thrust, even if that air is essentially nothing moving at 30000 km/h. Or figure out the EM Drive paradox.
Many large networks don't give a crap if their customers or internal systems are running attacks. Ever submitted an abuse complaint to Google, CloudFlare, or anything in China? This will probably require an opt-in blacklist service and a strong customer demand to have upstreams use it. Such blacklists exist for e-mail but they can't yet scale to the speed and size of idiot-of-things attacks. IoT blacklists would need to be very fast and need to rapidly group/ungroup neighboring addresses to maintain the desired dataset complexity.
Apple has been a questionable technological innovator for years but they could still stand out from the crowd by honoring warranties and providing customer support. Most phones are a $400 gamble because the manufacturer will blame everything on abuse, normal product wear, or forever claim that a fix is coming soon.
You could install TRIAC crowbars capable of stopping 10000 Amp surges only to have an immature individual prove that it's still not resistant to screwdriver prying.
I used to repair vending machines. People will always find a way to break something. If there's a break-away mount to shield something from excessive mechanical shock, people will break that. If all else fails there's chewing gum.
All of the white-labeling and firmware borrowing drove my crazy while I was trying to find a good security camera. They'd all die instantly when exposed to the Internet, and would literally crash on a gust of wind. Each new camera that I purchased was either exactly the same model or a clone of another that I'd tried and returned.
They all had the same flaws:
- Telnet or some mystery port stuck on.
- OOM crash on multiple concurrent connections of any kind.
- OOM crash if storage device slows down.
- Video bitrate regulation bugs (crash on moving leaves).
- Malformed video file headers.
- Sensor Bayer pattern wrong when rotating video.
- Session ID in URL and leaking through occasional plain HTTP requests.
- Unprotected REST/AJAX endpoints here and there.
- Remote access panel that crashes just using it normally.
- Running antique Linux compiled with no 64 bit anything so it overflows big numbers.
You missed the trick behind T-Mobile One. It's unlimited data but all the things that need lots of data are throttled to 1.5 Mbps. Yes, that's slower than even AT&T's ADSL1 home service. It's not optional and nobody has any opt-in. It's a forced throttle that breaks things.
T-Mo says can buy your way out of this throttle for $25/month, but you're still throttled. What that really buys you is a month's supply of "HD Passes." Every day you may edit your account to add 24 hours of normal speed at no additional cost.
I wonder if they remembered to bypass the flyback transformer driver with a small amount of capacitance. That captures flyback from nearby inductance and feeds it back into the flyback transformer a moment later. Without it, the driver sees nearly infinite voltage and arcs or avalanches (semiconductor version of arcing over). The EM pulse from that will kill pretty much any nearby semiconductor.
Avalanching or arcing to create EM pusles is the eventual goal, but you don't want it INSIDE your circuit.
That would be an honest mistake. LinkedIn built a new campus next to a neighborhood of Apple satellites. In the middle of moving, LinkedIn did a land swap with Google and decided to move their future HQ down the street behind Synopsys. (many blocks of abandoned HP buildings around there) Apple leased the new building that is no longer LinkedIn's future HQ.
I wouldn't trust a whitelist from Google because their interest is purely profits. If the Play Store is Google's idea of a whitelist, it's already an epic failure. Most apps contain malware imported from 3rd party ad managers and cloud tools. Flagging an app as abusive doesn't seem to do anything. Apple's store is cleaner but any device locked into it is crippled by Apple blocking anything that competes with inferior Apple offerings.
This will probably have to work like network blacklists. You subscribe to the ones you like and it's purely voluntary.
You haven't been following the news where the local monopoly/duopoly kills these with a flood of lawsuits and city council bribes. Usually the BS revolves around access to poles and conduits used for household wire utilities. Suddenly they're all full, or they're dangerous, or they're fragile vital infrastructure needing absurd insurance coverage, or the city council should not use any resources to look at such matters at all. Being that grassroots efforts start at a local level, it's pocket change for telco to crush them.
This isn't a Silicon Valley thing. Just about every state has tried community or new private internet services.
The Mac Server was better for Apple than they thought. It put benchmarks out in the open and forced Apple to compete on open standards. It made Mac software easier to develop, and better apps makes Apple customers happy.
The Apple ecosystem has been imploding for several years, repeating the ruthless pursuit of profit seen in the late 1990s when Apple was running a closed system and building those awful Performas. Regardless of how fanatic Apple users are, developers aren't going to maintain support for a platform that's extremely expensive, under-powered, and a shrinking market share. That was when I stopped being a Mac software developer.
Now we have two new "MacBook Pro" models designed for surfing the web in a coffee shop. The desktop "Mac Pro" is an old sportbike when professionals need a new truck. Every new OS release adds some bizarre and highly exclusive feature that nobody finds useful.
Steve Jobs won't come back to save Apple again. Apple needs to get back to open standards to reduce development costs and learn what the term "Pro" means.
How bad is your music if it sounds good on a pint-sized monaural coaxial speaker? To say it's also a music device rather than something for streaming talk radio makes me think it's a marketing gimmick disguised as a marketing gimmick.
They could all save a lot of space by leaving the speaker off. That should shrink it down to something the size of a... cellphone. Yeah, I'll just use my cellphone (with a headphone jack).
Every company balances the cost of fixing a defect in the factory versus in the field. Fixing in the field is very expensive but it impacts (ahem) a tiny percentage of products sold AND again a small percentage of products that have failed. Anyone who has had anything fail knows that a manufacturer has many walls of bullshit shielding them from warranty claims. You used it too much, looks like this scratch caused it, your home is in an area with power surges, hard water did it, improper care, you let a friend use it, not a factory authorized shipper, etc.
Samsung's mistake is people getting hurt. Had fewer people been injured, they likely would have escaped without paying out a single warranty claim.
Why an Engineer can not vote for Trump: He loudly announces that he can do everything better than you without having the slightest idea what he's talking about.
Why an Engineer must vote for Trump: Nonsense and chaos is often the fastest technique for finding flaws in a broken system.
I'm pretty sure the US is screwed with any running candidate. All that changes is who gets hit first.
The improvements that people really want, like a more reliable cell signal and longer battery life, have hit a wall. It's difficult to justify spending 2x on a premium phone when they have the same daily annoyances as every other phone. Premium operating systems, especially iOS, are starting to feel clumsy and dated compared to simpler systems that take on modern features more gracefully.
I suppose Google is making this because they get to watch the screen while you're using it. Google's business is personalized and interactive advertisements - nothing more. Everything Google does ties back to supporting that in some way. Even the self-driving car is physical manifestation of their search engine with paid ranking.
Too many ISPs and networks can't be bothered to handle abuse complaints, especially if they think they're too important to suffer any consequences. If we're going to put billions of Idiot of Things into the IPv6 address space soon, this all needs to be automated. That means a standardized and automated means of reporting problems, automated means for an ISP to detect that the problem is happening, and the ability to automatically block customers until the problem is resolved. Networks who can't be bothered to participate or who create false-positives should be entered into public voluntary routing blacklists, much like those used to track spam-friendly ISPs. It's the only way to handle tens of millions of attacks quickly. (Google may go offline for a week when this is implemented, but I'm sure they'll get around to joining the party.)
So some registrars are displaying e-mail addresses at images to prevent automated harvesting, and those images are harvested with less than perfect reliability. It sounds 100% blame should be put on those registrars for implementing a solution that breaks things to fix nothing.
There's a reason why pair programming studies are rare - it generally doesn't work. It has to be a specific type of task with the right people doing it. Good programmers will grab somebody for opinions as needed. Mandate full-time pairing and most of your staff will leave. The remaining two people will be the data for yet another report about how awesome pairing is.
By my calculations, Comcast lost several years of my business totaling about $10000 because they refused to give me the contract I wanted. They wanted me to pay all installation fees, all equipment fees, accept speeds as low as zero, and still be held to a massive early termination fee for 3 years. There must be one hell of a commission on that 3 year ETF.
Lets put this FAIL sticker on any project claiming that Big Data will solve problems that are aren't related to data. Big Data won't fix lazy inventory presentation, it won't fix high prices, it won't fix the broken Flash animations on your web page, it won't sweep the floor, and it won't make barely paid employees helpful experts.
Low and midrange phones usually support just the one most popular LTE band in each sales region. That causes severe congestion on that one channel in urban areas. 3G towers are being converted to LTE in the US so the phone's decision to drop down to a slower rate makes it worse.
Apple has always been just as buggy as anyone else. From the Apple ][ with the backwards sector interleaving, all the way to today. Serious bugs were left unfixed for years. It didn't matter as long as it made a good demo.
The difference is the walled garden. There was a time when you could buy 3rd party products to patch or replace Apple's. Some even posted free patches and productivity apps. That's gone and it took a lot of solutions with it. Your OS is digitally signed, the UI enforces one workflow, your apps have been screened for strict compliance, and your data might not belong to you as much as you think it does. Even root access on desktop computers is being phased out. A lack of workarounds makes even the simplest problem a big deal. Knowing that Apple is actively blocking solutions, as if you don't own what you bought, is frustrating as hell.
I had a Sprint Galaxy S2 a long time ago. This WiMAX version was notorious for EMPing itself due to badly placed antennas. The GPS sensor would gradually die and the capacitive button sensor would go crazy. After several replacements, Samsung starting sending it back with the technically correct description of "working normally." Samsung and Sprint both said I should buy a new S3 to fix it.
My experience is that, thanks to crappy software, cell phone batteries last one year. That's it. Just one year. A LiPo battery is good for about 300 to 500 full charge cycles. When the shovelware from Google and the phone maker run the battery dead by the end of each night, you're doing a full charge cycle every day. When that shovelware is buggy for a few months and running the battery dead in the afternoon, that's 1.5 to 2 charge cycles per day. I think I've just purchased my last fancy phone with a permanent battery. The next one has a removable battery or it's dirt cheap.
microSD card isn't negotiable. I need offline storage.
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