Posts by bonkers

'The Apprentice' is a load of old codswallop, says biz prof

Re: How would the professor know though?

well put. Its an outrage that Sugar puts himself forward as some sort of computer guru, his philosophy always was simply beating the shit out of suppliers - for most of them it was their last deal. His affordable PC breakthrough was a fire sale of ill-conceived non-compatible PC things.

That said, I do find his judgement good, he sees through most or all of the cuntestants pretty easily.

As others bemoan, something with the germ of an original idea and some real progression would be so much better than all the vapid marketing bollocks.

Apple threatens ANOTHER Samsung patent lawsuit

Re: Another one?

"legal beagles" - what a fantastic strapline.

For those that don't have a tradition of fox hunting - the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable according to Oscar Wilde, beagles are the repulsive pack dogs that live in compounds eating the discarded carcasses of stillborn farm animals.

Once in a while, when their masters decide, they get to tear a real live functioning animal to shreds.

Not much like patent lawyers then...

The future of cinema and TV: It’s game over for the hi-res hype

Re: interlacing

Downvoted twice - any reason?

I can't see why, its a balanced presentation of the case for and against interlacing. Interlacing is an easy existing method of increasing framerate at the expense of "specmanship" resolution, but there are issues with exactly what information it holds that make it difficult to know how best to upscale or interpolate the video.

interlacing

The article makes a good case for higher framerates and I agree totally. However we already have a solution that will halve the pixel count and double the framerate - its our old friend interlacing - a 1080i (note i not p) screen is what we need, within the existing frameworks, then move to higher non-interlaced framerates.

Interlacing is a really good method, only if the frames are shot at 48/50/60fps, like with a video camera - its rubbish if the source is 24fps film since the second field is simply delivered late. Interlacing with say 2 x 540 line (1080i) conveniently bridges the dilemna of motion and detail since on static shots its indistinguishable from 1080p.

It is justifiably unpopular in the codec world because you don't know if the two fields are part of a single exposed image or if they are two exposures, there is no easy way to benefit from the second field - shot at a different time - when trying to convert from i to p. . Also converting 1080p to 1080i looks blurry and is a waste of time since the temporal information is missing.

Charlie Miller to tell Vegas punters how to hack your car

read on

The OBD~II connector is a good starting point to probe the in-car system, that bit of it that you are attacking, directly. There are several papers that document how to move such an attack onto a corrupted music file, and then on to a fully wireless exploit through inevitable flaws in Bluetooth stacks. The killer is that once you can send CAN packets around you can entirely reprogram most things in the car - assuming you can get through the "hobbyist" grade security.

Try googling and reading the document titled: cars-usenixsec2011.pdf

"We modified a WMA audio file such that, when burned onto a CD, plays perfectly on a PC but sends arbitrary CAN packets of our choosing when played by our car’s media player".

They went on from there to a number of wireless attacks, the time-to-break depends on a number of factors, mentioned in the paper and hey, not a single hammer was used in the whole exercise.

BT boss QUITS telecoms giant for front-bench gov job

Re: Unelected

Absolutely, loathsome scum the lot of them.

Are we going to get carpet-bombed with shite advertising concepts for trade and investment now?

Going under the knife? Avoid Fridays. Trust us, we asked a doctor

black wednesday

Fridays are bad but death rates rise 6% in one day on Black Wednesday - in June, when the new crop of junior doctors are unleashed. Still, you can't moan too much, it is free after all.

COLD FUSION is BACK with 'anomalous heat' claim

Re: Reputations...

Why did you get downvoted for well-researched unbiased input?

Its easy to say that these people are idiots, they clearly aren't - though it is possible they have been duped.

I'm rather hoping they haven't.

Re: Sure..

Thanks for that - glad to hear its in use now, took a while though didn't it?

Where's all the cheap Titanium then? Surely anything is better than the existing Ti process. I shall look it up,

thanks again.

Re: Has anyone actually read the paper?

> Nonsense. There's nothing like enough energy there to rule out chemical processes.

have a look at my earlier comment and calculations. The energy density in the reaction vessel is beyond Hydrogen.

It cannot be chemical but it might be electrical with a sneak wire.

Re: "It's presumably converting its mass into energy."

small addendum, sorry... the chamber volume was 20mm bore, so my worst case figure is now 263 MJ/L

Still 1.8 times better than the best though.

Re: "It's presumably converting its mass into energy."

sorry - it cannot be down to stored CHEMICAL energy in the device. The whole point is that it is stored NUCULAR energy.

Re: "It's presumably converting its mass into energy."

My calculations suggest it is really converting mass to energy:

The average energy output was 816 Watts - this was calculated using questionable methods but importantly the control (dummy cylinder) when fed with 810W produced a very similar temperature.

The average power input was 235W, the test duration 116 hours.

Therefore the device showed a nett energy output of 67kWh or 243MJ. simples.

The reaction chamber volume was quite small - a 5mm bore 33cm long.

The secret powder that was in there was measured as 0.3g only - barely a coating. The researchers rounded this up to a figure of 1 gram. I will evaluate also a worst case figure of 57 grams - if the bore was packed with solid Nickel.

The energy densities are quite astonishing, considering petrol is the most energy-dense common substance at 50MJ/kg, with hydrogen (in any phase) on its own at 145MJ/kg.

I calculate 800 Giga-Joules/kg if the 0.3g figure is to be believed.

My minimum (using 57g) is still 4200MJ/kg - about 29x solid hydrogen.

the researchers claim 183600 MJ/kg - with a few other worst cases in there, I make it 242GJ/kg.

It could be all down to "fiddling the electric" - but it cannot be down to stored energy in the device.

Re: Sure..

I'm not sure you're right on that. If you patent, for starters it lasts only 20 years, secondly you have to reveal the details - then others can extend the work possibly putting you out of business with their improvements.

Take Rolls-Royce, they only patent what others can deduce from reverse engineering, if the secret is hidden in the manufacturing process they keep it trade secret.

Look also at "the Cambridge Process" for producing cheap Titanium - patented, sold to Carlyle group by Blair and shelved indefinitely to protect vested interests.

Re: Please pass the Fluke TrueRMS DVOM

Good point, you read it so I don't have to (I'm at work)

Assuming no fraud with the meter, like changing the sense resistor, then a simple long duration test will soon exceed the kWh/kg of known battery technology. The DC-in DC-out test is fundamentally even harder to defraud.

Why are so many commentards getting violent over the matter?

Be cool, do the tests, play no part in the screeching self-censorship that paid science has to abide by.

If you've bought DRM'd film files from Acetrax, here's the bad news

we told you so...

how about, expiring DRM formats give you a voucher to redeem against a good old DVD? - you still have to cover the mechanical and distribution cost of the DVD, but then you get a hard copy.

Alternatively, a token that allows you to download an "illegal" DRM-free copy of the film without risk of prosecution, since you've paid the royalty?

Securo-boffins uncover new GLOBAL cyber-espionage operation

Re: cache poisoning

sorry, that was bollocks.

I just read the paper properly, the researchers call it "the Safe campaign" and do not mention safenet except as a directory name. The disclaimer is simply to apologise for having to use the word, the report has to mention where the thing installs itself.

cache poisoning

Well, whist the malware does sometimes install itself into a directory called "safenet" (see copied text below), I think its a bit naughty to seize upon this for a name, it's a form of cache poisoning, despite the grovelling disclaimer. An internal name whilst it was being researched, fine, but someone should have pulled it out of the publication and kept the normal academic respect. Can you imagine if they had reason to call it MSword, or iTune?

The malware creators used the term "safenet" as a decoy and this should not be perpetuated.

here is what it does:

If User Account Control (UAC) is active, SafeExt.dll will be injected into

explorer.exe. Otherwise, the file is copied to %Program Files%\Internet

Explorer\SafeNet\ and registered as a Browser Helper Object (BHO).

Yet another Cabinet-level ID card farce

Paper driving licenses - I've had the same one for 24 years even though I've moved 3 times since then , and filled in the new address and sent it to DVLC to have points put on it :-( . It still comes back with a few more handwritten endorsements. I hate things that put you the wrong side of the law after some stupid time-out expires - i.e. for no valid reason.

I love the use of the cooling tower from Brazil - still the best film of all time.

UK faces hacking doom, but think of the money, security startups!

Cyber

OED definition:Cyber- relating to or characteristic of the culture of computers, information technology, and virtual reality.

Cyber attack and cyber security are reasonable terms for a minister to use, they're good at baby-kissing and, one hopes, policy. not IT.

Ok cyber-terms not as definitive as infosec - but even that's geekily overabbreviated, a bit too "street" for a politician.

We should welcome this initiative as an unusually well thought-out plan marrying the traditional UK strengths in this, to a bold position predicting that IT security will be a key technology in the near future, more so even than now and that government needs to get involved to put the UK in a position where we have a safer cyberspace for rent.

Furious Stephen Fry blasts 'evil' Reg and 'TW*T' Orlowski

GPS

BTW, on GPS, "nor does the process involve any relaying of signals from satellite to satellite." - sure it does, absolutely, they constantly renegotiate their local time and local position between each other, and with respect to the ground stations. Oh and it is this process that relies on the atomic clocks mistakenly attributed to the internet.

As I said in the previous comments, the latest outrage regarding Turing's machine was not very far at all off the mark, and love or hate his voice-over earnings, he does have the humility to mention he knows nothing of Riemann's conjecture, or the Zeta function. ~The fact that he is interested enough in these things to introduce them to a mainstream unfed consciousness is a big plus point, even is it goes a little wonky in the translation.

Stephen Fry explains… Alan Turing's amazing computer

Re: Am I missing something?

I also can't find much wrong in what Fry says in this instance - OK he's conflated two similar things:

The idea of a universal computing engine - the mathematical concept - which executes a defined algorithm on a (read/write) paper tape, with a few simple instructions including HALT. This is a "Turing Machine" and is enough to cast various mathematical problems in a concrete and untinkerable manner, for instance the successive approximation to a square root requires decisions and recursive calculation that cannot be easily presented as an equation. One of the great problems of the day was whether certain algorithms would complete, ever, or not - the halting problem.

The first computers were indeed hard-wired in their "instruction code", to perform key-searches for instance, they just replicated an enigma machine in its logic (using specialised "instructions" for instance to rotate the code wheel number 3) and accelerated the output. - a bit like microcode within today's CPU's.

The idea of a reprogrammable computer is really a return to the purity of the universal Turing machine, where arbitrary problems including the enigma replication can be performed, but with a less optimised and more general instruction set. That luxury could not be afforded at station X - they needed all the efficiency they could get.

It's kind of hard to get all that detail into the short conversational statement from Mr Fry - but his value is in introducing the interesting concepts, even being interested in the first place. I will applaud that.

Nature pulls ‘North Korean radioactivity’ story

Streisand effect?

What has this story got to do with staring at the back of a spoon and noticing that you look like Barbara Streisand?

Helium: Can it prevent the onset of Shingles?

Re: More explanation please

I don't think that's the answer, the drag heating will be the same, fuelled as it is by viscosity - and note that it heats the gas not the platter or head.

The thermal conductivity of Helium is indeed 5x better but this is a forced-air cooling as the gas will be whipped around - the heat will be conducted away by bulk mass flow not by diffusion. OK there is diffusion across the boundary layer to the casework, but this should be a small term.

So, thanks for the suggestion, but the question remains open as far as I can see it.

Re: More explanation please

I don't get it either - just looked-up the viscosity of Helium gas, which I had expected to be smaller due to its lesser degrees of freedom, but its the same more or less as Nitrogen. So I can't see how the platter friction will have been reduced.

My aerodynamics is limited, there are more factors in there than pure viscosity, but to me it looks mostly like a pure shear load of head plane against disk plane - which is viscosity by definition.

I'm sure they won't have spent years developing stuff that doesn't even work on paper, so what is the magic factor they are able to manipulate in this technology then?

Dotcom's Mega smacks back: Our crypto's not crap

Re: dedupe

The way to de-dupe as suggested above is to run a hash of the original, say SHA-1 at 256 bit length and store it "in the clear" . This does allow an identical file to be matched to yours, and copyright owners could make a rainbow table of all their stuff and detect copies, but, it only takes one bit to be different, say in the metadata, and the hash will be greatly different. This same property will cause any attempt at de-dupe to fail also since it needs bit-identical duplicate files.

Perhaps a method a little like Shazam's - taking a "fingerprint" of the file before encryption, so things that sound similar measure similarly. A corresponding process for video might look a the overall structure of the compressed video, its entropy versus time or something - again allowing similar fingerprints to be matched.

Of course, these approaches allow the rights-holders to trawl through the hashes (that would be extracted under court order) and identify stuff that looks a bit like theirs. Proving it is another matter - for that you need to be given a key, so for it to work as a file-sharer service then Mega must never own the keys, you have to ask the folder owner each time. So what if big copyright set up a load of shill accounts?

Intel bets the farm on touch-enabled 'convertible and detachable' Ultrabooks

Re: Have you ever tried 'alternative' keyboards?

If i cuold jst get ths fukcng keybrd to tlpe more thean tywo words correctly in a row then thst wold be a grte mp[rvoemnt

Lenovo proclaims PC victory, re-orgs to take on Apple

Re: Thinkpad is a revered brand

Thinkpads are revered - but not in any way that a marketing droid could ever understand - they are of robust good quality, they work properly, and they don't make you look like you're aspiring to be some poncy "brand model" - with the right cufflinks, watch, shirt etc.

It seems to have needed the CEO himself to plough through all the marketing bollocks and arrive at this simple conclusion, make good stuff, let a well-informed and un-selfconscious customer base buy it.

PGP, TrueCrypt-encrypted files CRACKED by £300 tool

Re: As Mr ChriZ said

Would that really work? - it is windows that deals with "resurrection" from hibernate, and I don't think it has the option within this low-level code to put up a screen and ask you for the password? Maybe it does.

Clearly the answer is to type the key in every time you return to the computer.

I find yellow sticky-notes are useful aides to remembering these sorts of tediously long numbers.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum FAILS latest radio noise rules SHOCK

"abject" ?

Its a marginal fail, its only 4 or 5dB above the limit, and at a couple of spot frequencies. A few minor modifications would fix it - either an "R" or a ferrite bead in the clock line, or a little work on the grounding scheme. I've seen much worse initial plots than this. Oh, and the emissions above 100MHz should be fine, look a the plot, there is no energy in the higher frequencies, it is just the test equipment noise floor. OK there might be problems with spurii and harmonics of the UHF modulator, once it gets enabled again. Not bad for the time and rather exceptional for our Clive - or Jim Westwood (see Reg's passim) to give him a proper name.

After 50 years, Europe gets one patent to rule them all

step #1, one target.

Whether part of a deep conspiracy or simply by the law of unintended consequences, this single system is a big fat target for unification with the USPTO "own stuff that already exists" process. There will come a time soon where almost everything sold will attract an "IP" tax going back to America. They have invented the most powerful and profitable machine ever made: The Lawyer.

Oh, and whilst on the Tolkein theme, a post of mine from July:

The Enemy still lacks one thing to give him strength and knowledge to beat down all resistance, break the last defences, and cover all the lands in a second darkness. He lacks the One Ring... So he is seeking it, seeking it, and all his thought is bent on it

Schmidt: Microsoft will never be as cool as the Gang of Four

Re: Rage on

But it did say that the gang of four mentioned were cool.

So I thought that could only mean the stuttering guitars and bonkers Trotskyist invective of 1978 Leeds-based band Gang of Four - chief influences of REM and Nirvana.

OK i thought it might be something to do with Chinese political history, OK, but then I hear that its a reference to some dad-dancing poncy overbloated corporate entities.

Cool - In a way that brands simply fucking aren't.

Rage off.

Amazon makes BEELLIONS from British customers, pays pennies in tax

Nice one Guv.

I like that they chose to publish the figures as they are entitled to do. Sends a good message. Too long have government types been scared by these guys. I suspect only public shame will bring their position round - all loophole legislation gets steered round if there is a will to do so. It levels the field for the other, smaller players who pay tax and don't squirrel it away into Bermuda. I don't care if amazon leave the UK market (the "deadweight" argument advanced elsewhere) - the same goods will still be sold, but with a small premium to the taxman that falls pretty fairly on those with the disposable income for these inessential items.

Assault on battery

You shouldn't really use the chargers that only do pairs, well they're OK as long as you use two equally discharged and similar capacity cells, but that can be quite an ask. Oh, and you should take them off charge after the allotted time, the trickle charge can be pretty high - if its more than the "water cycle" in the NiMH can handle then it will erode capacity. the not-quite-best cells (i.e. 2300mAh not 3000mAh) are more robust against overcharge.

its best to spend (shit, my powerex charger is £60 - I thought it was £30) on a decent charger/cycler. - it allows you to nurture the cells and alerts you to dud ones, they will go dud all of a sudden. thanks for the torch tip.

Boffins biff over ‘twisted radio’

Re: Rebecca M & The fundamental things apply

Similarly, minor typo's aside, the post was a good breakdown of the four information-carrying aspects of an EM wave. In particular, the introduction of the uncertainty principle as an explanation for Shannon's theorem was interesting - you know that it has no other basis in any physical law (afaik) - it ties in broadly with entropy, but apart from these two, and possibly the uncertainty principle, there is no physics that links the concept of information with anything else. Information does however seem to be "a conserved quantity" of some sort, and there should ultimately be some new physics coming from it.

Boffins explain research with interpretive dance

Frank Zappa

The late great Frank Zappa has first dibs on this concept. It was he who remarked

"talking about music is like dancing about architecture"

I can't help thinking there is a trace of this resignation creeping into the mindset of these physicists and technologists, forever being asked to explain their work but without confusing the lay audience with concepts they don't understand already. Has anyone seen the recent Horizon series? - might as well be a radio show for all the benefit they get from the moving wallpaper. Why not explain it using the full bandwidth, sure everyone will miss most of it, but it gives a real feeling for the subject. How about getting musicians to play, and physicists to describe, using whatever they usually use.

Skype touts FREE* Wi-Fi across the UK

Re: nope, totally lost here...

Never mind the digital economy act and the copyright liabilities it brings, what if your "customers" start downloading kiddieporn, jihadist encrypted files, all that shit - you would be in for quite a lot of difficult questions, never mind having your computers confiscated. At least this method ensures there is repudiation for you and an electronic trail for them.

Oh, and why are the other posters so uptight about "their" bandwidth? - is it not genuinely a free resource - assuming your use does not max it out.

Intel launches ARM battery life Windows 8 Atom chip

security

Glad to see Intel have got over themselves with regard to on-chip security, and the unique ID that this requires.

Similarly glad to see that they've kept the x86 backwards compatibility, unlike ARM, so you can get away with writing code just the once.

Half of Milky Way's mass found in million-Kelvin gas cloud

Re: Cool arcticle

Your're new here aren't you?

Glad you like it. Take some time to thumb through the back-issues, for instance the LHC coverage.

Berkeley Lab proposes 4D clock

multipole energy loss

because these are ions in a ring they have a multipole moment, like dipole but higher order, lets say 12-pole for 12 atoms. This will radiate electromagnetic energy as the ring rotates, you could pick-up a signal much as the way a gear-tooth magnetic sensor does in your car. You can detect the rotation, hence energy is being lost, and it will slow down to a stop.

Reg readers serve up bacon sarnie amuse-bouche

Re: VBS

Wouldn't that make it, sort of, more difficult to eat?

Anyway, I missed the competition, but here's mine - BLT sushi:

a tortilla /burrito thing, with bacon rashers sliced into strips, shredded lettuce and tomato, mayonnaise, carefully rolled into a spiral, pinned with a couple of cocktails sticks then chilled. Then you slice it into 8mm sushi slices.

Got a BMW? Thicko thieves can EASILY NICK IT with $30 box

Re: Blame Game

It is in part the fault of the others on the list - in that the OBD standard does not call upon any encryption requirement - it was designed to allow californian cops to read whether your car had declared to you that the emissions limiting equipment was faulty. - so the same readers had to work in perpetuity.

They could have designed it better, even to firewall off just the compulsory protocol commands.

the French have recently proposed anti-competetive legislation to the effect that all french garages shall be able to reprogram ECU's of any sort without having to be registered dealers and essentially under a FRAND type agreement. Though good for competition, its impossible for security - well the concept of a trusted dealer was never a good one, now it is busted we may get tools that require a session into the heart of the OEM in order to decrypt the protocols.

Cable offers to shower UK biz in taxpayer gold to stimulate growth

ploughshares into swords

Its sounds like a good thing to spend some money on engineering, but from the nationalisation days onwards it has always been hopelessly misdirected. It is only the dinosaur industries that can be bothered to fill out the paperwork. How surprised am I that 'our' prime merchants of death, BAE, look to be first in the queue? They want to train more apprentices, then guess what, they'll be wanting orders or all these new puppies will have to be drowned.

I say we should use the money to retrain them to design working, fixed-cost, fixed timescale competitive products for the commercial market - skills they lack in abundance at present.

I maintain that every engineer that crosses onto the dark side costs the country all of the useful things they might otherwise have made. They are a finite resource, let's get them making great new things that don't, intentionally at least, kill people.

Bruce Willis didn't Buy Hard: His girls can't inherit his iTunes

Re: Is that the sound....

totally agree, I've got a pile of original stones and beatles, some are even in mono.

should the other parents be having "shit taste" or "shite taste"?

Thanks ever so much Java, for that biz-wide rootkit infection

Re: After Flash and Acrobat, now it is the turn of Java

Firstly, an excellent article, and surely one of the first published accounts of the thing and how to kill it – and a rallying call to common sense, a Reg campaign.

Secondly, how could this happen and can we fix it – I mean do we need to replace the concept of a sandbox? Do we know whether address space randomisation or no-execute bits would have foiled the core exploit? I suspect that even with these hardware protections, exploits will still be found. It is a fundamental problem associated with running arbitrary code.

I like the post above, suggesting secure boot and a keychain, this would stop the rootkit infection, in a very obvious and uncompromisable manner. I think PC’s should come with a wire link to make the boot eeprom a ROM. Well that and the OS needs to be signed and the signature checked by the ROM code, standard stuff from then on. The problem is that Java would then need to be signed, for it to work doing its “day job” - and unless they can then sign all java apps we’re still ruined.

How about only corporate java gets signed and allowed to run – is that possible? Javablock will restrict Java to certain sites only, but its not as good as signed code.

The worry in all of this is that you only found this nasty because it was a shouty one – how many other discreet “sleeper” infections could be out there?

Super-critical Java zero-day exploits TWO bugs

HTF do you kill the auto-updater zombie thing?

in Windows 7 (its a work machine) I have tried the control-panel, java, updates, automatically check for updates - but it ignores you. Revisiting the updates tab shows the automatic updates as enabled, again. OK they don't install, but every time i reconnect the machine, java is there.

doesn't this seriously nix the entire concept of a sandbox? - i know they're supposed to work, but this lot are the first and foremost, and its never worked, and never will.

New rule on blood-soaked metals in mobes is POINTLESS

Re: No Tantalum

Erm, yes they are, and have been for a while - sparked by the Tantalum shortage of 2000. Ceramic capacitors have slowly crept into Tantalum territory - with high value (10uF and above) low cost parts. They are much better electrically - 20 milli-Ohms of ESR is impossible in a Tant. The other thing is that power supplies are moving into the many MHz of switching speed, and this needs less bulk decoupling. I haven't seen any Tants on new equipment for a few years now. Even Tantalum's abundant daughter, Niobium, finally developed to a point where its as good as Tantalum (in capacitors), doesn't have much market share. Its over, baby, better park all that Tantalum next to the Europium (was used in TV phosphors).

Coming to a cloud near you: dirty laundry

why not?

Amusing point regarding loading the wretched thing. However, I would like the option of tinkering with the cycle, why do we accept only a few options on this and dishwasher programmes, when we have so much control and choice over other machines. Whether this is used to save water, or clean better, why not allow user recipes?

For instance a low temperature wash is very green, but you need a blast of heat every few washes (or just for one of the fills) to kill bugs like S. Aureus.

New US rule aims to crack down on Congolese capacitors

Tantalum

Tantalum capacitors look to be on the way out - I don't see them in new phone designs, and haven't used any in my designs for a few years. They are expensive, have quite a high ESR and can catch fire. High value ceramic capacitors are now commonplace and pretty much ideal components. power supply frequencies are increasing also - this allows smaller values to be used, tiltng the market towards ceramic again.