Posts by Anton Ivanov

Intel takes out $1.25bn insurance policy

Re 1.25 billion

Who do you think owns the 64bit x86 set? The holy ghost? By 5 years the patents which AMD filed when they worked on that idea will be all filed and active and by that time very little stuff will still be running in 32 bits.

Intel hastily implemented (with LOTS of bugs) the pre-release spec without the final errata and a couple of instructions. That got their foot through the door, but unless they cross-license they will find out that the door has a hydraulic "close" pusher attached to it.

AMD is in a similar position with SSE versions from 2 onwards.

So they both have no choice but to crosslisense. Classic case of mutually assured destruction.

Government consults on possible £500,000 data breach fines

If the small company sole business is breaking the act?

If the small company sole business is breaking the act (as was the case recently with a couple of agencies) 10% is a very reasonable fee to do business. Almost like a licensing regime.

SandForce gets OCZ SSD design win

Consumer? My a***

Looking at current pricing for SSDs OCZ is anything, but consumer pricing. Enthusiast - maybe, but definitely not consumer.

Android's delicate guts ripped apart

Motorola as usually is not up with the times

Screws? How prehistoric...

I recently had to repair a Nokia E65 which fell "down the drain". Disassemble, wash in deionised water, reassemble. There is a stage in assembling the slider which basically requires hammering it in place with the spring held by some black magic. Nearly impossible to reproduce by hand and definitely impossible to do without leaving some screwdriver/wedge traces. Anyway, IIRC the damn thing had only 2 screws altogether and none of them particularly critical. Rest was held together mostly by friction. Way cheaper to assemble than the countless motorola screws. Ditto for Apple using glue.

Europe welcomes Dell's Mac Mini Zino HD

Windows not removeable

If it was not running Windows it may have made my Xmas shopping list. If it was using the 330 - definitely. As this is not the case, I will stick to assembling one myself from whatever I can get cheapest off the boxing-day sales.

Libel reform campaigners seek £10k damages cap

Too sensible

This is too sensible to be accepted by the British legal system.

Legless woman falls onto Boston train tracks

What are the red lines

Hmm... I wonder what kind of software are they running on this... These lines look suspiciously like the debug output of gmotion...

Symbian channels iPhone love into Android scrap

Re: Symbian and WinMo both falling, Winmo will hit the dirt first

Right conclusion - wrong logic. It is the fallacy of "develop for today and ignore the trend".

Both Windows Mobile and Symbian failed to correctly project the development of specialised chippery as well as software and silicon cost curves. As a result they spent a clinically insane amount of effort and money to make their OS-es work on a hypothetical target phone which has a very dumb radio and a large portion of the wireless stack runs on the main CPU. This appeals to both vendors and operators on some strange kinky low level which I have never managed to understand because it contradicts basic silicon economics. Investment into such a hard-realtime system has a constant cost (in fact increasing exponentially with complexity). It does not drop down with time like the cost of silicon and specialised systems.

At the same time Google and Apple went for a play which was based on the real state of the silicon economics. Their bet was that the silicon for a specialised radio+stack will go down in price according to the general rules of economics. This is exactly what happened. Same for general purpose chippery for the main CPU.

So Symbian is a dead man walking. So is WinMob. Both are zombies for the same reason - they have been so heavily bastardised to fit a hard realtime envelope that the development and maintenance now have a an ever-increasing cost associated to it which is much higher than Google or Apple cost basis. Google and Apple are already guaranteed to win the smartphone war on pure economical merit and the only thing that is going to change in the future will be the "border" between smart and dumb going down as Symbian/Winmob costs continue to stay constant (or even increase) while Google/Apple solutions costs continue going down according to basic laws of economics.

That was something that was possible to forecast 5 years back. In fact, I have tried arguing this with mobile phone designers and all I saw was them going irrational and foaming at the mouth extolling the virtues of doing it hard hard hard realtime on a single piece of silicon. Oh well, it is their jobs down the line so it will be them paying for their delusions...

Kingston SSD Now V 40GB boot drive

Haleluya...

Finally, a drive for us commoners...

I will buy that straight away if they drop the capacity down to 20-30G (if possible with an IDE interface). I need at least 3-4 replacement drives for my PCs and laptops at the moment and if this goes just a bit down in price (with capacity still above 10G) it will perfectly fit the bill. I have 5TB+ on the house servers so the only reason I need a local drive in a workstation is speed and working hybernation (unfortunately hybernation and diskless do not mix). I tried the low-end FDMs and they s*** really really bad so having a proper flash drive option is definitely a welcome addition to my Xmas shopping list.

Spain cuts off 3m pre-pay mobiles

How many of these are tourists?

I used to keep a set of SIMs for Spain. One of them is probably still valid and has a few EU of credit on it...

In fact, I even have an old Nokia 6xxx series from a rather unlucky trip where all of us forgot our chargers and found out that the Spanish telecoms operators have eliminated Samsung from their gestalt. All and every single one of them. And that is not supposed to be a cartel practice ya know... It just happened... Suddenly... Without them agreeing between themselves...

World's first iPhone worm Rickrolls angry fanbois

Re: Arrrghh!

Quote: Seriously though, why the hell do consumer devices have to have default root/admin/super-user passwords?

They do not. And apple did not. It used what should be used to manage consumer devices - certificates and public keys. The password is not accessible and not exposed in the default config. It becomes an issue only once you have hacked the iPhone. Prior to that authorisation to install software, etc is all done via public key cryptography. As far as having different passwords per device, I do not quite see the justification on wasting software development effort on this if it is not an interface that will ever be exposed to the user.

Is this the world's dirtiest PC?

This is nothing...

Damn, I wish I had pictures from 10 years back. In those days the CPU did not require fans so the gunk inside could build up indefinitely. Nowdays it builds up until the CPU fan dies, just like in this picture.

Sharp Aquos LC40LE700E 40in LED-backlit TV

It was not a 70's rock group

It was a 80-es pop one to coin that idiotic "Big in Japan" moto. To be more specific - Alphaville. They should probably get a lifetime award for the silliest texts in a song successfully to achieve No 1.

Suzuki unwraps Mini-like plug-in hybrid

Finally, about bloody time

Due to taxation peculiarities, Japan has managed to polish the 660cc engine to an absolute perfection. Both Suzuki and Daihatsu examples in this class are capable of delivering crazy amounts of torque and power-to-mass ratios. Taxation used to put a power limit on it so none of these delivers more than around 60bhp. These engines can happily pull along a car of swift/sirion/micra size even in motorway conditions while leaving enough space and weight budget to fit an electric motor and battery. Their only downside is that they need some tweaking to fit the pollution reqs for EU and USA.

It is surprising why it bloody took both of them so long to use one of the prime pieces of engineering IP in their portfolios. Finally, about bloody time.

Historian slams 'absolutely crazy' UK time zone

Re: Why not

You should not give such blasphemous ideas.

Next thing you will get the idea of schoolchildren having a life and childhood as they have in the rest of Europe. There they start between 7 and 8 so that they can finish by 1pm and have an afternoon to play. This includes countries which just about see some sunshine after 10am in winter by the way. Oh, and they start formal lessons at 7 as well. Another blasphemous idea.

Nokia sues Apple over iPhone

Re: Sounds like extorsion

Actually it is not. The license fees for most of that are pretty much determined by the GSMA and other trade bodies. If Nokia asked an exorbitant fee Apple could and should have taken the case with the GSMA and the EU competition commission. If they have not, well sorry, can't help it, Lazarus Long quote on stupidity comes to mind.

Prof: Extremists tend to dominate debates

You cannot put a compromise on a banner

The statement of the bleeding obvious.

You cannot put a compromise on a banner and gather the crowds under it to storm the Bastille. Compromises allow sustaining, not advancement.

Same as the positive thinking. You cannot make a crowd throw itself onto the bayonettes via a feel-good fuzzy positive thinking message. They have to hate to do that. Similarly, if you want a group to create something revolutionary you have to give them a pet hate object. A golden standard of "how this should not be done". They can from there on derive the "how to do it" themselves and they will often do it much better than a "positive idea" formulated by a visionary.

Telcos double down on netbooks with Windows 7

Oops I did it again

I thought we already saw that during the dot.bomb boom and this business model failed the reality check. Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.

AMD revs Athlons for Windows 7 assault

45W is still way too much

45W is still way too much. Add to that 20-30W worth of wimpy IGP video and other chippery, 5W of hard drive and it is enough to cook an average mini-ITX case. You need at most 40W TDP from the whole system, not just the CPU.

This will just about do to deliver a reasonably silent mATX, but smaller - forget it. It is simply not fit for purpose for small form factor PCs. It needs to go way less than that.

Freecom Hard Drive XS

Re: Faster USB under Windows

The more interesting question here is "HOW"?

If you look at the graph they all scream the same thing "USB Bus Limits". So in order to overcome it you either have to compress or to somehow tweak the protocol. Interesting... which one are they actually doing.

Boffins fawn over dirt cheap server clusters

Nothing new, move along

Not surprising. I have been using in-order (Via up till recently) cpus for servers for 8 years now. They can run circles around a Xeon as long as you do not force them to do heavy computation.

By the way, Intel and AMD are actually better now than they used to be. The difference was truly staggering 8 years back.

In 2002 a Via C3 800 delivered with ease >= 60MB/s ext2 filesystem performance on a RAID 1 software set while consuming 7W (motherboard without disks). An OEM edition of an Intel Xeon 2x2 (2 cpus, 2 threads each) barely crawled at 20MB/s while consuming 200W+ (again motherboard only). That is more than 60 times difference not in Intel's favour. So looking at the graph there has been a considerable improvement in Intel's finest. However, it is still not good enough to beat an in-order CPU doing a simple IO-bound task.

Sun tunes its VirtualBox

Why break a good product?

VirtualBox is an excellent Type 2 supervisor. Why spoil a perfectly good product trying to break into a saturated market? It is generally better than Xen (time to duck to avoid flames) as a desktop virtualisation product. If used on a Linux host it definitely feels faster and more responsive - on par with Vmware. It can continue to be better than Xen on the desktop and be the viable competition to Vmware for that market. Why, oh why screw it trying to break into the "bare metal" market where it is not going to succeed anyway?

FCC flooded with anti-net neut letters

Austine, do you have an attitude problem?

Austine, with all due respect the Internet has not been neutral since the mid-1990es. Cisco and co are defending the possibility for it to continue to develop along the current architectural lines instead of being legislated to go on a strange tangent into the big nowhere.

Even in those prehistoric days every node connected to the backbone was already running either WFQ or some form of priority queueing on the link making it very non-neutral. Every router then (and most now) was prioritising traffic and is still doing so. Every Linux box out there is strictly non-neutral unless you tune it to be. It will perform those obscene and blasphemous prioritisation of traffic by default. This by the way includes all el reg servers including the ones emitting net neutrality rants. It is also by the way one of the reasons why it actually works so good. Not that windows is very different nowdays. Even its rather lame network stack will perform such prioritisation as well.

Anyway, technical realities aside, there are also the business ones. I ran an ISP as far back as 1998 whose business model was based around it being non-neutral and being able to provide a differentiated service for the different types of traffic. Users came to us in flocks from other ISPs because the user experience was way better than what they provided.

If used in the interest of the user non-neutrality is a key in providing better experience.

That is what Cisco and most other vendors are advocating for - not to throw the baby out with the bath water. The Internet is non-neutral at present, has been non-neutral for the last 15 years and better remain non -neutral. There is nothing wrong with it provided that: THE NON-NEUTRALITY IS DRIVEN BY THE END-USER AND IS IN THE END-USER INTEREST.

In order for this to be possible the actual possibility for the net to be non-neutral should not be outlawed via legislation achieved through lobbists misrepresenting the goals and aims. Just like in your subtitle. It is a classic example of what I am talking about: non-neutral != closed and neutral !=open. That is a deliberate misrepresentation. Just like half of the neutral/non-neutral debate.

In fact we should all applaude Cisco, Motorola and the others who finally intervened in this exchanges of lies and misrepresentations. It was about bloody time.

Hitachi GST whacks Seagate in the Savvios

Re: What a waste

Write cache - yes. It is definitely turned off by most RAID controllers.

Read cache AFAIK usually is not.

Frankly, 64M vs 16M is not likely to make a hell lot of difference in most production deployments. It will make a difference only if you have a clued up sysadmin who have optimised the layout by hand or if you have spent a hefty wad of cash on a system that does that for you. That is the minority of sites. The majority will just stick the lot in a driver array and format it which means that metadata (journals, indexes, allocation tables) and data will end up on the same disk (courtesy of flat RAID5/6). As a result any data access to a single disk will always be accompanied by some metadata access which together will thrash the cache out to the point where it is useless.

DARPA, Microsoft, Lockheed team up to reinvent TCP/IP

reinvent the wheel

If you use _ALL_ features in TCPv6 you get that without any problem. You need network support for a couple of them which is not there, but for that you probably need Cisco or someone else doing network kit, not MSFT. For f*** sake it took me half an hour to sit down and draft a design that can do that recently. Not like we are talking rocket science here. It is bleeding obvious.

It is sad when people cannot read the spec for something that is standardised, available and most of all _IMPLEMENTED_ by them already and instead of that do "An elefant is a mouse designed to government specifications". Not that they are alone. They are clearly in the same boat with a few others - 3GPP, ETSI and ITU come to mind.

Disney kicks 'Ho White' out of bed

Re: Disney should wind it's kneck in

They created this particular visual representation. It is by no means the best one, but it is the best known one. Same as with Winnie the Pooh.

Palm Pré arrives in Blighty

Real data usage or "no computers please, we do not want you to use the network"

Is data usage proper data (any means of using it) or it is just toying with data from the phone. If it is just "toying with data" it is a pretty bad deal.

Trojan plunders $480k from online bank account

Re: Easy to fix

That is called virtual keyboard. Not particularly successful. A couple of American banks had that introduced 2-3 years back and it was dealt with very fast.

The only two systems so far which have been successful in eliminating banking fraud 100% are:

1. Using smartcards for authentication _AND_ signing each transaction with the smartcard. Popular in jurisdictions with high hacking pressure like SA, Eastern Europe, etc. You get a an internal browser popup which shows what you are signing for and asks you for the smartcard and its pin every time. If you got one of the readers with pin entry on the reader itself the system is totally bombproof. If not, it is still generally better than most banking auth currently in use in the western world. It has the side bonus that it makes use of digital sigs so you can actually sign any document not just transaction.

2. Using the debit card as a smartcard to sign every transaction. Used by Nationwide in the UK. You are given a couple of numbers to punch in the reader and the reader generates a hash. No fraud period. Which is not surprising as it is effectively a sneakernet - there is no physical connection between the machine and the reader.

Subaru set to show stylish hybrid

Hideously complicated

Two electrical motors on an AWD? WTF?

Is this trying to win special points for making it more complicated than the Prius or what?

Either one motor and use the AWD or two motors and kill the AWD link using an electric motor on the rear axle in 4WD mode.

Anyway, I happen to service my car at a Subaru dealership (most are authorised to service Daihatsu nowdays). I always wondered why do the guys bringing in Imprezas commonly have 900£ odd bills. Looking at this example of fine design I am not wondering any more.

Michael Dell: Netbooks go sour after 36 hours

Stupid...

90%+ of people who buy netbooks buy them as second machines. This way I can have a decent desktop (not a crappy desktop replacement) for whatever I consider "decent" and carry a lightweight laptop whenever I want to go. All within the budget.

There is simply no way I am buying anything above 10 inch (proper classic 4:3 diagonal, not widescreen if possible). Same for most consumers who have a netbook. If they are going to buy something it will be a desktop to supplement it, not a laptop.

In fact, the sole thing to prevent this for businesses is the software license costs. If a business is set up for a non-microsoft or mixed environment it is definitely worth doing. In a microsoft one, the duplicate licenses for office, servers and the extra exchange cals are going to kill you.

Racerunner SSDs tap Exar dedupe tech

Re: I wonder when..

It will not...

Unless you want the bit where the SSD is housed to burn a hole in your pants.

TANSTAAFL. There ain't such thing as a free lunch. Or CPU cycle for that matter.

AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870 and 5850 DirectX 11 GPUs

I read till the bottom of the first page and stopped

I read till I reached 190W draw and 90W idle. Sorry, that is absolutely disgusting power management. If I want to buy a convection heater, I will buy a proper convection heater, not one that pretends to be a video card as well.

Disclaimer - not a single one of the systems in my house uses more than 80W total and they are perfectly usable and fit for purpose.

Giant megaships to suck 'stranded' Aussie gas fields

re: What about alternatives..?

Hmm... I somehow foresee one of these being escorted by a navy on a suck-n-run mission to a field in the Arctic or the economical zone of a "failed" nation. Failure of course can be organised... Hm... Endless opportunities...

So yeah, we do not want yeah stinking alternatives... And the fact that all nations are hastily building catapultless aircraft carriers capable of functioning in the arctic and antractic no longer seems surprising.

Honda slips motorised unicycle into e-car

Skydeck == Electric FRV

FINALLY. A proper hybrid family vehicle. If this is as practical as a FRV and drives as good as FRV count me in for one.

Trabant my a**e

This is a literal copy of one of the most popular cars in Japan - Daihatsu Mira. It probably looks closer to a Mini in real life.

IBM throws DB2 Power cluster at Ellison's Exadata

The smell of lawsuit early in the morning...

There is at least one company out there which is trying to do this for generic tasks and I bet that they have patented at least some of the underlying mechanics. So this is being done and it is quite hard by the way.

IBM has clearly gone for the low hanging fruit on this one, because they can make the database aware of the underlying system so that there is little or no migration and much less remote data access compared to a generic system.

It will be interesting who got more relevant IP. Lawyers at dawn?

Nissan demos leaning e-car

Where is the HUD and Weapons console?

That will make one hell of a vehicle for a Bond movie. Just let Q play with it for an afternoon preparing it to be his "retirement mobility scooter".

UK, France mull Photoshop fakery laws

For f... sake

Can the idiot proposing this law open his grandma's album? Or have a look at her wedding pictures? I bet all of them are retouched.

Retouching was the norm until the gruff days of the late beatles and the flower power. Did it irreversibly damage the youth of those age? I doubt it...

MAID: Where's the love?

The big MAID usage is yet to come

Some of the really cool potential applications for MAID has never managed to take off:

1. Online video media. MAID is the only cost effective way to manage the long tail for providers who do not own CDN infrastructure and use centralised delivery instead.

2. Off-site network backups. Classic MAID application.

3. Virtualised desktops and mandatory network storage (webtops). If you maintain desktops for several thousand people on a centralised array MAID-ing is an extremely good way to save energy without sacrificing performance.

All of these applications are in the class of "will happen any time now". However that any time has not happened for 5+ years straight and one of the reasons is surprise, surprise - the fact that CIOs continue to budget for RAID (or tape in the backup case) instead of MAID for all of these.

Another factor is the lack of bandwidth. If every SMB had 50M up/50Mb down a MAID based network backup service would have been commercially viable. Same for download video services, same for remote desktops for telecommuters, etc. Unfortunately the bandwidth is simply not there :(

Blind one-legged man wins arse-kicking contest

Re: Of course he had to plead guilty.

He did not.

Blindness, missing limb chunks, prescription medication and being totally inadequate after some alcohol. The odds are pretty much 9:1 that he is a diabetic.

He can claim diminished responsibility all right. In fact, I would not be so sure about the pint. Probably he thinks he drunk a pint. More likely he had a couple of shots at most. So unless the police had him blood-analysed ASAP they are going to have some trouble proving anything. By the way, it has to be blood - breathalising does not work properly on diabetics either.

So in fact, all he needs is a good lawyer.

Oxygen-from-Moon-dirt passes vomit comet test

Re: @Peet McKimmie

And that is exactly why a moonbase as a jump-point to Mars and the other planets is a daft waste of money. It is much more cost effective to build something at one of the Lagrange points.

FCC boss moves for stiffer net neut rules

Re: red herrings

Lots of fair points eden, just expressed in a very inflammatory manner.

For all net neuter-ality fans:

1. There is _NOTHING_ wrong with a non-neutral net. Never was, never will be. As long as what has priority and what not is determined by the consumer. There are ways to do it and it has been widely practised by same ISPs (ATT, Comcast, etc) on their business products. Time to grow up and allow this to Joe Average Consumer instead of "mummy knows best" attitude.

2. Bittorent and family will expand to use any link until it is congested. Throwing more bandwidth does not help. So as long as protocols like it are around the net, it will have to be QoS-ed, prioritised and managed. It may be per user, it may be per protocol. However as long as the rules are clear there is nothing wrong with it.

Britons warned of plague of the 'supercats'

The guy who wrote it never dealt with a Siamese

It is not size that matters, it is how you use it. If you have been on the receiving side of a moderately annoyed Siamese you tend to remember that.

Also, 35 pounds is nothing in particular in Moscow. That was the size of a local moggie owned by one of our friends and he was not considered particularly large. I have not noticed the Russians claiming a drastic decrease in their population so ...

Linus calls Linux 'bloated and huge'

Re: No surprises here.

First of all, Linus is right. I have had at least 2 machines which were perfectly usable as media center client tipped over into unusability. They are now too slow (from 2.6.18 to 2.6.26).

Last 10 releases is roughly since NFSv4 has fully gone in. The ghastly thing has brought a few regressions that had not 2%, but 92% performance drops. Even with most of the problems fixed there is a boatload of places screaming for optimisation as of the last time I looked at it (2.6.28). Iteration across all elements is used instead of hashing and so on. Add to that slowdowns from moving portions of USB, parallel, etc to userland (hello Microkernel fans) and the picture is more or less complete - it definitely needs a feature freeze for at least a year in many areas until the code is sped up and optimised properly. Microkernel has nothing to do with it.

Using iteration to walk an ever-expanding permissions cache will be slow in microkernel. Same as in monolithic.

Second Life slapped with counterfeit sex toy suit

re: What's more surprising to me...

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?Second_Life_sex_causes_divorce&in_article_id=402338

See the pictures for yourself. They will answer your question.

Netbook sales set to soar - or not

Who is snapping netbooks

The netbooks are snapped by all those corporate employees who supposedly do not need them and used for work purposes.

I had enough lugging around a useless 4kg desktop equivalent this year and bought a netbook which I use predominantly for work purposes. Paid for it out of my pocket because IT would have never approved it. I also know quite a few people who did the same.

HP busts out fall PC lineup

120dpi+ fonts needed yet again

Crazy resolutions for fairly low size screens. While it may make some difference watching HD (which I doubt, screens are just too small) it is definitely a pain when using it for work. You either have to adjust fonts individually all over the place or adjust the DPI globally (if your OS allows it).

Disgruntled parrot lays into copper

Re: Scratches and bites? Lucky cop.

Agree. Even a "harmless" Cockatiel or Budgie can easily draw blood.

A Macaw has no problem biting your finger off if it decides to do so. Based on this description is merely mildly annoyed and showing lack of benevolence. The police officer should consider himself lucky not to require major surgery.

A phone in every car gains hard-won GSMA support

Very wrong math.

The math assumes that the phones will only dial 112.

That is not likely to be the case for most manufacturers. Ford is already dabbling into realtime telemetry, other carmakers are also looking at it.

The logistics of just one factory recall (turn on that "engine check/service light" remotely instead of locating all customers) pay back the investment for the car maker. Add to that the use in roadside assistance, etc and you get pretty good financials. For example the cost savings for AA from knowing your actual diagnostic codes when called are likely to be in the 20£+ range per year. Add to that pay-as-you-drive insurance (Aviva). Add to that...

And so on.

Microsoft, Cisco issue patches for newfangled DoS exploit

Falmebait, but for a different reason

The full writeup on the vulnerability has just been posted on BUGTRAQ and off the top of my head most Unixes will not be vulnerable to it because they do not disable TCP timers in a TCP zero-window state after the app has closed the socket.

The control portion of Juniper software stack is FreeBSD derived from the days of version 3.x so it should not be vulnerable. If I correctly remember the source (cannot be bothered to look at it right now) it still has the timer running in that case so it will kill the connection.

Neither should be Linux because the fixes for the various old FIN resource exhaustion vulnerabilities should deal with this. On top of that Linux actually has a few recent "special" fixes to deal with zero-window and broken window scaling attacks which should catch that as well.