* Posts by Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

1143 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2013

Twitter blew $36m on patents to avoid death by lethal injunction

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"if a CEO said he was looking into buying up shitloads of patents that may, or may not, be useful to the company"

It's become a form of gambling. With holds, folds and bluffs. Just as investment banking has transformed over the years - towards the casino, away from the banking.

Why can’t I walk past Maplin without buying stuff I don’t need?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: The future that wasn't

Thank you, that's just wonderful. Being 35 years late is not a problem, no grand vision has ever arrived on time.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Great headline!

"sufficiently rich that I could just call in a tradesman at any hour of the day or night"

Assuming there are any to call. Or if you manage to find somebody, living in the place you've never heard of, you'll have to fly him in at great expense. So much for the riches then.

Hyperbole? Yes. But craftmanship is slowly fading away. There is already a shortage of people able to maintain critical infrastructure (ahem, mostly referred as the legacy stuff, which is still standing, despite desperate attempts to offload it to someone else), and the future may well go by the Asimov's Foundation series. Unless the lessons are learned early enough to reverse the underlying processes.

Cherish the skill you have. Even if it won't make you rich today.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

The future that wasn't

Ah. The disappointments.

One magazine from the late 50's, which shall remain nameless, had some bold visions of the future - by the year 1980 we would have flying cars (obviously), no poverty, no unhappiness, etc, etc.

And...gasp...there are power lines running over the beautiful hills and valleys, on the pylons that are made out of PLASTICS!

Well, screw those flying cars, screw those utopian societies, screw those frikkin-sharks-with-frikkin-lasers! I want my plastic pylons and I want them now!

Windows 8.1 Update 1 spewed online a MONTH early – by Microsoft

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: A question

Yes/no questions are not always simple. Most of the real-world scenarios cannot be approximated to one-bit values. Too much loss in the compression. And if the end result, the gained knowledge, is not useful, there is no good reason to ask at all. It's nothing more than a noise.

Even worse, question may be set up in a way that both answers would be actually the same - like the good old "have you stopped beating your wife?" or "do you still drink in the morning?"

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Trollface

is it W8 Enterprise Edition?

"Also, forum posters warn that it's essential to install all of the updates in the correct order, or the process will likely fail."

That sounds very much like SAP, Tivoli, or other fine examples of enterpricey software. Although, there is usually no correct order, just an obscure order that happens to work, and nobody knows why.

Years of talk about MS wanting to move upmarket. Now the day has dawned.

Steve Ballmer: Thanks to me, Microsoft screwed up a decade in phones

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Yep, same here, first MS product in 20 years I actually wanted to buy. Of course, final product may have been wildly different, as manglement would definitely have wanted to bolt on some last-minute changes. To "enhance" this, to "integrate" with that, better "experience" all around.

Maybe it's even better this way. Noble death instead of half-life.

Roll up, roll up for the Reg Readers' Ball

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Pint

"What kind of cynical, embittered, angry mods must you be - if you've had to read all that."

Maybe the mods are quietly weeping at that, having seen the darkest sides of the human mind, mourning the loss of mental greatness that once was...err, probably never was.

Still, that would make it perfectly understandable if our dear Regtards are looking for a nice excuse to drink all London pubs dry. And then some more for the celebration of the fact that they do not have to deal with Youtube comments.

Belgian judge mulled BANNING APPLE (actually, its website) in Euro warranty row

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Apple's shitty batteries.

"their batteries are specially designed in such a way that they last with near-max capacity for longer, and a side-effect of that superior engineering is that when they die, they utterly die. "

Wow. What a load of spin.

Apple does not have very much control over the batteries. There are just a handful of companies producing the lithium cells, and Apple is not among them. They select the suitable cells, have some input on packaging and the interface board (which contains protection circuitry) and that's pretty much it. No magic recipes of their own. And ye cannae change the laws of physics, no sir.

As lithium cells in the packs are not individually charged, sooner or later there will be a disbalance between them (nothing mystical, age does not treat cells equally) and charge current starts to destroy the weakest cells. That's where the protection should kick in. To prevent cells from overheating and catching fire.

It is possible to play with the variables - increased values of allowed disbalance would extend the lifetime a bit - but it might be risky.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Apple's shitty batteries.

Going suddenly to zero is not that uncommon. It sounds like a failsafe has tripped. Multi-cell lithium packs are stuffed with protection circuits, they have to be, and some of those will never recover. Pressure valves on the cells are definitely one-way, main fuse usually too.

Cyber battle apparently under way in Russia-Ukraine conflict

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Times have changed. A shiny new Merc, straight from Stuttgart, with legit papers, is the most desirable. Other variants not so much. BMW has a factory in Russia, but Beverian ones are still more prestigious.

Cutting these supply lines would be perceived as the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the 21st century.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Turkey did close the straits in 2008. Both ways. To cool things down.

But the cruelest thing to do would be to cut off Mercedes exports. Now that'd create an almighty mess.

MtGox has VANISHED. So where have all the Bitcoins gone?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Pint

Re: You'd think it was 'qui bono' ...

Thanks.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: For an Technical IT site the level of ignorance here is shocking.

More along the lines "oh, this is so sophisticated, it cannot be just a scam".

Alas, smart people can be easily deceived, if their attention is channeled at those wonderful complexities, and the most fundamental questions are neglected.

What questions?

Qui bono, for one.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: And yet we're still to believe...

"I know all too well just how hard it is to mitigate yourself from being a target."

Quite a disproportionate struggle. Defenders must cover all the possibilities, whereas attackers have to find just one to succeed.

Then again, getting away with it is the hardest part. That does level the field somewhat.

Intel's new Xeon: Easy to switch between dual memory modes? Uh, no

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: what is new, exactly?

Quite common in 4-socket servers, actually.

Infinidat quietly files 39 patents. Let's take a closer look

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

And has been for the last 15 years or so. Always in motion the future is.

The other end of the telescope: Intel’s Galileo developer board

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: 400 Mhz?

CPU stuck in 1998, AC stuck in 2001. Lovely.

/spoiler alert/ Megahertz wars are long over. They lost.

Opera founder von Tetzchner: It's all gone to crap since I quit

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"Plus, it had a killer feature: when you click Back in Opera, it goes back; it doesn't try to reload the frikkin internet."

Indeed. Back to the previous page, just like it was, even POST forms filled out as they were. Presto's in-memory caching is really good.

Another neat trick - HTML part of the page is shown quickly, without waiting for all those goddamn image servers and click analyzers.

For 15 years of heavy usage, these probably amount to a few months of time saved.

Is modern life possible without a smartphone?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Sometimes, a telephone is just a telephone.

Neat indeed. I'm wondering about it too. Either they did not follow GSM specs to the letter, or employed some special tricks there. But yes, 30 miles over the sea, with a reasonable call quality.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Flat Earth Society

"A smartphone is an essential ingredient to modern life"

Throughout the history, there have always been 'essential ingredients'. For the better or worse. Borderline example - in the court of the Peter I of Russia, 'modern' people were obliged to drink coffee and smoke tobacco.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Sometimes, a telephone is just a telephone.

Ericsson GH198 was also excellent in the dead zones, pulled GSM signal from 30 miles distance with ease.

Yes, HP will still sue you if you make cartridges for its inkjet printers

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: I've had a claim 1 in 3 HP cartridges can't be refilled as they are too borderline to do so.

Hey, no reason to trip the WTF flag in this case. Of course there are replacement chips and whatnot.

JS19 just asked whether that claim has any merit. Well, it has, kind of, depending on, etc.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: I've had a claim 1 in 3 HP cartridges can't be refilled as they are too borderline to do so.

I've seen one similar effect.

No 10 and 11 cartridges, used in bigger inkjets like 2500C, have 'empty' flag in the cartridge chip. This will be set when physical pressure inside the cartridge drops too low. Faulty pressure sensors and firmware bugs can set it, too, for the greater amusement. No official reset methods available.

If you manage to refill the cartridge before the 'empty' flag is set, then it will work. If not, it will report 'ink low' condition forever.

Bill Gates to pull a Steve Jobs and SAVE MICROSOFT – report

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Pint

@ShelLuser

Excellent post, and it definitely was worth reading in full. Cheers!

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Seriously

Uh-huh. If SJ was not wealthy enough, then maybe Larry will do?

/from the article/

"Bill Gates wants people to think he's Edison, when he's really Rockefeller," Jobs' longtime pal, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, once told Newsweek. "Though I wouldn't mind being Rockefeller either. But referring to Gates as the smartest man in America isn't right. I'm not the fourth smartest man in America. Wealth isn't the same thing as intelligence."

US government names new head of NSA and US Cyber Command

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: hey ...

And once more, it's somehow those unsanctioned disclosures, which have caused that 'profound damage', but not the shady practices that were disclosed. Bloody broken record.

Hey, how about a suggestion, Mr. Logic Whiz? Playing with a handgrenade is completely safe and legal, IF you can keep it secret from everybody.

Lloyds Group probes server crash behind ATM, cash card outage

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: CEO's tweet implied hardware

Yes, it's odd. Maybe they've decided to burn the bridges.

IBM's bailed out of the server market - will they dump Storwize next?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: IBM's storage "strategy" was to turn SW products into HW

"That custom-made hardware has firmware /.../ It can fail just like any other software."

Yes, it can fail, and does. In its own little tincan. Where it probably cannot bring the whole house down.

Separation of functions, or shall we say 'sandboxing', is important. Packet storms against the external I/O ports should not be able to crash the main code, especially not all instances at once. Invalid pointer in the main code should not be able to overwrite the data cache. Yet both of these examples are real. And hard to avoid completely in the flat memory model.

So it is quite wrong to claim that *any* storage system is just two servers + software. Like Storagebod did in a cocksure way ("Shark is, and was, simply a pair of RS/6000 or pSeries boxes"), and obnoxiousGit in a more cautious manner ("that's true of every manufacturers storage arrays"). No, it is not true for Shark, nor is it true for Symmetrix. Do not belittle those ancient behemoths, please.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: IBM's storage "strategy" was to turn SW products into HW

"Ummm that's true of every manufacturers storage arrays. You might as well say what is DS8000 if not software defined storage (SeaScape)."

No, not always true. Big monoliths use a lot (as in hundreds of pounds) of custom-made hardware. This hardware plays an important part.

Just a small example - should that fabulous software stack crumble, then dedicated RAID controllers are unaffected and will keep the data intact. But RAID logic built into the main software, as most midrange boxes have, will crash with the software. Then there are bugs - memory boundary violations, cache sync issues, and other niceties. If the important bits are isolated by the iron curtains, it certainly does help against the data-munching bugs.

Human overlord Watson lives in the 'clouds' now, in a $1bn cognition unit. Don't be afraid

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Terminator

Obligatory part

I, for one, welcome our new jeopardy-inducing^W playing overlords.

Planning to rob a Windows ATM? Ditch the sledgehammer and bring a USB STICK

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Wouldn't it be nice ...

Technically possible. Most ATMs should have fully compatible PC and VGA level graphics.

Years ago, there was a hilarious magazine cover shot - Doom running on the ATM. No online version, though.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: inside job

Good to know. So it might be a defect in one specific ATM design, where USB ports are too easily accessible.

But of course it will be portrayed as a worldwide problem with ATM technology as such, run by the people with no clue whatsoever. Bloody sensationalism.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Disbelief

"It appears the ATM designers haven't learn that lesson yet"

No, it seems somebody has managed to unlearn that lesson. In the last millennia, at least 4 large ATM vendors did it quite reasonably - sensitive bits were at the bottom of the cash safe. Admittedly, USB was not used back then, I/O devices were connected via weird assortment of buses.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: inside job

Braindead design. 15 years ago, PC boards were locked away in the cash safe, as they should be. Who the bleep did let them out?

BlackBerry sues American Idol host's company for 'blatant' patent infringement

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Think there website has been hacked....

What are you complaining about? It had plenty of adwords there - world, leader, mobile, communication.

Oh. You wanted adverbs. Sorry, we do not use those anymore.

Google poised to become world's first TREEELLION DOLLAR company?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: A quick look

"Google will invest in all kind of crazy projects trying to find something interesting"

That's what they were doing in the last decade, and earned the Chocolate Factory moniker for that. But around 2008 something changed. They started to kill off those crazytech projects and transform into a bigcorp . It's hard to be sure what's going on there - but it may well be that they have jumped the shark. Or have become one.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: The "trillion dollar cap" prediction is the kiss of death

And Facebook in 2011, right here on El Reg.

www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/09/facebook_trillion_dollar_valuation/

Britain's costliest mistake? Lord Stern defends his climate maths

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: one small problem : "both halves of the debate"

"There are two factions"

Benchley's Law of Distinction: There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't.

NSA alleges 'BIOS plot to destroy PCs'

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Conspiracies are FUN

MEH. All those TLAs, including NSA, are just CYA front-ends to hide the real masterminds.

There are hints and answers, though, scattered around seemingly innocent places. Just like this one, from haikuonline or some such:

Guess what I found out?

My CAT rules the universe!

That explains a LOT.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: ahh.. so that's what happened to the xbone..

"backdoors that can brick systems are dumb"

There's also a legitimate need for unbricking, so local backdoors are not entirely evil. It really depends on implementation.

Spinning rust and tape are DEAD. The future's flash, cache and cloud

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: And in the cloud, the storage is?

/dev/null in the worst case.

How are those files stored on Megaupload doing these days?

Gadget world's metals irreplaceable, say boffins

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Recycling

"Unsurprisingly, the study's authors say the tech sector needs to get much, much better at recycling the metals it uses, including designing products to encourage and enable recycling. ®"

Amen to that. But better recycling is only half of the story - how about reducing the need for recycling?

IMO, planned obsolescense should be either outlawed, or heavily taxed. Same thing with planned failures. Why on earth should CCFL tubes and lithium batteries be non-removable? I do have a good example at hand - an Epson LCD panel from 1992, where CCFL tube can be easily replaced, and indeed has been replaced. Certainly not the case with the later designs. Ugh. LCD makers deserve a serious taxhammer for producing more toxic waste than really necessary.

Brit-boy Bates is Silicon Valley's pick for Microsoft's CEO

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Sillycone Valley's prick for Microsoft's CEO

Wot, no love for Steve Bong?

He really should be number 0 of your list. A perfect fit for the modern-day Valley.

Ex-Nokia team unveil Jolla smartphone with added Sailfish OS

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Don't think it's a good idea

"the smartphone market has been dominated now"

Quite intriguing, if not ominous, choice of words. Is it really "dominated" - or "violated", "oppressed", "assimilated", "mutilated", "destroyed"?

Well, whoever those dominators are, or whatever they think they have accomplished, they have my gracious permission to bugger off and take their "dominated" market with them. It is dead and starts to reek quite badly.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Thumb Up

Re: Your design is the same as any other phone.

"I want these guys to succeed just to show what they could have achieved"

Agreed. They seem to have a passion (hey, lads in the back, stop giggling! No jokes about Finns today!) about their venture, so it seems that a good part of their motivation is to do things they could not have done before. An unfinished business, so to say. And that is a far better cause than just money.

Godspeed.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: This will follow its parent destiny....

N9 can deliver a downvote quite well. See?

The Shoreditch STARTUP SCENE is a load of TRIPE: And that's why it's GREAT

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: All Hail Kim Jong Bong !!!

"It is not as if you be alone in Bong Ventures, is it?"

That question, my dearest amanfromMars, is so fittingly, virtually and positively redundant, for he IS the Bong Ventures, or alternately, he has become ONE with it, maybe even IT as such.

All hail Bong, the relentless purveyor of the much-needed synergy between constantly conflicting alternate realities of virtual realism!

DEATH-PROOF your old XP netbook: 5 OSes to bring it back to life

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Have you tried...

"One can carry the base unit and the other the monitor and keyboard. On their bikes."

Shurely you meant to end this with "uphill both ways"?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Oh, yes, he did end up with a small notebook, as he deemed iPad too expensive and not quite suitable for his needs.

It was just too damn funny to hear a young chap contemplating Debian on iPad. Not to mention that he actually read about difficulties involved (starting with jailbreaking) and would have pulled it off, too.