Posts by namke

Meet the real spin doctors: Scientists tell H2O to chill out so they can separate isomers

Interesting, but...

... I hope no-one works out how to make Ice-9!

Sacre bleu! Apple's high price, marginal gain iPhone strategy leaves it stuck in the mud

"Does the X astonish in the same way? Does it have the same lustre? You must be kidding."

Does any phone nowadays? No matter how much <insert phone vendor here> crows about their new releases, do they really make a compelling argument to go and buy a new shiny??

Bosch wants crowdsourced data for future connected cars

Re: Bosch, best known in the UK for domestic power tools...

not to mention being a pioneer in ABS and more recently stability control (aka 'ESP'), and being one of the largest suppliers of ECUs in the world.

So, yeah - not just fridges and washing machines ;-)

Get your special 'sound-optimising' storage here, hipsters

Errrm... Old news?!

Looking at the website, it appears that this is an article from "July To September 2011". Bollocks or not, this isn't really worth dredging up, is it?!

http://www.enjoythemusic.com/hificritic/vol5_no3/

Five Totally Believable Things Car Makers Must Do To Thwart Hackers

Re: Attack Vectors != vulnerabilities

Yep, I realise that - although having read the paper, they supplied no evidence that attacks were even possible. Simply having an ECU bridging two buses does not automatically mean that there is an attack there; comms peripherals may be set up only to read frames from the bus etc. (and many embedded processors are very restrictive about re-programming peripherals, such as forbidding configuration except after reset. Executing code from RAM may also be disallowed, either due to processor architecture or MMU/MPU configuration). All 'best practice' stuff (at the absolute, very least, follow MISRA).

Still, best practices can be skipped - see Toyota for example! (Also http://ht.ly/tU5AM)

Attack Vectors != vulnerabilities

Interesting quote from an article on forbes regarding this:

"A study released at Black Hat this week by security researchers Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller explored the “attack surface”, or hackability, of 24 different vehicles. The Infinity Q50, which Valasek owns, and the Jeep Cherokee, which Miller drives, did not fare well due to the number of attack surfaces they had. The researchers weren’t able to remotely hack any of the cars, though." (my emphasis).

The paper can be read here

It's an area which I am tangentially involved in, so I find this stuff quite interesting from a professional point of view too :-)

Simian selfie stupidity: Macaque snap sparks Wikipedia copyright row

Photographer's Assistants...

This is common practice in the world of the professional photographer and their assistants. The pro will choose the location, lens, point of interest etc. but it may be the assistant who takes the photograph. Copyright is still retained by the pro (this article highlights a shot where the assistant got a joint credit - and this was noteworthy at the time)

Not that I would in any way want to liken photographic assistants to monkeys of course...

Apple's Oct 22 WORLD-SHAKING San Fran party: New iPads or what?

Yep, I've been thinking that for a while too... 'twould make me laugh

Fanbois taught to use Apple's new killer app: Microsoft Windows

VMWare Fusion

Ah, looks like VMWare Fusion can run windows applications from the dock as well as Parallels...

I was under the impression that Parallels came out in 2006, along with the intel Macs...

The thing that Parallels can do that I've yet to see VirtualBox etc. do is get rid of the Windows, errr window. i.e. Windows programs appear on the Mac desktop. I thought that was rather neat.

Oh, and "operational systems"? I thought this was a tech site...

Seven all-in-ones that aren't the Apple iMac - and one that is

Apple expensive? Not really...

I found it interesting looking at the comparison table - there's only one machine significantly cheaper than the iMac (and that's the Tosh); the mac doesn't seem to stack up too badly at all - and it has vastly higher resolution screen too...

Still there's the knee-jerk 'Apples are expensive and for idiots' responses. I'm obviously missing something.

Muso scrapbook Soundcloud gets $50m, corporatespeak makeover

Have you tried Bandcamp?

I use soundcloud for public demos/sketches (sharing rehearsal recordings and 'private' stuff is done using dropbox) but for actual sales, I go straight to bandcamp.com which is set up for this express purpose. Plenty of stuff on there, much of it free or pay-what-you-want...