Posts by Acme Fixer

What did the Romans ever do for us? Packet switching...

Horrible inefficient? - Re: Freeview vs cable

Inefficient in what way? The amount of power in ERP is much greater than the actual power output of the final power amplifiers of the transmitter because of the very high gain of modern antennas.

Also consider that there is no cost for installation of cable, fiber or copper, just set up a transceiver and maybe a small antenna. Google is planning (or already doing) the high altitude blimps for terreestrial WiFi coverage

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/26/google-blimps

Re: What have the Romans ever done for us? @AC 12:32

They gave us the cobblestone roads all over Europe, and the ruts in them, too, from the chariots.

And STDs.

I remember forgetting this stuff....

HUH? How could you remember forgetting it if you forgot it to begin with?????

Right....

For pity's sake: DON'T MOVE to the COUNTRY if you want to live

Re: "When I mentioned a taxi as a good alternative, they said, "No, were used to drinking and driving, you're not, so that's why you need the cab"."

Nah. He just couldn't cope with driving on the "wrong" side of the road. Loaded OR sober.

Boeing batteries back under spotlight as 787 burns at Heathrow

<<It was only mildly on fire.>>

Well, DUH! When an airplane is made out of plastic (carbon fiber composite), there's no such thing as MILDLY!

Pttow! Ofcom kicks hams out of MoD bands

One other point... I thought that the protocols used in these bands were spread spectrum, frequency hopping, etc. So if there's a frequency in use, the equipment just skips using that frequency and goes about its business with little or no bad effects. In other words, there is no need to "kick out" one type of user, since they're all interfering with one another on an ongoing basis. Sort of like a free-for-all.

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme...

I don't know about the U.K., but the U.S. feds forbid radio amateurs from using the ham bands for commercial purposes. So if these bands were to be "monetized" (seems like a new term - thanks, Google), then it would be unfair to expect the radio amateurs to pay for something for which they could never recover their costs.

T-mobile US in invisible handset handcuff contract smackdown

"... like Apple have taken a bigger role in servicing customers."

Servicing... Like a bull services a cow.

The ten SEXIEST computers of ALL TIME

Re: WHAT!

Having had experience with the 4361, I would say that anyone with a soft spot for IBM should reevaluate their senses.

Paper computers: Not mere pulp fiction

In another article they talked about a 10 Euro E-reader. With those kinds of prices, it looks like paper is dead. Maybe the politicians will get enough lobbying from the paper industry to put a tax on e-readers, to help pay for the recycling.

One point about using paper for anything electronic... Paper is not a good insulator, and absorbs humidity, which makes it conduct electricity. That's one problem that has to be solved before it can be used for a printed circuit board substitute.

Microsoft flings out emergency patch for Iatest gaping IE hole

One Would Think...

That by now, 99.99 percent of these "gaping holes" would have been fixed, and we would not need to have a patch Tue every single month. But if people keep converting over to tablets, we will fix that problem, eventually. Except for my organization, which has given me a Win 8 desktop with a touch screen. Which sits back against the wall, and seldom gets touched. DUH.

Anger grows over the death of Aaron Swartz

Re: Alan Turing

In this article there was a statement made about Turing that I believe is incomplete, incorrect, or both. If you have any interest in Turing i suggest you read his bio or Wikipedia or some other more factual source.

Other than that, I thought the article was good, and I agree with the other principles it discussed.

'Leccy-starved Reg hack: 'How I survive on 1.5kW'

No Problemo

I would just go to Harbor Freight Tools and buy a cheapo generator, or else rent one for the temporary job. Then set it outside and fire it up, and remember to keep a can of gas (petrol) handy when it gets low. A few longer extension cords should complete the installation. Just remember to roll them back and stow them up so the local thieves don't steal them for copper.

Or if you have a bit if money, put solar water heating panels on the roof. Or maybe use the exhaust heat to heat the water.

'Not even Santa could save Microsoft's Windows 8'

It's the Apps, Stupid!

People don't care about what operating system the thingy uses, all they want to do is get a job done, and be able to share what they do with others. if there's an app on iTunes or marketplace that does it, then they're happy. Corporate will succumb to this too, as soon as they realize that they can do it, too.

Ever had to register to buy online - and been PELTED with SPAM?

Re: An exception to the rule - with some help.

I had the same experience with my credit union. It took them a few times, but they finally got to the bottom of the problem and fixed it. I dealt by email with not some flunky, but the VP.

I went to Office Depot and as I checked out, the cashier asked, "Do you want your receipt as paper or by email?" BINGO!!! As soon as they get your email address, the spam starts rolling in!! Of course, I told her, I'll take paper, 'cause if I give you my email address, you will spam me! And I already have enough of that.

MYSTERY programming language found in Duqu

Re: Remember the rumors that Stuxnet was written by the US military, CIA, etc.?

From what little I remember about Ada when I took the class, was that it was not a compiler, not an interpreter, but a translator, which spit out FORTRAN on the IBM 4361. What a joke. One Ada run took 8 minutes to complete and if more than one was running, it was more like 20 minutes.

I was going to speculate before I read the article. Then I thought, if it's really that obscure, those spooks just want to know if anyone has knowledge about it, so they can interrogate^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H question the person about whether or not they had anything to do with writing the actual code (!)

Facebook IPO to stuff $2.5bn in California tax coffers

Not Really

I and other Californians are not really holding our breath for any windfalls. In the intervening time, with gasoline prices here already over $4, going on $5, we are more likely as not to see whatever windfall wiped out by higher food, transportation and other costs. Someone ought to throttle the Wall St. bunch who speculate on the price of crude.

This just in: Brussels shatters CRT cartel

Cartrel???

If they're so bent on busting cartels, then why does the diamond cartel (deBeers) still get away with controlling and manipulating the price of diamonds?

Disposal Tax

The crooked colluders here in California charge us an additional tax on any LCD screen bigger than (I forgot) inches "for disposal". I could see this with the leaded glass in CRTs, but why are we getting screwed with lead free LCDs?

Spamford Wallace charged for hacking 500,000 Facebookers

Minor?

It's not minor when the number of spams he's spewed has more than nine zeros at the end. If you want proof of what I said, you can go back to the journals and see from the number of lawsuits he's lost and hundreds of millions of dollars he owes that this BSFH is in no way, shape, or form a minor spammer. He wasn't given the name King of spam for no reason.

And here's another fact: if you took all the electricity this BSFH has caused to be wasted on spam and put it on the electric grid, it could power the whole world for a year, if not a decade.

I learned well from my mother, who told me "I told you a million times not to exaggerate!"

Please?

It's about time they throw this recidivist in jail. Please? Just throw the key away. Just conveniently lose it - you will be doing the whole world a very big favor. Actually they should give him a video screen. One with an infinite number of channels, each channel only displaying one of his spams. That should (almost) be enough punishment.

And when he dies, he will suffer eternal damnation for being the worst human being in this world for causing the most hatred.

The second and third worst are Canter and Siegel.

Winklevoss twins drop Facebook settlement appeal

'Bout Time

There's an old adage, "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth." Perhaps these two fools finally heeded that advice.

Oh, yeah -- from H.P.: "Draco Dormeins Nunquam Titillandus"

Rats

Anyone (or anytwo) who try to take back a settlement agreement is, in my book, not a rat, but a snake. A two-headed one at that.

Legal goons threaten researcher for reporting security bug

Alternative???

I think it may be a good idea to send the email with only a link to the information, with a 'shrink wrap' statement that by clicking on the link, the recipient agrees to abide by the laws of <insert non-German country>, etc. Also the linked info should obviously not be on a server in Germany.

Mummy, mummy, there's a nuclear monster!

NOT TRUE

The following paragraph (I quote) has some discrepancies, it's misleading at least:

"Almost all other infrastructure hit by the natural disaster failed catastrophically. Housing, transport and industry across the region collapsed with deadly consequences, killing people by the tens of thousands."

The housing, etc., didn't collapse, it was washed away by the tsunami.

This incident did the most damage to peoples' perception of nuclear power. It showed that even though the Japanese knew historically about tsunamis as bad as this one (in 869 and 1896), they failed to design the barriers to block waves the height of those historic tsunamis. They chose to save money and as a consequence the plant was damaged by their cost cutting measures, instead of by mother nature.

After that, can you convince anyone in their right mind, especially insurance companies, to allow or insure a design that is potentially flawed? I think not.

Ofcom refuses to interfere on powerline networking interference

Unintentional vs. Intentional Radiators

Here in the U.S. the Part 15 mentions unintentional and intentional radiators. Well, if you have a motor, printer or other similar device radiates interference, it was not meant to do so and the interference is unintentional. It can also be mitigated by filtering with EMI suppressor sleeves on the cables, for example. These are the black bulges on the ends of the cable.

But now you have this power line ethernet device where the whole design is centered around the transmission (and incidental radiation) of high frequency energy over bare wires. If that isn't intentional, I don't know what is. If you try to get rid of it by filtering it out., the whole system stops working. In other words, the system is built in such as way as to purposely interfere with other nearby equipment.

I saw these were now available at the Microcenter store in their ads last week. FIrst off, I would never put one in service on my premises, because of the interference. Second, has anyone looked into the security of these signals? Can just anyone decode the radiated signals and find your private information? I would never trust them because of this risk.

Another problem that can happen with commercial installations where three phase power is used is that the sending equipment is on one phase, and the receiving equipment on another phase. So you end up with spotty or no communication.

Just use WiFi, or regular cat5 wiring. Just say NO to this junk.

FBI asks for help to crack mystery code in 12-year-old murder case

I'm suspicious of this.

I'm suspicious of this. What puzzles me is why the FBI's crack team of specialists in this field would not be able to solve something a high school dropout made up. Maybe the FBI is trying to get under cover cryptanalysts to come out, so they can secretly monitor their life to see if they're working for a foreign government.

Or maybe they'll offer the amateur cryptanalyst a job...

Fukushima: Situation improving all the time

Doesn't Change Reality

I think Page's perspective is interesting, but that doesn't change reality. For instance, the four nuclear power plants at the Fukushima Daiichi site, even if tamed and made safe, are likely to never come back online. The bad publicity has done a tremendous amount of damage to the nuclear power plant industry's reputation, not to mention the many hundreds of millions of dollars it will cost to replace the four plants.

Branson 'spaceship' successfully falls off mothership

New Mexico? I don't think so

According to Mojave Spaceport, they're not in New Mexico, but in California:

www.mojaveairport.com/contact.htm

Legendary steampunk computer 'should be built' - programmer

But, But, But...

The Analytical Engine should not be built UNTIL it has been 'built' in virtual reality. With the power of today's computers, it will be possible to do exactly the same thing, and also be able to take a virtual tour of the insides of the machine, much more intimate than the 'real thing'. And if the simulation is open source, anyone can d/l and run it at their own convenience.

'Larry and Sergey's HTML5 balls drained my resources'

But today's (Tue 9-7 Doodle is even more fun!

It makes my task manager performance graph kick up to 50% or so. But it's COOL!

Spammers ordered to pay tiny ISP whopping $2.6m

Gooooood Luck!

Probably about a snowball's chance in hell of collecting it. But the punishment should be appropriate to the crime, which is it not. The spammers generate 90 percent of all emails, and should have to pay 90 percent of all email servers and email bandwidth used by the ISPs. Then maybe the SOBs would almost get their just punishment. Unfortunately there is no punishment for the amount of aggravation and consternation the users suffer.

Bill Gates goes (mini) nuclear

If I remember Correctly...

The end product of a nuclear reaction still has radioactive nuclides in the spent fuel, so it's still a problem after the end of its life. Besides, any company (at least in the U.S.,) that makes these will not be able to get insurance nor funding, so it's doubtful that anything like this will ever get built.

Maybe they could just tow an old nuclear submarine up to the dock and plug it into the power grid. If anyone asks, just tell 'em it's charging its batteries. ;-)

Adobe Photoshop celebrates big 2-0

2 Semesters

I took two semesters of Photoshop 4.0 back in '98 and 99, for what it's worth, and I learned to use only a tenth of it, at that time. It is a program with a very complex set of features. I'm sure there are people out there who use more, but I can get most of what I need done with some silly free program nowadays.

Back in the early '90s for awhile I used a some program from a student in the technical university of Taiwan, it might have been called Display. It was free, and didn't do much manipulation but ran okay under DOS.

BTW, the Macs in the classroom crashed just as often as the Wintel machines!

Airships can defeat roadside bombers, says ex-US officer

In Deference

Even though the author, Lewis, may be British, I think he should spell "US Army Space and Missile Defence Command" the way the U.S. Military spells it, not to be a pedant but just because the British spelling has a lot less chance of being found by a search engine.

I've often wondered why these troops can't just keep an eye out for IED perps from the ground and nail them with a few bullets. Better yet, get a high powered transmitter and use it to trigger the IED while the perps are arming it. POOF! end of problem.

Australia leaves the internet

Hillary-ous

I find this hilariously ironic when I think about the fact that the Aussies are the ancestors of a bunch of ne'er-do-wells in a penal colony.

Ares I-X trundles to launchpad

Been there, Done that? NOT!

They keep on saying to skip the moon. But how else are we going to learn how to live on another planet? We need to go to the moon and not just visit, but **live there** for an extended length of time to develop a comprehensive understanding of what it takes to live in an extraterrestrial environment.

And the reality is that spending billions on Mars is unlikely to get enough funding to do it properly, resulting in a failed mission or no mission at all. Shoot for the moon, and spend a lot less.

McAfee: Save the planet - use a spam filter

It's just staggering...

We are getting typically 93 percent of our emails as spam; only 7 percent is legit. Those are the ones that don't manage to slip through our Pure Message(R) spam filter, but the percentage of spam that slips through is low, so the actual number is not that much more than 93 percent.

It's just staggering how much poo spammers sling at the email inboxes in the hope that some of it gets through and ends up as a 'hit' - a purchase of something usually worthless or illegal. What's not even mentioned is how much wasted time has to be spent by human beings dealing with this scourge, but I'm sure that it far outweighs the energy usage and is far more harmful.

But the real tragedy is that the growth of the Internet -- servers and bandwidth -- has had to be increased by so much percentage to keep up with the deluge of spam, and if spam had not been such a deluge, I'm sure that the providers and customers would bave been able to save billions or trillions of dollars.

It makes you wonder why the email system was not just scrapped and replaced by something else: a web based system or whatever, like the old BBS systems had.

Whatever became of the solutions offered years ago? Like the 'Penny Black' or whatever it was called. Every "solution" seems to have been sidestepped by the spammers.

Boffins sniff keystrokes with lasers, oscilloscopes

Easier Said than Done.

Just slap some equipment together and everything is at your fingertips. Yeah, right...

US Senate wants answers on soaring text rates

@ Anon Cow

" Take a break and go read the constitution again. Free markets regulate themselves"

In a perfect world, free markets regulate themselves. Unfortunately, it's not a perfect world.

Concrete-jet 'printers' to build houses, Moonbases in hours

@ dave lawless

Not according to The History Detectives. Edison wast stuck with the equipment that could make cement, so having a load of lemons, he tried to make lemonade. He said he was going to build the cement houses, and got patents on the concept of a concrete house poured into a mold. But his plans fell through, so it didn't happen. Instead, a guy named Ingersoll built some concrete houses in Union, New Jersey using Edison's techniques (the street they're on is named Ingersoll), but they were NOT built by Edison.

See www.pbs.org and The History Detectives.

http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/pdf/201_edison.pdf

"Raymond: Well Edison’s attitude was “I didn’t fail. I just found ten thousand ways that didn’t work.” So after all these media attention, Edison decided to cut his losses and get out.

Gwen: But that’s a disparity, because Antonio’s house was built in 1917, which is a number of years after this.

Raymond: That’s right. Well, it turns out that Edison never did build a concrete house."

The Hadron Collider: What's it all about, then?

@ Anon John

Five hours to Mars, and you have to spend one and a half times that long clearing Customs, getting your insides sterilized (we can't pollute another planet with our germs), and getting x-rayed for terrorist paraphernalia. Oh, and then there are the lines.. So big deal!

Paris, because she'll be only one of the few who can afford the trip!

Prototype orbital seaplane in Texan blimp-base blast

@ ASB

"I thought everyone knew that *submerged* submarines are easier to spot from the air than from the surface of the water.

Nowadays, I thought everyone knew that *submerged* submarines are easier to spot from space than from the surface of the water. The moving submarine causes a 'wake' in the surface, actually makes the water rise, and the sooper-sekrit spacecraft can bounce radar off the surface and see the change in water level.

"Bah. Today's youth. Schools going to the dogs. etc etc"

Ofcom steps up the power for unlicensed broadcasting

Lightspeed!!

At these nosebleed high frequencies, it's getting increasingly difficult to tell the difference between millimeter waves and long wave infrared. Anything above a few dozen GHz is getting into the realm where the atmosphere absorbs a lot due to the elements such as water and gas. So what's the point of trying to transmit up there? I dunno...

Fugitive spammer in murder-suicide

I can't believe that..

all the previous comments are so much BS about the state of the spammer, and absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the world, which is going to be a better place without his spamming. I wish, hope and pray that the other spammers would do the same, and save the rest of the world from literally billions of abominable spams.

P.S. I've received at least a half dozen 419 spams this week, seems like some wild animals have been unleashed and allowed to sneak past the filters with their nastygrams.

Seattle Spam King Dark Mailer faces 47-month sentence

You forgot...

Jeremy Jaynes, who got 9 years in the slammer. It's really a pity that it took so long to put Soloway away - I remember it was 5 or 10 years ago that his name was reviled and spit on by anti-spammers.

I notice that the last few spammer convictions have included conviction for violations of the Can-Spam Act. The anti -spammers said that the law was worthless, but it looks like they'll have to eat their words.

Watch all the holier-than-thous come out of the woodwork to defend themselves. If they'd devote some of their time to fighting spam instead of attacking others for their opinions, maybe the world would be a lot better place.

Last I heard from our email admin, we were running a bit over 100,000 emails a day, with about 90,000 of them spam. Fortunately, we pay big bucks to get the Pure Message system to delete those, so we get very few in our inboxes.

But today I got a spam with a nude pic of Angelina Jolie and it said that she and Brad were breaking up, and to click here to watch the video. I surmise the video would download a keystroke logger or other nasty trojan into your PC if you did watch the movie. If you want to see more of her, watch the movie Beowulf.

Divorce for shouty YouTube wife

WTF...

does this have to do with IT? Nothing.

There are 6 billion other concerns in this world and we have to be bothered with some rich bitch's problems. Sheah...

North Carolina targets WTF licence plates

Maybe He...

should use a BFH on the plate and just smash it flat.

There's an older gentleman that drives a '60s Ford Falcon ranchero around town with the California custom license plate TIHSEPA. No, I'm not kidding! Read _that_ one backwards!

Phoenix spies probable Martian water ice

It amazes me

how clueless some (supposedly intelligent) people can be.

Suppose the pics were taken at 1200 pixels, and the 1" mark was actually an inch, but someone scaled them down to 800 pixels. Just to be thorough, he relabeled the 1" mark 2/3". Duh...

OTOH, the speculation is cool. Just as long as it doesn't get too far out of hand...