Posts by David Pearce

Den Automation raised millions to 'reinvent' the light switch. Now it's lights out for startup

My home Internet connection has zero throughput glitches nearly every day for a few minutes, so there is is no way it is suitable for controlling lighting.

I have never seen a home Internet contract with a SLA.

Satellite operators' shares plummet as FCC plumps for public 5G spectrum auctions

The K bands are used for services like satellite TV, where losing 10 minutes a day in heavy rain is not the end of the world

Services like distributing terrestrial TV to islands still use C band. There is no terrestrial alternative in many countries in SE Asia.

There goes international roaming

I cannot see governments in the tropics allowing C band 5G, C band VSAT is the only satellite technology that works when it rains heavily.

I remember when you had to have a special USA cellphone because of their 800MHz band AMPS

FBI extends voting security push, LA court hacker goes down, and more D-Link failures

The DIR-615 was the standard router supplied by Telekom Malaysia for many years.

While the router is theoretically the customers problem and many have upgraded, there must be an enormous number still in use

World's oldest human was a 122-year-old French smoker after all

Jeanne Calments age has never been approached by anybody else verifiable since her death and that is very suspicious. The number of centenarians is soaring, but only 1 in 1000 of them reach 110 and only two people are alive over 115

UK.gov: Huge mobile masts coming to a grassy hill near you soon

The health effects camp will fail to understand that a taller mast reduces signal at ground level near the mast and also reduces the signal from your own phone as it does not have to go at full blast to reach a mast in the next road but behind a house.

American ISPs fined $75,000 for fuzzing airport's weather radar by stealing spectrum

Re: If I recall ...

The ~5.6GHz section of the 5 GHz block was excluded from the ISM band in most countries because it was used for weather radar first. It has gradually been released to WiFi use as the radars move out.

Unfortunately WiFi scanners detect 5.6GHz as unused spectrum free from interference and go for it without reading the rules

Psst. Hey. Hey you. We have to whisper this in case the cool kidz hear, but... it's OK to pull your data back from the cloud

Massive savings to be made running PostgreSQL on RedHat locally and you are still paying to have somebody to shout at if things go wrong

Just add water: Efficient Energy’s HFC-free chillers arrive in the UK

Water is awkward if you turn off the cooling in winter and the pipes freeze up

I used to use an ammonia cycle cooling chamber (they go down to -28C) and it stopped working when it reached 32C outside

Meet the Great Duke of... DLL: Microsoft shines light on Astaroth, a devilishly sneaky strain of fileless malware

And banks still insist on using Javascript for Internet banking. What could possibly go wrong?

Flight Simulator 2020: Exciting new ride or a doomed tailspin in a crowded market?

Any modern PC should be capable of running a single screen flight simulator smoothly, Flightgear runs nicely on an I3 class, FSX used to run well on PCs with a graphics card much slower than most built in graphics are now and only a GB or so RAM back then.

JavaScript tells all, which turns out not to be so great for privacy: Side-channel leaks can be exploited to follow you around the interweb

Several airline booking websites don't work with Firefox, but do with Chrome because of Java abuse. I guess that these must be magnets for card detail thieves

What's up at Microsoft this week? Windows 10 builds of course, Skype screen sharing... zzzzz... New Flight Simulator?!

Landing a Camel on the Nimitz is possible in Flightgear

https://www.flightgear.org/

Lyft, Uber drivers boost app surge prices by turning off, tuning out – and cashing in

In Singapore drivers for the regional player Grab, have taken to using GPS spoofing to allow a driver actually far from the pickup to take the job and using a hacked version of the driver app, that allows the driver to cancel a pickup that they don't want without penalty

What's that? Uber isn't actually worth $82bn? Reverse-gear IPO shows the gig (economy) is up

Re: I'm not sure I see how they get to profitability

Many countries don't have pavements, so you have to walk in the road.

This may be illegal in your jurisdiction

Uber have already lost out to local boys Grab in Malaysia and Singapore.

This is a business with low barriers to entry if Grab actually want to charge high enough fares to make a profit.

The A in AMD stands for 'Aaaaannnyway...' Q2 is gonna be good, chip biz vows, after dismal Q1

My I5 is a 2320, pretty ancient.

Intel Hyper threading seems to far more affected by the bugs than AMDs method and Intel seem to have lost speed advantage.

I am guessing that Ryzen 3 will be fairly expensive and likely peak in price at the year end as Win7 dies.

I always prefer desktops, the second memory lane makes a huge difference. Laptops only seem to ever have one ram module fitted.

I am replacing a aging Windows 7 desktop this year before EOL and was planning to get a Ryzen 2700x, but thanks to too early release of info about the 7nm process I am in a dilema. Wait for Ryzen, get a 2700x when the price drops. Neither means buy now.

I currently have a I5 and it has become glacial in the last year thanks to all the patches against the various Intel cache security bugs, no way I want another Intel CPU

Ok Google, please ignore this free tax filing code so we can keep on screwing America

The Malaysian tax assessment system has to be about the most efficient and well run service provided by the government. We have a parallel religious taxation system to make life much more complicated and I still got this years refund in a few days straight into my bank account.

So even developing countries can do this efficiently for free.

And in current affairs... Apple recalls three-prong AC adapters after some shocking behavior

A lot more countries use the UK style 3 pin plug than that list. It is standard in Malaysia for a start.

Down is the new up at Intel: PC processor sales rise while data center chips fall (So much for that data-centric push)

There is a repeating cycle of personal vs cloud computing or whatever marketing calls it this week. Right now cloud seems to have peaked. this time round

Double trouble for Lyft after share price drop sparks class action lawsuits claiming hype

Re: I have a question

You should see the howls from the drivers in Malaysia because they are being forced to get a commercial taxi driving license and insurance.

Are they employees or not will be the next row.

Uber lost out in SE Asia to local boys Grab. The problem with crazy values for companies like this is that if they try to take a large profit, someone else can spring up fairly quickly and easily.

UK comms watchdog mulls 5G tweaks: Operators want moooooar power

Is this the base station or the phone? 25dBm is 300mW, 28dBm about 600mW

These are typical mobile power levels.

Dear Britain's mast-fearing Nimbys: Do you want your phone to work or not?

Stupid NIMBYS don't understand that the RF field ar ground level from a 12m pole is much higher than from a 25m mast

SPOILER alert, literally: Intel CPUs afflicted with simple data-spewing spec-exec vulnerability

It would really help if banking web applications, the most critical thing most of us use, did not run Javascript and call third party site code

Sniff the love: Subaru's SUVs overwhelmed by scent of hair shampoo, recalls 2.2 million cars

Re: Not necessarily

Unfortunately they don't teach the need for a wetting current at university these days. Most cars use some sort of micro switch with plunger for this sort of application

A quick sample from Omron shows something like 1mA at 5V as a minimum ie 4k7, a surprisingly low value for the average fresh engineer.

How's this for sci-fi: A cosmic river of 4,000 stars dazzles lifeforms as it flows through a galaxy. And that galaxy is the Milky Way

Re: Continents and Stars

The centre of our galaxy is in Sagittarius, a little south of the celestial equator, so too close to the horizon from the UK to be well seen.

Granddaddy of the DIY repair generation John Haynes has loosened his last nut

I often feel like the main dealers know less about a modern car than I used to know from reading a Haynes.

These days if the computer diagnostics doesn't identify the problem you have had it, even with a totally non-electrical fault.

Ever used VFEmail? No? Well, chances are you never will now: Hackers wipe servers, backups in 'catastrophic' attack

Re: Um

The verdict was not a big surprise though

London's Met police confess: We made just one successful collar in latest facial recog trial

The number of casino high rollers is probably not so overwhelmingly larger than card counters as the public to wanted criminals ratio.

Casinos also have much better control of camera position and lighting.

Crypto exchange in court: It owes $190m to netizens after founder 'dies without telling anyone vault passwords'

Re: Lesson for us all...

Another scenario is that he was a fool, not a crook and somebody used a variation of rubber hose code breaking to force him to reveal the passwords and then killed him. $190m is far too much money to logically keep in your pocket

Fake fuse: Bloke admits selling counterfeit chips for use in B-1 bomber, other US military gear

Re: IC marking

Often these parts are the real thing, but have not been through the screening and QA, so even xray and decapping won't expose them. The issue is that they are not PROVED to work in the military environment

Whats(goes)App must come down... World in shock as Zuck decides to intertwine Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp

Telegram and Signal both have their share of security weaknesses too.

Creating a secure end to end encryption App turns out to be hard to do properly even if nobody is trying to put in a backdoor.

Apple hardware priced so high that no one wants to buy it? It's 1983 all over again

It was not that expensive, My first real computer around 1980 was PET, with a 32k RAM upgrade that cost UKP5000 for a single board, about a years salary for me then.

It'll soon be even more illegal to fly drones near UK airports

I have never understood how helicopters are allowed over London, a much greater hazard to anyone on the ground than a surveillance drone

The devil is in the details.

Just CAA licensed aerodromes is a long list:

https://www.caa.co.uk/Commercial-industry/Airports/Aerodrome-licences/Certificates/UK-certificated-aerodromes/

But will this also get extended to include military and the recreational airfields?

London City stops most of the centre of London

Encryption? This time it'll be usable, Thunderbird promises

Re: Dear TBird team

No, by becoming bloated and trying to push things into "the cloud" like passwords.

It's 2019, the year Blade Runner takes place: I can has flying cars?

An AI only highway is more realistic, then the coordinated controllers can pack the vehicles in close.

Humans are far too unpredictable to join in.

Self driving cars will be on motorways first, an AI only environment and no driveways, pedestrians, 2 wheelers etc. Urban streets are way too complex for computers to manage

Re: Who does?

In 2049 Rachel is long dead. I think that in the original she was built with a normal human span, she was not enhanced.

EU politely asks if China could stop snaffling IP as precondition for doing business

Re: A Chinese student once told me....

Just like the West then. with the MBAs earning far more than the people who do the work.

'Year-long' delay to UK 5G if we spike Huawei deals, say telcos

Re: My family are career criminals. Let me install your door locks; I'm good!

That rules out Cisco then as the US has form in spying on Airbus for Boeing

Chip flinger Micron reels in production, expenses as revenue growth comes to crashing halt

Re: A cynic might say

Did anybody say cartel?

So why is DRAM so expensive?

You better watch out, you better not cry. Better not pout, I'm telling you why: SQLite vuln fixes are coming to town

The SQLite team have kept the project clean by not doing any feature creep, the focus is a single user database engine, nothing else.

Concentrating on bug fixing and performance improvement more than adding extra functions is very unusual.

Did you know that iOS ad clicks cost more than Android? These scammers did

Amazingly stock Android, at least as of v8.1, does not have a torch function.

Grandmaster flash Samsung dominated SSD market in 3Q2018

SSD has become more essential since recent rounds of anti-Spectre/Meltdown patches seem to have made PC disk access blocking on multiple cores. My I5s have become totally unresponsive with >95% system idle just because a Windows update file is downloading and frequently accessing the harddrive.

UK.gov to roll out voter ID trials in 2019 local elections

Re: Lack of a secret ballot is a greater problem

Governments have monitored voting to punish civil servants who voted the wrong way around the World. The chilling threat is enough to keep parties in power for a very long time

Intel hits target: 27% of staffers are female? Apparently that's 'full representation'

There are far more female than male engineering graduates in Malaysia these days. Even outdoor jobs in civil engineering have many. The reason is that the government gives scholarships in engineering and the girls are better at passing the entrance exams.