Posts by Sebastian.Q.Ostragoth

Apollo 13 set off into space 50 years ago today. An ignored change order ensured it did not make it to the Moon...

that movie with Tom Hanks

Amusingly the DVD of the movie has a second audio track featuring a commentary by Jim Lovell and his wife, of which there is no mention on the DVD box. A mistaken omission I'm sure, but well worth a listen.

What a terrible result from this year's Super Bowl. Can you believe it? Awful. Yes, we're talking about the tech ads

5g will connect emergency workers to hospitals?

Ok here's one for us old farts... Hands up if you remember watching "Emergency" I think it was on the toob? Which as I recall featured medical staff at a hospital feeding advice to the (apparently woefully untrained) ambos over a radio. Go 5G! Can't wait for you to plug that non-hole.

LG announces bold new plan for financial salvation: Trying to actually make phones people want to buy

It's the price stoopid...

I'd like a phone that costs less than a desktop computer please... and as noted making it unsupported in less than 5 years is a tick against you too. No other industry thinks abandoning their product after 2 years is an acceptable practice.

Ozzy app maker cancels hump day: We've tripled profits! scream slackers

the Kiwis have been at it too...

From last year.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/02/no-downside-new-zealand-firm-adopts-four-day-week-after-successful-trial

US firm wins Oz-backed bid to block Huawei from subsea Pacific cables

Go back and read Ken Thompson's Turing award speech.

Looking at the code is not sufficient to tell you if there is a hidden backdoor as the compiler may insert one automatically. Looking at the compiler source is not sufficient to tell you the compiler is doing this as it may have code to add the compromise code to itself. Once such a compiler exists, all the compromise code can be removed from the sources and yet continue to propagate...

They did it! US House reps pulled their finger out, voted to restore net neutrality in America!

This is hardly a US speciality...

Whilst the comments about the US politicians being unable to find common ground have a small amusement value (schadenfreude from afar?) the sad fact is this is this century's reality. US pollies can't compromise to make decisions of value, UK pollies cant compromise to prevent a Brexit outcome (no deal) which everyone on both sides of the English Channel agrees would be disastrous, Australian pollies can't even agree on who should be leader from one week to the next, let alone anything of real importance.

Two Arkansas dipsticks nicked after allegedly taking turns to shoot each other while wearing bulletproof vests

Re: Definite Darwin Award winner in the making

I thought the rules were you only qualify for a Darwin award if you haven't yet contributed to the gene pool by breeding? If you have it's too late and you no longer qualify.

Don't get the pitchforks yet, Apple devs: macOS third-party application clampdown probably not as bad as rumored

signing fixes nothing... we already know this

So what prevents a bad actor from getting a $99 signing cert and signing their shiny new malware? Didn't M$ go through a long period of "signed drivers mean no bad code can get into your kernel" until a researcher, tired of the BS, built a proof of concept piece of code that powered down your PC (from hazy memory) to show that signing doesn't fix the malware problem. M$ had to quickly add cert revocation lists to their codebase to 'fix' the problem... which of course still doesn't fix anything, just stops "that last exploit we noticed".

The testing/notarisation suffers all the same issues of course. All I need to do is write malware that doesn't use recognised bad libraries and where the payload doesn't activate until after the testing is long complete. I get notarised, and it's game on.

I'm all for security. But these aren't the answers you're looking for. (Waves hand at Apple stormtrooper.)

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

Re: Twiggy name

The twiggy name was a reference to the odd double sided mechanism. In the day, Apple had long derided double sided floppy disk mechanisms as 'unreliable', hence the single sided nature of the Apple II 5 1/4 inch floppy and a generation of users cutting notches in their media so they could turn it over and use both sides (one at a time).

For the Lisa, a second slot was put on the opposite end of the disk sleeve and a second single head engaged to read/write the 'other' side of the disk. (I.e. the normal head at the back of the drive and a much more complex second head at the front/door end of the drive). This also meant Apple were pretty much the only suppliers of media.

So one of Lisa II's many cost reductions was to adopt the by then standard 3 1/2 inch drive the first gen Macs were using (with normal double sided heads).