Posts by Bronek Kozicki

Do biofuels cause famine? EU President opens probe

@AC

"... but where's all this ethanol going?"

simply, it goes into gasoline and diesel fuel. All kinds of it. For more details see http://www.esru.strath.ac.uk/EandE/Web_sites/02-03/biofuels/foreign_europe.htm

Office 2007 fails OXML test

Just before ppl come slamming OOXML and Office 2007

.... and I would be first to, I want to remind that this particular finding is not surprising at all, because IT standards are notoriously difficult to implement accurately. For example, the only vendor that implemented 100% of other widely acclaimed standard ISO/IEC 14882:2003 (C++ programming language) is EDG. And even there 100% is not guaranteed, IIRC.

Music biz proposes 'iPod tax' in return for format-shift freedom

as long as levy is reasonably small and money goes to artists ...

... I would support the idea. Still, outlawing format shifting was bad decision in the first place and this only goes to slightly reverse effect of that bad decision. It does not go far enough. In my personal belief format shifting is covered by fair use, thus is legal no matter what greedy corporation lawyers say. There is also issue of video formats conversion, which in next few years will raise in priority - when folks start converting their (legally purchased) HD DVD collections to Bluray Disc.

some relevant links to parties directly involved

this is government side of the story http://www.ipo.gov.uk/policy-issues-gowers-flexibility.htm and this is corporate side http://www.bmr.org/cms/uploads/files/Press%20Release%2027%20-%20MBG%20Formatshifting.pdf

The telly's an Armani, dahling

The TV comes with two remote controls

What a brilliant idea!

Predator kill-machine pilots suffering 'chronic burnout'

Latency and compression?

I wonder whether the latency introduced by satellite link and quality of video could be (partially) to blame. It must be frustrating not being able to immediately see what exactly are these things down there, as well as having to wait for plane reaction.

BBC vs ISPs: Bandwidth row escalates as Tiscali wades in

what happened to multicast?

I know, IP multicast has its share problems - but broadcasting is exactly tke kind of scenario it was designed to handle. With IPv6 around the corner, maybe the time has come to reconsider enabling it?

IBM smacks rivals with 5.0GHz Power6 beast

Water cooling

If we really did not want to have water in data centres, we wouldn't be able to use air conditioning there (ever heard of condensation?). Secondly, any fluid is more efficient in moving heat from one point to another than air - it really doesn't have to be water. Lastly, invention of wheel was technological backward step, too - we all should be able to carry around whatever we need by means of genetical engineering, of course.

Mine is the wet one.

EU sets cellphone users loose in aircraft

@Matt

"As well as a picocell, planes will carry a network control unit to ensure phones can only use the picocell, cutting highpower transmissions by phones" - seems like somehow they intend to block these signals, indeed. Although I have no idea how - scrambling other frequencies?

Awed fraudsters defeated by UK's passport interviews

IT system? what IT system?

We all know ;) it would take the govs at least 5 years to implement anything resembling IT system to run the interviews. In my previous message I assumed there is no IT system in place and the whole thing is run on unsecured email, CDs sent over Royal Mail, dozen of ad-hoc Access databases and Excel spreadhseets held by duct tape and squadron of secretaries rewriting data by hand (where majority of budget goes to). Otherwise we would have not heard any report on its efficiency until games in 2012. Poor and inefficient as it gets, but still - providing more security than system with no checks at all.

RE: Just because it seems pointless doesn't mean it is.

I actually agree with this. System devoid of all controls is just an invitation for fraud - as passport system was before introduction of interviews (and vote by mail system still is). Even if controls in place do not expose much fraud taking place, this does not mean the system is not effective to a certain degree. It might need improvement, but all things take time to mature. No system of controls can be 100% effective, but even when far from perfect, they do provide some level of protection and are far better than not having any controls in place at all.

One annoying thing about British society is this warm, but utterly naiive feeling that "nah, we do not need any kind of controls, no bad ppl would ever live here". Well, maybe that was true few decades ago (although I have never heard of UK being addressed as Utopia), but times changed. And, BTW, all European countries on the continent have some sort of national ID card and govt databases are usualy connected by some sort of national id number. Nobody's complaining and it simply works. And finaly, as to issuing passport to "bad ppl" - it gives unconditional right of entry to country that issued it. I think this should be enough to alert those planning to "export" criminals from the UK.

Ohio voting machines confiscated in criminal investigation

RE: Voting machines (@AC)

good idea. Actually I had the very same idea some time ago already. More details:

- vote (page) would contain printed cryptographic signature, signed by the private key of the voting machine with included location and time (from builtin GPS - they are very cheap these days). This signature would be encoded in the form of two dimessional barcode. This barcode would not contain copy of actual vote, but its hash - this way vote will have to be scanned from the actual ballot and verified against signature.

- voter would take printed vote to the ballot box, and the box would scan vote as soon as it is inserted. This implies that paper would be rigid enough to prevent voter from folding it when inserting to the ballot box (imagine inserting your CC to ATM). If scanner at the box entry is unable to scan the vote or confirm its authenticity, the box would simply push the paper to separate box for manual verification and counting. The box would know public keys of all the machines in the local that are printing votes.

Nortel widens telecom tubes with 40Gb/s optical cards

@mvrx

Yeah, put some buzzwords together, call it "prediction" and surely facts will follow :-P

Democrats refuse immunity for warrantless wiretappers

@Jamie

Here is one Potomac I know of : http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&ll=51.493184,-0.291889&spn=0.001874,0.003594&t=h&z=18 and it's in London. I guess it's contagious.

Mobo maker builds 'powerless' processor cooling fan

CPU ?

From the picture it seems like it is not the CPU, but north (or maybe south) bridge being cooled by this curiousity

Vista SP1 kills and maims security apps, utilities

I can understand their rationale, still ...

Generalizing a bit, the way these products work is by hijacking system calls (patching system call table etc.) - basically they are hacking OS (as demonstrated in http://www.amazon.co.uk/Windows-NT-2000-Native-Reference/dp/1578701996/ or http://www.amazon.co.uk/Undocumented-Windows-2000-Secrets-Programmers/dp/0201721872/ )

Microsoft never made promise that these hacks will ever work, futhermore it never documented APIs and data structures exploited by these hacks. No wonder they stopped working after an update. I'd rather have Microsoft secure the OS best they can not paying attention to products that only HAPPEN to work in some version (exploiting low-level undocumented system features) that leave some bugs unpatched.

Still, I wonder if any of these changes are made on other purpose that fixing actual bug(s) in the OS.

Start-up Pliant claims to have secret for speedier SSDs

@Steve

yes, but one can balance reads and, especially, writes, across multiple chips. The more chips you have and the better logic to balance writes, the bettter potential performance improvement.

Microsoft launches student Java and LAMP challenge

@Norman

Of course, headhunters ARE interested in placing good programmers in the banks no matter if they have degree or not. Their money are paid from client satisfaction, which is NOT measured in number of diplomas in R&D deps. Quite the opposite, banks tend to be the most pragmatic employers in regard of actual skills - theirs income strongly depend on it.

US judge arranges summary execution of Wikileaks.org

@Svein Skogen

Not ISP but registrar. Still, given court order in jurisdiction where registrar happens to operate, they have no choice but obey.

RIAA chief calls for copyright filters on PCs

HD perspective

All Blu-Ray users will have this kind of spyware installed on their players (stand-alone ones or PS3 - not counting drives working under control of general purpose OS) as soon as HD DVD becomes thing of the past.

B&O reveals self-calibrating robo TV

@Cameron & anon

Shure, like B&O. are off-the-shelf standard stuff. Try custom made Ultimate Ears, Sensaphonics or ACS if you want earphones ultimate in sound quality. Actually, B&O are kind of a joke in this context.

Amazon turns up volume, buys Audible

@ray

For one, I am happy Audible customer. I did not know that they even pretend to support MP3, though. I bought the device that is listed on their website as compatible (iRiver Clix2 ) . The format might be encrypted, but I do not care (much) - as long as I can use the files I bought, I have no problem with their DRM.

Is this the world's most expensive desktop PC?

Only 2GB?

not for me, I need more RAM.

American LaFrance blames IBM for bankruptcy

Another waterfall victim

I bet ALF was not able to express its requirements clearly, but instead of adopting agile approach, waterfall was selected. Which means they were virtually unable to steer the development/deployment as they learned what they actually need. False analogy of software to construction killed yet another project, and one business with it. I suppose we will have to wait fo fatalities before waterfall (and stupid managers promoting it) becomes thing of past.

Government told to ditch biofuel targets

still long way off

biofules are not the answer to civilization energy needs, unless coupled with methods of production that do not cost the Earth. And for this we need cheap and environmentaly friendly electricity, which, for now, is just a dream.

FBI rings warnings over VoIP phishing cons

@RW

almost good. The second (missing part) is to make ID fraud a crime. As it is now, there is nothing victim (at least the one in UK) can do put the thief where he belongs. So, if sheep are about to regret their stupidity, there must be some option for them to do next. Like call the authorities and provide all the help needed to catch the criminal. And, possibly in the future, try to recover money in civil case.

Heathrow 777 crash flattens servers

RE: err,

well, batteries are heavy and, as others pointed out there always is backup power anyway - air motion around the craft. I do not know how planes work but explanation that the engines are the only normal (i.e. not counting contingency ones) source of power is plausible to me.

USB 3.0-sporting devices start to appear... sort of

@Jamie

If there ever is going to be USB3 driver for Windows Server 2003, it will also work on Windows XP 64bit. Surprise, this version of Windows XP is from the same codebase as Windows Server 2003 (and different than Windows XP).

But it does not really matter. I very much doubt USB3 will provide significant performance benefits - the bottleneck will simply shift to somewhere else, e.g. controler, bus or hub. If it's not already there.

AMD gains altitude in Q4 but hit by ATI scud missle

@Pierre

"But still. I wonder why people keep on buying outdated Intel prcessors for their desktops, as they repeatedly failed to be significantly better than AMD ones, for a much higher price. The magic of marketting I guess. "

well, I bought Intel Q6600 because quad-core from AMD was still far from the market at the time (less than year ago). And, if I were to buy now, I would still buy Q6600 - just compare price (Intel Q6600 £160, AMD 9600 £155) and performance. As to the former, you need to choose benchmarks yourself, there are just too many of them all saying the same story (Q6600 faster accross the board by 5%-20%). And no, Q6600 does not use FB-DIMM memory, thus system power efficiency does not suffer from FB power requirements. Also, I'm not Intel fanboy - I used AMD since my first PC many years ago, but had to replace system last year due to motherboard failure (relatively new Epox). I started to consider Intel only when I learned that there are no new motherboards with socket 939 where my old AMD X2 4800+ (2.4 Ghz with 2 x 1MB cache) would fit and that AMD recalled this CPU from the market and replaced it with another, under the same name, but with smaller cache and different socket. This really annoyed me.

Brit violinist does a Radiohead

@torrent users

popularity has nothing to do with quality, ESPECIALLY in classical music department.

Pioneer Project Kuro 'Extreme Contrast' first look

good question

Might be anything. Maybe OLED, I know it is capable of "absolute dark".

Toshiba remains upbeat about HD DVD

@Highlander

"Of the two formats Blu-Ray is actually the more open and less proprietary of the two (by far). " - anything to support this claim? Also, are you comparing global or US only sales (I know what Blue-Ray is more succesfull in the US)? last but not least - is there any chance that my HD DVD titles will ever stop playing as a result of me playng some newer movie?

HD DVD also has DRM, but ...

the problem with Blue-Ray DRM is that you may easily find yourself in unfortunate position of being unable to play some of your old movies, because when you viewed your recently purchased "Spider Man 6" movie, the disk silently updated firmware of your player to deny you possibilty of accessing "old and less safe" versions of Blue-Ray format. Sony does not exactly have a history of being open in DRM front and Blue-Ray is specifically designed to allow making these updates as transparent to the user as possible. The other thing I do personally not like about Blue-Ray (and plain old DVDs) is regionalization, which is simply not supported by HD DVD. I wonder how is it possible The Register staff is consistently missing these differences between both formats.

@Frank

I also think Matt must have seeing difficulties. As to screen size , 90" should be just good for sitting distance of 12' (4m) , according to http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/Article/How-Far-Should-I-Sit.php . This is probably too much for typical room size of British household, but not really much for our American or Australian friends.

I bought HD DVD just before Christmas

... and it still works, despite recent announcement. Gosh, I even keep buying new movies for it (most recently "Bourne Ultimatum" and "Heroes - Series 1 Complete" - try to buy these titles in BR). The player cost me below £200 and am sure it will continue to work with no regard whatsoever to Sony releasing new version of its crapware DRM every few months. Even if it happens that at some point I will buy Blue-Ray player, my TV set has enough HDMI ports to accomodate both.

2007 worst ever year for data protection

Well, now we only need good laws to protect against ID fraud

it is a disgrace that the state can make your details available to fraudsters, yet refuse to target them when, as a result of government actions, you become ID fraud victim with shoddy credit file.

data overlap

Almost surely there is some, uknown, overlap between sets of these lost data, thus the more accurate figure would be "something between 25m and 37m", most probably somewhere in the middle 30m.

Kent council approves 'cleaner' coal-fired plant

more on biofuels

... can be found here http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2008/01/03/that-biofuel-may-not-be-as-green-as-you-think-it-is

@Richard Austin

The trouble with biofuel is that it creates CO2 when burn, just as well as coal, gas or petrol does. Which means it is a non-solution to greenhouse gasses issue. Maybe thermonuclear fusion is a long term solution, but we are half a century (or more) from it. In the mean time we need short-term solutions and my vote is for more effort on research (of clean energy sources) as well as using nuclear for a while.

The art of software murder

@Neil

"it seems the market demands refreshed glitzy software." - almost. The fact is that there is no such thing as software without bugs (if we put aside TeX). Users want to be sure that the software they depend on (whatever it means) is actively maintained, so that the bugs in the current version will be eventually ironed out. One thing to look at is the age of the newest version or most recent fix - if it's "old" (whatever it means in any given market sector) users will worry that the software they are about to commit to is not actively maintained and they will be stuck forever with bugs in the current version.

The point where interest of users and that of a vendor diverge is difference between "new version" (= more bugs, more sales) and "bugfix" (= less bugs, free)

I can tell how it looks like from the other side of the fence...

Well, to start with, the only asset that software companies own is source code. Source code is actual implementation of software features that can be sold and managed. Which means if you want to sell next version of your software, you need to add new features to the old source code. And this is where the software hell starts - because, as it turns out, this is not truth at all.

This is just what suits, brought from other industries to manage software companies, believe in. The *real* asset of software companies is experience of developers implementing the stuff - because you can only design and write well something similar to what you have already written before. The trouble is, the owners can't cash on this when they sell the company - new owners want the code (that is instant gratification), not experience.

Also, as time goes by, developers are demoralised by constant maintenance of the old software, or heartbroken by seeing it breaking its neck under load of quickly hacked in features it was never designed to perform. Had anyone asked them to implement the same thing from scratch, they would have happily make it twice as efficient and ten times as scalable - with the experience they gained. But that would slow sales income for long time, or even worse - clients would not see the new version for the same long time. Futhermore, there are very, *very* few companies where developers count more than the source code they produce. This is because managing *people* is a lot more difficult than managing so-called assets like, say, source code.

This is how new companies are formed by former employees of the old companies - by people dismayed by their employers, or simply laid off by new owners. And these new companies, with considerable know-how and experience, can actually write good stuff. But I leave finding examples to others - it does not happen often. More often developers just give up.

Toshiba tech paves way for 100Gb Flash chips

@Andy Barber

First: some photographers use RAW formats, and then each picture can easily take more than 10MB. My 4GB card holds about 200 pictures in RAW, and that's not enough for even very short vacations. Second: some photographers do not dump their whole cards online and instead publish carefully selected pictures. Still, I would be more interested in SDD drive (say, 500GB capacity and near 0ms access time) than memory card for my camera.

HMRC manual on data protection was protected data

@Martin

surely the explanation is that personal details of 25mln people are much less sensitive than HRCM security procedures. Or so HRCM bosses believe. I wonder if these procedures can be made public under freedom of information act - that would teach them.

Hackers re-poison Google search results

China and what else?

If you are going to block China, you should also block Russia. Not domain, but IP block. And then probably few other countries as well ... or maybe just stop using Internet at all.

Canadian Taser death caught on camera

four taser shots ... or whatever witnesses seen

According to Sima Ashrafinia (who also recorded the incident, although only on a cell phone) there were 4 shots - see http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2007/10/15/taser-death.html - two officers tasered this poor guy at the same time. Well, one thing I can say about Canadian police - cowards beyond imagination. I can imagine they will stay faithful to this role till the end of inquest. BTW, I checked how long he would have traveled to get to the the airport in Poland - 6 or more hours, most probably at night (the plane departed in the morning)

Tasser safe?

This guy was the 16th victim in Canda only. Few days later (17 Oct) there was another one - Quilem Registre. Surely, oridinal wrestling is less dagerous. Tasser is safe alternative to *gun*, not to wrestling. Also, this poor fellow had been traveling for 15 hours at least (probably few more to get to the airport in Poland) before being put in customs zone for another 10 - I hope this explains his mental state (if it does not, put yourself in such travel). At this time his mother enquired airport personnel about him at least 4 times, waiting for him 6 hours after his planed landed - and received no information at all. I agree it was not a very smart idea to travel alone not knowing the language, but 4 tassers shots? It's bloody murder.

Samsung samples SATA II 2.5in SSD

Write performance?

While I have no reason to doubt figures provided, solid state memory up to date suffers from poor write throughput. And there is no say in the article whether this disk is any better. As to write cycles, I do not think there is serious problem - sufficiently smart algorithms can distribute writes evenly over all memory cells, and this together with some extra storage should make good enough reliability and longevity. Cmon, you will replace your HDD after 5 years anyway.

Police dismantle global child porn network

@Chris

The fact that no arrests were made in 9 countries just means this - police might have been involved to assist in investigation ie. providing log files from local ISPs .

From my side I hope those arrested are severaly punished - on both sides of the "transaction".

Whois database targeted for destruction

well, this might work

"And I would make it mandatory for people to check and respond to these addresses 24/7, or else."

... if the contact information is that of the hosting company. They can relay communication to the client and, more importantly, are in a way responsible for running the website, or mail server, on behalf of a client.

In other words : technical contact *must* be there available and working. But I do not think there is a good reason to publish personal information, if the domain name is a personal property.

Abit IP35 Pro Intel P35-based motherboard

I own this motherboard

.... and am very happy with it. Few nice touches:

- really good layout. I fitted CPU cooler with 120mm fan (a very quite one) with no problems

- PWM controller for CPU fan - although I had to search for one (picked Scythe Kama) it just works at 600 RPM. Or stops completly when cooling is not needed - and it does not make me nervous. Also, all other fans are controlled by the motherboard (voltage regulation - not so reliable as PWM, but with good fans works just as well). Which makes for some really quite machine.

- uGuru - it's the first motherboard monitoring software I've seen that works well without administrative rights required (I use "power user" for almost everything). It also allows switching fan speeds AND CPU speeds without restart etc - all settings are just click away. Although it ships with ugliest skins ever seen, one can customize them (I use one from http://forum.uabit.com/showthread.php?t=110148 )