Posts by Flocke Kroes

You thought you were joking

Wheel already patented. Try fire or crop rotation.

Re: You know what would increase PC sales?

I think Microsoft know exactly how much value people place on Windows 10. That was why they made it a free upregrade and rammed it down peoples' throats so hard they got sued. Despite their best efforts to infuriate their customers, they are still getting a net profit of a about $1B/month. They can afford not to care.

Re: Sony should have ruled the roost

You forgot the Sony Memory Stick. (not to worry, so did everybody else.)

In other news, what has happened to Andrew Orlowski? The article contained only one half hearted kick at Samsung. Why hasn't he blamed Google for the bad weather or found Julia Reda guilty of witchcraft? I accidently read a couple of his articles recently and there were no ad hominem attacks or baseless slurs of character. Should I let him off the naughty step, or is someone ghost writing for he while he is on holiday?

Not the best choice

The short half life means the radioactivity falls to approximately background levels in weeks, so no long term damage. Terrorists should use Bismuth, with a half live of 1.9x10¹⁹ years - easily available as a common ingredient of lead free solder.

Re: Why?

DRAM has been produced at successively smaller scales. This reduces the power requirement per Mb and the latency per Mb. Both improvements have been trashed by the increased capacity. The CPU cache could be made bigger or faster - but that would cost speed or capacity.

Putting the cache on a separate die allows using a process dedicated to DRAM, which is cheaper than using a process that can create DRAM and a CPU on the same die. Also, using a separate die means the DRAM does not suffer from having to work at the CPU die's temperature, allowing the cache to be bigger, faster or cheaper.

Re: My username is...

Mr Coward, you clearly suffer from multiple personality disorder. Although some of your personalities have expressed their undying love for our president, others have called him a pussy grabbing loon and far worse. Your disparaging comments on the Department of Homeland Security were not welcome. Until it time for you to return home, will be staying at a Trump prison, which serves only the best luxury water at $5000 per glass. Now please hand over your online banking credentials my colleague, who will take out a loan in your name so you will be able to pay your bill promptly on your departure.

Please enjoy your stay in the US and return to us as soon as you can afford it.

Or the other way around:

Everyone and his dromedary who contributes to incubator APIs sues Oracle.

Re: IDK

According to wakipedia, Fukushima Daiichi was designed, constructed an built by General Electric, Boise Cascade, and Tokyo Electric Power Company. The first pages for the wikipedia entries for each do not mention Toshiba or Westinghouse, so at a quick glance, neither built significant parts of Daiichi.

Nuclear power need lots of water for cooling, so the obvious places to put them are coastal. All parts of Japan are at risk from earthquakes. Nuclear power stations run by Tohoku Electric Power which were closer to the epicentre of the earthquake survived because they had bigger sea walls. The site was not particularly stupid. The defences were inadequate and the warnings about them were ignored.

Re: Lesson Learned

Don't use plain text passwords to control your botnet.

Best interests

Perhaps the bast interests of Oracle's shareholders would best be served by not wasting any more money suing Google.

Thermionic valves require a vacuum

Build a difference engine out of glass!

Re: About time

Did anyone else start reading John's rant, and go back to check to see if it was amanfromMars?

John, please explain 'Illegal private emails'

As far as I am aware, government officials are not required to preserve private emails. Perhaps you could provide a link to the law making private emails illegal.

I think you could also benefit from reading the FBI's press release. As is well known Comey ignored FBI procedure in a scandalous effort to influence the US elections. His obvious bias shows throughout the press release, giving many scary short quotes suitable for twitter, which he promptly backs away from at the end of the paragraph.

So lets look at Comey's final summary: "Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case."

Not "evidence of violations", he said "evidence of potential violations". This is a partisan government employee going out of his way to abuse his position to influence an election, and the best he can come up with is some weasel words that at best imply an unreasonable prosecutor has half an excuse to continue this witch hunt.

Comey 'excused' his behaviour by claiming he was pressured to disclose by republican senators who had received leaks from his subordinates. Perhaps these leaks containing sensitive information were sent by email to private emails from government officials to senators. Why have these people not been locked up?

Re: If Apple were to get the billion...

This is not about Apple getting a billion from Qualcom. The important thing here is how much Apple's lawyers can increase their budget.

Re: what to do with the war head

So many possibilities. The first three ideas to spring to mind: keeping the veg fresh, using the tritium to make glow-in-the-dark key ring fobs and breeding giant mutant super intelligent gerbils.

In a similar vein, there is a use for a finger print scanner on a car. Set it so any finger activates the cameras and the cattle prod.

Re: it's easy to resolve...

"Being able to produce stuff that can be exported". So we are able to produce stuff, but don't, and it could be exported but we don't.

Imagine instead of buying bombs and bullets we buy are soldiers beer, and instead of fighting wars, our soldiers have parties. Still got manufacturing and employment for our GDP, but we make fewer enemies. I have confidence in our soldiers, but I am sure even they cannot drink our entire arms budget. Send the surplus beer to our enemies, and perhaps we will have more friends.

"tech advancement would grind to a halt". ROTFLAO.

Not proven

Finding pictures proves that pictures got there somehow. It does not prove the accused was detected by a NIT downloading them from the Playpen via Tor. Even producing code for a working NIT does not prove the accused downloaded anything. Was the NIT output was faked? Was the NIT deployed on the accused's favourite hidden bottle cap picture exchange site?

I would like the burden of proof set high: abusing a child or buying/bartering the resulting pictures. If you get accused because someone else copies child porn to your computer, how much evidence should be required for your conviction?

I would like to keep the world's paedos in doors wanking to pictures or drawings, and not have them out in the real world desperate for a shag. Unfortunately evidence based policy is too difficult for our current politicians.

Re: odds not that odd

Take a look at the asteroid belt, or the rings of Saturn. Gravity is good at making rings.

Re: Anybody able to do the math for me?

Force from emitting light: 3.3µN/kW. The xenon ion thruster on Dawn is 9mN/kW.

Wikipedia's article on cold fusion mentions plenty of places where the fraud was investigated (the neutron spectrum graph 'changed' shortly after Pons was told his unreproduceable neutrons had the wrong energy). The cost of much of the research is not in the article, but for the research where figures are given, $71million was spent on cold fusion achieving nothing.

Pons and Fleischmann understand electrochemistry and described their experiments clearly. They used calorimeters (notoriously inaccurate even in the hands of experienced professionals) which led to the early positive results from students around the world. They described melted electrodes (dissolving that much hydrogen in platinum is going to change its physical properties). They tried to use neutron detectors (read the instructions and budget at least a month trying to reduce noise down to something sane before thinking about trying to measure neutrons from your experiment).

The EM drive descriptions I have read either contained mind bogglingly dumb errors in the algebra or were vague well passed the point of uselessness. There were pages of 'this is really amazing' followed by more pages of 'they are all being mean to me' before I got as far as the deliberate misquotes of NASA employees talking to journalists. This well was thoroughly poisoned long ago. Given the background, it is amazing that NASA spent any time on this experiment at all. NASA used sensitive equipment and took time to identify and cancel out as many sources of error as was possible with the limited time available. I am curious about where there error is, and hope it is something more interesting than someone not plugging the GPS into the atomic clock properly.

Re: Definitions

Perhaps Turn have promised to be open and honest with ad purchasers. Turn can promise to lie to targets about the functionality of to 'do not track' button. They can promise that customers will only pay for adverts that appear on the browsers of targets who have expressed a relevant interest. Customers can be reassured that Turn will be honest with them and keep promises just like they do with everyone else.

Perhaps "near future" is ten years.

There are solutions

I have not tried to fill in PDF forms, but a quick web search showed several options. The one I would go for is pdftk (tutorial). I found evidence that Okular and Evince did not handle US tax forms in 2014. There is a list of GUI PDF editors here and here. People have reported success running some Windows PDF software with WINE.

The good news is that Adobe appear not to have heard of ARM or MIPS. I considered trying QEMU on a Pi, but I am too lazy to read Adobe's EULA.

Re: Err ... What?

Easy. Businesses just install a certificate for their own fake signing authority on all their PCs. They can then man-in-the-middle all https communication without causing the browser to show warning messages.

Re: MD5 is error detection, not the fault

I am not sure we have geometry free media. Try: hdparm -g /dev/some_modern_block_device

CHS numbers have been completely meaningless for at least a decade, but they are still a part of block devices just in case you have something dumb enough to look at them. Even GUID partitions includes a protective MBR with fields for CHS.

Future proof media? Going back 21 years means floppy disks, zip disks (daisy-chained printer port!), DDS-(2or3) tape, Parallel SCSI, PATA, USB ports (without OS support) and expensive CD-R. USB flash was not available commercially until about 2000. It is possible that I could get my dusty zip drive to work with a USB/printer bridge. Nothing else I had in 1996 stands a chance of working today. (My DVD writers claim to be able to write CD-R, but are lying. I can still read CDs, but could not write them in 1996).

At a guess, by the time the 2038 bug hits, USB will be radio or optical to avoid damage from fake USB devices destroying computers by sending 200V pulses on the data lines. It is possible that some of my current devices might work with an optical to USB3 bridge at that time. 10 years of future proofing has been practical. 20 years worth is not a good bet even with access to hardware from a museum. Me surviving another 20 years is not a good bet either.

Re: AMBxx

Try reading the title. Reg titles can be humorous, misleading and clickbaity, but this time there is no excuse. The title was clear, accurate and succinct. With a little practice you can decode even the more cryptic titles, recognise that the article/advert will be of no interest to you, turn on your television set and watch something more boring instead. The great thing about watching television is if you do not like it, instead of turning off the television you can write an angry letter to the BBC, which could be read out and ignored by commentards busy reading comments with less pointless noise.

If he finds Tracy Island ...

... problem solved.

Re: Let me get this alt right

Because some people, including commentards believe what they read in Wikileaks, instead of the author of the source material miss-attributed to Blumenthal in an email modified after it was hacked from Podesta.

Extra cases are great business

The judges cousin owns the hotel were the lawyers are staying. A juror's brother runs the cafe were the lawyers have lunch. In a sparsely populated district, patent litigation related business could account for the majority of the income.