* Posts by Frumious Bandersnatch

2662 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Nov 2007

Wanna sell a phone in New York? Better have a receipt

Frumious Bandersnatch

One more thing

My nit-picking above aside, there's also the question about whether this is even the right (or even a good) solution to the problem. It's the same old Sir Humphrey logic: we must be seen to be doing something. This is something, therefore we must do it. Will this make it harder for thieves to sell on phones? Well it might make a marginal difference, but the black market being what it is, a thief will still have plenty of options for selling what they steal. Will it do anything to deal with the actual causes of violent assault? Of course not. For that you need a completely different, and much more expensive set of measures like more cops, better street lighting, and maybe technological measures like (silent) panic alarms in phones, automatic shutdown/bricking (combined with a reasonable mechanism to get a replacement phone) and so on. Unfortunately, fingerprint scanning isn't one of those technological solutions, IMO...

Frumious Bandersnatch

Has he really had someone killed over an iPhone?

Sloppy phrasing aside (yeah, he should have had a "who was" in there), one wonders whether he the attacker would have acted any differently if the victim didn't have a phone. Can we really say that the phone was the proximate cause? I distrust any politician who has some piece of legislation he wants to get passed or agenda he wants to push (this latter tending to include all of them) and uses scare stories and tabloid-level reasoning (or rather, rhetoric) to achieve their goals. I'm reminded of several cases of politicians managing to get new laws introduced (eg, new drug laws and other restrictions on personal freedoms) based on evidence that's flimsy at best.

I'm not saying that an expensive phone flashed in the wrong place at the wrong time isn't a problem, but it's possible that (a) flashing any sort of bling could have triggered the attack, (b) the attacker may not have wanted the phone as such, but didn't want the victim calling the police, and (c) if it's a question of risking death or serious bodily harm or giving up your valuables, you're probably better off with the second option: you can get insurance against theft, and even if you're not insured against losing a phone (or watch or whatever) the pain of loss is better than the pain of serious injury...

So while I have nothing but sympathy the the victim and their family and friends, but I'm always suspicious of politicians that try to "make hay" out of these situations.

Apple's top bean counter: New spaceship HQ won't emit 'one atom of carbon'

Frumious Bandersnatch

SBS

*cough*

Fiendish CryptoLocker ransomware: Whatever you do, don't PAY

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Kinda lame

Oops.. my mistake. That paper I linked to is about a chosen cyphertext attack, not a chosen plaintext attack. I did plenty of comments saying that RSA is vulnerable to chosen plain-text attacks, but I wasn't able to dredge up a paper to that effect.

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Kinda lame

If they're using DH (likely) and they're using the same keypairs to encrypt and decrypt all the files, ...

I was going to contradict you (and had a nice summary of how RSA worked all written up and everything) until I realised you're not saying what I thought you were. If I'm understanding you correctly, you're actually implying a chosen-plaintext attack. A quick search suggests that you might be on to something (pdf)

Japanese pussies slurp 'meow meow' sex wine

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: so what is the correct pronunciation?

"Nya" is a combination of the syllables 'ni' (as in knights who say) and "ya" (short 'a' sound, as in cat). When the two syllables are combined, the 'i' vowel sound is dropped.

If you had a friend called Jan (pronounced Yan), and stuck an 'n' sound in front of it, that's pretty much what 'nyan' sounds like in Japanese.

Various syllables in Japanese (ki, shi, chi, ni, mi, hi, all of which rhyme with a shorter version of the English "me") can have ya, yu or yo attached to them like this and the 'i' sound is always dropped. A case in point is Tokyo, which is definitely not pronounced toe-kee-o, but actually more like it's spelled, with 'kyo' being a single distinct syllable sound.

(*Only the 'o' vowels in "Tokyo" are long, so it's often romanised as "Tōkyō", but that's a different matter)

Extreme ultraviolet litho: Extremely late and can't even save Moore's Law

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Slipped place

That would then become a transcendental place to live

I rather think that they'd have to continue expanding indefinitely (with an asymptotic limit, of course, in order to avoid scaring the neighbours)

iPhone 5S autopsy shows WHY it can't tell which end is up – dev

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: what a let down given the title

Have a thumbs up for getting one of my favourite actors into the discussion.

And one from me for the implied (well, inferred) sense of menace Steel + a soldering iron conjures up.

Snowden: 'I have data on EVERY NSA operation against China'

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Not exclusive.

I'm quite sure that Hitler and Stalin ...

Thanks to Godwin's Law, such a comparison probably isn't going to garner you quite as many upvotes as you might have hoped. Save the Hitler comparisons for much later in the thread (assuming it's even appropriate there).

AMD avoids a red-ink-stained quarter for once, market says 'meh'

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Don't you mean Xbox Ones

Sure its XBox Ones getting stock piled rather than 360s.

Shhh! By ruining the surprise, you're ruining half the fun of Christmas!

MEGA ASTEROID could 'BLOW UP EARTH' - Russian space boss

Frumious Bandersnatch

What I'll be doing

Provided I'm still alive, it might be a good time to grab the "Fish Story" record from the shelf and take it for one more spin.

Behold, the MONSTER-CLAWED critter and its terrifying SPIDER BRAIN

Frumious Bandersnatch
Alien

Re: "Giant" is not a valid metric unit

Giant? The article says the critter had a length of three centimetres

To be fair to the OP, the article also describes it as a "massively clawed beast", which might suggest a giant beast, even though it probably only means that the claw is massive (relative to the creature's size). And OP is talking about dreams, not reality, so accurate measurements or units hardly apply...

US parents proclaim 811 'Messiahs'

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: here on the edge of sunny Norfolk...

He'd probably pronounce it "Cumble", especially if he comes from Cholmondley.

Which reminds one, obviously, of calling one's child "Raymond Luxury Yacht" (pronounced Throatwobbler Mangrove, obviously).

Cannabis can CURE CANCER - cheaply and without getting you high

Frumious Bandersnatch

ellipsis ...

That bit you copied from their statement:

Importantly, they had an increased effect on cancer cells when combined with each other ...

So did they just trail off there before finishing the paragrap? Were they under the influence when they started to write it? Enquiring minds want ...

Yahoo! To! Switch! On! Webmail! Crypto! By! Default! Next! Year!

Frumious Bandersnatch

OMG...

That last line ... Yahoo! didn't actually say that it "takes the security of it's*users very seriously", did they?

Diamonds are forever POURING down on Jupiter, Saturn - boffins

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Best. Line. Ever.

If only there were some Yahoo angle. Best! Subhead! Evar!

MS Word deserves DEATH says Brit SciFi author Charles Stross

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: The customer is always right.

Equally, you could say that the publisher's job is the care and feeding of its stable of writers. Take Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which was famously written longhand on a long spool/scroll of paper. Evidently the publishers saw merit in the manuscript as it was delivered, and did all the work needed to get it into publishable form. Otherwise, we wouldn't have such a great work of modern literature.

Also, as GB Shaw said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Stross's "unreasonableness" is the kind I can get behind.

Google: Now your mom will try to sell you toilet paper

Frumious Bandersnatch
Headmaster

Re: whatever will they do next...

The gran[d] plan it seems is to elimnate

I assume you meant "e-limn", which as any fule no is "e-" (for electronic) + limn (depict or describe in pictures or words). The -ate suffix is entirely unnecessary.

Anyway, in fact that's just what they're planning on doing, as described in the article ... (Do keep up, [007]).

Who here needs to explain things to ELEPHANTS?

Frumious Bandersnatch

So does that mean they might enjoy magic tricks?

Observe this simple salt cellar ... observe this napkin.

So would the pachyderms "get it?" Maybe the boffins could do a follow-up experiment?

Brew me up, bro: 11-year-old plans to make BEER IN SPACE

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Interesting

On earth the head floats to the top of the pint.

Never mind the head, where's the yeast going to go during fermentation. ISTR that yeasts are either "top-fermenting" or "bottom-fermenting". I wonder how that will work out in zero-g?

Web Daddy Berners-Lee DRMs HTML5 into 2016

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: I am quite...

And also:

6) crackers exploit holes in DRM and the new raft of "you need to install a new plugin to view this video" style of messages, meaning that HTML5 will be no more secure (and possibly less) than before.

TWELFTH-CENTURY TARDIS turns up in Ethiopia

Frumious Bandersnatch

Highly Salasie

Ay...

Microsoft: We're nearly OUT OF STOCK of Surface 2 and Pro 2

Frumious Bandersnatch

Stupid comment, about as relevant as what GEC is doing in the diode lighting market.

Of course GE isn't worried about the LED market. It's too busy electrocuting elephants.

GitHub wipes hand across bloodied face, stumbles from brutal DDoS beating

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: GitHub & businesses

Who let grandpa on the internet again? Time to give him his pills.

Pfft. It was "grandpas" that built most of this Internet of yours ...

Down with Unicode! Why 16 bits per character is a right pain in the ASCII

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: The historical accident of little-endian

said Frumious Bandersnatch on the 4th of October, 2013

Ah... touché! I had to read it several times to figure out what the problem was. I do prefer the Japanese date system, but the point is well taken.

Frumious Bandersnatch

And if they don't understand, just REPEAT IT IN CAPITALS.

I prefer to just xor it with spaces.

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Agreement

Isn't BOM just a NOP in UTF-8?

Not if you use it for steganography...

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: The historical accident of little-endian

On a purely technical basis, little endian representations of numbers are much easier to parse and handle. I'm meaning proper numbers, not the arbitrary computer representations. Take the number 12345675679274658. Quck now, is that one quadrillion, twelve quadrillion, 123 trillion, or what? You are going to have to do a right-to-left scan of the number to find out.

Huh? That makes no sense:

* easier to parse? in all the (human, natural) languages that I know of, we start with the biggest quantity and work down (even in expressions like "four score and 7", "vingt et un" and "eleventy one")

* is that quadrillion, ... : you don't have to scan right to left---you just count how many digits there are (and last I checked, counting left to right gives the same answer as counting the other way)

You should have icon privileges revoked for such a silly post.

Frumious Bandersnatch

Little endian (x86/Windows) being COMPLETELY WRONG of course.

All my machines here (bar one) are little-endian. They're all running Linux, so it's not an OS-specific thing. You have to blame the CPU manufacturers.

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: There's UTF-8 and utf8 in Perl

And there it is. My fledgling interest is learning perl. stone. cold. dead. Life is just too short to deal with so much silly.

Don't let it put you off. Unicode in Perl more or less "just works". The only times I've had problems with it have been in trying to correctly convert stuff from other code pages and broken MS document formats. That, and sometimes forgetting to tell my database that the incoming data is UTF-8 rather than ASCII (though sometimes Perl needs a hint, too, to tell it not to do a spurious conversion).

Speaking of MS documents, I find it really incredible to come across HTML on the web that obviously came from MS Word initially and that has completely messed up rendering of some trivial glyphs (like em dash and currency symbols). I find it hard to believe that in this day and age, Word can't even convert to HTML properly. OK, so maybe the problem isn't with word, but with the options the user selected for the conversion, but still...

Plastic ingredient FOUND ON MOON of Saturn

Frumious Bandersnatch

It makes one think

Many (hopefully in multiples) years from now, if a travelling alien probe happens upon the remains of the civilisation here, perhaps they'll find all the various plastics we've left behind. They might find the variety of chemicals fairly unsurprising (given that at least propylene seems to form naturally in some places), but hopefully we'll give them cause to scratch their heads (probably in multiples) wondering what natural forces could have given rise to such a range of shapes and colours :)

Windows 8 fans out-enthuse Apple fanbois

Frumious Bandersnatch
Coat

Re: Sigh....

For the minute however, I am suffering utter pericombobulation trying to work out why 81...

For why? They're obviously preparing for IPv6 and the "Internet of Things". Having 81 licenses/machines should definitely be enough for anyone!

Rare gold iPhone 5s goes up against 50 caliber high precision rifle

Frumious Bandersnatch

32 feet/second^2?

I think that there's something wrong with the Register's Unit conversion page. I can convert 32 "feet" (whatever they are) into Linguine easily enough (it's apparently 2.1772lg), but what are these weird "seconds" squared? A bit of research on the web tells me that 1 "second" is approximately = 1/Pi nanocenturies.

So 2.1772lg/(1/Pi nanocenturies)^2. Hardly accelerating at all, in other words. Not impressed with this "iPhone" thing!

BOOGIE BALLMER: Steve Dirty Dances at tearful Microsoft leaving do

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: how about...

Penguin in Bondage --- Zappa

Congrats on MP3ing your music... but WHY bother? Time for my ripping yarn

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: And another thing

It saddens me a little to think how infrequently the care and thought that goes into putting together an album as a whole is noticeable once we get to mp3 players on constant shuffle.

It's funny how deeply ingrained that idea (sequential play) is. As far as I know, there's only one album that was deliberately designed to be played on shuffle: Minidisc, by Gescom. Exactly how "musical" it is is open to debate, though.

Granted, not all albums benefit from specific ordering. It's often a case of sticking the "hit" tune at the start or the end, with little musical merit in any particular ordering. There are exceptions, though. I couldn't imagine Dark Side of the Moon played in any other order. Sadly, nobody really makes albums like that any more.

Frumious Bandersnatch

my wife tried putting ours in alphabetic order in racks

A classic mistake. You need B-Trees.

Thorium and inefficient solar power? That's good enough for me

Frumious Bandersnatch

That's a kilowatt over... a thousand seconds... ummm... 20 minutes... is that all?

Damn it! There's another of my dreams cruelly dashed :(

Frumious Bandersnatch

Sounds like it would be a good way for apartment blocks to create and store energy

Well apartment blocks are generally multi-storey, so there's an easier way of storing energy: have a big fuck-off weight that gets raised over the day when there's a glut of energy and then lowered at night with some sort of energy-recovery system in train. Kind of like clockwork for the <checks watch> 21st century.

30 years on: The day a computer glitch nearly caused World War III

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Don't fret

In the middle is where we find balance.

More like "where we get run over by both sides", unfortunately.

Google reveals its Hummingbird: Fly, my little algorithm - FLY!

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Is it Christmas already ?

If old Google was like C, Hummingbird is like Python or Ruby.

New one is more like COBOL (or SQL), IMO.

SHOW ME the page THAT HAS some tat or other WHERE YEAR = 2009 FROM the register

Apple ups revenue estimates in wake of nine million–phone weekend

Frumious Bandersnatch

@toadwarrior (Bronze badge)

There aren't too many comments here. The fandroids must have to get over some serious butt hurt before they come in.

Meh. I'm a "fandroid". Never used an Apple iThing because I didn't want to be locked into a closed ecosystem. My reaction to the news? Good on them. Competition is good.

Microsoft: Surface is DEAD. Long live the Surface 2!

Frumious Bandersnatch

@BlackKnight(markb)

for someone who very quickly loses patients with technology

I really hope you're not a doctor or someone in the medical profession ...

Phil Collins' daughter 'will give you A VIRUS' – security bods

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Real information...

... or just a VIRAL promotion hoax for the actress?

I think you meant "hacktress", there.

THE TRUTH about beaver arse milk in your cakes: There's nothing vanilla about vanilla

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: @Robin: financially viable ?

It's not like real vanilla grows on trees...

True... it's a member of the orchid family.

Frumious Bandersnatch

beavers

The hunters drive them extinct, confectioners use it as a sly substitute and tv cooks can't get enough of it in their fancy recipes. Just one question---who's the real vanillin here?

Microsoft no longer a top Linux kernel contributor

Frumious Bandersnatch

3.10 comes after 3.9.

Well, yes and no. The kernel uses even numbers to indicate stable releases, with odd ones being more experimental. So after the 3.8 (stable)/3.9 (unstable) pair, then you can go on to the 3.10/3.11 branch.

Also, all kernel releases are defined by three numbers rather than two, eg, 3.4.1, 3.8.17, and so on. Also, to be totally pedantic, everything after a dot is treated as a regular "decimal" number when it comes to sorting (like 'sort -n').

In Perl: :

print join " < ", sort {

my @A=split /\./, $a; my @B=split /\./, $b;

while (@A or @B) {

$apart = shift @A || -1; $bpart = shift @B || -1;

next unless $apart <=> $bpart; return $apart <=> $bpart;

}

return 0;

} ("3.10.1", "3.2", "3.1.2", "3.10", "2.0", "2.1.4", "3.4.1", "3.8.17");'

Which prints

2.0 < 2.1.4 < 3.1.2 < 3.2 < 3.4.1 < 3.8.17 < 3.10 < 3.10.1

(apologies for formatting, since we don't have working "pre" HTML tags)

Angry Brazilian whacks NASA to put a stop to ... er, the NSA

Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: not from Bierce

@Irony Deficient:

I was ready to downvote you for that, but a search suggests that you're actually correct. Have an upvote instead for being all edumafiying and ting.

Server hack heads up the stack for a new challenge

Frumious Bandersnatch
Pint

"I can only say that English is not my first language"

All I can say is "bon voyage", since I don't know how to translate it.

<--- wasn't my pint over there a while ago???

Torvalds: 'We're not doing Linux95 … for a few years, at least'

Frumious Bandersnatch

wacky release naming/numbering

Perhaps he can take a leaf from Knuth's book (figuratively) and switch to using pi-based release numbers once he gets to 3.14. That is, 3.14 -> 3.141 -> 3.1415 -> 3.14159 -> ...