Sign in / up

* Posts by Christian Berger

4850 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2007

Page:

Films-on-USB kiosks come to airports

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Why not go a step further?

Well in fact why not just have a similar arrangement TV stations have, just allow them to "broadcast" movie for everyone to record. Essentially just setting up a NAS box somewhere and allowing people who are in the room, to download those movies for free. Make it some kind of complimentary service to premium customers inside your lounge.

Since there is no DRM to pay, and no individual licenses to be managed, this could be very cheap. A europe-wide broadcast of a movie often costs only double digit sums, so something like that could be very cheap.

0 0
Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: DRM? Will not buy.

The point is, renting a computer file simply doesn't make any sense. Having a "renting" offer only means that this will foster piracy from people who "rent" the film in order to remove the DRM.

It's wrong to sustain business models which collide with reality, and it's wrong to lie to content creators that DRM works and is advantageous to them.

1 0

TDK BA100 earphones

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: Test results?

Of course not, RegHardware doesn't have an artificial head to test this. Besides it would have been the first device they actually tested. (apart from fairly useless benchmarks on laptops, who cares of machine X has 123% more CPU power than machine Y?)

0 0

Eddie Murphy heading for worst movie ever glory

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: Never Ending Story 2

Come on, part 3 was easily a _lot_ worse.

1 0
Christian Berger
WTF?

Titanic?

I know there's a version by James Cameron, and a cheap knock-off with a rapping dog you might have heard of, but I'd nominate the Orlando Corradi version. The full title is "The Legend of The Titanic",

Not only because it's english soundtrack sounds (at least on the German DVD release) like it came over a medium wave link, but also because it's amazing way of throwing rhyme and reason over board.

I mean it gets tiny things wrong, like 1 minute into the film, you see "The Times" with the date "Moday 14 April 1912", OK, in the US the date is written differently, and "Moday" is actually spelled "Monday" and that day in April was actually a Sunday,..... but why does it say "INTERNET EDITION" directly under the title?

I can understand them using mice to explore that topic, but then again, mice mustaches aren't conductive, and even if they were they wouldn't electrocute someone, and even if they would his nose wouldn't blink, and even if he wouldn't come back to life after he died.

I can also understand that one might explore the idea of everyone being saved, perhaps even by some strange circumstances, and dolphins are perhaps an interesting idea, and I can understand that in a world where mice can talk it might not be to strange that dolphins can talk too, but why does it have to be caused by tears and moonbeams hitting the ocean, and why does it have to cause the dolphins to be able to levitate???

And I'm not even talking about the love story, or the subplot explaining _why_ there was an iceberg. (hint: it involves Sharks in prison suits, and a naive dog-faces buff octopus)

Watch it, if you dare:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaM0FIjz6oM

0 0

Mobile app privacy: You get what you pay for

Christian Berger

The main problem are conflicts of interest

If you have an App-Store you have essentially 3 parties. One that makes software. Their intentions may or may not align with the ones of the other parties. Then you have the customer. Nobody cares about their intentions their sole purpose is to provide money. Third you have a market provider which may enforce it's own interests, e.g. by making sure they get their "fair share" or other rules.

What would be more sane would be to move to a community based system, like its done for Linux distributions. You can get your packets from one or more repositories. Each one of those repositories is "staffed" by people who are also users and programmers, so they are likely to have similar interests than you. And if they don't, you can just switch distributions and even start your own one.

This way you can avoid many conflicts of interest.

1 0

Moore's Law savior EUV faces uncertain future

Christian Berger

EBL sounds interesting

...mostly because it can scale down. You can build a much cheaper lithography setup at a much lower cost. This would lower the entry point into semiconductor manufacturing. I personally believe that once chip manufacturing reaches the realm of a small company or even hackerspace, there will be new waves of innovation. Just like the home computer revolution did.

0 0

Nokia design chief ayes tablet plan

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

N810

It still is ahead of the competition. The only things it lacked were proper storage (only Mini-SD) and no GSM/UMTS module (which made sense back then, as both networks were hideously expensive for data back then, and it would have been classified as a handset and therefore network operators would have imposed their restrictions on it.) Of course it already did SIP VoIP and came with a Skype client. At least over SIP it does video. It even runs an X11 server so you can even run normal unmodified GUI applications on it.

Probably the best feature it has is the lack of a "market". You have repositories full of open source software. Nearly anything of use was and often still is available.

0 0

BBC boss confirms iTunes alternative in store

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: Open up the archives

Opening up the archives is actually more complicated than you might think. In Germany you can generally ask TV-stations for copies of previously broadcast shows. This is usually done for high, but fair prices, considering those copies are "handmade". (about 60 Euros per hour of material is common) I once asked them about an experimental TV show made in 1972 which has absolutely no commercial value, and they couldn't give it to me. The problem was that in order to hand out copies, they need to have the right to do so. And back then they simply didn't think about home video so they didn't negotiate the rights with the participants.

What would be more sensible, would be a "donation based channel". An actual TV channel, open to everyone, to which cost you can donate to (so it's cost neutral for the station) and material could be aired without re-negotiation. This would effectively allow them to open up their archives without any extra costs.

0 0

Cisco vows to give 4,000 Brit kids a proper IT schooling

Christian Berger
Facepalm

It's not about IT jobs

It's about teaching the public at large that computers are more than combined Browsers/Videoterminals/E-Book-Readers/Gaming Devices. Just like we teach everyone a little bit of maths or English or Geography, people should know what a "loop" is, and how computers work in general. For example they should know that computers can output everything, they can "lie" to you if programmed that way. This is a concept very strange and unusual to the population out there.

It is simply necessary that the population at large has a glimpse of knowledge of that technology. After all we all have to make decisions in a world which is more and more influenced by computers.

0 0

Voice prints at risk from impostors

Christian Berger

Brute force

I mean this was just about _accidential_ breakage of the systems. Nobody apparently has tried to use voice synthesis to generate samples of voice which are designed to systematically scan the feature space. You could record those onto a record and use a newfangled device like a gramophone to play it to the system.

0 0

Submarine cables get simpler, faster

Christian Berger
WTF?

Uhm, what do they mean?

You don't need to convert the signal to amplify it, there are optical amplifiers now.

Are they talking about dispersion? I'm not sure if that's even a problem at dispersion compensated fibers (you take one fiber with "positive" dispersion, and a matching fiber with "negative" dispersion and put them in series so the effects cancel each other out).

So what have they actually achieved?

2 0

Why Windows 8 server is a game-changer

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: @Christian

You're lucky then, so far much of what I've seen didn't provide such interfaces. If you are lucky the server installs as a system service.

0 0
Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: Hmm.....

The beauty of Unix, and why command lines are so useful on Unix is that most programs work with text which you can easily process at your command line. If it wasn't for the integration of nearly all programs into the command line it would be virtually useless.

Besides you could control many aspects of a Windows system for years on the command line. For example the whole "networking" stack was accessible via the "net" command. You could even start and stop services that way. So again, maybe some improvements, but nothing "game changing".

3 1
Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: Hmm.....

Well but why use a Windows host then? It can just as well run on a Linux host, which people already do for years. So no change here.

1 0
Christian Berger

Hmm.....

Well after about 2 decades of broken promises from Microsoft one should be cautious.

There are essentially 2 problems I see here:

1. How many of those new features will be available in the standard version, how many will require 3rd party software?

2. There is a large amount of legacy software out there running on Windows (server). Software which often needs a GUI despite being a server. Software that nobody dares to touch, let alone integrate with Powershell. So you won't exactly get much use out of it. You'll still end up with trying to debug buggy software written in the 1990s by someone who didn't quite understand his programming language nor the operating system he's using. (I admit have been one of those programmers back then)

5 0

EC researchers demo multi-gigabit fibre-to-the-home

Christian Berger

No, you don't want passive networks

Even with WDM it means you will still have to run any old standard your customers still happen to have over those lines. Eventually with services being shifted in and out according to demand, you'll end up with a patchwork of used wavelengths. Should you ever have to have some WDM standard you might not have the space as some customers still require some ancient standard for business critical operation.

Laying fiber to the customer is a multi-decade operation. It's the first substantial upgrade of the phone network. We shouldn't botch this by using passive networks, just run a dedicated pair of fibers from every home at least to the curb. Unlike copper fibers are incredibly cheap. Always keep in mind that we will have to use whatever we put in the ground for the next 50-100 years.

1 0

IT pros lack recent skills

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: Isn't that many "recent technologies" are crap?

IT is inherently slow at finding out what's good and what's not. It takes a few years to build a larger project on a new technology. And only after many people have implemented large projects with a new technology, people will be able to judge whether it's suitable or not.

Unfortunately few projects are properly documented, and there are next to no metrics on the quality of software platforms making this all pretty much a guessing game.

So if a technology hasn't aged 10 years yet, you should be skeptical. You may have found one of the few technologies which are useful, or you may have settled on the crappy solution.

0 0

Just like a real computer: Android gets Android IDE

Christian Berger

Good step, but not quite there yet

The reason why people (who like Unix) like Unix is that your normal interface is just as powerful as a programming language, but quite easy to learn and you can easily access virtually any program already written for Unix by using pipes.

The next logical step would be a "graphical shell" which has things as powerful as pipes and loops. How would that look like? I have no idea. Maybe it would be something like "GRAIL" a pen based programming environment from the 1970s. This might then be the "tipping point".

Having a compiler for your platform on your platform is just sensible. That way you can install software from source.

0 0

Panasonic CF-53 Toughbook 14in rugged laptop

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: Why don't normal laptops have handles?

With a laptop bag, idiots will pull up the bag while it's not closed and the laptop will fall out. Trust me, happened a _lot_ of times to me.

Besides bags don't provide any real protection.

0 0
Christian Berger

Why don't normal laptops have handles?

Why? It seems to make sense and even Apple did it once.

2 0

if year > 2013 then PC != Personal Computer

Christian Berger

Just wait until the cloud bubble bursts

I mean we already had a bit of such a bubble in 2000 when suddenly many free webmail providers burst. The same will happen with other companies.

Such things always come in waves. We are currently in a wave towards centralization of IT, but the next one will be in the other direction.

0 0

Oracle starts peddling Exalytics in-memory appliance

Christian Berger

What I wonder

Programmers are fairly cheap, particularly compared to that kind of software. And apparently most of the complexity within the software is caused by it trying to be general purpose, you can run more or less any database on that system.

Now wouldn't it be cheaper to just write a custom in memory database? Many customers will most likely only use it for a single purpose anyhow. Many commonly used programming languages are already quite well at storing structured data in RAM. You'd only need to add routines to read and write from files. Of course this would be hard to apply for any existing system, but when you design new systems it might be cheap to include that.

0 1

Megaupload boss: Site popular among US government users

Christian Berger

Wouldn't be the first time he cooperated

I'm sure selling off those user data to law enforcement was part of his "Plan B".

3 0

Nuke clock incapable of losing time chimes with boffins

Christian Berger

To bad HP isn't in the watch business any more

They made so nice Cesium wrist watches like the 5071A.

http://www.leapsecond.com/pages/atomic-bill/

1 0

SUPERCOMPUTER vs your computer in bang-for-buck battle

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: Yes, but what can we do with it?

Well the PC is the counter example showing how a hardware platform should be. You could, in theory have the same for mobile devices, however manufacturers keep you from having it. I'd love to have a mobile phone with some "Open Firmware" or "BIOS" or "EFI" so I can just load any operating system I want from SD-card without restrictions, and a simple hardware abstraction layer so basic things will just work, but there is not jet such a thing. So we end up with a lot of our computing world being deliberately dumbed down, just like in the 1980s.

1 0
Christian Berger

Yes, but what can we do with it?

While in the past you could do anything with your computer you could imagine. You now have artificial limits imposed by companies like Apple, Microsoft or others. You cannot do the things you used to do on a Cray on an iPad, since writing a Fortran Compiler running on the iPad would violate the usage conditions.

We would have so much power, but instead of finding ways to make it usable to the average person, companies choose to go the easy way and dumb down computers computers more and more, turning them into nothing more than appliances.

0 0

HD glitch for Apple TV punters

Christian Berger

Well with German Sky the competition is simple

German Sky has nothing (except for sports) exclusive. They don't produce a second of intelligent TV. All they do is broadcast a random selection of random stuff, and sports.

1 0

World's Raspberry Pi supply jammed in factory blunder

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

It's not like mass producing electronics is incredibly difficult

You can easily set up a state of the art production line for far less than 1000k Euros, including setup and the building. The equipment alone just costs about 300k - 600k Euros, depending what you want.

That is for a setup where you pop in the rolls of components and the unpopulated boards and get out complete PCBs.

1 0

The true, tragic cost of British wind power

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: The anti-nuclear barrier

Well France has the opposite problem. They need to turn off their nuclear plants when it's to hot because they cannot provide cooling. Even under normal circumstances they need to import power because they simply don't have the resources.

100% power from nuclear wouldn't work, because it takes days to weeks to turn a nuclear plant on or off. And even with it's huge subsidiaries (free waste disposal!) it's not particularly cheap. Plus our government is incapable of selecting a place to put the waste.

What you need is to have a mix. For example in Germany, gas powered plants pop up. Now that is considered to be a fairly expensive way to generate electricity, however this is done in a smart way. Businesses which need a lot of electricity build those themselves, and not only sell the excess electricity, but also the heat. This simple trick increases the efficiency from about 30-40% up to up to 100%, saving more than half the fuel in winter. (In summer electricity is cheaper here anyhow because of solar power)

4 1
Christian Berger

What's funny is....

That somehow Germany seems to be this magical place where such problems either don't happen, or are overcome. We see this as a way to generate useful jobs. Someone who puts up solar panels or wind turbines certainly is more useful to the environment than a business consultant.

As long as there's a will, there's a way. Waste hasn't been an argument in the past and will probably never be.

I mean you could probably save a lot by banning commuting by car and building a proper public transport system, for both the economy and the environment.

4 2

Java won't curl up and die like Cobol, insists Oracle

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: COBOL??!

I'd say _way_ more than that.

1 0
Christian Berger

Seriously everyone expects Java to become the next Cobol

A dependable stable platform which will outlive us all. Unfortunately Java already has gotten to complex.

I don't know how complex your average Cobol environment is, but I'd say that's a tad easier to maintain than your average Java environment. That's what it eventually boils down for platforms, can you still maintain it when all foreign support stops?

4 1

Deutsche Telekom shatters data-transfer speed record

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: so home users

One should note that the earliest tariffs for DSL in Germany by Deutsche Telekom were based on time. That's why Germany has PPPoE and "dial in", they even continued the same user names from their old "Prestel"-based BTX and the automatic hangup after 24 hours.

0 0
Christian Berger

Of course...

Deutsche Telekom is also one of the providers which complains about their customers using the Internet to much.

I mean think of it. 512 GBits per wavelength per fiber! That's a lot, particularly since Deutsche Telekom is not exactly a company known for having the smartest beans in the pot, and you'd expect that technology to be available in commercial products, soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6oxwknHnkg

(Ignore the text and just look at the acting, here they are determining phone numbers, the rest of the story is how their boss complains about 2 customers getting assigned the same number)

0 1

Sub-£400 svelte lappies hurled in Ultrabook preemptive strike

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Should disqualify him from management

It's simply stupid that you will be able to compete if you sell the same product as everyone else.

If your products are different, there will be people buying them and then you are not just a "second source" to some other company.

0 0

Intel: The data center will be 'Xeon E5 Inside'

Christian Berger

BMW is probably the worst example there

It's a very top down company. If they CEO says they should switch to V-tech computers, they will do so without a whimper.

And a million requests per second aren't _that_ impressive. That's 11 requests per second. Fefes Blog (http://blog.fefe.de) probably has way more, and it's running on some very old machine.

Other than that, of course Pixar is an impressive example, they need the cheapest processing power for their render farms, and the fastest systems for their animators.

0 0

Lego space shuttle hits 114,000ft

Christian Berger

Political bias

There has been some political bias in Germany against Playmobil people, since they are not manufactured in China.

0 0

A sysadmin in telco hell

Christian Berger

BTW, why 800 numbers?

I mean its fine to have a normal number _and_ an 800 number, but barely any customer needs an 800 number now as many have a flat rate for phone calls. I'd simply advertise the normal phone number, plus the 800 one in smaller print.

2 1
Christian Berger

Cooperation between companies never works

Unless of course it's against the customer.

That's why one should always try to rely on as short of company chains as possible. If one of them messes up, you're screwed.

This is something you should also keep in mind when relying on cloud services.

8 0

Europe is a happy hunting ground for TiVo

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: Broadband Internet pipe please

Well I also want them to fix their stuff when it's broken and to upgrade their equipment according to the demand.

Unfortunately ISPs are now more likely to invest in braindead TV offers than good service.

0 0
Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: Now if only

Or you can use various open source software package. I use VDR for example, but that one has a special plugin for Freesat EPG which crashes a lot.

0 0

Wireless breakthrough: one frequency, multiple signals

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

@bert_fe

They don't need to be completely orthogonal. There is a broad range between completely orthogonal channels (which would double the capacity) and the same channel.

0 0
Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: How Does This Increase Channel Capacity ??

Well the same way MIMO does. You try to get several channels which are as independent as possible. If you can somehow send out photons in different ways and detect those photons independently, you can get several channels instead of one.

However I currently don't think this is more than just some basic misunderstanding.

0 1
Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: Yer, circular polarization, right?

It's hard to say, it certainly doesn't look like it. However I'm not sure if that's just a mangled translation, or some basic lack of understanding by the experimenters

The interesting question is if there are any serious publications on it. That would distinguish nutjobs from serious researchers.

My guess is that even if this is true, it's not much better than classical MIMO systems.

0 0

Belkin Power Pack 4000

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: Typical marketing fluff..

Actually the mAhs won't tell you a lot, what you want is the Wh. Because you want power, not current.

But then again, that article was useless, like so many on RegHardware.

0 3

Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board

Christian Berger

Missing the point

It doesn't matter how secure such a system is, but how easily you can check it. The usual pen and paper based system can easily be checked. You can detect tampering trivially without any special knowledge.

It can be understood by everybody and checked by everybody.

Plus its cheap and gets results quickly.

So why even think about electronic elections?

4 0

Windows Server 8 beta ready for download

Christian Berger

The problem with shifting to command line

The problem simply is that most Windows applications, also on the server side, either are ported from other platforms (which might integrate) or are legacy applications which nobody will ever port to make use of the Power Shell.

3 0

Powerful, wallet-sized Raspberry Pi computer sells out in SECONDS

Christian Berger

They could still ramp up production

(I work at a company which produces electronics, usually more complex boards, with more common chip packages)

After all those 10k just take a day or so to run though the SMT mounter. It doesn't have a lot of parts. It would be trivial to just tell the manufacturer to just build a few times as many, at least if they can get the parts quickly.

Just as a point of reference, SMT mounters can mount about 10-100k parts an hour, depending on the mounter. This board doesn't seem to have a lot of parts,so the 10k batch should be finished in a day. What's more noteworthy is that the setup of an SMT mounter often takes a day, depending on how well it works. Those are machines which heavily rely on mechanics for precision, and handle a lot of tiny little parts. It's not uncommon for a little capacitor or resistor to somehow get into the mechanics and cause the strangest artefacts.

1 0

Microsoft drops 'risky' Windows 8 preview on World

Christian Berger
Reply Icon

Re: No Iberian languages?

Well you have to consider the Windows 8 target demographic. They aren't exactly aiming at people with good education, that's a market long lost to Linux.

11 22

Page: