Posts by Christian Berger

Never ever...

Never ever give your bank account details to a mobile phone company. That's just to dangerous.

My wish

My wish would be to have a simple way of making meshed networks and to join them. For example when you get to a network of the Freifunk movement, it should just tell you that you can join it, and automatically set itself up to do so.

Another idea would be to have an option to "be public" which would automatically try to find other "public" computers in the network. You could then copy files to them, for example via drag and drop. Or you could start applications "publically" for example via VNC or something.

Wrong market

The "getting it done" people either have Windows because it came with their computer, or use Linux as it's cheaper and works more reliable. (except for KDE of course)

Apple product are bought by people who have no problem patching a firmware image, or finding buffer overflows in the baseband chip, because that's what you need to do to get things done on those devices.

Microsoft has such phases

Microsoft has such phases . Remimber the very early 1990s when they promised to be compatible with everyone with their new product "Windows-NT"? They even designed features into it's NTFS which only Mac network clients could benefit from.

In the end, they might release some software which would be incredible usefull if they fixed a few easy to fix bugs and abandon them.

In the end Microsoft will not have learned anything. Their whole business model is currently based on offering what many people percieve to be the best WINE out there. Their current OS product only sells because they ship it with a copy of the product people actually want.

That's why we need meshed networks

Imagine a world where you would have meshed networks and everybody would have wires or radio links running to their neighbours and maybe the occasional central location. An event like this might have slowed the network down, but it certainly would have continued to work.

Sensible

If Intel had waited for Microsoft to implement the software stack for USB, we still wouldn't have USB.

Gamers will look forward to it

Because that will finally mean there's gonna be modchips and pirated games for the PS3. Now Sony actually has people against them having a logic analyzer and knowing how to use it.

I would gladly pay for good news

However I do not want to pay for PR and propaganda.

No Video CD?

Seriously? They cannot spend the less than a cent to make it play Video CD, even though it's still one of the most used formats. At least in czechia most movies fome out on Video CD before they come out on DVD.

Anybody complaining about UK television....

should be forced to watch only German television for a month.

Our commercial stations are like reality shows on BBC three, only done horrifyingly badly. They are not designed to show something remotely related to reality like on your channels, but instead only meant to humiliate the participants.

And public stations are only mildly better.

They take this seriously:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gETNrS_yd7s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Xfw2NKYUY

This has _nothing_ to do with traditional bavarian music. This is just a brainless obscenity. It's not even provoking.

Of course there are rare events when even German TV is good. One example is Ijon Tichy:

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

Or the German knock-off of "The Office", "Stromberg"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q63PrEyk5zw

How long untill all of BBC is torrentable?

I'd say about 3 or 4 weeks or so. Maybe even with RSS feed.

Communications would only be one way anyhow

So let's try to be a bit more clever than random stuff. Next time there is an 'interesting' cosmic event, let's send out a long message to the opposite direction. Now if there is (or will be) a civilisation in that direction, it will look towards us. It'll see the event, and then when it dims down, see our message. When the message arrives we will probably have died out a long time ago, but the others will have gotten a message from us, telling them that they are not alone.

Sensible use

That's a sensible use. The Atom line just uses far to much power to be used for portable applications. But in a NAS device it makes sense.

Big problem: Open standard?

If the boxes have an open standard you can use with any software it'll be a success. If it's yet another proprietary solution which can only be used with it's own software.

If it's an open standard you can suddenly use it for application servers which makes way more sense than having virtual desktops on a server.

Flash plugin vs Flash software

The Flash plugin will definitely die just like all the other plugins did in the past. Now it's up to adobe if they manage to have an "HTML5" export function for their content creation software. If they do, their software will live on. If they don't, it'll die.

Does exFAT have _any_ advantages?

I mean you can make FAT filesystems larger than 4 Gigabytes, and you can use alternative filesystems like ext2.

Cannot watch the video

I cannot watch the video, it's not availiable in my place. :(

Been to a school with one of those

They had Windows 98 clients acting as terminals to a Windows 2000 server. When I left, they had Linux clients as terminals to that same Windows 2000 server. :)

Uhm Quantel Paintbox?

Before that all, there was of course the Quantel Paintbox, which had features probably never to be imitated by Photoshop.

Will be interresting with meshed networks

Actually the only way this could work is by giving the network into the hands of the users. For example via meshed networks. Otherwise nobody would be stupid enough to pay twice for their connectivity.

Anyhow the hardware will be popular among people who want to spoof their own network.

Maemo=Debian

Maemo is just Debian so it's what most geeks want.

It would be interresting to see the long term effects

I mean will a "computer engineer Barbie" inspire girls to think about technology?

It's storage

It's storage, therefore it must be expensive.

Probably a sane idea

Now the next thing would be to implement a "Please Cache" header in IPv6 which tells routers to please try to cache the connection, if they can.

Then, If I was Google, I would design and build lots of small routers with built-in harddisks which then simply cache every http request which has the "Please Cache" header in it's packets. The router would then have wireless and wired interfaces. Maybe Google would even pay you a bit of money for the traffic you route and the traffic you cache to motivate you to connect your router.

This would mean a lot lower traffic and power costs for google as much of the content distribution would then be done in the network itself. And if done right, the whole net could profit from that.

Most importantly

Schools in Germany are dumping MS Office in favour of OpenOffice, probably because the typical pupil cannot afford the software.

In face I've even seen a school dumping Windows almoust completely. The only machine left was a Windows 2000 application server.

Big Misunderstanding

The main problem most people don't get is that those 100 GHz is probably meant for small signals. Essentially you amplify some DC signal and add a bit of high frequency signal. This is how it's done in analogue electronics. And in fact there 12 GHz is already _cheap_ as you can see at 3 Euro LNCs for direct broadcast satellite reception.

In digital applications you usually want to switch a transistor all the way. If you don't do that in CMOS you will essentially short circuit your power supply and your chip will blow up. This did happen in some early CMOS designs.

There is actually one digital technology which aims to use the speeding benefits of analogue circuits is ECL Emitter-coupled logic. Those circuits can easily reach the multi gigahertz range, however a simple gate can take several milliwatts of power. They are usually used as dividers for frequency counters.

One does not buy Intel because of the speed

One buys Intel because they have really good open source drivers. It just works out of the box.

And those chips are built to work without fans, so they won't overheat as easily.

Buffer overflows ahead

C++ is surely better than PHP, but the number of people actually fully knowing the language is about double digit. C++ is just a moving target which takes 4 years to master and changes completely every 4 years.

I would have rewritten it in a language like object orientated Pascal. It's compiled, but features functions like rangechecks. I have tried it on numerical applications and haven't been able to measure any significant loss in speed.

Well at least some use

Seriously, if they'd only have removed the DRM from the iPad, it would have been a usefull device. So far the most useful application seems to be VNC.

I seriously don't get your problem

DAB in the UK was a great success. There are _millions_ of receivers in your country. You can see DAB receivers in your soap operas. You probably have seen DAB radios in stores, maybe even in other peoples homes. People know about it.

I am a geek, I have studied electronics with a focus on information technology. So far I have only seen 3 DAB radios in real life. One in a laboratory, one in a museum, and the last one in a transmitter building of the regional broadcaster.

You might question if a digitalisation rate of 50% are right or not. Here even 0.1% seems overly optimistic.

In Germany the radio solution for audiophiles certainly is DVB-S, or radio over the infrastructure for digital television. All public music stations are availiable in 320kbit MP2, while some stations even broadcast in Dolby Digital.

What other reason is there

What other reason is there to have a femtocell? I mean to get Internet locally, I could also use WLAN, but to play with GSM, a femtocell is cheap hardware.

I don't think it's beeing counted

Has anybody found the connection which sends the vote yet?

It's still alive

It's still alive in Germany and Austria. So if you set your dish to 19.2° East you can still get lots of teletext. Even analog and all. :)

Of course they won't recode all their stuff

h.264 is the format they currently have all of their videos in. Do you seriously think they will reencode that all just for a test?

Of course we need to take a stand that we don't want H.264, but it's very understandably that they haven't yet switched to Ogg Theora. Even if they wanted to, the switch would still take weeks.

So what do we learn from this:

Let people run Linux on their boxes and nobody will take a serious look at your DRM systems.

People who just want to copy games or produce modchips to allow that typically don't have the expertice to circumvent your DRM. People who port Linux typically have.

If there would be competition

If there would be competition, no ISP would even think about doing that.

But, aren't many TVs compatible already?

I mean what you need to do 3D is for example pixels in different colours. You can either use that for the gimmick of colour television or stereoscopic 3D, as recently demonstrated by Channel 4.

I don't see the point of getting a new TV which uses polarisation or time to differenciate both pictures. After all that will start working, without glasses, once Phase 3 has arived.

At least they have experience with crashing

At least they have experience with checking if their boxes still work so they can restart them. :)

On the other hand, maybe you should get your routers from a company which doesn't think it has to implement the 90% crap of the standard, just to get it wrong.

Privilege escalation?

How? I mean 99.9999% of all Windows users work as "Administrator" anyhow.

If Win64 actually cannot run win16 applications it's no alternative either. Businesses depend on such applications to run.

Hardware: Problem solved

What we need now is something like the web, but for such documents. A network where everybody can provide content and everybody can read it, without having to go through a relevant middle man.

Is it really that hard to get real CCTV feeds?

I mean they should be able to get CCTV4 Europe and CCTV 9 via the hotbirds at 13° East.

Weired

The current kinds of Linux mobile devices already provide me with qualities no Windows Mobile device would ever do. After all, unlike Microsoft's offerings, Linux is usually Linux. (Unless you have something crappy like Android or WebOS)

No competition => Regulation

Unfortunately there's nearly no competition in the broadband market. In most places you cannot choose between several providers.

If customers could choose, they would gravitate towards open networks, but unfortunately they cannot. It's not an open market.

Now Comcast has a simple problem. They are providing internet via "broadband" cable. This is, unfortunately a technological dead-end, as all users need to share their bandwidth. So unlike DSL providers where they only need to rent another pair of fibers from the DSLAM, the cable network needs to be upgraded by beeing split into smaller networks. This is _really_ expensive.

There is of course the classic

Unfortunately in German, but it provided fun and laughter to German hackers until the advent of Bittorrent.

http://www.trust-us.ch/habi1/094_gedachnistelefon.html