Posts by Mage 9268 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007
How many USERS can use the Repeater with:
A) A commercial Rig not Icom.
B) A legal homebrew rig
Such a repeater is only really of value to Icom unless it ALWAYS supports any mode of transmission (technically possible on Duplex frequency pairs using linear amplifiers)
D-Star isn't encryption, but it's a closed, proprietary system used to sell Icom rigs. I can't understand why (a) It has support and (b) Why Comreg and Ofcom allow it and repeaters designed for it. It's inferior to FM and especially SSB for coverage and basically needs an Icom rig or an Icom licensed massively overpriced USB stick.
Yes, D-Star is just a scam to sell Icom radios. It doesn't even use a particularly good codec. But it's all patented, copyrighted and controlled by Icom.
Amateur radio historically wasn't private and in most countries it was a licence violation to use encrypted Morse or RTTY. Both possible in 1930s.
So two issues are PROPRIETARY modes, codecs, protocols and also ENCRYPTION. There should not be either. Especially in an Emergency situation as that limits those able to help to a rich elite.
20 or 25 years after creators death, i.e. the creator children. The 75 years is mostly benefiting large corporations and not estates. Corporations that made a huge profit in the 1st 5 years.
If the book,program, magazine, DVD, CD etc is out of print for maybe 5 years, then the copyright should revert to the author(s), or if that's inappropriate, then public domain.
DRM locks content out of public domain forever, except the pirate copies.
Yes, DRM is all about controlling markets and distribution. It's a lie about it maintaining copyright. Industrial pirates have never much been impacted by DRM. Also DRM is incompatible with innovation and the traditional concepts of copyright. It's even added to content originating in the public domain.
Yes, it sounds weird. What on earth would any miscreant want with so much kit simply walking up to the entrance.
"Zhang produced two Chinese passports displaying her photo." Why produce TWO passports?
"Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a regular news briefing in Beijing on Wednesday: 'I have no understanding of the situation you mention.' " That seems a reasonable statement even if she is a Chinese agent.
Tin foil hat Conspiracy Theory: It's someone [American?] that hired her and set her up to make the Chinese Government look bad?
"In a court filing on Tuesday, a public defender representing Zhang said she was invoking her right to remain silent." A good plan when you have already demonstrated idiocy. What exactly can she be charged with on the evidence? She was LET in without being searched or anyone qualified to decide explaining who she might me. She didn't use any of the equipment?
Octavia (later Augustus) won. The civil war was like Brexit. Invoked without a plan. They assassinated Julius because they wanted the old Republic and not an Emperor. They had no plan about the next stage. So Octavia won and as Augustus became the first real Emperor as Julius, while naming himself Caesar, didn't really become Emperor.
Also: England vs Princess / Queen O'Malley. Grianne / Grace usually won. Very large galleys with sails, but English ships needed wind and to avoid inshore. Grainne sailed to Greenwich to visit Queen Elizabeth I in her galley. She got to go home too. Side Note: This was the reign when the idea of the British Empire was invented though the 1st successful American colony wasn't until a few years after her death. Also both ladies born and died about the same time. Elizabeth was the first ruler to consolidate control over Ireland. Grianne / Grace is usually called a Princess, but by Celtic traditions she was probably the last regional ruler (King / Queen = ri / rigan, the High King, the ard ri was never a ruler in the Scottish or English sense of a king).
England vs Armada. Though English had standardised canon/shot and weather helped. Spaniards had too tall / large ships, too many sizes of canon.
Fantasy. So called "wireless charging" can have as much distance as my cordless kettle or an induction hob. The "wireless charger" needs a cable and a LARGER mains SMPSU as it has losses. It's inductive magnetic transfer, like a transformer core in two halves, primary on one and secondary on the other. An air gap more than a few mm and it doesn't work at all. A cordless kettle is just like a DECT phone dock, or security two-way radio dock. Actually very long ago you could charge a phone in a dock in the car or in the office. Easier than a fiddly connector. Bring them back as an option!
If you use RF to get range, then you create massive interference and need more complex certification. A lot more losses in the transmitter, path and receiver. You might need x10 the power of the existing inductive/transformer types.
Also for travelling a so called wireless charging plate takes up more space in your bag than a conventional charger, as it needs a larger PSU to power it!
Yes, Eir & Vodafone supply semi-locked down Huawei models. It's not Chinese Gov that worries me on those, but BOTH are only remote Firmware update (but DSL / VDSL security is not like Cablelabs DOCSIS 2.x and 3.x), both are rubbish for blocking URLs or IPs and Eir remotely enables "public" WiFi sharing for Eir customers. Without telling you, by default. Can only be turned off by Eir, no setting on user settings of modem on LAN.
My experience over the last 15 years is that all the makers are rubbish to deal with. Even if you are the ISP buying them!
Also sanctions against USA till they ditch CAN-SPAM act. Reporting or requesting removal simply confirms to spammer that you exist and makes your email address more valuable.
NOTHING EVER should be automatically opted in, except "Under no circumstances give any of my details to anyone. Do not send me offers or marketing"
Amazon's & Kobo's push "offers" to eReaders are dishonest and if not illegal should be. Amazon argues that accepting the marketing is worth a £20 discount. They don't explain that anywhere on the web page. Also £20 is peanuts for push marketing for life of device.
MS should be fined a % of turnover for their treatment of people with windows 10 and signing to LinkedIn (pressure to share address books!)
We all know how totally illegal Google, Pinterest, Facebook etc actions are.
NO large data-centre for data mostly used outside Ireland makes sense here due to the Electricity.
Wind & Solar are not the answer as there are long periods with no output. Especially Wind. UK has a bigger problem with failure of two nuke projects and much of their nuke due to close. Wind can be lacking over most of Europe for a couple of weeks at a time, so inter-connectors don't help.
I don't think so.
It's mostly hype.
More coverage needs more masts, no matter which G.
More speed/capacity needs higher mast density in existing bands, the higher bands with giant channels are only for auditoriums, stadiums and open plan offices, not real mobile coverage.
All these things need more CapEx and higher running costs with almost no extra income. So what incentive is there apart from some PR installs at cherry picked sites?
There are "invisible" 5G developments that are useful and will get deployed gradually to do with combining bands, back-haul and back-office. Not new air interfaces or 5G masts except for niche applications and high end power hungry phablets.
The technology isn't here either if you want natural field of vision, tracking of eye focus as well as eye movement (lets the SW make what is looked at on Z-Axis sharper and things closer or further away blurred, also you need adaptive optics so at to make seem the image is that distance away.
Enough GPU & CPU to have no lag.
Only the centre of field of view needs full resolution, but edges of view need faster response to head & eye movement and higher refresh as we are more sensitive to flicker and movement in peripheral vision.
Then for really good VR, you need more than the pair of projected images. You need data gloves with force feedback as a minimum and body movement sensors also with force feedback.
Only deluxe models would have a full suit with actuators and a liquid filled sensory deprivation tank along with acceleration simulation.
Meanwhile though there was a suggestion of the N.I. Assembly (Stormont), voting on May's deal, which enraged Scotland as they had asked for this from the beginning, Stormont is in its third year of not actually sitting.
Mysteriously no Direct Rule or a new Election date. Also DUP "Lost" the Brexit vote in N.I. and has less than 30 % of electoral vote so have no mandate. ANY UK government dependence on ANY N.I. party breaks intention of the Good Friday Agreement. Oh, and Arlene Foster left Unionists and joined DUP because she opposed GFA. DUP has ALWAYS opposed the GFA and no doubt hopes a no-deal Brexit will result in the death of the GFA. They don't care about peace & prosperity (not sure SF do either, but DUP is doing their work for them!).
Also no ability to have other than binary Yes/No in Westminster Chamber and UK uses flawed unrepresentative First Past the Post.
I blame Cameron, not May. But it's a disaster for EVERYONE, Remainers, Brexiteers, rest of EU, Ireland and especially N.I.
It could lead to break up of UK, England on their own.
What icons? A Planchette has none. Original had a hole for a pencil for 'automatic writing', later version was a pointer for the Ouija board, which might only have decorations, no icons, as it's Yes, No and alphabet. Released originally as a game and a game company still has the name as a trademark.
So what are these Oracle icons?
Great Auks were in Northern waters, I think last in the Baltic and only became extinct in 19th C. A little penguin like and also flightless. They had formerly been on Irish and Welsh coasts. It's believable the penguin is named after them. I think most surviving members of the Auk family survive because they can still fly?
It will in the end be as groundbreaking as Microsoft Services For Unix, the predecessor for Cygwin.
Though before that there was Xenix. I remember installing it around 1987 to test a C++ preprocessor that outputted C.
From Wikipedia
<quote>Microsoft, which expected that Unix would be its operating system of the future when personal computers became powerful enough,[4] purchased a license for Version 7 Unix from AT&T in 1978,[5] and announced on August 25, 1980, that it would make it available for the 16-bit microcomputer market.[6] Because Microsoft was not able to license the "UNIX" name itself,[7] the company gave it an original name.
Microsoft called Xenix "a universal operating environment". It did not sell Xenix directly to end users [I think they did eventually], but licensed the software to OEMs such as IBM, Intel, Management Systems Development, Tandy, Altos, SCO, and Siemens (SINIX) who then ported it to their own proprietary computer architectures. [I'm sceptical about how much of that is true, I was doing stuff on computers then for the day job]
In 1981, Microsoft said the first version of Xenix was "very close to the original UNIX version 7 source" on the PDP-11, and later versions were to incorporate its own fixes and improvements.</quote>
Really anyone that really wants Unix, BSD, Linux will do what they have always done. A real install. Most companies I know that are locked into Windows but developing on Linux are using VMs, on Windows 7. Many devs considering how to persuade upper management to let them have native Linux installs instead of Win10.
This will not affect Linux usage. I found both MSFU and Cygwin totally frustrating. It was easier to install a Linux distro on a "old" box when it was replaced by a new windows box, later only laptops. Then sneaky dual boots when HDDs got bigger. Now have an XP VM on Linux, unused for two years.
c) Get more minutes on real voice calls than using Data Allowance.
d) Real voice calls will work with much less signal or when data is unreliable
I have viber, but I've only ever used it on WiFi with the phone, and only only for text + photos. Even on laptop only text and photos.
For how many Android apps will the following work?
1) Copy/Paste
2) Printing
3) External USB or SD card storage
4) External local LAN storage via server shares & login
Will there be an included "file manager" instead of a third party one?
I've three versions of Android. Almost no apps support Printing. Very few external storage. A few support "Cloud" storage (not interested) and only a 3rd party file manager supports LAN shares.
Only the OLDEST phone has an HDMI connector. In comparision the Wireless connection to Smart TV on the latest phones and tablets are garbage. My monitors and adaptor boxes for monitors only support composite, VGA, DVI, HDMI. None support the RF based "mirroring".
One phone does already support two apps open in two windows. Multiple apps in separate windows is the only major OS feature missing. All the other things are sort of in the OS, but lacking in Apps either due to cluelessness or App originally for an ancient Android.
WFWG 3.11 was better than Android is for a desktop.
The problem is that if you design an OS and apps for a small screen with predominately touch, it's rubbish for desktop. As users of Win 8 & 10 know, compared to Win7 and earlier. MS used to make the opposite mistake for Windows CE / Windows Phone (before tiles/Zune etc).
Unless apps are trivial, they need two versions. One for desktop and one for touch phone/tablet. Also it's not really feasible to use many kinds of content creation applications on a touch only screen or a small screen.
This is a niche for people that don't need laptops. It also needs better written applications to succeed as well as an OS supplied file manager.
This is no threat to Windows, MacOS, iOS or any sort of Linux with a decent desktop / window manager. Partly because most apps are limited even compared with what Android can already do years ago and partly any App good for small screen/Touch won't be good for "desktop use".
Even keyboard layout support is a joke on Android. With mouse & keyboard some apps still occasionally need touch input.
I actually now prefer the minimalism of Travelodge, as long as I've figured somewhere to eat. It's not even that the overpriced food in UK, US and Irish hotels is much good. Netherlands, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Germany, Slovak Republic not bad for food in hotels. However all hotels and airports seem to be sourced from the same evil catalogue.
I wrote a book where two patches rushed out by different groups (one to do with BGP on routers) takes down almost all web & email, but not SFTP and other stuff used by data centres to replicate instances.
Set slightly in the future where all POS, ATM, Mobile Billing, Stock ordering etc is outsourced to the Cloud.
"No Silver Lining".
It's part fantasy, no not the computer bit where a smaller Cloud provider, the only one still working and the human employees using Satellite coms to try and convince the big players to take their patches, but the bit where it's owned by Fairy Folk.
A slide-rule! Such luxury only when I got to college. The calculator then had a valve, a vacuum tube, though it was only for the display. You could see the filament glow faint orange in the dark.
I only had log tables at school.
No doubt someone older will write how they didn't even have a modern abacus, but moved little stones in grooves (insertis calculis tractus). In case you wondered how people did counting using the Roman numerals. They neglected to tell us that at school when we were learning Latin and the mad Roman numerals. No wonder they employed Greeks, Hebrews, Persians and Egyptians as mathematicians.
I never did have the money for a programmable calculator. I bought a computer. Now the clones of the Casio with handy Bin Oct Hex Dec modes in slim brushed alloy front are only €2 and the actual Casios do fractions and seem harder to operate. Well, I've got an HP RPN calculator simulation on my phone. My wife had a real one once.
No, many sites do not want to charge. They are either free (no scraping or adverts), basically the owner is paying for it. Or advert funded (need not have evil tracking & javascript, an image/text & link is all that's needed). Or funded some other way (Government, Support for stuff you bought, crowdfunded such as Wikipedia). Some are funded by adverts sold by the illegal snake oil of stealing your activity on the site and across as much of the Internet as possible (Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp, Google/Alphabet). Others are selling stuff, so the site is free (Amazon, eBay).
Only a minority of sites suit a pure subscription model.
Why is block 3rd party off by default? I enable that on the browser straight after install. It's never broken ANY functionality. How are they even legal even before GDPR?
Also I block all or most cookies on most sites I don't login to. That also blocks Google's nasty multipage consent popup on search. Which has no "don't agree" or cancel. Blocking google cookies is the only way.
I use uMatrix
Also reduces my exposure to tracking and malware.
Explain, why a news site, or anything where you didn't need to log in, needs a session cookie? It doesn't.
Any site to do with purchases, tax etc needs a login.
Commenting should never be without a login.
I struggle to remember using a site that needs a session state, that you didn't have to log into first.
ACT Sirius One / Victor 9000 5.25" floppy got 1.2M bytes when Apple was 100K and IBM about 360K. It varied the speed as then much more can be recorded on the outer tracks. I think there was a competition to do a tune.
It certainly made the IBM PC look like junk (which reached UK at the same time as the Sirius 1).
Really this isn't a realistic threat, though interesting research.
Better sandboxed Web Browsers that also parsed JS more before execution?
Millions of upvotes on the 3rd party javascript/adware. Using uMatrix, NoScript etc can be more effective than AV, especially for Zero Days. No storage is auto-executed on mount. I KNEW in 1995 that was a very stupid idea for Windows. Amiga had proved it.
It's true that a new Fab for State-of-the-art is scary expensive. However leakage and tunnelling are now serious issues. 8nm to 14nm minimum feature does need very high quality materials and is close to the limits for sensible performance. Yes, you can as lab demo make a rubbish transistor from a few atoms. You've also a problem with high speed production of chips as you'd have switch from masks to Vector graphic writing using electron beams or something.
Temperature and background radiation and device life (metals drifting) become an issue too. I've wondered is best performance/reliability around the 28 nm to 40nm device geometry.
Nothing to do with Moore's law on chip improvements. Totally different technology. I wonder too was it a 5400 RPM low power drive?
Also I wonder what the SSD life is and how much advance warning of failure.
Moore's law wasn't a law, but an observation of CPU performance and transistor quantity on same size chip. About density.
In reality 14nm isn't ten times density of say 140nm (or 100 times actually for same area chip), because 14nm isn't even the average or typical, but smallest feature. Geometry doesn't mean what it used to mean when 90nm was the norm.
No, because the problem is OS and GUI bloat.
Not lack of CPU power, though I'd say Moore's law started running out of steam around 2002. The annual upgrades before then were stunning.
Comparing a 2002 1.8GHz P4 mobile (2.2GHz existed) Inspirion 8200 with a 1600 x 1200 ultra sharp matte screen running XP and a Linx 1010 tablet with Windows 10 and a Lenovo E460 with Win7 and Linux Mint + Mate (1920 x 1080 screen, i5-6200U, 4x 2.3GHz cores).
The Dell Inspiron 8200 XP (optimised, SP3 and all patches and sensible GUI settings): Beats all above for ease of use and performance, except Linux on E460 for any application using single core or Desktop. It does have an updated 120GByte PATA IDE and 2G RAM, 40G and 1G originally.)
Linux on the E460 is about same speed for desktop response faster everything else. But not the sort of difference between the 8200 and the earlier Dell inspiron from 2000 with 450MHz PIII coppermine mobile and Win2000. It's 1400 x 1050 screen and really hugely slower, but can beat the 10" Atom Win10 tablet at times.
Perhaps Intel is rubbish at low power + decent performance? Browser on my Alcatel A3 XL phone is faster than any Atom netbook or tablet I have.
I have Linux on the Atom netbooks. I have an EEEPC, with 32G CF card instead of original Flash. Current Linux Mint on it (18.3 Mate desktop) not as fast as the original Linux on it. We did try XP on it, but it's ill-suited for cheap Flash and would periodically freeze for a while. Also it was before the CF card socket was shoehorned in by cutting away part of the internals of case.
Netbooks and Tablets often seem spoiled by being only 600 or 720 pixels high in landscape mode. Also why don't the tablets dock to keyboard in Portrait mode?
We reached peak PC on x86-64 more than a year ago.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
