* Posts by Henry Wertz

438 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2008

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Sony teases netbook fans with 'new mobile' Vaio promo

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Probably not a netbook

I think this will probably not count as a netbook. Fujitsu, Sony, and several others have been (on and off at least) making small portables for years. But a $1000+ machine is not a netbook, as the reg says, it's probably not going to be cheap at all. Personally, the Sonys I've seen have had enough... umm... idiosyncracies I guess I'd call them... that I don't know if I would want one even if they were inexpensive, with all the fine competitors out there now. If they do manage to make this machine not stratospherically expensive, I'll be impressed and it should put some pressure onto the market, which is always nice.

Data center budgets to stay course in 2009?

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Probably already cut...

From what all I've read, probably the IT budgets are already cut to the bone, and even the craziest manager recognizes they cannot cut any more from it.

Corrupt cop abused police database to blackmail child abusers

Henry Wertz Gold badge

"Guidelines"

"The police say there are "strict guidelines in place regarding the use of intelligence databases". But they didn't notice the misuse. The big question, of course, is "why not?""

Well that's the tricky part with weasel-english, they stress there are guidelines in place, and that is all. They probably DO have a guideline "pretty please, with nuts on top, don't abuse this database."

"Have the procedures that allowed the misuse of the databases been changed in light of this case? What were they before? What are they now? How is access audited?"

They don't mention procedures, they mention guidelines. If they had any security I think the weasel in question would have mentioned more than "guidelines". I think this was phrased *expecting* the general populace to just assume there's some sort of security in place. I'm guessing in actuality there's not so much as an audit log. It's even LESS likely if there is an audit log that anyone looks at it.

This is the great risk of these 1984-style databases the US and Brits seem to be racing to get. We've just seen the example here in the US where the IRS (Internal Revenue Service, a.k.a. the taxman) has been found to keep an audit log but not routinely check it for abnormal activity.

Coffers Coffee Republic gets own cashless system

Henry Wertz Gold badge

So how much is a coffee?

So how much is a coffee?

My only experience in Europe was flying through Madrid Airport (on the way to Morocco.)

It was a triple combo... the dollar is fairly weak, airports always make stuff expensive, and Starbucks is pricey as well.

I got a large coffee (admittedly not black, it had some stuff mixed in....) and it was like 8 euros, this was $12 or so. Ouch!

Here in the midwestern US, cheap diner or fast foot coffee is like $0.75 to $1 or so (often this is quite burnt and nasty), regular coffee about $1.50, some really frilly thing could get you up to $3 or $4.

On the other hand in Morocco, a nice little shot of coffee was like about 5 dirhams (back then this was about $0.71). It is a small shot of very thick coffee, very well roasted and tasty and really has a kick to it (it seemed pretty similar everywhere I had it). The natives LOVE sugar and add as much as physically possible; I thought it was great black, but inevitably after a sip or two someone would say "no no you surely need some sugar" and I'd put it in, this was good as well 8-)

Oh.. back to the point... this makes a big diff on how big a deal a 10% discount is. Saving 7 cents a coffee is not worth it too me, but saving like a dollar apiece could be.

American IT staffing will not tank in Q1

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Probably right...

I'm certainly guessing IT staffing won't be cut -- most businesses have already cut IT to the bone, to the point that the IT people they do have are burning out and leaving the industry. Also, they simply must realize, if they cut spending on new hardware, they can save money, but... 1) On the desktop side, the failure rate will probably increase and they'll need a little "extra" staff time to get these switched out in a timely manner. 2) As machines move down the obsolescence scale it'll also take skilled admins with extra time to keep things tweaked for speed (or the machines will become unusable well before their time.)

Apple sued in Apple TV wireless audio patent clash

Henry Wertz Gold badge
Jobs Horns

Maybe not a patent troll?

Normally I'd consider them to be a patent troll. But if Apple hired people from UE, then came out with a product using this technology UE was working on, it doesn't look so good for Apple.

(OK, it's Ballmer but I thought the horns were appropriate.)

Sprint modem straddles 3G, WiMAX

Henry Wertz Gold badge
Alert

Not to be pedantic..

Not to be pedantic, but Sprint skipped 1G (analog) entirely. Otherwise.. agreed. I've heard they have customer support problems, and generally rather poor voice network (even in areas where the data network is good.)

Before claiming the CDMA network is TOO outdated though, most of it has EVDO Rev A, which does 3.1mbits/sec down and 1.8 up.

Microsoft issues emergency IE patch as attacks escalate

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Opera, reboots

"Happily using Opera are you? Except for all those apps that use an embedded IE-based WebBrowser control, huh?"

Interestingly it's possible to get rid of this -- wine actually handles several forms of embedding ie, embedding a firefox/mozilla rendering engine instead. It'd be nice to be able to take this and plug it into Windows somehow.

"Anyway, tell me this, MS, why when I haven't used IE since my last reboot, do I have to restart my computer to install. None of it's libraries should be loaded. Message to Microsoft: Get your damn dirty browser out of the OS!"

The short of it, because Microsoft does not have package management. This really causes a lot of problems for them IMHO.

Economists: European ancestors are what make you rich

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Not racist *or* "rasist"

Re: "Same rasist shite again "

Nothing racist here, you guys are MAKING it racist. Europe had a pretty hefty trade empire, and this is likely the leftovers of that. If the europeans in these areas had (relatively) wealthy parents/grandparents/etc. those inheritances will prop up the local economy a bit, if there was infrastructure invested in that'll help, and so on.

There could be cultural differences too... for instance, when I was in Morocco, Marrakesh and fez were a bit "wesernized". Outside that, people were real casual about work, it was nearly universal for people to take a 1-2 hour nap after lunch, holes in buildings were not getting patched, trains, busses, etc. never really ran on time (outside the capitol) and so on. (The naps are generally because it's too hot in the afternoon to go out, but I was surprised when people did this anyway even when it was room temperature outside.) This all was actually quite OK, people didn't seem to have any work stress etc. like here, but certainly leads to a rather sluggish economy and less economic development. It also appeared pretty sustainable, not like this economic bubble that's bursting as we speak in the US.

Fly-tipping yes, dog poo no - Jacqui promises Ripa changes

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Wacky Jacqui

Ahh wacky Jacqui (why don't you call Jacqui that any more? The name is well deserved)...

Yes of course it makes sense to use an anti-terrorism law on noisy neighbors. Sure... *rolls eyes*. You guys over there really need to get things in order or you'll beat the US to having a complete police state.

Europe-wide emergency number is go

Henry Wertz Gold badge

smokey bear

@Pete: We already have that in the states. The various police, with (for your amusement) CB names for them: Local police ("fuzz"), county police ("county mounties"), state patrol ("black bear", "brown bear", "smokey bear" depending on black, brown, or gray cars... blue ones are usually some kind of bear as well.) The state patrol is more for catching highway speeders. On a landline you usually will get the right one (in the city the city policy make most sense for instance), on a cell phone, since the exact location isn't known, you're very likley to get the wrong one.

The main logic between "911" (which really doesn't apply as much in this day of touchtone phones)... "9" is pretty high so it won't be dialed by accident, then "1" is the fastest digit to dial on a rotary phone. Now that people dial "9" to get out of so many PBXes etc., this isn't necessarily so good though.

Native Client d**k-swinging met with fake Googasm

Henry Wertz Gold badge
Alien

Moon base

"Where, within this fail yard, is the secret to world domination buried?"

The moon project! If they get on the moon and set up a moon base, surely they will be invincible... invincible I tells ya (cue supervillain laughter)

But really, Google's new sandbox is interesting in that it uses x86 segmentation registers for security; they've been there all along (since the 8088 at least, 386 and up allows large segments rather than the old 64KB ones) but I've not heard of anyone really using them. It's more of a slap to Microsoft for having insecure ActiveX for so long (when segments would have provided a nearly no-overhead sandbox) than anything I think. This *does* make the google sandbox non-portable though, making it even less interesting than usual IMHO (REALLY non-portable -- segment registers were removed from x86-64 since noone was using them, so not only is it x86-only, it's 32-bit x86 only (it *should* run on 64-bit Linux but under a 32-bit browser.))

Microsoft knew about Xbox 360 disc-scratch problem, employee claims

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Of course they can be sued

What the hell is with all you "Duh, just don't tilt it?" types. I mean seriously this drive ***IS*** defective. As Adrian Jackson says, ever heard of a CD Walkman? (Well I'm guessing "no", but...) this thing would go in a pocket or bag *while you are jogging*, and read CDs... without scratching them!

This lawsuit seems to be covering the early units that did not have warning stickers, etc. (Note a warning sticker is a pretty lame fix for a design defect.) For all of you saying "well you wouldn't put a DVD player on it's side" 1) DVD-ROMs *do* work just great on their side. HP for one seems to LOVE mounting drives that way. 2) DVD players aren't shown in ads sitting on the side and the case isn't really shaped welll for it, unlike XBoxes.

Apple's holiday Mac sales flatline

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Laptop behaviour

"I wonder why the contrast between desktop and laptop behaviour... Why would Apple do so much better in the laptop market, compared to desktop?"

The kind of people that buy Apples are all buying laptops now I think. Even if it just sits permanently in one place on their desk.

Internet gambling mogul surrenders $300m in guilty plea

Henry Wertz Gold badge
Linux

The fine...

Yeah really, what kind of name is that? Dutch or something?

I like the $250,000 fine they throw on there, after paying $300,000,000 8-). (Well, actually I don't, I don't think online gambling should be illegal. But anyway.)

Flab-fighting EV powered by pizza

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Re: Not a prototype

Ahh gotcha. Honestly this car is already much more practical than some of the old 50s and 60s concept cars (especially the "out there" ones like the Ford Nucleon... like the name sounds like, the power source was going to be a nuclear reactor on the car.)

This kind of concept would actually be possible with the piezoelectric stuff that's (finally...) been developed to turn all kinds of footsteps, etc. into electricity (along with maybe a more conventional generator or two in the seat or something.) Just due to physics it'll have to be plugged in but you'll actually be (slightly..) cutting down on the power it pulls through the power plug.

Oh, plus lolz to the comments of it being like Flintstones. Very true it is isn't it 8-).

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Off right?

(Admittedly it's a prototype, but..)

I just hope they put in an interlock to *enforce* only exercising when parked. I already have enough problem with people not staying in their lane, running stoplights, doing that stupid "swing way to the left to make a right turn" (swerving themselves out of the turn lane *back into traffic*), the even stupider "swing way to the right to make a left turn" (again swerving themselves back into traffic), and so on. The last thing I need is to have one of these crush itself against the side of my car because the "driver" was rowboating instead of actually driving.

Interesting idea though. The energy from exercising generally turns into heat inside the machine (for ones that use resistance) or just goes nowhere I guess (for weight lifting etc.) I've seen a demo rig where a bicycle with generator was running a TV, 100W lightbulb, fan, etc. (Usually 1 at a time, the exibit let you turn them all on but it was too hard to pedal enough to keep them all from browning out.)

Original lightsabre sale brings big, big bucks

Henry Wertz Gold badge
Joke

Re: What a piece of crap

"It never looked like such a flaky bit of metal junk in the films, surely?"

Well, to be fair in the movies there's a light beam coming out the end of it.

FCC kills Puritanical wireless vote

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Yep

Yep, what a winning plan... the wireless cos don't want to be told to give anything away for free. Everyone else doesn't want inefficient and buggy porn filters on their connection (See the earlier australian example where prudes got the gov't to spend big money on filtering software, *assuring* them there'd be at least 1 million interested, when the actual figure proved to be under 20,000.)

And the FCC guys are right as well -- this would lead to plenty of congestion. As it is, the cell cos charge a lot for data, and still have problems keeping enough capacity to keep up with demand (not just wireless spectrum, but backhaul as well..) As long as everyone weren't turned off by the disgusting lack of porn on the new spectrum, the cell co would probably have to use almost the whole 25mhz if they wanted to avoid unreasonable slowdowns. No wonder there aren't any takers.

First steps with offline Silverlight and Live Framework

Henry Wertz Gold badge

"Cross platform"

"we could only test XP SP3/Vista SP1 and IE7"

Ahh, the traditional Microsoft definition of "cross platform". It used to be "well, it works on both 2000 *and* XP", now "oh it works on XP *and* Vista".

Admittedly it's a preview, but if silverlight was fully cross-platform compatible this Mesh app should run just the same on the Mac as the PC. It'd be ironic if moonlight gets ported to osx and is more compatible with silverlight than the official silverlight for Mac.

I have to stress to anyone at Microsoft reading this, you CAN'T try to use your cloud services to try to extend your OS share. That'll will just lower the number of developers and users available for your cloud rather than helping maintain your eroding OS market share.

Story withdrawn

Henry Wertz Gold badge

2.0 is pants 2.0

I picked 2.0. It's a pointless term, challenge anyone to come up with an example of what it means and, like Steve Sutton says a few posts above, if you challenge several people to agree what it means they can't come up with anything. Some claim "2.0" involves social networking somehow, despite networks being used for "social" networking for over 40 years (see PLATO for instance). Others claim AJAX or the like, then having to come up with convoluted arguments on why the advanced web stuff in the 1990s was not 2.0 despite having every feature they list. In short, @Ian "I mean, it's certainly the most accurate and properly used of the terms given."... no it's not.

blook and plix sound pretty annoying, but I've never heard anyone use either term so much as once, so they therefore don't trouble me.

freetard is not too great without a counteracting commercialtard term for riaa backers etc., or microsofttard term for people who back microsoft's every mistake over free software. But, meh, it's just too entertaining to watch the word "freetard" bait the real rabid, well, freetards.

Podslurping sounds disgusting, but, I don't pod-anything or i-anything so I don't get exposed to this term enough to bother me.

Man trademarks ;-) emoticon

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Trademark, copyright, patents

"Surely to trademark something you have to actually prove that you own it in some way - Either you developed it yourself or you paid someone to develop it for your company?"

Nope. Trademark is not a patent, it is just claiming use of a particular logo or symbol for your particular line of business (plus trying to deny use of "confusingly similar" logos and names.)

"I thought you couldn't trademark something that is in common use within a certain context. The smilie already existed, so he can't copyright it."

That's right, except they were claiming trademark, not copyright. And apparently, per a few posts above (the post by Christoph), the Russian trademark agency agreed, the trademark was denied.

To avoid confusion...

Patents cover inventions*, trademark covers logos and names, and copyright covers copying creative products**. Coca Cola for instance -- if I tried to clone Coca Cola, if the formula is patented they could try suing for patent infringement if my copy was close enough (really they couldn't, any patent would have expired over 75 years ago, but...) If I called mine Coca Cola, they could get me for trademark infringement, or if I used like a similar logo but called it Coka Cola or something. It's supposed to be based on the logo or name being similar enough to cause confusion. Copyright? Wouldn't apply as much (since it's more for books, music, movies, software, etc.), but if I copied the non-logo graphics for my bottles, they wouldn't be covered by trademark but would be copyrighted.

*Patents cover inventions, plus whatever other crap the local patent office allows people to slip by... in the US for instance, they allow software patents (ugh), they allowed business method patents until recently (ugh!!), and I think may still allow genetic patents (ughhhh!!!!!).

**Creative products -- so copyright isn't supposed to apply to just data collections. But, despite this there've been copyright cases here in the US about copying data (in bulk) from phone books and Westlaw, they do both assert copyright even though by strict interpretation it's just a collection of phone numbers and legal cases. It's legally clear cut, but in actual cases, they'll be like "collecting all that info is a lot of work", and some judges (contrary to the letter of the law) decide it's copyrighted.

Any clouds in your sky?

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Cloud computing? Feh

If I were going to use a cloud, I'd use something closer to Amazon's, where it's relatively standard (you run a VM with what you'd like in it), to one where like I have to do everything in Python or some particular programming language.

That said, I'm not that excited about it overall. I think I'll just leave it at that.

Dell battles HP to trash Mother Earth

Henry Wertz Gold badge
Paris Hilton

well...

Well, I can't really complain too badly about the memory. Maybe one center only had one stick? They could have either made the person wait, while they moved RAM from one center to the other anyway (i.e. not saving any actual fuel), or ship the two seperately. It is a little funny that the delivery people at the end didn't put them on the same truck.. they make real sure to do that here to save truck mileage and time (since "time is money").

These others, they are a little silly I must admit.. especially the boxes with one rubber foot apiece.

Paris, she is quite puzzled by these packages I'm sure.

Nappies OK'd by beaks in Nowak space loverat fracas

Henry Wertz Gold badge
Alert

Astronauts these days...

"Lykkebak has previously stated that the much-wrangled-over nappies found in Nowak's motor were actually her children's, used while evacuating in the face of Hurricane Rita in September 2005, fifteen months before the unpleasantness in the carpark."

Even as a lame defense, would you seriously claim this? As AC "Used?!" says, who the hell would keep used diapers in their car for 15 months... also I would think that it'll be easy to tell 1) they're totally the wrong size and 2) Roughly how long they've been soiled.

Astronauts these days, jeez....

Google OS gOS - if at first you don't succeed...

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Linux distros...

The article is, overall, right. Not about Linux never being able to get market share, and Windows dominating forever... but, gos, Linpus, etc., these custom-for-one-machine Linuxes are rather poor, I'm very unsure why they didn't just use a stock distro. Just put Ubuntu or something on there and be done with it, like Dell is doing on the MIni 9. This negates the issues of the Linux distro being all stripped, and their being no apps for it -- there's apps to do nearly everything under Ubuntu as under Windows, plus some Ubuntu apps I haven't seen a good Windows equivalent to.

Fighter jet crashes in suburban San Diego

Henry Wertz Gold badge

He is a real pilot

"A real pilot would have stayed in the plane and steered it away from houses to make sure he didn't kill anyone (else)""

In some areas of the northeast and California especially, there's huge areas with no house-free areas to go. It sounds like he did what he could, a jet with no engines isn't particularly flyable.

I can't see a dual-engine failure being attributable to pilot error.

Google Oompa Loompas cloaking user agents?

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Just someone who is "paranoid"?

I wonder if it's just someone that is "paranoid". You know, flash off, no java, no javascript, clear the cookies and browser history all the time. Some people at google might just be "Ha! I'm going to clear the user-agent string too!" Or testing anonymization tools. Something like that. I just don't see google hiding a new OS by clearing it all out entirely. Maybe it's even just an internal test build of Chrome that had a bug making it leave the user-agent blank 8-).

Apple's Snow Leopard set to exploit GPU power

Henry Wertz Gold badge

OpenCL and 3DLabs

Just to fill in the background for this... if you think OpenCL sounds a lot like OpenGL there's a good reason.

SGI came up with IrisGL then OpenGL, releasing the full specs. OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) took over OpenGL in 1992, then gave it up to Khronos Group in 2006. OpenCL sounds good to me though, right now the utilities to get stuff running on a GPU look pretty nice but standardizing it is even better. Nvidia's existing GPU programming sounds pretty similar to OpenCL... you write your code and put in some nvidia .h's at the top and (ifdef'ed I'm sure) nvidia-specific mallocs on your data set memory (or explicit memory->GPU and GPU->memory calls), and nvidia-specific few lines of code around loops. It compiles normally through gcc, somewhere in the pipeline an nvidia-specific step puts in the library calls that allocate memory on the card, build the nvidia opcodes, etc and autoparallelizes your flagged loops. (Probably Visual C rather than gcc on Windows I suppose...) OpenCL sounds like this but standardized so that same build will work on Nvidia, ATI, 3dlabs (who i didn't know where still in business), etc. Nice!

(did a little googling).. ok, 3dlabs still makes the glint and permedia but die-shrunk for embedded use. Nice!

MacBook Air owners get laid

Henry Wertz Gold badge
Paris Hilton

A theory

My theory is, as has happened MANY times on Apples, Apple but a cheap 18-bit LCD into this machine rather than a proper 24-bit machine (for Apple users, 16-bit is "thousands of colors" and 24-bit "millions".) They will use dithering algorithms so the cheap display can pretend to be a proper display... I'm guessing rather than using a proper dithering algorithm (which tries to randomize the dithering a bit specifically to avoid getting laid.. heh...) the screen just goes ahead and gets laid (tee-hee again.)

Paris, she also likes to get laid.

Electric car seller hits brakes as UK EV sales plunge

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Other reasons?

Two other reasons I could see personally..

1) Gas (err... excuse me, petrol..) prices have dropped. Here (Iowa, USA) they've dropped from a peak of over $4.20 to currently $1.69 per gallon. I know there's far more taxes in Britain but I assume there's probably still been a nice drop there as well. I'm not saying an electric car wouldn't still be cheaper overall (I really don't know) but it certainly can't help those sales any when the conventional fuel costs have dropped so far.*

2) As Bruno says, all car sales are dropping, a lot.

*Conspiracy-wise, I think OPEC realized they were putting a serious scare into people regarding fossil fuels, and have made sure to keep prices down again to avoid too many people getting super-efficient vehicles, electrics, etc.

BitTorrent net meltdown delayed

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Latency and congestion

@David Hicks

"Latency MAY be the sign of congestion, or just a long link, doesn't mean you can't still have high transfer rate."

Yes. That's one reason there's so much research into this, instead of having it already finished. I've never heard of M$'s particular TCP, but TCP Vegas was just the beginning -- TCP New Reno, TCP BIC, and TCP Cubic have all tweaked the congestion algorithms, and TCP Hybla is explicitly designed for slightly lossy satellite links. "They" are trying the trick of coming up with a TCP variant that responds to latency *increases*, so that it can keep up good speeds on high-latency but high-bandwidth connections (while backing off when the latency is increasing due to network load..)... The hard part is doing this properly with a normal TCP implementation at the other end (i.e. it's harder to ensure correct behavior from both ends when a connection is "New TCP"<->TCP versus "New TCP"<->"New TCP").

In this case, it appears uTorrent will just bypass this whole issue by using their own congestion-control algorithms; it should be easier since 1) well, implementing their own TCP congestion control is right out, that's done in the kernel on most OSes, and I'm not sure a user app will get accurate enough latency info anyway, since it'd see a data stream rather than actual timestamped packets. 2) It knows it'll be utp<->utp so it shouldn't have to worry about TCP version incompatibilities making the congestion control misbehave.

Appletops may get juice pump

Henry Wertz Gold badge

R134a?

@Steve etc.

This isn't really related to water OR liquid cooling, the patent title is rather misleading. R134a is used in car air conditioners... At regular pressures it's actually a gas, the oddest thing about this whole patent is Apple's insistence on refering to this as liquid cooling. In an R134a setup (for cars) the evaporator has a low-pressure cold gas, this is in the dashboard on a car or would be on the heat plate of a computer. This gas is is heated by the air or CPU (cooling off the air or CPU as a result)... This now-hot low pressure gas is run through the compressor, which compresses this into a hot high-pressure gas. This is run through the condensor (on a car this is the "extra radiator" you may notice on air conditioned models), where it's cooled by air rushing past.. By the time it's all cooled off it's a high-pressure liquid. The high-pressure liquid runs through an expansion valve or orifice tube, at which point it's a cold low-pressure gas (for the same reason that compressed air from a can is cold...) It's now ready to go back into the evaporator.

Two problems with this:

1) Where would you place the condensor? The heat doesn't just go away, this is just a fancy heat-transfer system.

2) Environmental. Apparently the EU has banned new car designs using R134a as of 2011, because its' a greenhouse gas. A computer is not a car, but how green will Apple look putting "banned" refrigerants into brand-new products?

Apple anti-virus advice was nothing new

Henry Wertz Gold badge
Linux

One reason I won't get a Mac.

Actually one of the reasons I won't get a Mac. I like full disclosure from my companies. Apple loves not having full disclosure, and in fact massive spin control. Something like publishing this article, and instead of just adding a note (or update) saying it's inaccurate or whatever, just pulling the article and pretending it never existed. Look on Dell's forum, it has complaints with people trying to solve them (usually successfully). Look at Apple's forums. If there's a problem with a product there'll be people trying to solve it for a few days until someone from Apple comes by and pulls the threads. Not a sticky saying "here's how to solve this", just no more thread. So if you happen to miss it for the few days its up, and your mac has the same problem, you won't be able to know what's wrong purely through research. They've gone as far as telling third-party sites they can't discuss certain things, and trying to legally bully them into doing it.

No thanks!

New .tel domains bid to be world's phone book

Henry Wertz Gold badge

no-.tel mo-.tel

So, I'll look up xxxx.400.319.1.tel or 1.319.400.xxxx.tel or whatever in a while and find out that I need my pen1s enlarged, some sweet sweet v14gr4, work from home, and the King of Nigeria needs me to help get money out. Sweet. If it's done reverse format like the fax gateways (used to?) be, someone can get 1.tel and get the whole North America area code, 44.tel for Britain, etc. Not bad for 15 pounds or so.

Battlestar Galactica prequel shuns space, spaceships

Henry Wertz Gold badge
Stop

Like original series then?

So it's going to be like a few of the episodes from the original series, where an episode could be someone like cutting some wood and going back to the cabin with it? Then cooking dinner? Sounds exciting.

If they do it right it could be OK. The whole talk about "wider audiences" and so on implies to me it's not though. Taking a theme, then watering it down to try to appeal to more people... well.. does that work for anything? Careful guys -- a much wider audience will not watch scifi no matter how watered down it is, and a sci-fi audience will not stick with watered down scifi. Also, replacing "space ships" with "robots" (well, proto-Cylons) will change the audience a bit but not necessarily widen it.

I do hope the show is good though.

Plod pioneers painless data collection

Henry Wertz Gold badge
Paris Hilton

Liquor fumes?

Oh... I thought maybe it'd be truly roadside and just watch for liquor fumes building up in the cars, like those smog testers I saw in Colorado*. Paris, because she looks a bit hung over.

*If they still do it this way, they had a roadside sensor at roughly tailpipe level on a few onramps to watch for the ol' black smoke or oil smoke. The state found they could save tons of money over a draconian California-style emissions program and still get large emissions reductions just by mailing a note to the dirtiest 50 cars saying "Hey! Free car repair!"

French courts tighten iPod tax loophole

Henry Wertz Gold badge
Unhappy

Missed something?

"Or........ have I missed something."

Yeah I think the one thing you've missed is these assholes have an MP3 tarrif, but STILL want to hassle people for downloading the 40 euros of music they've already been forced to pay for.

Nintendo in profit on each Wii sold

Henry Wertz Gold badge

SOP for Nintendo.

Yeah what bobbles31 said. Even with the NES, it was more distinctive for what it didn't have than what it did -- it was nicer than the 2600, but not as advanced as other competition coming out at the time (I can't name any off the top of my head, because Nintendo and Atari crushed it thoroughly and quickly.) Wait.. Sega Game Gear. OK. (Note if you compare the whole canon of NES games with these competitors, NES looks good because programmers found every trick they could over the years after the ex-competitors were off the market... at the time they actually competed, the competitors had slightly better specs and graphics but were costlier.) SNES? Same. They got *enough* specs so they could make nice games on it and no more, to keep price down and profits up. It was KILLED spec-wise by some systems. Same with Wii -- it's essentially a clocked-up GameCube, it's got enough muscle to make decent-looking games, they consciously avoided pushing high-definition gaming because it just doesn't add to the fun factor and greatly increases the cost.

It's a smart move. My last game system was a N64 I won in high school, but if I were going to get a system I'd probably get a Wii. I play games for fun, if I want to geek out on how high-def game scenery is, I'll look at screenshots on gaming websites, and if I want to *play* those I'll get a souped up gaming computer (and probably try to force the games to run under wine, I hate Windows.)

What have we learned about managing outsourcing?

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Generic equivalent vs outsourcing

"Outsourcing will be a good idea when management decides they themselves should be outsourced "to improve the shareholder value" or whatever other buzzphrase of the week is hot among Business School Product."

It's happened! (This was over a year ago, not recent when so many companies are in trouble) I don't remember what company it was, but over time they'd outsourced packing and shipping, warehousing, manufacturing, IT, and customer support, and had no in-house product design either... Well, the designers and manufacturers realized they could produce for themselves, potential customers realized there was nothing differentiating their products from a cheaper generic equivalent, investors realized the company was nothing but a shell of managers that did nothing productive, so the stock collapsed and the managers were out of work.

Hands-free kits make drivers even more dangerous

Henry Wertz Gold badge

yes they do have such little brain capacity

"Do people really have such little brain capacity that when using hands free kit which allows them to keep both hands on the steering wheel and look straight ahead, they can't talk and drive at the same time?"

Yes. People are that stupid. They'll *look* at the speaker of the handsfree kit rather than the road... not have the common sense to just shut up for a moment while they're crossing busy intersections/merging into traffic/etc. Get cheap hands-free kit so they have to screw around with the phone to dial etc. *while driving*, and so on. I can't comment on the drifting across lanes, the drivers here in Iowa City do that anyway... 8-( I'll go weeks with no trouble, then have to honk 5 times in a 10 minute drive to avoid different people deciding it's fine to drift into the side of my car (no wind or anything to particularly explain it.)

Apple tells Mac users: Get anti-virus

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Engineer to be secure

"Why not engineer the product (OSX) to be secure? "

"Sure.. nothing can be guaranteed to be 100% secure at any time.. but as a vulnerability is discovered it should be fixed.. and if there is a period before the fix is delivered then the OS vendor and their product needs to be able to cope by itself... not require the customer to buy an "extra product"."

Vulnerabilities ARE fixed as discovered (although, I've found Apple MUCH slower about doing this than say Canonical...), and "if there is a period before the fix is delivered then the OS vendor and their product needs to be able to cope by itself" is nonsense. People are HAND designing these viruses and spyware to successfully affect the system. These systems are *designed* to be secure but people do make mistakes... if coders were perfect there'd be no security updates. (That said I run Ubuntu rather than OSX).

That said, I'm thinking this may cover things pretty well:

"if you run an unknown app and it suddenly asks for Admin rights, you can be fairly confident it's probably up to no good." The big difference on the Mac (and Unixes in general), THEY DON'T JUST RANDOMLY DECIDE TO RUN CODE. (Also, Ubuntu at least has stack smashing and etc. support, that the app can't just request to turn off like in Vista.)

Windows internet share drops below 90 per cent

Henry Wertz Gold badge
Thumb Up

Hey it's Pacman!

Just saying, that pie chart does have the striking resemblance.

Bittorrent declares war on VoIP, gamers

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Bandwidth use not insatiable.

"They're short-sellers; except they can refuse to cough up if the stock price (or rather, bandwidth usage) rises."

Funny you should use this comparison, but this is one of the things that got the US investment firms where they are now. These stock guys were *naked* short selling, meaning instead of delaying the stock purchase a day or two (in the hopes that the price had dropped, and they could buy it cheaper than they sold it) they just skipped the part where they ever got the stock, and just sent over a note saying "stock on demand, honest". Then recently when people started calling those in -- whoosh! Some stocks were like 50% oversold, no stock to go around.

"I just had this conversation with the head of mobile for a large telco - and it is obvious that our ability to consume bandwidth is nearly insatiable. The only way to price resources with insatiable demand curves is on a metered basis, i.e., you will have to pay by Gigabyte."

Mobiles are not the same as landlines. With good-quality copper or fiber you can push quite a lot over it, compared to mobile tech where there's a fixed amount of spectrum, expected to serve everyone within range of that cell site.

Secondly, the demand curve is NOT insatiable -- the companies in Japan that provide 100mbit/sec service have found usage plateaus at a certain point (with the rare exception -- they have put up a 30GB..per DAY.. upload cap to handle a few users. If you hit that, you are throttled.) There's a few torrenters who are just apparently trying to get everything ever (900GB/month UP? wow) but most what in the US or Britain would be "heavy users" get every torrent they want, get sick of HD youtube or whatever, and they're done -- they don't just keep using more bandwidth. The rough part for you Brits is the BT backbone -- I'm quite surprised someone hasn't laid out their own backbone in Britain, to avoid being charged per-MB at the ISP level.

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Bandwidth use not insatiable.

"They're short-sellers; except they can refuse to cough up if the stock price (or rather, bandwidth usage) rises."

Funny you should use this comparison, but this is one of the things that got the US investment firms where they are now. These stock guys were *naked* short selling, meaning instead of delaying the stock purchase a day or two (in the hopes that the price had dropped, and they could buy it cheaper than they sold it) they just skipped the part where they ever got the stock, and just sent over a note saying "stock on demand, honest". Then recently when people started calling those in -- whoosh! Some stocks were like 50% oversold, no stock to go around.

"I just had this conversation with the head of mobile for a large telco - and it is obvious that our ability to consume bandwidth is nearly insatiable. The only way to price resources with insatiable demand curves is on a metered basis, i.e., you will have to pay by Gigabyte."

Mobiles are not the same as landlines. With good-quality copper or fiber you can push quite a lot over it, compared to mobile tech where there's a fixed amount of spectrum, expected to serve everyone within range of that cell site.

Secondly, the demand curve is NOT insatiable -- the companies in Japan that provide 100mbit/sec service have found usage plateaus at a certain point (with the rare exception -- they have put up a 30GB..per DAY.. upload cap to handle a few users. If you hit that, you are throttled.) There's a few torrenters who are just apparently trying to get everything ever (900GB/month UP? wow) but most what in the US or Britain would be "heavy users" get every torrent they want, get sick of HD youtube or whatever, and they're done -- they don't just keep using more bandwidth. I wish I could get Verizon FIOS, it's also 100mbit with no cap -- they also found the heavy users don't just keep getting heavier as they get more bandwidth. The rough part for you Brits is the BT backbone -- I'm quite surprised someone hasn't laid out their own backbone in Britain, to avoid being charged per-MB at the ISP level.

Beeb to cut the f**king swearing

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Yep!

"Ever seen the South Park episode 'It Hits The Fan"? The ancient Knights of Standards and Practices will be along shortly at this sudden increase in the use of cursed words..."

Yes I have (here in the US on Comedy Central.) The first airing on Comedy Central was completely unbleeped (they bleep a couple f-bombs but say shit all 162 times). People where shocked. SHOCKED! Actually they surprisingly weren't, there's still strict rules against swearing on the air here (see George Carlin's "7 dirty words") but recently they aren't much enforced. In general, stations are much stricter than they have to be (since the law's pretty ambiguous most stations don't want to risk a theoretically possible large fine.) Since they swear so much, this dragon like bursts out of some mountain hideaway and starts trashing the town. As Wikipedia says, :"Kyle destroys the dragon with an ancient magical rune stone belonging to a knight in the mystical Order of Standards & Practices."

Jamming convicts' mobiles works

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Interference

"Why else would they have [radio masts] pointing at prisons?"

Because the FCC licenses have a clause that if you don't cover an area, you can lose the license for it. Also, some prisons are off in the middle of nowhere, but some are just in some city, so it's not pointing at the prison, it's pointing in general in that direction.

If these prisons are out in the desert or whatever, this is fine with me. But they HAVE to make sure they are not interfering with neighboring stuff. Note, just because the phone "works" outside this zone doesn't mean there isn't interference -- WCDMA and CDMA are interference-limited, having an artificial interference source could severely degrade the capacity of these systems... requiring the cell co (if they can't get the jammer shut down) to add cell sites and add capacity to existing sites when they otherwise wouldn't have to. Your phone bill could be raised because prisons are interfering with your signal!

Did Parallels ship pre-release version 4 code?

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Not too unusual.

Agreed. It's certainly an issue if the online version is STILL buggy (as some are claiming.) BUT, everyone does this. From what I've heard it takes a month or two from the time they ship a "golden master" to some copying plant to it being boxed up and ready to sell. Lots of software has updates in that time period. Ubuntu? About 200 updates for 8.04.1 or for 8.10 (which has only been out about a month). Turbotax? It doesn't even ship with the tax forms on disk, they have to be downloaded by the autoupdater.

Software update nobbles Sky+ boxes

Henry Wertz Gold badge
Paris Hilton

Why?

Why don't they just downgrade the software to the previous (presumably working) version until they figure out the problem?

Paris, because she might know why I guess.

The Netbook Newbie's Guide to Linux

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Hackers and netbooks

"it's amazing how buzzy hackers have become about them."

Yep. Because:

a) No Microsoft tax. I'm *not* saying Windows is rubbish (it is..but I won't flame on about it..), but I don't want to pay for it when I am NEVER going to use it... and have Microsoft count me as a Windows user when I am not.

b) Nice size and power. Linux distros are efficient, I don't want or need a multighz multicore machine just to take care of business. My *current* notebook is a Celeron M 1.4 with 512MB, I plan to get something like a Mini9 very soon. If I run out of CPU power for extended time, I will find what's least important and renice it to low priority (Note: this might be a nice point'n'click tool to add, some GUI method to turn down some apps' priorities.)

Nice article btw. I think it's nice to have a nice article that digs under the hood a little. People'll say Linux is too hard while thinking nothing of digging into the windows registry on a regular basis (or doing actual file editing on OSX to adjust stuff the GUI doesn't let be adjusted), this shows that even if you have to edit a text file it's not usually too bad.

"No, the REAL hacker solution is to install Slackware 1.x from floppies..."

Hahaha yeah. I did the full diskset slack install back in the day. A full system (for the time... openoffice, netscape (let alone firefox), etc didn't exist yet) in about 20MB of disk space, I ran in 8MB of RAM.

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