Posts by Henry Wertz

Happened before, but not with ATC

@Luiz. Yeah. Except since it's Air Traffic Control, they're going to have to investigate, reinvestigate, and re-re-investigate what "caused" the card to go bad, probably decide how to redesign it so it won't be a problem again, then find out they spent all the cash on the above so they can't actually implement the suggested changes 8-)

And, I don't think it was the Air Traffic Control, but I remember reading just a year or two ago about ANOTHER airport that was knocked offline by a faulty NIC -- I think it was the flight scheduling? OK, based on the article, it was because of the security theatre systems breaking down.. Oh, here's a link courtesy of google: "Because of one faulty NIC, 17,000 stranded at LAX" (from August 2007): http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/15/because-of-one-fault.html

Sony divisions

From what all I've read, I think quite a few Sony divisions do not want copy restrictions, region restrictions, etc.; but, Sony Entertainment does, and (despite making less cash than SCEI I think), seems to have more influence. I had read that the division that made DAT players, asked to be able to make the last DAT model copy-restriction free... since, after all, it was the final DAT product being made. But Sony (probably Sony Entertainment) said "no", so they released the final model, the whole division quit en-masse and went to Google Japan.

Doesn't stop me from not buying anything Sony, the outcome is still making unnecessarily restricted devices, putting spyware on CDs, and so on. But, it does explain why you'll see inconsistencies between the products.

Reminds me of this AI Koan

This uncanny ability (which I've also got..) to (to the untrained eye) do nothing, turn on a machine, and have it work, reminded me of something, which I finally found.. this is one of the "AI Koans" from the MIT AI lab from the 1980s sometime:

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly: "You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.

They didn't show up!

"And that's where I have a problem with this. If you take someone to court to seek damages you have to show that a specific financial loss has occurred, and that the loss is the fault or responsibility of the party from whom you seek damages. So if I buy a washing machine which has an electrical fault which causes a fire that burns down my house, in order to be awarded damages I've got to be able to show that is was the washing machine that caused the fire."

AND

"Are we honestly expected to believe that the average bittorrent user could have uploaded a total of 37.5 gigabytes of this game, particularly with upload speeds in the UK being less than the download speeds?"

....

Well.. no. You don't have to show any damages in any meaningful way, and can make any stupid claim you want that someone shared 900,000 times, IF THE DEFENDENT DOESN'T EVEN SHOW UP. If the judge was on the defendent's side, they could have showed up and said "this is a load of crap" and the judge might just say "yes it is, case dismissed." But, if they don't show, they judge has to go with the prosecution, no matter how crap a case they made. I mean, hell, some spammer sued Spamhaus here in the states for $11 millon, and won, because noone from Spamhaus showed up (of course, Spamhaus is also not subject to US law, so the spammer hasn't collected a cent.)

Of course, if this is done like it is in the US, these guys that didn't show up to court might not HAVE to pay anything, and they might just have collection agents asking "please pay the 750 you owe" at worst.

Vista hasn't improved to take advantage, it's bloated

@Christopher Emerson,

"Perhaps all these people winging about the extra hardware requirements should go back to using windows 95 if they want the speed :P

Times changed, hardware improves, the software improves to take advantage of it. If you don't upgrade, you get left behind, and it doesn't give you any grounds for complaining that you can't run the latest software."

Hardware does improve, and software does improve to take advantage of it. "Improve" doesn't mean bloat -- Vista is *BLOATED*. Martin Maloney's example of systems with 256 MB RAM, 40 GB hard drive, Athlon XP 2000+ (or so) class CPUs.... Ubuntu runs great on that, while also taking full advantage of the latest and greatest. >4GB of RAM (even on a 32-bit system?) Sure. Multiple cores.. no sweat, it even treats cores and hyperthreaded CPUS properly.. and so on. I mean I wouldn't complain if Vista required 512MB or something, but 2GB and a dual core for reaosnable performance? That's absurd.

Yes, I'll blame "Sony" for actions of "Sony BMG"

@Highlander, they are all part of the same company, and yes, I will boycott a whole company for actions of one portion of it. The company as a whole could have owned up to this problem and fixed it, instead they ignored it until they were sued and lost money on it.

"DVDs are too big for a device the size of the PSP" -- not if you used a smaller one. Of course then it's still non-standard, but you wouldn't have the whole "let's make a whole new disc for no reason" going on -- you'd just use a "mini-DVD" essentially, similar to how there are some mini-CDs.

CTRL-ALT-DEL and UNIX

@AC that said "I saw a Unix OS recently It is just like DOS! Why do you greybeards get so down on MSDOS its just like Unix.", no it's not. DOS supports 640K of RAM, but apps run in segmented mode (only 64KB at a time in other words!). No multitasking. Pipes are faked by writing stuff to a file, then feeding that file into the next program in the pipeline. No proper shell. No proper utilities (sed, grep, more, etc.) And so on. Even the "old-school" UNIX systems had a proper shell, proper multitasking, proper pipes, proper utilities, and proper memory access (apps use "flat memory" model, not 64KB segments). Most had support for virtual memory as well. Also, if you had more than one screen attached (usually additional screen attached via serial ports), UNIX is also multiuser!

Ctrl-alt-del: It doesn't generate any special interrupt at the hardware level.. but, in DOS (or other real-mode stuff), keyboard generates IRQ 1 for each keystroke, and the BIOS keyboard handler is hard wired to recognize ctrl-alt-del and handle it specially. Windows NT also handles it specially for security purposes... (probably, they chose that combo since it was already well-known). Microsoft flubbed a LOT of security stuff, but someone realized "Hey, people could write a fake login prompt program to collect passwords", and that is why you have to hit ctrl-alt-del in NT and 2000 to get to a login prompt -- so you KNOW it's the real one. And, it's hardwired to fire up task manager the rest of the time so you can wrestle control back from rogue apps.

Re: heystoopid's comment

@heystoopid: Spot on! For those in UK, Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep's current "solution" to their vehicles being gas hogs is to have a promotion for $2.99/gallon fuel for some number of miles per year for the first 3 years. The best economy of Dodge's entire car lineup is 24 city 29 highway for one and another that gets 21 city 31 highway (better I suppose if most of your driving is highway). Ford and Chevy both have cars that do 24-25 city and 34-36 highway... and a Chevy Malibu, despite it's large size, manages 22 city 32 highway.

I'm overall disappointed in US vehcile fuel economy (not just US automakers though; Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, VW at least are ALL guilty of deciding "oh, americans like more powerful engines" and dropping in either a US-specific engine, or the highest-power engine available on non-US models. Other than the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius, the BEST fuel economy I've been able to find on any car has been 29 city 36 highway. Get a smaller car? They tune it up for acceleration. (Take a look at fueleconomy.gov or car co's web sites -- Honda, Toyota, etc., the smallest models will not get a single MPG better than the midsize, and usually lower highway mileage.)

Sure there's safe levels.

@heystoopid, sure there's safe levels. It's like any other type of energy -- if you go out in the sun for an hour you're fine, go under a high intensity tanning lamp for an hour you're burned, go under something 10x stronger you're probably burned to a crisp. Low enough intensities won't even penetrate skin; and to deal with cosmic rays etc., cells repair DNA damage, so low counts per minute of higher-intensity radiation doesn't cause a problem either. Is this island safe? No idea, I'd assume there's some hot spots that would make it not safe to reinhabit.

No one's forgotten about early radiation researchers OR uranium miners... they were regularly exposed to high levels of radiation.

As for trinitite -- I did some googling, the Trinity site was buried shortly after the blast for security reasons apparently.. so despite there being a 10 foot deep by 1100 foot section of it, there's not lots in circulation. But I found no mention anywhere of anyone actually trying to withdraw the existing samples from circulation.

Is it some twisted market test?

Maybe it's a market test? Perhaps someone at Asus thought the Linux EEE sold so well because it had a head start, and wants to see if releasing the next model with XP first will behave similarly. (Hint to Asus: It won't. People are sick of the Microsoft tax, and more and more people are finding out, to their shock, that XP will be unsupported by the end of the month.)

iPhone isn't ready for the enterprise

To get it out of the way ahead of time, iPhone isn't a smartphone. Smartphones allow the user to install any app compiled for that phone; iPhone doesn't (without jailbreaking it.. a *jailbroken* iPhone would count as a smartphone, but that's not how it ships and Apple actively is trying to prevent the customer from doing this.)

The article isn't arguing the iPhone is necessarily a bad phone -- but, the enterprise has developed very specific features a phone has to support. It either a) has to be super-stripped.. you can't leak much info by losing a phone or whatever if the phone just doesn't do anything interesting. b) Be able to be kept under IT's thumb. A blackberry or the like, they can disable the camera, block or allow as much software installation as they want, encrypt and password-protect everything, and even remotely disable the phone (so a stolen phone can become a paperweight.)

As for O2 speeds -- maybe they aren't throttling. The peak speed is (depending on what version of HSDPA is deployed) 1.8, 3.6, 4.8, 7.2 or 14.4mbits, but that's if you're the only user, close enough to the site, with a phone that supports it, and a site that has that much backhaul. I don't know what the capacity is for an HSDPA cell, but oversubscription's a definite possibility. If you're far from the site, speeds will of course drop. The phone or card, that's certainly a factor -- if it's UMTS (but not HSDPA) the max would be 384kbps for instance. And backhaul -- I don't know about in UK, but here in the states, some rural EVDO sites (there's basically no rural HSDPA, AT&T has HSDPA only in citites) have a single T1 running to them.. so the site *could* do 3.1mbits/sec over the air, but the backhaul can do 1.5mbits/sec.

@AC that forwards stuff from his secure Blackberry to insecure iPhone: You're a moron. Others have already told you why. Talk to IT, don't just subvert security. It's there for a reason.

@R C: You have it ass backwards. Almost EVERY phone offers what the iPhone has, and then some, other than having a shitty interface. And, yes, I WOULD rag on a gold-plated phone, that'd be an enormous waste of money that adds no functionality to my phone, and would be tacky. I don't know what your beef is against IT types, so I'm not even responding to the rest.

Exaggerated, but should be usable

I think CherryPal's greatly exaggerating the performance, and they really shouldn't.. they'll have people benchmark it and simply tear them a new one. But, as long as the CPU and chipset are reasonably modern, a dual-core 400mhz PowerPC-based setup should be quite pleasant as a desktop. And it's hard to argue with 2 watts.

Police permission to read a book?

Eugene, noone should EVER have to write the police to ask "Hey, can I read this book?" That is ridiculous. (But perhaps true? Both US and Britain DO seem to be getting ridiculous.)

$3,000 PC? Doubt it.

They really shouldn't claim this machine will outrun a $3,000 PC. People may well benchmark it and tear them a new one. But, based on spec of a dual-core 400mhz PowerPC-based chip, it should certainly be pleasant enough as a desktop. A notebook based on this would be great, with a good battery the battery life would be insane.

Amazing..

Amazing.. simply amazing. Before I saw the pics, I figured like a texture or two might have been "borrowed" and someone was making a stink over it. (Last time I read about this, it turned out nothing bad had happened -- both games had used a few textures out of some generic pile-o-textures). But.. these shots look identical.

For a point-n-click style game, you would think they would draw up some unique art, it shouldn't be as difficult as making up a bunch of 3D models etc. after all. If they can't draw, then hire someone who can, or do it all sketchy like a few of the Nintendo games and whatever you do, don't admit it's because you can't draw, say it's to make some artistic statement (heh).

Microsoft & power saving

@Cavehomme, "Not hat I like these corporations particularly, but had it not been for MS then most of you would not be making a good living becuase the masses would not be using computers on anywhere near the present scale. Ms produces a lot of cr@p, but they have also done a lot of good, and at least evil Bill is paying his penance now by devoting much of his life to re-investing his billions to the poor sods of this world."

No, if not for MS PCs would have been running CP/M (and possibly MP/M, a multiuser version of CP/M) and GEM. DOS was just a CP/M clone, QDOS, that Microsoft bought for $50,000 (not telling the writer about the big deal they were working out with IBM). And, Digital Research was already working on GEM before Microsoft started Windows, so PCs would have had a graphical environment available without Microsoft. Other stuff Microsoft produced? Word processor? Wordstar, Wordperfect, AmiPro. Spreadsheet? Lotus 1-2-3. Virtually everything people credit Microsoft for "creating" already existed, Microsoft just put the competitors out of business (occasionally through making a somewhat better product, usually through monopolistic practices.)

@fishman: People HAVE gone after Vista with pitchforks. It seems like everyone hates on it full-time. I know I sure do.

More on topic, I think this article is just hating on Google. It'd be good for the environment for Google to release every trick they have for making an efficient data center, but it'd also be crazy. This is one of Google's major competitive advantages, and one I'm sure they've spent LOTS of money coming up with. Microsoft is still trying to kill Google, Google telling them how to save money on data centers would just help Microsoft do this.

Small warship huh?

If Roadrunner needs a small warship to carry it, then I'll be REALLY impressed when the hypercomputer's smart enough to drive a small warship through traffic!

No to white space usage

Yep! If Microsoft pushes this through, it could well be quite disasterous. They've ALREADY had at least two prototypes (one in 2007 one in 2008) that miserably failed testing. The 2007 model failed to detect analog TV 20% of the time, and strong digital TV signals 50% of the time; it also didn't pick up mics. The 2008 model also failed. Microsoft claimed they were faulty -- tough! If the system fails in any way than failing off, it's a failure -- last thing I need is neighbors "faulty" Microsoft hardware killing TV reception.

I also don't think the band should be licensed off to the cell cos though -- if this were done, there'd be no ability for anyone to add a new TV station, they'd have to outbid telephone companies for the spectrum!

Make it just scan stuff the user clicks on.

Yeah, this sounds kind of crap. The idea is good in theory, but set it up so when a link is clicked on, it'll scan it THEN and warn if it's a naughty link. (Since it's an add-on I imagine it could do it this way.) Then it's still providing protection, while not clicking on stuff the user didn't ask for.

I'm with alex dekker...

I think alex dekker summed it up perfectly... waaaahmbulance indeed.

Cry me a river, Canonical and Redhat. I love Canonical's work, but for an education contract, it's probably easier for a company that specializes in education to pick out the open source products that will be best than for an open source company to figure out what educational users want.

Tried XP or Ubuntu on that Core Duo?

But have you tried XP (or Ubuntu for that matter) on that Core Duo with 4GB? I guarantee, you WON'T think Vista's running well after you see how something else runs on that.. those are incredibly high specs by any but Vista standards. This is what people object to about Vista (well, among other things).. you simply shouldn't need that much hardware just to make an OS run worth a damn.

It IS worth mentioning a machine has a shit OS

@KenBW2,

But Vista is such shit, it really is a major negative point against any machine, and with so many new notebooks coming with Linux distros, it IS well worth mentioning. Given the crapulence of Vista, vendors should provide an XP and a Linux option, and it's worth mentioning if they don't.

And, is it REALLY that easy to get a refund from the vendor? From what I've seen, it usually is not -- they will really not want to give a refund for the M$ software, despite the license terms saying the vendor is supposed to.

Just sell the stock!

These assholes should really just sell the stock, it's higher than Microsoft's offers anyway! Or, they can gun for getting 51%. The heads of Yahoo know that Microsoft will just drain any value out of Yahoo post-merger, and so do not want a merger. These stock brokers would know this if they knew dick about technology, but they do not.

Xanders right, the testimonials are creepy

@Xander: You're right. seriously, people, look at these examples...

One called someone to tell them they one $1 million.. that COULD be funny.. but he didn't tell him it was fake, he let him buy a $600 bottle of champagne, they both drank it, and just called AGAIN from a fake number to ask him a trivia question and then say he didn't win the cash. *he never told him it was fake*

One called a "friend" and gave fake results from Planned Parenthood.

One called a friend ON HIS BIRTHDAY to claim a stripper was on her way, and just thought it was hillarious that he kept waiting.

One called a plumber friend to tell him his plumbing license was revoked.

One called someone who specifically said they didn't want to be in a movie, got them to say some lines, and spliced them into the movie anyway.

*AND THOSE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE THE PRANKS*.. wow "hilarious".

Agreed!

Agreed! Microsoft should not be able to complain if people are importing and reselling software. Maybe they can't; the companies that got sued for this should lawyer up and they could perhaps get the case dropped (plus Microsoft can pay legal fees.)

As for the others: Naughty naughty. You really should just put Ubuntu or something on those systems; an automated install takes under 20 minutes, and with a network install you don't even need to pop in a CD. If you used ghost or something to image them it'd take even less time (but, the 20 minute install does a nice burn-in test.)

I'm with Yang...

I'm certainly with Yang here.. It has not gone well for any company that Microsoft purchases. They're also a convicted monopolist, and by trying to buy up all Google's competitors (in search + web advertising at any rate) they are just trying to leverage this to take down Google and gain a monopoly in another market. If Microsoft wants to try to take over, fine, try to buy 50.1% of the stock.

If these investors do not like Yahoo's decisions, don't sue -- they haven't done anything to deflate the price (in fact it's risen ABOVE Microsoft's current offer), so there's not some big loss in stock value to sue over. If ya think Yahoo's fucked up and the stocks going to tumble, sell it now while it's high!

I had a machine do this...

"Laptop self destruct is a better principle, have them explode (or at least smoulder a little) if a DC is not contacted within 5 minutes after power-on"

I had a IBM do this... in my case, it just made an otherwise sellable surplus computer worthless, but... we got a few Thinkpads in. Found this one wasn't working fully and cracked it open to see why. Wrong move! It turns out, after looking on IBM's web site, that these few thinkpads had an option so they would check for a particular radio signal, and not power up if the signal was absent. (If the department had a clue they would have turned this off in the BIOS before they sent in the machine.) Additionally, they were tamper-resistant so when I opened it up to see what was wrong it blew the motherboard.

@"Where's a mac fan boy when you need one! "

@"Where's a mac fan boy when you need one! "

Right there ---^ saying "Oh I haven't personally seen this attack so it's no problem" and saying it's just a slam on Macs, even though it's not even a platform-specific bug.

Ivan, at the pwn2own contest, the machine wasn't pwned because the owner "let" it be.. the machine was pwned simply by the user clicking on a web link.

Predatory prosecution

This suicide's a real shame, but this kind of predatory prosecution is what makes have no respect for the feds. The whole "let's just stretch these laws well past what the breaking point and see what sticks" type attitude is simply ridiculous, and I hope a judge drops the case and files some kind of an ethics charge against the prosecutors for doing this. A *civil* lawsuit by the parents/relatives of the young lady who killed herself is entirely another matter, but it seems to me no crime was committed and the state should stay out of it.

CPU driver

"They are going to take (or are currently taking) alot of flak for this, yet it dosnt take a genius to figure out whats going to happen when you install an Intel processor driver onto an AMD processor machine. "

Uhh, it detects you aren't on an AMD machine and doesn't execute? That's what happens on all my Linux systems.. my gentoo kernels are custom, but Ubuntu kernels have AMD, Intel, Via C3, Transmeta, and a couple other power management drivers. They don't blow the system up, they check the CPU type and don't run (except the right one which does run.)

"Think what would happen if you took an ATI graphics card driver and installed it onto a machine with an Nvidia GFX card in it.....ok, assuming you turned off the bit where the driver would pick up the problem and not activate...."

Exactly the point! The driver should not activate.

"your GFX card wouldnt work....now think about what generally happens to a computer when a processor dosnt work....""

Yes. This is why the driver should run a sanity check, not just run. I won't give Microsoft too much shit for this mistake, but I do give them shit for instead of being "Ooops! Let's fix those drivers" just being "Ohhhh, that's by design, we're not fixing it it's the sysprepers fault". This kind of thing is exactly why we abandoned sysprep where I work in favor of installing Ubuntu on fresh sysytems. The preseed setup for Ubuntu isn't the easiest thing to set up, but once it's setup it just goes and goes no matter what system I throw it on (I've run it reasonably on a P2-400 up to Core Duo, including AMD systems, and ran..make it "crawled".. Xubuntu on a Pentium-120... I don't recommend that for sanity's sake.)

Strength

"While I'm not sure about the method, it seems like the biggest problem linux has is that there's a constant reinvention of the bicycle."

That's really a strength. I mean, it's true that it spends developer time that could go to other things.. but

a) Developers like to take existing code and make it better. These same developers may not be interested at all in working on some new project. (After all, many are working on it on a personal, not paid basis.)

b) It avoids ending up with a Microsoft-like mess of code.

1. Ugly code, even if it works, will be pulled out and replaced with clean code. This avoids a maintenance nightmare later on. Code that isn't ugly but is slow is sped up. This helps make it possible to release new distros without drastically increasing hardware requirements... so depending on how you look at it, you can run the latest'n'greatest on your old hardware (I have run Ubuntu 8.04 on some systems that are pushing 10 years old and it ran OK) or you can get more out of your shiny new servers, because the apps are much more efficient than they could be.

2. People don't just glue what should be seperate apps into an interdependent mass, because it makes the apps break. Which can sound bad when someone wants that app out NOW, but is good overall because it means the app will keep running in the future, portable to other systems, and so on. See Microsoft having trouble with their own apps breaking with each OS release, because they start intermingling what could/should be a seperate app with OS functions.

EHS and "4G"

"Q. How can a young child or baby tell you if they have a headache when near wi-fi or a mobile mast?

A. They'd cry their ass off. Young children and babies don't just lie around if they ache.

Q. How can you stop your neighbour putting their wi-fi router on the wall next to where you sleep?

A. No idea. I haven't had this problem.

Q. How much does the signal increase if you live in a flat, surrounded by people with routers, computers, and Nintendo Wii's?

A. Rounding down, zero. Do you fall down and start twitching when anyone within a block runs a microwave oven? The leakage from them is FAR stronger than wifi signals. Do radios and TVs give you a fit? They have a local oscillator that spews out plenty of RF noise. How about cars? The spark plugs can produce quite a bit of RF noise (except diesels that don't have this).

Q. Why does a window seem to focus the signal into a room, making it worse inside the room than if you were outside?

A. It doesn't, it's all in your head. The window lets a signal in better than a wall but it doesn't amplify or focus signals.

"

....................

4G... well, initially 3G was supposed to be service that would get 128kbps or up. Then once that was met by CDMA-1X (144kbps) and was found to not be much better than the present "2G" services, 3G was redefined to mean considerably higher speeds. Despite this, GSM providers here love to claim EDGE is "2.5G" or even "2.75G" even though it's definitely not by present definition of 3G. It's essentially a marketing term more than anything.

To be honest, rather than having some crazy 100mbps service, I'd rather have a "3G"-style speed but with caps lifted. For instance, Verizon Wireless where I live still has only 1X (144kbps) but has EVDO (1-3mbps more or less) rolled out over most of their service area -- but with a 5GB cap. I'd love to have 1-3mbps wireless without a cap more than 100mbps with a cap.

No Office

People aren't avoiding Office 2007 because it's buggy -- I hadn't even heard about that. People are avoiding it because:

a) Office <something older> is good enough.

b) Already have OpenOffice. Why spend $$$ for something else?

c) Ideologically opposed to OOXML and/or Microsoft.

d) That crap non-menu bar. Microsoft and fans' response is generally along the lines of "Oh you're stupid", "You have to learn how to use it", "It's the wave of the future get used to it". Well, having little nearly-identical-looking blobs (a.k.a. icons) instead of text doesn't do it for me, and I know many like me. If Microsoft's Office team doesn't wish to accomodate people like me, then fine, I won't use Office.

e) No Linux version. I wonder how many people Microsoft *assumes* are running Windows (due to sales figures from all those preloaded PCs) really aren't. They're NEVER going to get Office 2007 since it's not available for them.

For me, it's mostly b, d, and e. But c applies too -- I don't like Microsoft's behavior and avoid sending them money when possible.

Math is wrong on the plasma!

A 2400W iron on for 1/3rd of an hour uses 800watt-hours of power. The plasma for 1 hour uses 400 watt-hours... In fact, you're using as much juice ironing for 20 minutes as watching the plasma for 2 hours.

Honestly, saying using 400 watts of power for a TV is OK because other stuff uses more power is a surprisingly American attitude (note I am one so I should know.) I'm not going to tell people they shouldn't be able to have plasmas, but they are ridiculously power-inefficient. Way worse than the CRTs that people are abandoning due to inefficiency. As a consequence of the power usage, they also run hot -- it gets very hot where I live, besides the 0.4KWhs to run the TV I'd also be paying for additional air conditioning all summer long to cool the room back off.

As for the actual article -- I agree. Keeping track of carbon credits is a silly way to go about this. I'd love to be super-efficient and make extra money. But, tracking all that would be very tricky. It's easier to get the same effect by just jacking up electricity, gasoline, etc. taxes, and possibly providing a low-income credit so those who can't afford to heat the home due to increases still can.

Apple quality..

Phreaky doesn't state it well at all, but he's right. As much as Apple fans hate to admit it, Apple do in fact make some models that are unmitigated junk. Some have had 30% failure rate in the first year. I work at a surplus presently, and I can assure you some Apples (at about 5 year age range) have a rather astounding failure rate (Dell GX270s do as well -- in the Dell's case due to blown caps.)

Other models are great and last practically forever. bygjohn's right, some Mac models are a pain to open up and work on, but I don't think anyone would accuse an Apple product of being flimsy. They have a unique appearance and are solid.

As for this settlement? "Funny money" you have to spend with Apple, and THEN excludes a bunch of stuff, seems pretty crap to me. But it's par for the course -- my parents got a class action $10 certificate from Iomega over dodgy Zip drives. Which excluded using it for Zip disks etc. etc., basically knocking out anything under about $120 or so. They weren't too unhappy about it -- they had the 1st gen Zip that actually didn't crap out, but the $10 cert would be a real slap in the face for people who did get shoddy products.

Security

First off, none of the below is meant to dilute the blame due to those who actually ran these botnets. I think the sentence is a little long (I'd go for a shorter sentence and larger fines), but anyway...

"So your argument is that the victim is at least partly responsible, for failing to lock their door / wearing a short miniskirt / whatever?"

I think the argument using this analogy is a lock manufacturer would be partly responsible if they sell "locks" that do not actually hold a door shut. Analogously, Microsoft's made it FAR too easy for people to install unauthorized software ont Windows systems.

"at how naïve some of The Reg readers are. Secure your computer against these guys? You've got to be kidding. Short of cutting your Internet cable, there is no real defense against these bastards. Windows is so full of holes it may as well be swiss cheese."

Yes, I secured my machines by getting Windows the fuck off of them. Although, when I ran XP, by ditching Internet Explorer & Outlook (using Firefox and Eudora, set to not use IE rendering engine) and shutting off the crap services it runs by default, I did not have any crap show up on it. (I ran Ad-Aware and AVG and they never showed a thing.)

"Of course, it is also easy to jump on the "Microsoft sucks" bandwagon, but I think anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that's not the answer either. Anyone who has worked in law enforcement knows and lives one simple rule. "If someone wants in badly enough, there's nothing you can do to prevent him from getting in." "

Computer security's not like picking some physical locks though. A stock Ubuntu system, there's 0 network services running. It's simply impossible for some botnet to install onto it, there's nothing to connect to. Network apps... well, firefox doesn't haphazzardly run code the way IE will (for instance firefox doesn't have ActiveX at all; flash and Java are sandboxed; and the whole app is protected so buffer overflows etc. will crash the app rather than running bad code.) The whole interface, gnome, KDE, mail apps, etc. make it difficult enough to save a random executable and run it so noone's going to run an app by accident, run an app thinking it's a JPEG, etc. MUCH harder to install an unwanted app onto.

Not OEM's fault

Sorry, but saying "ohh, you can't install an Intel driver on an AMD system, it's the OEMs fault" is bull. That's just laziness on Microsoft's part, pure and simple. The Intel power management driver should see there are no Intel CPUs present, and just unload or deactivate. Similarly the AMD PM driver should deactivate on an Intel system. It should be possible and valid to put both power management drivers into a single install.

Ubuntu? I can install on any type of system and (move the hard disk, or ghost) to any other type of system.. I wouldn't want to go to a 486 but I could. Realistic minimum's like a P2 with 256MB of RAM. Moving a live install over I may have to tell it I have a different video card; OEM, I do belive the video detection is run on first boot. No driver hell, no "oh noes, it's an AMD, time to blow up". Microsoft can sod off.

bad?

Yeah, from the footage I saw in the youtube clip at least, it didn't look like there was any bad behavior whatsoever -- just people playing around with waterguns.

Deathstar?

So, I've really wondered -- has Hitachi cleaned up or shut down the plant that was churning out bad Deathstars? The OLD Deskstars (20GB and down) were fabulous, the later IBM Deskstars were what were so bad. The smartest thing Hitachi could have done is announce publicly they've fixed their problems; without knowing I wouldn't risk it.

Cap!

I have been heavily opposing caps, because of how unreasonable most capped plans are (5 or 10GB? 20GB? Feh). But, 250GB is very high. As Christopher Martin says that comes out to a bit over 95KB/sec continuous. I torrent a fair amount and have gotten nowhere NEAR that amount. If I were heavily torrenting, I would simply cap the torrent app at 95KB/sec (or perhaps 90KB to ensure "wiggle room"). Then you will simply never hit the cap. Personally, it seems like most torrents* will burst to 100s of KB/sec for short time periods (when I get a few fast seeders) but do well below that 90KB/sec the rest of the time anyway (pulling like 2KB/sec apiece off a number of seeders.)

*Umm... entirely Linux ISOs of course. Yeah.

Apple-haters

"Funny, how many Apple-haters are still around. If you don't use a product why make idiotic statements about it? No life? Nothing better to do?"

Well, yeah. People hate on lots of products. Apples are a good target though; they're expensive, the Apple fans like to argue they're not expensive. And, reliability varies a lot by model from fantastic to absolute lemon, while Apple fans like to "prove" the whole line's perfect by citing examples of long-lasting (reliable) models they've owned.

"First of all, Apple's software warranty is 90 days, hardware is 1 year. Both can be extended to 3 years by purchasing a single AppleCare support plan. Which, after all these years of using Apple products, I have never had to buy (my 20 year old Mac SE still boots and runs)."

The SE was solid. Some Apples have not been.

"Secondly, to the idiot that said, "Apple runs what.... 4 or 5 applications", Apple computers can run more software than any other computer system, including all software for Mac OS X, Linux/Unix, and Windows. (Mac OS X currently runs thousands of applications.) The fact that you assume "Apple" equals "Mac OS X", shows you have no idea what you're talking about."

Well, "4 or 5" is harsh, but the fact of the matter is, Apple essentially does equal Mac OS X. Otherwise, you might as well just have a PC, they can run Linux/Unix and Windows software (although, personally, I wouldn't recommend Windows on either machine.) However, you're right though, I run Ubuntu and don't lack for apps; if I ran OS X I wouldn't lack for apps either.

Well..

I would say either the CTA should have to show the ads OR return the $300,000, personally. They can't really expect to pocket $300,000 and not display ads. They really shouldn't be required to do both (return $300k and show an ad).

Re: Amdahl's Law

Well, I did some googling, and it seems the Altix ICE is in fact a cluster machine; each blade has a quad-core Xeon, 16 blades per blade enclosure, and 4 blade enclosures per rack. This would take 40 racks for 20480 cores.. the whole thing would be connected with Infiniband. However, it does appear each blade will be booting an individual copy of Linux with this setup (booting via Infiniband) and all storage done to Infiniband-connected storage. So it really will be running 5120 copies of Linux, each handling 4 cores and 32GB of RAM. OTHER machines in the Altix line are large shared-system-image systems though, with 512 cores running under a single kernel not being too unusual.

Linux doesn't really suffer from it's historical roots.. I'd say Linux scaled to 4 CPUs through roughly the 2.2 kernel. It seems 2.4 would scale to 128 or so pretty well. SGI did research and kernel improvements to improve scalability. The 2.6 kernel has an improved scheduler that keeps a given thread on the same CPU (to maximize cache hit rate). NUMA (non-uniform memory access) is handled intelligently so the system doesn't bog down from having some memory faster than the rest. 2.4 had one "big kernel lock", 2.6 has the minimum locking required to avoid any general cockups. And most importantly, the scheduler in 2.6 is O(1), so scheduler overhead doesn't increase with number of CPUs or processes. SGI scaled 2.6 to 512 cores fine. For 1024 cores, they had to just enlarge an in-kernel table or two. The largest singile system image system in the world is also at NASA, with 1024 dual-core Itanium2s (2048-core single system!) This is also an SGI Altix, but a shared-memory model instead of Infiniband cluster model. It seems to go from 1024 to 2048 cores, SGI just had to enlarge some kernel tables again, and it ran fine.

Amdahl's law definitely applies.. and applies even more with a cluster. But I think the kind of code NASA runs in fact will be heavily parallelizable. Apparently each infiniband channel does 20gbits/sec, so hopefully that's enough to keep those processors well-fed.

Yeah..

Yeah, you guys in UK don't really know why this is such a big deal. As it is now, GSM providers here are just like there, where they sell you a locked GSM phone, but after a while you can get it unlocked; you can buy your own unlocked phone and swap your SIM into it too. But, the big GSM providers have other problems (less coverage, AT&T seems to have network problems, etc.)

The CDMA providers (Verizon Wireless, Sprint, Alltel, US Cellular) don't use SIM cards, you give them the phone ESN (electronic serial number) and they put it on your account. They will not activate a phone they didn't sell; so you can't take a Sprint phone (even if unlocked) and place it on your Verizon Wireless account. This is the big deal -- if I am paying for voice serivce, and paying for data service, why does it matter what device I'm using it on? Verizon Wireless has pledged to go to allowing any device by later in the year (as long as it's compatible, won't harm the network, etc etc.), but Google wants to make sure they really follow the spirit of the agreement, not you "can" use whatever device you want but you'll pay 10x as much or something.

Ubuntu it is!

Well, where I work, we've had the following go down several times:

(Some person): "Oh these machines have XP licenses on them, it'd be easier for some people if they came with XP"

(technicians): *throws some chairs* "But, the drivers! And the install is slower."

Boss asks legal department: "Can we put XP on these machines?"

Legal: "Sure I suppose it's fine"

Boss: "Can I get that in writing?"

Legal: "..."

Boss: "Ubuntu it is then!"

The Ubuntu install is automated so I PXE boot the machine and walk away. (I'm running a netinstall rather than ghosting because I want to exercise the hardware a little to help catch faulty systems.) It includes drivers for the hardware we get, which ranges from 1 to 8 years old more or less. We tried an automated XP install, and we get so many different systems it seems like every time we plugged one in it'd install with missing drivers. The legal aspect is the real clincher though -- we won't have Canonical come and hassle us like we could with Microsoft!

Civil case?

Why don't you bring a civil case against the robbers. I assume Britain has equivalents to these.. here in the states if police were uninterested, I would bring a case in small claims court. For civil cases, the standard of evidence is FAR lower than criminal court since it's not someone's freedom on the line (so the CCTV footage would be admissable.) For small claim's court, it's apparently very informal -- no lawyers needed, just basically tell a judge what happened, probably bring like a mini-DVD player with your vid on it to show him, the defendents (if they even show up) say "Uhh, that's not us" even though it obviously is, and then the judge decides the case. Collecting is another matter if they don't want to pay, but I'm sure there's ways to collect.

Smart...

This would be a smart purchase. I think it would be smart for DT to do though if they get a reasonable price. SprintPCS has 1900mhz licenses to cover the entire country, while at present T-Mobile does not. They both have relatively small networks compared to AT&T or Verizon Wireless' but combined they'd have more coverage than separately.

In future the alphabet soup would not be a big problem as it is now. At present, So now you have Sprint running iDen and CDMA, and T-Mobile running GSM. For data, Sprint has EVDO rev A, (2-3mbits/sec) while T-Mobile has EDGE. They've got 1 city with UMTS, but it's voice only, data is forced to EDGE apparently.

But, AT&T plans to go LTE. Verizon Wireless plans to go LTE. Alltel is looking to go LTE. US Cellular hasn't announced, but unofficially they plan to go LTE by 2012-2015. (See note 1) Sprint? WiMax.

So, DT just has to ditch wimax and go LTE. iDen's claim to fame is rapid, reliable push-to-talk, letting customers use the phones as walky-talkies basically. Sprint's already working with Qualcomm on "QChat" so they can do good push-to-talk via EVDO, then they'd phase out iDen. (AT&T and VZW both have push-to-talk but apparently it sucks). So DT should let that research continue, migrate the existing T-Mobile GSM network to LTE, and migrate the existing Sprint network to LTE. Instead of having to push GSM customers to CDMA, or CDMA customers to GSM (Note 2), you just get people to buy LTE phones over time and there's no more alphabet soup. (There should be both GSM+LTE and CDMA+LTE hybrid phones to cover the transition.)

Note 1: LTE is a fairly raw data transport, with calls being carried essentially via VOIP. It sounds like LTE is more a totally separate network than an upgrade of any sense from GSM, so existing GSM and CDMA networks are essentially on equal footing doing this upgrade.

Note 2: This is a touchy subject. GSM users decry the lack of phone options that CDMA users are stuck with. US CDMA users decry the lack of GSM coverage -- there's much more CDMA coverage than GSM in rural areas. Any provider that tries to switch from one to the other loses many customers.

Taking the piss

You guys that suggest a drill or hammer are taking the piss.

At present, we are taking our faulty drives to a recycler, that runs them through some crazy-ass hard drive shredder.

"When a hammerdrill + a bench vice = ~$100-150 (if that)

OK - might take slightly longer than a minute per drive, but at that price you could buy two, and hire two monkeys.... err.. I mean students to do it."

Try "buy two per week". Hard drives are hard, we tried conventional drilling, and also a rotary saw, and the drives simply destroy the drills and saws. Fast. I think you could get a heavy-duty rig that'd work for under $11,000, but it's not going to cost like $100.

"14lb club hammer, a cold chisel and a steady-handed, fearless co-worker - everything you need to render a hard disk unreadable, and a lot less than $11.5k"

Until they are injured. Sledgehammering hard disks is fun as hell, chisel or no, but flying chunks are a significant risk.. it seems like someone almost got hit in the eye every time we did this.. and the sledgehammerer rapidly gets a sore arm. You cannot do many disks this way.