* Posts by Henry Wertz

438 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2008

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How to destroy 60 hard drives an hour

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Yeah..

Title's inaccurate. I wondered what good a 60/day drill would do -- I could sledge-hammer them faster than that. 60 an HOUR though... that's pretty decent. This would be great for excessive amounts of disk disposal. I wonder if it'll clamp onto the old 5 1/4" drives (yes, we still get those in too.)

Apple update trick triples Safari share

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Commentful

@Graham it works with Amarok DESPITE Apple's attempts to block it. The ipod has changed it's on-disk indexing format several times. Each time the Apple fanbois say "Oh, it's only meant to be used with itunes, that's your problem, besides it's probably to make the index better." But at one point, they simply took the old format and stuck some weak crypto on it -- this was just to break 3rd-party apps.

And, indeed, I find checkmarking other random software in an updater as greasy as hell. Apple should absolutely not be doing this. Although, frankly, it doesn't surprise me.

@Paul Taylor, I assume you're running MacOS 10.3? OS7 didn't have Firefox as far as I know. Ubuntu 8.04 for PowerPC, the LiveCD is rather slow but it'll give you a good idea of what you're in for. It's pretty nice. For Intel Mac of course there's Ubuntu 8.04 for x86, you can run 32-bit or 64-bit version I think. The review I saw, the reviewer was trying to be..umm..diplomatic towards OSX so he wouldn't get too many flames; he sounded like he liked Ubuntu better, but overall concluded Ubuntu (7.04 I think?) versus OSX was a draw, and recommended OSX for newer machines and Ubuntu for older machines that either don't support 10.4/10.5 or where 10.4/5 are supported but slow. To find it, go to http://cdimages.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/8.04/release/ ... it's not on Ubuntu's normal pages because official PowerPC support was dropped almost 2 years ago! (Since Ubuntu is Debian with some bling, the lack of official support doesn't matter.. Debian has good PowerPC support so Ubuntu actually does too.)

DoJ beats up tech firm for H-1B only job ads

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Skills shortage

I WOULD take a $20/hour job, if it was here in the midwest where living costs are cheap. But there aren't any -- they either pay for $20/hour for 40 hours (but expect 60-80 hours of work).. or they pay like $10-12/hour. I could make more here managing a fast-food restaurant than I would in IT.

The problems with H1Bs as I've seen them: As others have said, it's rapidly deflating the pay rate and extending working hours, and allowing comapnies to violate working laws (see Steve Brown above, where he worked extra hours, with no overtime pay, and put into a 401K which he now can't access.) As others have said, quite a few H1B employees end up not really knowing what they are hired to do, and pick it up on the job as well.

This is the second issue -- companies say there are no qualified people in the states. Well, if you claim you need someone with 5 years experience in your industry, and every other employer ALSO claims they need people with 5 years experience.. how will the person with 1 year experience gain 5 years experience? They will not. There's no way the US will have a skilled labor pool if no company is willing to do any on-the-job training, apprenticeships, or the like, preferring to hire H1Bs (who apparently, based on above comments, ALSO end up just learning it on the job.) Hire some locals who seem sharp but don't have the 5 years experience, and make it so it's easy to fire those who are not picking the job up. Boom! A skilled work force, that knows the business well, and are local so there are not communications problems.

Frustration and joy - Microsoft's CTP in action

Henry Wertz Gold badge

But..

But, SQL Server Express has a 4GB limit? Wow. I'm not used to using software with artificial limits placed on it.

VXers slap copyright notices on malware

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Re: Enforcement

The contract may be legally null and void, but apparently the contract terms HAVE been enforced. It's in the hands of an antivirus company after all.

What *I* wonder is, how many of these types of toolkits are out that have NOT been picked up by antivirus companies (presumably because the purchaser followed the purchase agreement)?

Ubuntu man says Microsoft's about to 'swallow a hand-grenade'

Henry Wertz Gold badge

@AC & @RW

@RW:

1&2) Windows instead makes me keep going into the registry.

3) Found the same thing for Windows and OSX for that matter. I just look until I find a solution. If the solution was that easy, it'd be fixed after you ran an update.

4) Agreed! UNIX overall is 40 years old, and X is over 20 years old. Apps don't look very consistent.

5) It does keep improving though, and seems to me much better than Windows or OSX. Bugs do suck though.

@AC

"Let me give you guys at the Reg some names of people an interview with whom would indeed be interesting ...

The Dalai Lama, Richard Dawkins, Kishore Mahbubani, Muhammad Yunus, Hans Snook, Masayoshi Son, Helen Alexander, Anatol Ugorski, Eugene Drucker, Hilary Hahn.

Shuttleworth? Can't find that name on the list of people who have interesting things to say.

"

Gotta be honest, other than the Dalai Lama and Richard Dawkins, I haven't heard of anyone on that list. I seriously doubt they are related to IT in any way. Shuttleworth, on the other hand, is the head of Canonical; I guess what he had to say wasn't too earth-shattering but I found it interesting to see what he had to say as a largeish IT player. The Reg is after all an IT site.

Canuck faces life sentence for nude girl webcam scheme

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Re: Ehh...

"Life? Seems a bit much, given that you could rape a woman or murder your drug dealer in cold blood and get less. Defining the level of crime by the nature of the victim is a dangerous precedent."

About the victims being 14, I agree, this is greatly overrated. I think in some cases paedos that aren't out raping'n'pillaging should get counseling, chemical castration (which brings the sex drive down to 0), or the like rather than lengthy prison sentences. However, blackmailing for more photos, cracking machines to obtain more photos, etc. (at least 12 separate times!) shows someone with a definite lack of any sort of conscience to me. He should get a harsh sentence even if the victims had been adults. This is quite dangerous; he should be in prison either for life or until he gains enough of a conscience to ensure he doesn't do this again.

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Wow what a slimebag..

Title says it all, what a slimebag. Extorting and blackmailing people for additional photos? Hacking in to keep the cameras running? That's greasy as hell. Who knows how many he did this too? The 14 are just the known ones... he's getting what he deserves.

Verizon calls itself 'innovative'

Henry Wertz Gold badge

True 'dat

Yeah, I'm with Eugene on this one. I mean, MAYBE VZW will have some kind of change of heart, but I'll believe it when I see it. I have VZW, the service is great, but I expect there to be some catches. So far the one concrete thing has been VZW says they will allow non-VZW phones, as long as an example of that model is sent to VZW's lab and certified. What will the cert cost? And will there be some freaky per-MB/minute rates for the "open access" plans? Maybe, but that's what remains to be seen.

Teradata puts feisty start-ups on notice with appliance charge

Henry Wertz Gold badge

@AC

Well, that's the enterprise hardware market for you. Large companies will joyfully spend like 10x (or more) the cost of building a system for... well, I don't know what for. Everything I've read about Teradata is good, but in general color me cynical about this stuff. It seems like a lot of these big companies will buy a pre-made enterprise product to avoid the costs of doing it from scratch, only to spend more time and effort "integrating" or "customizing" the product than they would just building from scratch. My suspicion is the way many companies are structured, the red tape simply makes it impossible to do this stuff in-house.

Microsoft's 'Vista Capable' appeal thrown out

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Of course "Vista capable" is dishonest!

And you know it. Quit claiming being able to barely limp along with Vista Home means a machine is Vista capable. Microsoft screwed themselves on this -- even executives within the company were like "I wouldn't do that if I were you" and surprised when they bought "Vista capable" machines to find out that actually they aren't. If it had said "Vista Home capable" that'd be a different matter, but they do not.

To me this'd be like "Oh, sure this machine with 64MB of RAM and 1GB HD is XP capable, it'll run Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs which is XP-based."

Plugs pulled on satellite paedo tracking after pilot flops

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Or...chemical castration

The easiest solution, which has been tried in limited trials and works easily, is chemical castration. It's not like it sounds, it doesn't dissolve a persons balls off. It either blocks testosterone production or blocks it's uptake... I'm not sure which. I saw an article about this and it worked great -- several volunteers (that were released from prison, but said they had urges and were sure they'd reoffend) were given this. It'd be easy to apply more widely and make sure people got the shots, the shots were given either monthly or maybe even less often. They found they had no interest in the pornography they used to have, and the paedophilic urges they had were gone. You still wouldn't want one of these guys to be a school teacher or whatever, but the volunteers became quite harmless. This has not been applied widely at all, but certainly it'd work pretty well.

Nvidia drivers named as lead Vista crash cause in 2007

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Driver errors..

"I'd suspect that these driver errors were caused by the developers trying to do too much, too fast with an overly complicated operating system. Possibly with inadequate documentation and information."

From what I've read, the REAL reason ATI and NVidia have so many crashes is Microsoft refused to ship them a Vista version without video-related rights restrictions. It's very hard to write a video driver, and it's just that much harder when there's hostile code in place actively preventing running a debugger.. looking for unusual behavior and killing the driver preemptively ("tilt bits", designed to try to keep the user from playing a rights-restricted video, then just copying the video back out of video RAM).. and so on. I'm surprised they got it to work at all.

@Gordon Fecyk

"Here's a clue: Making drivers open source doesn't stop people from writing crappy drivers."

Nope but, in the case of some VERY poor Linux drivers that have been released, driver geeks do work the poor drivers over. I've seen several drivers that were quite poor but open sourced get worked over into fully functional and well behaved within literally months.

However, I don't think they should have to release source. I do urge them to release card specifications though. (Which, now that AMD bought ATI, they are releasing the specs. Here's looking at you, nvidia.)

OpenOffice update released

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Delta updates?

@Gerry

That's very cool 8-). I hadn't realized any distro did deltas for anything.. closest I've seen personally is gentoo *sometimes* being able to get a patch for a "version 1.0.1" to "1.0.2" update, since it builds from source (then it updates to 1.1.0, and has to download the whole source again...). Good to know SOMEBODY is doing updates with deltas!

Ubuntu does bird beta

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Fair warning though..

Fair warning though.. since it's under heavy development, 8.04 has RIDICULOUS numbers of updates. I have a virtual machine with it, and it'll have like 150 updates a week.. 7.10 is pretty polished, and it seems 8.04 will be even more so.

Vista SP1 downloaders bite back

Henry Wertz Gold badge

OK...

@Some AC "My experience in IT has shown me that anytime there's a major release it will totally blow up some users machines."

Service packs aren't supposed to be a major release -- a major release would be going from 2000 to XP, not original to SP1, SP1 to SP2, etc. Having a serivce pack blow out people's systems is quite unimpressive.

@rob,

"So all the sceptics, I am unsure if you have ever used the OS or if you just like seeing your unguided voices in print on websites but give Vista a chance, it is not nearly as bad as its press of late."

I've seen it. It was slooow to boot (several minutes), ran like crap, thrashed a lot for no reason. It's at least as bad as it's press. The Microsoft "party line" is of course that I should upgrade or replace any system that isn't fast enough.. well, why should I? I can get full functionality (INCLUDING Aero-like desktop effects) on basically any system made since 2000 or so.

wolf:

"It's too expensive! It's too bloated! It won't run on my 386! It's using all my memory!!! Wah!"

My sentiments exactly! Vista *IS* too bloated and slow. I mean, sure, GBs of RAM and multi-ghz CPUs are cheap, but the OS should not be chugging this all for itself just to barely run. I recently saw Ubuntu boot up MUCH faster off a *LiveCD* than Vista did off the hard disk of a Toshiba Satellite. It was a core duo with 1GB of RAM... I know, someone's just going to say "Well, duh, you're supposed to have at least 2GB". Bull. An OS should NOT need 2GB just to boot. Ubuntu 7.10 is relatively bloated for a Linux distro, and it runs fine on a P3-866, 512MB, and a 20GB HD.. it is snappy and boots in about a minute flat. (Note.. my home computers are AthlonXPs, the P3 is an older work computer.) Core 2 Duo with 2GB? I've seen several Linuxes run on a system like this. It's ridiculous, it'll boot in like 15 or 20 seconds, and the desktop will come up so fast it pops up while the few second long startup sound is still playing. It's hard to use up that second GB though 8-).

"And these posters need to get a life--or better yet, a *clue*. If you can't make Vista run you sure as hell won't be running Linux."

If it's driver problems, perhaps true. If it's someone with a system that doesn't meet Vista's portly system requirements, well, the recommendation for even the most modern Linux distro is like 256MB of RAM, 4GB HD, and a P3 (and there's distros for lower end systems.) Realistically, any distro will run great on a P4, 512MB, 10GB or more HD.

@Skullfoot

If you're running 32-bit, Microsoft has just patched it to claim 4GB in use while actually still using 3GB. As much of a hater as I am, I don't blame this on Microsoft -- this seems to be a common limitatin to 32-bit OSes on Intel architecture, 512MB-1GB (or sometimes 2GB) of the 4GB address space is set aside for exclusive OS use, not available to applications. (Linux, other Windows versions, OS/2, etc. all suffer from this limitation unless you go 64-bit.)

@Steven Hewittt

"So what actually is the issue with Vista? It can't be stability, features or cost. (It's as solid if not more so than XP, has more new or improved features than the change from 2000 to XP and it's under £100....)"

Well, of course it can. Stability -- having an update kill a system is not stable. People have had plenty of stability complaints. Features and cost -- Microsoft has competition now! Comparing to older Microsoft OSes, you're right. Compared to Linux distros, OSX, etc., you are not... the features of Vista have been matched and surpassed by other OSes, and price has been beaten by some (and not beaten by others -- OSX costs a lot if you have to buy a Mac to run it for instance.)

Dear ISP, I am not a target market

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Re:Mozilla / Firefox / Adblock

Nope, that is why people are protesting so much. Adblock will prevent the ads from displaying, but Phorm intends to hook in at the ISP level to track people's browsing habits. Two additional problems:

1) It's opt-*out* instead of opt-in.

2) It doesn't ignore traffic over a connection even if it is opted out. It's like "Well, we collect the data anyway, but trust us, we don't actually use it". The "profiler" is apparently owned by the ISP to keep things legal in this case, but it runs Phorm software and forwards any results to Phorm-owned equipment.

So, based on the descriptions, they'll still be profiling you even with Adblock running.

Personally, I think the guys at Phorm are probably right.. this probably does anonymize info properly, probably isn't a big privacy leak etc. But the thing that bothers me is it's 100% unnecessary. As opposed to this system, which hooks into the ISP level and hoovers up data no matter what, other ad companies do extensive profiling, but via cookies and IP tracking when images are loaded. So, the end user who doesn't want this tracking doesn't have to trust the ad company, they can block images and cookies from doubleclick, google, etc.

Note: To me, this is the BIIIIG lie about Phorm claiming ads will get better because of them -- Doubleclick, Google, etc. already have profiling data for most poeple to personalize their ads. The ad companies, or ad purchasers, just don't want custom ads apparently.

US gives thumbs up to OOXML for ISO standard

Henry Wertz Gold badge

What has changed?

"the spec is much better now than when we started"

What has even changed in the OOXML "standard"? I didn't think they had made very many changed to it at all, just planned to re-vote and see what happens?

MobiTV backs away from threats to website that posted links to free videos

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Well..

I was a little surprised by this.. howardfourms has rules against getting free VZ Navigator, and a wide variety of phone app loaders and the like. Clearly MobiTV has no actual security, which I think affords them no legal protection. But given talking about all sorts of other phone hacking is also legally protected but banned on the forums, I'm surprised that he didn't agree to just XXX out the URLs or something (especially given they did ask nicely before they pulled out the lawyers.)

My guess? The other reason MobiTV calmed down was the "highers up" talked to some people in IT, and realized this could be fixed relatively quickly, i.e. it's not a "oh, the URL is out, we're doomed!" type situation. Rotating the stream URLS periodically alone would be easy and make it that much harder than just bookmarking the same URL for each channel.

Pentagon rattles sabre at Google's Street View

Henry Wertz Gold badge

What I don't understand..

What I don't understand is how Google got these snaps to begin with. I haven't been around many military bases, but I wouldn't have expected a Google van could just cruise up and down the streets in one. I guess they can 8-).

Baidu sued by Chinese copyright group

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Well...

Well, perhaps they should still get protection for being a search engine. But, I looked at Baidu once or twice -- they had (just looked -- make that "have") a separate media search function that is UNCANNY about returning almost entirely commercial results. Put in "car", and rather than having some usual mix of videos of people showing off their cars, car races, etc. with some music videos and TV shows mixed in, it's like over 90% music videos and shows with a few misc items thrown in.

That said, is that enough to be illegal? Who knows, laws in China are different than Britain's or US's.

Dutch tax office deletes 730,000 tax returns

Henry Wertz Gold badge

records destruction

From recollection all states records must be able to be destroyed within 24hrs

Yup, I've got a system for records destruction at the surplus I work at... a beefy paper shredder than can shred disks & CDs, and a sledgehammer for rapid hard disk destruction. 24 hours? No problem 8-)

(In all seriousness, though, hard disks are 3-pass erased there unless they are faulty -- up to 32 IDE disks at a shot, and 3 6-8 disk SCSI enclosures for 3 different types of SCSI disk sleds. A machine is sitting waiting to be hooked up if we start getting SATA disks.)

Subprime PC retailer coughs up $5m fine

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Yeah I can't belive people go for this...

David Wiernicki has already said this but...

I've seen Blue Hippo ads here. The ad shows a setup with a cheap-looking inkjet, very cheap looking digital camera, LCD, and antiquated-looking PC. Specs off the site, Athlon 64 3200+, 512MB RAM, 80GB HD, CDRW.

A mere $40 per week, or $2080. OUCH!!! In fact the first bunch of times I'd heard the ad I thought they had said $40 a month... Well, now that I see you don't even get it for 6-12 weeks, how the hell would anyone go for this? I can't believe anyone would do this, settings aside $40/week for 6-12 weeks would be enough to pay cash for this stuff and be done with it.

I'm glad they got fined -- slapping a markup on a system is one thing, but marking charging roughly 4x the system cost is downright predatory.

Hotmail dies on both sides of the Atlantic

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Not so clueless..

@John The Microsoft bashing is NOT ridiculous. Something as widely and globally used as Live logins* should NOT be centralized in a single location. Microsoft has lots of data centers.. either 1) they had a software crapout at every center (the "failed upgrade" theory). 2) The failover software crapped out. 3) They don't have enough capacity, so one data center failed, failover worked, but the remaining infrastructure instead of slowing down under load completely crapped out.** 4) They really are ignoring best practices for something of that scale and running it out of a single data center, which failed.

Any of those 4 is deserving of severe bashing.

*Not used by me though. I just don't trust Microsoft enough to give them any credentials.

**IIS used to be infamous for this.. Apache on Linux would gradually slow down as more load was placed on it.. whereas IIS on Windows' response time would stay level up to a certain load (part of this level part was actually faster than Apache..) then past a certain load it'd rapidly increase, so rapidly that 5-10% extra load would make it totally unresponsive. To me this would seem to make capacity planning a bit of a trick!

Tiscali and BPI go to war over 'three strikes' payments

Henry Wertz Gold badge

@Nick Askew

"Suppose it was the police writing to say we suspect this IP address is owned by a kiddy fiddler, would they want money from the police too?"

Yes. At least here in the US. Well I don't know about "kiddy fiddlers", but I saw an article a bit ago about the phone cos shutting off wiretaps (not the illegal ones the ones with warrants and all) because the feds were not paying their bills. As far as I know, traces and the like cost money too. That's telecoms but I would expect IP info and the like to cost too, to cover the time to dig up the information.

Pr0n baron challenges Google and Yahoo! to build better child locks

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Safesearch?

Maybe it needs some tweaks (I have no idea) but google has SafeSearch, and it defaults to on. So it's quite false to claim they're doing nothing about this. And if someone is too squeamish about it they should have one of those web filter softwares on (which should then be able to block "SafeSearch" from being turned off.) If they don't have a filter anyway then anyone who wants porn can just go get it without the help of yahoo or google.

SCO bags $100m to fight another day

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Great...

I think this is great news...Hopefully the company will start paying SCO, SCO will be required to send it all over to Novell, since SCO owes them $30 million in licensing fees SCO has not paid them yet.. and the firm will realize they are sending money into a big money sink. Then Novell is paid the money they are owed, that SCO tried to weasel out of paying, and SCO is still broke.

London Congestion Charge becomes CO2 tax

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Blah

@AC with the golf, Richard Porter, Matthew.. others have already said but I would think the £25 charge is for 2001 and older vehicles WITH >=3.0L engine, not all 2001 and older vehicles.

@Andrew Heenan, "The 15 persons per bus is either fiction (in zones 1-3, anyway), or it's a 24 hour, all of greater London figure. Either way, it's *dishonest* to quote such an irrelevant statistic, when we both know that zone buses are packed to the gills in the peak."

Not dishonest at all; the bus will pollute full or empty (one question is how much the pollution level varies based on load...) so you can't just claim the bus is efficent full, end of disucssion, if the bus is not full most of the time.

I must comment, the city I live in has this type of situation. The buses USED to have signs on them that said something like "if it weren't for this bus you'd be behind *30* cars". They had to take them down... the buses on the University campus run full, the other ones even during rush hour will run with like 15 people in them, and I've seen them go by with literally 1-2 people in them (well, 2-3 if you can't the bus driver). It turns out 15 people can't drive 30 cars 8-).

Living in the states, this won't apply to you but I have 2 comments I wish would happen here:

1) Better public transport. Locally we have buses and taxis. The buses on the university campus are great, they run at 15 minute intervals and run quite full. The ones off campus.. 1 hour intervals, and per the above they run virtually empty. IMHO they should have smaller buses that can run more frequently. I wouldn't ride the bus knowing I could be stranded for 1 hour if I miss it (it takes maybe 20 minutes to drive across town here.) 15 or even 30 minutes? I could deal with that.

2) Better cars. I drive a 2000 Buick Regal with a 3.8L V6 right now. (See my note on gallons below*) This car gets about 22MPG city and 36MPG highway (but I got over 40MPG on a recent long trip). My parent's 2000 Deville gets 24 city and 36 highway, with a 4.6L V8. If I get something like a US-spec Honda Civic (with the 4-cylinder, not V6..) it is supposed to get 30MPG city and 43.2 highway. Higher mileage, but not much higher considering the Civic is smaller, and slower (MUCH slower compared to the V8 Caddy I bet).

The US-Spec cars, the big engines are carefully tuned to try to maximize gas mileage (not so much on SUVs but certainly on cars); small economical engines, they'll drop it in then decide "Ohhh, it needs more power for US use!", change the gearing to power gearing and tune it for power. Result? Why bother. The car still doesn't have the power it would with some bigger engine, while getting almost as low gas mileage.

One of the few smart things Bush's administration has done was to pass the new fuel economy requirements here upping the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) from a pathetic 20MPG to 35MPG (in British gallons this goes from 24MPG to 42MPG). I'm a libertarian so I hate regulation**, but the car companies left to their own devices are doing the bare minimum -- most are right at 20.1MPG average (for *cars* -- SUVs are counted separately) and just aren't giving a lot of choices of fuel efficeint vehicles. Some technology will come out that is supposed to increase mileage 10 or 15% -- it does on European-spec cars.. the US model comes out "Oh, hey we increased power 10-15% with the same mileage as the previous model year!" Blah. Now they are finally scrambling to apply this to provide good mileage.

*Side note. 1 imperial gallon (as used in Britain) is 1.2 US gallons. This is partially why US MPG figures look so bad.. mainly it's because they are bad though. I converted the above numbers to imperial MPG so they'd compare with what others have posted.

**And also have no one to vote for. The 2-party system here is broken.. if you wonder about the low voter turn out here, that is why.. democrats and republicans don't represent most people here.

HP latches onto Qualcomm's Gobi chipset

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Hey, don't hate on the CDMA tech.

Indeed. The 1X CDMA tops at 144kbps, which is not so good. But that came out in the late 1990s, and in the current CDMA infrastructure is used for voice calls with data all on EVDO.. Current data tech is EVDO Rev A, which can theoretically get a bit over 2mbps (still using the same 1.25mhz pair as a CDMA channel.) I have an older Revision 0 card, and I got 600-1000kbps typically while travelling* with ocassionally nearly 2mbps. In Manhattan it was slower, fluctuating from 400-900kbps. And people that use Sprint comment about Verizon Wireless' relatively poor data speeds, their typical speeds are apparently even faster. It might be weird for the US to use CDMA technologies, but I've never gotten data speeds as low as 64kbps on 1X let alone on EVDO.

*Speeds while travelling because I don't have EVDO at home yet, only 1X 8-(.

Mobile subscribers showered with spam

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Some filter it..

So far with my Verizon Wireless service I have only ever received 1 spam in about 4 years. I forwarded it to someone at the company and they credited me the SMS cost (plus probably did something about it.) What companies should do, and apparently VZW does:

1) They have strong spam filters in place. I haven't heard of anyone getting like 10 spams a day, but subscribers to some other phone cos in the states will apparently get like 5 or 10 a month.. so either it's unfiltered or the filters are leakier. The one spam I did get, apparently a lot of people got 1 or 2 that week, VZWs spam filter temporarily broke down apparently.

2) SUE THE SPAMMERS. "The big V" is apparently quite agressive in suing SMS spammers.. and my understanding is because of this they get much less spam to begin with than other cell cos who don't bother to sue.

New Mexico bets future on promiscuous supercomputer

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Huh.

I've been to New Mexico, and it's nice enough if you are into desert (I liked it fine.) But...

a) As was alluded to in the article, self-sufficient in 5 years? I expect it'll be obsolete by then, unless ongoing upgrades are planned. Most machines on the top 500 are off the list within 2 years except a few that were built out and expanded. I simply wonder what demand there is for buying time on a cluster that is 5 years out of date.

b) The bigger issue... This isn't the 1950's. Ya don't walk up to the computer operator and toss them a stack of punch cards or a tape to feed into equipment physically connected with the machine. The two ways I've seen of feeding in info: 1) Internet connection. Sounds ridiculous, but internet2 has 100 gigabits per second on all links and some other research networks have similarly ridiculous speeds. 2) One place I've visited that does astronomical interferometry, they have a crap 56k leased line (making option 1 impossible), so the remote stations send hard disks* via UPS to the central station for processing, then the central station sends them back. As the old saying goes, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

*The station I visited actually still uses tapes. They were sent a box of Deskstars, the one guy there pointed out Deskstars are crap, he was told they'd be fine, and on the first run about 75% of them croaked. Apparently the central office never replaced them and just had them use the old reel-to-reel tape drive instead. I can't make something like this up 8-).

FBI sought approval to use spyware against terror suspects

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Ubuntu spyware

It's much MUCH harder to come up with Ubuntu spyware. No apps shipped with an ubuntu desktop will just decide to autorun an E-Mail attachment or something off a web site. UNIX in general uses an executable bit to mark whether files should be executable,so a ".jpg.exe" or the like won't be executed. A malicious shell script won't be executed, it's not flagged executable. As an added measure, when I misnamed, oh, I think it was a movie clip I misnamed a ".jpg", the gnome shell yelled bloody murder and wouldn't even let me try to open the file until I renamed it properly.

Don't get me wrong, X actually makes it plenty easy to grab keystrokes, and sending the keystrokes over the network wouldn't be a big deal either. But, the only way to install the spyware would be: 1) FBI comes in in person and installs the keylogger. 2) The target really is daft enough to follow instructions in an E-Mail that are all like "Hey you, please save this file, chmod +x it to make it executable, and execute it. kthxbye."

(For that matter, a fully patched and up to date Windows box is harder to get spyware on to than an older one too. This likely relies on people not keeping up to date boxes.)

Is Verizon gaming Google in US wireless auction?

Henry Wertz Gold badge

@AC

I'd LOVE less speculation. But, the bidding is secret so without speculation there is simply nothing to write about... and the speculation is well-informed and reasonable given what I know about those companies.

I'm with Morely btw... VZW's service is too expensive. But, AT&T's service is too, and AT&T is pure evil.

As for cash to buy C block and use it.. well, it's certainly really expensive, but VZW is spending $6 billion/year on their network presently.. (split between further EVDO buildouts, building out new service, maintaining/repairing existing sites, and adding 1X channels in areas that are approaching capacity... I don't know if the $6 billion includes buying out carriers, since they've spent a billion or two in the last year buying a few of them..)

Database gurus slammed for Google post

Henry Wertz Gold badge

Well..

These DBMS experts are right, they just miss the big picture.

MapReduce is quite suboptimal. It really does duplicate a lot of work, and do other work very inefficiently. The thing they have missed, doing it in a more optimal manner would require an absolutely collosal machine or closely coupled cluster, which I think simply could not scale to anywhere near the size someone like Google has.

MapReduce proper isn't novel -- it's been known in comp sci for decades. It IS novel to use it in such a huge setup as Google has and make it do useful work though. DBMS setups simply wouldn't scale this high.

They are also quite right that MapReduce won't use traditional DBMS tools -- some, such as backups and various tacked-on rollback functionality, are simply unneeded in something like the google cluster (files are inherently backed up -- there's always multiple copies, and things are cross-checked so if a machine croaks, it's contents are re-backed up out of the backups.) I wouldn't use MapReduce in replacement of a DBMS setup. But that's just not what it's really used for...

Anyway, I wouldn't say they're all totally full of crap etc. like some have said, I would just say they argued against using MapReduce for a DBMS and missed what it's really used for.

Will Microsoft parachute Windows 7 in early?

Henry Wertz Gold badge

OK the right numbering...

The right numbering, Win95/98/ME was not counted.

NT 3.1

NT 3.5

NT 4.0

2000 is NT 5.0

XP is NT 5.1

apparently, server 2003 is 5.2

Vista is 6.0

Microsoft started NT at 3.1 because Windows 3.1 was out at the time, they made NT 3.1 (and 3.5) superficially look like Windows 3.1, and they knew that people would not want to buy a version 1.0 product (so, there wasn't really some other product considered to be NT 2.0 or 1.0...)

As for AC that says Vista isn't so bad -- sorry, yes it is. You might not think buying more RAM and faster video card to run Aero is a big deal, but you should see Ubuntu with desktop effects run on a machine *WITHOUT* a faster video card and more RAM -- it runs acceptably on a system with 256MB of RAM and Radeon 7200 (as long as it's not the PCI one...). 512MB and Radeon 8000 series or newer (or Geforce 4 and up*) runs great. I'll save my money thanks. The hardware is cheap but it's ridiculous I should have to buy it because Microsoft spent coding time on rights restrictions rather than code optimization.

*Geforce 4 and up requirement is due to the nvidia driver for older cards missing the composite extension desktop effects need, rather than the cards being too slow.

Microsoft prints get-out-of-jail card for Vista Home

Henry Wertz Gold badge

@Michael Nielsen

Funny that, isn't it? I've noticed the same thing -- if I'm doing something that would do heavy video, qemu's virtual video card is quite antiquated. Otherwise, virtual XP under Linux is faster than real XP. I think the caching system is just that much better.

A friend of mine also ran GuildWars under wine, and was amazed to find it installed 2-3x as fast, again due to much faster disk I/O 8-). (He thought it might have gained a few FPS playing too.)

Henry Wertz Gold badge

WIll this make a difference?

So, will this make a difference? Last I had checked/read, the final beta of Vista ran under virtual machines; the release candidate and actual release of Vista did not. It runs some odd ACPI checks that fail under qemu and bluescreens if they fail; last I read it also didn't run uner vmware. As near as people could determine last I checked, these checks were artificially added to prevent running under virtual machines. Sound like WIn 3.1 and DR-DOS*? It sure does to me! So, having the license ALLOW running under VMs might not actually make it that possible to do so (except, I assume, under Microsoft's own VM product.)

* For those who don't know, the WIndows 3.1 betas had extra code that made very irregular checks for features that Windows itself did not use (File Control Blocks (used in DOS 1.0 only), among others) and would bluescreen with error <randomly generated number> when it determined it was running under non-MS DOS. This was commented out in the release version of 3.1, but made Novell spend lots of time trying to figure out why 3.1 beta wouldn't run under DR-DOS (until they found the artificial check code.)

Apple cripples Sun's open source jewel

Henry Wertz Gold badge

@Sean

Sure it's "his baby" if he did most of the work on it. He never claimed a license violation, Apple is within their rights. That doesn't mean he has to be happy about Apple taking his good work, and compromising and crippling in order to appease the pigopolists. This is classic Apple though, and why I've never considered an Apple product -- after years of using fully open systems, it's clear that Apple pays lip service to open source as much as the licenses require, but are not really interested in open systems.

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