* Posts by William Boyle

293 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Aug 2008

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Icelandic town demands vulva museum

William Boyle

Duh?

I think I'm moving to Iceland...

Canonical bungs kill switch onto Ubuntu's Amazon 'adware'

William Boyle
FAIL

Boneheads!

Canonical should follow Red Hat's example. RH doesn't need to pwn us with ads. They make their money on support, and they provide it in spades! If Ubuntu continues on this course, I will have no option but to stop recommending Ubuntu to anyone interested in Linux, and will encourage my friend Kathy Malmrose of ZaReason to drop Ubuntu also, in favor of Mint or Debian.

Vandals break into congressman's office, install Linux on PCs

William Boyle
FAIL

I think Grimm's tin foil hat has fallen off...

Chambers says Cisco is mulling succession plans

William Boyle
Thumb Down

63 - time to retire? No way!

I'm 64, and started a new (and hope long-term) position with a major tech company as senior systems engineer at the beginning of this year. I'm certainly not ready to retire! If Chambers thinks he is ready to retire, then he is, but it should be HIS decision! If he leave Cisco, then it should be because he is ready for some new challenges, and NOT because he is "too old" for the position!

FTC settles spying charges on rent-to-own computers

William Boyle
FAIL

And the FBI...

And the FBI is probably banging itself on the head, saying "why didn't we think of that!"... :rolleyes:

Fans revolt over Amazon 'adware' in Ubuntu desktop search results

William Boyle
FAIL

Fark Ubuntu!

Time to revert to good old Debian! Same thing, just no pwning...

Christian footie match ends in almighty brawl

William Boyle
FAIL

Once again...

Once again, proving that religion is the root of all evil!

Motorola, Samsung smash Apple's touchscreen patent claim

William Boyle

Apple to learn about MAD

MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction

This was the concept that kept the US and USSR from blowing each other to bits during the Cold War - if you attack me, you will be destroyed as well. I think Apple is about to face what happens when you violate those principals in the patent arena...

French Skyper freed after accidentally hacking bank's phone system

William Boyle
FAIL

The bank should pay

The bank should not only be criminally liable for having such a hair-brained passcode for critical infrastructure, but they should pay the man back for ALL legal fees, for his time, and a BIG penalty for this fiasco!

Made for each other: liquid nitrogen and 1,500 ping-pong balls

William Boyle
Thumb Up

Great!

This reminds me of some of the experiments in freshman physics I had with Frank Oppenheimer at the University of Colorado in 1966-67! As we would say at Dulwich College (SE London where I went in 62-63), well bowled! :-)

Microsoft releases VMware-eater

William Boyle

Blargh!

To Heck with both MS and VMware. At least VirtualBox is mostly open source! Personally, I have a hate-like-hate relationship with Oracle, but I have been a happy user of VirtualBox for over 5 years now. For data center (yeah, I'm a Yank) applications use KVM on Red Hat Enterprise distributions, but for personal productivity/development purposes, VBox is the best (IMHO) option out there, for Windows and Linux (client or host). Can't speak for OSX since I don't have an iDevice. I do run Windows (several versions), Linux (many distributions), x86 Solaris, QNX, DOS, and other x86 operating on VBox and have had zero problems with any of them.

New vicious UEFI bootkit vuln found for Windows 8

William Boyle
FAIL

Just how long before...

Just how long before some enterprising malware writer can fake a bootloader certificate? My guess is that if it hasn't been done (certainly by the NSA or other government spyware organizations already), it will be soon.

Organic food offers basically no health benefit, boffins find

William Boyle

"organic" vs "traditional" growing methods

The nutritional values of food whether grown organically or otherwise, will be pretty much the same. The difference is that organically grown foods don't have pesticide and other residues in/on them (or much lower amounts) which have known deleterious affects on the consumer.

Thanks ever so much Java, for that biz-wide rootkit infection

William Boyle
Devil

Java - write once, infect everywhere!

Exhibitionist Shamoon virus blows PCs' minds

William Boyle

Or...

Or, this could be the work of government agencies that want to raise the cyber-threat level, hence increasing their influence and importance.

Nokia CEO: No shift from Windows Phone

William Boyle

Don't fracture your base

I am a senior Nokia engineer. Personally, I like a lot of things about my Nexus One Android phone better than my Nokia S40 phone, N8 Phone, and new Lumia 900 (Windows) phone. However, I understand perfectly why Elop has settled us on support of the Windows phone OS going forward. Attempting to support multiple operating systems on a suite of mobile devices is divisive (pun intended) to an organization. Can you imagine Apple supporting anything other than iOS, or Google anything other than Android (well - maybe). That sort of effort splits your attention without appreciable benefit, other than to appear to be a follower rather than a leader.

So, is there room for 3 major phone environments? I think so, and I think Stephen made the correct choice in wanting to be a leader rather than a follower. Did we want to be just another Android vendor? There are a gazillion Android phone manufacturers out there now. iOS is out of the question - Apple would never license it. Microsoft needs a big adopter in order to move its phone OS into the mainstream, and decided Nokia was it. This does not reduce our challenge in getting back into contender/leader status in the mobile phone market place, but I think we can do it.

FWIW, there is a lot to like about the Lumia phones, and the price is "right" (for the consumer at least). Only time will tell if we have made the right choice, but don't count us out of the race just yet!

RIM: We can't flog phones, would you like our nuke plant OS instead?

William Boyle

Good stuff

I've been a QNX user and developer for 30 years - I have serial number 0008. In my opinion it is probably the most innovative, and reliable, hard real-time system suitable for embedded systems made. At FASTech Integration in Massachusetts we used it to write the control system software for the US Navy's RAMP project, cell control software that still is used to run major manufacturing plants world-wide, and it has only gotten better over the years. The current iteration, Neutrino, is the foundation for for the BB10 OS as well Cisco's mission-critical IOS router operating system. What does that mean? Basically, most of the networks in the Internet world are run with QNX.

What do I do currently? I am a senior developer and performance engineer for Nokia... :-)

And by the way, QNX is definitely used in the critical real-time control systems for a number of nuclear power plants, none of which have melted down to my knowledge... ;-)

As for what "hard real-time" means is that you can utilize RMA (Rate Monotonic Analysis) to profile the system to be mathematically certain that no critical deadline will be missed. Kind of important in things like nuclear plants and fighter avionics I think. RT Linux cannot do this. Windows cannot do this. WindRiver VRTX can maybe do it (I haven't tried, though NASA and the JPL use it in the Mars Rovers, so it probably can). In any case, there are only a few (2 or 3) hard real-time microprocessor operating systems available, and QNX is right up at the top of that heap.

SHOCK: Poll shows Americans think TSA is highly effective

William Boyle

Gotta wonder

One has to wonder how many of those polled have actually flown from US airports recently. When I passed through the terrahertz scanner in Sacramento last month, they still had to grope me because of "back sweat" that skewed the images... It was a hot day (100F+), so you'd think they could deal with that. :-(

Microsoft and NYPD install big data crime-fighting system

William Boyle

A reprieve of sorts

Given Microsoft's track record in implementing large scale systems like this (not good), I think the criminals in New York can expect a bit of relief from the NYPD. Also, it will be interesting to see just how long it takes for someone like Anonymous to hack the system and publish its contents to the world?

Apple patents shopping lists

William Boyle

And just why do we pay these boneheads?

The patent examiners are either incompetent, corrupt, or have been told to approve anything that they don't understand by their "superiors". The current patent situation, world wide, is an outrage, and it is costing EVERYONE a lot more than just pocket change every year.

Software bug flattens NYSE trader

William Boyle
FAIL

No due diligence here

All program and high-speed trading organizations should be REQUIRED to run their software in a simulated trading environment and certified "stable" and non-disruptive of the market before it is allowed to trade in the actual market. The fact that these boneheads have screwed up the equities markets so thoroughly in the past couple of years must result in new rules regarding how quantitative trading software can be used, or this sort of crud is just going to continue to rape our investments and retirement funds. Companies that cause this sort of disruption should

1. Eat their own losses, or if they made a profit, disgorge it back to those who did lose as a result.

2. Be required to make good any and all losses of others caused by their trading.

3. Be fined at least 2x the value of the market disruption that they caused.

4. Have adequate insurance to make good on these "fines" should they not have adequate funds of their own.

These sort of regulations/requirements would put an end to this cruft in short order I would think (hope)...

Anonymous declares war after French firm trademarks its logo

William Boyle

Re: AND

They also used "I Don't Give a Darn!" for SS, but the original was as I posted...

William Boyle

Re: AND

And "I Don't Give a Damn" is the short stop! A&C cleaned it up a bit over time and the short stop became "I Don't Care!"... Either works here I think. :-)

Qubits turn into time travellers

William Boyle
Thumb Up

More evidence

Just more evidence that the universe is far stranger than we can possibly imagine! My favorite physics limerick:

There was a fellow named Bright

Who traveled much faster than Light.

He left one day in a relative way

And arrived the previous night!

Natwest freezes debit cards, online banking in fresh cock-up

William Boyle

No excuses

There are NO excuses for this sort of failure to occur. The truth is, is that hardware and software fails. What separates the professionals from the amateurs (and from these failures, NatWest's IT and data center services organizations, ARE amateurs) is designing and maintaining the systems to be fault resilient, in that they can tolerate single or multiple failures of components and systems, but the result is only degraded performance (increased latency, usually), not NO performance. I can say this because I have been a major designer and implementer of such systems (high volume, large scale, fully distributed transaction processing systems) that run most of the semiconductor, flat panel display (TV), and disc drive manufacturing plants in the world. Those manufacturers are VERY intolerant of "fab down" scenarios, and 6-sigma up-time is just barely adequate for their needs. Until financial organizations (banks) like NatWest apply the same sort of engineering rigor to their systems and processes, these sort of scenarios will continue to occur.

Serco ate our IT supplier: Now what? – London boroughs

William Boyle

Time to investigate

Vertex purchased for £55m, yet has a contract with London boroughs worth £44m+ per year. What's wrong with this picture?

HTC handsets hit by grip of death

William Boyle

I've had similar problems with my N1 in that after some time of operation (minutes to hours), the touch screen registration becomes bogus, in that touching some part of the screen well above the bottom soft keys will still activate them. This was supposed to be fixed a long time ago, but it has been a continuous problem for a couple of years now. The only solution (temporary at best) is to reboot the phone (giving it the 3-finger salute). If that was not happening, I would be 100% satisfied with this Gingerbread OS system.

Star Trek's Scotty boldly goes where he always wanted to

William Boyle

Beam me up, Scotty.

Finally, Scotty gets himself beamed up! Wonderful! Have fun up there James! :-)

Microsoft's FDS data-sorter crushes Hadoop

William Boyle

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

As that old saying goes, "There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics" - sort of a redux of the old saw about MIPS == "Meaningless Index of Performance". There are Hadoop/MapReduce implementations that can blow MS figures out of the water. They tested their system against an out-of-date version of Hadoop/MapReduce. What does that prove? That they are faster than software that was out-of-date 2 years ago? In internet time, that is about 1000 years...

Big names unleash 1,000-node Hadoop stampede

William Boyle

1000 node HDFS cluster? Not so big...

A 1000 node Hadoop cluster isn't all that big, in terms of those who are actively using the technology to store and analyze petabytes of data. 1000 nodes == ~250 production nodes (3x redundancy + 1x control/fail-over), which if each has 24TB of disc (12x2TB in a 2U enclosure), you have 6PB of production data. Not a small Hadoop cluster, for sure, but not the biggest by any stretch. So, I think this is probably a decent sized cluster for research, and many/most production systems, but not nearly big enough to model installations such as Google, Facebook, et al.

New Apple keyboard patent may spell trouble for Android

William Boyle

Proof of corruption in the USPTO

This is not a new idea, and the fact that the USPTO is issuing a patent for this concept is just plain disgusting! I can point out "soft" keyboard mappings from the early 1980's. I used to do this for clients who had disabilities - missing fingers, hands, etc. so they could interact with the computer effectively. Press one "hot key" and get one mapping, press it (or another) again, and get a different one. That way, they could do things like the "three finger salute" to reboot the computer with a single key.

Road deaths spark crackdown on jaywalking texter menace

William Boyle
Thumb Up

Oblivious texters walk into traffic...

Sounds like a Darwin moment to me!

Microsoft ejects DVD playback from Windows 8

William Boyle

Say NO! To DRM!

Yet another reason to run Linux on your PC...

Gmail goes titsup for 30 MILLION PUNTERS

William Boyle

X Sigma

Let's see. 10% x 120 minutes == 12 minutes of total downtime for Google's email customers. If that is all the downtime for a year, this is 5 sigma (more or less) uptime - a very good metric for web services! I deal with performance/reliability issues as a senior systems/performance engineer for a VERY large internet company, and we would be delighted to provide our customers with this level of service (I am working hard to get to 6 sigma - about 5-6 minutes of downtime a year).

Moody's downgrades Nokia to near-junk status

William Boyle

It's all relative

I am an avid Android user - getting a Nexus One 2 years ago from Google at the Linux Collaboration Summit, and I also have a Symbian Nokia N8 (my work phone - I am a senior engineer at Nokia), and a Series 40 C3-00 test phone. New employees in my division are getting Lumia 800 Windows phones. I have to say that I am impressed! I think MS and Nokia have done a lot very right with these phones. Are they going to be the smash hit Elop (and the rest of us) hopes? Only time will tell, but I think that new users or users upgrading from simple cell phones to smart phones will be very happy and productive with these devices.

Apple drops 'thermonuclear' patent bombshell

William Boyle
Thumb Up

Happy April 1!

Har de har de har... :-)

Top Italian OPERA boffin steps down after faster-than-light mistake

William Boyle

Just because...

Just because as a scientist you are proven wrong, it doesn't mean you weren't right! I hope that he did not resign because he was proven incorrect in his analysis. If he did, then there would not be many REAL scientists left in the world! That is the entire purpose of the scientific process - formulate, project, experiment, analyze, and go back to the beginning to do it all over in a different manner. At the least, this has shown us that all "scientific" results need to be validated by independent experiments.

Use the holy word of God to stay secure online, says bishop

William Boyle

Sanskrit

Well, if you want to crack my passwords...

1. You need to know Sanskrit

2. You need to know my past

3. You need to know my mind (and even I have a problem with that!)

Akanda Mandala Karam. There are multiple ways of spelling that phonetically, such as Akanda - it could be Achanda, Achandha, Akandha, Acandha... FWIW, this is the first phrase of the guru puja. Finally, this phrase has zip to do with any passwords I use... :-)

Music fans not welcome in RIAA-backed .music

William Boyle

Parity please!

Does that mean we can also have a .pirate TLD that only allows free media as well?

Peeking up the skirt of Microsoft's hardy ReFS

William Boyle
Thumb Down

Other OS support?

So, how much information will MS provide to help us create Linux drivers for this file system? Or will we have to reverse-engineer it from scratch? I kind of suspect they will make it as difficult as possible, even to the extent of claiming copyright and/or patent privileges...

Windows 8 hardware rules 'derail user-friendly Linux'

William Boyle
FAIL

Boycott ALL Microsoft products! Let the hardware vendors know that if they allow this "initiative" (read attempt at monopoly) to go forward with their hardware, NO ONE will purchase any of their cruft! Because of their anti-consumer attitudes, Sony has lost 10's of thousands of $$ in sales to my family alone (or more, given the size of my family). None of us will purchase ANYTHING from Sony until they change their behaviors in a fundamental manner, that gives control back to the purchaser or their products, not the maker. FWIW, this includes CDs, DVDs, TVs, audio and video equipment (our family includes sound and video/animation professionals), not to mention games, PCs, and whatever else has a Sony trademark.

Murdoch slams White House over SOPA in Twitter row

William Boyle
FAIL

Murdock, the burdock (a spiny weed)

Murdock is an Australian (he may be a naturalized US citizen, but so are a bunch of Al Queda terrorists), so what does he have to say about freedom of speech in the USA? Nothing that I want to hear, for sure, and I was BORN here!

Official: The smartphones that suck much more than others

William Boyle

Ubiquitous mobile communications

Let's face it - mobile has become the DSL/Cable internet and preferred communication medium for the 21st century. This is not going to change, and the mobile broadband providers need to get on-board with this, providing better/unlimited connectivity, bandwidth, and throughput at reasonable costs to the end-user. Those that get this, and provide such to the consuming public, will be the ones that survive the rest of this decade/century.

That said, I just started work as Senior Systems/Performance Engineer for a tier-one mobile phone company and we are providing phones that consume 1/10 the data used by other smart phones when browsing the web, or utilizing web applications. The cost for such efficiencies are on us since our server farms do all the page fetching/processing/image rendering and then just send screen update commands to the phone. This sort of technology will help reduce the network load, but since we expect to sell another billion smart phones with this technology in the next couple of years... :-)

Reg hack cops a licking from the bosun's cat

William Boyle
Thumb Up

I wonder

I have to wonder what my good mate Popeye would make of all this bilge... :-)

Iran spy drone GPS hijack boasts: Rubbish, say experts

William Boyle

Difficult != impossible

This sort of exploit may be very difficult, but with some luck, may not be impossible. After all, think about all of the computer system exploits that have been declared "next to impossible" that have been successfully carried out...

Feds charge eight former Siemens officials with bribery

William Boyle
Thumb Down

I really don't see how this could possibly be considered within the jurisdiction of the US Justice Department, unless of course the executives and contractors are either US citizens or were working for the US subsidiary of Siemens.

New account of Flight 447 disaster published

William Boyle

This is why...

This is why pilot-less commercial aircraft will never "fly". When the computer and instruments are snafu, the only thing keeping people alive are the skills of a human controller (pilot). Unfortunately in this case, the pilots did not have the requisite skills and experience to deal with the situation, unlike the pilot that landed that plane on the Hudson River a few years ago, saving all the passengers and many more on the ground after a serious bird hit. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549 for details about that miraculous event.

Schneier: Teens and treaties - our cyber-war saviors

William Boyle
Thumb Up

"Even a cyber-war hotline would be a good idea between the various countries cyber commands," he said.

Hello? No, it's not us! Honest!

Pirated software hard drive on display as art

William Boyle

Source or object?

So, is this source code, or just distributed object code? if source, the value would be reasonable. if object, not so... :-)

Politicians call for Modern Warfare 3 censure

William Boyle
FAIL

No other choice

So, I guess if you want to participate in gratuitous violence against the public, you have to either join the military or the police forces?

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