Sign in / up

* Posts by James Dennis

24 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Aug 2006

High-speed Chinese train kicks French, Japanese butt

James Dennis
Reply Icon
FAIL

however from TFA

"By contrast, the FT points out that it takes the US's Amtrak Acela Express three and a half hours to traverse the 300km from Boston to New York City - although that train has hit 217kph (135mph) in time trials."

So thats an average of 186 / 3.5 = 53 mph!

Wikipedia says:

70 mph (110 km/h) average

and also says:

Distance travelled: 456 mi (734 km)

Average journey time 7 hours

Which works out at 65mph!

Another source:

http://www.trainweb.org/tgvpages/acela.html

The Acela Express cuts the Boston - New York run to 3:23 (from 4 to 5 hours), and the New York to Washington run (the territory of Amtrak's 125 mph Metroliners until the introduction of Acela) to 2:45 from three hours.

Please reset your normality signal. Over.

0 0

EnterpriseDB revs Postgres database

James Dennis
Linux

Red Hat Network

Unless I am misinterpreting what you are saying, Red Hat has indeed released some source code for the Red Hat Network. Project Spacewalk (http://www.redhat.com/spacewalk/) is Red Hat Satellite but with support for CentOS and Fedora. AFAIK Satellite is much the same thing as Red Hat Network proper, just local.

0 0

Microsoft fortifies Windows 7 kernel with overrun buster

James Dennis
Stop

@Sean Timarco Baggaley

All I'm saying is that Microsoft should be congratulated for taking security seriously not berated,

anything that makes an exploiter's job harder is a good thing.

IMHO Microsoft deal with security issues much better than Apple. MS is generally open about vulnerabilities, Apple is not.

0 0
James Dennis
Go

Pwn2own - real world exploits

Both the Firefox and Safari vulnerabilities that he proved were exploited on a Mac OS X system. The German hacker said the latest versions of both Firefox and IE take full advantage of features built in to Windows Vista that make it far more difficult to reliably exploit than on the current version of OS X. Those features, including "data execution prevention" (DEP) and "address space layout randomization," (ASLR) don't appear to be properly implemented between OS X and versions of Safari and Firefox built for that operating system, Nils said.

"It's quite easy to write an exploit for Firefox on OS X compared to Firefox on Vista," he said.

Charlie Miller, an analyst with Baltimore-based Independent Security Evaluators, also won a Macbook and $5,000, for developing an exploit for a previously unknown critical flaw in Safari on Mac OS X.

"Mac OS X has some ASLR but not much, and there is no DEP in OS X," Miller said. "My exploit relied on exploit code being in certain spot, and that it would [execute], and in Vista neither of those things would have happened."

0 0

BitTorrent net meltdown delayed

James Dennis
Boffin

@Stu

Even if it wasn't layered on UDP you don't have to use TCP or UDP with TCP/IP. IPsec has components that use neither yet they are still TCP/IP (and works with all routers - excluding some cheapo funny NAT things).

0 0

Jesus Phone vuln delivers fanboys to phishermen

James Dennis

@ Kiminao

Apple deserves criticism just by their lack of transparency when it comes to dealing with flaws.

0 0

UK data watchdog gives Google spycar fleet the greenlight

James Dennis
Thumb Up

Streetview is useful

Assuming blurring occurs correctly (and doesn't just protect horses) I don't have a problem with Streetview. It has been useful on a number of occasions while in the US to get an idea of a turning or a location before travelling there for the first time.

0 0

Is SproutCore worth the Flash and Java iPhone snub?

James Dennis
Alert

Currently Unusable

Shows promise. When I first tried it about 4 weeks ago I found the response times poor and a lot of UI blocking going on which kills user experience. This seems to be almost 100% solved now. However, majority of the sample controls are broken on IE7 for me.

0 0

AT&T prices up PAYG 3G iPhones

James Dennis
Boffin

Price comparisons

When comparing US and UK prices, as well as the exchange rate it's worth considering that pretty much always the UK price advertised includes 17.5% VAT and that US prices never include the state/local sales tax which is typically around 6%, 8% in CA.

0 0

Free Wi-Fi still a goer in San Fran'

James Dennis

RE: Free Cancer

Go live in an underground bunker.

0 0

Chinese telco jumps starting gun in 3G race

James Dennis
Stop

@Allan Rutland

and how much does the average person in China get paid?

0 0

Missing, presumed tardy: Orange IPTV

James Dennis
Thumb Down

Nickel and Dime

They've also lost their sparkle by nickel and diming by doing things like removing the free insurance cover and starting to charge for itemised billing. Plus, what is the new voice about???

0 0

Darling admits Revenue loss of 25 million personal records

James Dennis
Thumb Down

Password protected discs

How is the mentioned password protection supplied? I have a feeling if it was encrypted they would say so.

0 0

Brussels asks Ofcom boss what he's on about

James Dennis
Flame

Re:What has OFCOM done for us ?

While my BT account manager (I don't think I actually have one) can't call BT wholesale about DSL that's fine, because my LLU connection was set up in 12 days, is faster than BT ADSL and cheaper than a monopolised BT system would ever be!

0 0

Google gets jiggy with MySQL

James Dennis
Happy

When will the benefits be seen?

With the MySQL 5.1 release seemingly in development/alpha/beta for an ice age (looking at the change log the first 5.1 appeared 29 November 2005) I wonder when there will be a production-ready release of code that incorporates some of Google's changes? Also to be talking about features in version 7 seems like a decade away!

But that aside, bring on the Google improvements!

0 0

Microsoft opens Xbox 360 Arcade

James Dennis
Alert

VAT

When doing the comparison remember that US prices have up to 8% sales tax added on at the point of sale. It's still not equivalent but lets be fair.

0 0

MS drops nagware validation for IE7 installs

James Dennis

Also Good for MSDN Users

Now MSDN users creating a test machine will no longer have to use up an activation to install IE 7.

0 0

BT aims to make UK a Wi-Fi kibbutz

James Dennis

Information Disclosure

Will all of BT's broadband customers be put on a easy to use (read easy to datamine) map so that other ISPs can target them? :-D

0 0

Orange speaks out with new voice

James Dennis

argh

I don't really appreciate being ask if I want to check my credi' (no t). Bring back the old voice!

There is also a mix of old and new when topping up.

0 0

NASA examining Shuttle's dings, extending mission

James Dennis

Re: Great close-up

Photos are taken on approach to the ISS.

0 0

FBI logs its millionth zombie address

James Dennis

BT already doing somtehing

BT are already using Content Forensics from StreamShield Networks to detect spam traffic and quarantining machines. This only appears to be targetting spam traffic though, no DDoS or other zombie activity.

0 0

Windows recovery loophole lets hackers in

James Dennis

If I was MS I'd ignore it too

Too many supposed vulnerabilities start with "all you need is admin access/local access at time of boot".

Is it a vulnerability that anyone can boot disk 1 of redhat/CentOS, type "linux rescue" and access the file system as root? I don't think so. The only way to protect local data from this sort of access is to use full-disk encryption.

Password access to the rescue console is no protection, just a hindrance.

0 0

A look at Apache modules

James Dennis

Documentation Severely Lacking

"So for the first time you have a more than just the source code and a handful of ad-hoc materials to help upgrade your LAMP and application server skills!"

Very true! The Apache web server is very powerful and extensible however when I first came to implement a module I found the documentation seriously lacking for anything but the basic cases.

0 0

Nokia E61 smart phone

James Dennis

Same problems as E60

I've just returned a Nokia E60 after 2 weeks. The wifi configuration options definately could do with more work and aren't up to Nokia's normal intuitive UI design. Being able to enter the full alphabet into a field accepting a hex WEP key seemed silly.

There was no mention of the excellent SIP support in the review which I successfully configured to operate (even over NAT which Nokia says is not supported) but it was everytime let down by the very poor wifi support. I found that the wifi would have disconnected in the background without informing me and would not reconnect without a power cycle.

I found that using the advanced wifi options I could turn off power saving mode and the wifi would work great - but the battery would then last less than a day.

Almost there but not quite. I bought this phone because of its wifi and SIP but had to return it because the wifi is SO BAD.

0 0