* Posts by Eddy Ito

4662 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2007

Trio nailed in US for smuggling $30m of microchips into Russia

Eddy Ito

Re: Just how hi-tech?

Does anyone else think the export rules are a bit silly if the Russian military could raid traffic lights for the hardware they wanted? Although I suppose if they made a cluster of all the traffic lights in Russia they'd have a rather impressive grid computing environment.

You own the software, Feds tell Apple: you can unlock it

Eddy Ito

Flip that over

I wonder if the feds have checked the back side of that sword they are trying to wield. By the feds logic Admiral Rogers' iPhone should equally be an open book to Tim Cook & Co.

California enormo-quake prediction: Cracks form between US boffins

Eddy Ito

Re: @Tom 7 (was:Forget the San Andreas...)

The southern portions of the East Coast would likely be washed over quite far in but toward the north it would be more like Sandy with only the very coast taking the brunt of it as the terrain rises pretty quickly as you move inland.

Just think, if we get lucky Congress will be in session.

Eddy Ito
Holmes

To quote the late great Yogi Berra "It's deja vu all over again"

Or would a "Back to the Future" reference be in order?

So just what is the third Great Invention of all time?

Eddy Ito

Re: Surely money itself is the great invention?

I suppose it depends on how 'raw' we're going to get. Certainly communication or language would be near the top since even preagricultural societies needed to be able to get across the idea of "When they chase it over here you hit it with that rock and I'll stab it with this stick and we'll all eat tonight."

After that I'd put agriculture then maths to round out the top three. Again it depends on how conceptually bare we're wanting to get with things.

I'm a bit dubious about money being a great invention since it seems like it's often just an easy way for government to tally up taxes on all sorts of things. If you swap potatoes for a chicken it's pretty hard for government to take a chicken leg from you and 1.5 potatoes from the other guy you traded with and that's especially true if it's a living chicken you ultimately wanted for the eggs. Granted, it's a lot easier carrying money around than a cart of chickens, potatoes and eggs so it isn't all bad.

Ireland moves to scrap 1 and 2 cent coins

Eddy Ito

In those denominations notes would be more costly since while coins cost more to produce individually but are cheaper when amortized over the average lifespan which for small notes is roughly 18 - 24 months where coins last 25-35 years. In other words, the government isn't likely to spend more money to make things more convenient for anyone else. Sure, one might argue that shuffling the extra weight of coins uses more fuel, is more costly, heats the planet, kills wildlife, etc. but we'll likely be living in a cash free society before any government bean counter even notices, perhaps once they've upgraded that last Windows Server 2003 box.

UK drivers left idling as Tesla rolls out Autopilot in US

Eddy Ito
Childcatcher

Re: According to the BBC

He could have certainly worded it better but as long as it's gentle and doesn't fondle them excessively I suppose it'll be alright.

Weight, what? The perfect kilogram is nearly in Planck's grasp

Eddy Ito
Joke

Re: What does this mean for the "Olympic Swimming Pool/Double Decker bus" standards?

with delicate cat-gnasher marks on the remains.

Excellent! You've just proven we can now determine the mass of a cat by counting how many moles are in them.

FAA issues lithium battery warning

Eddy Ito
Paris Hilton

spare lithium metal and spare rechargeable lithium ion batteries for personal electronics...

I had to read that twice as on the first go I was wondering if lithium metal was a new fashion thing. A replacement for tin foil hats perhaps. Don't mind me, I was having a Paris moment.

Laser razor binned from Kickstarter resurfaces on Indiegogo

Eddy Ito

Kickstarter doesn't collect the money until the end of the funding period. If it doesn't succeed in reaching it's goals or is pulled before the period ends, no money needs to be returned as none was collected.

Researcher messes up Wi-Fi with an rPi and bargain buy radio stick

Eddy Ito
Black Helicopters

Re: In the hands of a burglar, would a portable (battery powered) unit stuff up....

False alarms? Are you really sure someone wasn't breaking in every time someone re-heated the coffee in the microwave?

Man goes to collect stolen-car court docs found in stolen car in stolen car

Eddy Ito

week old sashimi

Sorry, something smells a bit off. Why did he have the keys to a car? Was the owner equally stupid and left the keys with the car or were the keys part of the loot from robbing the house?

Who gets Teslas made and throws Apple shade? It's… MUSK!

Eddy Ito

Re: Seems that he must view Apple as a threat

So in the latter case he would be just like Jobs.

Phone-fondling docs, nurses sling patient info around willy-nilly

Eddy Ito

Doctors and nurses were using smartphone apps to communicate medical data, even though they realized that this might not be the best approach, in the absence of a more secure alternative.

In the absence of a more convenient or cheaper alternative, surely.

Maker–NOT: 3D printer upstart Makerbot jams, cuts extra 20% of staff

Eddy Ito

Re: Top of the bubble!

They've already been bought by long time (and expensive) 3D printer maker Stratasys. The VC types have already gotten some coin. What it sounds to me is like Stratasys is going to let it die and brush the dust off it's hands and publicly say "oh well, seems there wasn't a market for cheap 3D printers after all" while in private it's more a matter of "that's one way to eliminate the budget competition".

Israeli lander FOUND ON MOON (in 2017)

Eddy Ito
Headmaster

although at 140 (earth) kilograms

Kilograms are a unit of mass not weight. Pounds and kiloponds are a unit of weight not mass. While something on the moon weighs less than on earth its mass doesn't change.

US Treasury: How did ISIS get your trucks? Toyota: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Eddy Ito

Re: Hmmm

I think their M198 Howitzers marked "Property of the U.S. Armed Forces" have to be towed.

Miss Brittany dethroned for posting 'nude' Facebook pics

Eddy Ito

The only tits I see are the leadership of the Miss France organization.

It's the act of stripping for the camera that's banned.

How do they know she stripped for the camera? Perhaps that's her normal daily attire or she was getting ready to go to the beach or perhaps she was totally naked and donned jeans for the photo thus doing the opposite of stripping for the camera. I could go on ad nauseam but then I'd sound like a whiny French pageant official.

Scary Trans-Pacific Partnership trade treaty signed off

Eddy Ito

Election pending warning

At least here in the US there is an election coming up next year. As a result we can expect one of three outcomes. Either it will pass swiftly in the hopes that the public will forget about it come the election, it will be rejected nearly as swiftly or it will get shelved and die as it only has 90 days to live. Clearly one of the latter two is preferred with a swift rejection being ideal as we won't have to sweat for a whole quarter but there is solace in delay as it brings the election closer and raises the congresscritters political risk.

Keep in mind that the US isn't calling this a treaty but an agreement, specifically a congressional-executive agreement which requires a simple majority of both houses of Congress. A treaty in the US requires action only by the Senate but it requires a 2/3 super-majority to ratify it and it can often sit indefinitely waiting Senate advice and consent. Treaties are somewhat less politically risky in that only 1/3 of the Senate is up for reelection every two years which currently gives the other 2/3 of the Senate 3 years for memories to fade.

T-Mobile US hires someone other than bungling Experian to offer ID theft monitoring to hack victims

Eddy Ito

Re: Good move on T-Mobile's part.

We know they dinged one but not the full extent and may never know but what of the other two? Yeah... I know... "when" not "if", but do they?

Since it seems Experian has been open for two years, the answer to when may very well be years ago. Much like the Scottrade breach it seems a good deal of this activity has been ongoing for quite a while and I actually expect we will be finding out that more financial institutions are sitting in the very same boat. Wasn't the breach at JP Morgan Chase going on for months when they spotted it last year?

Personally, I blame the NSA as they find these holes and keep them to themselves so they can exploit them but it's highly likely that if the NSA can find them so can their adversaries. In this case the enemy of my enemy isn't my friend.

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Eddy Ito

I have to say your "Inside the Painting" VR software is great but I noticed a glitch in the "Trees and Undergrowth" series by van Gogh we need to talk about.

Five things that doomed the big and brilliant BlackBerry 10

Eddy Ito

Re: BB10 - not dead, worth a lot

It's not QNX that makes it a bear it's that the UI layer is in QT 4.8 and the current version of QT is 5.6. Of course the 5.x series wasn't released until late in 2012 and I understand the changes from 4.x are substantial. It may have been easier to switch back then but they were probably too busy trying to stay afloat. I don't think they'll get rid of QNX as it's probably a profitable segment as maintaining the core isn't likely all that difficult.

Junk patent ditched in EAST TEXAS

Eddy Ito

Re: It all boils down to money

Of course if one can bribe the independent experts, and one usually can, we're likely worse off than we are now. Heck, Edison had 'friends' in the patent office which helped him out from time to time, why can't anyone else with a few bucks to toss around?

How about if the patent author be required to write the patent in clear language rather than in verbose legal obscurese? A simple test would be to bring it down to the pub and if the bartender doesn't understand the language used, it isn't clear enough.

Woman makes app that lets people rate and review you, Yelp-style. Now SHE'S upset people are 'reviewing' her

Eddy Ito

Just did a whois and the poor folks at peeple.com aren't the ones behind the app. Pity they are getting flushed by the shitstorm.

Eddy Ito

The app already has bad reviews on Yelp although I'm not sure it's the right place. peeple.com != forthepeeple.com

Eddy Ito

Re: What was the business model here?

3) Sell the "contact list" of raters and rated alike and score a twofer since you've collected a lot of personal details about people who aren't willing to join.

Slander-as-a-service: Peeple app wants people to rate and review you – whether you like it or not

Eddy Ito

Re: Wonder what will happen...

Don't forget the business model is selling out all the personal details of involuntary participants. If anybody ever hands my phone number to scum like this they are going to get a rather nasty phone call from me.

I also wonder what happens if they wind up flooded with wrong numbers. Heck I just got a phone call asking for someone named Jane, what if I get a text from this vinegar and water pair letting me know that Jane was just ratted on pee-pal? What recourse does poor Jane have?

FATTIES have most SUCCESS with opposite SEX! Have some pies and SCORE

Eddy Ito

Re: > more sexual partners often (usually?) = poor success at sexual relationships.

According to DDG, Taytay could be either of two municipalities in the Philippines. It doesn't help me understand any better either.

Shoe stores top US credit card EMV-ready leaderboard of fail

Eddy Ito

Re: pinsecure

Paper? They've all got that digitizer scratch pad with something like 30 x 9 pixel resolution with a dead spot near the middle. Assuming it's over the signature required limit.

BBC joins war against Flash, launches beta HTML5 iPlayer

Eddy Ito
Facepalm

@ lurker Re: About time...

Yes, I have the same problem with many videos on this site.

Smuggle mischievous JavaScript into WinRAR archives? Sure, why not

Eddy Ito

Re: @Ben

The problem is that the typical user doesn't care about 7z, zip, rar, bz2 or anything else, they want to open the file which is why self extracting archives exist in the first place. They don't want to deal with decoding file extensions and finding the appropriate utility to open it. This is doubly true since MS turned file extension visibility off by default. The only time you'll find a specific utility on machine is if a particular format is popular in some region where the user frequents and it isn't handled natively by the OS. The only way 7zip has a hope of gaining a 90% share is if MS and Apple support it natively.

Tesla X unfolds its Falcon wings, stumbles belatedly into the light

Eddy Ito

Hammer?!? Bah, keep an automatic center punch in the cup holder.

Eddy Ito
Black Helicopters

Why do people need cars?

If we start asking stupid questions like what or why people need X, Y or Z we're going to be in for a rather poor existence because existing is what we'll have whittled life down to. We need backdoored encryption? We need self destructing phones? We need to leave our potentially explosive water bottle at the TSA checkpoint, you TSA types will be gentle with that won't you? If I hear one more stupid politician telling us what we need I'm going to go postal1!

1. In this context the term "postal" means to write many letters, buy many stamps and mail every jackass congress critter2 a firmly worded letter informing them of my disapproval of this particular choice of wording.

2. Yes, I recognize the redundancy; it's for em-fah-sis.

Eddy Ito

The thing is if we assume the roofline is typical of other SUVs at about 64" we can roughly estimate the height of the open doors is near 90" (7.5') and most home garage doors are only 7'. Granted many garage doors in the open position will be higher than the door opening but there has to be some room for the mechanism and the door itself so I'm thinking an 8' garage ceiling may be very tight indeed. Given there are plenty of even lower garages/car ports here in SoCal it means not opening those doors inside the garage but then that's a fairly common thing to do anyway since many aren't really wide enough for real humans to enter on both sides of a normal car anyway so I guess it's just a matter of if it fits.

Find shaving a chore? Why not BLAST your BEARD off with a RAYGUN

Eddy Ito
Joke

Do not look into razor with remaining eye.

Feds want a phone smart enough to burn itself if it falls into the wrong hands

Eddy Ito

Re: It Will Backfire

That is where the backdoor they keep trying to mandate comes in. You really do have to wonder if these guys actually listen to themselves.

"We want everyone to have secure phones that we can access as we wish and if the security system is threatened it will self destruct unless we're the ones threatening the security system. It's really that simple, I don't see why you lot keep saying that's so hard."

Apple CEO: We've hoovered up your cash faster than ever before

Eddy Ito

Re: More childish reporting from Register

... represent the counter-culture of Silicon Valley, putting people in control of computers and out of the hands of nerds and business people who wanted to use computers to control people and just make them be a part of the huge business machine.

I see what you did there.

Eddy Ito

Re: Plus c'est la petite monnaie...

Arguably the unfortunate bit is that they sold 13m units which is up 3m from last year. The difference is that last year the 10m unit initial weekend didn't include China sales where this year it did.

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Eddy Ito

Jesus, unplugged

Finally! Someplace quiet where I can concentrate and get some work done. Lord knows these folks aren't going to save themselves.

Eddy Ito

And on the third day he did press the control and the alt and the delete keys simultaneously with his left hand for the third time and said "That's it! I'm going to reformat this partition and try that Linux thing."

Anthropology boffins solve 9,000-year-old headless body cold case

Eddy Ito

Re: I'd sure like to know

I didn't see in the linked article where they said the individual was killed by decapitation or if merely the corpse was decapitated. Perhaps the headless person simply choked on a bone and died and everyone else figured they needed to remove the head so he could breathe in the after-ether-misty place.

We saw the future: Apart from the bath apps it looks like the past

Eddy Ito

Re: I used to love tech...

OOohh! Can the 4K panel duplicate the color and ghosting of the old P1 phosphor screens? Please say it will, please!

More email misery and pillory for Hillary as FBI starts quizzery

Eddy Ito
Paris Hilton

Hillary Paris Clinton???

How to build a server room: Back to basics

Eddy Ito

2. You cannot power 100A worth of equipment from a 16A wall socket.

Yes you can, as long as watts in = watts out. For the DC inclined 100 Amps * 12 Volts = 16 Amps * 75 Volts. Simple really.

DRIVERLESS cars: Apple ups the ante with meeting in California

Eddy Ito

Re: The margins in the smartphone market are very low, if you exclude Apple

Don't forget that currently their marketing is counting on a 12-18 month upgrade schedule. Not likely with a car but maybe they could pull it off if they're willing to pull off the battery+software upgrade for a few years. No matter what, it isn't going to be an easy transition like the iPod to iPhone push was. I mean that was a factor of two in consumer dollars but iPhone to iPhucking car!?!?! That's a big boy step and likely a major hit below the margin belt in volume.

Eddy Ito

Re: The margins in the smartphone market are very low, if you exclude Apple

You're forgetting that in 2007 when the iPhone made its debut it was priced lower than what was then the top tier. At $600 the top of the line, 8 GB, iPhone was at least $100 cheaper than the Nokia N95 and it wasn't long after that Apple dropped the price upsetting many early adopters and it wasn't barely a year when the recently introduced 16 GB iPhone was down to $400. Recall the BB Curve 8300 was about $450 and even Motorola's Razr flip phone was going for around $300.

Consider that what Apple does best is design, UI/UX and marketing and ask what doesn't Apple do. Apple doesn't manufacture anything, it's all contracted out. It would take a whole lot for Apple to start from scratch in the auto manufacturing industry and all that initial cash outlay would deplete their reserves for R&D. Heck Fiat only started back in the US because they could buy the infrastructure cheap by buying Chrysler.

You make in interesting point about the high end with Bugatti, Lamborghini and let's toss in Ferrari and ask if they could survive without their parent company. Considering none had managed to make it on their own the answer is no. The profit from the premium brands comes from the massive infrastructure that already exists due to building Golfs and 500s in sufficient volumes.

Tesla is the interesting one since they are trying to change the paradigm but they aren't yet profitable. I hope it works for Tesla but I don't see Apple jumping of that cliff when it's so easy for car makers to go bankrupt. No, Apple is going to do something that will allow them to partner with existing manufacturers albeit maybe on a more grand scale. I can see an ad which touts "brains by Apple and brawn by [BMW, MB, etc] all beautifully blended in the new Feudal Lord Series. Stop being a lowly vassal and buy one today."

Eddy Ito

Apple aren't about to go into the automotive building business because the profit margins simply aren't there so it's not an area where Apple would be interested. Consider some of the best operating margins in the automotive industry are 6% where Apple runs nearer to 30%. That's a huge gap and not something I believe Cook and Co. would be interested in floundering about in. No, Apple likely wants to develop the software and network infrastructure to wrap up with a pretty bow and sell to automakers. It isn't going to compete with Carplay, it's going to be Carplay Autonomous Edition but with a catchier name like Apple Drive seeing as the "i" bit is going a tad stale.

Global warming stopped in 1998? No it didn't. If you say that, you're going to prison

Eddy Ito
Pint

Re: Is this some sort of Turing test?

Cheers!

Eddy Ito

Re: Interesting law to apply

Yes but Senator Whitehouse is an unmitigated buffoon. If he really wants to abuse RICO I say they should start with his trading extravaganza a month before the beginning of the market crash in 2008.

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Eddy Ito

You can see the thermally insulated tantalum silicon underwire processor here. It works a treat under heavy load but we need to come up with a catchy name for it.