* Posts by Eddy Ito

4662 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2007

A curious case of the shingles

Eddy Ito

Really Chris?

As they say somewhere in baseball, cowboy up. This isn't a courtroom and just because something is hearsay doesn't make it invalid. Besides, if you wait to have seventeen confirmatory sources for every article you won't ever get anything out until it becomes old hat. It seemed pretty clear from the statement; "Barber reckons an interim capacity boost can come from 'shingle writing'..." that this was an interesting potential to be explored and not something "coming to a store near you". I took the Barber quote pertaining to external drives and performance as potentially a reference to back up media used in data centers and not some portable hdd picked up at Wally World. I'm sorry that what HDD said got to you but really, suck it up, take the critique, including this one, for what it is and move on.

Google tests multiple accounts in single browser

Eddy Ito
Troll

Meh

Google's glitter wore off with the whole single user install of Chrome BS. Why not tell me on the download page that I need a "Pack" to perform a system-wide install install of letting me install as administrator and then finding out that only the administrator account had access? Damn right I'm still bitter, it's an hour and half drive to my Aunt's so I told her to stick with FF as slow is better than broken... fixed.

Drive suppliers hit capacity increase difficulties

Eddy Ito

My first time, well ok, my second time.

Some time ago I took a dead 9GB scsi HDD apart, being curious why it was so thick, there there were read heads on both sides of each platter of which there were several. Have they dropped a side since?

Cal Pol: Turn Jacko's ranch into state park

Eddy Ito
Grenade

I vote for California

Just give me a little heads up first. I only just moved here because my wife starts med school this fall and we have yet to be infected. We can get out clean, I promise and I already have the escape route through Mexico planned.

Cable lays plan for graduate tax

Eddy Ito

Obvious, no?

As far as reducing the number of universities, ok, what's wrong with that? If the number is reduced, it would naturally become more difficult to enter. This pushes the crowd that is only going to school to avoid going to work toward the workforce. Yes, some with talent and desire will be left behind to become plumbers or politicians but is that really bad?

Eddy Ito

Re: Perhaps you shoud have tride harder?

"Lawyers generally get paid more than teachers... and the teacher will likely get a lot more piece of mind and a lot more leisure time."

More peace of mind an leisure time? Most lawyers I've ever met have complete peace of mind given their general lack of conscience and leisure time? I'd wager most good teachers spend a fair amount of their free time grading papers, revising teaching plans and spending extra time with students meanwhile the good lawyer is off playing racquetball down at the club or swilling gin at the pub and the paralegals are doing all the real work. As for the bad teachers, lawyers and I'll add doctors, meh, like bugs there are too many to count.

US Army trials Iron Man super-trooper exoskeleton

Eddy Ito

Rugged indeed

If it weren't well over designed, the first joint failure while under full load would bring new meaning to the term "my knee buckled."

Double whammy: The music tax based on deep packet inspection

Eddy Ito
Thumb Down

Oh shit!

My cable ISP is bad enough and drops to below 500 kbps when the freetarders get on in the evening. A tax would clinch my switch to DSL.

India to place $11bn order for AIP hi-tech submarines

Eddy Ito

@Matt Bryant

Sure subs have some clout but somehow I think the likes of Intel, IBM, etc. that have large stakes in both countries are a far better deterrence to a national scale conflict where subs and missiles would be employed. Sure, there might be local flare ups but big governments like the big dollars big companies bring to the peace negotiations. One caveat is that the inverse is true when oil is involved.

Symbian Titanic heading for iceberg

Eddy Ito

A title or two

I have to agree with the others who say the current Symbian is really a wonderful OS for a phone. It isn't a gaming platform, finding anything is a folly and there are far too many keystrokes to set up anything but it will make phone calls for days.

"gambling everything on the Palm Pre handset and new webOS - a bet that Palm decidedly lost."

Not really. If that were true, they should easily be one of the top vendors. The bet that lost was on the marketing people they hired and partnering with Sprint, itself a third rate marketer at best. Those mistakes are sure signs that they are a good engineering company with absolutely no market sense whatever.

Fanbois end Judas Phone 'Death Grip' with, um, SIM tape

Eddy Ito
Troll

You're absolutely right Martin

Your fix is far superior even if it does cost another few hundred dollars. Oh, I've thoughtfully provided the icon you obviously forgot.

Eddy Ito
Pint

Fixed

My patent !pending solution can be yours for under 2 bucks.

http://www.amazon.com/Sally-Hansen-Color-Quick-Clear/dp/B001TXE2K6/

Hell, you can even get different colors, perhaps at a greater cost, so your iPhone 4 can feel pretty and you can change the color to reflect your mood. It is beyond me why I've never seen it mentioned although I've seen calls for recalls that essentially ask for the same thing. I've used nail polish on circuit boards to prevent shorts on knock-ups in the past so I don't see why it wouldn't work on an iPhone.

Now then, I'm late for Beer-thirty appointment. Oh, you might want to avoid copper colored polish or anything with metal flakes for that matter.

IBM's new water-cooled supercomputer fires up

Eddy Ito

power != energy

So over the course of the day they save roughly 6 gallons of diesel fuel or just under 17 kg of LPG. It may not sound like much but then again when I lived in snowy New Hampshire we used less than half that on the coldest, -20 C, day including showers. Figure in the going prices for heating fuel and it's easily a few thousand euros each year.

Thanks for the pic link Florence. I notice, according to the schematic, they are using parallel flow heat exchangers, an interesting choice be it by engineer or artist. Just don't get me started on that table.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ibm_research_zurich/4581958666/

Gulf spill to annihilate all earthlings, says seer

Eddy Ito
Unhappy

That's the reason.

This is one of those reasons it is so hard to get people to believe real things. Reading articles like that one starting with "Scientists say" just makes people think that scientists are whacked out nut jobs with nothing better to do than make shit up. It doesn't help when the real science types make an honest mistake and get something wrong as the common man just uses that as further proof that scientists are out of touch with reality.

'Holland wins World Cup' declares CBSNews

Eddy Ito

Needs more cowbell

America will start paying attention when Wally World, Budswater and the other mass marketers get on board as sponsors willing to shell out sufficient dollars to TV people for coverage. Of course this will require a large tournament to be held at a time when it doesn't have to compete with the other sports for viewers. Oh the "Super !Bowl" or "World !Series" pretty much has to be US focused since international sports are considered an offshoot or mere training for the Olympics.

It also means getting schools on board so the chitlin' can fool themselves into aspiring to be one of the rich players with lots of bling. Unfortunately, hoops has the city locked up and american football owns the corn states. That leaves competing for kids who can't make the cut on the baseball teams in the suburbs. Granted, we all joke about "soccer moms" driving ability but most of the kids are really off playing lacrosse, hockey or something with bats. Perhaps it is even the term 'soccer mom' that suppresses acceptance.

Also, note the catch 22 is a bit circular as nobody wants to spend money on something with a small fan base and the fan base is unlikely to grow until big money is involved on advertising. Until then, it's meh of the same that helps insulates us from the outside world.

Ballmer: Windows Mobile lost a 'whole generation'

Eddy Ito

Consumer = CxO

Now that's settled. Steve is only interested in the CEO, CIO, etc. Who else even stands a chance of walking into IT and demand that they be supported? It will work when the demand comes from the person signing the IT dept's paychecks. Everywhere I've ever worked has pretty much used this model, heck one company owner was so in love with SAP that it was pushed onto everybody for everything.

Eddy Ito

Palm

err.. HP. lol

Mother faked ID to 'disappear' child from school waiting list

Eddy Ito

American? Off by half

You are thinking of the other half of America, that is to say the political half who figures people are too stupid to do things for themselves and need guidance on how to do it "right". Mind you there is a small fee for this guidance that consists of pretty much everything one owns. Of course this political half doesn't know they are just as stupid as everyone else if not more so.

Yes, yes, I know there are some who group themselves by either a red elephant shirt or blue donkey jeans and they are thinking I'm talking about the "other guy". Know if full confidence that both groups are right.

Apple sues three more over power adapter 'knock-offs'

Eddy Ito

Meh...

If it's only the patent linked in the article then it's just a design patent and fairly trivial to work around. If they can win a suit based on that then the companies listed really did do everything they could to make an exact duplicate. If that's the case, Apple should be able to sue over trademark violations as well. A total no brainer since design patent infringement is a pretty obvious call.

Google versus Facebook: stop your photocopiers

Eddy Ito

It's the games

I've said it before, Facebook is a mini blog with games. Moreover, it's a web gaming platform that lets you, sort of, play with you're friends. It's popular because people don't have to buy special hardware and pay up for a subscription to the online game space. It's a simple matter of sitting down and playing a few hands of poker, doing a mob hit, whatever and being able to show off to your friends how well you did. So you can compete with your friends in the same friendly way as you did when you were kids from thousands of miles and several timezones away.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm wrong but show me a facebook app, any facebook app, that is, no, even looks like a productivity tool that is more than a to-do list / calendar. I'll wait.

Miniature Apple display spotted in the wild

Eddy Ito

Apple mood ring or

To animate the Apple logo on the cover of laptops... pac man style of course.

Oz privacy boss says Google Wi-Fi slurp breached law

Eddy Ito

Far easier I think

"The post said that the data was collected by "mistake""

Asking for forgiveness is always easier than asking for permission.

"It's also rather amusing that the chair... doesn't encrypt her Wi-Fi network."

Isn't what they had in mind when speaking of open government?

Android slurps market share from Apple, RIM, Microsoft

Eddy Ito

Meh

Perhaps the reason for the slight iPhone dip is because folks were holding off for 4 to debut. It would be interesting to know if the iPad is actually cutting iPhone sales. After all, if you have an iPad why would you need anything other than a basic mobile? It's a bit like taking a step back where folks had PDAs and mobiles. That said, this is clearly nothing but good news for Android, now if only the GOOG wasn't such a bunch of wanks.

NSA setting up secret 'Perfect Citizen' spy system

Eddy Ito
Thumb Up

Re: Spot on...

"you could put in an electric timer which has a bit of randomness built in"

Lovely idea, so simply using common weather station sensors should do the trick. How long would it take them to figure out that you "bake bread" only when the temp drops 5 degrees with a southerly wind and a light rain?

iPhone 4G blingmobe: Yours for £13k

Eddy Ito

Basic supply and demand

Diamonds are in greater demand than things like benitoite or taaffeite which run half or less than the price of diamonds and yet are much rarer. Then again you've never see an ad saying benitoite is a girl's best friend. I imagine the good salesman would say that each diamond is unique and therefore just as rare as every other unique gemstone, you know in the way you tell the kids... just like everybody else.

FLYING CAR, full hover, fairly quiet, offered to US Marines

Eddy Ito

Love the concept

I really do and it all seems quite clever, but... it seems to me that the Marines are frequently the ones deployed toward the front. You know, where the blokes working for the other side are prone to shoot at them. If the flying jeep is so light, it can't have much armor and no mention was made as to any countermeasures that might be employed on it. Mind you, a fair portion of pilot training in the military is learning how to shoot the other guy whilst not to getting shot in return. It seems to me that it should at least have an "oh shit!" button that would be available should one of the passengers happen to notice an inbound RPG that isn't automatically detected. Said "oh shit!" button would naturally bypass the imposed limitations on "climb, dive, roll, pitch, accelerate and decelerate" placed for the ease of operation and allow for a full tilt boogey escape which may be automated or not.

Vital PARIS supplies jet in from US

Eddy Ito

Oh yeah, that PVA

Funny but the first thing that came to my mind was polyvinyl alcohol (C2H4O)n not polyvinyl acetate (C4H6O2)n. It did have me wondering for a moment.

That said, I had assumed you would be using corrugated paper for structural support.

Two infosec blunders that betrayed the Russian spy ring

Eddy Ito
Paris Hilton

A redhead

It may be red now but given the quality of the spy work I'm guessing they all have blonde roots. I'm beginning to think Paris is the perfect spy, lulling everyone with that public persona.

Google can kill or install apps on citizen Androids

Eddy Ito
WTF?

So what's left?

Palm and WebOS... I need to talk to a few people but it's looking better every day.

Apple accuses HTC of iPhone tech theft (again)

Eddy Ito

@chr0m4t1c

"every time Apple gets involved all the commentards can start frothing at the mouth and saying "See?! See?! Apple are evil b*stards!!!!"."

The US patent system may be broken but going after HTC is a clear case of throwing patents around because they feel they can. They are hoping to crush a little competitor and perhaps scare off some of the bigger fish in the sea by showing some strength. Notice they don't go charging after Palm or Motorola even though the latter makes phones very similar to HTC with the same OS. They may claim they like fair competition as a pretext for going after HTC but they're fully aware that if they pulled the patent shit with the bigger kids in the pool, they'd themselves nose down at the bottom of the deep end.

Eddy Ito

Prior art available I'm sure

Oh look, a keyboard from a vintage laptop! It appears that if you interrupt the computer with a Fn+F7 keystroke you can shift to an external display. What's that? They tossed a tiny pull up resistor into the external display port to provide the same interrupt functionality! OMG, that's magical and revolutionary!!! Imagine a device manager that isn't part of the OS, why... it's almost like a... a... BIOS!

$ umount /dev/display/sarcasm

Middle-aged sex is crap: Official

Eddy Ito

The next questions

Is there a tie with the medications and obesity studies? Do the meds make us less randy and does pumping all that extra mass 'round the middle mean we tire quicker? Really, I need to know what to expect in the next all too few years.

Tom Stoppard: Tech is destroying the written word

Eddy Ito

Languid language

Would that the written word were a wondrous weapon of wide eyed whippersnappers. Alas technology transforms the tongue to a common conveyance and slave to scientific soliloquy.

Then again, perhaps that's why people started writing things down in the first place. Sure maps and pictograms might be the quick way to find a lake or show how to kill a buffalo but it isn't going to be much more advanced than that. Sure a picture is worth a thousand words until you want to make something like beer or bread and you find that you need a lot of pictures that can be replaced by a small number of words... how many grams of yeast? damn it rewind the video!

Apple iOS4 upgrade adds multitasking, folders... and pain

Eddy Ito
Alert

Ouch

That's going to leave a mark.

Eddy Ito

spot local

"There are also some official issues with the new OS affecting users, such as the inability to handle wireless LANs whose top-level domain is ".local""

Sounds like a big oops to me. A quick check of my Apple notebook reveals that in "System Preferences" under "Sharing" it shows, under the box for "Computer Name", a line of text that reads; "Other computers on your local subnet can access your computer at [computer name].local"

I can only imagine the newb figuring that Apple had sweetly provided him with the perfect domain name for his lan and used it. Perhaps he didn't read the fine print at the bottom when one selects a service, such as FTP or Web, it reads "Other people can access your FTP server at FTP://[name].lan/..." Oh, any big corporations using .local? We'll soon find out.

iPhone 4 fever takes hold. Again

Eddy Ito

Is it me?

It seems this whole thing looking more and more like a circus. Let me guess the slogan for next time round, "iPhone5, this changes everything, again and again" only to be followed with "iPhone6, changing everything, ad nauseum" and "iPhone7, more of the same not staying the same". Yes I understand you've got a lot of stuff like an extra camera, sortof multitasking and a flat backside, like most everybody else. Seriously, they're going to need a new marketing guy and soon. Ok, I'm done, the fannies can down vote now.

Copyright wally of the week

Eddy Ito

Never learn

Ah the good old days, when you could buy an original paper to submit to the profs. Now it's all free papers downloaded from the intertubes and hope you don't get caught. Sad.

Google risks OEM wrath for unified Android UI plan

Eddy Ito

Commoditization highway

Windows dominance in the PC space helped drive the commoditization of PC hardware forcing makers to compete solely on terms of price and specification. It is understandable that the handset makers don't want to run into the same situation but it already loping down that road at a good clip. We are already seeing the similar things starting to drive differentiation with MHz & Megapixels. The problem is that once a phone is fully featured the only place to go is commodity unless one can either innovate / acquire new differentiators or establish a dominating brand presence, which really only buys time for innovation / acquisition. Notice that Apple has been playing this latter card quite well as it morphed from computer maker into CE wizard.

Renew your firearms licence via your iPhone

Eddy Ito
Black Helicopters

What big Apps you have, Grandma

All the better to track you with my dear gun owners.

Microsoft unveils – wait for it – another mobile OS

Eddy Ito

Let me get this straight

So now they are doing to mobile what they did to the desktop? Does this mean that WinEmHa is like Win 7 Starter, Win CE 6 is Win 7 Home and Windows Phone 7 is analogous to Win 7 Ultimate... So what is Windows Mobile then? Are they deliberately trying to confuse the shit out of everyone? Can we dial it back to two versions per platform, one GUI, the other headless and let people add the shit they want? Hell, it seems MS has more OS SKUs than GM has car models across all brands.

iPad gouges netbook sales

Eddy Ito

Sighted

"Clearly, then, the iPad isn't only being bought by fanboys."

Oddly the only one I've seen "in the wild" was at a restaurant a few hours north of LA on I5. It was an older couple with the iPad plonked in front of the lady on it's folding case cum stand. Mind you it appeared to be on the home screen and I didn't ever see her touch it. It reminded me of how some women leave their Prada/Coach/Whatsitthisweek handbag in a most conspicuous place to show the other ladies how high maint^W^W "cool" they are.

Canadians form adulterers' privacy campaign

Eddy Ito

Concrete ordure

The sympathy meter isn't going to ring very high. That said, if Canada is anything like the US, her best bet is to have a judge decide because a jury is highly likely to say tough shit.

Killer piranha stalk Folkestone pond

Eddy Ito
Thumb Up

Lucky fella

In case he's reading this. Chop up some tomatoes and a couple of shallots. Put some butter in a pan, let it melt over low heat and make a bed with half of the tomatoes and shallots. Place the cleaned piranha on the bed add salt, pepper and a bit of parsley then cover with the remaining tomato/shallot mixture. Add a few oz. Pinot Gris, cover until fish is done. Remove piranha from pan and reduce remaining mixture. Pour reduction on plate, top with piranha, serve with yu choy and rice with sweet potato.

Developers twitchy as wait for Symbian^3 goes on and on

Eddy Ito

I've seen this before

It's almost as if they are waiting to become obsolete so they can do something else. It oddly reminds me of Palm OS.

NASA: Civilization will end in 2013 (possibly)

Eddy Ito

Doesn't matter

It will be 2013 and anything that happens will be the fault of the US Presidential election. It doesn't matter who is the chair, the losers will say "now look what you did! This is all your fault, our guy would have saved us" and the winners will say "thank goodness, at least we have a chance. In four years this will be fixed". Oh yeah, if there is a change of ownership add in a little "look at this mess they dumped on us!" One last thing, the blame will be for everything from anthropogenic solar storms to a collapsing So-so Security as the baby boomers start to retire en masse.

What's that? You say there's no such thing as anthropogenic solar storms... isn't that cute, it's almost as if you think that matters.

Radiation warning labels for deadly mobes!

Eddy Ito
Grenade

Too true

"... more information isn't always helpful."

Yes, just hold the open end of the fire hose up to your mouth while I go and turn on the hydrant.

Wannabe Jedi drool over potent laser 'lightsabre'

Eddy Ito

But will it blend?

Personally I'm waiting for one that will replace my chefs knife and not look like a silly movie prop.

iPad beats BlackBerry for browsing

Eddy Ito
FAIL

Did anyone RTFB?

"The iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) are shown stacked, the others as individual lines."

The iPad is the tiny dark green triangle in the corner and peaks very close to the BlackBerry and if it beats it, it's not by much. Perhaps the intent was iOS beats BlackBerry.

From the chart, the iPod, on top, has been fairly steady showing only modest growth and the iPhone saw a surge between May and July of '09. It also seems that the iPad is eating into iPod/iPhone use as there is a slight decline in both just prior to the iPad popping up on the radar. What remains to be seen is how will this change when other tablets are introduced.

Microsoft trumps Kinect with 'sleek, silent, sexy' Xbox

Eddy Ito

Shadow puppets?

Well if there are no shadow puppets can we at least play charades?