Posts by Nigel 11

Goody goody yum yum

Anyone remember that man who died watching "the Goodies" many moons ago? His widow managed to quip that if he had to go, it was good that he went laughing.

Entranced and thrilled is probably a close second. Life is a terminal medical condition.

Maybe....

Maybe they should consider offering misguided hackers with borderline Asberger's syndrome a job, rather than trying to lock them up for twenty years?

Showering in impurities

Anyone who has ever gone swimming in the sea really shouldn't worry about slight imperfections in the pee recycling system when showering. Think about all those fish ... and that's before we add our own effluents.

And last time there was a drought in London, they told those of us living in West London not to reduce flushing our toilets, because they needed the "water" in East London ....

I'll drink to it, but not sure if I'd want to drink from it.

AEScrypt first

Sounds pretty useful.

But I'll be using AEScrypt on my files before I let Google store them (for access on the move and as a backup-backup). Wonder whether storing Zettabytes of effective random numbers was part of their plan?

Microsoft shooting self in foot again

The number one problem: as with Windows Vista / 7, they've thrown out the user interface which the Office users grew up with, on all versions up to 2007. A menu bar (with incremental "improvements" at various upgrades, but not intrusive enough that one couldn't adjust as one went). It was insane not to offer an Office-2003 User-interface compatibility mode.

It's also significant that very many Word users know nothing about computers and (dare I say it) are not always particularly motivated. They're secretaries or call-centre staff, or all sorts of people who hunt-and-peck at a keyboard who would prefer not to have to.

As others have said, the best "upgrade" may well be OpenOffice, more compatibility with these users at zero cost.

Paris, scrutinizing a ribbon bar. Ooh-err.

Nexus is an English word, not a made-up name.

No-one can claim exclusive rights to Nexus, it's an English word. From the online dictionary:

Noun

1. a means of connection between members of a group or things in a series; link; bond

2. a connected group or series

So tough!

But maybe a bit hubristic for Google, implicitly claiming to be the first connected group or series? I'd have awarded that honour to Racal, later Vodafone, for inventing the mobile.

They sue only as a last resort

They don't normally sue, until they've exhausted all other avenues for obtaining license compliance. Most such violations are unintentional, and the offending party is persuaded to release their source code once they have the violation drawn to their attention and have taken legal advice.

Methinks the organisations named are being particularly difficult, either out of pigheadedness, or because their firmware contains something that they want to hide (Spyware? Customer-monitoring-ware? Closed-source DRM? ) that they've linked into a GPL-derived work.

Removing it ... not the finger

She thinks she's joking?

As soon as her finger is the key to anything of value, there will be people out there performing amputations. It's alreary happened in South Africa, where a businessman had his finger hacked off when the carjackers found out that his Merc was started by fingerprint not by key.

(He was probably lucky it didn't start by retina scan)

What I've been waiting for?

Unanswered question, weight?

If it's not too heavy, I think I'll be buying one.

Are we sure ...

Are we sure, that paedophiles haven't already written a stealth child porn distribution virus? After all, they are the ones who will benefit if half the world's PCs web-caches become polluted, and the "it wasn't me, it was a virus" defense is thereby bolstered?

I seem to recall reading in the early days of computer viruses, that a Bulgarian dissident wrote an evil capitalist propaganda distribution virus, in the hope that the secret police would then implode in self-incrimination and doubt. Which subsequently happened, though for different reasons.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Lets see, a telly is on 4 maybe hours/day and in standby 20 hours/day. They're saying it has to use 50 watts less while it's on, saving 200W/h.

Now consider the standby consumption of a telly. And a DVD recorder. And a satellite tuner. And a games console. And a PC. And a Printer. Alarm clock radio. Audio system. Digital radio. Microwave oven. Duplicate systems used even fewer hours/day in bedrooms, guest rooms, etc.

My home power meter shows that standby power consumption is usually over 1 watt and often over 3, per device. Let's say 10W for the telly stack. 10 x 20 hours = 200W/h, again.

This is complete and utter waste. The TV's remote-control does standby for several years on a couple of AAA cells! They should have mandated that no device is allowed to consume more than a milliwatt when in stand-by, and not bothered about what it uses when it's on. Electronically, that would mean disconnecting the PSU completely from from the mains in stand-by, and running micro-power electronics off a rechargeable battery or large capacitor, which would recharge every time "on" was commanded. Easy to do that with an optically-coupled triac.

Once California had forced the manufacturers' hands into producing hardware that can stand-by on microwatts instead of watts, it would not be long befoe that same technology became universal, saving vast amounts more power all over the world. Chaper then to make just the one "greenest" version, rather than continuing to produce a different version to waste more electricity.

Rogue ATMs fitted with skimmers ....

That should be, Rogue ATMS which *are* skimmers. ATMs operated by organised crime.

I worked this risk out very many years ago, and never use an ATM that's not installed in the wall of a bank. Who knows what modifications have been made to the innards of the ones in service stations and clubs?

We should all be equal under the law

Irving is an obnoxious nutter, but he has the same rights to privacy and freedom of speech as the rest of us.

It's somtimes justifiable to break a law for the greater good, especially if you are willing to publicise having done so and take the legal consequences as a form of protest. Does this apply here? Doesn't look like it. If they'd found a smoking-gun e-mail which made it clear that he doesn't actually believe what he's preaching, that would be different. Having not found any such, they should have quietly gone away.

"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me."

Today, "they" - western governments - have designs to record all our e-mails and phone calls. If these "hacktivists" are not roundly condemned for their actions regardless of the nature of their target, it plays right into these governments' hands. It'll be your e-mails next, and then other hard fought-for freedoms. And that is the slippery slope to the sort of government that only an Irving could want.

What are they migrating?

What are they migrating from and to? From Unix to Microsoft Exchange, maybe?

If it ain't broke don't fix it.

An apology in print

Paste "NOT" above vacant on the billboards?

@Rafael 1 - how many percent

It really doesn't matter as long as it's ever so slightly bigger than zero.

If a spammer sends 150 million spams and gets just one idiot who responds with details of a bank account from which he steals £1000, that's a win for him. Especially if the bandwidth consumed by the spam was paid for by someone else, which is the case if it's sent out by compromised PCs on someone else's net. Ditto if he gets 30 orders for blue chalk-and-rat-poison pills at £33 profit on each.

I've read a theory, that this is why most spam is so lame. They don't WANT to snare any moderately intelligent people who might then create significant "heat" for them. They don't want to be sufficiently plausible to a man on the Clapham omnibus, that truly capable geeks with a hero complex set out to lure them into the arms of law enforcement. They want to ensnare only drooling idiots, who won't have a clue what to do next after getting themselves robbed or conned. This is why, for example, spammers hardly ever put their spam through a spelling and grammar check program.

White noise a solution?

It occurs to me that there is a solution for the neighbours trying to sleep, but being disturbed by vocalisations, that would cost a lot less than soundproofing.

Get a white noise source. 50dB of white noise will sound like silence after a few minutes, but will mask other quieter noises. It's sometimes used in open-plan offices to reduce the disturbance caused by conversations at other desks. Another example is the seventy-plus dB of fans in our server room - doesn't sound noisy when you are working in there, until you discover that the only way to have a conversation is to shout.

Those "natural noises" CDs (breaking waves, windswept plains, babbling brooks, etc) work on a similar principle - some people find them more relaxing than white noise. (The brain treats white noise as silence, and complete silence can itself be disturbing, so add the texture of a natural soundscape).

Wish I'd known this back in my Barratt box days!

Add a beefed-up grid, solar and tidal power

The problems get less if you can bring in more power fron further afield. For this we need a higher-capacity Europe, North Africa, and Middle-East spanning electricity grid. Thinking about wind alone, it's unlikely to be calm everywhere simultaneously. Then throw in tidal power (available only on coastlines, with its own different periodicities to the weather) and Solar power (flat calm in Southern Europe usually means peak sun, though it often means fog in the North where Winter sun is in any case scarce).

Pumped storage can also mean compressed air in large salt-dome caverns. Other forms of energy storage include hydrogen (from electrolysed water) and flow batteries. If the energy one is storing is fully renewable, then inefficiency matters only in economic terms.

I can't help thinking Wind power is ultimately a distraction. We ought to be building that grid, and investing in solar power generation in Southern Europe and the Sahara. In the UK, we need to build the biggest version of the Severn barrage - 15% of our electricity requirements from the tide.

Wrong packaging?

They could make installation far quicker and easier AND save some cost on packaging, if they re-engineered this SSD as a PCI card . (The bus connection would be for power supply only. Data via SATA. Alternatively leave the SATA power connector alone and make the bus "connection" mechanical only)

Of course they'd still need to sell the disk-like variant for notebook systems.

I wonder which is the best mid-life kicker for 1Gb RAM XP systems with older (slow-ish) 40Gb and 80Gb HDDs - this drive, or upgrade the RAM to 3Gb? "Reg", it would be nice for all of us if you benchmarked this. The SSD has the advantage of being able to outlive the system you upgrade with it.

Isn't it bloody obvious

Isn't it bloody obvious that the perverts gain by making it possible to blame malware? Therefore it stands to reason that the perverts are the people writing the malware to spread paedo imagery onto an many innocent people's PCs as possible.

How many innocent people's lives are going to be wrecked, before the courts finally realise that for as long as the world uses MS Windows, no-one is in proper control of what's stored on their hard disk?

Yawn?

Saves a little power and weight, extends battery life of a notebook. Not bad.

What would be really interesting would be if they cranked up the rpm to the maximum that the platters can stand - probably well in excess of 20,000 rpm. That might be pretty useful in the enterprise arena. Solid-state's biggest weakness is random write of small chunks of data, which would be a really fast-spinning hard disk's strong suit.

They could probably also fill such a disk with Hydrogen gas to increase heat dissipation and to reduce drag. It's so tiny, there would be very little of a safety issue - a few cc of Hydrogen can't make a serious explosion even if some ingenious accident let it all out at once and sparked it.

Doh!

Force-feeding is regarded as a form of assault or even torture in civilized countries. Doesn't that give them at least half a clue?

Firefox Adblock-plus and Flashblock plug-ins recommended.

Name wrong

Eee keyboard?

An Eeeboard, surely.

Apple, hole, digging

Apple's attitude is the main reason I won't buy an iPhone. Not ever. Not even if they open up when forced to do so by the competition.

In a year or so, Google (Android) and/or Nokia (Maemo) will catch up, and Apple will then discover what it's store of goodwill is worth. (That's negative goodwill, negative worth).

BBC2 first

My guess is that they're retiring BBC2 before the other channels as a final, un-ignorable warning to people who still haven't clued up that analog TV is on the way out. It'll force them to ask at a TV shop why they've lost BBC2, and they'll come out clasping a digibox, and then it won't work until they buy a new aerial as well and someone teaches them which remote control is for what. It's going to be a horrible shock to some technophobic grannies living on the state pension.

Provided the thing never comes back to earth ....

I don't see a problem with building a reactor in orbit and then sending it off into space. Enriched Uranium fuel rods aren't desperately radioactive, an accident while they were being transported up into orbit would not be very serious. It's only after the reactor goes critical, that you really don't want any chance of it re-entering Earth's atmosphere.

As was pointed out above, a space reactor needs very little shielding. For a true low-G spacecraft, you can put the reactor a long way from the rest of the space-ship, connected via a lightweight structure rated for milli (or micro?)-G forces only. Neutrons heading out into space are harmless (half-life 15 minutes after which they'll just join the other protons in the solar wind), and inverse squares will do a lot to reduce the neutron flux that you'll have to shield the crew quarters against.

It's just occurred to me that if you put a lump of Uranium (the reactor core) between the crew quarters and the sun, that would be useful shielding against solar storms as well!

@marvin - Recover data from wiped disk

It's not at all impossible to recover data froma wiped disk, if you are an espionage agency or are willing to throw six figure sums at the task. However, if you are only worried about someone poking around using a PC and operating system (typical cracker or criminal activities) you are safe enough after you have written the whole disk to zero or random.

The first problem is that there will be some data left un-erased on the (few?) sectors which the disk decided were dodgy and relocated. Someone with knowledge of the firmware or manufacturer-diagnostic commands can doubtless read those blocks.

The second, bigger, problem is that on the physical platters, overwritten blocks have magnetic fringes down the sides that are not fully over-written. It may be possible to retrieve (some) data from these fringes using special firmware and the drive's own read/write heads. It's certainly possible by dismantling the drive in a clean-room and using a much smaller read-only head or probe to explicitly examine the fringes.

DBAN / DoD multi-pass erase patterns are designed to minimize this risk by repeatedly writing, with patterns that maximise the degree of erasure. Nevertheless, alignment of the heads with the magnetic tracks changes with age and temperature, and so erasure cannot be guaranteed.

If the data on the disk is worth five figures or more to anyone, your best bet is physical destruction. I'm told that at a certain defense establisment, the hda first has holes drilled in it, is then pounded by a big man with a sledgehammer, and ends its days in a vat of ferric chloride solution, which will rapidly dissolve any bits left on the broken bits of disk platter.

Er, NO!

> "the latest version of Xorg that now defaults to, for those of you with a dual monitor setup, spanning the desktop between monitors, rather than cloning between them. Quite frankly, that's the way it should have been from the beginning, but as they say, better late than never."

So be it, but if "dual monitor" is a notebook or netbook with a projector plugged in to the VGA port, then this is very definitely a retrograde step! (Perfection would be auto-detecting whether what's on the VGA port is a projector or a monitor, but I don't know if that's even possible).

I just hope that finding one's way back into clone mode is easier than it is with Windows XP.

@Wind Farmer

To: sales@stupidcorp.com

Cc: bigwig@stupidcorp.com

Dear Sirs

I recently visited your web site for the first time, and I was informed that I could not proceed further unless I used Internet Explorer. Since IE is not available to users of the Linux operating system, and since IE is well known to be the world's least secure, most buggy, and least standards-compliant browser, my first visit to your site will also be my last.

Darwinian economics should provide an appropriate resolution to this issue in due course.

Yours etc.