Posts by Charles 9

Re: "Key to the car's economical performance is the braking system"

"Ultra light weight construction means it will be a death trap in an accident."

Even with very strong lightweight materials?

Getting up a hill relies a lot on the drive's torque, as the rotational force applied to friction is what allows it to fight gravity on the incline. We know it can do 0-60 in about 10sec on the flat, and acceleration helps gives us a ballpark for the torque. How does this compare to other cars and how they can handle hill climbs?

Re: le -sigh-

Tell that to the INVESTORS. Fiduciary duty demands investors come first.

Re: Meanwhile

Depends. My cable provider provides this service gratis with whatever service is already in use (doesn't even go against the data cap), but not all are like that, and remember that many providers have data caps. Accessing the content you want runs the very real risk of being charged for overage, meaning they get you either way.

Re: Cheep....

Yours is NOT a decent-sized market. I'm in a community of around 100,000, the coverage map says I can get 4, maybe 5, but because of the geography it also says I'll need an amplified directional antenna to get most of them.

Re: Cheep....

Problem being the reception can be hit or miss plus those "cheap" antennas only work if you're in a good area. If you're nestled in a valley or have things like trees blocking your skyline, you're likely SOL. Trust me, I've tried. Used to be cablecos sent those stations in the clear but won the argument that satellite providers are required to scramble due to technical limitations (namely, due to the wide coverage of satellites, they have to broadcast ALL the local stations at once and limit the stations at the receiver end).

Plus the FCC mandate only applies to local terrestrial broadcast stations: typically no more than a handful of stations at once (usually 3 or 4, maybe 7 or 8 if you're lucky, plus most are beholden to the big networks, including NBC which is owned by Comcast). Your average nonbroadcast TV provider offers about 50 channels on the low end and over 100 with the standard packages.

Re: Not sure I understrand the number of dimensions.

Perhaps they mean how much of the individual voxel is "occupied" If Length, Width, and Depth indicates the sizes of rooms, Size would be how full is each room while Orientation would indicate which way the furniture is turned.

Re: re. voxel

They may be stretching the definition here a little bit, but I can see the point. Each point of data in this design supposedly is a volumetric element, just not of uniform size or orientation (thus the additional two dimensions).

Note they also said a specific temperature, so I imagine they physically measured the degree of deformation the substrate experienced during their experiment and extrapolated a point at which the data is too degraded to recover. IOW, it's a number to perhaps take with a pinch of salt but at least they can explain how they came up with it. Plus note the temperature was actually quite high (close to 500K) and nowhere near standard temperature or your average room temperature. As noted, glass is actually extremely stable as long as you don't get it up near the melting point (in fact that why glass is rather brittle--it has no "give").

PS. We've been hearing about holographic crystalline data storage for decades now (add Babylon 5 to the Sci-Fi worlds that make use of it in their fiction), but we've yet to see them actually get out of the lab. The end of the article, though, hopefully paints a different picture. Let's hope we can actually get our hands on this for an archival medium in the near future.

Re: Re:1974 film Zardoz

"In a nod to another comment I have made today, he also proposed a space elevator, to reduce the energy required to get into LEO."

At least that idea has a concrete status: Not Possible YET. We've already got a pretty decent idea of the physical characteristics needed to pull it off. We just haven't found or invented a material able to tick all the marks yet.

Re: I'm more worried about stability of society than displacement.

"If you have a big shop, a human operated till is much faster."

Unless the only human-operated tills ALL have lines going halfway to the intimates (and this is the norm these days).

Re: Not Concerned Here

The problem is that ANY means found to get around the lock would be considered worth more than its weight in Bitcoin. Miscreants will be dying to leak this knowledge out and make it work in the general case.

Re: An easy way to break encryption?

"If they have the encrypted text and the unencrypted plain text, do they not then have the key to reading all similarly encrypted texts?"

Not necessarily. What you describe is a form of Known Plaintext Attack:

- Given X and X', find Y such that E(X, Y) = X'

A good cipher tries to make that problem difficult to solve.

Re: Are there any precedents with other forms of security?

That's why they employ safe crackers. Anyway, the analogy is flawed. More accurately would be to say they're trying to retrieve contents from a booby-trapped safe rigged to blow if it's opened by any way other than the combination. Only problem is the only person who knows the combination is dead and the booby-trap has a fail-deadly vigilance check. If it's not opened within a few days it blows itself up. And yes, if I recall, it IS possible to build a one-way fail-deadly mechanism where the only way it'll resolve is by exploding. One such device was set in a casino a few decades back.

Re: Why Trev Pott is wrong - a privacy advocate's view

"Unless they can break into Apple and steal the key used to sign iOS updates. Hopefully Apple restricts access to that to a few people, and keeps it on an air gapped system, but obviously I have no knowledge of their procedures."

If the bad guys want something badly enough, they'll hire insiders. Or find weaknesses. Remember, at least one of Sony's PS3 private keys got compromised and more and more malware is being signed with genuine keys that were likely stolen (so they not only can pass authentication checks but also can't be voided without collateral damage), so it's not outside the realm of reality.

Re: Why SATA

Fair enough. That's what I do, too. It's a lot cheaper to get the SODIMMS aftermarket. But I'm pointing out that unless it's a late Win7 laptop or later, chances are it's going to be under-provisioned in RAM going forward, especially if the laptops you run into (like mine) are from the XP era.

Re: Why SATA

"I upgrade a lot of laptops old and new and the SSD is the best thing period. RAM is secondary....very secondary. Most have come with 4GB for the past 6 years so they are at least functional on that point."

Then we're in different worlds because I'm lucky to find a laptop with 4GB standard (I eventually got one, but as an exception to the rule). Most I run into (and they're about the same age range as yours, about five years) are lucky to have 1GB on board and frequently only have 512MB. And trying to run anything serious on XP+ or even a recent Linux distro on something THAT small is Chug City. No amount of disk speed is going to save you from a thrashfest (not to mention thrashing adds wear and tear to your drives), in which case the RAM takes priority over the disk.

PS. I DO game and do a lot of media work. I'm getting ready to step up to a Core i5 that'll double my throughput but I want to put some extra work into it first.

"I bought a 1"TB" drive from Amazon for £142 last month. That's getting to sensible price points and certainly not as much as the PC."

For less, I can buy 5TB from a brick and mortar, WITH all the markup that entails, so from where I sit the gap is still too big.

Re: Why SATA

I'm inclined to think maxing out the RAM is the single best thing, as it takes out one of the big issues with too little RAM: thrashing due to paging (and thrashing is not a good thing for SSDs, either). Furthermore, most laptop RAM is pretty cheap, especially for old laptops that don't use cutting-edge SODIMMs (ex. I upgraded a pretty old laptop from 512MB to 4GB for about $20). That said, switching out the hard drive for an SSD is still the second best thing.

Re: It needs a serious pair for Toshiba to do this...

Still gonna need a bulk storage medium for the medium term, and the money for that is going to be on this taking over spinning rust in that department, unless that 5D Crystalline tech manages to shake things up.

Re: Why SATA

Legacy issues. My computer, for example, is almost nine years old. Back then, PCI Express was primarily for graphics cards (mine's a 1.0 with only one x16 slot and one x1 slot). Solid-state PC drives hadn't even hit the market yet. But it DOES have plenty of SATA ports. There are many old laptops out there that work perfectly fine...but could stand a bit of a boost, and after you max out the memory, switching out the hard drive for a SSD is a solid next step, but many of them are pre-NVMe and of course don't have any spare PCIe slots, so the only option is to use the existing SATA bus.

Re: DVD still outsells Blu-Ray

"Broadly speaking, children's movies and "serious" dramas tend to do better on DVD, summer blockbusters do better on Blu-Ray."

Probably due to the target. The stuff trending towards DVDs are probably being targeted for portable players (where resolution is less of a selling point, thus why you don't hear much of portable BluRay players). The blockbusters are normally snatched up for home theaters where you can see and hear the difference.

4 times is still a bit over the top, plus there's the matter of bulk storage needs (where the price shoots up considerably). Get it down to around 2x even at high capacities and then you can declare a sunset on spinning rust (much as getting players below $100US was pretty much the sign that BluRay had overtaken DVD as the movie disc format of choice).

Re: ...absolutely no options for handset makers to make any changes..

No, I think the handset makers will still be able to customize the UI to some degree. Isn't that what Overlays will be all about?

Re: Ooh.. ooh! Cant have that!

That excuse went out the door with Stagefright. Now Google's under legal pressure to take control of updates in order to cover its kiester. With more coverage of exploits and increased risk of such a device divulging State secrets, Google will want to prevent a repeat performance lest something slip and put them legally on the hook for allowing it.

Then you end up with something like Stagefright which is a potential total pwnage exploit that means practically EVERY phone is vulnerable, including the ones that are EOL but can still put Google in the hole for the security hole.

Re: Which flagships?

Can't. Radio frequencies aren't universal, and they haven't invented the universally tunable cell data chip yet (some physical limitations involved).

Point being TEMPEST is such onerous that only the most important of computers are given the treatment. Now, these researchers are saying it can be done ANYWHERE, with inexpensive, not-too-hard-to-conceal equipment, meaning practically nothing is safe. Imagine the effect on business budgets if every single piece of electronics in their firms had to be given TEMPEST-level hardening.

Re: White noise jamming

Radio antennae can be made highly directional and highly frequency-selective (like a Yagi), allowing you to zero in on your target with enough precision to penetrate most of the noise.

As for getting enough iterations, just use a commonly-used encrypted target and hit the sniffer each time it's being decrypted (you can hide the device in a box in a closet, maybe).

Re: Re. This is why

"Hint: why are random resource sucking games installed on a new phone in the first place?"

Because the developers are paying the phone manufacturers to do it, meaning it helps defray the cost of the phone, making it more affordable?

Put it this way. Many people aren't prepared to pay the complete, unsubsidized cost of a smartphone without any sponsorships or subscription plans.

Re: Darwin is calling

Ever considered this is a Stagefright-based exploit, meaning the Install dialogue never appears? Instead, the malware rides the MMS straight through to System, gains root permissions, and goes from there all without your knowledge? Remember, many phones are prone to Stagefright AND at EOL meaning they'll never be patched to fix the exploit.

Re: Also: streamed video

Isn't that hampered by low data caps, though?