* Posts by Charles 9

16605 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Finally, a USEFUL smart device: Intel boffins cook up gyro-magneto-'puter bike helmet

Charles 9

Then recycling needs to be encouraged. Once it breaks (the internal electronics can be cushioned to reduce the chance of these breaking), they should be encouraged to call in and order a replacement for a reduced price. Maybe it can be done like some warranty jobs where the replacement comes in and you send the busted one back in the same box.

Charles 9

Re: All that safety...

It should be noted that some municipalities prohibit the use of earphones while on bicycles, on the understanding that auditory awareness is considered too important to compromise. As some have said, some people can't turn their heads that much without twisting their torso, which in turn means they unintentionally turn the handlebar. Meaning trying to look back can actually be dangerous. As for "hybrid cars", they're big enough that you can still hear the wind as they pass and the friction of the tires on the road, not to mention the whirring of the electric motor. I hear the same phenomenon in electric golf carts. They're not completely whisper-quiet ninja autos. Put it this way, you need as many senses as you can employ to be at your safest on a bike. You can't rely solely on sight (blind spots) or sound (drowning out).

Charles 9

"For divers, there are already dive computers to control depth, air pressure and ascent rates, normally worn on the wrist."

And they already make a helmet-mounted display for divers so the diver doesn't have to look down to be kept informed. In fact, they already make an HMD for firefighters, too (the C-Thru).

Charles 9

Re: As a motorbike rider...

So you're saying that a helmet display is more dangerous than taking one's eyes off the road to glance at the gauges on the bike? And it's not like it's new tech since helmet displays have been developed for military aviation as well. It's just a matter of developing a way to unobtrusively display useful information like speed, revs, and fuel.

DEATH TO TCP/IP cry Cisco, Intel, US gov and boffins galore

Charles 9

There's ALWAYS proxies. Given encryption, there's no way to block an encapsulated forwarding packet (the "double envelope" as I call it). As far as the ISP knows, the proxy is the targeted "entity", after which it's out of its control.

Beer in SPAAAACE: Photographic PROOF

Charles 9
Stop

Except last I checked, your average plastic cup is round. I've never seen one that was ellipsoid, probably because such cups are prone to collapsing on the narrow dimension. So, assuming the cup is round, either the cup is NOT pint-sized (such a cup in the standard shape would have to be at least four inches tall, and a Lego figure is only about two inches) or that's not a Lego figure on the right. Could be a Duplo figure, which are taller to account for the larger blocks.

Nvidia blasts sueballs at Qualcomm, Samsung – wants Galaxy kit banned

Charles 9

Re: If I had a time machine...

As I recall, 3dfx barely missed the turn of the millennium when nVidia borged them, and the PCI Express standard didn't come out until 2004. That's a pretty lengthy interval for "as soon as". As you mentioned, 3dfx was too ambitious. They lost the plot. Not only did they misfire catering to the hardcore set, they lost the more mainstream buyers.

Though I should note that an external power hookup from the PSU developed independently of PCI Express. I actually own a broken ATI All-in-Wonder AGP card that took an external power feed, either from a floppy-style connector or from the connectors we now associate with PCI Express Power.

Charles 9

Re: If I had a time machine...

Except that it would only cover you for the New and Improved design. The old design would still be open season, and anyone you tried to sue can just wave the expired patent in your face.

Charles 9

Re: If I had a time machine...

As I recall, both sides sued each other. offsetting each other in a patent war. In the end, 3dfx bet on the wrong horse (please direct your attention to the Voodoo5, a card so ungainly it needed its own external power supply to work properly--plus the FANS). People went with ATI and nVidia for more practical reasons, which left 3dfx in the cold and eventually borged by nVidia.

Charles 9

Re: Whither Apple?

Samsung may produce the Exynos SoC, but both the CPU and GPU are actually licensed designs from ARM (that includes the Mali, the actual infringing component--it's not unique to Samsung as many ARM SoCs use it). Most of Samsung's tweaking concerning the Exynos is on the CPU end, which isn't being sued. So Samsung could still point fingers: this time at ARM, who made the original GPU design.

Charles 9

Re: Whither Apple?

So why hasn't Sony been sued? Or HTC? Or LG? Why was Samsung singled out? And what about Samsung's claim that it should be taken directly to the companies that make the infringing chips (Qualcomm, etc.)? Samsung are just using the chips like everyone else, after all.

Scared of brute force password attacks? Just 'GIVE UP' says Microsoft

Charles 9

The thing is that the article notes that the trend is more towards either offline attacks where gatekeeping is useless or with distributed attacks where the site is swarmed with a million attempts from a million IPs, each trying to crack a different user just once or twice. You can't filter by username because each individual user is only attempted once or twice, and you can't filter by IP because of the sheer number of IPs being used in the attack. It's basically indistinguishable from the legitimate use case of a million actual users actually logging in all at once.

Comcast merger-bait spinoff to be known as GreatLand Connections

Charles 9

The problem is that, unlike in other parts of the world, the USA has a ton of sparsely-populated area. That means running ANYTHING out to The Middle of Nowhere involves a ton of infrastructure costs, to the point there's the risk of a failure to return on investment. Therefore, ANY company that is interested in actually getting there won't do it without an exclusivity contract. It's basically Deal or No Deal.

IOW, if you prevent contracts of the sort, you run the risk of leaving small communities in the lurch.

Charles 9

Re: two parts will do

The TV part MUST be regulated because NBC Universal contains NBC, one of the three major broadcast networks. Being broadcast, it's subject to FCC regulation.

Verizon hit with $7.4 MEEELLION fine for slurping users' privates

Charles 9

Re: Which begs the question

Besides, the NSA is part of the government itself. They're basically IMMUNE from paying fines because the government holds sovereign power: my government, my rules. And that Cosntitution? Ink on a page...

As for Verizon, they should've been forced to make their policy opt-IN.

Google could be a great partner for Iliad in its quest for T-Mobile

Charles 9

Re: WiFi

Also, T-Mobile phones in the USA can take advantage of a WiFi Calling feature that doesn't require a femtocell or other special equipment to use: just a phone with their firmware. It "just works" and is one reason I stick with them.

Charles 9

FTR, Cox already has something of a mobile rollout. IIRC, they're a MVNO on the Sprint network, so buying into T-Mobile (which is GSM and not compatible with Sprint) would create a shakeup on that end. That may be why Cox is denying interest in Iliad at this time: there would be additional up-front costs for them.

Australia deflates Valve with Steam sueball

Charles 9

Wouldn't Valve counter, like they do in the US, that the transactions are considered leases and not sales, and therefore not subject to consumer rights protections (refund guarantees in Australia, first sale in the US, etc.)?

Super Cali signs a kill-switch, campaigners say it's atrocious

Charles 9

Re: @Eugene Crosser

"Such countries are few and getting fewer. If all the stolen phones were only usable there, the supply in those countries would balloon to the point where even the high end phones would become worthless, and thus not worth the risk of stealing in other countries."

Unless that country's phone market is skewed enough (as in the prices are too high and/or supplies too low) that a black market is allowed to thrive there. Turns out that's the case in a lot of southeast Asia. Knick a good phone, fence it overseas, and you stand a good chance of turning something, even if you sell it for cheap. These are also countries where their blacklists are less likely to be up to date (or maybe not even honored because their attitudes toward the West are frosty).

Charles 9

Re: Once again...

Roll-your-own networks will likely be unable to beat government-sanctioned jammers. And US cell phones have a restricted number of frequencies it can use, so the government could well have the capability to jam ALL of them.

Charles 9

I think this Act prevents the exploit in this case as the bricking is, IIRC, designed to be one-way. Meaning once it's bricked, nothing can be recovered from it. It would basically have to be reflashed from scratch, which wipes out the user data. Who knows? Even this might be disabled, preventing it being cleaned out and fenced.

Charles 9

Re: @Eugene Crosser

That STILL doesn't prevent the phone being taken to a country where the blacklist isn't honored or kept up to date. The lists tend to differ from country to country, and countries may not talk to each other. With a bricking, once it's bricked, it's bricked everywhere, meaning it's tougher to fence a stolen phone.

Charles 9

"Real thieves can always carry a Faraday bag they can pick up at Amazon to drop the nicked mobile in and sell it off at their leisure in Tibet. Of course that will just mean that California will pass a law banning the possession of Faraday bags by civilians which will soon lead to bans on metal foil and ultimately the closest someone will be legally able to get will be 00 steel wool pads that are no more than 1/4 inch thick but I digress."

Then why aren't they doing it already with the iPhones that have Activation Lock?

Charles 9

Why don't the conspiracy theorist consider that the government can simply order the cell towers shut down? It's a simpler approach, can be achieved with a warrant, and has precedent, both in and out of western civilisation.

And before you go the "recording atrocities" angle, this law has no effect on dedicated cameras (of the video or still variety).

Pay to play: The hidden cost of software defined everything

Charles 9

Re: Cars Too

You can use a program (like Torque for Android) together with an ODB-II adapter to read, interpret, and clear fault codes.

Charles 9

Re: Closed source...

It's a cardinal rule of business. You're not a business if you're not making money. If they don't get you one way they'll get you another way.

Take printers. You can either have an expensive printer with decently-priced supplies or a cheap printer with expensive supplies. If you try to find a cheap printer AND cheap supplies, you'll find it won't last long.

High-quality, inexpensive, long-lasting — Pick any TWO.

That 8TB Seagate MONSTER? It's HERE... (You'll have to squint, 'cos there are no specs)

Charles 9

Re: So that's the end of RAIDs then

Nice advertisement for ZFS...except for one thing. It's NOT platform agnostic. Otherwise, it would work natively in Windows.

"An OpenZFS port of code to Windows is not likely in the foreseeable future. The OpenZFS launch discussion on Slashdot touches upon some of the issues."

The closest solution to this is to use another machine and network the drive. zfs-win only mounts the drive read-only. Oh, and I also read that its more robust data-protection features are memory-intensive.

In any event, I'm thinking of the more likely event of gradual deterioration (a sudden catastrophic drive failure is basically game over for anything short of paranoid redundancy, which is not usually the desired setup for a consumer). PAR files combined with strategic physical file allocation (arrange the physical files ext-style, shotgun-like) should increase the odds of a recovery in this scenario.

Charles 9

Re: i Wussed out on Offsite Storage,

Ever considered using the cloud but encrypting your IP beforehand? If you don't trust even self-encrypted content in the cloud, then you're basically in DTA mode, in which case your offline storage is no safer.

Charles 9

Re: Now you can lose 8TB of data in one shot instead of just 4!

For Flash to be viable as a consumer backup medium, it has to beat SATA and USB, carrying slow but large spinning rust. Right now it's 4TB for $150. How close is Flash to this, and what's its longevity, both in terms of write cycles and in terms of offline shelf life (I keep hearing of flash bit rot)?

Charles 9

Re: Nobody has yet asked the important question

15GB per HD movie? That's generous. HD net videos shouldn't do more than 2GB per on the top end (BD 1080p rips of 1GB/hr are considered generous, most are half that). And all the retro stuff can be crunched down even further due to the reduced resolution: say 10MB/min or about 600-800MB per. Meanwhile, all the PornTube stuff is even smaller: say 100MB for a decent size/quality clip. That could shrink the whole estimate back to the low end of the PB scale.

Charles 9

Re: Nobody has yet asked the important question

I don't think so. Just in official circles, what you can find on the Internet probably ranks at least in the tens of TB...and growing. No single drive on Earth has the capacity, and I suspect the amount of porn will keep growing with the drive sizes, making it rather a chase.

Charles 9

Re: Now you can lose 8TB of data in one shot instead of just 4!

"Spinning disk will die quickly once flash gets large enough."

The economics simply aren't there and won't be for the foreseeable future. Flash either cheaps out but loses longevity or sticks with longer-term chips that are an order of magnitude more expensive per TB. For bulk storage that must still be randomly-accessible, there's no substitute for spinning rust. Otherwise, said alternative would be in the consumer sphere as a backup medium (tape's currently enterprise-oriented and too expensive while opticals are too small a capacity relative to today's drive capacities--it would take around 20 dual-layer BD-R's to store the capacity of a 1TB hard drive and those discs will inevitably have longevity issues). Frankly, I would LOVE to see something other than spinning rust as a medium-term consumer archival medium, but I'm not seeing it.

Researchers camouflage haxxor traps with fake application traffic

Charles 9

No, because this is more along the lines of cameras with no blind spots or "Police officers may be posing as employees." The traps are getting to the point that an outside is hard pressed to tell if it's a trap or not until you're beyond the point of no return, as with a bomb that's impossible to defuse (and it IS entirely possible to make a bomb with a one-way arming mechanism--think sacrificial braces or glass bulbs). Just because you know the trap's there doesn't mean there's much you can do about it.

Charles 9

Re: just sayin

Trouble with that idea is that intruders are like roaches and mice. They can usually slip under your notice until it's too late, staying under the radar and in the places no one bothers to look because bothering to look everywhere takes too much time and money and they'll just slip in after you leave. That's why we use roach bait and mouse traps...and honeypots in this case. If you can't find them, make them come to you.

Charles 9

A Turing Test for Honeypots?

So basically, creating a server that looks so much like a legit server that a hacker can't tell the difference between it and a real server?

Why do I keep thinking the Turing Test for some reason?

PS. I know it's not an exact analogue, but the basic idea is the same: a simulation of a real server that can't be distinguished from the real thing, only in this case used intentionally as a bait. Sort of like creating a highly-convincing drug dealer persona for a police sting.

Ice cream headache as black hat hacks sack Dairy Queen

Charles 9

Re: Is it just me…

Plus in the US, credit cards typically come with theft insurance standard (Visa frequently advertises this aspect on TV). If a card is ID'd to have been stolen, the issuer can usually flag any suspicious transactions, ring you up, send a new card, and you're not on the hook for the oddball. This is especially true for cheap transactions, where it's just cheaper for the credit card company to eat the occasional small costs rather than waste money in legal battles.

Govt control? Hah! It's IMPOSSIBLE to have a successful command economy

Charles 9

"A command economy doesn't need to account for left hand screws being different in different towns. That way lies madness. Instead a command economy says THIS is the screw for the people."

And then you hit the brick wall of reality: that one size DOES NOT fit all. Inevitably, you get complaints of a physical nature, such that "Live with it!" is answered with, "Why don't YOU come and try this?!" Dictating square pegs doesn't work when life gives you round holes.

Charles 9

Re: @ TedF

"That assumes no capitalism and probably more of a corrupt socialist paradise. Capitalism works due to a flow of money which requires people to spend. To spend there must be an income which capitalism dictates to be earned."

But when Capitalism reaches the end-stage, the ones who have it all don't NEED to hire out. They'll have everything they need ON HAND. You're talking about catering "For the Man who has Everything" (and I DO mean Everything). And if labor is required, they can either use a robot or just convince someone to do it for a crust of bread (or something else so ephemeral that it's gone before he even leaves).

Charles 9

"And it all boils down to one question: who decides? Does a government bureaucrat decide what is best for you are do you decide?"

But in most cases, it's NEITHER. Usually, you can only decide if you're PROVIDING. Otherwise, you don't have much say. If it's not the government dictating terms, then it's a private provider. And one of the goals of the provider is to remove your ability to choose so that you can't just "walk away". Think of the situation of a town with only one well. Because it's so valuable, SOMEONE'S always going to make a move on it AND will have the means to keep out everyone else. Who would you rather have in control of the well? Public or private interests?

Charles 9

Re: A reasonable compromise for socialists...

Utilities as I recall trend naturally toward monopolies because of the necessary evil of infrastructure. Allowing the market to compete here would mean multiples of pipelines, power rigs, and so on, which are considered eyesores. Not to mention for each redundant infrastructure, you reduce the RoI on each set, so the money stops adding up.

There's also the matter of medicine: an industry for which people don't always want money to be the determining factor. Plus certain medical circumstances prevent flexibility, meaning the market can become predatory.

Charles 9

Re: censae?

So in other words "census" is self-plural, like "species"?

Charles 9

Re: The internet

Perhaps, but it was the state who gave the Internet the initial jumpstart with ARPAnet, much like modern space technology was pretty much jumpstarted by the state-run "space race". There are some places the market falters, and one of them is in what I'd like to call "industria incognita": novel industries where there is no prior data on which to draw possibilities. Basically, the market hates to take leaps of faith, and it's only by people willing to gamble or with the resources to safely take a change or two (like states) that we get any data on them at all.

As for efficiencies, perhaps there's another way to look at business strategies: forward planning. For example, does a business always strive for the immediate gain (what I'm seeing a lot today due to investor/voter pressure) or is a business willing to take a hit now (commit a "necessary evil") to secure revenue down the road? I suspect this latter is one big weakness of any elected government because it implies doing something necessary but unpopular such as raising taxes or cutting fundings to beneficial projects. Thus you see hemming, hawing, and can kicking because no one wants the blame for it. I recall that's at least one reason why Machiavelli favored an autocracy. Not saying he had it all right but rather he had a point.

Boffins attempt to prove the universe is just a hologram

Charles 9

Re: Trillion defined

Seems a touch inconsistent since I was expecting it to be 10^24 instead (if a million is 10^6 and a billion is 10^12). I would've thought 10^18 would've been described as a million billion instead of a trillion.

Banking apps: Handy, can grab all your money... and RIDDLED with coding flaws

Charles 9

Re: Not surprising

"The lack of adequate review framework is a key fail. You have no idea about the quality of a piece of code until it's been tested and those tests have been reviewed by > 1 trustworthy third parties..."

But tell that to the bean counters...

Charles 9

Re: Not surprising

"Yup. Life was much nicer in the era of software supplied on ROM. If it came on EPROM, you knew to expect some quirks. But if it came on a ROM, well, a faulty ROM set could sink a company so there was none of this "push out what we have and fix whatever develops in the field later" idea."

Even then, the fact that everyone only had ONE chance to get it right didn't exempt rush jobs. In the business world, the coders have to compete with the other departments just like everyone else. Ask Atari back in the early 80's. It's particularly hard to to code a game when you have such a short timetable (with NO room to maneuver--it MUST be ready in time for the Christmas sales rush or it's not worth doing). Perhaps the RISK of going under beats the CERTAINTY of losing your business to the competition if you don't deliver.

China building SUPERSONIC SUBMARINE that travels in a BUBBLE

Charles 9

Re: Why use the military?

"Who do you think owns most of the US governments debt, and thereby picks up the US's bills?"

Its own citizens, if you care to check the actual books. Most bonds and treasury notes stay in the US. China does hold some US debt, but it's not a very sizable portion. It's one reason the US's sovereign debt isn't considered as dangerous as others: because most of it is held domestically.

Cracking copyright law: How a simian selfie stunt could make a monkey out of Wikipedia

Charles 9

It's not JUST the ownership that makes it the owner's copyright. It's the concept of AGENCY. A photographer acting in the employ of a company and using the company's equipment is essentially an agent of that company, so the copyright goes to the company.

Who needs hackers? 'Password1' opens a third of all biz doors

Charles 9

Re: NO REALISTIC

So what happened in the Middle Ages when most people were illiterate and STILL had to remember tons of usually-dissimilar things in their day-to-day lives?

AMD unveils 'single purpose' graphics card for PC gamers and NO ONE else

Charles 9

My card's a mid HD6, so I guess I'm several gens out of the loop. Let's raise the bar, then. Same specs except at 4K resolution (4096 x 2160)?

Charles 9

So the Obligatory Question:

Can it play Crysis...at 1920x1080 at a minimum 60fps with all maximum details with, say, a Core i7 six-core CPU backing it up?