Posts by Henry Wertz 1

Also (regarding x86 transition)

Also (regarding x86 transition as an example), on Linux it *didn't* result in random crashes. You could run 32-bit userland, no crashes since everything would work the same (you had >32-bit address space *total*, each app was still limited to less than 4GB.) And no significant problems mixing 32-bit and 64-bit other than some duplicate libraries. It never was that big a deal.

Pure speculation, I wonder if isync is using something like Linux's TUN/TAP or in-kernel VPN to give isync it's own network interface (which tunnels through to Apple to do it's thing)... if so, then instead of just opening a socket to Apple, there'd be some kind of unusual kernel involvement. I'm quite sure it's just some quick fix either way.

Interesting

I'm interested in climate and weather modeling, I found this quite fascinating, thanks!

I'm glad you mentioned a "Mexican wave" is a standing wave, I'd never heard of a Mexican wave 8-).

Huh....

I just didn't find that top that racy. A little side boob, but that was just because it was not cut to push the boobs together into a "plunging neckline" style cleavage. She did show a fair bit of leg but I got the impression that's not the problem? I wouldn't expect someone to be dressed up like this to, say, news anchor (although I can always hope...), but for a dancing show? Well, anyway, I knew Turkey is pretty conservative.

"I worked for a major American bank a few years back. They were using OS/2 v.2 for their ATMs. It would not surprise me if they still do. Banks are extremely change-averse. They talk a good game when it comes to security, but many (at least) don't walk the walk."

OS/2 would actually HELP their security. No extraneous services, OS/2 was quite secure by design, and (as a practical matter) an OS that old doesn't have many people researching it and looking for exploits.

The main issue I've seen are ATMs which are running Windows with all kinds of irrelevant services running, and clearly poor security practices. Frankly, the ATM industry should straight up follow procedures similar to what casinos follow for slot machines. THOSE are some secure machines. I've seen one boot, it ran a stripped BIOS, which checked the "normal" BIOS before executing it. This checked the checksum on a bootloader *and* the Linux kernel it loaded, the bootloader checked itself, the BIOS, the kernel, and the software before loading the next step (this software was I think in a ramdisk, so there was no chance of it missing "extra" software on the system). The software then checked the bootloader, kernel, and itself before proceeding to run the rest of the software in the ram disk. Finally, i think the system ran an extra check that would cause the system to immediately halt if any unauthorized software was running on the system (i.e. if something managed to bypass ALL THOSE CHECKS, the system would then kick off and die anyway.)

If you value privacy, DON'T USE FACEBOOK

if you value any privacy, DON'T USE FACEBOOK. You can put your most personal details on Facebook, marked with every possibly privacy option for just a few friends to see, and Zuckerburg *will* screw you over sooner or later and give that info out to everybody.

I have a FB account, only used for single sign on (so if I want to comment on some blog or something I do not need to make a new account). My age, and the college I graduated from (which I now think I should not have given them either.) No photo, no personal information, no posts, no answer to the friend's requests. FB is getting nothing from me.

I don't understand..

I don't understand, I've been able to d/l stuff off youtube forever now. Are they pretending they have useful DRM? (Being able to throw stuff on for offline viewing within the app -- including the ads and viewing report to let people get paid -- is nevertheless a good idea.)

For perspective

How bad is it really? Wikipedia indicates 75,000,000 active lines. The total fee for these carriers goes from GBP 48.8 million to GBP 225.9 million. This increases it from GBP 0.65 to GBP 3.01. i do think it's unlikely carriers will just eat the charge.

I had to run the numbers, in order to post a comment on the independent's article rubbishing their misleading article title "Customers face paying four times more for 4G services in proposed price hikes". (Of course, besides being inaccurate, there is no "four times more" here, it is four times *as much*... four times *more* would be five times the original amount.)

Yeah I don't buy it

I don't buy the premise of the report. Apple has made VERY expensive (frankly overpriced) computers for decades. People will complain they are short on cash for EVERYTHING ELSE while at the same time showing off a (usually) $1000+ Apple computer they've just bought. People buy them like clockwork. A lot of people buy the ipads and iphones like clockwork despite the very high cost too. This will of course limit Apple's market share, but it doesn't mean the existing market will suddenly collapse on them. If their market share DOES start collapsing (i.e. because of some problem in future products) then making them cheaper would likely not help either.

Two big issues

I'd have two issues here:

1) NO SPACE TO WORK!!! Really, HP started pushing "work from home" hard years ago (pre-Fiorina....) because they were selling off office space while expanding the work force. These people will be in there, with like 3 or 4 people vying for each desk and computer. This I'm sure will be MOST productive.... yeah. I'll stay out of the general argument for and against work from home pretty much. I think, personally, I find working from home fine, and furthermore think that I could get all the human interaction I'd ever want through chat sessions and speakerphone. But I know some people just NEED face-to-face.

2) Employees taking the downgrade personally? Sorry, but HP staff has executed just fine, it is HP management that has failed. (Honestly I think right now they are still on a slide because of Fiorina's extreme mismanagement, particularly her cutting R&D down to nothing -- which provides short term gains for a few years, but long term losses.)

I'll take my chances

So the (supposed) choice is between 1) Risk of terrorists or 2) A secretive organization* that runs amok with no accountability and no checks and balances, because they can say every aspect of their operation is secret -- and still a risk of terrorists. I'd rather take my chances with #1.

*Well, really, several; GCHQ, NSA, and Australia and Germany's counterparts, at least, since they seem to closely cooperate.

It's an ARM...

Regarding power to run this thing, it's an ARM. It probably won't charge all that fast, but to get 6 hour battery life, I think the battery is also very small so it may not take as long as you'd expect. The power use of these would be very low compared to what you are expecting. Some Atom netbooks (with GMA500 GPU) were down to 5W, with ones with regular intel graphics over 10W. Typical portables will ship with 10-30W CPUs. This ARM uses a watt or two under full load, and can actually halt and go to under 0.1W usage idle (some x86 chips do this, others "idle" while still using several up to 10 or so watts of power.)

Shingling...

I'd missed this apparently, so here is a quick description of shingling...

Shingling writes a track on the hard disk so it largely overlaps the "previous" track. This allows a significant capacity gain. As a consequence though, it is essentially designed assuming you start writing at block 0 and write sequentially to the end. If random rewrites are even possible, it'd be by leaving occasional "gaps" where tracks do not overlap, and then having to rewrite the whole group of tracks between gaps -- i.e. very slow. Reads would be no problem.

It would therefore lower the cost of disks that are just having backups written out to them anyway, while having hard disk speed read speeds.

"The intersection of two major power corridors probably complicates the whole issue as well."

Indeed. If the power lines are from two different "grids" then you can have problems where one is like 59.9hz and the other 60hz, or voltage differentials, they may be both 60hz but you have to worry about phase, and so on. I'm not experienced with this but it's tricky business, particularly when talking about megawatts rather than kilowatts.

An apocryphal story about early ethernet...

A few vendors had their ethernet gear at an early 1980s computer show. This was early so probably they were using coaxial thicknet ethernet. So, they plug in a computer at one end to the thicknet, go to plug in the computer at the other end and ZAP! This big arc jumps between the cable and computer before it's even plugged in and both computers go up in smoke. The two ends of the building were fed off different substations, and this caused serious problems. (After this, they realized ethernet ports had to have voltage protection, to hopefully avoid most problems, and hopefully blow the port rather than the computer in worse conditions.)

Traditional detective work I think

"Possibly the biggest lesson for anyone comtemplating a secure or anonymised internet (dark or light) for any sort of transactions: legal, financial or various shades of naughty, is to design it such that no part of it touches the USA.

If 5% of the world wants to build a wall around themselves, the other 95% should let 'em."

Not a bad idea to have Internet routes that avoid the US when there's no reason to go there.

I have no love for the US govt's view they are some world police, and their disgregard for the right to privacy. That said, I don't get the impression there was any sigint (signals intelligence) used to find the Dread Pirate. Just traditional detective work. Plus, after all, 4 out of 5 arrests so far were done by the British on British soil.

Open Kepler conference?

So, why don't they just have an Open Kepler Conference? NASA bureaucrats can sit around in an empty room while the scientists go and have a conference. (Hopefully, the NASA scientists -- as opposed to the bureaucrats -- can leave the conference "on their free time" and go to the real conference too.) As was pointed out by the delegation from Yale (who is boycotting), the excuse for kicking the Chinese delegates is "national security", but the information to be presented at the conference is ALREADY PUBLIC.

Remote desktops

Yeah, I have a vnc client on my phone. Of course, given that it's not a tablet, I ran it, was like "Woah" then was like "Oh, wait, this screen is FAR to small" 8-). It did a drag effect (similar to when you can pan around on a large photo) but seeing like 1/20th of the screen at a time still made it a bit useless.

Anyway, good on them for providing RDP clients for more systems.

Supercomputer tech...

This is essentially supercomputer tech, where with a very high speed, low latency interconnect fabric and 64-bit address space, you can have these show up as a large pool of processors with large pool of memory instead of a bunch of seperate systems with a fast network. These traditionally could be run as one large system or several smaller ones as well. This would have definitely been too expensive for data center applications until recently, but here ya' go, apparently it's not any more and I think would work well for a cloud service provider usage.

De facto IPv6?

So, I expect there may de facto be a lot of teredo use for a good while, among people who want a publically accessible IP address. In short, I run miredo, I have a publically accessible IPV6 address even though I'm behind IPv4 NAT, and it's compatible with the few dynamic dns providers that support ipv6-only operation.

Miredo for Linux implements teredo fine (and inadyn supports ipv6 dynamic dns updates); Windows has teredo as well. You get an IPv6 address (out of a "reserved range" that still has enough bits to give a lot of addresses per IPv4 address...). It uses some tricky packet trickery to get a direct connection between 3 out of 4 main NAT types so teredo machines still can do direct connections. There are quite a few IPV4 to IPv6 gateways out of which it seems to pick the best one automatically. if I run traceroute6 it seems to find a pretty direct route in general.

An abomination if that's how it works

"As I see it the standard proposes being able to pass an encrypted stream through a 3rd party plugin before handing off to the video renderer, basically think along the lines of adding a netflix plugin to your browser to enable viewing netflix content via any browser that will support the plugin.

if that is all it is then I don't see it causing any harm"'

That causes great harm... HTML is supposed to be platform-neutral. If this is how this works, it is an abomination. I already have flash for this purpose, thanks. These plugins will be: 1) Probably badly written. 2) Probably Windows-specific. 3) Probably x86-specific. 4) Probably have security flaws both in plugins and infrastructure, so you'll get exploited again and again. Whose to even say a site that *claims* it needs a rights restriction plugin even does? It may just be passing the video straight through while running spyware on the system.

"They may be shareholders but having been in a position of a shareholder where the board lied to you, it's not so much about recovering the money you lost as attempting to send a message that if you lie about your company to those people who own it, then you'll pay the consequences as damn well you should."

People that had the board lie to them should be able to recover. However, BB did not lie, they actually thought they would recover the company's fortunes. Furthermore, I looked at the Sep 27, 2012 press release -- all it shows is BB10 gaining momentum and a few early adopters saying how much they like it. It makes no predictions whatsoever on future usage or popularity. Investors: ***PLEASE*** NOTE!!!! When a platform is new and has almost no users, *IT WILL SHOW HUGE PERCENTAGE INCREASES* in almost every stat, and this is meaningless is guessing how widely it'll be adopted by the public!

This is why every statement of this type, from any company, has text like the following (this is actually from the Sep 27, 2012 press release, with another paragraph or two of text telling where to look up risk factors to the company and such.):

" "Forward-looking statements in this news release are made pursuant to the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities laws. When used herein, words such as "expect", "anticipate", "estimate", "may", "will", "should", "intend", "believe", and similar expressions, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on estimates and assumptions made by BlackBerry Limited in light of its experience and its perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as other factors that BlackBerry believes are appropriate in the circumstances."

"Film at 11"

Phone that just came out outsells phone that has been on the market for six months. Film at 11.

That said, I hope Samsung reverses this recent craziness of SIM locking.

Client side watermarking? So stupid.

""Jimmy can't save up and buy DRM free 4K films"

So what - that is still no excuse for theft."

You mean copyright infringement. If this were theft, the file sharing site would have deprived the movie company of the movie after they took it from them (wouldn't that piss them off!), and then Jimmy would have deprived the file sharing site of it after he took it from them. They are not, they are making copies. By using improper terminology you add nothing to this discussion. Edit: Forget it, I didn't read all the posts to realize I was feeding a troll.

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Anyway... watermarking seems like a good idea. Whether the movie company wastes money on yet more attempts at rights restriction or not, it's never proven effective in the long term. With the watermark, people will be able to make fair use of the video. But when it gets to mass distribution, they'll get pinched. Problem solved.

Watermarking on the CLIENT DEVICE? Absurd. You ("you" being the movie industry..) still assume you will come up with an unbreakable rights restriction system (you won't), you assume if client devices are subverted you can disable them (you'll have so many pissed off customers you will not believe it, and devices WILL be subverted.) You assume that your watermarking will be to clever for anyone to figure out (server-side watermarking could be switched up as frequently as you want, whereas client-side will be built into the box and only updateable via firmware update, which the customer may or may not bother to do.) And finally, you throw away the chance to give the customer what they want -- plenty of potential customers get free movies because as it stands, they can either get the free movie and watch it on whatever device they'd prefer, or they can pay you for a movie then find out it won't actually play on some of their devices due to the rights restrictions you artificially threw in.

I urge you guys, get a clue and do not waste time on client-side watermarking.

"Also aboard will be compressed memory, which not only saves power by reducing the need to spin up your hard drive to keep RAM stuffed full of data goodness, but should also increase performance if the compression algorithm is sufficiently zippy."

Hopefully they have an adjustment or at least on/off for this. I used zram on Linux and for my workload it turned out to be rubbish for my workloads on my lower-RAM systems. Graphics? Check, raw bitmaps compress like crazy. Compiles? Check, gcc stuff also compresses like crazy. ZRAM worked wonders for this stuff. Apps that want to buffer a bunch of video or zip file or anything in a compressed or encrypted format in RAM? Oh no, that doesn't compress, so instead of more RAM you end up with effectively less and may swap like crazy. Oh, and VirtualBox is non-pageable so ZRAM does nothing for it but take away available RAM.

Regarding Mac vs. Windows ownership -- please, Apple fanbois, don't be daft and pretend you are saving money. Linux cost: $0 since 2005 (including hardware, I only replace hardware if it fails since linux has nice low system requirements.) Windows cost: Don't be silly and pretend anyone would downgrade from XP to Vista, and also, as some have said, Windows does not have the forced upgrades by dropping support for older versions so quickly. OSX: As a few have said, you would have to replace your Mac at least once since 2005 to be running a current OS, and possibly twice.

This here is the big problem I've seen with Macs, and actually follows a nice curve...OS7 supported systems up to about 10 years old (basically all the Macs that you could shove enough RAM into). OS9, about 8 or 9 years old. By OSX 10.0 it was down to about 6 or 7 years old. Then 5 or 6 years old. 10.4 or so, 4 or 5 years old, 10.7 or so, 3 or 4 years old, now 2 or 3 years old. You see where this is going, if it kept going within a few years OSX would only support currently shipping hardware. If Jobs were still around, i feel like he'd possibly even favor that... I don't know now.

"I'm not much of a gamer but the approach they seem to be taking looks like trouble from a user experience standpoint. One of the big advantages of the consoles seem to be since they are all the same the games will work the same way on all of them (or they should). "

Agreed, these are good points. The downside of the console approach, though, is you have games within a year of a new console being released that already max out the console hardware, then after that you have PC ports where the console port has to strip out loads of detail to run on the (by then already out of date) video hardware. If you want more quality, you're out of luck, it's going to be 4 or 5 more years until the next console comes out. With the Steam approach, the game will be able to adjust quality just like for a PC, and if you want to run the newest games at full quality you can buy a nice shiny new Steam box. I'm concerned in the long term, though, will a time come when the oldest low-spec Steam boxes can't run certain software at all, and how do you convey that? Will they say "You need level 9 video and level 6 CPU to run this?" or will it just vaguely be "some steam boxes won't run this"?

"Having such a varied selection of hardware seems to invite similar troubles that impact PC gaming on the Steambox platform as well, driver quality, compatibility with Linux (as a Linux desktop user for more than 15 years now I have plenty of first hand experience) etc....."

I'm sure no vendor will be daft enough to build a steam box with poorly supported hardware, and as gaming systems they won't be sticking some old S3 Unichrome or something in there. Compatibility with Linux is not an issue, steam is running on Linux, and now that Valve is shipping a supported Linux distro they will make damn sure the Steam stuff all works on it.

IMHO

Was Apple's stock overvalued? Most definitely. Is the new CEO a disaster? Well, no, but he does not have Steve Jobs' reality distortion field either, so I don't expect Apple to just keep flying high forever -- I also don't expect it to crash and burn though.

Re: the Quicktake 150. Yes. A $700 digital camera, 640x480, and took photos in proprietary format (they had to be *converted* to JPEG or TIFF after transfer to the computer.) Oh, and the transfer was by serial cable so it took a while (although, at the time, there was not USB so this is fairly unavoidable.) (The 100 only had Mac cable and software, the 150 also had PC-compatible serial cable and software for WIndows 3.1) The big mistake was the technology wasn't there yet, and Apple overestimated the market for a high cost, low-resolution camera. I don't like saying "Apple was just ahead of it's time" because usually it's simply Apple fanboi'ism and not true. But in this case it's true; if Dell or HP had tried to come out with an inexpensive digital camera, they would have ended up with a $500+ 640x480 camera too.

Yup terrible

Yup they are terrible. I've used one at one store that worked right and it was nice. The other times I've tried to use it there, or anywhere else, it always has enough problems to not make it worth it.

I don't think so..

I don't think it'll be "which OS do you want to use?" it'll be, HTC would have a HTC model number 1270 and a 1270W for instance. Otherwise, Microsoft would want a license fee paid on 100% of the phones even if it's not used, like they do on PCs.

UTF-8 and internationalization

Well, UTF-32 (4 byte unicode) does accomodate all characters in a flat space (it even has a "user defined" space de facto split up so you can have like Klingon and Lord of the Rings fonts installed with their proper character codes. Yes indeed.

Here's the "meat" of UTF-8... wikipedia has a nice table which I cannot paste here, but the short of it is UTF-8 is 1 to 6 bytes, but the longest lengths are for characters "at the end" of the unicode code space, in practice most characters are 1-3 bytes. Unicode will encode some characters that are a character with an extra mark or two on it as a 2-byte character and one or more 2- byte modifier characters, which will be encoded in 3 bytes by UTF-8. byte 1 is 0xxxxxxx for a 7-bit character and always starts with 11xxxxxx for a multi-byte character. (It is 110xxxxx to indicate a 2-byte character through 1111110x for a 6-byte character. These lengths encode 7, 11, 16, 21, 26, and 31 bits of a 32-bit Unicode character. extra bytes are all 10xxxxxx.

That said *shrug*, as a programmer I find Android and Linux both have plenty good internationalization APIs available, and I avail of them so I don't have to worry about the details.

450mhz

450mhz is certainly suitable for LTE. This band was used years ago for NMT analog phone standard... those companies who held on to licenses (especially in eastern europe) basically laughed all the way to the bank as they found CDMA and EVDO ran just fine in the 450mhz band.

They found GSM unsuitable because a) It was already technologically obsolete and b) the 22km distance limit is a big problem at 450mhz where a site can otherwise go much much farther.

They found UMTS unsuitable because a) early on when Qualcomm pushed CDMA+EVDO, UMTS was not even in commercial deployment yet. b) The allocations were weird, although the full NMT band is 450-470mhz, the carriers would get weird allocations... they might have 10 or 15mhz, but not necessarily contiguous, so some found they could not run even a single 2x5mhz UMTS channel, whereas 2x1.25mhz CDMA and 2x1.25mhz EVDO channels fit better. LTE supports 2x1.4mhz for similar situations.

All kinds of cheats

"Its not really cheating though, as technically the phone CAN run at that speed, they arnt falsifying data, just being a bit dishonest about how long the device would last at that speed."

Oh it's absolutely falsifying data and cheating. If the device will never *ordinarily* run at a speed, it is flat out cheating to make it run at this higher speed only when running certain benchmarks.

That said, NVidia & ATI both got caught making illegal optimizations in OpenGL and D3D benchmarks (in the past, they know they'd be caught now), you could take some 3D game or app, rename it "foobenchmark2000.exe" (or whatever), and suddenly your game would get like 40% better FPS but look like crap (most of the illegal optimizations were turning quality options off while lying to the user and app and claiming they are turned on. A few cheats were odder, like recognizing a specific 3D sub-benchmark and just pulling a known set of triangles rather than doing proper visibility tests and hidden triangle removal.

It's been practically an art among supercomputer vendors to try to make their machine as fast as possible on benchmarks, within the constraints of the supercomputer benchmarks. The rules are stricter and stricter now, but in the 1990s and 1980s? Weird compiler optimization flags, weird setups that could even be re-tuned for each benchmark (especially on cluster systems, tuning settings so one benchmark would run great while the next may run terribly, rather than a "compromise" setting that runs all of them pretty well.) Custom systems that closely resembled a shipping system (other than just happening to run benchmarks faster....) but a customer couldn't actually buy for any price.

I could go on and on but I won't.

About burn rate

"At first sight the stock hit would seem quite unfair, as petrol-fuelled cars routinely burn following accidents"

I wouldn't say petrol-fuelled cars *routinely* burn, at least here in the US it's pretty uncommon to have cars, even after a serious accident, just decide to light up.

I was going to say it seems the Tesla's are burning quite a bit considering how few have shipped. But I googled it, a quote from the globe and mail:

"Given that Tesla’s Model S and the discontinued Roadster have been driven a combined 113 million miles and that this was the first battery fire, the company’s rate of catching fire was still only one-tenth the frequency of conventional car fires, Wedbush Securities analyst Craig Irwin said. "

Umm, I guess this analyst will ignore the other Tesla fire a few years ago (due to an improperly routed electrical cable -- 12 volt, though, not part of the drive train.) If this statement is otherwise accurate, it'd still make it's burn rate 1/5th of conventional cars.

sell them straight away?

"Would they be allowed to sell them straight away? I know they can seize and sell proceeds of crime, but wouldn't they have to hold them until a court convicts Ulbricht before they can be disposed of?"

Depends on the jurisdiction. Some dirty police departments (mainly in Texas and Florida...) have used and probably still do use trumped up drug charges as a fund raiser, basically to steal people's property. They'll pull someone over, seize the car and throw their ass in jail. Then the victim has their trial. Oh, they were found "not guilty"? Whoops we already auctioned the car off sorry about that! These departments usually then claim the law as written doesn't require them to refund anything, and once they are dragged into court end up paying what they auctioned the car for rather than anything resembling replacement value -- astoundingly, the court usually doesn't even require the police department involved to make the victim whole! And then they wonder why the locals are not ever so helpful towards the local police department...

Maryland is not Texas so I assume they'll hold onto his stuff during trial. I really don't know how it works with currencies, though. Are they obligated to hold onto the bitcoins throughout the trial? Or can they exchange them all for dollars and hold dollars in escrow? It's more of an issue than normal, since bitcoin exchange rate is pretty volatile, and they are after all cashing in BTC30,000-40,000 all at once if they exchange them.

100% true

This is 100% true, I read about it at the time. The then-CEO of Qwest was the ONLY telco head to tell the NSA "come back when you have a warrant". He pointed out that the NSAs requests were illegal and unconstitutional, and Qwest did not respond to illegal methods of requesting information. A while later, he sold some stock. A while after that, the feds dropped a large fiber optics contract that had already been awarded to Qwest, and gave it to somebody else (I think AT&T). They then tossed the CEO's ass in jail on the claim that he somehow knew ahead of time that the feds would unilaterally drop this contract and therefore was insider trading. At trial, his defense was basically nothing, as he was prohibited from bringing up any of this in trial (the usual federal claim that even information already published in the New York Times is classified and cannot be brought up in trial).

Hardware problems and upgraders.

Regarding people regarding this as a "hardware problem", they might as well. Windows 7 (let alone 8) require so much more resources than XP, that they can either a) spend money on more RAM and possibly other upgrades, on a system that is approaching retirement age anyway or b) not do that and realize it'll be replaced soon. (Partially, upgrade cycles are simply unncecesary, but realistically the systems will start to become less reliable as fans fail and so on.)

Regarding: "Where did all the upgraders go?"

I've seen several big causes of them evaporating:

1) The same people that balk at Ubuntu or whatever being too different, see Windows 7 and especially Windows 8 and also find them too different. They are rather irrational and find ***ANY*** change compared to bone stock XP to be some huge deal.

2) They find out the REAL choice is buy a new computer, put Ubuntu (or something) on the existing one, or keep it as is -- these are not business users worried about a hardware upgrade lifecycle. But, tthey have a laptop or whatever where it will not meet 7's requirements, and is not upgradeable to meet the requirements either. I've upgraded 3 of these cases to Ubuntu (with Unity turned the hell off, replaced with gnome classic), after their XP install got totally pwned (and no reinstallation CD or partition of course). They could not be happier.

3) Even worse, people that were interested in getting a new system with 7, then see the systems now have Windows 8... at which point, they plan to NEVER upgrade. Yes, people would rather use a 10+ year old PC than Windows 8.

How stupid does the NSA think we are?

How stupid does the NSA think we are? They keep lying, they actually are naive enough to think the media will lie and just parrot what they say, whether than looking at the documents that have been presented to them telling what really is happening. The NSA has been performing illegal and unconstitutional wiretapping programs for over 10 years, and even when directly questioned about it a) Lied and said it was legal. b) When confronted with the FISA court report where *EVEN FISA* said it was illegal, they said "yes it is" and lied. c) When then told "this decision clearly says it's illegal", claimed they stopped. d) Profit? Then e) When confronted with info saying THEY DID NOT STOP, they then went back to step a, lie and claim it is all legal.

Just how stupid do they think the public is? I just hope our effective one-party system doesn't get distracted from putting the NSA on a tight leash and dismantling the unconstitutional programs.

Losing out on best talent.

"2) If my experiences are anything to go by, there's no way on Gods green earth anyone who could remotely be described as a hacker would be employable in a corporate environment. Certainly not the ones I know who would fail the piss test."

I wouldn't work anywhere that wanted a piss test. This type of rigid corporate environment are the ones who lose out on the best talent.

But, anyway, I can certainly see hiring hackers for security positions, they will know the insides and outs of various systems better than someone who read about them in a book, will know the tactics hackers will likely try, and (if they hid their tracks) probably know the ways to tell someone is hiding their tracks. I'd really want to 1) Make sure they are not hacking from work. 2) Make sure they will not be leaking out info from the company. (I think quite a few hackers hack recreationally rather than for gain, so #2 is not as big a worry as one would at first think.)

Glad Google's motion failed.

I don't think Google should lose the whole case necessarily (automatic scanning of E-Mail to get better targeted ads, given that I'm using a free service that will have ads? I don't mind at all). But the blanket argument "users of 3rd party services have no expectation of privacy" is nonsense*, it depends on the nature of the 3rd party service.

*With the NSA's illegal actions it's probably true as a practical matter that 3rd party services have no privacy, but I still expect companies to properly disclose how they will violate privacy if they are going to, which Google does. And I hope a huge wave of lawsuits sweeps over the NSA for their illegal actions, hopefully with jail time involved.

Niice tech demo with dubious claims

This is a nice tech demo but makes dubious claims. So, this allowed an 18% increase in capacity how exactly? Do they simply mean they added 18% more total spectrum by using 2.3ghz spectrum? Or do they claim they were doing something to make the LTE use more efficient. If so, it seems any technique for improving LTE capacity would work on licensed bands too, also yielding an 18% improvement.

"It would be better if the radios could decide between themselves what band to use, but that presents technical problems which may prove insurmountable. "

It is insurmountable. It's "hidden node problem" writ large -- little short-range transceivers with crappy little antennas cannot pick up weak TV channels, will therefore decide the channel is clear and blast right over the legitimate user of the channel. Microsoft tried -- twice -- to demonstrate this would work fine, they blasted over the channel both times, and both times claimed it was software problems (which made me chuckle -- Microsoft writing buggy software? No kidding) rather than admitting the much more likely explanation that the antenna was not sensitive enough to assess the channel so it didn't work. After the second attempt they seem to have ditched it.

Microsoft mail unreliable. Film at 11

Microsoft's E-Mail is unreliable. Film at 11.

But seriously, on the one hand, I think these services provided a very important service, the spammers were absolutely out of control. Collateral damage? Don't use an ISP or hosting provider that tolerates spammer. I feel for those who have some overzealous local ISP arbitrarily blacklist you.

On the other hand, I personally use NO blacklists, getting all spam helps my Bayesian filter train better so it can effectively block the spam (as opposed to only training off whatever spam makes it past a blacklist.) The blacklist now is not enough, one must use a Bayesian filter anyway to effectively block enough spam; so personally, I decided to ditch the blacklist, and I think if I ran an ISP I'd also ditch the blocklist and just let the spam filter crunch a bit extra.

Oh on topic for the article -- I'm glad this kid got arrested and hope he gets the book thrown at him. By all appearances, he was working for hire for greasy greasy spammers. Spammers and those who help them can piss right off.

Well...

Well, in counterpoint, I don't get the warm fuzzies from having to dig up a physical CD, shove it into the player, and hope it works. My current portable has no CD drive (second battery instead), because I found portable CD/DVD drives to be FAR too unreliable to actually expect to be able to put a disk into it and expect it to work (unlike desktop drives which are reasonably reliable in general.) I have no issue ripping a stack of CDs -- it's fast -- but have zero interest in the CDs afterwards. I can share my MP3s a hell of a lot easier than sharing a CD, then hoping it comes back, too.

I won't belittle anyone for liking to keep the phyiscal artifacts around, but I'm simply not one of them and it sounds like the writer's son isn't either.

Smug mode enabled

"The problem is in building coverage. Higher frequencies used for 3 and 4G do not propagate well through walls and you can have large numbers of punters gathered in indoor environments. So"

Not to rub it in, but my voice and 3G are at 800mhz and 4G LTE is at 700mhz here in the US. *smug mode enabled*

Makes sense.

I mean, the whole "real Windows" "crappy fake ARM Windows" and "Windows phone" is a unholy mess, but there's no reason they can't have one app store, and it shows only compatible apps on your device.

Android does this, you can mark what size screen your app needs, Android version minimum, if it is making naughty use of NDK and is therefore only ARM, MIPS, or Intel-specific rather than portable, and so on, and your app just doesn't show up on a device if it's incompatible. Of course people (generally who don't know better) complain about "fragmentation" in the Android market because of this variety, ignoring that games that don't support lower end models are just like GTA V not running on a old low end PC, and that it's easy to make normal apps run on "everything" (my apps for instance are just marked Android 2.2+, no special requirements whatsoever.)

Of course not 5G

Of course, this is not 5G. The "G"s are to follow cell phone standards, which Wifi and Bluetooth are most assuredly not. I think one rude surprise these vendors will find is that wifi is very VERY **VERY** poor at sharing a channel. Cellular systems, the cell site keeps a tight reign on devices, coordinating channel access and so eliminating the hidden node problem. Wifi has options for this which are generally not used, so a wifi network with a few users will run great, but a wifi network with enough users will get huge amounts of collissions and retransmissions to the point of being absolutely useless under a load where a similar amount of spectrum running a cellular standard would not yet be breaking a sweat.