* Posts by Tom 38

4341 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2009

PM writes ISPs' web filter ads for them - and it must say 'default on'

Tom 38

Re: Cameron's looking pretty stupid on this one. But he wants all Britains to feel like this->

a lube-greased flume

Exactly the stuff that I'm going to need to register for now.

Except that I'm not going to. Fuck them. I'm sticking all my internet traffic through a fat pipe to a dodgy ISP in Amsterdam.

Apple needs help: iWatch, 'Retina' iPad mini delayed until 2014?

Tom 38

@Homer 1

You make good points - however, if I think back to pre-iphone days, I didn't want a fucking SMARTPHONE, those things are shite, dire battery life, so slow and yet still so expensive to use the internet, apps are launched by using a stylus to navigate through WFW-style folders, and have ridiculous scroll bars on the side of its "windows".

I was much happier back then with a "really cool" clamshell phone, made me feel like Kirk. It had a 3 line alphanumeric screen and you could make calls on it.

The point is, sometimes things change. I don't even currently wear any watch, but a year before I bought an iphone, I didn't even use a smartphone.

Linux 3.11 to be known as 'Linux for Workgroups'

Tom 38
FAIL

Re: @Greg J Preece

About time AMD and Nvidia put some leg work into getting their cards working.

What precise features are you missing from nvidia drivers, apart from the ability to read their source code?

More to the point, what features have you missed from nvidia drivers for the past 5 years, during which time every single nvidia graphics card going back to the geforce 2 has been fully supported on linux, BSD and solaris.

Screw it, says NSA leaker Snowden: I'm applying for asylum in Russia

Tom 38

Re: USA to world

Hello America, this is China, we're calling in the loans.

STEVE BALLMER KILLS WINDOWS

Tom 38

Re: Microsoft FAIL

Not to mention, today's Linux is every bit as easy to use as Windows or Mac, and it doesn't pretend to be a smartphone when you really want a desktop.

Not used Unity then?

Tom 38

Re: Mr Mainwaring

Don't tell him your name, Pike!

Oh please, PLEASE bring back Xbox One's hated DRM - say Xbox loyalists

Tom 38

Re: I agree wholeheartedly - used cars

Have you seen the second hand price for a genuine, low mileage release date car?

Please get a clue, when the new cars can't be sold as new, they get 10 miles put on the clock for 'delivery' and are sold as second hand through partner garages for ~60% of price. This is for actual new cars, not really 2nd hand games.

Dev bakes actual, edible raspberry pie with Raspberry Pi

Tom 38

I don't really see the point of this

Most things that need to be microwaved for distinct periods need something happening at the end of those periods, something the microwave can't do itself - eg stir, add water etc, so you need to be involved throughout anyway

From the video, it looked like the multi part timing didn't even work anyway, he programmed in 180 seconds, it stopped after 158.

Sysadmins: Everything they told you about backup WAS A LIE

Tom 38
FAIL

Re: Completely agree...

You cannot be serious! This application/system is a major point of failure, and by your own admission, if this box fails you have no hardware or software which can run this application!

Even though you are religiously backing up both the OS and the application, a single hardware failure could leave this system broken until you can urgently migrate it to a different host. If you can't restore a back up, it isn't a back up.

Feds BANNED from DEF CON by founder (who is Obama's cyber-expert)

Tom 38

Feds don't have super rights to enter private premises without a warrant. They can simply be asked to leave, and unless they have a warrant, they will have to obey.

Caterpillar B15: The Android smartphone for the building site

Tom 38

Re: But did you damage

Stick decent tires on any car and snow is not a problem. The French police in the Alps use Fiat Pandas with snow tires.

BT: Ofcom's planned wholesale price cap? Just a smidge too tight

Tom 38

Re: Good joke

There used to be, they all went bust, apart from NTL who went super bust then somehow managed to buy everyone else anyway.

You can never "choose" from cable companies though, no cable company ever puts their kit in a street already with cable. I guess you want to have another layer, with a wholesale cable provisioning company and a bunch of resellers? Doesn't seem that useful tbh.

How con men snatched £100,000+ in iPads and other kit from IT disties

Tom 38
FAIL

How do you figure? The crooks in this case would be selling pristine ipads, still shrink wrapped and ready for activation. Even if the buyer is super paranoid and insists that the boxes be opened and the ipad turned on before handing over money would see a perfect, brand new ipad. When turned on, the ipad would show the docking/activation logo, just like a genuine, unstolen ipad.

The mug then hands over his money, and the seller is gone. Only when the mug gets home and tries to activate his ipad does he get told "actually, this is a stolen ipad, and we aren't going to let you use it".

The Three Amigos offer sanctuary to cornered NSA leaker Snowden

Tom 38
Joke

Re: Truly a man without a country ...

"Third rate Commit hell"

Is that the limit of your intellect? Everyone who "offers asylum" is "third rate commie hell"?

Commit hell is actually what you get when your repo is out of date when you commit, and then when you do pull updates, you find you have retard colleague Bob's ridiculous changes to merge your own changes back into.

Commie Commit Hell is when you have to resolve the conflicts in a group meeting with Bob, your boss, your bosses boss, and three people who don't know the language, the project, or even your name, but have very strong views on "correct" code.

Tom 38
WTF?

Re: Martin Short cousin

Martin Short's (of 3 Amigo's fame) first cousin is Clare Short.

Jesus Fucking Christ, this is actually true!

Tom 38

Re: Three Amigos

Forget Manning, how about the illegal treatment of prisoners of war. The US found time after 9/11 to pass laws allowing them to do whatever the fuck they want to anyone in the name of counter terrorism, but they can't find time in the 12 years to charge them, or even clarify if they are enemy combatants (and therefore now PoWs) or not.

The land that gave us the bill of rights is denying to it's prisoners the human rights that even the Nazis allowed their PoWs. The degree of civilisation in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.

Radar gremlins GROUND FLIGHTS across southern Blighty

Tom 38

Re: Good

The Evening Standard has had a multitude of articles on Heathrow expansion.

A couple of weeks ago it was a scare piece, saying how awful everyone's life is in West London due to all the flights, aircraft noise and so on, and how a Heathrow expansion would be a disaster.

Literally two days later, the local politicos in West London went apeshit at the idea of BoJo Island, which would DESTROY their local boroughs and lead to the collapse of civilisation in Hillingdon.

Seven snazzy smartphones for seven sorts of shoppers

Tom 38
FAIL

Who said it was a value phone? From TFA:

I should make it clear: this round-up only concerns itself with top-end devices

Brits: Give us £1m and we'll build a crack ALIEN-HUNTING TEAM

Tom 38
Alien

For some reason, probably my "country" upbringing, the phrase "Alien Hunting" is conjuring an image of fat men with red faces and blazers on horses, drinking whiskey and shouting "Tallyho!" as they storm over fences, preceded by a couple of hundred squawking beagles, which sound an awful lot like seals when you get a lot of them together.

All this while, Roger the Alien is four fields away, disguised as an old lady.

Microsoft offloads heap of critical fixes in 'ugly' Patch Tuesday

Tom 38

Re: Surprise!

One truth, software is never perfect!

Well, there's Z. You'd hope that someone writing a nuclear power plant's systems isn't just firing up vim and going "Aha, what we going to write today!".

US Navy coughs $34.5m for hyper-kill railgun that DOESN'T self-destruct

Tom 38
Alert

Re: Now there is

Newton might have something to say... Throw a magnetic rock (whatever that is) out of a railgun in orbit and you just changed the orbit of the railgun.

Split rock in half. Fire one half towards the target, fire the other half in the opposite direction. Where is the railgun now? Action, reaction.

US states: Google making ad money on illegal YouTube vids

Tom 38
Facepalm

Re: What they SHOULD be doing??

Youtube gets something ridiculous like 100 hours of footage a minute uploaded. The staff required to check this footage for legality would be mind blowing.

Google's profits are mind-blowing. It's much easier to say "it's too expensive!", coin it in and pay off whomever comes to investigate.

Why is it when a kid from up north makes a website with dodgy user contributed links to content that has ads it is piracy, but when google do it it is safe harbour?

Tom 38
Headmaster

Re: Ads for illegal pharmacies?

Google already got fined heftily for doing this;

Pedant-o-clock: No they didn't. They paid a half a billion dollars in bribe money to make people stop investigating.

'Weev' appeals AT&T iPad hack conviction

Tom 38

Re: Insecure server makes it OK?

Not random, sequential IDs.

Google 'disappoints' US congressman over Glass privacy controls

Tom 38

Re: Scary

3. It is harder to use for surreptitious recording, since a stock phone needs to be placed in line of sight, which is not necessarily the optimal position for common personal usage;

What a load of bollocks. For you to record someone with google glasses, first off, you'll be wearing google glasses and looking right at them. Secondly, you then need to say "glasses, record". Probably twice.

If you wanted to surreptitiously record with a mobile, you simply hold it in your hands, entire phone hidden apart from the lens, and angle it towards the subject. No voice command, no facing the subject, no fuck off obvious glasses.

However, and this is the main issue, if you wanted to record really surreptitiously, you would use any one of hundreds of covert cameras, button hole cameras, watch cameras, pen cameras, even cameras in glasses that look like real glasses. All of which are legal, all of which have been readily available for many years without requiring over-the-top-arsehole-driven legislation to save society.

Not being able to perceive nuance in real life situations is the mark of a basement-dwelling nerd. So, take your self-involve, anti-social, Aspergers view of the world elsewhere.

Dear me, try knocking yourself out of your paedo-terrorist daily mail fantasy for a moment and read the drivel you are spouting.

Crimelords: Stolen credit cards... keep 'em. It's all about banking logins now

Tom 38
Headmaster

Re: Lazy users,Lazy politicians

90% of ALL cyber crime could be eradicated by using commercial-grade OS - ie FREE open-source UX systems. That is a fact that has NOTHING to do with with the lower use of UX but is due to the INHERENT security in UX.

Open source user experience?

Lazy users can't be bothered…

…to put the "NI" in "UNIX"?

The future of cinema and TV: It’s game over for the hi-res hype

Tom 38

Re: Good article, but does the punter care?

Apple products are pants when it comes to what subset of the h264 standard they support.

Nonsense, they are in fact extremely clear about what H264 profiles each device supports. I've never seen one claim support for a feature that it doesn't support. What it doesn't do...

If you are interested in any other video encoding or different container formats then you might as well forget about it.

…is support arbitrary containers that they don't care about. You won't find good (any) mkv support on an ipad, but re-mux to mp4 and it will work perfectly.

If you care about what a particular device supports, the tech spec page lists it, eg the ipad mini supports "H.264 video up to 1080p, 30 frames per second, High Profile level 4.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats;"

Ex-inmate at Chinese prison: We made airline headsets

Tom 38

If instead of paying £35k per year per convict to keep them locked up, we offered them the choice of working on selected infrastructure projects for £20k a year, then they've got a job (and probably a job that otherwise wouldn't exist, or would cost a lot more), they're picking up a skill, paying tax, and nationally we get the benefit of the infrastructure, as well as saving £15 k per head.

Would we actually save 15k per head? Have you taken into account each lag on £20k/year is taking the £35k/year job of someone who hasn't broken the law.

The only jobs you can reliably in mass sell prison labour for are manual labour jobs, building and so forth. People who currently work in those sectors probably do so because they have been unable to get jobs working with their minds¹, and so there are no alternative jobs for them - the prisons have taken them all.

This could lead these former hard working, tax paying, law abiding citizens in to poverty. What comes after poverty? Crime. Ah well, at least we're keeping the prison population up, otherwise we wouldn't be able to build all them lovely infrastructure projects on the cheap for the rich white man.

¹ Massive generalisation.

PlayStation 4 is FreeBSD inside

Tom 38

Re: Some people need a life

Stuff that ran on a BSD box 10 years ago stands a VERY good chance of running on a BSD box today (after a recompile, granted)

In fact, most FreeBSD 1.0 static binaries will still run on FreeBSD 10-CURRENT, as long as you flick some sysctls to allow slightly old behaviour!

One of the main distinctions I like is that all the BSDs consist of an operating system plus third party packages, where as all Linux distros I've come across consist of a set of packages. So, why the hell does that matter?

In BSD, the OS lives in / and /usr, and your third party software all lives in /usr/local. To configure the OS, you change text files in /etc, to configure 3rd party software, it's text files in /usr/local/etc. All the source code for the OS lives in /usr/src, and you can update and rebuild the entire OS with three commands.

Another massive benefit is the kernel. The Linux kernel has literally thousands of options. In fact, even picking a linux kernel has masses of options, what with all the different patchsets. Unless making a very particular kernel, like ARM or a memory restricted platform, with BSD you usually just run stock GENERIC.

Next up, how BSD does development - I'm concentrating on FreeBSD here, as I know that development cycle best. BSD has an in-development branch called CURRENT. New features and bug fixes go into CURRENT, and once they've bedded down in CURRENT, the bug fixes and some of the features are merged back to release engineering branches of the previous releases, which eventually become the next point release. Therefore you can track the RELENG branch, and get all the bug fixes and newly supported hardware.

I used to run Linux on a few boxes, since BSD lacked support for most TV tuners. Then a clever Danish chappy spent a weekend writing a driver that allows BSD to run Linux usb device drivers in userspace on FreeBSD, using FreeBSD's excellent Linux syscall mapping. This in fact works even better than on Linux, where when a driver or device crashed, there was a good chance you need to reboot the machine. With BSD running the driver in an unprivileged userspace process, resetting the device just requires restarting the process.

Our week with Soylent: Don't chuck out your vintage food quite yet

Tom 38

Re: Organic?

What is all this fascination with peanut butter, one of the most fatty and energy dense foodstuffs you can lay your hands on. Of all the foodstuffs you could be munching on, peanut butter is probably about the worst.

I had crunchy peanut butter a couple of years ago, and haven't bought peanut butter since.

Glasgow subway's new smart tickets aren't, moan passengers

Tom 38

Re: Names

'Spiral In to Hell Line' is more accurate.

Tom 38

Re: Too cheap

In London, it still costs £4.50 (WTF!?!) cash or £2.10 (still not good) on an Oyster for a journey on zone one…

The price of a cash fare is deliberate, it is to maximise the revenue from tourists and visitors to London without affecting the residents.

…a journey on zone one, even if that's from Leicester Square to Covent Garden

That one stop route keeps TFL in gravy.

Apple: If you find us guilty in ebook price-fix trial, EVERYONE suffers

Tom 38

Re: Amazon cornered the market all right...

Amazon cornered the ebook market by selling books on the best sellers list at a loss, cross subsidising from other parts of the business.

Best sellers wholesale at $11 a title, Amazon sell them for $9.99, Apple wanted to sell them for $12.99 and not be undercut by anyone.

Nominet sacks freshly-hired exec implicated in hospital 'cover-up' scandal

Tom 38
Headmaster

Re: Tried...

Roll: A cylinder formed by winding flexible material around a tube or by turning it over and over on itself.

Rôle The function assumed or part played by a person or thing in a particular situation.

If I see one more "roll account" I may scream.

India's outsourcers fume over new US immigration bill

Tom 38

Re: Yes but

You assume there are $75 billion worth of latent IT talent in the US ($15bn in taxes at an average rate of 20%, actual rate is irrelevant) to replace these outsourcers.

Presumably you are also upset that outsourcers/near-shoring cost less than hiring American workers, so you are must also be happy with American industry being less efficient if the practise was removed.

Thousands of fingered crims, informants spaffed in web security COCK-UP

Tom 38

Re: Hire peanuts, paid monkeys

I bet it happened like this:

They hired a developer for X weeks

He set up SSL, with self signed certs, intending to replace with signed certs laters.

Management refused to spring for real cert.

Developer leaves

SSL site forgotten about

...

Profit

When Apple needs speed and security in Mac OS X, it turns to Microsoft

Tom 38

Hey Maharg, didn't know you worked here too!

Julian Assange: I'm quite happy to sleep on Ecuador's sofa FOREVER

Tom 38

Re: Bah

What worries me more is the evident level of corruption and manipulation of our own governments. That is frightening.

Evidence for your "evident corruption and manipulation"? Thought so.

UK telcos chuck another £1m at online child abuse watchdog

Tom 38

The one positive thing that is coming out of this is that the IWF will no longer be allowed to silently block content any more. If a resource is blocked, your ISP should now insert an error page indicating the IWF have restricted the content, instead of just giving a 404.

PS: I have Blind Faith on my spotify playlists, does this make me a paedo? When I play the album, some geezer in Sweden sends a picture banned by IWF (on wikipedia) to my phone.

Latest NASA ASTRONAUT class is HALF FEMALE

Tom 38

There should be more women in space. Since the average woman weigh significantly less than the average man, it makes much more logical sense to send a female astronaut than a male, unless there are tasks that physically a fit woman cannot do. They will also use less food and oxygen than your typical "Right Stuff" candidate.

STEVE JOBS hits back at ebook ruckus FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

Tom 38

Re: Difficult enough to believe Apple on any legal claim!

In any case, these days can't people self-publish ebooks, and take all the wholesale price, assuming they can sort out things like editing for themselves?

Yes, they can, however..

The biggest market for ebooks is Amazon, and unless you are a publishing house or best selling author, self publishing on Amazon means that Amazon can set your price and determine your cut. If Amazon decide to give your book away for free - and they can - then you get nothing.

This isn't necessarily a problem, you can sell your books wherever you like, however .... Amazon are slowly destroying all other market places by systematically undercutting competitors on bestsellers - and only on bestsellers - using a cross-subsidy from their other departments in order to destroy competition. Is it cool to just have one market place, that entices you in with one hand and gouges you with the other?

Tom 38

Re: So

(*unless people think that the legal system is scared to go up against Big Business Amazon while simultaneously keen to go after Apple.)

Yes. Lots of people think this. DoJ was extremely happy with Amazon fucking over businesses and consumers left, right and centre. See this article, which came out when DoJ initiated this storm.

http://www.ilsr.org/dojs-lawsuit/

The authors of this report are no Apple fans, but they really dislike what Amazon were allowed to do.

Tom 38

Re: So

The point of having 'competition' isn't to provide money for uncompetitive competing companies, it is to provide better value for end users

In fact, it isn't. The purpose of competition is that it promotes healthy markets, where everyone from producer to distributor to consumer is getting a fair deal. Since Amazon launched the kindle, they have been massively manipulating the ebook market, using predatory pricing to pick up users and forcing the producers (authors) to bear the cost.

At the point the agency pricing model in around 2010, Amazon had 90% of the ebook market, and were buying bestsellers for around $12-14 and retailing them at $9.99, subsidizing the sales with profits from everything else Amazon does. The purpose of this undercutting was to drive B&N out of the ebook market, and seriously damage their book market. By offering predatory pricing only on the bestsellers, and only on their device, they were hooking the end user into a kindle world, with all your books coming from Amazon.

That's just the 'prime' books from major publishers. The smaller publishers have an even rawer deal with Amazon, Amazon tell them how much they get for a sale. If you've priced your book at $5, and Amazon decide to sell it for $1, you get a cut of that dollar, that's all.

Whilst all that was going on, consumers were getting a great deal on bestsellers. In fact, when iBooks launched - with the agency model - most people were distinctly unimpressed with Apple's prices. Apple refused to sell books for less than they paid for them, whilst Amazon was perfectly happy to do so.

The DoJ lawsuit against Apple simply confirms Amazon's book monopoly.

MPs demand UK rates revamp after Google's 'extraordinary tax mismatch'

Tom 38

Re: Slight EU problem

The trick is hiring "customer support staff" in the UK, who do everything that an account manager used to do apart from receiving the signed P.O., which goes to the 'sales' staff in Ireland, who do everything that accounts used to do.

When the papers say "the service industry rebounded this quarter", that's what they are talking about.

We want to put a KILL SWITCH into your PHONE, say Feds

Tom 38

First a kill switch in your phone

Then in your brain.

How long till TSA fit all foreigners with one on entry?

Jailed LulzSec hacker Cleary coughs to child porn images, will be freed soon

Tom 38

Re: The Asperger's Syndrome sufferer

The thing is, the story goes like this:

Hacker picked up for shenanigans (DDoS, botnets, dodgy friends).

Hacker's kit confiscated by plod.

Oh my, plod find such a small quantity of CP that it could fit on a novelty sized CD.

Hacker reputation ruined, already in jail for shenanigans, pleads guilty to CP in order to reduce eventual sentence and not be placed in gen pop.

I'm not saying in this case that Cleary was set up, just that each time a hacker gets double slammed with CP after they tried everything else, it just seems strange.

PS: I'm a hacker, although not like Mr Cleary, I write my own software and investigate my own hardware. I don't have any CP, and have no intention of getting any.

Probe into Autonomy allegations could take years - report

Tom 38

Re: "of high profile law firm Steptoe & Johnson"

For US readers, Steptoe & Son is the UK show Sanford & Son was based on.

Facebook, Microsoft beg Feds: Let us tell users what YOU asked for...

Tom 38

Re: Don't get too excited

So, it's a trade-off - higher taxes or more dead civilians...or making use of the resources that are sitting right there for the reading.

How long do you think people will continue to give their data to US companies if the US government treats it like it's own data store?

Asus FonePad: You may feel a bit of a spanner

Tom 38

If you go with a real 3G network like 3, they have considerably more 3G coverage than other providers. You can actually use it out and about, rather than providers like O2 or Vodafone, where 3G really does just drop out as soon as you leave the town.

Tom 38

This phone supports HSPA+, which is a 3G technology. I think in the US, you are told this is a 4G technology and pay more for it.

HSPA+ UL:5.76 Mbps/DL:21 Mbps

3G :

WCDMA :

850/900/1900/2100