Posts by STrRedWolf

Badly mixing your franchises...

Someone had a hyperspace engine failure there. "Warp 9" and "photon torpedo" are Star *Trek* references, but the Pentagon's JEDI project is a Star *Wars* reference. Next thing we know people are going to argue that Starbucks shot the Darlek first.

Queue the red shirt vs storm trouper fight jokes in 3... 2... 1... (someone call the Doctor)

And badly sourced.

The report pointed to a CBS network affiliate... which isn't in Baltimore. It pulled the copy from the Baltimore CBS station, WJZ.

Yes, I've sent a correction notice in. I bet the Reg hacks are sleeping off their hangovers...

The question really is: Do you need something to recover a crashed laptop, a virus-loaded laptop, or do you want something to back up your laptop so you can recover easier (aka prevention)?

For a crashed (or crashing) laptop, there is only one solution: Spinrite at grc.com. This works wonders and is worth the $90. Don't be fooled by it's tiny (3.5" floppy) size -- it's written in assembler by GRC's sole owner, Steve Gibson. Spinrite also works on SSDs (using level 1, max level 2). Get it, slap it on a CD, boot into it, scan your drive. It'll take a while but it's worth the wait and price.

For a virus loaded laptop, pull a copy of the AVG Rescue CD, and boot into it. Scan your system. Then switch to MalwareBytes and let it clean up your system.

If you Windows install is completely hosed, grab a Knoppix CD and use it to dig through your laptop and copy your data to an external USB drive. This is Linux for the win.

For prevention, there's numerous ways including Carbonite or even setting up a Raspberry Pi with a large desktop HD (or even a USB based Drobo) and setting up a "Time Machine for Unix" scheme.

Why not just replace the last-end compression?

Mozilla forgot one other item as well. JPEGs are compressed in phases. The first few are to translate the RGB image to a different colorspace, something like YuYv. It then reduces the image down depending on configuration (remember, JPEGs loose information by design), and then finally hands it off to a general data compression codec.

That codec? Arithmetic.

No, it's not LZW (aka XZip), not BZIP, not even GZIP (PKWare's Deflate) or LZ77 (GIF), hell it's not even Huffman! It's plain arithmetic encoding, and anyone who knows their compression codecs knows plain old' arithmetic encoding SUCKS.

To demonstrate that it sucks, the folks behind StuffIt! (Mac compression tool) put in a custom JPEG compressor, which took the JPEG, undid the arithmetic encoding, and recompressed it with Deflate. When it was uncompressed, it just un-Deflated it, re-arithmetic encoded, and passed it off as the original JPEG. It got like 10-15% savings.

Haven't been monitoring things, have we?

Phoronix published results of the Flash Friendly File System (aka F2FS) that's bundled in the Linux 3.8 kernel. Compared on SSD, SD cards, and even USB flash drives against EXT3, EXT4, XFS, and even BTRFS... F2FS improved performance in most cases. In some cases it even beat exFAT and NTFS.

I'm waiting for it to stabilize on 3.9 though.

If this goes through, this means:

Pirate Bay, bullet-proof hosting services, and even Mega will land mirrors on their networks.

Internet connectivity gets upgraded ASAP.

The media companies start bribing heavily enough to cause military action.

A&B get nuked.

World War 3.

I'd move to Germany but they're even worse than the US.

Okay, what's Vulture Far East? Tokyo?

And what about Vulture North, since the home office (nest?) is in the UK?

Great, another Trojan horse. And why haven't these been yanked off the store?

PA Touchscreen was not calibrated.

Hearing reports that the touchscreen on the machine wasn't calibrated in PA. The Ohio problem, though, if it's a paperwork/audit issue, needs an audit.

Actually, Apple did talk to Oracle earlier and decided to get out of the biz of doing their own Java builds. Oracle will take care of that now... and considering what Oracle's done to patch Java (finally)...

Don't forget the DIY stuff.

Did someone forget that VDMK also works in any VMWare product (including the free Server, which you can slap on any Linux box) and Oracle's VirtualBox?

Would be nice if it matched Dropbox's range of OSen.

Skydrive: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android (by third party)

Dropbox: Windows, Mac, *LINUX*, iOS, Android, and many third party access.

Yeah, wake me when Skydrive hits the penguins.

Agree with Patrick on @elreg being human

(First time commentard, please be brutal. :D )

I was about to suggest that -- let @theregister and @regsecurity be RSS feed stuff, and @elreg be human (with some updates on various projects going on). Monitoring @theregister for feedback will be helpful in case of problems (like hacks to Vulture Central hardware or notices of specials at nearby pubs).