* Posts by Ru

1818 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2007

DIY aerial drone monitors Wi-Fi, GSM networks

Ru
Headmaster

Durr

Max ceiling != working altitude. Do you always drive your car >100mph, and go everywhere on foot at a sprint?

There's an old arstechnica article (see here: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2002/08/warflying.ars but it looks like the old map content is dead) which did some simple warflying between 1500 and 2500 feet in a light aircraft, which I bet will be flying higher and faster than your average drone. That trip had no problems isolating SSIDs, though they weren't trying to do anything more clever like sniff 4-way handshakes and the like.

GE brings holographic storage back from the dead

Ru
Happy

Stone slabs, chisels.

Proven storage lifetime of the order of tens of thousands of years. Low capital investment, low ongoing costs. Reading and writing equipment has remained pretty much the same since its first release.

Write speeds and capacities are rather low of course, but you didn't specify those requirements in detail so I guess this'll do just fine.

Lightning strikes cloud: Amazon, MS downed

Ru
Meh

You seem to be confusing computer scientists with marketers

Newsflash sunshine, the people who understand the issues involving with running fault tolerant distributed systems are not the ones selling those systems to you.

Antimatter close to home

Ru

So, by this logic,

as asteroids have been found in space, we can extrapolate that space is acually SOLID ROCK.

Ru
Boffin

"big boom"

Conventional fission warheads aren't particularly hazardous in the event of an accident; triggering a nice neat fission reaction in a warhead is a very non-trivial exercise. Sure, you could accidentally detonate it, but the same problem exists with your unicorn-fart powered antimatter confinement device. Or were you thinking about launch accidents? If you've got the magical powers to make super conductors and generate antimatter willy-nilly, you can certainly make a nice catapult that can fling payloads into orbit fast enough that even in the event of problems they won't be falling back down.

Wouldn't a hafnium nuclear isomer based system require less magic than your proposal? Or hell, a plain old laser-triggered fusion warhead probably isn't that far away. Or you know, just a normal orion drive. Even rocket science isn't exactly rocket science, these days.

Apple, Walmart, and you: Making money in mobile

Ru
Meh

Oh you crazy techno-utopians.

"There's going to be a fundamental shift in what we think of as 'money' and 'ownership'."

This tired old line gets regurgitated again and again and again. It tries to gie the impression of being all forward looking and prepared for synergetic paradigm shifting (but no whalesong darling, that's terribly twen-cen) without actually containing any content at all.

Money cannot, will not change until we reach some sort of delightful post-scarcity civilisation in the distance future. What *people* think of as ownership will probably not change ever. What *companies* think of as ownership is already rather different. In the same way we now have unlimited* bandwidth, we can own* entire record catalogues. In due course, I expect to be able to listen* to it on my* various media devices.

But marketing aside, the world is changing without the assistance of smartphones. You may note that the current fundamental shift in thinking about money is going from thinking you still have any to realising you have nothing. At that point, 'ownership' tends to become 'foreclosure'.

Ru
Boffin

Careful there, chief.

Making consumer tat isn't the only game in town, remember. Grown-up software often attracts grown-up price points, too. It would be surprising to see it on a smartphone or tablet, though.

Google erects master API for linking web apps

Ru
Meh

"growth of alternative powerhouses"

Groupon? Twitter? Seriously?

You've failed to list a single powerhouse there. Much as Facebook might wish it otherwise, they are not a serious service provider now and there's no particular reason they should ever be. Apple is a much more serious threat, because they are so overwhelmingly rich and popular and are also pushing everything into the cloud; only it'll be a private apple cloud and third parties will be welcome in about ten years time when the various national monopoly comissions across the world finally grind into action.

Cisco warns over warranty discs of EVIL

Ru
Alert

"Malicious suppository"

Bloody hell. Should we be more worried that Cisco are supplting legitimate suppositories to their customers?

Nikon D5100 16.2Mp DSLR

Ru
Meh

Avoiding small-sensor lenses is daft

Though I'm a Canon user rather than Nikon, I've used several EF-S lenses and still own a 10-22 which for many years was one of the best rectilinear ltra-wide angle lenses on the market. It is currently worth about 400 quid more than I paid for it.

The higher quality EF-S lenses (the 17-55 springs to mind) are pretty good, but the people who demanded 'full fram or nothing!' would get something like a 17-40L instead which was bigger, heavier, much more expensive, slower and non-stabilised. But hey, one day you'll get a full frame, right?

Until you do, feel free to artificially limit your gear. Me, I'll be taking nice photos with my 'inferior' gear.

Police procurement deal means cops pay more

Ru
Headmaster

"A mandation is never a popular decision"

Quite so. I'd suggestion also that US grammatisation is also likely to be less than popular on this side of the pond. Studying at the school of Palin is best reserved for Tea Party service, hmm?

Unless of course it was lousy transcribation by the Reg, of course?

Mr Bean prangs £650k McLaren

Ru

Yes.

We eagerly await tales of battery failure followed by you crawling away from its burning wreckage.

Microsoft vs Google patent ding dong gets stuck on repeat

Ru
Meh

Only software?

Nortel made a lot of the hard stuff, too. This is a more general patent problem you're looking at here.

Ru
Meh

Think about how cartels work, for a moment.

Google wanted the patents to attack the cartel. If they'd joined the cartel, they wouldn't be able to attack apple or microsoft with them.

Defensive my arse. They could have signed up to reduce future licensing issues; a perfectly defensive strategy. Instead they want MAD, and suddenly find themselves without any weapons at all.

E-petitions site: Death wish FAIL

Ru

How about using Mantis or Bugzilla for Government?

I rather like that.

I forsee a whole lot of WONTFIX in your future though.

Microsoft skewers Google's anti-Android conspiracy claim

Ru
Meh

"that's the way these evil companies work."

Actually, I'd go as far as to suggest that Microsoft, Oracle and Apple have all made innovative products at one point or another, and (at with the possible exception of Oracle, whose products and history I know very little about) some of those products have demonstrably been to the benefit of consumers.

The fact that they are also keen monopolists and vicious capitalists is tangential. They aren't charities, they owe you nothing and if they don't enrich their shareholders they are potentially operning themselves up to lawsuits. They are pragmatic, and obliged to work within the legal frameworks of the markets they operate in. As Google is demonstrating, you don't have to play the same way as everyone else, but there's little point in whining when you failed to take an opportunity when it was available.

Ru

"Then they should have invented something"

Best case scenario here is that they invent a load of really awesome things to do with mobile telecomms, and cross license them with everyone else. And they'd have to do so for less than the cost of acquiring pre-existing patents. And they'd have to do so without treading on any existing patents. These things are non-trivial.

Martian water slides caught on camera (maybe)

Ru
FAIL

OMG CONSPIRACY

Who stands to benefit from evidence of life being hidden? No-one.

Who is likely to get loads of extra funding in the event of extra terrestrial life being discovered? NASA.

Who runs a totally watertight operation with absolute secrecy? No-one.

Come one now. The world is full of crackpots, and sometimes they're not totally wrong. But this is a pretty tenuous conclusion you've reached there chief.

Linus Torvalds dubs GNOME 3 'unholy mess'

Ru
Facepalm

"Linux has jumped the shark"

Oh no, the big desktop environment projects have all turned to shit. I guess I'd better start uninstalling debian from all my headless servers and replacing it with a different OS instead. Woe is me.

Ru
Boffin

try something new...

Be daring. Drag your desktop kicking and screaming into the twenty first century. Fire up Fluxbox.

Ru
Unhappy

If it were a window manager, sure

Instead, its a basically experimental operating system with a terribly small developer and user base and less than awesome application support, poor hardware support, etc etc.

It is only ever going to be a toy. BeOS is long gone.

Hobbyist killed by home-made hovercraft

Ru
FAIL

Re: Regulation-haters

"Could have easily hit someone else", you say? Based on what evidence?

There are already plenty of legal frameworks across the world for dealing with situations where an idiot puts other people at risk. I don't recall any suggestion that he was doing so here. I'm sure you'd love to live in the sort of nanny state that forbids all activities except those expressly defined as safe and acceptable, but a combination of a compensation culture and removing people's personal responsibility does no-one any good in the long run.

Anonymous unsheathes new, potent attack weapon

Ru
Facepalm

Durr

This is the 's' in 'skiddy', the purpose of which is to facilitate use of mildly sophisticated attacks by complete idiots. The sort of people who will be using it will be significantly less capable that the sort of person who wrote it.

Ru
FAIL

Really?

How much money do you suppose the various colours and flavours of Anon have defrauded from the public?

Brits love their phones, but spend less than ten years ago

Ru

"These people need help."

Why?

Boffins deduce chip's crypto just by looking at it

Ru
Boffin

Only a temporary reprieve

An acquaintance of mine was working on a technique to hinder visual inspection of microchips for his PhD. I seem to recall it involved printing a chunk of security circuitry across a lumpy substrate above the chip itself. Printing was used rather than the usual lithography techiques so you didn't need a flat surface, which made it slightly more awkward to open up than normal chips. The materials involved were also a lot more delicate, so are much harder to expose cleanly using acids.

Still wouldn't be perfect, but you can bet these sorts of techniques will be used to defeat this sort of analysis in the not too distant future.

UK police warns off hacktivists

Ru
Meh

"a dozen more spring up"

The traditional rate is 'one every minute'. We haven't yet reached the rate of 5 arrests an hour.

One might suggest that the public reaction to the items you mentioned above would be a democratic one; actually working towards political change is hard though so what we'd all rather do is sit behind a veil of anonymity and make relatively unexciting attacks against relatively uninteresting targets. Yeah, power to the people.

Columbia debris emerges from Texas lake

Ru
Facepalm

Not everone has eidetic memory...

Its a tank. One tank looks a fair bit like another. Its usually buried inside a space shuttle, where not everyone gets to look. Why would every other NASA engineer recognise a random bit of ironmongery?

Boffins shine 800Mbps wireless network from flashlight

Ru
Boffin

Go search for RONJA

10 megabit LED-based point-to-point networking device. Probably the spiritual descendant of the device you're talking about.

Point to point optics can be way faster, certainly; the wikipedia page has what it allegedly a gigabit-speed device. The interesting thing about this new invention is that it is fast and broadcastable, not merely point to point.

Ru
Boffin

Ever seen LEDs change brightness?

Like the fancy power lights Apple has made so popular? This is done via PWM, where the power to the LED is pulsed at a high enough frequency that the flicker is imperceptible to the human eye but the total amount of 'on' time in any given time period is reduced to give the illusion of different brightness levels.

Ever seen a nasty old fluorescent light that appears to flicker? Never heard much about those things killing people either.

Whilst I'm at it, boring old AC-driven incandescent lamps flicker too, though not quite to the same degree of course.

Ru
Meh

Hospitals and planes, blah blah blah

Rather more careful development and testing of the hardware used in these environments would mean you could use perfectly sensible radio networking instead. People can, and do, use conventional mobile phones, sattelite phones and WLAN devices in planes. Emergency service radios are often used in and around hospitals, and then there are pagers and so on and so forth.

In the most sensitive locations, such as intensive care or an operating theatre, fixed line devices are perfectly justifiable.

Acoustic trauma: How wind farms make you sick

Ru
Paris Hilton

Quick, register sonosmog.com

This seems a teeny bit more justifiable than electrosmog, but I doubt it is quite as clear cut as the report's author likes to make out. Holding windfarm builders accountable for their actions seems like a splendid thing to do, however.

In the meantime though, I'm sure there's good money to be made selling magnetic earrings to ward off the deleterious effects of Sonosmog (tm pending) exposure.

Google dangles needle over Web Bubble 2.0

Ru
Meh

When we refer to the past, what do we mean?

There's a whole lot of past-tense going on in reference to Microsoft there. MS have changed a little recently (not enough, of course) and are taking a slightly different approach to the MS of 5, 10 years ago... but the key thing is their influence is vastly overshadowed by Google.

Maybe you need to stop f**king frothing at the mouth. Honestly, I'm startled you didn't do a wholesale search and replace to change 'soft' to '$shaft' in your post.

Game graphics could be 100,000 times better

Ru
Boffin

Voxel hardware rendering support already exists

Some other guys in my company work on medical imaging systems that use off-the-shelf nvidia tesla gear attached to windows boxes for exactly that purpose. There's no nice equivalent of opengl/directx of course. As I said above (assuming it gets moderated before this post!) voxel rendering has, or had patent issues.

Ru
Unhappy

Voxel rendering had other issues

Namely that it was heavily patent encumbered in the US. There was no incentive to develop good voxel rendering engines or hardware when plane (badum, tish) old polygon rendering systems could be made royalty free and are perhaps simpler to envisage and implement.

Toshiba launches thinner spinner

Ru
Trollface

Disambiguation is good.

You don't want to confuse it with z-depth, z-width or z-length, after all.

Samsung-Apple Wars: Galaxy blocked Down Under

Ru
Gimp

Not quite

This isn't a 'tablet' market here, it is an 'iPad' market. You can't compete with something that isn't basically an iPad, because people want iPads.

Nobody really wants a tablet; this isn't like the iPhone where everyone was crying out for a smartphone that wasn't bloody awful, and now the benchmark has been set everyone is happy with their new less-awful smartphones.

PLCs a prison vulnerability: researchers

Ru
Big Brother

A few things to consider...

- Key systems don't necessarily scale nicely.

- Key systems required a greater degree of trust in keyholders.

- Key systems allow local security bypasses if a key is stolen.

- Key systems do not support some kind of 'emergency lockdown'; keyholders must be physically present at a door to seal it.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a PLC-based electronic door system, so long as it was sensibly implemented.

There's also nothing wrong with combining the two approaches...

Ru
Alert

Careful, now

1. You assume that the system hasn't been installed in such a way as to make identifying devices straightfoward.

2. You assume that the plans for the system cannot be obtained by a malicious third party.

Somebody has to know that button A is connected to solenoid B. Between corruption, theft, carelessness and social engineering, are you sure that information will never get out?

Tablets will overtake consumer PCs, says Fujitsu CTO

Ru
Big Brother

When a tablet can be used by multiple users...

You'll buy one tablet per user and support our economy and like it, you godless communist.

HTC sues Apple in the UK

Ru
Coat

How else might one tailor a law suit?

:o)

Nokia N9 joins next month's mobile match

Ru
Unhappy

You lucky bugger

The 950 was more or less the handset I've been waiting for, and I don't really have the time to pretend to be a developer to get one.

I'm rather disappointed they won't make them for the rest of us.

HCL discloses 'email deletion' requests from News International

Ru
Trollface

"nothing which appeared abnormal, untoward or inconsistent"

Absolutely. It is entertaining that routine MS Exchange administration is indistinguishable from malicious activity, though.

Isolated human genes can be patented, US court rules

Ru
Facepalm

Wrong.

Replicating a gene you already posess? No-one is patenting mitosis here. Get a grip.

Instead, what you'll see is something much more entertaining, like "we could test your newborn for a whole series of easily preventable but very unpleasant genetic diseases and cancers, but it will cost you $$$", swiftly followed by something like "failing to take these tests may impact any health insurance claims you make in the future".

Please don't assume lawyers and capitalists are stupid. There's a pretty good reason why they're all richer than you.

Good news: A meltdown would kill fewer than we thought

Ru
Facepalm

Those who fail to learn from history

are probably doomed to go trolling internet forums like this one. Can you provide any references for these 'experts' saying a reactor explosion was 'impossible'?

I seem to recall that quite a few of the big and exciting nuclear incidents not the result of natural causes were down to reactor staff Doing Something Stupid. Chernobyl, Sellafield, SL-1, whatever.

There are so many differences between Chernobyl and even old school reactors like Fukushima, its hard to know where to start (you might consider learning about containment buildings). Problem is, we don't get nice new reactor designs thanks to a combination of renewable fanaticism and panicky nimbies who don't understand the issues crippling any research and any hope of building decent new nuke plants.

I hope you're all prepared to live in a future where electricity is a middle class luxury. I'm sure the proles will take that in their stride, right?

Ru
Facepalm

Because people don't understand or care about real risk

Stop smoking, stop tanning, cut down on your barbequeues and friend food and processed meat. There; your lifetime chance of cancer has probably decreased by a measurable amount. Might do you good to move out of urban areas, too. Oh, and learn about restricted calorie diets and other hair-shirt means of longevity. But who is going to bother with all that, if they aren't already some sort of vegan?

Or alternatively, to increase your life expectancy, don't drive.

Anyway, you're missing the point. People get cancer; if you're not on course for a case of fatal heart disease this is what you get to look forward to. Nuclear power's health impact is pretty negligible at this point.

Sci/tech MPs want peer review, not pal review

Ru
Facepalm

The UK does "do"

Epic fail idiom.

Firefox maker moves towards a browser-free world

Ru
Unhappy

Is it just me,

or is everything that people are enthusing over about html5 already available in, say, flash?

Mature toolchain, massive user and developer base, blah blah blah. I guess we should probably be thankful Adobe haven't tried to give us FlashOS yet.

Me, I see two problems in the bright HTML5 future. Maybe three. Firstly, what is stopping a dominant vendor doing the old embrace and extend trick? Google and Apple spring to mind. Have a think about what Chrome's NaCL is intended for. Secondly, javascript/html is a bloody awful dev platform. I've worked with various languages and GUI frameworks in the past, and whilst few have actually been very good they've all been significantly nicer to program in than javascript, and mildly more convenient for presentation layout than HTML/CSS. Having to code in JS for the rest of my life seems a bit like a punishment.

Lastly, the whole 'write once, struggle everywhere' approach is probably quite familiar to most web devs. The problem has manifestly failed to go away over the last ten years. It isn't going to stop now. Platform providers are manifestly shit when it comes to supporting complex standards; why is this going to change? This problem is perhaps a subset of the 'embrace, extend' issue above.

When Silverlight, of all the unloved and unwanted dev environments starts to look good in comparison to the glorious new future, the world is very clearly heading in a bloody stupid direction.

World needs needs Tequila power: report

Ru
Facepalm

Oh dear oh dear

A 14 year latency before the first crop isn't the end of the world. It may even be a quite reasonable economic gamble that will pay off handsomely when your investment matures.

Now, much as I'd like to trust the foaming rants of a random internet denizen over some fairly simple research by people who have little to gain by publishing their results, I'd say they have a reasonable point. Doesn't seem worth arguing it here, though.

Oh, and as for your dose of reality; no thanks. You can go live in a hut wearing hair shirts and begging gaia for forgiveness; I for one will continue to support nuclear power and fully expect to be living my energy intensive lifestyle for many years to come. Don't expect the rest of us to join you in your ignorant flagellation.

UK Cops 'duped' into arresting wrong LulzSec suspect

Ru

There's a traditional tour

round the station and down the big flight of steps a few times. At speed.