* Posts by Ru

1818 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2007

Boffins develop liquid crystal solid-state raygun turret

Ru
Flame

Self-toasting

Even if you're only absorbing a single percent of a megawatt-level beam, that's still a fair bit of heat to extract from a fairly delicate piece of equipment. This is a useful bit of kit, certainly, but it would make a lousy laser turret.

Mirrors and stuff work just fine. Its the laser itself that's the bit that needs the most improvement.

Fujifilm Finepix X100 APS-C camera

Ru
FAIL

Holy pricing-out-of-the-market, batman

A thousand bucks for a nice, but not stunning camera with a non-interchangeable lens? Someone was on crack when they fired up the marketing for this one.

Compared to the EVIL (electronic viewfinder, interchangeable lens) cameras on offer from olympus, panasonic, sony, samsung, everyone and their dog, this just doesn't stack up. Maybe if it were half the price it might be worth it, but as it stands you can get something like an Olympus E-PL1 with a 14-40mm and a 20mm f/1.7 and still have more than enough money left over to fly away for a long weekend somewhere nice to play with your new toys.

PlayStation Network credit cards protected by encryption

Ru

"never ever give your proper full name"

A correct name and address are often required for cardholder-not-present credit card sales. Birthday though, no need to help em out with that.

Feds move to uninstall bot that hit banks, airports, cops

Ru
Boffin

No-one is save

Since when did Microsoft, or indeed anyone, offer a guarantee of security, implied warranty, suggestion of fitness for purpose or merchantability?

You do read EULAs, right?

No-one is going to make that sort of guarantee of something as monumentally complex as a modern consumer operating system; they'd be bare-faced liars if they did, and they'd be tarred and feathered at the next shareholder meeting. Fine fine, you have an irrational hatred of MSFT. But do you think Apple would make the same guarantees of their software? How about Google? Who's going to underwrite such guarantees of open source software? Perhaps you want govermnents to make that illegal too?

Making provably secure software for any non-trivial purpose is exceedingly difficult. I guarantee you that no-one is willing to take a 20-year step back in software and hardware functionality in order to get that sort of guarantee unless they are literally forced to do so. As most of us live in a market-driven economy, it simply won't happen.

Amazon refudiates Apple 'app store' trademark suit

Ru
Grenade

Re: You all need to sort it out

That seems a little drastic. But if it is the only solution, might you consider going on a commentard killing spree before finishing yourself off? The rest of us would be terribly grateful.

'Anti alpha' mirror-matter made from gold in atomsmasher

Ru
Heart

Infraboring?

Awesome term.

Google seems to think you may not have been the first to coin it, alas, but you win a consolation prize of some prestige for being the first to bring it to my attention.

Smartphones eat games handhelds and cameras for lunch

Ru

Smartphones will eat the low-end, sure

...but there's reasonably limited scope for putting a big sensor in a smartphone (for lower noise, better low light performance, better tolerance of cheap optics, shallower DOF) or a big lens (for zooming, rectilinear ultrawide FOV, wider apertures) or even a nice big flash... so they won't be replacing mid-to-high end compacts or dSLRs anytime soon.

Similarly, there's not a lot of nice smartphones out there that would replace my GPS... IPX67 water and dust resistance, reasonably impact resistant, 40 hours battery life on lithium cells. Things like the Motorola Defy are getting there, but they're pretty niche and still not quite up to the job.

There are a whole family of unexciting bits of consumer electronics out there which no-one will really miss when they get eaten by smartphones, though. Dedicated car satnavs spring immediately to mind.

Modern-day ninja in epic battle with riot police, robot

Ru
Flame

That's no ninja

1) He didn't disappear in a puff of smoke

2) He was using a sword against people with guns

Sounds more like a boring old Samurai to me. Real ninja were quite keen on the whole 'common sense' thing.

Pope says gravity proves technology can't supplant God

Ru
FAIL

@Paul_Murphy, Re: The Scientific Inquisition

Following in the spirit of the original inquisition, it is clear that those two do not believe in gravity should be hastened off the top of the nearest tall, overhanging structure or landform to ponder their lack of faith on their descent.

Ru
Boffin

Least powerful force?

There are quite a few examples in nature of where gravitational attraction exceeds electromagnetic repulsion. Neutron stars and black holes, for starters.

New tech lets you drink exhaust fumes

Ru
Boffin

Not the only way it was done...

The original Graf Zeppelin could use Blaugas as a fuel, as that weighed the same as the equivalent volume of air. Not a bad solution; just refill empty fuel bladders with unpressurised air and neutral bouyancy is regained.

AMD backs USB 3.0 on desktop and laptop chipsets

Ru

Re: marginal technologies

Firewire has been a wee bit over the hill for a little while.

Esata on the other hand... I'm not so sure that USB3 will just blow it away. Now we have useful stuff like power-over-esata the benefits of USB3 aren't quite so cut and dried. I'll bet eSata gets a speedbump before USB3, too. I guess it will just come down to the cost of the supporting hardware in the end.

Embrace chaos, beat pirates... buy my book, says Mason

Ru
WTF?

Make money by selling niche content, you say?

Didn't 'The Long Tail' cover this a few years back?

Me, I'm a cashtard nowadays. I'm happy to pay for content that isn't lumbered with restrictions and isn't in some shitty format... problem is, so few people seem willing to sell me this stuff. Seems like lots of publishers have finally got to grips with selling MP3s online, but hardly anyone shifts lossless stuff like FLAC, ALAC, WAV, whatever.

Here's me, willing to pay a premium for this stuff. And yet whenever I try to find it online, I just find page after page after page of torrent sites and dodgy russian businesses. Seems like half the music I buy nowadays is second hand; I'd much rather enrich the artists than ebay but it seems like my money ain't good enough.

Android, Steve Jobs, and Apple's '90%' tablet share

Ru
Alert

Are you really sure about that?

"Apple's high-margin, premium-pricing business model demands that the company cede market share as it hordes the high end of a market"

Given the bang for buck you get with an ipad, it looks an awful lot like Apple are competing very heavily on price here. Given their premium product reputation and generally quite reasonable standard of engineering, android devices that aren't half the price of the apple equivalent are going to look overpriced to joe public, no?

Brain boffins in cortex mapping breakthrough

Ru

Re: Find out how they grow and connect

Tricky things, emergent properties.

We've a reasonably good idea about the workings of genetics and DNA, but still the issue of mapping a proteome and understanding protein folding is immensely complex; far more so than mapping a genome.

I don't imagine that understanding brain function given some knowledge of protein folding is as easy as understanding protein folding given some knowledge of the structure and chemistry of DNA.

Technology turns us into RAGING CRACKHEADS

Ru
FAIL

Yay dichotomies

So you're either a helpless device addict who suffers physical withdrawal symptoms or you're a happily liberated individual enjoying the benefits of your freedom from the bondage of consumer electronics and the interwebs.

No middle ground.

e-Borders snares 2,800 possible crims, 5 tons of baccy

Ru
Thumb Up

Re:

"Sure, but I don't know of what use it be to you unless you wanted to break the law."

I envisage some sort of distributed, open, croud-sourced, peer-to-peer and extensively buzzword compliant justice system.

We will publish your details in various highly trafficed sites, asking questions like 'have you ever been sexually assualted by this individual?'. I'm sure as a fine, upstanding citizen you'll not have to worry about any negative responses. If there were any, we'd forward them to the police and to your employers and parents for closer investigation.

You'll be fine with all this, naturally.

Judge flips $625.5m Apple patent payout

Ru
Happy

Awesome.

"It additionally accused Mirror Worlds of "triple-dipping" by asking for payment on three different patents."

I like this defence. "We may have done 3 bad things, but they're all the same kind of thing so we should only be punished once".

Google bids $900m for Android and Chrome patent shield

Ru
Thumb Down

Re: Monopoly money

Don't be so sanctimonious.

Why not consider exactly how much wealth flows through your government. Hint: truly mindboggling amounts, of which billions are likely pissed up the wall thanks to waste, corruption and incompetence. 900 million dollars is a trifling sum by comparison, and that's even before looking at how much cash is plowed into, say, defence.

It isn't the job of Google's shareholders to bail out the world, and even if it were they simply could not afford it.

EU parliament suspends webmail after cyber-attack

Ru
Paris Hilton

Technology != Product

Verified Microkernels? Mandatory Access Control?

Please let me know which one of those actually provides a webmail interface. I'm sure they could get someone like BAe to build them a lovely mil-spec mail system for a few billion euros, given a decade or so (disclaimer: system may not be lovely or functional), but in the short term it is largely impractical to protect a large, complex, distributed system intended for use by totally non-technical people against skilled, intelligent, resourceful attackers.

There's not a system in the world that will protect a bureaucracy against the carelessness and thoughtlessness of users who are more interested in *using* the system than jumping through security hoops. Virtualisation and fancy programming languages will not fix this.

Google 'clamps down' on world of Android partners

Ru
Boffin

Re: True Open Source Branch

" I would like to see developers take the current open source code and create a "true" open source branch from that. One not controlled by Google"

CyanogenMod.

There's no shortage of custom OS images for non-Honeycomb android devices, some more user-friendly than others. Have a peek at some of the work mentioned on modaco or xda-developers. I use streakdroid myself. In theory, one should be able to rebuild the OS images for any android phone of Gingerbread/2.3 vintage or earlier. In practice, as with normal desktop hardware, there are no shortage of closed source binary drivers out there that hamper this activity.

Google's 'clean' Linux headers: Are they really that dirty?

Ru

BSD, etc

Linux had more than marketing buzz; it has a pretty substantial base of tools and developers already available... far more than can be said for any of the BSDs. On the other hand, I agree with your underlying point. Why do so many companies use GPL code incorrectly, knowing full well its nature, when they could just use a BSD instead?

Binary blobs, incidentally, are a particular aversion of OpenBSD and for entirely sensible reasons. Its also quite irrelevant when rolling a new commercial product. As for forking... I've never seen any particular aversion to that sort of thing, but more a sort of 'what's the point?' attitude.

Antarctic ice breakup makes ocean absorb more CO2

Ru
Boffin

LIfe giving oxygen

There was once a whole biosphere of anaerobes for whom oxygen was a dangerous corrosive metabolic poison... you don't see them about quite so much these days.

MS plans response to HP's webOS ... in 2013

Ru
WTF?

Holy Security Catastrophe, Batman!

"rich web content, such as a YouTube video, could be embedded in a traditional Word application without compromising security"

As previous experiences with flash, javascript, VBA macros and the wonderfully flexible document formats that are PDF and doc[x] should have shown everyone; 'rich' documents are, have been and will continue to be utterly riddled with security holes.

I wonder why they feel they've finally got a handle on the problem to the extent that they're happy to release a system allowing everyone to simply and easily vastly increase the attack surface of themselves and their contacts and colleagues.

Online world maps rub jubs against todgers

Ru
Heart

Cup size alone is an inadequate metric...

Spend some time comparing and contrasting, say, a 52FF with a 36D and you'll see what I mean.

Intel's Atom chip chief goes mobile

Ru

Not just netbooks?

Its only been fairly recently that Atom-based server systems have arrived. Seems like a natural fit for me; plenty of demand for low power here, and vastly greater need for x86 than mobile devices.

Sure, x86 netbooks and mediapc-type things will just get gobbled up by a tidal wave of cheap arm-on-android stuff (and that feels pretty overdue to me, too) but they're hardly the only game in town.

Canonical's Dell and Lenovo love lets Ubuntu down

Ru
WTF?

Prehistoric?

"That opportunity is relevance in a world where software has been "app-ified" or gone SaaS, and the concept of an isolated desktop computing platform feels prehistoric."

I'm not sure I wholly understand what you mean by 'app-ified'. Is this some newfangled straightforward interface to some sort of magical App(tm) distribution and update service hosted out in The Cloud(tm) somewhere? I feel positively neolithic. All I've had for the last 10 years or so I've been using linux is this daft 'apt-get' tool, which only provides me with 'software packages' from the 'internet'.

Oh, and as far as I'm concerned, the notion of an isolated desktop went out the window when DSL became readily available (speaking from a UK-centric point of view, here).

Nothing is new. It is just wrapped up in a shiny interface, and slathered with trademarks and software patents and contextual advertising and lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit.

Make streaming a felony: Obama

Ru
Stop

Copyright infringement is a criminal matter.

This is a *good* thing, on the whole... it acts as a discouragement to people who might otherwise freely pass off the work of someone who might be unable to afford to sue the infringer. A minor discouragement to be sure, and one that doesn't really do enough to prevent large, rich media corporations riding roughshod over the rights of others with nothing more than an 'oh, sorry' rather than the thousands they'd happily extract from the same person were the situation reversed...

Anyway, tl;dr: in many jurisdaictions copyright infringement is a crime. See the Copyright, Designs and Patents act in the UK for example. It is not, however, theft.

Asus Eee Pad Slider

Ru
Thumb Down

"less than £300 including VAT"

How on earth did you come up with that figure? A retail price of 400USD is never going to equate to anything less than 400GBP.

Anonymous probed for hack threat against WikiLeaker captors

Ru
FAIL

"they're not the worst in the world"

Ahh, because other nations indulge in such activities all the time, its perfectly okay for the good old US of A to do so only every now and then? At least, until they're worse than China! I guess at that point its fine to cast aspersions upon them, right? But until then, the western children should quit whining.

You'll note that N&G made no mention of their relative unpleasantness in the grand scheme of things. Your point is irrelevant, and your argument is pitiful. Presumably you are also a child, but at least you can remain on the moral high ground, being neither cosseted or western, right?

Cure for BALDNESS causes IMPOTENCE, says new study

Ru
FAIL

Total non surprise

Male pattern baldness... linked to testosterone. Male libido... linked to testosterone.

Hint: eunuchs tend to keep a full head of hair.

The side effects of finasteride can't possibly have been unknown for all this time; hell, anyone with 5 minutes and an internet connection could work this out for themselves. This study has about as much value as the much touted ursine toiletry research that is oft mentioned in the Reg's comment threads.

Cellphone exposure linked to changes in brain activity

Ru
FAIL

"his surgeon was convinced that using a mobile phone may have been a factor"

So, an individual who wasn't a specialist in cancer biology or RF equipment or who had even the first idea about how the two interact jumped to a conclusion. This isn't even anecdotal evidence. So the guy died of brain cancer. I'll point out he was also a friend of Richard Branson; maybe that's what caused the tumour?

Anyway, whilst I'm complaining... don't confuse the power outputs of old military radio and radar guns with mobile phones.

ZeuS trojan attacks bank's 2-factor authentication

Ru
Thumb Down

Re: User Education

This cannot and will not ever work, and no public system should ever require this in order to be secure.

The Meeks shall inherit the Office ...

Ru
Thumb Down

On branding...

"LibreOffice" is not a nice name to pronounce, especially if you try to pronounce 'libre' correctly. Its spelling is not necessarily unambiguous when talking about it, making spreading the word slightly more awkward. OpenOffice, as a name, passes both these simple test. What on earth were they thinking? Could they really think of nothing better?

Assange fights extradition in court

Ru
Flame

Awesome stuff

"Lawyers for Swedish prosecutors told the court that the warrant had been issued for the purpose of prosecution, even if specific charges had yet to be made."

I'm not quite sure where to begin. My outrage floweth over. They'll be breaking out the terrorism laws next, no doubt,

Oracle and IBM carve up open-source Java leadership

Ru
Unhappy

RE: ATS could quite well replace Java

Hurgh, I've just read up on ATS.

It really, really, really won't be replacing java, and to think otherwise suggests that you've spent a little too much time locked away in an ivory tower somewhere.

Hint: Java's speed, or lack thereof, is not its primary failing.

Open source to bust up Cisco Borg collective?

Ru

What protocols would those be, exactly?

There are no shortage of proprietary Cisco protocols (EIGRP, ISL, VRRP spring to mind) but they are not *core* networking protocols. You can manage just fine without them, but they provide a means to a) avoid failings of standard protocols and b) lock you in to cisco hardware.

Gates: Killing the internet is easy

Ru
Thumb Down

Mesh networking will not save the world

How hard do you suppose it would be to add a 2.6ghz scanner to a police vehicle? Maybe some sort of house-to-house UWB might evade that sort of detection, but faced with well armed police in the employ of what is not easily distinguishable from a military dictatorship I think I'd rather stick with traditional methods of covert communication.

Shame satellite bandwidth is still so pricey, but its clearly not beyond the reach of some militant groups...

Mexico demands apology for Top Gear outrage

Ru
Heart

A common confusion...

Actual Mexican food is quite dissimilar from 'Tex-Mex', a meat'n'carbtastic US product which is what most people seem to think of as Mexican. Sick and cheese is not an unreasonable description of that, I guess. Funny thing about food in relatively poor countries; it isn't wall-to-wall ground beef, because most citizens just can't afford it.

Embrace your outsourced future

Ru
Boffin

Don't make cheap rubbish?

You can't compete with someone who's skills are 'good enough' but whose cost of living is a tiny fraction of your own. You'll never make cheap consumer goods more profitably than a Chinese factory, and its been the case for years that barrel-scrapingly awful web code can be made by a bunch of guys in Thailand for a few dollars. Sure, it will suck, but most web stuff sucks so who can tell?

I'm not particularly bothered, my skills are quite specialist and are likely to remain relevant and lucrative for a good few years yet. The sorts of people who can replace me will have had expensive western academic education; they're not likely to work for pennies when they can so easily get much more.

Next smartphone tech? Predator style thermal cameras

Ru
Thumb Down

Re: Fatal flaw

If 'the baddies' wanted it, they can already get it. Follow the link at the end of the article; you can get handheld thermal imagers suitable for identifying, say, the last PIN entered on an ATM keypad. This particular genie was let out of the bottle years back.

Leica S2 professional medium format DSLR

Ru
FAIL

Seems like a bit of a dead end

The common route to digital medium format photography involves interchangeable backs on existing modular camera setups. Digi back breaks down mid important photo shoot? Swap it out for a film back and finish the job. S2 breaks down? Well, you'd better have splashed out another 18 grand for a second one. Its a new lens mount too, so no-one will have any existing stashes of valuable glass, so its going to cost an absolute fortune to get started with this new toy. I'm not seeing any good reason to do so.

FAA to pilots: Expect 'unreliable or unavailable' GPS signals

Ru
Boffin

dGPS is no substitute for military precision GPS

To use dGPS properly, you need a fixed base station at an accurately known position, and you need a radio link between the base station and the mobile unit so the encrypted, high precision differential can be calculated and a more accurate position reported to the mobile unit. There are almost certainly some major restrictions on the distance between the two stations, and differences in altitude, and speed of the mobile unit, etc etc.

Fixed stationary unit? Sounds like a precision guided munitions victim. Mobile unit with chatty radio transmitter? Sound like something that will be easy to spot and/or jam.

Bottom line? dGPS is great for civil engineers doing surveying. Its pretty ropey to plan a military operation around.

Raygun dreadnought project reports 'remarkable breakthrough'

Ru
Flame

Retroreflection won't save you

Similarly, mounting a nice parabolic mirror on your plane won't save you either. The problem is one of energy densities, and focus. The laser will be bounced off a big mirror at the weapon end (low energy density), and focussed down to a dot on the target to fry it. The energy densities at that dot will simply incinerate any mirror or prism you put in the way.

And that is if you somehow managed to reflect the whole beam and perfectly aim and focus it on its target, a tricky job for something that needs to be small, fast and aerodynamic and carry a warhead to its target.

Missiles are not an appropriate weapon to use against a laser-armed battleship, any more than the huge cannon of WW2 battleships were appropriate weapons to use against aircraft carriers.

Ru
Boffin

Reflection is only skin deep

The moment the shell of the warhead begins ablating, its reflective characteristics are gone. Then it will begin cooking.

There are various sophisticated ways to protect against powerful lasers, but it seems like a fair amount of effort... all a warhead needs to be is dumb, solid and fast. Invest in companies that make railguns. Oh, that's an ONR project too.

How I watched a holographic storage company implode

Ru
Headmaster

Re: "productise"???

As a great man once said, "Verbing weirds language".

Car immobilisers easily circumvented by crafty carjackers

Ru
Stop

NXP. There's a familiar name

The solution, of course, is to take the people who undertake such studies to court for their criminal attempts to circumvent lawful protection mechanisms and disseminate their studies to the car thieves of the world. There's clearly nothing else to do.

As for TI... well. I have an encryption system here that 'might' be stronger than AES too. My license fees are quite reasonable.

Gawker tech boss admits site security was crap

Ru
Boffin

Re: It's ALL Crap

Just because breeches are nowadays considered antique trouser technology, the basic manufacturing principles have not greatly changed and indeed many modern trousers may not be as secure as some designs of breeches.

Ru
Troll

It might well be their fault

In the interests of integrating with existing systems, many utterly retarded compromises may have to be made. As a contrived example; if you're being paid to build a service which accepts SQL queries over an unauthenticated, unencrypted HTTP connection, your avenues of sensible implementation are limited.

Although its a safe assumption that every coder other than yourself is an unprincipled incompetent cowboy (and indeed experience often bears this out) it isn't always the case.

And to those saying 'walk away'; we all have bills to pay. If you've clearly stated in writing that the system will be broken as specified, you may as well finish the job. You can always pad the costs to include arse-covering legal advice.

iPad media apps: Stealthed hobbits thwart Google's flaming Eye

Ru
FAIL

Yay, unsearchable data!

If you can't hide subscriber-only content from unauthorised third parties without having to write an iwhatever application, you already have some pretty serious issues. It isn't rocket science.

Allowing search engine spiders to see an abstract of an article's content with an associated 'subscribe here!' link is a non uncommon solution either; various academic paper repositories and journals take this approach.

By hiding all your data, no-one is going to know what they're missing, so its going to be trickier to pick up a wider audience. You're also require your own search engine for your archives and most people seem utterly inept at doing such things compared to google's reasonably slick offering.