Posts by Ru 1818 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2007
Clearly, doing weird little abstract image puzzles and word association games is an abomination in the eyes of the lord.
Next research topic: why do people think IQs are a useful metric for anything other than doing weird little abstract image puzzles and word association games?
Uh, in much the same way that a human soldier is easily disabled by shooting out his brains.
Only it doesn't involve an actual person dying. Plus, I'd be mildly concerned about clever sniper-hunting technology attached to a different bot with a high power rifle that will shoot you out of your little hideyhole.
It is more easily disabled by creative use of barricades which would require genuine people to come remove them, whom you can then use the aforementioned human disabling process upon to ensure that the current ruling party back in the US starts losing votes.
Well, its all basically debian, innit? Ubuntu certainly is, and xandros likewise (who provided the eeepc linux distro, I do believe)
That's where the nice package management came from (apt) certainly. And gnome and kde at distro and OS independent, if you were thinking of a common look'n'feel.
I'm more curious as to why Red Hat hasn't tried to stick its oar in. Or Novell, for that matter.
I've been happily using conditional comments for some years to differentiate between IE5,6,7, and the rest of the interweb's less recalcitrant browsers. I'd be somewhat disappointed (to say the least) if MS were throwing away that irritating, but perfectly functional hack.
They can't be that much more irritating than a badly driven 'mobility scooter', but I don't see a whole lot to approve of. Why not just get a bike? I daresay, one of these days some clever gentleman will find a way to power the humble bicycle with the aid of electricity. No doubt such a device will be rather more practical than a segway, and be perfectly legal to drive on road and on bike lanes...
But why spend all that time and effort on seriously complicated things, when a far simpler and more reliable solution can be easily shown to do the job just fine?
There's no mention of how large the telescopes should be, by the way. Only their price, and high quality optics can be extremely expensive regardless of their size. Also consider that even moderately large telescopes can still be concealed in vans and cars and so on without any particular difficulty.
Of course encryption means something. DPI may tell you what sort of traffic you're looking at, or at least hazard a good guess, but an encrypted channel is still just a load of (almost) random data to any outside observer who can only infer, say HTTP content from a port number of 443 or whatever. It can't tell porn from bank details if they're encrypted.
Now, if you're talking about throttling high bandwidth, long duration TCP connections then yes, that's possible and doesn't even require super fancy packet inspection.
What's more likely in your particular case is that encrypted bit torrent does not usefully obfuscate itself, it merely hides content and is still quite obvious as to its nature.
Or are the comments here getting slowly more and more content-free, and full of people who seem to think they have to follow in amanfrommars' footsteps and write everything in some kind of tedious and semi-coherent argot?
Anyway, on subject, I wonder exactly how much power all these recycling processes need, and where it comes from. There was a delightful tale from my neighbourhood a little while ago whereby the local recycling facility was using a huge and powerful rubbish sorter to save on labour when separating mixed recyclable stuff. Only it used massive amounts of power, making most of the recycling effort supremely pointless.
Perhaps.
But you'd be less likely to have, say, a bunch of police with automatic weapons splattering an unarmed, kneeling guy's brains out all over, say, an underground train carriage.
Anyone know of the exact rules of engagement for armed police? I'm pretty certain it doesn't involve a western-style quickdraw and kill. That gun will have to be out, and the camera rolling (and presumably recording sound) long enough before lead meets cortex to capture at least some kind of validation for the shot.
Its the tasercams I'm more interested in, however. There's far too much tase first, ask questions later going on, and anything which might curtail that should be very warmly welcomed.
But you will see rapidly diminishing returns on a *desktop* machine. There are only so many processor-intensive things that need to be run simultaneously after all, though at least having a dozen cores will allow you to cope with a much high volume of crapplets and AV/antimalware programs at once.
Servers can, and pretty much always will benefit from being able to run more processes... many web apps (for example) can be trivially parallelised, although filesystem and database access cannot be sorted out so easily.
The next trick is going to be blazingly fast concurrent IO to keep up with all these processes. It won't be much good if everyone and their dog can get a handful of 12 core+ monster chipsfor pocket money, if they're then going to have to invest in eyewateringly expensive 10gigE or infiniband interconnects, and an armful of SSDs running in parallel.
Right, right. I wonder how this can be established, just via better communications?
If the road from A to B can carry X cars, and on a nice sunny day 2X cars try to go down it, it is still going to get jammed.
But I guess that 'in certain areas congestion can be reduced at certain times' isn't quite so snappy.
>How long before someone business-aware buys the rights to this machine and markets a version as a sex-toy.
Think carefully about how much sexual pleasure you could get from something filled with crushing spikes, that can only reduce things to pulp. And then consider the rest of the world too. Why buy the rights to this, when lawn mowers and wood chippers and food blenders could do a very similar job so much more cheaply?
This is probably because software can easily be far more complex than hardware. Witness the number of operating system disasters vs the number of processor disasters.
Its all very well saying 'ooh, throw more cores at it, throw more processors at it', but actually making use of all these fancy new hardware resources requires non-trivial amount of programming talent, and more importantly, powerful compilers.
Why do you suppose that Itanium, with its fancy EPIC architecture geared towards pushing more code through more hyperthreaded cores hasn't taken off as Intel hoped? It certainly didn't help that they pushed the burden of making better use of the processor on to the compiler. And sufficiently capable compilers just aren't out there.
"Simon Davies of Privacy International, which campaigned against section 49 of RIPA when legislation was being drafted, was surprised at the low figure. "That number is remarkable, given the abuse of RIPA by quangos and local councils," he said."
Consider that the people involved in the frivolous use of RIPA might a) rather use it covertly, and demanding encryption keys from school-hunting parents isn't exactly subtle, b) havn'et got round to lifting computers yet, or c) simply don't understand the technology or its possible uses.
Freedom from Oppression through Incompetence. I guess that will have to do for now ;-)
I love the way various branches of the government 'rebrand' themselves from time to time to attempt to flee from the scandal and incompetence of their previous incarnation, allowing them to get stuck into some scandal and incompetence of their own.
Politicians have learned so much from big business. No place for democracy, that's for sure.
Looked like I was going to be joining my other half, who would be working in California for a bit. Happily the plan has changed, and we will be travelling to Canada instead. I'm quite relieved about that.
If it weren't for the fact that I am a British citizen, I probably wouldn't be in the UK either. What a sorry state of affairs.
At least as a last resort, you can always hire a competent coder to kick the driver into shape. Expensive, difficult, but not impossible. This is rather tricky to do with equivalent closed source drivers.
On a vaguely related ranty note, the worst thing about many raid drivers for linux, et al, is that the hardware manufacturers are seldom helpful and forthcoming with hardware documentation. This isn't unique to raid cards of course, but it is a pain when one of the largest manufacturers behaves this way. Releasing buggy hardware makes reverse engineering extra tricky. Thankyou, adaptec.
Spotted and blocked by NoScript. It's a clever little tool to be sure.
@Ishkandar
It matters because the trick allows you to do pretty much anything you like, under the guise of being a legitimate site. See comments about drive-by malware downloads, etc.
Also, having a silly posting 'shtick' wasn't cool when amanfrommars did it either, though at least your effort is parseable.
What a stupid, stupid thing to get all riled up about. There are already plenty of new strains of various bits of malware in the wild, and AV people are always, always going to be playing catch up. Only this time, they have a target they can whinge at.
The best thing to do is to hire a nice law firm who can point out that by modifying software to evade virus filters, the coders or competition organisers are guilty of infringing some deeply tedious DMCA-a-like law. Or better yet, lobby the law makers to criminalise this sort of programming which is clearly intended to aid and encourage criminal elements!
Only no particles are being projected, are they? In fact, this is almost, but not quite, totally unlike any kind of accelerated ion weapon.
The principle has in fact been proven many times... but like so many fancy projects it is totally unsuited to the battlefield at this time. The first demo I heard of was an enormous chemical laser based thing that might just about fit on a humvee and be useful enough to taser a person at short range.
In fact, I believe Tesla wanted to make something like this way back, only using powerful UV lamps instead. Not very practical.
Give em a few more years yet, I reckon.
Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Or just a poor line.
Wasn't there an article on the reg quite recently about how an otherwise respectable researcher cried 'connection throttling!' when ut just turned out to be a few hours of router problems?
Perhaps you can convince them its okay being beige and boxy?
Oh, and Andy Barber... given that the article specifically mentioned 'open' wireless networks, why are you going all CAPITALISED about your secured one?
I leave open wireless as I find it. If I lived in a more densely populated area, I'd be tempted to run an open network just to see who might be using it and what for. Its funny how people often 'steal' bandwidth in this way, but don't imagine for one moment what a potentially ghastly security nightmare they could have let themselves in for.
>Considering that the earth is getting a fifth of the light it once used to, I say we need more CO2 in the air, before the world famine gets worse
The articles actually mention a '20% decrease in light', which means we'd be only 4/5ths as bright as we were before that occurred. I think an 80% light reduction would have more obvious (and catastrophic) effects.
Carbon capture is a ridiculous idea, which is why only 3 governments even consider it. There is absolutely no way to capture a significant percentage of our carbon output in an energy efficient or economically sound way. I find it unsurprising yet rather depressing that the UK government is keen on such a blatantly stupid concept.
They do have a noticable effect, even on the fairly low powered airguns which are legal in the UK without a firearms license. They will be just as useful on larger and more powerful airguns, which could plausibly be lethal weapons.
But it is a particularly uncool crime to be punished for.
It is a little sad that hypocrisy is considered to be a far worse thing than at least *attemping* to make a moral stand. It is seen as far better to be totally amoral, and to take no stand at all. (thankyou, Diamond Age. Go read it if you haven't).
I'll eat veal and foie gras, but not battery farmed chicken, for example. OMG hypocrit (sic) you might say, but factory farming is not only a far, far more unpleasant process than the production of either of those two, it also produces decidedly disappointing products.
If the PETA boss does manage to improve the lot of cute animals across the world at the expense of a few litres of insulin, then she's done well. Attack PETA because of the stupid things it does (there's no shortage of those!) but not because of the proclivities of its management.
The problem is that we demand far more meat than is practical to farm in 'nice' ways, and we demand it at a cost which is rather impractical to sustain without these rather unsavoury production methods. Moreover, the production of meat is quite inefficient, enerywise, compared to growing edible crops on the same land. Historically, you'd farm animals on land which could not be used for grains or veggies. LIvestock can process grass into things which are actually nice to eat after all.
If synthetic meat becomes practical, thats great. The world could benefit from cheap and widely available protein, and all sorts of less desirable farming practices can be stopped. But what are the chances of s'meat being a) cheaper b) just as nutritious c) actually accepted by consumers (its far more deserving of the label 'frankenfood' than GM wheat, or whatever) and finally d) being less destructive to the environment?
Pretty slim, I'd say.
I've come across two instances of multiple drive failures... one because a guy didn't ventilate his workstation well enough and zapped half a dozen drives over the course of 3 years. The other was my former employer, a school, who somehow had a whole load of deceased fujitsu 18 and 36gb 10k scsi drives. I'm inclined to blame careless handling rather than faulty manufacturing.
Final verdict? Each manufacturer will suck more than the others. Your favourite manufacturer is blatantly the worst. Use RAID. That's what its for.
Not to be confused with theft by the way, anonymous from mars.
I wonder how they define damage, and how they added up that particular total. There seems to be a trend amongst various large US organisations (DoD springs to mind) in bringing up these frivolous sums as the amount required to secure their systems. No matter that they should have spent the money do the securing ahead of time.
It is amusing that Vladuz was caught by such a transparent scam. What on earth was he thinking? Its not like he needed to hand over anything physical. How delightfully naive. Maybe the investigator claimed to be a pretty lady with the big boobies.
Of course you can please them. You can drop down dead.
Tedious stereotypes aside (I presume you're a jackbooted telegraph reader, or fat, bespectacled nerd still living at home? or some unholy combination of the two) I don't imagine that wind or wave power will ever be a practicality, given the demands of our energy hungry cultures. Not to mention the fact that no-one wants anything like that near them, nor nearby anywhere which looks nice, or contains unusual animal or plant species, etc etc. All the plans are pretty much dead from the get go.
The only practical sorts of things are going to be small scale solar and turbine projects, smarter combined heat/power services, blah blah blah. No sign of anything nice like fuel cells on useful scales either.
Bring back the pebble bed nuclear reactor projects, I say.
At least all these MVC frameworks raise the barrier to entry a little. Ease of coding is what leads to the most awful results... just take a look at an internet full of awful, unmaintainable PHP.
Having to think at least a little about how you're going to structure your app (even if you do just throw everything into the V bit) and using an ORM layer to talk to a database instead of writing flaky SQL probably cuts down on the most common catastrophes of web development, if only by a little.
Assembling a nice FCGI app in C might be pretty gosh darn fast, but is it more economical in the long run than just buying a bunch of shiny Sun T1 boxes and using a more web-dev friendly language?
But expecting everyone to code better is a bit like the myth of educating your users not to do stupid things.
>if someone asked me for a cab I'd have a fair idea they wanted a taxi
The caller wasn't asking for a cab. They were asking for a 'cab, innit'. Try saying those words out loud, and try to imagine how this confusion might have occurred. Enlightenment should soon follow.
This sounds like it is a device intended to compete with mid to high end graphics cards, doing lots of fancy 3D graphics, yes?
Then why doesn't it use the same x16 high bandwidth connection that such cards generally use? I'm reasonably certain that it isn't just there as a marketing ruse.
"If the reader & access control are designed properly they'll be hardened to prevent investigation of the hardware - the hardening techniques are well known and proven."
ahahahaHaHaHaHAHAHAHAHAHAA.
No they won't. Security is always an afterthought, and an additional expense. Lots of people will want magical biometric sauce in their security setup, but I rather suspect that a significant percentage will choose based on price rather than resilience to attack.
Give it a few years, and no doubt this sort of research will become illegal anyway, or publishing these sorts of results wil result in a hefty suing.
If their super-secret expensive license IP can be stolen by black-box reverse engineering of their drivers, then it was hardly protected in the first place. Perhaps they should have dropped such things into a firmware blob that ran on the board itself and never interacted directly with the host OS. Sounds like they were hardly exercising 'due diligence' here. Maybe they just don't believe he could have gotten the cards working without stealing their code.
Problem is, I still do not believe that driver engineering is in any way illegal. Hardware companies have been obsctructive and unhelpful to open source developers, yet I do not recall and story about a driver developer being busted for 'IP theft'.
Has he stolen proprietary Creative code, which contains software licensed from a third party? No? All his own work via reverse engineering? Then probably the best they can hope for is to hit him with the DMCA or whatever equivalent is available, for circumventing their alleged 'protection measures'.
I see and read all sorts of things about reverse engineering... indeed, you'll find all sorts of tedious EU directives on it which are no doubt far lass draconian than the equivalent US laws. Reverse engineering for the purposes of compatibility would seem to be okay... it is only when you use this information to release a competing product that you're breaking the law, or do naughty things like decompilation, etc etc.
The fact that a EULA tells you you cannot do this will not override local law.
Perhaps Creative are in the driver software market, and occasionally throw in bits of circuitry for free?
The attitude of hardware companies towards detailed specs for their products and openness with regards to drivers continues to baffle me.
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