* Posts by Adam 1

2545 publicly visible posts • joined 7 May 2012

Supercapacitors have the power to save you from data loss

Adam 1

Re: Kaboom?

Personally, I prefer "Supercapacitors are like batteries, but more awesome"

My TIGHT PANTS made my HUGE iPHONE go all BENDY!

Adam 1

They'ren't

Adam 1

You're folding it wrong.

What the 4K: High-def DisplayPort vid meets reversible USB Type C

Adam 1

Re: sigh

It is not that a 4K frame isn't better than 1080p frame. Of course it looks better paused side by side but you are at normal viewing distance* hitting some seriously diminishing returns.

It is also quite a way to misunderstand how it is that our eyes work. Our eyes track with a central high resolution focal point and periphery low resolution. If something on our periphery captures our attention, our eyes will move to focus on it and our brain magically stitches it together. You have no doubt seen the kids books in the Where's Wally series. If so you will know it can take a few minutes to find him, but if Wally had an animated hand waving at you with the rest of the image still, you would see him in under a second. Our eyes** are very good at picking movement.

In the real world, I would prefer the bandwidth used to better represent the movement in the frame, even to the point of dropping below 1080*1980 resolution briefly during that movement because that would "look better"

* er, that would be my definition of normal viewing distance; not that of my 2 year old.

** technically our brains rather than our eyes

Adam 1

sigh

Does anyone else think that 4K is solving the wrong problem? If you are going to provide 4x the bandwidth of 1080p then take a closer look at that 60Hz figure. I would take a 1080*1980@240Hz over this.

iPhone 6: The final straw for Android makers eaten alive by the data parasite?

Adam 1

Re: Shallow analysis?

>Why can't I download my upgrade for Opera mini from Opera's site, etc.? Opera sure isn't 'spyware is us!'

Check on Settings / security / allow apps from unknown sources.

Then you or an app can download APKs to your heart's content. I personally like the all updates in one spot rather than having each vendor produce their own auto updater, and I find Google's rules for submitting an app for approval far less arbitrary than certain fruity competitors.

Ten years on, TEN PER CENT of retailers aren't obeying CAN-SPAM

Adam 1

Re: Apple being the biggest spammer ever

Be reasonable! Apart from trying to scam you out of your life savings, what has spam ever done to you? They may be bad, but there is no need to liken then to distributors of u2 songs.

Jihadi terrorists DIDN'T encrypt their comms 'cos of Snowden leaks

Adam 1

Re: Bah!

If there was a backdoor, as a US based company, could they be under a secret order from a 3 letter agency to not disclose the said backdoor?

Infosec geniuses hack a Canon PRINTER and install DOOM

Adam 1

Re: Ah, the t'internet of things ...

Iot; a solution in search of a problem.

The sound of silence: One excited atom is so quiet that the human ear cannot detect it

Adam 1

Re: Spinal Tap...

You would need an amplifier that goes up to 11; that's for sure.

Adam 1

So if an excited atom vibrates and there isn't another atom to hear it, does it make a sound?

The Apple Watch and CROTCH RUBBING. How are they related?

Adam 1

Re: Pebble's nearly there

>tapping is way more discreet, I have no desire to advertise to all and sundry what I'm doing with my smartphone

Siri, listen to Rick Astley.

SanDisk's record-busting 512GB SD CARD will fit perfectly in your empty wallet

Adam 1

There are a couple of options. You have SD cards with built in WiFi that can mirror to any android or ios device. You also used to be able to get external card reader + hdd with a one button "clone what's on this card to the HDD" button. I had one about 10 years ago when a 512MB CF card cost would empty your wallet with around 40GB on the HDD.

Super Cali goes ballistic, Uber Pool is bogus: Ride sharing biz is illegal in the state, says regulator

Adam 1

+1 for article title of the year.

Airbus developing inkjet printer for planes

Adam 1

Re: F'ing Hell.....

It'd be cheaper to just fly on the unicorns themselves than the number you would need to make that quantity of printer ink.

Three photons can switch an optical beam at 500 GHz

Adam 1

Three photons walk into a bar. The bartender asked "three lights?"

Adam 1

Re: But...

They would never see the light of day again?

/here all week

Adam 1

If my math is right, that is less than a second to transmit a blu ray disc. Not bad. When can we have a real NBN?

Found inside ISIS terror chap's laptop: CELINE DION tunes

Adam 1

>The laptop also included speeches by more than 100 jihadi ideologues and advice on how to avoid the attention of the authorities.

Tip 1: Don't download this speech.

James Bond's metal-toothed nemesis Richard Kiel dies at 74

Adam 1

Re: wow

No one wants to be outed as a viewer of Adam Sandler movies.

TorrentLocker unpicked: Crypto coding shocker defeats extortionists

Adam 1

Re: I'm conflicted

>If you already have a backup of the data then why bother ...

IF you have a recent up to date backup, fair question. Many people don't. What they probably have sitting on an iPod somewhere is one of the MP3s from their music folder. The article suggests that as little as 2MB was enough to calculate the XOR key, or in layman's terms, a single song is enough to recover all their data.

Adam 1

Re: I'm conflicted

Pretty sure he is in Oatmeal land actually.

Leak of '5 MEELLLION Gmail passwords' creates security flap

Adam 1

Re: Not my GMail password

>I would assume that Google does not 'know' the passwords... salted cashews and such stuff.

You're right that they won't know the passwords in their database, but they can perform a match between the hashed password and what they stored. If they couldn't then it should be self evident that they also couldn't validate your credentials when you visited their website.

Enigmail PGP plugin forgets to encrypt mail sent as blind copies

Adam 1

Re: Surprising

To notice, you would need to be running wireshark or fiddler or something. At the ui level, how would you know...

Adam 1

Re: ... if one wants to 'Hide BCC recipients' ...

I took it to mean that the recipients in the to and cc fields would be moved to the bcc field if you answered yes.

'Serious flaws in the Vertigan report' says broadband boffin

Adam 1

Re: NBN for average or high end users?

>should the government be providing an NBN service that meets the average needs or high end users

Should the government be providing a health service that meets the needs of the average patient or high dependency patients? We could have an orders of magnitude cheaper healthcare system if we had the same attitude.

Should our public transport system cope with peak hour rush or average load?

Should our power grid cope with the hot summer peaks when everyone is running air conditioners and pool pumps or just average draw?

I agree in principle that there is a point where something becomes unviable, or a point of diminishing returns if you like, but the real problem with FTTN is that we are taking about a capacity date in the next decade unless you think that trends will change. That is big coin for infrastructure that will require reinvestment as soon as it finishes. If it were 20-25% of the cost of FTTP then I would certainly be torn, but it is well over half the build cost anyway. More than that, it still relies on the flaky copper from the node to the house. This means you are going to have to relay copper to the node which will need to get torn up again in relatively short time. It is only cheaper if you restrict consideration to the next decade. Longer term it is more expensive to operate, orders of magnitude more expensive to upgrade (at best you are driving around to every node and upgrading hardware there rather than at a central exchange)

Dodgy Norton update borks UNDEAD XP systems

Adam 1

Re: 'Uninstall all Symantec / Norton products immediately... that might help'

Lol. Someone who thinks the uninstaller provided by Norton is for removing the software.

Boffins hunch over steaming cups of coffee to find HIDDEN SECRETS of caffeine

Adam 1

Re: That's confusing....

>African elephants or Indian elephants

Kenyan, I believe.

Adam 1

>You're new here aren't you? Or at least don't visit much.

No, it appears that the poor chap kept a backup of his passwords in a photo in his iCloud account.

Data entry REAR-END SNAFU: Weighty ballsup leads to plane take-off flap

Adam 1

>At best, it would flag imbalance and cause seat reassignments shortly before departure (ie, chaos)

If only they were carrying hundreds of tonnes of some sort of liquid that could be pumped into tanks in different parts of the aircraft to rebalance the weight.

DREADNOUGHTUS: The 65-TON DINO that could crumple up a T-Rex like a paper cup

Adam 1

Re: Wow!

Still too frightened to go near the snakes and spiders in Australia though.

Scared of brute force password attacks? Just 'GIVE UP' says Microsoft

Adam 1

Re: So basically, MS says ...

>... clueless idiots running MS products are clueless?

That statement may be true *cough* TIFKAM *cough*, sorry had to clear my throat.

What was I saying? That's right, I think you missed the point. If say A! Company! Whose! Name! I! Will! Redact! So! As! Not! To! Embarrass! Them! stores your super duper unbreakable "wrong unicorn paperclip capacitor" password in clear text then it is compromised.

BTW, congratulations reg; nice click bait :)

Good luck with Project Wing, Google. This drone moonshot is NEVER going to happen

Adam 1

Re: Why?

> but what does Google get out of it?

I can't imagine any reason at all why Google would be interested in being paid to collect a continuous feed of low altitude high resolution images of populated areas....

China: You, Microsoft. Office-Windows 'compatibility'. You have 20 days to explain

Adam 1

>Could be talking about wine on Linux (or what the Chinese are planning for an "own" OS)

I believe that theory is credible.

Adam 1

>If you own both the OS and the application, it is possible to make the OS work for the application.

As a generalisation I agree, but this would hold more water if it was say windows media player being able to use hidden optimisations to improve framerates or reduce battery drain, or SQL server getting some unique filesystem priority levels not adhered to for other dbms, but we are taking about a productivity suite. If you think about its limited technical requirements, there isn't a whole lot of ways to cripple their APIs that would benefit Office without the commensurate disadvantage to other products Microsoft need to maintain a viable desktop ecosystem.

In terms of their Corel lawsuits that was quite a different story. The windows API was under active development and decisions could be made to drop or otherwise make specific calls suboptimal, and they could publicise them late in the development cycle for Corel for maximum interruptions and to give their own products an advantage. Completely unacceptable behaviour if true. But in 2014 I can easily write** an office competitor using Win API, .NET or Java and achieve a level of functionality and performance that Microsoft would prefer wasn't possible.

** actually, I couldn't, lacking the will, money, patience and expertise to undertake a project at that scale, but the point is that no magic API would ms office a measurable advantage.

Adam 1

I may be a bit slow, but as a developer I am struggling to think of any office feature that requires anything resembling a secret undocumented API call. The inputs are all keyboard, mouse and filesystem calls. The outputs are all canvases (screen/printer). The functionality whilst broad in reach with a feature set as long as your arm is not complex at any functional point that I can see.

It is fair enough to criticise their not so open document formats but this argument about hidden APIs doesn't seem to hold a lot of water.

Chumps stump up $1 MEELLLION for watch that doesn't exist

Adam 1

Re: Kickstarter space shot

Too late. Half of them are already there.

If you think 3D printing is just firing blanks, just you wait

Adam 1

Re: Something for the weekend?

^ what he said + on a mobile device.

And off to the patent office for me too.

NASA to reformat Opportunity rover's memory from 125 million miles away

Adam 1

Re: Dust removal

>As for wipers I suspect they didn't want to scratch the cell surfaces which is what wipers in a dry dusty environment will inevitably do.

Maybe it could just find some water then use that. Two birds and the rest.

Too slow with that iPhone refresh, Apple: Android is GOBBLING up US mobile market

Adam 1

Re: Seeing as Android is a (1) malware magnet (2) blatant iOS ripoff (3) fragmented mess…

It's a phone, dude.

Adam 1

Dual boot option? I would love to see a touch enabled version of grub.

Mozilla's 'Tiles' ads debut in new Firefox nightlies

Adam 1

Re: Fail. Fail. Fail.

So your saying there's a chance.

Oz fed police in PDF redaction SNAFU

Adam 1

BUT, er Team Australia!

Raspberry Pi B+: PHWOAR, get a load of those pins

Adam 1

> dubs it "Revision 3" of the B – rather than an updated version.

I think I will wait for Revision 3.14 myself.

Intelligence blunder: You wanna be Australia's spyboss? No problem, just walk right in

Adam 1

Re: That's not how it works

For what purpose was he granted security access other than his employment contract defining his responsibilities in such a way that he is permitted?

That is not to say they need to delete his identity records or confiscate his cards but a process wasn't followed. In this case it appears benign but they need to look at how this happened to avoid future cases where it is not 5 days and the contract is not being renewed.

Adam 1

Re: Alternative story if it worked

Or ASIS reports best ever productivity figures after management unable to interrupt for a week.

Seriously though, it would be entirely appropriate to deny access under such a case and failure to reject access should be seen for the security lapse it could have been. Who else "can't access" their systems?

Bright lights, affordable motor: Ford puts LED headlights onto Mondeo

Adam 1

Any suggestion about what this does to the repair costs if they get busted in an accident? (Even if you don't plan on having one, it is one of the factors that goes into the spreadsheet to figure out your insurance premiums so it still matters)

China hopes home-grown OS will oust Microsoft

Adam 1

Re: New user interface ...

I have no clue what you guys are saying.

Best shot: Coffee - how do you brew?

Adam 1

Re: I'm a Nespresso fan

I love a fresh ground coffee too, but I always found myself in a bit of a dilemma*. There is frankly too much faffing about to grind, warm the machine, clean all the tampers, filters, jugs and steam wands to make it worthwhile before work. So it used to be a weekend treat for me to make it. The problem is that anything pre ground would go stale well before it was used and I wasn't as happy with the el cheapo grinder which was too course for my preference.

I ended up buying a nespresso because it gave me something quite tolerable with the convenience of instant. I won't pretend it is the best drop that I have ever had but it is better than more than a couple of "baristas" have given me over the years.

*first world problem, I know