* Posts by DropBear

4733 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013

Let's replace Ethernet with infrared light bouncing off mirrors!

DropBear

Re: History repeating itself

I'm with bazza here - never underestimate the power of convenience-level availability to become qualitative change. What has changed in tech lately is not so much groundbreaking new stuff, but tectonic shifts caused by ubiquitous availability of dirt-cheap high-power tech. Allwinner SoCs were by no means mind-blowing tech-wise - being able to chuck one into anything without even thinking about it was though. Quadcopters don't use any revolutionary new tech - they exist because convenience MEMS accelerometers / gyros / ESCs / LiPos became a thing. Seeing a stepper spin used to involve etching your own PCB full of transistors, buffers and heatsinks - now you just grab a handful of 2x2cm modules out of your "misc Aliexpress junk" bin. We're at the point where chucking the equivalent of a PC into a washing machine controller is the much easier option than making the same thing with sliding contacts, small gears and a motor. I suspect it works much the same with these lasers...

DropBear

Re: The good and the bad...

Don't be silly, no need for any staggering - this is where the "and mirrors" part comes up. Preferably scattered along the walls, probably also active, to auto-calibrate them to horizontal (or whatever the plane angle is). You don't even need to arbitrate access, just find one that both ends can see. Hey, I think I'm starting to see the light here...

Corn-based diet turns French hamsters into baby eating cannibals

DropBear

Can't imagine how this is news - when I had hamsters (yes the cute, small ones) back in the day it was well known we need to watch and separate the newborns as fast as we can or else the mother "takes care" of ALL of them...

'Maker' couple asphyxiated, probably by laser cutter fumes

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: no warning of toxic gases then, just aesthetics and housekeeping issues

...although if "water for ingestion purposes" were invented today it would come with a 230-page booklet full of agreements, disclaimers, notices, warnings and advisories related a plethora of relevant health issues, contraindications and possible side-effects (80 pages for those alone, including five different types of sudden death observed - although exceedingly rarely - during clinical trials), with special dosage for children and during pregnancy, twelve pages of (proprietary and branded) active ingredients, including but not limited to H2(TM), O2(TM) and even CO2(TM), and useful recommendations such as seeking medical care immediately in case of over-dosage (but not before the Doc reads all 230 pages of the booklet).

You know what, we are hopelessly screwed...

King Battistelli tries again to break Euro Patent Office union

DropBear
Joke

Probably a Kickstarter raising enough to hire an assassin. I don't see anything else working...

Disk-nuking malware takes out Saudi Arabian gear. Yeah, wipe that smirk off your face, Iran

DropBear

Perhaps we should then agree on a suitable set of euphemisms to unequivocally distinguish "we're not saying it was them but technically it totally was them, 110%, on good authority" and "the idea has been floated around by various entities without half a clue but plenty of agenda" without having to articulate either of those explicitly. Right now they're kinda blurring together...

Northumbria Uni fined £400K after boffin's bad math gives students a near-killer caffeine high

DropBear
Devil

Re: Contradiction?

Really now...? Why, how do you reckon one recovers from "short term memory loss" (like the one after a bit too much alcohol) - by suddenly remembering stuff you can't remember the next morning, a week later or something? Or did you mix up "short-term memory loss" with "permanent loss of short-term memory"...?

DropBear

Re: Numbers

"an example of the need to double-check everything"

Yeah, that was before "agile methods" were invented...

DropBear

Re: bad math

That was my first reaction too - I have no idea of specifics of caffeine dosage, but hearing of a dose of 30 GRAMS of pure caffeine instantly blew ALL the fuses in my brain. Let's put if that way - would you consider putting 30g of SALT in your glass of juice? How about sugar...? No? Well then...

Forget Tony Stark's Iron Man – exosuits of the future will be spandex

DropBear

These might have their uses in light-assist / medical or even military endurance enhancement applications but I just don't see them happening in heavy military / industrial settings where the goal would be to notably increase load carrying / lifting capacity - you simply need the rigid frame to take the load off the person wearing it, pushing and pulling here and there on a body-suit won't do squat there.

Nuclear power station sensors are literally shouting their readings at each other

DropBear

Re: I think I'm going to patent...

You're too late. See prior art...

Assange reverse-ferrets on promise to fly to US post-Manning clemency

DropBear
Paris Hilton

"...saying Manning was not quid-quo-pro"

I must be doing something wrong, admittedly, but somehow every time I try to recall that expression the words come up in a different order.

IT team sent dirt file to Police as they all bailed from abusive workplace

DropBear
Devil

Re: Not surprised

Look, I enjoy speaking in drastic absolutes at least as much as any Aspie out there and I do certainly have my own opinion on what constitutes "worth" about the work one does, yet I cannot help but point out that in that Unconditionally Worshipped Gloriously Best Economic System There Is of our days, Captialism, people - not entirely unlike any other Product or Good - carry as "real" whatever value the market assigns to them*; as such, if any high-rolling parasite scumbag cruising on sheer luck is deemed by a sufficient majority of the market to be rare and therefore valuable enough to warrant getting away with murder and being begged on one's knees to stay, then that's the value they'll be carrying and that's exactly what's going to happen - they'll get away with murder and begged to stay. I might (as I do) disagree with that assessment all I want, but that won't change how the rest of the world (well, at least the part of it that matters) will go on acknowledging it and treating said scumbags as entities factually embodying untold heaps of value worthy of being rewarded with anything they might desire, at the expense of anybody else including any and all disposable wage slaves.

*Part of the problem clearly being that those dispensing the rewards obviously judge worth by results obtained rather than effort expended: while this view has its obvious merits minimizing wasted effort, it can be said to have certain morally arguable aspects in any properly functioning society. At any rate, its logical conclusion is that the worth of someone achieving great results with zero work is great, while the worth of someone achieving little with Herculean efforts, regardless of the circumstances that cause this, is slim, and that both should be rewarded strictly accordingly to that value. Anyone taking a dim view of that conclusion is hereby cordially invited to find a better system, with the caveat that anybody who possibly could to anything at all to help replacing the current system with their new one will be absolutely, categorically opposing this wonderful idea (and they'll have society's official division of institutional thuggery on their side, not afraid to use it). But despair not fellow worthless scum - as Soames would say, you could always try selling balloons and dream of becoming great yourself...

DropBear

Re: An innocent question

I'm somewhat more interested in exactly how, in the age of effortless conjuring and vanquishing of bits at one's whim, does one judge the merit of a claim such as "all these files are coming straight off the defendant's hard disk Your Honor, I totally didn't simply acquire a random selection online and copy it into "Exhibit A" (and the off-site backup) myself, honest, Guv.". Not that I suggest "Mike" did anything of the sorts, obviously - but if he did, how would we know?

My hole is a private thing – see for yourself

DropBear
Trollface

...of course, he didn't so much own said single by Lee Marvin as rather a temporary license to listen to his copy* (in private - strictly no public performances allowed such as at gatherings of friends, henceforth called "a party"), there just wasn't anyone around to helpfully point this out to him at the time...

*dependent on agreeing to the EULA, terms of service and the applicable license, subject to be revoked at the manufacturer's sole discretion at any moment and automatically terminated at various events including but not limited to the potential deterioration of said copy due to natural causes and prolonged use

Deadly Tesla smash probe: No recall needed, says Uncle Sam

DropBear

Re: Insurance companies watching

I see your point but I'd consider a 40% change in a baseline figure of 420 accidents, if not definitive, still pretty significant. It's not like a 40% change from five accidents to three...

DropBear

Re: Persuit of perfection vs. incremental improvement

I actually agree with your intent in principle - but if only willful negligence presents a danger to companies, what would stop them from adopting a deliberately ignorant "see no evil, hear no evil" attitude, where no question is asked too thoroughly out of fear of an inconvenient answer going on record as a result?

DropBear

Re: Phew, got away with it...

"Autopilot isn't a bad description"

Except it kinda is. The actual function might be similar ("keep current course") but the job requirements themselves are very different on a car and on an airplane. What suffices on a plane is not enough to do the same thing on a car - simply maintaining course is perfectly sufficient to keep a plane flying in the correct corridor out of trouble as there's nothing it can possibly hit that way; it's easy to see how that doesn't even begin to describe what's needed to stay out of trouble using autopilot alone in a car on a road.

Also, I assure you that if flight corridors were 1m larger than the wingspan of a plane - kinda like how highway lanes currently are for a car - all flight autopilots not based on a surveyor-precision GPS would fail left right and center too like nobody's business.

Zuck off: Facebook's big kahuna sues Hawaiians to kick 'em off their land

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Spoonerism, surely?

Well, one could say that car dealerships deal in car ownerships, although the owner is probably not the dealer, unless we're talking about a _very_ small ownership dealership...

Linux is part of the IoT security problem, dev tells Linux conference

DropBear

Patches in small hardware are Not At All A Good Thing. Like, at all.

- there's always a chance you brick the device on an update, and for Average Joe that's the end of the road. Exceedingly annoying if the dead device happens to be a lightbulb, even more so if it was ALL your lightbulbs. Yes, un-brickable bootloaders are feasible, but also exceedingly rare and hellishly hard to do properly in severely UI-constrained hardware (like a lightbulb).

- there's always a chance some more powerful computing device in your home (could easily be your phone or better yet your router) is already infected with something capable to identify and download appropriate malwarified firmware for your lightbulbs. Devices that can implement https and actually check they're really connecting to who they think do actually exist (barely just recently, in things like the ESP8266 chip, and poorly even there) but not every tiny chip is capable of doing that at all. You could of course also just simply sign firmware updates - right until your global key leaks / gets extracted / defeated etc.

- there's always a chance the absolute certainty that sooner rather than later one of the updates will alter or remove a feature or behavior that was the absolute cornerstone of your use case (or just breaks compatibility with something you need to keep using) - the only question more common than "how do I upgrade the firmware in <whatever>" is "how do I DOWNGRADE the firmware in <whatever>" and chances are the device (or the software that accompanies it) will actively try to prevent you doing that or even just avoiding the update...

- there's always a chance you'll end up in the nut-house trying to figure out why your Unambiguously Identified "Product X" just isn't willing at all to do / inter-operate with what is commonly known as something the Well Known "Product X" is quite capable of doing / inter-operating with, unless you're lucky enough to figure out you simply happen to have the "wrong" version of firmware and somehow everybody neglected to tell you that this is an Actual Thing with what is a stupid-simple, supposedly plug-and-play device (happened to me only yesterday, and I was getting close to reaching for an axe...).

Chrome dev explains how modern browsers make secure UI just about impossible

DropBear

Hahahahaha... well, my address bar sits right below the menu, so any "mini-windows" displayed by "chevrons" need to span right across both my bookmark bar and tab bar - I'd like to see a webpage fake that convincingly. As for the fullscreen thing, that should never have been allowed. Most stuff I watch in a small in-page window, I can press F11 if I want, and I'm fine with launching a dedicated player on my PC (if only HTML would let me do that), but page content really shouldn't be able to just commandeer my screen, warnings or no warnings.

Meet 'Moz://a', AKA Mozilla after it picked a new logo

DropBear
Unhappy

Well what else do you expect from a bunch of folks who took it upon themselves to decide for you what extensions you may or may not install...?

Phoney McPhoneface: The thrilling tale of ZTE's crowdsourced mobe

DropBear
Mushroom

Re: Why?

Because Kickstarter stopped being about helping things that couldn't otherwise come into existence do just that, and started very much also being nothing more than a convenient free marketing and advertising tool* to just gauge interest and drum up some hype, roughly at the time a filthy rich film studio "kickstarted" a movie on it. Ever since then, it's just one of the motions corporate marketroid parasites routinely go through with any project they're not very sure about.

* Considering these are the _exact_ people from whose whim KS allegedly hoped to rescue creative people from, I find this trend genuinely ironic and incredibly distasteful. Same also applies to those creative people who quite obviously regard KS as nothing but a springboard (clearly unable to finance their project on its own) towards an eventual corporate publisher / investor they can sell out to as quickly as possible once proof of sufficient public interest exists.

Japan tries to launch satellite on rocket the size of a telegraph pole

DropBear

Re: Telegraph pole?

Silly me, thinking "graph" had something to do with WRITING...

Father of Android II: A Hardware Comeback

DropBear

Re: The USP...

Except it would be inevitably Yet Another Cloud-based Thing which would make it less than interesting as far as I'm concerned faster than you can say "not your data". Actually, a PRIVATE "cloud" (home mini-server) based ecosystem might interest me indeed but nobody in their right mind is willing to do that when they can "monetize" YOU instead. If I were a rich venture capitalist in the mood to play with a startup instead of the wage slave that I actually am, I'd go for an Android compatible ecosystem with iron-clad / granular privacy controls, encrypted _everything_ from storage to comms, and private server sync. It would have to be a "click-through wizard to install" and "no monthly subscription" affair though or it would be guaranteed to fail...

DropBear

Re: connector

"When - other than headphones - was the last time anyone connected a cable to their phone other than to charge or power it, or side-load some application from a PC?"

Need to do it any time I want to access my phone. Bluetooth works about 40% of the time (other times the transfer mysteriously just keeps "failing" no matter what I do even though both devices freely admit seeing the other) and even then I have to manually re-arm "receive a file (you fucktard)" on the PC for every single file I want to transfer.

As for Wi-Fi, that's nice and all but how am I supposed to access anything at all on the phone (unless I want to run an FTP server on it all the time or something)? Yes, Kies Air does exist but has been broken and complaining about an expired certificate or somesuch for years now - and I'm absolutely not installing AirDroid even if it legitimately does need access to all the permissions it wants.

Or I can just forget all that misery and plug in a cable. Yeah, I do hate cables, but so far the alternative is infinitely worse...

Smart fingerprint padlock startup to $320k backers: Sorry for the radio silence

DropBear

Re: Indeed, no concept of Project Management.

"So just going quiet is inexcusable and raises alarm and suspicion."

Agreed. And yet, that is exactly what happens, time and again, at the first sign of trouble, with any crowd-funded project, large or small: they just go f#$%$%ing silent. Yes, there are laudable exceptions, but this behavior is so universal they hardly count. Even though in my experience backers demonstrate astonishing amounts of good will any project with issues but ongoing communication, somehow it seem the "hit and run" reflex is just too strong and universal: "if anything goes wrong, pretend it didn't and just hide"...

Maps and alarm clocks best thing about mobes, say normies

DropBear

Re: Pareto analysis

In my case it's more like 99% of the time 1% of the features: the alarm clock, exactly as they said. Everything else is in use only 0.0001% of the time (each), including calling, so yeah... for me it's more like "you hardly ever need a <whatever>, but when you need a <whatever>, you REALLY need a <whatever>".

Now for a really cool micro-drum solo: Boffins chill gizmo below quantum limit

DropBear

Re: Science-Fiction getting more real every day

Surely any food out here in the real-world already contains the agents of its own decomposition - isn't more a game of trying to prevent them to act? Wouldn't any means of perfectly destroying organic agents in the food also destroy some or all of the organic nature of the food itself...? I admit I'm clueless on this...

DropBear

Re: Very

"Surely these are the last words spoken in every universe ever"

Come now, we can't know that. Some might go with "Hold my beer and watch...!"

Dieselgate: VW pleads guilty, will cough up $4.3bn, throws 6 staff under its cheatware bus

DropBear

" Most likely it was mid to upper level manager who thought there was a loophole in the EPA regs..."

...who of course may have been an idiot but certainly not stupid enough to approve anything _on record_ so good luck pinning anything on him...

DropBear
Unhappy

Re: Urrm:

Anyone up-to-date on modern prosecution practices should have noticed long ago that anything one can do to any number of people (including murdering them) warrants barely a slap on the wrist compared to the "I WILL DESTROY YOU AND EAT YOUR SOUL"-style punishments for even the slightest things one might do against either a corporation or the government... People are a dime a dozen, the state couldn't care less about what you do to how many of them. It will never make a difference in the totals. But anything else - oh, now it's personal...!

EU wants power to fine behavioural data bad boys and the ad men aren't happy

DropBear
Devil

Re: When I first went online...

"...no porn..."

Hahahahahahaha... oh wait, you're serious! Let me laugh harder: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I still have a bunch of 256-colour GIFs complete with the stamped-on BBS telephone numbers and "scanned by" notes that did the rounds when the internet was still nowhere in sight. You know, nostalgic reasons...

Too much landfill, too little purpose: CES 2017

DropBear

Re: I predict...

"That the porn industry will be the first to make it work."

I'd be fine with that to be honest so why the hell can't they just get on with it already?!? (also, we need a Fry "take my money" icon...)

Asteroid nearly gave Earth a new feature, two days after its discovery

DropBear
Trollface

Re: not to scale

Quite. It's common knowledge the only thing we really need to fear (well, beside "fear itself") are high-altitude Nokias...

DropBear

Re: So close?

Interesting. The distinction felt artificial to me, then I just realized neither of the other two languages I speak (one of latin origin, one not) has different words to designate speed vs. velocity. Sure, there are a bunch of more or less synonyms, but as far as physical properties are being described, both have only one word for both the scalar and the vector...

DropBear

Then again, with a 2-day warning, you'd certainly be in wrong city if it managed to hit you...

Man jailed for 3 days after Texas cops confuse cat litter for meth

DropBear
Trollface

"Innocent until proven guilty"

Ehhh, that's so pre-truth...

TV anchor says live on-air 'Alexa, order me a dollhouse' – guess what happens next

DropBear

Re: Alexa, Tea, Earl Grey, Hot

"So ... no smartphones, nor tablets neither, and nary a laptop in sight?"

Would you be very surprised if I told you that my laptop is old enough (had to fix the hinges that stuck and broke the case I then had to replace, but otherwise works just fine thank you) to not have any cameras, and that I stopped updating Firefox on my phone when it started asking for access to audio...?

Routes taken by UK prosecutors over supply of modified TV set-top boxes

DropBear
Mushroom

Re: City of London Police = Rent-a-cop

Bullshit, mate. They don't park wherever the fuck they see fit for as long as they see fit because they NEED to. They just do it because they CAN, as there's nobody to stop them. And they fucking KNOW IT. So cut the melodramatic crap and quit while you're ahead.

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Dodgy law

"But how on earth can you charge me with mass murder when all I committed was trespassing?!?" - "Well yes but you stepped on some bugs while doing it. Several in fact. And it sounds SO much more impressive..."

https on thereg

DropBear

Re: Link to Forum on Articles

An http main page request landed me on the https version (so I made sure I'm not dreaming. Repeatedly.) but an article comment link led me back to http; even after manually loading https comments, upvoting threw me back to http again.

Hapless scouser scours streets for lost Crimble drone

DropBear

I don't really see how geo-fencing would help with anything unless you literally want to restrict the thing to your back yard. Once you go past your own literal fence, heck knows where it might fall - knowing it should be withing a mile or even half a mile will not be of any help, except regarding how far out you should go posting your posters...

Put walls around home Things, win $25k from US government

DropBear

Why, what's wrong with a plain firewall without uPnP...?

How the NYE leap second clocked Cloudflare – and how a single character fixed it

DropBear

I'd very much like to rephrase that as "One of the problems with computers is whenever you sit down to write software you build all your implicit assumptions about the real world into it instead of doing it properly and the real world gleefully proceeds to call out all your bullshit immediately".

DropBear

Re: the code was updated to check if rttMAX was equal to or less than zero

That's actually going _forward_, and is by far the less problematic case. It just makes something that actually took 1 second look like it took 2...

Dotdot. Who's there? Yet another IoT app layer

DropBear

Re: "One agnostic app layer to rule all of the connected gizmos"

...then again, if you're into the embedded device thing, you can quite likely also name the other 27 contenders, of which Zigbee is but one (one of the ones that failed to properly catch on, like, for real for the longest time now).

Hackers could turn your smart meter into a bomb and blow your family to smithereens – new claim

DropBear
Boffin

Re: Explode away

I have no way of knowing exactly what kind of destruction the bloke had in mind, but I can definitely confirm even chunky PCB traces asplode in a very entertaining manner when you fail to heed your home AC's manual's warning not to power the thing down and back up in relatively quick succession (once is quite enough when done "properly"). We were making some mains switching gear at the time (which you'd call "IoT" today) when we learned that particular lesson at the cost of a thoroughly destroyed device (also, fun fact: a 100W 0.5 amp tungsten bulb will happily blow your 25-amp peak current triac the millisecond it decides to burn out). So no, I don't think he's necessarily fibbing at all.

Twas the week before Xmas ... not a creature was stirring – except Microsoft admitting its Windows 10 upgrade pop-up went 'too far'

DropBear

Re: Apology or not, results are the same

"I don't understand the downvotes you got."

Oh, how about asserting that MS patches are any sort of viable replacement for actually managing a machine, for starters?

DropBear

Re: Self Defenestration?

"companies should hire a "corporate scapegoat" who's paid well to admit mistakes, take the blame..."

Oh, Ostap Bender was fully aware of that, and he did indeed do just that for his "company"...