Posts by DropBear 4735 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
On one of the Discovery shows a while back they did try powering an appliance (not sure if it was a laptop charger or a small CRT TV set) from a bunch of bicycle dynamos of people pedaling. If I recall correctly, a whole team of champions was practically dying right there trying to get it to work even for a short while...
"One of my professors used to say that if you have to use an analogy to explain something, you do not understand the subject well enough."
Yes, all that endless row of people who ended up having to try to explain voltage and current using liquid flow analogies to an audience who's eyes immediately glazed over on any attempt to explain the subject directly must all have been ignorant on the matter themselves. Definitely. Yeah, that must be it.
"Even the cheapest TP-Link ADSL / Cable (FTTC capable) offering proudly boasts an 'ipv6 ready' sticker on the box nowadays. No excuse."
Oh, you're offering to buy me a new router then, at least as good as the old one was...? Because it's working just fine, and it's not going anywhere any decade soon...
"This is a test of whether the drive itself creates thrust... not whether the battery does, or the generator, or the test controller.."
Heyyyy, awesome! A little while back we had no EMDrive at all, and now we have even batteries and generators and controllers creating thrust! Astounding progress...!
I think the more realistic version is "our systems could work perfectly fine without any 5000 mile long wire, but we're not willing to stick our neck out for whatever that might happen while we are unable to keep our eyes on them (very, very) remotely so we'll make sure if that wire breaks you won't be allowed to use them"...
"Still, it hardly seems fair to criticize our particular point in time so harshly, esp in comparison to such preceding jewels..."
I will not deny that the tendency to do this sort of thing is not new. What definitely IS new though is the greater and greater ease with which new technical means facilitate global surveillance and power abuse. And that seems hell-bent on blowing up in our faces some time real soon, if things keep going the way they have been lately...
"I would love to be able to pay a small subscription to read the site. Of the order of say £10-15 per year to disable all the adverts."
What if I were to tell you the red dot is not real they possibly make more than a smidge more than that off a person (who doesn't block ads)...?
Oh, it absolutely does, make no mistake. It may all be in the user's mindset, but collectively that's comparably immutable thing to Windows's (once) absolute dominance as OS simply because it's what everyone else uses. The result is that countless businesses don't have websites anymore, don't have mailing lists anymore, or indeed any way to keep in touch or even get in contact (!) - they just insist you look them up on Facebook. Wanna order a Pizza or even just see the menu? Tough luck, visit this Facebook-based take-out food on-line ordering platform we are a member of! Unfortunately, these guys really do make the best pizza in town, I can't just go elsewhere - fortunately, they do still pick up the phone. For how much longer, I'm not sure...
My problem with the "vault" model (well other than eggs and baskets) is that it _needs_ to be cloud-based, otherwise it can fill in passwords only on the single device it resides on - typing the truly gibberish passwords that are the whole point of this by hand is just not going to happen; of course, one could try setting up some sort of a personal server or some other DIY scheme of syncing the vault around, but that's too much of a hassle for me - and I would still be locked out of every account I have on any ad-hoc "alien" device.
I think a USB device masquerading as a keyboard that could type in credentials into any hardware that has a USB socket would be superior - if only the task of requesting a specific password would finally be integrated into one of these - scrolling through passwords with tiny buttons on the USB key itself (as most of these seem to want you to do) is just Not Going To Happen as far as I'm concerned. Also, much too often these keys expect you to keep them secure and have no other means of authentication (unsurprising considering they have practically no UI) which is completely unacceptable IMHO (and no, I don't see potential built-in fingerprint readers as much of an improvement).
"I'm curious what makes people so anti-MS (for this specific thing) yet merrily give their lives away to the others?"
I can only assume that just because people are fine with being seen in public they are in no hurry to rip off all their curtains to achieve the same "transparency" in what is the equivalent of the privacy of their homes.
Dear Manufacturers,
as regrettable as it is, we can't keep buying stuff you make solely and exclusively to keep you in business. Because we certainly have no other reason whatsoever to - there has been no compelling new feature in computing for many years now, and everybody who needed more computing in their life has long got their fill by now. No thanks, we're good.
That would buy us all of three seconds, four even, if we're lucky. It would just mean traditional PC-infecting nasties would start carrying payloads looking for LAN-dwelling IoT stuff to infect; from then on, NAT would do nothing against Mr. 192.168.1.200 and half a million of his buddies suddenly starting to hammer briankrebs.com or whatever...
"Nature will always find a way..."
Oh, the water just answers the distant call of the silicon in the electronics remembering the time when it was still sand on a beach, pining for the once-gentle embrace of the waves...
"Come out, come out, let's play once more...!"
And where exactly would you store that glorious "common list" in the world of routers that are unable to run the latest OpenWRT due to not having enough storage to keep it? Unless of course you want the router to immediately send your proposed password to a perfectly safe and reliable (of course) server somewhere on the internet, for a "commonness check"...
Suit yourself - I put a mind-numbing amount of care into choosing (and caring for) the stuff I have, and none of it is interchangeable with anything else comparable. Me and my stuff are quite tightly... interconnected... for want of a better word; I certainly strongly determine what I have, and believe it or not some part of me got infused at some point into my things - I am hopelessly, painfully incomplete without it all.
Naaah. I'm still charging my smartphone every day begrudgingly, seeing as how my previous smartphone had to be charged only once a week. No way I'm willing to even entertain the notion of adding another device to be charged daily to the list - my current watch (that I never take off by the way) takes about four years between battery changes and that's precisely as often as I'm willing to bother with that sort of thing.
"Dunno where you live but hereabouts if you're running an unsafe car on the roads you can get a conviction however ordinary you are."
And cars have garages than can grant MOTs. What non-God-Tier-Entity do you have in mind that can in good faith assert that a given device is "safe"? It's exceedingly rare to discover major faults in an existing car which is why recalls work at all; with computing, it's the daily norm. So do please tell me you intend to equate "safe" with "all patches issued as of today being applied" so I can laugh all next week.
"An Amazon gift card is sufficient. So I can buy paperback novels. Nope, no electronic gizmo needed. When the mega-EMP strike occurs I'll have plenty to read while I starve to death, thank you."
But why no electronic books? I don't get it... I thought rolls of punch tape and a hacked Enigma machine that can display them would be thoroughly EMP-proof!
Wait, you bemoan that we might have gotten the SEASON of JC's birth wrong?!? Quick piece of advice - never look up how the YEAR was "established"...
"Who today even uses a dual core processor? Even browsing (with video) now taxes quad cores."
Sure, as long as you define "taxing" as "using less than 10% CPU total at watching 1080p Youtube either in windowed or fullscreen mode, with 37 other tabs open". On an AMD Phenom quad core right now.
Yeah, about that - I'm hell bent on getting an RX 480 in my AMD CPU'd desktop instead of my old Radeon, in spite of being called an idiot for trying to Linux with anything other than an NVidia. EXCEPT that card AMD announced for $200 MSRP _SOMEHOW_ keeps selling for $300+++...
I feel the same way - although as an established hardware molester I can appreciate that passing a buffer allocated on the stack (with a transient existence by its very nature) to a DMA-capable peripheral (which is by definition meant to operate somewhat independently from whatever the software is doing) is not the brightest of ideas, even if you swear your code goes nowhere until the buffer is spent. But that's probably a gross oversimplification anyway - I'm absolutely clueless about any OS-related code...
"so what's your point?"
Not sure about his, but mine is that my electro-mechanical / electronic hybrid watch bought about two decades ago has had its battery changed all of about four times total, never ever got a date wrong, twice a year when I'm adjusting for DST is always still within the proper minute (I don't care for more precision than that), is tested to be actually waterproof as I never needed to take it off even in a swimming pool, has a dial face so reflective I can just about read the time even in starlight, and costed me all of about a few dozen bucks, bought from a well-known purveyor of cheap commodity watches and musical keyboards. There is no conceivable reason I could think of to justify paying a small fortune for something that cannot possibly be better, and that includes advertisement that I had a small fortune to spend on it.
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