Posts by DropBear

Re: @shufflemoomin

"With the correct Intel or AMD AHCI driver you install to the correct IDE controller"

You can't really do that, since as I said, in IDE mode (the AMD hardware at least) has a different PCI device ID than in AHCI mode and therefore trying to install the appropriate drives only gets you "no new drivers could be found" - the .inf file is simply not targeted at the IDE-mode device IDs. The only way to get it to work is to copy the .sys manually into system32/drivers and manually create the relevant registry entries so the .sys is picked up on boot once you switch to AHCI. THEN you can install the "new hardware" promptly detected by XP since the right hardware PCI ID is now visible.

Anyway, I forgot to mention the kicker in this whole kaboodle - while both Win7 and WinXP had to be babied around carefully to make the transition, the boot manager I use to dual boot them (the Linux BURG) needed no change whatsoever and booted the newly-AHCI disk without ever batting an eye...

Re: Given that this is a VM...

"Unmm, isn't that a little inconsistent?"

Not really. In most cases, FOSS contributions are about two things - solving some annoying immediate issue and generally contributing to a joint build effort of something bigger; for the purposes of the first part, MS has no relevance - but for the second, to me it would feel wrong for the project I help build to be Windows of all things...

Re: Fool me once

I guess you've never heard the saying "smart people learn from other peoples' mistakes, normal people learn from their own mistakes, and dumb people don't even learn from their own mistakes" - I have no doubt it applies equally well to companies (are they not people too after all?).

...because only attractive people are supposed to have desires, surely.

Re: IofT

Maybe, maybe not. There's hell to pay when you're attempting to heat back up multiple rooms that cooled significantly down, and it might just take the rest of the evening to get back to anywhere near desirable temperatures, considering most people don't have "preemptive regulation" thermostats that fire up half a day earlier to get where you want them by the time you want them...

Re: Does it matter?

Not really. There's no such thing as a job market (or indeed any production being done) around here ever since 2008 - on the other hand, we're swimming in code monkeys...

Re: IR reflector on inside of bulb ?

I have a hunch the reflector is not all that ideally reflective, and then you'd now be heating up the glass bulb... again. Heating the filament instead would seem to be far less of a problem...

Re: GPS Blanking

For a drone attack, sure, absolutely. But I think the restrictions I mentioned were meant more against an ICBM-style weapon - much higher and faster; I was just wondering whether the Chinese models bothered to implement those limitations...

Admittedly, SQRL sounds intriguing, I'll have to keep an eye on this. Gibson on the other hand is somewhat notorious in not exactly a good way, sort of McAfee-style - let's not forget this is the same guy who thinks you need a discombobulator to stay safe, who was running around in circles headless chicken style in panic predicting The End Of The Internet As We Know It when raw socket support appeared in Windows...

Now I'm kinda wondering if there ever was a video driver from any manufacturer who went to the trouble of actually cleaning memory - to be honest, I remember seeing this sort of "flash something at video resolution change" quite a few times in the past; I always considered it shoddy and inelegant programming (wait, is there any other kind left?) but didn't quite realize the privacy implications...

Re: Never mind the replicants

"Where's my artificial owl!?"

I heard they very much exist and were just about getting ready to come after us all Hitchcock-style but they got wind of what kind of money they can make on the set of the new Harry Potter spinoff and got hired there...

Re: Inventive?

...wouldn't that be "Right to bear arms"...? I'm not aware of anyone particularly being prevented from baring his arms...

Re: In dispute?

"Whoosh!"

Stop trolling, we know you're Randall's bot.

Re: TWC didn't get breached?

You are aware that "phishing" means you click through to a malicious site impersonating the proper one, where you enter your credentials with your own two hands due to sheer stupidity being excessively gullible, yes...?

Re: Hmmm

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, that twitter suggestion seems much more sarcasm than suggestion. The initial problem was that they took a known and knowable quantity (the time when the encryption was done, preserved as the modification time of the encrypted file) and used it to generate the encryption key: once you know what the seed for the random function was, it's not random at all and anyone can find the key again later using the same seed. That means that hashing that time changes NOTHING, the seed is still known, now you just have to hash the modification time of the encrypted file before using it as random seed if you want to find the "new" key; in other words, as long as they start from "time()" it doesn't matter what they do to it to make the key as long as we know what that time was and what exactly they did to it. Failing to grasp that is what the sarcasm targets, as an utterly useless piece of advice.

What does matter is that this time they _preserve_ the original file timestamp while encrypting the file, which means we no longer know later what their "time()" seed was as we no longer know when exactly they modified the file. Thankfully, as I understand it, they do need to store the key they used somewhere in order to decrypt the file if ransom is paid, so they embed it in an encrypted form into the file itself - except they f###ed up the key encryption part, so the key is embedded into the file IN PLAINTEXT... making it ridiculously easy to decrypt.

Re: GIMP!

"FREE! So just let that sink in before you diss it."

That might influence my willingness to use it. It has zero influence over how usable I think it is, therefore over how loudly I may or may not diss it. For the record, I don't think it's all that bad at all since the handful'o'windows issue went away, but _if_ I did think it was awful no amount of freeness would matter one damn bit.

Re: To pricey for a Huawei

"You are just paying the Cupertino tax on top."

That's just it. The tech might well be as good or better that Apple's - the "made in china" is not relevant; however, "not made by Apple" is. Not sure who's prepared to pay top-of-the-line flagship prices (for what may well be a top-of-the-line flagship indeed) in 2016 for a phone that isn't bought for its brand, unless you simply must have the absolute bleeding edge and nothing less will do. Do Huawei now have a reality distortion field of their own that I haven't heard of yet? Because if they don't, the whole impetus of the recent Conquest of the Cheap Chinese Phone (CCCP) hinges on it being significantly cheaper at comparable functionality - which of course this phone isn't.

Are you willing to pay a proper Cupertino tax for a non-Cupertino phone just because it's supposed to be even faster?