* Posts by DropBear

4733 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013

SpaceX makes nice with U.S. Air Force, gets shot at black ops launches

DropBear
WTF?

I was wondering who would just shoot SpaceX and why...

...then it started to dawn on me what they meant was SpaceX gets "a" shot at something...

Doomsday Clock says 3 minutes to midnight. Again

DropBear

Re: I don't understand it

Bit of a wind-up indeed - considering I don't ever remember having seen it more that five minutes "away from midnight", I find it difficult to not just bin it straight with the boy who cried "wolf"; much like a terrorist alert that never goes below orange, it just ends up failing to impress anyone...

LEAKED: Samsung's iPhone 6 killer... the Samsung Galaxy S6

DropBear

Re: Mature market syndrome

This is normal. Revolutionary products are rather rare.

No. It's not. Get me a YotaPhone 2 if you want to get me interested - this does nothing my S2 doesn't already do.

Judge to Dish Network: your Hopper's hip, it ain't no Aereo

DropBear

"The difference between Hopper and Aereo, the Judge found, was that Hopper does not store content at a third-party location"

Too bad all those legal (and many non-legal) folks find it so difficult to take a step back and take good look at that statement to realize how utterly ludicrous that "difference" actually is.

Drinking to forget? OK. But first, eat a curry... QUICK!

DropBear

Waaaait a minute....

I just realized typing this is uncomfortable because one of my hands seems to be holding the sandwich I packed for lunch. Damn! Am I really this easy to manipulate?!?

Your anonymous code contributions probably aren't: boffins

DropBear

Hmmm....

I wonder how easily would this tool identify someone who knows he might be profiled and consciously tries to stay away from some of his own known habits. Obviously, trying to do this many different times would be a short route to the nuthouse but perhaps it would work for one or two specific known-dangerous things to contribute to, as a departure from one's "normal" coding style. You know, start using else-ifs instead of switches, suddenly pick up a preference for Hungarian notation, pass everything through GNU indent at default settings, that sort of thing...

Netadmin wanted for 'terrible, terrible, awful job nobody wants'

DropBear

Re: Be nice to actually make a difference

No, I think it's just a mechanism to try to take the edge off - sort of like telling you I just totalled your car, through fits of laughter in the hope that somehow you'll get less mad that way - see, it's all good fun, hahaha (but yeah your car really is just scrap now)! Not that this ever works outside Hollywood-land, but they seem to think it does...

Copycat drug souk Silk Road 2.0: Another man cuffed

DropBear

Re: Lies, damned lies, and US government statements

Strange... re-reading the lines I can't accuse them of actually saying that, but that is exactly how I read it the first time too - that $8m was the amount of income SR2 was making for its operator... There's definitely some shady quasi-subliminal manipulation going on here in the wording.

Windows 10, day ZERO ... Will Nadella be the HERO?

DropBear

Re: Apps aren't the problem? Rubbish!

Actually, I'd be curious to see an actual top 50 of Android apps - chances are not a single one is installed on my phone. I did go to Google Play to peruse a "top apps" list - whatever that means - and within the first 50, the only one I do have is Google Translate. And yes, that means no interest whatsoever in Facebook, Twitter, Viber, Whatsapp, Instagram, Candy Crush etc etc etc...

Wizard of Oz OFFICIALLY 'most significant movie' EVER, says PNAS

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Wizard of Oz most significant?

"Inconceivable!"

Oh really...? Tell me you have never used and/or encountered the expression "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"...

DropBear
Trollface

Re: meh

"no, it's not watchable."

It totally is too - compared to "Gigli"...

Come and Twiddle Tek Gear's one handed keyboard

DropBear
Facepalm

So...

...they made a keyboard roughly the size of those miserably useless smartphone keyboards, only much harder to use...? Awesome!

Polish chap builds computer into a mouse

DropBear

What all these "inventions" neglect to (or choose to not) consider is that this general idea of a portable computer, "with you all the time" is NOT constrained by the computer itself (heck, you're already carrying an equivalent of that gizmo in your phone) but by the availability of decent peripherals. Sure, ultimately the phone is capable of functioning as a self-contained computer, but it's definitely not convenient to use as one, as-is. You'd want a full-size mouse, keyboard and screen to go with it - and just arbitrarily providing one of them (the mouse, here) will not solve the lack of the other two, even if ads for such gadgets try their best to convince you spare screens and keyboards are ubiquitous. The truth is, we're peripheral-limited and that's unlikely to change as long as working on a full-sized desktop or even laptop will remain much more comfortable than on any ultra-portable solution.

To be honest, the most ubiquitous peripheral today is... another complete computer - which is why solutions like the obscure, now defunct "Black Dog" USB dongle (that essentially cannibalized its host PC for its peripherals, but ran all software locally, outside its host, using it only as an x-server) still seems the best idea of the bunch. It's a shame it didn't take off. Maybe this would be a good time to re-implement the same thing in a smartphone? I mean, they already have the only required USB connector anyway...

Facebook is MORE IMPORTANT to humanity than PORTUGAL

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: "Really? But Google is the internet, surely"?

Oh, come on now! When did the World Wide Web in all its http:// glory stopped being the internet?!? Am I getting old...?

Pull up the Windows 10 duvet and pretend Win8 and Vista were BAD DREAMS

DropBear

"For me, the most noxious element is the way it tries to bully you into using a Microsoft account to log in to your PC"

Funnily, that reminds me why I can't access Ubuntu forums anymore - one day they just decided I need to sign up for an "Ubuntu Single Sign On", my old forum login was not good enough anymore. I said no thanks and walked...

MYSTERY RADIO SIGNAL picked up from BEYOND our GALAXY

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: Space is big, my brain just ain't

Let me try to put this another (perhaps more familiar) way - apparently the Sun's daily output of energy is the e-equals-mc-square equivalent of the mass of about FIVE MILLION QE aircraft carriers every day (albeit that's without any double decker buses on deck). Now who's glad we don't have to foot THAT bill...?

Sorry, Qualcomm, Apple – your patents don't scare us

DropBear
Mushroom

Kill them with fire...

Patents were always operating on a severely misguided premise: that facilitating a new discovery be made public by offering it protection would help others make use of that discovery. That premise in turn is based on the thoroughly false assumption that said discovery is a rare, precious thing that warrants being shared even under restrictive conditions. Utter bullshit. Today we know those "earth-shattering discoveries" are a dime a dozen, limited only by your R&D budget - it's the difference between the delusional assumption the we still wouldn't have phones if Bell failed to invent them versus the reality that they were actually re-invented simultaneously five minutes later.

And that means that instead of helping the inventor sharing his wondrous new discovery with the rest of the world, patents actually punish and prevent the rest of the world from making use of that discovery when everyone and their uncle inevitably comes up with the same solution to the same problem right on the heels of the first guy. Patents effectively say that I need to rent my own ideas just because some bozo happened to come up with them last week. In my book, if I can come up with an idea, I should be free to use it. If you think yours is invaluably unique, lock it up and/or shove it somewhere the sun don't shine, right next to the one about rectangles with rounded corners, where it belongs. Now, kindly hand over those blast goggles please, I wanna see what this big red button does ->

Buggy? Angry? LET IT ALL OUT says Linus Torvalds

DropBear
WTF?

Re: Middle finger

You seem to have used the words "Register article" and "appropriate" in the same sentence. By mistake, surely...

This could be a case for Mulder and Scully: Fox 'in talks' to bring back The X-Files

DropBear

What's up Fox? Did you run out of awesome series to cancel during their first season...?

Scary code of the week: Valve Steam CLEANS Linux PCs (if you're not careful)

DropBear

Re: What is the best practice here?

But at least running as a non-root user will prevent bad code like this from damaging the system as a whole.

Not much of a consolation these days when a desktop Linux is likely used as a single-user machine where all the valued bits likely belong to said user, while the system itself could probably be reinstalled fairly easily...

Anyway, I know one guy who'll be doing all his Steam gaming on Linux with a separate user that isn't even allowed to flush the toilet on the system...

You'll get sick of that iPad. And guess who'll be waiting? Big daddy Linux...

DropBear

Re: Linux on mobile.

As someone who spends multiple minutes cursing every single time I need to use a console of 4-5 lines on an Android phone (the rest being covered by the "soft" keyboard) I whole-heartedly agree. If only there was a decent recent Android phone with a FULL qwerty (no, not those "portrait" Blackberry style abominations), preferably on THIS SIDE of the pond ('murrica seems to get all of them)...

DropBear

Re: iOS and OS X

Bwahahaha, non-commercial developers listening to complaints from users... go on, pull the other one! Not that commercial devs always do listen (far from it), but in my experience the OS mantra is, overwhelmingly, "that's supposed to (not) work like that, wonfix, now BUGGER OFF - yeah, we mean all several hundreds of you complaining about the same exact issue and by the way you're all idiots".

I'll build a Hyperloop railgun tube-way in Texas, Elon Musk vows

DropBear

What Brunel do if he was around now?

Probably express his satisfaction that his early idea based on this concept is actually in service now then promptly move on to bigger and better things - he didn't seem to do "me too" stuff...

DropBear

Re: Pure Genius

Hmmm, we need to do some language-innovating here. We clearly have the term "mad scientist" for people who do this sort of thing with their own two hands, but what do you call them if they're the ones hiring the boffins? I mean "mad entrepreneur" doesn't quite have the same vibe...

'We will SNORT UP CRYSTAL DUST and then do a MAJOR software update'

DropBear
Joke

Actually, that sounds like an excellent excuse to finally go to Mars!

"- Boss, we borked SSH on 123.123.123.123... we need physical access to reboot it!

- So what are you waiting for?!?

- Well, we kinda need a ride first..."

Kim Jong-Un shoot-em-up Glorious Leader! yanked

DropBear
WTF?

Re: Sums it up really

I cannot possibly imagine this being true; I'm the single "developer" of a modest piece of obscure code (in quotes 'cause I can't code to save my life on PC - chips are another story) and even so I'm using Git - not even for backup, I just can't fathom how one could develop software without any version control. Seriously - you screw something up proper, and have zero ways to back-paddle?!? BULLSHIT. Incidentally, that also means I have the full code (current and past) on three different computers, including the server - quite improbable to lose...

Samsung's first Tizen smartphone is HERE ... by which we mean India

DropBear

Push the power button four times and the Z1 will send a canned help message to your primary contacts

Let's hope then the "take screenshot" is not also assigned to the same button (as is in the Galaxy S series, also being notoriously hard to get right and needing lots of attempts to trigger)...

TERROR in SPACE: ISS 'Nauts end panic by switching computer off and on again

DropBear

Re: In space no one hears you fart

I can't possibly being the only one giggling like stupid right now at the thought of a space suit equipped with a tasteful little rocket nozzle in the appropriate position...

Don't use Charlie Hebdo to justify Big Brother data-slurp – Data protection MEP

DropBear

Re: Saying we should bomb $MiddleEasternCountry in retaliatiopn

"In the UK it is an offence to make a threat to kill someone if you intend the victim to believe that you intend to carry out the threat whether you intend to or not."

Which - while commendable in its intent - is exactly the kind of thing that has zero business being in a piece of legislation: it makes YOU punishable for something outside your control. While straight up seriously threatening someone with bodily harm is obviously not something you should get away with, this leaves arbitrary scope for a third party to maliciously decide to "feel credibly threatened" by something you did whether or not you actually meant to threaten anyone (or indeed have any idea that such interpretation of whatever you did would be possible).

NSA: SO SORRY we backed that borked crypto even after you spotted the backdoor

DropBear

Re: Misnegation or obfuscation?

Didn't anyone tell him that the whole world is aware that ANY sentence beginning with "In truth" is definitely a lie, no exceptions?!?

PlayStation-processor-powered plutonium probe prepares Pluto pics

DropBear
Joke

Re: Light, camera, wait - what about the light?

Well... what did you think the Plutonium was for?!?

What do UK and Iran have in common? Both want to outlaw encrypted apps

DropBear
Mushroom

Re: Oh not again

...a car fail to stop when a pedestrian had stepped foot on a zebra crossing...

The problem is pedestrians know full well they can step down and start crossing once a car is about a metre or so away form the crossing - they'll cross behind the passing car - and they have exactly zero interest in your concern that you might lose your license because they technically stepped off in front of you, even if no-one in their right mind would expect you to be able to stop that late. The plod still expects you to (naturally).

This was all within a space of 20 minutes in a small town. Number of cyclists committing offences? 0

The number of dickwad car drivers and cyclists together is dwarfed by at least an order of magnitude by the number of Darwin award nominee pedestrians who never even bother to look either way and simply just dart across a road with their eyes firmly lowered to the ground wherever and whenever they feel like it - older folks are doing this as their main form of locomotion, in my experience. Runner up prize for the retards who never quite understood that the fact that a car should always stop when you cross at a crossing does not mean you should not always personally check that they'll be actually able to do so if you step down right now.

DropBear
WTF?

https isn't "secure" in the sense that it can't be eavesdropped - never has been, isn't really designed to be

Beg pardon? You have a source for that? And I'm not talking about someone who might be able to break it and listen in with enough effort - what you seem to suggest is that it's effectively plaintext and that's not how I remember it.

5 Times An 'Unhappy Person' Dared To Use The Word 'Boring' At CES 2015

DropBear

"And the problem with that was what precisely?"

Nothing at all, as long as you don't mind the constant guilt-tripping for not looking like Tarzan yourself (unless you are, in which case never mind).

Tesla S P85+: Smiling all the way to the next charging point

DropBear

Re: Hmmmm.

"Which might make it feasible even at a hundred grand, if financed right."

Have you got any idea how many dozens of second-hand cars can be bought for the same hundred grand...?

DropBear

Re: Not bad but still no cigar, methinks!

"Tesla would be a winner if it used the same (or similar capacity) battery packs but with less KW in the motors"

Except a weaker motor would save you exactly zero energy - you're giving up an advantage for no gain. Energy is mass times speed, and a weaker motor does not reduce your car's weight substantially so the same car zipping along at the same final speed took every bit as much energy to get up to speed as another one that got going that fast in half the time. Once you're at speed, the energy needed to fight aerodynamic drag is exactly the same. Your wimpier motors might ever-so-slightly reduce the cost, but not by that much either.

That's the main problem and the reason people keep quoting "the laws of physics" - the energy you need to propel a car is fixed, not something you can "invent away", and the amount of energy one can store in a chemical battery also has known limits. There simply isn't any room for a car on rubber wheels rolling along a road powered by chemical reactions in bowl full of electrodes to get all that significantly better. You need either a completely different energy source or something that is not recognizable as a "car" as we know it to change that...

DropBear
Mushroom

Re: If only..

"...the more dangerous it is when things go wrong and all that energy makes a break for freedom"

Sure, releasing that energy on purpose by someone trying to use your "fuel tank" as an explosive is not something you can solve - lots of energy in a small container can always be used nefariously. On the other hand, if we're just talking about safety without malicious intent, there can be a world of difference - both nitroglycerine and C4 are explosives, but one of them goes off at the drop of a hat, while the other isn't even ignited by a bullet. And I certainly don't think we need to worry about antimatter any time soon - now, if they ever invent hobby level 3D-printers that can churn out antimatter... yeah, then we might have a problem.

French Google fund to pay for 1 million print run of Charlie Hebdo next week

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: Do you know what i have noticed?

"There is no "moderate" or "extreme" Islam - there is *only* Islam"

Really, now? Is this the same Islam that built a whole fucking minaret to Jesus in the name of religious tolerance?!? You know, I might not know about that if I haven't been there myself...

SpaceX in ROCKET HOVERSHIP PRANG: 'Close – but no cigar,' says Musk

DropBear

Re: In the voice of Withnail...

Hey, I'd settle for a computer rendered video based on telemetry too...

Saudi Arabia to flog man 1,000 times for insulting religion on Facebook

DropBear

"eh, nuke Mecca."

Is that you, Theophilus Farnsworth...?

DropBear
Devil

Re: In a few decades...

This process took 'Christian'* nations almost two millennia

For some strange reason you seem to have mistakenly used the past tense there. You know, "In God we trust" and all that jazz...

DropBear

Re: Je suis Charlie...

If you know your next door neighbour was convicted...

Apples to Oranges. The law is only concerned with your neighbour's past actions, you are mostly concerned about his future ones...

NASA closing on fix for Opportunity rover's 'amnesia'

DropBear
Boffin

Erm...

I'm having a bit of a problem here converting watt-hours to jigawatts - somehow the units don't seem to balance out...

Erik Meijer: AGILE must be destroyed, once and for all

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: the mantra...

Indeed. Problems appear when management inevitably decides that such a "negative attitude" is unacceptable, and both three shall be satisfied, or else. Predictably this works about as well as throwing a tantrum about working warp drives and teleporters to be produced at once, except one can't actually explain that to management - they exist to communicate decisions to you, not to let you talk back.

Lollipop licked: KitKat still king in Android land

DropBear
Flame

Also, there's the little (subjective, I know) problem of Material Design needing to get killed with fire. I want Holo back - sadly, it's a losing battle.

DropBear

Re: Android upgrades

What should have been done is have a pure HAL

I'm saying this in the nicest possible way, but that's typical engineer thinking, concentrating only on the technical aspect of the problem. What it fails to address (beside the various "political" angles of why a manufacturer may or may not be inclined to do this) is that most manufacturers insist on having a thick custom layer on top of the OS, that would absolutely positively fail the instant you changed anything at all in the OS below it.

Cryptowall's ransomware's tough layers peeled

DropBear

Re: Anti VM my foot

An honest question - does it matter whether the share on the other machine is writable or not? Or does the malware just bypass security and infects the share anyway?

BILL GATES DRINKS 'boiled and treated' POO. Ah, 'delicious'

DropBear

Re: Could this be made small scale?

One would imagine all that water outside the sailboat (while not readily drinkable) would be a lot closer to drinkable (easier to convert) than any waste held inside the boat...

EDIT: oops, all these similar replies were hiding on the next page...

Elite: Dangerous 'billionaire' gamers are being 'antisocial', moan players

DropBear
FAIL

Still reporting the vocal minority then

You're obviously severely confused on which "minority" is the vocal one.

Ex-Microsoft Bug Bounty dev forced to decrypt laptop for Paris airport official

DropBear

They will if they image the drive, see things they can't understand, and pass it to forensics to figure out...

The whole point of a Truecrypt-style hidden volume is that in its encrypted state it should be pretty much indistinguishable from unused space filled with random noise. There is nothing to "find". Not even Truecrypt itself can tell you whether there actually is something there or not until you give it the proper key. The only giveaway would be the user getting visibly reluctant to carry out a full wipe of the allegedly "empty" space - but that would only happen if there was no backup of the data somewhere else which would be stupid anyway.