Posts by noodle heimer

Thoughts about Sprint's MPLS network?

Readers - and maybe vultures? - any thoughts on how Sprint's wireline offerings, in particular their much-touted MPLS offerings, will fare after the merger? Is that a business tmo has any interest in at all, something they may spin out to satisfy regulators?

I haven't seen any coverage in the tech press on this, and frankly I don't care much about cell coverage.

Take it from a performer

Wbich, Neal, you once were:

“Go back to the pre-recorded era. If you wanted to hear Caruso, you went to go see Caruso and it’s coming back to that. The t-shirt and the album are peripherals of the actual performance. Everything revolves around the gig,”

That's Richard Thompson. Once upon a time, Neal, you were a guitar god. And you toured, and people went to see you, and got something honest out of the transaction.

Now you expect to live off your back catalog and sling audiophool hokum like the Pono.

Shut up and play your goddamn guitar. If you're good and you're determined you can make a living at it. Superstardom is an accident of the mid 20th century, not a star placed in the Firmament by Jehovah around which the universe must revolve.

Me, I'm a listener - but I buy concert tickets every year.

Analysts are saying it looks like the real deal

The folks who first IDed the Equation Group at Kaspersky are saying the binaries use encryption the way the EG uses it, and consider that to be good evidence this is a real exposure.

At least one ASA vulnerability is new and useful, a good insider attack tool.

way too fucking soon

ouch. Enjoy every sandwich, as Mr. Zevon pointed out.

A few years back, I had an SSG 550 series go titsup and pulled the memory for a peek.

The workstation I was looking at it on pointed out that there was a trojan in the filesystem.

My impression is that Juniper's been a target for this kind of thing for a long time. I'll need to see where the sample is - I'm fairly sure I still have it or can find it.

board chairman's son?

not too good to get caught with your hand wrapped around certain tills....

firetv basically blows chromecast out of the water.

add kodi and you have the big three - amazon, Netflix and your local files. launched with Ethernet and dedicated audio out. sideloading apps is trivial.

I get the impression that roku is very good also, but don't know if Amazon video is available for it or not. my memory is that it wasn't at the time the fire launched.

How sure are they that they'd finished resetting the passwords? The doc's only three months after Snowden left. I've had access-via-incompetence at old worksites for far, far longer than that.

the most important note in this essay (IMHO, of course)

Was that for amplifiers, performance is measured, and for speakers, almost anything *but* performance is measured.

If you go look at stereophile equipment reviews, especially those for speakers, what's striking is how many measurements they make on things that don't matter. Impedance changes as a function of input frequency, for example. They always measure it, and it's a proxy for nothing predictable. Instead, they could do much more thorough measurements of sound pressure time and amplitude response to simple and more complex inputs, seeing as it's the sound pressure that we actually hear.

But what they really, really never do: compare, in the same measurement, recordings played through otherwise identical systems with only the speakers being different - this despite the fact that they often refer to a pair of speakers as "my reference speakers for years were..."

head to head performance metrics across vendors, as we're used to seeing for all other electronics? Nope!

Instead, volumes of meaningless stuff that sounds like wine snobs talking. Except that the number of people who are physiologically able to reliably (ie, measurably and repeatedly) distinguish some of the facets of wine being snobbed over is probably higher than those who can accomplish the same thing with audio.

The up side for the rest of us: the cast-off gear from two or three decades ago can sound as good as the very expensive stuff sold today. (All the moreso when the ebay seller misreads the label on what he's punting.)

whoopsie

Usually, I hope a technical site will mention the OS that a new piece of gear will be running.

Which in this instance is Android, for anyone who hasn't skipped to the link.

the lack of SaX2 in the 12.x line is going to be fun

For years, SuSE has relead heavily on SaX2 to manipulate the xorg.conf file and actually get xwindows visible.

With 12.1 landing and the Sandy Bridge chips (and associated new graphics capacity) coming online just as SaX2 is dropped hard... big fun.

I still have a viable SaX2 on an 11.3, and may have it on an 11.4 that was done as an upgrade, but on new installs, I don't have it any longer and it is truly annoying at times not to have it. (as, for instance, I was setting up a new laptop a few weeks ago - so, completely fresh install on new hardware.)

maybe, just maybe

they've noticed that the 7" tablet from BN - a store with, like Apple, actual physical storefronts - is currently the best-seling Android tablet. This despite or because it's being pitched as an e-reader.

I think Apple has realized that there is a good-sized chunk of the market that wants a smaller display.

I'm curious about whether they want to go to 7" or down to 5" -- I had a chance to play with the Samsung 5" android mini tablet / big media player this weekend, and it is a very nice size point.

Genuinely pocketable. About the size of the Tungsten T3, extended.

vipre was developed by Sunbelt

before Sunbelt was bought by GFI. I never did understand what, exactly, GFI thought the value of Sunbelt was.

During the brief period when I trialed their antispam/antivirus box, I learned that they were using another outfit's good and very expensive definitions on it - and to cut costs, didn't actually license it properly but paid per update. This meant that it wasn't auto-updating but only updating when something really nasty was on the loose.

after their staff pulled the truth like taffy on a mailing list discussing the issue, I sent it back.

And I will never again do business with a company in Florida. Seriously. I've had nothing but bad experiences with folks who decide to run businesses from there.

shouldn't be very hard to verify

If the guy's right it shouldn't be hard to verify the claim. A plaintext password left in a DLL is very likely to be available in caches. Also, the Comodo partner could simply own up.

nookery rocks

For me - and on the desktop, I'm a gearhead, running multiple VMs and wanting plenty of ram and computing power, and a few T of storage in the living room - the Nook is an excellent tablet.

The tablet is mostly about consumption - about a nice thing to read the news with the evening, or a book or two.

The blazing fast CPU isn't a big deal to me (though if I watched movies on a tab, the Nook might start to seem slow) on a tablet. I want control of the OS and I want easy file management.

The nook's trivially rootable, my model most often boots the BN firmware rooted so I can use an RSS reader but was running a mod this weekend to look at bluetooth support (keyboard, good; microphone, not so good yet in my hands.)

It's the first device I've come across to rival the 12 year old niche Palm Pilots have filled for me, with the addition of b-folders for locally accessible address database.

I hope Amazon makes a 500 dollar device - I'd hate to see them make a 300 dollar device and have the nook dev community get more interested in Kindles.

we can only hope

that this will be implemented. Along with a serious cell signal jammer on every plane.

That would almost make up for the Shoes Off Theater on every fucking flight (at least here in the US.)

The announcement did get me to buy a device

But not an AppleTV.

I do not have a large library of files transcoded into h.264 - I have a large library of files in a range of formats accumulated over the years. I've never much liked itunes, even though I have an ipod.

I do like lots of storage, and have a 4 bay nas in the house. I wanted to be able to use it as well as netflix.

I picked up the WD live tv plus box last night, and so far I'm impressed.

It seamlessly picks up the DLNA served media. It doesn't obligate me to have a PC switched on (and doesn't interrupt watching movies if I need to reboot the system, or do work on a different box.) It costs 20 bucks more than the new Apple box but seems to support the widest collection of file formats from a media server that anyone supports today.

And it has netflix, which I may or may not keep.

not to worry

It's only 100 million US.

the NSA can't brew tea for that little money.

This just about covers a quarter of the Raytheon project managers' bill to spend an afternoon reading up on Snort and recommending the NSA make something just like that, only for SCADA commands too, and not just in TCP/IP, and with a neat dashboard.

Visio?

I haven't run across a linux app that can read and create visio diagrams.

Am I missing something? If I'm not, an update to this piece specifically addressing Visio would be of interest, since Open Office doesn't read visios (or at least the variant I use doesn't.)

Similar questions apply to Project.

Not a hater, not a fanboi

I have not used a Mac in production for some years now. I recently bought, then gave away, an ipad after getting tired of the lack of internal filer. I do have MacOS installed on a couple of the systems I use regularly, so that I can answer questions about it when they come up.

At the office and at home I use more and more linux - SuSE at work, and Ubuntu on the CULV laptop I replaced the ipad with.

So, having heard the hoo-ha about Apple's site demo'ing HTML 5, I tried visiting.

In Firefox, I'm told to go get Safari. Not available for my platform.

In (webkit driven) Konqueror, I am not told to get Safari. The page just fails to work - the initial page loads, but all of the links just reload the page.

Brilliant start for a demo of an open source technology.

so, the native apps

Are basically prohibited from implementing the top two uses for any computing device.

Brilliant.

How my mum got her ipad

This is exactly how my mom wound up with an ipad.

And she loves it. It lets her listen to music and read email and websites. She's never been able to sort out a computer with a GUI before, in part due to not wanting to.

I haven't yet shown her the youtube video explaining that the ipad is the magical and revolutionary computing device for housecats. Seems unsporting.

I have a large library of technical PDFs which I'd hoped to consult using the pad. But needing to use any of the kludges on offer was a complete fail - it simply wasn't worth the hassle to get the files on, and then to quickly update which were and which were not on it an ongoing way.

A second issue is that my home network has a Netscreen running it, and Netscreens don't put the wireless network and the wired network in the same subnet. Nor do they make passing broadcast traffic between routed subnets trivial.

Consequently, many bonjour based apps worked terribly in terms of reaching my filer. I was able, ultimately, to watch video from the filer - but I have a television for that, and if I want to watch something while out of sight of the TV, I want that something to be displayed on a screen that can be easily stood up, then repositioned.

Now I have a CULV laptop for my dicking around the house toy. It runs win7 if I need it to, but spends most of its time running ubuntu. It has a useable local file system and is able to reach things in the house by IP address rather than by broadcast.

It is not magical and revolutionary, but it is very much more functional for me.

how much longer will the npr app live? the abc app?

Boy, if they don't like apps that look like desktops, how much longer will the NPR or ABC apps live?

What, forever, because they're driven by major players?

what on earth

is the point of that stupid dog website, the .net one?

Looking at it is like flashing back to geocities circa 1999 or so, back when pets with their own websites had just heated up the doublewide community in the rural South.

still liking the Palm OS best

I've been using various Palms for around 10 years now, for contact management and for extensive use as an e-reader.

I relied on Handspring devices for five years, then tried (and did not like) the Sony variant and am now happy on a T3.

I started using Avantgo as a newsreader, and moved into RSS once AG was killed.

The great thing that the Kindle has done for me is create many more ebooks than initially were available (aside from hardcore dork things, which have always been available as PDFs and hence were things I could load up.)

The kindle and the Apple and the JooJoo are larger than I want to tote and give me much less control over what lands on the reader and how I use it.

Granted, you're now limited to buying used devices off Ebay if this is what you want to keep Ludding along with, but I hope by the time I finally have to give up on these, someone will have come up with something close to as good.

those crying are not webmasters

The title claims webmasters are up in arms about this.

The webmasters I know are fine with this. They design pages, do some front-ends for databases, and generally work on getting things out there for people to read on websites. Honest work.

Metz' piece does not quote any upset webmasters, either, despite the title - though the lede gets it right. SEO types are unhappy. Especially the lazy ones who wanted to be able to keep selling the same old crap to every new customer for the same outrageous fees.

Boo hoo hoo.

it's not a fucking tenant

good christ.

Who is driving your spellchecker now? Spellcheck would have offered both tenet and tenant as alternate spellings for whatever was fat-fingered in, so someone obviously doesn't know much about, hm, words.

The author should be off the hook; if the author used the word tenet, one hopes...

okay. scratch that.

Where did using tenant come from there? And can that person's left pinky fingernail be torn out as a way to raise staff morale and inspire them to stop making everyone look like droolers?

And can the resulting Staff Morale and Inspiration Lifting Exercise (SMILE) be posted to Youtube?

if it's light, it's a win

If this comes in at around a kilo, charger included, it's not competing against budget boatanchor notebooks, it's competing against higher end machines, the Thinkpad ultralights and high-end lightweight Macs. These are machines people buy with weight as a factor more important than cost.

If the screen opens properly it may be something I'll buy - I gave a netbook to my sister last year for Christmas, after figuring out how bad the keyboard was for the actual work I do, which involves typing but does not need a lot oomph. The screen was a problem, also, since it didn't fully open.

Sis liked it, I enjoyed playing with it, but even as a personal machine, it didn't work out.

This? This might do well for me.

first, kill all the lawyers...

Dunno. Seems to me that putting pockets behind Metasploit not be a good idea. Particularly not a security company's pockets.

Unlike Snort, Metasploit is an intrusive tool.

Seems to me that the first time some script kiddie starts poking around some company that uses logging with Metasploit and a few weeks later a Nexpose sales call comes in, an argument could be made that Rapid7 is deliberately beefing up Metasploit to drive sales of its security consultancy.

call me stupid but

wouldn't it help to have the comparable NetApp performance score somewhere in this article?

I do appreciate the detail the article gives explaining the paternity of the joint venture.