* Posts by Christian Berger

4850 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2007

Microsoft offers free keyboard covers for Surface RT

Christian Berger

The better solution would have been

...to finally include x86 emulation so you can run normal win16 and win32 software on it. Even if it's really slow and hardly usable, it will allow you to run certain pieces of essential software like VPN clients and such.

Now beaming live from Pyongyang: NORKSCASTS!

Christian Berger

Re: Getting their TV is actually comparatively simple

> I'd hate to see your idea of a dish for difficult-to-get signals...

Actually in Vienna you cannot get BBC one with a 5 meter dish, you need larger ones.

BTW, does anybody know a British data centre with good Freeview reception?

Christian Berger

Getting their TV is actually comparatively simple

They are on Thaicom 5, which reaches west just to about Austria where you can easily get it with just a 5 meter satellite dish. Plus there is a wmf stream somewhere.

WikiLeaks party flirts with Oz law by taking Bitcoin gifts

Christian Berger

Bitcoin was never meant to be anonymous

The central idea behind Bitcoin is the distributed transaction log which is accessible to everyone. Every transaction is stored there till infinity.

This is the opposite of anonymous. It's pseudonymous at best. It was never meant to be that. What it was meant to work without any central instance and to be as democratic as possible.

Microsoft exposes green users' privates in web quiz snafu

Christian Berger

In Germany there is a variant of that

It's called the V-Model. Essentially you start with a specification and then you refine it more and more until you actually code. Then that code will be tested against the specification. This leads to horrible software since a mistake in the specification will cause mistakes in the implementation. And should the programmer notice it and fix it, he will have made an error.

In the V-Model someone would probably have simply declared the filenames of the PDF-files to be the number of the main index in the database.

The Tomorrow People jaunt back to the airwaves

Christian Berger

Sci-fi is at a dead end...

...you need to re-invent it. You need to try out something new. Get rid of the same old smooth CGI and get something new and fresh.

Like, for example Ijon Tichy Raumpilot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecTxsiSBucs

Christian Berger

Re: US Remakes

I have seen the US remake of "The IT Crowd", those guys have no idea about pacing. Even the German remake was better than the US one.

Fibre boosters trip the light fantastic with 800G BPS LINKS

Christian Berger

Apparently even per wavelength

You can do multiple wavelengths. I'm not sure if you can still do 100 at those speeds, but more is certainly possible.

That's why we _really_really_really_ need point to point fibre when doing fibre upgrades. Only then you can run multiple generations of endpoints at the same time making upgrades feasible. Or we would at least need dedicated wavelengths per user.

Now it gets serious: Fracking could RUIN BEER

Christian Berger

@destroy all monsters

Well essentially now it means that if you are an oil company you are "to big to fail". The same happened, for example, with the German phone company. They used their call records in order to spy on journalists so they could catch a whistleblower.

Experts: Network security deteriorating, privacy a lost cause

Christian Berger

Network security is an oxymoron

Networks can never be secure, as they are typically outside of your reach. You cannot prevent people from tapping your wires, unless you go through extreme measures.

Instead the more sensible approach is endpoint security. Make sure that whatever data you throw at your endpoints, they will not break and that all data that needs to be secure is properly encrypted and authenticated.

This is something modern Unixoid systems are fairly good at. If you want to transfer files between 2 networked Linux boxes, you are likely to use ssh which is encrypted and authenticated. Same goes for web services. A good percentage of those are already reachable via https, and even though that's https has it's serious flaws, it's still relying on some imaginary network security.

BBC suspends CTO after £100m is wasted on doomed IT system

Christian Berger

Re: siemens

No, Siemens just isn't good at technology. It's not their main area of expertise that's why they are constantly selling off technical parts of the company.

Virgin Media slides fat 10Gbps pipes into Murdoch's BSkyB

Christian Berger

Wouldn't they want to upgrade to something more current?

I mean 10Gig is slowly being phased out already. If you are sending people to replace ports and perhaps even more serious network equipment, shouldn't you use 40 or 100 Gig Ethernet?

SCADA security is better and worse than we think

Christian Berger

Well actually

The Austrian power grid nearly collapsed recently because of a misguided broadcast packet instructing all sensors to dump their values onto the network causing a huge overload on the data network.

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Chaos-im-Stromnetz-durch-verirrte-Zaehlerabfrage-1865269.html

Kim Dotcom claims invention of two-factor authentication

Christian Berger

Re: @asdf (was: This plonker claims to have invented

Well from my own experience the patent clerk inserts/suggests those references. Patents clerks look for similar patents and essentially mention everything they find, no matter how bogus.

So being quoted many times in patents doesn't mean it's a novel idea or anything. It just means that it's something that seems relevant to a lot of other patents.

Christian Berger

He claimed a lot of things

Like breaking into the GSM-network in the 1990s. Do yourself a favour, look at his "German years" before he mercifully left out country and was still called "Kim Schmitz". That guy was just one of the most annoying people out there.

Fairphone goes on sale to all

Christian Berger

Wait! They are selling it?

That's a revolutionary new idea for novel mobile phones. For example Nokia successfully tries a "no sale" strategy on their N950 and N9 phones, which much success, the N9 probably still sells more often than all their Windows phones combined.

So trying to sell it, that could be the new idea for successful mobile phones everyone's been waiting for.

If you've bought DRM'd film files from Acetrax, here's the bad news

Christian Berger

Again let's compare the user experience

Pirate: Got DRM-free file immediately without paying. It plays on any device without any problems. And it will play essentially till infinity.

Customer: Had to install special software which may or may have malevolent components, and may or may not work on some devices. Lost all his content now.

Again, DRM only affects the paying customer. And it always affects them negatively.

Embedded systems vendors careless says Metasploit author

Christian Berger

Well I recently had an interview at an appliance vendor

They seem to believe that networks can somehow be secure, their TCP/IP stack is a custom one running on a microcontroller to small to run Linux.

The big problem is that we are used to having our systems designed by people who know about networking since they are experienced with some form of unixoid system. However there is currently a wave of new devices comming from people to whom the idea of a port-scanner is novel and undocumented protocols are secure... since nobody could exploit a protocol they don't know about.

The problem is, as long as there is nobody who does it right, we will never see any decent solutions.

BT Tower is just a relic? Wrong: It relays 18,000hrs of telly daily

Christian Berger

I don't get the reasoning of the headline

I mean sure, microwave links become a niche, though I'm surprised they actually removed all those dishes, just giving those spaces to radio hams and Freifunk enthusiasts would put it into good use.

However it's current use to the BT is completely independent of its shape. It's a building, it got sensible amounts of fibre to it, it has a generator so they use it for backend broadcast systems. Of course it's a serious decision, but would it have been an office building with the same infrastructure, they would have taken that one.

So yes it's a relic even though they still get some use out of it.

Stand aside, Wi-Fi - these boffins are doing 40Gbps over the air

Christian Berger

Where's the advantage over free space optics?

I mean 240 GHz probably doesn't go well through walls... or dirt on the antenna.

Cameron's Tech City: Desks? Yes. Cash? Yes. Coders? Nope

Christian Berger

Actually not

The big driver of the start-up culture, particularly in "Silicon Valley" were some naval bases which attracted "defence" industry. Of course garages are useful for starting any company as it keeps your investment down.

Christian Berger

Re: Why an I not surprised?

My experience is more that recruiters don't understand anything at all. They neither understand the job nor the people and just randomly match and mix. Besides in my experience companies which outsource their recruiting obviously don't care about the people they get, otherwise they'd do recruiting themselves.

US boffin builds 32-way Raspberry Pi cluster

Christian Berger

It might be interrested once the main processor is usable

Currently you can only use that tiny little ARM core on the Raspberry Pi, while the main processor, a large DSP used for it's video outputs, is largely unusable running some closed realtime OS.

Opening up that DSP would enable a whole new set of applications. For example you could do fast data processing, for example to do sonar or even radar on that little board.

Intel's answer to ARM: Customisable x86 chips with HIDDEN POWERS

Christian Berger

Missing the long term problem

Sure, they are now near copying ARMs approach and try to appeal to handset makers in that way, but that's not the long term problem. We are now in the "home computer" age of mobile computers. Every manufacturer has a totally different platform. If you are lucky you get some dedicated port of some operating system (i.e. Android) which won't be supported and which you will be stuck with.

In the home computing age the IBM-compatible PC arrived, sweeping away its competitors. Suddenly you had a machine that could run different operating systems, where you could upgrade the operating system just by booting from a different diskette.

If Intel wants to succeed in the long run, they must bring real advantages over ARM. For example they could create a SoC with a little boot ROM which allows booting from an SD-card. That ROM could also have routines to access the hardware, kinda like a BIOS. (But please not as complex as UEFI)

One of Intel's strengths in the 1970s and early 1980s was that they provided full developer support. For example you could buy their development system and it would include a full Pascal compiler, while the other vendors still required you to hand-assemble your code. Intel should try to do the equivalent of that today. Make it easy to build a mobile device and slap your software onto it, just like it's easy to slap a new operating system onto a PC.

They wouldn't be successful with it at first, but once all those tiny Chinese manufacturers get a hold of this they will have conquered the mobile devices market.

Hey, Teflon Ballmer. Look, isn't it time? You know, time to quit?

Christian Berger

When in doubt, stick with your CEO

That seems to be the prevailing idea of investors these days, continuity of management, even if the current management consists of total idiots. I mean just look at HP, as far as I know they had a CEO who made stage publicity photographs of using a competitors product, and announced the discontinuation of the PC branch only to not actually do it afterwards.

As a CEO you have no actual accountability. You are paid to make decisions, you might have some bonus coupled to the stock price, but today it's near impossible to get sacked, no matter what you do.

IT bloke publishes comprehensive maps of CALL CENTRE menu HELL

Christian Berger

I don't quite understand the reason for this

I mean just having short codes robs you of the fun of exploring the IVR. (If you are into it) Obscure options might be more interresting. If you want something from a company calling them usually is the worst option, sending a letter to the CEO personally will give you a better and quicker response. (letter not e-mail!)

Well for my IVR I'm thinking of adding an "I just want to talk to someone" option. It then randomly picks a country and city, and dials a random number in it.

Google's Native Code browser tech goes cross-platform

Christian Berger

Where's the advantage?

I still don't see where the advantage is. JS-interpreters are so amazingly fast these days, you will have problems getting any advantage from having some byte code.

However the disadvantages are obvious. Byte code is much harder to check for malware, and it's much harder to edit it when you have found some.

Telly apocalypse foretold for 4G arrival fails to hit London: Brighton next

Christian Berger

Re: Didn't know about the trial in Brighton

Well it might be caused by that, but it's also likely that your reception always has been "on the edge" and now is just a bit below. Even though marketing makes you believe it, DVB-T is not some plug and play solution. Your antenna needs to be carefully aligned and the question of having an additional amplifier or not needs to be evaluated based on individual facts.

Christian Berger

Re: shock horror

Well the fear is something else. Real amplifiers don't just multiply the signal to amplify it, but they also have a non-linear characteristic. The stronger the input signal the stronger the non-linear distortions. (Think of clipping)

Now if such non-linear distortions happen, separate frequencies can mix. Just think about (sin(1.5x)+sin(1.6x))^2. It'll have lots of new components. LTE and DVB-T signals aren't simple sine waves, but more complex signals. If you have non-linear distortions it's nearly impossible to say if those aditional components will be relevant or not. It depends on how bad the non-linearity is, which depends on how close the input signal of the amplifier is in regards to the maximum input signal of it.

So it is hard to predict what's happening, and unfortunately most DVB-T receivers don't provide any decent debug features. It would mostly be a software issue.

MIT takes battery-powered robot cheetah for a gallop

Christian Berger

Re: Outrunning a human?

Of course, that's the idea behind it. What else could you do with a running robot? It's much easier to terrorize people with such robots and drones than with actual people.

Congress: It's not the Glass that's scary - It's the GOOGLE

Christian Berger

That's why you want free software

The Android universe is not really free. It requires device specific changes, making it nearly impossible to have sustainable free Android distributions. Just look at Cyanogenmod. It's a great effort, but they cannot support more than a few models at a time.

What we would need is a common scalable hardware platform. Essential things like unaccelerated frame buffer access (and setup) should work the same on all devices, as well as hardware discovery. Just like on the PC. Every PC boots your operating system the same way, it'll have certain standard hardware, it'll have BIOS routines to access other hardware. It has ways to enumerate devices on the PCI bus.

Right now every ARM device boots differently. And when you are booted you have no idea of finding out what kind of SoC you are on. You cannot access your framebuffer, you cannot access your external Flash. Often you cannot even access a serial debug interface for help.

Acorn founder: SIXTH WAVE of tech will wash away Apple, Intel

Christian Berger

We'd need better education first

In order to make sufficient progress in computing, we'd need to have actual computer literacy in our society. That doesn't mean that everybody needs to be able to program large software packages, but that people can understand what a computer actually is. People know what a book is, and they could write a little text if they had to, still few write whole books. However this knowledge is essential for widespread computer use. People need to know which limitations lie inherent within the technology and which ones are arbitrary, chosen by the designer of the system. Only then they can really choose which systems they want, or what changes they want to existing systems. Some of them may even be able to make those changes themselves.

The next point is that now that we have lots of data, we can make more interesting interfaces. Completely native interfaces are next to impossible, however you can meet somewhere in the middle between natural language and computing language. You end up with something like SQL, which, once you put a bit of effort into learning it, allows you to efficiently state complex questions to a computer which it will answer.

Tech startups, Silicon Valley, not all they're cracked up to be

Christian Berger

Whenever you read an economy study...

... keep in mind that economists are not scientists. They like calling themselves that way and they like to use metaphors of science, but they aren't. They don't conduct experiments to disprove their theories, they don't adapt/abolish their theories when they collide with observations, they do nothing real scientists would do.

Sony investor wants to break up firm, re-invest in hardware biz

Christian Berger

Well they missed the digital age

As you said it, Sony used to have a great reputation. For example they also had a broadcast/industrial sector, and many consumer products seemed to be just spinoffs of that. For example Betamax was just a scaled down U-Matic.

Now in the digital age, there is little possibility to differentiate yourself from your competitors. People paid more for a Sony VHS recorder since they could reasonably well believe it could reasonably be a bit better than the competition. With DVD you can only have 2 levels of quality, working and broken. If you want to build a better product you need to make it more versatile. For example you have to make it play VCDs and SVCDs... and maybe MP3s... or MPEG4 video and so on. Sony refused to do that while Chinese manufacturers simply embraced it. So you could buy a better device for a tenth of the price.

If Sony wouldn't have had it's content arm, they simply would have built devices conforming to the consumer needs. They could have ditched DRM completely. They could have brought out an HD-capable format when the DVD came out (e.g. by using multiple disks per movie or something). Just like the LaserDisk it would have been a profitable niche.

Euro PC shipments plummet into bottomless pit of DOOOOM

Christian Berger

EuroPCs are still made?

http://www.classiccomputer.de/ams/scheuropc.htm

Of course you shouldn't be surprised that a PC with an 8088 CPU doesn't sell to well.

D-Wave wins the quantum-classical horse race, kind of

Christian Berger

In general

If a company or an individual claims some scientific breakthrough, it's safe to expect it's a hoax. Companies only very rarely provide an environment to foster innovation. Although it may be possible for a company to have a breakthrough, it's very unlikely that they research in that direction and are able to research.

Who is Samsung trying to kid? There will NEVER be a 5G network

Christian Berger

5G may not be about speed

There's plenty of problems with current systems aside from speed. Speed is already something LTE Advanced tackles.

Maybe 5G will be about avoiding patents, or about cutting down the required infrastructure and making the network mesh like. There are a lot of things that could go into 5G.

Windows 8 'sales' barely half as good as Microsoft claims

Christian Berger

Re: Microsoft lies about sales figures? *GASP* Say it ain't so!

Even when HP ships 100k Win8 machines, it doesn't mean they will continue running it at the customer.

On the hunt for a new ampere

Christian Berger

Re: The problem is how many electrons in an Ampere.

Well it's electrons per second. So the speed you can count at limits the highest current you can measure. Additionally it's a bit hard to "scale" currents so it's hard to divide a current by a well defined factor.

Of course all of that is just theologic by definition since Metrology is just about the belief of something called "Reality" which can be explored by "measurements".

Notebook sales to surge, says notebook seller

Christian Berger

Re: Competing in the wrong direction

Near full ack. Although I see little point in an optical drive anymore. In my last laptop it simply broke. Though I have an extra PC for all things optical disk related.

Charity chief: Get with it, gov - kids shouldn't have to write by hand

Christian Berger

Of course the importance of handwriting is shifting

In 2003 or so I worked in the archive of an old hospital. There I've seen their old books from the 1920s wher they carefully noted down everyone who came to them in beautiful handwriting. It had to be well written as many people had to be able to read it quickly. We usually don't need that kind of handwriting any more. We communicate less and less often via handwriting.

Today handwriting is mostly an extension to your brain. The best examples for this can be found in maths and engineering. You write down intermediate results which otherwise wouldn't fit into your consciousness. You only have something like 150 Shannons of capacity there. Handwriting is not limited to text, but can also other kinds of data, like relations or geometrical forms. That's the beauty of it. And that's a tool that's still useful... for people who deal with more than 150 Shannons of information.

Christian Berger

The difference is deeper

Graham Walker talks about what employers want. He apparently doesn't see education as a means to enable people to take part in society, he sees education only a means to make people employable. Such people generally want education stripped of all non-essential parts to create cheaply and efficiently programmed people only doing and knowing what they are supposed to do. This is one of those ideas which sound reasonable at first... until you'll notice that those people don't have any visions, creativity or even knowledge to do anything different. Companies employing those will end up loosing their capability to innovate.

Not now, Apple: We've got the Pi-Phone, the smallest mobe network

Christian Berger

Well back when GSM came out...

...it was the early 1990s. And since nanocells do have all the data processing inside, all you need to do is to care about signaling. And that's not a lot of work since it had to be done by 1990 general purpose computers.

Once we get full access to the main CPU of the Pi, there will be a whole array of uses for that little board.

German govt DUMPS 170 NEW PCs riddled with Conficker

Christian Berger

Well, you need to be consistent.

You can either spend money on education and first educate your users then give them cheaper and more productive systems to use, or you can keep your users ignorant and solve problems by buying newer and more expensive systems.

Those people could probably work way more efficiently on an old early 1990s UNIX box with a bunch of terminals, but uneducated users don't accept that any more. I mean I learned word processing on a Microsoft Xenix system. It even had Microsoft Works for Xenix installed. It worked, and it wasn't harder to use than modern versions of Offices. The main difference was that menus were accessed by hitting Esc twice, then you could scroll through them. However to be fair, that 386/50 we had was quite slow for 20 users.

Retro-tech fan seeks cash for Commodore 64 clones

Christian Berger

How about...

How about putting all the network stack onto a virtual diskette drive?

If you change the ROM or load additional software into RAM you are loosing compatibility, but the diskette drive already has a fairly abstract interface. I'm not a good expert in that area, but from glancing over the documentation I've found, it may be possible to use the peripheral interface to talk to a TCP/IP stack running outside of the C64.

How smart does your desk phone need to be?

Christian Berger

Re: I'm a bit torn here.

Well with most VoIP phones you can use a LDAP server which is perfectly fine for companies. I'm sure decent products will also allow you to use simpler ways, like text files and such. There are now even Android desk phones... if you prefer that.

NGNs essentially try to give you all the disadvantages of a dedicated phone line with the disadvantages of a VoIP service. I don't quite see why I should spend money on that. I can get VoIP telephony from another company which then also means that I can keep my number no matter where I am in the world.

Christian Berger

Re: Presence

Well snom does a particularly good job at integration. They have open interfaces which are deliberately simple. And they try to speak common protocols.

For example they sell a "box with buttons" that's designed to work together with their VoIP phones, however it's an independent device which can also do HTTP requests when you push a button. That's just simple and elegant.

I think those are the challenges we face, we need to develop a bunch of simple and obvious protocols for easier integration. And of course Video Telephony. :)

Think enterprise software is complex? Check out the licences

Christian Berger

I never quite understood why such a market even exists

I mean you don't just install SAP R3 into a server and you are done with, those systems require a huge development effort to adapt them to the company. Wouldn't it be much simpler and more cost effective to develop your management software internally? I mean how much of SAP R3 do you actually need? Do you need new features of it? Wouldn't it be better to instead have something you made yourself (or contracted someone to make it for you, giving you the source code) so you could change it depending on what you actually want?

Computing is now such a vital part of many businesses, why hand it over to another company?

Yes! It's the NFC phone-bonk doorbell app AT LAST

Christian Berger

So... you give a list of all the people who visited you to a cloud service?

...just so they can ring a bell?

Apart from the obvious question why you even wanted to ring with your smartphone, wouldn't it be much more simpler to just have a QR-code with a picture... so you can direct the ringer to an URL which will make it ring?

Something like:

scanning QR-code on door => starting CGI-script on your webserver => sending off IM messages and playing "ding dong" on your server

This seems much simpler than trying to get it to work with people who visit you. It doesn't need apps, and you can even buy hardware buttons which make an HTTP request if you still fancy a normal doorbell.

Over ONE-THIRD of PCs will have SSDs in 2017 - analyst

Christian Berger

Re: SSDs, I believe, have now overtaken memory as the single most cost-effective upgrade

This is actually something I have tried, but it didn't work for me. I also don't quite see how it could work. After all after a few days your whole operating system and software will be in RAM anyhow.

It may however make sense for "suspend to disk" situations.