Blocking

I find blocking Flash only is the most effective. I can ignore static adverts and if I WANT to watch flash I click on the ¦> Arrow

Stupity

These will cause interference. Because a yagi on a TV set will pickup the TV and the WS unit, which due to its small portable aerial(s) won't hear the TV channel.

This is part of the "Cognitive" radio movement which if allowed space to grow will destroy predictable use of bands for long life equipment.

Mobile?

It doesn't matter how good the technology is, 3.5GHz is NOT suitable at all for mobile use.

It's too near LOS and very poor building penetration.

Easily blocked by every truck, tree and building.

Even 3G at 2.1 is much poorer than 900MHz GSM for coverage.

This will be an epic fail, tarnishing an oversold but quite good technology.

Linux

Almost all existing SatNavs / PNDs (Personal Navigation Devices) use Linux.

Even the new Archos 605 GPS. An up to 160Gbyte PMP with WiFi, Opera, WebTV/Radio, 800x480 touch screen.

Microsoft a bit late I think.

DSL?

Basically you need 1Mbps upload from your game server at home for 640x480 action.

Most DSL is 8:1

1M / 128k

2M/256k

4M/512k

8M/1M

are typical ratio.

Mobile Internet you may get 1Mbps. Anything from 70k to 3Mbps with no QOS or consistency.

Most people will be lucky to do 320x240 (256k needed)

I hope they do ARM linux soon.

Glitches

Mines OK

The last 3months worth match reality.

Instrumentality

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_Lost_C%27Mell

Cordwainer Smith knew.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentality_of_Mankind

They missed the boat

Blu ray exists now with about 50Gbyte?

A new 1T drive from a competitor will play bluRay. They are doomed now.

It's like the Philips V2000 fiasco. If it had launched before VHS & betamax as N1500/N1700 we would never have had VHS/Betamax. But by the time they got production quantities the VHS had won.

Inphase sounds worse off.

Fit?

Not fit for purpose:

Ergonomics

Menus

Buttons

Software.

A design flaw that stops people being able to figure it in 3mins never mind 20mins is as much a valid failure as an exploding battery.

So..

So it safari then, just not the swish version of the iPhone.

I find the S60 safari better than either version of Opera on same qvga phone and better than IE on WinMob.

What other mobile browsers are there?

Government Advisor

Ex advisor on again this moring on BBC R4 pushing Electric Cars and Nuclear.

What is the grandchildren going to do with decommissioning & waste?

Electric cars waste energy. Up to 30% grid loss and upto 20% charging loss. Diesel is a better bet.

What about the carbon / engergy cost of all the concrete for a NP station?

Yes SMPSU used in Servers, PC, laptop, TV, many chargers and almost every electronics and also CFLs etc, take more current to keep power constant. They may even lose efficiency and consume MORE power.

Only really filament bulbs, electric heating (Immersions, Washing, tumble driers) but often not the motors take less power.

Grid losses on SMPSU current is higher at lower voltage as the current is higher and grid resistance is the same P = i2 r

Coal but with better scrubbers and CO2 removal on stacks is best power solution. We know there is 100's of years. The Arabs have been estimating the same reserves fro 30 years which is a bit suspicious and appear to be past peak production unable to increase flow on most fields. North Sea is also past peak and I'm sceptical about claims this week of increasing its production.

Rising oil prices is good. The UK may have Tax on it too high, but USA has tax far too low.

OS bloat

I used NT 3.5, 3.51, 4.0 and skipped Win2000 (NT5.0) to XP (NT5.1).

My 386 server with 12M RAM was fine with NT3.5

My NT 4.0 RAID5 Server was fine till this year. Had to update to Server 2000 to run WSUS to reduce amounts of downloads for our XP clients. Server 2003 (NT 5.2) needed more RAM than could be afforded (RAMBUS RDRAM!!).

I have a copy of the 1st NT, 3.1. The 2.0 version of NT was essentially MS OS/2 with LAN Manager. (NOT IBM's OS/2). Not many people used it.

Arguments

It's nothing to do with open vs closed source or even Debian

The Debian people brought their tool error problem to attention of OpenSSH, who ignored it. The Debian guy then did an incorrect fix.

1) Because the code was C

2) Because the lack of a comment in the source

3) Because the design by OpenSSH of using allegedly uninitailised RAM to make it more random was flawed.

4) The Debian guy didn't understand what OpenSSH had done (which creates a tool error when you compile.

5) Because OpenShh ignored his requests for help resolving the issue.

6) because a HW RNG is *STILL* not standard on all platforms. (Some old Intel chipsets, some VIA and some ARM have a HW RNG).

There is quite a flame war between some OpenSSH, Debian and random other folk on the blog of one of the OpenSHH team.

This was an unusual mix of issues not helped by the general crapness of C / C++ as a secure accurate programming language.

Almost all buffer overflow vulnerabilities are also as much due to the nature of C / C++ stupid array bound checking (by default none) and stupid string handling as inept programming. Java and C# only slightly alleviate these issues.

Mines the one with Modula-2, Ada, Occam and Oberon on the back

@Kanef

Outside the Network!

Ha.

The obvious way to do this (hack) is a browser vulnerability. For your browser, the router is INSIDE. Infact ALL the routers I know only update via LOCAL (usually 192.168.yyyy.xxxx ) subnet.

For any ISP, you can assume the default Router IP is not changed. Other typical ones are local net 192.168.yyyy.1 or 192.168.yyyy.254 where yyyy is 0 to 255 and usually 0 or 1

Most people don't change default router password.

If you change your router default Admin password, it's unlikely this idea can be exploited. No outside access required. Only a vulnerable browser and malicious website (Active X anyone?)

Spanish Funny Character

Ha! Ireland raises Spain's Funny Character by a Stuffed Turkey.

At this rate next year's winning entry will be a plastic singing fish.

You have *SEEN* that foul Dustin?

HD

The problem is the TVs.

They are rubbish.

Also for HD at 8ft viewing you need about 50" or 60" or indeed with typical 37" you better off sticking to DVD. HD was invented for HUGE screens, not to make existing ones sharper, esp. in Europe where we have 576 lines instead of USA 480 (1/3rd better quality) on smaller screens (Majority of so called HDTVs sold are 32" and 37"!)

I havn't seen a LCD or Plasma I would replace my CRT with, even for SD. Maybe a 3 chip projector + zoom lens is the way to go. Many programs I don't want at HD size.

@Alan Edwards

It's normal here in Ireland you can't get a subsidized phone till you sign the contract. You can't buy it without the contract without paying full price.

Unless you are planning to use a fake credit card and address?

No more remakes

Where are TODAY'S good writers?

Europe

With European SD being 570 line rather than US/japan 480 and very few over 48" TV, I can't see people seeing much difference unless they have 52" to 60" 1080 line set.

The majority of "HD Ready" sets sold in Europe are still 28" to 37" and only 1366x768, really poor for 1080 line Satellite or DVD (There is virtually no 720p content in Europe).

Also we don't have the 24 fps -> 30fps interlace artifact to make "Progressive" a compelling format.

I'd expect Bluray standalone take up to seriously lag std DVD for several years till true 1080 line projectors and > 52" TVs are below 900 Eur.

Then

It's Lufthansa for me!

Artifical Fertilisers

The issue is NOT the chemical composition of the Fertiliser but the considerable amount of energy needed to make it. Which is partly why fertilisers are a popular bomb ingredient!

Read up on how fertiliser is made. In some cases the carbon footprint of biofuel could be worse than doing nothing!

The fuel transporting ingredients to factory

Fuel / power to make Fertiliser

Fertiliser to farm

Machinery on Farm

Transporting crop to factory

Processing crop in factory..

Only using waste organic matter (banana plant, maize stalks, wheat straw etc) to make fuel makes sense (no impact on food production or fertiliser carbon cost). Sadly no-one can do that at commercial scale or cheaper than the most expensive oil, even with free biomass.

Peter Fleming

His brother's books are better written, though not so many. (Well the two I've read. I read a few Bonds before ever seeing any of the films, IMO the books are slightly better!).

Thinking about what "Travels in Tartary"* and the fact that he was in charge of "military deception operations in Southeast Asia" makes me think he was the real spy in the family too.

I wonder what he thought of his "little" brother's creation?

(*Combination of "One's Company" and "News from Tartary")

Size

About 15 to 20 Terabyte in 2.5" form factor. Rising to maybe 40 Terabyte Raw storage...

They may use 50% for code redundancy to do error correction giving maybe 7 Terabyte at start and more than 20 Terabyte later.

How many centuries of MP3 listening?

I vote the ElReg unit of storage is years of MP3s or YOMs

XP

Switch eyecandy, restore, index & unwanted services off and XP does run in a PII 233MHz with 256M RAM.

NT4 however will run on it faster with only needing 24M for OS.

NT3.51 will run needing only 8M for OS. Fine on 32M RAM.

A better OS should use LESS ram and go faster and crash less often.

Each new MS OS needs about 2x to 4x RAM and 2x to 5x CPU speed to be slightly slower.

Win 2008 Server "seems" better because newer HW is faster.

Moving GDI into Kernel on NT4.0 was stupidity,

making GUI optimised for a native DirectX/Direct3D (Evil Insane Gamers API for DOS programmers) is ultimate stupidity making non-games / traditional GDI APIs emulated on Vista. This why on real DirectX 10 gpus Aero is faster than tradtional desktop.

I don't know

It could be filched snaps of anyone's office "night in the pub".

Was there a cake?

How do we know these are really El Reg Hacks.

Where's Verity Stob?

Random

50c PIC CPU connected to 5c 3.3v zener diode as a noise source. I2C or serial connection to host.

(You can get 8pin SM PIC with built in A/D).

I'd not bother with wireless. Too many non-random signals.

The noise from a Zener is real random noise from Molecular kinetic/heat energy. The amount is related to temperature. It's usable from DC up to 2GHz as a "white noise" source to align / check filters with a Spectrum analyser.

ARM

It's called ARM.

For same functionality it uses about 1/10th power, less ROM & RAM and about 1/5th of the PCB space.

It's not good at stuff like cryptography or 3D graphics or MPEG, so they stick custom silicon as co-processors to do that.

About 100,000 transistors compared with 10,000,000 on an Intel, so lots of room for other on-chip stuff.

No support chips needed as per Intel.

There are versions with video I/O, LCD, touch screen, USB, audio I/O all built in too.

Samsung even has one with the FLASH and RAM layered in a 3 chip module same size as a regular chip (Intel/Via/AMD version would fry).

Basically you can get a ARM based laptop on a Chip.

About 100 chip makers / designers licence ARM cores.

You don't see

You don't see autonomous trucks on roads. Soyuz is not news but the Euro ATV is.

Truck drivers should be very worried.

Mouth Wash

Terrible stuff..

May have alcohol.

If antibacterial, you create super bugs and even risk a black tongue.

Brushing is important.

Excess sinus production down back of throat is a major breeding ground, Mouthwash won't help that.

Mobility?

What happens when you move between masts?

Also in Slovakia, Ireland, Germany, Finland the FLASH-OFDM delivers up to 5.4Mbps in only 1.25MHz of spectrum, with broadband style pings/latency.

Netherlands, Norway, Denmark coming soon...

HSPDA/HSUPA can do up to 14.4Mbps, but needs much more bandwidth. In the same amount of bandwidth, Flash-OFDM can deliver up to 5 times more users at 1Mbps as HSDPA can.

One problem that 3G/HSDPA/HSUPA has is that as you add users the cell shrinks and efficiency can be 50%, as it is CDMA. WiMax and Flash-OFDM don't have this problem.

WiMax having a lot of success as a fixed Wireless solution for ISPs.

Traditional Mobile Operators are likely to go HSDPA/ HSUPA -- LTE /HSOPA type route. ISPs will only go for a Mobile solution in some cases, the bigger market is Fixed Wireless. For Mobile they will be partly constrained in choice of HSDPA/EDGEII/LTE/Mobile WiMax/ Flash-OFDM or whatever by licence and spectrum match up to available equipment.

Divergence

There will be 4.3" 800x 480 portable game consoles with power of PS3 / Xbox360 that can drive ordinary TV or HD 1080 lines.

There will be Media Boxes that make a MS Media Centre look stupid (It's dead already). Basic Sat / cable boxes won't be game consoles, but things like PS3 with add in Sat or DTT tuners... Oh.. You mean that's already a PS3 accessory?

Game players is a small percentage of Setbox users. The majority of set boxes will never have more than they do now game wise.

Given that some games are a box load of DVDs, I'd not see serious game downloads replacing disk/cartridge sales. More as well as.

GPS

Not Geostationary, just high up.

Geo is about 45,000km /22,500Miles.

In theory with a special receiver you could use GPS at an Altitude ABOVE the GPS, as long as you pick up at least 3 of them. Different software in receiver needed.

Quote:

The height of the orbits is then about 20200 km. Orbits in this height are referred to as MEO – medium earth orbit. In comparison, geostationary satellites like ASTRA or Meteosat – satellites orbit the earth at 42300 km, which is about twice the distance of GPS satellites.

http://www.kowoma.de/en/gps/orbits.htm

The ISS and Iridium Sat phone are LEO (Low Earth Orbit).

Satellite TV, Thuraya Sat phones and World Space Radio all use Geo or Clarke Belt orbits.

DVR

I have the similar but more portable 800x480 4.3" Archos 605WiFi

The Internet is MUCH better than Safari or Opera on the E65 phone. Phone displays are just too small.

But all these Archos are useless for DVR. They only record at 640x480

As PMP (video) and Web-Browers, great. I hope the rumour of Real Player or equivalent is true.

Unlike other PMP it will play 720x576 files as is. Though re-encoding to DivX is recommended to fit 2 to 3 times as many as straight DVD (which needs a plug in).

Indeed these are not DVRs.