* Posts by gabor1

28 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2010

Here we go again... UK Prime Minister urges nerds to come up with magic crypto backdoors

gabor1

Biometrics

Can someone explain why this can't be solved by biometric security? Just as my fingerprints open my phone, Apple could preinstall the fingerprints of federal judges who could also open it, should they grant themselves a warrant to do so. How is that a backdoor?

Latest Snowden reveal: It was GCHQ that hacked Belgian telco giant

gabor1

Re: Those with nothing to hide

Let me fix that for you.

"Those who have nothing illegal they have done to hide have nothing to hear from whistleblowers. "

Steelie Neelie calls for TOTAL BAN on EU mobe roaming charges

gabor1

Re: Now watch all Western European Mobe companies go bust overnight

Do you know who are the big mobile players in Eastern Europe? T-mobile, Vodafone and Telenor. All "Western".

gabor1

Re: Great (<sarcasm>)

libertarian drivel shot from the hip. the point is to change what is deemed "out of ordinary". and no, the market cannot change that fast enough by itself. and my prediction is that actually you will NOT be paying more, because once the telcos are forced into the EU-wide game, they will compete more (because their areas of overlap will be larger), and become more efficient. And boy there is room for efficiency! a lot of what you pay for is customer relations and marketing costs, not pushing the bits through.

Nuke plants to rely on PDP-11 code UNTIL 2050!

gabor1
Mushroom

Re: It just costs money

It's not just ordinary reliability as in "well tested", but also robustness against radiation - plenty of that in space. Those 30 year old CPUs running at 1MHz are quite resilient. Could it be that the nuclear industry is also having similar issues?

Doped nanotubes boost lithium battery power three-fold

gabor1
Facepalm

call the editor please!

"so the team decided to see if carbon nanotubes are more effective.". WTF ? how did carbon nanotubes get into it? and into the title ? gheez.

The touchscreens that push back, thanks to Brit hi-fi boffinry

gabor1
Go

Shurely

the killer app is an on-screen keyboard with haptic feedback.

Bah, humbug! Virgin Media censors Charles D**kens

gabor1
Coat

pendant

You mean HHGTTG

Hasselblad H4D-200MS medium format multishot camera

gabor1

do be a square

I think you'll find that the format is 58mm x 58mm, commonly called 6x6.

Army raygun to boost power with starlight de-twinkling tech

gabor1
FAIL

umm..

Reader, meet article. It'll be aimed at incoming things, which are very much in the line of sight.

Missing moon rock found among Clinton's knickknacks

gabor1
Happy

w

the rumour around the time was that they took some W keys from keyboards. dunno if it's true, but it's funny.

British warming to NUKES after Fukushima meltdown

gabor1
FAIL

Well, if I don't have clean drinking water, but I have access to the Internet, it wouldn't be so hard to track down some filtration equipment. I'm sure they are twelve a dozen on ebay.

The average visitor to the LSM doesn't even know what not having clean drinking water is like. They probably think that it's OK, you just buy the bottled stuff from Sainsbury's. The question is really misleading, because of the hidden implications. In a society which cannot provide clean drinking water, your biggest problem will not be the lack of internet.

It's like asking what is more important to you: your shoes, or your <insert favourite smartphone>. I bet people would say their phone, because they can't even conceive of a situation in which they don't have a shoe. If you take the question literally, i.e. choose between otherwise completely equivalent situations, one with a missing shoe and the other a missing phone. Obviously, my shoe is £30, my phone is £300. But choose between being a tramp on the street without even a shoe, and a middle class couch potato who just about cannot afford a £300 phone, obviously the latter...

</rant>

Apple 'orders 12 petabytes of storage' from EMC

gabor1

Really

Not $10K, but £10K, and my discount factor for bulk purchasing was not 10x, but 100/72 = 1.38x, which I think is not unreasonable. The machine is a 4U box from Supermicro. They used to make the innards of the Sun Thumper, which was the best deal in town for years, until Oracle killed it by hiking the price 5-fold.

gabor1
Flame

And how exactly is this news?!

I recently bought 72 TB for £10K. With bulk purchasing, call it 100 TB for £10K, so 1PB for £100K, so Apple just spent around a million for disks. So who cares? Are you going to report every tech company who spends a mil on hardware? gheez. Tell us when you've heard what they are going to do with it. And I mean when you've heard something *new*.

Back to the nano-mechanical future

gabor1

Antz

The ant doesn't go splat because its terminal velocity is small. Try dropping an ant glued to the bottom of a hard drive: it will go splat indeed. But I agree with you that any such danger is probably easily mitigated by mechanical isolation, as is currently done in hard drives: read heads do not like being slammed into the magnetic media either.

BOFH: Who's been naughty and who's been nice?

gabor1
Grenade

censorship? what's that?

They show uncensored here, must be your merkin lawyers demanding sanitising scripts.

Reg hack tickled by Kent schoolgirl

gabor1
Paris Hilton

anyone?

Not sure what you're hoping to hear from that anyone - "that's right, I try every week"..

Plasma space-drive aces efficiency numbers: Set for ISS in 2014

gabor1
Stop

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

I don't think it would, because as its speed goes up (relative to us), its mass would also go up (m=m/sqrt(1-v^2/v^2). But it could get close... Remember the physicist with the crazy white hair?

Apple signals disk free notebooks way to go

gabor1
Jobs Halo

apple, gravity, etc.

Shame about the 1.56 Kg weight... the *comparable size* MBA (11.6") is 1.04 Kg. That's less than two thirds the weight. If you look at price vs. weight, it's a steep curve. You may not care as I happen to, but still do please compare apples with apples.

Apple Magic Trackpad

gabor1
Jobs Horns

clicking is a pain

I tried this at a friend's house the other day. the mouse motions are fine, but I find dragging is a right pain (literally!) with trackpads, even more so since buttons have been removed. Have any of you ever tried dragging with the new style track pad (magic, or macbook)? you have to press hard on the pad, which is already bad enough and then you have to force your finger to slide while you keep pressing hard. Yes, I know you can turn on tap to click, but that doesn't really help when dragging, because you have to wait for the tap to register before you can move your finger to drag. With the "magic", clicking with the thumb was almost okay, but clicking with a finger was actually painful. And this from someone, usually considered to be a fanboi by most independent observers.

People have no bloody idea about saving energy

gabor1
Boffin

DJCM quote

My favourite quote from David Mackay's book (Sustainable Energy - without the hot air) is "If we all just did a little, together, we could achieve... a little!"

http://www.withouthotair.com/

gabor1
Go

Go Lewis!

This *is* why I read the Reg

gabor1
Stop

landfill?

Would someone please explain to me why filling land with inert material (such as glass) is a bad thing? It's not like we get the material from outer space and Earth will get bigger or something... Glass is made of sand, and it can bloody well go back there.

Reading the comments, it feels like a LOT of raw nerves were touched here. All you greenies, take the examples of the article or the paper, and do the math (if you don't believe the statements of the article). Then put your hand on your heart: did you know the result before you started?

And to those who scream about multiplying by the population the 1W electricity saved by powering off instead of standby. Your understanding of number and percentages are so poor that I doubt it's worth carrying out the above exercise, you'll get it wrong anyway. "Lightswitch nazis", I like this.

119 iPad apps for admins, coders, and geeks

gabor1

ssh

If you were going to mention an ssh client, I would have thought by far the best is iSSH by Zinger-Soft. Apart form a terminal client (or two, since it split the screen), it comes with its own X server, so you can tunnel X connections to it. It also contains a VNC client, which it can also tunnel through ssh.

Just sayin'...

Apple flogs 3m iPads in 3 months

gabor1
Flame

it doesn't have wheels either

(but if it did, I'm sure Apple would file a patent for them). But seriously, I can't understand all the people who are lamenting the lack of Flash. The lack of Flash keeps it out of the hands of the rest of my family, so I can use it for what it was bought for: web browsing, emailing, document editing, note taking, data projecting and map viewing.

Stop whining about something you self confessedly don't understand.

Balinese lad seduced by bovine temptress

gabor1

And where is

the obligatory Playmobil™ reconstruction?!?

Drinking coffee offers no real benefit, say eggheads

gabor1
Coffee/keyboard

one small problem

Um... individual differences (whether genetic or environmental) are all the rage these days. I wouldn't be surprised if the largest bias in the study arises at the recruitment stage. It might not be random who becomes a coffee drinker and who doesn't. Individual differences in alertness during the diurnal cycle are well known (cf. late owls and early-birds). It is only on top of this that the physiological addiction effects happen.

Now, can those of you who actually bothered to read the study enlighten the rest of us on this point? Ta.

Should all hard drives be encrypted?

gabor1

stickies?

I don't see what is the problem with writing passwords on post it notes. Most data loss will occur through physical loss of mobile storage, or via data transmission. The post it notes stuck to my monitor are perfectly safe from those. In fact where else would you like me to store my good passwords? In my mobile phone?! That is just as likely to get stolen. Sorry, brain is not an option.