* Posts by Pet Peeve

506 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Nov 2009

Page:

Last ever batch of TouchPads isn't coming to Blighty

Pet Peeve
Happy

When is a joke not a joke

HP: Hey Samsung, watch this! If you sell our tablet for $99 they fly off the shelves!

Samsung: yes, but you're losing $200 on each one.

HP: We'll make it up in volume.

Samsung: TAXI!

Pet Peeve
Thumb Up

It's funny because it's true

I think "Agilent" sounds more like a social anxiety medication.

Maybe you're right and looking for anything resembling Earth Logic is misguided, but there has to be SOME way they are trying to spin this, or they're going to get shareholders suing the board for mismanagement. Of course, that is probably going to happen anyway - they just made $400 million disappear in just a few weeks.

Pet Peeve
WTF?

Wacky old world

So let me get this straight - the original price was $400 US, and the reverse-engineers said that they cost about $300 to make. If that's true (and I'm only going by press reports at release), then it seems to me they would make a lot more money if they sold off the parts than assembling them and losing $200 on each one at retail.

On the other hand, if the production run was already underway and the pricey components like the processors and flash memory are already wave soldered onto the boards, then I guess you've got no choice, it's not like they're going to sit there with gobs of CHIPQIK and unsolder all the pieces to resell them.

Gripping hand, I guess saying you sold out of two production runs gives you SOME pretty words to put on your quarterly statement, and having a bunch of these units loose in the world gives you some real life experience with how WebOS performs and that may be worth taking a loss in the short term if the data is useful for when they make WebOS toasters or whatever. It also avoids the publication of pictures of them in a landfill like atari cartridges of E.T.

Reg hack cast adrift as Illuminati Online goes off-line

Pet Peeve
Thumb Up

seconded

I've been a pobox.com subscriber for almost as long, and it's never had a single hiccup. They have outstanding filtering too, you can individually subscribe to a bunch of blocklists, set up your spam to bitbucket or go into a holding pen (for each blocklist selection), and they'll mark in the forwarded headers which blocklists weighed in on the decision to forward the mail or not.

Between pobox filters and gmail (where my pobox mail goes most of the time, though nobody knows it), I get about 2 spams in my inbox a year, out of tens of thousands intercepted. Great service.

1000 day wait for Sarah Palin emails nearly over

Pet Peeve
Thumb Up

If they're related to their office, yes

Ms. Palin used a non-government account to conduct state business "off-record". This release was a result of a demand that they be made public, as they would be if they were created using an official Alaska govt account. More of this needs to happen, like the past president's emails created on his RNC account to duck archival laws.

Releasing them on paper was a dick move, and pointless since they'll shortly be made electronic again.

RIM PlayBook strikes back at Jobsian internet dream

Pet Peeve
Facepalm

pseudocide

Tim Berners-Lee isn't dead, so won't be rolling in any graves, unless he's into that.

Use of Weapons declared best sci-fi film never made

Pet Peeve
Thumb Up

Dang right

I think it's totally unfilmable, because of the unusual (and brilliant) narrative structure, which hides the key plot point until the end/beginning.

It's one of the masterpieces of SF, but if you're making a culture film, go with The Player of Games.

Google won't open source fondleslab Android before 'year end'

Pet Peeve
FAIL

Wha?

OSX isn't even a LITTLE "based on linux". Where did you get that crazy idea?

Computers taught to sing using autotuning talent show

Pet Peeve
WTF?

wait...

... somebody actually found a use for genetic algorithms? Next someone will try to tell us they found something more useful than toasting bread to do with fuzzy logic.

Is there anything to find on bin Laden's hard drive?

Pet Peeve
Thumb Up

Don't be so quick to scoff

Even if we make the assumption that these couriers carried encrypted drives, that doesn't mean they stayed that way. Bin Laden's camp was physically firewalled from the internet - he may well have worked on the concept that if his security was defeated there, it's game over anyway, and not kept his local hardware so well secured.It's hard to protect against a physical compromise of a computer, short of the old thermite on the hard drive trick, which didn't happen.

And also remember, not all intelligence is in the messages themselves. It may be even more important just to know where the messages came from, and where they were going.

The Sandy Bridge Hackintosh

Pet Peeve
Thumb Up

Run some benchmarks

How does it perform? In the early days you mention, it was mostly a dancing bear exercise - the exciting thing was you could make it work, but it run like crap.

Revealed: Secret security plan should Kate leave Wills at the altar

Pet Peeve
Unhappy

You have got to be kidding

This is a joke, right? Please tell me that a mature first-world country didn't engage its intelligence apparatus to protect it against a flighty bride. "Defense of the Realm" this ain't.

Apple sued over iPhone location tracking

Pet Peeve
Stop

Damages

Don't you have to prove actual harm to sue for damages? Being unhappy about the existence of a file is not damage. Idiots.

iPhones secretly track 'scary amount' of your movements

Pet Peeve
Boffin

Meh

I ran the program. The database is not where you've been, but what cell tower and wifi networks you've been in range of. I was on a trip to San Jose last month, and there were points on the database that were 75 miles away from there. It's not a breadcrumb of your exact gps track, it's the resources that the phone used to connect, or to provide you with GPS info during the trip.

It's definitely a good idea to encrypt this better, but not for the reason you think - it's an EXCELLENT resource for determining exactly where cell towers are - it makes a little circle for each one. That's not really information that you want so easily collected - I think it's quite possible I could drive around a city and collect the location of every piece of cell radio infrastructure in one day.

Binary dinosaur drive found alive and breathing fire

Pet Peeve
Thumb Up

Not in zork

Lewd mode was a feature of a later infocom title, Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

Apple AirPlay unlocked

Pet Peeve
Boffin

Can't put the genie back

If the private key is in rom, and it has to be, then it will just be found again. It's another AACS, when are they going to learn?

George Lucas 'very happy' with 3D Phantom Menace

Pet Peeve
Stop

If only...

... you could magically apply a filter to the film that makes the characters and story interesting, and the acting decent. 3d cardboard is still cardboard.

Tesla Motors sues BBC for defamation

Pet Peeve
Stop

wait, what?

Top Gear is a comedy show with cars providing some of the source material (not that there's anything wrong with that, I love the show). I don't know what's dumber, Tesla taking Top Gear seriously, or the people thinking about buying teslas (all 5 of them) taking Top Gear seriously.

In any event, trying to embargo the episode is just going to make it even more popular. Laugh it off, guys.

Fukushima scaremongers becoming increasingly desperate

Pet Peeve
Flame

huh?

What do you mean "the facts have largely been reported correctly?" Other than the very rare voice of reason like Lewis, the reporting has mostly been beyond horrible.

Shame on you for speaking out of your nether orifice.

Pet Peeve
Grenade

Gah!

I stopped looking at the photos after the one where the safety lights were made to look like some sort of nuclear glow due to oversaturation.

Seriously guys, we all laughed at the 911 "truthers" when they did the same thing to try to prove there was molten iron at ground zero, and we're going to keep laughing at you blatantly making s**t up.

Pet Peeve
Coffee/keyboard

duuuuh

They had one of the worst earthquakes in recorded history, a tsunami that did well nigh half a trillion dollars in damage, and had 6 reactors take a hit larger than they planned for ALL at once. If they *weren't* shitting their pants, they wouldn't be human.

Of course this is a disaster. But making it worse than it really is, is outright irresponsible, and you really have to consider that there's ulterior motives at work because of it. I'm sure greenpeace is preparing another [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE] press release as we speak. Do brits say "Arseholes", or does "assholes" work fine too? They're that. Yeah.

Pet Peeve
Troll

Oy

Nice strawman you're kicking the stuffing out of there, Sparky.

Pet Peeve
Stop

You have got to be kidding

Ladies and gentlemen - we present the only HAARP conspiracy loon left on the planet. He'll be here all week, enjoy the veal!

Pet Peeve
Alert

Not buying it

5 or 6 Sievert is invariably fatal. Post a reliable source or I'm calling shenanigans.

RSA breach leaks data for hacking SecurID tokens

Pet Peeve
Alert

Always wondered when...

... this was going to happen with securid. It's all because of their greed in wanting to remain part of the authentication chain.

Ideally, an authenticator distributor would manufacture the device, program it, copy the programmed code to a disk for the customer (or print it out), and then immediately delete it, so it's never recoverable again. SecurID does a great job of making the fobs themselves write-only; the programming contacts are buried in plastic, with anti-tamper contacts embedded in the plastic while it's still liquid, so that if you ever try to expose the chip again, it destroys itself. Tried it a couple times with a dremel and really fine bits - no matter how delicate, you can't get enough plastic off without resetting the chip. Compared to all the other fobs I've played with, RSA's are the best designed. Vasco's is nicely solid as well, but not quite up to RSA's standard. The good thing about Vasco is that they don't hide their algorithm.

But, instead of doing the job RIGHT, RSA did it lucratively. They keep the programing data, and act (at least for some companies) as the authenticating party. Thus, if they get ripped off like this, it's not just one company that is hosed, it's every company they service. I imagine that they are sending out thousands and thousands of new fobs in a panic - the cost of that, and liability for anything lost from the breach before they're replaced, will probably wipe out every extra cent they made from doing this part themselves. BIG mistake.

Token cards are a fantastic second factor. But you can't mishandle the key material, or you've made the whole system worse than useless.

Pet Peeve
Boffin

not really

It's not a bad idea at all to set the keys in the factory, because then you can do a better job of tamperproofing them. Letting the user reprogram them exposes you to some possible exploits that are MUCH less likely if the chips are never writable at all.

RSA blew it by keeping the key data someplace it could be stolen (or kept it at all, see my other message). That was the real idiocy here, and it will hurt them badly.

HBGary's nemesis is a '16-year-old schoolgirl'

Pet Peeve
Coffee/keyboard

Uh huh

And I'm sure she browses the web from behind 7 proxies, too.

Steve Jobs bends iPad price reality

Pet Peeve
Troll

Title

I call bullshit on calling bullshit. Grandstanding much?

Watson? Commercial – not super – computer

Pet Peeve
Thumb Up

AI

Standard AI skeptic response: "oh wow, just like chess, it turns out being good at jeopardy is not proof of intelligence".

Not that I think Watson *is* intelligent, but I have to say I'm dazzled that it's possible to fine-tune a machine learning system with a dataset that large. Normally, ML systems get just good enough to be a little interesting, and then they hit a local maximum that the scoring system is never able to improve on.

Good work guys, now pare it down a bit and put it on the internet. Being able to ask a computer "what's that giant rubber thing that's one sixth of something else", and get the answer "a ningi"? PRICELESS.

iPad's biggest rival? Microsoft's dead Courier

Pet Peeve
FAIL

Riight

Job's first law of tablets - if you can se the stylus, you've already failed.

I don't know if the 'kno' is actually a product or simply yet another in a series of "I'm making a tablet too" concept adds, but looking at the picture on the front page, I'd agree with Mr. Jobs on this - that interface is stupidly small for a tablet. Navigation should ALWAYS be something you can do with a finger, with use of something like a pen limited to very special situations, such as high precision drawing.

Electric forcefield space sailing-ship tech gets EU funding

Pet Peeve
Thumb Up

Insanely cool

Another advantage of this system is that the sail is mostly holes, so less chance of taking significant damage. Even a small rock is going to mess up a normal solar sail going 30kps.

Plus you don't have to worry about accidentally gift-wrapping an asteroid if you crash on it.

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

Pet Peeve
Thumb Up

Probably

The actual acceleration depends on the mass of the ship (see above), but yeah, that's the idea. Let that small amount of push add up and add up until you're halfway there, then turn around.

VASIMIR has a ridiculously high specific impulse compared to chemical rockets, which makes getting up to that kind of velocity practical. Google "rocket equation".

Pet Peeve
Thumb Up

Practical numbers

The "teach a man to fish" guys are spot on here. 5.7 newtons of force applied to a 100 ton spaceship, you're talking a 10 millionth of a g force. Paltry, but if you apply the force continuously in the right direction, VERY useful. In the ISS it would let them cheaply and effortlessly raise or lower their orbit. For long range missions, add more motors and ramp up the power - apparently the VASIMIR scales very nicely.

Best thing to happen to space science in 40 years.

SAP ordered to pay Oracle $1.3bn

Pet Peeve
Thumb Up

schadenfreude

Oracle can be a tough company to deal with too, but SAP is a million times worse. This will knock about three years of net profits off their balance sheet if it stands up - just about as long as a badly botched installation (by SAP, we unfortunately let them run the show) has been driving us crazy.

Browser add-on updated to slaughter Firesheep

Pet Peeve
Go

In other news...

... thing comes out because the thing that came out first was written so that thing would come out.

Firefox extension detects FireSheep snoop software

Pet Peeve
Boffin

Look it up

I know you were trying to be funny there, but why is the "joke alert" tag always related to failed attempts at humor? Bovid is a perfectly good word, correctly used in the article.

Pet Peeve
Grenade

Missing the point

Firesheep exists as a club to bang over the heads of the idiotic web2.0 sites that don't do basic session security. Countermeasures are stupid because they don't fix the underlying problem - that session cookies are sent in the clear, ripe for grabbing out of the air.

Stop complaining about firesheep - direct your anger at lazy sites that still think it's 1997 and https has significant overhead.

Apple MacBook Pro 17in Core i7 BTO notebook

Pet Peeve
Thumb Up

Dock repositioning

Use tinkertool. You can put the dock on any side, and also pin it to the corner instead of the center. I put my dock on the right side and pinned to the bottom of the screen, so the trash can is always in the bottom right corner.

PARIS in 89,000 ft climax

Pet Peeve
Stop

Stop calling it a brick!

Vulture 1 was in no way bricklike. If it was, it would have hit the ground hard enough to wreck it. The only damage is that little hole in the wing, and it probably got that at 89k feet when the balloon popped and pulled the plane free.

Watch the slow motion parts of the release video. It acted like a plane, at least for a while.

Pet Peeve
Thumb Up

it's the atmosphere, silly

It's true that there isn't a significant difference in gravity (I don't think that becomes significant for several hundred miles of altitude, at which point it's job done as far as getting to space is concerned), but there is a huge advantage of launching from high altitude in that you don't have to punch through so much air resistance - at 89k feet, you're at less than 5% of surface air pressure. PARIS was well above the MaxQ altitude of the space shuttle, for example. Cool stuff.

Google "air launch". It's something that comes up now and again - I think the scaled composites x-prize winner has some of this going for it.

Pet Peeve
Alert

Tiny cameras

There are some insanely small video cameras - like this one: http://www.dcctrain.com/shop/item.asp?itemid=1793 (dime sized, 4 ounces including batteries), but would it work at altitude? I doubt it - I've played with slightly larger cameras than that one, and they did NOT like getting cold.

Pet Peeve
Thumb Up

Straws - not just for drinking anymore

Typical troll playbook - if you call them out on their stupid comments, they "hit a sore spot". If you laugh at them or ignore them, you're secretly "butthurt".

I'm amazed that a paper plane could drop from 90K feet and land with a tiny little hole in the wing and no other damage. Sure, it's super light and therefore has the terminal velocity of a helium-filled bee, but seriously, if it was flopping out of control most of the time, you'd think the stresses would have ripped off a control surface or even a wing. And the tiny pictures of the plane in the distance after release (Hey Bastok, did you see that?) don't look like it's falling like a brick; it's clearly seen from the top down, and at least appears to be traveling in a semblance of the right way forwards (that release video was the coolest thing ever - the plane peeled off almost like it knew what it was doing). It probably did a spiral for the entire trip down - this is not a brick type of flight regime now, is it?

Do you have any accellerometer data? It would be really neat to know how hard it hit the ground, and how many Gs it was pulling during the trip down.

LOST Vulture One PARIS spaceplane FOUND!!!

Pet Peeve
Pint

Neato

It's in really amazing shape! Is there any recoverable onboard telemetry so we can find out if it flew or simply plummeted with style?

Facebook pages very much public, even when set as private

Pet Peeve
FAIL

Who writes code like this?

So let me get this straight, facebook private pages are protected from on-site searches, but if you know the URL you can view a "private" page always?

Here's a radical idea - if a page is protected, require a login before showing it, and if the person isn't permitted to see it by the owner, don't show it even if they are logged on? There, job done.

Wi-Fi starts getting chummy with its peers

Pet Peeve
Thumb Down

Huh?

What do you mean "bluetooth has never taken off in the US"? Endless crowds of toolboxes with flashing earpieces beg to differ. Oh wait, they got another call they have to take.

Multi-touch iMacs prepped in Cupertino?

Pet Peeve

Needs banana icon

Gorilla arm still applies. I can't see them making this a standard feature.

General Motors bitchslaps Tesla with Range Anxiety™

Pet Peeve
WTF?

Revisionist History

I like how the GM folks said the EV-1 "failed", when they had to pry the cars out of their owners hands. They weren't for everyone, but for those they worked for, they were liked a LOT.

They failed because GM failed, not because of the well-documented use case of the EV-1.

Rise in Latvian botnets prompts Spamhaus row

Pet Peeve
FAIL

There's a bridge I'd like to sell you

Do you trolls even THINK about what you write? Cripes, that doesn't make the slightest sense.

Pet Peeve
Heart

Uh huh

Thinking your ISP is too big to be blocked is arrogant. Spamhaus is right on here. If you have out-of-control spamming from a host's IP, and that host is unresponsive, what are you supposed to do, eat your spam?

The only people who think Spamhaus is "arrogant", and that their "review process is clumsy" are spammers, or hosts that don't think they should have to do their part to keep the net clean. News flash, it's 2010 and you can't get away with being lazy in how you handle spammers.

Upgraded iPads, iPhone, and Apple TV reported

Pet Peeve
FAIL

Duh

What the hell is it with these rumors? There's been this level of detail in them before, because it's easy to have lots of details when you MAKE STUFF UP.

Give it a freaking rest already and stop publishing rumors as news.

Page: