Posts by Kevin McMurtrie
449 posts • joined Friday 15th June 2007 18:33 GMT
Posted in Want to use WD diagnostics? Buy Windows
Datacenters?
Don't insane numbers of consumer hard drives go into low-cost datacenter network storage racks? They're definitely NOT running Windows there and, even if they did, nobody can run a software tool on each of a few thousand hard drives to configure them.
iFinger
Do Google phones support cursor hovering?
Shoehorn
Back in 2006, a plot of land measuring 5000 square feet in the middle of Silicon Valley's endless urban sprawl cost $400000 to $700000. High elevation land with a view of the valley and easy access to expressways, like that area of Cupertino, costs enough to make even the wealthiest wince. It's why the mansions look bubble-shaped and squished.
Whoops!
What happens if you slip while carrying 300lbs at chest level? Do your legs snap off at an odd angle? Does the weight crush your arms and ribs when you hit the ground? Maybe lifting the load high off the ground isn't such a good idea.
Posted in Waterfall Niagara speakers
Dampening is there
I've thought about building speakers like these for my home even before I saw these pics. You'll see from the photos that there are large dampeners around the woofers, holes in the passive resonator, and there's room for more dampening under the passive. My cost estimates were far lower and I still couldn't justify it, not even when it's a speaker, a sculpture, and a hobby project all at once. I was also going to use polycarbonate because it won't crack.
Probably is a trackpad prototype
The long cables imply that it connects to something large like a laptop. Two complex cables implies two separate functions. There's a colored pattern on the screen that's too chunky for pixels but they could be light interference from touch sensing conductive films.
A visual trackpad sounds very cool but it would be useless without a new GUI paradigm. I doubt Apple wants so many GUIs at once - Mouse/Keyboard, Keyboard with gesture pad, Keyboard with visual gesture pad, iPhone/iPad, and iPod.
Perfect for watching YouTube
Where is the need to send 21.6Gbps of video long distances? Not even in 10 years will there be a consumer device that can source that much REAL data. It makes more sense to send the video in its original storage format, which will remain 5 to 100Mbps for quite some time, and decompress to high bitrate pixels at the point of display.
100W over Cat 6 - It would take about 45V @ 1.2A on each of the four pairs to survive 100m. Fire icon, because thats what would happen if you had a coil of extra HDBaseT behind your TV.
The Register to the rescue
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/01/holy_water/
Just don't commit any crimes in Lourdes.
Posted in Brace yourself for 4TB drives next year
Consumer RAID lagging
Consumer RAIDs rebuild at 1 to 20 MB per second. That makes rebuilding a 4194304 MB disk not so fun.
Can't finish in 10 seconds?
26 billion CPU clock cycles on seems generous.
Party like it's 1999, pack your things like it's 2001
Pleasing advertisers was the key to success in the 90s. That was followed dot-com decimation around the year 2000 when customers left seeking actual content. Bill Gates needs to pull a Steve Jobs - Return to MS to save it from doom.
Posted in Vauxhall Ampera extended range e-car
No shifting
Fancier electric motors work fine with a single gear ratio. Moving the torque curve can be done by changing voltage ranges, changing windings, or by mechanically moving the magnets.
I don't know why you're having traction control problems with an automatic gearbox. Good cars have precision control over wheel spin. An electric motor would be even more precise and a rat's nest of complex brake modulation plumbing would go away. It's just a matter of the engine control computer in an electric car knowing how to do it.
My only gripe about electric cars is that they're still lacking refinement. The technology isn't mature enough to build an affordable electric car that is durable, sporty, and efficient all at the same time. This car comes close but I have my doubts that being efficient for only the first 40 miles is good enough.
Posted in Apple reels as Steve Jobs Flashturbates
Uncool
Sure, Adobe went stale after the 1990s but many of the attacks were undeserved. Advertisers' desire to consume as many resources as possible will persist whether Flash exists or not. Remember high frame rate animated GIFs that looped forever? Advertisers will drain the battery with poorly coded H.264 and JavaScript animations too. Last time I checked, QuickTime wasn't any less prone to crashing than Flash, either. It's great to ban Flash because of its obsolescence but Apple's barbs will come around full-circle.
ha
You missed the point. Google is worried about Google's security, not yours.
Blocks referrer
I searched for my own site while watching the server logs. With plain http, a click produced my full Google query in my logs through the 'Referer' header. Https scoping blocked the referrer data, so this does have some value. Malware sites won't be able to create customized fake pages and it will prevent a dozen web sites knowing that you searched for "rapid corpse disposal."
It's good news for Google too. It makes their collected data very exclusive, and Google is all about making money from data.
Posted in Consumers still want it hard
1.0 not there yet
Version 1.0 has lots of problems. High capacity systems are heavy, there's no backlight for low light reading, pages sometimes change on their own, it keeps losing bookmarks, there's no search, and I can't seem to unhighlight text. I've opened and closed the PTech several times hoping it would update itself, but no luck yet.
See? That didn't hurt. I'm really your friend.
Expect more harmless accidents to come from Google. It's desensitizing public to privacy intrusions and abuses of personal data, and it has been going on for years now.
Microsoft was called evil because they fought dirty to take control of your software. Google is all that and they want your data too.
Posted in WiGig gets spec and Alliance endorsement
Like IR, but more invisible
60GHz sounds like it's going to have all the hassles of IR but with higher costs. What IR tech always lacks is a temporary visible beam to assist aiming. With a visible guiding beam, you could chose a common location on a wall or ceiling for all devices to bounce their signal off of.
AAC
A critical factor not mentioned here is codec efficiency and quality. A poorly performing codec can drive up bandwidth costs, drive up the cost of encoding hardware, or provide a poor customer experience. H.264/AAC was chosen as a standard by many large companies because it completely blew away other codes at the time. Suddenly home users could stream high quality video without exotic internet connections or hours of buffering. To also imply that H.264/AAC will be the future standard is ridiculous. Codecs come and go.
Popcorn
Apple could simply have power drain specifications to reject inefficient apps. Bad code comes in all forms so the coding language restrictions do a poor job of hiding Steve's raging ego. There are also certain tasks where JIT-compiled JavaScript, Java, Perl, etc. can run very efficiently.
Developers using Flash rarely have intentions of efficiency. It's too often a short-cut language for rapid offshore development. Adobe can run a big angry lawsuit only to find all of their apps being rejected again on technical grounds. It's all going to be amusing.
Immortal hoax
Two ways to do this: Squishy liquid pouches powering turbines that feel like walking on soft sand or sidewalk plates that sink so you're always climbing stairs. Either way it won't happen.
If cities want to suck some free energy from somewhere, put this technology on steep downhill roads where it would otherwise go towards heating brakes..
Sponge
Inkjet printers flush their liquid money into gutters at the edges of the page. It's a solution for stagnant pigment clogging the nozzles, with a pleasant side effect for the printer manufacturer . Thin font or fat font hardly matters. The difference ends up in a large sponge at the bottom of the printer.
Epic fail for a university IT department not figuring out a paperless workflow at least 10 years ago.
Posted in Apple display patent enslaves sun
Prior fart
I had a handheld TV that did this in the 80s. You opened the case partway and watched the LCD from a mirror on the base. There's a good reason for them not being made any more. Even with impossibly perfect optics, color LCD screens can never be more than 16% transmissive. E-ink is more efficient but it doesn't need backlighting contraptions.
One-legged 'A'
So both test groups flunked?
White of insufficient illumination
"...to send email through accounts with a Live.com address, which are whitelisted by many spam filters."
Not mine. Not as long as Microsoft has no working abuse contacts.
Party like it's 1999
4Mbps? At best this will be a few billion dollars spent cleaning up the splices of ancient telephone wires. Very little of the effort for this initiative will be of any use towards the future 50Mbps goals.
Can you hear that? That's the sound of modern nations laughing.
Awesome
Will that make my crusty old AT&T wires carry faster DSL? No, I think my Internet forever remains the same.
Concept demo
This is an early concept demo - the kind that Marketing departments show internally at regular intervals. They imagine the workflows of 5 to 10 target customers then display a product serving them. After this meeting, Engineering finds that 90% of the product's decisions shown in the demo were made without sufficient input parameters (magic is not an input parameter). Test groups say, "That's amazing, but can it..." Project managers add up the costs and find it too expensive for the target customer. The demo and the specifications are reworked for a couple of months and eventually the amazing magical product looks quite common.
Old trick
This trick is almost as old as the search engine web sites. Give the web crawlers content stolen from other sites. Give people advertisements and/or malware to real people. It's a simple matter of checking the User-Agent header.
There are similar tricks for malware hosting. A malware server or its name servers will show system administers a special page that appears to be operating normally or an error page saying that the site has been deactivated. Everybody else gets the malware, a fake store front, or a proxy for various uses.
Posted in Pentax K-x
Really 12.4?
The full-res photos don't seem all that sharp. About only high frequency components that I could find in Photoshop was noise. It reminds me of some research in the 90s on how to upsample media in ways that trick the brain into seeing a higher resolution image. I recall that high frequency noise was used to mask lost details, then your brain would then replace that noise with a very convincing assumption about what the details should be.
The high ISO photos look great. There's relatively little noise and noise suppression damage. Put a bright lens on it and take it into town at dusk.
Bio are in currents water, not air
Friction noise in air is not hard to detect. Hair, shoes, clothing, plastics, and sometimes stresses on the floor create significant amounts of electricity with every motion. This makes a portable device not so crazy to design after all. The real question is how many naked and hairless test operators can be hired with that $6m of development cash.
Other way around
The registrations aren't fake to avoid spammers. They're FROM the spammers. Spamming is illegal, regulated, or at least hated with a furious passion in most places. Every time you get a spam you can bet that the domain name owner doesn't want to be found. Try looking some up.
But there's no video
Just an empty space in the article
Posted in Toshiba tunes into TransferJet
RF intimacy
If two touching computers may yield only 370Mb/s, what kind of act is needed to achieve the full 560Mb/s?
Waxed paper cup malnutrition
Will drinking soda from a silicon dioxide vessel make it healthy again?
Hanging is OK
Flash Player 10 release notes:
"Receiving live streaming audio for over an hour may result in loss of audio and a non-responsive Flash Player. (237333)"
Duh
It doesn't make sense why there isn't a hinged metal plate over the antenna. It doesn't need to be thick, it doesn't need electrical contact with anything, and it doesn't need software support. Regardless of how secure you think a protocol is, it's common security sense to not let people play with it when they don't need to.
0-62mph in what?
Hopefully that's a lot under 14 seconds. Up in the 14 second range it would have a hard time competing with small diesel engines...and hills.
Passengers must not be armed
If you're counting total width, a lot of healthy people aren't going to fit in those seats because of their shoulders.
And the Roddenberry fans
Might as well bring the Jobs fanatics and Roddenberry fanatics together: Who hasn't admired the Star Trek PADD devices? Laptops are clumsy to carry around and anyone who has used one without a table knows the kind of stares generated by accidentally dropping it. There's a business use for a device that could display documents prepared for a meeting and have just enough user input for note taking. Give it the ability to dig through files on your desktop computer and maybe the laptop gathers dust. That's the Monday through Friday use. At home, like you said, it's for massive media consumption.
Posted in Apple preps touchy-feely iMac
App control
A touch screen is very nice for app control, especially since Apple is pushing for Bluetooth peripherals. You can check e-mail, control music, start video chats, and perform quick maintenance tasks without the hassle of powering up the mouse. For this to make much sense the iMac will need a very low-power running state so it can be left running constantly without drawing more than a few watts. OS X, as it is now, can't spin down the boot drive and it doesn't seem capable of slowing down the CPU much.
Posted in Peppa Pig told to belt up
Splat!
A few episodes of Happy Tree Friends should cure a child's sense of invincibility.
The plan is coming together now
According to Google, whitespace use is critical for the future of the Internet and it requires a geolocation database to protect public TV broadcasts. This forces the use of Google Location Services at the router, not at the browser where it's optional. Now Google knows where HTTP traffic originates within a very small area. Combine it with their tracking services, search engine hits, GMail, etc. and they have the ability to track everybody in every detail all the time. I don't think there's a shortage of bidders for that kind of data.
Posted in U2 frontman bitchslapped by TalkTalk
All you do is...
A most confusing article for those not following UK telcos, as Bono sings and Talk Talk was a band.
Doin' the Evil
The real story is Google is building a database mapping MACs to locations. A MAC alone doesn't provide any info so they must have quietly made deals with a lot of telcos and WiFi operators to gather data that normally isn't recorded for any length of time.
I got super signal analyzer too
al-Qaeda is in my /dev/random.
cat /dev/random | strings | grep -i "kill"
KILL
KIlL
,h4kIll
KiLlS
kIll
Kill
\kILl
J-A-I-L
Staying home for a Federal Court appearance is not the best of ideas.
Posted in Data Robotics CEO change no big deal
It's a RAID
Seamless failover of staffing too. Impressive.
-blink-
They don't remember the old days where having the keyboard and motherboard on the same box meant the cables in back pulled out after a few ergonomic adjustments. There was a dreaded and familiar chirp as the switching power supply strained to draw the last joule from the capacitors. Unlike the Apple ][, the Gecko doesn't have a platform for a heavy color CRT to pin it to the desk.
Speaking of being pinned down, wouldn't this have a hard time competing with newer cellphones?
Evil gets its mojo back
Considering rumors about the next US iPhone carrier, the fight between Microsoft versus Apple is back and the battleground is Verizon. Hopefully the loot from the Bing deal pays for the damage caused by being a battleground.
