Posts by Don Jefe

Re: All I ask is his dad is not called a defendant....

The father is a politician so the fact his son doesn't have at least one oversized headphone jack mounted in his skull is more than enough evidence he's not a cyber hacker.

Re: Cut and Dried

We may not hold innocent people hostage, but we'll sure as fuck hold accused people hostage. Guilt and innocence are matters for the courts, not the jailers. After he's arraigned all the rules for a 'speedy' trial change. If the case involves a foreign national, thus the involvement of the State Department, that accused flight risk can be kept in jail for a very, very long time while diplomatic negotiations are underway. It's legal trickery that allows for punishment before the accused has been judged, and it sucks, but that's just the way things are.

Re: @Jonny Canuck

The Americans have a long history of kidnapping people to bring them to justice? Yes, that's true, but if it makes you feel any better, we didn't invent the practice. The Greeks, Romans and Persians really took the practice to knew levels thousands of years ago. Additionally, as someone mentioned earlier, the Isralies are so well known for the practice that Mossad isn't flagged as a misspelled word by computers. That's not to say I approve of my country's actions, I don't, but kidnapping for 'justice' is a really, really old practice.

I salute your faith in mankind sir. Perhaps I've been too long around the wrong sort, but the only reason I can think of that the average lab worker would voluntarily stay with this and wait is so they can maximize the damage claims in the enormous lawsuit they're about to file. I like your thought much better though.

Re: Is it just me.....

They have to verify it's real to rule out it being a hilarious prank. A hysterical laughter bomb planted by some long gone researcher who was perfectly content not being there because he knew what would happen, even decades later. Kind of like that guy who made arrangements to have a bunch of harmless, finely ground white plastic powder poured over his body before they closed the casket. With an engraved placard inside that says 'Fuck You grave robber, now you've got Anthrax'. That kind of humor is timeless.

Re: being anonymous, these services are designed to be used for illegal activity

A wise man once said: 'Jurisdiction is meaningless. That's why we have spies'.

On a really good day it's a losing argument if it requires a government, any government, to play by the rules. Between various 'greater need' justifications and no qualms about rewriting definitions to suit their current needs most governments are quite adept at interpreting the law very differently than you or I.

On a not really good day, which is most days, governments don't really give a shit. If there are no legal provisions for getting what they want they've got effectively limitless resources to throw at the problem in the form of your favorite state intelligence agency. If they just don't want to dick around with you they'll cut off your funds and forbid companies to do business with you.

There's no aboveboard business potential in working around a government. Why do you think nobody does it? I can assure you, the willingness, resources and technical ability to sidestep governments is there, it's there in huge quantities. Nobody does it because it's a loser, you can't win with workarounds. You can attempt to change things through the democratic process, good luck. Or you can attempt to change things through martial process. Again, good luck. But you aren't going to change anything setting up a data center in Tonga.

Re: Compromised from the start?

Right? I was thinking the same thing as I read the article. I have no confidence in a private entity having the resources necessary to prevent infiltration by State intelligence agencies. Officially sanctioned government intelligence operatives rarely have checkered backgrounds that flag them as risky people. Spies tend to be good at that sort of thing.

There is great potential for comedy gold in all this you know. Suppose the entire project was a super secret government honey trap that, because of their stunning resumes and flawless background checks, ended up recruiting nothing but super secret government intelligence operatives. Each person, believing they are the only undercover agent involved, works diligently to compromise the project with clever coding trickery. It's only after general release they discover they have created to most bulletproof secure communication software in history. Hilarious!

@Valeyard

A list isn't required to Hoover up data. A list is required to tell you which Hoovered data to look at. I'm assuming you're in IT, but this is pretty basic stuff...

Re: on a technical note...

A really unfortunate side effect of stuff like this is that the correct answer is whatever the answer is. Punitive sneakiness is almost always the work of people looking for a patsy, not a person interested in facts.

Governments, NGO's, NPO's and companies have lots of, legal, ways to investigate internal matters and have a court support the investigation. When you're doing it back channel the truth probably isn't the goal.

Re: Pointless and confusing

Yeah. People really suck at math. Some of the worst at it I've ever seen are the CFO's of energy providers. They get all bent out of shape when residential consumption in an area goes down .05%. If those idiots only knew little things didn't have a significant impact their jobs would be a lot easier. I'm sure it's probably a job security thing. If they didn't make a big deal out of the little stuff they would probably be made redundant.

Re: Speaking of Canada...

No. That's efficiency. Two systems with identical input and output can generate significantly different amounts of heat by using components of different efficiencies.

Basic applied thermodynamics.

Re: It comes down to power supply efficiency

@JeffyPoooh

Yes. Lots of lightbulbs do indeed have a standby mode, but I suspect not many people have them in their homes.

Modern 'Explosion Proof' lighting assemblies use standby to prevent sudden state change from potentially causing a spark (and explosion if it's a bad day). A convenient side effect is that the bulbs last 'forever' as they never experience the cold to wide open state change that kills other bulbs.

High intensity HID spotlights, emergency lights, construction lights, makeup lights and shitloads of specialty videography and photography lights all have standby for the same reason as above and so that they provide their full power and proper color of light immediately after being turned on. Old, pre-standby lights of those sorts experienced significant color shifts as they 'warmed up'. The end result was that it was hotter than hell where those lights were in use because they were left on to eliminate the color shift period.

Most streetlights in the US have standby. Mostly for filament longevity purposes. There was a big grassroots movement here in the late '90's when the proles discovered that their streetlights were sucking so much power and in older lights were actually on constantly, at reduced levels, by virtue of current leaks, but nobody knew it because you can't see them burning in the daylight.

I'm sure some home lights have standby as well, but most people have no need for such things and would never even go looking for them.

*New lights in reef aquarium setups have standby too. People probably do have that sort of thing in measurable quantities.

Re: Speaking of Canada...

@Symon

No. That's the most basic understanding of electricity and, like most things, isn't as simple as you'd like it to be when you go to apply it.

Heat as a function of draw is only, kind of, valid as a comparator for like vs like. You can make some, crude, assessments like that if you are comparing two AGP's or two LED's. But that doesn't work if you are trying to compare draw from a high density component like an AGP to the system wide draw of the rest of the components. It is entirely possible, and not uncommon, for the total draw of a system to greatly exceed the draw of the hottest component in a system but still produce less heat.

Re: Well it's not hard

Please reorient your map, or globe, so that Canada is near the top (or bottom) relative to the floor in your house.

In this orientation it should be much easier to see that Canada is not generally considered to have a traditional, equatorial climate. In fact, recent satellite imagery has confirmed that Canada is nearer to as far the fuck away from the equator as it can be. There is a growing consensus among climate scientists that Canada might be really god damn cold for 80% of the year. The few Canadians that have been studied are purported to live in small, dome shaped shelters made of stacked snow bricks, called 'igloos' and dress themselves in baby seal skins for protection from the cold. Little else is known about these hardy people.

Pending future expeditions across the tundra and into the mythical realm where legends of monstrous white bears and rabid white foxes frolic, all tales of large, cosmopolitan cities with excellent education and healthcare systems, good beer and stories of a tribe of lost Frenchmen are to be considered myth.

Re: Speaking of Canada...

To be fair, heat isn't a very good indicator of draw. The primary heat source in a console and general use computers is related to graphics processing. In standby mode, graphics processing, obviously isn't a factor. It's a matter of how the heat is created, not what the other less operation intensive, but still (comparatively) significan draw, lower density component packages are doing.

Re: And for every false positive ...

That has bothered me intensely since the Snowden stuff began. Yes, the assault on civil liberties and the 'justified disregard for the law' by lawmakers is revolting. I'm not sure it's possible for them to fail any harder at their jobs. But Christ on a cracker, do they have to curb stomp every principle of information science too?

This is undergrad level stuff here, but the only part they seem to have gotten right is that the public would be upset if they knew the scope of this monument to poor education systems. Regardless of ones stance on the necessity and ethics of all this mess, I cannot see how a compelling argument can be made for ignoring the most basic of information management fundamentals.

Enormous sums of money have been spent (hilariously, lots of it in the form of government grants) to develop better methods and processes for information discrimination in real time data. Obtaining information has never been a problem (spies, public 'secret police' and that nice man from Stasi have been around since day 1 to deal with that). The problem has always been in identifying what information has value. Most of The Register's target audience would be working in coal mines if only the information you wanted organized itself before it got to you.

Half-assed work just pisses me off. If you're going to do something do it right or don't do it at all. That goes double if my tax dollars are being spent on it. Bunch of slackasses. As if it were needed, this is just more proof Douglas Adams was right: Anyone capable of getting into government should be automatically disqualified from government.

Re: Dan 55 mooooooity OMGeeez!!! What a DISASTER!!! We're all DOOOOMED!!! Etc.

'Snowjob' is Trademarked by Hasbro as part of their GI Joe family of products.

Re: A small fly in the ointment

The costs of storing all that useless data is nonexistent. That's the biggest perk of being a government that has zero qualms making the taxpayer pay for their own cavity searches. It's really nothing to worry yourself over though. Since this is all related to 'National Security' the actual costs are recorded on the first invisible page of the GAO annual spending report. A lot of work goes into making sure intrusive government surveillance programs don't cause you any anxiety.

Re: Or was it for political purposes?

Yes. Using a covert, super enabled, state intelligence agency to investigate tax statuses is probably the first thing people think of once they are holding the reins of power. Of all the creative ways to abuse power, investigating civil infractions with a maximum penalty of $15,000 is definitely the ultimate reward: 'Ha! Choke on the Throbbing Manhood of vengeance you fool! Suck it all. The taste will be burned into your soul as you attend one 30 minute class on asking the IRS for assistance in populating forms. Watch your future slip away as your bank account is debited $125/month for the next decade. The echoes of your suffering will reverberate for ages and all will know the price of thwarting me'.

Re: Trickle Down

Yep, incremental product transitions are necessary in any and every market and market segment. Consumers won't go directly from A to E. Interestingly, they won't go from A to E even if there is no significant price difference.

If 'A' satisfies their needs they'll just keep using 'A'. If you give them 'E' you've just given them solutions to problems they didn't know they had and since they didn't have those problems when they had 'A' staying with 'A' means they won't have those problems (there's a lot of boring science behind all this, but a great contemporary example is WinXP, or 'A' for this discussion. It wouldn't have mattered if Win8, 'E', gave you a blowjob every time you used that disjointed menu screen. Taken as a whole 'E' created problems where none existed before. Doesn't matter what advantages it provided, the general consumer doesn't make decisions that way).

In a land of Roman Numerals, the decimal point is God. You have to grow your markets at a pace and scale that meets their needs, not the needs of other markets or the needs of fringe users. It's tricky business and there are more than a few clever people and former executives who cry themselves to sleep every night on cheap cotton pillows instead of some hookers cocaine covered tits because they were 'ahead of their time'.

'Are your speed limits still in MPH'?

My carrier registers speed in knots... If yours doesn't it might be a French counterfeit. Flip it over and see if it says 'Hecho en Mexico' on the drain plug.

Re: I name this ship White Elephant.....

Western wars in the last two decades may have had a big air power element, but not an air superiority element. See, air superiority requires your enemy to have aircraft to be superior over. That hasn't been a problem in quite some time.

Western militaries have been grossly misusing air superiority aircraft as light bombers and that's just as stupid as parking nuclear submarines in the Persian Gulf (ICBM's are fairly launch site agnostic you know). F-35's and such are cool and all, but if you're going to fight a ground war from the air, F-35's and such are just about the dumbest, most expensive, least efficient way possible to do it.

I'll admit 'Top Gun: Long Range Bomber' or 'Top Gun: Drone' isn't Oscar material. But if you're not planning on occupying and claiming dominion over a foreign land then sailing little airplanes to the place you want to bomb really doesn't make any sense. If expansionism isn't in the cards you can just fly airplanes to your target then fly back home. You don't need to land if you don't want to annex the country. For Christ's sake, you could put 800-1000 Kamikaze drones on an aircraft carrier deck and have a drone factory inside.

The details are irrelevant. If the goal is to purchase the most appropriate military equipment based on recent wars then anything that needs to land outside your country is as dumb as using donkeys as mobile SAM emplacements.

Re: Bust-up

Here's a useful tip to keep in mind for the future. If, at any point, you have the desire to run comparative siege engine projectile experiments involving oversized public transports and military aircraft, just do it.

You're not going to get permission for that sort of thing. Trust me on this, there's a threshold beyond which no bureaucrat or elected official is capable of rationalizing what you've written on the Application for Special Use Permit. At best, you've made next Christmas very painful for the bureaucrat's family that has to feed their institutionalized and straightjacketed father turkey purée through a straw. At worst you'll be shot immediately.

However, if you're bold, and somehow manage to acquire all the elements necessary for your experiment, it's highly unlikely anyone will stop you. Firstly, it's just never a good idea to interfere with people who can round up a giant bus, a fighter aircraft and an enormous catapult in the same place. Common sense will shield you. Secondly, even the thickest, most aggressive and well armed person is going to want to see what happens. If it's impressive enough you'll remain safe. If you blow it you'll probably be shot, but being shot for just for asking was a real risk you've already sidestepped, so you're 100% further than you would have been. Carp Areadime!

Re: What? wait! STOP!!!

There are shitloads of reasonable analysts, but like with politicians and religious sorts the reasonable ones are drowned out by the lunatics.

Low Risk

There's very little risk of other manufacturers following the Apple path of non serviceable products. For one thing being mildly serviceable, a battery you can swap and support for removable storage media have become market differentiators. It's risky business to screw with those sort of things.

But more importantly, manufacturers would have to raise their prices, or absorb the losses, to compensate for the costs associated with direct attachment assembly (components soldered directly to the board with no sockets). It seems counterintuitive, but direct attachment assembly isn't an across the board savings exercise if you're dealing with tens, or hundreds, of millions of reasonably complex assemblies.

Consumer electronics, even the nice stuff, is built with the shittiest components money can buy. If there's an unusually expensive component (like a high spec display) the costs will be offset somewhere else (low tolerance parts or glue instead of fasteners). What that means in production is that QA and rework are crucial to maintaining your margins.

The higher your volume, the more crucial that rework becomes. Even though the parts are cheap, it's a loser to simply scrap populated boards. If you can't fix the assembly, it's still worth partially depopulating the boards and putting components back into production. But if your high cost components are soldered to the board you've got a really expensive problem. The available solutions are defined for you by the economics of the situation, you really don't get to pick if you want to make money.

If you're punching out extremely high volumes of products with low margins it's insanity to go direct attachment. The labor to fix problems or liberate individual components is extremely expensive and razor thin margins simply won't allow tossing out populated boards. You've got to have socketed (expensive) components and get rework wrapped up super fast or lose money. On the user end of the business socketed components really do wonders for secondary markets (refurbs and reverse logistics) that solve huge inventory and logistics problems for you. Again, volume defines the scope of post primary market problems.

But if your volume is comparatively lower, and you've got big margins, the situation is reversed. It makes sense to go direct to the board. For one, it lowers parts count (no sockets), but it also let's you spend extra time on rework and component recovery. The labor at lower volumes is still cheaper than socketed components.

As far as consumer electronics go, neither way is 'better'. Both options have pros and cons on the production line and for the end user. As I said, on the production line the decision is made for you; the math isn't negotiable. For the end user there's a benefit in pricing, but swappable batteries and removable media are important to some people as well. For the end user the biggest benefit is simply choice, it's one benefit you don't get as a manufacturer.

Re: Is this really a problem?

The real threat is potential disruption on the manufacturing side. People toss the 'economies of scale' buzzword around all the time, but they generally don't understand how unbelievably complex it is to make economies of scale work. It takes a lot more than simply scale.

The most important, and most difficult, part of making it all work is accurate forecasting of your supply chain needs, facilities operations, warehousing and logistics. If you're more than a little wrong your costs increase far beyond what, in this case, 5 million units would normally cost: Everything is interconnected and but you're forecasting on events anywhere from 6 to 18 months in the future.

The rarely discussed 'dark side' of volume driven, mass scale manufacturing is that losses scale faster than gains. For (ludicrously simplified) example: Based on forecasted needs, you identify a way to adjust your supply chain and save $1 for every 1000 units turned out. But something outside your realm happens and your forecasts were too high. You end up purchasing too many (part) under contract and delivery of (part) is staggered in a way that's got your warehouse overfilled, insufficient materials handling equipment and too many of the wrong staff. Your $1 per 1000 savings has morphed into a $2 loss per 1000 units. It gets even worse if you miss your next round of forecasts. The echoes can sometimes be heard, around the world, for years afterward.

Obviously, 5 million units across the entire EMS sector isn't the end of the world, for anyone. The losses will be absorbed and that'll be that. But if the issue was more widespread it's the consumers who will pay. Manufacturers and resellers won't eat big losses just to make consumers happy. They'll raise prices and consumers will have no choice but to pay more. That's an inevitable, nasty, side effect of mass manufacturing where there is no competition between the EMS players and a world where everybody but the EMS sector has scuttled their manufacturing capacities.