Posts by bri

Re: Are European cards vulnerable?

Short answer? No.

That security relies on opt-in, which in EU companies usually do (Amazon is an outlier - they are too big to be coaxed probably), but outside it's more of a mixed bag, because credit card companies don't have the power there to tell the merchant to upgrade security or else.

IDK if it's possible for yourself to block any transactions without 3DSecure process on your bank side (that would prevent you from purchasing anything from Amazon, mind), but otherwise credit card processors tend to pass through any payment that meets the criteria, as they are set for that particular merchant. Many banks also apply some behavioral risk models, which actually stop some frauds. However, primarily they don't want to block legitimate payment (which is far more likely event, event in crime-ridden areas).

Still, if it's a fraud and you are not part of it and you didn't do anything really, really stupid, banks usually foot the bill (I know for a fact that my bank does at least).

Re: quality.. (@AC)

Warmer sound through digital? You can't be... You can't be ... You can't be ... You can't be serious!

BTW vinyl itself has a physical DRM in place, built-in (or pressed-in?). It has practical limits on number of replays.

Stimulates the imagination though. You have to imagine the original sound when listening to well-worn favourite LP. It sounds so warm that it is completely unintelligible for someone who doesn't know it from heart. It follows that vinyl is best for music you hate :D

Re: Is the author just trolling? @DougS

Well, in my book "10x faster" is a different term from "identical". Especially in 1st gen tech.

Although I do share the broad view of the article about somewhat misleading overstatements , I too find the tone and indeed the contrast between presented facts and conclusions of the article as jarring.

@ Ole Juul

Too optimistic a view. Software community can overcome reasonable problems within 'the game'. However, legislature defines its rules and what is defined as 'breaking'.

This must be stopped cold ASAP (or massively watered down), this is a disaster in making.

Re: @ bazza (@TechnicalBen)

"...4 years seems more than enough to get some increase in grid capacity..."

Some maybe, in special cases or in countries where some mandarin comes and just makes land owner sign off the deal or else. Certainly not in Europe, with property transactions, EIA processes, pressure groups negotiations and so on and on taking years. I guess it's the same all over (democratic) world.

In the free world you have to take into account the fact that despite everyone agrees on some infrastructure being necessary, no one wants it in their backyard. And if they agree, they usually want something for it and on top some concessions that take time to negotiate. Sorry if it sounds patronising (that's not the intention), but I really want to show that things really do take time, often longer that people appreciate.

As a side note - I don't believe in biodiesel (unless from food production waste, which is only miniscule amount). It is more damaging to the environment than the normal one. It results in destroyed soil, erosion, requires massive amount of fertilisers. This is a brutal, dirty business violating nature. Actually, top soil would need many decades to naturally recover from such (ab)use.

Re: Call back (@ Roq D. Kasba)

No, he's a bloke.

Anyway, it's written perfectly in order for people to actually read it through without implied 'agenda filters' and think about the issue. Well done.

@Ledswinger

This is a bit harsh. Design of an airplane (esp. combat one) is a decades long process. DoD designed specifications in an era when we have oohed and aahed over Windows 95. F35 has been first flown in an era when smartphone meant either Nokia Communicator or some barely functioning, overcomplicated (from today's perspective) Windows contraption and tablet meant 2kg hulk with a stylus and Windows XP Tablet edition.

I don't think anyone could have predicted the current state of technology and security challenges. However, from conflicts in the past they knew that not investing is even more callous thing. Still, they have two decades of experience of how not to do it, so maybe this will be useful in designing better development frameworks and processes. So hopefully not everything is wasted.

@ac confusion

Linux is free, SLAs aren't. End of story.

Re: Completely pointless anyway (@Crazy Operations Guy)

Well, MDM is quite often used to deploy policies and enable provisioning/wiping company data (its own apps for instance). It can thus enforce locking and other security policies, but it can't unlock your phone per se (well, they can factory reset/wipe it if so configured, but it wouldn't help in this case, quite the contrary) - they need PIN IIRC, not MDM password (which could be remotely reset).

Or it can for instance monitor phone's location, but FBI has better data from cell phone operator, so such a feature is not that useful here either, IMHO.

I can't see how even reasonably configured MDM could possibly help here. Having said that I completely agree with your first paragraph.

Re: Success myopia - like it! (@Matthew Taylor)

I see. However, when you actually achieve something, it's OK to be happy about it, which may look as smugness from the outside. It's natural.

On the other hand, if you want to learn something (and there are quite a few things I wouldn't know without viewing some TED talks), it really helps to have an open mind. Either one's learning or judging. I prefer the former as usually I view talks outside my expertise, so I don't have the chops for the latter. But if the idea looks sound I don't care about the messenger.

which brings me to the original article - Mr. Khosla's ideas seem deeply flawed, biggest of which is the idea that you can model society without actual data (life experience, humanities) and that those models are sufficient (cf. the paragraph with Kafka mentioned). This is grotesquely arrogant. Even journalists in the Economist he so likes (me too) obviously draw many of their ideas and comments from liberal arts background. This solitary fact shows Khosla doesn't know what he is talking about.

Re: Reread the Article (@Sproggit)

You are a bit incorrect there - if OS sees 8 runnable threads, 8-core Intel CPU will execute them all in parallel and all cores will run on advertised clock rate. The trick with sleeping some cores in order to pull up clock rate of others (up to "Turbo" speed specific for the CPU and number of running threads) is applicable only when there are less runnable threads than the number of cores.

This feature doesn't support your argument, nor does your mentioning of Hyperthreading. What were you aiming at?

Re: Nope

Well, from data ownership / data security PoV of company there is no tangible difference between outsourced IT on leased HW and cloud. And as companies outsource like there's no tomorrow, such externalized IT running on someone elses HW is almost a norm today.

It's like with office buildings. Nobody actually owns an office building unless he is in the rental business, physical security is usually external hired company and we can go on and on. And physical security is THE barrier. We are past that one either, for a long time and nobody in IT wonders (which is odd, 'cause when you have physical access, you effectively own it).

In this regard cloud is only a little step further. The only question is how to use it as securely and dependably as possible, with emergency procedures, redundancy, multiple vendors and hedging in place. Business as usual.

Re: Satisfied Customer @ Geoffrey W

YMMV, it really depends on what you listen to and how. For instance, I listen to the music all the time and even very good things get pretty boring fast. So I like to listen to new music (new for me, not necessarily released recently), I like to explore different genres. With traditional approach, it gets expensive while with streaming it is flat rate. I like it. Whether the provider is Apple, Spotify or Deezer, is fairly immaterial. And when I really like something, I buy a CD for that quality time.

Granted, when you stop paying, then the service goes and so does everything you haven't explicitly purchased. But if you have trouble paying USD10-15 a month, you have really different kind of problems and music obviously isn't high on your priorities list.

As for quality, streaming is usually of lower quality than physical medium (OK, Deezer is little different). The same goes for video (there are more artifacts on streamed video). However, if you don't listen to the music in a quiet room, with good noise dampening, some sensible hifi, then it is nigh impossible to really appreciate the added quality of physical medium, not mentioning that only handful of releases are mastered well. Listening to Deezer or FLAC while on the go is complete waste of bandwidth/storage.

@Esskay

Au contraire, you do step down to appease shareholders and other relevant parties, when such a massive loss of value occurs. And I don't believe that Winterkorn wanted to clean up the mess created under his watch, with everyone questioning his every move.

Horn is in full corporate damage control mode, as minimizing fallout is crucial to future survival of the company. I don't believe a word he said, but I fully understand why he said it. He also has no other choice. Unless he wants to endanger hundreds of thousands employees. The are no good choices for VW now.

Nobody forces you to use it

When Red Hat goes to XFS (!) as their primary system it shows that in this space Linux sorely lacks. Development of complex POSIX FS takes long time and the best hope (as of today) is btrfs. Which has some fundamental problems of its own. It will take time, maybe even major redesign to make it work. If something takes ten years to develop and we are not limited in number of people, then what's wrong with pursuing multiple strategies?

Kernel is fairly modular. You can turn off features, you know?

Oranges, apples, information, lack of

It's funny how fast people resort to calling others ignorant while doing errors on their own.

1) This article is about Stagefright. This component is as device independent as it gets. So "variability", "different SKUs" play a very minor role. Updating some backend for widgets however, that would be a different matter

2) Each model of every vendor comprises of multiple SKUs, often with different innards (to cater for different standards, frequency bands and so on)

3) It is fairly possible that iOS is on more than billion devices as they have longer useful life (maket share in number of sold devices != market share in devices in operation). Coupled with the fact that iOS runs not only on iPhones, but on iPads and iPods as well, billion devices is fairly reasonable. I can still get update for device over three years old.

Re: Pity

'Good enough' doesn't cut it anymore. In custom builders market they focussed on, only the best is important. 'Good enough' is fine for lowcost OEM, but this doesnt earn money without large numbers. And if they want to play in this business, they have to provide unique business relevant features on all final products, such as those Intel has with AMT/vPro (while there are not many companies actively using it, those functions make Intel 'better for business'). OPMA is just a fantasy no one offers in volume and they don't have anything else in this segment Intel can't trump.

They focussed on declining markets such as traditional home DIY PC, so now they have even less money for development. And it shows. Before, at least in GPUs they had fiercely competitive cards in top end, which is a must from marketing perspective. Today, they are lagging. They are nowhere to be seen in ultramobile, server, compute acceleration. In their major PC related markets they compete almost exclusively on price. This won't end well for them. They need to find their long lost competitiveness and find new markets or they'll end like many others - either part of bigger company, or pure SoC player in OEM business. Or even worse.

Re: It's not all about the pixels...

The magic in 808/1020 was really sensor size, not massive pixel count - the information that both had bigger then usual mobile-phone sensors was somehow lost in the noise. Actually, 1020 had far smaller sensor than 808 to fit optics into the body and its quality suffered for it, but it still managed to beat everything else into submission, when you had the patience and photographed static scene (it was woefully slow due to wholly inadequate CPU).

That's also why they had to do such an enormous protruding optics - bigger sensor, bigger optics. The pixel count only means that reading and processing requires more energy (power and time).

Re: Dear US of A

Who said it was on external-facing network? They could get there through multiple hops - it's perfectly sufficient for another government body to have connections both to OPM and external network.

Having seen some large networks and their defenses I don't believe that such hacks are *that* straightforward. But granted, it would be even more tragic that way.

This assumes the problem is understood, which would be a tall order before this notification and that there is sufficient height to lose while solving the problem. Would be a bummer when on final approach.

@boatsman: Re: more talk, less code

The problem is that (broadly speaking) opensource is better for developers and service providers as they have no upfront costs, but it doesn't directly benefit end user that much (it does, but indirectly in other fields through new services etc.). The only thing it brings to the table, is more choice. Which is good and dandy until you have thousands of things to choose from, which bewilders CIO and normal user alike. You need aggregators who package that choice. You need such Red Hats.

When you have an unruly heap of OSS offerings with all manner of strings attached (projects for fun without any semblance of longterm sustainability etc.) and two, three nicely wrapped-up commercial ones, it is no contest. Pure free as a freeedom as well as beer OSS loses. Marketing, packaging and support simplicity is hugely important. And engineers totally s*ck at marketing. They need marketers and sales people to keep them employed. So it is just natural that Red Hat, whose success stems from old fashioned marketing and sales and a small number of packaging and engineering ideas, has such ratios of marketing and engineering personnel. Marketing and sales are mission critical for them. Engineers are 'only' very important.

@Mr.Mischief

Glue keeps things in place, the whole structure is firmer, doesn't bend as easily, doesn't sqeak, it's less likely to fail. Soldering everything has the same benefits - connectors are frequent points of failure. It's fairly understandable that company specializing in selling spare parts doesn't like it.

As Jan 0 pointed out, this is just normal progress. Tinkerers' pleasure stems from the fact that their skill is useful. And where nothing breaks (or specialist equipment is needed), their skill is irrelevant and they can't prove their worth. They have to find something else to do. C'est la vie.

Re: OH RLY? (@ Warm Braw)

This is not a good example as selling customer data is a very different industry from making a gadget. It's like they started to sell heavy machinery. Especially if the major selling point of your device is that the owner of the said device is a customer, not a product. Change of this policy is very unlikely and rather foolish from business perspective (until they start to lose money - if they start to lose money, all bets are off, of course).

Two reasons:

1) It is one of key reasons why they can command such a high price for their product. Once they choose to ignore it, they start to see eroding price very quickly as there is no compelling reason from not buying from either Microsoft (which has the same mantra and is cheaper still) or Google.

2) Monetization of data is another thing - the value of customer data depends on how you package them and how you sell them. As far as I know Apple has very little experience there, whereas Google is the Daddy. Apple would get pummeled by Google in this area and they know it.

Re: surprise- a translation company doesn't understand IT (@Bassey)

Although I wholeheartedly agree that many companies are highly IT dependent, hence should upgrade their capabilities in that area (for instance in UAT or vendor cooperation), they are not IT companies, their business lies elsewhere. It's like we don't call air lines aircraft manufacturers, although bigger ones have often significant say during the airplane development and they have large service departments full of aircraft engineers.

On the other hand IT vendors often pose as 'solution providers', but then you find out that they don't understand the problem their solution purports to solve. Because part of the problem is often in areas of usability and company culture, which are areas where IT really does not shine.

The problem is of bridging the gap.

Re: Proof?

What proofs are you talking about regarding empirical science, such as physics? The best you can do is to find out that your model/hypothesis is not in conflict with current observations and possibly that the alternative model is indeed in conflict. You can't mathematically/logically prove anything of consequence though.

The empirical knowledge may change (and often does change) with more thorough observation. In real world, proofs are useful only within models which give them constraints, something to hook up to. We don't live in an idealized model however.

Re: Android upgrades

Well, JLV, you raise a few valid points, but they are rather theoretical.

Firstly, as a case in point, iOS 8 works on over 3 year old iPhone 4S fairly well, thank you very much. It's not a speed demon, but features are there (where possible) as, most importantly, are there security fixes. Iphone 4s user could update its system the same day as iPhone 5s user, no waiting (well, apart from Apple's inability to keep their servers up, but that's another matter).

Secondly, it is Android failure as the *possibility* of such behaviour enabled manufacturers to do exactly that. It is fairly similar to approach Microsoft took with their Windows platform in the 90's - when you make something possible, inevitably someone will take advantage of it and the result is a mess.

Thirdly, you forget the other side of mass market: niche needs are ignored, they are too costly. Majority of Android users don't upgrade, they don't care, they just want cheap smartphone and they want that only because it has a bigger display than featurephones and there are more games for it and they are told that this is the technology to buy. Power users are a minority and they are expected to shell out bigger money (i.e. bigger margin) for their phone, they are ignored if buying cheaper device. There just isn't enough cash in those cheap phones - manufacturers have razor sharp margins and they will stay afloat only when you buy from them phones as often as possible. Why should they entice you to buy them less? When you buy it anyway 'cos it's cheap? It would be dumb. No one cares for a few thousand geeks out of 20 million batch.

Apple on the other hand has a reason to provide upgrades - they milk users for cash even when they don't buy devices as often, they just need you to stay hooked-up to their services and not leave for WinPho or Android. In contrast, apart from Google, Android phone manufacturers don't see a penny from Google Play content purchased on device they have manufactured. And that's a fundamental difference.

Re: Isn't the whole thing about systemd...

Oh c'mon, this is not a religion. We are technicians/engineers. We get tools, we do stuff. Tools evolve, change as requirements change. All this is under GPL, you can scan the source code for Big Brotherly things, you can even do your own patches if you are so inclined. Today you are "forced" to use systemd, before you were "forced" to use init. Frankly, it is a symmetrical situation. Do you think init was somehow democratically chosen from bunch of alternatives by large plenum of opensource developers and users? No.

Before with init, it was complicated to create dependencies and this created unholy mess of script-fu with init (especially in real world where there are more services than smtpd and httpd), today with systemd it is slightly more complicated to do "trivial" things such as running single purpose server, but more complex things that were almost unmanageable before, are possible to manage again.

Boo-hoo.

Define innovative

Frankly, with some definitions you can argue that there never was any innovative stuff right through to the discovery of fire - others have burned themselves with friction, so this was derivative and no real innovation, yet alone breakthrough :)

For consumer device, the whole mix of packaging, usability, capability and content is achievement in itself. Whether it is innovation by your definition, I don't know, but in my book, it really was.

Re: That side-on picture of the phone looks just like... (@ cambsukguy)

...you mean Nokia N9, surely?

Re: who more anal, the analyst or the analyst who analyses him?

We'll see in September. I really don't know what the fuss is about. Speaking of research - what research had he done, pray tell? I still see some remains of dried tea leaves...

Re: Bays (siblings question)

I'd say it has to do with superposition of vibration modes and resonance you get in an enclosure and getting (and maintaining) head over the track as well as meeting average seek times they claim (ie getting lock...).

The more vibration the slower performance due to rereads etc. it has followup impact on buffers/caches etc.

In other words it makes it slower under these conditions. And in some particularly badly engineered enclosures, it may shorten lifetime.

Re: No mention of CentOS?

Exactly, the difference is in their kernel version (they take newest one from kernel org, apply patches and then claim that everything is compatible with RHEL which validates against its own kernel). Which is fine and dandy, but I am not so sure that for instance the kernel has the same reliability on, say, HP servers... And ksplice (the only potential benefit) isn't really worth the risk for majority of usecases. And that java abomination that is OEM for management? No, thanks.

Without paid support you don't have access even to patches, which makes CentOS better value for money as you get patches for free. And 100% compatibility with RHEL as a bonus.

They are not weird, but different :)

Anyway, the reason is probably the fact that FOSS is heavily used also on Windows (really), there is for instance large installed base of Apache on Windows (the inroads of IIS is probably due to conversion of these sites, but I digress).

FOSS that is multiplatform and works also on Windows usually uses OpenSSL if it needs SSL functionality, because developers want as much OS independent code there as possible. From security and performance POV this is not optimal, but such is the situation.

It's not so easy

Many big corporations are actually making profit off of it, those losing are usually those of the "new economy" - pure cloud providers, which try to sell to international customers. Their voice however is not so loud yet as they don't make that much money. Traditional companies however (Oracle et al.) are actually better off, as they don't have any compelling cloud offering, so this situation benefits them. The only big corporation in some quandary, seems to be Microsoft with their Azure and Office 365 and even for them cloud is rather strategic bet than money making enterprise.

Other companies making money off of cloud services, are often doing almost the same as NSA (Google/Facebook anyone?).

Re: The problem is approach

That's the reason I wrote about demographic facts in *time* - in the context of climate we are talking about 20, 30 or 50 years' timeframes. This is not a matter of 5 years...

A few years ago there were almost no cars in China. Look there now. What about India and other fast growing countries? Subsaharan Africa is a poverty poster child and I completely agree that they are incomparable to the US for instance. Still, there are some fast growing economic powerhouses that are playing catch-up vigorously while having population many times larger in total than US and Eurpe combined.

People there are feeling the progress, they are better off now than before. This whets their appetite for more. This is only natural and we should acknowledge the fact and plan accordingly.