Posts by Bronek Kozicki 2859 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Sep 2007
@nematoad sadly, there is nothing suspicious about this. That's how politics works in US, and since the agreement was between EU and US, it was certainly driven by US based corporations. Very little happens in US politics without business being involved. Gosh, I'm happy to live in a (very slightly) more civilized country.
The problem is that tests, as established by EU standards body, and which have been heavily influenced by German manufacturers, require that during the test the vacuum cleaner is not sucking any dirt. Which allows manufacturers to claim that their vacuum cleaners only use 750W energy when running in test conditions (this could be 10W as well), but says absolutely nothing about real world use, is misleading to consumer and harms competition (i.e. sales of Dyson vacuum cleaners). There is clear similarity to test condition of diesel cars.
Dyson had a problem with this for a long time, and IMO justifiably so.
Say what you will, but NASA does have pretty good idea how to turn the collection of parts from thousands of unrelated subcontractors, into a robot device running many years with no end in sight on the surface of Mars. Is it relevant experience for advising PC purchases in the government? Well, perhaps not all of it ... but they must be doing something right, no?
Luckily there is some competition between mobile networks, so they need to watch the costs, and cutting the jobs associated with "legacy technologies" is an obvious way to go. It will take a long time however - as long as 2G (and 2.5G) networks are used, these "legacy technologies" are not actually legacy, they are used by current clients who need support (billing etc.)
... but having been forced to look for unwanted Windows 10 upgrade tendencies on daily basis in my computers, I am a bit sensitive to words "Win" and "10" in close proximity to each other. Would El Reg please consider policy to avoid such traps in the title when writing unrelated articles?
Mine with Windows 7 box in the pocket, thank you.
... to recommend to author my own keyboard which is Topre RealForce, but upon reading more I found that typing comfort is not what the author is looking for. Also switching to proper sized keyboard from a very low one might be difficult. Still, the recommendation stays for other readers.
I'm using FireBrick, but they are more like firewalls with WAN port (as many as you want, if you bother with VLANs) and LAN ports (ditto) supporting all the usual broadband protocols, rather than your regular broadband routers. They only have 4 physical RJ45 ports, do not have WiFi (buy AP instead) and they require external modem(s) in bridge mode. On the other hand, the things you can do with routing, firewall rules and logging ... you probably cannot do with anything else (in this price class - custom machine aside). Also, their firmware is updated by the vendor automatically (if you want that).
@werdsmith you have an upvote for pointing out the difference between burning the fossil fuel in a car and in a power station, however I want to note that there are good reasons for a diesel to be very clean and efficient in hybrids - i.e. under constant load and RPM, not geared directly to wheels. Where petrol engines benefit (from running at the optimal conditions all the time), diesel ones would too.
Communication between hardware and kernel is fast indeed, the problem is when bulk of this communication starts or ends in userspace. Which implies a context switch has to be executed and adds to latency (between 1 or 2 microseconds, IIRC). In case of large bandwidth or latency sensitive network communication this can be big deal, since context overhead is added on every packet.
Also, given the right setup (e.g. CPU isolation and pinned execution threads to reserved CPUs) there is absolutely no reason for userspace code to be slower than kernel code (also no reason to be other way around, obviously); it is about cost of context switches (also cache hotness and similar things)
Whoever downvoted me should read this
The VW scandal has also exposed the toothlessness of Germany's regulatory regime, opposition parties and industry experts say. The main oversight agency for the car sector, the Federal Motor Transport Authority, falls under the Transport Ministry in Berlin, raising questions about its independence and readiness to police the sector.
. . .
[In] the run-up to the next election and amid heavy pressure from the VDA, her government lobbied aggressively in Brussels - even threatening other countries in order to win their backing, according to diplomats - to water down new European rules on CO2 emissions that Daimler and BMW opposed. In a “Dear Angela” letter that later leaked, causing an uproar in the German media, Wissmann urged Merkel to fight the more ambitious targets.
"I think we need to ensure that in our drive to protect the environment we are not damaging our own industrial base," Merkel said at the time.
Months later, and only weeks after Merkel had won a third term, her party received donations totalling 690,000 euros from the family that controls BMW. The news sparked a backlash from opposition parties and the German media. The CDU said the money had "no connection to any political decisions".
This sentence might raise suspicions "its VPN service decrypts HTTPS-encrypted traffic". Assuming https is not horribly broken on iOS, the prerequisite for this would be installation of own fake root CA (which would have to be unique, or perhaps not) in phone's memory and then generation of fake ad-hoc certificates to hijack https connections made by applications running on the phone, while also validating (or not?) https certificate of the outbound connection. I see no other way how this could work.
This implies that one would put an enormous amount of trust into developers of this application. Any connection made from the clients' phones could be potentially hijacked, including banking app, private chat etc.
Of course, it is remotely possible that Apple might enable some more refined solution, e.g. users could decide which apps see which CA roots (thus excluding certain apps from fake CA root). Or perhaps something else to limit the scope of this hijacking. The main point is : if you give this much power into hands of single developer, you may yet come to regret it.
Without her efforts you would not now have USB 3 in the kernel at all, you ungrateful prick
all your points are valid, but this one. There would be USB3 support in Linux implemented and maintained by someone else, that's how it works. It might be latter and perhaps in worse (or better?) shape, but one thing is for sure - it would be there, eventually.
... yet. We don't know for sure that there will not be new BB10 devices following "Priv". As Andrew said "BlackBerry 10 is deemed essential ... because of its security features.". This market niche is not going away. And some companies do not have to be large in order to make good and successful product; it is how you measure this success that bothers me (e.g. compare Pebble against Apple Watch).
Yes, RIM was large company with large market share. Yes, Blackberry is much smaller company and its market share, compared to Apple or Google, is tiny. But they also significantly cut their cost, and are looking to expand to Android market. I do not see why this should be interpreted to mean that they will eventually abandon BB10; it is in the realm of possible that the cost of hardware design/development could be shared between both Android and BB10 divisions, allowing BB10 to continue its existence on new devices.
... assuming this is genuinely (at this time) benevolent, there are some interesting scenarios how things could develop in the future. Just to mention three possibilities 1. take over by "bad guys" 2. arms race with "bad guys" 3. hidden agenda starts to play.
One scenario which IMO firmly belongs to fantasy land is that large vendors will start taking responsibility for the hardware they sold. Those vendors who do that, usually do not sell devices cheap enough to build significant market share (hat tip to Fire Brick). Of course, regulators could step in and make this legal requirement, thus levelling the playing field for security conscious vendors, but I do not expect this to happen (not in the next few decades, anyway). In the near time, we are much more likely to see the growth of such "botnets" and what might follow (see above).
Given the relation between German government and car industry, this is far from over.
I also don't want apps which have access to everything. However, after what Blackberry has done with Amazon Underground (access to everything and no way to remove it) I am rather disappointed in the company. Perhaps straight Android with added security will be better than BB10 with Amazon backdoor.
I never looked at it closely, but iPhone apps are compiled from Objective-C to machine code. Whereas Android apps are mostly (with the exception of some parts from Google or hardware vendors) bytecode run by Dalvik, which is JVM and also runs garbage collection etc. , in other words they are less memory efficient. So, if you took one app and compiled it in Xamarin to iPhone and Android, the resulting binary would have most likely smaller memory footprint on iPhone, than on Android (when actually running). Which means that iPhone does not need as much memory to run apps fluidly, as Android does. It also does not provide the same level of isolation, but that's different matter.
I dont know this for sure, but given the size of ship engines and the type of fuel they burn I suspect they do not burn at the very, very high temperatures, required to create vast amounts of NOx. Yes that makes them inefficient, meaning they emit lots of CO2 (also soot and whatnot), but probably not so much NOx. Would be great to check this against some sources, actually.
there are few examples when bad IT management causes loss of life, but this probably would be it. I doubt that companies and managers responsible even considered what will happen if the project continues to bleed money, but the most likely outcome (as unfortunately witnessed elsewhere in Britain) will have been cutting health services in the trust, including things like E&A , cancer treatment etc., which likely have led to some number of (avoidable or premature) deaths.
What is making it even worse, it seems very unlikely that anyone will be brought to full responsibility (as opposed to shifting chairs) or that health department will learn anything from this failure.
... no one posted this link to BBC Newsnight 2014 yet
@itzman nice explanation, I suppose the same applies to diesel power generators which, as I understand, are normally run at lean burn for fuel efficiency. If so, then there is a big question to green lobby: how many of these generators have been installed in support of wind turbines, how many are used, and what anti-pollution norms do they actually have to adhere to.
@Voland's right hand surely CO2 testing was done using standardized tests, which have been established long time ago in cooperation between motor companies and interested national/international agencies. Same as NOxtesting, actually. Or mpg figures, for that matter. And everyone knows that these figures are fiddled and bear no resemblance whatsoever to real driving conditions.
There is hoping that this scandal will be a wake up call to replace these car tests with something a bit closer to reality (but do not get your hopes too high). Unrealistic test conditions are not confined to car industry, it happens everywhere when vendors are allowed too much influence - reminds me of Dyson
There is small difference between state-backed hackers and outright global spying programme. One relies on freelance hackers, stringy budged and no judicial oversight, and the other on employed hackers with huge budget and no judicial oversight. The more important difference is that one seems focused on perceived external enemies and the other on indiscriminate spying of everyone, external or internal, enemy or not.
It would appear to me that, surprisingly, the latter approach enabled by huge budged, seems to yield worse results - due to lack of focus, perhaps. Which might be related to demonstrated severe lacks in defensive capabilities.
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