Posts by Eddie Edwards

This is absolutely disgusting

It's far too late to buy them in time for Christmas now.

It's pretty simple

If you don't *want* a career in IT, don't have one.

If you do, a few Coke cans and Chewbacca posters aren't going to put you off when compared to, say, working 8 hours per day, getting out of bed early to catch the train, etc.

ZOMG

"Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control."

The real choice is surely "propagandist binary characterization" vs "sensible discussion". I don't want a debate where you choose which opinions are allowed any more than I want a debate where Google does.

Memory lane

Reminds me of when Acorn boosted the sector size of the DD floppies from 256B to 1024B, allowing 5K of data per track instead of 4.5K. Golden days.

The idea of making a 4K sector "look like" eight 1/2K sectors is fundamentally broken, however. Software is supposed to be able to rely on a sector write being atomic; in particular if the write is interrupted (e.g. power outage) it should not corrupt an adjacent sector.

@ Julian 4

First comment of the week for me, that was. Nicely overstated and ludicrous. Well done!

Your comparison of the proprietary FAT file format to the "right to own paper" is superb.

Yes, you're right, nothing short of a war is justified over this.

First they came for GIF, and I did not speak out, because GIF was a dreadful file format.

etc.

Do I really care?

Another £6 per year for a phone line? Do I give a shit? I just saved £6 per *month* on my phone line moving to Utility Warehouse, and I didn't really give a shit about that either.

Anyway are we talking about unused lines (as in para #1 of article) or all lines (as in para #2 of article). I'll judge this after someone explains it carefully.

One molecule different?

"its chemical formula is one molecule different to ecstasy and as such dealers are claiming is not a controlled substance"

I suspect they mean it has one additional atom in the molecule. Table salt is one molecule different from MDMA. Maybe we should all be arrested for that (it's a bit unhealthy, after all).

Anyway are Durham police *asking* to be sued for wrongful arrest? "We decided that even though he wasn't committing a crime, we didn't like what he was doing, so we arrested him".

This is why everyone aged 14-30 loves & respects the police so much.

Que?

What warning is that then? Do I need to subscribe to the "I give a shit" group to receive this?

Anything on Facebook is public. Get over it.

Shame

A great shame, there were some amazing ideas in there. For a while it looked like Intel would wipe the floor with nVidia.

@ Francis, nice to see this 1990s attitude still holds in some quarters! It is funny how the "fundamentally faster" idea of RISC ISAs so profoundly lost to Intel's 1970s ISA, but what Intel proved was that the ISA doesn't really matter. Current x86 *architecture* bears absolutely no relation to 1978 x86 architecture, though. We're not stuck with anything, except a certain bytecode.

It's not like you ever see the ISA of a GPU anyway. Larrabee would have pleased anyone except hardcore x86 haters.

Yeah, but

Yeah, but what did they take the picture with? The world's smallest webcam?

It looks shopped to me.

More!

"The implications are a little disturbing," one Reg reader said in response to Google Public DNS. "This could easily be a valid attempt by Google to deal with certain holes in the extant DNS infrastructure. However it could just as easily be a bridge too far."

Yay! Bring me more vague paranoia dressed up as news, and include more non-committal reader comments please!

Here's my attempt:

This could be a good idea. Or it could be really, really bad.

You can use that in more or less any article you like!

Amazon & Promises

A promise is not an absolute guarantee, it is a demonstration of intent or will. If I promise my daughter I'll pick her up from school, then get into a car crash, I haven't broken my promise - merely failed to carry it out. Neither have I lied if I can imagine circumstances under which the promise can't be carried out.

Only a lawyer* or would argue otherwise. It is refreshing that Amazon are capable of making statements without consulting those parasites first. Sony, for instance, certainly aren't.

* or a blogger

Do want

Actually I do want this. Combined with an SD card and powered by, presumably, magic, I can see this as a very nifty "physical cut-and-paste" tool. Like a USB stick but without all the faffing around through dialog boxes, unmounting, etc.

"Select + waft" could mean "copy" and "nothing selected + waft" could mean "paste".

Super duper.

Beware

I know someone who works at the LHC, and apparently the thing almost blew up again.

This was caused entirely by the fact that when the operator wanted to click on "SHUTDOWN NOW" some fucking auto-opening Shell advertisement got in his way.

Apparently CERN is going to rethink the ad-sponsored "free superconducting magnets" programme for LHC #2.

Auctions are less biased?

"Auction systems are less open to bias"

What are you talking about? Auctions are biased in favour of those with deep pockets. Witness El Reg's previous articles on radio mic allocations.

The previous system may have been biased in favour of the public good, but it's not clear you can call that a "bias" when allocating shared resources. Tilting the entire process in favour of multinational corporations is a slightly more pernicious bias, if you ask me.

"even changing economic times can't completely explain why the Swedish auction raised so little."

Or why the Finnish one did ...?

Never mind, if the UK auctions don't raise enough the govt can always tax the hell out of the buyer. It's not like govts are short of options for raising stealth taxes, as Labour has demonstrated quite well over the last decade.

You think this is bad?

You think this is bad? Wait until the corresponding appliances arrive, which shut themselves off at the whim of the electricity companies. Wait until the law states that only such machines may be purchased, and that it is illegal to disable the feature. They'd better get a good war going because I can't see people accepting rationing otherwise.

Yay for the Dragon!

Brought a tear to my eye reading that Ken Kalish interview.

I once typed a game in from Dragon User which was 100% machine code, entered as hex, with no CRCs or anything. I got my brother to read the hex out while I typed it in. It took several hours, and the bloody thing never did work.

Toshiba

"heaven knows what Toshiba has made, but the Cell chips are in TVs, apparently"

Well a little online research would tell you - they make the SpursEngine chip, which is available on a PCI card, contains hardware AVC encoder, hardware MPEG-2 encoder, hardware decoders for both, and four SPUs running at 1.6GHz (half the clock-rate of PS3).

Outside TVs, the PCI card is used for video transcoding, natch, but also for some niche applications. For instance, Howler Technologies ships a G729A codec for SpursEngine which can offload 425 simultaneous calls onto the SpursEngine card (disclaimer: I wrote it).

Riiight, this poor guy with traces of high explosives on him

Less than 5ng is ignored, presumably meaning that more than 5ng is not. He had 9ng, and was unable to explain it. Might not be enough for a terrorism charge but it should be enough for a warrant to search his computer files. He then obstructed that. What is the legal system supposed to do? Say, "oh, that's OK, never mind"?

What's the point of this story? It's fine for paranoid schizophrenics to play with high explosives and refuse to talk to the police about it? Yeah, right, because no harm could possibly come from that.

You might have had more of a case against RIPA if he was of sound mind.

How is this a bug in IE?

You have to (a) download a PDF printer driver (this isn't MacOS) and (b) print an HTML webpage to PDF using it.

How is this a bug in IE? Printing is designed to go to a printer. If you divert it to a file and then publish the file without even giving it a casual glance first, caveat emptor.

Or is the "bug" that loads of people just don't care and publish the PDF anyway, because after all who gives a toss that you are called "EddieEdwards" on your local machine, given that you're publishing it on "Eddie Edwards' Blog".

Must be a slow week in security.

(PS: if you do care, and think IE + PDF printer driver is a valid conversion tool, go to Page Setup in IE and set "footer" to something other than "URL". Job done.)

Furorer?

How many iPhone apps are there?

How many complaints do we hear?

El Reg thinks this is newsworthy; no-one else does.

@ Crazy Operations Guy

"This is very unacceptable behavior for a CEO. First he used an informal style in a business reply, Second he didn't even put forth an argument or any reasoning AT ALL (just like his followers), and he sent it from his PHONE, something that should only be done when an urgent message needs to be sent and are away from a computer, and should never be done to a customer."

Where do you work? IME this is precisely how all CEOs communicate with anyone they don't need a favour from.

The style is not "informal" it is "excessively terse and commanding".

"Arguments" are only made by people who need favours.

I have had inboxes full of messages like this.

Anyway, this guy is not a "customer". He's a developer who decided to bitch right at the celebrity CEO of Apple. What did he expect in return for circumventing Apple's developer support system? A gold-plated iPod?

Rumours of the death of rotating media may be exaggerated

I suppose it's easy to forget that rotating media can be pressed these days for much less than a penny per GB.

Rotating magnetic media may be on the way out, but until etched silicon reaches cost parity with pressed aluminium, rotating optical media will be with us for a while longer.

Kool Aid

I get the feeling from this article that Lewis thinks a 150kW laser can be put into "Pink Floyd" mode and project a lethal sheet of death into the sky.

This of course spreads the laser's power over a very wide region, rather than focussing it on a specific target.

You might want to wait for the 15,000kW laser first.

Sucky demo code

"Sparse matrix math ... on that test, a Larrabee chip that was not overclocked was able to do between 7.9 and 8.1 gigaflops, depending on the test and the size of the matrices."

Considering it could do 800 GFLOPS on another test, that's some pretty crap sparse matrix code.

@ AC (JK)

Raising issues with the judge's *example* is unproductive. The general principle is enunciated above this. It's a basic, common-sense answer to all the stupid nerdy loopholes people like to think exist.

The mod-chip guys said "We're not copying *the whole game at once* so it's not copyright violation".

The judge said "Fuck off. Yes it is."

Once again, society has rejected a tired freetard self-justification.

@ Seanmon

LOL

Sobering thought

If it wasn't for my persistent smoker's cough the inside of my lungs would probably look like that!

Clearly we need to create PCs that can cough. Currently mine only wheezes.

Wow

Someone invents a network protocol and everyone is up in arms.

Jesus, let's go back to pen and paper, shall we?

Oh wait, Gutenberg "embraced and extended" that, didn't he!

Bad Gutenberg. Don't you know you should "do no evil"?

Cost money?

"If Ofcom is going to reserve frequencies for wireless entertainment, then it will cost money, and we're going to have to decide if it's worth it."

Not selling off national assets does not "cost us money". When we sell an asset we receive cash, true, but we lose the value inherent in that asset. Since the asset is no longer owned by us, we are also going to start paying rent on that asset from the purchaser.

The total national "cost" of reserving frequencies, then, is the sale price for the spectrum, minus the value currently extracted from the spectrum, minus the amount we'll end up paying in "rent" to the spectrum buyer.

If the spectrum buyer manages to turn a profit, this "cost" is always going to be negative. It costs *us* the value currently extracted plus the buyer's profit on the asset.

If the spectrum buyer is owned by investors in this country, this "cost" is always going to be negative - even if the buyer's profit is negative the shortfall is paid by people in this country.

The only outcome in which we as a nation do not lose out when selling national assets is if the buyer overpays (or otherwise fails) and is a foreign-owned company. In other words, we can win only if someone else loses, and the outcome is out of our hands. This is known as a "gamble".

Generally speaking, it costs money to sell national assets, for the same reason it costs money to remortgage your house. One way or another you are going to pay to extract short-term capital from an asset. You are not going to make money on the deal. The money is made by those with the capital that you need.

What hope for the rest of us?

What hope for the rest of us if even NASA gets trapped into making wild speculation?

"Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012,"

Either NASA have perfected the forward-temporal view matrix (aka crystal ball) or else they don't actually know whether this statement is true or not.

Not having any reason to believe something is true is not the same as knowing it to be false.

So here NASA are, taking a punt at predicting the future, and simultaneously claiming some superiority over another group of people who are also just taking a punt at predicting the future. Smells fishy to me.

Look, NASA, everyone sane knows that there is no reason to expect the world to end in 2012. But if you want to win over the less sane members of society, perhaps you could try doing it without printing what is essentially a bald-faced lie.

You've also got your credibility to think about. If something bad *does* happen to the Earth in 2012, by chance, you're going to look like fucking idiots.

Oh that's too easy

"come up with a concrete concept to crack climate change, clamp down on crime and create career opportunities?"

How about hunting down and burning everyone over the age of 20 who isn't in gainful full-time employment?

Bingo - cheap carbon-neutral fuel, no more crime (except white-collar crime, which doesn't count), and thousands of new career opportunities for hunters.

I can't think of a possible downside.

Cougars

Shiiiit, James Delingpole is a bit of a cock, isn't he? Ha ha, let's turn a blind eye to female paedophiles in the classroom - after all, we're all UP FOR IT, aren't we lads?

Until I read his article, I thought a cougar was a member of the cat family, and hence could easily be male, or minging.

But now I find out it's a phrase used by tossers to make their sexual boasts just topical enough to print in a newspaper.

What a funny language English is!

Good chance for cross-marketing

Maybe in Spiderman IV, Peter Parker will work for the Daily Boggle.

*applause*

Orlowski should do an anti-global-warming story with this level of self-deprecation

Alan Johnson started the row?

There I was thinking Nutt started it, and the media carried it on.

You've managed to wind the other scientific advisors up pretty well too.

@ Charles

"Adding restrictive features like permissions potentially prevents the evolution of some usage models"

Yes, and *not* having permissions potentially prevents the evolution of other usage models.

Permissions are not a restrictive feature. They are an enabling feature. They enable the person responsible for a document to prevent people from putting in stupid content or otherwise fucking it up behind his back. Without this basic feature many many uses for collaborative software are nixed.

The only guy who thinks permissions are restrictive is the guy who doesn't have the permissions. But there is a reason that guy doesn't have the permissions.

@ Voodoo

"A cable subscriber has every right to own their modem, and as their property they have every right to modify it however they want."

Sure they do, they just don't then have the right to connect it to the cable provider's service. If they want to make their own cable network with their own wires, that's fine.

Compare this with electricity meters where you can (I assume) buy an electricity meter and mod it so it doesn't count the juice, but you cannot then connect it to the national grid in place of your authorized meter.

"Anyway, property rights are of fundamental importance in this case."

Not really. The case is about whether or not it's OK to make *and sell* these modified meters, along with customer support to help people hook them to the national grid.

Haha

Ironically, the reporting of this case will probably boost her career, which would indicate that he does indeed have the powers he claims!

For this case, yes

For this case, it would probably be better to get used to the bag than see it as a temporary annoyance. Probably better to think "I'm a guy with a colostomy bag" than "I shouldn't have this bag but I'm waiting for another operation".

Presumably this may well apply to amputations or paraplegia too.

Other cases are not so clear cut. The placebo effect strongly suggests it is better to believe you will get better from a disease than to believe you will die from it. I don't think a study of people who have had a part of them removed would really apply to the much broader class of people who have a disease and a probability of survival vs death.

Dear oh dear oh dear

The old farts are out in force today.

Have you old farts actually gone back and watched even such classics as "Genesis of the Daleks" let alone stories like "The Nightmare of Eden" and "Full Circle"?

They are all CRAP. Lovable crap, but crap none-the-less.

Dr Who of the 80s spent 4-6 episodes per story with almost no plot development other than the discovery of new corridors to run down. The entire plot of most of those classic stories can easily be condensed to 45 minutes and still leave room for snogging.

New Dr Who is far tighter and paced incredibly quickly. They don't *have* cliffhangers in most episodes, leading to actual plot development between the title sequence. 13 episodes of 45 minutes each gives us almost twice as many stories and situations as 26 episodes of 22 minutes did.

Furthermore, the characterization of Dr Who in the 80s was pitiful. There was almost none. Every companion was a bald cliche while the Doctor himself just went around offering jelly babies and being a bit off-the-wall. The characterization now is at least as good as that in EastEnders, and since soaps live or die on that basis this is pretty fucking high praise.

Finally, David Tennant is God, and you know as well as I do you'd shag Billie Piper given half the chance.

Style over substance? Of course! But Dr Who always was.

More likely

It's nice to propose patent issues, but the most likely issue is that ZFS is not really finished. OpenBSD counts it as "experimental", and for good reason. ZFS is designed brilliantly with respect to how it uses discs. However, its implementation seems to assume "infinite memory" which isn't a realistic assumption. ZFS is very memory hungry. It is also incredibly poorly written - although this may be usual for UNIX - in that each request to ZFS uses its own thread. It makes for very readable code, but not necessarily the best performance.

We ran ZFS on a file server for 3 months and hit all these problems.

ZFS does a lot of things right, but the claims it makes are overinflated compared to the reality of the implementation's limitations. You certainly could not put this on a machine for liberal arts graduates to use.

Hear hear!

What Kevin said. This is certainly borderline fraud, and I don't see much evidence that it *wasn't* intended to dupe the news agencies. The EFF are rushing in with support which may well be unjustified. And why did no-one get Reuters' response? They're the damaged party here - the defrauded ones.

Idea

How about flying from Liverpool?

Better vs Worse

"there are dozens of examples from the history of technology to show that better doesn't always win"

There are plenty of people ready to say "A is better than B" as if A and B were things with only one dimension of variation, and plenty of history to show that they're wrong, but apparently we only learn that "better doesn't always win", not that the very concept of "better" is inapplicable in the real world where every object has multiple facets, all of which apply simultaneously.

Technical merits have been proven time and time again to be the *least* important predictor of success. Especially when the relative merits are at marginal.

Two different types of battery with broadly comparable specifications are never going to rise above each other on technical merit. Network effects will always dominate when selecting between two broadly similar choices - ultimately you buy what everyone else bought. Given that Li-Ion is already in use everywhere I'd argue that any contender which doesn't offer more life than Li-Ion is already dead.

It's all irrelevant anyway. Electric cars won't shift in quantity until we move to a battery tech that has enough capacity to do the job, and that means actually pushing the specification envelope outwards, not coming up with a niche benefit at the same spec.

36 hours?

My happiness lasted 36 minutes.

But I did but one of the "crippled" eeePCs.