* Posts by Mage

9265 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007

IBM bets POWER8 processor farm on hardware acceleration

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Re:nicer screen

16:9 is worse than 4:3 for laptops.

Unless it's a "retina" screen you get 1080 pixels high.

Non-Shiny is hard to get.

Cheap models have poorer viewing angle than 14 years ago.

2002 there were 15" totally matt, ultrasharp, wide view angle 1600 x 1200 screens on some laptops. Good luck finding one even as good as that in PC World.

Some high end Lenovos and Apples have better screens, but you need 17" due to the 16:9 form factor

HD Video curse, reducing resolution of PCs! Maybe we'll see some decently priced UHD/4K laptop screens, still be cursed by video factor .

Mage Silver badge
Coat

"our cadence today is closer to 2.5 years than two."

Closer to 5 to 10, or non-existent for real world performance? Unless you can use more than 2 cores without I/O bottle neck. Per core performance for believable laptops compared with single CPU 2.2GHz P4 Laptop in 2002?

Anyway it WAS NOT CPU power but number of Transistors?

It was 12, then 18 then 24 months ...

It was never a law but an observation cum target?

Apple supremo Tim Cook rules out OS X fondleslab, iOS merger

Mage Silver badge

Re: Not magical or game-changing then?

Now it's been officially denied, when do we reckon the iPad Pro will ship with iOS X?

Never. iOS is an ecosystem that makes more Revenue and gives Apple more control. The question is will there be a laptop with iOS?

Mage Silver badge

Re: Only Half The Story

Follow the revenue.

There won't be a hybrid product running OS X.

iPad data entry errors caused plane to strike runway during takeoff

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Re: Using toys as tools...

A surface and iPad are BOTH consumer toys.

I can't believe that airlines are using consumer stuff without real keyboards really designed for media browsing.

LUNATICS!

Microsoft shelves 'suicidal' Android-on-Windows plan

Mage Silver badge
Windows

Never fear

Order in popcorn (or other snacks) and beverage of choice.

I'm quite sure MS will find another way to kill Win Phone.

Remember Danger / Sidekick.

Or the fact that in USA MS once dominated smartphones in pre Apple iPhone days.

Trouble brewing as iThing coffee machine seems to be hackable

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Bogus firmware updates?

Maybe as simple as changing the DNS server used, then making firmware.ithing.com point to the malware?

No, the EU is not going to make hyperlinks illegal

Mage Silver badge

Re: Hyperlink != content

Yes, but iFraming or scraping other sites content is a violation of EXISTING Berne Convention copyright law.

Links, with perhaps a paragraph of text = OK.

Actual building a site from other people's content = BAD

3ROS exploit wins plaudits for the prettiest Mal-GUI ever

Mage Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Good

Soon it will have ribbon, tiles, inconsistent configuration options, require crysis capable GPU & CPU, only run on latest versions of OS X and Windows and generally involve the developers spending 95% of effort maintaining the eye Candy.

I welcome this as it will distract from the development of effective malware/

Apple to add 1000 jobs to Cork payroll

Mage Silver badge

Re: Irish iMacs

iMacs period are a tiny part of Apple's revenue stream. Just like they make some stuff in USA too for political reasons. Apple are largely a marketing driven badge engineering outfit, everything important to revenue is 3rd party China.

Mage Silver badge

Temporary

Announcements like this all the time.

Then 1/4 to 1/2 the jobs created.

Grants are trousered.

Then a few years later it's shuttered.

AST, WANG, Dell and others made PCs here and are gone.

US Congress grants leftpondians the right to own asteroid booty

Mage Silver badge

the United States does not thereby assert sovereignty

Yet.

Stupid arrogance.

So. Farewell then Betamax. We always liked you better than VHS anyway

Mage Silver badge

Re: SECAM

SECAM was 625 lines like PAL (about 576 visible). NTSC 525 (about 480 visible)

There were various incompatible Secam systems eventually, surviving till Analogue switch off.

The post WWII French MONO system was 819 lines

UK Mono system was the 1936 405 lines (about 377 visible)

Mage Silver badge

Re: V2000 Philips

It was REALLY late to market. It eliminated guard bands by using piezo mounted heads that could dynamically wiggle. So could use a flippable tape as well no noise bars for still or slow and speeded play (which changes angle of slanted track hence noise bar on Betamax and VHS)

Problem was they couldn't mass produce it for about 2 years after prototype demo!

Early VHS had to completely delace from drum to F-FWD / F-REW, Betamax didn't need to. Later VHS had the "Jet Drive".

Shame Minidisk never made it as alternate to Floppy, though a larger MO sony format was used in special 3.5" drives in 1990s (ZIP drives in comparison were rubbish). There was a Vaio with mini-disk but like net-MD player you could only transfer digital audio TO it and play, Even your own analogue recordings were not digitally readable on Net-MD or Viao due to Sony's BRAIN DEAD Entertainment division obsessing about DRM and copying. That's what destroyed MD. Artificial restrictions. Other people did make MD players.

ARM's new Cortex-A35: How to fine-tune a CPU for web browsing on bargain smartphones

Mage Silver badge

Too big a queue and pipeline can slow down

If the program has a lot of branches/conditionals already fetched, then stuff gets discarded and it can be slower than a short queue.

How Twitter can see the financial future – and change it

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

can Twitter be used to fiddle the stock markets?

Silly question. Any news / comment on any platform can be used to fiddle the stock market if enough people that buy or sell the affected shares believe it.

Let's get to the bottom of in-app purchases that go titsup

Mage Silver badge

Re SCART

Purely invented as a Tarriff wall by French. A TV had to have Peritel (SCART) to be allowed to be imported and sold. It was meant to be really cheap, which meant that the cables would easily fall off. It was a failure for intended purpose as everyone selling to France simply added them. They never really made to USA which prefered RCA connectors for EVERYTHING! (RF, audio, phono, Y/C aka s-video, composite video, stereo record / playback-- four cables instead of a DIN, component video, HD Component etc).

SCART could have done HD, but by time (much later than USA because PAL higher resolution than NTSC) HD came to Europe, copy protected Digital connections preferred.

Mage Silver badge

Totally irrelevant fact

The first UK set top boxes were to add Band III (for ITV) to older Band I only sets (BBC 1 only) around 1955. Some earlier sets couldn't work if moved from London to Birmingham as they had only a single factory aligned channel.

Cable TV in USA was probably the first major set box market.

Fire TV and Apple TV are more misleading than AMDs 4 module Bulldozers as they are not TVs, no screen and no tuner. They are media streaming gadgets, not TVs.

AMD sued: Number of Bulldozer cores in its chips is a lie, allegedly

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: SMP as we know it could be outlawed

Nonsense. It's not about forbidding anything other than misleading marketing.

The cores share parts(excluding cache and FPU) normally exclusive to a CPU.

It's certainly nothing to do with SMP either

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

FPU

There are other important shared bits, not just the FPU. These modules are single cpus with some internal parallel parts to speed processing. They certainly can't work as two cpus.

Cell networks' LTE-U will kill your Wi-Fi, say digital rights bods

Mage Silver badge
Mushroom

"listen-before-talk"

Only works for clients sharing same base. Search "hidden transmitter syndrome"

This is mobile Telco greed and attempt to have people use phone on expensive Mobile instead of fibre fed WiFi.

No matter how it's done, it's wrong. WiFi already barely works. band sharing is EVIL.

GSMA offers a share and share alike approach to the C-Band

Mage Silver badge
Mushroom

Greed

Mobile misuse the spectrum that they have. They shouldn't get satellite bands and especially not sub 700MHz.

What do you call a spreadsheet with lots of negative numbers? Qualcomm_FY2015.xlsx

Mage Silver badge

Desired income source

Qualcomm hates manufacturing. They prefer income from IP.

Alumina in glass could stop smartphones cracking up

Mage Silver badge

Yes Transparent Alumina = Sapphire

Sapphire Glass

Been used for analogue watches for a very long time indeed. Problematic to make larger windows. Also while it's very hard so scratch resistant, a panel of it is easier to crack than some glasses.

It's interesting they have found a way to blend Alumina and glass. I'd have thought an alumina film on glass substrate (meta material) would be better.

Is the world ready for a bare-metal OS/2 rebirth?

Mage Silver badge
Windows

But ...

Weird. The OS that MS morphed into NT3.1 (there was no NT1.x or NT 2.x) and that was killed by Win95 having better driver support. There was the strange MS OS/2 + Lan manager in 1989 after IBM and MS split on the OS/2 deal. (sold for servers with win 3.0 workstations I think?)

Does MS still have that source and a licence?

Of course MS once sold a Unix too.

I'm too old. I saw all these when they were new. Where did I put my Cromix and Minix discs?

Chinese fire up world's 'most powerful' drone brain

Mage Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Raspberry pi

This a a Raspberry Pi on steroids. The original Pi is built down to a price and is barely more than an obsolete phone chip on a breakout board. The Pi series is fine for the money. But if you have more money and want a more powerful ARM with much more I/O then this is it. I wish it cost 1/2 as much though.

At a bit lower price this would be very nice for all kinds of projects where the Pi lacks I/O or CPU power.

'T-shaped' developers are the new normal

Mage Silver badge
Mushroom

The developers of today

"The developers of today cut their teeth on Linux and OS X and they use languages like SCALA, Python and Ruby, instead of .NET and Java."

a) Only some

b) Irrelevant

c) Relevance of article depends if developing Web applications, Android Apps, iOS, OSX, Windows, Linux Clients or embedded code (which is very different for a 50c 8 bit CPU and full fat OS in TV, Router or set box).

The big issue as always is poor design and implementation. You can't test in quality. Crap untyped Scripting languages make spotting implementation mistakes hard.

My impression is that "pretty" is on increase last 10 years, quality, usability and privacy down. We don't seem to have progressed in security judging by the vulnerability mailing lists I have for all the popular OS, web client applications and Web CMS server apps.

E-mail crypto is as usable as it ever was, say boffins

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Not really hard?

Ha!

I use thunderbird. I installed the extensions etc. Now, I've in the past set up secure VPN server on Win2K and also on Linux, generated keys and setup clients. Did it on port 80 so it would work almost anywhere.

a) I gave up on getting a key generated for PGP

b) No-one I exchange email with is going to even try.

It's really too hard. I've been setting up SW, since 1980.

Setting up servers & OS since 1986

UNIX since 1986, Linux since 1999

It's stupidly hard. People complain about how hard it is to setup decent WiFi Security with a good password etc. This is very much harder.

Windows 10 growth stalls during October

Mage Silver badge

With Xbox and Windows Mobile users to come

Really they are irrelevant in looking at x86 laptop/desktop/notebook OS market share.

The story of .Gay: This bid is too gay! This bid is not gay enough! This bid is just right?

Mage Silver badge

Gay?

It used to be feeling light hearted. There is no suitable synonym. Happy isn't quite the same.

We've been robbed. Why should the TLD belong to a subsection of LGBT at all?

Big mistake, Google. Big mistake: Chrome OS to be 'folded into Android'

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

killing a secure, lightweight desktop OS in the process

a) It's just a shell on Linux to implement a browser based thin client.

b) It's really Google spyware.

c) It's horribly limited as a destop OS, it's really a "cloud" style terminal.

Android too is shell based on Linux optimised for small touch screens and is poor compared to a regular Linux Distro for a desktop / Laptop.

This doesn't matter, as a proper Linux distro is a better solution than Google's Chrome OS, which was never a real alternative OS.

Patch this braXen bug: Hypervisor hole lets guest VMs hijack hosts

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

entanglement of C macros

That was the FIRST thing I learnt, when learning Assembler in 1979, was that macros are needed by large assembler programming projects, but really DANGEROUS.

When I learnt C++ in 1987, then I learned that C macros are an evil throw back to Assembler.

1) Always check Array bounds / strings

2) Always sanitise stuff that uses SQL at back end.

3) Never use Macros, not ever.

What SEVEN years ago? That's 2008, over 20 years later.

Why is it that almost all vulnerabilities are continued implementations contrary to what was realised in the 1980s?

'Profoundly stupid' Dubliner's hoax call lost Intel 6,000 hours of production

Mage Silver badge

Re: Phoning it in

Yes.

Sometimes they give wrong bomb location resulting in more deaths. (Omagh).

Personally, I'd never go to an evacuation point for a terror alert, a fire or natural disaster yes. But a terrorist is likely to put the bomb at the assembly point. Hint in the name. They are not attempting to take down infrastructure.

Mage Silver badge

mastermind crimina

Ex Intel contract staff

Mage Silver badge

No, CCTV, call box, DNA etc.

Original news 02/04/2015

"The phone box on Bath Road in Balbriggan from which the call was made was identified and sealed off just hours after the call"

""They were identified within hours of the investigation from phone records and CCTV."

Now the prosecution of one is complete

Time Lords set for three-week battle over leap seconds

Mage Silver badge

Re: Why stop there?

Octal would be handier than Hex, for hands.

Cisco: The day of PCs is passing, cloud storage will dominate by 2019

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Cloud?

It's 3rd party hosting.

Been around since 1960s, but rebranded, free security agency monitoring, unknown backup and security protocols. Rental computing on less reliable connection than a leased line.

Yahoo! crypto! queen! turns! security! code! into! evil! tracker!

Mage Silver badge

Wikipedia commons user sites?

I think for read once and cache locally mediawiki installs using wiki commons from mother ship the HSTS is used. I got cryptic emails from Mediawiki last night about HTTPS only and need for HSTS on Wikipedia.

New DMCA rules mean you can fiddle with your tablets, routers, cars (as if you weren't anyway)

Mage Silver badge
Pirate

examined and customized by their owners

Presumably the DMCA only applies in the USA, so this is of interest mainly to our poor privacy-free American cousins.

Oracle's Larry Ellison claims his Sparc M7 chip is hacker-proof – Errr...

Mage Silver badge

4 bits one in 16

So you try 16 times?

Or what have I misunderstood?

Verisign warns new dot-word domains could make internet unstable

Mage Silver badge

"actual public benefit reason"

Yes.

I've had deep forebodings about this. It's so obviously senseless, destabilising and a money grab.

FCC under fire over TV, mobile broadband signal interference fears

Mage Silver badge

place too many broadcast television stations in the wireless portion of the band.

What?

600MHz is a POINTLESS STUPID band for Mobile. Cellular needs small cells to have capacity. Cellular needs 850MHz to 2.5GHz to have controlled and decent propagation.

The problem is MOBILE not TV. 600MHz is an excellent BROADCAST band. Rubbish for Mobile. Too uncontrollable cell size.

This is greed.

Dad who shot 'snooping vid drone' out of the sky is cleared of charges

Mage Silver badge

200ft

Zoom lens on camera?

Still, decent cartridges to down a drone at 200ft?

WhatsApp laid bare: Info-sucking app's innards probed

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Big Brother

Collects stuff

I thought everyone knew this was pointless spyware.

Preparing for IoT? Ask some old questions and plenty of new ones

Mage Silver badge
Big Brother

it wont work the first time around

Even if the 3rd or 4th iteration works, it's abusing consumers. Protective legislation will be non-existent or at best too late.

Google and cable pals oppose LTE-U's spectrum grab plan

Mage Silver badge
Pirate

LTE-U

Yet another attempt at so called White Space radio. It doesn't work and can't sensibly work.

Project Loon is daft (I wonder what Google is really up to?), it doesn't scale and is a hazard, but LTE-U is disingenuous greed, theft and malicious.

'iOS 9 ate my mobile broadband plan'

Mage Silver badge

Idiotic

How on earth did anyone think this was a sensible default?

Ofcom won’t hold back in latest mobile spectrum auction

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Pirate

Morons

2.3GHz is OK for Mobile.

3.4GHz is too high. OK for WiFi or point to point or Point to Multipoint outdoor aerials.

700MHz is Broadcast. Absolute moronic stupidity. Cells that are too big for useful capacity. Even the 800MHz is dubious.

Developments in TV need 700MHz. Actually even the 800MHz would arguably be better for Broadcast than Mobile.

Ofcom wants to abolish Terrestrial Broadcast and have Radio & TV via Mobile Operators only as it's higher licence revenue.

Satellite, Cable, Fibre, Internet & Mobile are complementary to Broadcast. In reality the Mobile operators plans to to TV are actually just Subscription TV Broadcast in Mobile sized channels, Not Internet / IP.

Google can't hide behind Alphabet, EU competition commish warns

Mage Silver badge

Re: How can you fight a monopoly which offers products for free

Maps, Android, Earth were bought in using Advertising revenue and changed to support Advertising. The Search originally was unbiased. Now it's gamed by Google to support adverts. Hence it is dishonest and works as a bookmarking service. It's not as good for real searching of stuff you don't know, but better at serving relevant adverts and listing places you visited before.

Street view was created to slurp private info, WiFi (not needed now due to Android) and support adverts on Maps. It's primarily capital expenditure, not technology, only justified by extra advertising revenue.

What sort of company needs a line like "Do no evil"? They might as well register "No harm done" too.

They are a threat greater than MS ever was. So is Facebook.

We can't all live by taking in each others' washing

Mage Silver badge

Everything is the product of labour

I'm not convinced of this statement. Initially there may be labour. But after that an autonomous process. Can apply to a Robot Factory, automated oil well or burning forest and then scattering seed of something that doesn't need replanted every year. Or totally automated agriculture.

Surely many things will be the product of less and less labour, tending toward zero?

Sorry to see you go, Tim.