* Posts by daniel

233 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Apr 2007

Page:

French police cuff six over Sarkozy bank fraud

daniel
Flame

That was fast...

In less than 8 days, 6 people are in the nick.

When J. Bloggs get's his card hacked, it's 3 months, complaints to be loged with the cops, copies sent recorded delievery to your bank, arguments with your bank manager to get your money back.... And no-one has ever got nailed!

Oh, he's a high ranking civil servant.... I forgot that the law and justice has 2 speeds...

Windows 7 borrows from OS X, avoids Vista

daniel
Happy

@James Dunne

You forgot some:

Windows 2

Windows 3

Windows 3.1

Windows 3.11 (Aka WFWG)

NT 3.51

NT 4

95

98

ME

2000

XP

2003

Vista

2008

Windows 15 would be closer to the truth!

Sarkozy fails to stop sale in voodoo hoohah

daniel
Flame

@Kenny Millar - Automatic translation fail

Translation fail : This is what it means translated into English - and it makes just about as much sense.... You want to try posting that in plain english and get a decent translation?

For teh lulz :

"A bit...

Never the mind all these idiocys with the french prime minister, allows all to exit and but an Apple Mac place. You know, it is the path to follow"

What does Prime Minister François Fillon have to do with Apple Mac Places?

lrn2french next time :)

London consumers trounce corporates in wireless security

daniel
Flame

Maybe it's because....

that home users have operator-branded routers with WEP or WPA pre-configured and that the setup CD does everything for you, and that corporate kit is generally brand name supplied blank and just "plugged in and go" by some of the highly paied erks who no nothing about sefcurity (yes, there is no "f" in....)...

Of by the management who get pissed when the resident BOFH says that he has to enter a password, and it's too difficult. Just make it work...

Another London BT exchange hit by thieves

daniel
Pirate

@Who's building a new network?

This stuff seems highly specialised.... I don't see Arfur Daily flogging half a dozen DSLAM's and core routers at the local car boot to John Q Public to hook up his home PC to the net...

Being sold to Africa? on Ebay?

Hackintosh maker bites back at Apple

daniel
Jobs Horns

@Anonymous Coward

Maybe my choosing of the word "monopoly" is wrong from a legal point of view, but according to what is in the EULA, this is exactly what Apple is trying to enforce: If you want to use MacOS X, you *MUST* only use it on a Mac, even of other platforms are technically capable of running this - and we will enforce this rule by force of intimidation or law.

If I buy a licence for Windows, I want to be able to install it on whatever hardware I want as long as it is (today) x86 compatable.

The same goes for Solaris, for OS/2... or MacOS for x86 macs... I purchased the CD off the shelf, it's x86 compatible. I darn well want to install it on any x86 hardware that is compatible.

Oh, I can't because Apple want me to buy their hardware too.

In France, this licence would be struck as illegal as this licence agreement pushes forced "linked sales" : if you want to purchase product X (MacOS X / iPhone) you must also purchase product Y (Mac computer / iPhone contract) - this is why apple's exclusivity lock in for Orange in France was deemed illegal by the courts: You must be able to buy subscription without the phone or phone without the subscription, leaving the customer with choice.

And as MacOS is cheaper than the equivalent full box version of Windows XP, I would love to purchase MacOS X and install it on my laptop to replace Vista - but no, the licence forbids that, and Apple issues takedown notices to anyone that publishes that information, even to people that have legally purchased a licence to use...

But as installing on anything other than a mac is a breach of that licence... So this licence only serves one thing: To force by legal means the sales of MacOS with Apple hardware, to the detriment of consumer choice.

Steve could make fortunes by selling MacOS to us PC users, some of who would welcome a replacement to Windows with somthing else than Linux, with decent support and a well designed interface. The fact that it would also be about 70% cheaper than the equivalent Windows would also be an added bonus.

He could make a ton of cash and still keep Apple hardware sales from the hardcore fans, as even as a windows/linux fan, any mac is better designed than the aluminium desktop case that Psysis is using as illustrated in the article.

It would seem that the Hardware team at Apple still has the same power over the sofware teams as they did when "Star Trek" (MacOS on PC) was proposed in the early 90's and crushed.

daniel
Jobs Horns

What is with the Psystar bashing FFS?

By the looks of the photo, it's a bog standard assembled PC with a nice (but not too sexy) case that a lot of other companies make out of their garages and PC repair workshops, and just as some of the Linux friendly guys go out of their way to select hardware known to work with their favorite distro, Psystar have done the same for PC hardware known to work with probably an EFS bootloader and with MacOS drivers.

Remember that this is not difficult as Mac's are now glorified PC's.

Now, Psystar sell an assembled PC. They can install Linux on it. They can install WinXP on it, they could install any other PC hardware compatible operating system on it, and they chose MacOS. Why not: Apple sell the OS retail on the shelves, and you should be able to do what the hell ever you want with it as long as you do not crack off illegal copies, but an extra limtation is the licence saying that you must not install this on non apple hardware or you will go to hell (or somthing along these lines) - meaning that they are enforcing via licence a hardware lock-in to preserve a monopoly.

OK, the licence says that you must not do this and that distributors must not do this. Psystar's next step (excuse the pun) would be to sell assembled PC's and a retail box of MacOS, with a disclaimer telliing the user that they are both sold together, but they should not install the supplied MacOS CD on their hardware (along with a step by step printed installation guide).

What the user does with their 1 user licence is their business as long is it does not cause harm to the company creating the licenced content...

As Apple has done before with Mac cloners (I remember one in the mid 90's), Apple got pissey over them selling hardware cheaper than their own overpriced tat and got them shut down. Now, i'd like to see Apple do this to every PC manufacturer and assembler, as in theory, they are all capable of running MacOS....

The Devil, as Stevie has definitely got ideas above his station...

Scumbags punt Trojan with baby kidnap lure

daniel
Joke

This is a Belgian virus

Please kidnap yourself, then send us $50 000

UK etailer punts bovine coitus thumb drive

daniel
Joke

@Antidisestablishmentarianist

Quite right. Let's make a class action complaint and sue for damagages :)

Mobile broadband: What's it for?

daniel
Boffin

@John

In France, you can have several offers:

Bouygues Telecom (pronounce "Boo-eee-ggg") GPRS / 3G for businesses: 69 euros VAT inclusive for unlimited use (a 500 mb cap exists on their general public offers though). I have had some issues with their 3G key though but on HSPDA, it's very very fast. All ports seem open to Internet, though you connect via a Bouygues Telecom Proxy that attempts to limit P2P use (but it does not worl too well ;-) )

Orange Business (France Telecom): Unlimited for just over 100 euros a month... but they do not tell you that it is unlimited to only one IP address and one port (ie unlimited connection to your company proxy and your company takes the internet connection from there). General only have pre-set subscriptions (100, 500 mb etc) at various prices, starting at 49 euros the last time I looked with a price per meg over the top. Only common ports (HTTP, HTTPS, pop, smtp, ftp) are available on these offers too

SFR (Vodaphone) have a quite decent unlimited offering: they do have a 1 gb "fair use" limit, but I was told that for the moment, they have enough capacity as not to have the need to enforce it. Prices start at 49 euros a month, and ports are blocked in the same way as Orange.

SFR also have the best offering for mobile internet on their handsets, starting at 49 euros for 3 hours airtime and unlimited internet (1 gb fair use not really applied as mentionned above) - This is a darn sight better than Orange's offer with the iPhone!

Note: SFR's (and the special Orange iPhone subscription) definition of fair use is that once you have gone over the limit, the operators *may* (at their discretion) reduce your bandwidth but not cut you off. Bouygues's notion of fair use (on the non-business subscription) is "unlimited internet" (but use over 500 mb and we will bill you 1 euro per mb over the top), and they may end up in court over misleading advertising.

Colonel: Bowman army comms 'astonishingly bad'

daniel
Flame

PMR from Tesco?

A plain and simple 2xAA powered personal handheld CB would do far better!!!

How friggin hard is it design a decent army radio FFS!

US utilities plot remote switch off

daniel
Stop

@Schultz

Looks like you have not read this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/15/goddard_arctic_ice_mystery/

Seems like that ice is not going away as fast as Knut thought it was...

Grazing cattle display animal magnetism

daniel
Boffin

@Boring Bob

You should watch the James Randi videos on youtube debunking homeopathy...

1

4 rules of homeopathy :

1) Prooving: Take a substance and give it to a "well person" and note the effects.

2) Patient walks in to the doc's and has symtpoms corresponding to those effects - so you give them that substance diluted

3) Dilution: Take 1 part of substance, and dilute in 10 parts of water then "shake not stir". Take 1 part of the diluted mix and recommence... 19 more times

4) The more you dilute it - the more powerful it is

Oh, and remember Avogadro's number: After point 4 gets to 24 repeat dilutions, you have 1 chance in 10 of finding 1 molecule or atom in the mixture and some go up to 1500 dilutions - the equivalent of 1 grain of rice diluted in a sphere of water the size of the solar system with the sun in the center and pluto at the edge... then diluted 2 000 000 000 times...

Anatomy of a malware scam

daniel
Boffin

@Chris

No, sorry, the Bluescreen is not the last action Windows does before halting - most of them will execute their full or mini memory dump, write to the event log then restart.

This is to help the availability of headless servers where the problem could well just be a fatal application error and the restart clears the problem. A techncian does not need to take a trip to the colocation room to hit a switch. In any case, the reboot after bsod is an option that is user or admin settable.

Cheers,

Daniel

Dancing Baby v. Universal: Baby wins!

daniel
Flame

WTF?????

"Universal suggests that copyright owners may lose the ability to respond rapidly to potential infringements if they are required to evaluate fair use prior to issuing takedown notices,"

My translation: This law will force us to think before we mindlessly post takedown notices and haul people up in front of the beak without a leg to stand on except our bigger legal budget.

Fire.... as that is what should be applied to some of the Majors and their legal team

gOS - a Google good OS for your Mum

daniel

Now if only...

Someone would write a *coherent* GUI for all the systems administration tools, and kill vi with fire - developing on Linux at times has me pining for MS-DOS Edit!

I wish there were more distros about that "just do it" rather than to install a browser, type make, make install and decypher pages of GCC warnings and errors - and maybe you will be spared dependancy hell on installing an RPM if you sacrificed beforehand a blonde virgin in the name of Linux & Cox on the nearest Full Moon to the Summer Solstice...

That password-protected site of yours - it ain't

daniel
Flame

@Everyone

Yes, you know it, I know it and as said in the article, it's been known a long time - Just as the rules to win friends and influence people in Dale Carnegie's famous book are known to everyone; but... how many people remember to apply them????

Also, remember that all El Reg readers are not l33t hax0r5 like some of you whinging and whining there and some may not know about this.

BBC iPlayer upgrade prompts new ISP complaints

daniel
Happy

@amanfrommars

It is me, or did Amanfrommars's comment seem to make almost sense?

UK.gov loses 29 million personal records

daniel
Dead Vulture

@trackSuit - Oh No Not Amanfrommars again

Just as you get into reading some interesting comments, you get an el reg bot spouting unintelligable crud

Dead vulture - What should happen to amanfrommars et al...

Wireless browsers shut out of the Olympics

daniel
Unhappy

I do not understand...

If you are a foreign national roming in a country not your own, you may not speak the lingo or purchase all local "official sponsor" products...

So the IOC tell you that you must watch the sport in a language that you do not understand, that focuses on their own athletes (and ignore yours - fair game really as everyone does this) and shows ads to products that you have never heard of - and cannot understand anyway...

I think that most of the International Olympic Corrupted need a good rogering followed by a session with a cluestick...

Boeing gets new raygun-on-a-lorry contract

daniel
Flame

@Power Pentode

And where do install the radiator and multi-kilowatt cooling plant that is attached to the polished copper alloy mirror into a 1 kg mortar shell?

The laser itself it not that big... just imagine the core of an Intel Pentium 4 HT processor.

The actual hardware is not that big - but the radiator on the other hand is fricking humungous!!!

Ergo, that 20 ton truck will have a 200 kg laser, a 5 ton genny and a 5 ton HVAC and a 5 ton fuel tank to run the whole kit...

Fire... well just because !

Tories call for more freedom for snoopers

daniel
Flame

FFS Wake Up Everyone!

Complain, complain, complain, moan, moan, moan....

Remember, you voted them in, gave them the power to decide for you, then give them free rein to do whatever they want and you fscking well *let* them.

You gave them power to defend your interests, represent you to the rest of the nation and to the world. Remember that you can also take the power to take their power away from them. You also have the right to remind them of *why* you voted them in.

If you do not have that right, you are no living in a democracy.

When will we see 10 000 strong march protesting in front of 10 downing street reminding the politicos of their duties to the electors? Probably never. Too difficult. People can't be stuffed. Easier to complain and sign meaningless petitions than actually doing somthing in the real world - which is the only world that politics understand.

Vote for the party who represents your ideas not an idealology of "left good right bad" (or vice versa). Find the party even if they are an outsider and vote for them.

If you do not vote, you cannot complain. If there is no-one to vote for with your ideas, run for office yourself. If you cannot run for office, band togeather and remind and inform those who are - or could be - in office where their personal agenda's end and where their duty to the people start, or shut up, put up and stop complaining because if you have done nothing to change the situation, it's because you are willing and able to accept it. Period.

iPhone apps selling like hot cakes

daniel
Flame

Backdoors

That's nice. A hidden backdoor into your phone.

What happens when as mentionned above it get's pwned?

What happens when Apple makes a mistake like when like several years ago, iTunes deleted your second disk partition if you upgraded it?

Oh, sorry, we made a mistake and deleted all of your documents on your phone, 600 songs and corrupted your address book. Here is a $6 credit to the itunes music store so you can replace 1% of your lost music catalogue. Have a nice day.

Blighty's nuke-power push stalled as EDF buy falls through

daniel
Flame

@Unsurprising

Yes, there have been a problem with a subcontractor working at the Tricastin plant that released radioelements into the environment, and there is contraversy about a long term radioactive pollution on the same site due to military waste, but this waste dump is off limits and civilian exposure rates are not applicable... Probably the same with most other nuclear military applications.

Dispite this pollution, exposure has not as yet had a noted impact on the local environment.

An EU medical study around all nuclear powerstations and recycling plants in europe did actually notice a larger number of lukemia and other cancer's arount 2 centres: One in Germany - now closed... and Sellafield... So yes, accidents have occured and will occur (like Dungeness B being washed away by the tide in the near future, or being flooded if the sea levels rise as it was built too close to the sea shore), but it seems that the UK could do with having a little more expert input in the matter that the French have.

Oh, I'm sorry, maybe it's because you take quality newspapers like Teh Sun too seriously and believe that only xeonophobic and europhobic Britain can have the answer as the rest of the world except the US are just a bunch of ignorant hicks?

Ubuntu man challenges open source to out-pretty Apple

daniel
Flame

@Hywel Thomas

For the common luser, "unmount" is what you do when you get off a horse.

"Remove" or "unplug" is what you do when ou pull a USB key out of a socket.

"Eject" is what you do when you want the computer to give your CD or DVD back to you so that you can put it away.

The programmers use technical terms... but forget that the users want it to "just work". installing for example: A user does not want to use the source. A user does not want to compile as generally it will not compile and you cannot find out why.

Linux came from minisystems to the desktop for systems admins and other geeks.... Linux was not designed to replace the desktop... originally.

A good linux is one that boots first time, installs almost all drivers, can update and can be configured without ever *EVER* having to use :

- A command line

- A man page

- tools that no-one but the programmer can understand.

For headless servers, Linux has no equal. For desktops, sorry, Linux is not even at the stage of stability and usability of Windows 3.1 and MS DOS, even if it may be a bit prettier on the eye candy size.

SanDisk Sansa Clip MP3 player

daniel
Stop

@USB mass storage device

"Loading the Clip is a straightforward operation as either an MTP or MSC device and it picked up ID3 tags with 100% accuracy."

MTP: Media Transfer Protocol (access with a sync protocol or application)

MSC: Media Storage Class (access as a removable disk)

So you can sync with a crappy software stync tool or by drag & drop as an external hard drive.

Lurk Moar...

Apple sees red over iPhone 3G

daniel
Jobs Horns

Define "A percentage"...

About 0.01% goes to charity, the rest - including the $30 supplement - goes into Jobsworths pocket...

And you will still have to pay extra to get the firmware upgrade...

UK comms intercepts up by half - and it isn't the council

daniel
Pirate

@Dangermouse

Hai Guize,

10000 people with Epic Fail Guy / Guy Fawkes / V for Vendetta masks !

Anonymous iz in ur skware pwning your MP'z!

Shame 4chan does no longer have /i/ to plan this, then again, this will be the first stop for the Party Van...

daniel
Flame

@Another misleading Reg article

So having the state requesting explicity your "Communication Data (subscriber details, or call records)" does not worry you?

The fact that these requests have also jumped by 50% does not worry you?

The fact that this is done in the name of "public safety" as that GB is one of the unsafer countries of the EU - yet the arrest rate of criminals has not jumped by 50% since last year does not worry you?

Your question title should have been : "Another El Reg article about the state profiling the population" or "An El Reg article about the state lying about safety and still not enforcing law and order" or "Why is the government spending my taxes with no tangible goal" ?

You have all lost the script: the state works for you, but I think that they have now got most of you to bend over and take their stick...

Just remember that 10000 "cyber-protesters" over the internet are ignored by everyone. 10000 people breaking down the barriers and marching down 10 downing street telling the PM that the next time his bureaucracy does somthing stupid like this, it's Trator's Gate - is not.

The old expression was "Give me liberty or give me death". Now it's "Give me my remote control and I'll be happy".

90% of people in GB won't lift a finger, so the country is fscked.

US nuke boffins smash petaflop barrier with 'Roadrunner'

daniel
Joke

Was the test rig...

Made of only 50 000 cores, called Wile E Coyote?

Microprocessors are the new cigarettes

daniel
Paris Hilton

JP Morgan...

Is getting pissed that they are not getting a return on investment that their own in-house valuation and estimation teams predicted. They don't give a fsck about what the business actually *DOES*.

Intel and AMD invest billions in R&D to make new and faster processors: If they applied "Philip Morris" ideas to their business, we would still be running 386's (hey, you are using a 32 bit processor. 4 gb of RAM and wow, 40 Mhz is good enough for everybody! - We even got upgrades : Want a 387 Copro?)

R&D would be limited to the colours on the box..

So, the chip founders invest billions in R&D, new factories, new production methods to go faster, cheaper, cooler, and every dollar that went into designing the 486, Pentium (1, Pro, ,2,3,4), dual cores, Xeons, ARM, specialised microcontrollers, memory, chipsets would actually have been better spent playing financial games and paying out dividends to shareholders - Like JP Morgan.

JP Morgan have been playing the financial game so long that they have forgotten that a dividend payout is optional - and the amount paied is defined by the board - according to outlook and planned investment and innovation - and not the shareholder playing out-of-the-boardroom media terrorist.

Are they not making enough cash out of oil and other raw material speculation? I find that we are paying these barstewards out too much every day as it is...

Investment bankers and insurers. Should be strung up by their privates and whipped.

PH, as she knows alot about private parts and being whipped ;)

Microsoft urges Windows users to shun 'carpet bombing' Safari

daniel
Flame

@AC / Apple, GNU/Linux? No? Blame M$

Ohh, a troll who did not read the last few lines before posting "Crimosoft Bad, OSX Good", unless he committed an ID 10 T error.

"And before any Mac users decide this is an issue they can safely ignore, remember this: While Microsoft's recommendation obviously is limited to Windows users, Dhanjani says the carpet bombing scenario can play out on OS X, too."

Want a 1TB optical drive? Call/Recall me

daniel
Boffin

@Chris

Amen.

Happend to me when working on a new PC : A dell luggable, P4M system. CD-ROM drive. I had a funny 5 minutes wondering why the data CD the customer recorded from his old desktop would not mount...

Until I realised it was a DVD... and the drive was not.

Maybe it's about time that they do a 5.25 sized 3.5 inch diskette box that contains the DVD, with a nice soft coating that protects the whole darn thing.. or even a good old PVC sleeve like the original 5.25's to protect the data surface from drops, sratches, thumbprints, drivecrashes etc...

EU sets ambitious IPv6 target

daniel
Boffin

@FRLinux, @Quirkafleeg

@FRLinux : You are quite right ; Should not comment when tired ;) but I understant what I meant even if the rest of the world does not : (24 usable bits rather than 8 fixed bits!) It makes more sense than AManFromMars though!

@Quirkafleeg: Quite right, 8 addresses -1 default gateway, -1 broadcast leaves 6.

One solution could be using a common network like some hosters are doing now; You do not get your private network with a private server colocation, but you are in a pool with several hundred or thousand other machines. This makes for more efficient network address use. Somthing like this could also be used for companies that want to host their own IP's at the end of a dedicated data line rather than giving a dedicated subnet, you get 3, 15, or 93 addresses, all depending on your needs... may need some changes to the ISP's core networking infrastructure though, installing bridges everywhere!

daniel
Flame

How about breaking up a few class A's...

IBM has a class A (9.0.0.0/24), a long with quite a few others.

Do they really need 16 million routable numbers each?

When I worked in France, all our workstations had one of these addresses - all of which on the campus could have been installed with a private NAT'ed class B address somwhere in the 172's or even just replace corporatewide 9. with 10.

Same goes for the DOD, 3M and a couple of others... That could free up another few percent...

10 companies freeing up in total 100 000 000 addresses, that's another 2.5 % freed up.

So do we really have 3,5 billion used ip addresses - or just a hell of a lot of slack space?

Some companies give you 8 addresses, even if you only need 2 or 3. The rest is locked up but never used, so potentially, plus the class A subnets that are still classed as unused or reserved could be opened up, and we could reclaim 20 to 50% more available addresses, pushing off - once again - the IPV4 depletion monster that screams the immediate death of the internet in the next 12 months that keeps rearing it's head since the late 90's!

Indian gov denied BlackBerry snoop

daniel
Flame

Smelly fish anyone?

you know that government agencies can listen in to your phones and texts, but suddenly a secure messaging system arrives.

National security goes ape and requests access: The supplier cannot refuse if he want's to keep on selling their kit (like they did for the French).

So, they craft a press release informing the whole world that they refused to give the indians read access to their pushmail system, so would-be terrs and diverse baddies go and grab a blackberry.

First of all, the government would probably request information on new blackberry lines opened in the week or so of this announcement, and secondly, of course they have access to this information - just this way,they get the idiots gullable enough to believe that they don't...

American auto dealer offers free handguns

daniel
Flame

@Chad H

"no guns, no bullets, no school shootings"

So how come adolescents in Manchester can get guns for £70 and kill fellow 13 year olds?

When you had a firearm certificate for handguns in the UK before His Tonyness outlawed them, the Police had right of access day or night to inspect your weapons, which should be kept in a locked steel gunbox, bolted securely to your house. Ammo to be kept seperately in a locked steel ammo box with rope handles (so you do not burn your hands on the box when removing ammo from a burning house).

At this time, the police knew where about 95% of all firearms were.

Remember that the Hungerford shootings were carried out with (amongst others) an AK47, which always was an illegal weapon, but most of the population went "oooh, Guns. Bad. Nasty. Ban All Leagally Held Guns Now And Stop All Crime".

Idiots.

Now, handguns are illegal, and it has never been easier to get a gun and ammo illegally in the UK, and violent crime with handguns (or other illegal weapons used for hunting or warfare) are on the rise.

oh well. At least His Tonyness got won his first election through this. For all the good it did the rest of the country.

BOFH: The Batcave

daniel
Thumb Up

@SJ Coombs - The Yetties anyone ?

All sing along:

"So if ever your in Devon

And you goes in to a bar

Just ask for Dead Dog scrumpy

It's the best there is by far

Refuse all imitations,

And you'll sleep just like a log....

You can always recognize it

By the hair of the dog!

Dead dog scrumpy,

Dead dog scrumpy,

From the apple tree,

Dead dog scrumpy,

Dead dog scrumpy,

Full of pedigree..."...

Cheers !

'Loitering Munition' prowler-bomb in Welsh test

daniel
Flame

@jonB

Amen.

10m a shot.

How many artillery shells can you get for that?

- "Smart" 155mm shell with GPS guidance (excalibur) : $150000 (what, about 100000 beer tokens?).

- Standard 155mm HE shell : under 1000 bucks (about 750 quid?)

So, for 1 "loitering" unmanned kamikazi RC cruise missle abortion, you can get 100 lumps of GPS guided ordonnance (maybe more if you get a wholesale reduction, or you can immolate a small african country with over 13000 standard 155 mm shells - and scare the living sh*t out of the natives.

10 million quid a shot. 15 000 000 dollars. A standard tomahawk only costs 2 million...

I'm not sure that I understand the economics of this.

And I rember reading on the innerneck that there is this kiwi in New Zeland who is making his own RC cruise missle with off the shelf parts, for infinitly less than that... Pay him a few crates of beer and a new Ute and I'm sure he'll be able to build an arsenal of RC Tomawhacks - or supply his own design for the Greater Glory of the Empire...

Boeing raygunship fires first blasts in ground testing

daniel
Flame

Was there not a Tom Clancy book...

Cardinal of the Kremlin IIRC when a guy said about fitting ICBM's with mirrors and spinning them, and the response was that 'it's about as useful as a ballerina spinning in front of a shotgun. That energy has got to go somwhere". This is why the "Star Wars" mirrors, lasers, masers et al had serious cooling problems on the sending end...

As for reflecting it back to the aircraft, that would take some funky aiming to get it right... you may get fried a few times before getting it right, and that is only if the mirror does not get totaled by thermal shock beforehand.

UK Carriers safe: Other war-tech ripe for the chopper

daniel
Happy

@heystoopid & others

Someone in the British Army advocated getting the AK-74 & ammo being made under licence by BAE to replace the SA-80 and multi-million "service pack" upgrades... or better, get them delievered by a bent Russian supplies sargent (a couple of 38 ton containers should do) paied for in cash on a moonlit dockside...

So to replace the Harrier with a ramp take off mach 2 fighter-bomber seems a good cheap deal, plus the fact that BAE could then sell upgraded avionics to the russian navy like the Israelis tried after absconding with Dassault's Mirage design plans and building the Barak.

Was it not the HMS Ark Royal that had a ski ramp to lauch Buccaneers?

Also from what I have heard, the F35 V/STOL version has problems as it seems to have been lifted from a Soviet design with lift jets in the fuselage which take up precious fuel and weapons space...

And finally, WTF happened to Hawker-Siddley's supersonic harrier? I know that they worked on a design....

Voilà : Buy weapons from your ex-ennemies, and make substantial savings (at least on the Rifles), and you have a choice of buying an obscenely expensive aircraft from the Yankees or reactivate a 30 year old plan of finally delievering a bigger, better brother to the already excellent Harrier, oh and keeping the current baby carriers to launch them is an added bonus and saving.

Please also note that the Charles de Gaulle has other problems, like the lowest bidder for the ships screws delievering sub standard goods and the screws screwing themselves off 2 hours into the first shakedown cruse (no-one could be blamed as the design office had a freak fire just after the MOD investigation started destroying the plans), and that the Rafale fighters designed by Dassault for this carrier had serious avionics and integration problems IIRC.

Finally, having a nuclear powered carrier is good, as it needs refuling less often, especially when looking at the state of the current oil markets... so that carriers could still run even when oil runs out... But not their aircraft!

The only solution would then to be running carrier versions of the old Soviet (then) SU-25 that could be converted to run on alcohol or diesel...

This therefore means that the russian nuclear carriers with cold war fighters - if shown the Top Gear episode on making bio-diesel with chip fat and white spirit - would own the world and Lenin's Dream Would Finally Come To Pass.

Everyone sing now the chorus:

Long live our Soviet Motherland,

Built by the people's mighty hand.

Long live our People, united and free.

Strong in our friendship tried by fire.

Long may our crimson flag inspire,

Shining in glory for all men to see.

We're all screwed I tell ya.

Visual Studio update dents Silverlight development

daniel
Unhappy

"Code centric visual studio"?

I thought that the "Visual" part of Visual Studio meant that you could Visually design an interface, and from that interface, develop the code that ran it.

So Now, will Microsoft be soon shipping MS C++ Design Studio and Visual Basic Desigh Studio to develop Windows Forms GUI's and force the developers to use Visual Studio for the actual code?

Silly? I thought so until I found out that you cannot design a form for Silverlight with VS2008, and you had to do everything in code - a complete reversal from what Visual Studio meant for me.

Also, it would seem again to me that silverlight 1 has not even left the starting blocks that MS is now pushing production development on Silverlight betas...

MS really has to get a decent and coherent stance on this: When C# was introduced in .NET several years ago, it was clear that it was a new development language.

Today, silverlight is out for a year or so now, and I have only just discovered that it's a sort of Adobe Flex... and even tutorial websites get lost about what Silverlight really is...

Clean up your ship Microsoft. If no-one understands what you are doing due to the fact you have too many disparate voices telling people how great the technology is without telling people *what* it is, No-one knows "where they want to go today".

Comcast mulls overage fees for bandwidth lovers

daniel
Boffin

Bandwidth and cost

If you are on DSL, then the maximum limit by the DSL spec is 8 or 16 or 24 depending on version (1, 2, 2+...).

Between the ISP and you, you can get ressources at line speed (ie. VOIP, streaming TV, Linux iso's from the companies own FTP server...).. and again, this depends on the use of the pipe from your DSL exchange to the ISP's datacentre ressources.

This is part of your ISP's infrastructure.

Your isp then has peering agreements to communicate with other ISP's, and have their own datalinks, and these connections are far more limited than the exchange-to-physical-point-of-presence, especially as they are far more used.

Now, if you want a fully unlimited quick connection, you can contact a professional ISP and get a SDSL line starting at 400 euros a month (£300/$600) in France for a 2mbit/2mbit with 8 fixed ip addresses, SLA defined minimul bandwidth, guaranteed response and reconnection times (like 4 hours after failure).

This you do not get with a home dial up isp.

If you have a professional need to push huge amounts of data around, consider using a professional connection, otherwise, I can fully understand ISP's wanting to end the "free lunch/free beer" connections with 1% of users using 80% of ressources. You are paying 10 times less than an enterprise quality connection, and it is time that the users stop using it as such.

If an enterprise grade connection with guaranteed bandwidth costs 10 times the amount of a "residential" grade connection, there have to be some limitations, and the ISP's have the right to enforce them.

But, they also have the obligation to inform their users of what constitutes reasonable use for a cheap connection, and also provide decent solutions for those who want/need a better solution than the standard one.

Mobile roaming in Europe: Have your say

daniel
Paris Hilton

@Jolyon Ralph

We don't *have* T-Mobile in France (execpt a bunch of doped cyclists during the Tour de France)...

Orange (France Telecom), SFR (vodafone) and Bouygues Télécom are the 3 carriers with a couple of MVNO's (Virgin, a couple of football clubs and radio stations and universal music). There may be a fourth soon, with the internet operator Free negociating with the government for a cheap 3G licence (compared to the billions of euros paied by the current 3 mobile carriers).

PH as she knows as much about "health medication" as T-Mobile's cyclists...

Vodafone sews up iPhone distribution

daniel
Boffin

@Alan

Technically, radio transmission is americano-croatian: the theory was invented by Nickola Tesla . Marconi just built the box according to plans...

How to destroy 60 hard drives an hour

daniel
Boffin

When I worked for Alcatel...

a new wafer fab was being built. One of the unix sysadmins walked out with a box full of dead drives, placed them side on and asked the road making team to run the road roller over them.

The mashed parts were shovelled up and mixed further on in the access road's concrete bed.

Eye protection due to flying plastic ;-)

AMD now has 'more than allegations' against Intel

daniel
Paris Hilton

Open and shut case

This looks very simple. If AMD was _____ by Intel while ____________ and ____ then it is clear that ________________ was the cause of it all and __________ should be severely _____.

____ should therefore be _____ to a sentence of ______ and fined _____.

An open and shut case I say.

Creative settles MP3 player capacity clash

daniel
Boffin

@daniel b

that would be fun, using a 1000 byte cluster on a 512 byte per sector storage device...

The problem here is that the general public do not understand the tech reasoning. We all learned in school that 1 kilogram = 1000 gramms. 1 kilometer = 1000 meters. Everyone that watched the Battle of Britain, "Angels 10" meant 10000 feet.

Then we start in IT and learn that for technical reasons, 1 kb is 1024, (10^2) due to the binary nature of a computer.

The, as mentionned before above, storage manufacturers start selling drives as 40, 80, 120 gigabytes as a marketing ploy as they have found out that it's better to give a nice full number than the real capacity (For John Q. Luser, for the same price, would you buy a 40 gb drive or a 38 gb drive?).

Some drives actually seemed to stick to the truth : I'm looking at a trio of old IBM Deathstars in my parts bin - 20.5, 46.1 and 61.5 gb respectivly, a quantum fireball at 20.5 gb, and guilty looking Maxtor "DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB ATA / 133 HDD".

Changing from Base 2 to Base 10 allowed lower capacity drives to be "uprated" - and oversold.

The stinger is when you install 3 TB of disk storage, you actually find 2.79 Tb available. Marketing moths have eaten a 210 Gb hole in my storage...

Changing to processors, Cyrix invented the infamous "Pentium Rating" (fond memories of my first Cyrix 6x86 PR200+), followed by AMD. Intel stuck to their standard frequency ratings until they too fell to the marketing sirens and found it easier to market a T5500, Q6600 and god knows what rather than PIV 3.06Ghz HT.

At least with intel you knew what you were buying. Now it's all dumbed down.

Back to storage - you do not really know what you are really getting: your real storage is calculated in base 10. Your (possibilty unknown) needs are set in base 2. They are not compatible. It's time that the storage vendors either relable clearly their capacity (it's your player 8 or 7.3 gb storage?).

RAM vendors do not have this "underselling" problems. You want 2 Gb, god darn it, you'll get 2 gb (2^(32-1) bytes). WTF can't storage vendors do the same?

New attack technique threatens databases

daniel
Joke

@matt

I agrie. Us Prophesionals do not maek erors in our sauce cod.

And wot F In Prophesionals?

daniel
Boffin

Was Oracle not the one selling UNBREAKABKE databases?

WTF? Marketing people LIE!!!!

OMFG. Pwned. Wallhack. My world will never be the same again.

Page: