Posts by Mike

CCandRs

First off, I agree that software has been shared for a _long_ time. And I, too was pretty annoyed the first time I bought a product, with source code, and found a great wodge of _my_ code, shorn only of my name, email address, and copyright (along with 'feel free to use this but keep my name in the source') notice. But I didn't stay up nights thinking of ways to get even.

The whole license kerfuffle reminds me of those restrictions that get tacked on to land deeds. Many of them, like the part where I can only have two non-white servants, and only the asians, not the "colored" are allow to actually live at my (under 900 square-foot) house have thankfully been rendered legally moot. Would that these bizarre restrictive successors follow the same route.

PhotoID datapoint

A friend's uncle showed up for work at a shipyard for two years, during WWII, with the photo on his ID card replaced with one of Adolph Hitler. (Ooops, Godwin. :-)

(No, it was not an _Axis_ shipyard. Here's your coat)

Japanese averse to non-Japanese development?

Maybe today, when I'm not really following the business, but back in the heyday of arcade gaming (meaning, coin-operated games _in_ arcades), there were quite a few sales of games developed outside Japan. Of course, only a few of those sales were of games _built_ outside Japan. The other 20K per title were Japanese made counterfeits. But hey, they _were_ developed elsewhere. :-)

Not a 5200 competitor.

IIRC, the ColecoVision used the TI graphics chip. The one that got everybody calling motion-objects "sprites". As such, it was more an equivalent to the TI 99-4 and various Apple-][ add-ins. The 5200 was an Atari 800, more or less, in the same way that the original XBox was a PC.

Coleco's Gemini was just a counterfeit Atari 2600, so even more primitive. (not to mention they fell for a couple traps in the chip when the cloned it, making the lawsuit almost a slam-dunk :-)

With all that money...

You'd think they could hire a sock-puppet who could compose a coherent post. (I'm looking at you, Anuj)

Or is AmanFromMars moonlighting?

Piling on

@John -- maybe it works for you, or maybe it works now, for a while, but I can assure you that RealPlayer Hell did indeed extend well into OS-X time.

Side-note. A friend once had a job that involved porting RealPlayer to an embedded "internet radio". Looking into why it seemed such a resource hog it turned out that it threw a _blizzard_ of floating-point exceptions during operation.

Apparently the average PC either is _so_ fast that it doesn't matter, or more likely just disables the exceptions and whatever cruft ends up in the FP regs instead is "good enough". Real Media was, of course, completely un-interested in bug-reports.

Y2038 bug

Although this has been going around a bit, the actual problem would occur if a significant number of systems are still running OSes that have not gone to 64-bit time_t. (solutions involving epoch shifting for archival data already exist).

Maybe someone's cufflinks will still be running a 32-bit OS that hasn't been updated in 30+ years, but I doubt Google will.

Trust and precautions

"Not clicking on links in email" is only possible to those who do not use Outlook, or who do not allow Outlook (or Outlook Express) to use its preview pane.

As for trust, Adobe shared my "registration" spam-trap email address with a porn-spammer within 30 minutes, so I have to presume it is an automated process.

(N.B. there is/was apparently no abuse@adobe.com. You have to send registered physical mail to a law-office behind an P.O.Box in Los Angeles to complain. Or that was the case when this happened. Dunno if it is still that way because I will certainly never buy another Adobe product.)

Getting Paid

There are many forms of reward. Oddly, I get paid to develop open-source code, that makes my employer's hardware more salable. OTOH, I once spent 4 hours of my own time researching prior art to help Microsoft defend against a troll. Do what you wish with your life, I'm spending mine as I prefer.

@Tom (Internal Mail)

You must be using Exchange Server. It used to regularly take over four hours to get email across about 3 cubicles. When it arrived at all...

The bottleneck

As other have mentioned, USB2.0's 480Mbps is in practice slower that FireWire's 400Mbps, essentially due to hellacious protocol and SW overhead. Unless USB3.0 introduces a new controller (ala EHCI) _and_ some seriously redone protocols, expect 4Gbps to be a "speed of light" (Guaranteed not to exceed) number. And pray for enough controllers that you are not sharing one between your storage array and your mouse. :-)

Full Jails

Actually, given the extreme overcrowding in many states (e.g. The Guvernator's CA), it is possibly true that the jails are full (100% capacity) with innocents, and the other 200% of capacity occupants are guilty. :-)

I suppose we could consider reducing sentences for possession of crack cocaine, or relocate some of the paedos to the (nearly empty) cells reserved for option-backdaters, but I doubt that will happen.

Legal? sabre rattling

If you believe they stick to legal (let alone ethical) behavior, I'd suggest you research the case of Keith Henson

Two things

1) If the game is copyrighted, it will be "in perpetuity" in the US, or until we get a reasonably non-corrupt SCOTUS, which amount to the same thing.

2) Just shows that Mattel execs don't do Facebook, but do watch "60 Minutes". As soon as I saw the "online scrabble" in last Sunday's Zuckerview, I thought "Lawsuit!"

I guess I should be grateful...

that the last software update to my HP 3210 makes it crash (tiny BSOD) if I attach it to a network. Forced me to hard-connect it to the nearest computer. Also made it a PITA to use from other machines, but hey, Thanks, HP, for saving me from this exploit (maybe?)

Who killed Alpha?

IIRC, Compaq was the hitman, hired by Intel, before HP got involved.

I'm no longer any sort of HP fan (although I'd love to have a VMS/Itanium workstation for much the same reasons I'd love to have a Showman tractor :-), but that particular deed is not, IMHO, their fault.

@Jeff -- Tabloid magazines

Economist maybe, but Scientific American has been down at the level of Omni for years now. Next you'll be saying Tufte could take lessons from Wired. :-)

Yellow Peril

The interesting thing to me is that while many folks have "access" to the BSD underpinning of OSX, so there is some possibility of the "good guys" noticing a vulnerability before the "bad guys", Windows source is tightly controlled. Whether you think this is a good idea or not may depend on whether you remember that the Chinese government is one of the groups that has access. I tried to ask Bill Gates once whether they had filed any security-related bugs, but got cut off. Either answer would have been interesting.

It has a 100% rate on preventing repeated murder

Bzzzt, sorry, thanks for playing. When the state executes the wrong person, they are also _not_ executing the actual murderer, and since they stopped looking for him, he can correctly assume that he's "gotten away with murder", and may indeed repeat the crime. Only if you assume that 100% of people convicted of murder are in fact guilty (which has been repeatedly proven false) does your statement follow. But then "If I had the wings of an angel..." :-)

Only after the IC?

The idea that transistors were only important for switching uses after the invention of the IC is ludicrous. The CDC6600 and IBM360 were both important computers that used transistors, but not ICs, as were all the early DEC machines, STRETCH, well, the list is pretty long. Seems like another case where the author has confused "where I came in" with "what actually happened".

(To the pedants, the SLT modules in the 360 were _not_ ICs, even though they have been described as such by some confused souls)

Millions of downloads?

Where in the US does there exist an ISP that, for the amount this woman could afford to pay, provides sufficient upload bandwidth for each of those songs to have been copied millions of times? I suspect even in Tokyo that would be difficult. In the US? fuggedaboutit.

Apple Innovation

Not much of an Apple fan, but let's get a grip. The floppy-disk drive on the Apple ][ was sufficiently cheaper and more robust than all that had gone before to mark a real departure. The difference between an affordable personal computer with removable, random-access, reasonable speed storage and all that went before is significant. If you don't think so, you are probably not old enough to get chills at the mention or "Kansas City" and "Tarbell".

What makes you think they clicked?

Doesn't Outlook Express still default to having the preview pane, which, essentially, "auto-clicks" on whatever message is on top when you launch it?

And before everybody says "Well, don't run OE", take a deep breath and consider the poor sod who, y'know, has to work for a living, in one of the (vast majority of) offices that use Exchange for everything and whose boss is always "pushing the envelope" in ways that make only bug-for-bug compatible with Outlook usable at all.

What about de-lobotomizing?

Would they have to "approve" re-flashing a Moto RAZR to its original firmware, before they _removed_ a boatload of functionality (e.g. moving pictures and ringtones directly to/from it over USB or bluetooth, rather than paying for a circuitous jouney via their network)? Especially if I was only interested in enabling USB, so there was no valid RF concern? The only way I could see such a device interfering with their precious network is financially. Oh, wait...

Obviousness

Dunno about you folks, but one of my banks, various departments at my workplace, my ISP, and two of the three hosting providers I use _regularly_ send me email that smells like phish. I can only assume one of three possibilities:

1) The major shareholders are setting me up for the mother of all phishes.

2) Their website and customer-service were set up by the CEO's 12-yr-old nephew.

3) Their website etc. were set up by the one company to underbid the CEO's nephew.

But in any case, sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistiguishable from malice.

WD-40, or better

Snide aside, but although I like WD-40 for many tasks, I actually use "Starter fluid" (Ether and light oil) for those severely rusted-on cases. Larn't that from an old railroad man, and boy, was he right. I'd have never gotten the speeder apart without his advice, and the skin on my knuckles has praised him ever since.

64-bit busses

Not to suggest that the design is all that practical, but modern systems use high-speed reduced-pincount "busses" like Rambus, HyperTransport, PCIExpress...

I have personally run close to a gigabyte/sec over NIC that was connected to the MB via a PCIExpress (x8) cable some 45cm long. A bit wider than I'd want to stuff through those "branches", but nothing like ISA fans would imagine. :-)

Computers are conceptually simple (well, to some of us), but the implementation details of even a fairly vanilla PC these days are complex and sometimes surprising.

Now, what I want to see is a PC that allows "hot" memory replacment like some mainframes of the 1970s. Only really of interest if your OS stays up for long. :-)

Mike

Greylisting

Let us know how that works out when you have many subscribers on, say, gmail. Greylisting, at least as she was implented a few months ago, works on a per-IP (or sometimes hostname) basis, so when someone (or their company or ISP) uses a bunch of load-sharing servers, the resend has a good chance of coming from a (slightly) different source, so gets deferred again, and again, until by sheer luck it repeats an address/hostname within the accept window.

I've seen it take hours from a gmail account.

It wouldn't be difficult to fix, and perhaps has been by now at some installations where the admins have a clue. Oh, right, that was the _other_ universe.

Mike

Alternate universe?

You guys obviously live in some alternate universe where telcom is reliable, at least to the extent POTS was in the USA before Judge Green.

I get Internet, landline, and mobile from three different companies, and despite the pain of three largish bills a month can't really consider a "triple play" because each of these has a very spotty connectivity record and abysmal customer service. All my eggs in one rotten basket? No thanks.

Mike

@Rick "Real GPS"

Not challenging, but enquiring. I am casually acquainted with an engineer who worked on "Assisted GPS" for mobiles, and I got a backgrounder on it. Some phones do indeed use "real" satellite-based GPS. The "Assisted" part is where the system uses triangulation to get a rough position and uses that to speed up acquisition.

Now, it's entirely possible that some operators (e.g. the ever-slimey Verizon) are doing something else. It wouldn't surprise me if Verizon even shut off existing real GPS on their customers' phones, but that doesn't mean that real GPS on mobiles doesn't exist.

Note to Vulture-Central: If we must have silly icons, can we have a propeller-beanie for nit-picking about technical content? :-)

Best Viewed

I wish Graham Marsden was kidding.

Having attempted to view sites with "file:" URLs for images, I have to agree with the first part of his comment, but perhaps I'd take along a clue-by-four.

Lie down with dogs

Get up with fleas.

I am amused that anyone would be surprised that hiring out dodgy work carries a risk of backfiring. "Honor among thieves" is a fable for the marks.

Have you forgotten...

that this is all subject to review at the Supreme Court level, and that the Supreme Court is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the White House these days?

Not even MS reads the EULA

I once complained about egregious MSFT EULA wording in a public forum, and was "called out for exageration" by a lawyer from MSFT. I then proceeded to tell him the exact product, revision, and section of the EULA from which I had quoted the text. Got back a "Well, I'll be darned" from him after he verified it himself.

I conclude that not even MSFT lawyers actualy read their EULAs. But I do.

Lines of descent

The impression I had always gotten was that Intel was like Disney Animation, with two fairly separate teams doing interleaved products, separated in time by one-half a product development cycle. Given that, you would expect the 1st, third, ... products to have more in common with each other than they do with the 2nd, 4th, etc.

There are solid product-management reasons for this, but also a fair probability that if you are, e.g. a fan of the odd-numbered products you will find something to not like about the evens. That said, I, too, am a fan of the PII (aka Sexium/P6, IIRC) based line. Among Intel CPUs. :-)

HP quality

HP printers used to be known for rock-solid mechanicals and dubious software quality. A few years back in a Carly-inspired re-org, some friends there told me that the PLAN was to outsource the mechanical design and keep the software development in house. It makes a "new-HP" sort of sense: "play to your weakness". It also explains why my 3210 "all in one", which I bought for networked printing, has not been usable as a networked printer (BSODs itself if you connect via ethernet) since my first software update. Sigh

Comments

@Ian: If you need a comment to explain trickery, remove the trickery.

Depends on the level of "trickery", and the audience. I have been known to insert comments explaining, e.g. hashes that use "well known" properties of twos-complement arithmetic, at the request of a supervisor who offered the alternative of a 4x slower approach. These days, there is no real lower limit to the skill and knowledge of potential code readers.

Brit Tech Lead

@Martin

...or even in teh 940s when we gave you Frank Whittles the Jet engine technology

Good Lord! A Thousand years ahead of the rest of the world? I knew that early Britain was a hotbed of techno-ferment, but still... :-)

Bargain Bans

Actually, if I could pick up a "banned" PS3 for under $100, I could be interested.

Being that my interest in PS3 is pretty much limitted to using it as a cheap Cell development system, running Linux... :-)

Moller

And here I thought that _everybody_ on the planet had figured out by now that Moller's revenue is from brochures and "investment", not really flying anything. Unless of course the posters above are trolls.

Anyway, if you could reduce the production cost of a flying car to zero, the insurance would still price it well beyond my means, and probably those of most Reg readers.

Could help

As an aging radio amateur, I applaud anything that will pique the adolescent's interest in things RF. The time spent figuring out how to bedevil the old coot who wouldn't return your ball will be amply repaid when the rest of us who know which end of the electron is up saunter off this mortal (scramble-wound) coil.

Curious

Can someone point me to an unbiased explanation of just how this thing works?

I have internet connectivity via Comcast cable-modem, and as spotty as the "6Mb" downlink is, I am dubious about the reliability of the "128kb" uplink. And even if it were to be rock-solid, how does one pipe tolerable video though 128kbps?

Thanks

Faster than USB

There are two typical ways to do that sort of thing. One is to compress the data as it goes out to the drive, ensuring hours of merriment when things go wrong in return for never knowing quite how big the disk is, effectively. It also further increases the CPU load associated with your USB devices, as if that wasn't already a problem.

The other is to violate some part of the spec. USB has rules about the priority of various sorts fo traffic, with "bulk", as usually used for storage devices, falling into the "whatever's left" slot of bandwidth. If a device claimed to be, say, a display or audio port, and used the isochronous slots, it could dial up the bandwidth pretty much as far as it wanted, killing the response of anything else on that controller. isochronous is not guaranteed delivery, but again, two choices, you could layer either forward error correction or a retry scheme on top, or you could just accept the occasional silently failing transfer, with resulting file corruption.

Any of these choices mean you need a "special" driver that hooks into the OS in "special" ways, so you would be very OS-specific (probably even OS-version specific). Note how carefully they say "Windows or Mac", then "Any PC". If they really mean the former, they don't mean the latter, and vice versa.

Loadable Modules

So, I was hallucinating the "load on first open, unload on last close" drivers that were part of RT-11 from at least the early 1970s? Right, they weren't named "modules" and they didn't have nifty features like modprobe.conf _silently_ overriding options, but then RT-11 ran in 32K of memory, so that should count for something. :-)

Pace - I am not saying that Linux doesn't offer many more services than a 32K PDP-11 without memory-management did almost 40 years ago, but "the first time I ever saw" is not the same as "the first time it ever happened"

Patenting FAT

Not this again...

The "FAT patent" is not about the original FAT (first used in MS Disk BASIC, then adopted by QDOS which became {MS,PC}DOS. It is about the "long filename" hack.

I won't argue that MSFT acted with due haste about springing it on camera makers et al, but it neither was it "20 years"

Most likely

It will soon be exploited by javascript to make _sure_ there's an advertisement wherever your eyes are looking.

Don't hold your breath for Verizon

If they do offer a gPhone, it will probably be like every other phone I've had from them, hobbled by "custom software" that essentially disables every neat feature that you thought you bought the phone for, except those they can monetize at absurd rates, of course.

The Small Inventor

If there really were many successful small inventors, the status-quo folks wouldn't have to keep trotting out the intermittent-wiper guy.

How is "stripping patent rights away from those who can't afford to produce the invention" worse, or even very different, from the current system that strips all rights from those who cannot afford millions in legal fees to withstand the onslaught of corporate lawyers who are past-masters in running out the money clock.

The best a small inventor can hope for is to be buggered only by the biggest guy in the yard, who will then keep the others away.

The whole _point_ of the patent system is to use the force of law (i.e. people with handcuffs and guns) to prevent people using the fruits of their own creativity if someone else has a better lawyer. Remember, independent invention (despite being one of the key bits of evidence of obviousness) is no defense.

Missing the point

Which is that the Korean Govt. wants to throw some cash at its friends in the RFID business. Quality or provenance of Whisky is totally irrelevant.

Gaming and Elections

While it is true that IGT and Bally could probably do a lot better than the current crop of [ft]ools, they are by no means infallible, and part of their previous behavior had to do with the Nevada Gaming Commission taking security _very_ seriously. Even so, a few years back a slot-rigging gang that included a gaming-commission employee was uncovered. Add to that the fact that Gaming is no longer a "Nevada thing", but has spread in the U.S. to Atlantic (Who cares if the games are rigged, look at those tax dollars) City and every Indian reservation with a reliable supply of electricity, and you'll see that the level of inspection overall is quite a bit lower today.

For completeness, I'll mention that "in the old days", the casino owners were not totally dependent on the gaming commission to enforce "fair" (to the casino) games. Of course, today's clients of Diebold et al. may have some blackjacks and cement overshoes at their disposal, too.