Posts by The Flying Dutchman

If the functionality exceeds VoIP eavesdropping...

... (and it apparently does), it's illegal inside Germany too. That's the point.

In the meantime, officials of several German federal states have more or less admitted that this malware was indeed gov business...

In Italian...

... that would spell "F-otto", thus "fotto", which is 1st person singular present of the verb "fottere".

Look that up... ;-)

The problem is...

... not so much the application code that programmers write, but the level of abstraction commonly used by today's computing platforms.

Say, as a practical exercise, one would want to emulate the computer used for navigation aboard Apollo spacecraft. One could choose to do this by using javascript running in a browser - a pretty sensible choice as a matter of fact. I'd bet that only a millionth part of the machine cycles would involve the actual computing, the rest would be eaten by the interface, handling events and painting pixels on the screen...

'Electronica'...

... as in, music composed specifically for reproduction by electronic waveform generators, has been around since the early 1950s and maybe earlier. Stockhausen, "Electronic Studies", 1954.

been there...

One might actually wake up in the middle of the night with one of those huge cartoon-style question marks hovering above one's head, because that long freight train that usually passes at 3:30AM for some reason *didn't* run that night... ;-)

awww...

... you beat me to it.

converts "returning to the fold"

I wouldn't put my money on that.

Both machines are legacy hardware and came with XPHome originally. Which is pretty hard to keep secure these days. Botnets exist for a reason. The required AV software causes a huge performance hit, too (and is by no means a silver bullet).

Maybe, if my "converts" could afford brand spanking new machines with a Win7 Ultimate license... but I doubt this will happen in the foreseeable fututre. And certainly not "within a few months".

Oh c'mon...

... 128kbps mp3's are sooooooo 2001...

These days for me it's either 256kbps VBR or better if I'm stuck with mp3, but I'd prefer lossless (flac or ape).

Anyway, a more interesting metric (from my point of view) would be : how many 10mpix canon raw files can be stored on one of those?

(answer: probably more than my beloved 400D could shoot during its lifetime)

No WD40 on pots...

...ever!

It fixes the problems for a short while, but it tends to thoroughly ruin pots so treated.

Use a proper contact cleaner instead such as Kontakt 70 or CRC Contact Lubricant.

Spent fuel is not combustible...

... But the zircaloy tubes it is packed in, under certain circumstances, certainly are. If the fuel gets hot enough (through its own decay heat) zircaloy may oxidise very rapidly, i.e. burn. The reaction is strongly exothermic and thus adds additional heat to the system, which will further propagation.

Also note that the spent fuel pool of No. 4 (the one in trouble) contains a full reactor core's worth of fuel elements that have been unloaded from the core a couple of months ago (or so). These are quite hot both in the conventional and the radiation sense of the term, and if cooling fails a zirconium fire is not at all unlikely.

Such a zirconium fire will result in a white hot molten eutectic mixture of zirconium and uranium oxides, spiced up with fission fragments many of which are volatile at temperatures involved, and there will be no containment structure to stop these from getting into the environment.

Alpha kicked

A friend of mine got himself an Alpha 233 workstation back in the day, he used it for photographic rendering, the heavyweight architectural stuff. It ran Lightwave on NT4.

It was nearly an order of magnitude faster than top of the line Intel based machines or Macs.

It now sits in a corner in my lab, minus its Quantum Atlas SCSI HD (long dead) and its CDROM drive (ditto).

When I'll get round to it, that is, when I'll be able to locate the above two items at less than extortionate prices, I'll fire it up and put BSD on it, just for the heck of it.

I got my first set of Torx wrenches...

... in 1985, when teh intarwebs wasn't even invented yet. Asian markets didn't have anything to do with it either, the wrenches in question were made by USAG, Italian-based purveyors of fine quality tools. They were also quite expensive.

I still use them.

Wordstar?

I suppose your iWhatever has a golf ball teletype by way of user interface rather than a touchscreen?

Orbital Anvil Delivery System(OADS)

Developed in tight collaboration with ACME, I suppose?

The sad thing...

... is that this malware does have a point:

Current AV software tends to be a huge resource hog and certainly affects a machine's performance.

On top of that, a lot of malware manages to escape detection by virtue of being new variants that the AV software doesn't yet know about. With said new variants appearing at an amazing rate, and there being a 24 - 48 hour window (my estimate)* before installed AV software can pick these up, AV software offers only rather limited protection from the dangers of getting pwned.

The best AV software resides between your ears.

"Do I really want to click on this?"

* the timeline being:

- new malware appears in the wild

- AV HQ detects new malware

- AV HQ makes database update available

- User updates AV software

Anyone prepared to pay more than a few quid per metre...

...for speaker cables automatically disqualifies him/herself from being taken seriously when discussing audio gear.

The single requirement for speaker cables is that the conductor cross section be sufficient such that the series resistance can be considered negligible. For a 5 metre run, 2.5 sq mm is quite sufficient (having a total series resistance of about 0.07 ohms), even considering the fact that some of the more idiosyncratic speaker systems may have impedance dips as low as 3 ohms. Reactive effects (inductance and capacitance) can be safely neglected since the circuit impedance is very low, unless you're looking at *very* long runs. If one wants to be picky, one can use 4-conductor jacketed cable (with the conductors laid up in the shape of a square) so as to obtain a star-quad configuration. 3-phase mains cable works very well, and is very cheap.

Everything else (hyper-pure linear-crystal oxygen-free copper etc) is 100% hype. Copper used in run-of-the-mill electrical conductors is pretty pure as a matter of course, and the "linear crystals" are automatically obtained when the copper ingots are drawn to progressively thinner wire strands.

As a matter of fact, I dare anyone to distinguish the snake oil speaker cable of their choice from a run of suitably robust but very common and dirt cheap mains cable in a double blind test.

All those who worship at the altar of "high end" audio, I've got news for you.

The signals that make up your most prized recordings have travelled through tens of metres of cable that would cost a quid a metre at most, and often much less. On their way, they've encountered untold numbers of industry standard connectors that cost no more than a few quid apiece, and they've been routed through a truckload of top-of-the line recording gear whose signal path contains such diabolical things as op-amps, (gasp!) and electrolytic capacitors (aargh!). Lots of 'em.

Now ask yourself: Is spending 500 quid for a pair of hyper-duper "interconnects" with alleged magical properties, to carry the signal the last few feet from your CD player to your amp, really going to make one iota of difference?

Not slashdotted...

ElRegged

First thing to use on a new system...

... before one gets around to installing software that's actually useful.

On more than one I've had the, ahem, pleasure to deal with a brand new out of the box machine, and in each case, the plethora of toolbars, trial versions and thinly veiled spyware could have easily taken an hour or more to manually hunt down and remove.

So yes, on a new machine, Decrapifier should be the first thing you run.

wow...

...If Dubya and cronies were still in office, that might have qualified as sufficient reason for a "pre-emptive strike" against the Land of the Rising Hentai (and $deity knows what else)...