Posts by badger31

Re: These Days...

@HamsterNet

That's a bit like saying 'try driving your manual-shift car without using the gear stick' when someone says manuals are better to drive than automatics.

there's just an empty space

What study?

@anon

There was no study mentioned in the article. Just putting processed meat on a list of probable carcinogens is fairly meaningless. Oxygen should be on that list, and that's only marginally more important than bacon. To suggest that bacon is equally as bad for you as tobacco smoke or asbestos is disingenuous, to say the least. I'm actually surprised they didn't spout some percentage of a percentage to boost the bullshit. E.g. "Bacon makes you 10x more likely to get bowel cancer (0.0001% to 0.001%)*

* All these figures are made up. I've no idea what the real statistics are, and I'm guessing neither do the Daily Mail.

Re: Stupid move

I don't usually go in for thew whole FTFY, but, this being the thread of 'fuck', fuck it.

"In the recent Windows update, this option was checked as default; this DID NOT GO UNNOTICED and we are removing the check."

<dream>As a penance, they should be forced to open-source DirectX</dream>

Re: Sad...

@ Lush At The Bar

Spot on. That's the true bullshit right there. Anyone with my (or any) phone number, or one just randomly picked, can post shit and there's fuck all that can be done about it. Can she really not see the possibility for abuse here? The lawyers must be creaming themselves right now. The company and its peeple [geddit?] will hide behind the "we're just the medium" and "we have no control" lines.

Re: Shameful

I have to admit that this is where Apple's model comes in to its own. How many devices can run iOS 9, and therefor need testing, compared to Android? Google can't test them all, so it's down to the manufacturers - they get android for free, after all. The flip side of that is that there's no dodging the blame here by Apple.

Re: On the cheap or do I mean expensive?

Most definitely cheap. The non-bluetooth device is free, most people will already have a smartphone it can use (not just iphone), and there is no contract, monthly fee or minimum payment. If you don't use it, it costs nothing. They just take at most 2.7% of whatever you put through it (the % goes down for large amounts. I forget the limits as they are irrelevant to me. My wife uses one at craft fairs and the like. It's perfect for that sort of thing. If I was WorldPay, I'd be shitting a brick.

Re: Pain point

Be careful with the grandfather plans. Both my wife and I were on 'The One' plans. I got booted off when I didn't continue paying extra for the phone. My wife was on a pay monthly sim-only One plan (paying ~£15pm IIRC) when she received a letter informing her the One plan was no more and she was automatically being moved onto an equivalent plan costing ~£35pm. We weren't happy with that, so now she's paying the same, but getting only 1GB of data per month, which we are obviously not happy about, either. We wanted to quit on principal, but the bastards arestill the best value for our needs.

Someone who really REALLY wishes they backed up whatever data is worth >$500 to them.

Targets:

1: Keeps valuable data on phone

2: ... not backed up

3: Installs software from dodgy stores

Talk about limiting your market.

Re: UHD Blu-ray is already sunk

It's all about manufacturing. I'm guessing Blu-Ray discs are still pressed, like CDs. Unless SD compatible chips can be manufactured with the video data on them, with DRM, they'd have to load each card up, either individually or in batches, and I just can't see that being viable.

Re: Absolutely brilliant, except the screen size

+1

The Z3 Compact is a great wee phone. It's entirely possible to build a top-spec phone in a pocket-sized form factor.

Re: Why should they ban them?

@AC - What a bell-end of a comment. Vaporising is one of the most effective ways of getting smokers off cigarettes there has ever been. They remove ~99% of the harmful stuff, leaving only the practically harmless nicotine (less harmful than the related chemical caffeine). I have many friends who were unhealthy smokers who are now much healthier vapers. I've been in confined spaces with them and smelt nothing at all because there's nothing to smell. In a modern free society we should be able to as we choose, so long we aren't harming anyone. People inhaling nicotine vapours are not harming anyone, not even themselves compared to smoking cigarettes. If you are personally offended by then, you can personally piss off.

This IS about copyright, not patents. I boils down to the fact that software is covered by copyright, so the question is are APIs software? I've always believed that ideas are not copyrightable, but implementations are. APIs are slap-bang in the middle, straddling both sides. I guess you could say that they define the idea and are the first step towards implementation. We all know that enforcing copyright on APIs is a bad idea, but as someone who has written APIs I understand why they are covered by current copyright laws. It's the law that needs to be brought up to date.

I agree. MagSafe is a work of genius - why get rid of it? Seems like a backward step to me. I love my 5yo MBP but it's definitely showing it's age, despite the upgraded RAM (8GB) and SSD (512GB). But at least I could upgrade it. I'd love a new MacBook, but every year Apple give me less incentive to buy one. More expensive, less power, non-upgradable and now no MagSafe! Fuck Apple. Now I'll have to find a nice ultra book and stick linux mint on it. Bollocks.

Re: Keyless Vehicle Theft...

So, read "keyless" as "jamming a screwdriver into the ignition lock"

You don't even need to drive the car to steal it, just drag it on to the back of a lorry. If they are getting broken up for parts, they don't need to run.

Re: Yawn

@Killing time

No, my mates moves was a stupid one - he just got a little over excited. He had decided on his approach before the hand was dealt and we all laughed and pointed at him for getting caught out. That part of my comment was just an amusing aside, but it highlighted the fact that a lot of the time, in NL-TH, the actual cards in your hand are irrelevant as nobody gets to see them.

"A previous PoC used 56Gbit/s InfiniBand to link TSM and GPFS servers and also produced outstanding results:

Peak backup performance using multiple sessions for a single TSM server is 5.4GB/sec.

Peak backup performance using multiple sessions for two TSM servers is 9 GB/sec in total.

Peak restore performance using multiple sessions for a single TSM server is 6.5 GB/sec.

Peak backup performance using a single session for a single TSM server is 2.5 GB/sec."

9 GB/s over a 56Gbit/s (7GB/s) link is very impressive, some might say impossible. Looking at the linked blog post shows that the TSM servers connect to the switch each with a single 56Gbit/s link, but that the GPFS Storage Server is hooked up to the switch with 2 x 56Gbit/s connections per server. So unless I am mistaken, they are sending the data to and from the same storage, albeit through the switch. This sounds more like marketing than a genuine PoC to me.

Re: Prius?

<rant>

Because so many people get all wet in the pants about the prius, as if they are saving the fucking planet. They are far worse for the environment to produce than most cars, due to their complexity; they are not well built, causing multiple deaths [http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2013/01/18/toyota-settles-first-hundreds-wrongful-death-suits-involving-unintended/] and at least one massive recall [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26148711]; and they are not even fuel economical when you get out of a thirty zone.

OK, so battery powered cars are not yet ready for mainstream use, by quite a long way, but if you have an electrically driven car with a relatively small battery (mostly for accelerating and kinetic energy recovery) kept topped up by an efficient internal combustion engine (running at an RPM that is not directly tied to the speed of the car) you have the best of both worlds: maximum torque at 0 RMP, no clutch, regenerative breaking and the power density of petrol/diesel.

The Prius marketing is all about its green credentials, and they are mostly bullshit. Every time I see a Prius, I assume the driver is more concerned about looking like they care about the environment than actually caring about the environment. Or they are an idiot. Or both.

</rant>

Re: Where are the 2TB SSD's?

Buy two 1TB SSDs.

Re: Backslash, Backlash!

Bollocks! The problem is the law, not the telcos. How are the telcos supposed to 'validate' the requests, if not automatically? Who's going to pay for it? The telcos have no power to refuse these requests, so why bother? If I were a telco, I know I'd be doing this automatically. I would also log each and every request, looking for evidence of abuse of power.

I agree. Always on security just means people (Internet users, that is) will just get used to the idea of accepting self-signed certificates. Very dangerous, indeed. At least HTTP isn't pretending to be secure.

Re: There are lies ...

Speaking of fruit based statistics, here's my favourite:

93% of people would put someone's genitals in their mouth, but only 6% would eat a brown banana.

Dr_N is right about the VPN

Netflix is at its best when connected through a VPN. This now means that (English speaking) people living in these new countries can sign up, connect through a VPN to USA (for the biggest selection). My wife an I ditched Sky TV (£21 - £71 pcm + adverts + contract) in favour of Netflix (watch what you want, when you want with no adverts - just so long as they have it - for £6 pcm with no adverts or contract). For the difference in price, you could go ahead and get Amazon Prime as well (also £6 pcm) and still come out way ahead. With Sky, you are paying to watch adverts. Screw that!

Oh, and if you are worried about watching it on your big screen telly, get a chromecast or better still something like a Sony BDP-S1200 (although a doubt the sony has an option to connect to a VPN).

And on the subject of VPNs, if you are not scared of a Linux terminal shell you can (like me) get a VPS in the USA for $13.50 per YEAR (http://lowendbox.com/tag/fliphost-net/). For that you get 500GB of data pcm - plenty. Just install Ubuntu Server, ask nicely to have ppp enabled and install pptpd (plenty of online guides for this). I haven't tried watching Amazon Prime through the VPN, so I can't comment on that, but Netflix works a charm.

Re: Prototype rocket explodes

Exactly. If it didn't explode, they would not have been pushing hard enough. How and why they rockets could explode is very valuable information.

Re: Password fields need to be bigger.

<rant>

I've always had a problem with the maths of that particular cartoon. It treats each word as a series of characters (plus common substitutions), be he actually states that passphrase be FOUR COMMON WORDS. Even if you tried all combinations of the top 2000 words, thats only 2000^4 = 1.6e+13 combinations. OK, thats only a smidge less than his 2^44 (1.8e+13), but I could easily prune that search tree with simple heuristics and word ordering. (I'm actually tempted to try this!). If the password is 8 random visible characters, thats 95^8 (6.6e+16).

I type in login many, many times a day, so it needs to be as quick to type as to remember. No way I'm having a 25 digit password no matter how easy to remember. The only use for this I can think of is that 'verified by visa' bollocks, which won't allow it anyway. Every time I need to use that, I can't remember my password, and every possible variation of my memorable passwords has already been used, apparently, leaving me with no choice but to set a new password every time, with even less likelihood of me remembering it. And all that is needed to change the password is my card details and my DoB, so some thief with my wallet would have no problem.

Anyway, my main point is that a sufficiently random 8 digit password will be hard to crack, and if you use it enough, your fingers will remember it, even if you don't.

Oh, and password managers are just a pointless single point of failure (that could go 'tits-up' [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/12/lastpass_outage/]), and if someone hacks that password, they own you, bitch.

And besides, who the fuck cares what your facebook or twitter password is? Generally speaking, the login password is not the weak link; unless you're a moron with a password like 'password1'

I could go on, but ...

</rant>