* Posts by Voland's right hand

5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011

Apple Watch fanbois suffer PAINFUL RASH after sweaty wristjob action

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Did I miss something

Did I miss something or Apple just patented a method to breach an air-gap network at high rate.

Age guessing with Microsoft is FUN! Now give us your metadata

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Really, there were no other massive photos?

And of course this picture is sexist!

Did you get possessed by a Dworkin ghost or something?

Shields up! Shields up! ASTRONAUTS flying to MARS will arrive BRAIN DAMAGED, boffins claim

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Tinfoil Hats?

No. Water ones.

The only way to provide reasonable shielding is if the astronauts are shielded by the propellant. 1m of water goes a very long way towards shielding both nuclear propulsion and cosmic rays. 1m tank + shield around a sphere with 10m radius is ~ 400 tons. If some of this water is used as a propellant to get to Mars orbit and back you are also looking at a journey time under 30 days.

The problem is getting all that water onto the spaceship in the first place. If you are launching from Earth - not a way in hell. It is not feasible. If it has been brought into Earth orbit from the Asteroid belt., than it is a completely different ball game.

IMHO, we are planning things in the wrong order. We have to get (via automated capture ships) to the asteroid belt first and only then we can go to other places in the solar system.

Who thinks Microsoft Edge sucks? Erm, Microsoft

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Hatters Will Hate!

Bursar, did you take too many Dried Frog Pills...

Tesla reveals Powerwall battery packs for homes, Powerpacks for cities

Voland's right hand Silver badge

The 7 years number is a magic number

Anything you try doing on energy efficiency of a house (except insulation) the return is seven years.

Solar ~ 7 years. Heat pump instead of central heating ~ 7 years. Condensing boiler + aux systems necessary to replace at a time) ~ 7 years.

I have done the math plenty of times and once you account for interest rates, etc you suddenly realize that your old conventional gas boiler is not that inefficient.

What is Apple's idiot tax on Watch these days? 'About $265 or 80%'

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Idiot Register

II wonder if the Chinese smartwatches (that existed before Apple Watch) have an 80% margin...

Wrong reference example. That is the margin for luxury goods - f.e. that is the Parvenue Tax on the Omega.

IMHO, Parvenue is more descriptive than Idiot for this particular occasion.

Amazon boss Bezos' Blue Origins declares test flight 'flawless' ... if you overlook one snafu

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Impressive, quite impressive

So which one of the Amazon packagings (A7 maybe?) will this "drone" deliver. Can I order a scheduled delivery of "flowers" to someone I like? Do I need a Prime account?

All right, jokes aside - very impressive. With that engine they are only a few steps away from orbital flight - it is the same thrust as the engines in the Falkon 9 (~440 or thereabouts). That is more than enough to put a payload into orbit. Or a Prime delivery on some dictator's lawn.

Ha! Win 10 preview for Raspberry Pi 2 pops out of the Microsoft oven

Voland's right hand Silver badge

I could

They perceive Pi as a threat in Education which they have nearly monopolized outside worldwide.

Note - unlike the Linux Pi you also need a fully blown remote Windows PC to work on it. Two windows licenses for the price of one and all in the name of Education. Hurray. Now watch it being driven top down to all schools. In the olden days there would have been salesman visits by Billigatus himself to the Bliar and the other top politicos. It is interesting what level will go Nadella to push it.

Is Grant Shapps being naughty on Wikipedia – or did a Lib Dem stitch him up?

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: We can see the edit history and discussion.

I do not need to think here.

Let me just consider it. A "Web Marketeer". Once again, let me consider it, "A Web Marketeer". No, I do not need to even consider which one is more likely to be telling the truth and which one is not.

Snapdragon 810 chip doesn't overheat, jilted Qualcomm sniffs at LG

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Compared to most phone case materials leather is an insulator

Compared to most phone case materials leather is a good heat insulator. So something that would have fit in the thermal envelope of another phone, may be too hot for this use case.

TomTom MyDrive brings satnav syncing to PCs and mobiles

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: TomTom Go Mobile

That is why I use Sygic. Same map database, same traffic sources (except some of the Eastern European countries), none of the gimmic idiocies.

And most importantly - it works.

I have clocked 20k miles around Europe and some reasonable mileage around USA with it so far. My only wishlist is that they stop being stupid about limited MIrrorLink availability. They have it now working for a fixed set of maps and a fixed config which is only available as a bundle. If you want to add it as a feature to an existing purchase it is a no go. Based on what they have done so far, my guess is that it is only a matter of time until they fix it.

Android gaming platform Ouya is down to its last life

Voland's right hand Silver badge

It is the usual story of app delivery

If you are building a platform for which somebody else owns the app and content delivery (Google in this case) you might as well switch to digging your own 7x2x6 feet hole in the ground. Their only chance was to sell themselves day one to Google, Amazon or one of the TV players which has content aspirations and no console and that chance did not come along.

Ryanair stung after $5m Shanghai'd from online fuel account

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Well... color me surprised...

My guess would be that the budget allocation for Internet Security is comparable in priority to the budget allocations for Customer Care, compliance with disability law and a few others like that. That would explain it.

NASA spies weird glow from Pluto's FRIGID pole

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: "The US has been the first to flyby every planet of the Solar System"

Same for Mars:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1962-061A

Don't you love people rewriting history in the name of Public Relations...

US Congress promises death to patent trolls in bipartisan law scribbling

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: peer review?

This will work only in "hotly contested" areas which usually have funding anyway so they do not need it that much as it is not difficult to find a sponsor to work on invalidating the patent using the existing review procedures.

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Does nothing...

Just ban software and business method patents. Plain and simple.

Why the US government reckons it should keep phone network kill-switches a secret

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Jack Bauer....

Nothing - the remote cellphone trigger will probably have alarm(s) set too as a failsafe.

'Android on Windows': Microsoft tightens noose around neck, climbs on chair

Voland's right hand Silver badge

That depends on how do you define obscure app

What this will solve is the "casual" games gap. Apps gap - not so much.

While the emulation layers are generally good enough to run "Where is my Water N" for various values of N, they start falling over once GPS, Bluetooth, etc come to play. So, for example, if Torque is your "must have" "obscure" app, this move will not make you switch to windows phone any time soon.

Similarly, where running "Where is my Water" under emulation may work, Shadowgun or the Sonic equiivalent of Minion Rush will probably have issues with graphics performance. The gap to QNX is much smaller than to Windows by the way. The graphics APIs there are very different.

I agree - that is likely to kill the patient

Fondleslab deaths grounded ALL of American Airlines' 737s

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Now an intelligent design

Hmm, that would more than double the cost of getting the software written and of maintaining the two systems

The cost of a single outage is in the millions. I doubt that the cost of maintaining different makes and versions for the Captain and co-pilot is anywhere near that.

New EU security strategy: Sod cyber terrorism, BAN ENCRYPTION

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: It is unacceptable

How about not creating conflict zones which haemorrage weapons around our borders for starters?

That is much simpler, and generally more effective.

If we did not openly and actively sponsor fanatics waging civil wars on the Russian periphery and in the Middle East for the last 20 years the AK47s (actually, most of them are AK72 nowdays) would not have been there to be sold in the first place.

Free markets aren't rubbish – in fact, they solve our rubbish woes

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: When I was a kid

That system seemed to die out in the UK about 1960ish.

That system died worldwide by ~ 2000. Prior tot hat we used to have a joke in college that no party is woth mentioning if it does not have a non-zero first derivative (e.g. f you cannot buy some booze after returning the bottles). A really big one had a non-zero second derivative. Add your jokes about e^x, integration, etc here :)

The difference is in what replaced it:

In most countries it was replaced by plastic which still largely goes into landfill regardless of all the efforts to recycle it.

In a few countries which already had strict recycling and environmental regs it was partially replaced by an alternative system where the bottles are melted and recast a-new instead of being washed. It is reasonably cost effective and more enviromentally friendly than plastic for small (250ml and 330ml) containers.

The Apple Watch: Throbbing strap-on with a knurled knob

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Obvious reasons

How about this reason: "Because I do not want a browser and on-screen keyboard".

It is rank raving lunacy to stick a browser on it (and a keyboard) when you have a 5in + slab to type and read on.

The value of the watch (or any other wearable that does not interfere directly with your field of vision) is in unobtrusive notifications, sensors and a set of simple UI tasks which specifically relate to these two categories. If you need to use a keyboard on a wearable, that means that the UI design for that wearable is a failure. This bit Apple got right (and so does Pebble and most of its apps). The current crop of Android smartware has this wrong. The level of wrongness is different - from Sony which tried, but failed to get it right (it was on the right track, just too early on) to Samsung whose Smart Watches are a complete idiocy as they are effectively a second phone - one you wear.

In any case, when you give it a thought, let's suppose we have the next wearable gadget - a wearable ring or an earing (there are use cases where making either of these smart may make sense). So, what's next - having a keyboard and browser on that too? Mobile radio? Wifi?

C++ Daddy Bjarne Stroustrup outlines directions for v17

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Direction number one

Put the poor thing out of its misery. Let's face it - it now looks like the creature from The Fly.

Do the C++ and Java fans like it or not, a lot of the modern stuff like functional programming constructs heavily depend on late evaluation and runtime type checking. Trying to fit this square peg into the round hole of the strict compile time type check has resulted in a horryfying generics and lambda syntax in both. C++ (and Java) were not the most easy to comprehend language before that. With that, they are almost as bad to read as sysadmin (not professionally written) Perl.

Just taking one look at the C++ (and Java 8 for that matter) shenanigans to implement any of the recent "must have" programming language features is enough. This thing has outlived its time, it is time for it to be put into maintenance mode instead of having new features grafted onto it.

Citroën C4 Cactus BlueHDi: A funky urban crossover

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Why?

If you are driving in a city there are more compact alternatives with better internal organization, use of space and better power trains.

If you are driving it outside a city those funky road panels are going to produce both drag and noise. No thanks. If I need something for motorway use I will chose something with better comfort, streamlining and not as gutless as this.

If you have the rather insane idea of taking it into real crossover territory and use it for "mild" offroad in the domain of the now unfortunately no longer manufactured Daihatsu Sirion 4WD, the (unfortunately unavailable in the UK) Suzuki Swift 4x4, Old (real) Subaru Forester or even the good old Panda 4x4 you are toast. It will survive for about 30m in the "native territory" of these. Come on - I do not even see it traversing a rather "mushy" wet lawn without getting stuck. Or getting you to the bottom of that ski slope in a European mountain of choice with 4 inches of snow on the road.

I am not going to even comment about proper 4x4 territory. This is the Rover StreetWize of the year 2015 - all style, no substance.

Google TUGS Nexus 7-INCHER from its online store

Voland's right hand Silver badge

It did not stop at 4.4

There is 5.0 on Google site and is installable via autoupdate. Word of warning - it will make your otherwise decent tablet virtually unusable and rolling back for some models is nearly impossible because the "official" downloads when used using the "official" install over USB procedure brick your tablet.

You will need to combine a bootloader from a pre-release build and your OS load of choice to make it work.

To be more exact you need bootloader build jwr66y or earlier. jwr66v bricks the device. After that you will also need to turn the upgrade nags off because Google will continue to nag you to "upgrade" to the unusable 5.x series builds which break wifi, make the tablet ~ 3-4 times slower in UI responce, etc.

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: dell 7in?

I tried Lollipop on my Nexus 7 and rolled back. It was basically unusable.

I had to hack it anyway - as Google + Asus have broken the bootloader and it now bricks your tablet if you try upgrading it. So I downgraded it back to Kitkat. It now works fine and it is not going to be seeing any upgrade any time soon.

ZOMBIE Google Glass 2 FEEDS ON Italian BRAINS, says specs supremo

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Glass always has been, and always will be,

It's working decently in certain areas of the workplace, It is a great accessory for a cop. Face recognize, Face match, Dredd mode activate.

I find it difficult to see what are the legit civilian applications in a public space though. As a "civilian" it is not my freaking business to know the names, sexual preferences, age, political orientation, etc of every person on the street (it is something google or fbook can easily dump in front of the glasshole eyes). Doing so is an unacceptable invasion of privacy (despite happening in a public space). Even as a cop it is clearly beyond the limits of what is considered a reasonable search.

DRM is NOT THE LAW, I AM THE LAW, says JUDGE DREDD

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: below is a list where DRM successfully stopped piracy

Invalid xml my friend, invalid xml. That failed to parse :)

Good news! Your job's not going to the Philippines

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: The race....

I would not be so sure - Just the opposite.

Some of the countries moving towards the top have _HIGHER_ salaries (Czech republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania) and significantly higher per employee costs due to the social security requirements (one year mandatory maternity leave, etc). Specifically in IT and CS you are also looking at comparable or higher starting/graduate salaries than in UK.

So it is not race to the bottom any more. It is now a race for value for the money which is an entirely different ball game. That is a game I am willing to play (as I know I can win).

Got a big day planned in 15 billion years? You need this clock

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Obligatory Terry Pratchet reference

Someone is building a glass clock again...

Booking.com smacked by EU competition bods. Yeah, yeah, yeah

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: The trouble is...

The booking conditions are not identical.

Hint - look at the pet clause.

This is what the hotels presently use to get around Booking.com contract. They publish on Booking.com a "no pets alowed rate" and they do a special "pets welcome rate" for direct booking. The pet rate is not advertised on Booking.com so Booking.com can go stuff it on their exclusivity clause.

I know at least several hotels in 4 countries which all do that (Bulgaria - 2, Spain 4 off the top of my head, Hungary - 1, Czech republic - 2 off the top of my head). And this is only the places I know and use :)

RSA supremo rips 'failed' security industry a new backdoor, warns of 'super-mega hack'

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Audiences

Indeed. Though even at home you are starting to look at defence in depth. If you have kids you simply cannot afford not to - you never know what they will drag in from the Internet despite all of your firewall and AV efforts.

Nork hackers no pantomime villains, but a hugely unpredictable menace

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Hmmmmm.....

As a ratio to valid traffic - much less then the smurfs and other broadcast reflection attacks that were flying around in 1998-1999. In those days it was a significant fraction of the traffic. On a really bad day in an ISP NOC you could have half of your traffic comprising of DOSes. Now - not so much. A DOS here or there is big, but DOSes as an overall proportion of the traffic are significantly less than what they used to be during the early days of amplification attacks (amplification by directed broadcast from a spoofed source).

Apple will cut down 36,000 acres of forest in 'conservation scheme'

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: which company is worse?

Undoubtedly HP. I have seen stuff like 4 boxes one in another to ship a _PAPER_ confirming your license.

KABOOM! Billionaire fingers dud valve in ROCKET WIBBLE PRANG BLAST

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: hes got money and he is going to spend it

Just so it's clear, the booster returns the surface about 200 miles from the launch point, not at the launch point itself.

You missed one - transporting the rocket back 200 miles on land is a major logistical exercise. Transporting it on a barge at sea is a piece of cake.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Tortilla de patatas

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Potatoe variety

I beg to differ. Real canarian spud grown in volcanic ash (not fake imports).

The best Tortilla I have had was in a small hamlet in the middle of nowhere on La Palma. Actually, once upon a time you could have a decent one even on Lansarote. Not now of course - papas do not grow well in a concrete parking lot.

US Navy's LOCUST DRONE CANNON is like death SWARMED up

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Prior art

You call that a drone swarm?

Now this ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-700_Granit ) is a drone swarm. Thankfully, never ever fired in anger.

RADIOACTIVE WWII aircraft carrier FOUND OFF CALIFORNIA

Voland's right hand Silver badge

If they deliberately scuttled it they'd be pretty stupid to forget to take the planes off first.

Not if they were glowing in the dark.

Governments lodge just 10 subpoenas for GitHub user info

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Interesting

All three Russian requests are related to misusing github as a pastebin for "the suicide guide". If memory serves me right, the Russian law involved here dates from the Stalin's days - it is one of the articles in the criminal code which prohibit assisted suicide. I would have expected that to be dropped during the edits in the 90-es and 2000s. Guess not.

The articles are available from outside Russia by the way - nothing earth shattering in them.It is also not "law enforcement" (as in article). It is the Russian equivalent of Trading Standards (which in Russia has teeth by the way, though it tends to use them selectively).

Nvidia's GTX 900 cards lock out open-source Linux devs yet again

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: firmware

card too old, the vendor is not shipping updated drivers any more Bingo - nailed it on the head.

Nvidia has a policy to force obsolescence of older GPUs at driver level long before they need to be obsolete as hardware.

There is nothing wrong with 620 series for example. I have a nice fanless PCIE Quadra and couple of nice fanless 620s which are still more than sufficient for nearly every use a non-hard core gamer will make of them. However, I can no longer use them with their drivers because they have set an "obsolete" mark for them. They are no longer supported. I cannot run them with noveau either because they run too hot (last time I tried) due to lack of dynamic frequency management.

As a result they are sitting in the spare parts drawer and all desktop GPUs have now been replaced by AMD. For these, I still have to run the proprietary Catalyst driver for a couple of months on the newest parts, but I can switch to the free one shortly thereafter.

Oracle grunts, grimaces, pushes out 98-flaw security patch batch

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Might be a bit less painful if they were a bit more "regular"

Ya call that constipation, now early 2000-es was Oracle constipation. They were not releasing security fixes for years in some cases.

In any case, the CVE database has no info on the vulns (they are just reserved numbers) and there is no announcement with actual vuln contents on BUGTRAQ. What a bunch of ... ... ... ...

Revealed: The AMAZING technology behind Apple's $1299 Retina MacBooks – a lot of glue

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Well duh!

Not just that. I do not see how this is compliant with Eu Electronic Waste directive and its counterparts in various USA states and Japan. I am starting to wonder how much of the "other Sir Johny juice" has been used to grease it getting a CE kitemark - it should not have gotten one as it is not compliant to current regs for consumer equipment in their recycling portion.

A car built with this level of disregard for the equivalent (slightly older) regs for recycling for cars would have been prohibited from sale.

Easy ... easy ... Aw CRAP! SpaceX rocket ALMOST lands on ocean hoverbase

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Just a thought:

RP_FLIP

That is an interesting idea. However, it does not have the mass to convert to a landing pad. You are looking at a "monster FLIP" with displacement ~ 10x the displacement of the original RP_FLIP to do that. At least.

I would not be surpirsed if Elon builds something like this when the idea reaches production stage as it can double as a launch pad as well.

1. It makes his march towards "The Ultimate Supervillain" status nearly complete. Add a large fake tanker and no Lotus driving Brit teamed up with a cute "Russian" (quotes intended) agent will be able to defeat him.

2. From a cost-saving perspective he no longer has to lease the fairly expensive pads at NASA facilities.

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: ..

Size matters.

Like it or not a Nimitz class monster does not wobble too much. It is just too BIG for that.

Compared to that landing on a small barge is a different exercise in its entirety.

Google’s plan for WORLD DOMINATION takes shape. And it begins with a patent

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: So "Don't be evil"...

You should look at this in context:

http://blog.efeciftci.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/terminator-linux41-825x510.jpg

We have only a few more Linux versions to go.

Kia Soul EV: Nifty Korean 'leccy hatchback has heart and Seoul

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Where your wallet is

If you commute by car.

1200£ per year 30 miles daily round trip, 250 days per year, assuming traffic congestion, jams, waste of fuel, etc. 8400£ savings. Services are cheaper too ~ 1000£. Tax is zero (for now) ~ 1000. All in all - it pays back on face value as a second household car/commuter vehicle within warranty. The biggest Kia problem (for me) - it being a vomit comet boat is largely alleviated by moving of centre of gravity lower so it does not wobble so much. You can charge overnight, range does not matter because your workplace is within round-trip range.

All in all, it looks viable. In fact, this is the first EV I have seen so far which is good enough to be considered as a possible replacement for the Daihatsu which we use as a city runabout when (and if) it decides to go to the great scrapheap in the sky.

Labour manifesto: Tech Bacc, not-spot zapping and hi-speed interwebs

Voland's right hand Silver badge

@ Evil Graham

Actually for the great majority of people, the intricacies of the insides of a computer are way beyond their skill or desire to understand.

So is mathematics, chemistry, physics and astronomy. We do teach them in school though.

It does not matter if they will use it even once during their lives. What matters is that they have an idea how it works and have acquired some structured thinking in the process of figuring out how it works.

In any case, while the intention was to teach them in schools, the schools did their very best to obstruct the intention. Same as with academies - given even an inch of deregulation a unionized state employee will peruse that deregulation to do less work.

Learn yourself hireable: Top tips for improving your tech appeal

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Just contribute to a project

Same (or better) result, fraction of the cost and a "live CV" you can point at - "I am the guy who wrote this". You also learn stuff in the process - how things work, compliance practices, coding practices, testing practices, integration practices, etc.

It is not necessary to be a developer by the way - there is plenty of sysadmin, automation, etc projects to go around which can be used for such a CV uplift.

Yeah, I know, unpopular compared to "loading the tape*" with the latest "career info" into your head at a course/exam.

* The "tape" reference is from Azimov's "Profession". It used to be a mandatory reading for an engineering degree in MIT. Probably still is.