Posts by DJO

Well that sounds good but if implemented retiring ministers won't get a sinecure at Capita after they leave Westminster, so forget it.

Re: Unclassified email

Yes a boring banal message, with a CC list containing the names of agents and FBI staff.

Often the metadata is more useful then the message itself.

As most politicians seem to have little understanding of the difference between CC & BCC it's not a huge leap to assume some addresses would be revealed, with a copy of that mail it would be easy to construct a similar looking one, spoof the origin and go phishing.

If FBI staff are used to insecure mails from higher-ups it's a weakness begging to be exploited.

Re: Business as usual

No, the rich own the newspapers and that's not the same thing. If you think journalists are rich, you've never met one.

Re: Thales

Don't worry I'm sure* Thales will replace the ones they crashed free of charge.

* "sure they won't"

dob as much shit on handsets as they wish.

But it must be GDPR compliant shit or even more fines. Compliance here means no assumption of permission, no pre-selected opt-ins, full declaration of any data gathered and the ability to uninstall unwanted crud.

What they (possibly inadvertently) give with one hand, they take away with the other. Overall this should benefit consumers.

Re: "but how many people still want a QWERTY?"

I backed the Gemini so it cost me ~£300 which was a bargain, they are still available from the Indigogo backer site for $599 (~£450) which is a fair price. The full UK retail is £600 which I think is too much for the device. So if you want one act quickly.

The Mk1 has a few drawbacks, the USB is weird, 2 C sockets but they are of limited function, the forward facing camera is absolute pants, just adequate for video chat or grabbing QRs but that's about it, no idea how good or bad the optional rear camera is. Due to the magnets holding the case shut they've disabled the compass which is a bit of a bugger. Other than those caveats it's a great toy - excellent keyboard, absurdly high resolution screen (but aren't they all), fast processor and a big (& heavy) battery.

Re: The dragon is waking up

It's a grand cycle

120 years ago America screwed Europe with wholesale theft of intellectual property and undercutting labour costs.

Then Japan did the same to America.

Then South Korea did the same to Japan.

Now China is doing the same to SK.

Next on the cycle will probably be parts of Africa if they can clamp down on the endemic corruption.

Re: "explain rustlers microwave burgers?"

My overriding curiosity is this, though: who on earth—really, who—actually buys that grotesque filth?

I've never actually tried one, they could be ambrosia of the gods for all I know but instinct tells me not to find out.

We all need some mystery in our lives.

Z turned up for the EU, tiny solo UK is an irrellevance and can be safely ignored. I presume that's what you mean.

Re: Money transfer

Conversely the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory tells us that on random events new universes spawn to allow for every possible outcome.

So every or any ticket you buy is guaranteed to win the jackpot, that's easy, the hard bit is being in the right universe afterwards. But for every ticket you buy there's a version of you having a great time (or is found dead in the smouldering wreckage of a Ferrari).

Re: God!!!!

Infinitely preferable to Watney's Red Barrel

As is everything from Chateau Margaux '82 to raw sewage.

Re: Smiles in the aisles

For all those who think F1 is easy and say "anybody could win in the Merc".

Around the UK there are a few F1 simulators open to the public for "racing" sessions. While they might not replicate the experience 100% they are pretty close*.

Have a go on one of them and then tell me driving a F1 car is easy.

* Much much easier, no 200 settings on the steering wheel, automatic gears (optional), no tyre wear, etc, etc...

Re: ZTE and Huaweii backdoor all their chips

Well if there are back doors in the silicon then as most of it was sourced form the US it's hardly ZTEs fault.

But it would be amusing although unsurprising if the US refused to buy kit because of the back doors put in by the US itself.

Re: Nothing cleaver to say,

Axiomatically so

All true, also somebody was breaking in when he was out and sorting out the cheques and maliciously paying them in to our innocent victims bank account.

Really, it could happen to anybody.

Re: Our lunatic planning process

No. it's Ireland's (if you are Irish, sorry) planning process working as it should and NOT riding slipshod over the concerns of the local population and not allowing corporations to vandalise the environment.

Ripping up woodland is never a "green option" no matter where you get your power from.

Re: Oh look

If you can make one that works in a desert

Dry sand will flow almost as well as water, it shouldn't be too tricky to have an arrangement where you fill a hopper with sand and it flows out (like an hour glass) and turns a wheel to generate a trickle of power.

Re: Crowdfunding blunder

Errare humanum est

"contract" not "contact"

Re: This is exactly why I now avoid Apple gear

they should have a 5 year warranty

In the EU there's an unlimited statutory guarantee for design faults and flaws. This should be fixed for free.

Of course in counties where the rights of companies usurp the rights of consumers, tough shit.

Re: Completely bonkers

making it appear that the disc itself was produced and distributed by microsoft.

Yes, that's "passing off". If he had had the media labelled with his company name he would not have been guilty of anything.

More mea culpa - I screwed up the maths, those figures are for a sphere with a radius of 1AU.

To get the right figures multiply everything by roughly 8, so it's

100,000,000,000,000 Welsh area units - or -

1,200,000,000,000,000,000 Putney High Streets.

Or in a more obscure unit: 9.8 x 10^17 miles^2

Re: Nope

I've seen proof of concept of cutting keys from a photograph so hold those keys tight and look out for parked vans with tinted windows.

Re: Eclipsed?

you should not compare a few Mainframes to 10.000s of servers.

If the throughput of a few mainframes is similar to rooms of x86 servers then it's a valid comparison. it's not just the failure rate but the failure mode that's important, when x86 devices fail they tend to stop working, when mainframes "fail" more often than not they send the admin a message and reroute around the afflicted part and continue working, a bit slower but without interruption.

if you also gave the x86 servers an equal amount of I/O co-processors the x86 server would smoke the Mainframe in terms of cpu and I/O performance.

Er, no. The x86 architecture is not designed to carry the I/O loading, if what you say was true then people would be doing it. While you can set up a lot of I/O channels on x86 you cannot use them all simultaneously at full bandwidth.

Regarding the cpu power of Mainframes

Yes you are completely missing the point of big iron, they are never used for processor heavy tasks, that is not what they are designed for. Simply they are for moving huge amounts of data around very quickly and really that's it and that's something x86 does not do well, yes one PC can move a fair bit of data around but it does not scale well and for massively parallel work, forget it.

Re: So Some People Know Nearly Everything About Everybody.... Suprise... NOT

Whenever i hear, that the data has been destroyed, i just do not believe it.

Why not? I'm positive they destroy the data as stated.

Now the copies, backups, analyses, excerpts, reformattings, print-outs and miscellaneous versions, that's a different question. They are all far too valuable to destroy but be assured the original file is long gone.

Re: Penalties

If "corporations are people" then they should pay income tax on every penny they receive.

a rubber stamp that says "Not at this address" and then re-posted anything that came through the door for previous residents.

If you need something incriminating (such as some freshly grown shrubbery) posted to you, getting the poster to send it to the name of a previous occupant can be enough to provide plausible deniability.

Disclaimer: I do not now nor ever endorse any such illegal activity no matter how stupid the relevant laws might be.

Re: Even if it's True...

result in North Korea being reduced to a series of glowing and somewhat radioactive craters.

No it wont. The problem with nukes is the damage can spread to neighbouring areas, Pyongyang is reasonably central so that could be reduced to dust but most of the military bases are near the borders and SK really doesn't want to to become collateral damage, the other side of NK is close to Vladivostok and causing damage there would not be a wise move.

I suppose a narrow central strip could be eliminated making SK into an island and allowing Russia to expand into the other side.

Re: Far Back In The Mists Of Ancient Time

And thus was the Empire forged.

But eventually: "the system broke down, the Empire collapsed, and a long sullen silence settled over a billion worlds, disturbed only by the pen scratchings of scholars as they laboured into the night over smug little treaties on the value of a planned political economy."

"In these enlightened days of course, no one believes a word of it."

Re: Wtf

get a working one from the Yanks?

So once the Yanks had one that worked why did they come up with 2 different solutions for the next 2 missions?

Every payload needs a slightly different solution, what worked for one lander wont necessarily work for any other payload so there's little advantage to be gained.

This stuff is quite complicated*, there's no "off the shelf" solutions when everything is essentially experimental.

I'm certain ESA already have full access to all the design and telemetry from the previous NASA missions and use whatever information is relevant.

* "rocket science"

This doesn't seem to do much against encrypting malware though

Most data files and all executables have a fixed header, encryption will generally corrupt that so it should be possible to detect most cases of encryption on the fly.

Just look to see if the first few bytes of a file change, if so backup the original and then if there are a lot more similarly affected files stop the operation and ask the user if it was intentional.

The idea needs refinement but it should be possible to make it work pretty well.