Posts by Anton Ivanov

It depends

You need to remember basic physics theory. In fact, you need to remember the "perfect black body" experiment where perfect absorption of light and conversion into thermal energy is achieved by letting light through a small opening into a cavity and never letting it out.

So if you do not deal with the windows it will indeed become unbearably hot and will _NOT_ cool down at night. The same is valid for any modern house - it need blinds if you are not to die of heat stroke in the summer. Best kind are external rolldowns. Unfortunately while these are a standard feature on the continent they are nearly impossible to retrofit on a British house because the windows are put flush with the outer wall surface so there is no space for them (unless you put ugly side fascias as well). The same is valid for winter. Even with doubleglazing the windows will still leak heat so you will save more by having decent blinds than by wasting 100 quid per m2 on wall insulation.

In any case, insulating to the extent described in the article does not make any sense because do we like it or not we have to let fresh air into the house. I really would not want to be in a living room with 4 people which has been hermetically sealed so it "heats itself" from their heat. That is even if none of them have eaten any healthy fiber-rich diet. If you want to save a _LOT_ on your heating bill you actually need to build a good ventilation system with a heat exchanger. This however is once again very difficult to fit into a British house without ripping out all floors and re-plastering large portions of the ceilings. I am planning to do start putting some of that in on the next overhaul which unfortunately will be in 5-10 years or so (I made the mistake not to do that 10 years ago on the previous one).

It is the storage choice which drives it

You do not really need a high-end flash drive per node on this one. This is a Linux FFS, they can all boot off a dedicated IO node and run over NFS from it using a separate 1G backplane if needed. This will immediately shave off 3000$ off the ticket price. There are a few other choices here which also make little sense for most Linux workloads. Once the build has been cleaned from the outrageous waste you will be looking at around 10K USD which is not bad for a system in this class.

Does not work

The standard applies to all devices which connec to the GSM network and parts of it are set in stone in EU directives.

You are however on the right track - it is not the iPhone, iSlab, IC**p or whatever else with i* which is the reason for the software SIM discussion.

It is your electricity meter and other telemetry devices especially ones that operate in outdoor environments like water meters. There the extra mechanical contact between the SIM and the reader has a significant probability of failure over the lifetime of the device (usually regulated to at _LEAST_ 10 years). That is why everybody wants it removed. Without it the mobile companies cannot compete for this market in the long term.

So they will introduce it and it will be part of the standard regardless of any Apple involvement.

That is if there is anyone left alive from ground staff

If I was ground staff I would definitely look for a different job. Passive RFID tags need to be irradiated with a sufficient amount of energy to talk back. Doing this in a building the size of the Gatwick departure lounge should be enough to unglue the back of your retina after a few months of constant exposure (if not earlier).

If they really want to do that they should switch to plastic reusable boarding cards with active tags (or other tech like mesh altogether) which are programmed at the checkin and collected before departure. This however is another can of worms which will categorically refuse to be re-canned once it has been opened.

Stop seeing the hand of Jobs everywhere

Who said that it will be an iPhone in the first place. Stop seeing the hand of Steve everywhere for crying out loud.

The first device is more likely to be an electricity meter. There the extra cost of the SIM is actually comparable to the cost of the GSM/GPRS modem.

The engineer installing it already has a toughbook which costs a ££££ anyway.

Nothing really daft here. In fact it makes lots of sense.

Both of my kids suffer from travel sickness, so what

There is only one answer to that - bring them to chose the car. You should see the car salesman face when he asks you what does it take for him to sell the car and you point to a 2 and half year old and say "If she likes it". Especially if you tell them that she vomits in 10 minutes in 95% of all vehicles on the market.

Once you have cracked that, rest like the "disable button" is technicalities.

Excellent

I guess now is the time to look for a bargain basement discounted one.

It is one of the next gen tablet devices that can actually run a proper linux distro instead of being crippled with running a selection of Java-that-is-not-Java.

http://tosh-ac100.wetpaint.com/page/Overview

My only gripe with it so far has been the price. There is no way in hell I am paying 376.00 for a slate even if it does what I want. I'd rather suffer from trying to fight with Linux for one of the pseudo-tablets that the second tier vendors have produced.

Actually I beg to differ here

Microsoft never backstabs its channels on patents and copyrights. In fact it is an explicit part of the licensing arrangements that it will take over the litigation in such cases. It makes a very big point out of it in their marketing.

It is Google speciality to treat the middlemen as per the old Russian proverb (not surprising considering Mr Brin original nationality) which starts with the tradesman is silver, the customer is gold and finishes with: "A posrednik - gavno" (and the middlemen is sh**e). In a world where most companies follow the Microsoft example and ignore the end-customer in favour of the channel this will often give a company a competitive edge (Apple is another one using same approach). It may however backfire in the most spectacular way on occasions.

My gut feeling is that this will be one of those times. Mr Ellison is not someone who will give up a fight easily. Google has finally encountered a company that operates a "confirmed kill" policy in its conflicts and will not back down at handwaving and PR. This one will be lots of FUN to watch.

In any case, it is well deserved as Google should have gone with something like python which is not patent-encumbered and achieve the same result. FFS, Apple managed to make developers swallow Objective C. If that is possible, anything is. Even Perl.

Depends where

In some parts of the world that is indeed the case as this is one of the most standard tricks in the book to dupe customers and especially tourists. That was definitely the case 20+ years back on most Moscow markets. It was "the oldest trick in the book".

Depends which ones

TSA has chosen X-ray.

There are however IR and microwave units on the market as well. IMO IR is the right choice if there is any tech to be deployed at all. It is harmless and it is reasonably good at detecting stuff. The famous German chemistry prof TV stunt does not apply in reality as most passengers will be queuing in line for the machine and before that at the check-in so anything taped to legs, hands, etc will warm up and become clearly visible.

They are also invaluable if there will be another SARS, pigflu or whatever other pandemic of the day scare as people with a fever are immediately visible even they have stuffed themselves with lemsip to the gills.

Same here

We all dream about a proper watch. We sometimes even buy one. And at the end of the day we use the phone. It is "today's watch".

I have been tempted more than once to sit down with a magnifying glass to see exactly what is wrong with my grandad handme-down to my dad and nowdays my hairloom Omega. Grandad apparently got it from one of his patients during WW2 instead of payment for saving his life - he was the only doctor in 200km radius to remember his oath and treat jews and non-jews alike in the middle of the 1944 malaria outbreak in Southern Europe. When he refused to take any money for the quinine the patient "forgot" his watch. From there on it is in my family being handed down for 60+ years now. One problem with it - it stopped working sometimes in the late 90-es and neither my dad, nor me have had the time to look what's wrong with it.

So for a 10th year in a row I keep not being able to find the time to make it tick again. So instead of having a proper "man's watch" in the form of a _REAL_ 1930-es vintage Omega, I still still use my mobile phone instead.

I bet I am not the only one out there who would love to have a "proper watch", even has a proper watch and ends up using his phone again, again and again.

Yeah, right

Walk out onto a street and ask the honest cittisen which has 20K in cash to pay for anything to come forward. I would like to see that honest cittisens.

Yes, we pay much more for cars, houses, etc but we pay that on credit. For stuff like the mask in question or fake identity papers anywhere around the world you PAY CASH or it is the kind of credit you 'd rather never take. The credit that costs an arm and a leg to pay back. Literally. Though usually it is a kidney.

Exactly

I have a dead Sony Vaio Picturebook C1F in my spare parts bin. It is a 2001 machine with 1024x480 screen and dimensions that are even smaller than those of a modern netbook.

While vendors wanted to "think differently" the consumers wanted small notebooks at non-Vaio/non-Tosh pricing and that is what they used the netbooks for. From there on the deliberate crippling of the platform by marketing reqs like "Though shall not have resolution more than 1024x600" killed the market before it could take off.

It is yet another bit of history repeating. Take a bazooka, aim at foot in the name of "non-cannibalisation", shoot. Cannibalising your products is NORMAL. If you do not do that and there is an obvious opportunity and the market is non-regulated someone else bloody well will. The free market will make sure to that. By deliberately chosing not to cannibalise you are giving that competitor an opportunity it may never get otherwise. To make matters worse if you are a monopolist you are also gving that someone the opportunity of a lifetime to break your monopoly. Non-cannibalisation in a non-regulated market is a terminally dumb idea (TM).

The crippling of netbooks gave the tablets finally their chance to shine under the sun, the marketing shenanigans with i810, i840 and the deliberate crippling of i815e and disallowing OEMs to ship systems with full use of its capabilities gave a chance to Athlon to eat a big chunk of consumer space. Let's be real - Athlon was not that much better than P3 and P4 in those days. However, it was not deliberately crippled to specific memory types and limited configurations on purely marketing grounds. And so on... There are plenty of examples to this in just Intel's recent history.

Let me guess for you - Debian

The choice when dealing with a Dead Badger is pretty much between Debian, Debian and Debian.

This looks like a cool addition to my collection of Dead Badgers. I have an original Lenovo S10e but it has been annoying me a bit lately so I mostly use a vintage Y2002 PowerPC TiBook (running Debian of course). I may actually consider replacing the Lenovo with this one.

Hmm... If they discount it after it flops during Xmas I will probably get myself one.

That is not guaranteed to work and will fry the passengers

A femtocell coupled with a suitable controller is 100 times better than any jammer or disruptor. There is a number of particularly entertaining reject codes in GSM which will cause a phone to go into a halt mode. They are hardly ever used because they are not part of the usual compliance spec and some older phones like old Samsung reboot instead of shutting down. The rest supports them fairly well though.

You can just tell all phones that are on but not registered properly with the femto to shut off. You can also detect phones which have been left on with roaming enabled. It can also be used as a security feature by running through the "destination" operators in sequence as "pre-flight checklist" and raising an alert if any phone tries to sign on.

So the real security solution here is not knee-jerk against femtocells. It is to equip all planes with one and actively use them for security management.

You obviously have not tried to read opensolaris code

While I do not write in C myself, I have had to dive into the IP stack and other portions of the kernel on BSD, Linux and Solaris many times for a living.

Linux will not win a beauty award (especially compared to BSD sources which are a pleasure to read). However most of its kernel code is not bad. Most of it is also understandable and can be analysed for security problems through simple code inspection.

Try analysing anything through code inspection on Solaris kernel for laughs. For example its network stack can be undestood only with a BIG jug of something 80 proof and lots of aspirin at hand. Not that the rest of the kernel is much better either... Actually even ethanol solutions and aspirin are not a guarantee that you will grok what is going on. Example - on Solaris tcp is a 1MB+ _SINGLE_ C file with all offload, crypto, etc hooks crammed into that single file. Example on "How not to organise code" (TM). Analyse that? Some other time...

I was going to say the same

Java is not C, C++ or even Perl for that matter. It is not a language where you can hang yourself by a thousand of different, artistic and inventive ways.

Given the same simple problem in Java, two different software engineers would produce nearly identical pieces of code.

That is exactly why Java is the preferred in-house development tool nowdays.

This example produced by Oracle is a proof of Java's power to shoehorn programmers thinking into a standard compliant mold where it is no longer an art or a science but a trade. It is not a convincing example of code being lifted or copied. For that you need a _NON_ _TRIVIAL_ piece of code.

That is in REAL Engineering

Show me how many software companies do a proof of concept for a system before committing to doing it properly? - Very few

Show me how many software companies do a proof of concept that is used for a _PERFORMANCE_ and _SCALABILITY_ verification? In an actual test harness? Well, I have yet to see one.

So it is indeed one car going across the UM bridge because that is what the actor/action/process interaction describes and a few cars going off the agile bridge because there are no railings yet in this iteration.

Forking will not help

Patents, patents and again patents.

It is an essential part of any business development nowdays. It is called FREEDOM TO OPERATE analysis. The person which did the freedom to operate for Android at Google really deserves to be fired. Anything with so many patent traps should have never ever been considered as a direction for development.

Google should have stuck with python and improved the VM for it or gone to something new entirely. Anything but Java.