Posts by Brian Miller

Re: But with the advent of touch ... we will see a rebound in traditional notebooks

If it was the advent of "grope" instead of "touch" you'd see sales soar through the roof!

Really, I'm not surprised that sales aren't going anywhere. I have two notebooks, a Toshiba from 2006-ish and a Lenovo from 2009-ish. I recently loaded the Toshiba with Ubuntu, and the Android SDK runs just fine. The Lenovo is still going strong with XP, and I haven't decided yet to reload it next year with Windows or a Linux build. There's no point in buying a new machine as long as the old one is more than responsive enough for my needs. I'm planning on buying a Mac, but that's only for iOS development.

Re: Maybe

The manufacturers are trying to turn us into walking antenna towers! Cell phone: radio for cell network, radio for WiFi, radio for Bluetooth; headset: radio for Bluetooth; watch: radio for Bluetooth; smart glasses: radio for Bluetooth.

That's six radio transmitters on your person. Isn't that rather a lot?

Re: ¿Malware?

When I first got my Lenovo notebook a few years ago, the "value added" apps weren't compatible with Visual Studio 2005. I had to uninstall a lot of Lenovo's apps for Visual Studio to behave properly. Also, after I installed Kaspersky and ran a scan, it reported that the Lenovo apps exhibited rootkit-like behavior.

Comforting, huh?

Re: $12.8M is damn impressive...

It's impressive, but how many people didn't sign on who, like me, figured that they'd never make their goal? If it had looked like they would have been close, I would have jumped on it in a heartbeat. But to fund that goal, they'd have needed over 40,000 Linux enthusiasts. And yes, that means people for whom "root" is their name, "make" is just how things are done, "C" is not just a letter of the alphabet, and "Bourne" isn't a secret agent.

I do hope that Shuttleworth will restart the project, but with a lower funding goal, because I would like to have one of those phones.

Re: FCC?

Oh, it's easy to research it as a private citizen. That's been done and published. You don't monitor the servers, you monitor the LCD screens. Modern CPUs are running in multiple gigaherz using multiple cores, so the RFI would be worthless for monitoring. Yes, such things could be done in the days of the 6502, 6809, 68000 et al, but once CPUs got out-of-order execution and instruction caching, it was all over. After all, if you can't tell what's going on inside the chip when you have full bus access with a HP data analyzer, don't expect the NSA to do it from a block away.

And as far as sabotage, compare a saboteur vs knuckle-head developers. Who produces more down time?

Re: I heard..

Actually, that's a good way to screw everything up on a large system. If something doesn't support the instantaneous load of EVERYTHING coming up at once, then you'll have a repeated load failover. Imagine 5000 machines coming up at once, and all of them have the same DNS rotation. One DNS is slammed into oblivion, then they all synchronously jump to the next DNS server which is slammed into oblivion, etc. Eventually somebody gets the bright idea of shutting down most of them, and turning them on a few at a time.

I have no idea what's gone on this time around, though. Good to see it didn't last too long.

Re: In 1975 there was a report called "Coal:Bridge to the future"

Some of it is on the net: http://lawlibrary.unm.edu/nrj/21/3/16_polach_coal.pdf

A really good question, though, is what would happen if electricity were rationed? Chips are always getting more efficient, but how much would be shut down if the NSA was told they could only have 10KW of electricity for data, and how much of Google would go dark? What would a shopping site like Amazon look like if they could only have 5KW of power for their IT?

Re: @Robert Sneddon

Well, Kodak used to have their own glass, but they dropped it. Their glass used to be supreme, and it was rated as being better than Zeiss. Unfortunately, like too much Kodak does, they dropped their Ektar lenses. They're a *film* company, not a camera company. (sigh...)

Kodak has been selling off their jewels and profitable bits for decades, so don't blame it all on the current gang of idiots. Eastman Chemical is doing just fine. Kodak has had plenty of fantastic patents. They sold off everything because they're a *film* company, not a digital technology company. And now they aren't selling that much film. Their industrial document printers are fabulous, but that's not enough for them.

Film is still amazingly profitable for them, but it's just not generating enough revenue to prop up all of the other parts of the company that are dead weight.

Re: Compression

"good PRNG"

If it's a pseudo-random number generator, then its output isn't random! That's the very definition of the "pseudo" part of it. That's why a certain brand of Las Vegas blackjack machines was cracked. You want an output that looks as if it is totally random, for a non-random input. Say you have a camera focused on a busy street. Each frame, you XOR the bytes, and that's your new random number. There's no predictable algorithm generating the raw numbers, so the output is random. A pseudo-random number generator uses an algorithm, so the sequence repeats at an interval. That's what makes it pseudo-random.

That's why a plain-text attack is so brutal on encrypted text. Once you get a guess on that key, you narrow your search down until you've got it. We won't need quantum computers to break encryption because we'll have cheap CUDA and Adapteva machines to try out absolute gobs of keys.

It's called a one-time pad

"... they message could be XOR'd with a random binary sequence and a third sent to each server - not enough for any one party to even think about dencrypting the content but with an inherent back up in the event of a server failure."

One-time pads are unbreakable. I used them while I was in the Army. Imagine Alice burns a DVD full of random data. She sends a copy of that to Bob through USPS registered mail in a secured container. (USPS registered mail is good enough for official secret documents, and is placed under secured storage while in USPS transit.) When Alice sends something to Bob, it's XORed with data on the DVD. After a while, both Alice and Bob destroy their DVDs and Alice sends Bob a new DVD.

As for open source, the problem isn't the services, it's the governments' demand to view the users' data. Where can the data go where a business can thrive? What country absolutely allows private encrypted data to remain private? Any in the first world? Any in the third world? Would you want to be part of a distributed network, which means that at any time government agents could burst in and seize your computer?

Re: 1000 System Admins?

The article states that Snowden + 1000 other sysadmins had access to the data, not that there are 1000 sysadmins at the NSA in total.

But what I keep thinking about is this: So 90% of the admins are tossed out the door, what will the NSA do if the remaining 10% give the NSA the finger and follow after their chums? Then you'll have 39,000 employees who don't know how to work the servers.

Exit the US, and then go where? New Zealand? China? Russia?

Seriously, the only way for something to be "bulletproof" is to be hosted in every single country that can support a data center, and then a shutdown in one country would not result as in a shutdown of the service overall. However, none of this prevents data from being read before it enters the mail servers.

As for throwing a wrench in Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, et al, the big guys have already acceded to the NSA's demands, and they aren't moving out of the US. Ballmer threatened to move Microsoft out of the US, but that was over taxes.

Re: I find it amusing

I would have thought that this would be a wake-up call to abandon off-site cloud hosting entirely. When the data leaves US shores, then it can be analyzed in depth, as much as the NSA likes. Supposedly, if the NSA legally wants your data within the US, they have to get a warrant.

However, no matter how badly (or goofy) the NSA gets, the real problem is with cyber-crime. I just finished reading "Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground," by Kevin Poulsen, and it just blows my mind how some encryption in commercial applications would have prevented a lot of data slurping by hackers. (And of course do things like not use RealVNC, leave back doors open on the machines for tech support, no passwords, or "0000", etc.)

If you really want to be anonymous on the Internet, don't use it, and only pay with cash.

Re: Trying to sum up... and suggestion

There's a gap between weeding out bots and weeding out spammers. I'm on a forum which has CAPTCHAs on user registration, and posting for the first 50 or so posts. The new user registration also includes email verification. This has been effective at removing bots, but has been completely ineffective at removing human spammers.

Here's a way to remove bots: have an image map with a randomly mapped areas with random names. The user can click on the appropriate spot, but the bot will be confused. For audio, ask the user to differentiate between different sounds.

But if someone wants to stop *spam*, then you just have to wait until the bot or person actually posts something.

Re: 4 SPACES?!

" There are no automated tools to help do that."

Have you no editor? Have you no formatting utilities? Good God, man, the C beautifier isn't that difficult to use! What are you using, ed or notepad?

As for coding standards, they change from company to company, and usually are close to whatever the auto-formatting the IDE gives you. VS C# is different from Eclipse Java, blah blah blah. Whoopee. I've worked in places where it was tabs, and places where it was spaces. Put your { here or there, yadda yadda yadda.

The main thing is consistency. Be consistent, and stay consistent.

Re: Not easy to be found innocent at a court martial

A military jury only needs a majority to find someone guilty. The question is, did he do it? Yes. It doesn't matter *why* he did it, but that he did do it. Manning has confessed to doing it, and I doubt that anyone on that jury will vote a verdict of innocent.

Re: So, yeah

If you have a lot of people, it can be much slower than hosting it on-premises. But Exchange isn't exactly lightweight, so good luck with whatever you do.

Re: What goes around, comes around...

But do you remember that before the wall was built, East Germans were fleeing the country? They knew that the wall was there to keep them in. They knew that the West was "free," at least you usually wouldn't be jailed or even shot dead for voicing your opinion. And they knew that if they attempted to cross that border, they would be shot dead.

We now have government agencies prying where they shouldn't, and it keeps getting a rubber stamp by those in power. But we do have something that the East Germans didn't have: a working ballot box. Let's have a bit of global revolution, and revolve some people out of office.

Re: Bravo

I worked with a fellow who told me about the time his Navy ship brought a new IBM printer on board. The crew operating the loading crane banged the printer into the side of the ship, and left a dent in the side of the ship. The printer worked fine.

Yes, I worked with a Sperry-Univac drum printer, running 4,000LPM, so that's about 66 pages per minute. Ricoh has some high-end printers, but not Xerox, and certainly not HP. And none of those are machines that you move around them with a bit of respect for your personal life and limb.

Re: Who uses fast Enterprise Drives Anymore?

Why bother with solid-state "drives" when you can just plug in 3.2 terabytes (4.0Tb raw) on a single PCIe card? Really, what's the point?

Perhaps the data centers want the storage without the huge price of SSD, and they don't need ultimate speed for the application.

The troll has to pay the money back.

A company I worked for got hit by a troll. The troll asked for $X, and the owners were ready to pay. Then the troll asked for $X+N, and the owners decided to fight. They spent $X+N+Y on the defense, but they won, and the patent was shown to be invalid. When a troll loses, the troll has to pay back *all* of the companies that paid it.

Re: What Pebble doesn’t yet provide is

What's the point of a wrist watch?

Which is easier: looking at your wrist or grabbing at your smartphone to take a look at it? As an extension of the smartphone on your wrist, it's a decent idea. At some point there may be something that will clip on to a pair of glasses to provide a heads-up display, and receive user input through, say, a ring or two on your fingers.

Re: Does the update actually help?

According to what I heard on the radio, the update was pushed out automatically by Verizon. The researchers wanted to see a more thorough fix, which would require a hardware update.

The biggest problem is not hacking someone else's femtocell, but deploying your own femtocell for snooping other people's live phone conversations, like what people used to do with scanners before cell phones went to digital.

Movies in Hong Kong, manga & TV series in Japan

They changed the setting when they decided to do the movies. I forget the reasoning why they moved Section 9 from Japan to HK. I doubt that a Chinese version of Section 9 would look anything like a Japanese version. Ah, well.

You want nit picky? The first cyber implant "was" in 2016, GITS is set in 2030, and Kusanagi underwent a full body prosthetic at 6yrs old. So just how old is Kusanagi?? How long would medical technology have taken to move from a simple cyber implant to an experimental full body prosthetic for a small child? And then to top it off, she was full cyborg, and an experienced adult, during pre-Section 9 in Central and South America combat.

Time line? What time line? We don't need no stinkin' time line!