* Posts by tjdennis2

20 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Nov 2012

Surprise! That £339 world's first 'anti-5G' protection device is just a £5 USB drive with a nice sticker on it

tjdennis2

Apparently someone though that people gullible enough to believe that 5G was causing Coronavirus, would be gullible enough to pay a lot of money for a device that would magically protect them.

We (may) now know the real reason for that IBM takeover. A distraction for Red Hat to axe KDE

tjdennis2

Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

I used to work at HP and we setup thousands of Red Hat servers. I don't think any ever had any UI installed. They were all on virtual machines in data centers and SSH was the only access into them. If you did need X11 for some special software package it was probably just VNC with TWM.

For desktop Linux, there are much better distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, etc. You wouldn't want to pay for a RHEL license to get patches for a desktop system.

Crypto-gurus: Which idiots told the FBI that Feds-only backdoors in encryption are possible?

tjdennis2

This is possible to do safely

In needs cooperation with the software vendors, but it can be done. Law enforcement officer gets a warrant and provides it to the app vendor. Vendor creates public/private keys and gives the LEO the private key. Then they send a stream of all the communications to the LEO, all encrypted with the public key. Once the warrant expires, the data stream stops.

This doesn't get them anything from the past just like a wire tap, and nothing once the warrant is over. Every warrant gets a new key pair so no one other than the LEO can decrypt the data. And no one gets a stream of the data from the app without the warrant starting the process. None of this is weakening encryption.

This would also work from any government using the same process assuming the app vendor is willing to work with other countries.

What did we say about Tesla's self-driving tech? SpaceX Roadster skips Mars, steers to asteroids

tjdennis2

Auto drive probably only works if it can see the lane markings...

Amazon Key door-entry flaw: No easy fix to stop rogue couriers burgling your place unseen

tjdennis2

Had a DLink camera like that

I have a couple DLink cameras that instantly freeze as soon as any motion happens in front of them. These Amazon cameras seem about as reliable.

This was a dumb idea from the start. How many people have security systems in place which would prevent this from working? Or pets that could potentially get out of the house if the courier isn't paying attention. Lots more things can happen too.

I like the other poster's idea of just having a self-locking box outside the door for any packages. Drop them in, close the lid and it's locked.

Windows Insiders with SD cards turn into OneDrive outsiders

tjdennis2

Place holders

The new Place Holders feature in OneDrive required changes to NTFS to support the virtual files. I guess they assumed they couldn't support other file systems if Place Holders wasn't something you could just disable.

Coming to the big screen: Sci-fi epic Dune – no wait, wait, wait, this one might be good

tjdennis2

Can't be a single movie

There is far too much content in the book to make a single 2 or 3 hour movie. Even the 3 part mini-series left out a lot of details. Now, if they could do something similar to LOTR with 3 or 4 movies...

Not sure how well the movie would be received these days though considering Paul leads a series of terrorist attacks against the local government to finally take power from the Emperor.

HP Ink COO: Sorry not sorry we bricked your otherwise totally fine printer cartridges

tjdennis2
FAIL

Choice

Choice is always the best customer experience. Even if we choose a bad cartridge once in a while, we can always fix it ourselves. Locking people into your own overpriced ink is the worst in customer experience.

My HP OfficeJet 8600 actually got rated as the worst ink waster in the industry. It wastes ink even when I'm not printing because it wants to be ready in case something comes a long. I'll do everything I can to find the cheapest ink to feed this thing.

YouTube breaks Sony Bravias

tjdennis2

Who uses the internal TV smarts?

The smarts in these TV's have always been under-powered and horrible compared to any external box you could attach. It always seems they put in the bare minimum just to add a bullet point to the sales brochure. TV's should be simple output devices with no smarts at all other than a TV tuner.

There are tons of options out there for adding great interfaces to your TV experience that a TV maker just can't compete with or even keep up with. In Sony's case, they should just provide a discount for their PS4 with a TV purchase instead of trying to duplicate the PS3/4 interface on low powered hardware in the TV.

Australia to spend a billion bucks and seven years on SAP project

tjdennis2

No government contract comes in on budget

I'm not aware of any software project for a government to come in on budget. They better be planning to have at least $5 billion in the budget for it and a couple extra years for the implementation.

The Register has reported on a few projects in Europe with EDS/HP that never went as planned.

Doctor Who: Oh, look! There's a restaurant at the end of the universe in Hell Bent

tjdennis2

Re: After more than 4.5 billion years of the Doctor remembering Clara

He wasn't looping in time, he was repeating the same actions over and over for 4.5 billion years. We joined him after he had already been doing it for 7000 years which is why the stars were different to him. Every time he transported in, it was a fresh copy from the hard drive so he didn't remember the previous attempts. Then he works it out by the end and causes the loop to repeat again.

The question I have is if every time he repeats a skull falls in the water, why wasn't the pile super high after 4.5 billion years? Only the rooms inside the castle were resetting since the pile was already 7000 years old.

Wow, what took you so long? Comcast bends net neutrality rules

tjdennis2

Re: That's the point

> I pay my ISP to deliver bytes in a timely fashion. Getting charged differently for bytes from different sources is wrong.

Think of it this way. The ISP has a connection to the Internet and must pay for that access by the amount transferred. They are counting your bytes at "their" connection to the internet. Every byte that comes from your modem and reaches to the Internet costs them money that they must charge you for.

But anything that originates and stays within their own network and does not go over the internet is not costing them anything so they have nothing to pass on to you for charges. As long as the content they are giving you has not come from the Internet in any way, they shouldn't count it towards your data cap. That would be charging you for Internet access you never used.

If they're just trying to cache Netflix or YouTube data, then that would be from the Internet and they should not be able to give you any special deals.

Of course, in reality, how they make your modem know the difference between the two types of traffic is beyond me. I'm fairly certain they get their byte count from the modem.

Flickering screens turn Microsoft Surface Books into Microsoft Surface paperweights

tjdennis2

Disabling Hyper-V worked for me

Apparently Hyper-V gets enabled if you install Visual Studio and that's when my Surface Pro 4 started flickering. I did a quick web search and everyone said to just disable Hyper-V again which seemed to fix the issue.

Microsoft knows about it and should hopefully be sending out a fix soon :)

Mozilla to boot all plugins from Firefox … except Flash

tjdennis2

Don't confuse plugins with extensions

FireFox is not getting rid of extensions, just the binary plugins which software companies might install on FireFox like video codecs, SilverLight, etc. Think of them like the ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer that everyone has always hated.

Personally, I think they should dump Flash as well since they set the date at Dec 2016. Apple never supported Flash on their iPhones and iPads and we survived that perfectly well. No excuse for web sites not to convert to html5 in the next 15 months if they care.

tjdennis2

Re: So no AdBlock, NoScript, or RequestPolicy then

Those aren't plugins, those are extensions and will still be available. Plugins are the 3rd party binary code modules that FireFox can use.

FCC will vote to cut off 41 million broadband users this Thursday*

tjdennis2

Re: people don't need

Actually, the 640K statement and issue had nothing to do with Microsoft at all. It was someone from IBM that made the statement while they were designing the original IBM PC computer. They had to assign the video card memory to some addressable space within the 1MB that the 8088 CPU could reach and ultimately chose position 0xA0000. That left anything below available to the operating system which ended up being the 640KB barrier.

Later, hardware creators came up with ways to put more memory above this address and Microsoft or others started giving us EMS memory, and then XMS which could go past the 1MB mark on the newer processors. The video memory stayed stuck there in the middle for a long time until the 386 chips came out and could remap everything around it.

Ah, those days were fun...

Dear-ly beloved: Apple’s costly iPad Mini with Retina Display

tjdennis2

The problem is that for manufacturers, the Droids don't last long enough on the market to spend the R&D money. An accessory for an iOS device can have a typical run of 2 or 3 years before Apple changes the hardware shape or interface. That's a lot of time for people to buy the hardware that can use the accessory.

On the other hand, there's a new Android phone or tablet on the market every 3 months so by the time they get a case on the shelves, the next model is out and everyone is buying that instead. So the number of units they can sell accessories for is going to be a lot less. Not worth wasting the R&D money.

Google fine-tuning iOS mapping app for Apple submission

tjdennis2

Re: This is so funny

The problem with your theory here is that Apple wrote and owned the maps app. Google was only providing the mapping data. It was Apple that was updating the maps app over time and they did want to add Turn by Turn. But when they approached Google for the needed data, Google wanted too much money.

Personally, i think Apple should have paid whatever it took and updated the existing application. Their own rewrite has been a horrible mess. I had a 2003 HP iPaq which ran Mapopolis and had perfect maps and directions and I can't believe Apple released something so horrible with ten years of prior mapping experience out there.

iFixit CEO launches open Toshiba service guide scheme

tjdennis2

Are facts copyrightable?

I'm not sure if this is the same in all countries, but sometimes the documenting of facts might not be copyrightable. I'd consider the manuals to just be documentation of what's inside the laptop and therefore, facts. Might be worth arguing.

Monitors to grow half an inch in 2013

tjdennis2

I'd like a square monitor

All this wide screen stuff is very annoying on computers. It's great for my TV where I actually sit and watch TV and movies. But on my computer, I want to do work so a nice 30" square 2600x2600 display would be the nicest thing possible. I doubt I'll ever see it :^(