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User: grantek

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Comments · 186

  1. Re:Messaging? on Facebook To Buy WhatsApp · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's Jabber, but without the hassle of account creation. Username is automatically set up as your phone number, and password is your IMEI or something.

    So it's about as secure as SMS, but also as practical for technophobes. It's free of charge and allows much more data than SMS (file transfer of pics etc.), which is why people use it.

  2. Re:You might smuggle the gun.. on Defense Distributed Has 3D-Printed an Entire Gun · · Score: 1

    If you've got access to propellant it'd often be better to build a Kirk-style blunderbuss out of strong pre-formed tube. It's hard to imagine a situation where you have access to a 3D printer and appropriate plastic, AND happen to have a couple of small-calibre low pressure bullets, but I'm sure there are edge cases where this will do nicely.

  3. Re:Before anyone asks... on Hitachi's Tiny Robo-Taxi Carries 1 Passenger and No Driver · · Score: 2, Funny

    You don't have to use the windows though, if you want you can just sit in the back with your wine.

  4. Re:big deal on Gamer Rewrites Valve's Steam Installer For Debian · · Score: 1

    No no, it's the other way around. Debian is Ubuntu for people who don't want to go to the hassle of configuring privacy settings or uninstalling bloat.

  5. Re:Where have I seen this before? on Carmack On VR Latency · · Score: 1

    Well it's funny, there was a horde of people suggesting more basic versions of John's warping techniques in the comments section to Michael's blog post. They were all dismissed because he felt the silhouetting John talked about was too much of a deal-breaker for realism. John's experiments seem to suggest otherwise, so it'll be interesting to see two competitive headsets using different sets of tricks to try to fool peoples' sense of realism.

  6. Re:science or tech on Microsoft Wants Computer Science Taught In UK Primary Schools · · Score: 1

    I personally think CS education is sorely lacking in primary school age kids, but at that age it's got nothing to do with computers. Just teaching kids basic logic (you can do it formally or in the form of logic jokes and riddles for the kids that learn in different ways) goes a long way to setting them up for CS and other sciences, but it's also a valuable mental tool to have when you start getting affected by politics, propaganda, and marketing in the real world

  7. Re:how can the stalwarts of gaming keep up? on The Tiny Console Killers Taking On the PS4 and Xbox 720 · · Score: 1

    Rural areas. Dialup and satellite internet suck in this application. 3G? Unless one has a large data cap or uses their console infrequently.

    A "preloaded USB stick" service would be nice from an internet-only store, say if they could do an 8GB stick for $5 and you have the game within a week. You'd still need the dialup connection to decrypt the USB stick files and install to your console, but if you're on dialup you're not going to be playing multiplayer over Internet, so you can safely tell your console not to attempt to update whenever a patch is pushed.

  8. Re:Fuck secure boot. on Matthew Garrett Makes Available Secure Bootloader For Linux Distros · · Score: 1

    If you follow the money, it's actually about protecting IT from corporate users. No more, no less. You don't need a conspiracy to explain it when a billion dollar problem is staring you in the face.

    Then why is Microsoft signing a "click OK to continue" shim that allows corporate users to install their own "untrusted" OS onto a system that only trusts the Microsoft key? Does MS have a more restrictive key that can be installed manually by IT departments? If so, could that be part of an evil plan to then get it onto generic vendor machines?

  9. Re:ARM Linux Netbook finally arrives? on ARM-Based Chromebooks Ready To Battle Windows 8, Tablets · · Score: 1

    Would you trust a vendor preinstall of a desktop linux distro? Standard practice for Windows power users is to put down a clean install of the OS over whatever the vendor preinstalled, for power users I'd be happy with doing this for GNU/Linux distros even when the system comes with some flavour of Linux-based OS.

    ChromeOS provides a set-and-forget OS that avoids the Microsoft tax and works for the non-power-user. As long as there's a supported method of reinstalling an unsigned OS (previous iterations of Chromebook have had this, but it's always something to watch for), that should be suitable for the power user to reinstall over.

    In the magical future when there's big commercial support for users on desktop GNU/Linux, then it will be important for vendors to preinstall a desktop-grade OS, but not now. ChromeOS devices should become cheaper and cheaper, not more and more powerful for the same price.

  10. Re:This is what Microsoft wants on Why Microsoft Shouldn't Copy Apple's iOS Walled Garden · · Score: 2

    This is actually a good point - Microsoft have gone through decades of pain being the target of malware, have suffered through it, and at this point have something of an immune system developed with Security Essentials and the ecosystem of third-party anti-malware. It's definitely an advantage over Apple, whether or not it's the best way to go.

  11. Re:Oh? on RIM CEO: 'There's Nothing Wrong With the Company' · · Score: 2

    Read your signature as part of the conversation, wasn't out of place.

  12. Re:Hack your phone on UK Police Roll Out On-the-Spot Mobile Data Extraction System · · Score: 2

    Of course, there are issues of UK police forcing you to hand over the encription keys (they have a legal right to do that in UK).

    What would be nice is an encryption setup mode where you have your password/authentication plus 4k of random data (like a big salt). When you set up the encryption or subsequently boot the system decrypted, it regenerates the random data and re-encrypts the internal final decryption key with your password+new random salt. When you shut the phone down normally, the salt is saved in cleartext and you're ready to go upon next boot, but if you yank the battery or shut down in "panic mode", the salt isn't saved and the phone is unrecoverable by you or anybody else. If you're worried about losing data, you could also have "saved salt" as the default mode, and the only way to render the device unusable would be to shut it down in some sort of "panic mode"

  13. Re:No more Unity 2D? on Google Talks About Its Ubuntu Experience · · Score: 5, Informative

    Unity3D will still be usable without GPU acceleration, it will use a new software implementation of OpenGL called llvmpipe. llvmpipe is a much better software rasteriser than we've traditionally had, but it's still software which means it's significantly slower than even the simplest of hardware OpenGL implementations.

  14. Re:The easy way on Ask Slashdot: How To Make My Own Hardware Multimedia Player? · · Score: 5, Informative

    Even with the best of tools and setups, pure streaming is not always an option. My synology NAS barfs on .mp4s sometimes.

    Your NAS doing DLNA is doing more than a NAS needs to. XBMC happily supports connecting to Samba or SFTP shares within the application, or you could just use NFS and attach the NAS share to the local filesystem. If a NAS cares about what type of file it's sending over a plain filesystem access protocol like that it's a broken NAS.

  15. Physical security on Ask Slashdot: Making a Tablet Run Only One Application? · · Score: 1

    I saw a demonstration at a car show where one of the manufacturers had an app on iPads that were mounted in perspex boxes. The home key was covered and inaccessible except through a pinhole, and that was "hard enough" to get around given they had staff in the area to keep an eye on people.

  16. Re:Storing passwords (not as easy as you think) on Zappos Hacked: Internal Systems Breached · · Score: 1

    Ooh. User ID #67215298's password is "correct horse battery staple". Who is user ID #67215298? Uh... we haven't cracked that server yet.

    Yes you have.

  17. Re:Remote Usage? on The Pirate Bay To Stop Serving Torrent Files · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you can get a .torrent file onto a remote downloading host you can get a text file with the magnet link there.

    Alternatively, you can use a client-server torrent client (like deluge), where the GUI appears on your workstation but the downloading happens on the remote system.

  18. Re:Unforeseen consequences on A DNA Sequencer Cheap Enough For (Some) Doctors' Offices · · Score: 3, Funny

    This is a completely different machine, it's not the one that TSA agents will use to remotely scan your DNA...

  19. Re:Regardless of THIS flaw on Facebook Flaw Exposed Private Photos · · Score: 1

    In addition to that if you have the static URL to the photo it persists after the photo has been deleted as well.

    Well, that's to be expected when using a static cache - it's the only way DNS can manage, for example (DNS changes take a while to "propagate" through the Internet).

    If the deleted content is still there a week or more later, then you've got problems.

  20. Re:Here we go full circle on Video Game Consoles Are 'Fundamentally Doomed,' Says Lord British · · Score: 2

    But to be fair, isn't it possible to put an SSD into the console to replace its HD?

    Read the title of the thread you're replying to.

  21. Re:Obligatory tin-foil fueled comment on CyanogenMod 9 Working On the Nexus S · · Score: 1

    Something about seeing the phrases "pre-rooted" and "Google Wallet" in the same sentence scares me.

    You want your financial details to be secured by allegedly-trusted hardware? I'd rather a secure cryptographic protocol that requires the client only to have the correct credentials. Sure, having an unwalled garden (the 'pre-rooted' bit) will lead to data theft through malware, but it's no different to being conned out of cash from your physical wallet.

  22. Re:DRM = bad on Penguin Yanking Kindle Books From Libraries · · Score: 2

    If I followed that philosophy I'd be stuck playing crap little "old-school" styled indie games instead of something immersive and deep like Deus Ex: Human Revolution (which is only available on Steam, which of course uses DRM).

    Something tells me you went for the upgraded neurochip in the game :P

  23. Re:Hmm.. on Ask Slashdot: Best Tools To Aid When "On Call"? · · Score: 1

    So whatever is in a Bond movie is reality?

    I thought so, at least that it was based on the personal experience of at least one person who was involved with writing or setting up the scene. I assume they have advisers from intelligence or law enforcement with their own inane but amusing anecdotes, but yeah, everyone's different.

  24. Re:Hmm.. on Ask Slashdot: Best Tools To Aid When "On Call"? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Give her some nyquil?

    Honestly, after a few weeks you won't even need that. I can be called with a loud ringtone, have a discussion with the helpdesk about the problem, stumble out of the room to go work on it, stumble back into bed a few hours later, and my partner doesn't even realise I was called the next day. Now that she's on call as well the same thing happens to me - if you wake up and you're tired, and your subconscious knows you don't have to get up and work, you can fall back to sleep as soon as your head relaxes back into the pillow.

    I remember watching a recent Bond movie (I think it was Quantum of Solace) where Bond calls M in the middle of the night and she logs onto a workstation built into the bedside, if you look you can notice she has a partner in bed that doesn't budge an inch :)

  25. Hook it up to Facebook on Startup Testing Mobile Farmbots · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you need a bit better pattern recognition or control there's thousands of people willing to do farming from their PCs for free.