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Comment: Contracting? (Score 5, Interesting) 477

by Daimanta (#46923975) Attached to: Sony Warns Demand For Blu-Ray Diminishing Faster Than Expected

Was it even ever popular? I never had a Blu-Ray player in my house and I have only held a internal player once in my hands. In my opinion, Blu-Ray has failed as a successor to DVD. Even in the autumn days of DVD, you can find disks and players everywhere. With the better Blu-Ray, adoption had been hurting and it has never seen the lift-off its predecessor had. I doubt that a successor to Blu-Ray will fare much better.

Comment: Re:Hard drives have no future. (Score 1) 82

by Daimanta (#46450995) Attached to: Nanomaterial May Be Future of Hard Drives

SSD has gotten less expensive, but it still is about $75/$1.00 a gig, well more than a comparable spinny platter.

More like $0.50 per gig. Prices have been dropping fast and cheap SSDs are finally on the rise. You can now get an 240GB SSD for $100 which is not bad considering this was absolutely impossible one year ago.

Comment: Re:Google WTF are you doing? (Score 1) 154

by Daimanta (#45150687) Attached to: Google To Support Windows XP Longer Than Microsoft

But it's dead simple to install a 3rd party start menu.

Which one works fully? When I tried Classic Shell, I still got the tablet UI in some situations, e.g. when I needed to get to the Control Panel.

Using Windows 8 + Classic Shell. I have configured Classic Shell in such a way that it never shows the tablet UI. And it's nothing more than checking some boxes in the configuration, easy as pie.

Comment: Don't know their science (Score 2, Informative) 88

From the article: That means a 100kg person weighs 700g more near the North Pole, where gravity is 9.83ms-2, than at Peru’s Nevado Huascaran summit, where gravity is 9.76ms-2.

They are implying that mass is a function of gravity. Everybody who has had the most basic fundamentals of physics knows that mass doesn't change, only weight(measured in newtons)

Comment: Re:Self signed? (Score 1) 276

by Daimanta (#44372831) Attached to: Anonymous Source Claims Feds Demand Private SSL Keys From Web Services

I really dislike the way certificates are treated right now. Certs incorporate two different things, namely authentication and encryption. Ofcourse I understand that it is more secure to have an encrypted channel while communicating with a host that needs to be authenticated but the reverse isn't always the case.

Sometimes I am not interested in authentication with a machine because I know that the machine in question is the right one. What I AM interested in is the fact that I should be able to communicate with that machine knowing that an outsider won't snoop on my line. The most common application I can think of where there is only authentication is an SSH-connection. The fact that the link is encrypted is essential given that userdata and other sensitive data passes a lot of(NSA-enabled) routers on the internet. Given the simple authentication(this is the key, are you sure?), you can quickly set up an encrypted connection without the hassle.

The www is more annoying in this respect. You have to buy(this implies paying and spending time) a certificate from a signing authority and only then you can safely browse the web the way it SHOULD be. What complicates matters is that (some/all?) browsers are absolutely allergic to self-signed certs. This is purely placebo since it is just as easy to build your own signing authority and signing your own cert with that authority. Apparantly, some browsers(firefox I'm looking at you) don't have the reserve while the security level is exactly the same since evildoers are probably willing to go the extra mile and create their own signing authority.
There is only one option, allow self-signing as an encryption measure but not as an authentication measure. Naturally you have to take care while doing this since it could implicate that any encrypted connection is secure. On the other hand, I'm not sure that people even look at the cert-status of lets say a bank while they are connecting. The people who do that are smart enough to do the right thing anyway.

Comment: Re:Calling Burston Marsteller a PR firm is a joke (Score 1) 162

by Daimanta (#39160387) Attached to: Foxconn Hires Top Spinners To Defend Its Image

Well, on some fronts the Romanian propaganda certainly worked. The wife of the dictator of Romania, Elena Ceausescu was a woman who never finished middle school. In propaganda they basically made the world believe that she was a renowned scientist(chemical researcher) and the party even managed to get her a doctorate.

But propaganda can never withstand the shining light of truth and the image of the wife of the dicator as a brilliant scientist evaporated after the fall of communism in the eastern block.

Comment: Re:Is your parting line supposed to be a critisism (Score 1) 182

by Daimanta (#38630000) Attached to: North Korean Nuclear Facilities, From 30,000 Feet

Leaflets were dropped for 2 days before the bombings by the CIA warning citizens that the cities were going to be destroyed, and many of them got out of town.

The US also dropped leaflets advising the Japanese to surrender because resistence was futile.

If you are stupid enough to believe enemy propaganda in whatever form, you are pretty stupid. The leaflets could just as likely be a ruse.
