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Comment Rainy Season (Score 1) 346

From mud to mosquitos a host of torments are continually endured by body and mind, but it's not as hot as dry season when the heat never stops, when sleep is no escape for dreams fixate on the burning sun, not that hot.

Comment Win8 may be a predictable slash and burn stratagem (Score 1) 391

Microsoft must look with cold calculating green eyes at Apple's success in selling overpriced consumer devices, apps, and content.
The traditional personal computer allows customers to install third party software creating no additional revenue for Microsoft. With a fiduciary duty to shareholders to maximise revenue, Microsoft strategists seem to be hell bent on the goal of selling millions of client devices that customers can only use to buy apps and content through Microsoft's online facilities.
To achieve this vision, a world of walled garden consumer devices, it looks like they are willing to follow Apple and abandon the general purpose computer.

Comment Re:Lots of patterns (Score 1) 466

Ok possibly delimiters, but he has spaces, lines, and brackets to delimit.

I'm seeing this guy as coming at it from a completely different perspective compared with textbook cryptography, because he started inventing it when he was a boy. Like a programmer, he probably honed his system over time.

In his scheme, SE is used so much it could be an abbreviation for the status of something he's observing, eg if he was single and straight it's possible he was looking at women and SE stands for "Seems Easy", whereas "South East" is unlikely as other compass directions don't appear. Other letters could be initials for people.

Where was he and what was he doing when he'd write these notes? Looking at tv, reading comic books? I'm betting the key to this cipher is not a traditional cryptography key, it's dispersed in the minutiae of his life.

Comment Re:Lots of patterns (Score 1) 466

There's another thing that gets me about this. This guy takes privacy measures, and since no similar notes were found in a regular search of his residence, maybe he has a stash well hidden under a loose floorboard or something...

If these are notes he uses short term and then discards, they may well be trivial, but still might yield information that places him and/or others in the days preceding his murder and thereby open a new line of inquiry.

But why would he go to the trouble of encoding trivial information. Maybe it was it for fun, control, a sense of achievement/feeling smarter than the rest, or was he hiding something... Could be a mix of motivations, and a mix of topics being recorded, but knowing one motivation to record secret notes would narrow the field.
I wonder at exactly what age he first started and what events occurred in his life before or around that time, the first motivation could well have carried on, eg he notices girls and starts recording things about them.
While no-one in his family can decipher the notes, do any of them have any idea WHY he started keeping notes, they'd need to think back, painful as it may be...

Comment Re:Lots of patterns (Score 2) 466

This is something originally developed by a boy so most likely it evolved over the years to include multiple methods. It may use shorthand/abbreviations, bad grammer, mis-spelling, and slang. A single cipher method is highly unlikely.

It's probably simple in that it will have one step between plaintext and ciphertext, and words are not transposed. Also it looks like numerics are not encoded

Brackets or a line around a section could seperate trips, days, people he met, conversations on the phone, or anything, but we can probably safely assume they're in chronological order.

That 71,74,75 sequence could be revealing. Could they be house numbers, was he a train-spotter, is it a long term plan for his old age?

And could "NCBE" mean "No Change Behind Eddies" referring to a fruitless search for change dropped by drunks behind Eddies Bar or something?

What this job needs is detailed knowledge of his life; people, places, interests, habits etc. because without that background there's no way to determine what he's referring to. If all such data were dumped into a database to make a word index, that could help (maybe not so useful I just thought it up).

But FBI, if background info can't be released, at least make large size scans of those notes available in TIFF format (>12bit) so people have a chance to see what the letters are in the noisy parts.

Comment Re:Fukushima? (Score 1) 86

Exactly, working in dangerous conditions such as nuclear plants is often touted as a good reason to fund robot development.

Instead they gave us dancing robots http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZzLAsHiGHU

We get the warm fuzzy feeling, but it's probably a fatal dose of radiation from the spent fuel rods that robots could have made safe.

Comment Fukushima? (Score 2) 86

TEPCO workers can't see what's going on in those reactor buildings without taking huge personal risk.

If they used something like this to survey they'd know where to aim the fire hoses instead of waiting until there's another plume of smoke from the spent cores they're missing. Just saying.

Comment Re:Netflix (Score 1) 277

Agreed, the type of convergence they're selling in this case is simply locking together several technologies which are developing at different rates into one device. That tradeoff is fine for a mobile phone but for home entertainment on the big, abstraction gets you more flexibility and is environmentally more sensible due to scale economies in manufacture of commodity items and individual items lasting longer.

It's predictable that the manufacturers would still seek to differentiate their products with longer feature lists in the battle of the brands to preserve margins, they're getting some bites but along with the alternative tech trend you've highlighted, people are spending more time online at the expense of traditional couch potatoing. While most people will still get a big living room screen, it's not the priority spend it was.

Comment You've got to brand linux yourself (Score 1) 227

Your suits probably drive BMW's and Mercedes, their mentality is to go for the big brand.

You can sell linux as the Tesla Roadster - less well known and very different, but new, exciting, and the way of the future.

If I'm right about these guys your best bet is to price Linux at 10% more than any other solution.

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