Posts by Shane Lusby

CERN boffins turn lead into gold for about a microsecond at unimaginable cost

Resume

While not cost effective, the ability to add Alchemist to your resume is priceless.

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

Re: Mental image

I presumed after they hit send they went to go play Murder in the Dark.

Do look up! NASA unfurls massive shiny solar sail in orbit

Re: ‘Edge’

Just one turtle, under the four elephants.

Not a Genius move: Resurrecting war hero Alan Turing as your 'chief AI officer'

Yet....

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

Re: So the system didn't cut the ringtone when the phone was picked up

I mean even ignoring the 90 second ringtone issue, if you had a 10 second one and answered it on the second ring you don't want it running another 6 or 8 seconds. It should be preparted for a file long enough to catch the attention if you don't have the phone to hand, but obviously cut off pretty promptly once picked up.

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

Re: This is actually a devious plan .....

Honestly over here that are far more interested in the tasty to eat than the healthy side. I'm betting if they marketed radioactive boar meat as a cure for vaccines they couldn't kill them fast enough to keep up with the demand.

Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

Re: they are now the last known digits of Pi

And 103% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

We've found it... the last shred of human decency in an IT director – all for a poxy Unix engineer

This is how you build a loyal team. If there is praise, spread it to the people under you, knowing you will still get credit for running the team that got the job done. But blame? You take that and shield the people below you and do what you can to keep your crew solid. Will lead to a few suck moments, but in the long run your people knowing you have their back is worth it.

Pluto is more alive than Mars, huff physicists who are still not over dwarf planet's demotion

Meh

Real life is messy. Whatever definition you decide on is either gong to arbirarily chop pluto off the list or add some other bodies onto the list. Maybe harness the righteous anger and change the definition to include 'bodies humans live on' and see if the pissy people will start funding colonization programs for all their favorite former planets?

Fire chief says Verizon throttled department's data in the middle of massive Cali wildfires

Re: What do you expect?

The problem you are making in judegement here is I am certain the plan they need on a random month is FAR less than what is needed during raging giant wildfires. So are you saying they should over buy in a long term contract that exceeds their needs most of the time?

FireEye pulls Equifax boasts as it tries to handle hack fallout

So these early indicators that the hackers didn't go any deeper, was it Equifax that determined this, or someone we have any reason to trust the opinion of?

MH370 researchers refine their prediction of the place nobody looked

Re: Let's get real.

Excuse me, are you accusing even a portion of the American Government of competency at this point?

Uninstall QuickTime for Windows: Apple will not patch its security bugs

In other news, users should update their calendar to 2016 as 2002 is no longer supported.

BBC telly tax drops onto telly-free households. Cough up, iPlayer fans

Re: iPlayer - accounts and international markets

As an American fan my only two questions were when are they going to let me pay and are they not going to be total dicks about the price? At the fee quoted I'd sign up tomorrow if they let me.

SCO vs. IBM looks like it's over for good

Re: Groklaw... updated ?!

Groklaw is still up to read but hasn't had an update in about two and a half years. It shut down in an 'oh my god, they are reading our emails' panic rather than going the "encrypt 'em if you've got 'em" route.

Bill Gates is once again the richest man on Earth

Re: The rich get richer ...

Glad to see this comment. I wasn't the biggest Bill Gates fan back when he was working but I can't really fault what hes been doing with his time and money since then.

Massive! Yahoo! Mail! outage! going! on! FOURTH! straight! day!

Re: It's only a matter of time.

Hit it in one. I've been intending to move on from yahoo for probably going on two years now, but thus far the hassle of actually shifting everything has not quite out weighed the general painfulness of yahoo. Ahh, the wonders of being lazy.

Ten top stories from Classic Doctor Who

Was coming here to say the very same thing. I think McCoy is treated very unfairly because some of his Doctors scripts were such complete rubbish. His darker take on the Doctor was great and Remembrance particularly and moments of Survival and Silver Nemesis were brilliant. And if Survival overall was far from the greatest episode ever at least the final lines felt like a bit of a closure when they killed the series off,

'There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea is asleep and the rivers dream; people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else the tea is getting cold. Come on, Ace, we've got work to do. '

Who should play the next Doctor? Nominations needed!

Re: John Hurt is off the list!

The 12 regen limit was already implied as broken back in the old series. The Valeyard was 'between his 12th and final regeneration' which pretty much flat out says R>12 in this case, if not giving you any clue what so ever where his final regen will actually fall.

A second for Rufus Sewell. It hadn't occurred to me until I saw him mentioned above but I do think he would do a brilliant job.

COLD FUSION is BACK with 'anomalous heat' claim

Copyright?

Surely the MPAA and Paramount will be raiding their labs for infringing on the idea of cold fusion from The Saint? Yet again pirates are trying to steal from the creativity of the poor starving media companies who barely have a crumb of bread to share between them.

The IT Crowd returns to Channel 4 for a final episode

Re: Its time to celebrate!

That's a nice tnetennba!

Texas schoolgirl loses case over RFID tag suspension

Hand off

I would think collecting the RFIDs and handing them off between classes so there were continuously 200 students in a certain class and several others completely empty would rapidly shoot this one in the foot.

NASA admits hiding 'really good' news from Martian soil

I for one welcome our new dirt based overlords.

40,000 sign petition to oust Rep. Paul 'pit of hell' Broun

Typo

Oversees, unless he is exporting topics?

ThinkGeek trembles before Pork Board's pork sword

Seriously?

Parody is well protected as freedom of speech. They should have told the porkies to spin on it and run the article again.

MSI tells 97,000 customers to 'Read The F***ing Manual'

Can we buy them a round?

Anyone else wish they had stuck to their guns and not backed off on it being a joke?

BOFH: The PFY Chronicles

The BOFH is Dead.

Long live the BOFH.

Although, anyone else expecting a Sherlock Holmes death rather than the PFY actually taking on the mantle?

NASA moon-bomb probe strikes rich seam of fruitcake

I am the moon

He's so bright and milky white

Shining down upon the ground

He's so bright, milky white

Shining down upon the ground

Everybody look at the moon

Everybody seeing the moon

The moon is bright, he's milky white

Everybody look at the moon

Hey! I did a song. Jupiter, I did a song. You ain't got one.

Hotmail phish exposes most common passwords

Agree with many

A lot of the info in the article is skewed because these were people who were dumb enough to be phished, but there is also the point that the hotmail accounts could be throw away accounts anyway. I go for very secure passwords for the few sites that matter(financial, web admin and useful email passwords) and for almost everything else, one pass. I mean do you really care if someone hacks your account on a forum you posted three things on two years ago?

Walmart's Jesus Phone no better, no worse

@ Steve Wineberg

Its not that those of us on the coasts don't realize there is more to America, its just that we realize those portions of America don't really matter, other than as a large swath of land that must be passed over to get to somewhere real.

Blu-ray backers highlight rising demand

Vup??

'while early adopters, who are keen on buying into the format, will be hindered by shortages of cheaper machines.'

I'm totally willing to give them the recession hurting sales bit, no arguments there. But anyone buying in at this point I would say is not an early adopter, so the current cost of machines is meaningless for them. The format is hardly mainstream yet, but its been around essentially 2 and a half years now.

'Faith-based' investment firm fingers holiday's most sinful games

Boycott

I for one say we all stop buying computer games until the industry gets its act together and starts making 39 point games. I refuse to settle for anything less than the maximum score and urge everyone else to demand the same!

Boss frogmarches bound employee to cop shop

BOOTNOTES!!!

For every bloody comment about 'Wheres the IT angle, whine whine whine' READ THE CATAGORY. Its Bootnotes. If you're not familiar with the boot notes section, go take a look. Its anything amusing that the Reg guys and gals feel like publishing that doesn't have an IT angle. So the next time you're scanning the front page, if you can't stand articles without an IT angle, don't click on the ones that are labeled bootnotes. Or if you do, don't bloody whinge about it.

Employees sue for unpaid Windows Vista overtime

15 minutes

What you guys are not keeping in mind is some of the utterly crap software riding on top of the OS in some cases. My job runs some software on top of the OS on a system with seriously insufficient memory, the system takes a tiny hair under 10 minute to reboot and get to where you would clock in if you actually had to boot it up every morning. Not something we normally do in my job, but any of you that are used to decently written software would be horrified at the stuff some corporations will pay for.

Grand Theft Auto reportedly inspires teen rampage

Trend Graph

Here is a fun little graph of violent crimes over time with video game releases picked out on the graph. The direction isn't what the media would lead you to believe.

http://i25.tinypic.com/2r6ns4y.jpg

US woman sues over exploding thong

Blind guess

Utterly blind guess here, but if the garmet was even a single size to small for her I'd think Victoria Secret will have a simple enough defense.

HD media future may be Blu, but it's not rosy

Crap movies lately

The fact of the matter is the Q1 movie releases largely sucked. Some new ones are rolling out soon that are worth while and we'll be buying again.

[rant] When it comes down to it who the hell is choosing the movies being released in HD? You can get Beerfest in HD! Even if you for some reason wanted to own it at all, there is no reason you need a high resolution version of most comedies.

Welsh blogger fined over 'menacing' plod blog

Vup?

How can you not read that as "God you're a prick and I feel sorry for any kid thats going to be raised by you", I mean sure its insulting but its pretty obviously meant as an insult not a threat.

PETA offers $1m for test tube chicken

Pointless prize.

How bloody stupid is this? Frankly if someone was able to produce the product the wish, that tasted perfectly like chicken and was commercially viable(i.e. as cheap or cheaper to produce than chicken) they are going to make so much money that the million prize will seem like chump change. Vat grown protein I think is still hovering somewhere over 10k a kilo last I heard.

BOFH: Lift laughs

Pinch schematic

I would definitely agree with Dylan Moran for the BOFH and Simon Pegg for the PFY.

And without putting to much time into seaching here is a pinch link

http://www.powerlabs.org/pssecc.htm

US HD hardware sales 3:1 in Blu-ray's favour by year end

Console owners

I think you need to check your age ranges on the average console owners. They are not dominantly owned by 12 year olds any more, and haven't been in years.

Beyond that, and as many have pointed out above there are many people purchasing PS3's as a Blu-Ray player that happens to play games rather than as a game console that happens to play movies. I've only had my PS3 a short time but I currently have 3 times as many movies as I do games and I only expect that ratio to grow with time.

Need a new set of b*llocks? Try Argos

4 letters

Interestingly you get different responses for boll, bollo and bollocks so the first 4 letters theory seems inaccurate.

Best Buy sells 'last Wii' twice

Confused?

The thing that confuses me here is that its not like Best Buy is selling them over list or anything. There isn't a need to create more demand for a unit that is selling out anyway, so why not just throw their stock on the shelf, sell through them and skip the theatrics?

Babbling net software sparks international incident

Multibable

If you want to kill a few minutes and a few braincells try googling 'multibabel'. There are several sites that will take any phrase, run it through the babel wringer a few times and eventually pop it back out in English again utterly mangled.

Reg lexicographical Shock Army liberates mobe

Hmmm....

Up the voltage?

The RIAA will come to regret its court win

Baen.com

Check out Baen.com for their free library. They have been saying it for years and putting their money where their mouth is.

Giving away some books has been good advertising for others. They don't have a single book that doesn't at least have a few free chapters available. Which means you know whether or not the book is going to hold your interest before you bother buying it.

Sony breaks out 'mass market' Blu-ray players

$500 BDP-s300

Well at the very least the price of the S300 is available, on Sonys website. $500 is still a tad dear for my pocket book at the moment, but at least they are still heading downwards at a reasonable rate.

US customs bust coke-smuggling 'submarine'

Stop. Think. Continue.

They are not saying the SUB went through the panama canal. They are pointing out that the Customs unit is based out of Florida, but that does not mean that it was straight out of Florida that day. Just as the smugglers may have been based out of Columbia doesn't mean they are not allowed to leave Columbia to actually do their smuggling.

Porn company Perfect 10 sues Microsoft

Costs?

Anyone have any clue the kind of dollars they are actually spending on their lawsuits? Because we get articles on them every couple of months and that kind of advertising would normally be insanely expensive. I keep finding myself wondering if its a sort of alternative advertising budget. Win lose or draw they are getting regular exposure.