Posts by Marvin the Martian

Spaniards deploy self-propelled ROBOT BALLS

Edit subtitle: "Motorised automatic bollocks to prowl Iberian fields DOWNHILL"

Stairs? They have an inclination of typically 40%

Any incline above 20% will already stop these balls, there's just not enough space inside the sphere to move the centre of mass sufficiently. So for a golfball-sized sphere, a matchbox is insurmountable; for a football-sized one, a regular kerb (or a furrow in a field, more to the point);

Yet a staircase is laughed at by an apartment-sized spherebot (though I may have played too much katamaru damashii.

Rise of the Machines: How computers took over the stock market

Re: To err is human...

It's not that the boys running wall street were fully human; arguably more than the computers that start to replace them but not that much more.

M

Supercomputer vid proves NASA black-hole ring sniffers were RIGHT

In the subtitle

YOu misspelled 'beeellllion'.

Jaguar to open new car-making factory in Blighty (virtually)

Re: AC "return car manufacturing to Britain"

I think he also meant "legendary" in the sense of "apocryphal".

I'm going one better than Jag; I'm going to simulate a lab simulating the building of cars.

NSA: 'Dozens of attacks' prevented by snooping

Re: "NSA's "intent" to get specific figures on the number of attacks prevent out in the next week."

Nice made up narrative. It's about as convincing as holy mass. Feel free to personally donate all your life savings to this new saviour, but the rest of us want some evidence to justify both methods and budgets.

ROBOT COW teaches Saudi kids where milk comes from

No the lesson is this: democow with 50L inside.

Cows are born small and stretchy. Then they drink themselves full of milk until big and round. When empty, you eat them. There must be a conservation law for milk or something.

What did the Lehman Brothers implosion look like to a techie?

Re: The ant's eye view

I'm also baffled by the constant "we" from a techie contractor (not policy maker or anything) at a bank.

Asus FonePad: You may feel a bit of a spanner

Re: Sounds promising

bad idea. How can I watch a vid while on the phone with my boss, if it's one device?

Or choose which of the two to run down if no charger at hand?

Reg readers tumesce as they get their tongues round 'podule'

Love the "building church leaders" logo

In the building trade it's frowned upon to install thing with large "this way up" arrows pointing down...

Anyway, isn't a podule just a poodle with a shorter body and longer nose?

Ex-Microsoft man plans brand of consumer marijuana 'fine cigars'

Re: In a similar vein....

No, quality brands of speed and coke he will establish later. "Bolivian Highland stroll" for example.

Stand back, everyone! Dragons' Den ace HAS FOUND THE CLOUD

Re: "to realise capitalised loans"

Maybe it's their business model: "we'll store your data!" OK, I uploaded them. "Now give us money or you'll never see those lovely data again!".

As the data are more or less loaned to them (they don't own them, and they're in their keeping) it's the only scenario I can think of that is correctly described by that expression.

Fairphone goes on sale to all

Not quite.

No, 'Politically Correct' is an 80s euphemism, from a time when it was par for the course to arrest a man for "walking while black". And closing-time-at-a-dive-pub type ramblings got on national stages under the label of 'humor' and 'bernard manning.

The fact that it's now generally associated with nannyism and i-dotting officiousness is very encouraging in itself.

Mobile tech destroys the case for the HS2 £multi-beellion train set

And ticket pricing?

Wait... Does the cost-benefit analysis (depending on everybody on the train sitting not working not phoning not checking up on things) take into account that all these £50/hour people will have to pay say £50 extra per half hour faster that the train is?

Why would your model anyway assume that anyone who's not working on a train (where there's space to do so --- not in the usual cattle commuters), would be working otherwise? It's people on their time off, or it's the same people that's checking their facebook during 'work' otherwise, and so forth.

HP preps Project Kraken for monster HANA in-memory jobs

"Kraken"?

If you want to name it after dark things whose awakening brings despair, why not go the whole way and call it "Project Cthulhu"?

Copyright expired in 2008, so that's not what keeps them back.

Løvefïlm signs hit beards’n’berserkers series Vikings

Re: horned helmets?

If it's on History, it wouldn't surprise me to see horned helmets.

I had the misfortune of watching their "Rome" series, filmed somewhere in the Baltic (and they didn't even bother faking Latin) with 20 blokes that normally reenact the triumphs of the XXth Legion every weekend: Over I think six episodes, I saw the same 20 blokes fight another 15-20 blokes dressed up now in vaguely-arabic, now vaguely-norse, then vaguely-asian dress, and so on.

Except the one time the first twenty split into two groups of about ten, with the newer group holding a newly-painted sign "VI" up and that represented civil war. That kept me on my toes.

Analysts brawl over 'death' of markup language

Thirded.

As long as the "A" doesn't stand for "APL" snuck into the "XML" it's all fine by me. What the "C" would be for, is harmless by comparison.

Not cool, Adobe: Give the Ninite guys a job, not the middle finger

Obligatory?

That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

Also, in the article, "they should have checked with PR first" -- clearly, because PR is where a bunch of geniuses, philosophers, and friends of humanity typically gather together and come up with far-sighted decisions.

Ubuntu without the 'U': Booting the Big Four remixes

Re: If...

On a memory stick will not really give a good impression of responsiveness etc.

Windows XP support ends a year from … now!

YOu're right.

... and it's obviously bugfree and security-hardened after 12years of fighting the gremlins, so no worries at all running it unsupported.

Inside Adastral: BT's Belgium-sized broadband boffinry base

Re: Yes, very impressive BT: "Let BT run Belgium"

That's just adding cruelty to injury.

Help save the endangered QUANTUM OWL, pleads Reg man

Good ol' classic values.

Random sexist remark about female scientist (ok, trick-cyclist rather)? Check.

It ought to be obligatory to now pay for full fellowship; as a conservative you have to put your money where you mouth is and conserve something.

Microsoft, Adobe, wilt during Australian price gouge grilling

"Anything Arla is NZ"

Hm... The Danish part of NZ, that is.

Victoria and Albert museum in narrow escape from Napalm Death

"Sadly, heavy metal fans won't get to enjoy this"

Yes, but Heavy Metal fans wouldn't in any case; they won't listen to hardcore like ND.

Oi, Microsoft, where's my effin' toolbar gone?

Re: What is this article supposed to be?

"Ligatures are due to the page layout typesetting and LaTex is page layout, so comparing apples to oranges is quite unfair. Word makes no claim to being a "page layout" application"

That's about the stupidest thing I've read the most idiotic comments list I've seen in a long time;

it's like saying that biological cells shouldn't contain DNA because DNA is an ecological thing, or computers shouldn't do floating point operations because that's a cloud feature.

Build a BONKERS gaming PC

Re: Bonkers? Yes... Overpriced? Most definitely

Other advice I thought strange: to do it over a few weeks.

To wit, if you want pure brutal expensive force, that's a property that's completely lost over a year (give or take). So each week it takes you to build, you lose about 2% of the value of the thing.

Or better 3%, if you fit the curve exponentially instead of linearly, as you should.

Architect pitches builder-bothering 'Print your own house' plan

Pencilled notes? Seriously?

What boggles my mind is the hand-pencilled numbering on the parts. If you're CnCing anyhow, why not have the machine mark the number in it...

If only to avoid typos and misreadings of other people's hand etc.

Hard Man of Facebook: We might just eat those cheap TLC flash chips

Is that a weather chart he's standing in front of?

Crazy wind, but still pea soup coloured mist?

Playmobil punts bank-heist set to wide-eyed kiddies

Or the tyrannosaurs & raptors

The 'dinosaur' sets of Lego and Playmobil on the other hand inevitably provoke plays about bloody violence against people, which isn't seen as so bad in this country ('as long as no poor widdle animals get hurt').

Michelin critics to football blogger: Salaud! Unhand that URL

Expensive.

Now I've got to buy "Better know your hammer" (for those who cannot tell their frame hammer from a pein one), and a few other potential prezzies.

There should have been a "NSFWallet" warning with that page.

Superbowl blackout was a stuff-up, not Anonymous

"effected me in now way"

Well now, are you sure it didn't affect your spelling?

Ethernet at 40: Its daddy reveals its turbulent youth

What is even more missing: an alternate history.

If (as he says should maybe have happened) Simonyi had written Ethernet instead, we'd have a well-functioning open standards wysiwyg text editor, and an expensive (even more than TR) proprietary network interface that has Clippy the Paperclip trying to talk us into doing stuff?

/The good half of that outcome is more or less there (hello, LibreOffice4.0).

South Koreans pawn shiny tech for stress-free loans

3% interest rate?

Per year? Week? Day? Hour?

Ten 3D printers for this year's modellers

Re: No RepRap?

But owning one still don't make much sense (except the £300 hobbyist kits, possibly). If you actually need the produced output (like the mentioned "no we don't make that anymore" cases), you get it from a place like http://www.emachineshop.com/ --- then you can have it in either a useful form (say metal), instead of some doubtful plastic ('has a shelf life').

Because in the real world, you need stuff from specific plastics, or spring steel, or sterling silver, or other; and you need it moulded, extruded, milled or etched. These are one-trick ponies, some with arguably useless tricks ('good for hearing devices' but the plastic degrades rapidly?).

Possible exceptions I can imagine, like the architecture firm that can fire its model maker, and would be OK with printing in some brittle plastic as long as a large spectrum of colours is available (with surface possibly hand-finished). But on the whole each of them seems quite limited or too expensive.

So: 6,500 Win 8 laptops later, how are BT's field engineers coping?

Wait, What?

BT field engineers process parking fines?

"This BT division [...] has seen how well the convenience of this platform works in the field: from photographing and reporting damage on-site to swift processing of parking fines."

Iran develops working ICBM: Intercontinental Ballistic Monkey

Re: Muslims in Space

This raises the question of stasis chambers for deep space travel: should Jewish and Muslim astronauts be defrosted (once a week, resp. 5x a day) to do their praying?

(Same for Catholic monks, of course, just with more singing at dawn and vespers.)

Star Trek saviour JJ Abrams joins the dark side: Star Wars VII

Re: Star Wars originally planned to have 9 parts?

"iirc, Star Wars was originally planned to have the one episode, until it became a massive hit"

No. The very opening of the first film writes "Episode IV: A new hope" on the screen.

IIRC, the planned masses of fighting robots etc were far in advance of then-existing budgets and technical capabilities. Don't forget that the one noticeable movie he'd done before is "American Graffiti", a laidback slice of adolescent life (and not a big hit) --- not the kind of thing that makes you say "here's $500M, mr Lucas, go invent some tech and make this movie".

Huddled immigrant masses face 'British values' quiz

Re: Lester, I beg to differ

What is this "history" you speak of? The Victorian version of it that's been stamped into children since then? Something usefully focused on the period from 1066 to the Tudors? The revised version looking at atrocities from Ireland to the Raj? A more feminist one?

Can we now kick out all those residents, british-born or not, who cannot answer "What should you never mind if you're a Sex Pistols fan?" --- this solves the entire NHS and budgeting crisis, as not many over-60s would answer.

[As a Belgian, I never learned anything much at school about the few million Congolese that were killed under the glorious regime of king Leopold I... There was a hint in the margins (e.g., Stanley the newspaperman was mentioned) but it was mostly economic structures and administrative organisation.]

Twitter adds loopy videos with Vine integration

Re: Inspires... CREATIVITY?

No, no, they refer to the other meaning of the verb 'inspire'.

"Vine inspires creativity... and exhales nausea" (or excretes weborrhea, but that's another bodily function).

Tablets aren't killing ereaders, it's clog-popping wrinklies - analyst

Re: Correlation != Causation

Well the graph is anyway wrong, as the deathrate isn't a straight(ish) line --- there's coffin dodgers that will hang on to 105, 110, even 115y --- but a saturating function, so a horizontal asymptote at the "100% dead" point. Similar for eBooks, as I guess that 50y--100y from now there will still be the odd (very odd) geek running one or more as if it's a C64.

That will be called the 'siliconpunk' lifestyle probably.

Have Brits fallen for Netflix, or do they still LoveFilm?

"display a TV Show as one item"

I definitely think each season should be one item. You mention Dr. Who --- each season totally different actors, just same branding and backstory.

And it used to be a total mess, with all episodes of all seasons randomly ordered if you searched by series name; nor a link to 'next episode' anywhere in sight. Now it works perfectly fine.

Microsoft's ARM blunder: 7 reasons why Windows RT was DOA

Fortythousand Schmortythousand

The cited "there's only 40K apps" and similar (much higher) figures for Android and iOS beg the question:

How many apps are needed?

Disregarding games (where infinite variations and clones can be had), how many other apps are needed? *Four-five office suits,

*ten editors (baby versions of popular desktop ones, and mainly for markup and scripting languages --- nobody in their right mind will do heavy duty work, e.g. compiling, on a tablet),

*less than ten browsers,

*ten weather widgets,

*less than ten calendar widgets (which IMO the OS should already do),

...

All in all about a thousand, tops?

Any more than a thousand makes managing choice hopeless: people cannot usefully scan, they will only consider the top-five or so in whatever category they search (count review-stars, some comments, the end).

Former CEO John Sculley: Apple must adapt or die

Re: Another option.

I think "Blackberry" would be such a fruit

Re: "This article is a waste of pixels." - really ?

You don't have to be a cow to discuss milk, but it sure helps to be at least a mammal.

Here you get a snake talking, and not a particularly knowledgeable or intelligent one.

Wanna really insult someone? Log off and yell it in the street - gov

That, and the simple fact that an online insult stands unretracted for millions to view, while something shouted on the street is a quickly forgotten one-off.

Question arises: if someone shouts abuse at someone on the street, and someone else puts it on youtube (maybe because they agree with the sentiment), it becomes a crime again? But who's the criminal, the shouter or the uploader? Both? Neither? What if shouter and uploader are the same?

Satnav blunder sends Belgian granny 1,450km to Croatia

Re: Non-information

Hm... "Lille" may either give a coastal city in France, or a small village in the north of Belgium. Not always that obvious you must select country.

Re: What about her Passport

... and in belgium it's obligatory to carry your ID card on you. So that solves the border problem.

'Mauro, SHUT THE F**K UP!'

Re: McAfee giveaway discrimination?

Not in south america.

5,000 UK pubs get free Wi-Fi... and they're not even all in London

Re: Miss Congeniality ?

The pub is more comfy as the coffee bar --- but it's far harder to work efficiently in a comfy sofa than on a rickety metal table. So it will remain coffee places here.

Manning was 'illegally punished', will get 112 days lopped off any sentence

@JimmyPage

It's a bit of just-so-stories that superficially make sense but are completely generated by digital-rectal manipulation, no? For instance, "after the revolution" so say 1776 they didn't want hanging so they chose the electric chair --- somewhere end of 19th century as electricity wasn't big yet...

So you're pretending there weren't executions for a good hundred year? No "String 'em high!" etc etc in Wild West settings etc?

In summary, no, the electric chair wasn't chosen to distinguish themselves from the English. I have no idea whether any of your other arguments have a stronger foundation or are similarly pulled out from a dark place. (And as for an earlier post by you, no mention of bears in the cables.)

Amazon puts up CD rack in the cloud, unearths your OLD stuff too

Re: What about...

Err, Ratfox... You seem to have missed the whole GoogleBooks malarkey!?