Posts by Steve Mann

Churlish HSBC drops atomic-scale accuracy

Bah!

"Less than 1 Mile"

GAGA prepares to inhale some grass

Bah!

An electric drill won't spin the strimmer (US "weed whacker") cord fast enough to be of any use. Have any of your "technologists" actually ever *mown* a lawn? I would have thought that such experience would be a quick way to eradicate idiotic options like spinning weed whacker cord with a Ryobi 18v electric drill and expecting a result. Tsk. Must try harder.

NASA halts 'naut flogging Apollo 13 notebook

Erm...

The worth of the artifact is all in the possession of it.

PDF? Of no value whatsoever. This is an issue of antiquarianism, not librarianism.

It's the difference between owning a Jaguar D type and owning a kit-car replica of one.

bah!

I'm conflicted on this one.

On the one hand no move was made to preserve the technology surrounding the Apollo project, much of which has been lost due to arcane rules on how to treat classified documents when you are a vendor to a compartmentalized government project - the next time someone says "we can put a man on the moon but..." gently point out that we can't any more - the design documentation is mostly shredded. Indeed, it looks to me like no sooner was the project cancelled than everyone wanted to forget it.

On the other hand this book is indisputably government property, possibly gifted on to a genuine hero who showed the right stuff in buckets and should get more than a handshake for that. Had it happened in this day and age he would have sought damages from the manufacturer of that lox tank stirrer.

Why not let him sell it and come to an arrangement with the buyer? That would be honourable and classy.

Another question springs to mind: is there a plinth somewhere waiting for this artifact or are we talking sticking it in a box somewhere until a place can be found at the back of the museum at Kennedy Space Center?

Why modern music sounds rubbish

Bah!

Interesting that the article mentions Bob Dylan, a man who for years moaned and dripped about compression ruining his music (and this complaining went way back before CDs) but who led the stampede to get his catalog into MPsquash format where compression is orders of magnitude worse than in the old vinyl days. Mr Z doesn't let his aesthetics get in the way of his dollar fountain any more than the next man.

That said The Marching Moron Syndrome is always with us. I happen to agree that modern recordings sound crappy, but it wasn't until I saw this article that I understood why.

Don't mind me. I'm still recovering from two attempts to find an acceptable digital conversion of 10cc's Sheet Music. Buggered master (by the sound of it) and a remaster that did little to fix the problems and introduced some of its own. Bah, and double bah. Thank Azathoth I have the original vinyl version. Maybe I'll convert it myself, crackles and all.

Space shuttle Endeavour launch delayed until at least May 8

Whereas I ...

... always wondered why more people didn't grasp the enormity of throwing a handful of people into Earth orbit using technology.

I guess it's down to the usual thing - a failure of imagination.

That and a lack of education as to what you get for your nickle-a-year investment in Space Tech.

And in a world with Google and Wikipedia there's no un-lame excuse for that.

Pentagon out to 'destroy' Wikileaks, founder says

Bah!

I won't believe any US involvement in the Ecuador mess unless I read about it on Wikileaks.

PARIS team cracks Vulture 1-X wing

Bah!

By the time you're done the weight will give you a glide path better described as the "vertical plummet".

You're over-thinking the problem.

Instead of gluing in strut after strut, consider that the paper skin itself will do much of the work of holding the spars in the proper place. Add temporary spacers and alignment blocks, add glue tabs to the aerofoil ribs and glue them to the bottom surface paper. Then carefully draw the paper over the nose of the wing and glue. Finally, remove the temporary spacers etc and glue the top surface down.

Hey Pasta! Instant (well, nearly) monocoque wing.

I dunno what they're teaching in schools today, no hope for nation, dropping standards, ASBO youth culture etc etc etc

Major Stevie (Mrs)

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

RTFM=NBG

I welcome RTFM messages, invite them in fact, provided the "helpful" respondent goes the extra angstrom and gives me a manual title or reference number and the page number at which I may usefully begin what they might equally usefully assume is the umpteenth attempt to FIND what I'm asking about in TFM.

Alternately, they could point me to any prior RTFM that does so. Simply writing RTFM is AMUAAHSAAJW (as much use as a ham sandwich at a Jewish wedding).

I'm currently attempting to debug a server with a baffling timezone problem and another with a sendmail issue. After forcing a couple of "helpful" "expert" sysadmin colleagues - who had RTFM'ed me - to give me a hands-on demo of their superior skillz they ruefully admitted that the (still unsolved) problems' solution(s) was not *in* TFM and STFU.

Pandora plus Endor: Multi hab-moon motherworld discovered

Bah!

WTF is an "exomoon" FFS?

Azathoth on a bike! If as much effort was put into getting *into* space as thinking up new names for perfectly ordinary objects seen in a telescope, we would be talking about these bloody moons in terms of decent names like Jinx, Wemadeit or Wunderland instead of carrot-9b or whatever stupid nonsense the so-called "scientists" responsible called it.

"Exomoon".

Where's the Tylenol?

Silicon Valley hypegasm for miracle shoebox powerplants

Bah!

I thought this was going to be fusion-in-a-shoebox, and on the strength of that ordered my gas and electricity disconnected pending clean, cheap, home-generated power. Now all my pipes have burst and there's nothing hot for tea.

*When* will The Register begin presenting the important information *clearly* in its articles?

Mad Aus gov accuses Sydney hacks of hacking

Bah!

Morons in power etc!

Intolerable etc!

Security by obscurity etc!

Wouldn't happen on a Mac etc!

Open source etc!

Yours etc.

US must redesign killer hot dogs

Bah!

Meat content in UK Sausage? Don't make me larf! I get my Cumberland sausage from Myers of Keswick (in Manhattan) and he readily admits he can't call 'em sausage in the US as legally they don't have enough meat in 'em. Delicious, though.

Wasn't the general lack of meat in bangers the plot of a "Yes Prime Minister" episode in the '80s? As I remember it, the E(E)C was going to reclassify them as "Meat By-Product High-Fat Offal Tubes". Of course, that was only make believe, but still, when Hacker read the list of ingredients it put your average hot dog to shame in the "almost edible tat" stakes.

eBay boss bids for governorship

Bah!

Feedback totals needed before anyone entertains this "bid".

Zaphod Beeblebrox home sun 'shrinking', may have blown up

4 Ed Blackshaw

But we wouldn't see that for about 430 years or so. If it wasn't for the pesky vacuum of deep space we might have heard it rattling around in the drum during the rinse cycle.

Typical!

I bet one of the astronomers let Betelgeuse go through the wash in his or her pants pocket.

Scientists: Tasers work, but we don't know how

Hmm

Time to market my cotton/wire-mesh/cotton sandwich tee-shirt methinks. I'll license the image of Frank Zappa to put on it.

Dry clean only, or risk rust.

Microsoft arms half-wit developers with PHP handgun

Well.

One so rarely sees such a convincing simulation of rabies in the online press.

Well done that man.

Unisys soups up mainframe engines

Unix. Right.

Laugh it up, but if you want an O/S with outstanding recovery characteristics, where things actually work and there are NO "known bugs" in the system utilities, OS2200 is your bunny.

I remember it with fondness every time I trip over another "feature" of our particular brand of Unix or (shudder) Linux.

And the merger of Sperry with Burroughs happened almost three decades ago. Time to start using the past tense when referring to it.

Tram driver crashes while texting

Bah!

Effing cell phones. These damned things should require a licence, and the approval process should involve demonstrating that the prospective user has a higher IQ than the handheld communication device.

I've been damn near run down three times in the last year by morons who didn't understand that the "no driving while using a phone" law was enacted specifically with them in mind. About six months ago I was passed by a woman in a car who, although using a hands-free celphone, was illustrating the emotional content of her side of the conversation by waving *both* hands in the air. This right outside a school.

The human race isn't ready for this technology.

US Uni campus hack provokes security alert

Bah!

[In a thin, wavering voice] UC Berkley? Encryption? Hello?

Asda clamps down on killer teaspoons

Bah!

No wonder there's no more "Moon, June, Spoon" in the songs today...

Darth Vader tops movie misquote poll

Bah!

The "Steenkin Badges" misquote wouldn't have been funny if it hadn't been in the wild *long* before "Blazing Saddles". It was, and so was I.

Gawd, what hath we wrought with this internet "history by consensus" crap? IMDB? They are good for titles and cast lists. Much beyond that and you are in the world of "contributing readers" i.e. Wiki-Saucerloon Land. Caveat Emptor.

Two of my faves from the print world are "Elementary, my dear Watson" and "Alas poor Yorick. I knew him well." (Won a quid off me dad with that one, and him with a Complete Works Of Bill S. an' all).

Solar Cycle 24 set to be a quiet affair

Bah!

And why, pray, was it felt appropriate to illustrate this story with a bob of Swarfega?

Top British boffin: Time to ditch the climate consensus

Bah

Makes a change for the mob to be citing peer-reviewed (or not) science rather than God Swill, Catholic Dogma or any of the reasons used to - I dunno - justify torture, claim the air in post 9/11 NY was "safe", shoot doctors outside clinics and gosh knows whatall else.

I've seen the Athabasca Glacier and I know why *I* think the Earth needs our help. But that's all right. UEA is sitting on what used to be a port town. Once the tide rises and engulfs Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Beccles Diss and all points East I'm sure he'll be reveiwing the science to see what the hell can be done to save the UK lowlands.

I hope they did the much-needed (but oft-delayed in the late 70s) maintenance on the raised walkways at UEA. They might very well be the only way short of a canoe of getting from EAS to the Sainsbury center in future years.

:o)

Linux risks netbooks defeat to Microsoft

Oh Dear

Another Windows/Linux flamewar with hardly anything relevant being said.

I'm really, really looking forward to the point where there is a viable alternative for the home user to Windows. Linux isn't it, yet.

Because, despite what several hysterical mouth-foamers are saying, the vast majority of people can simply walk into a Staples, buy a copy of Office for *much* less that $500, load the disk, install the software with a click and (Vista users only spend another 45 minutes trying to register the thing and having to set up a passport account but hey, that's Vista, doesn't happen on XP, which should have been a clarion call to SOME Linux vendor out there years ago), and you are up and running.

Someone mentioned GIMP. Gimp. The benchmark for maddeningly unintuitive intefaces that is thrown up time and time again as a "viable" alternative to well-established packages like Photoshop (the full-blown thing). I've had people patiently explain to me that the *problem* in Madison Avenue is that all the graphic designers for some reason refuse to dump a package that they have used for years so they can move into the Linuxy goodness of GIMP. When I suggest that perhaps the evangelical effort would be better spent lobbying hard for a Linux port of Photoshop, I am condescendingly told that I don't understand the issue. Riiiiight.

Suse. I was enthusiastic when I saw this in action, demonstrated by some eager young things who were salivating at the business market assembled before them. Like many others there I was slightly *less* impressed when the tech lead for office systems integration sardonically related that "one person had baulked in using Open Office because of lack of pivot table support, so we put it in even though we don't see why anyone would use it". Once again a know-nothing-outside-his-narrow-field techie blew off his own size ten and he didn't even realise what he'd done. I wanted to grab him by the neck and scream "Geat a f*cking clue and do some research, dimwit!".

But then he went on to say that he couldn't see why a firm in New York would want digital camera support either (Goodbye medical market, newspaper market, insurance market and those are just the three waiting at the top of Mr Head).

What puzzles me is that it is largely the same crowd that bleat over the horror of having web-site choices forced on them as being the very anathema of what the modern computer user experience should consist of, that then turn round and say "Well, you should stop using whatever tool you've been doing business with for x years and switch to <linux "equivalent"> just for the pleasure of using Linux". When the inevitable list of shortcomings of that "equivalent" mounts too high for them to answer, they generally fall back on "what do you expect, it's free?" which, of course, is the death of what they're trying to argue for. Can't use *that* one in front of the Board of Directors.

Until the major third party software vendors start producing for native Linux, there will be no sea change in the way people in the street view their computers.

Stop whining about how the other guy doesn't do it right. Make the alternative a better choice FOR THE USER.

SCO ordered to pay Novell $2.5m Unix royalties

I'd just like to say thanks

to the wickdads who posted mile-long hahaha's and borked the browser wraparound, and the lazy Register website "programmers" who didn't foresee the problem this would cause and mung the text accordingly.

I've often felt that the horizontal scroll control doesn't get enough use.

V.droll.

US sees first airliner flight with laser defences

Not to mention

that despite the Bush rhetoric about "foreig oil" we can get all we want just by asking Canada for it. After all, it's where we get most of it already.

"So why the higher prices" you ask?

"It's due to all the fish in the atmosphere."

Apple swipes £121 for 'free' MobileMe trial

@ "Webster Phreaky"

Oh Webster, you obvious pseudonym you, he wasn't saying the Apple "pay before you go" system was free on other phones, he was saying that e-mail service in general is. And he's right.

Perhaps a little less Hysterical Promac Appleboost (the high-energy drink recommended by Steve Jobs) and a little more elapsed time between reading and replying is in order?

You might also want to check that dictionary you're so enamoured of for a proper spelling of "Freaky".

El Reg nails Street View spycars to Google Maps

@ Ginger

Unless it has radically changed since I lived there:

A pub for every day of the year, for starters.

Review site furious over McAfee SiteAdvisor 'false alert'

Yes but

Where's the Linkscanner angle?

Pope apologises for Apple's MobileMe sins

Mohammed Phone

But my colleague Mohammed doesn't have one.

My other colleague, Jesus (pronounced "hay-zoos") does.

QED.

Grissom bows out of CSI

4 Whitter

I agree that CSI: Miami is not as good as the original, but interminable? Only one channel and no off-switch where you are?

:o)

Hackintosh maker gets legal greeting from Apple

@ Jason

Er, no, actually. That's "restraint of trade".

A free market is what the other guy is trying to establish. That's where Apple sell the OS and that's the end of their involvement (and, of course, their responsibiliy for making it work)

Either way, who gives a toss? If you want "Unix-like" why not just acquire a real, free Unix? The woods are full of 'em. If you go Solaris, you even get their mucho spiffy dtrace utility, something every geek ought to see in action for g'tstself.

British drivers face jail for causing death by dangerous driving

Well...

It's refreshing to find out that the plague of brainless tw*ts who don't understand that even with cruise control and an automatic gearbox you shouldn't spend your drive texting, working the GPS or fiddling with the center-console mounted GUI for the stereo is not limited to the people of New York.

I've had the telephone pole outside my house knocked in half twice in as many years by kids who thought the car would drive itself (at twice the posted speed limit) while they did something more important.

I was almost hit on the way to work this morning by a total nidiot who blew through a stop sign at a T junction (I was on the main road) because he was too busy with holding his cellphone to his ear - in direct contravention of NYS law I might add - to put both hands and both braincells to the task of keeping his vehicle under full control.

It's good to know I won't have to reacclimatise if I return to blighty.

Other than that whole left-side/right-side thing of course.

File system killer leads police to wife's bones

@Robert Long

The key part of the phrase, that has to be explained in every capital trial, is "reasonable".

Clearly, the jury in this case, who for some reason have come under your vitriolic fire for doing a civic duty that most people would all-but chew off an arm or leg to get out of doing, found that any doubts they had in the light of the evidence they were exposed to were unreasonable.

That is to say, that it was MORE reasonable to deduce this lying, sociopathic, murderous, did I already mention lying git had killed his wife and hidden the body than that she fled the country while he was re-arranging his card interior (as one so often does) and hosing it down (who here hasn't said "damn the devaluation and damage to fixtures and fittings, I'm hosing out the interior of my car" at sometime or other?). Oh, and reading his "Hiding the Evidence For Dummies" books.

I'm amazed and not a little appalled that people are *still* trying to excuse this murdering git's behaviour even though he has finally admitted "it's a fair cop (but Aspberger's Syndrome made me do it)".

Wanna make book on that Aspberger's diagnosis in light of his record on honesty?

Hay-zoos on a velo.

The Moderatrix will see you now

Carbon Footprint

Could not the world's perceived problems vis-a-vis excess carbon be solved by sequestering it in large amounts of graphite sports equipment?

Surely the answer to the Runaway Greenhouse is the Driver Mountain or the undersea Squash Racket Reef?

Alan Sugar leaves Amstrad

Amstrad Stereo Kit < Sliced Bread

My speakers were better than adequate and my amp was streets ahead of the competitors' efforts back in '76.

Of course, I wasn't spending a fortune on the kit so I didn't expect Bang & Olufsen levels of innovation and quality.

Eurofighter at last able to drop bombs, but only 'austerely'

Bah!

This "Eurofighter" is a waste of time and money! Let us return to tried and trusted, battle-proven airframes that proved thier worth time and again.

We beat back the savage hun with the noble Spitfire, and gave them a bloody nose with the mighty Lancaster. Let the skies darken with their shapes once more as they take the Ordinance of British Democracy to our enemies!

Chocks away!

How to beat AVG's fake traffic spew

Marginal Websites "don't matter"????

I have to agree with Mark on the "arrogant twit" front here.

In the course of my leisure time I have recourse to a number of small, free sites that are of no interest to a casual user but will score high on Google if the right keywords are chosen. In one case that would be exaclty two words. It is entirely unreasonable that these sites should be "slashdotted" by a poorly written piece of software. If the bandwidth (carefully calculated by the webmaster-owners) is exceeded, the sites will be shut down for up to a month. How is this a fair or even a justifiable "solution" to the malware menace?

"Poorly written"? Yes. When I started in the IT industry as an entry level programmer, I would have had my fingers broken for coding any algorithm that followed every path "just in case" instead of concentrating on the actual job to be done. And that, despite all the whingeing from AVG spokesdrones is what is happening here.

There is absolutely no reason why this software could not do the exactly the same job it is doing now, but on clicked links only. The AVG user would be no more exposed to exploits than with this witless, poorly thought-out and outright toxic method of "clicking" every link "just in case".

Only the fact that AVG bought in this "technology" makes the situation and AVG's seeming thick-headedness make any kind of sense. They must be desperate to not invest any more cash in the thing.

Who will be the next Doctor?

New Doctor?

There is only one feasible candidate for the newest Doctor.

Only one actor can give the nuanced performance required for this beloved icon of British TV.

I speak, of course, of Will Smith.

Microsoft says ‘hasta la vista XP’ - well, kinda

Dear God

Windows 7 will build on Vista?

Using a graph I drew based on each MS O/S "minimum requirement" I have to ask:

Is there that much RAM in the known universe?

Bloke crams 13 into Volvo S70

Warning! Warning!

Fools! Do you not see that this could only be a case in which a rogue timelord's Tardis, complete with army of deadly child-like automatons, materialised with it's chameleon circuit working but its bigger-inside-than -out widget severely burned out?

No doubt this seemingly idiotic "Gniwosch" (and does that look like an Earth name to *you*?) is in fact none other than the insidious timelord genius, The Master, and yet another diabolical plot is unfolding in his newly established headquarters in Tottenham.

And what do the forces of law and Order do? They let him off with a "driving ban", a paltry fine and a slap on the wrist!

When will the British courts get a grip on the real threats facing society?

Oh, the cops may have tried to confiscate the "Volvo" but we all know that the locks on a Tardis are isolinear when the plot demands it. Tthey'd never have gotten inside it to release the handbrake so they could tow it.

CERN declares Large Hadron Collider perfectly safe

@ AC #1

Yes. By you.

Rare Mac Trojan exploits Apple vuln

Camera Activated?

This is FUD. Young female iBook owners should continue to blog topless as God intended, though most of hem should sit about six inches further from the screen for health purposes.

Virgin Media collects customer banking details on CD, then loses it

No

Nonononono you guys don't get it! I see where they are going here.

Virgin, in a secret strategic move co-ordinated at the highest levels with other financial industry giants such as banks, building societies and helped occasionally by good old government incompetence, has simply drawn a larger lesson from its financial business rules: To reduce the worth of personal banking and ID data, simply flood the market with it.

I see this as a bold new front in the war against cyber crime and ID theft. Virgin customers should thank their lucky stars they had the good fortune to do business with such a forward-thinking organisation.

Big TV flips ad blockers the bird

Hmm

In my opinion the problem isn't the ads themselves. The problem is that the ad designers work under a bunch of assumptions most of us have issues with.

Assumption 1) I want to see eye-hurting animation and will tolerate it in my field of vision while I use the site.

This is the thinking behind those moronic animated in-program eye-turd pop-ups that various television channels have fallen in love with. They now not only take up over 20% of the tv screen real estate, but also have independent sound channels that play over the program in progress. Whoever thought this was a good idea should the fingers of each hand amputated by having them pulped with a coal hammer. The message might then get across. All animation superfluous to the site content must go and no exceptions.

Assumption 2) I have a state of the art computer and can afford the cycles needed to reload an animated add or roll-over every few seconds.

Of course no-one would be surfing the net on an old, slow pentium 3 would they? Ads that burn cycles (unless activated by clicking) must go and no exceptions.

Assumption 3) All users have cheap high-bandwidth internet connections and therefore can afford to have a constant barrage of witless ad-necessary chit-chat sucking it up without worry. After all, who uses dial up these days, or high bandwidth but premium-priced connectivity services? All unauthorised (ie sans click) adbabble must cease forthwith.

I don't think anyone with a realistic sense of what it costs to bring the internet to them would object to static ads that could do more if clicked on. It's these stupid epic feature films that get served up that cause the ill-feeling.

The point of advertising isn't actually to get you to buy stuff, at least, it's not the main point, which is to raise brand awareness so that when you are in the mood to buy a particular item the advertised brand name springs to mind before anyone else's. Just look at the average car commercial on TV. It tells you little about the car itself, but tries to associate the brand with a driver type in the hope that when that type of driver needs a new car, they will think of the brand in a positive light. This mission can be achieved with static sidebars and suchlike. They're just not as shiny, is all.

Which is the problem, since ad designers believe in their heart of hearts that shiny=better.

Could pen-sized GPS jammers paralyse UK shipping?

@ Roy Stilling

I'm with you Roy, but the sextant is of no real use without a really accurate chronometer and some good-quality charts.

Luckily, mosty handheld GPS sets have a clock and a map display.

:o)

Stray left foot washes up on Vancouver beach

I say

Something is definitely afoot here.

AVG scanner blasts internet with fake traffic

@ John A Thompson

Well, Link Scanner may indeed be the best thing since sliced bread but ever since, well, forever really, the idea of getting a computer program to take the lazy way out and do things the worst possible way has been seen to be bad practice. Entire carreers have been built on not doing it the "Link Scanner Way", and a library of books have been written along the lines of "never do anything the Link Scanner way".

Testing every link on a search engine page is simply a waste of resources at every level. I can't speak for anyone else, but often when I'm using Google for work purposes I need to make a couple of attempts at a query before I see *anything* worth clicking on. Why in Azathoth's name anyone would think it a "good" idea for software to go swanning after the links I have no intention of using is beyond me. No doubt I am being intensely thick, even less doubt you will explain it, at length (this now being the John A Thompson Opinion Page).

Point of information: Since any "scanning" actually takes place in the user's machine anyway, what exactly are the different semantics of doing this *after* a click rather than before? Other than the real speed costs of the software becoming all-too apparent to the user in an unambiguous way of course.

Reality time. The thinking of this clearly never went beyond the "let's hide the cycles needed under the user's reading time" stage. The idea is causing real damage at every level. It should be consigned to the stupid box and everyone concerned given a light touch of the cattle prod for being immensely thick and another to remind them to think it through *first* next time.

One rarely comes across a situation so worthy of the Gordon Bennet Award For Not Getting It.