Posts by Stevie

Feast your eyes: 10 'fortysomething' smart TVs

Bah!

And right from review number one I get the sinking feeling that the priorities are all wrong as the "cool" webcrap is salivated over and then the "okay" picture quality, lousy black capability and "lightbulbs across the screen" artifacts are shrugged off as par for the course.

This is how we ended up with telephones that can display a movie in one bajillion p and decode music into Dolby 15.7 surround sound but on which it is all-but impossible to make a call during which one will understand what is being said by the other party thanks to the digital clipping and other stupids.

A television should do one job excellently: be a television. In saying that I feel like Jim Hacker explaining to Sir Humphrey that a hospital should have patients rather than exist solely as an accounting exercise.

Speaking only for myself you'll do me a service by reviewing televisions first and foremost in terms of picture quality when in use as a TV, *including how well the picture survives being seen from an oblique viewpoint (such as will probably be the case for such small screens in the average home) rather than when standing directly in front of it in Currys*, and perhaps mentioning in passing the bloody OS running all the webcrufty, rather than blithering about WebOS and the maths printed on the box and casually dismissing what will actually be a lousy viewing experience for many with an airy wave of the pen.

Orion: To Mars, the Moon and beyond... but first, a test flight through Van Allen belt

Re: Yaaaaaaaawnnnnnnn.....

Apollo heat shields and shuttle tiles are using very different principles to protect the craft from the heat of meteoric re-entry.

The shuttle defense was to keep the heat away by insulating the craft.

The Apollo approach was to carry the heat away as vaporized iron (and to insulate the capsule from the heat of the melting iron with a weird caulk-like substance, but that is oodles easier to do than keeping the total heat load away from the people because of the realities of latent heat of vaporization and like that). Apollo also had a layer of oak between the astronauts' backs and the weird caulk stuff in case all that failed because it turns out that charred oak is a very good heat insulator.

Re: Flying...

"So the ISS is flying?"

No. it is endlessly falling (until it brushes the atmosphere too hard and no-one gives it a kick). Then the "endlessly" part stops being true.

"The essence of flying is that it uses aerodynamic forces to control direction."

The essence of flying is that it uses aerodynamic forces to stay aloft. Those early glider flights were made with no provision for maneuvering, but are still real flying.

"Hence the altitude at which spaceflight (as NASA seem to call it) supplants atmospheric flight (at that altitude the speed required to fly on aerodynamic lift exceeds the orbital speed)."

This is scientists defining a point at which it stops being their fault and starts being someone else's. In space no-one flies. They float, they fall. They go in straight lines (or would if spaceflight were a real technology with proper support so the space ships could get out of the twisted geometry of the earth-moon system and go somewhere interesting). So they go in parabolas. Which is another way of saying they plummet I guess.

Wish I could have a go, but one of the other ways in which my Dad's generation failed us was in not having the vision to match the books in Parkgate Infant's School library. I was supposed to be holidaying on the Moon by now, having also visited the wheel-shaped space station in a proper orbit waaaay out of the reach of the atmosphere.

Interesting to note that the record for the "highest" orbit from the earth is still held by Charles Conrad and Richard Gordon, who grabbed the prize in a Gemini capsule (an entire line of capsule-rethink technology that was abandoned for the more primitive Apollo) in 1966, and that the record for most times in space stands at just 7 flights.

Re: Falling with style, then.

Inarguably.

Re: Bah!

See, the *thing* about flying is that it involves going horizontally at a sustained altitude. It can be a very low altitude, but to be classed as flying it has to be sideways and not downwards. Ask the people who won the X-prize for doing it under human power.

Going extremely fast downwards is not flying. It is plummeting.

The lift on your "lifting body" is not lift *upwards* as many would naturally assume, but lift *sideways* and it ain't very much lift.

Your cosmonaut is saved by the shallow angle of initial re-entry as much as by the "lifting-body" design of the Soyuz, and by the fact that some of the air it is hitting is spilling past the tilted heat shield instead of piling up against it.

Admittedly the lift helps stop the angle becoming steeper, faster, but it is still an outright lie to call this "flying".

Unless you are using the word in its more informal sense, to convey high speed, as in: "I was flying down the motorway in my TR6" or "Canonballs were flying past our ears". I'll readily concede that dropping from orbit in meteoric re-entry (the real name for it, look it up) is, in that sense, flying.

And tipping the capsule up a bit to make it steerable still isn't some new science trick pulled out of a hat by Team Orion.

Bah!

No, it doesn't fly, it plummets.

It is intended to plummet slightly off-center so that the air flow over the cone produces lift on one side so you can steer it if you are lucky.

A bit.

And this isn't new because they were doing this with Apollo and Gemini and for all I know Mercury too, though I have no actual knowledge about that one and can't be bothered to look it up for you.

But flying, it ain't, unless you are a skydiver (Skydivers also refer to steerable plummeting as flying).

Give nerds their own PRIVATE TRAIN CARRIAGES, say boffins

Bah!

The Long Island Rail Road has instigated a Quiet Car policy in which one car is set aside for getting away from Foghorn Leghorns on Phones.

Of course, this being the Long Island Rail Road, who are to ideas as soup is to concrete, there are a few "gotchas".

a) The Quiet Car is always the west most car in the train, which means in the morning the one in which every rail crossing is signaled by blowing a rack of airhorns located *under* the said car. Nothing says peace and quiet like FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRN! every three minutes.

2) Compliance is voluntary. By doing this the Long Island Rail Road has inadvertently invented the world's most powerful Git Attractant.

Re: Enabling mobile phone shouters

Bravo! I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who lives for the blessed silence brought about by the tunnel, the most massively useful structure ever invented for making hairless plains apes shut the fuck up.

Personally I am in favor of legislation requiring people to prove they are more intelligent than the phone they are buying before they are allowed to walk out the door with it.

Ten Linux freeware apps to feed your penguin

Bah!

This article has me wanting to spec out a system for a proper Linux for the first time to use at home.

I only have a couple of Pis and a BBB running that O/S flavor at the moment.

Re: GIMP

Speaking as someone who uses it, GIMP isn't particularly intuitive either. Took me quite a while to find out how to just get a window displaying the layer stack in the toolbox area set aside for it the first time I needed it.

US retail giant Target fails to get banks' MEGABREACH lawsuit slung out of court

Bah!

This is very good news.

Now the bank can hand over some to cover *my* material losses in the aftermath of one (1) credit card details bonanza break-in and two separate (1 1) "lost or stolen" tapes containing my mortgage information.

Sick of the 'criminal' lies about pie? Lobby the government HERE

Bah!

Speaking as someone who has eaten and regurgitated more than his share of (apparently) Alsatian Dog can I just say that until I threw them back up those faggots and peas from the Parson's Eson (name changed) were the tastiest things on the planet?

And that furthermore, in the interests of my personal safety I was in sore need of ridding myself of all the beer I had foolishly consumed in the mistaken belief I was having a good time?

And that the track bed of the railway running across the Radford Road was kept nicely weed-free by my stomach acids (and whatever was in the faggots that hadn't once conversed by saying "woof")?

Ah, British Casual Cuisine, the best in the world! Why would anyone want ingredients they could positively identify?

While the web stares at cat pics, the glue of the internet is being shifted from US govt control

Bah!

I suppose it is naïve to suggest that the entire management process be run as a part-time effort by professionals using the RFC methodologies that work so well in actually implementing the Internet of Wingnuts?

And that they be elected by peers (peeriodically), be from engineering backgrounds and be paid a stipend to cover expenses rather than fat-cat salaries?

Watching this play out is like watching a cellular automation run on a big system with field wraparound parameters. I wonder how many small, static blobs will be left after the humongous glider gun shoots itself, fragments and flies apart?

US parking operator: YEP, hackers got your names, credit card numbers, secret codes...

Bah!

Hm. We can blame lots of people here, but top of my list is the program design team who decided that capturing the card information was a good idea, and then stored it all as a structure that could simply be looked at to gain meaningful (and dangerous) information from data.

When will IT twonks learn that if you are going to give a customer the ability to hold credit card data, or any financial credentials for that matter, separating the components of those and using metadata to re-acquaint them when needed is the way to go?

And, of course, why wasn't it all encrypted anyway?

And why were the details that make the actual physical presence of the card ascertainable at a distance from the user captured?

Of course, all my complaints fall on the rocks of reason if the actual exploit was a buggery-bastard tech-in-the-middle intercept that grabbed the data before it touched down on the car-park people's disks.

This is what happens when you insist on making your cash registers the same as everyone else's and make them talk to each other. So much for the Internet of Things. More like the Internet of Dings.

SUPER-SUEBALL heading IBM's way in Australia

Re: and projects came in to time and budget ...

Er, how do you explain the Met Police and Sperry going ten rounds over their fingerprint recognition non-system of money suckage circa 82/83 then? Can't be bothered to cite, but I was in the trenches between '81 and '84 and the horizon was ablaze from all the crashed and burned. I recall the figure of 10 million pounds being demanded from Sperry. Dunno if it ever got paid.

Up-ballsed computer mega-projects were not uncommon in those days, when a success might be measured in managing to mothball the system in question before anyone suffered a brain aneurism and tried to run the bugger.

In fact, Datalink (like The Register, but printed using ink on a flexible, vegetable-derived substrate) ran an article about a high-priced consultant who offered to work for free if the client would guarantee the project would go live, so bad was the design-for-mothballs culture.

Bah!

IBM engaged in Unethical Practices? Unthinkable!

But a larger question looms in what passes for my mind: Why on earth would anyone hire an American company to do anything concerning health care? American Big Business hates the idea of centralized government-run health care and will stop at nothing to prove that it doesn't work and is too expensive.

I worked for a man back when computers had actual transistors in 'em who wouldn't let IBM salesmen across the company door jamb on account of the things one of them had done sometime in the past as the result of not getting the winning bid in with him.

Good to see some old-school business practices can survive half a century of "modern thinking".

Mmmmffll-CHOMP: I won? Reg reader to have CHOC-TASTIC YEAR

Bah!

Send all your too-pedestrian-for-my-refined-palate Cadbury's products to me and I'll show you what a yob I am by eating them and making "I'm having the most fun I can with my clothes on" noises.

"Artisan". The most over-used word in the new millennium marketers' lexicon.

'America radicalised me!' cries Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom

Bah!

"We recognised the sensitivity of the excess data provided and ensured it was retained securely, until it was returned to Vodafone. "

Because when you send someone digital information you no longer have it, just like with a Christmas Card.

"The Met agreed that it would only use the material for a policing purpose, when in the interests of justice to do so, and where people were already charged and facing criminal proceedings."

So, any time they felt like it, then.

Brits to teach Norks hacks about 'multimedia websites'. 5% of DPRK is in for a TREAT

Bah!

I would have thought securing a reliable food supply, raising the health care standards and providing a twenty first century education for the populace were waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay ahead of "broadband in every hovel".

Of course, once your people are well-fed, healthy and literate they will rebel. It is the way of things.

Dead Steve Jobs to give iPod MP3 evidence from beyond the grave

Bah!

Fools! iTunes is Democracy spelled in horribly compressed and artifact-riddled music files!

DNA survives fiery heat of re-entry on test rocket

Bah!

In other news: Mysterious amorphous blob-thing rampages the countryside around rocket landing site.

It's BLOCK FRIDAY: Britain in GREED-crazed bargain bonanza mob frenzy riot MELTDOWN

Bah!

You can't really call it Black Friday until you've had a few deaths and a trampled child or six.

My wife and I are shopping for a flat screen TV of decent size here in New York. I told her that I had zero interest in clawing my way through crowds to save a few pennies and would be doing my shopping after the bodies had been dragged away and the blood spills mopped up.

It is worth however many hundred dollars not saved to avoid dealing with Sale-Crazed Consumerloons and the terminally fed-up by lunchtime staff hired to serve them.

Antarctic ice THICKER than first feared – penguin-bot boffins

Re: Your numbers are crap

"Scotch is at least 40% alcohol, the good stuff closer to 60%. So a bottle only contains around 0.3 litres of water.

Now, like any good scientist, I'm off to re-test my findings. The 18 year old Jura, I think...

"

Like any good scientist you should remember to tell people whether your alcohol percentages are by weight or by volume.

2/10 See me after class.

Re: Bah!

"about the arctic anyway"

Pfft! Tomato/Aubergine.

Bah!

I don't understand why there's a need for these Linux-loaded robosubs to judge ice thickness.

Did we lose the notes Captain Rock Hudson took?

Amazon DROPS next day delivery amid Cyber Monday MADNESS

Bah!

Well, I can't speak for the T&C Blightside, but in the USA Prime membership does *not* guarantee you'll get your tat in two days (Prime is a "free two-day delivery" deal here) but that the mailing part of the fulfillment will take two days.

So when I stampeded to buy a home NAS I saw a thrilled journo here trilling about, that was available as a Prime offer (and therefore superduper desirable), I was a bit nonplussed to discover the turnaround time was going to be on the order of three months.

Turns out no-one actually had any in stock yet, and wouldn't have them for yonks. But when they did they'd send it out as two-day mail.

So I cancelled out of that order, took a breath and the urge to own wore off.

systemd row ends with Debian getting forked

Bah!

Fools! Devuan is democracy spelled in ones and zeroes!

Blade Runner sequel might actually be good. Harrison Ford is in it

Bah!

It's going to be great.

Just like Prometheus was.

Hi-torque tank engines: EXTREME car hacking with The Register

Bah!

Spiffing motor you have there sir.

Should anyone wish to compromise the handling and actually fit a standard Merlin, the vexing Five Reverse Gears problem can be addressed by simply inverting the rear axle, reversing the sense of the differential.

This fix courtesy of my former good mate Wart and his amazing Four Reverse Gear Ford Classic (arrived at as an unintended side-effect of the need to move the welded chain axle-lifts forward just a tad - so they'd stop punching through the boot floor - and the observation that they'd go where they would work better just nice if the axle mounts were the other way up).

We have a winner! Fresh Linux Mint 17.1 – hands down the best

Re: Replace LibreOffice with OpenOffice for better stability.

But not the latest edition, which has introduced a number of issues with hanging and crashing on The O/S That Must Not Say Its Name, especially when home-baking pdfs.

Re: Upgrades

>>Keeping your /home on a separate partition helps.<<

Yes, especially if that partition is encrypted.

Plus, a little git-managed directory with all those nasty configfiles (generally somewhere in /etc) and little compare-and-plonk scripts on the side.

All sound advice.

Remind me again what prevents the average windows user from taking up Linux in its stead. 8o)

Bond villains lament as Wicked Lasers withdraw death ray

There can be no justification ...

... for intentionally blinding animals or people with super strength lasers.

Wot, not even "I suffer from Asperger's Syndrome?"

Works on everything else.

Two driverless cars stuffed with passengers are ABOUT TO CRASH - who should take the hit?

Bah!

At what point did the "Collision_Avoidance" and "Stop_The_Bloody_Car" subroutines go out of scope?

Human DNA 'will be found on moon' – Brian Cox

Re: OBE == sir?

Trudat. If you have an OBE you get called "Ringo".

Re: more than just high-energy Scalectrix

Oi! Marshal that quark, please!

Bah!

I would like to propose an alternate scheme, wherein sponsors submit photos that are used to make high-relief etched plates. These are fastened to the blunt snout of the spacecraft, which is driven at maximum revs into the lunar regolith, stamping the likenesses into the green cheese for all eternity.

No harpoons or drills needed.

Beware Brit cops bearing battering rams. Four nabbed over Trojan claims

Re: Small beer in the grand scheme of things

The UK economy lost (estimated) 6.8 billion to cyber crime over the last year.

Yes. So your point is that the police should stop interfering with this otherwise successful business?

We have cyber bulling that remains un-dealt with too.

Bullying is a cultural issue that has more to do with the way people think than the law. Demand new law allowing civil prosecution for Civil Rights Violation and let the victims get revenge through the courts.

We have terrorists organising themselves on social media.

And everywhere else. Your point?

We have the big players dodging taxes.

A matter of the need for Tax Statute Reform - demand your MP work to close the loopholes that make this so easy.

We have companies playing fast and loose with data, with breaches all over the place.

The people in charge are human and make mistakes. That said, there should be corporate law to penalize companies that don't learn from the experience of data loss by hacking - say, if the Dimwit Bank doesn't learn to encrypt everything after their (insert large number)th break-in.

New law doesn't just happen because you want it to. You must engage in the political process. Your MP is there for a reason - use him or her. Make them earn their money. Tell them what you want and why, then pester them until they understand that they want it too. Organize.

You can't expect anything to change if you just sit there using The Force.

Renewable energy 'simply won't work': Top Google engineers

Bah!

Translation: Windmills won't power the Google Server Farm.

Maybe the elephant in the room is that we need less internet capacity sucking up all the megawatts?

Or perhaps we need to relocate the server farms somewhere it is cold all year round, making more passive A/C possible? Somewhere where the energy *can* be found from, if not renewable sources, clean ones. Somewhere that desperately needs the income this would generate.

Like maybe Iceland? Cold, broke and sitting on top of the world's most reliable geothermal sources.

Barges in hot, humid SF or NYC don't really cut it in comparison.

Forget the climate: Fatties are a much bigger problem - study

Bah!

From a humorous "calendar of the year's great events" printed in Punch, around Christmas of 1971, in which every second month American Scientists proved some activity caused cancer:

December: American Scientists prove living causes cancer.

Webcam hacker pervs in MASS HOME INVASION

Bah!

Tsk! Russians again. Can no one stop these digital dastards?

Mystery Russian satellite: orbital weapon? Sat gobbler? What?

Bah!

Fools! This is a clear ploy to divert attention away from their secret project to tunnel through the continental shelf and launch an attack from the safety of the Earth's core!

Bah!

Point of order, Mr Chairman!

To be a "constellation" they'd have to be bunched together and stay in the same formation over geological time.

What we have here is one satellite joining a bunch of other satellites, except it probably isn't joining them so much as being somewhere completely different to each of the others otherwise what's the point, right?

YOU are the threat: True confessions of real-life sysadmins

Bah!

It has been my experience in over 35 years in the IT business that the "lower" one gets into the infrastructure support - the closer to the metal - the more overblown the perception of personal importance to the enterprise is, with a corresponding elevation of the Dick Factor.

The observation that talent in IT seems to run hand-in-waldo with dysfunctional social skills, elevated sense of worth and a relaxed stance on ethics based on I-know-best is no surprise to anyone I would imagine, but is a cause for concern to anyone putting their business in such people's care.

I'm just racked-off that I get painted with the same brush as the San Fransisco Shirthead when it comes to expectations regarding personal ethics.

Free antivirus software, expires, stops updating and p0wns the world

Bah!

Two unnamed vendors were behind 87.9 percent of expired anti-virus subscriptions, largely because the software was foisted on users as bloatware on new machines.

OR

Two unnamed vendors were behind 87.9 percent of expired subscriptions, largely because the users of the computers failed to grasp what the virus protection was for or how important not having an up-to-date copy was and so when their three month trial expired and they were asked for the first annual subscription they clicked on "no thanks" and then took no further action to obtain and install an anti-virus solution of any sort.

I don't know if my version is any more correct than the author's, but since the author offers no evidence to support the attributed motives to the people in question I reckon mine is just as valid and I'd bet money on it being closer to "the truth" since anyone caring about "bloatware" would surely be savvy enough to install something to do the job.

Philae comet probe got down without harpoons

Re: @Stevie

Why? Because I pointed out that so far the only part of the mission to have worked as designed was the bit that required only maths, and that the bit that required engineering has proved to be packed mostly with fail?

Re: Bloomin typical !

Well played that man.

Hacker Hammond's laptop protected by pet password

Bah!

Indeed, it was stupid to pick part of the password to match the name of his cat.

But how did the FBI hacker get the "CHEWY" part?

That is the clever bit.

Attack of the drones: ‘Nefarious’ private use rising, says top Blighty copper

Bah!

I'm thinking The Register could, instead of just providing the usual fireplace in which to allow the conflagration of people's outrage to blaze, provide some solid leadership and pointing of the way to the Rest Of Europe by running a competition to design the rebus-onna-pole needed to warn would-be snoops that they are entering a No Drone Zone.

My first attempt would be a red circle on a white background, said circle surrounding a horizontal black two-bladed propeller with a stylized eye below it, and a red diagonal bar o'er all.

Facebook's plain English data policy: WE'LL SELL YOU LIKE A PIG at a fair

Bah!

Dear me, I would have expected a journalist to understand that there is no requirement that "plain English" be in any way ambiguous.

In fact, it has been my experience that High Legalese is pretty much designed to obfuscate and phrase ambiguity upon ambiguity with the utmost ease.

Or haven't you read a software EULA?

The fact that lawyers, when assured of an audience, lose the capacity to phrase anything in unambiguous language (or even grammatical English) does not make dense polysyllabic gibberish a requirement of the process of drawing up a legal document.

Only the need for weasel clauses requires that sort of nonsense. Otherwise, all software vendors would have to write "although you paid a lot of money for the privilege of using our product, we do not promise that it can do what we say it can in any way, shape or form and you, by buying it, have agreed that you will not hold our feet to the fire if it doesn't". Much better to drone on about parties of the first part and non-transferable n-seat license privileges until the reader's eyeballs have shriveled up.

Assassin's Creed bugs shift setting to LSD-drenched 1960s Paris

Bah!

Re: first video:

Bowman falls through a star gate designed by Jack McDevitt.

"My god, it's full of fog".