While it was indeed a Simpsons joke, that's not the origin of the theorim; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
Posts by DiskJunky
27 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2008
Give 1,000 monkeys typewriters, they'll write Shakespeare. Give them robot arms, and wait – they actually did that?
Microsoft working hard to unify its code base, all the way down to the IoT
Earthworm Jim
Tuesday 11th December 2012 10:06 GMT 
Nostalgie
I really, really wanted to play and love this game. I was never able to get past level 2 though - on any version of it (I tried 3). I just found it impossible to know what was interactive. The background looked like foregrounds and I could never tell what I could jump on. Cue several hours losing all lives and resetting the game... I never picked it up again. Too difficult :-( And yes, I'm a platform nut (mario, castlevania, megaman, sonic, donkey kong, etc). Never any joy with earthworm jim.
It’s official: Google shrinks the world!
Thursday 11th October 2012 13:48 GMT
Re: Errmmm...
Fair enough but intuitively if something had the mass of Earth it would be unlikely to be so dense as to be only 6 meters across unless it was what was left over from a neutron star or black hole. From a purely practical point of view, I can't see something with the mass of Earth being that small - it just doesn't have the...well, mass, to achieve that kind of density. if that's the case, then you can't keep the mass constant in the calculation. Or am I missing something again?
Why Paris? 'cos I'm feeling that blond right now
Thursday 11th October 2012 08:58 GMT 
Errmmm...
Maybe I'm missing something obvious but if the escape velocity has increased 1,000 fold along with the gravity, how exactly has the radius shrunk? A quick google and some very rough guestimates would say that if the escape velocity has increased then so must it's mass by a proportional amount. Perhaps a thousand fold? Maybe but if so then this would put the radius of the earth somewhere between Saturn's and Jupiter's.
Or am I being a complete dumbass and missing something obvious? I'm confused with this 6 meter radius thing...
Populous
Wednesday 26th September 2012 13:32 GMT
Game reviews
How come we still haven't seen game reviews on other systems? Missing so far (I think) are
Sega MasterSystem
Sega Megadrive
SNES
GameBoy
GameGear
Atari Lynx
Playstation (I'm adding this as it's of the same era as the n64)
There are a very wide range of titles to choose from and it wouldn't take much to whip out an emulator and try a few of the "top 10" on any given system. Anyone remember the original Super Mario Land on the GameBoy? God, the hours lost on that thing and those "NOOO!" moments when the damn batteries ran out (you were luck to get 4 hours out of 'em)
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Goldeneye
Wednesday 15th August 2012 15:57 GMT 
N64
Goldeneye was good for multiplayer...but super smash bros was better. I've probably buried a significant portion of my life playing that game with friends. We ended up getting so good we were effectively playing pong with any n00b gullible enough to play us. Against each other, nafarious tactics such as deliberatly diving off the edge of the platform so that noone else gets the kill point and donkey kong's suicide throw to carry someone off the edge with him made for many, many hours lost.
Dammit, I wanna play now!
Ten Android games
Newbie German team 3-to-1 fave in cluster building compo
Aga cooks up phone-controlled 'iOven'
Friday 25th May 2012 12:40 GMT
Another point
The app isn't entirely pointless. If you consider the price of the cooker, 10,000+, then the most likely demographic for buying one are the wealthy. With a large number of owners being of the executive type, i.e. the kind of people with busy and somewhat unpredictable schedules, it means that the use case for putting your dinner in the oven and being able to remotely turn it on when you finally know what time you'll be heading home is a valid one.
Not so useless.
Woman spanked for dissing ex in Facebook snapshot
Slovakian police chief quits over Dublin explosives run
Friday 8th January 2010 14:25 GMT
Dublin missed it
Why on earth didn't Dublin airport pick up the explosive? The only raided the guy's flat several days after when the slovakian police notified them. Also curious why they arrested the guy if it was obvious that it was the slovakian police that told them. What did they say to the gardí? No-one seems to want to talk about why the Irish completely dropped the ball in detecting the explosive and the disproportonate response afterwards
DARPA hands BBN $30m in evil 'Machine Reading' plan
Microsoft goes green to win IE 8 and Bing users
Take a hammer to your hard drive, shrieks Which?
Thursday 8th January 2009 13:17 GMT 
hmm
There is a good argument for the protection against shrapnel etc but I'd have to agree with Which in that the only real *100%* way to destroy your data is to physically destroy the disks. Something many companies do in fact. If you want to read more information the problems involved in destroying and recovering data, particularly on an ntfs system you can go to the grc site and microsoft's aquired site sysinternals. One of the main issues is that on an ntfs (windows 2000, xp, vista, server family...etc) if you write different information to a particular byte in a file, the physical location where the information is written to is different than the original location. So writing 1's and then 0's to a particular byte in a file ends up with several physical entries in multiple physical locations on the disk. While there are tools to get around this (mainly by bypassing the os and file system), you still have the issue of removing the data effectivly from the disk material. Given that data can be recovered even from a burned disk, I'd be very sceptical of any tool saying that they can completely remove the data via software. Physical descruction is more and more looking like the only reliable way.
US wireless pioneer to carriers: Don't be European
Thursday 11th September 2008 10:32 GMT
Huh?
am I understanding that right in thinking that he seems to be saying go back to the days of the "internet portals" where "everything" we need is determined by that first page that we see - and space on those pages paid for by companies who which to "be seen". No thanks, I'll stick with searching via google. Which is an american company last time I looked...
Today is not Hadron Collider Day
World goes mad as Bill and Jerry eat churros
How to stop worrying and enjoy paying for incoming calls
Friday 5th September 2008 10:17 GMT 
not quite true
Fair enough that terminations charges level the playing field for the companies but it leaves customers wide open to scams where someone calls you and you have no real choice but pay if you accept the call. Does that then mean that you never pick up if it's a "no number" or a number that is not in your phone book? That doesn't exactly lend itself well to practical use. It's the *customers* ofcom should be thinking of, not the companies! Let's get some perspective here!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
