Posts by Peter Martin

Intel imagines chips in nappies to create the Internet of sh*t things

wonderful but dont read this during your lunch break bweerrrkk

as per title

El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Urrgh

Despite what the 'experts' say surely a screen is for showing content, not white space? If I wanted white space I'd pick up a sheet of A4 printer paper.

BT Infinity ‘working to fix problem’ after three days of outages

Had a major outage here in rural Dorset on Wednesday evening for several hours. A traceroute showed packets getting lost in the ukcore.bt.net maze. No DNS either. Was it coincident at at approx the same time 1&1 DNS was broken as well.

Reported the next day as: "Yesterday afternoon at 4pm EST an unknown third party initiated a DDoS attack on 1&1's DNS infrastructure."

Samsung turns off lights on LEDs worldwide – except in South Korea

Re: much better light quality?

Err LEDs often use phosphors to produce different coloured white light.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#Phosphor-based_LEDs

And LEDs have a fairly narrow band of discrete wavelengths too

3D fad fades for Yanks

re resolution of 3d systems

When viewing 3D, at home at least, the resolution is indeed compromised. The standard way of transmitting 3D HD content in an MPEG stream is to combine the two images either side by side or vertically. The 3D Tvs use these two images to render two sets of frames, one left one right. View a 3D movie on a standard TV set and you'll see the two images. So to carry a 3D MPEG in the same general bandwidth as a normal HD MPEG movie, the horizontal or vertical resolution is halved for each frame, and your brain is left to fill in the gaps. This is usually visible (notwithstanding the effects of distance of the viewer etc. as per the recent article in the reg).

Fanbois howl as OS X update bricks PGPed Macs

re errr

Really?? Last time I used whole disk encryption (the built in filevault) it took many hours to encrypt, and even longer to decrypt. So a 1 hour OS update turns into an overnight marathon.

Booze makes you clever, having none makes you stupid

Swingeing taxes on booze in UK tax?

Interesting the study was carried out using Norwegians - they have one of the highest levels of taxation on all alcohol, so they can probably only afford to drink modestly anyway, plus they are probably better off folk as well. Last time I was there a bottle of wine cost over £40 in a modest hotel.

UK.gov sacks lead e-Borders contractor

sacked the wrong parties

I almost got excited, but they are targeting the wrong folk. Aside form the usual mess of poorly stated requirements , moving goalposts and all the usual mess of gov. IT projects (an assumption on my part admittedly), the whole programme is badly thought out - anyone here a leisure sailor? Just look at the procedures we'll need to follow not to mention the restrictions on where and when we go anywhere if for example we want to pop over to France!

HP shatters excessive packaging world record

re WTF?

Yes companies _are_ getting penalised, just not the right ones. It is the recipients that have to pay to get rid of the packaging, and it costs even more to send empty boxes back to the vendors.