Posts by Annihilator

Scientists discover supervolcano trigger that could herald humanity's doom

Statistically speaking, I'm a man, if I live in the world. In the UK though, statistically I'm a woman.

Time travellers outsmart the NSA

Re: Well I'm convinced.

I suspect some went with #IwillhazCheezeburgeryesterdayz in error, thus revealing their time travelling ways. Fortunately, they then saw the register's report that time travellers *had* been found on the interwebs, and thus went back in time again to delete the tweet.

Two white dwarfs and superdense star. Yup, IDEAL for gravity lab in the sky - boffins

I thought it was already known that it only worked for spherical chickens in a vacuum?

Gran Turismo 6: Another glossy, gorgeous Mario Kart on steroids

"For me, the pinnacle of racing sims was Toca2"

100%. Still got my PS1 copy and hanging on to my PS2 to play it on. You know, back when Sony gave a shit about backward compatibility and not having to choose between chucking your games or having two consoles under the TV.

HALF of all Bitcoin-investing Winklevoss twins predict $400bn market for the currency

Re: Its the new economic model

Thing is, it's even riskier - we know it has zero intrinsic value and will return to zero eventually but have no way of predicting when. It's one of the purest bubbles there are!

UK payday loaners cop MEGA £175K fine for 'misleading' SMS spam

Re: Report offending spam texts to your network operator by sending them to 7726.

"Report offending spam texts to your network operator by sending them to 7726"

Handily, that number is also the interest rate of the pay day loan company sending the spam texts, so easy to remember.

Thought of in-flight mobile calls fills you with dread? Never fear, US Dept of Transport is here

Yet again

Yet again, missing the point that you can already make bloody phone calls from a plane via the inbuilt ones that nobody ever uses.

Not to mention, Virgin Atlantic already offer an inflight pico-cell to make calls from your mobile at international rates.

When the lights went out: My 'leccy-induced, bog floor crawling HORROR

Re: Always carry a torch

Far too big - I've always got one of these on my keyring:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00420EUR8/

B&Q are flogging similar for a quid. Don't last ages, but are only a couple of cm long, about 0.7 in diameter.

Re: Power Generation

Why would you "reduce the mass temporarily" and still expect energy in vs energy out to match? And what would be the point?

NASA opens its Jupiter photo album to honour Pioneer 10

Re: Bah!

"I thought the zoom had the layer of yoghurt-y stuff on the outside, with the hundreds-and-thousands. "

That lolly sounds fab...

Apple's 'Smart Dock' patent filing makes Siri your new roommate

GLC

"Siri, am I gangsta or what?"

Martians yet to retaliate after Curiosity's 100,000th laser strike

Hurt

No chance of Curiosity blasting "No More" into the surface of the planet?

Brit inventors' GRAVITY POWERED LIGHT ships out after just 1 year

They do

Pumped-storage hydroeletric does pretty much what you say - they pump water up into a higher reservoir during low-demand periods, and release it on demand or during peak periods. There are at least two that I know of in the UK (one in Scotland, one in Wales) and act as Grid reserves

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity

D-Link FINALLY slams shut 'Joel's backdoor'

If Joel was a one-man dev, test, package and deployment man for firmware, then yes. However in the case of a large company like D-Link that is sodding unlikely.

Re: And number of D-Link routers updated?

True, but by the same token the same Joe's won't have enabled external access either. In fact they probably wouldn't have changed the default password and username either.

Re: It can be switched off, but most users won't.

"Remote admin should be disabled as factory default. This is my new armchair crusade!"

On the products in question, it is disabled by default.

Dell tells staff: If you haven't got stomach for private era, leave

Thing is

It's usually the bright, re-employable ones that jump ship.

IT MELTDOWN ruins Cyber Monday for RBS, Natwest customers

Re: Another offshored error?

It wasn't an "outsourced" issue last time. "outsource" <> "offshore"

NASA pic: DOOMED ice Comet ISON literally had snowball's chance in hell

Re: And the Eadon memorial award goes to. . .

"Didn't know that he had passed on."

Was apparently banned and all comment history erased. Not sure if there was a specific comment that triggered it.

KILO-MACH SONIC BOOM probed in fireball embers of 1572AD SUPERNOVA

Re: In Space, No-one Can Hear You Explode

"given the speed of sound in a near-total vacuum, I and my trusty walking stick can still beat Mach 1000 easily"

Except they're not referring to the speed of sound in a vacuum, they're referring to the speed of sound through the interstellar medium

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_remnants

PS-PHWOARRR: We review Sony’s next-gen PlayStation 4

Audiophile

"The console’s perpetual forward slant lends it an overtone of kinetic energy like a work of vorticist art."

Let me guess, you also do hi-fi reviews?

SCRUBBED: Technical oopsies halt SpaceX's bid for the Money Ring

Geostationary - bloody tough

Serves as a good reminder at how astonishingly far out geostationary orbit is - ~22,000 miles. Consider Hubble, roughly the furthest a Shuttle ever got, is about 350 miles.

MY EYES! Earth engulfed by BRIGHTEST EVER killer gamma-ray burst

Re: Dr Hertz

I'd prefer Herz was his first name, Van Rental his surname.

BOFH: Resistance is futile - we're missing BEER O'CLOCK

Re: Irony

"As I was reading this, an advert from BT appeared at the side"

Gotta love vaguely intelligent adverts that widely miss the mark!

Arduino-powered probes ArduSats launched in space: Listen in to beacon

Re: Cool vid

Pushing up or forward (or even sideways) gives risk of later collision with the ISS.

Cool vid

And as a bonus, the ISS will have gotten a tiny boost in orbit by pushing them out.. ;-)

It's the games, STUPID: Sony makes 'about $18' on each PlayStation 4

Re: Does that include returned/failed units

You're assuming that they write off the returned/failed unit instead of a) refurbishing it (for other returns), b) use it for spares, c) repairing it.

Possibly EXPLODING or GLORIOUS Comet ISON: The (GIF) MOVIE

Re: As any fule kno

By the same token we should be pronouncing CMOS as "Kih-moss" instead of "see-moss". As above, etymology doesn't define pronunciation.

Although it's definitely gif, not jif.

PlayStation 4 BLUE LIGHT OF DEATH blamed on power cords, TV sets, butterflies in China

"Posted it above but the compatibility issue may be a HDCP issue."

Oh I've no doubt, but it's still an insane situation to be in that we've managed to create a cabling system that has incompatibilities.

"TV compatibility issues"

Seriously?

Coroner suggests cars should block mobile phones

Re: Great f**king idea

"Option 2: Make it a "feature" of cell phones, implemented with the accelerometer/gyro/GPS/whatever. Circumvented in short time."

So goodbye to passengers using a phone, goodbye to streaming radio stations.

'A measly 3 Instagrams? NO!' Sexy selfie Snapchat spurns Facebook's $3bn

Re: This news has cheered me up this evening

"A 190 million GBP lump sum is just about enough to live an above average life for the next fifty years, certainly not luxury."

You've extrapolated up costs and inflation, but not calculated net present value of the £190M to balance it. Or considered what the money will be turned into - you use a house as an example, consider the house they buy will increase to the same level of worth. Not to mention how they invest the money.

Re: Turns down 3 billion?

" a billion seconds is 31 years"

Bugger. Wish someone had told me that on my 30th. I'd have quite liked to celebrate my billionth second birthday.

Roll on 62...

Brit ISPs ordered to add more movie-streaming websites to block list

Re: They'll never learn

"I'd hazard a guess that its only detered the less technically minded"

Uploads will have dropped drastically. The less technically minded (exhibit A - my brother) found out about torrents, but didn't realise they kept seeding, or even what seeding was. By the time I visited him and investigated why his "internet was slow", the list of seeding content was huge (and a disturbing insight)

Boffin says astronauts could hitch to Jupiter on passing asteroids

"A University of Washington team funded by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program is hoping to harness nuclear fusion in a system which could get astronauts to the Red Planet in just 90 days."

"Dear diary, started my research job today. My team-mates seem nice, and everyone is quite new too which is a relief. First day was rather quiet in the end, just figuring out email and accessing the shared drives. Then sat around waiting for nuclear fusion to be nailed so that I can start work on step 2"

I want that job!

Mixed bag of motors lifts India's budget Mars shot

Re: What's an order of magnitude in a joke?

Couple of things - first India has a much lower cost of labour. If we offshored the majority of our government spend to India to take advantage of this, I'm pretty sure the public would hit the roof. Secondly, I'm sure we could quite easily build a one-off rocket to Birmingham from London that carries zero passengers and doesn't have to return, but I'm not sure the benefits would stack up.

FLIGHTMARE! Inflight cell calling debuts, dealing heavy blow to quality of life

Re: Plane phone usage

" I once saw a Mexican "diputado" use it like a public payphone"

He urinated in it?

Not a "debut"

Planes have had telephones on them for years. As for mobile service, the last Virgin Atlantic flight I took over a year ago had its own picocell which wasn't even particularly expensive - as I recall it was the same as normal roaming charges to the country you were flying to.

http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/gb/en/the-virgin-experience/in-flight-connectivity/mobile-phones.html

I connected to it out of curiosity. Didn't make any calls through it though, just a couple of texts out of interest.

Furious Google techie on NSA snooping: 'F*CK THESE GUYS'

"They can use symmetrical encryption and lock up the keys"

Quite - asymmetrical encryption would also be computationally huge in comparison and rather a waste of resource for a 1:2:1 link. Even asymmetrical 1:2:1 connections only usually use this to establish a shared key and switch to symmetrical

"Google wasn't encrypting traffic on dedicated leased lines running between its data centres. It's easy to be wise in hindsight, but this looks like a serious shortcoming."

It's easy to be wise with foresight too - there's no such as a private leased line. One assumes it all came down to a risk assessment.

UK.gov BANS iPads from Cabinet over foreign eavesdropper fears

Quite. Why he thinks that he's exempt from NSA/GCHQ monitoring is beyond me.

Although by the same measure, I'm surprised it's taken them this long to twig that if they're doing things like this to other governments, it's fairly likely the same is happening to them.

Helium-filled disks lift off: You can't keep these 6TB beasts down

Drive noises

Is the whine from the disk a few kHz higher than normal?

Does "talking like Donald Duck" now appear as one of the troubleshooting steps for signs of an imminently failing drive?

Have you reinstalled Windows yet? No, I just want to PRINT THIS DAMN PAGE

"It's a £500 A4 colour proofer. Not sure I want to throw it away just yet."

What's your day-rate and how much time have you spent?

Besides, flog it on Ebay as "slightly used" to get some dosh back.

Fiery bits of Euro satellite to rain down on Earth this weekend

Re: If a bit lands in my garden ....

"GOCE has no nuclear pile"

That's just what *they* want you to think. We're all doomed... Still, my tin-foil hat will protect me just nicely thanks.

Snowden: Oh, PLEASE let me come to Germany and help Merkel with her phone

"Please can we not turn this guy into Assange 2.0 where he lingers like a bad smell, dreaming up new allegations every time the media focus moves elsewhere?"

You know that Snowden has leaked all he's going to leak, right? It's the newspapers (well, the Guardian) that are staggering the release of what he leaked.

Re: NSA

"Just wondering when Germany became part of the USA"

Probably the same time that France, Italy and Spain did. Remember when they refused entry to their airspace to the Bolivian president due to suspicions Snowden was on the flight, forcing it to land in Austria?

Apple: SCREW YOU, BRITS ... no unlocked iPhones for you

Re: As if I needed yet another reason...

I doubt that people purchasing an iPhone care where they're getting it from?

Re: Analsysis flawed?

Because there's Apple the retailer, and Apple the wholesaler. Resellers don't just pop into the Apple store, buy some and re-sell them. They get them wholesale from Apple, only in this instance, Apple refuse to supply them wholesale to their re-sellers, unless it's tied with a network contract (in which case, it's more likely the reseller is getting them wholesale from the network providers, not Apple).

Virgin Media only puts limited limits on its Unlimited service

Re: mangled english....

"50:1 in the uk maybe (where you paid for local calls.)

In more enlightened countries if you didn't run at least 12:1 people would bitch like mad about regularly busy signals. The "unlimited" ISPs back in those dialup days ended up having to run around 5:1"

I'm talking about the first DSL products, not DUN. I was also talking about bandwidth contention ratios.

Re: mangled english....

You've just described what a contention ratio is though. Regardless of where the bottleneck is, the company *should* have a target contention ratio that it shouldn't breach. FTTC is the same (and bear in mind, VM *is* FTTC). If the backhaul out of the cab is 100Mb, you can sell 25 x 100Mb connections, or 50 x 50Mb connections without breaching your 25:1 ratio. They sell an additional 100Mb on that cab, they have to update the backhaul to 101Mb.