Posts by Annihilator

Entire Reg readership would fill 205 Olympic-sized swimming pools

70kg is being kind??

70kg = 11 stone something-or-other, right? Way to make me feel depressed! Though at 6 feet tall, I'm hoping there's some wiggleroom there..

Lloyds TSB, Halifax tech stumbles into the cold, goes titsup for hours

Re: Irritatingly vague system anyway

Depends who you ask, not all banks will tell you (not all are capable).

And it's not "many banks" that have an upper limit for fraud reasons, it's every bank. They're unlikely to tell you the answer either, for the very reason that it's in place. "Hullo Mister Bank, can you tell me how small I need to make these transactions to beat your system please? Many thanks"

Irritatingly vague system anyway

While it's true that "most" payments will go the Faster Payments route, it's a largely pointless system if there's no way to predict that it definitely will. I've had payments go to the same recipient take 15 minutes, 1 day or 3 days.

An improvement, but useless if I can't reliably know when it will arrive. All I know for sure is "no more than 3 (working) days"

Germany's RTL pulls free-to-air channels off terrestrial TV

Re: This is very shortsighted

"The People own the spectrum and deserve vibrant free TV in return"

Sadly, they usually receive vibrant-free TV instead.. :-|

Martian 'lake' said to hint at 'deep biosphere'

Re: Why should there be life on Mars?

Even assuming life even got started its unlikely its survived the harsh conditions there now.

"Uhh life uhhh...uhhh... finds a way"

This week's BBC MELTDOWN: Savile puppet haunts kids' TV

Re: I put my foot through my cornflakes

"Seriously - do people think that there will or should be some huge effort dedicated to excising any and all reference to Saville from the BBC archives or something?"

I imagine the Beeb are treading very gingerly before broadcasting any of their usual BBC2/4 filler of TOTP from various years... Steve Wright is going to find himself very busy topping and tailing performances that are suddenly in need of an intro.

Is "group of people get offended" still news?

You forgot " at slightest upset".

But you think it's bad here, you should try the States - entire "special interest groups" designed to generate the outrage on a scale the Daily Mail can only dream of. If you think OFCOM are bad (and they're largely toothless), you should see the awesome might of the FCC.

Microsoft to end Windows 8 discounts on January 31

Re: Not bad for £25

And were any of those speed/battery improvements measured? And if they were, was the speed boost anything you wouldn't see from a reinstall of the OS anyway?

VIA bakes a fruitier Rock cake to rival the Brit Raspberry Pi

Re: Where's the market?

" I don't think the extra $44 for the VIA's VGA socket's good value!"

Ah, but for an extra EXTRA $20 you can have it without the VGA socket. Oddly.

White House raises the signature threshold for petitions to 100,000

Re: Petitions

@Lee Dowling - good post, one of the few loooooong ones I bothered to read :-) In summary though, you're right, all petitions are to a gov are a convoluted survey.

Re: Heh

Though to be fair, for the US to reach the same population proportion that represents, they'd need close to 4,000,000 signatures ;-)

Re: Double Solution

But that would mean only the wealthy could effect and influence policy and... oh, wait... Situation normal, carry on.

NRA: Video games kill people, not guns. And here's our video game

Re: An NRA spokespersons said...

"I tried wiping out my school witha cassette copy of Manic Miner. I got tired before killing even the weediest first year weakling and was easily overpowered by (unarmed) teachers"

And this is why it's imperative that we arm teachers with video games. Or something like that.

Hyperspeed travel looks wrong: Leicester students

Re: Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs....

"Shouldn't it be FEWER than 12 parsecs? :)"

You've confused parsecs for parsnips I fear.

Re: "A Slower Speed of Light"

"Or they could read "Lost in Transmission" by Wil McCarthy."

Or they could watch "Lost in Translation". Or at least, time tends to slow down for me when I'm watching that, waiting for something to happen...

Re: How the Kessel Run was run

"Also, the warp drives in Sci-Fi do not allow the spacecraft to fly faster than light, they allow the space they are in to be warped to the point that relativisticly, the craft appears to be travelling faster than light."

Yet in effect, they do move information from one point to another faster than causality allows. It's not so much the "how" that's the question, but the fact that doing it will make the answer precede the question ;-)

Amazon-bashed HMV calls in administrators, seeks buyer

Re: Wonder how much tax HMV paid

"It is done to our detriment and we should be pissed off about it."

Nope, it's done (partly) to our benefit. You think that if Starbucks et al were paying higher rates of tax that their prices would stay the same?

Anyone who ever used CD Wow or Play.com to effectively avoid paying tax (prior to them changing that rule) are probably blissfully unaware that's what they were doing.

Microsoft flings out emergency patch for Iatest gaping IE hole

Re: Unfortunately,

You can only name two? I'd wager that around 50% of the FTSE is still XP/IE7, not to do with Head Honchos living in the past, more to do with the fact rolling out to Win 7 is a helluvan outlay, and that the corporate environment will be littered with web interfaces accumulated over the years that only support IE7.

'Mauro, SHUT THE F**K UP!'

@Syldra

By the same extension I guess you support state RFID tracking of children when at home then? Using your same story:

" The parent is responsible for their kids and if a child says he goes to the park but doesn't and goes somewhere and has an accident, I'm sure the social services would come and say "How come you let him go to <insert dangerous place> ?". It's far less invasive than cameras too."

Re: Linus

"If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs"

Following from Dr Mouse about software deprecation, what if a user programme was exploiting a live bug and a kernel patch fixed the erroneous behaviour - can we blame the user programs then?

Apple rubbishes rumours of iPhone for the masses

Re: Snigger..

I was thinking more along the lines of Family Guy, when Peter tries to teach Meg how to date guys:

"Meg when I get through with you, you're gonna be beating guys off with both hands!"

Snigger..

"beating off competitors with a cheaper iPhone"

I find hands to be more effective.

Is this possibly the worst broadband in the world?

Well you know that at 2.5km away from an exchange, it's probably closer to 5km line length. And you can see from the exchange details that it's an ADSL Max exchange (and tiny, so next to no chance of ever expanding to FTTC, certainly even on the early planning stages). So it's a situation that's never likely to improve.

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/NDWOR

It's a good example of the fast/slow broadband divide that's only ever going to get wider sadly. Plusnet are unlikely to be able to perform miracles either.

Forget 3D: 13,000 UK homes still watch TV in black and white

Re: Hmmm...

In many ways, yes :-)

1 - [number of people owning black & white TV] will include those who already have a colour tv & licence

2 - [number of B&W licenses] <= [people who require one!]

3 - [number of B&W licenses] will also contain the set [those buying B&W licence to get the inspectors off their back and know to turn the colour off in the very unlikely scenario where someone comes round]

Latest exoplanet discovery is a virtual CLONE of Earth

Re: Thanks

Ta for the reminder of how many days there are in a terran year - I can NEVER remember!

It's closer to 365.256 ;-)

Fireflies donate gut feelings to LED research

Re: I dunno about the lenses

Don't get too excited, it'll no doubt get cancelled after just one series...

Buying a petabyte of storage for YOURSELF? First, you'll need a fridge

Re: Does it really need all that much stuff?

"Does it really need all that much stuff?" - to make it useable/useful, yes.

Plus something for them to plug into and consolidate it into a storage array. Thunderbolt allows 7 (or 6? not sure if it includes the host) daisy chained, so a machine that has 8 or 9 ports would be in order. Plus a floor that would support ~ 400kg, and power into the room that could support ~3kW (plus whatever server) across 50 plugs. In one room.

For "race to the bottom" storage, I picked up a 3TB external USB3 drive from PC World over christmas (was an emergency in my defence!) for under £120. Get 334 of them for £40K. But by the same token I wouldn't consider 6,100 floppy disks as a useful alternative to a DL DVD :-)

Toy train company bids for West Coast Mainline

No need for the big wad of cash, just a misleadingly optimistic revenue projection that leads to a big shiny prize at the end of the term (with no obligation to actually pay that)

Re: Safety

Bob Crow would be delighted, just think how many maintenance contracts would need to be put in place! And the strike actions while the drivers' jobs are made safe!

Segway daddy unveils DIY weight-loss stomach pump

Re: Some sympathy the larger folk

"I'm one of those Thin on the Outside, Fat on the Inside people who drinks and eats with seeming impunity"

I used to be one of those people. Rejoice not though, at some point your metabolism will give way!

Adobe offers free trip to PowerPC era

Re: Gimp Schmimp

@Captain Underpants "It's also about not having a single application run in half a dozen windows (each of which is recognized as its own executable) which is what I found last time I tried to use GIMP. (You can imagine how much fun it is trying to use alt-tab in that context)"

^ That. A thousand times that.

Sky watchers prep for early 2013 asteroid fly-bys

Re: Rather humbling

"I've always been curious about this... How do we know that we know where all the big ones are?"

Short answer - we don't.

Re: Rather humbling

"We know where all the big ones are"

We know where the ones we know about are!

Rather humbling

Our biannual companion 2012 DA14 passes us by at the same sort of range that your Sky transmissions come from, yet we didn't see it until last year. Makes you wonder what else is up there, unseen, ready to create another Tunguska event. Or worse, extinction level event.

Scottish Highlands get blanket 3G coverage

Re: Voda Femtocell

I find mine needs a reboot on an almost weekly basis. Occasionally the DSL connection reboots and the Voda box doesn't seem capable of reestablishing a link. Just blinks forlornly saying the connection was lost and never thinks to retry.

Re: Not sure I understand this...

"Now all I have to do is winkle something out of BT that talks to whatever PAYG mobile my father happens to have this year, and also my Virgin"

Not quite, it has to come from the mobile operator in question - has nothing to do with BT (or whichever broadband provider). They're also single-network only, so would only work for (say) Vodafone. In fact Vodafone seems the likeliest solution for you, as the others provide them only to "valuable" customers who complain enough. Seems unlikely your father would spend enough for them to care?

Microsoft: We're SO SORRY for Media Center TV guide titsup

EPG

The other article mentions how the old WMC can't read the broadcast EPG and so has to get it via the Internet/MS. What isn't mentioned is why on earth it can't be patched to just read the EPG data from the broadcast stream like every other device under the sun? It's baffled me for years when I previously used it.

Ancient Mars: Covered with life, oceans, clouds, and imagination

Re: The chances of anything coming from Mars

Depends on how you define "intelligent life". Life has existed in some form for around 3.5bn years on Earth. Intelligent life has existed for some 500m years, not many of it would have evolved into beings that could comprehend life outside their own planet.

Who's to say that without a large asteroid impact, dinosaurs wouldn't be the dominant species today and that they'd be just as big and dumb as they were then.

It's quite easy to suppose that life will pretty much always start given the right conditions (as it did with our planet), it's quite another thing to assume that life will always evolve to a species that has the capability to leave the planet.

Anonymous turns private eye in Ohio rape case

Sadly, yes, by the accounts she was drugged and carried from party to party

iPhone 'Do Not Disturb' bug to self-destruct on Monday

"not to mention the company itself has become the most hated on earth"

You mean "by you"? It's entirely possible to neither love nor hate Apple you know. Google "most hated companies" if you want a real list.

Re: *Time* for change ?

"I remember Nokia introducing scheduled profiles years ago and they didn't suffer from any of these issues.. you know why ? they actually tested their code. Back then updating phones software was not as easy/commonplace as it is today"

Granted, it's a stupid bug on Apple's part, but comparing it to a Nokia profile schedule of the 90s (when I recall it on my 3310) isn't particularly fair. Yes they probably did have better test coverage, but I suspect it was a much smaller code path on of the old Nokia OS and so a lot easier to achieve that coverage compared with a smartphone. The demand for features wasn't as great either.

But yes, old Nokias had bugs too, even the aforementioned 3310 (had trouble operating when "no service" was displayed and rebooted).

What's THAT, you say? Apple MIGHT be making a NEW iPHONE, iOS?

Re: WTF !?!

@A Non e-mouse - yup, selectively quoting and missing off the end of that paragraph (namely "not that anyone sane was suggesting that") is a clever way of getting a different point across. Or did you just stop reading at that point and rush to the comments?

Re: Really?

"Stop thinking so much about your advertising revenues and BITE THE HAND."

And you don't think a massively sarcastic article about Apple hype is doing just that?

Making MACH 1: Can we build a cranial computer today?

Coat in advance

"Of course, this being a lithium battery, our hero’s bosses in the SIS would need to ensure the power pack can be eventually removed and replace"

Unless it was created by Apple, in which case it would be welded to your skull...

Thunderbolt interface strikes YOUR PC: What's the damage?

Re: FW800 slower than USB2?

I think it might a symptom of the Firewire cards used in the test being PCI, not PCIe

Re: USB 2.0

What's more interesting to me is that USB 3 is "only" 2.5x faster than USB 2 in realworld tests.

Re: Charts: Mb/s or MB/s ?

I'd assumed Megabit/s, but you're right by the looks of it as I just did the maths. Otherwise ~50MB/s would be quite tame.

Official science: High heels make you sexy

Re: Really?????

"What a waste of time."

Consider why it was published:

1) it was part of a study of human behaviour, these sorts of things are useful to know in evolutionary studies

2) (most likely) it's a good advertisement for Portsmouth Uni, coincidentally 2 weeks before admission deadlines close (15th Jan), particularly for the Sports & Exercise Science course starting in September.

3) (less likely, but plausible), it's not uncommon for sponsored research work. Wouldn't be at all surprised if I saw Schuh or similar quoting the results.

But of the likeliest options, I'd go with 2, with a mixture of 1.

When your squash partner 'endorses' your coding skills on LinkedIn...

Re: AAAAAAAAAA++++++++++ Article

You forgot "would reccommend", "would recomend", "wood reccomend" or the highly unlikely "would recommend"

Craptastic analysis turns 2.8 zettabytes of Big Data into 2.8 ZB of FAIL

Re: Delta Tango Oscar

It's Greek, therefore older than America, let alone "American-business-twatspeak nonsense". I first encountered it in school when I learnt calculus. I've also encountered it in the phonetic alphabet which you've perhaps ironically used.

As FDR mentioned, perhaps you'd have preferred "difference", but that wouldn't have accurately fit, given the author could then have been talking about the differences in the data sets, not the difference gap. So yes, it's quite a good word. I use it when describing data sets as just one example.