Posts by Annihilator

NASA iceberg-finder prangs into Moon's south pole

Moon juice

"Moon juice would also be hugely valuable for operations in Earth orbit, as it would be easier to get it there than it is to boost it up through Earth's powerful gravity well and troublesome atmosphere. Some have even suggested that lunar rocket-fuel factories could turn a tidy profit selling their product to satellite operators above Earth."

Erm, this stuff that's going to come back from the moon and fill up a satelite (I'm thinking some poor guy trudging down the hard shoulder with a petrol can). Unless I'm being really thick, then they have to get this petrol can up to the moon in the first place (and then back). Wouldn't it be easier just to fill up the petrol can here and send it? Unless this is going to be a reusable petrol can, which will mean servicing it in space.

Paris, cos she can fulfil servicing anywhere.

Toyota Prius fourth-generation e-car

@green099

Absolutely seconded. I'm getting incredibly bored of smug Prius owners who think they're MPG figures are amazing and saving the planet. The Top Gear mob showed it's a doddle to get this sort of milage out of a normal/evil/dolphin-killing car, assuming you know how to drive the thing economically.

NASA tweaks killer asteroid's trajectory of death

RE: National Lottery

"So I'll still be around 50 times *more* likely to be squished by Apophis than winning the UK National Lottery jackpot the day before."

A common mistake regarding odds. The odds of *SOMEONE* winning the lottery are quite high, probably close to 2:1. The odds of *SOMEONE* being hit by Apophis are still 1000000:4 (or 250000:1 as we normal maths bods prefer).

Apple posts iPhone update

No battery

So no indication if this fixes the apparent battery drain? Oh how I wish I could go back to pre-v3

Blogger claims Twitter-served court order a success

@DavCrav

Waiting for the tweet of "We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram"

MS plasters Ballmer's signature on Windows 7 special edition

RE: Drivers

The reason Win 7 has been so 'driver successful' is because it's not changed the versioning significantly enough to require rewritten ones. Vista drivers pretty much work with Win 7.

Consider Vista taking the brunt of the pain in terms of getting drivers updating. MS have learnt a bit of a lesson.

Easy mistake to make

Would not have surprised me if Ballmer had signed the underside of the disc. With a stanley knife.

O2 could impose out-of-contract iPhone lock-in

Or

I'm sure that Orange or Vodafone would be more than capable of and willing to provide said unlock code, no?

Yank slams El Reg 'zio-fruitcake' Playmobil 'crap'

Doesn't count!

This clearly cannot qualify for a FoTW. One of the rules quite clearly states "Do not reread your flame". This douchebag has apparently been working on this for the best part of 4 months. Even with his remarkably lower-than-average IQ, I can't help but feel he probably reviewed it at least once.

Without standards, there's nothing left!!

Pluto still a planet, says Ronald McDonald

Dwarves

To echo david 63, dwarves are still people! It's this kind of prejudice that is driving kids away from sciences. Won't somebody please think of the children??

Wales adopts mobile average speed cameras

@Evil Graham

"I'm not sure about that. I drove through the average speed cameras in the M1 roadworks last week at a law-abiding 50 mph - and plenty of people were hooning past me without a care in the world."

Your speedo only has to be accurate +/-10%. You could have been going 46 (reported as 50), whereas your hooners were doing 55 (reported as 50). It's why the speedlimits are in reality, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77.

I want to know what they're cunning plan for bikes are though, given these ave checks are all front facing cameras. As James May said, he's planning on going through them at a ton, giving the middle finger, safe in the knowledge there is no number plate on the front of his bike.

Also, anyone know if they're still incapable of coping with lane changes? It was certainly hypothesised that changing lanes between cameras caused their little brains to conk out.

Autodesk goes after eBay seller - again

Garage sale

Hmmm... this chap is rather fortunate really isn't he? Anyone else found $4K software licences onsale at their local bring and buy?

Microsoft Security Essentials shakes up consumer antivirus

@Jazzman

I think, in fairness, it's safe to assume you didn't write the article though :-) That will be Steve's gripe.

Steve - I stopped using Comodo when I realised it tried to bundle the Ask toolbar (may not anymore in fairness), which I generally count as adware. Kinda figured if that passed their logic test, I wouldn't be trusting their product!

Ads watchdog underclocks reseller's 9.2GHz AMD CPU claim

Car for sale

Each wheel capable of doing 140mph. Top speed of the car, 560mph!! 1 careful owner, full MOT, £5000 o.n.o.

Cosmic rays hit Space Age high

@Paul 25

Most sats are RAD hardened (oo-er) but there's limits it can withstand (the reason that there are still redundancies built in). That's why it says "conceivably" :-) The concern is more for the puny fleshlings in the guise of Major Tom in his tin can. The other reason that "older" tech is used is due to it having less complexity, µm scale and thoroughly tested - we can pretty much be sure that any anomolies in the CPU performance are known by now and the predicted outcome from them are near as damn it 100%.

But thanks for the article Lester, if only because I've now got a song running through my head, and an image of Philip Schofield in the broom cupboard:

Uuuu-ly-sseeeeee-eee-eeeeee-eee-eeeeeessss no-one else can do the things you do

It's me Nono small robot you know, friend of Ulysses

Virgin Media network goes down down south

Wrong assumption

I expect most people just assumed that the throttling had kicked in early today.

MS opens up Security Essentials downloads from today

@The Original Steve

"NT7 is Windows 7. Try typing "winver" at a command prompt" - maybe you should and realise what Windows 7 is. Clue - it's not NT7

"If you seriously believe the security problems (botnets, spyware, viruses) in the last 5 years have been through holes in the OS I strongly recommend you take a look at half a dozen end-user PC's (home users) and take a peek."

Conficker

My biggest beef with Security Essentials is the WGA thing. Just punt it out no questions asked to all and sundry, regardless of legit software for crying out loud!

UK, France mull Photoshop fakery laws

Lazy

Actually I think it's more a sign of lazy photographers these days. Most of the airbrushing stuff could be achieved through appropriate angles and lighting, but nowadays it seems that they just say "f*ck it", snap a quick one and give it the once over in Photoshop.

Nation's moral guardians snap over 'shag bands'

Oprah, Oprah, Oprah

This or some variant was brought up on Oprah about 5 years ago. Does yellow mean you have to give Lance Armstrong a reach around?

One of the many moral panics that springs up from time to time. Still, jolly good fun to be able to reminisce about the phrase "lickout"...

Freeview website titsup ahead of big retune

Re-tune warnings

Well I switched on my DVR (Humax) the other day and it flashed up with a big message saying "please retune at the appointed time". Checked the inbuilt tuner on my two TVs (Samsung and Sony) and got the same message. I honestly think most people will figure it out just fine. In fact most people will suddenly discover they can get Dave Ja Vu and Virgin 1 (24x7 instead of evenings) during the process as they haven't retuned in a while.

I'm not really seeing the big fuss! I can (almost) understand why some AC has taken the opportunity to rant about Vista - nothing else to see here.

PC tune-up software: does it really work?

Memory upgrade

A memory upgrade is possibly the easiest thing for even a novice. And these days it's incredibly simple to get the right product for the system - Crucial supply a system scanner that tells you what system you've got, how many banks are free and what memory your machine can take (taking into account BIOS limits etc)

http://www.crucial.com/uk/systemscanner/index.aspx

A memory upgrade will also lower boot times as noted in the article. The result seems quite contradictory, but in layman's terms, when Windows boots, it will load as much as it deems appropriate into "real" memory, and load the rest into virtual memory/disk. It still goes through the same process to do this though, but can't write to virtual memory as quickly as the real thing. If you're in the habit of hibernating the system though, it will increase the resume time (but it's a fairly swift process to begin with)

To be honest, I'd say that a non-tech person would have as much luck with an upgrade as they would with something like CCleaner

NASA retargets Moon-attack probe

Translation

"However, it now says that "based on continued evaluation of all available data and consultation/input from members of the LCROSS Science Team and the scientific community, including impact experts, ground and space based observers, and observations from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), Lunar Prospector (LP), Chandrayaan-1 and JAXA's Kaguya spacecraft", the suicide mission will now end in a 98-kilometre-wide crater called Cabeus."

aka - "we think we're going to miss but getting the excuses in early"

Vodafone joins the iPhone throng

Logos

"But Apple's demands for a share of user revenue, as well as control over the pricing and marketing of their baby, put some operators off signing a deal with Cupertino. This will likely result in near-identical offerings, differing only in the colours of the attached logos"

I've never seen an O2 logo anywhere near my iPhone, not even on the box. Only place is on the sim card, which let's face it is hardly on show. Vodaphone and Orange's iPhones won't differ in the slightest, just where it shows the network operator in the top left corner. Apple won't let anyone sully their brand.

Pricing will quite likely not change. Apple are dictating the prices and operator margins are squeezed to the absolute mimimum. Customers won't benefit from this financially, it'll just give people a choice of who their operator is - coverage is all it will come down to and that will be a personal choice based on location. The only other difference will be support and let's face it, they're all as bad as each other.

@cdtplug - you really don't think that locked phone owners aren't paying this through their network charges anyway?

Eurocrat demands MP3 player volume limit mandate

Gah!

We know it's bad for you, leave us alone. Is there a massive deficit in the NHS budget because of overspend in treating patients for ear damage after excessive volumes on mp3 players (incidentally, does this extend to a DVD player, Nintendo DS, PSP, or, lord forbid - the headphone jack on my amp?

Google shuts down bank snafu Gmail account

What right...

... did Google have to remove the email as suggested above? Please point out where a bank has snail mailed a document to the wrong address and subpoenaed the mail company (US Mail, Royal Mail, whatever) to get it back, or indeed bust into the person's house and taken the letter back if already delivered.

How is this any different? If I fancied indulging in a bit of reductio ad absurdum I'd say what right would the bank have to repossess the house/PO Box to achieve the same end?

Apple sends iPhones into 'Coma Mode'

Coma

Mine has exhibited coma mode since the 3.0/3.0.1 update. Was hoping 3.1 fixed it!

Apple squeezes video camera into iPod nano

re: Interface?

"Also: if the iPod Touch can get a 64Gb SSD, how come netbooks seem to be saddled with 16Gb at best? Admittedly that kind of capacity would push the price point out of the usual netbook territory, but it would be worth it to have a decent capacity drive that I wasn't constantly worried about breaking."

Difference being that Touch's don't need very responsive IO performance. At a guess from experience it writes at around 3-5MB/s, and only needs to read at the rate it takes to play the music. I'm guessing it's probably not the same sort of SSD that you'd see in a hard drive.

Adaptec bolts SSDs onto lightning RAIDs

@Steven Jones

"Oh yes - and if a disk controllet can do this sort of caching, then it can be done in a drive. Add a few gig of SSD flash and some clever cache algorithms into a standard drive and we might well have something of use to the average PC user"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_drive - not many turned up though as the advantage wasn't huge, but the costs were.

Failing that, it's already in use to an extent in Vista/7:

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

Caching algorithms have improved over the years you know, and can actually recognise when large backups are in progress. CPU designers have honed caching algorithms for several decades now. The SSDs won't fail over night, they'll just gradually reduce in capacity. Data won't be lost, performance will just gradually drop. Building it into the drives will exhibit the same effect.

Apple yanks C64 emulator from App Store

re: Doom

Never mind Doom, I had a weird version of Quake running on an iPaq almost 7 years ago. I can only imagine it's come along since then.

The reason I abandoned it? How on earth do you control Quake with a stylus? Not easily is the answer. But fun for 5 minutes to find out.

The reason Apple don't want this is purely because it's the thin end of the wedge. Allow a C64 emulator, allow an Amiga emulator, allow a Game Boy emulator -> Megadrive/Genesis -> Saturn -> N64 -> PSP etc - Wii??

OK there will likely be a natural hardware barrier at some point along the chain, but you can bet that Apple have shot themselves in the foot by being guardians of the software gate, and therefore leaving them open to the inevitable lawsuits. I suppose it's also a revenue loser - you need to get a special "licence" (read money for Apple) to develop for the iPhone. This C64 emulator technically means anyone can be a developer.

Granted, as mentioned above, I doubt you'd get many people relishing the prospect of digging their software out the loft, seeing if the C90's have stood the test of time, and typing it on an iPhone keyboard. Frankly I struggle to write a medium-length email on one. Just tried it:

10 GOTO 20

becomes

10 GIRO 20 with the helpful autocorrect

NASA panel: Human spaceflight in 'unsustainable trajectory'

@ D@v3

Dave, technically speaking, they don't need to "bring it down". But they do need to "keep it up". ISS (all orbiting things really) are falling towards the earth. It's a very very very gradual spiral, but without occasional boosts, it WILL fall out of the sky.

Generally speaking, you don't want it falling where ever the maths takes it. Could be Australia, could be New York, could be London. So you have a choice: pay to keep it up there, or pay to bring it down in a controlled manner.

@elephant in the room

"Is it up to NASA to decide to deorbit the ISS?"

No, it happens at the end of the planned mission, but it's NASAs responsibility to actually do it.

If it makes you feel better, the Russians (in a brilliant bit of recycling) are studying the feasibility of taking their bits off and building their own space station out of them. That does pose a problem to NASA though, as the rockets that are capable of doing a de-orbit burn belong to the Russians... I guess they're hoping they don't take them

Discovery bids adios to ISS

ISS inhabitants doomed

""The dream of being able to go out and just have an unencumbered view of space - we'll have it. You can open up all the windows and look around and really feel like you're out there"

I'll be honest, I think opening the windows up there is probably that last thing you'd want to do. Indeed it's probably the last thing you'd ever do. Apart from explosively decompressing.

Custard Creams can kill: Official

Jaffa Cake not a biscuit!

There was an extensive court case between HMCE and McVities that ruled a Jaffa Cake is indeed a cake (and therefore not subject to VAT). McVities argued that biscuits are normally expected to go soft when stale, and cakes would normally go hard. A Jaffa Cake goes hard when stale.

It's this sort of shoddy report writing that's ruining the country! Think of the children!

Commodore 64 emulator hits iPhone

Not forgetting..

Dizzy!! I want!

Man remanded for extreme porn offences

Too much outrage to notice the funnies

"Individuals may be remanded in custody on a number of grounds – usually where there is fear of them absconding, or where they might interfere with an ongoing investigation"

Where "an ongoing investigation" should read:

a) themselves

b) a goat

c) ...

I'll allow you to fill in some more amusing blanks

NASA orbiter snaps Apollo 12 landing site

@SmallYellowFuzzyDuck

"So how are the moon conspiracy nuts going to wriggle out of this one then."

It will *never* shut them up. Some branches of the Nuts Association are of the opinion that unmanned landers made it, and this is all we're seeing. In their minds, there is NOTHING that you can't fake. Messages coming back from any subsequent landings can just be relays on the moon. Even if NASA offers them a free trip to the moon, that channel 4 mockumentary where they took a handful of idiots into "orbit" (read: studio in Russia) has given them all the ammunition to get around that one.

Just ignore them until they stick their hands into a combine harvester, convinced that they're faked blades.

Mobile hack shows need for security upgrade

Towers

"The GSMA has been claiming that an A5/1 Rainbow Table will need the equivalent of a tower of books 20km high, which is about as useful as saying that such a table couldn't be written on a fish."

Coincidentally, that's how I back up my data... But I prefer two towers for redundancy (I've got a colocation arrangement with Saruman). Backing up the video collection isn't so good, you lose a bit in the conversion/compression algorithms. Most of my vids fit onto one page:

"Dave the plumber enters the house, some music starts playing and all plumbing interests divert to the biological type"

The alternative was printing out each frame with subtitles, but that would require 4 towers.

Bletchley Park to restore 112-byte* '50s Brit nuke computer

Half a byte

"featuring a magnificent 112.5 bytes of memory"

I first read this as bits, not bytes, and immediately wondered what half a bit was...

Does this imply that its word size was only a nibble? I thought that way-back-when, a byte was whatever size the hardware defined it to be?

Still utterly confused, but less so than half a bit.

But yay to Bletchley. Please build it out of Meccano(c)

Snow Leopard forces silent Flash downgrade

Flash.. aaaaa-aaaaaahhh...

Why is Flash even bundled with SL?

GTA maker coughs up $20m for 'hot coffee' sex

@ Lol1

I like, but my preference is usually running them down instead. Why waste the bullets?

PS3 phone out next month

Like PSP/PS3 compatibility...

... utterly pointless. The closest they came to a "cool" feature for the PS3/PSP combo was when GT5 was rumoured to use the PSP as a rear-view mirror. That's been long scrapped.

Just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should be!

Sony snubs Microsoft in Google Chrome browser deal

Hello, Sony helpdesk, can I help you?

"Hello, I've just bought a new Vaio thing and I can't find my Internets"

"It's still there, it's just called Chrome now"

"Well I don't want it, I preferred the Microsoft Internets I had before"

and so on

Caviar Black gets 2TB model

@Dave129

"Previously you would have maybe 2TB spread over 5 or 6 500GB drives (just for example). Meaning if the RAID was lost, it was "only" 2TB of data"

You'd have to expect a lot of things to go wrong to lose the whole 2TB! :) As far as I'm aware, MTBF hasn't changed as the drives have gotten bigger.

Back-up's always been a problem, especially if you're running at the larger disk sizes (hint, it's why enterprises generally don't) as you need at least twice the storage capacity somewhere. It was the same the first time I had a 20GB drive I wanted to back-up, pretty much the upper end of storage at the time. Tape or equivalent HD was the only option (or about 30 CDs - unweildy and expensive - just like 40 BD discs would be for the 2TB drive), and at least as expensive as the initial purchase.

Apple and Snow Leopard take-downs - just say no

@Colinmac

True dat. I'll be honest, when I started reading this article I assumed it was about the OSX install dongle!

Lightning-gun tech 'approaching weaponisation'

RE: Electrically triggered

"Many explosive detonators are electrically triggered aren't they?

In which case if you fire a little charge at the bomb don't you risk setting it off rather than disabling it if it uses an electric detonator? And if that isn't the case with current bombs, is it possible to make a bomb that would go off if you shot it with one of these things?"

Yes, a controlled detonation, and generally part of the point. Be in no doubt, they're not going to be pointing this thing at a bomb, pressing madly, slowly moving towards it and pressing harder - like my dad when the tv remote batteries go.

How to run Mac OS X on a generic PC

non-Apple-labeled

"You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so."

Well, I've sure the Windows versions of Safari and iTunes came with exactly that warning - may have changed since, so I wouldn't be worried about using it. Selling it, maybe...

But come on, be a man and just play with a hacked version and don't let it update. Worked fine for me, even in a VM environment.

PS3 Slim unscrewed

Something wrong with me

Whenever I see pictures like that, I get an excess saliva problem and go a bit misty eyed. I suspect the men in the white coats will come for me soon...

The one that buttons up at the back please.

Kettle car breaks speed record

Bravo, jolly good show..

But the improvement to the real world is where?... the fact the record hasn't been broken in over a century is shurely a sign that it's no longer relevant!

Or is it a case of the marvellous point made by Clarkson (from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article1139929.ece)

"The problem is that humans have already climbed the highest mountains and sailed on their own through the wildest and loneliest stretches of ocean. But though the records have gone, the world is still full of Chichesters and Hillarys and Amundsens. As a result, these people have to think of stupider things to quench their need for a spot of frostbitten glory. So, they insert a few sub-clauses into the record and set off from Margate to become the First Person Ever to Pogo Stick Round the World — Backwards. "

Wikipedia to crack down on celebrity Wikideaths

ROFL

"A warning to celebrities: under the new policy of moderating articles of living people, fledgling Wikifiddlers can still tamper with your article - only now they have kill you first"

Love it. Where do I submit my list of candidates for termination?

NASA scrubs Discovery launch

@Emo

Took me a second to get that :-) Here's hoping it's the pilot and commander!