Posts by Tom 7

Horror in space: Hot alien giant boiled alive by nasty radiation-belching star

Dims by a bit every 1.5 days

Which could be a wave travelling around a star that size. Hope its a planet mind.

The biggest British Airways IT meltdown WTF: 200 systems in the critical path?

Re: Workers defending their territory; managers afraid to challenge them.

I'd imagine its more likely managers defending their territory than their subservients.It will almost certainly be the manager or sales rep who requires a certain service and refuses to have that taken away.

Re: Typo? Looks strange

When working on fibre optics we used to work for an error rate of less than 1bit in 10**14bits. Its actually not that hard to work out if you are above or below that level at the theory level . Sitting in the lab for whatever was required to check that less than 1 bit every 3 days is wrong on average for 400Mb is another matter all together.

Re: Ignorance and greed

From the article "Indeed, it was far from clear that even senior NASA management were actually capable of understanding the warnings their engineers were raising – often having neither an engineering or a scientific background."

This - in every company I've worked for. Even in the ones where they had some engineering experience it was so out of date as to be useless or actually only had a talent for climbing greasy poles. The best boss I ever had was an utter charlatan but he had the sense to leave the engineering to those that knew about it

Silicon Graphics' IRIX and Magic Desktop return as Linux desktop

Too long ago to remeber exactly what it was

but I used to use an SGI workstation and Cadence software to do chip design. I do remember it would process at 1Mips which seemed incredible considering it was 100th the volume of the similar performance VAX box in the server room.

I remember it being a really nice machine to work on - and the combination with the Cadence software let me do some amazing things. Got a bit scared after a long long session when a colleague down the corridor worked out how to fuck with my XWindows making it melt slowly after disabling the keyboard. If I'd lost that work I would have fried the bastard.

Utah fights man's attempt to marry laptop

Re: Marry a laptop?

Does the sex stop? It may go down on him.

Boffins find evidence of strange uranium-producing bacteria lurking underground

Re: "Well, if you believe the claims about nuclear explosions in Earth's past "

Surely the water only becomes a less efficient moderator when it boils - its the neutron hitting the protons in the hydrogen that moderates them so it density not temperature dependant. So the reaction would only stop when it blew - but then deep down in the earth the pressure could allow some serious energy to build up before it went off.

Amazon granted patent to put parachutes inside shipping labels

Oh what fun one can have with a drone and a sky hook

those 85" tellies might slow it down a bit mind.

LIGO physicists eyeball a new gravitational wave

Re: Two solar masses (in energy) escaped

Einstein's field equations state that nothing can get into or out of a black hole. Time stops at the event horizon.

Spacecraft spots possible signs of frozen water on the Moon

Re: GOD!

I'd leave that bottle of moonshine and walk away slowly.

Re: Water, water everywhere...

Recently someone found out how the earth creates its own water from chemical reactions under high pressures. Cant find the source at the moment but it pretty much explained where it came from - we had it all along just in a different form.

BT considers scrapping 'gold-plated' pensions in bid to plug £14bn deficit

Re: Much like my pension, which I'll likely never get.

Re Ledswinger - BT pension fund would be fine if they hadn't decided to not ''take a holiday' from paying into it after privatisation. The members continued paying but the company didnt as it felt the fund was oversubscribed. Presumably this money can be got back from the shareholders?

Nvidia: Pssst... farmers. Need to get some weeds whacked?

Re: If you can spray between the [weeds] crop plants

But the idea of most GM crops is to make them resistant to herbicide. Using this visual system means you can use mechanical weeding and plants dont develop a resistance to that. Despite what was written earlier in this articles comments in Canada in the 80s roundup tests showed that weeds developed resistance within 3 years. Weeds are not annual - many of them can put in several generations in the lifetime of the crop. We have lots of Japanese knotweed in hedgerows down here that has been sprayed and injected with roundup every year for the last ten years to my knowledge and is still there and spreading - thank god that stuff doesnt seem to set seed!

If you can spray between the weeds

you could hoe too - that would save you having to reinvent the herbicide when the weeds develop resistance.

El Reg straps on the Huawei Watch 2

Re: Nah

How else do you expect google to provide you with life enhancing adverts if they dont know where you are?

I must confess I've only ever used GPS 'services' once and that was to drive to a garage when low on car juice. It was shut.

Capita payments service Pay360 goes TITSUP

Re: Major payment system ..contract says

You do realise most of the contracts are largely written by the contractor? The government save us money by getting rid of the decent lawyers who can spot a loophole the size of the earth in a contract and the contractors run rings round those left.

What's got a vast attack surface and runs on Linux? Windows Defender, of course

Re: Fuzz?

It was given a name in 1989 - many of us had been doing similar for many years before. I saw my first bit of what is now called fuzz testing in around 82 or 3 and it was written in coral 66 I believe. A colleague used it to test functions to see what would induce functions to blow up rather than to look for attack 'services'. When code, and systems took minutes or hours to get to a useful state catching shit like that was a lot easier than working out why a system was on its arse.

Sensible compilers make it a lot harder/redundant.

Nokia's retro revival 3310 goes on sale and disappears immediately

Re: 2G only?

If you have a 3310 with 4g AND can use it to tether to then there is no need for their really expensive phone with all that lovely snooping android on it.

Or in english, shit I was going to get one just for the above.

Schiaparelli probe crash caused by excessive spin, report concludes

Re: Why don't they test them on Earth first? A thicker atmosphere

You could make a parachute that would be a pretty close approximation in terms of behaviour to that of the other one on Mars. And as it would be noticeably smaller and could be tested by firing it from a gun, lots of times for not a lot of money.

DARPA orders spaceplane capable of 10 launches in 10 days

We dont need a space elevator

we need a moon based elastic band.

Windows is now built on Git, but Microsoft has found some bottlenecks

Re: SourceSafe

Their methodology worries me - I 'touch' thousands of files but I dont get push them back unless I've contributed something I want to actually think is needed.

Britain's on the brink of a small-scale nuclear reactor revolution

After Manchester

One can only guess how many armed forces are scurrying around our nuclear sites at the moment. I cant imagine us being able to defend all these little reactors from some ill informed seeker of some invisible truth or other.

Euro Patent Office staff warns board of internal rule changes

Re: Just say no?

I'd imagine Battistelli has reduced productivity in the workforce to the point where a strike would not make much difference.

I'm guessing he has some clandestine photos of the board members or something,

SoftBank-Saudi fund raises world's biggest tech pot at $93bn

Re: Interesting...

"Softbank believes the next stage of Softbanks revolution is to keep expanding before someone realises we're a tad overoptimistic and a lot bigger than we really are"

Re: Robots and AI software don't pay tax

It wont take long for them to discover they cant just buy and sell from each other for very long.

No nudity please, we're killing ourselves: Advice to Facebook mods leaks

RE What if I pixelate it?

You'll never see it again!

Cloud giants 'ran out' of fast GPUs for AI boffins

Re: They should have used AI...you have 20 days to submit your

You dont understand deadline. Or 'management' who will not allow you time to do your real work until you point out if its not done today they wont be able to take your work to conference.

What is dead may never die: a new version of OS/2 just arrived

@jake

If IBM had used the 68008 rather than the 8088 the PC may have started a teeny bit slower but we would have avoided 10 years of some of the finest brains in the world trying to work out which 64k block their brain had exploded in.

Shit even MS might have written a decent OS on that!

And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin hologram ... Sir, it is only wafer thin

Re: Holograms

Some 20 years ago I saw a hologram in which an american football player ran a few yards as you tilted the hologram, which IIRC was about the thickness of old 120 film. I was gobsmacked by it but couldn't think of any use for it other than maybe advertising. I'm guessing the designer hasn't either.

I dread to think what life will be like when someone finally works out how to make lcds on a sub-wavelength scale so we can create holograms on the fly. As you point out bandwidth needed would be huge and there appears to be a physical law that the script intelligence content is the the inverse of the bandwidth.

MP3 'died' and nobody noticed: Key patents expire on golden oldie tech

Re: No, No NO!

In 1969 Quad (as they were then) were testing their new current dumping amplifier. The did double blind tests with golden eared journos from the HiFi mags of the day.

They tests their MkII valve ampr (1% distortion) , their 33/303 transistor amps (0.1% distortion) against the 404/44 (0.01%)setup.

Not one of the golden ears could accurately tell the difference in double blind testing. The golden ears response was to refuse to do double blind testing and put themselves out of the valuable work of bullshitting about HiFi.

@ac challenge

Careful there - no-one has ever been able to tell the difference between un-encoded* 16 bit or higher but MP3 adds features to the stream that are audible with experience and people can tell the difference in double blind tests.

* presumable flac would be undetectable too but that assumes the decoding is carried out seamlessly and the spec doesnt cover how the operating system works so it is possible for flac decoding to add very small gaps which may be unnoticeable by some but observable by others.

Re: MP3 vs other formats

"I should re-rip all my CDs, Vinyl and tapes (reel and cassette) to FLAC."

Why on earth would anyone in their right mind want to change CD to FLAC? You've said space is not a problem so leave as is.

I've been digging around for years and I've yet to find any double blind tests that can reveal anyone who can hear the difference between 16bit CD and higher res of any form and I have no doubt that FLAC will not loose any quality but it just seems pointless for 30% saving that on some devices may cause jitter during decoding when it could be directly streamed to the DAC.

Robot lands a 737 by hand, on a dare from DARPA

RE: Flight deck crew costs doesn't even enter into the picture.

Still wont stop some accountant saving the company money. Saving that $100,000 a year may not make any difference to ticket prices but its a health bonus for someone.

I've noticed in some companies above a certain level saving $100,000 will lead to a much higher bonus. Maths is different in the thin air at the top.

Travel IT biz reportedly testing 100TB SSDs

Data centre in your pocket.

Mind you it will take a time search for a file from your phone.

Have a go with this WW2 German Lorenz cipher machine – in your browser

Re: 3D Simulation

re screw slots. I wouldnt bet on that - I've seen heavy machinery where that happens. Some watchmakers do it to.You can either make sure its engineered like that* or put small spacers at the bottom of the hole.

*Some modern machines will always start tapping the holes at the same angle and the screws from batches can be similar enough to achieve that Anal Retentive look.

Re: Enigma, the cipher famously cracked by Tutte's colleague Alan Turing

Doh! Spat that one out without thinking again.

Re: Enigma, the cipher famously cracked by Tutte's colleague Alan Turing

Primus Secundus Tertius

As I understand it the Bombe emulated the Lorenz machine and ran through various encodings to rapidly find settings that looked like they might be the ones used to encode the message and then these were tried in Colossus.

It's 2017 – and your Mac, iPad, iPhone can all be pwned by an e-book

Re: Greedy Apple!

Apple hardware tends to last? I've not seen an iPhone in someone's hand without a crack in it.My daughters spent more on new screens than the phone cost.

Australia considers joining laptops-on-planes ban

Re: And in other news,

I travelled many hundreds of times on business before the internet thingy. I think maybe 1% of those trips would be necessary in the www world. I may be able to work on the plane but no where near as well as at home and definitely not at the airport or on the way to and from. Its nice to get away paid for but I much prefer to have a proper holiday I paid for.

Like many government travel policies this will cause more damage to air travel than it causes - people will learn to avoid travelling and that it is in fact more cost efficient not too.

Mind you its not as bad as the 6000 lives a year wasted in extra security since 9/11.

Google DeepMind's use of 1.6m Brits' medical records to test app was 'legally inappropriate'

RE: Did the hospital or Google

Well the hospital certainly did for not protecting the patients data and identities.

I'd be happy for my non-identifiable data to be used in an experiment of this form so long as the full results are returned to the NHS.

74 countries hit by NSA-powered WannaCrypt ransomware backdoor: Emergency fixes emitted by Microsoft for WinXP+

RE: We can't afford it all

I worked for one company that sadly told us it didnt have enough money for the touted 1% pay rise as the end of the world was near and a couple of days later the company accountant turned up in a new car where the wheels alone would have paid for the 1% rise. And they wonder why people dont think its worth working their arses off for them...

PC repair chap lets tech support scammer log on to his PC. His Linux PC

Re: VOIP why can't BT do that?

BT get paid by the call and the time - or a contract. I'd imagine you VOIP comes out of your ISP non-existant monthly allowance.

BT dont do it cos they make money out of it, your ISP does it to stop sending them an email which costs more to respond to that than simply cutting off the hawker.

Hold them on the phone as long as possible.

As someone in semi-retirement I used to walk them down the garden path and throw them in th compost heap. Alas the PC I was pointing them at (w98) died and I cant be arsed to find the disc to set up a VM. I've have been tempted to brake the law and take them over but can imagine how pissed off you'd be going up before the beak for doing the world a favour.

Warm, wet, mysterious... sound familiar? Ah, yes, you've heard of this second Neptune, too

RE There's obvious and there's obvious

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2130188-earth-may-have-been-born-in-a-huge-flare-up-of-the-young-sun/ for more complications.

There's obvious and there's obvious. Planetary 'theory', or the stuff I've seen seems to make very sweeping assumptions which are mainly necessary to make the maths a bit easier - i.e. possible. Things like flat rotating disks of matter that form the star and planets. When you look around the skies the chance of these things happening seem pretty slim.

We are only now spotting planets around other stars and none of them seem to support such simple models as being of much use and looking at clouds of matter from supernovae that might form systems suggests the models are a bit simple - but we've got to start somewhere! Now we are getting to the point where we can run simulations of system formations we then have to make models to run and test.

Its not rocket science - its a lot lot harder.

Re: Some reassurance...

Always in the wrong bloody jobs though!

UK hospital meltdown after ransomware worm uses NSA vuln to raid IT

First degree?

So the only way to get decent qualifications these days is to kill people for them?

Re: Oop North

The internet and phones are down then!

Beeb hands £560m IT deal to Atos. Again

Re: That's a Labour Government for you!

No - it was the Wigs ffs.

Re: Ex bbc

Lots I'd guess, but obviously not the talented programmers the BBC once had.