Posts by Stoneshop

Printing the Future: See a few of UK’s 6.2 million 3D-printed ‘things’

Re: And yet it already has shown it's usefulness

And the Apostrophe Agency wants to have a word with _you_.

Microsoft: We're nearly OUT OF STOCK of Surface 2 and Pro 2

@ John Brown (no body)

I was thinking the tablet AC needs would be Ibuprofen, to get his two braincells in step again. But Immodium would indeed be fine too, to keep them from being excreted rectally.

NSA using Firefox flaw to snoop on Tor users

Re: I would like to post a controversial opinion. It's not the truth...

He's been telling us all he knows about the NSA. Thanks to him, we know exactly more or less what they are up to. Every day, there's something new. Some things, we now know, they can do (shock horror, better watch our step). Other things, we've found out, they cannot do yet (so it's safeish for us for the moment to do these things with totalrelative peace of mind). It helps that the young man is able to leak to us PowerPoint presentations in which NSA operatives candidly inform one another about what they can and cannot do about this or that technology. These fall into our lap and we smirk, knowing that we've found part oftheir weakness.

Wacky racers – The Reg's guide to 2013's Solar Challengers

Looks like it needs help reaching even the lower shelves.

Simon met this one in a local supermarket where he was stocking up on supplies for the trip south.

What kind of supplies does a croc take for such a trip?

Oh, shoppin’ HELL: I’m in the supermarket of the DAMNED

Re: Waitrose FTW

Here in .nl Albert Heijn uses the exact same system, and on the occasions I've used it (my regular store doesn't have them yet) it worked smoothly. The running total on the scanner is a nice extra. Haven't had any exit checks yet.

BTW, you also have to scan your loyalty card to be able to take a scanner. And as far as that's a loyalty card: you just ask for one, handing over personal data is entirely optional.

The life of Pi: Intel to give away Arduino-friendly 'Galileo' tiny-puter

Is there anything that does not run Linux?

Mmmmyes. Basically systems not sporting an x86, Power or ARM CPU, or 68k or AXP if you're looking in the past a bit.

The list of systems not running NetBSD is a fair bit smaller.

Re: Two stools

If the Galileo works in a similar fashion and doesn't just emulate the Arduino in software, then it would be a great addition.

The GPIO pins are controlled via an I2C I/O expander, with the I2C bus running at standard speed (100kHz). So

a) there _is_ software inbetween what the sketch assumes is an I/O port and the actual hardware, and

b) bit-banging will only manage to get you a couple 100Hz at most. which is about 1000 times slower than you'd be able to achieve with a real Arduino.

BOFH: Welcome to Helldesk, ma'am, may I take your bags?

Funny

Latest addition to the helldesk here is a petite Asian woman.

Thorium and inefficient solar power? That's good enough for me

Re: @ James...

Like the fact that you've lost your ability to have a green roof. That is to say that you couldn't create a green environment to capture and use the rain water to reduce the gray water run off which ends up going in to the sewer system.

Nonsense.

First: the rain that would fall on your roof, still falls on your panels (they don't magically stop precipitation), runs off them, onto the roof proper and into the rain gutter, from which it can be collected.

Second: if you have a flat or lightly sloped roof, it's still advantageous to put whatever it is you'd put on it underneath the panels. The roof stays cooler, increasing the panels' efficiency.

Re: Disruptive Night Time Solar..

The answer was no as you need AC to run the inverter

Depends on the inverter. Ones that can run in 'island' mode don't necessarily need mains AC, although getting them synced when AC is restored may require a restart.

There's also the possibility of using an offline UPS (the type that basically runs off batteries that are kept topped up while there's AC), with a separate charging circuit grafted on that runs directly off your PV panels.

Former Microsoftie in AUTOMATIC BEER MAKER funding plea

Re: Combine it with a teasmaid

A beermaid at your bedside?

3.5 hours

Well, for turning barley into fluids it's quicker than a horse, but the result will be much the same

Susceptible to viruses *AND* bacteria

"New type of yeast detected - no suitable driver found. Allow Picobrew Zymatic to connect to the Internet and download it?"

Google FAILS in attempt to nix Gmail data-mining lawsuit

Re: @ Philip Lewis

you reminded me why I stopped posting on El'Reg.

Funny, I still see new postings by Anonymous Coward

Dixons preps home 3D printer for plastic-piping punters

Re: 52 quid for a block of plastic?

£1,200:£52 Looks like a much better ratio than you get for the supplies on ink jets.

And like inkjets, the price for the printer will fall, the price for consumables won't. Although the moment that a new printer with a set of cartridges will be cheaper than a replacement cartridge for last year's model may be some time off still.

Curiosity keeps on trucking despite government shutdown

The right time

Even the Asteroid Watch team that keep an eye out for Earth-threatening objects in space are on furlough,

A suitably-sized asteroid heading for Capitol Hill would be just the ticket.

Plastic ingredient FOUND ON MOON of Saturn

Re: Tupperware? What's that got to do with it?

Not the same as Propane.

And where did it say 'propane'? Sure, it's not the same as propene/propylene, but that's neither here nor there.

-ane : CnH(2n+2)

and for n>= 2

-ene: CnH(2n) <- one double C-C bond. Old nomenclature: -ylene

-yn: CnH(2n-2) <- one triple C-C bond

Oracle sued over $33,000 bill for SaaS: STRIPPERS as a SERVICE

Re: ooh...

am not codding you!

And that's the trout.

Launchpads, catapults... what a load of - WAIT, there's £15m for grabs?

They lost an opportunity for acronym redefinition

"Connected Digital Economy Catapult"

Or CoDEC for short.

Tracking the history of magnetic tape: A game of noughts and crosses

Re: "each reel could store 1.5 million characters (224kB)"

1572864/229376 = 6.857 bits per char, which sounds as close to 7 bits per char as makes no odds, which sounds fine to me.

You're calculating bytes per char, not char per bit.

229376 bytes would be 1835008 bits, if we're talking 8 bits per byte.

So 1572864 chars in 1835008 bits would be 0.857 char per bit.

Radioaficionados españoles: Echadnos una mano

¿qué?

It's all Greek to me.

OK, so we paid a bill late, but did BT have to do this?

Re: Good Experience with BT

Brutish Telecon

How to get a Raspberry Pi to take over your Robot House

Re: Reg ongoing feature?

Currently it's a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist,

Sure, I could go about the house when I leave, or go to bed, to check if all the doors are closed and locked, all the lights are off except the ones I want on, etcetera, etcetera, or I could press a button that selects the desired state.

Now include a sunscreen that I want down because otherwise the house will be uncomfortably hot when I return, but which had better be retracted when the wind picks up. I also want ventilation and heating control to coordinate between them, and shut down a room's radiators when there's a window open.

Next step: running stuff that can run either on low nightly tariff, or on solar when sufficiently available.

If you think those are non-existent problems, you're wrong.

NASA: Humanity has finally reached into INTERSTELLAR SPACE

25 august 2012

From the NASA website: The new plasma data suggested a timeframe consistent with abrupt, durable changes in the density of energetic particles that were first detected on Aug. 25, 2012.

The day Neil Armstrong died.

HP dumped from Dow Jones Industrial Average

HP's investor relations unit

FRTA "retaliations unit"

Compact Cassette supremo Lou Ottens talks to El Reg

Can we have a picture of Mr Ottens?

http://rinusvanalebeek.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/wpid-lou_ottens_cass1963.jpg

Re: Interesting

On my bookshelf there's a book by a guy (currently the book's in one of at least a dozen boxes due to a move, and I can't readily recall his name) who wrote reviews for a British motorcycle mag in the 1960's and 1970's. 25 years on he decided not just to bundle some of his articles in a 'best of' compilation, but to go and visit the designers of those machines, and interview them on the background of their design choices back then.

Very interesting indeed.

Re: Ah, cassette tapes...

Of course I never had any threadlock on me, so once it had been adjusted once it would wander out of true again after a few months.

"OK, done. Now, can you grab a bottle of nail polish from your mum's dressing table?"

Google chap reverse engineers Sinclair Scientific Calculator

Re: The perfect calculator!

I was going to say the same; the most frequent refrain after "lend us your calculator" was "where's the equals button?"

One particularly obnoxious and ignorant twit, whose sense of entitlement apparently extended to me supplying him with a calculator, took about five minutes of key-pounding (this was an HP29; it could take the abuse) before latching on to the lack of the equals key. He then demanded "a normal calculator".

"Here, have my slide rule".

Are you for reel? How the Compact Cassette struck a chord for millions

Re: Lumbago easing...

claimed to be portable

It's got handles, so it's portable. Ask any military person.

Batteries

One small error: the EL3300 and its direct successors used five C cells, not AA; those wouldn't have lasted a C90. I know from experience. Lacking fresh C cells and a working mains adapter, I bodged five penlites in the battery compartment of my EL3302 using oodles of sellotape. It was hardly worth the effort.

Ballmer's emotional farewell to Redmond: I LOVE THIS COMPANY

Re: Selection process...

Musical chairs?

BALLMER TO RETIRE FROM MICROSOFT

They've run out of chairs?

letters

Lenovo to ship all new PCs with Start Menu replacement

Re: Just awesome

I don't want any more bloatware / crapware on new machines!

So, what are you using instead of Windows? Inquiring minds want to know

Brazilians tear strip off NSA in wake of Snowden, mull anti-US-spook law

US-centric view.

"We have concerns with the [possible] changes, such as requiring the maintenance of data in Brazil," said Bruno Magrani, head of public policy at Facebook Brazil, according to the report. "This requirement would entail huge costs and inefficiencies in online business in the country, it will impact small and new US technology companies that want to provide services to Brazilians."

Companies providing service to Brazilians would quite likely be located in Brazil themselves, and thus be unaffected. Just stops them from using a foreign cloud provider, but I suspect there will be sufficient local supply to satisfy that demand. For foreign companies that would be the cost of doing business in Brazil, just like it is in Switzerland.

Card-cloning crooks use 3D printers to make ever-better skimmers

There was an article recently about a slot design that would make magstripe skimming a lot harder. The card would be inserted broadside, so that the stripe doesn't pass lengthwise over a single point in the slot, then rotated once fully inside the machine.

Of course, rotating would only be necessary if the ATM needed to read the magstripe in the first place, otherwise it's just additional mechanics that can fold, spindle and mutilate your card. Having a read head that moves on a spindle is a long-solved problem problem anyway, so that's a more suitable solution for reading the stripe.

As for protecting the keypad against overlays, maybe have a close-fitting cover over it that slides off after you've inserted your card?

For a gun, some parts such as the barrel you want to print in a single piece, to give them as much structural integrity as possible. Else you'll be futzing around with epoxy resin and acetone, to get the pieces to become one and you'll be cursing why you didn't build it from glass- or carbon-fiber reinforced epoxy in the first place.

Bill Gates's barbed comments pop Google's broadband balloons

Re: Intelligence!

The internet can help people conduct and grow their businesses in remote areas (ie: they can reach foreign markets, investors etc), thereby bringing prosperity to remote areas help improve the quality of life, and incidentally give them more money to spend on healthcare and education.

And infrastructure to actually get their products to or from remote markets would magically appear when there's internet?

There are ways to help these people help themselves. Internet access is not the first on that list. By far.

Samsung rolls out first mass-produced 3D NAND flash memory chip

But these are not CPUs?

Moore's Law does not apply solely to CPUs: he predicted that chip density would double every 18 months. It applies to RAM, ROM, Flash, FPGAs, CCDs and even ordinary logic chips just the same.

Limbaugh: If you hate Apple then you're a lefty blog-o-twat hipster

Re: Disproportionate

Guardian is middle left. You need to read more if you think that's "as left as they come".

@Darren: Maharg is using the US definitions of 'left' and 'right'. Fair enough, seeing that this is about some US bullshit peddler.

Sergey Brin's 'test-tube burger' cooked, eaten, declared meat-like

"We have a situation where 1.4 billion people in the world are overweight and obese, and at the same time one billion people worldwide go to bed hungry,"

That's 1.4 fattie per, should not only solve the malnourishment problems, but also, as a side effect, reduce use of natural resources such as petrol, textile fibres and large cars

World's FIRST TALKING SPACE ROBO-CHUM BLASTS OFF to the ISS

Re: "Share and Enjoy"

It had better not be a Genuine People Personality prototype.

Russian cargo ship drops off spacesuit puncture repair kit at the ISS

Air

Or is the replacement air just to replace that lost in airlocks etc?

That they're also sending a spacesuit puncture repair kit should be a clue.

SolidFire snaps up $31m in funding, brandishes 3.4PB monster

Solidfire

Sounds like a Chinese flashlights-and-batteries brand: TrusttFire,UltraFire, NiteFire, SingFire ... (for many more, look on DealExtreme).

(<mumble>Fire is not quite the right brand name for Li-Ion batteries, I'd think)

BOFH: Don't be afraid - we won't hurt your delicate, flimsy inkjet printer

Re: inkjet v laser cost benefit

The noisiest was a 600lpm drum printer (long since retired) when printing a 132 character line of the same character.

Well, you get a rather distinctive sound when printing a line of the same characters, but if you want LOUD, then figure out the character pattern that makes all the hammers fire at once.

(the one with the ear protectors instead of the glasses)

Re: Dot Matrix Printers

Now consider a VAXcluster, with one node crashing and printing its stackdump, the other nodes spewing opcom messages that they're missing a fellow cluster member.

Very distinctive, and sure to raise your attention.

For pity's sake: DON'T MOVE to the COUNTRY if you want to live

Re: Old children....

I can't seem to attach icons on this phone

Try using Sellotape if you consider Superglue to be too permanent.

Burger-rage horse dumps on McDonald's: Rider saddled with fat fine

Re: @AC

Apparently, judging by the time the downvotes started, the US contingent with their "bikes are dangerous and irresponsible period" have started to notice this thread.

Re: @AC

you put it into a ruck sack, tank bag, etc. then you are not holding it,

This is about getting a burger or something from a McD's Drive-through. Whether you move away from the window holding the bag in your hand, between your teeth or jammed between your arse and the saddle is not the point, but apparently some people want to assume you can only do the first, and base their condemnation of one's action on that assumption, considering it unsafe (which it's not).

Re: Does anyone know

Never been stuck behind a cyclist for miles on the way home after a long day? Never been hit by them, and / or nearly hit by them?

And this is relevant regarding what happens in a McD's drive-through, where things proceed at a pace not faster than the capability of the burger-flippers to hand out their wares to the consumers in the driveway, exactly how?