Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Scandal-hit Olympus plans to axe staff, flog off stake – reports

Not the last

"Sony and Panasonic were the leading possibilities"

Funny that, when Sony is the company most people are betting on to make a similar announcement pretty soon

MPs brand BlackBerrys for bobbies scheme a failure

Re: Again!

They looked at it but it meant replacing the GAO and PAC with a single intern txting "well duh" about each suggested project.

BBC uses lifted Iraq war photo to depict Syrian slaughter

Re: An accidental clue?

The war in Iraq/Libya and Syria are entirely different - Syria doesn't have any oil

Arabs without oil ? Fsck-em

Julian Assange extradition: What's next for WikiLeaker-in-chief?

Looking on the brightside

There was a concern that, if you could order the extradition of somebody if 2weeks after having sex you decided that they should have worn a condom - it would have led to massive shipments of club 18-30 patrons around europe.

But since this remains the only case so far - it's clear that all those drunk couples coupling on the beaches of Spain and Greece were part of a loving long-term partnership.

What a touching and romantic outcome !

Re: Bradley Manning

But at least it gets you out in the open air.

Olympic Wenlock plod cops condemnation from Amazon wags

Re: Prohibited

Although to be safe - you should call it "Summer 0x7DC"

Ofcom king Ed Richards seeks BBC throne

Re: Ofcom chief goes to BBC, BBC chief goes to ofcom.

I was betting on either Alistair Campbell or James Murcoch

Facebook needs Opera - to rescue it from dependence on Apple

Re: Opera...

I can't see it becoming more bloated - surely being adopted by facebook will simplify the browser.

Removing the need for the address bar for example, or the ability to browse to other sites.

Japan to get Android phone with built-in radiation dosimeter

Catch-22

Surely anybody that is so paranoid about radiation wouldn't be using a cell phone?

UK High Court split over Twitter airport bomb joke

Re: Seriously

That's the legal point.

The airport didn't take the threat seriously, there was no evacuation, there was no security response. He was later arrested for making a credible terrorist threat and he argued that if nobody took it seriously then it couldn't have been credible.

Shocking

Surely these judges should be detained for supporting terrorism ?

Fusion-io stuffs workstation storage into bulging hand luggage

Re: Liquid cooled??

What's even funnier is that they will happily let you take a box of incomprehensible wires, batteries, and blocks of plastic onto the plane - so long as you drain the water out of the pipes first!

Space Station crew enter the Dragon

That's their great achievement

Over SeaLaunch 20years ago - they finally got the government to recognize that if they didn't allow more choice in the launch business people would just take their satellites to India/China/whoever.

Then they tried to block this by preventing satelites being exported to China for launch they simply built the satellite there aswell - what better way to destroy your industry!

Self-driving Volvos cover 200km of busy Spanish motorway

Re: Worried

>They are Volvos

I'm more worried about them running off to chase motorbikes

Free Windows 8 desktop app development is dead

Re: Talk about betting the farm on it

That's the point - you want a lot of apps on metro, not the desktop so the easiest way is to make metro the only thing you can program for free.

The old studio express didn't do MFC because they wanted people to do c++/CLR and winforms instead (or were banned from pushing MFC on kids by some sense of moral resposnibility)

ITU adopts two ultra-high def TV specs

Re: Frame frequency and so on.

Precisely the point - since there is not longer anything broadcast in Pal or NTSC (or there won't be by the end of the year) is there any point in making different digital versions, except in a pathetic attempt to enforce local monopolies?

South Africa and Australia to share SKA

Re: Shhh, hear something?

S Africa is still pretty big and the site is on a desert mountain miles from anywhere.

Re: Bandwidth!

The SA and Oz telescopes aren't directly linked, instead each local set is correlated with a local clock and then compared off line later. The data rates are only really scary at the high frequency end and there isn't much point in doing baselines that long at those frequencies (although resolution increases with baseline the filed of view and sensitivity drop)

Combining telescopes on different continents (VLBI) has been done for decades at lower frequencies - one of the interesting bits is that you need to know the position of the dishes relative to each other and the centre of the Earth accuratley - so it's the best way of measuring small changes in the Earth's crust.

How to keep your money safe if the euro implodes

Good news for the UK

The pound must be booming since we are safe from all this foreign Euro business.

It must be up at a couple for US$ by now.

Vatican in pact with Microsoft to initiate world's youths into Office

Odd that they didn't choose another OS

Infallible leader at the helm that fans think is God and opposition think is the anti-christ.

Copied the core stuff from a much older version and added some pretty fluff on top.

Users need to be approved to get in and then pay a tithe on everything

Can be kicked out at any time for not meeting some detail of a rule that is arbitrarily changed by a secret committee

Claims to be highly moral but relies on lots of poor people in 3rd world countries

Seems like there is some corporate synergy there that is a better fit than MSFT ?

Microsoft corrects itself: 'We expect fewer people to use Windows 8'

500million Linux users next year

We’ve just passed the 500 million licenses sold mark for Windows 7, which represents half a billion PCs that could be upgraded to Linux on the day it ships.

SpaceX does what it HASN'T done before: Dragon in close ISS flyby

Re: Great but oversold?

When the commercial supply module leaves a card saying "we tried to deliver but you were out" before buggering off before you can answer the door.

Russian satellite beams home 121-megapixel pics of Earth

Re: North America

A little tricky for a geostationary satellite to be centred over anything other than the equator.

That's the reason for the failure of Yorkshire's space program - you can't put a satellite in geostationary orbit over Barnsley

Re: Can do / can't do

All they have to do is invade Germany and kidnap a few scientists again

If only they had managed to pinch a few car designers and brewers as well......

Re: re Flat Earth

That's why they never show you the other side with the turtle

Apple design chief Jony Ive knighted - but not by the Queen

Re: What about my 3 year old?

Making a laptop with a completely smooth flat surface but with all the connectors, lights, switches etc of a regular laptop is trickier.

Adding 'design' to a laptop by just putting bits of chrome plated plastic on the corners and having LEDs stick out of the case at random angles depending how the solder worked is easy.

Re: What about my 3 year old?

Did it have rounded corners? - the lawyers will be round to have words

Canary Islands host long-distance quantum teleportation

Not sure I see the point

I get the whole collapse wave-function action at a distance bit (went to physics, got the T-shirt)

But I don't see how this provides any security?

If Carol was in the middle with an identical model Quantum Communicator 3000 she could grab the first entangled photon. Then create and send a new uncollapsed one onto Bob with her own message.

The only way Alice knows that it was Bob that collapsed her photon and not Carol is the common time reference and it seems that this would be just as reliable (if not more so) for a regular communications packet going down a fibre.

Volvo claims V40 is first car with an airbag for pedestrians

Alternatively

You could teach captain Volvo not to deliberately crash into everything on 2wheels

UK.gov energy policy: You can't please all the people much of the time

Re: It's not the fuel but the source

That's the other economic advantage of gas.

If we use gas we don't need to spend 30bn on Trident.

After all it would be a bit silly to have an expensive nuclear weapon to protect us from Russia when they can shut us down by just turning a tap off - so savings all round.

IT distributors: The only people adding value to the world economy

A solution for Parcelforce

"...is willing to pay more for these services than they cost to provide. This is the very definition of adding value."

If only they charged 10quid for leaving you the note saying that they rang the bell and ran away - the post office would be profitable.

Greene King pubs to offer free beer Wi-Fi

Re: USA does free WiFi so much better

But look at the beer you have to drink!

Do you want Black Sheep and a login page or Miller and free wifi?

'Dated and cheesy' Aero ripped from Windows 8

Re: If you want some sort of consistency with Windows

Except the makers conspire with MSFT to stop you

Server will only run signed drivers and the HW makers only supply 'server' drivers for their 'server' HW - that's why the same PC from DELL costs 2x as much on the server page

New and intuitive

Personally I'm ready to welcome the new smartphone metaphor

There area couple of 1000 commands in one of the 3D modeling programs I use - it takes forever to find a little used function in the menus or toolbars.

Now that there will be a single intuitive and obvious touch gesture to select between optimising hole placement by tool path as opposed to tool change time my life will be much easier

What's copying your music really worth to you?

Re: Format shifiting levies

In Canada there is a levy on all blank CDs to cover this.

In theory it goes to the artists based on all time record sales (so Bryan Adams and Celine Dion) - however the 25c/disk (!) doesn't cover the costs of the scheme so no money has been paid out.

But small local bands selling their own home made CDs do get to pay the levy on the blanks - so that's OK then.

Zuck weds self to lady friend in surprise ceremony

Re: No matter what happens to the stock

Yep - always a good idea to marry a doctor

Pints under attack as Lord Howe demands metric-only UK

Re: litre of beer??

The litre isn't a proper MKS unit -you should ask for 1/1000 of a cubic metre of beer

HTC phones held up at US ports after Apple patent ban

Re: I said it before...

It's not necessarily a HTC prove it is compliant it's more a case of - these foreign phones are doing bad things to a great American company, we might just have to take a look at all of them, that might take a few weeks/months etc.

Back in the day when Japan actually made stuff we would often get this - if there was some sort of issue with a Japanese competitor - our kit would sit on the docks waiting for some paperwork.

Virgin straps on phone masts for the flying upper classes

I once used one of those back before mobiles.

I managed to get an operator somehow without putting in the credit card, then I get her to put the call on my ATT calling card (remember those!) without her knowing I was on a plane - then I couldn't think of anyone to call !

Spy under your car bonnet 'worth billions by 2016'

Re: Before anyone says "here comes big brother"...

It will mean more running red lights.

There was a trial scheme in one town on this side of t'pond. Since they don't have detailed maps of speed limit zones it just tracked how often you braked hard.

More breaking = bad driver = lost your discount insurance rate.

So if a little old lady walks out into the road or a cyclist cuts across you - you have a split second to decide if the dent in the bonnet will be cheaper than the insurance hike.

Behind the lens of NASA's self-adapting ISS space telescope

Re: Adapting adaptive optics

We used to use "active optics" for correcting mechanical effects and "adaptive" for correcting atmosphere - but now people use adaptive for both.

Adaptive optics doesn't really help for looking down into the atmosphere - but isn't as necessary. Standing at the bottom of the atmosphere looking up - any small change in refractive index turns into a big angle distance and so the image of a distant object moves a long way. Standing at the top of the atmosphere looking down - any movement of an atmosphere near the object has very little effect

In el'reg terms it's like putting your eye up close to a crinkled bathroom window and looking out vs pressing a body upto the glass and looking at it from a long way off.

Re: Did you program any other space projects?

It's because they have a very "manned mission" mindset - you can't upload a new crew if you kill them with a bug.

The reason Apollo worked - in spite of the technology at the time - was that everything was tested and rehearsed to a ludicrous degree. But this attitude has continued as religous doctrine in everything they do.

I was involved with one of the original instruments on Hubble. Everything on it had to be "man rated", that made sense as far as not using toxic or hazardous propellants that an astronaut could come into contact with, but it extended to everything. We were restricted in comms chips to very low bandwidth designs that were man rated (ie apollo era) that severely restricted the science data.

One report put the build cost of Hubble at 300% of what it would have cost if had been made to launch on a rocket rather than the shuttle.

London's Oyster card website still down after 12-hour outage

Wrong kind of packets

on the line ?

Study reveals high price of porn addiction

lost their jobs or been in trouble with the law as a result of their addiction.

That's hardly the fault of the porn.

It's like saying that women earn less than men and black men are more likely to be arrested - and that's their fault for being female or black

Pirate stomping by Google et Cie won't work, says expert

No it doesn't - that was shot down by an El'reg story last week

It was based on a claim that 7.2% of goods were bought over the internet.

That's like saying Staples contributes 50% of GDP because people's payslips come in envelopes.

"accountable" for issuing "improper" takedown requests

But it seems accountable is just that the take down request has to be published.

So Microsoft will still send take-down requests for OpenOffice but they will be accountable - in that Reddit might get to find out !

Did dicky power supply silence climate-change probe Envisat?

Re: recycle

But if you put the recycled satellite in the wrong blue box the galactic space council can get very nasty.

At last! A use for Blighty's phone-boxes: Free Wi-Fi hotspots

Re: Why stop at phone boxes?

I'm guessing that the phone boxes have some sort of connection to a telecommunications infrastructure.

Of course they might be that they are using dialup.

Red faces abound as boffins build gamma ray lens

Re: You are right, and not just X-rays but low gamma more than 20years ago

Not Fresnel lenses - they used a nested set of glancing incidence mirrors

The problem is that only a tiny region near the mirror has the correct angles for glancing incidence - so you make a mirror 1m diameter and you only get to use a few micron wide ring around it. So you have to stack lots of them like tubes and because the wavelength is so small they have to be polished to fantastic tolerances

They're called Wolter mirrors http://www.x-ray-optics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=59&Itemid=71&lang=en#Wolter_optics