Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Russia successfully launches Glonass-M

Not quite polar

Glonas is about 68deg inclination, GPS is 55 deg.

So apparently America hasn't considered invading anywhere north of Newcastle - can't say I blame them.

Psst, kid... Wanna learn how to hack?

Nice but

Along with everybody on the reg of course I'm going to get one - and I have a few arduinos lying around.

But I really don't see it's relevance to IT in schools. If the future is the cloud why not give each kid a free "cloud service of the day" account and let them mess around with Javascript, closure, Ruby etc. This is about as important to teaching "kids the skills they need for a high-tech workforce" as writing asteroids clones in BBC basic was for us in the 80s.

Second US Navy robot stealth bomber takes flight

Topgun meets Revenge of the Nerds

The movies are going to be a bit different though.

Especially the scene where the navy's top fighter pilot arrives in the bar to impress Kelly McGillis, steps off his segway to reveal the beer gut and T-shirt declaring his love for all things trek.

My handle is "l33t-nerd" I downed 32 chinese migs and I'm a 7th level mage in WoW

Stonehenge finds hint at rituals far more ancient than the stones

No purpose

You can't really apply modern standards to the behavior and beliefs of primitive superstitious people so long ago.

Just because we can't imagine spending millions of man-hours on erecting a pointless circular construction that had no real use except for a single ceremony doesn't mean that these people thought the same.

On the other hand - it could just have been the -3 millennium dome

US Martian nuke-truck launches without a hitch, but...

and yet

Employment at any US rocket maker is restricted to US citizens only for security reasons - United Launch Alliance have a special exemption from Nafta to stop those damn Canadians working there

Disgusting

This supposed IT angle news story was obviously just an excuse for the prurient editors at the Reg to publish pictures of naked rocket engines.

SHARKS tempted by BIKINI CLAD Thanksgiving BABES

@hate to say it

"But these are WILD animals whose behavior is unpredictable. "

That's not true, so long as you listen to them, pretend to enjoy the stupid chic-flic and feed them enough chocolate they can be quite placid

Control group

Perhaps it's the bikini that is protecting them from the sharks?

Where is the control group of bikini-less young women ?

Netflix shares fall on profit warning

DVD vs Streaming

Yes, downloading the entire DVD or Blu-ray isn't going to work at the moment for most internet connections.

But people that want the Blu-ray version, or want to watch every extra on a DVD aren't Netlfix's market. Those people buy the disk, and the directors cut, and the collectors edition, and the special metal tin. Netlfix's competition is renting from blockbusters or buying a Fox movie package.

Compared to regular cable viewing quality Netflix's streaming is fine.

No you can't buy DVDs to rent

You need to buy an expensive license to rent out the DVD.

There was a company (can't remember the name) who were doing a Netflix type service where you rented the physical DVD, but instead of shipping it to you they physically put it in a drive at their site and streamed the content to you. Their claim was that since they weren't copying the disk and only the single viewer was watching it a time it was exactly the same as a rental.

- They got slapped to death.

First sale doctrine doesn't give you unlimited rights to copyrighted work.

It was broken!

Does anyone seriously think that shipping physical DVDs to people is the future of watching content at home? If they do then my new, "web page delivered on a floppy" service is for you!

The same people who said this was crazy are the ones saying that Blockbuster should have got out of physical stores and gone online 10years ago.

They definitely botched the launch - they could have done it better. Or kept the DVD business in house but wound it down - separate prices for new customers, make it an extra charge option for existing renewals. Although supposedly one of the reasons for spinning it off was that Hollywood were charging twice as much for DVD+online rights as online - irrespective of how many DVDs actually shipped.

The bad thing about netflix here is that the choice is terrible., Except for a few old BBC programmes and some art movies you have never heard of - you had better like "straight to service station bargain bin" sequels. But until Hollywood realise this is the future nobody else is any better

Inside the BBC's R&D Labs

Re: Sorry

Then that's even worse. They have had cheap technology for putting low data rate sideband info in audio streams for years, now the solution is for a toy to connect to your wifi (how do you enter a WPA password on a Dalek?) and then to the BBC servers and hope the latency isn't too bad.

Good job subtitles have already been invented or they would be using twitter - or sending you SMS texts !

Sorry

But is this supposed to be impressive ?

Inventing searching the text of subtitles - just as real image search "find an image with green tree on rainy landscape" is starting to work.

Adding RDS to a digital radio standard that everybody except the BBC has abandoned.

And a sound activated toy that was on Tomorrows world 20 years ago. 10 years ago I worked on modifying it so that the hidden audio codes could survive MP3 - and it was old boring tech even then.

'Hands off our books, content miners! Those aren't cheap'

@Intellectual armed robbery

Before publishers - institutes used to publish their own journals and swap them with other institutions. Then in the 20c it became too expensive and inefficient to run your own printing press and so commercial journals took over.

Now it seems that universities would be better off running their own on-line journals again.

Council not fined after 7,200 sensitive files dumped in skip

@Absolutely

Sensible policies for a fairer Britain!

Russian diplomat caught driving while 15 TIMES over booze limit

DD Limits

The reason for the limits generally have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with politics.

Set the limit at 0.8 = 1 drink and the opposition accuses you of being soft on drunk driving, so they propose 0.4, you counter that you are tougher on drink-driving and make it 0.2, .....

Then somebody who has no idea how science (or possibly counting) works decides to make it 0.

Pretty impressive technology though - to pick up a single O-H bond in 250 moles of blood volume (say 10E26 molecules) just by blowing into a bag.

Atomic time boffins build better second-watcher

How do you know?

You compare your time with the average of a bunch of other clocks around the world.

Some individual clocks drift faster or slower - if yours stays at the average you are the winner.

You have to love the NPL attitude, leap seconds will become unworkable in only 1700years and if a massive comet hit the earth everyone would have to adjust their watches.

Moon goodness: Far side of Luna in full colour

@cool

Lowest point is Antoiniadi Crater -9.12 km, highest is on the dark side so doesn't have a name - it's romantically called (latitude 5.4125°, longitude 201.3665°) about 10,786 meters

You can get much higher mountains on the moon because the lower gravity doesn't pull them down and with no liquid mantle there is noting for them to sink down into.

Sea level on the moon is simpler than on earth, the moon is much more spherical (because it's solid and doesn't spin as fast) so you just pick an average distance form the centre. No two agencies seem to agree on the distance though

Buxom soul diva to show a real use for NFC at last!

@Possibilities

Sufficient silicon, only need to brush up against them, convenient height for turnstyles and bars

Knocker-Knocker communication could be big!

High Court: TVCatchup reproduces copyrighted films ... in buffers

@Lydonator

Like the way that the $79 kindle shows you an ad before you read the book that you paid for ?

Pickles plans curry colleges to halt Indian immigration

Not just curry cooks

What about all those other foreigners that come and work here?

Surely we should be retraining British unemployed to be priests, imans and rabbis?

Alongside the opportunities for stripping shouldn't Sheffield job centres also offer the opportunity to retrain as religous leaders to redundant steel workers?

Clooney fingered for Steve Jobs role in Hollywood biopic

Needed - actor with stubble who thinks they are Jesus

Surely a role for Mel Gibson ?

Mysterious sat-pic China desert markings - EXPLAINED

@out of curiosity

Yes the UK uses a circular target with lines about the thickness of a road. For secrecy these are combined with the normal road network - the use of 1000s of them suggest a massive fleet of UK spy satelites.

however the Hanger Lane gyratory is still believed to be a message to aliens

China decrees in-flight cellphone calls are safe

But if you can't trust the professional cabin crew

Can you trust the flight crew, the maintenance crew, the cargo loaders, the fuel truck drivers?

If the cabin crew think that a phone in flight mode can crash the plane - perhaps the pilots believe that waving their arms around and making jet noises keeps it flying, perhaps maintenance think that engines should leak oil and tanker drivers think lbs and kg are the same thing.

Army raygun to boost power with starlight de-twinkling tech

Odd choice of camouflage

The natural enemy of ultra-flat, ultra-reflective, ultra-expensive dielectric laser mirrors is dust.

Judging from the colour they painted it - they don't seem to have realised this.

Can we think of any circumstance in which the American's might want their army to be used in a dusty sandy country ?

Ermmm

As a mere astronomer with a PhD working on AO and high resolution systems - I would hate to suggest that they are "aving a larf"

There is a very big difference between an atmosphere very close to you tilts the angle of parallel light arriving from a distant object - and the disturbance of light with an atmosphere all along it's path.

Without getting into lots of details of Cn2 profiles and near-field phase screens - it's the difference between pressing a body up against a bathroom window and looking at that from a distance, and pressing your eye up against a bathroom window and looking at a distant body

Jim Westwood, home micro revolutionary

Sinclair

Sinclair's ability was not only to employ bloody good engineers - but to let them get on with it.

He's quoted in one of the books about British industry that "employs an engineer on a salary of 20,000 but quibbles over buying them a 20quid tool to do their job" .

Unfortunately this attitude eventually sent the TV outfit bust when everybody in the village could apparently bill anything to Sinclair withotu question

Goldman Sachs slapped over iPad price-cut call

Goldman Sachs

If Goldman Sachs announced it was wednesday you wouldn't believe them!

Drama as Thai frogmen struggle to save world PC market

"removing roofs or cutting holes in walls?"

Massive floods tend to handle roof and wall removal for you quite efficiently

Time to dig out the CV: NASA 'naut applications now open

Degree a bit of a waste of time then

Degree + experience OR 1000 jet experience.

PhD OR 3years experiences teaching kindergarten.

So they can have scientists or just a bunch of people with experience of bombing Iraq and another set reading them a story and telling them it's nap time

Nvidia: An unintended exascale-super innovator

OpenACC

Translation - we like CUDA, write for CUDA and you have to keep buying from us, please ignore openCL. But we have to look like we are open, standards compliant and no-propriety to get government contracts so we will simply propose our own.

Ironic because if you use the non-proprietry, open standard, openGL on PCs you are pretty much stuck with buying NVidia because nobody else writes drivers worth a BEEEP

Happy 40th birthday, Intel 4004!

I feel old

I'm the same age as the 8008 !

US anti-hacking law turns computer users into criminals

And on the reg...

All users posting as Anonymous Coward will have to prove that they are not only anonymous but also a big girl's blouse who is afraid of spiders

Pass the wine, dear. Yes, that papier-mache thing

Burn the heretic

"put the paper outer-casing in the bin"

Anyway shouldn't really greenies be making their own wine and thus stopping the global exploitation of French peasants?

Mystery radioisotopes in Czech air are not from Fukushima

Bomb belgium

Obviously evidence of a secret Belgian nuclear weapons program.

Never heard of a Belgian nuclear weapons program? Well that shows how secret it is!

.... News just in .....

Following the discovery that Belgium doesn't have any oil it has been decided to invade the Shetlands instead.

NASA: 2012 solar flares could DEVASTATE CITIES!

@Mayan Balderdash

But what about all those old Cobol programs written by Mayans that only used 4 digits for the date?

First scientific paper filed from Spaaaace published today

Gravity no big deal

Gravity is pretty insignificant compared to the magnetic forces on the plasma. And the main problems is keeping it away from the walls as it goes round the donut - rather than it falling onto the floor.

This setup is just useful for research because it lets you have a very small bit of plasma just sit there for a moment while you measure it.

ARM rolls out new GPU, loses head

Re: Not knocking ARM

1.9Bn cores, $20M profit - so 1c per core

While Samsung makes perhaps $5 on fabbing the chip

And Apple makes $300 on the phone

ARM makes less/unit than the chinese peasant putting them in the boxes

As I said, it's not an attack on ARM - but on all those politicians/economist/business leaders who announced that the UK wasn't going to any of that old fashioned metal bashing "making things" but was going to lead the world in intellectual property and financial products.

How is the financial products industry working out by the way?

Not knocking ARM

It's just that on the global scale of computer companies it's like promoting Dutchy Original shortcakes as a great British success alongside McDonalds, or comparing Morgans to VW or Toyota.

And these are the greatest success that has come out of the country that invented the computer in the first place!

A 'British' success

ARM while a clever model with lots of clever people made a profit of $20M last year - Apple made nearer $7Bn

While licencing and intellectual property is a nice business it's putting products into people's hands that really makes coin

Eurozone crisis: We're all dooomed! Here's why

Single UK currency

It did always used to confuse me how London and Frankfurt were SO different economically that they couldn't possibly share a currency while Chelsea and Barnsley were so similar that it was ridiculous to suggest they couldn't

I suppose it's the same logic that says decisions mustn't be taken by distant bureaucrats in Brussels, but it is essential that decisions about Gateshead are taken in London.

Non-euro solution

For Britain thenm is to "do a Lira" - just print more and more pounds.

So the pound goes from $2 to $1 to a fraction of a euro.

It does mean that a lot of British brick layers will be hired in Poland as cheap labour and Dutchy-Original biscuits will look like a bargain in France. Good job we don't have to import any raw materials for our non-existent industry though.

@Soros

It will be interesting if the truth ever comes out as to why Britain didn't join.

Did Brown have the 'real' figures for Greece/Portugal/etc - and if he did why didn't Kohl?

Was it just domestic politics - he would have lost the NF vote if he had introduced foreign money?

Was he afraid of the house price boom if interest rates suddenly halved to German levels.

Did the city fear losing it's currency trading?

Did the Americans 'persuade' Blair to stay out to keep the Euro cap under the $ and stop it become the default oil currency?

Since British banks are still on the hook for euro debt anyway it's not necessarily such a blessing.

Cheap gas is a 'crisis' for Greens, but not for us

@Strange

WWI was partly over German access to Iraqi oil.

Navies had started fueling their fleets with oil rather than coal and so it was vital that the Hun didn't get an advantage over the Royal Navy.

The first battle of WWI was ironically on the road to Basra

We must burn the gas to save the planet

Methane is about 75x more powerful a greenhouse gas then carbon dioxide.

The only safe way to dispose of the billions of tons of this dangerous planet destroying time bomb under our feet is to burn it

'Angry Bird' netflinger projectile brings down drug ultralights

According the US GAO

Last year they intercepted 1.5M kg of drugs entering by land, 24,700kg by sea and 12,000Kg by air.

Since that 12,000kg includes all the stuff coming in as commercial air cargo, stuff hidden on passengers and all the small (and not so small) private planes used by smugglers - it suggests that the amount carried by ninja stealth radar avoiding ultralights might be a bit negligible and the whole project is rather more a cool toy and grants program rather than a serious effort.

Immigrants face £49k wage minimum to stay

Is this so we can import tube train drivers then ?

Wi-Fi hotspots to skyrocket over next five years

What about GSM

Surely the underage 9 x10^8 Hz band should ban content while the adult 18 x10^8 Hz band could allow it?

In the US of course you would need to be over the 19 x10^8 Hz for porn and over the 21 x10^8 band to see mention of booze.

See once you explain the technology in terms a government minister can understand it's easy!

Veg rustlers hit with conditional discharge after roadside lineup

Did this begin 'once upon a time'?

The police actually solved a crime - quickly and efficently

Without needing the police helicopter or involving a high speed chase?

And it wasn't just a crime where they get a few hundred quid in fine income for a victim-less offence.

Pay-by-wave: At least it's better than being mugged

Simple solution

Along side your Apple/Crackberry/non-fruit-related-Android-unit you also carry a Nokia1100 in order to call the bank when you your NFC smart phone is stolen.

It's also useful for calling other people when the battery on your smart phone is dead by 10:00 am because you watched a video on the tube.