Posts by Robert Ramsay

Everything Everywhere to be Nothing Nowhere in rebrand

I salute you!

For managing to get a Porcupine Tree reference into a telecoms story!

D-Wave goes public with 81-qubit protein modeling

Wait - 81 qubits?!

The last I looked, the best anyone had was eight!

That's the final kiss of death for 40-bit encryption then :D

IEEE admits its MS-DOS history revisionist is in Microsoft's pay

Obligatory Casablanca reference

"I am shocked, SHOCKED, to find there is gambling going on in this casino!"

Samsung's Wang was up 22 hours a day, had no time to copy Apple

Re: I'm only commenting on the headline

Indeed! Well played, El Reg, well played.

Apple, Microsoft reveal their Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

'Steve Jobs ... vowed to spend his "dying breath destroying Android"'

...And did he?

Google may face grilling by MPs over 'immoral' tax avoidance

WHAT ABOUT GODDAMN VODAFONE?!!

That is all. Thank you.

Not a Cloud in my holiday sky

I'm warming to it. I'm reading it for the same reason I used to read Guy Kewney, Martin Banks, and Huw Collingbourne.

Microsoft dumps Metro from Windows 8

Re: So: Windows Marina then.

What about the Windows P45 :D

HP must throw its PC biz overboard to survive, says analyst

Analysts...

Some people are a damn sight more 'Golgafrincham B-Ark' than others...

Virgin Media nukes downloads after SuperHub 'upgrade'

I'm just really glad I do my own routing! The modem they gave me when our old NTL surfboard finally died has been fine, and only once have I been jerked around by their customer service.

Maybe I'm one of the lucky ones, but I think they've actually improved over NTL's customer service in our area. I especially like that they seem to be quite prompt in putting any known problems on the answering machine so that you can just phone up, and find out if there's a problem without having to faff your way through the usual "Press 1 etc" stuff.

Jackson’s Hobbit becomes a trilogy

Re: A cinematic first

And the Oscar for Most Unwanted Mental Image goes to...

EMC's creepy challenge: Give Big Data a 'human face'

We ALREADY have a human face of big data. See icon.

McDonalds staff 'rough up' prof with home-made techno-spectacles

The bit that freaked me out...

"The eyeglass is permanently attached and does not come off my skull without special tools."

Blimey o'Reilly.

UK.gov's cost-cutting 'shared services' went £500m OVER BUDGET

I'm sure they'd have been all right if they'd leveraged their synergies...

O2's titsup network struggles to find its feet

Please God...

...let this come down to outsourcing...

Revealed at last: Universe's intergalactic dark matter skeleton

Re: @Chris Miller

This is excellent stuff. I suddenly realised I hadn't explained about the time part of it. The idea of the Page and Wootters paper is that the whole thing (all the many worlds) is "pre-existing" (if you can call it that) and the passage of time is an artefact of the way our brains work. Like when spacetime was discovered, people worried that if everything was this pre-existing block of 4D stuff, everything would be predetermined.

With many worlds, it becomes more like a railway shunting yard that we travel through, changing points when our choices decohere. The whole railway yard already exists, but we cannot see it all at once.

I've realised now that we would need to have a way of modelling this astoundingly complicated picture before working out whether we can prove or disprove it...

I can understand why our current picture would be fine with a constant amount of dark matter, so I shall be very interested to see the results from actual measurements from the projects you mention.

Re: @Chris Miller

Thank you! I'm intrigued to hear that the idea also helps with dark energy as well - I fully appreciate what you say about it being insanely complicated :-)

The idea I am exploring is whether this artificial looking setup actually comes good if you consider each of the branes involved to be the "universes" in the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics. There is a paper by Page and Wootters (http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v27/i12/p2885_1) where they show that it's possible for what we consider the past and the future to be special cases of those universes, and the limitations of our brains would mean that we perceive the world as a "flicker-book" of these branes.

Also, the idea leads to a prediction - since the number of parallel worlds would be increasing all the time, dark matter (and I presume dark energy) should increase over time. I'm guessing it is possible to measure the dark matter from galaxies at different distances (i.e. times) from our own and see if there is any variation.

Since, @HolyFreakinGhost you are one of the few people I've ever had contact with who knows about this stuff, I would be grateful for any more insights...

Re: @Chris Miller

What do you think of the idea that dark matter might be cumulative gravity spilling over from the branes that make up quantum parallel worlds?

Linus Torvalds drops F-bomb on NVIDIA

Good on you, Linus.

I'm big and clever and I approve of this swearing.

Facebook set to file motion: Will blame NASDAQ for IPOcalpyse

Fool... money... parted...

...that is all. Try the fish.

Reborn UK internet super-snooper charter to be unveiled today

As for myself...

I shall be building a hard disk factory in the wilds of Scotland... we might be needing a few...

Re: "Later today, the Home Office will unveil its plans"

"Like C3P0 covered in a layer of wafer-thin ham"

Home Office spunks another £12.8m on face recog tech

Thanks to the Register's page layout...

for breaking this headline into

Home Office spunks/another £12.8m on face/recog tech

Plasma drive starts with pee

the stuff ends up with a pH of about one? What on earth have they been drinking?

Ericsson predicts over nine billion mobile subscriptions by 2017

All that's going to be left after the human race dies out are going to be the cockroaches and huge piles of mobile phones...

82 London Underground stations to get free Wi-Fi for the Olympics

I have one acronym for you...

VoIP.

I SAID I'M IN THE STATION

Virgin Media flushes pipes clogged by piles of Spotify fans

I wonder...

any connection with

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/28/virgin_media_outage_routing_error/

?

Virgin Media wipes out websites with routing blackhole

My 2p...

I also had no trouble at all - I'm on what used to be NTL - maybe there is some connection?

All in all I'm quite happy with Virgin. From my point of view, they have improved over the last few years. The only problem I've had that was their fault was when they cocked up the Warcraft ports a while back. And even then, with a little work, I got to talk to one of their actual techs who said they were trying their best to fix it asap because all of them were Warcraft players themselves :D

Ouch! Facebook slumps below IPO value on day 2

Once upon a time...

"You swapped the cow for a handful of WHAT?"

Inside the Skynet ghost town built by bunker-based boffins

Is anyone else...

...thinking of The Truman Show?

Keep out of the Olympics' way, earn a haircut from TfL app

I would like to donate my haircut coupons to Boris Johnson.

'Fake Carla Bruni' Twitter account spreads Thatcher death rumour

Or as Ted Heath put it...

Interviewer: "Is it true you said 'Rejoice, rejoice' when you heard she had resigned?"

Ted Heath: "Actually, I think I said it three times"

Apache releases new OpenOffice build, promises faster upgrades

Re: Latex...

Are you Randall Munroe in disguise?

Ten... Bedroom Gadget Treats

Has no one noticed...?

In the first picture, the TV is coming out of the *head* of the bed...

Virgin Media's latest throttling rules

Re: A few things on this

That's very odd. I have my own Smoothwall router attached to the modem without problems. I don't have any Macs, but the Smoothwall is ofc a kind of Linux and I have other Linux boxes attached. Besides, if it blocked non-Windows users, surely the PS3 wouldn't work either?

Parents shocked by priestly PowerPoint pr0n

Re: @Adze Where Did He Go?

I thought Onan's sin was *refusing* to sleep with his (dead) brother's wife - which is why he spilled his seed as a "dirty protest"...

Steve Jobs biopic

Who will play Ballmer?

John Goodman, of course.

Oz regulator to Apple: Don’t call it 4G if you can’t connect

Heh

Like the random Godley and Creme reference, although of course that was New York and not Australia...

Warp drives are PLANET KILLERS, Sydney Uni students find

Space:1999 had it also...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_One_(Space:_1999)

Spotify v. Pure Music

One question

....Does Pure Music pay artists more than Spotify's 0.000000001p per play?*

*there may be too many noughts here

Gartner: Ultrabooks aren't tickling anyone's fancy

And in other Gartner news...

hundreds of thousands of dollars are made by "analysts" who never get called on their "predictions".

Kinect plus tablet control insane skateboard

Question:

What's the first thing you do if you start to lose your balance? Answer: wave your arms around to try to steady yourself...

TalkTalk, 3UK scratched off Ofcom's Xmas card list

Are you Doctor Who?

The company was only founded in 2002 and wasn't launched until 2003...

Saudi prince opens wallet, buys $300m slice of Twitter

7% of Murdoch, eh?

why didn't he just buy the rest and close it down?

iPhone users get iJustHadAShag bedpost-notch boast app

Arrrgh

CIVILISATION IS OFFICIALLY OVER

Learning about chip design from Silicon Roundabout

What the fuck is he wearing?

That is all. Thank you.

Beeb rescues old Who episodes

In that case...

You'll not want to find out what happened to most of "Not Only But Also"...

RED MOON to GO DARK tonight in Pacific eclipse

That subhead is absolutely brilliant.

I rank that one up with "Intel and AMD piss on each other's chips" "Wife auction goes titsup" and the one about Alcatel laying off loads of people: "Sack Ray Blur"

Boffins find new 2012 glyph on 'secret' Mayan brick

TBH...

The cosmos could do with a bit of a regeneration.