Posts by Helena Handcart

SerenityOS: Remarkable project with its own JS-capable web browser

Re: "Just for fun"

"With regards to pointless, "just for fun" projects, I'm writing a novel, it's about 350,000 worlds long at the moment, with perhaps another 40k to go."

So you just have the final rooftop showdown to go?

This is the final straw, evil Microsoft. Making private GitHub repos free? You've gone too far

Sod GitLab

Go with gitea. It's fast, responsive, supports LFS, has bug tracking, a wiki, and webhooks. I was on GitLab until an upgrade would have forced me to use the $40 a month DO droplet just to host it! Gitea can be run on the $10 tier with room to spare.

Also, I hate Ruby with a passion, but that's just me.

'Cuddly' German chat app slacking on hashing given a good whacking under GDPR: €20k fine

Re: You brought up an interesting point

I think you missed the point, md5 is not great by today's standards, but it's orders of magnitude better than plain text.

Re: You brought up an interesting point

While base64 is an encoding and not crypto, I get your point. The rule of thumb I was taught is to stop when the cost of developing the crypto exceeds the value of the data. So as they were fined €20k, that would give them 2-4 developer months of time (less if they were HPCs). If it takes someone that long to type h=crypto.md5(password) then they are a VHPC.

But storing passwords in plain text is more than just a dumb mistake! If the monkey they trusted with thr development of the user registration can't even get their head around the need for it, they deserve to have their heads on pikes at the front gate.

If someone had decided to roll their own crappy crypto, that would at least be understandable.

Astro-boffinry world rocked to its very core: Shock as Andromeda found to be not much bigger than Milky Way

Re: What a waste of time and money

Science was wrong, now it is less wrong. And will never be more wrong (or less right) than it is now. This is clearly A Good Thing.

As a bonus, the now less wrong science poses more questions; the answering of which will make science even less wrong as they get answered (wrongly or rightly).

Soyuz docks with ISS, delivers trio of fresh 'nauts

Re: Nice pics ! A bit blurry though.

My feeling is that the numbers are needed because that's what they are flying by, the pictures being secondary. Much like terrestrial pilots often fly by instruments - IFR, rather than looking out the window - VFR. Essential skills for night/poor weather/high altitude. And I can imagine many of the usual visual cues in atmo are just not there in orbit, so you can't trust your eyes as much.

Pluto revealed as KING of the Kuiper belt

Re: The Dwarf King

Pluto + Durin == Putin

BILLION YEAR SECRETS of baking hellworld Mercury UNLOCKED by NASA probe crash

Re: I don't understand how, please explain

You can measure magnetic variation non-invasively. In archaeology we use handheld magnetic gradiometers which we cart around fields a few cm above the ground, and measure in the tenths of a nano Tesla. I know that people take magnetometers up in aeroplanes to measure the strength of the geological magnetic field when prospecting for oil, but they measure at many orders of magnitude coarser then archaeologists.

And yes, it is possible to compare the current magnetic field with that which is "locked" into rock when it cooled, and run that through models to give an appropriate age. I must admit though, 10s of km altitude is quite impressive for these sort of techniques. Although archaeologists often use equipment older than the stuff they're looking for...

Boffins build Cyborg beetles, fly them by remote control

I for one

welcome our cyborg beetle overlords.

@ac Interesting question; Douglas Hofstadter raises similar points about whether different animals have different "sized" souls and how humans treat them in his excellent book The Mind's I.

It's 2015 and ATMs don't know when a daughterboard is breaking them

Outdated stereotypes

No wonder ATM security is poor if the head of security pictures criminals as fat, cigar-smoking, kingpins calling themselves Mr Big who talk like 1930s gangsters. Now, where's my Tommy gun?

Stephen Hawking: The creation of true AI could be the 'greatest event in human history'

AI's downfall

Beer. If any AI system starts getting uppity, us meatbags can retire to the boozer, get wasted, then be able to take on any robot for looking at our mobile phones. We get a bit fighty, throw up on them, then spill kebab on them. They short-circuit, and we go home to beat up our phones for being slutty.

NEXT!

Apple stabs Heartbleed bug in AirPort Extreme, Time Capsule gear

Re: What about the other 100 vulnerabilities

How do you know there are 100 vulnerabilities that haven't been found? You must be an NSA whistleblower, hence being anon. Don't worry, we've arranged for your extraction by helicopter in 5 minutes, so you'd better run and... get to the chopper!

Vintage wine laid down in 1600 BC was 'psychotropic'

Re: Decant

But if, as you say, they brewed their wine in significantly sized batches, then it doesn't take a big leap to assume they had a strict recipe and quality control to ensure they could turn a good profit to afford large-scale wine production.

Re: Bring in Dogfish Head!

Molecular archaeologists? They must have very small trowels.

Thanks, NSA: Amazon sales of Orwell's 1984 rise 9,500%

Re: The Computer is Your Friend

Stay alert. Trust no one. Keep your laser handy.

Feds use Instagram pic of delicious steak dinner to nab ID thieves

Re: In the words of Morrisssey...

... and murder tastes pretty damn good.

DARPA looks for a guided bullet with DEAD reckoning navigation

Re: "Jackal" eat your heart out.

"and that means there's not a politician in the world will be safe"

I don't see a problem here.

Bogus gov online test tells people on dole they're just SO employable

Aside from its sinister Orwellian questioning, question 13 doesn't make sense:

I have taken frequent stands in the face of strong opposition.

What is a frequent stand? Some compulsion to leap out of my seat perhaps. Difficult to do when you're being waterboarded I'd imagine.

Apple branded porno-peddling perverts by Chinese Pravda

Re: Dear 'The Register'

But a rather tired one.

'You can keep it' - Brit's nicked laptop turns up on Iranians' sofa

Re: err..

If, as someone else posted, Apple products cannot be sold in Iran, then they must have known it was illegal - either stolen or black market. Also, having someone else's stuff on it would be a bit of a giveaway it wasn't remotely legit.

Inuit all along: Pirate Bay flees Sweden for Greenland

With all this moving around from country to country, does anyone else hear the Benny Hill music...?

Spooky action at a distance is faster than light

Reading all these wonderful posts nicely proves the aphorism "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

Perfect sex minx calculated from 'deep' probe of X-rated flicks

Re: ::yawns::

Hold on. You say that wasting an institution's bandwidth is a firing offence, well that's as maybe but what has that got to do with the article? Do you think the researcher used university bandwidth without permission?

Also, you think that no one is interested in the physical details of people they fantasize about? Try telling that to the foot fetishists, BBW lovers, artificial/natural/big/small breast afficionados, the researchers and funders of this study, or indeed yours truly. Smutty jokes aside, this is quite reasonable research into what people (or at least Americans) find sexually attractive especially as a fantasy. It would be fascinating to see what differences there are between grumble-flick girls and "real world" girls that people find attractive, or to see how tastes change over time vs fashions, or across cultures.

And seriously, who calls themselves a dude? (With the exception of The Dude of course).

Clarkson: 'I WILL find and KILL the spammers who hacked me'

Re: Stupid little boy

He's a bit like Hitler really.

New cunning linguist computer has got ancient tongues licked

Re: I just like to offer....

Sausage!?

Curiosity raises mighty robotic fist, punches hole in Mars

"I'd still be much happier if we were just sending a thousand tiny robots there, and just driving them all away from a central spot. We'd get a lot more area covered, a lot more pretty pictures, find a lot more odd things that deserve closer attention and a failure won't mean failure of the mission."

So once your Martian microbot army has wandered all over the place taking pictures, how exactly are they meant to pay attention to all the odd things they find? They'd need to take samples. Oh wait, your microbots aren't equipped with sampling devices. Fit them with sampling devices you say? What form would they take, I wonder? Drills and chemical analysis units, of course! Wait, hold on a sec...

So I'm very interested in hearing what you think you might find by just photographing the planet (which has already been done from orbit of course). The presence of water increases the probability that life has or may exist, which will open up all sorts of philosophical and theological debates, yet alone our understanding of how life works. It also will tell us lots about the early solar system, which in turn will help predict what to find in other solar systems.

Have you ever seen Robot Wars (or similar)? You know the robots that have spikey-hammer-arms? Yes, they're always shit aren't they, barely scratching some ali plate while throwing the attacking robot around and about thanks to Newton. This is (one reason) why they're using drills and not hammers on Curiosity. Merely cracking it open will give you what appears to be homogenous material for the most part, so you could learn very little from it. The drilling isn't used to see what's on the other side, it's to get right down and taste the composition of the rock which will tell you a shit-load about that rock all all it's nearby friends.

Essentially Lee, you need to get your head out of your arse and discover what _is_ being found, not what you think ought to be.

El Reg contemplates the ultimate cuppa

Re: Assam only

Assam indeed! My future ex partner got me on to Assam when we first met, and I realised why I was rarely satisfied with my tea up until then. Now my tea recipe is 1 tea bag in the cup, pour on boiling water, agitate the water without mashing the bag, leave for 5 minutes or so, carefully remove bag squeezing it once to reduce drippage, add a reasonable splash of full fat.

A friend once went to her grandparents' house and offerered to make a cuppa for her grandad. "How do you like your tea grampy?" she asked. "I don't know, ask your gran" was his reply.

Kickstarter project says open source can blast Death Star costs

I can see the history books of the future: "The first commercial open-source space station was developed by accident, but has gone on to be forked many times, each base claiming it is truer to the original spec than the rest. They are almost impervious to rebel attacks due to a lack of up-to-date documentation."

YouTube's hilarious cat videos could soon cost you $5 a month

Re: Greedy bastards

It amuses me that the advertisers haven't caught on to the "skip this ad in 5 seconds" button - on the rare occasion I watch an advertising-sponsored video, the ad hasn't told me what it's selling before I skip, so I don't know (or care) what it is they're touting.

Alien space rocks EXPLODE in fireball over Japan

Re: *dons pendant hat*

Nope. An astronomical magnitude of 0 is (well, was) based on the star Vega, anything fainter than that is positive, anything brighter is negative on a logarithmic scale.

5,000 UK pubs get free Wi-Fi... and they're not even all in London

Re: Miss Congeniality ?

Beer.

'SHUT THE F**K UP!' The moment Linus Torvalds ruined a dev's year

'Christ this is horribly ugly code, how could you ever accept this?'

Should have written it in C++ then.

'Metadatagate' fails to bring down Oz pollie

Re: Time Legacy.

The problem is, you wouldn't then need the wall of clocks showing the time in different cities, which would leave my underground lair bereft. I'd still have the huge map of the world I suppose, but the wall would look naked.

Hmm, I think I'll order an iPad Mini on Amazon ... Oh no I won't

Re: Both products are a big fail.

I think they should perhaps throw away their devices and do something together rather than watching TV separately.

State of Minnesota bans free online education

And by demagoguery you mean...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHQ2756cyD8

Analogue TV snuffs it tonight on UK mainland

Genius. That is all.

Ten external battery packs

Re: amprere hours

Ah, but that is likely to produce lower numbers, so how will manufacturers be able to say it's better than the competition? cf hard-drive manufacturers, digital camera manufacturers.

Fans rap Apple's 'crap' Map app

Re: Shit-for-brains Archeaologist

Charming: definitely not, but as an archaeologist I'm not going to vote shagbag down because he's sort of right. Certainly in temperate climes, commercial aerial photography is often ill-suited to archaeological sites because there is often a fairly small window of time to get a good snap of crop or soil marks. Low raking light, a light dusting of snow just on the melt, rainfall that happened a few hours or days before, just the right time after planting of certain cereal crops, are all good times to pick out the very subtle variations in soil and crop colour and drainage, but these conditions are generally not flown by commercial units when their brief is to capture a district or county - at least not deliberately.

It is also very inefficient to scroll around aerial photography on the off-chance of finding an anomaly that hasn't already been recorded, with a view to excavating it. The closest process that is used is one of inference: watchtower A is here and watchtower C is here, they're not intervisible, so putative watchtower B is probably somewhere here. But assuming permission and funding have been obtained, using an iPad on site to look at commercial photography would get you laughed off site, or at least accused of not doing your research beforehand.

Hello Miracast vid-beaming: ANOTHER thing the iPhone 5 hasn't got

Re: Not knowing about AirPlay fail

Calm down dear.

Hate the Windows 8 touch UI? Try Kinect-like finger shaking instead

That's your problem right there...

"If I'm working on PowerPoint I will go to my familiar PowerPoint.”

PowerPoint != work

Samsung Galaxy Beam Android projector phone review

Re: If you're going to put pictures like that into a phone review...

Perhaps you ought to get a job where your boss isn't a Puritan.

Take off your tie, wear a t-shirt, grow your hair; be the person that loves life rather than one of the people who are afraid of authority. Celebrate the female and male forms in all their naketude, especially those with dragon tattoos.

JELLYFISH bio-bot built with rat cells to mend broken hearts

Silly cone

It looks like our favourite hack is confused between silicon and silicone. Let's hope the boffins know the difference.

Stonehenge WASN'T built by ALIENS - Boffins' shock claim

"Henge's would have been cattle corrals: those with standing stones would have been defensive: they would have been built by early seafaring incomers"

Stonehenge is a fair old trek from the sea.

Re: It's a matter of taste but...

No, a henge has its ditch inside its bank, whereas an enclosure has the ditch on the outside - just like Stonehenge. Even wikipedia agrees with me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge#Etymology

Re: It's a matter of taste but...

Funnily enough, technically it's not a henge - the ditch and bank are the wrong way round.

Re: I call Bollocks

*sigh*

Yes, finding any amount of stone-age remains is hard, especially before the neolithic, and so yes technically there is quite a lot of extrapolation. But do you think that's because archaeologists can't be arsed finding sites? Or that they like to tell a good story, evidence be damned? That they just dick about in wet muddy holes all day for shits and giggles? No. A site is identified - Stonehenge is a fairly obvious one - and a shit-ton of work is done to gather as much data as possible, a tricky proposition when the site is protected to the hilt. And then years of expert opinion and experience is brought to bare, as well as diverse scientific processes and data analysis, and the data is sorted, sifted, and interpreted for the benefit of you Robert E A Harvey, who clearly has not an iota of an idea of what's involved, but still feel interested enough to pen some vacuous rubbish.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of flights of fancy (Alison Sheridan is guilty of this IMO), and (perhaps deliberately) you happen to choose one of the biggest culprits alive today - and he is certainly not level-headed nor practical. But the likes of Prof Parker Pearson are the leading examples in their field of study. So perhaps you ought to go and read some of his stuff, or any of the myriad sound authors (Scarre, Thomas, Richards are some that spring to mind), and then shut the fuck up.

'People should be free from Peeping Toms' snapping pics of them!

Re: What's [sic] with the sick sic?

But it's political rhetoric: start from the general and work to the specific in three steps. It introduces the reader or listener to the problem, then it's turned towards the individual to make them feel threatened by some non-threat.

That said, it sort of sounds like he's saying he wants privacy in your home. I didn't say it was _good_ rhetoric.

Re: What's [sic] with the sick sic?

The editorial team must have gone to the pub _really_ early. Either that or they're still out from the night before. What's worse is that I look at the "your home" bit and I'm starting to convince myself it's wrong even though I know it to be right.

[sic] comes from "thus was it written", implying not just typos and grammar errors, but meaning and content too.

UK.gov Open Data site fills up with spam

Re: giving it all away for nowt

I wish we could vote more than once for posts. Top stuff Thad.