Posts by bharq

Microsoft keeps schtum as more battery woes hit Surface sufferers

I guess you were planning on buying a Volkswagen?

Password reset: 45 million creds leak from popular .com forums

Re: Hi, it's 18atcskd2w here...

You dummy!

You know you should never use your name as a password...

Silent Nork satellite tumbling in orbit

luckily, word wars are my favorites as they are usually the least bloody kind of wars.

Behold the mighty Swiss SPACE JUNK NOSHER PODULE

emphasis on Swiss

No, no, no

It's like Swiss cheese - the actual cheese only makes up about one percent, the rest is just... holes. So the calculations work out.

Which is totally unlike Bulgarian airbags, as they are usually a bit more... eh... filled?

Unions call for strike action over 'unusable' Universal Credit IT

byline

While I'm all for the creative use of bylines by the Reg, as a non-native English speaker, the present one got me slightly confused

"Getting it off the ground is like kicking a dead dog"

What am I to make of this?

- that it's dead easy? (pardon the pun)

- that it smells and flies come out?

- that it's quite useless? (getting it off the ground, that is, not the system per se)

- that it's something you generally want to avoid?

Please, noble English speakers, El Reg commentards and other know-it-alls, I would be much obliged if you could enlighten me on this subject

Glass door to the ancient past FOUND ON MARS

Welcome

I for one welcome our glass-embedded overl...

wait a minute. Already captured in glass?

HAH, YOU TINY MISERABLE CREATURE - TREMBLE BEFORE ME, FOR I'VE GOT YOU IN MY POWER!!!

Every billionaire needs a PANZER TANK, right? STOP THERE, Paul Allen

tinfoiled

"Don't worry, Allen hasn't gone all tinfoil hat"

I believe that's why he bought the tank - it offers a far superior Faraday cage than a tinfoil hat!

Pedants beware!

Panzer = armour

Kampf = combat

Wagen = vehicle

so Panzerkampfwagen = tank

and Panzer tank = armoured tank - so while somewhat pleonastic, it's by no means two words with the same meaning.

Nothing attracts pedantry like an error in a pedantic post...

At least I hope the River Avon tasted good when you bit it!

That Panzerregenmantel is mine, thanks.

HAMR time for Google's MapReduce, says not-so-startup

Back to the drawing board

for a new name - or are they planning to introduce this technology on harddiscs with Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording technology?

Spanish village of 'Kill the Jews' votes for rebrand

Re: 56 registered voters... "very intense, very hectic"

compared to his normal day job as a mayor of 56 people - definitely very hectic!

That NSA denial in full: As of right now, we're not pretending to be Facebook or Twitter

forgot a big one

the use of the word 'inaccurate' in the first sentence, as opposed to 'false' in other sentences.

When I spy on hundreds of millions of computers, if you say I spy on millions, that's not false - after all, millions are a subset of hundreds of millions. However, it is inaccurate.

Or if I spy on millions of PC's, laptops, mainframes and smartphones, then saying 'millions of computers' would be inaccurate. Although they all contain processors and do some computing and as such might be classified as 'computers', so the statement is definitely not 'false', colloquially they are not classified under this general name and as such you can get away with 'inaccurate'.

Oh how we love pedantry... and reading this statement, we're clearly not the only ones!

Euro satellite to count a billion stars, find origin of Milky Way

units, units!

1.5m km. I'll try not to be pedantic and correct it to M km or Gm (damn - failed), but come on, use some real units! How much is that in brontosaurussess (brontosauri?)

Sueball-happy patent biz slaps lawsuits on 14 tech firms

Re: @ skelband Here's a thought

"I know it makes patent licensing impossible, but I believe that licensing should not be permitted in the law either."

Stupidest thing I've heard in all this patent babble: licensing is what patents were created for. Or do you expect all inventors to be great managers and great salesmen? And even if they were, if I have a fantastic product (i.e. "car") that requires your invention to work (i.e. "wheel"), I would have no choice but to buy it from you. Can't supply enough? Tough luck. Quality assurance issues? Tough luck. Want some small modification? No, can't be bothered with that. Now, if I take a license on your invention, I can use it in my product, adjust it, all while funding your research for improving the invention.

Let's also not forget that without licensing, there'd be practically no standards (a lot of technology in e.g. DRAM-standards is licensed on FRAND terms) - the only way to make an invention into a standard would be to make a monopoly out of it. And we all love monopoly's, don't we.

11m Chinese engulfed by 'Airpocalypse' at 4000% of safe pollution levels

Re: Hmmm...

They'll copy anything over there... If we don't watch out, soon they'll have better smog than we had!

Do we have the patent lying around somewhere?

Curiosity drills into Mars

those damned metric measurements

you got them mixed up again! A 2.3mm drill bit making a 6.4cm hole in hard rock without breaking the bit? Quite an achievement, indeed. According to NASA, it's a 1.6cm drill bit (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20130209.html), quite a bit sturdier and - more importantly - doing a lot more damage! BWOUHAHAHAHAAAA

Do we have a Reg unit for small lengths? centiLinguine or something?

Taiwan's Polytron promises see-through phones

need a mirror!

"an ever-optimistic spokesperson for the firm told Miss Asia"

Why would she be interested? The most beautiful person in her neighbourhood would, per definition, be herself, so she probably needs something that turns into a mirror instead of getting transparent.

Paris, because... well, you know!

Boffins spot planet that could support life... just 12 light years away

"We are now beginning to understand that Nature seems to overwhelmingly prefer systems that have a multiple planets with orbits of less than one hundred days"

I thought it was just our current planet-detection systems that are biased towards short-orbit planets?

WIMP-seeking detector flooded

Re: OY! Units!

IIRC: NYDRC (No, You Don't Recall Correctly) - the standardisation was solely for the El Reg's Special Projects Bureau. The only agreement made for the Reg as a whole was the inclusion of some proper Vulture units (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/vulture_central_standards/), but there was no unit included for temperature.

Maybe the Vulture Board should comtemplate including a unit for 'hotness' - so which one ranks higher, the Paris or the Lohan?

Curiosity latest: MARTIAN DUST DEVILS assail prowling robot rover

blast the devil with your laser canons!

that's what I would do if my nuclear tank was under attack...

Foxconn: Worker who lost half his brain in accident must leave hospital

I wonder

with half your brain removed - do you need to keep your head tilted at all times? If you shake your head, does the brain flop around inside? Or do they put in some dummy place-filler? (could be the new rage: look at my silicon implants! no, not there, higher!)

Maybe Paris can share here experience...

Japanese cubesat to flash Earth with Morse message

no more clouds!

"although Tanaka warned that a successful sighting will, of course, depend on the weather"

Damn Amazon and all it's fellow cloud providers... you can't even see a decent satellite from down here...

AI game bot HUNTS DOWN ENEMIES, passes Turing Test

Re: "We can mimic that behavior"

The definition of AI is not the imitation of intelligence, but the imitation of intelligent behaviour. So yes, it is perfectly adequate in this context.

Scientists: 'Castration is the key to a longer life'

Re: Castration is....

for this effect, it would be balls out: the snip doesn't stop the testosteron flow that's accused of shortening male lifespan

MoD to become even more top-heavy as a result of personnel cuts

uninformed

For some reason, I keep reading "uninformed" instead of "uniformed" personel. Are those words interchangeable?

Behold: China's robot noodle army!

conversion factor

Here we go again with these foreign units - what is the noodle / linguine conversion rate? And does it change when made by robots?

Cloud engineering could save humantiy, suggests boffin

salt rain?

"...which would spout huge amounts of sea salt particles - generated from the ocean - into the air as they went along."

does that mean salt rain? I don't think the crops would like that...

Surfing ROBO-shark hunter stalks great whites along US coast

I call BS!

"...is part of an arsenal of ocean-tracking tech that's receiving data from acoustic tags on the predators and transmitting it back to shore"

don't believe it - it's transmitting instructions to their underwater army of laser-armed sharks!

We are doomed - doomed I tell you!

The touchscreens that push back, thanks to Brit hi-fi boffinry

long live the LCD!

so the LCD is fused to the gorilla glass, which is vibrating like hell. Any informed opinions (or, as this is the Reg, wild guesses) on how this translates into life expectancy for the display?

Star Trek's Scotty boldly goes where he always wanted to

crowded

308 people in a canister the size of a lipstick... must be crowded up there! I can hear the ashes calling out to each other: move over - it's my turn to sit at the window!

Samsung boss vows siblings won't see a penny of inheritance

got me there

you left me scratching my head when there was 100b won... how did he win it? or did he earn it?

then suddenly a light switched on inside my head...

Paris, 'cause she doesn't need a light switch!

Corny conversations prove plants 'talk'

Re: Accept it

"But what is the purpose? What can the plant do to defend itself?"

some plants are known to increase the level of toxins in their leaves when they receive such signals - I believe this was observed in oak trees when one of them emitted signals that he (she?) was infected by a certain beatle

Scientists refine smart self-assembling building blocks

now if only they could make 'em 3D, expand the memory to... say... roughly 800MB, get the size down to about 50µm and assemble some 100 trillion of them, you know what they could build?

Foreign sabotage suspected in Phobos-Grunt meltdown

so basically...

...they built the thing for half the price with underpaid engineers, took the money from ESA and the chinese and distributed it to the party officials while putting the blame on 'everyone but us'?

maybe these Russians are smarter than they appear...

British garbage worms survive in space without human help

unmanned mission

Is it a wormed mission, then?

Boffin bothers frogs until they spill super power secrets

a 3D X-ray video camera - could I have one of these? A hell of a lot of interesting possibilities is entering my mind

Feds probe naked Scarlett Johansson outrage

smart guy!

you can see why this man is called Cluley and not Clueless...

More transistors, Moore’s Law, less juice

timewasters

"Now all we need to do is come up with reasonably efficient software that doesn’t waste processor cycles doing not much."

wrong - we need to come up with software that doesn't waste MY time as much!

LOHAN to suck mighty thruster as it goes off, in a shed

a title is now optional!

You should either rethink your proportions, and make it longer and thinner, or put some insulation or a bit of dry ice on top - at the moment, too much heat is coming in from the top - besides, doesn't LOHAN deserve something longer?

Natalie Portman slaps John Galliano

obvious

sorry to point out the obvious - but weren't the Italians on the same side as Hitler?

Mac daddy predicts all-knowing, all-seeing UI

welcome!

and of course "in the cloud" = controlled by some megacorp, be it Googlintosh or Macrosoft or whatever. And anyone not wearing their personal monitoring device is suspect, because "if you don't want the whole world to know what you're doing, perhaps you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"!

Seagate sees big drive capacity jump coming

Monday morning

probably my calculating skills have left me on Monday morning, but I thought that 0.77 EB on a total of 69 EB is about one percent instead of ten...

Indonesian smut vid star's arse hauled into court

Playboy!

nice to hear that the judge officially stated that Playboy is "no pornograpy". Time to inform the IT-department to change the net filters...

Oz journo pokes PARIS

what?

what exactly does Lohan have that Paris lacks?

PARIS unveils impressive box

shake it, baby!

before you send it up into the sky, make sure you shake it and check everything stays in place. And make sure the aluminum foil doesn't come loose and block your camera...

Facebook Places - why, and why not

please rob me

reminds me of that Dutch guy with his "please rob me" website...

Google remarkets behavioral ad eyeball creep

aha

aha, that explains it!

I got slammed with this for the first time yesterday, when I visited an online store and some hours later saw the banner of this store staring at me in a completely unrelated site. I thought it was so creepy, I felt naked in front of my pc! (no I wasn't, I was at work and my work at the moment doesn't involve getting naked). I immediately destroyed all the cookies on my machine, which solved it (temporarily).

Good to know you can opt out of it - but seriously, how many people have any clue that it's Google doing this, and if they do, know that there is a possibility to opt out of it?

Yes, Internet Explorer is on the wane in Europe

work vs home

The StatCounter graph shows a clear weekly pattern: Internet Explorer peaks during weekdays, Firefox in the weekend. So there are quite some people that (have to) use IE at work, but when they can choose freely, prefer the Open Source way.

So I guess the choice is clear - sys admins, please follow!

Penalty for silent calling goes sky high

the Dutch way

in the news yesterday: in the Netherlands, they have a database that you can enter if you don't want sales calls. It's been extremely successfull: 4 milion people have already subscribed.

However, the flip side: when marketing firms realised they cannot reach their public by phone any more, they switched to door-to-door sales tactics - which are, in my opinion, a lot more pain in the donkey.