Posts by Alan Birtles

FAA stays grounded in reality as SpaceX preps for takeoff

Re: Stage Two

The video is showing the remains after the explosion tumbling not tumbling before the explosion

What if someone mixed The Sims with ChatGPT bots? It would look like this

When you feel old

When a game from the year 2000 gets called an "early computer game"

Software engineer accused of stealing $300k from employer was 'inspired by Office Space'

Code review is for wimps

Was there no code review for a critical payment processing part of their application?

After roasting Nvidia for overheating issues AMD now has its own

Re: der8auer

basically some liquid evaporates in the hot area carrying away some heat, it then moves to a colder area and condenses, releases the heat, the liquid then travels back to the hot area and the cycle repeats. All very clever with no moving parts. However if the whole thing gets hot enough that the liquid doesn't condense then it stops working and just gets hotter and hotter until enough heat is removed and the liquid can condense again. Also if its not designed correctly so that the condensed liquid flows back into the hot area then it'll stop working (needs to work whichever way the vapour chamber is orientated, some experiments show the cards run cooler when mounted vertically rather than horizontally).

I'm no expert but it sounds like the former issue can be solved by setting the amount of liquid and the air pressure in the chamber so that the liquid always condenses over the desired temperature ranges (but you have to make sure it still evaporates at the lower end of your temperature range too). The latter issue is down to the design of the chamber itself and could be harder to fix.

Swiss lab's rooftop demo shows sunlight and air can make fuel

Re: Policy shift from whom? The Gods of physics?

Batteries and Hydrogen can't compete with hydrocarbons for energy density (yet or perhaps ever) so for fuelling planes where energy density is vital any reduced efficiency in energy capture will probably be outweighed by reduced energy use from not making the planes heavier

Apple ditches support for pre-2015 MacBook Air, Pro laptops with macOS Monterey

you can always vote with your feet and disembark from the Apple gravy train

Splunk junks 'hanging' processes, suggests you don't 'hit' a key: More peaceful words now preferred in docs

I'm off to "Stop responding" a picture on my wall

LastPass to limit fans of free password manager to one device type only – computer or mobile – from next month

Re: Rebulid?

https://keeweb.info/ makes keepass pretty easy to use, setup google drive sync and then it works on any device

Danger zone! Brit research supercomputer ARCHER's login nodes exploited in cyber-attack, admins reset passwords and SSH keys

"change passwords and SSH keys on any other systems which you share your ARCHER credentials with"

Umm, isn't the point of SSH keys that the server only has your public key so a compromise of your public key on one server wouldn't need to change your private key?

Volterman 'super wallet': The worst crowdsource video pitch of all time?

Its so smart it can't even carry any of those old fashioned coins

WordPress daddy Matt Mullenweg says Wix.com 'explicitly contravenes the GPL'

does the GPL apply to server side code?

My understanding is that it doesn't hence the need for the AGPL licence

Teen whiz exposes WhatsApp profile pic privacy blunder bug

Abandon what's app and use telegram instead, it has a Web app, it's free, secure and gasp has an open api

Mozilla, EFF, Cisco back free-as-in-FREE-BEER SSL cert authority

Re: A major obstacle to encrypting everything

SNI is fairly well supported now so SSL virtual hosting is possible http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

TRANSMUTATION claims US LENR company

4.6 volts * 90 amps = 414 watt hours? no, try 414 watts per hour, they don't say how long they run their kit for so there is no way of knowing how much energy they actually use!

US lawmaker blames bicycle breath for global warming gas

Re: I think he forgot something

And walkers, cycling is more efficient than both walking and running

Ten... dual-band wireless routers

The latest firmware update for the edimax improves the interface a bit

Samsung bakes lower-voltage server memory

"1.33Mb/sec of bandwidth" - my broadband is faster than that! I'll take the high power option

Ten... Premium Android smartphones

xperia pro

xperia pro is coming soon... http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/corporate/products/phoneportfolio/specification/xperia-pro

Apple pulls app after dev publishes users' PINs

Alternatively...

People (quite rightly it turns out) didn't trust the app with an important pin code so used an easy to remember but insecure code instead. On the other hand many people are probably using the came code for their bank cards

Chinese mobile malware powers click-fraud scam

re: (untitled)

these aren't viruses they are trojan horses. there is a big difference, viruses are self propagating, trojan horses require the user to be fooled into installing them. the android trojan horses are quite limited at the moment due to android's security measures. they can only do things normal apps can do and wont be able to disrupt the phones operation (apart from maybe running up large data bills and using up credit)

Hitachi refrigerates rack rears

(untitled)

it means that for 1 kw of power they can keep something cool which is producing 43.5kw of heat which you could say is 97% efficient (for 44.5kw of power usage they are getting 43.5kw of useful work)

Samsung E60 e-book reader

waterstones

I agree that waterstones is terrible but you don't have to use it, you can use any digital editions store including wh smith. (Or with some drm jiggery pokery you can read books from any store including the kindle store)

Buggy home routers expose O2 customers to hijacking

Not suprised

I helped setup my parents router this weekend, i was only mildly suprised to see that it was using wep by default. what was more suprising was that by default there is no username and password required to login to the web interface!

Sony's 40GB PS3 for Europe confirmed

@olius

€399 - VAT = €340 = $481 which is less than the US 60GB price. considering the extra costs of operating in europe (longer guarantee obligations, multiple languages to support etc.) i think the price comparison is reasonable