Posts by Terje

It's big, it's blue, and it'll be raining down on you – it's 3200 Phaethon

Re: Interesting ... but

To answer the questions.

1. To say that it's blue is rather a misnomer, the surface is very very dark, it just reflect slightly more of the blue light then it "should", I assume some group has tried looking at the reflected spectra, but as a general rule it's quite hard to figure out the composition from that.

2. Asteroids and comets are generally considered to be two separate populations of objects.

3. Phaeton don't pass through the atmosphere what happens is that the earth pass through the leftover debris that has spread out over the orbit. If indeed Phaeton had passed through the atmosphere it would likely very soon have resulted in one of two scenarios, either nudged about to cause an impact, or be flung out to a different orbit.

Still using Skype? Good news! After HOURS of meetings, Microsoft reckons it knows when you're Not Active

No I'm quite sure it requires a dedicated effort to make something that much worse.

Can't get pranked by your team if nobody in the world can log on

At my workplace the "expected" punishment for forgetting to lock your computer is to have the background replaced with a picture of Justin Bieber, a fate worse then death for the seconds it takes to restore order to the desktop!

Hate to burst your Hubble: Science stops as boffins scramble to diagnose gyro problem

Re: One can only hope

The focal length has nothing to do with how far you can see, but more about the field of view and resolution you get with a given sensor.

Example:

A full frame DSLR camera with a 100mm lens gives an approximate horizontal field of view of 20 degrees

If you replace the 100mm lens with a 50mm one your field of view will double and at the same time the resolution will be halved if using the same sensor.

The theoretical resolution of a telescope is not affected by the facal length of the telescope but by its diameter. Hubble has a theoretical maximum resolution of about 0.05" while in practice the resolution achieved with most of the sensors is about twice that 0.1"

If I recall correctly the telescopes they got were rumored to be spares for KH-11 telescopes. so they should probably be 2.4 meter diameter telescopes which is identical to that of hubble and it should thus be able to achieve more or less the same resolution.

Cambridge Analytica's daddy pleads not guilty to ignoring data notice

What is the possible punishment for this if they are found guilty?

Judge: Georgia's e-vote machines are awful – but go ahead and use them

I guess the real reason is that you need an organization around the voting process. printing ballots etc should not be the issue. Getting people to count the votes and training them is likely to be a much larger problem.

Microsoft: You don't want to use Edge? Are you sure? Really sure?

Re: Links to resolutions, will work with any browser

Granted I'm counting my apartment and not the entire house (in which case it would not be very impressive with 10), but I could not come up with more then 8 possible candidates to run any form of unix flavor including the electricity meter in the basement.

Volkswagen faces fresh Dieselgate lawsuit in Germany – report

If Volkswagen selectively told current shareholders about this, how then would acting on that information not constitute insider trading if the information is not publicly disclosed?

Jupiter suffered growing pains before becoming our system's big daddy

It would need to gobble up a fair bit more then just a little more mass to turn into a star, as the cutoff limit for a brown dwarf (still not rely a star) is about 13 Jupiter masses, it is true though that without changing other parameters (Such as a lot of heating by being excruciatingly close to the sun for example.) if Jupiter were to gobble up more gas it would stay approximately the same size.

Well, can't get hacked if your PC doesn't work... McAfee yanks BSoDing Endpoint Security patch

Mcafee almost work after you tell it to don't bother looking at anything in the vicinity of visual studio...

US voting systems: Full of holes, loaded with pop music, and 'hacked' by an 11-year-old

I'm continuously amazed at how a system that is known to be broken so far beyond repair that it should just be tossed on the scrapheap is still used.

While pieces of paper are nowhere near as fashionable they are as far as I know not prone to being hacked by anyone and his mother with a wifi bluetooth or other wireless device.

Phased out: IT architect plugs hole in clean-freak admin's wiring design

Re: Bridge rectifier?

Be glad they were not using Tellurium, compound smelliness apparently increase as you go down that group of the periodic table S -> Se -> Te. I assume that Polonium compounds would be even worse, but there you have other problems to contend with that are more worrying then smell..

Re: Plot twist? What plot twist?

No, in the civilized part of the world that is entirely normal

Sysadmin trained his offshore replacements, sat back, watched ex-employer's world burn

Re: Not in IT...

So how are they to prove that you deliberately didn't train them well? being a good teacher is usually not something that is required for most jobs... and completely, so they want to retain you as a consultant training the replacement for eternity? In my optinion most of those clauses should be easily torn apart by even a half decent lawyer.

Sysadmin sank IBM mainframe by going one VM too deep

Being Swedish people call # a whole lot of things, though the only one that I can think of that any swede would universally understand is "brädgård" that is the Swedish word for "lumber yard". As Dave126 pointed out above as being the Swedish cartographic symbol for a lumberyard which I had no idea of, now I do feel bad about learning things during my vacation so I better stop reading comments!!!

Either my name, my password or my soul is invalid – but which?

I just don't understand why so many sites try to force you to weaken your passwords by specifying you must have at least one upper case character one number and one non alphanumeric character. there are ten numbers, there are in reality something like 16 special characters that is ever likely to get used...

Just enforce a decent length password. and for the love of god don't ...ing limit the password length at say 32 characters, if the function you use to hash the password can't handle arbitrary long input (within reason) then fix your hash function don't force the user to limit the password.

GitHub given Windows 9x's awesome and so very modern look

Re: UI elements that make it obvious what they do?

Then I would recommend the logitech mice with "free spinning" scroll wheel that I'm since a number of years totally addicted to and force me to keep using logitech mice, I have even goten a couple of additional proselytes at work.

Re: UI elements that make it obvious what they do?

I do have to say that while I agree in general that keeping controls clean is a good thing I do love the markings on the scrollbar in VS.

Security guard cost bank millions by hitting emergency Off button

Re: Big Red Buttons are irresistible!

I think that sending Foul Ole Rons smell over should be enough to convince them, or we could try some headology!

You must NOT under any circumstance add a Pterry icon!

and for the small minority of you who don't get the Pterry bit I suggest reading up on Pyramids.

BOFH: Is everybody ready for the meeting? Grab a crayon – let's get technical

How come the boss is still alive? He should have had a regrettable accident halfway through this!

Da rude sand storm seizes the Opportunity, threatens to KO rover

Welcome rover overlord

Obligatory XKCD refference

https://xkcd.com/1504/

Actual control of Windows 10 updates (with a catch)... and more from Microsoft

Re: Visual Studio 2017 is an atrocious mess!

I would be content if they just sorted out edit and continue, and debugging parallel / multithreaded code in a sane manner.

Did you test that? No, I thought you tested it. Now customers have it and it doesn't work

Re: Soldering irons

And don't hold them like the models in the advertisements do....

Boffins quietly cheering possible discovery of new fundamental particle: Sterile neutrino

Re: This is not making physics any easier

Granted the following quote from him (Niels Bohr) I'm quite sure that batshit crazy is about correct.

"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough."

A Reg-reading techie, a high street bank, some iffy production code – and a financial crash

Re: Or...

It's obvious that the only suitable language for such a problem is prolog...

Police block roads to stop tech support chap 'robbing a bank'

Sounds to me like he did exactly what Vimes would have done, (Bring in Detritus / Dorfl and the riot would quietly decide that rioting was not what they wanted to do today). Carrot had of course have solved the issue by saying how sad he was at the behaviour they showed and they would all have felt bad and gone home possibly after buying a small gif to their mothers on the way.

Microsoft, Google: We've found a fourth data-leaking Meltdown-Spectre CPU hole

I have to admit I have a hard time distinguishing all the different attacks by this time and I have not read up on most of the newer ones enough to tell exactly how they work, but if you manage in some way shape or form to learn things that have been speculatively loaded into cache,how is that not snooping on cache regardless of what method you use to do it?

I believe my main point still stands, if you disallow everyone and his mother to run what is in reality arbitrary code on the cpu they will not be able to exploit the side channel attacks because they have no ability to run the code needed to do so.

I have always subscribed to the principle that if you can run code on the computer you have access to anything and everything on it. I think that rather then losing x% performance by disabling speculative execution etc. we should ask ourselves why on earth we allow javascript and similar technologiesto actually run code able to snoop on cache memory in the first place. I believe the only sensible solution is to take a step back and lock down the remote code being executed on your machine and take the slowdown from interpreting code instead of running it through a jit compiler and letting it run amok on the cpu any way it wants to.

Of Course this leaves open any amount of holes to snoop data if you are a native code program, but that is something I already assume it is able to do by virtue of healthy paranoia.

Hitler 'is dead' declares French prof who gazed at dictator's nashers

Re: Death of Conspiracy theories?....not likely.

1 Brain 1 Jar...

0 Brain 2 Jar -> 1 Jarjar...

We all know that jarjar was most definitely a sith lord in disguise

ergo George Lucas must be hitler in disguise!!!

Sueballs flying over Facebook's Android app data slurping

What I loathe to no end is the fact that on most phones (my lovely HTC10 included) the bloody spying bloatware comes preinstalled and unless you root the phone it can't be uninstalled... Sure you can disable it, but it still slurps a not insignificant amount of space.

LESTER looks up, spins its wheels: The Register’s beer-butler can see ...

I'm quite sure that a laser is instrumental to the whole concept! As far as I recall they use lasers to achieve the low temperature records so just scale the technology up to cool the beer!

SpaceX Bangabandhu-1 launch held up while Dragon splashes down on time

I think I need to cut down on my Pratchett diet as I immediately read that as Bhangbhangduc.

Mine's the one on top of four elephants on a turtle.

Zombie Cambridge Analytica told 'death' can't save it from the law

Re: Pass out the torches and pitchforks!

Do we have any actual evidence to the fact that they are NOT directly employed by the fellow downstairs?

Mines the red formfitting asbestos and lycra one

Re: Here we go again!

I didn't know they were a part of the Marketing division of Sirius Cybernetics!

'Computer algo' blamed for 450k UK women failing to receive breast screening invite

Re: The real question is...

I would have to say that your numbers are rather doubtful given that unless there are additional checks such as biopsies etc. before treatment then there's something very very wrong. But said people would not have been scared and didn't have to go through possibly painful follow up checks.

NetHack to drop support for floppy disks, Amiga, 16-bit DOS and OS/2

Playing aggressively early on, and knowing what to wish for makes it a whole lot easier.

Mine's the erodeproof +3 gray dragon scale mail

Europe fires back at ICANN's delusional plan to overhaul Whois for GDPR by next, er, year

Why on earth would someone wave around the fact that they have been general manager of the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority as something positive? The only times I ever hear about them is because they are failing miserably to do what they are supposed to. But I guess moving from one malfunctioning organization to another is not such a big step.

Incredible Euro space agency data leak... just as planned: 1.7bn stars in our galaxy mapped

Re: Norton?

The trusty Norton will never go out of style,still probably the handiest one to have when observing!

ISO blocks NSA's latest IoT encryption systems amid murky tales of backdoors and bullying

Re: Interesting times.

And they also tend to have some form of external power supply and thus able to use decent encryption.

Here's another headline where NASA is dragged through the mud for cheap Mars wise cracks

I just wonder how mud on supposedly exposed rock has managed to survive 3.5 billion years of wind erosion? Does the article mention anything about that kind of thing?

SpaceX finally Falcon flings NASA's TESS into orbit

Re: Always get nurvous

Are you actually implying that the JWST will ever be ready to launch? what strange and wonderful world do you live in and can I come and join you?

Scotland: Get tae f**k on 10Mbps Broadband USO

I just don't get why there is even a rollout of something that slow to begin with, to my Swedish eyes it's just ridiculously slow, in all reality you need a fiber backbone anyway so to me rolling it out all the way just makes so much more sense.

Deep in remote Oz, an antenna has 'heard' the oldest stars

Re: Why dark matter?

I agree totally with that, which is what makes it so exiting!

Maybe the dark matter did soak up the energy, maybe somehow the energy was involved in creating the dark matter altogether, the problem is we just don't know how dark matter work apart from it interacting through gravity, thus invoking dark matter to solve a problem that is not gravity related seems a bit odd to me without further evidence for it actually being able to interact in other ways, or someone figures out a neat mechanism to feed the energy through a gravity interaction.

I feel like dark matter is on the verge of turning into the astrophysics version of the 80s turbo, add it to anything even if it has nothing to do with the actual thing just to look cool.

Re: Why dark matter?

I would start looking at the models of the universes evolution after the big bang, remember those models have quite a lot of fiddly bits and black magic involved as is.

While I think there is well enough evidence for the existence of dark matter I don't agree with the the conclusion that since our models of the early universe say that it should be temperature X and we measure temperature Y the obvious way to solve it is to dump the energy from the hydrogen to the dark matter through a process that as far as we have been able to tell through a lot of expensive experiments don't work in the universes current state, sure something may have caused the dark matter (that we still don't know what it is) to couple to matter and soak up the energy, but since we thus far have no evidence whatsoever for it interacting with matter in any way but gravity it feels like "we have no idea of how to consolidate the models and data so let's invoke dark matter through magic process and call it a day"

The result is interesting enough as it is without trying to force it to fit the models through doubtful means.

Why dark matter?

So what is wrong with the obvious solution, the hydrogen was cooler then expected, because something in our modeling of how hot it should be is off for some reason, no need to involve dark matter through an unknown process.

icon because that's what those early stars did very very quickly.

Hot NAND: Samsung wheels out 30TB SSD monster

No price!

"and no price indications"

I would guess that if you need to consider the price of one of these you don't have the budget for it...

UK Home Office grilled over biometrics, being clingy with folks' mugshots

Re: This is B@*&£$%!

So what you are saying is that there are racks upon racks worth of hardware containing data that can't be connected to an individual in any way?

If you have a system that can't retrieve that I would say the best solution to the problem involves a couple of jerry cans and a match.

If the system run sql or some other more esoteric solution is rather besides the point, if you can't even enumerate what you have in the system it's broken beyond repair.

Re: This is B@*&£$%!

Maybe a simple sql query won't solve a case like that if we assume the data for convicted / under investigation etc. cases are held in an entirely different db, but just do a select query on that database once a month to select out the persons that should be retained drop into a file of you choice, send file in whatever manner you please to the second database, parse said file and drop all records that don't match, it would probably be all of what? A days work in real life, add in governments and contractors and you get a year, ok let's be realistic here, we are talking government and big contractors after all so say three years, but there have still been more then enough time to do that.

Epic spacewalk, epic FAIL: Cosmonauts point new antenna in the wrong direction

I thought it was one of the big no nos of spacewalks was to intentionally lose stuff, yes it will deorbit relatively fast, but given a bit of bad luck it is supposedly possible to have a nasty encounter with the gently floating away object at several kilometers per second a month or so later (can't remember the particulars for that though so take it with about .75 kg of salt).

Mystery surrounds fate of secret satellite slung by SpaceX

Given that they congratulated sapcex on a successful launch I think it's safe to assume nothing major went wrong with the launch. and so it should be in more or less the correct orbit and It should therefore not have crashed down quite yet...