Posts by Bodestone

Ridable giant robo-bug creeps, crawls toward reality

A little cheeky

Saying they dreamed it up recently when there has been an awesome hexapod in active service for at least 5 years:

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

Russia slashes space station ship trip to just six hours

Re: So it's not only faster but...

Not necessarily.

Usually the faster routes are more fuel intensive. The 2 orbits would have been the previously calculated way to get there on minimum fuel burn. That burn would drop you into an orbital pattern that would get you close in 2 orbits with no further fuel usage. OK, so you may save a bit on rations...

Re: Ummm

You beat me to it.

For the sceptics out there who don't believe it is an eighth an know that google never lies:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=48%2F6

Using Facebook causes less eco damage than farting, figures show

Re: But have you allowed for the shorter half-life?

Why? It's only the gasses recently released into the atmosphere that causes the issues.

How can CO2 re-released from oceanic absorption be classed as man made emissions?

And do they factor..

The fact that excessive fb users (i.e. those that sit in front of the computer all day eating junk food and getting no excercise) are likely to fart more?

NASA's nuclear Mars tank prepares for high pucker-factor landing

The mars aliens aren't invisible

They just have good printers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AoAJOF5GVQ

Three punters' data use doubles

Switch to wifi

I always switch to wi-fi at home or the office even though I never come near my data cap (2 gig sim only on 3)

Partly this is habit. Mainly though I hate having to put in a PIN all the time to unlock the phone (required with ICS if you have credentials on the phone) and Unlock with Wifi removed the need when you are hooked up to your selected stations.

I don't agree with the petrol analogy though. If Vauxhaul offered unlimited tank refills then people would tend to drive further than if they had to start forking out for their own petrol after the first tank each month. It goes without saying.

If 3 were not as cheap on their buffet deals then their overall usage may not have increased as much.

UK is first class for train Wi-Fi in Europe

I agree. Working wi-fi would be even better

It takes 20 minutes to connect, when you can. It never remembers you from last time so you have to go through account creation every time then it claims to offer you 15 minutes for free per month I believe, not per journey (though of course with it not remembering you from last time..)

15 minutes is just about enough to get logged in to whatever you wanted to do since it is barely better than mobile internet anyway.

Sysadmins: Your best tale of woe wins a PRIZE

Bit of a WTF situation just now

10 months down the track we are still trying to give us money to replace our primary (read only) flile server. If it powers down it will not come back until the following routine is followed:

Unplug cable, pop lid, remove BIOS battery, bridge reset, insert power cord, remove cord, unbridge, replace battery, close lid, power up, reconfigure the BIOS again.

Combined with the fact that we are still trying to also get money to replace the faulty tape drive. It goes for a couple of days then fails with unknown HW error. Only solution is to power down drive and server, power up drive, wait, power up server. Sometimes it works first time, sometimes takes a few tries. Our last successful backup was 9 days ago.

Slight issue

If you go there and spend ages typing something in then you will lose all the text unless an already logged in member of their community. To register they seem to want a huge amount of your details before you can continue.

Google Nexus 7 price, details confirmed in pre-I/O leak

Re: You know that all looks okay to me

Chances are it will support HDMI out via an MHL adapter.

Samsung snafu grounds blue Galaxy S III

But.. Just 2 colours?

OK, I'll not be leaving my Note any time soon but I would have to forgo what looks like an awesome phone because they don't offer it in black/dark grey.

I don't believe any phone/techy gadget should ever be white. it's a terrible colour that should be confined to fridges and washing machines.

Doh! Sage Pay forgets to renew SSL certificate

They're not the only ones with certificate issues just now

https://o2email.co.uk/html?brand=o2mailuk

Quantum cruncher beats today's computers by 10⁸⁰

This sentence should be taken out and shot!

The quantum device in question uses a pancake-shaped crystal of beryllium ions – 300 to be precise – that Bieruck says the team built “from scratch, atom by atom” with a told ABC radio that the apparatus required to capture the crystallise the atoms uses lasers, pumps and vacuum chambers to do the job, but that the rig needs occupies only a single room.

Ten... smartphone survival accessories

Where's the Spiderpodium?

GorillaPod may all well and good but not nearly as versatile as the Spiderpodium

Windows 3.1 rebooted: Microsoft's DOS destroyer turns 20

I actually still have...

Almost mint condition, boxed with manuals, install disks for Windows for Workgroups 3.11

Xbox 360 video cable boasts NOISE VIRUS protection

Compatible with all types of screen?

Any screen that uses a cable connection?

I have a 32" LCD. That has DVI, SCART and Coax cable connections. That thar cable is not directly compatible.

Smartphone owners demand bigger screens

The note is perfect

Smaller phones would fall out of my shirt pocket when I bent over. The Note is nice and snug. It just pokes out of the top a tad.

All Hail...

The Samsung Galaxy Note

How a tiny leap-day miscalculation trashed Microsoft Azure

They never learn

A few years ago I spent many hours trying to get Exchange 2003 installed and it kept falling over. Several hours in my search on the error message started producing hundreds of additional results from countries several hours ahead of me.

That's right. It couldn't be installed on Feb 29th. I had to wait until March 1st.

Windows 8: Thrown into a multi-tasking mosh pit

What's the worry?

We all know that before final release there will 3rd party software to bring back the start menu and hide Metro unless specifically asked for.

Ever wondered how many limp todgers to the mile?

Crays

After this article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/08/supercomputing_vs_home_usage/

I think that all smartphone and computer reviews done by El Reg should also give them a cray rating..

ipad2: 1.5 Crays

Judge nixes Apple's bid to patent-bash bankrupt Kodak

I'd like to see someone treat them like the squabling kids they appear to be, take all of the patents off them, put them all in a big tombola and make them take turns in picking them out.

Google Wallet falls open after casual hack

Well, to coin a phrase

Whoops.

Microsoft schtum on Dropbox snags with IE

IE9 seems very twitchy about its warnings. I was trying to download the virtual XP for win7 from Microsoft. MS wouldn't let me as it claimed it was a malicious file. It has done the same for many MS downloads.

Geek seeks cash for Top Trumps-style CPU game

Ahh, memories..

Of getting the aircraft carrier and thinking "don't pick speed, don't pick speed"

Chrome passes Firefox in global browser share

Well of course

Firefox isn't packaged with everything and the kitchen sink.

Almost every non tech computer user I know has chrome and doesn't know how they got it. Many just use it until I am there and they ask me where it came from and how to get rid of it.

Microsoft tempts with WinPho demo on... iPhone

They could have made an effort

If they had included support for Opera Mobile then they would have reached a much larger audience.

SHARKS tempted by BIKINI CLAD Thanksgiving BABES

It's a well known fact...

.. that autoerotic asphixiation kills more people each year than sharks.

After all, sharks are fairly straighforward when it comes to sex.

Scientists probe Earth's core, make mystifying discovery

@M Gale

You beat me to it.

What do you get if you multiply 6 by 6?

Voda to plug not-spots with mini-masts in boozers

Too little too late

And probably won'd solve the issues many of are having.

I doubt they are going to put up a few thousand of these around edinburgh city center or glasgow to provide some kind of signal that their map claims is there and isn't.

Between the airport and the center and then back out of the other side it is all buit up, populated areas. 50% 3g coverage which offeres little or no data transfer rate. Only in about 20% or so will it go to 3.5 which is the only time data is possible.

There is still a good portion where all signal drops off completely.

It's been getting steadily worse over 6 months and if they can't even maintain their core infrastructure then what are they doing wasting money trying to provide a service that is likely to be just as poor to new areas.

I'm off as soon as my contract expires in january. I'd go sooner if I could be arsed fighting the early cancellation fee.

Voda in 3G blackhole probe by ASA

Same for me in Edinburgh

Seems to have been getting steadily worse over the last 6 months.

Now 2 3rds of locations I might be have dropped to 2g including the bulk of the city centre.

On a strong 3g signal site lookup can take 30 seconds to timeout though page load tends to be OK.

Only on 3.5g do I seem to get anything like fit for purpose browsing and that seems to be about 10% coverage over Edinbugh just now.

My experience with the CS was slightly different in that they did offer to look up issues in areas if I supplied postcodes. At the time apparently 2 masts were down in the region of the airport, 1 by my flat and another around the Corstorphine regions. This was jsut after some very strong wind but since coverage is gettign worse I can just assume they are not putting them back up again.

Apple snubs Samsung's Oz patent peace offering

I still don't get it

The whole of Apple's infringement suit is that the samsung's look the same.

OK, so the Galaxy Tab, if you squich the aspect ratio and squint a bit might look similar (though I also don't see how you can patent rounded corners, I for one do not look forward to Apple preventing the sale of custard creams) but the S range of phones look nothing like an iPhone.

Mozilla forces Firefox 7 on memory diet

About time too.

It popped up last night at home on one machine telling me that 7 was here so I thought I'd give it a look. It did seem slimmer so I used Help->About to update the other.

All of my machines in the office are still telling me it's up to date at 6.0.2 though. Ho hum. I'll just keep closing it each night (and occasionally randomly thoughout the day on the Win7 x64 machine) for now then.

Can you handle LOHAN's substantial globes?

Wingspan....

Just a quick thought.

If the plane was rotated by 90 degrees could you not knock the wingspan from the boom lenght?

Nokia ‘giving away phones at cost’

The UK will probably not be taking the N9

Looks like I'll not be shopping Nokia again then. Given up on Symbian,

Maemo rocks. I was waiting to see what folks thought of the N9 before making a descision but it seems that has been taken out of my hands.

Spooks made 1,061 bugging errors in 2010

Spreadsheets, really?

They are using spreadsheets to manage this information?

Can, worms, open.