Posts by Phil O'Sophical

They WANT to EAT YOUR COMPUTER - welcome your ANT overlords

Re: Reg cruelty

Texan pounds are 3x as big as everyone else's.

New 4TB drive spaffs half a telly season into your eyes AT ONCE

Re: um

Well, Bluray sets a minimum of around 7MBytes/sec, so if these disks really can do the 180MB/s claimed, that is > 16 channels at Bluray definition.

I'd be more concerned with the "initial 0.55 per cent chance of drive failure per year.". Out of every 1000 drives they ship, more than 5 will fail in the first year? That's worrying.

As for the price, $175 seems more likely, looking at other 4TB drives on sale.

Scramjet X-51 finally goes to HYPER SPEED above Pacific

Re: X-51

> intercontinental, underground maglev in vacuum tubes, anyone?

A transatlantic tunnel, hurrah!

Google research chief: 'Emergent artificial intelligence? Hogwash!'

Moore's law acts against it

Intelligence may emerge, but by the time someone has spent 18 years "raising" it to adulthood, other more advanced intelligences will have been created. Who's going to want to spend the time raising an iRobot20 when they can get a new iRobot21 a year later for the same price?

Lonely-heart Maltese techie vs Bonnie Tyler for Eurovision crown

Re: Vote with your conscience

Already got the pre-recorded stuff lined up.

The ESC hasn't been any fun since they got the scoreboard & voting working properly. Bloody modern technology.

Oracle updates Java versioning to allow more security fixes

Re: why not

> version number readers that crap out on the slightest mishap.

Ah yes, the ones that think 5.10 is < 5.9 :(

My god, what's that STENCH belching from your iPhone?

Re: I can see the future...

> slide the lid off a box containing a turd.

Doesn't fit their "razor blade business model", which relies on people having to pay for refills, though.

Re: I can see the future...

Hmm. "Custom mingtones" anyone?

Synergies

Wait till they get together with Kimberly Clark

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/10/kimberly_clark_tweetpee_nappy/

"Was that you, dear?" "No, must be the baby alarm again"

Will customers buy into Oracle's modern-day mainframes?

Re: My two cents

The Sun name is still there, all the Oracle hardware is badged with Oracle and Sun.

Apple adds Galaxy S 4 to Samsung patent suit

> Do they do Bakelite in white?

yep. Think light switches. Rounded corners and all.

Sun lets loose with THREE record eruptions in 24 hours

Re: The other

That's on Page 3 of the other Sun...

France weighing 'culture tax' on phones, slabs, PCs, TVs

why?

Freetards can steal content, but they still have to buy the media?

Re: fail

> Looks like s big win for WWW.amazon.Lu

Yep. Just one tablet sale moved abroad to save that 1% tax costs Hollande & co. almost 20% in lost VAT. If 5% of sales go abroad, it's a net loss.

You'd think he'd have learned the "look at the net picture" lesson from the way Depardieu & other big earners left to avoid the 75% "rich tax", yet despite the courts ruling the first implementation of that tax as unconsitutitional they're still trying to bring it in. The iShiny tax will have the same negative effect. No wonder the French schools in London are being overwhelmed by demand from expats.

Come on guys, you can't tax yourselves out of a recession! Where's la Madame Thatcher when you need one?

Review: Samsung Galaxy S4

Re: In fact, if you were being unkind...

Why does anyone need 1920 x 1080 resolution on a 5" phone, FFS?

Boffins plan to drop €250,000 TEST-TUBE BURGER on London

What makes a burger succulent and juicy is the exercise the cow's muscles got while the animal was romping around the field, building up all that tasty fat. I would expect that a testtube burger will probably have all the succulence and flavour of pureed Spam.

Apple asked me for my BANK statements, says outraged reader

Re: "she emailed over copies of them... and then immediately began panicking"

> certain that at the very least - the email was going to *someone* at Apple.

Well, you can be certain that one of the recipients is someone at Apple. Since email is generally not encrypted or secured against any form of interception or copying, your ID details could have been intercepted by anyone at any of the ISPs it crossed, not to mention anyone the anonymous Apple employee forwarded it to, deliberately or accidentally.

The great $45m bank cyber-heist: Seven New Yorkers cuffed

Re: "shot dead at his house while playing dominoes"

Its absolutely forbidden for the card to leave the customer's sight, I've seen waitresses at Heathrow having to insist (to American customers) that they must bring the machine to the table, and cannot take the card away.

NASA boffins: Space 'scope JUST missed dead Cold War spy sat

Re: Units.

Canteloupe?

Why next iPhone screen could be made of SAPPHIRE - and a steal...

Re: Sizes?

One is a drawn ingot, the other is a deposited coating.

Although a Humvee decorated with candles would certainly give one pause for thought.

Re: Never mind the quality - feel the width !

Hmm, it wasn't really the image I wanted to accompany my morning coffee, though.

Hotel marketplace Airbnb: Show us your privates if you want to book a bed

> Bear in mind that most continental hotels will require a photocopy of your passport

Really? In my experience European hotels just want a credit card, it's only US hotels that ask for photo ID as well.

Crap computers in a crap box: Smart-meter blackouts risk to UK

Re: Whilst I can see the value.....@Tom Walsh

> And also when the gas central heating kicks in, and the electric pump starts drawing 7-800W of power itself

You might want to invest in a better meter, one that can correctly measure reactive power. A central heating water pump will never draw anything like 800W, 150-200W is more like it. What does the rating plate on the pump say?

Too costly to fix?

So no doubt the government response to this will be to define hacking smart meters as a terrorist offence with a 10-year minimum term, thus firmly securing the stable doors long after all equine inhabitants have departed.

Canadian TV station wails: NFC bonking... it's not SAFE

Re: NFC

"Put your mass-transit ticket card, or your building's door-access card, in front of it - or another NFC-enabled credit or debit card, for that matter.. The remote NFC snooper that everyone's so afraid of .. . will trigger both cards and be unable to read from either."

Not so.

I have three such cards in a badge wallet, for access to three diferent sites. Some of the badge readers can happily find the right card when I wave the wallet at them, others require me to extract the card concerned. It seems to depend on the sophistication of the card reader,.

> But Play.com will be on the hook for any fraudulent activity on the card..

Which Play factors into their prices, so that all Play's customers end up paying for it. That's how all businesses handle theft, by adding it in as a "business cost".

It does not mean that it can be ignored because there's apparently no important victim...

Continued lack of women in tech bemoaned by ex-techie lady MP

Re: Getting the gender terminology correct

I doubt it. Look at France where terminology is gender-specific, we get "blogueurs" and "blogueuses" but the land of M. Chauvin doesn't seem notably better-supplied with female geek(e)s.

Re: Common sense !!

I agree, and it would be interesting to hear the views of any female commentards. I think that there is a big difference between "not choosing" to enter the tech sector, and "choosing not" to enter it. In my first job I'd have said that the number of women was >> 16%, but that was in a city wirh a large university CS department and lots of female students. My current employer does anecdotally seem to be around that 16% figure, for a much older workforce. Have the percentages been studied with age in mind?

There is clearly no physical or mental reason why the sexes shouldn't be equally represented (unlike building sites, for example), so there must be other causes. I see no sex-related difference in the quality of engineering or design work among my colleagues, although I have found female QA engineers to be better than their male counterparts. Whether they are more conscientious, or just better at delivering criticism I'm not sure!

It is clear that around age 30-40 women do take a larger share of child-raising tasks, and whether that is cultural pressure or personal choice is a sensitive subject for debate. It can result in a career stalling, someone getting a reputation for "never wanting to travel" etc. That may not be a problem for someone with the drive & money of a Marissa Mayer but not everyone feels like her.

It isn't unusual for someone to make a life/career balance choice in early life and regret it later, and the usual double-standards raise their heads. The man who neglects family to forge a career, and later regrets his poor relationship with his children, is a staple of popular drama and it's fashionable to criticise him for his decision. If a women puts family first, and later bemoans her lack of career advancement, it gets blamed on "society" or "industry" causing problems for the women. Criticising the woman is slammed as being sexist, or playing to stereotypes. Equality by the numbers isn't the solution.

Ten ancestors of the netbook

Re: Psion...

I always lusted after the Psions, but I couldn't justify one for more than play, and they never quite made it down to "what the hell"gadget prices.

Cat ladies turned brand-squatters poke fun at religious right

Re: And lo, there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth

Cat-holics. Brilliant!

DARPA looks for a guided bullet with DEAD reckoning navigation

Re: Reference position?

> I wonder how they get an accurate position in the first place?

They don't need one, all they need is an accurate relative position for the target.

Re: Inertial? no way -"Still, it would be WAY better to have that for a grenade launcher."

> If you must develop these things, make it so only governments can afford them.

Nice idea in theory, but the reality of modern technology is that anything a government can afford today will probably be feasible in a well-equipped garage in 10 years time. At least by having the big guns (pun intended) research & make these things there's some chance that they'll be able to keep such measures (and countermeasures) ahead of the amateurs.

Virgin Media: SO SORRY we fined your dead dad £10 for unpaid bill

Re: Outstanding

> humans are still much better at context than computers.

I can see some semi-literate minimum-wage type looking at and and thinking:

"payment - late

customer - late.

looks OK to me."

Vietnamese madam cuffed after advertising girls on Facebook

I see an opportunity

But it wouldn't be called Facebook

Free French app app booted by Apple, triggers 1m-strong petition

Re: apple v the French

The French know exactly what to do with an apple. It's hard to beat a good Tarte Tatin.

Boffins explain LED inefficiencies

Re: LED droop

Yes, but the damn light stayed on all night.

Securing the Internet of Things - or how light bulbs can spy on you

Re: No

> So you can pay premium rate for your electrciity rather than economy7 or economy-super where you let the power company turn down your AC at certain times in return for a 50% discount

So what's different aboiut how it works today? They'll tell you that you can surrender control in order to get cheaper prices, and a year in you'll find that it isn't that much cheaper anyway.

It's official! Register hack is an alcohol-flushed cave dweller

Re: Anything you didn't know?

> now at risk of higher life insurance premiums

But can probably qualify for a better retirement annuity rate.

There's always a silver lining...

Readers, we need you... for LOHAN ignition failsafe brainwaves

Hard to describe without a picture, but...

...I'll try.

There are two cables running from the truss, meeting in an inverted V with the cable to the balloon connected at the apex. While the truss is suspended from an inflated balloon, those two cables will remain taut. When the balloon bursts they'll go slack.

What if you redesign your cylindrical spring-loaded switch so that the contacts are held well apart, not by a pin but by tension from a cord at each end. That is, as long as the cords are kept pulled, the contacts remain open.

Attach those two cords between the legs of the inverted V part way along (think of the crossbar in an uppercase letter "A"). While the balloon is inflated, the legs of the A remain taut, and the crossbar (with switch) is kept under tension. As soon as the balloon bursts the cables go slack, the spring in the switch pulls the contacts closed, and we have ignition.

It would need some experimentation/calculation to get the spring tension right. Enough to ensure a good contact, not so much that turbulence could cause premature release. As a safety measure you could perhaps retain the pin as a lock, linked to ~100m or so of cable fastened to the ground, so that the system wouldn't become live until it was well into flight? Alternatively the electronic timer safety might be enough to protect against that, assuming that the rocket won't be armed until, maybe, 30 minutes into the flight?

Ex-LulzSec bloke to spend a YEAR in the cooler for Sony hack

Re: $600,000?

> Plus he got caught so his prospects as a criminal aren't too bright.

Funny how those two always seem to go together...

British bookworms deem Amazon 'evil'

Re: I know who the fuck Neil Gaiman is...

> when trying to raise $300,000 on Kickstarter for a new album raised $1.2 million and then tried to enlist pickup musicians to play live with her for "hugs, high fives, and beer" (or some such insulting shite.)

Everyone loves a trier... More fool those who handed over the $1.2m...

Re: What sort of cretin buys a Amazon Swindle anyway?

> EPUB. You can use readers and content providers interchangeably

Funny, I can use my Kindle just like that, too. Only perhaps 10% of the stuff on it was bought from Amazon, and that was because it was the cheapest/most convenient place to buy at the time.

The Kindle is probably the easiest device to use with Amazon, but not at all difficult to use with other sources. Maybe you need to broaden the material you're reading on your non-KoboKindle?

Google's Page drops the A-bomb: Google Glass runs Android

Re: Stop Press

Everyone? Now that would be news. Bad news.

The Reg puts Vulture inside the Large Hadron Collider

IET

If any of you are members of the IET it's worth giving the guys in the Swiss branch a call, they organize CERN visits from time to time, but numbers are limited.

More Brits ditch Apple tablets for Amazon, Google, Samsung kit

> They don't allow porn on those things.

That's only because to the fanbois an iPad is porn, nothing else is required.

Ofcom fines TalkTalk AGAIN - a whopping £750k over 'abandoned calls' gaffe

Re: Ouch

Not "ouch" enough, by a long chalk. I get 3 of these calls a day, every day, weekends included. £1000/call, given to the victim, would be a good start.

Applicants sought for one-way trip to Martian Big Brother house

Re: Can we send Eadon?

How many years to download Windows8 SP1 from Mars?

Vint Cerf endorses software-defined networks

Re: Old Age

Nobody mentioned centralised control, the article is about separation of control. Out-of-band versus in-band. It's a sound principle, look at how Bell got bitten by in-band control of the phone network when the Blue Box came on the scene.

Study: Most projects on GitHub not open source licensed

Re: Unclear on the concept ...

Yes, "free" software has been around for years, since the days when user groups like DECUS made it easy to share anything people found handy for their PDP. Most manufacturers had some equivalent. The whole concept of "open source" really came about from Stallman & co's attempt to distinguish between the "free beer" and "free speech" aspects. GPL brought the lawyers in, and everything got needlessly complicated after that.

I would say that most people who program for fun tend to go with the "whatever" model of licensing, with perhaps a few restrictions on use in nuclear/defence/pharma depending on the political leanings of the coder in question. I doubt if that has changed much over the past 50 years, it seems to be what the github survery is showing, anyway.

The WTFPL is probably the simplest and most honest one around: http://www.wtfpl.net/about/

Londoners in mass test of telly tech savvy as 4G filters mailed out

I don't follow this phrase:

"...while only 37 per cent of primary sets are using Freeview the vast majority of the remaining 1.27 TVs are reliant on free-to-air digital TV which is vulnerable to 4G interference..."

There is no broadcast terrestrial TV in the UK except Freeview now, and it is essentially the same thing as "free-to-air digital TV " unless satellite (Freesat) is being considered, which won't be susceptible to 4G.

I suspect that what is meant is that 37% of TVs have built-in Freeview, and the rest rely on separate Freeview boxes, in which case all will be equally (in)vulnerable to the problem.

It will be interesting to see the outcome of the experiment, though.