Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Iran X.25 terrorists actually BANKERS

Re: XOT

Strictly speaking XOT is X.25 over TCP, not just over IP. For completeness, RFC 877 (obsoleted by RFC 1356) describes how to run IP over X.25. You can build some interesting stacks...

"a security researcher rather than a hacker"

There's a difference?

Massive strike at Foxconn's iPhone 5 factory

detail work at sub-millimeter accuracy

Isn't that what factory robots were invented for?

Astroboffins to search for mega-massive alien power plants

Re: If we are no alone

No way. They won't be able to slurp us all, some of us will live to see the bigger universe.

LOHAN plugs into some hot LiPo treatment

Re: SI Units

Sounds good, if they can get the video back to Earth...

Purpose of RFID finally discovered: It's for pairing up socks!

Re: I'll take the bait!

0x32 shades, surely?

Oracle fudges touts Sparc SuperCluster prowess

Re: SPARC, not Sparc !

I'd guess that it's nothing to do with legal concerns over trademarks, it's just a reporter that is too lazy or rushed to override a spell-checker which automatically "corrects" excessive capitalization. What that says about the level of care taken over the rest of the article is left to the reader...

European Commission: Cloud will save us from economic doom

Re: EU To Kill Cloud?

Don't worry. This is the EU stardards world. There will be an EU standard, a French standard, an incompatible de-facto standard that the real world will use, and an opt-out so that the UK can do things properly.

NYPD: iPhone thefts rising ten times rate of other crimes

Re: sting operation?

> indeed the UK Goverment Cabinet in a hotel in Brighton in 1984.

According to IRA information, the Brighton Hotel bombing used Frangex, a commercial form of gelignite manufactured in Ireland. Most IRA bombs in NI used ANFO, it was much easier to get than Semtex.

Re: Crimewave?

It may surprise you, but many of the people who commit "petty larceny" are also involved in other bigger crimes. Once the cops have an excuse to search a flat on the grounds that there's a stolen phone in it, they can find all sorts of other things.No smoke without fire, and all that.

Same thing applies to cars. I'm told that UK police often check out supermarket car parks looking for cars with expired tax discs, bald tyres, etc. The owners who display no regard for the little laws are often mixed up in bigger things.

McFlurry McMisdemeanour costs Welsh lass McJob

Re: Mounsey sounds like

Let me guess, even his after writing "Your smile is very welcoming." in her appraisal she still turned him down for a BJ, so he was just waiting for an excuse to get rid of her?

Rolling robot avatar trumps telecommuting

Re: Just wondering...

> ...how does it go up stairs?

Dunno, but I'll bet it falls down them really spectacularly...

There were some stories on devices like this a few years ago in IEEE Spectrum:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/humanoids/the-reality-of-robot-surrogates/1

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/051810-anybots-qb-new-telepresence-robot

As I remember, the writer of one of the articles said that it had led to an embarassingly intimate moment when he had to phone his boss and ask him "please reboot me" :)

Guardian's Robin Hood plan: Steal from everyone to give to us

Re: hugs and beer

Only if they bring the moderatrix back.

Barnes & Noble Nook HD and HD+ hands-on review

Nice

Hopefully a bit of competition will encourage Amazon to get its finger out & make the Kindle paperwhite available in Europe sooner rather than later.

Analogue TV snuffs it tonight on UK mainland

Re: CEEFAX

> Digital TV from a reasonable distance (compared to how we used to watch TV when I was a lad)

You mean far enough away that you can't see the crap?

My Mum lives 15 miles from a main (500kW) transmitter. She has always had perfect analogue reception. She now has a strong digital signal, and the analogue picture quality on the old analogue CRT is still far better than from any of the LCD digital TVs in the house, and from the Freeview box connected to the analog TV.

An HD signal, downconverted to SD, is almost as good as analogue, which shows that the problem is not digital per-se, but the appalling levels of overcompression used to cram 60 channels of crap into the space that once held 5 decent ones.

Then again, people used to look at VHS recordings and rave about how good the picture was, so most people won't even notice that the digital pap they're spoon-fed with is rubbish quality. They've paid £1000 for a fancy new flat screen TV, so it must be better.

Re: Just saying like.

Why? Nothing in the article suggested that it was.

Pirate Party takes Mayor's chair in Swiss city

Maybe the Swiss misunderstood "international speak like a pirate" day?

40 Foxconn staff hospitalised after CAMPUS RIOT

Re: Money

The correct quotation is "For the love of money is the root of all evil". Money itself is just a token.

Made for each other: liquid nitrogen and 1,500 ping-pong balls

Re: Shocking safety precautions

You should have tried it, it's a really weird feeling having your fingers in boiling liquid. Almost like feathers, but not quite.

Re: Great!

I still remember, as a teenager, being taken by a friend's Dad to an afternoon of similar chemical high jinks run at the local university. I still find physics and chemistry fascinating.

Re: Interesting point

My guess is that's the same physics as described here, but with a less tricky starting condition.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/6/

Ig Nobels 2012: Physics of ponytails, chimp arse-cognition and more

Re: One of these was already invented

That's a shame, I remember the BBC trade test film about Evoluon. It's still on YouTube somewhere, I think.

UK electric car funding - another subsidy for the rich say MPs

Re: pop out your current battery, put in a freshly charged one,

You're ignoring two things:

1) The amount of storage space needed to keep all those batteries waiting to be swapped. A filling station could see 1000 vehicles a day, that's perhaps 500 batteries (full of hazardous materials) on charge at one time.

2) The amount of energy that you would need to suppy to the 'filling station" to charge all the swapped batteries. Level 2 chargers can draw 20kW. 500 batteries all drawing that much power would take a hefty extension from the grid to each station, or a local gas/diesel power station.

Mars rover Curiosity gets ready to blast its first rock

Re: I hope JPL uploaded some more audio

Better turn on the microphone as well, so we can hear if there's a yell of "Ouch! What the f*ck was that?"

Did genetically modified food cause giant tumours in rats?

Re: Need to independently study GM vs. "Roundup"

I doubt if your neighbours put Roundup on their lawn to kill the clover, given that it does a fine job of killing lawn grass as well.

Who queues for an iPhone 5? Protesters, hipsters and the jobless

Re: Please, everyone, stop this...

And kermit is (was?) a genuinely useful program.

Freeview kit to require retune tomorrow

Re: re: Why Not

> who on Earth would watch them?

Sadly it's like email spam for Viagra. Believe it or not, they do get enough responses to make a profit and keep going, and in the case of Freeview that contributes towards the funding of the system.

Microsoft offers workarounds for IE bug

Re: User Security Enhancement Link Extension Safety System

"Are you sure that you're sure"? Definitely? Really want to do this?

Dropbox drops JavaScript, brews CoffeeScript

Re: week-long hackathon ?

> I guess that depends largely on the quality of the cross-compiler f

No, it depends on how well the people writing the Coffeescript understood what the original Javascript does, and how thorough their non-regression testing was. The term "week long hackathon" suggests testing along the lines of "it compiles, ship it".

Would you trust your data to Dilbert & co?

week-long hackathon ?

Well, that certainly bodes well for the site security. Not.

Apple time is now world time

Re: Is it just my imagination...

> Really, really annoying when every other bit of text (on this page) is dead straight.

Animated GIFs are really, really annoying, full stop.

My first reaction on seeing it, even before I read it, was to hit the AdBlock button...

Worker dumps council staff's private data in supermarket skip

Re: "the body had been issued with a £250,000 fine" ..

Fine *all* the councillors as individuals, and bar them from holding public office again until they pay. They're happy to take collective credit when something good happens, so let them take collective responsibility as well.

LOHAN straps on satellite comms capability

Re: Way to opt out of warranty support

Is that what they call a "lifetime guarantee"? The warranty expires when it dies...

Apple's iCloud goes titsup, email evaporates for unlucky 1%

Re: Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit

iDiot, surely?

Hacker uses Kindle as Raspberry Pi screen

Re: WHY would you do this?

To learn how, why else?

Thomson joins vid-streamers' rush for MPEG-DASH

Re: Multiple connections

Multiple connections will only help if the ISP is throttling at the IP level, which seems unlikely. Web servers may throttle connections like that, ISP's usually won't. It won't help if the throttling is at the basic (probably ATM) level, since all connections will be considered together as a single flow over one virtual circuit.

NASA's spy sat snaps Curiosity rover burning tracks on Mars

Re: hypocrisy of the human race

I'm sure that if the BBC had sent Jeremy Clarkson on a one-way trip to Mars people would have been happy to see him leave any tracks, and even donuts, that he wanted to.

First Irish-speaking virus holds bloke's computer to ransom

Re: " ...only about 60 per cent of the virus makes sense in Irish."

Try it after a few pints of the black..

New broadband minister snubs 'ugly' fibre cabinet gripes

Re: Pictures?

http://www.broadbandwatchdog.co.uk/story/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/bt-fibre-cabinets.jpg

The fibre one is the one on the left.

Guinness World Records pulls beards off online Secret Santas

"I'm sure it was an honest mistake, I hope the poor employee doesn't get fired."

I hope (s)he does, with lots of publicity. Then maybe bozos will learn how to use their email correctly.

How many of these no-longer-secret Santas will find it hilarious when they start to get all the spam that will now follow, if even one of their PCs has a virus that collects email addresses?

Android dev smacked with £50k fine over premium rate SMS scam

Re: How to put 'thumbs' icons after message

Just select the icon (one click) before hitting Submit. Works on Firefox for me.

Radio arse tags solve modern-day TV musical chairs dilemma

> I'd like to see Full Contact Hide & Seek.

Isn't that called "sardines"? OK, it was a long time ago...

New rule on blood-soaked metals in mobes is POINTLESS

Re: No Tantalum

> ceramic capacitors are supplanting tantalum

Not at all, they're completely different beasts. Ceramic capacitors have been around for decades, they're used for low-capacitance applications such as decoupling ad RF. They are non-polarized.

Tantalum is used for electrolytic capacitors (which are usually polarized), to replace the bulkier 'wet' and solid-polymer eletrolytics that take up more room and can die when overheated. That's why tantalum is so sought-after for miniaturized equipment like mobile phones.

Watchdog probes rules for naughty mobe fondling on flights

Re: Don't start that "get a real book" nonsense

> reads with one hand, and aims with the other, while he's standing in front of a urinal

I've waded past that urinal.

Ten netbooks

Asus Eee PC 1015BX: "at up to 26mm thick, it's one of the chunkiest netbooks here"

Asus Eee PC X101CH: "just under an inch at its thickest point making it one of the thinnest machines here'

Seriously? 0.6mm between thinnest and chunkiest?

There's a reason for El Reg units, you know.

and while we're at it, where's the EEE girl?

British Minister likens Anonymous to fascists and racists

If the Ecuadorian president thinks that sexual assualt is not a crime, then perhaps it's time to tell him that his seedy little country doesn't meet standards of common decency, and to expel his ambassador and diplomatic staff until they apologise? I doubt very much if we need them more than they need us.

Has cash corrupted open source?

Linux?

> There once was a time when open source was all about peace, love, and Linux,

And maybe 20 years before that, it was peace, love and Unix. And RSX-11. And VMS.

Linux is the new kid, it wouldn't even exist if the GNU tools hadn't already been there. One thing that did change around then was licensing. A lot of the original open source had licenses which said pretty much 'you can do what you like with this as long as it isn't commercial". GNU and GPL did change that, although I doubt it was the original intention.

Curiosity preps for first Martian road trip

Re: wind sensor fault

> There's a load of unprotected wires on the top there

Maybe it's a hot-wire wind speed gauge? Simple, and lightweight, but obviously requires an exposed wire.

Doctor Who to hit small screen on 1 September

Re: "Heartbreaking exit"

> going to stay dead for once?

When you own a time machine, does that question even make sense?