Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Crypto boffins: RSA tokens can be cracked in 13 MINUTES

The step order is crucial.

Not really. You could start with Step 4 and get the same result.

NASA counts down to nuclear tank invasion of Mars

Re: Computers are good for this:

Compuers are good for it if you ask the right questions. As phrased, the answer is simple: Just drop the thing.

He's omitted the need to do the last few cm very slowly...

US East, West Coasts face fast-rising sea levels

Oracle?

Won't bother Larry, all the more ocean to sail on...

Lithe British youngsters prioritise fun over privacy and security

security only matters when you have something to secure

Silver surfers are more likely to have possesions that they value, and don't want to lose. They could be material (savings, investments) or not (credit reputation). "Gen Y" is more likely to be worried over student debts (who would steal those?), and won't have had time to build a reputation, so they probably think they have less to lose.

They'll learn, later.

Huawei Ascend G300 budget Android

Dommage

Could be worse, wouldn't be surprised if "un smart" became the French equivalent. Just like a sweatshirt is "un sweat".

Earth bathed in high-energy radiation from colossal mystery blast

Re: hitsorical record

> I wonder what they saw that they interpreted as a "red crucifix". I don't have the original text handy, only a translation.

Best I can find is this, although this is from 775:

Her oþiewde read Cristesmęl on hefenum æfter sunnan setlgonge;

Microsoft douses Flame

Re: "Microsoft trustworthy computing"

That rather depends on what you trust it to do...

Ten... bits of Jubilee tat tech

Re: Here in Sonoma, CA ...

> ... nobody gives a rat's ass about your tiny little monarchy.

Fair enough. At least you've heard about the Monarchy, here in the UK hardly anyone's ever heard of Sonoma, CA. Your showy neighbo(u)r Napa is much better known.

Enjoy!

Dole office to roll out digital benefits to north-west – 6 months early

"roll out digital benefits"

Oh, I thought it meant that they were going to pay unemployment benefits in Bitcoins...

Vauxhall Ampera hybrid e-car

Re: No.

> Petrol @£1.42 Litre, Electricity at 6p/kWh (eco 7 overnight)

That's a short-term gain. Half the price of petrol is tax/duty, if everyone drove things like this the government would have to find some way to recover the lost income. You'll still end up paying it.

If you want to do an accurate comparison, take the cost of petrol before tax and compare it with the cost of electricity before tax, The numbers look much less interesting.

Mars rover Opportunity spots WALL-E in crater ramble

Re: So who decided where the Greenwich of Mars is?

Merton Davies, apparently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy-0

Re: time on mars

4000h day? Wouldn't it just have been "about 830pm" then ?

And the worst film NEVER made is...

Re: picking nits

True, which is why her TV series and album were called "My Name Is Barbra'

I'm now embarassed to have admitted that I knew that...

Top Facebook exec begs students: 'Click on an ad or two'

Please "Click on an add"

Sounds like the "pump" part of "pump and dump"...

Fake Angry Birds app makers fined £50k for shock cash suck

Reprimanded?

What about jail time for fraud?

HP takes a big profit haircut, too

Re: huh?

So anyone with less than $750 burning a hole in their pocket has to choose, and more are choosing a tablet instead of a PC upgrade.

Open Data Institute pours golden £10m shower on upstarts

Re: Golden Shower

but we're used to getting p*ssed on by government...

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

"summons demons in her undies"

I'll bet that tickles.

3D TV fails to excite, gesture UIs to flop: analyst

Re: Doh!

> The real thing people want are larger screens w hight density images. HD , 2HD and now 4 or even 8 HD resolutions.

I think what people really want is content so absorbing that you forget whether it's 2D, 3D, HD, or even B&W, and just really enjoy the programme.

Sadly we abandoned that idea somewhere in the 1970s :(

Review: Raspberry Pi

Re: TV USB powah

> regular USB port is 500mA.

Technically you're only supposed to draw 100mA from a USB port without asking, if you want more you're supposed to negiotiate with the USB controller, up to 500mA max.

In practice most USB ports that I've seen are just hooked across the 5v rail, and will deliver anything you ask, if the PSU can cope.

Most teachers who used a BBC Micro didn't have a clue when they started, either. They *learned*, that's the idea.

Re: Waiting to pre-order...

> due to memory constraints.

I know that software bloat is the in thing these days, but how can 256MB of memory constrain *any* decent programmer?

If it shipped with 256KB I could understand the complaints, but anyone who can't get their choice of software to run in 256MB just isn't trying.

Apple's Siri nominates Nokia as best phone maker

whopping 4 user reviews

http://xkcd.com/937/

Solving traffic jams with maths

Re: Priorite a droite

Is legally the default rule on evey road in France, unless there is a sign indicating otherwise. You mostly find it in villages, as a way of slowing down the traffic on a main road going through the village. The possibility that someone could legitimately drive out of a side road in front of you is a very effective way of getting people to slow down.

It does have an unusual side effect in that anyone turning left off a main road (i.e. across traffic) must give way to an oncoming car that is turning right into the same side road, since at the point where the left-turner is half-way through the manoeuvre the other vehicle is on its right.

Main roads outside towns/villages generally have priority signs, with Yield signs on the joining side roads, to override the default.

Re: lucky people

Ah, Melbourne. The city of that bizarre invention, the hook turn :)

Re: Black rubber tubes

The temporary rubber tubes placed on the surface and hooked up to a recorder are indeed census points, but I don't think that's what the post referred to. Before the buried inductive loop system was used, traffic lights were controlled by pneumatic sensors. These were metal tubes with rubber tops, buried in the road just before the lights. As a car arrived at the lights it would signal the local controller, which could then trigger a change.

I've no idea if they survived the transition to centralized computer control, or if that had inductive sensors from the beginning.

Road deaths spark crackdown on jaywalking texter menace

Re: innocent driver

> rather hard on the innocent driver who has to go through life with the image of the gene pool no-contributor bouncing off their vehicle..

It's the US, so only a matter of time before such a driver sues the deceased's estate to soothe the distress caused.

Google shoves cybersquatter off 763 Googletastic domains

Re: That $7000

Probably not, but even if you did they'd likely follow airline tactics, and charge you a $20 "administration fee" for each $10 refund...

Vote now for the worst movie NEVER made

Re: So...

Come on, El Reg. The least you can do is offer to *make* the winning entry. I'm sure Lester & Lewis would be game for it... Could you get Ms Bee back, as well?

British 4G mobile data rollout 'will mean NO TELLY for 2m homes'

Re: stable picture

http://tinyurl.com/ccz88gs

multiple dishes

You can get 8-output LNBs these days, how many PVRs have you got?

Re:grouped amp

The best answer is probably "maybe". If the 4G signal is being picked up by the aerial, and if the filter at the amp input is reasonably sharp, then it may be OK. That's the principle of the add-on filters being proposed.

If the interfering signal is strong enough to be picked up by the amp directly (and very few are in screened cases) then no amount of filtering/grouping will help.

A better solution may be to remove the amp altogether. Many people fitted amplifiers to improve their DTT reception when it was broadcast at low power. Now that the switchover is almost complete most transmitters have increased the power of the DTT signals to a level where an amp should only be necessary to feed multiple TVs, and they're usually pretty low-gain (10dB, versus 26dB for a masthead amp).

Re: Adjacent?

You've misunderstood the problem. Most current amplifiers are wideband, accepting signals across the whole DTT band. When some DTT signals are moved out of part of that band, and stronger 4G signals appear on those frequencies, the amplifiers will pick up those signals and may overload. At that point the *whole* DTT band gets messed up as it passes through the overloaded amplifier.

That's the allegation, whether it will be widespread is another matter.

iPad chargers can open beer bottles

But does it charge afterwards?

When Swedes do their military service they are issued with a bottle opener as part of the official equipment. That is because some years ago a bright spark found out that you could open a beer bottle using the business end of an ammunition clip. Unfortunately after a few beers opened like this the clip got bent just enough that the weapon would jam when fired. An official-issue opener was the simplest solution...

US, Euro e-car makers back 'standard' AC/DC jack

Re: Anti tamper? @Charles9

>: do not have their own cables attached as far as I could see.

That's because such cables are likely to suffer the same fate as garage airlines. Give the charging point a socket, and have the cable attached to the car. That way you have some change of finding a usable charging point.

Or just use a liquid like biodiesel or ethanol. Tried & tested.

Basic instinct: how we used to code

Re: Ughh... Still shudder when I recall those days

> If you understand how it works at a low-level, it's easier to appreciate it at high-level.

True, although I do have to admit to some relief that no other langauge that I know of implemented the FORTRAN Arithmetic IF ! (cue dozens of posts with language examples...)

> You are aware, aren't you, that the "Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code" is a retro-fitted phrase?

No, it isn't.

"Several versions of the popular Jargon File once claimed that BASIC is a backronym created in the 1970s (recent versions have corrected this). Evidence from the original Dartmouth BASIC manual (1964) show this to be untrue, but numerous online dictionaries and reference works on the Internet have now proliferated the earlier Jargon File's error."

Re: Ughh... Still shudder when I recall those days

The only things crippled about BASIC were the minimalist implementations that people made to shoehorn it into 1K of RAM. Proper ANSI-standard BASIC isn't a bad language to program in, and on VMS VAXen (maybe other systems) you could compile it and get decent performance as well.

Don't forget that BASIC was developed at Dartmouth college as a simplified (hence the "B") way to teach programming, so that beginners didn't have to start with FORTRAN or Algol. It did that job well.

No BASIC on my Solaris desktop though, snif :(

Hanging's too good for 'em - so what do you suggest?

Re: Simple

> quite a lot of people who would not be deterred

Approx 51% of the human race...

Floppy disk drives jam James Bond theme

Used to be able to do this on the Amiga

By stepping back past track 0 the head would "ping" against the end stop. Do that at the correct rate to generate a note, and you could get quite a wide range of music. Tended to trash the drives if done too much though, so people would only demo it once or twice. The progarm was called something like "drive music" I think.

Stray SMS leads to aborted landing

Re: Misconceptions

> hard to believe they could hear the ringtone

Maybe, but I could well believe that some smart-arse pilot might use the "Stall! Stall!" message as his SMS alert ringtone...

Re: Interference

> Yes, I'm quite sure that mobile phones have enough power to communicate with base stations 10-14 km away. :rolleyes:

Of course they do. A GSM phone can have up to 2 watts output, that's plenty for 50-60km under ordinary conditions, and several hundred if conditions are good. Part of the standard for such phones is that they negotiate with the base station to use the minimum power required, but they will crank it up when necessary if the base station signal is weak.

Re: Yet iPhones and their ilk just needed to be in aircraft mode

> The regulations are there in case of an accident and resulting fuel spill

The only really likely way a cellphone could cause a problem there would be if it got dropped or smashed in the crash, and there was a spark as the battery disconnected. That could happen whether it was on or off.

Amazon to all data centers: Keep up, if you can

Re: wake me up

> doesn't require you to build your application to fail (that is, not react badly when infrastructure goes bad and doesn't recover),

Shouldn't you *always* build your apps like that anyway, just as basic good practice?

Swiss, German physicists split the electron

Uncertainty

http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2012-04-17/

Re: The seperation of spin . . .

You can take the spin out of politics, but you'll still get screwed by the remaining momentum... And the charge is always too high.

Trojan sneaks into hotel, slurps guests' credit card data

selling trojans

Given that the financial institutions which are attacked have a clear interest in stopping this sort of behaviour, how can they, of all people, not be able to trace the money paid back to the sellers of this malware? Or stop the transfers going through?

Austrian village considers a F**king name change

Re: Must find a copy of The Telegraph...

Remarkably blandly: "The Austrian village of Fucking is to vote on a name change"

Re: Surely there's an opportunity in this...

Not to mention the advertising potential: "Come to Fucking Austria for your next holiday". Makes "Visit Britain" look naff.

Starck brewing 'fairly, if not very, revolutionary' Apple THING

Revolutionary and French?

iGuillotine?