Posts by Ru

Moon riven by colossal cracks

Re: Request for technical information

It looks like a detailed picture, but when you consier the actual size of the moon, you'll see that this particular map isn't actually that high resolution.

The technique that GRAIL uses is derived from a similar system called GRACE that mapped the Earth... bit more data available on the relevant wiki page, etc, and a bit of searching the interwebs may provide you with similar information from more trustworthy sources. The technique is very neat, though not trival to explain, but basically it involves two spacecraft in the same orbit measuring the changes in their relatative separation over time.

GRACE managed a 200km resolution for its gravity map of Earth, but from a much higher altitude. I can't find actual numbers for GRAIL right now, but they'll likely be of the same order.

2012: an epoch-defining year for home entertainment

Re: For the average Brit? Not so much

"slightly less SPAM and slightly more advertisements"

I put it to you that targetted advertising which generates a fairly small pool of adverts to show you based on recent activity is largely indistinguishable from spam, inasmuch as it can show you the same advert over and over again across multiple pages and multiple sites.

The fact that someone paid for it to be there doesn't make it any less spammy.

Lets hear it for adblock, eh?

US and UK spooks alerted over massive Swiss data leak

Re: Not a very good BOFH

"The NDB were only alerted when the Swiss bank UBS told them of a suspicious attempt to set up a numbered account"

Is there a way to open a numbered bank account in a non-suspicious way?

Just out of curiosity, you understand.

China plans astro-farms on Mars

Re: Obligatory tree-hugger post

Already got one, thanks. Its the non-renewable resources that seem to be causing most of the hassle.

Flash memory made immortal by fiery heat

Re: This tends to imply that this memory could survive running hot

It'll be a very small heating area, heated for a very short period of time. The bulk of the control systems and packaging will be the same as everything else on the market.

The Lord of the Rings saga lies hidden deep in your Mac

Re: Forget OSX

Deeper magic? Are you mixing your milieus?

Baby Bong #businessmodel is my PRIDE and JOY

Allow me to express my disappointment

That not only does "มาลัย" apparently translate as "garland", but a bit of unsafe image searching didn't turn up anything even remotely resembling an alarming thai idiom. Just picture of flowers.

Help-desk hell

I've repressed my helldesk days quite effectively, but a few traumatic or entertaining moments sometimes float back up.

One guy was wondering why his cheapy inkjet had stopped working and was making a funny noise. He was careful to tell me how well he'd treated it, and he'd opened it up and cleaned it and used WD40 on the moving parts and everything...

Bungie talks up 'genre-defining' Destiny shooter

They Raygun Viking look is quite nice, though it does make me thing of Skyrim with tanks at the moment.

Seeing as how Valve has apparently given up with the Half Life stuff, it might be nice to have another choice in the fancy high-budget and vaguely plot-driven shooter market. I've not really got on well with the recent chest-high-walls-em-up type games, here's hoping for something a bit different.

How to launch people into space...

Re: Of course... if the body were immersed in water..

The rats in The Abyss did not drown or die of lung trauma. One died of unrelated causes some weeks after filming. Ed Harris had to hold his breath in a helmet full of water for the liquid breathing shots; nothing special about those effects!

"G-forces are simply acceleration induced by the Earth’s gravity"

Tsk.

Data cops: Facebook privacy plans must be 'modified'

Re: Don't like it? Don't use it.

Do you genuinely believe that every user of facebook is well aware of the implications of being a facebook user? This sort of exercise is there to protect the people who don't. You don't have to like it, or facebook, but I for one am in favour of measures which limit facebook's ability to exploit the ignorant and foolish.

Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 arrives, first of many

Prices are high to allow the salespeople some wiggle-room, and let the buyers feel like they're hardcore negotiators and that they got a super good deal.

I also suspect that all those folk who negotiate a better price pay the standard, unlisted price for any of this sort of stuff also sign an agreement to never say how much they paid... so it is quite possible that some of them got the masseuse deal that you're interested in.

Badges for Commentards

'In coming weeks we will roll out a few more commentard voting options - such as "helpful" and "informative"'

Your optimism is to be commended, but surely if you wanted a voting system that would actually get used, perhaps you'd be better off with a negative rating system... "troll", "fanboy", "shill", etc.

Oracle de-cloaks JavaScript Nashorn project

Er, is this news?

Nashorn has been in the works for a while; its effectively been the test bed for a lot of the new dynamic language support coming into the JVM. The name of the project and its existence and goals have been public knowledge, so what else has changed?

‘Anonymous’ takes down Texan RFID-tracking school

"we, and especially the yanks, have no need for security in schools, it's not like there's ever any form of violence in schools"

I hear that prisons make strong efforts to keep tabs on the location of their inmates, and have a strong interest in security. I'm sure this is why there is never any form of violence in prisons.

Cambridge boffins fear 'Pandora's Unboxing' and RISE of the MACHINES

Re: Bob the Angry Flower in....

Change of Plan.

Warming up the thruster that will ram LOHAN to glorious heights

"lack of atmosphere at altitude may prevent heat radiating away"

Surely, convecting away? You'll get more or less the same amount of heat loss by radiation in a vacuum as you would in sea-level-pressure air, I assume.

PGP Zimmermann teams with Navy SEALs, SAS techies in London

Er, what?

"Users don't even have to trust us"

They have to trust that you're actually tellling the truth about the service you're operating.

How Intel's faith in x86 cost it the mobile market

Re: Ever tried to imagine an itanic mobile, anyone?

Healthier? That's an interesting notion; I'd be more in favour of a small number of widely licensed instruction sets than a larger number of proprietary ones, and it looks like the market feels the same way. Similar arguments can be applies to programming languages and operating systems (or at least their kernels).

As for intel and their mobile strategy... I'm probably in a minority here, but I felt that the Atom line was actually quite a reasonable one that was more or less killed before its time thanks to intel's tendency towards kleptoparasitism. They didn't want atom products to eat into their higher-margin, low-end laptop'n'server lines, and so crippled the ability of vendors to build interesting atom-based systems. Sure, they relaxed their grip eventually but too late for their new products to actually make a significant impact.

Thank BRIT eggheads for new iMac's sexy seamless knife-edge

Re: sealed forever

Dremel, ducktape.

Bish, bash, bosh, job's a good 'un.

Hackers break into FreeBSD with stolen SSH key

"Trojanised packages"

Verbisation should be treated with all the contempt usually reserved for "mobe".

Astronauts (or other 'nauts) could find life on Mars quite healthy

Nukes are pretty much always the way to go.

"But send one with power sufficient to do the job - the cost will be enormous"

The cost of sending anything to Mars is enormous. Military grade fission reactors are surprisingly small and lightweight, incidentally... there are already a few in orbit.

the second it goes wrong and we contribute to laying waste part of another planet will be the death of the whole thing

Laying waste to what? There's no biosphere to contaminate, no living things to kill, no watercourses to poison. No humans will be walking around unprotected from the environment. There's not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to support a good fire which remains one of the best ways to spread radiatioactives into the atmosphere. There's no water-based weather cycle to damage containment structures and leach away radioactives. There's not any tectonic activity to speak of, let alone volcanic and there won't be any tsunamis there any day soon. If a meltdown did occur, the physical disaster will be largely ameliorated by bulldozing a load of regolith on it.

Practically all of the arguments (rational and otherwise) against building nuclear reactors on Earth simply do not apply on Mars.

What are quantum computers good for?

Re: Navel-Gazing

What do you use to make tools with?

Russia restores comms with space station after roadworks cut cable

Why on earth hasn't someone invented some sort of communications protocol that can be routed over multiple channels? It can't be rocket science... they seem to be doing okay at that.

Omnishambles beats off mummy-porn, becomes English word of 2012

Re: GIF ?

Its about the animations. It says something rather depressing about the state of video on the web, that we're still using animgifs after all these years.

LOHAN to slip in sexy little black number

"Either the fuse blows, the circuit board tracks melt, or any weak links in the wiring break"

Presumably you're not expecting the whole ensemble to catch fire, with all of the entertainment that entails with nearby unfired rockets?

Coders grill Herb Sutter on future of C++ at Microsoft

Re: what happened with .NET ?

You'll have more luck moving a .net application between x86, x64 and ARM than you will with an unmanaged language. If your code is trivial, you can even get it to run on Mono.

BOFH: Can't you just ... NO, I JUST CAN'T

Re: Password complexity

I suspect that given a suitably secure office, the old postit-on-monitor approach to security is not nearly as bad as having a lousy password on a device that may be easily stolen or accessed from anywhere on the internet. Cleaning staff are usually the flaw in that approach, however.

I'm a fan of 2-factor stuff, myself... TOTP dongles and smartcard access can reduce the impact of a multitude of sins.

Stob on Quatermass: Was this British TV's finest sci-fi hour?

You win a special prize

For the phrase, "the first opportunity to unzip its CGI fly and wave its synthetic jewels in the viewers' faces".

Kim Dotcom's new Mega site barred by Gabon

Re: TANSTAAFL, AKA Quids pro quo

"maybe thumb his nose at the US by basing a business there"

Oh come on. He saw a nifty domain name, and registered it. There's no more complex motive than that. This simply acts as a timely reminder that ccTLDs come with all sorts of strings attached.

Apple engineers 'pay no attention to anyone's patents', court told

Re: Quelle surprise...

The US Patent system doesn't even pay attention to anyone's patents either. The whole sorry mess is set up so that the validity of a patent or the non-infringingness of any particular thing is left to the courts to decide.

The sheer volume of obfuscated dross is impossible for anyone to get a handle on.

Skyrim DLC lets players FLY DRAGONS

So, flying on dragons... I wonder how freeform that is. They ditched levitation magic(and other airborne shenanigans like super high jumping) after Morrowind because of the hacks they had to make to their engine which would be revealed in all their ghastly glitchy glory from the air. Be nice if they brought that sort of thing back. They did manage to implement horseback combat after all this time, at least...

In the loop: how Halo defined a new decade of first-person shooters

Was the part-regenerating, part-non-regenerating hitpoint system present in other systems, though? The armour/health split was common enough, but both bits tended to be ablative, no? Or if health regenerated, the non-regenerating armour took the damage first, or in parallel.

Slideshow: A History of First-person Shooters in 20 Games

Re: Wot? No Deus-Ex?

I'd drop Deus Ex into the same category as System Shock.

Facebook COO Sandberg sells MEELLLIONS OF DOLLARS of stock

Re: Pump and Dump Scam - rats leaving a sinking ship

"Goldman Sachs... are a bunch of sharks.

Speaking as a vertebrate, I take offense to that. It has already been observed in the past that Goldman Sachs are in fact a giant vampire squid clamped to the face of humanity.

"Zuck's outfit is still worth... around $60bn"

"Zuck's outfit is still worth roughly about the same as British supermarket giant Tesco at around $60bn"

Lets go for "valued at $60bn" rather than "worth", shall we? What with Tesco having strippable assets, and all. Facebook's value lies largely in its userbase, and users aren't exactly fungible.

KDE 'annoys the hell of' Linus Torvalds

Re: Every user interface gets this way!

"It's a great excuse for a developer to not work on what needs to be done or finish what he was doing before."

This isn't just about procrastination, and working on easy fun things rather than hard important things.

There's a more deeply seated issue that pops up in any human organisation, especially ones which are committee based. Groupthink is part of it, but any sufficiently cliquey organisation will end up attracting people that reinforce its views and discouraging dissenters to the point where people who object to the idiosyncrasies of a project are simply ignored. I'd raise PHP as an example of this, but any project with an excess of WONTFIX issues is probably guilty too.

I've no idea if this is happeneing at KDE mind you; I'm too lazy to find out, and spend more time on XFCE these days.

Where are all the open-source mobile projects?

One issue for low-level projects in mobile land is the vast amount of relatively young proprietary hardware. Take a look at the phone models you can install Cyanogen upon; its a fairly small subset of available Android phones, because porting to a new phone is likely to be a painful and complex process. The GPL is no help here; I have a custom ROM on my Dell Streak 5, but it is unlikely to ever run anything more modern than Android 2.3, because of the lousy hardware support by Dell.

We don’t talk any more... on the commute

"Mild horror combined with sarcasm and sexual arousal"

I can't quite picture this myself. Perhaps some example mugshots of some of the Reg's staff forming this expression would help?

Debenhams cafes ban outré terms like 'espresso' and 'cappuccino'

I can get behind the excommunication of "grande" and "tall" (especially the latter), but cappuccino? Clearly they don't think much of their customers.

A history of personal computing in 20 objects part 2

Hmm, iPads?

I'd have put Apple's most recent serious innovation as the iPhone. Whilst it wasn't the first touchscreen smartphone, the UI certainly blew away all the competition, and it has certainly defined the look and style of pretty much all smartphones since. The iPad wasn't anywhere near as interesting by comparison; did it really sell well because it was 'tablet computing done right', or because it was an Apple product?

Sony promotes Vita with QUAD-JUBBED WOMAN

Re: Ahhh, the French

"boules" (the latter only encountered in Quebec I think).

Sounds like someone has been searching for highly subjective colloquialisms on a certain set of "crowd sourced" websites. A little more reputable than Urban Dictionary, but not by a whole lot.

Re: Ahhh, the French

"Nichon" is the only french mammary colloquialism I've come across. Etymology unknown, and I doubt it has quite the same degree of informality. Maybe it is closer to 'boob' than 'jub'.

Felix Baumgartner sadly turns out to be blinkered FOOL

I wonder how he feels

about extravagant corporate sponsorship of activities that do little to "save the planet".

Snooper's-charter plans are just misunderstood, sniffles tearful May

"Excellent Hallowe'en vampire makeup, Minister"

I was getting more of a Palpatine vibe, no so much Nosferatu.

Slideshow: A History of Horror in 20 Scary Games

Re: Someone needs to mention Thief

I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but this eye... its completely blind.

Geneva devastated by monster tsunami, millions at risk

There's even a map in the article showing where the Rhone enters.

Hmm, I think I'll order an iPad Mini on Amazon ... Oh no I won't

No doubt this outrageous turn of events will be rectified in due course.

Brit 4G live TODAY: At last you can bust your data cap in 5 minutes

Usage caps aren't intrinsically bad things, so long as they aren't stupidly small. I'd always choose a sensible cap over an Unlimited* service which throttles your connection to death or imposes secret fair-use rules. My home DSL has usually been with providers who provide 50-100GB with some form of PAYG or top-up or premium package above that limit; this seems quite reasonable and a good way to keep prices and traffic management down for the majority of customers.

500MB though? What on earth are they thinking? If someone needs that little data, why on earth would they care about 4G?