Posts by Robert Heffernan

Dutch develop world's largest touchscreen

Angry Birds...

Umm... yes, you could.

I use the PC version with my ASUS touch screen all the time. And that giant screen is compatible with the standard multi-touch interface in Vista & 7

Now to get them to show a video of Angry Birds in action ;P

No new strings for Guitar Hero

Lost opportunity

Just think of all the innovation that could have came from Guitar Hero when you combine it with the Kinect on the 360... Air Guitar Hero anyone?

Tunisia plants country-wide keystroke logger on Facebook

SSL Overhead

They probably don't turn on SSL by default for the whole world due to the additional overhead an SSL session places on the web browser.

An entire planet worth of overhead would require a not insignificant upgrade or expansion of the server farm to accomodate all the extra load. Not to mention the extra power used by the servers to operate and in cooling, then there is the extra carbon footprint.

AMD takes on Intel in 'the internet of things'

Adobe Flash in Hardware??!?

"All three APUs offer DirectX 11 support – lacking in Intel's latest Sandy Bridge processor line – plus support for OpenGL 4.0 and OpenCL, and hardware decode support for H.264, VC-1, MPEG2, WMV, DivX, and Adobe Flash."

So the APU has Adobe Flash support in hardware eh? Now all I need to do is point some malware at the internet connected gambling machine to exploit the OBVIOUS security flaws in the adobe flash hardware and walk away with a truck load of cash!

Custom ICs in small numbers to be cheap as (normal) chips

Industrial Espionage

Such a device could also be used in an Industrial Espionage capacity. Say a chip designer hacks into a competitors R&D system and is able to download a copy of the design for a super-duper up and coming chip. The evil designer is able to basically 'burn' a copy of the stolen silicon data to do physical testing of the unreleased ASIC design that would otherwise not be able to be done with an FPGA due to complexity or mixed-mode designs, etc, all without spending a massive amount of money on making the physical masks.

For example: AMD steals an upcoming Intel design (or Intel steals an AMD design), now due to patents, reverse engineering, etc, AMD (or Intel) can't actually copy the design, they'll get found out the moment the silicon hits Intel's (or AMD's) electron microscope. So they burn a physical copy of the chip to test it, and target the improvements to their own design to outperform Intel's (or AMD's) design.

Bogus Kama Sutra presentation opens your backdoor to hackers

comment.txt.exe

You would think that any double-extension file would throw up a red-flag in pretty much every Anti-Virus product out there, especially when the actual file is an exe file.

In-flight fight for stubborn iPhone-loving teen

This Is A Title

While the rules are the rules, and you really should be following them while flying on a plane, there hasn't been any reports (than I know of) of passenger electronic equipment interfering with flight control systems. Modern aircraft are designed with all sorts of shielding and redundant systems that are extremely well engineered due to the number of people on board.

The bad idea is including LAN connections in the aircraft for passenger use, and the fact that this LAN does find it's way back to the flight control systems, with a firewall in the way. This is a really bad design, and any passenger LAN needs to be removed, or physically disconnected from the flight systems.

'London black cabs to go electric in 2 weeks' – Boris Guardian

Old Idea

As you can see here, the bumper-car idea was in development since the Mid 1950's, with a prototype even being built.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Kw0SfregL.jpg

Google 'Crankshaft' inspired by Sun Java HotSpot

*Sigh*

Why not just feed the whole damn thing into the optimizing compiler. It's not like webpages have the entire Windows codebase to build every time you reload the thing. It would take milliseconds at most to deep compile your average java source file, less time than it would take to download all the images used on the page.

Stuxnet expert nuke-boffin killing: Iran claims arrests

I don't need no stinken title!

Give it a couple of weeks and you'll be able to read which western intelligence agency is behind these attacks on Wikileaks

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

You Forgot...

It's also available on PC.

Most coders have sleep problems, need 'hygiene and care'

Oi!

I take offense to that last statement... I DO NOT code in Java!

Buffy to slay her way back into cinemas

Oh Noes

'She assured the LA Times, though, that she'd "take the touchstones of the Whedon world but frame them in 'a new story' that is very much of the moment".'

Great, so Buffy is going to be a pale, moody emo, fending off vampires and werewolves trying to hump her instead of stabbing them in the heart. No thanks, i'll stick with the Wheydon/SMG formula thanks.

DARPA: Hypersonic strato-ship crackup was no biggie

@Publius

It was definitely autonomously controlled during re-entry and landing, although I heard a story that apparently the Russians were rather dissapointed with the landing, as it landed a meter off the center line of the runway.

The Shuttle didn't get a crew-less autonomous flight capability until after the Colombia incident, and even someone needs to run a cable from the General Purpose Computers up the back, to the flight computer up the front on the flight deck, so the GPC can do the flying.

Exposed: leaked body scans published online

Looks Like..

It looks like someone worked out what that "Prt Scr/Sys Rq" button on the keyboard does.

Zuckerberg: the iPad 'is not mobile'

Easy definitions...

Definitions to solve the issue...

Mobile Device: Battery operated, fits in a standard size pocket. Easily operated while walking.

Portable Device: Battery operated, too large to fit a standard size pocket. Not so easily operated while walking.

So...

Jesus Phone = Mobile Device

Fondle Slab = Portable Device

Microsoft's IE9 'nearly finished'

Finish This Sequence: Faster, HTML5ier, Chromier....

Buggier?

Boffins mount campaign against France's official kilogramme

Does that mean...

... when a builder asks his apprentice how heavy those planks are, the correct answer is always 1kg?

Vulture 1 rolls out of fab bunker

@mittfh

The camera attached to the payload is actually stuck to the balloon, not the plane itself. It will capture the initial release of the Vulture 1 from the balloon but not it's whole flight.

If it was up to me, I would stick one of those $15 keyring video cameras in the plane anyway and hope for the best.

*Pint, No more till you fly the thing!!

Apple TV stripdown reveals mystery solder pads

Makes Me Wonder...

...What would happen if you populated the connector and plugged it in.

Vulture 1: Plane plans planned

500 straws, some tissue-paper and dope.....

..... Sounds like a friday night out in these parts!

*Ok, ok, im going!

SanDisk bigs up its flash postage stamp

Yeah, 157 and for good reason.

The 157 pins are there for a reason. In an "End-User" scenario you would find most pins either connect to the power planes for improved power distribution inside the chip, or are non-connect (NC).

Now with only Power and SATA signals documented, you will probably find a lot of the NC pads are actually connected to stuff like JTAG for the initial programming of the SATA controller's firmware, Direct access to the flash array's address and data lines for factory testing of the array, and any number of other functions.

One way to tell if such hidden functions exist is if some pads need to be pulled high or low for no other reason than the datasheet says it's required for proper operation but with no other reason.

PARIS pumps up a Mk 2 release mechanism

Plan C

The rubber tube is a stroke of sheer mechanical genius and much is to be applauded for the solution but the idea of using the GPS or even a reading from a barometric pressure sensor to determine altitude does have some useful advantages in a contingency situation.

Say for example, the balloon bursts for some reason without getting to the planned altitude, the onboard CPU will detect the sudden drop in altitude and release the payload before falling too far.

I would say it's better to release at a lower altitude, than to watch it fall and crash.

ISS suffers coolant pump failure

RE: "a couple of spares sitting on external stowage platforms"

Personally, I would pitch the faulty unit out the back of the station, on a slight downward angle. Then ship a nice new pump unit up on one of the regular Soyuz resupply ships. That is what they are for after all.

Judas Phone: more Photoshop tomfoolery

RE: Bootnote

"We are not really set up for Photoshop madness, but we always welcome contributions."

Sounds like an enhancement waiting to happen!

Rancid IE6 'more secure' than Chrome and Opera US bank says

In Other News...

...Google reportedly behind buyout of Chase Bank.

Hybrid hard drives: what's not to like?

Files? Huh

Somehow I seriously doubt the claim that the HDD knows to store the most frequently used files on the flash. They are a block-based storage device storing addressable chunks of 512 bytes or 4096 bytes (on newer drives) in a single sector, and that is all.

So unless someone wrote firmware for the drive to understand the structure of FAT, NTFS, EXTx, ZFS, etc the drive wouldn't even know the concept of a File.

What I can see going on is the drive keeping an eye on how often a particular sector is read, and the most read sectors are mirrored in flash. You could almost call it a non-volatile cache.

*Troll, cos where are the muppet icons when you need them!

HP and Yahoo! team up to print ads in your home

SELECT Title FROM `FunnyTitles` ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1

But at The Reg, you'll find your humble reporter saying, instead: "People, people, people... Do you think that when you buy a newspaper or magazine you're not paying for ink? It's just that the publisher pays for it, and you pay the publisher."

The difference here is, the newspaper publisher buys ink in such vast quantity that it only costs a few cents worth of ink to print the same area as an A4 page. On the other hand, printer ink is so expensive that you are looking at 15 cents or more for a single page of A4 type.

I myself am a huge believer that advertising should NOT cost the end user a thing, be it cost of ink, bandwidth used, or even ads on pay-tv channels. Basically, if it costs me money, I want a refund!

Bigfoot Networks Killer 2100 gaming network card

@Thomas 4

"a delay of 50ms can make much more of a difference than in an MMO where a delay of 200-400ms often does not make a significant impact on raiding or PvP"

I live with a very Hard-Core WoW raider. If he ever has a ping higher than 150ms to the Aman'Thul or Silverhand servers (From Australia) there is hell to pay. Even 10ms of additional latency is enough to wipe the raid due to dots, cool-down, etc being cast on the client but the server not registering it in time.

How you were able to get in a guild or pug a raid with a 200-400ms ping is beyond me!

*Beer to settle my nerves as raid time approaches, praying my connection holds up

Oz government in filter paranoia meltdown

Bugger-off Conroy!

Unless the ALP force conroy into dumping the filter alltogether, or better yet, sack Conroy, there is no way in hell I would consider voting for them.

Robot cars can now do a Rockford into a parking space

Awesome, but...

While this is an Awesome display of how well automated driving is getting, they really need to take some time and get rid of all the crap on the roof of the car and pack it into some nice neat package that fits into the lines of the vehicle... All the equipment reminds me of the roof of "Ecto-1" (The car in Ghostbusters)

Wobbly drive array problems? This'll stiffen your rack

Vindication At Last

Finally, now I can scoff at those who think my server rack design incorporating 5mm thick steel rails is massive overkill! (I was going for supporting heavy loads, but vibration resistance helps too)

Mozilla spills plan for, yes, Firefox 4

Quake console, ABOUT TIME!

So FINALLY we'll be able to truly be able to deal with those evil worms embedded in websites...

drop the console down,

"Impulse 9"

"Impulse 255"

Go to town on those bad boys with quad damage and the nailgun!

F*ck you, thunders disgruntled fanboi Apple user

I can't jump because...

*Shove* AAAaaarrrgghhh!!

US netwar-force Cyber Wings badge unveiled

No School like the Old School

That badge is so awesome in a retro, old school sci-fi way, and the shiny chrome really looks the part, all it needs to do is work in a little gold into the existing design and they are on a winner.

I hear the alternate competing design was a diorama of an emo script kiddy sitting in an internet cafe h4x0ring passwords to goth porn sites

iPhone code ban facing antitrust inquiry?

@John 104

"right. Because all the other smart phones and PDAs that were out in the previous 10 years were completely incapable of doing anything.... Yes, you are a fanboi."

The only apple device I own is an iPhone and the only reason I bought it was because I wanted a better data allowance than I could get with my usual nokia selection. After my iPhone contract expires I will be going after some form of Android based device, depending on what is available at the time because it is as equally capable and usable as the iPhone

I have always found older model smart phones to be slow and cumbersome with a bad UI, the only thing i ended up using my old nokia for was the GPS and below-par web browsing, on the upside all the button mashing to get through the user interface did help my texting speed.

I have had PDAs before but never liked them as much as I should because the touch interfaces to them were too problematic, the styli were always too small and toothpick like (I have big hands) and trying to touch the screen directly was also an issue in does it recognise correctly where I touched (did I mention I have big hands). The next issue was the handwriting recognition was poor, even when I sat back and tried to teach it my writing style.

All in all, in my experience the iPhone is the first device I have used that fits in my pocket, has a decent browsing experience, can run custom apps, is easy to navigate and use the UI, looks good and has some decent CPU power to boot. If that makes me a fanboi then so be it but as mentioned before, Android can do what the iPhone can and has the benefit of not being under the iron grip of Steve Jobs.

*Flames, cos I waved the fanboi flag... then burned it!

Bad Steve!! No desert for you.

I for one support an antitrust investigation. The iPhone is a great device an not only as a phone, it's truely put computing power into peoples pocket in a way many only have dreamed of. But in this case the AppStore vendor lock-in should be illegal, it's like trying to shop around for the best deal on a car only to find there is only one car dealer in existance, and they are fixing the market price.

As a software developer who's weapons of choice are C# and the .NET framework I was excited to hear about MonoTouch and being able to use my preferred toolset to develop iPhone apps. I was almost to the point of allocating a budget to buy a mac, pay the developer tax to his highness Steve, and to buy a copy of MonoTouch. Then this whole OS4.0 issue cropped up and I scrapped the plan.

*Disclaimer: I am not a fanboi but this was posted from an iPhone

Granny friendly phones

Granny phones huh..

In my experience, the elderly like things that are familiar to them. That's why they would LOVE this little item!

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=286

*Beer for such a Genius idea!

SCO: jurors too busy Facebooking to rule on Unix claim

"Second Jury Ruling"

Jury: "We the jury, find in favor of the SCO Group, we find that they do indeed own all assets of the Unix operating system"

SCO: "Holy Shit! We Won!!!"

Jury: "No, we're kidding, what part of YOU DON'T OWN IT do you not understand!"

Steve Jobs: mystery patent pool to attack Ogg Theora

>Insert Title Here<

Why not have the browser just tap the OS's video codec pool and work out a list of supported codecs and use them. It works well enough for almost every other media playing application out there. Pointless to take out second licences for a codec when the OS already has them.

*Grenade : A gift for patent trolls

Obama to backtrack on NASA Orion cancellation - reports

@Paul Bruneau

You are completely missing the point of a manned space program. Sure you can get some really great science from unmanned robotic programs, but ultimately it's machines doing the work, and returning data that basically is just numbers and images.

The best kind of work is done in-situ, on the space station if something doesn't happen like it's supposed to, the problem is worked and resolved in minutes usually, the astronaut doing the work is able to relay information back based on the context of the situation. Take a stuck bolt for example. A machine trying to remove the bolt would come back with a response saying 'bolt stuck' and wait since it's programming would fall-over at that point. A human can relay back the bolt is stuck hard, there appears to be some damage around the bolt hole and putting a lot of force behind it won't budge it. A few minutes later the response would come back to drill it out, so the astronaut does it, no need to spend a day writing program commands, another day to set them and then send it to the robot.

Space flight is the next frontier of human exploration, we NEED to do it, it's in our nature to do it and if we don't we are assigning ourselves a doomed fate to die out when the earth's time is up. Cost should not be a factor.

Microsoft slams coffin lid on Vista

Upgrade?? Huh!

Anyone who want's to "Upgrade" one windows version to another needs to have a good hard look at how their PC is performing.

I am pretty sure Microsoft don't do "Upgrade Installs" any more due to things like the changes to filesystem locations like moving "C:\Documents and Settings\" to "C:\Users\". Sure Microsoft could have shuffled the files around on install, but there are so many badly written programs that a user could have expected at least a quarter of their apps to stop working. And who's fault would it have been then, not the app writer's oh no, it worked FINE before the upgrade.

I am not a Micro$oft fanboi in any way, I feel they owe me a Win7 license for all the crap I had to go through with the whole Vista incident, but you gotta point the blame where it's due. In this case it's not at Microsoft.

To be honest upgrade installs in the first place were a bad idea, if you are replacing the system software you should be using the time to also upgrade the latest drivers, security software and applications. It's a no-brainer really and no one I know would consider doing an upgrade.

And now - new stealth jumpjet makes first hover landing

CGI Video??

Am I the only one to think that video of the landing is CGI. The aircraft is too clean, the colours are too sharp for the rest of the scene, the landing was too quick, the sound didn't sound right, there are transparency issues around the edges of the aircraft especially around the open fan covers on the top of the plane . And that was what I picked up just off the 1st viewing!

*AC cos I don't want one of these prooving the video was real on top of my house!

Google (finally) nabs On2 video codecs

@Peter

"Either way, it is likely to be bad news for the Theora project. This would be a real shame, as they have been working really hard to produce an acceptable open codec."

Why would it be bad news for the Theora guys? The way I see it, if Google open sources the latest On2 generation, then the Theora project could pick up that source and spin it into a new, more efficient Theora codec.

Sony seeks 'universal console controller' patent

Umm....

While this seems like an interesting idea, It actually flying is another matter.

Doesn't microsoft have an embedded security chip in their controllers to prevent unlicenced manufacturerers building controllers compatable with the 360.

They aren't going to get past that without somone hacking the chip... oh wait..

BOFH: The PFY Chronicles

>ToDo: Insert Appropriate Title Here<

Oh No!! Simon Dead!! This can't be happening! Thanks for the laughs old friend, you'll be missed.

*A Pint, In memory of a legend!

NASA Titan moon-balloons to run on cloud fuel

[Insert Witty Title Here]

While it sounds like a good idea, like any typical source of patio/bbq-gas, the moment the probe gets there and tries to start burning the stuff, they'll find all the gas has suddenly vanished, leaving someone to have to dash down to the local service station for a refill.

Santa Fe man demands half a mill for being near iPhone

Say!!

This LessEMF clothing looks like it'll do the trick! woven from conductive threads and whatnot.

Also looks pretty comfortable too!

Say, is that thunder I hear?

KERZERT!!

Yep.

Oz firm seeks talented IT developer

Dangit!

I got all the required job attributes, and I even live in Albury (and ride past the Border Express office daily) But unfortunately I am a little lacking in the Breast department! Oh well!

*Paris, cos even she doesn't fit the job description!

The Avatar storage effect

@ 1st Post AC

In response to your questions...

Yes she does (In a national geographic kind of way)

and Yes it is!