Posts by Brian de Ford

WIN a RockBLOCK Iridium satellite comms module

Bod

Box Of Doom. BOD. Says it all.

Google chap reverse engineers Sinclair Scientific Calculator

As all Sinclair products, it was a pile of shite.

Yeah, you can find bigger piles of shite to compare it against and then it looks good, but it was a pile of fucking shite. An incredibly clever pile of fucking shite, but still a pile of fucking shite.

100 million self-driving cars will be sold globally in 2035 – report

Secure V2V communication?

I cannot think of any secure comms protocol that has not had security holes in the past. I doubt very much that any secure comms protocol in existence is completely without security holes that can be exploited in the future.

If ever this comes about, terrorists will pump a lot of time and effort into figuring out how to hack into this. Not only will they be able to cause a single car to swerve over to the wrong side of the road, it will first pass this message to other cars in the vicinity. Instant carnage.

Actually, given some of the stuff reported recently in El Reg, perhaps it will take very little time and effort to hack such a system.

That Microsoft-Nokia merger you've been predicting? It's no go

They used to be worth buying

Nokia used to be worth buying but they stopped having any value after they adopted a crappy OS/GUI that everybody hates. Even Microsoft knows that. Why throw good money after bad?

Microsoft caves on Xbox One DRM and used-game controls

What they really meant...

Translation:

We just saw the news about Sony's PS4 . Unless we match their DRM terms our product is completely fucked. We only listen to user complaints when they can buy something far superior to our steaming pile of shit at the same price or cheaper.

If only enterprise IT worked like my iPad ... or at least my car

Wow! That was like being in a really extended Dilbert strip.

Any storm in a port

<aol>

Sure, it's bad design. You can't easily determine orientation visually even when both parts are in plain sight (you need reasonable eyesight and light to see clearly into the connector).

Of course, you can do it by feel. But if you get it wrong and don't feel the resistance you can push too hard and break the plastic inner thingy (I've done that once). A more resilient form of polarization, such as found on mini-and micro-USB would be an improvement. Of course, somebody stupid enough can still force it in and damage it (3 of my neghbours are prime candidates for doing this).

A better design would be like the power connector on a mac mini - it will go in either way around and you'd have to be really strong and stupid to plug it in at 90 degrees to the correct orientation. But I expect Apple has a patent, trademark and registered design on connectors looking even vaguely like that one.

So live with it being naff. Except it's worse than you thought. The design is such that one of the connectors will wear out a lot quicker than the other. Guess which connector is on the PC and which is on the cheap-to-replace cable.

NASA joins ESA dark stuff hunt

Unstable...

L2 is not stable, although a halo orbit close to (not around) L2 is. At L2 a modest expenditure of delta-V is occasionaly required to nudge it back into place. The same applies to L1 and L3.

In contrast, L4 and L5 are far more stable. Not perfectly so, because of perturbations (mainly from Jupiter and Saturn), but far less correction is required than for L1, L2 and L3.

Take it or break it: the return of the drop test

They're wimps. Sound like wimps. Look like wimps. Test like wimps.

Now if you want to see a robust technical comparison of the iShowOff 5 and the Galaxy S3, go to

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rofgMueCOqo