Posts by Aquilus

Raising the price of in-demand processors really helps the bottom line, says AMD

EPYC is so good!!! I've been trying to find a 7443P all year :<

Alibaba wants to get you off the PC upgrade treadmill and into its cloud

"The company hasn’t explained how one might attach a keyboard and mouse."

Bluetooth?

Microsoft takes tweaking tongs to Windows 10's Start Menu once again

YAY

Wow I sure can't wait for Candy Crush saga to decide to reinstall itself !

Android trojan EventBot abuses accessibility services to clear out bank accounts – fortunately, it's 'in preview'

Re: Assets

"The "file" program does not look at a files extension to determine the file."

Yes which is why i'm storing the code as a base64 encoded comment to a valid jpg. Keep up!

Florida man might just stick it to HP for injecting sneaky DRM update into his printers that rejected non-HP ink

Don't buy HP. Or Oracle. Or Microsoft. Or Cisco, Google, Amazon, Facebook or Intel. Or use Goldman Sachs. Or Bank of America. In fact, pretty much every large American corporation is evil and corrupt.

Astroboffin Kurtz ends 40-year quest to find a predicted one-sided vibrating star that was never seen – until now

It's got a massive spot! someone should pop it! don't be in the way of the plasma jet :P

For real this time, get your butt off Python 2: No updates, no nothing after 1 January 2020

Re: The fork is already out there

no silly cos etothei'ing is the same as rotating something complex and so e^i tau = 1 makes much more sense cos that's just saying one rotation takes you back to where you started but e^i pi = -1 tells you one half-rotation takes you to the opposite point which alright yeah ok I guess also true but weird to care about enough to prefer it to be the canonical example of the identity :V

Apple programs Siri to not bother its pretty little head with questions about feminism

YES

SIRI know your limits :V

The time a Commodore CDTV disc proved its worth as something other than a coaster

Re: Optional

wot sort of roses are you sniffing? :V

Oz watchdog claims Samsung's leak-proof phones ad campaign doesn't hold water

Mine is set to cycle between 55% and 85%. I can unplug it, plug it in, as much as I like, and it'll just drain down to 55% then start charging til it hits 85% then sit there. I <3 it so much.

Tesla's autonomous lane changing software is worse at driving than humans, and more

Re: Incomplete

But Musk tweeted there would be robotaxis by 2020! That's only 7 months away. Surely he wasn't lying?

That's Numberwang! Google Cloud staffer breaks record for most accurate Pi calculation

Re: Normal numbers

Probably.

Nuisance call boss gets 8-year ban after trying to dodge firms' £700k fines

Banning him? Oh wow yes that will definitely stop him

They should put a few thousand from the settlement towards hiring a private investigator to keep tabs on this shithead, to catch him in a few months time when he's acting as a shadow director for the next incarnation of this scam.

Visited the Grand Canyon since 2000? You'll have great photos – and maybe a teensy bit of unwanted radiation

I love hot rocks :D

Wow that's a lot of fuss for a few buckets of maybe-slightly-glowy rocks :V

One click and you're out: UK makes it an offence to view terrorist propaganda even once

So basically, I'm not allowed the defense of "Yes, I know the link contains terrorist propoganda, and I intend to watch it. But I'm an adult, of sound mind, and have decided to examine the evidence myself so I can make my own mind up"? That behaviour is now criminalised?

Huh. Well good job we didn't let the terrorists win by altering our way of life and removing our freedom because they hate it, or anything...

Windows 10 Pro goes Home as Microsoft fires up downgrade server

Microsoft being Microsoft

It happened to me. And you know what... I wish I could say it caused a moment of sudden realisation that I was *done* with Microsoft. Like being in a long term relationship where the love was lost long ago, where excitement and desire and the happiness of having shared goals and alignments have been replaced with annoyance, anger growing into contempt for them and shame for yourself at letting this go on for so long without breaking up. That this was that *snap* moment where all of that fades into numbness and a sense simply of 'You know what, I'm done. You won't change. I don't care if you do. Go do you.' and the freedom that would bring... but I have games to play. Like having kids, you love them, but just wish they'd grow up so you could be free and let you break away from this unhappy mismatched contemptuous union you're trapped in for their sake.

But I can't. I'll accept the abuse. I'll tolerate the cold contempt we both hold each other in.

Each time they hurt me I'll just go a little number.

For the kids.

Send up a satellite to zap space junk if you want Earth's orbit to be clean, say boffins

Re: Idiots

"You missed that all you need to do is get the orbit elliptical enough to start dragging in the upper atmosphere."

What, and you think a delta v of 5 cm/s, while it zips around at 9.4km/s is enough to do that?

I haven't missed anything, and I repeat my assertion. You're an idiot with zero intuition about what these numbers, what half an hour of a 60mN force on a two tonne mass moving at 9.4 km/sec actually *means* to it. Answer. Fuck all.

Idiots

"The team has calculated that in order to send a one to two tonne object to reach the Earth’s atmosphere in about 80 to 150 days would require a thruster performance of 60 milliNewtons for 1,800 seconds."

Has it? Has it really? This team of boffins has calculated an impulse of 10J (0.006 x 1800) is enough to deorbit a two tonne satellite? A delta v of 5mm per second (divide the impulse by the mass) on its 9.4km/sec orbit speed will knock it out of orbit?

Am I the only person with an intuitive enough understanding of GCSE physics, that I didn't just glaze over when those numbers were mentioned, but actually had a mental 'this is bullshit' warning go off? You're all a bunch of fucking innumerate idiots. This is exactly like a newspaper breathlessly reporting that a farmer has grown a 10 trillion tonne turnip the size of Wales as truth, and not even bothering to clarify or have any 'these numbers aren't reasonable' warnings go off.

Funnily enough, no, IT admins who trash biz machines can't claim they had permission

Re: This man is obviously a psychotic

It's alright, I've learned to stop worrying and love the downvotes ;D

Assange thanks USA for forcing him to invest in booming Bitcoin

April fool?

Bet you wish you had patented it ;P

Microsoft boasted it had rebuilt Skype 'from the ground up'. Instead, it should have buried it

"With Discord and Slack existing, why?"

Because your grandmother hasn't heard of Discord or Slack. And wouldn't know how to use it, even if you installed it for her. You are not Skype's target demographic.

Bullyboy Apple just blew a $500m hole in our wallet, cries Qualcomm

Re: Did I get that right?

> How does that fit in the contractual world of business to business trading?

Tortious interference.

DNA-bothering eggheads brew beer you were literally born to like

Re: Hitchikers guide to the galaxy

It tastes almost, but not quite, entirely unlike beer.

Canny Canadian PM schools snarky hack on quantum computing

Re: Check this out for a cool explanation

I had it exactly right because I prefaced the phrase you quoted by saying it doesn't seem to allow that. :V

Check this out for a cool explanation

I found this page to be an enlightening explanation of how quantum computing works, as well as being a bit of a mindfuck in that it gives a method for instantaneous cooperation at a distance. It's intriguing because it doesn't seem to violate relativity by allowing -information- to be transferred between the points instantaneously, but does mean when the two compare notes afterwards, they found they acted in a way as if they'd communicated.

http://twistedoakstudios.com/blog/Post6536_implementing-quantum-pseudo-telepathy

The little animated diagrams of the gates and their effects on the superpositioned qubits are amazing :D

Oculus Rift review-gasm round-up: The QT on VR

Come on real time mocap

VR will get amazing once real time motion capture (perhaps using multiple LIDAR tranceivers spaced around the player and a bit of clever maths to map the results onto a skeletal model) can represent the body and limb positions of the player with that of their character in the game world. At that point, rather than being a disembodied pair of eyes, the player's mind can latch onto the new representation of their body, if it moves lag free and in accordance with their sense of proprioception. This also allows scope for a lot of cool stuff like gesture recognition and control. Why need a clumsy controller if, with the right movement of your hands, you can cast that spell in the game world? Or swing a sword or point a gun and have it accurately reflected with the movements of your character as he fights that monster?

Trust me, if you can meditate well, or take a hit of acid before playing, or are suggestible and the right induction is used, reality will skew for you. It'll be awesome. All you VR naysayers have no idea what is coming soon,

Universal Credit slammed by MPs: Late programme branded 'unacceptable'

Try something different

Good. The more of a clusterfuck it becomes, the more billions pissed away on Yet Another Government IT Disaster, the greater the argument for a basic income.

Twitter boss ‘personally’ grateful as five Twitter execs walk

Patience

They should stop trying to "build experiences" whatever the fuck that means and just work to maximise the number of people venting their daily brainthinks into their vast database.

Natural language big data semantic analysis AI bollocks is coming on quick and it'll be worth far more to have a dataset of how a vast chunk of humanity thinks, than the peanuts they're trying to extract with ham fisted early-monetisation advertising bullshit.

The golden eggs are still gestating.

China: Our approved vendor list – Kaspersky, Symantec are not on it

Hmm

If you're going to hide a filesnarfing rootkit, then an anti-virus product is pretty much the ideal place to put it. It gets installed on every machine, scans every file nightly, is allowed to install kernel mode drivers, and needs holes punched in the firewall to let it download updates.

So yeah. What does China know about those two firms, the NSA, and national security letters, that we don't?

Russia: There is a SPACECRAFT full of LIZARDS in orbit above Earth and WE control it

Hope he likes the lady lizards ;D

Be rather amusing if after all this, the male turns out to be gay...

NASDAQ IT security spend: $1bn. Finding mystery malware on its servers: Priceless

Re: "Not all of the banks agreed to take part"

Company: "Do you have a court order?"

FBI: "No."

Company: "Ok, you're not seeing our computers."

That's simple enough to understand, isn't it?

Aereo has to pay TV show creators? Yes. This isn't rocket science

Blame the supreme court not Aereo

The 6 majority justices looked at what the letter of the law said, ignored it, and decided on a verdict contrary to the law but that fitted in with their own morality and sense of justice. That's fair enough, but at least be honest and admit that's what they did. The 3 dissenting justices looked at what the letter of the law said, found that Aereo wasn't in violation, and decided that if the law needed to be changed to close the loophole, Congress should be the ones to do so. I find myself siding with the dissenters.

To claim that Aereo ignored copyright law is disingenous in the extreme. They complied precisely with copyright law, going so far as to use a dedicated antenna and transmission path to make certain of that. The fact 6 justices have pulled the carpet from under their feet by inventing a whole new aspect to copyright law (do you look like a cable company) is hardly their fault.

Gourmet chemists sniff out ultimate cheese on toast

Re: Import the ingredients

What a deliciously hipsteresque recipe! I tried it, but ended up burning the roof of my mouth. Guess I started eating it before it was cool...

Mozilla shoots down Thunderbird, hatches new release model

So they're pretty much saying that Thunderbird is feature-complete, and are only going to deal with bugfixes/stability issues? Fantastic! Works for me.

Don't forget, it has the ability to support addons, so anything not in the core can be added by third parties if you really want it. Otherwise, just leave it alone, it sends and receives email which is what an email client should do...

Apple 15in MacBook Pro with Retina Display

Re: Can we please stop calling it the "Retina Display"

VGA screen res naming standards are the most retarded thing ever. Just call it 2800x1800. Not QUWEXMGA or whatever superlatives they decide to mash together to represent it.

Boffins glue self-righting ROBO-VELOCIRAPTOR tail to car

Combine it with the synthetic gecko-foot and you'd have one nimble robot lizard that could leap from place to place, sticking wherever it lands! I approve the direction of this lizard-related research heartily!

RIM: BlackBerry 10 is fine, delays are down to chip ship slip

Lazaridis?

Anyone else notice RIM CEO's surname is an anagram of "Is a lizard"? Coincidence? I think not... and the game Ant Crusher... why would a non-reptile ever want a game like that on their pad or phone? It's a sign, people... the lizards are coming...

Mozilla forces Firefox 7 on memory diet

The main problem I have with Firefox is when you close it, then decide maybe 30 seconds later you need it open again (or click a link, or whatever) and it pops up a stupid 'Firefox is already running but not responding' box. Why does it take such an insane amount of time to cleanly exit? If it's compressing databases or defragging its history or reticulating splines then why on earth not do that during the hours of idle time I typically have the browser open during the day, rather than upon shutdown? And why do it every single time it closes? Modern apps shouldn't take 30+ seconds to close and go away... especially something as frequently spawned as a web browser...

HideMyAss defends role in LulzSec hack arrest

4> Don't keep logs in the first place, and therefore comply fully with the court order by supplying a printout of 'cat /dev/null'

Robo-warship sub hunter: Free DARPA crowdsauce game

Reminds me of CRobots...

Anyone here ever play CRobots? This story triggered recall of my college days (late '90's) where our computer science class competed to come up with the best algorithm for a simulated autonomous robot that could move, scan a certain direction, and fire a projectile. I think the later versions also added IFF and communication between friendly robots. Coding an autonomous swarm would be pretty fun... :)

Samsung rolls out 22in see-through screens

Wasted power

Yeah, I remember thinking "WOW! I'm living in the future!" when those animated LCD advertising displays started to pop up on the underground. Now when I see them I'm more likely to muse on just how much power they waste compared to posters, and how many tonnes of CO2 per year that equates to.

Sony wins subpoenas revealing visitors to PS3 jailbreaker site

Keeping logs isn't mandatory, y'know...

Come on, server admins. Show some common sense. If you're hosting something so obviously dodgy as instuctions on how to hack a multi-billion dollar companies prime piece of kit, why are you not logging to /dev/null?

Sheila's Fails? The statistics of biological risk

You must dine at my club

Now taking applications to join "Sheila's Private Members' Club". Per the exclusion in equalities legislation, we are permitted to restrict membership on the basis of sex. It just so happens that a perk of membership is a free car insurance policy. Fancy that!

Oracle: 'Eight Android files are decompiled Oracle code'

Why have you written that so often?

Unless you've got a sneaky #define of count hidden somewhere that causes side effects, what possible effect would that bit of code have, aside from wasting a few CPU cycles?

Cornish pasties awarded protected status

... minced?

Did I read that right? Did that marketing association claim an authentic Cornish pasty can contain MINCED beef? No it bloody well can NOT! Fresh baked with hunks of chuck steak or gtfo.

Fifa, Uefa lose free-to-view footie challenge

Completely wrong...

No, I suggest -you- read the rules. Having a device capable of receiving live broadcasts is not illegal. Using them to receive live broadcasts without a license is. You don't need to 'nobble' the aerial sockets, or 'prove your innocence' by harping on about your extensive DVD collection. Just refuse the inspector permission to enter your house, revoke his implied leave to pass onto your property to get to your front door, and ignore the dozens of threatening letters accusing you of being a criminal that you'll get from the TV Licensing offshoot of Crapita, and you're good.

Skeletal scanner would ID terrorists from 50 meters

Terrorists are rare...

The trouble is, terrorists (and of course, the obligatory thinking-of-the-children-provides-justification-for-anything pedophiles) are extremely rare. Even if the scanner has a 0.1% false positive rate, because the prevalence of terrorists in society are even less than that, it is still likely to finger many orders of magnitude of innocent people over actual terrorists. And no, I don't consider hundreds to thousands of innocent people being hassled, delayed, having guns pointed at them, arrested, or being executed due to police incompetence a suitable trade-off for catching that 1 real 'terrorist*'.

* which probably means he's watched a jihadist YouTube video, or plans to stuff a few petrol cans into his car and drive it into a shop window, given their recent form.

Google can kill or install apps on citizen Androids

Stop making it easy for them...

Covertly installing applications without the user's permission on their phones? Well I'm sure that won't interest the security services at all. I'm sure there absolutely definitely won't be a flood of sealed court orders winging their way to Google HQ, identifying certain phones of interest, will there...

Wannabe Jedi drool over potent laser 'lightsabre'

My leg is twitching...

BAN THEM IMMEDIATELY! Or terrorists will be using them to bring down planes whilst pedophiles lure in children from miles around.