Posts by STOP_FORTH

What does London's number 65 bus have to hide? OS caught on camera setting fire to '22,000 illegal file(s)!!'

Re: I'm more interested in the source

He has a cousin in Notre Dame called Hatchback.

Re: 65 bus route

It's all we have left! We're interested in railways, underground railways, traction engines, steam ships, clippers and omnibuses because we were instrumental in developing most of them when the rest of the world were using horses.

Aeroplanes (US), hot air balloons (France), Zeppelins (Germany), motor cars (Germany), rockets (Russia/Germany), monocars (Russia), autogyros (Spain), helicopters (Russia) are passing fads which will never catch on. Consequently, they are of no interest to us.

65 bus route

Back in the day when Red Ken simplified bus ticket prices by introducing zones, you could probably travel further on a 65 than any other bus and stay in one zone.

I don't know why anyone would want to know this.

Happy days, travelling from Kingston to Ealing for a pint or two.

Facebook to save US users from ads bought by foreign state-controlled media

Pandora's box

Look in the corner, guys. I'm sure I saw something in there.

Astroboffins peering back in time with Hubble find stars may have been flickering into life even earlier than thought

Unhelpful sugestion

Or, just maybe, there never were any Population III stars and loads of "metallic" elements came spewing out of the Big Bang?

Telescope nomenclature

We really need a Super Duper Telescope if we are to make any progress in our endeavour to understand the Universe.

Got $50k spare? Then you can crack SHA-1 – so OpenSSH is deprecating flawed hashing algo in a 'near-future release'

Re: Two hashes are better than one

That doesn't really address the point. Even if two different hashes are compromised, using them both as separate hashes still gives some measure of assurance that the file has not been tampered with. If only one is compromised file integrity is guaranteed by the other. If both are compromised it may still be extremely difficult to find a hash collision for both.

I was merely using MD5 as an example.

My question really is - are two hashes more secure than one?

Two hashes are better than one

Some time ago I noticed that some Linux ISOs were being signed with two different types of hash - usually an MD5 and some type of SHA. Whilst I realise that this is not really applicable to OpenSSH, surely this is still a reasonable defence against hash collisions?

You overstepped and infringed British sovereignty, Court of Appeal tells US in software companies' copyright battle

Re: Watch Out USA...

Narwhal tusks.

Worried about the magnetic North Pole sprinting towards Russia? Don't be, boffins say, it'll be back sooner or later

Why have the lying, fake, mainstream media not mentioned this?

Donald Trump extends ban on Huawei, ZTE telecoms kit in US companies to May 2021

Ooh, sneaky!

The ultimate 4-wheel-drive: How ESA's keeping XMM-Newton alive after 20 years and beyond

Down withYankee imperialist running dogs!

Star Wars? Really?

That is Fireball XL5. It's the new model without the strings.

Kids today!

Now go and watch Nebula-75 on Youtube before I have to chastise you a second time.

International space station connects 100Mbps symmetric space laser ethernet using Sony optical disc tech

They had to destroy all those razor blades somehow.

Re: Nice technology

If you exclude every fibre-optic link on the planet, I suppose laser communication is quite rare.

What can possibly go wrong?

As long as ICANN and all the usual gang are administering everything we should be fine. I bet Disney will get the .plu domain. I'd like .ear and .moo if that's alright with everybody else? .eur will automatically 404!

Fright at the museum: Bored curators play spooky Top Trumps on Twitter over who has the creepiest object

Re: Salzburg

They were all too big to go into a packet of salt and vinegar.

Salzburg

The museum in Salzburg has a pretty grisly collection of pickled things in jars.

How's your night sky looking? The Reg chats to astroboffin Mark McCaughrean about Starlink and leaving a mark

When they give you lemons

I'm not trying to minimise the inconvenience these things cause to astro-photographers but.....

Since there are going to be lots of them and we know their shape, size, altitude, velocity and position at any given time (OK, last one is less certain, they're LEOs)....

Could they be used for transit/occultation studies?

Unlike asteroids, they are not all whizzing around the ecliptic.

Vivaldi browser to perform a symphony of ad and tracker blocking with version 3.0

Re: I'll be watching out for this

Lord Thomson said it first.

Somewhere, way out there, two black holes, one large and one small, merged. And here on Earth, we detected the gravitational wave blast

Stupid question

I'm quite happy for all the tech sites to refer to the higher frequency as an "overtone" but none of them answer the important question.

Is it an even harmonic or an odd harmonic?

Black holes are very old, so my guess is they are driven by valves.

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

Re: Out of the frying pan into the fire?

VxWorks doesn't like clock rollovers either. Why have they never fixed this or does it only affect older versions?

(Have personal experience of a horrible 248 day bug, luckily it was only crashing broadcast systems.)

Dot-com price rises on their way over the next four years: ICANN approves Verisign contract, walks off with $20m

Broken beyond repair

Create a parallel internet. Decentralised, poison-proof DNS, new address space, tunnel everything through IP4 and IP6, non-spoofable From address for e-mail.

That's what we could do. Pigyback on everybody else's fat tubes.

Microsoft staff giggle beneath the weight of a 52,000-person Reply-All email storm

Advice

A friendly IT guy told me that the best thing to do was reply all with a 10 MB attachment and read receipts enabled. (We'd had two of these events - with more recipients.)

Linus Torvalds ponders: Is Linux 5.6 going well because it's bug-free, or thanks to that other bug?

Title

Emperor Penguin surely?

(Funniest Wiki-vandalism I ever saw was on the penguin page. Someone had modified the binomial name so it read "Emperor Penguin (Penguiness Biggus)".)

Freedom of Information coverup clerk stung for £2k after deleting council audio recording

Irrelevant comment here

I know nothing about this case or local councils generally.

Just came here to say that the Llangollen canal is delightful and passes over the stunning Pontcysyllte aqueduct.

Broadcom sues Netflix for its success: You’re stopping us making a fortune from set-top boxes, moans chip designer

Re: FRAND

387 and 663 cover error correction. There may be some merit in these, but a few companies tried patenting Turbo codes for broadcasting some years ago and got their fingers burnt. (That clever bloke from Cambridge who wrote the alternative energy report showed that all Turbo codes were a subset of an existing error correcting scheme.)

283 seems to be a way of efficiently transmitting video encoding data. This may actually be novel.

The rest look rather over-broad, basically how do you get high bandwidth, time-critical stuff over a network. (DVD bitstreams? What?)

Look like typical US patents to me. Not sure this would fly in Europe. DVB standards are all FRAND based. Compression standards are a bit more confusing, because of the sheer number of researchers, overlapping ideas and not everybody agrees to licence stuff as FRAND.

Edit David MacKay was the prof. He showed that LDPC codes (invented/discovered by Gallager in 1960) were a superset of all Turbo codes. This wiped out a promising business model/technical blackmail scam overnight.

Microsoft's Bill Gates defrag is finally virtually complete: Billionaire quits board to double down on philanthropy

Re: Would you like to be fried with that?

I don't have to answer your "one question". I don't live in a theocracy, you don't get to frame compulsory questions, or burn to death anyone who refuses to answer or who gives the wrong answer.

Your time is over. Take your absurd death cult with you. You are not forgiven.

Re: Would you like to be fried with that?

I'm glad He understands predator/prey cycles. If His solution is the same as that produced by millions of years of evolution it just comes down to deciding which is the most likely explanation. Then we just have to decide which of the thousands of gods is the correct one.

They all seem pretty unconvincing to me, what is special about yours?

Re: Would you like to be fried with that?

So you can't answer two simple questions.

Why is God obsessed with nipples?

Why is God obsessed with beetles?

I'm sure scientific endeavour will eventually explain these things.

Not sure what that has to do with your imaginary, invisible friend.

Well I liked CP/M.

Re: Would you like to be fried with that?

Here's the thing, putting the word "logical" into a sentence doesn't necessarily make it true.

God created everything, logically He is therefore nothing. See? Sounds profound, but means nothing.

You still haven't explained why he stuck nipples on most male mammals.

The Guy is obsessed with the things.

Also, why did He make so many types of beetle?

Re: Would you like to be fried with that?

I do not think the word "logical" means what you think it does.

We all know Michelangelo got it wrong. What possible use would Adam have for a belly button?

Or nipples?

Re: Would you like to be fried with that?

OK, I'll bite. If we are all made in God's image as moral creatures, answer me one question.

Why does He have nipples? What is their Divine Purpose?

He's not The Messiah......

Yeah but, some folks say that without all that Wintel upgrade obsolescence nonsense there wouldn't have been so many discarded PCs for us to put Linux on!

In 1995 he wrote a book called "The Road Ahead". I read it. IIRC he didn't mention The Web at all, although there was some mention of the "information superhighway". It was hastily re-issued with extra sections on the information superhighway.

I saw Tim's first webpage in about 1992. I'm not saying I realised how big The Web was going to get (I had been working mostly in comms and was aware of LAN and WAN technologies and point-to-point protocols - it just looked like another damn' thing to learn about.)

By 1995, however, it was pretty clear that NetBEUI wasn't going to last.

Visionary, no!

Broken lab equipment led boffins to solve a 58-year-old physics problem by mistake

Nomenclature

Annoying, isn't it? Took me a few seconds to realise what they were, the skin colour helped.

I think this may be a UK thing. In Southern Europe they seem to be less squeamish. In Portugal and Italy their name for these things seems to be comprised of the local words for blood and orange.

Incidentally, why hasn't some boffin/plant-breeder developed a blood orange that is as easy to peel as a tangerine?

Don't eat them, you'll break your teeth!

I thought NMR was just renamed MRI so as not to use the scary word "nuclear"?

(See also - blood oranges now labelled "ruby" oranges in supermarkets.)

After the lawyers, can I suggest culling marketing types?

Want to own a bit of Concorde? Got £750k burning a hole in your pocket? We have just the thing

Re: RegSPBFunder

Um, paywall. Sorry.

RegSPBFunder

Divide number of regular readers into £750k then put up a firewall. Easy peasy. Badged commentards pay double, natch.

Aww, a cute mini-moon is orbiting Earth right now. But like all good things, it too will abandon us at some point

Re: Science Alert!

That's a bit judgemental, standard anti-Selenian bias.

How do you know it's not Fifth Column ocean water traitorously giving it away?

Yo, Imma let you finish, but for the 6,000 people still using that app on a daily basis ... we have a question: why?

Oh, and marrer.

Re: Wassup!

Ay oop.

DuckCockMateLovePetChuckMyLoverMyLamb.

If you're struggling to keep new year resolutions, try NGTS-10b, a mere 1,000 LY away. One year is just 18 hrs

Re: The other side cold and dark?

So you say. What are you hiding there alien fiend?

One man is standing up to Donald Trump's ban on US chip tech going to Huawei. That man... is Donald Trump

Re: Consistency

I can't believe I used the wrong icon!

I have always used the Big Brother icon.

Re: Different != Better..

I suspect that the amount of money you'd need to offer Denmark to buy Greenland has increased.

Other than that, dunno.

Consistency

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Except when it's not. What is so hard to understand?

Private equity ponies up £2m to help launch satellites from sunny Shetland by next year

Catchy name

If you want a technological initiative to crash and burn, you should really call it R101.

What's the German word for stalling technology rollouts over health fears? Cos that plus 5G equals Switzerland

The tortoise and the hare

Surely radiation propagates at the speed of light? That's got to be faster than rumours!

Re: Just get the info on both sides.

I fear for Poland.