Posts by twelvebore
84 posts • joined Friday 8th February 2008 10:56 GMT
Well...
A better example would be you recording me walking into M&S without me knowing... then when I get home and start using my PC/tablet/whatever to read The Register, I get lots of pop-up ads telling me the great deals on lingerie I missed in M&S today, and how I might like to visit the pizza restaurant you went to after you filmed me in M&S.
Re: Big challenges
"They screwed up big time with 64-Bit. Producing Itanic and then letting AMD produce the 64-Bit architecture we have today"
... and they've then gone on to crucify AMD with their own instruction set. To the point that certain websites are predicting AMD leaving the parts of x86-space where 64-bit is relevant.
I've not great love for Intel, but I have to say when they stop messing about and concentrate on pure technological execution, they can really get the job done..
Embargo
Did you just break the Nature embargo? Or was that someone else?
Re: And?
Maybe not a good upgrade for your 4S, but it looks like a nice replacement for my 3GS!
You don't *have* to change your phone every 12 months!
Posted in Hands on with LG's 21:9 monitors
Ugh, 1080 again.
Waiting for the 40" 3972x1600 pix version for some proper wide-screen desktop and games playing.
Dear Mr Beck
Some guys from 1880 called, they want to chat about you nicking their ideas...
Re: I'm more concerned...
So phone them up.
I downgraded from the 20Mb "old-L" package to a 30Mb "new-M" package, they were round to fit my new modem within a day or two. This despite my area being marked as due for the doubling upgrade months from now.
My broadband bill is now £10 cheaper than it was, my broadband is faster, the caps are less silly, the new modem was free.
Font choice
Not sure how to take this.
Is this the ultimate sign of Mr Cameron's austerity measures kicking in? The size of the UK public debt means that our government can only afford one font license now?
Is this a left-over from Mr Brown's premiership? One Font To Rule Them All, One Font To Blind Them?
Or is it Mr Clegg's influence? Looks good at first glance, but in doesn't work in any real-life? But at least it's scrupulously fair, in that it's equally crap for everybody.
On the bright side, at least it's not Comic Sans.
Posted in Does Britain really need a space port?
A good place to ascend to orbit...
...how about Ascension Island? It's roughly as close to the equator as Kourou. It's surrounded by ocean too, so less chance of pissing off the Germans or Scandinavians if something goes wrong.
From thin to thick and back again
21st century X-terminals then.
Didn't SGI (Silicon Graphics back then) push this sort of stuff a couple of decades ago?
Re: Well Well
Hmm. Let me see...
- VM throttle my 30Mbit connection to 15Mbit if I download more than a certain amount at peak times
- no other ISP in my area is capable of providing more than 6Mbit *at any time of day*, regardless of what I or others are doing
Yep. Makes sense to ditch VM and go elsewhere, for sure!
Posted in Mobile phones still safe... probably
Re: Where's all the DoD/MoD/Russian Data
So I guess the important points in your proposition are that:
a) the evidence is there, it's all been known for years by Some People
b) the evidence is being kept secret from The Other People
I can't put my finger on it, but this sounds very familiar. I'm sure I've heard this before, or maybe seen it on the telly in some programme or other.
Can you tell me, is deja vu a symptom of having my brain fried by RF radiation? Or have I been hanging around the Internet for too long?
Posted in Mobile phones still safe... probably
Off the top of my head, here's a few candidates for the next Big Health Scare that I'd like the Daily Mail to pick up and run with:
1. worrying about stuff you don't understand causes stress, and consequentially leads to an increased risk of heart disease, and other stuff you don't understand (hence causing more stress, see point 1).
2. reading Daily Mail headlines leads you to worry about stuff you don't understand, whilst simultaneously failing to educate you about said stuff. This leads to an increased risk of heart disease, and other stuff you don't understand (see point 1).
3. listening to people who read the Daily Mail causes stress, with a consequent increased risk of heart disease. See points 1 and 2.
4. apparently there's been a massive increase in heart disease over the past few years. I should be worried, because it's all due to stuff I don't understand. According to the Daily Mail and a bloke I met down the pub. See points 1, 2 and 3. And 4.
5. Sod it. I'm off to drown my sorrows in alcohol. Apparently this isn't good for my health. According to the Daily Mail. See points 1, 2, 3 ... 4... and most of the rest of the book.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the attitude that leads our children to be brought up in such a way that they're utterly incapable of dealing with the way things work in the real world.
So do you reckon that the Google "bulldog" enforcers got to him?!
OK
Chop chop then. If you can do it, do it. Mars is only 18 months away, so what's stopping you? Looking forward to the first tweet from Mars. All privately funded of course.
Would be even better if the technology had been entirely privately funded, rather than "standing on the shoulders of giants", with the giants being the giant piles of cash spent by the Western and Eastern Bloc governments throughout the Hot and Cold Wars developing the basic under-pinnings of this private-sector-poster-child technology.
So much easier to do stuff on the cheap if you build it on someone else's IP without paying the full costs.
Oral hygiene
Why did I first read that as "Sabotaged by the dentists"? Must be pub time, it's been a long day.
History
Erm... have you clicked on the 'History of SOFIA' link on that web page?
I want to know...
...how this mother is gonna overclock. Are they shooting for the 10Hz record?
Posted in Why did my server just die?
<title>
Are you sure that this story doesn't say more about the pitfalls of virtualisation? In particular in virtualising production and test platforms onto the same physical server?
It's big
WASP-12b is 1.4 times the mass of Jupiter.
Title
To be honest, if they're going to continue in the vein they have been to date, where the influence of science on policy comes a distant third to the Daily Mail and the Catholic Church then I'd rather there weren't any scientists on the ACMD. At least then we can do away with the transparent pretence that policy is based on evidence rather than the whimsies of the "I don't like it so you can't do it" brigade.
Brown alert
Surely there should be a level above red alert, ie. brown alert?! For when all those things you've been worrying about have just happened and it's just hit the fan...
Line rental
The other con that they can stop is failing to quote the proper headline price when advertising their broadband - they forget to mention that you need to pay an extra £12/month or so renting a phone line that you may well not want.
Haha!
"His duty position and responsibilities did not offer him the situational awareness needed to validate his postings to the media"
translation: he don't know what he talkin' 'bout sucka! He jus' jive talkin'!
Posted in Samsung R780 17.3in laptop
My personal take
Well my missus has one of these, it's a decent machine but my biggest gripe is that the inclusion of a numeric keypad shifts the main part of the keyboard to the left. This makes for a somewhat weird typing experience for a touch typist, especially in the dark.
Oh and while we're on the subject of typing in the dark, when are all >£500 laptops going to get with the 21st century and include an illuminated keyboard?
Other than that it's a decent bit of kit.
Posted in What can Google's tablet deliver?
Huh?
Posts like this confuse me. It's like people are willfully missing the point of consumer-oriented tablets like the iPad and so on.
The executive of any company that makes a tablet aimed at the "I want SSH and X11" crowd should be taken out the back and shot by its shareholders.
In other news ... Pope craps in woods, bears are Catholic
So basically they asked developers if they'd prefer to get more money for their apps, and on average the answer was yes? Where can I get a job asking these questions?
Would these devs prefer a 33 / 33 / 33-and-you-foot-the-bill-for-production split of a more traditional distribution model?
Newsflash
In other news, foxes have called for de-regulation of access to the chicken coup.
Content
My money would be on them buying a media company (Time Warner is about $40bn from what I can see). Need lots of content for that $1bn data centre to stream to all those iP[ao]ds.
Forking hell
Google in embrace, extend, exterminate shocker . Who'd'a thunk it?
Posted in AT&T plans $2bn wireless overhaul
Timing
Building a network worthy of the first decade of the 21st century.
Centralise
Central government should take over the role and aggregate the back-office functions of *all* English local councils into a single, large, central, multi-billion pound facility. What could possibly go wrong?
Oh, wait...
Stoneygate
That exchange serves more than just the posh bits of Stoneygate - it's my local exchange and my area solidly blue-collar.
Well
An Arcturan Megabeetle of course
Simple and pretty secure
The way the density is derived is fairly simple, it's basic geometry and Newtonian physics. The major uncertainty comes from estimating the size and mass of the host star, and typically it's less than about 10% in each of those - certainly well enough understood to know that these exceptional planet densities are highly unlikely to be due to errors. Put it this way - if these estimates are way off then we seriously misunderstand how our Earth orbits our Sun!
Other way round
The orbital period (or more intuitively the distance from the star to the planet*) determines the planet temperature, not the other way round. Basically the closer they are to the star, the more energy they receive from it.
(*) orbital distance and orbital period are closely related through Keplers Laws.
Very uncertain, probably very distant
The patch of sky Kepler is looking at mostly contains stars which are a fair distance away (thousands of parsecs). Measuring the distances of stars that far away is difficult, the results usually have large error-bars. That's probably why the distances aren't mentioned - they're unknown to a precision worth quoting.
Not evil, just hypocrits
You're misreading the article - it's not saying that "Google is evil" it's saying that Google are a bunch of hypocrits. Which they are.
Your PC experience is far improved since the arrival of Microsoft (yes, even if you don't use Windows). Would you trust them to go unfettered and unchallenged in the marketplace?
@AC 17:01
You don't really understand how science works, do you?
This effect may well end up re-writing the laws of physics, but before we get to that point we have to be damned sure it's not due to some phenomenon that's well currently well understood by the laws of physics, but not factored in to the models used to predict the positions, movements and accelerations of spacecraft.
To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes “When you have eliminated the possible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” What teh boffins are going through currently if the first bit, eliminating the possible. There are many possibilities, these effects are exquisitely subtle. This is definitely a two-pipe problem.
Believe what you will though.
Paris, because she's defied the laws of physics live on video.
Posted in Hands off our boffins!
Priorities
Given how well science works in this country and how poorly the government performs in comparison in delivering "economic and social value-for-money", maybe they should first get their own house in order?
Posted in Vodafone Music has disastrous relaunch
Website bad anyway
The Vodafone website is *always* slow, particularly the account management side of it. It never ceases to amaze me how tech- and comms-oriented businesses can be so blind to the problems and how bad it makes them look. They spend millions sponsoring Lewis Hamilton to improve their brand image, then slap that same brand image over a website that feels like it's running on a 386.
Posted in Cameron escapes Twitter twat rap
OFTWAT
I demand the creation of a new quango to regulate the usage of the T-word on public radio. A staff of a couple of hundred and a budget of £80 million pounds should do the trick I reckon. Someone has to think of the children you see.
Posted in US military cyber force activated
67th
67th Network Warfare Wing ??
So the first 66 Network Warfare Wings weren't up to the job then? Or are they all busy hacking FaceTube or similar?
Never understood how the US military allocates these numbers, I'm sure it's intended to make it sound like the army/air force/whatever is bigger than it really is, and scare the Russians.
Nuclear option
I'm wondering whether the MoD might be thinking that the option for nuclear-powered carriers might be back on the table given the delayed time-table. The next government is likely to have a lot less grass-roots party issues with nuclear-powered-<insert powered thing here> than the current one.
Termination
Termination charges are basically just part of the petty war amongst the networks being passed off on the consumer. Fundamentally it hurts all of their businesses, but they haven't realised it yet.
Just like they haven't realised that it helps all their businesses to share their networks and let me connect to any of them without the "Emergency calls only" nonsense. I'm not going to switch to your network just because it's the only one I can get in a place I rarely go to. I'd be more likely to switch to your network if you make deals which allow me to use my phone wherever I go without having to give a crap whose infrastructure I'm actually using.
The high-street banks tried all this on with trying to charge customers to use each others ATMs. The result? Within months it all collapsed. It's free now. The consumers don't care, they want to be able to use *any* ATM without giving a crap about charges. Eventually the banks all realised that they were better off not antagonising their customers, and sharing that infrastructure. One day may the mobile networks will have the same epiphany.
Career development
You'd think MPs, in particular Labour MPs, would be keen to be vetted ASAP (and have the tax-payer foot the bill). It'll make it *much* easier for them when they shortly cease to be MPs, and try to get jobs as eg. taxi drivers, or similar.
Less is more
Amusing that this story is running in the Daily Mail.
Anyway, I'd like to suggest that all English police forces have their budgets halved. They've quadrupled over the past decade (according to my council tax bill). Maybe if their resources were more precious they'd not be so quick to waste them? Or am I being naive?
NoScript
Sorry, NoScript isn't the answer. Or rather NoScript is no more the answer to web security than pulling the Ethernet cable out the back of your PC. NoScript is like Vista UAC but ten times more intrusive and annoying, and therefore ten times more likely to get the "yeah, whatever <click OK> <mutter>stupid *%^@ing browser</mutter>" treatment.
Landing site
Let's be clear about this, images of the Apollo 11/etc. landing sites will *not* quash conspiracy theories. Anyone willing to believe a conspiracy spanning four decades and involving several hundred thousand NASA employees isn't going to be swayed by some nifty snaps of "Buz woz here, summer '69" written on the surface of the Moon. These are digital images after all, and I dare say the Conspir-o-Loonies will be quick to point out that the World Government could buy many hundreds of Photoshop licenses to less than the price of a single black helicopter.
