Posts by David Hicks
1061 posts • joined Tuesday 22nd April 2008 12:44 GMT
Not a lot
A Brown Dwarf is basically a gas giant large enough that fusion can be sustained at the centre, though it's not really a star either on account of being quite dark and distinctly tepid.
IIRC.
Was thinking much the same
Some of us were hotly anticipating said ARM based netbooks, but the very few that did arrive were two years after they were hyped and never really took off.
Also - how is any of this article news? Ubuntu have had ARM support on and off for ages. I don't get the impression it's that difficult for them to do, mostly because they build on debian which has more ports than you can shake a stick at.
Sooner it dies a death the better
Yet another strike against BTC - now a proportion of the money supply is illegally generated!
And to those that say they'd notice the machine getting hot and the fans on - I hope you would, as readers of the register. Millions wouldn't think past "Computer is loud!" or "Computer is broken!" though.
And then perhaps it could be refined. What's to stop a virus writer putting in some temperature detection and slowing its activity to keep it a little cooler, plus making it a very low priority process so it doesn't interfere with normal operation?
I'll admit to gaining quite a bit of schadenfreude from watching the price of bitcoins slowly decline over the last month or so...
I've said it before and I'll say it again
Adblock, Cookie Monster, Better Privacy, flashblock, maybe NoScript (I don't bother).
Set your browser to flush the cache on exit.
Evercookie doesn't work against this setup. I see very few ads on the net. If a site needs session cookies to work I can enable them temporarily or permanently as needed. If a site I trust (el reg) wants them I can enable them.
I can stop facebook logos loading when I'm not on facebook.com, kill scripts that slow everything down unnecessarily, generally make the internet a nicer place to be. If a site wants to track me then they can. I'm just not going to let my browser help them.
Nobody else has the apple effect
For good or for bad, Apple customers are prepared to spend a lot of money on Apple gear.
If you want to attract people away from the iPad, or attract customers who would not buy an iPad, you're going to have to be really, really good on price.
429 quid for a 32GB slab/pad/panel/tricorder/whatever is not in any way cheap.
Posted in Wikipedia: It's not for girls
Meh
There are a large number of clique-ish, angry nerds on there who will delete pages and revert information that goes against their political views, or is decided quite arbitrarily not to be notable enough.
I watched a friend's page get deleted because of notability concerns (he's had three novels published recently) while there's a page for every bit-part character in the most obscure anime/manga you can think of....
Yeah, it's populated by the absolute worst sorts of geeks and I can well imagine rampant sexism in the mix there too.
Agreed
There are actually quite a lot of us out there that have rules about who is our facebook friend. Mine is "I have in the past and would again in future like to have a pint with this person"
Similarly to the above - anything that gets onto facebook in the first place is so inconsequential that I genuinely wouldn't care if my parents or my workplace saw it. Both groups already know I enjoy spending time talking arse down the local, and frankly if anyone has the patience to scan through more than a couple of weeks worth of inane banality then they're welcome to whatever they think they can infer from it.
Is there no tv out?
Sorry to bring this subject up *again* but my N900 has tv-out, so along with a sixaxis controller it makes for a great portable console when on the road and staying at hotels and the like.
Posted in Twitter-control botnet mines Bitcoins
That all depends
All the non-savvy will notice is "Gee, this computer's getting slow!" while their electricity bill rockets.
Especially if they have a decent GPU.
Posted in Twitter-control botnet mines Bitcoins
And nothing of value was lost
Well, nothing of very much value, any more. After repeated scams, theft and fraud it looks like the price is down to under a third of its peak and heading downwards.
I know it's wrong, but I'm getting a lovely dose of schadenfreude by reading the bitcoin forums at the moment.
Posted in Nokia ‘giving away phones at cost’
Lost it, totally.
They just can't compete. Their devices are behind the curve on hardware *and* looks these days. And they keep making stupid decisions.
Like the N950. It's the developer-only version of the N9. It's a little large, has an aluminium case and (most importantly) a slide out keyboard. This is *exactly* what N900 owners want. But no, unless you've published an App you can't even apply to be considered to get one, let alone just buy the damn thing. Instead the only new maemo device is the N9, crippled like nearly every other smartphone on the market by not having a physical keyboard.
I think I'll be looking at WebOS devices next.
Posted in Feds arrest 16 in Anonymous hack probe
In an FBI interrogation room at this very moment...
It seems that you've been living two lives.
In one life, you're Joshua J. Covelli, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, pay your taxes, and you... help your landlady carry out her garbage.
The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias "Toxic" and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not.
(hey, el reg - we need an Agent Smith icon)
I wish someone would give me a million quid
for being a total failure.
As it is I can only command a a small fraction of that much and I actually have to provide useful, profitable work. Maybe I'm doing something wrong here.
And where does this money come from?
There's a free upgrade to Win 7 from Vista is there?
Personally I took advantage of the manufacturer's downgrade media offer. Then switched entirely to linux.
Nokia support them?
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!
Nokia think your phone platform is just peachy do they Steve?
Could this be because the guy in charge is fresh out of MS academy?
This is the worst case of cart before horse. There's an MS guy in charge, so Nokia like MS software. This does not count as a testimonial any more than my mum saying I'm such a handsome boy.
Posted in Cleaning up the Bitcoin act
So it's not a currency?
It's a speculative asset? Glad to hear you agree.
Me, I thought it was a currency and payment method. If it is then any bitcoin income will be taxed. If it's not then it's a modern tulip bulb.
As a high earning single geek
With a car and no property, this barely affects me or my finances at all as far as I can tell.
Why all the fuss?
Posted in Cleaning up the Bitcoin act
We don’t want Bitcoins to be underground and illegal.
Then expect to be assessed for tax.
And then expect to lose about half your users that are crazy libertarian types and consider tax to be immoral and an affront to their absolute ideas of freedom.
Surely there already are offences
For computer hacking, which this effectively is?
No?
Posted in Bug-Byte Manic Miner
Wow, Manic Miner
First game we had for the C64 when I was but a little'un.
I remember Eugene's Lair very well. As soon as you get the last key, Eugene goes and sits on the portal, blocking you. Timing it perfectly was essential.
Any game that progressed past Eugene's Lair was a success and felt like breaking exciting new ground.
Maybe I ought to go download it.
Maybe...
Maybe when your nephew has 20 years experience they'll offer the same to him.
What do you mean it's not possible to get 20 years experience by age 17?
He's just not trying hard enough...
Mandating >40% of one gender
is not treating people fairly as individuals. It's the opposite, it's treating people as part of a group and giving them advantage or disadvantage based on that group.
Mandating that they all get the same access to insurance regardless of gender is treating people fairly.
(Please note before replying that I'm some sort of sexist pig that I have no vested interest in keeping any gender ratios as they are or really any interest at all in boards at all. I'll start worrying about the fairness of the glass ceiling when I get out from under the glass carpet. The boardroom is not accessible to 99.9999 percent of men either. If adding some old girls to the old boys club that you still will never be part of, makes you happy, good for you)
Posted in Samsung NS310 netbook
Actually performance may well be pretty good
There are a lot of hurdles to overcome, depending on the exact hardware as you say, but once it's up and running you can get decent performance out of a hackintosh netbook.
I gave up after a while as something about MacOS started to annoy me, but on my eee it ran well enough to run steam and play a few games like Plants Vs Zombies, and iTunes was fine too. Eventually went back to Linux though.
Posted in Samsung NS310 netbook
It still feels like the eee901 was top of the curve here
Decent battery life, solid state storage, linux option (yeah, I know, only us geeks care about that), about 300 quid.
Things are now shinier and can have better battery life. They have not got cheaper (in the UK), and they have all got hard drives now. Otherwise there's almost no difference.
Posted in Moderatrix kisses the Reg goodbye
Oh you can never leave...
...that''s just not how it works.
You have been entertaining, which is most of what counts in this world, so good luck with future ventures :)
Some detection possible?
In order to emulate a keyboard *and* a mouse, one would have thought that you'd need a USB hub chip in there too, at which point you have a policy that could deny the use of hubs, probably.
I may be wrong of course, there could be a way to have mouse hardware + teensy pretend to be a logitech composite input device. But either way, to be able to send keypresses I have a feeling the system needs to recognise it as slightly more than a mouse.
Posted in Samsung NC110 matte-screen netbook
Rip off Britain?
Looks like you can buy it in the US for under $300.
Hell, you can get it in Australia for $360 (AUD).
Sure there's tax to contend with, but 329 quid is an outrageous liberty to be taking with the British public.
If they are Sk1pt KiDD!355
Then god help us all, because if script kiddies can do that then think what real talent could do.
Yeah, I know
But it is an extra thing to carry. i like the slidy keyboard on the N900. I know it's a brick compared to a lot of the newest smart phoens, but that doesn't bother me all that much.
Posted in EFF backs away from Bitcoin
Bubble, Bubble, toil and trouble...
Bitcoin is in a speculative bubble. A serious one. It is pretty much only used to speculate and trade. There is virtually nothing you can actually use it for that approaches normal economic activity. Most of the currency seems to be in private hoards.
I don't imagine that the value will crash immediately the exchange opens up again, but I do expect it will crash when the current wave of media attention wanes due to press/public boredom. Unless a real economy starts to function in bitcoin it is not and never will be an actual currency.
The fact that most of its proponents are all treating it as an investment says a lot. Expect tears before bedtime.
And that's even if the current rash of hacks, breakins and trojans subsides.
Posted in WTF are... connected appliances?
Soon, in a fridge near you -
Third day, scared and all alone in the cold and the dark. Why do they hate me? #lastsausageinthepack
Posted in WTF are... connected appliances?
Clearly, in order to complement the smart fridge...
... we require the Smart Sausage!
Not only will the upcoming smart sausage know it's the only one left in the pack and it'll be able to monitor it's own internal state so you'll never throw away another good sausage.
Not only that but as part of the smarter home network, your Smart Sausage will be able to monitor your bowels on the way down and tweet any medical recommendations!
Almost sold
There are some good hardware upgrades there, but NO KEYBOARD?
The physical keyboard is the only thing that makes using things like the python development environment and the terminal in any way tolerable!
And no, there's not really a joke or any sarcasm in that. I actually like being able to do that sort of thing on my phone.
The sad thing is that it's still probably the best phone on the market for the likes of me.
These are not weaknesses in SSL/TLS
They are weaknesses in the current PKI. And yes, the PKI is thoroughly broken. There are too many vendors supported by default in all the browsers, virtually guaranteeing that at least one is vulnerable to some sort of attack.
Perhaps the browser makers should perform a thorough audit of each authority before allowing it in?
Or perhaps it's time for some other clever PKI scheme... not a clue how you'd go about making a better one though. There must be a way!
Posted in Well, that about wraps it up for the NBN
Umm... you functionally moronic?
Seriously, the NBN is about putting in decent, modern infrastructure, which is exactly what this country needs. Doing that at less than 100MB in this day and age would be ridiculous and unlikely any cheaper.
Posted in Bitcoin collapses on malicious trade
One compromised account
One, single, compromised account managed to crash the market completely. Wow.
And the reactions to the 'rollback' are understandable. What's done is done. Anyone that bought low (and had half a brain) would have moved the coins out of mtgox as soon as possible. The rest is just compensation to people who lost out.
Also it's amusing that the guy says Bitcoin will be back around 17.5 when the market is restored! Undoing a bunch of trades surely doesn't magically make it worth what it was before...?
This whole thing just shows exactly how shaky the bitcoin economy is. The high value is there simply because the volumes are so damned low. Any one of the early adopters that's sitting on a few thousand 'coins' could destroy the whole thing at a stroke.
Posted in Well, that about wraps it up for the NBN
Shove it where the sun don't shine, Turnbull
I live in Perth. If I could get reliable 10 Mbit maybe I wouldn't care so much about the NBN, but sure as hell something needs to be done if I can't get more than 3-4 in a state capital! And that's on a good day!
Australia still doesn't seem to get this "internet" thing. Retailers haven't realised they actually have to compete with overseas offerings now, and the government doesn't seem to have realised that part of the reason Australians don't use the 'net all that much is because the infrastructure is out of the stone age.
Oh, a mixed estate
I thought we were going to be investigating hypervisor stacking.
Running KVM on Hyper-V under VMWare ESX, just for a laugh...
That devaluing has a purpose
The purpose being to keep money flowing. If money never devalues then people hoard it.
And so you get what we had here (before the theft), people hoarding masses and masses of bitcoins, but the actual volume of the bitcoin economy being so low and so unstable that this one guy could have caused the value to plummet by selling up. And he didn't even have that huge a treasure trove.
I hope you haven't sunk too much 'IRL' cash into the scheme, but if you have then... well good luck I guess. You're going to need it.
Riiiiight
And it's totally not a scheme for early adopters to hoard coins and cash out at the expense of later users... totally, yet this guy somehow has a hoard of 25,000 of them.... And if the market couldn't handle about 0.25% of the coin supply being put up for sale then the bitcoin 'economy' is clearly mostly made up of these hoarders.
Also if there's no way to show or pursue theft then somebody also f*cked up the system design.
Posted in Asus Eee Pad Transformer Android tablet
Probably not yet
Nvidia haven't released open source graphics drivers for these for Tegra2 yet, there's no free alternative as far as I know, and I'm pretty sure there's no closed source driver for generic, non-android linux either.
Good plan, but not quite available yet.
At least they could give us a way to switch most of it off
That would be nice.
I've found a way to stop the irritating preview panels appearing by blocking some of the stuff involved with adblock.
I too miss the days when there was just a logo, a text input box and some results.
Posted in Bitcoin slump follows senators’ threats
Shakes the establishment?
LOL.
Some think of the children type mentioned the drug trade and Bitcoin to a couple of Senators who figured they could use it for some more "tough on crime" political posturing. That is all.
Note that while it may be out of their control at the moment, if made illegal it will wither up and die as the mainstream avoid it.
Also LOL @ the standard "OMG we're enslaved by money" rant.
Posted in Bitcoin slump follows senators’ threats
I'm not sure it's a matter of being keen on it
So much as seeing what it is - a flawed attempt at wresting monetary control away from government. It suffers from a variety of problems (mostly related to the limited supply and mining) and its image isn't helped by the fanbase of people who don't think they should have to pay any taxes, ever....
Posted in US senators draw a bead on Bitcoin
Still not a threat
Anything that can (and will) be squashed with a simple law is no threat.
Maybe you and I see the definition of the word threat differently. Whilst it does have claws and teeth, I wouldn't consider a housecat a threat. In the same way I don't think anyone would see bitcoin as a threat. It's not only.
If you want to change taxation, if you want to reform the monetary system (and this meme does seem to be growing), if you want to reduce the control that the government has over everything, these are not bad aims. Picking up a new currency, especially a flawed one, is not going to work without associated political reforms.
And I'll repeat - it doesn't matter what currency you use, the government can and will find a way to tax you.
Posted in US senators draw a bead on Bitcoin
Adding people ups the value
Or haven't you noticed?
And therefore those that already have bitcoins get better off the more people that use it. Not because they get more bitcoins, but because they have more bitcoins already, and the new miners can't make anything like the same amount as the production rate of coins drops sharply over time.
Posted in US senators draw a bead on Bitcoin
Look, I object to high taxes as much as the next fella
And I'm as suspicious as anyone else as to what the government spend it on.
However, for bitcoin to be taken seriously as a threat to entrenched interests, it would have to be able to be taken seriously on a large scale by a wide selection of the population. I'm quite comfortable predicting that it won't be.
Add to that that making bitcoin transactions and conversion into 'real' money illegal acts would be both easy as a stroke of a pen and effective in massively reducing the potential audience and therefore its viability as a currency. No, it's not a threat to anyone.
A real popular movement with a replacement currency that was actually viable, sure. Bitcoin, no.
As for your Rothschild quotes, well you may want to think about applying them to the early adopters and their very profitable early mining activities. They may not control the currency, but they sure as hell made sure they got the lion's share of it early on.
Posted in US senators draw a bead on Bitcoin
WOW, seriously?
Bitcoin doesn't threaten anyone, it's a niche attempt at a currency that's going to fall flat on its arse.
Leaving aside the built in hyper-deflation, bitcoin is no threat to anyone that wants to spy on transactions or tax you because (and this is if it isn't flat out banned) -
1 - It stores the details of its provenance, certainly the last transaction. Unless you launder it. There's a good reason money laundering is illegal in the real world. Expect it to become so online also.
2 - You will be taxed if you have significant bitcoin income, one way or another. There are only two certainties in life, death and taxes. Never forget this.
But a threat to existing interests? Sorry but that's laughable. Worst case for bitcoin is that it's made illegal. Not because it couldn't survive, but because the numbers of people needed to keep it useful wouldn't be there.
Posted in US senators draw a bead on Bitcoin
Yup, interesting idea but fundamentally flawed, IMHO
Over a third of all the bitcoins that will ever exist are already in the hands of a very few people. In the theoretical situation in which bitcoin actually goes into wide use, these people get to be instantly rich due to massive deflation, because no matter how many people join in, the rate of new bitcoins being created is held constant, approaching a limit somewhere around 21 million.
Massive and continuing deflation will not only make these current holders of bitcoin rich, but will also mean that nobody spends them. If the value of currency is going to be more tomorrow than it is today, why hold on to it?
In a 'real' currency this isn''t as much of a problem, because people still have to eat and therefore spend. Bitcoin is not going to be anyone's primary currency in the mid term though, just a secondary.
So what should sensible folks do now? Probably, I think, mine some bitcoins and hang on to them for a while, just in case ten years down the line the deflationary disaster has somehow been averted and 1 bitcoin is suddenly worth a million quid....
