* Posts by frank ly

6077 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

EE squashes Orange UK: France Telecom's been 'destroying it for years'

frank ly

Re: Tell us more !!!!

"... to get his teeth into a new brand ..."

A juicy one, I assume.

Passing asteroid MOONS the HUMAN RACE

frank ly

It's big and dark and lonely out in space ...

... so I'm not surprised that asteroids get together for companionship.

Switch it off and on again: How peers failed to sneak Snoopers' Charter into terror bill

frank ly

Re: Lord King of Bridgwater

If he was a useless seat warmer, why was he elevated .......... oh

BOT AN ABOMINATION: Mechanical DRONE VAMPIRE spreads wings

frank ly
Coat

"... a future application of the DALER might be to find victims in dangerous areas after a natural disaster."

And then feast on their blood.

Coat: I had to get that in - I'm going

'One day, YOU won't be able to SENSE the INTERNET,' vows Schmidt

frank ly

Re: "with your permission and all of that"

You can't meaningfully give your permission for something you don't understand and for which you're not truly aware of the consequences. All that is irrelevant of course since people will sign up for shiny techno goodness because it's so 'convenient'.

YOU. Your women are mine. Give them to me. I want to sell them

frank ly

Re: GarageBand loops

I'm not sure about your makeup (too colourful and contrasty) but you have some great videos - thanks :)

Atlas unplugged! DARPA's unTerminator robot cuts the power cable

frank ly

Re: What can possibly go wrong?

I'm hoping it's a wireless 'enable' code that must be permanently present and continuously sending a complicated code. If the enable code is lost then the power is cut. (Cue comments about a HAL situation.)

ICANN orders re-evaluation of dot-gay

frank ly

Re: Not gay enough

"... could not agree amongst themselves what being gay actually meant ..."

Is it like being Christian in that there are different denominations and different forms of 'worship', etc.?

frank ly

@Swarthy re. dot-inc

Those are also the rules for registration of a .ltd.uk domain; the name must exactly match the officially registered company name IIRC. I'm not sure about the rules for .ltd and .limited. It's confusing!

SPACE the FINAL FRONTIER: These are the images of COMET PROBE ROSETTA

frank ly

Re: It's with my other camera

I wonder how big the comet is and how far away Rosetta is? Maybe they could ask it to keep still for some long exposure pictures?

frank ly

Re: Pretty amazing pictures!

To be fair; as did the rockets, propulsion and guidance systems, etc.

2015: The year of MAD TV science, but who can keep up?

frank ly

Re: Content content content....

.... and will there be any 'content' that's worth watching?

Drinking to forget? OK. But first, eat a curry... QUICK!

frank ly

Yes, but

I'm afraid of curry.

SECRETS of the LOST SCROLLS unlocked by key to HEALTHY BOOBS

frank ly

Other applications?

Will it work on those scratch-to-reveal lottery tickets? If I was working in this area, I'd be making friends with lots of corner-shop owners.

Whisper keeping schtum over abuse of user data

frank ly

Re: Truer words ...

It's where they belong; in a brick built privy with no damp proof course, at the far end of the garden.

FDA draws line between wearable health gizmos and proper medical gear

frank ly

'Medical' advice too?

Lazing in a chair at just past midnight with a heartrate of 80bpm? The display should say, "go to bed and get some sleep you idiot."

DVRs at the ready tonight: El Reg's motor Vulture is on the tellybox

frank ly

Move over Jeremy Clarkson

How about a regular Reg Gear programme? Not just cars but various equipment reviews.

Firefox 35 stamps out critical bugs

frank ly

In the future

Will there ever come a time when Firefox (or any mass usage) software is bug free? There are, I assume, a finite number of 'lines' of code in Firefox, so if they keep fixing bugs then eventually, surely, all bugs will be fixed. Roughly when will this be?

Dongle bingle makes two MEELLION cars open to exploit

frank ly

Outsourcing

"Progressive Insurance said ...... it would welcome input on identifying the holes."

Because that's a lot cheaper and easier than doing it properly in the first place.

Why does the car control system accept inputs from a dongle that anyone can plug in? Why don't they have an output-only port for monitoring? A moment of thought would ......... oh.

Siri? Are you seeing another man?

frank ly

If you want bandwidth ...

... hide messages in YouTube videos. It would be a lot easier to do and the 'security' services would be swamped with data if they tried to find them.

Is is a Bird? Is it a Plane? NO! LOOK OUT it's an ASTEROID!

frank ly

Frikin' lasers

That's what they need to bombard it with, so we can see it when it goes past.

REGARD our TINY but POWERFUL LASER, suitable for very SMALL sharks

frank ly

The first two were quantum entangled, as you can tell by the timing of their posts. The third one had fallen off the quantum dot stepping stone and needed time to get out of the stream of everyday analogies, which really drag you down.

‘Whatever happened to Vladimir Putin?’ and other crap New Year prophesies

frank ly

re. "... the Moon entering Uranus ..."

It depends on how you pronounce it, which often depends on how old you are. I sniggered (and wheezed).

IT cock-up – not jihadi DDoS – fingered for French web media blackout

frank ly

Re: A bit of over-reaction by the media?

I regard The Independent as a 'quality' newspaper (which is not difficult in comparison to the others) but their coverage of technical matters often makes me laugh/groan. Now that the facts are known, will there be any articles giving corrections or explanations? I doubt it.

Sick of these new dot-words? Join the .club – it's the only one challenging .com

frank ly

NamesCon?

How very appropriate.

Big Blue's biggest mainframe yet is the size of a fridge

frank ly

It seems to have casters at each corner so you can easily move it around during internal reorganisations and re-furnishing/decorating activity.

Also, I have a feeling that it's quite a bit bigger than my fridge.

Australian desert deluge demonstrates why we're doing it

frank ly

Re: Yep Central Australia .....

I was going to say something about anti-freeze not being good for you, then I realised. Do you put any additives in radiator water at all?

BATMAN LASER builds smaller, faster hard drives

frank ly

Questions for somebody who knows

How does the areal density of this compare with current 'high spec' hard drives? Can the magnetic state be read with the laser as well as be written? I'm wondering how much more development is needed before we might see them for sale.

UNDER A VEST: Man cuffed for smuggling 94 iPhones strapped to his body

frank ly
Coat

He was wearing them wrong

Coat: The one with no iPhones in the pockets.

Icelandic brewers knock up whale 'nad beer

frank ly
Happy

Re: Probably NSFW

Thanks for reminding me. I've just caught up with five weeks worth of cartoons.

Preserve the concinnity of English, caterwauls American university

frank ly

I'm perturbed

They have 'pertubate' as a verb in that list. I suppose someone knows the word 'pertubation' and made an assumption.

Windows 7 MARKED for DEATH by Microsoft as of NOW

frank ly

Never forget

"Windows 7 ... is more stable than its predecessor Windows Vista ..."

Has Windows XP been written out of history?

Hawking and friends: Artificial Intelligence 'must do what we want it to do'

frank ly

Re: motivation

Why would an AI that is tasked with making paperclips be given the ability to destroy all human life? Which idiot designed it and which idiot made it. My toaster does not (and never will have) the ability to remotely control my car.

frank ly

Re: "Our AI systems must do what we want them to do"

This reminds me of the 'joke' about the inteligent missile, which on being given the launch command said, "No! I don't want to explode and die, I want to stay here on my launch pad."

Peers warn against rushing 'enhanced' DATA SLURP powers through Parliament

frank ly

Wait a minute

"I think we cannot allow modern forms of communication to be exempt from the ability, in extremism, with a warrant signed by the Home Secretary, to be exempt from being listened to."

Relace 'the Home Secretary' by 'a judge' and that would be fine. Oh wait, that is already the case. I think that by 'Home Secretary', he means a senior civil servant or member of staff of Downing Street or senior police officer, or council office clerk, or local PCSO ......

No, the Linux leap second bug WON'T crash the web

frank ly

Re: Time lords in Paris

Alons y!

One Sync to rule them all: How Microsoft plans to fix OneDrive

frank ly

"Such childish words." Says Pedo Bear.

Will hottest CES gadgets be HOT TARGETS for hackers?

frank ly

If I consider the recent history of personal/retail/corporate security issues, I wouldn't let any of these 'jump on the bandwagon' devices anywhere near my home or any system that I was responsible for.

World's largest ship swallows 900 MEGATINS of baked beans

frank ly

No mention of fridges?

Just wondering.

Lube company merger receiving second 'in-depth' probe

frank ly

Entendre-Entendre

See title.

Get your special 'sound-optimising' storage here, hipsters

frank ly

It's true

I recently 'upgraded' my music (and video and picture) collection storage from a small group of 10 year old PATA drives to a pair of shiny new 1TB SATA drives. My 192Kb/s .mp3 collection now sounds more harsh and has less warmth than before. I've tested this over a variety of music styles and it's very disappointing. The videos and picture files also look a big 'edgy' with brighter but glaring colours.

Samsung’s SUPER-speedy SSD is a real power-sipper

frank ly

Use of words

"... energy efficiency, requiring only about 450MB/s per watt for sequential reading ....

Shouldn't that be " ... achieving about 450MB/s per watt ..."

Hang on a second – Time Lords have added one to 2015

frank ly

Re: since you ask

Instead of adding an extra second, why not make the seconds (at the internet reference clock) happen more slowly for a short period of time - say 1/30 of a second slower for 30 seconds before midnight - then the internet time will have been adjusted to the 'correct' time?

ALIEN EARTH: Red sun's habitable world spotted 470 light years away

frank ly

Re: ... bring the count of exoplanets known to humanity to a thousand.

There may be a few Goofy ones in there.

frank ly

Hmmm

"... the team validated them by using a computer program called BLENDER ..."

Are they sure that what they're seeing wasn't created in Blender?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_%28software%29

Dev put AWS keys on Github. Then BAD THINGS happened

frank ly

Re: What about pre-payment?

Pre-payment credit cards are not accepted by organisations that would want to apply debits to your card without your explicit permission for each transaction (or the card issuer will not allow them to be registered for this). I know this is true for Paypal since I tried to register one This is to prevent you from running up a large bill before they try to debit a card that only has a small amount of credit on it.

FREE EBOOKS: Apple falls into line with EU refund laws

frank ly

Re: a lot of people can finish an ebook in two weeks, given a long enough commute into work

He has a very good high resolution display, so he gets better copies with no errors from the OCR.

Mirror, mirror: Seagate shows off 1TB data shiny at HDD beauty contest

frank ly

Great!

I'd be able to see the annoyed look on my face as I kept getting my password wrong.

Seagate makes CES splash with $99 drive, 'personal' cloud offerings

frank ly

Why?

"The two-bay system can be reconfigured after purchase to function as a single copy data store (RAID 0) ...."

Why would anybody want RAID 0 inside a remote NAS type box? If you want to combine capacities you could do some disk spanning or JBOD type of technique. The write speed of a modern SATA disk is far faster than most domestic networks could provide, so there is no speed advantage and the reliability gets shot since _all_ data would be lost in case of failure of one of the drives.

Ugly Microsoft code NUKED Bing and Yahoo! – report

frank ly

A code update:

Had it been tested 'properly'. Was it deployed onto all servers at once? Sometimes, I sit and wonder at the things that happen out there.