Voyager - never was a spacecraft so aptly named.
Posts by bigphil9009
242 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jul 2009
Voyager goes off a (helio) cliff
Review: Google Nexus 4
Latest exoplanet discovery is a virtual CLONE of Earth
Buying a petabyte of storage for YOURSELF? First, you'll need a fridge
Yawn
Please can we stop with this whole "spinning rust" thing? It's infecting Trevor Pott's articles too, and is a little bit too smug for my liking ("ooh, look at me - I know how things work"), not to mention completely incorrect - these days most magnetic medium on the platters of HDDs is a cobalt alloy, most definately not iron oxide...
Hero Playmonaut lost at sea as SPEARS ditches in Channel
Adobe demands 7,000 years a day from humankind
EULAs
I'd always thought that there was a little bit of give-and-take in all of these things. The software vendors just assume that your average Joe (and I include myself in this definition) will just tick the box, and your average Joe just assumes that he won't get taken to court should he fail to remove all copies of Flash from his mountain of backups once he's sold his old PC.
These agreements are mainly in place to stop massive abuses of software theft and copyright abuse, rather than impinge on what the other 99.9% of users are doing with their computers.
At last, a bionic arm that passes the Beer, Egg and Looks Cool tests
Incredible
The most incredible thing about this, is that during the segments when he is cracking the eggs and drinking a beer, he just looks like a bloke cracking an egg and drinking a beer - the prosthesis is so well designed and (more importantly) operated that it disappears into the background and we can just concentrate on what the guy is doing, not how he is doing it.
Curiosity rover hijacked by will.i.am to debut science song
Microsoft pops preview of 'biggest, most ambitious' Office yet
No Graphics Driver
I've installed the preview and have used it for a couple of hours and the overwhelming feeling is one of being transported back to the times of Windows 95 and the terrible 16 colour icons and desktop that we used to be presented with when Windows didn't have a driver for the graphics card. I cannot understand for the life of me why they have chosen such a stripped back, bare look for the suite - and the bright white has started to give me eye strain.
They call this progress?
Korean telly factory power cut costs Samsung $30,000+ per second
Does this part of Samsung make the "Retina" displays for Apple's gear? If so, I would be surprised if they remain loss-making for long - would spinning them off not make them an attractive target for an acquisition by the big A? Could this be Samsung shooting themselves in the foot? Or have i got the wrong end of the stick?
Red Bull races gamers for Grand Prix prize
HTC handsets hit by grip of death
Sounds like the same thing that happened with the Galaxy Nexus
The "spinning out" issue sounds suspiciously like the issue that occured on the Galaxy Nexus (ICS) when it was first released - it hadn't been fully tested on the 2G 900MHz GSM networks and when switching from a 3G band to the 2G one, it went crazy, vibrating and becoming totally unresponsive so that the only thing that fixed it was a battery-pull. The problem was patched pretty quickly though...
Study: The more science you know, the less worried you are about climate
Smoke-belching flash drive self-destructs on command
Why GM slammed the brakes on its $10m Facebook ads
Netgear Powerline Nano 500 Ethernet-over-mains adaptor
Quitting your job? Here's how not to do it
Revealed: Google's SECRET London office
Tourists follow GPS, drive into sea
Oracle starts peddling Exalytics in-memory appliance
Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet
Windows 7 squeezed into Android tablets
From server to end user: What's coming up for NFS?
Fallen DRAMurai warrior Elpida files for bankruptcy protection
Jabra Halo 2 Bluetooth headset
HP caught with SIX Windows 8 PC packages up its sleeve
Drew's Cookie Jar - psst. want a forum upgrade
Steelseries SRW-S1 PC gaming steering wheel
Microsoft probes IE8 dll AWOL hell
T-Mobile's Full Monty speed 'capped at 1Mb/s'
Symantec: 'NetBackup 7.5 speeds backup 100X'
BT Vision throws Microsoft Mediaroom under a bus for Linux
OTT?
I thought it was good documentary and journalistic practice to use the expanded version of an acronym in the first instance, and then use the acronym thereafter. I can't see anywhere in this article an explanation of "OTT", and then to add insult to injury, the author goes for it at the end and uses the damn thing three times in two sentences! I realise that this piece was originally published elsewhere, but some editorial oversight would be nice.
New Earth-observing satellite snaps 'blue marble' shot
Russian supply ship heads for ISS, space garbage crashes into Pacific
Boffins dig up prehistoric popcorn in Peru
George Lucas: 'No more Star Wars'
Microsoft raises 'state of the art' son of NTFS
Olympics volunteers urged not to blab online
God, the cynicism on display here is breathtaking. Granted, the games have cost a shed load more than was first intended, (and as Londoner I have seen my council tax increase in order to partly fund it ) but is it any wonder that the rest of the world increasing see Britain as a nation of whiners and moaners given the attitudes on here and other places? Let's at least try to take some pride in what should be a cause for celebration!
Raspberry Pi Linux micro machine enters mass production
Bad form to repy to one's own post, I know. But as the commenter below me, and a very enlightening article on the RaspPi website says, there seems to be a typically British tax law that penalises anyone wanting to manufacture electronic systems in the UK. I would encourage anyone that has the slightest interest re-igniting Britain's once world-class manufacturing industry to sign the petition in the post below.
British Manufacturing
I wonder how much they would cost if they had decided to manufacture in the UK. I can (kind of) understand Dyson's POV where a 20% increase in costs would add to an already expensive product, but the same kind of percentage increase here would make a much smaller total difference.
I know they are going for cheap-cheap-cheap, but I can't help thinking that it would have been much better if the board that was designed in Britain, and will be used by a generation of British kids was actually built and engineered in Britain too - something to be a little bit proud of, perhaps.
Footie club sacks striker for homophobic tweet
Homo-phobia
Homophobia - the fear of homosexuality. That tells us that a homophobe is frightened of homosexuality. This is what it comes down to - they are afraid of people who are not like "them". Fear can be conquered through education, can't it?
Or are attitudes such as those displayed by the footballer (and many others) not related to fear, but rather prejudice and hatred? These attitudes are somewhat harder to overcome.
NASA's twin GRAILs reunite in lunar orbit
EMC hikes drive prices, blames Thai flood tragedy
The Best of El Reg 2011 now on Kindle
I do worry that this is going to become an ongoing trend - a move towards all of the investigative-style articles becoming paid-for ebooks, and the more lightweight articles being dispensed on the ad-supported website.
I have actually purchased the Jobs and VMWare articles, and whilst I found them enjoyable and informative, there wasn't really anything in them that we didn't get to see on the ad-supported site in the olden days....
I wonder if this is the start of a stealthy paywall-esq model?
Voyager probe reaches edge of Solar System's 'bubble'
It makes me feel tremendously proud of us as a race that these voyagers are out there, so far from home and still going. They will continue to travel, and outlast us all, even though at some point in the next decade or so their RTGs will decay to the point where they generate insufficient power to allow them to keep communicating with the miniscule dot surrounded by other tiny dots that is their view of the place we all call home.
Mozilla denies OS X Leopard 2012 kill
I've thought about this; there are too many instances of people using that version of the phrase for them all to be wrong (gosh, how optimistic!). I suspect that the full version of the phrase should be something like:
"I could care less about that, but I'm not going to"
and the last bit has been forgotten about over the years.
However, it may just be that some people are just stoopid...