* Posts by pierce

146 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Oct 2011

What kid uses wires? FCC supremo angry that US classrooms are filled with unused RJ45 ports

pierce

Re: What is he saying?

nah, it just requires using clever smart products like Ubiquiti UniFi AP's that autocoordinate, instead of dodgy SOHO 'routers' or overpriced traditional Cisco enterprise kit.

Google's mystery barge flounces out of San Fran, heads to Stockton

pierce

Re: The Barge is...

except, offshore of California, the open pacific ocean is some of the gnarliest seas in the world. the 200 mile limit puts you WAY out past the end of the continental shelf, where the ocean floor is several miles deep.

Microsoft to get in XP users' faces with one last warning

pierce
Mushroom

I hope it DOES brick ATMs'. anyone building embedded systems using consumer desktop software deserves everything they get.

AVG killing LiveKive cloud storage service

pierce
Mushroom

the primary attribute of a cloud is being nebulous and wet.

Muslim clerics issue fatwa banning the devout from Mars One 'suicide' mission

pierce
Paris Hilton

why is this even news?

'crazy cult leaders issue stupid edict about something that likely will never happen anyways' ?!? seriously ?

paris, cuz she digs crazy

Better late than never: Monster 15-core Xeon chips let loose by Intel

pierce

Re: SPARC

those hyper-hyperthreaded sparc T series chips also perform rather poorly when you load down all cores and threads... lots of threads but slow CPU performance of each individual thread... and they are only available in insanely expensive Oracle brand servers.

Apple patents touch-sensitive controls for MacBook

pierce

or the Dell U2410's we use at work, they have touch sensitive controls on the bezel.

Cisco asks court to bin Rockstar patents

pierce
Mushroom

how the heck can someone buying a patent invalidate an existing license agreement? that makes a mockery of the whole system.

Life support's ABOUT to be switched off, but XP's suddenly COOL again

pierce
Facepalm

Re: A possible explanation

I dunno. my employer physically scraps surplus machines, its too expensive to wipe them securely for resale or donation. the disk drives go into a metal shreader

Thundering gas destroys disks during data centre incident

pierce
Megaphone

I doubt its SAS vs SATA. however, SAS disks in a data center are far more likely to be 2.5" 10k or 15k rpm, while SATA disks are much more likely to be 7200 rpm 3.5".

just saying....

US feds want cars conversing by 2017

pierce
Mushroom

omg, what fun you could have broadcasting erroneous telemetry. "BIGASS TRUCK IS COMING AT YOU FROM BEHIND AT 150kph!!!" muahaahah, that should wake up some slow left lane clowns.

Democrats introduce net neutrality legislation in Senate and House

pierce
Paris Hilton

Re: consumer?

consumer? customer?

no, you're the product.

Tell us we're all doomed, MPs beg climate scientists

pierce
Boffin

Re: Garbage In Garbage Out

the suns energy output is remarkably steady regardless of solar flares, sunspot cycles and such.

sure, in a few dozen more billion years, it will change, the sun will eventually swell up into a red giant, then collapse to be a white dwarf. but on a year to year, decade to decade, century to century basis, the suns output is a smooth flat line.

so, find a new red herring, k?

FCC says US telcos can start moving to IP-based calling, but in baby steps

pierce

no, no, when its all VOIP, its becomes a DATA SERVICE and not a PUBLIC UTILITY. no more common carrier, no more line sharing. AT&T's wetdream comes true, they can revert to the closed proprietary network monopoly of the 1960s.

We're on the same wavelength! TV stars cosy up to flog spare Hz

pierce

ABC and NBC have been broadcast on the same HDTV 'channel' for a couple years now in the Monterey/Salinas/Santa Cruz , NBC on 8.1, ABC on 8.2

I don't see how this is news.

German frau reports for liver transplant clutching bottle of vodka

pierce
Pint

how about... Deutscheinfraubetrunkenluder

WHEW! OpenBSD won't CloseBSD (for now) after $100,000 cash windfall

pierce

how does 'open source' pay the electric bill and such ? I don't think the power company is particularlly interested in C code.

Workers, guards clash in hours-long Samsung factory RIOT in Vietnam

pierce
Trollface

Re: yeah

face it, 50% of the american population is effectively worthless.

Virgin Galactic's supersonic space ship in 71,000-ft record smash

pierce
Alien

I'm amazed this has taken so long. I drove to Mojave Spaceport for the launch of the X2 flight, october 2004. nearly 10 years ago. at the time it seemed like they were just a couple years from scaling it up.

btw, the X2 flight reached nearly 112000km (69000 miles). afaik that was the last and highest flight of SpaceShipOne.

Top Microsoft bod: ARM servers right now smell like Intel's (doomed) Itanic

pierce
Boffin

Re: Microsoft change CPUs???

NT was originally developed on MIPS. It has run on MIPS, X86, Alpha, Itanium, and even Sparc although that was never released.

pierce
Paris Hilton

Re: Dinosaur MS

the basic ARM instruction set has been around a long time but there is a lot more to a server than just the instruction set, the total infrastructure for a full blown ARM server is quite new. Windows needs a whole new HAL to support its memory management, DMA, IO bus enumeration, bootstrap sequence.

Data caps be damned, AT&T says providers can pay for mobile broadband

pierce
Big Brother

no, no, you can't pay for firefox or chrome. youtube and google and netflix will have to pay AT&T to let you access them without a data cap.

Ten classic electronic calculators from the 1970s and 1980s

pierce
Coat

how did the HP 65 from 1974 not make this list? it was the gold standard for programmable calculators for years and years.

====> because you needed kinda big pockets.

Coming in 2014: Scary super-soldier exoskeleton suits from the US military

pierce

Shades of the original version of Starship Troopers....

or every Gundam giant robot manga and anime out of Asia, hah.

How the NSA hacks PCs, phones, routers, hard disks 'at speed of light': Spy tech catalog leaks

pierce

and this was their capabilties in 2007, 5 years ago. thats before the utah data center etc have come online with their zetabyte storage (assuming they've sorted out the power problems they were having this summer)

Drawers full of different chargers? The IEC has a one-plug-to-rule-them-all

pierce

Re: USB?

it doesn't. original USB was 2.5 watts, the enhanced USB 'power' version used by ipad's and such is 10 watts. even a superslim ultrabook is about 40 watts.

pierce
Pint

Re: Yet another failure?

really? I've had to replace or repair dozens of those coaxial connectors, all different and proprietary on various laptops over the last 10-15 years.

beer, because a job well done deserves one!

Relax, Obama! Former Microsoft exec tapped to save sick healthcare.gov

pierce
Facepalm

so his first order of the day will be to throw out everything done to date and start over in ASP.NET and MS SQL Server ?

Pirate Bay ties up in Peru

pierce
Pirate

gee, does The Register get a cease and desist order now for pointing to TPB and aiding and abetting in distributing the magic numbers--err--magnet links to said copywronged crap?

Intel puts fledgling internet telly service up for sale

pierce
Holmes

Re: USP?

Badges? We don't need no steekin' badges, man!

CIOs, IT chiefs: ARRGH! What do you MEAN, HR just bought 400 iPads and didn't tell us

pierce

Re: I don't want control

you mean, just like Finance is the gatekeeper of all MONEY in the company ?

sure, go ahead and spend a bunch of unbudgeted money on the support infrastructure for the unplanned toys they bought themselves.

US watchdog snaps on thick gloves to probe Tesla's FIREBALL e-cars

pierce

gasoline, air, heat == fire.

solution?

Possibly EXPLODING or GLORIOUS Comet ISON: The (GIF) MOVIE

pierce

yeah, its amazing what you can 'see' when you amplify noise.

Microsoft advertises Surface, Excel with maths mistake

pierce

just put a quote in front of the text field (your serial number), like '000085545

Google Chrome: Extensions now ONLY from the Company Store

pierce
Black Helicopters

and the google play store has already dropped Adblock+ for android, how long before they block such useful extensions from the desktop browser to?

Microsoft glues Windows 8, Windows Phone programming programs

pierce
Facepalm

they are really trying to kill off Windows for desktop workstations.

gee, apple has a store, google has a store, WE MUST HAVE STORE TOO!

gee, noone wants to USE our store, LETS FORCE THEM IF THEY USE WINDOWS.

gee, noone WANTS TO USE WINDOWS ANYMORE ON THEIR DESKTOP

now what?

Internet Explorer 11 BREAKS Google, Outlook Web Access

pierce

8.1, if its ever forced as opposed to optional, will be the final straw that will move me to Linux desktops full time.

gee, does anyone know of any Adobe Lightroom replacements that worth a darn? I shoot extensively in Canon Raw format, and /need/ lightroom for its ease in managing and easily tweaking large numbers of pictures to get optimal results.

Wanna sell a phone in New York? Better have a receipt

pierce

except that telephone chop shop is a 13 yr old with a laptop and usb cable.

Forget Wi-Fi, boffins get 150Mbps Li-Fi connection from a lightbulb

pierce

I remember HP or someone like that had an IR office network system something like 20 YEARS ago. they had ceiling transponders that looked much like camera domes, and plug in transonders for a variety of computers.

this system was, of course, something slow (I'm remembering 1-2Mbit/sec shared bandwidth), and yes, I think it used IR. line of sight transmission created various problems.

America: Land of the free, still home of the BIGGEST spammers on the planet

pierce

Re: Digital stamps

i host a couple discussion lists with as many as a few 100 subscribers, all non-profit things like attendees of a folk music festival, or members of an astronomy club. if I had to pay for every email, this would become untenable quickly.

Young? Been online five years? Congrats, you are the ELITE MINORITY

pierce

hey, but they can always GOOGLE that boring stuf-__OOOH, LOOK AT THE KITTY!___

Beat this, cloud giants! Musk rocket flings 1TB hard drive into SPAAACE

pierce
Facepalm

and all these numbers assume you're the only concurrent user of this service.

hah.

'Occupy' affiliate claims Intel bakes SECRET 3G radio into vPro CPUs

pierce

Re: From the linked article

cut the blue wire.

Oracle revenues miss expectations – AGAIN

pierce

re: SPARC hardware

the T4 servers aren't M-something. the M-Somethings are the Fujitsu Sparc64 based servers.

people don't buy M series servers to run compilers, believe it or not. they buy them to run large enterprise relational databases with 100s of concurrent transactions

Microsoft no longer a top Linux kernel contributor

pierce

that makes sorting things ugly.

It's about time: Java update includes tool for blocking drive-by exploits

pierce

Re: And this is why we still have Microsoft Java VM's on PC's...

well, duh. java.sun.com is the DEVELOPER site.

www.java.com is the end user site. giant green button to install latest and greatest runtime.

NASA: Humanity has finally reached into INTERSTELLAR SPACE

pierce

oops, 36 years. got ahead of myself.

ok, 85000 years to get to Alpha Cen.

pierce
Boffin

its been flying since 1977, thats what, 45 years? its now 17 light-hours away. the nearest star is about 40000 light-hours away. It might reach Alpha Centauri in 100,000 years.

we are so insignificant.

Nasty nuke-lab data-slurper EVOLVES, now feeds off new Java hole

pierce

yeah, and html5 has no security holes, oh no.

people never write bad python code, oh no.

a client application written in C# will ONLY run on a MS Windows client, and one written in ObjectiveC will only run on a Macintosh. oh yeah, and .NET Framework (C#), gee, which version? Java at least has maintained a fairly high level of forwards compatability.

Silicon Valley slurped millions of NSA cash for PRISM participation

pierce

Re: WAR IS GOOD!!!!!

actually, it never was Air Force. Originally Moffett Field was US Army Air Corp in the 30s, in 1942 it became a Naval Air Station, its now a Moffett Federal Air Field', used by joint civilian-military. NASA Ames Research Center is colocated there, which also dates back to the 1930s as a aeronautical laboratory.