The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

* Posts by Herbert Meyer

79 posts • joined Thursday 31st May 2007 12:13 GMT

Page:

Herbert Meyer
Devil

tools of the Antichrist

If Morgan Stanley is handling their IPO, they are certainly in league with Satan.

Herbert Meyer

Re: Why not just rent the proper Cape Canaveral?

Nasty cynic that I am, I am gonna guess that State of Texas offered a whole big pile of tax incentives, subsidies, and just plain bribes for this facility.

Herbert Meyer
WTF?

Middle class to Mars ?

Their days on Earth are certainly numbered.

Herbert Meyer

Re: still quite impressive

Best data I heard of was the Sandleuk supernova, Kakamonde detected neutrinos within seconds ? of light flash, over about 100 million light years ? A while ago, knowledge decay.

Herbert Meyer
Devil

Re: So

Depends on how tightly you wrap the cable around their necks.

Herbert Meyer

Russian Booster ?

Well, not likely. North to South track means polar orbit. Few satellites go for polar orbits, very energy expensive. But useful for observation, good ground coverage.

Herbert Meyer
Devil

Re: Isn't 1024 x 768 good enough for them?

Who cares ? I have had develper's preview running on a 1024x600 netbook with a touch screen since last fall, using strictly the desktop interface. It's still there, if you know where to look. The start menu may be gone from the lower left, but all the start menu shortcuts are in the usual place in the file system. Same for control panel. Just put some desktop shortcuts to 'em, and F microsoft.

Herbert Meyer
Flame

a quotation

"The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread ." - John Milton

Herbert Meyer
Stop

4 years my *, how about 60 years

The difference in volume has been obvious since the beginnings of TV broadcasting. I could find old cartoons from Mad and the New Yorker and other US mags, dated from the 50's, observing the phenomena.

Herbert Meyer
Happy

Thats too easy

They are all LYING ! Every word is a lie, evasion, or misdirection.

Thank you, I feel much better now. Time for my medication, NURSE ! NURSE !

Herbert Meyer
Stop

Fermi's joke

Neutrinos are an explanation of the violation of conservation of energy in Beta Decay, made up by Fermi, in the 1930's as a joke. Their existence was not demonstrated until the 1950's, in observations at Nuclear Reactors. Almost every experiment involving neutrinos, like the Solar Neutrino observations, has produced puzzling results.This joke has gone on long enough, we do not understand neutrinos.

Herbert Meyer
FAIL

citing Heinlein, Asimov already cited.

Heinlein thought low orbit was the best place for fission power plants. But then "Blowups Happen".

Herbert Meyer
Facepalm

for foot injuries

I have XFCE installed for the inFrequent occasions when I shoot off my foot, trying to "Improve" the gnome or unity desktop. Until recently, wifi required a graphical desktop to start, so I would have to find the ethernet cable to run a command line when I had improved the system too much.

Herbert Meyer
Mushroom

better yet...

Where are the handholds for Major Kong ?

Herbert Meyer
Pint

It's on the Rio Grande

And the imagery may have been shot the week after a rainstorm.

Herbert Meyer
Boffin

Sorry, wrong hemispere

New Mex is in the Northern Hemisphre.

Herbert Meyer
Mushroom

WTF

Having driven through the array, on US60 west from Socorro, NM, the best name is "WTF is That ?" No, we knew it was there, but were unprepared for the scale of the thing. Then we got directed off the road by a NM State trooper, to make way for a portable building being moved.

The thing is between a long stretch of NOTHING, the array, then MORE NOTHING. You should drive it someday. It is just west of the Trinity site. After visiting, you understand why they blew it off out there, it is nowhere.

Herbert Meyer
Happy

title for Hydro-Despot

Perhaps Pharaoh ?

Herbert Meyer
Holmes

up the supply chain

This, and the reports of "Apple Stores" in China, leads me to suspect the manufacturers are running the production lines overtime, and shipping production to somebody other than Apple. One of the hazards of outsourced manufacturing.

Herbert Meyer
Pirate

If you don't know

And if you don't know how to root it, they will sell you a howto book, published by O'Reilly. And a couple of books on Android development, a book on java programming, one on python, maybe a tune or two to listen to while you read....

Herbert Meyer
Boffin

as expensive as good beer

No, liquid nitrogen is not expensive. I suspect that having done this once, AMD will redesign with a closed loop cooler, and do it repeatably (a bit slower). Anybody (engineers please) know how to build a liquid nitrogen heat pipe ?

Herbert Meyer
FAIL

cynicism

Fusion power has been 10-15 years away for almost 60 years now.

Herbert Meyer
Black Helicopters

but no tanks

Well, not as many tanks, The armor school and the Patton Museum were moved to Georgia.

Herbert Meyer
Happy

you forgot Amiga

Maybe there will be a Commodore phone someday.

I actually have an Intel classmate netbook, and I hunted down a MeeGo image for it, copied it to a USB drive, booted it, and then said "Why ? I already have Ubuntu on this thing, I need another linux like I need a spare..."

Herbert Meyer
Pirate

Ruins of Halo

The previous ruin left behind by this looter was Halo, head quartered in Niles,Illinois. From some very non-descript industrial park buildings, they custom-built a 14 story building on Toughy Ave. The building was completed just before the collapse, and included a tubular sculpture that sang in the wind, annoying the neighbours no end. The building is now ? was ? occupied by Shure corporation, an audio manufacturer. It is down the street from another legacy from a corporate looter named Ilg, a 1/2 scale copy of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Herbert Meyer

Not mean...

Maybe a bit stupid. Perhaps targeting people with jobs and money would be a better strategy. Maybe "Peggy" on the Capital One commercials is behind this one.

Herbert Meyer
Flame

an app

Since Apple users are sheep, they would be happier when they are surrounded by other sheep. So my app idea is a Location Coolness score, by the local density of Sheep (other Apple users). This data makes the job pretty easy.

So a Lady GaGa concert would be a really Cool place, and shopping for tires at WalMart Not Cool at all.

Herbert Meyer
Stop

second system effect

Confounding any performance comparisons is the "second system effect" - recoding ANYTHING, even in the same implementation, will boost performance. Compare the C++ implementation with a second PHP done on the other side of a "Chinese Wall" ? After dropping the "rarely used features" ?

Herbert Meyer
Thumb Up

DIY

Do It Yerself: Get a new disk and an OEM retail copy of Win7, back up your data (if you can figure out where it lives). New disks are cheap, OEM Win7 cost about $110.

This option comes without useless MS tech support. You already know more than they do, guaranteed.

Herbert Meyer
Grenade

Hammer and Pliers

I read something last week about some hedge fund crooks erasing flash drives with hammers and pliers. Perhaps I can find my old UV eprom eraser, once I get the opaque cases off. Moving up the spectrum, an unhealthy dose of X or Gamma will work without removing the cases.

Herbert Meyer
Linux

the difference is...

Between Jobs and Shuttleworth, the difference is, if I don't like Steve Jobs handiwork, I cannot walk further in the Mall, and get one at the other Apple store. If I don't like Mark Shuttleworth, I just walk a bit farther, to the Fedora store, or back up to the Debian workshop, or whatever.

Right now, Mark's problem is that Unity and Wayland don't quite work yet. I am running Narwhal on a touchscreen netbook, and I am using the xfce desktop most of the time.

Herbert Meyer

penguins don't catch cold either

But I have to:

1) Have a copy of clamav on linux to check and scrub any files I give to or get from windows victims.

2) Same on bootable linux usb for scrubbing infected windows systems

3) MSE on the dual booted systems that I run windows on for my own purposes

I share the general tech consensus that MSE is as good as anything, better than most, but any monoculture is dangerous. But windows itself is a monoculture.

MSE is a damn sight better than the 90's MS Anti-Virus product.

Herbert Meyer
Boffin

err...

Can I enter "file:///" in the browser's locator line ? Does it have a locator line ? Perhaps even "smb://" ?

I know, technical solution to a political problem.

Personally, I have an Apache in the basement at home. Use it as a media server and remote disk.

Herbert Meyer

harry turtledove said...

"Down in the Bottomlands". Harry said it what is now the Mediterranean Sea.

And someone else said the Black Sea.

Same idea, different place on the map.

Herbert Meyer
FAIL

privacy by design ?

privacy by design == security by design ?

security by design => privacy by design ?

privacy by design => security by design ?

Are these the same ? Or one implies the other ? They are clearly related. Security will be required to prevent "unscrupulous" webSlime from circumventing any regulatory or technical mechanisms.

And since security by design has not been, or ever will be, achieved, privacy is unlikely.

And how long has it been since anything on the web was scrupulous ?

Herbert Meyer
Alert

what have they done so far ?

There is a lot more to how this gadget functions than the communications protocol between small box and big box.

SOMETHING rather high level in the big box is tracking motion of the image, and turning it into commands.

That will take a while to RE.

Perhaps we should read some of MS' tech pubs for clues ?

Herbert Meyer

anybody else remember ?

Back in the 80's or early 90's there were reports in the trade press about booby trapped printers, that were aimed at Vax minis. Supposed target was Saddam's electromagnetic enrichment plant.

Herbert Meyer
Coffee/keyboard

maybe he was watching the road...

Perhaps he had the nose camera piped to the laptop screen. Probably not, though.

Anybody else see the irony that the cop who pulled him also has a laptop mounted on his dash, to check plate numbers and driver warrants (at least they do in the states).

Herbert Meyer
WTF?

did nothing ?

The guy who did it is sentenced to 10 years in prison for it. That's the headline for the article. He is going up for hacking their computers, not being an idiot. The idiot part is what makes the story interesting. If you send up people for stealing credit card numbers, this guy should go up for his crimes.

Wadda want, send him to each and every victim's computer to scrub it ?

Herbert Meyer
Boffin

who deserves the credit ?

For hyperbolic geometry ? Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky ! and a song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQHaGhC7C2E

Herbert Meyer
Happy

nice picture

A link to a higher res version ?

Herbert Meyer
Thumb Up

more powerful than ,,,

And uses a damn sight less power. Seymour's patents were for the heat pipes on the circuit boards to prevent the beast from melting. And perhaps the robot that did the 60 miles of wirewrap on the backplane.

Now, can we argue about the quality of the Fortran compilers available for modern PC ? Never mind the old beast's pipelined vector architecture, what the new guys do not have, Just superscalar multiple execution.

Herbert Meyer
Troll

too much carbon

Geothermal, maybe in Iceland.

Herbert Meyer
Boffin

does it have a 400 Hz motor-generator as well as water cooling ?

Then it would be like an old 370. If the front panel has the dial-in knobs to set IPL unit address, it is the old 370. Not a faster computer, they just re-defined the flop.

Herbert Meyer

Senator Rosewater sez

The difference between art and porn is pubic hair. Of course, that was a while ago, before shaving became fashionable.

Senator Rosewater was a character of Kurt Vonnegut, loosely based on one of Dan Quale's relatives, an uncle, perhaps.

Herbert Meyer
FAIL

Properly disposed of ?

Buried at a crossroads with a stake thru its heart ?

Mouth filled with salt, sewed shut, face down ?

Encased in high density concrete, buried in a lined pit ?

Glassified, in a secure cave in a geologically quiet area ?

Dropped thru the event horizon of a black hole ?

Probably not, the Vista zombie robot will continue to clank across the landscape for decades. I can still find WindowsME systems. Stinky, stinky software.

Herbert Meyer
FAIL

service pack == new version ?

and bug == feature.

MS software engineering standards ?

Herbert Meyer
Go

launched aircraft will be pilotless

Already, the limiting factor on acceleration of steam catapults is pilot g's. The limit is about 6g, the pilots have to recover from greyout within a few seconds to fly the plane before it hits the sea. No pilot aboard, higher acceleration.

Herbert Meyer
Boffin

@hugo

"Point is there is no commonly used IO device that lets you present ASCII to a human in under 100,000 instructions."

Ascii ? I doubt it - Ebcdic more likely. I will check my chronology, although IBM invented them both, I think Ebcdic came first. And the instruction set had several packed to zone conversions, at least in 360.

Herbert Meyer
Linux

works for me

I had been running the karmic beta on a dell 5150 laptop for two months, since I could not install fedora on it without 3 days of grief - anaconda does not like any hardware I own, I have to build a system alacarte.

Karmic ran so well, Friday I decided to re-install the WinXP system that stinks up 1/3 of the disk on laptop. It was suffering from bitRot and maggoty performance. I need windows to run a few applications, like TI education software, and some other backwards vendor's stuff.

I had a built in problem with a hole in the disk partitioning, anaconda had shrunk a fat partition without a good reason or permission, I had put a filler in between this and the linux partition. I removed the filler by booting from the karmic CD, and prepared to deal with grub's confusion about re-numbered partitions, and found out karmic uses grub2. At 1am Saturday.

After a bit of research on another computer, I found how to boot from grub2 by hand (it's not hard, just different), got the karmic back up, and went to bed.

Saturday morning, for practice, I ran grub-install and update-grub to make the fix "permanent". I knew I would have to do this again after installing windows stomped on the master boot record.

After spending Sat. morning on it, I had a fresh non-maggoty WinXP system, and the karmic dual booted.

Two questions:

1) why bother ? I use windows so little, I have not installed many apps on it.

2) what is wrong with fedora's anaconda ? I have been having a horrible time with it since June. All of my attempts are on dell hardware. If I suffer thru the botched installs, fedora works as well as usual.

Page: