Posts by KrisMac
58 posts • joined Wednesday 21st July 2010 02:07 GMT
The only reason anyone is angry at Bob...
... is that they didn't think of it first....
Re: How old is the star?
And with their more dexterous hands their typing might have been a lot less inclined to random error than mine....
Apologies for typo's in previous post...
Re: How old is the star?
Both the Grandparent and the respondents are kind of right in this argument it seems to me...
Yes it took 4.5 billion years for US to evolve as a technology using specied, but that is primarily down to the random disatsers that overtook, (brought to a dramatic end!) the evolutionary development of the previous series of dominant species that had climbed that far up the slope.
If left to themselves, (as opposed to bing mericlessly crushed back into primordial forms by a hurtling chunk of space rock), who is to say that the first technological speiced to evolve on THIS planet might not have been more closely related to iguana's than humans...
Re: Not just OS X
The BSD calendar made it way into Debian years ago.. and from there it has been carried across most of the major Linux distros, (incuding Ubuntu et. al.) ever since...
"It is impossible to count the blessings I have received over my years at Microsoft," Sinofsky
...is that becasue it is impossible to count the number zero perhaps??
Re: Dumb question time from interested amateur......
..of course the other answer to my own question is that the source is wobbling around, which kind of implies spin on the black hole?
Dumb question time from interested amateur......
Why is the jet non-linear? Every other image of a cosmic jet I have ever seen has been effectively a straight line.. this one appears to wriggle about as it moves outwards from the black hole.
Could it be that the jet is encountering massive resistance a it travels away from its parent causing the leading edge to slow down? I was thinking dark matter, but unless there is a vast amount of the crazy stuff in the immediate vacinity of this specific black hole then that explanation still doesn't satisy the question of why this jet is so different from othersthat have been visualised.
Of course I've just not looked at as many jet images as others around here :-)
Woah!... thats a bit of a shocker...
The downside of course is that no-one will have the heart to tell the patients...
Posted in Microsoft unleashes Windows attack tool
Of course...
...now the malware developers out there can test their latest techniques against Microsoft's very own analysis program to see if they can escape detection... He Who Does Not Get Caught Wins!
Re: partially bollocks
"the companies gaining from the exercise can then use the money to spend on R&D"
Err... No! What part of 'Non Practicing Entity' slipped past your analysis? Patent trolls NEVER conduct R&D, other than researching who their next victim might be...
This is US $29 Billion dollars worth of attempted self defence fighting funds wasted which potentially drew directly from the R&D spend of those companies that WOULD have used the money for that purpose if they had not had to scrape the trolls off their footwear...
Posted in Australia goes cold on ACTA
Great... but still not good enough...
Deferral will be seen by some politicians as meaning "Lets get a new committee together to see if we can sneak it past some other way..."
ACTA needs to be killed stone dead! Deferral does not mean dead and buried...
Tense is everything...
This galaxy is 12.4 billion years away, ergo what we see now happened 12.4 billion years ago... so far so good... now why does elReg inist that the galaxy is 'producing' stars at an incredible rate? Surely it once 'produced' a lot of stars.. once upon a time in a universal location far far away, (from both our and its present location).. and may at this specific instant in time no longer even exist...
Saying this thing is 'producing' anything at all is actually total supposition because we know absolutely nothing about its true current state.
Posted in HTC locked out of Windows 8 tablet party
Cognitive Dissonance at elReg?
el Reg seesm to not even be reading its own re-posts before posting comments like this one..
It doesn't take much of a troll back through the archive to see yesterday's post that said that not even Microsoft believes the Enterprise is interested in Win8: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2012/06/07/win8_enterprise_yesno/
..so what WAS StuxNet if not a 'cyber-attack'?
No point telling us what StuxNet WASN't... setting aside the rights and wrongs of the need for the effort completely - if a deliberate, well planned, well funded, brilliantly coordinated, multi-front assault by one or more sovereign nations against extremely well protected, national security assets of another soveriegn nation does not qualify as a 'cyber-attack' just what the f$%k DOES?
Pray Tell elReg... because this article sure as hell doesn't (paint me extremely dissappointed - the reporting standards are slipping again)
Yay for the f@#$ed up US Patent system..
..way to go United States of F$%^ed UP... you are screwing up your own industries by crushing innovation. good one guys..
Posted in Galaxy is teeming with homeless planets
Well it is 2012 after all..
...the boffins just need to look behind the sun to find the nearest wandering planet that's about to destroy all life as we know it... apparently....
Being on of HP's clients in the AP region..
...I can tell you that their service is nothing short of shit!
I have something in the order of AUD$250,000.oo worth of kit currently on back-order from pre-christmas and all I get from the vendor is a revised backorder ETA on a weekly basis to say how much later it is going to be - never why it is late in the first place.
Unfortunately I am locked into a global contract negotiated by the super-brain drones at our corporate HQ, (in another part of the world where apparently black is white, night is day and HP's shit don't stink), so I can't just tell then to shove their orders and go elsewhere..
Future spacecraft (whether Earthborn or Alien) are unlikely to have ANY standard shape...
As has been written about in numerous books, the most practical means of construction of a large star-faring vessel which does not bleed the home planet of scarce resources is to hook a few engines onto a hollowed out asteroid...
..end result is totally random configuration to account for the variability in shape of the original lump of rock... it could be anything from a flattened disk to an elongated peanut... pure spheres being unlikely unless the original rock was so massive that its internal gravity was strong enough to pull its sides in equally...
ergo - discussion of 'design' is pointless until we get to the point of selecting a rock...
Lots of precipitating salts....
...along with a few bundles of hydrocarbons and a little bit of heat energy and what do we get???
mmm... perhaps not so unpleasant for organics after all if what grows around Earths geothermal vents is anything to go by....
Well Played Sir!
Titus Technophone I tip my hat to you...this has to be one of more successful trolling posts of the morning, based on the frothing and foaming at the mouth it generated.
Well Played Sir indeed!
Phobos-Grunt ?
Are you sure that the name doesn't refer to the space marine in DOOM?
Excuse me but...
...shouldn't the astronomers be thinking things through in the right order?
surely "The gravitational influence of the asteroid will have no detectable effect on Earth" should really be "The gravitational influence of EARTH will have significant and detectable effect THE ASTEROID"...
Ass about backwards thinking is why important factors get missed...
Based purely on statistics...
...some of them are unlikely to have much say in that particular matter...
The Cynic in me says..
...just because they claim to have fired 1000 shots does not mean they have not worn out 1000 railguns in the process...
Politicial Double Speech is alive and well and living in the US Military
Where the fuck is John Carmack??
Without Doom to kick start the whole multi-player experience, none of the more recent development would mean squat...
We would still be in a words of MUDS.. some folks arounde here will be too young to even remember what they were - and they have John Carmack and ID games to thank for not ever having to...
Posted in US decommissions massive Cold War nuke
...President Obama's vision of a world without nuclear weapons...
...has Barack been talking to th Pakistani's lately? I'm not sure that they 100% agree with his perspective...
Looks like globalisation economists need to learn more about the butterfly effect...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
'Can the wind off the wings of a butterfly in the Amazon cause a tornado in Texas?'
Chaos Theory in action.....
"...to all who have been touched in some way by Dennis..."
..this pretty much includes the vast bulk of the present generation of living human beings, (certainly in the developed world)...
The spread of computers into business and their development into effectively personal household appliances may have happend without the release of C andUnix, but I believe that it would almost certainly have been a much slower and much more painful progression. The explosion of development that we saw in the late eighties and ealy nineties might still be waiting in the wings to happen....
Rest well Dennis Ritchie... we all owe you a great deal
..I agree with you up to a point...
The 9 character sequence selection/match process does trivialise the problem, but as a proof of concept of his methodology can be accepted as valid. In order to prove replication of Shakespere, the X number of randomly generated characters must be compared to the original text to determine a match....
What the experimenter now needs to do is increase the number of randomly generated characters to at least match the length of the shortest of Shakespere's sonnets. In that way, the match must be achieved without the jigsaw puzzle approach..
I doubt if the experimenter will be still alive to see his creation actually achieve the more difficult task but, (this being a random universe and all), I am always prepared to be amazed :-)
Posted in BOFH: No, the Fabinocci sequence
...also...
The 3-finger salute is something you traditionally give to a WINDOWS(tm) box not a Linux box which prefers the more graceful 'shutdown -r'...
... although in the PFY's case I suspect he would spend q few enjoyable hours repeatedly running 'shutdown -k' on the accounts server and watching the drones scramble to save their precioussess...
Posted in NASA: Beam me up some power, Scotty
However....
The Light beam is likely to be juiced up while the launch vehicle is relatively close to the source, (on the ground) and extend relatively slowly as the vehicle moves upwards through to the upper atmosphere...
... so the superheating effect will occur over both a longer time period and a longer distance than that of the average lighting bolt. We may experience that effect as a vortex effect causing quite high winds as the heated air funnels up the length of the beam sucking in cooler air below it...
...home made tornadoes anyone? How's that for man made climate change :-)
While I agree with your premise...
... I feel it only right to point out that the 'most patenting company' in this picture is not the fruity one - it is IBM! Big Blue's patent portfolio puts everyone else into the shade.
The thousand or so patents snagged by Google this time around will probably be replaced by the IBM papetnt machine ten times over in the next twelve months.
I will grant you however that the fruity variety do seem more willing to use their bits of paper in more aggressive ways than even the Nazghul can dream up...
...feeding the troll...
Once again the trolls show their ignorance...
The issue is not about the safety of Linux - it is about the stupidity of sys-admins who fail up patch up their boxes... That problem is completely indpendant of OS...
For those interested there is an old post from Information Week on Phalanx here: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/infrastructure/210201115
The inportant factoid to take away is the version of Linux affected by the rootkit.
"Phalanx is a self-injecting kernel rootkit designed for the Linux 2.6 branch that does not use the now-disabled /dev/kmem device,"
To blame Linus as it is today for lazy administratiion that could have prevented this attack years ago is like saying that Windows 2008 Server is completely insecure because someone out there is still running NT4...
Posted in Will the looters 'loose' their benefits?
The problem with your utopia is that...
... there just IS NOT enough wealth in the world to go round....
If you take the estimated amount of currency in the U.S., Asia and Europe, and then round it up to the nearest hundred billion (to account for the fact that a lot of nations don't actually know how much money is in their country), and then turn it all into U.S. dollars, you'll come up with $34,370,000,000,000 dollars. That's $34 trillion. And if you divide that by the number of people on the planet, which is over 6.6 billion, you get $5,203.60. That means there there's only five thousand dollars available for every man, woman and child on the planet!
How comfortable to you believe YOU would be living on a little over $5,000.00 per annum?
Given that most people access their share of the $34 trillion out there via some form of credit, (VISA anyone?), the accumulated interest on the debt comsumes upwards of 20% of their annual 5 grand.. So the world's wealth is quietly dissappearing down a rabbit hole.
The only saving grace to that is the productivity of a very small percentage of the planets surface which continues to generate wealth in the form of minerals and food. Should the supply of new wealth ever begin to drop off, (Peak Oil comes to mind), we are all going to be in pretty bad shape.
The only way EVERYONE can have comfortable lives if is there are fewer of us. So, until people stop having more babies, the concept of EVERYONE living comfortable lives will remain a sad self-delusion that is only affordable to those who ALREADY HAVE comfortable lives.
Posted in LOHAN team buried under ballockets
Well, the doughnut balloon plan kind of has legs, if someone out there can find one,
..how about an inner tube from a large tracter or heavy earthmoving vehicle (such as this: http://www.ausbusiness.net/wp-content/uploads/mining-dump-truck-265x245.jpg).
The upside of one of those, (other than its ability to hold a bit of gas), is that it would already have the necessary valves in place to retain said gas once injected....
Posted in Antimatter close to home
Conspiracy Theorists Unite!! :-)
So this 'South Atlantic Anomaly' doesnt hover ominously near Bermuda then does it? Could anti-particles be zapping planes from the sky???
*joke icon for the humour impaired*
Posted in PLCs a prison vulnerability: researchers
Oh the Irony...
.... America, the country with one of the world's largest prison populations per capita, helped to develop oneof the most virulent computer worms. A worm which has just made security in all those prisons redundant...
I wonder if that potentiality was included in the NSA collateral damage assessment report prior to them giving approval for release of StuxNet into the, (Iranian), wild?
Posted in More on the ‘NBN hack’ that wasn’t
An arrognat prick?
...so he will fit right in with the rest of the 'security' industry when someone inevitably offers him a job then won't he?
Indeed...
"It is the crime that impacts negatively upon communities. ..."
Sound a lot like "Guns dont kill people - people kill people...."
Same self-justification for doing nothing....
Oracle may not have known that the claims were invalid...
... remember that that bought all of these patents as a job-lot when they ate the Sun.... Due diligence only goes so far - they may have had every reason to believe that what they were paying for was valuable stuff, (and Sun certainly wouldnt have been trying to give them the idea that the patents were worthless!)
For Oracle to be seen as criminal, they would have had to have had every patent re-examined prior to the takeover and still gone ahead anyway.
For what it is worth, I personally think they SHOULD have had every patent re-examined prior to the sale - it would have prevented a load of nonsense, but probably decimated what was left of the shareholder value in Sun....
Posted in Bitcoin collapses on malicious trade
So.....
"...first, steal the Bitcoin account, then use a large trade to drive the value down, buy the coins back at the new, lower value, and then try to trade out completely..."
Naked short selling hits the virtual world... I'm surprised its taken this long....
The prattlings of a CFO...
...to an investor meeting have effect on one and only one market - the "share" market. As such it amount to chest thumping and boasting - it will have absolutly no impact on the PC, phone or erver market - or ant other market where real comodities are traded as opposed to the imaginary assets dished out by stocks and bonds traders...
"Bruce" Rogers???
... I say that the time loop has finally closed and we have all come into the Twenty First Century to catch up on good ol' Buck... now posing as semi retired truck driver.
...I bet he was really trying to recover his space-plane-fighter-jet-submarine that someone had rumbled hiding in a dicrete back-yard location...
Surface Detail
I read 'Surface Detail' recently. I didn't think it was the best Culture novel ever, but the concept of the 'Hells' blew me away. One of the best parts of the Culture series is the fact that Bank's vision of interconnected virtual worlds is only a hair beadth away form current reality.
I can easily suspend my disbelief to imagine a world where everyone is 100% integrated into the 'net' - afeter all I watch my kids on Facebook all the time and despite the scary implications they are certainly 'immersed' in what they do....
Anti-Symmetric Keys???
...am I the only one who read that line in the 'Mujahideen Secrets' image as 'Anti-Semitic Keys'?
Or is the whole thing just a late Middle-Eastern April Fools joke.....
yeah but...
... dontcha think that 'iPad' is just a little bit about the underlying tech as well - sorta/kinda/maybe??
And really - who knows what 'cloud' really means anyway?
To me its just a 'back to the future' return to my mainframe days as a student. The 'User Experience' is completely untouched by the tech and what you percieve to be the experience is solely the domain of the delivery mode, (browser, thin client or SaaS service portal)...
Posted in Australians can’t read or count
Mr Disraeli missed one...
probably becasue the wire services were still in their infancy in his day...
".. and wire-service hack journalism..."
The author makes his point extremely well - Press releases that are mindlessly repeated by lazy journo's too stupid to read behind the 'news' are nothing bu sucker-bait
Not Open? Since When did 'Open' mean 'Anarchic'?
Maybe my 20+ years in the IT industry had given me poor eyesight from VDU burnout, but can someone point me to a 'successful' Open Source project that is not under the 'control' of someone?
* Linux == Linus Torvalds (if you don't believe me, just try publishing crap to the kernel).
* Apache == Apache Foundation, (via registered Comitter List)
* GNU == Free Software Foundation, (Richard Stallman et al.)
* OpenOffice == Oracle, (nee SUN)
* LibreOffice == The Document Foundation, (via the Steetring Committee)
I cannot for the life of me see what the difference between Google's approach to project management and the apporaches taken by these other projects is. Nor can I see why a project should be alloed to decend into anarchy, simply because it was originally punted by Google.
This is just Microsoft and their pet media hacks trying to sling mud/FUD...
Nothing new here - move on
Freudian Slip?
"...Dell has to bulk out its networking offering and get base supplication software..."
Yes... If things go on as they are we certainly will be back to worshipping at the temple of Mainframe...
