* Posts by Ru

1818 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2007

Ten Windows 8 Ultrabooks

Ru
Meh

No battery life listed?

I'd say that's a pretty important property of a laptop. I ignored a broad swathe of the last generation of 'ultrabooks', because their batteries were only good for a short commute.

screen makes do with a resolution of only 1366 x 768, though on a panel this size that’s arguably all you need or want

No. No no no no no. You do us a disservice by repeating such things. Have we not expressed our dissatisfaction with the state of laptop screens enough by now?

I'm hoping that Google's new Chromebook Pixel will herald a new batch of small laptops with rather more sensible resolutions and aspect ratios. Now if only they'd give us a non-glossy screen and slice a few hundred quid off the price, none of these other offering would get a look in...

Ready for the car 2.0? Nvidia preps UPGRADABLE car system

Ru

Easy peasy. Stop issuing updates for the car firmware. Inform insurance companies. Premiums for people using unsupported vehicles go though the roof. Software obsolescence is dead easy to engineer.

Harassed Oracle employee wins case, cops huge legal bill

Ru
Meh

Re: Good!

I'm a woman and

You very clearly are not.

Shut the CANUCK up! Sony offers $1m to hacked gamers

Ru

Re: £250,000 fine for losing 77 million credit card numbers

Compare and contrast with the $600,000 that this gentleman was fined for a separate incident involving a separate hack where Sony was the main injured party: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/19/lulzsec_sony_hack_sentencing/

Kepler continues exoplanet bonanza

Ru

Re: Moons

Using the current means of detecting exoplanets, I suspect that there's no reasonable way to detect the presence of a moon with a decent degree of certainty. The nature of these small rocky worlds that are rather larger than the Earth isn't 100% certain yet, let alone anything smaller.

Ru

Re: Moore's Law and the Fermi Paradox.

Instead of just being rude could you perhaps set out what you see as being incorrect with the paper?

The major failing is their cherrypicking of data to give them a nice regression line. Their underlying idea remains interesting, but the "evidence" they've presented in support of it is nothing of the sort, sadly.

You could have a read of this, perhaps: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/04/18/graaarh-physicists-biologists/.

Ex-LulzSec bloke to spend a YEAR in the cooler for Sony hack

Ru

Re: $600,000?

our wonderful legal system has created another person who has no reason to work and to live off 'the dole' forever

The key point you're missing there is that the gentleman in question has no incentive to do any legitimate work.

Java 8 release date slips again, now planned for 2014

Ru
Headmaster

"Project Lambda, an effort to add Lisp-like code structures to the Java syntax"

Alonzo Church rather predated the creation of LISP, and I believe he coined the term 'lambda expression'

My compsci history is a little fuzzy, but I think that lexical closures popped up in the 70s, a little while after the creation of LISP, and I believe they were first implemented in some (admittedly obscure) languages first.

Applicants sought for one-way trip to Martian Big Brother house

Ru
WTF?

Re: Reality TV fail

How are they going to balance the intelligent, mentally stable people they'd need for a mission like this

Even if they start out as intelligent and stable, they won't stay that way long once they've been exiled to a caravan on an airless freezing ball of rock with three other human beings as their only company for the rest of their lives.

If there's no plan to retrieve any colonists, they'd better send quite a few more than that at a time.

Study: Most projects on GitHub not open source licensed

Ru

Re: And what's the problem?

I use my github account as a junk pile of sorts... all kinds of litter gets chucked on it without any expectation that it is anything other than fleeting use or interest to me. There's little point wedging license information at the top. There's a lot of this sort of stuff in public repositories, and checking it for licensing isn't really very productive.

If I set out with the intention of making reuseable code, it gets a license header, but more out of habit than anything else. I don't care about pandering to businesses so much... plenty won't care about anything I ever publically release, because"we won't use anything we just find for free, because it might expose us to liability" (thankyou, US software patent law) and plenty more will just thin "we'll use anything we find regardless of license, because no-one will know we're using this stuff and even if they did we're far richer than they are" (thankyou, legal systems across the world).

Movie review: Oblivion

Ru
Paris Hilton

@Jolyon Smith, Re: Slightly off topic

I think you might not be aware that

I don't think that anyone who actually read the article was unaware of that fact.

Most brain science papers are neurotrash: Official

Ru

Re: Don't believe everything you read

Oh? Do you have any evidence of that?

Oh S**T, here comes a robot to take my job

Ru
Terminator

Re: Robot apocalypse? - I think not

Also this: http://xkcd.com/652/

Remember Streetmap? It's suing Google in a UK court

Ru

Re: I remember streetmap...

Streetmap provide pukka OS versions of the maps, whereas Google don't

Bing do that nowadays, if you weren't aware. Even down to Explorer map scale, which is handy.

Google asks Blighty to slave over its Maps for FREE

Ru

Re: UK already has an open map

Apparently they have chatted with the OSM people in the past, and at the time the licensing requirements were a bit of a legal grey area, and certainly something of an inconvenience for big companies.

OSM went through a big license change not so long ago, with the aim of making it (legally) easier to consume their data. Clearly whatever changes were made were not good enough for Google. There are other (much smaller) companies who have used OSM data for commercial purposes... Cloudmade spring to mind, but maybe they're probably less likely to attract negative attention than Google. Who knows.

Shaky liftoff for Sputnik: Dell's Linux lappie runs its own cloud, ish

Ru
Facepalm

Re: What a surprise! Linux is STILL not ready for the desktop!

Or to put it another way: "Dell still not capable of deploying Linux".

Hibernate works fine on my linux-running laptop, desktop and sundry virtual machines. If Dell cannot get an operating system of their choosing working on a machine which they specced, then surely they are to blame... Ubuntu didn't choose Dell's hardware, so why is their underlying platform even remotely relevant in the face of Dell's inability to test or correctly configure their own products?

Ru
Paris Hilton

You would think that using free software would mean a lower price. The same-spec Windows version is £1,079, and the Linux edition is £1,078.80. The

Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but comparing the £899 base price models... the Windows one has a lower spec processor. This suggests that you are getting a better deal from taking the Linux option here. Did I miss some configuration step?

GE shows off tank-tough tech

Ru

Hrm

So the ability to take 40g of force is considerable

I rather suspect that 40 gravities of instantaneous accelleration is relatively easy to achieve with a rigid body impacting a hard surface... if you drop something like a ceramic cup onto a tiled floor, if could conceivably be experiencing well in excess of 100 gravities at the point of impact (because the decelleration time will very short indeed... under a millisecond, and it isn't a very elastic material).

Feel free to point out where I'm wrong here though, I'm not a engineer!

You can trivially test this by getting some old harddrives with known non-operating shock tolerances, and doing some drop tests and seeing if you can still read from em afterwards ;-)

Seoul plans anti-GPS jamming system to thwart NORKS

Ru

Re: Is There Proof Of Nork Nuke At All ?

The last even that was a possible underground nuclear test was somewhere between 6 and 14kt yield... that's an awful lot of conventional explosives, but it isn't totally implausible that somewhere like NK might attempt to fake a nuclear explosion this way.

Normally you get all sorts of interesting fission byproducts lofted into the air after a test... the recent Xenon-133 scare suggested that the Norks had the real thing, but that claim was retracted pretty sharpish.

The Norks can almost certainly produce their own plutonium from spent fuel rods, though they might not be able to do Uranium enrichment themselves. Chances are that they can make a nuclear bomb, but that's not the same as being able to create a useful nuclear weapon (the Tsar Bomba for example, had more in common with a building than a warhead).

NASA-backed fusion engine could cut Mars trip down to 30 days

Ru

Re: Possibility for terrestrial Energy Generation

"Possibly", is the anser to that. Extracting a decent amount of electrical energy from the reaction is likely to prove tricky (see also: thermonuclear weapons and fusion power generators), but if they get it working it should be easier than similar technologies like laser and magnetic liner inertial confinement fusion .

US Navy blasts drones with ship-mounted LASER CANNON

Ru

Until they outfit aircraft with lasers. May take a few years but they will get there.

When they can mount aircraft with a nuclear reactor capable of pumping out megawatts, and a heatsink capable of absorbing that much heat, I'll believe you. But by that point, ocean-going based kit with huge reactors the ocean as a heatsink will be orders of magnitude more powerful again.

Drones bearing big reflectors that let you bounce your battleship's lasers and focus them on targets over the horizon are the likely future of air power.

Ru

Only if there are more lasers than missiles. It only takes one to get through in order to give you a bad day. Most don't even need to be particularly well "guided" in order to tie up the defense sytstems.

To be pedantic: only if you can put more missiles into the air than the laser can disable in the time it takes a missile to travel from the laser's effective horizon to impacting the ship it is mounted upon (which is ~30 seconds for a Mach 3 missile). That's potentially quite a lot of missiles... missiles that are quite expensive and not exactly commonplace (the Chinese and Russians probably have hundreds, but not thousands, and they'll not all be in one place).

China and Russia may well be equipped for such an attack... folk like Iran almost certainly are not, and they'll be the ones most likely to come to blows with the US in the near future.

Ru
Boffin

Re: How about deploying one of these right now

It does not take a lot - a few watts (tens of watts at most) @ 1m range are enough to detach your retina or damage a CCD

It'll take a lot less than that. Tens of watts of reasonably focussed infrared laser shone into your eyeballs will cook them. Permanent damage to eyesight can be done with less than a watt. Lasers capable of pumping out hundreds of kilowatts are incredibly nasty things to be anywhere near at all even if they're not pointed at you.

Ru
Facepalm

Re: Effective Coatings

The sort of stuff you'd make a re-entry heat shield out of would do a splendid job to defending against laser fire. Spinning a missile on its long axis would also work okay, but it does mean that you can no longer use fins to steer.

Thin coatings of highly reflective material would be useless, as they'd be rendered non-reflective in a fairly small fraction of a second. Box reflectors would not remain intact long enough to reflect a destructive amount of energy back at the emitter (though any spectators without laser filtering goggles might not fare so well... see icon).

Anything that uses thermal or laser designation guidance can be blinded trivially, as would any TV-guided devices. Possibly radar guided missiles might work, but I don't know a whole lot about the physical properties of radar transparent materials and whether they can be made usefully laser proof.

Best stuff to use against a target with a practical battlefield laser? Big old-school cannon rounds, or railguns. It'll be weird if battleships come back into fashion, but not implausible. The key word though is practical... most battlefield lasers to date simply aren't powerful enough, and maybe dumb countermeasures will be enough to defend against them in the short term. Maybe. But retrofitting your arsenal with laser shielding is not cheap or straightfoward.

Ahoy! Google asks US gov't to help sink patent 'privateers'

Ru
Trollface

Re: Is there another side?

Does that mean that Apple can shutdown my toaster manufacture just because my toaster looks a little bit like a rectangle with rounded corners?

Does your toaster manufacturer indemnify you against this sort of lawsuit? Because I'm pretty certain that a lot of people produce slices of toast using these devices... slices of toast which look suspiciously like rectangles with rounded corners. Maybe you should fire off a legal nastygram to your baker, pointing out they're exposing you to litigation?

Why I'm hiring the BRAINS and BALLS of CONSERVATIVE 2.0

Ru
Pint

Bong never ceases to be perfectly perceptive and utterly despair inducing.

Time to give up hope and hit the pub, I think.

Gaming's favourite platters get another stir of the pot

Ru
Meh

you including the Blizzard side, of Activision?

I'm getting on a bit these days and can't quite muster up the old youthful vitriol, but I still feel a sense of disappointment with Blizzard. Enormously long development cycles yielding fairly conservative games? That's a bit sad. All that power and money didn't free them up to make new and interesting things as I'd naively hoped. See also: Valve. My pocketmoney is going to kickstarter game projects these days... Big Gaming hasn't done it for me for some years.

EA though, ooh, they still get me riled. They're not quite the Giant Vampire Squid of the entertainment industry, but they certainly aspire to be.

Cisco gobbles UK mobe mast maker - you know where this is going

Ru
Facepalm

Re: A precursor to Computing Teleportation

Are you a markov chain?

Boffins shine new light on dark matter

Ru
Boffin

Re: Confused

So what happens if you put dark matter in water? does it sink?

That's a tricky question to answer, what with it being (presumably) non-baryonic in nature. But, hazarding a guess (not being a physicist of any sort, you understand) I'd say that it would probably sink through anything on account of being unable to interact with it.

Why does our galaxy spiral?

Ru
Pint

Re: Waste of time and money

No, No listen. Just imagine that you’ve got this ebony bath, right? And it’s conical. So what you do, you fill it with fine white sand right? Or sugar, or anything like that. And when it’s full, you pull the plug out and it all just twirls down out of the plug hole.

Whoops! Tiny bug in NetBSD 6.0 code ruins SSH crypto keys

Ru

It is entirely possible to use a hardware RNG as a source of entropy and yet still completely balls up your key generation. Hardware support for encryption and decryption is not the same as hardware key generation, incidentally.

A cursory search turns up a netbsd bugreport from 2006 talking about a driver for an intel hardware RNG. It may be reasonably assumed that the project has hardware RNG support since that time, but I'm entirely too lazy to verify this. Certainly other BSDs and *nixes have supported such devices for some time.

MasterCard stings PayPal with payment fee hike

Ru
Paris Hilton

Re: Coming to a wallet near you...

Goopal? Palgo? Paygle? I'm disappointed in you all.

Poopal is clearly going to be the winner.

Wind farms make you sick … with worry and envy

Ru
Facepalm

Re: Proof of the of the pudding...

"If you like it so much why don't you go live there"

How old are you?

In relation to the good professor's other work, would you only trust a study on the link between smoking and lung cancer by scientists who were on 60 a day and riddled with emphysema?

SCADA honeypots attract swarm of international hackers

Ru
Facepalm

"This is a wake-up call for operators of these infrastructures"

Ha ha! No.

This might be a wake up call if security researchers hadn't been banging the "SCADA connected to the internet is stupid" gong for years. This might be a wakeup call if it weren't for that little Natanz incident involving vulnerable SCADA systems.

Maybe a powerplant going offline or a factory burning down might beconsidered a wake-up call... and even then, what are the chances that job number one will be to allocate blame and cover arses, and fixing the underlying issues will be secondary?

I suspect it'll take aggressive and concerted government intervention with hefty penalties to wake up any of the folk responsible for these systems.

Nvidia, Continuum team up to sling Python at GPU coprocessors

Ru
Paris Hilton

TIOBE is the language popularity list that I see most frequently mentioned: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Python comes in 9th there, with Java and C fairly predictably in the lead. I've no idea how valid its figures are.

New nuke could POWER WORLD UNTIL 2083

Ru

Re: salt plug

All your pipe work is full of solid salt. How do you melt it again?

Most of the salt will have drained into the holding tank. The pipes won't be blocked... rather crusty, perhaps, but they'd have lots of space still.

I am not a nuke engineer, but restarting the reactor doesn't seem like an impossible task. You heat your fuel load up to melting point in a filler tank above the reactor, and heat up the inlet sections of the reactor chamber so the fuel doesn't refreeze. You then let gravity drain the molten fuel into the reactor chamber, where nuclear reactions will keep it warm. It can then flow through the outlet pipes into teh heat exchangers, melting any residue as it goes. You might need to heat up the fuel pump to get it started again, as it would have to be above the heat exchanger and wouldn't have the hottest fuel running through it.

Hell, you could just lag the whole thing in heating elements, if it came to that. I don't doubt that the real system is rather more elegant.

Curiosity succeeds – Mars was wet enough for life!

Ru
Facepalm

Re: same old story ...

"This is merely evidence that our previous theories weren't wrong, therefore it was a stupid boring waste of time"

You don't really understand much about science, do you?

Congratulations, copyright infringers: You are the five per cent

Ru

if someone is going to pay, they will pay, if they can't or don't want to, then they will download or record of the radio...

I'd qualify that statement... "if someone is going to pay, and someone is willing to sell them what they want, they will pay".

Of all the film, TV, literature and music produced in, say, the last 25 years... how much of it is legally available for download in a high quality, DRM-unencumbered format? Now compare that with the proportion of that same content which is freely available as a high quality and free illegal download, or even the amount that can be purchased from some dubious Russian site.

Ru
Devil

Re: The customer defines value

HBO... are trying a different tack. Rather than attack the pirates, they seem to be interested in offering a better service (specifically for "Game of Thrones", the most infringed TV series last year).

Oh? I'm reminded of this: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

BRITAIN MUST DECLARE WAR on Cervinaean menace

Ru

Re: And can I pop in a vote

You really don't want wild boar

Yeah, they're nasty pieces of work. An angry boar can do you a fair bit of damage... deer are generally a little less aggressive.

Ru

all these wild animals "Destroying it".

Given that the deer have no natural predators, and some of the deer species in the UK are invasive, what do you propose to do about them? There's nothing particularly natural about their current abundance, and large numbers of deer are indeed destructive.

Military-industrial patent troll demands BEEELLIONS from Cisco

Ru
Meh

"inventor of key VPN technologies"

Are any of the words in that phrase actually true in this case?

Belgian boffins find colossal meteorite

Ru

Re: Why...

There's also the slight benefit that there are very, very few people searching the area, those that are searching are scientists, and there's no local laws prohibiting them from taking any they find.

Hey, media barons: The noughties called, they want their mobile tech back

Ru

Re: And so?

Sure bad advertising is annoying. But so long as it's not intrusive - there's no harm in companies being allowed to get their message across.

Advertising and marketing are necessary because there are few things that are legal to purchase that sell themselves. But the sheer magnitude of the shite in online advertising beggars belief... pop-ups, pop-unders, irritating animations, even more irritating sounds, unskippable landing pages, deeply intrusive and hard to remove tracking systems and overwhelmingly incompetent "targetted" advertising campaigns combine to produce a fair bit of negative feeling.

The problem is that the advertisers are largely crap at what they do, and their solution to this is to trick or force you into eyeballing their work. Good luck with that, guys; I guess its easier than being any good at your jobs.

More importantly, our current web model requires that advertising works, or it's not going to be sustainable

Is this really such a bad thing? People can't really sell content anymore; everything is expected to be free and bespattered with ads. For all the reasons listed above I generally use adblock/noscript/ghostery and ultimately this is harming the current income stream of many websites I find useful or entertaining, but few of them provide an alternate means for me to subscribe, or reasons for me to do so. Not my fault, is it?

SimCity 2000

Ru
Meh

Given the less than impressive state of the last couple of Sim Cities, I'll certainly not be buying the latest unseen. EA are still the masters of sucking the life out of a creative dev team and then reanimating the corpse of the franchise to shamble through another few releases to wring the last few pennies out of it.

Ru
Flame

Re: Microwave power! Not entirely fiction

I liked the way that the microwave power disaster was simply called "Oops".

Ten smartphones with tablet ambitions...

Ru

Re: Magic Touch tech which means you can fondle your slab while wearing gloves

Have you tried running a few loops of conductive thread through the tips of the fingers on your gloves?

Ru

Funny thing, fashion

I picked up my Dell Streak 5 dead cheap cos the idea of a phone that big or a tablet that small was frankly laughable at the time. Shame it was so difficult to upgrade the OS, mind you...

Ruby 2.0.0 adds syntax sparkle, boosts performance

Ru

I suspect that a lot of the bad feeling that Ruby accrued over the last few years was down to the sudden massive popularity of Rails with the cool kids and their tech startups and the subsequent very messy divorce as the language's shortcomings became apparent.

Take a look at the other implementations of the language like JRuby or Rubinius you'll find that Ruby is performing pretty well these days.