Posts by Grikath

Re: Crushed nut algorithm

"What on earth is the point of a fixie?"

Weight reduction. The things really are only used in track-cycling by sane people (for a given level of sanity, if you're pursueing that particular sport) .

They're not particularly useful on normal roads, and actually relatively dangerous to use there, given that the fixed gears mean you can't properly bank your bike in turns at speed without running the risk of hitting the ground with your pedals, which is especially unfunny if your feet are also strapped to said pedals. There's a solid reason speedcycling tracks have those heavily banked corners....

Re: Awesome

"Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done and why. Then do it! "

R.A.H. as L.L.

Re: Everyone does it @DougS

Unlike the US , where Racial Theory and it's subsequent Eugenetics "science" was actually conceived and heavily promoted, even up through the 60's, amongst scientists and government, and still holds firm ground in quite a few of the more ....conservative... areas ( be it physical or political) ?

The only difference between Germany and the rest of the "Civilised World", is that they incorporated and formalised the concept with the usual Gründlichkeit into Policy. In the US ( and the British Commonwealth/Colonies) it was already so ingrained into culture it didn't need formalising. It was already in effect in full force, and it got worse in the US after WW II.

Oh , and the basic concept of the concentration camps weren't new either.. The Nazis were quite taken with the efficiency of Dealing With Things in the US, and simply copied the concept of native-american "reservations", and put them through the Gründlichkeit mill.

Re: @AC Because we're ...

Because here in Europe the Look of a Thing either falls under copyright or trademark law, never under patent law... Patents are only for technical innovations over here, not windowdressing like the Rounded Corners.

Re: Plasma Spewing

Don't ever forget that the area just outside the event horizon is still subject to the normal laws of physics.. This means there's a very rapidly spinning ring of very hot plasma right outside that black hole, making for a pretty substantial magnetic field around it. Plasma that enters that bit at the right trajectory will get an almighty whallop and gets shot out at the poles at rather impressive speeds. Same happens at neutron stars, really. the black hole event horizon simply has a higher energy density, so it shoots out stuff even faster.

Re: Huff post has a cracking debunk of lunar conspiracy

There's an even simpler one: If the lunar landings were faked, or even fake-able, the USSR would have done the exact same thing, and probably better, given that they were notorious for their quality in manipulating foto's and skill at propaganda. They had the technology, political environment, and manpower to pull a stunt like that, more than the US.

Yet they didn't bother. Instead they focussed on reliable launch vehicles to put satellites and space stations up (and incidentally ensure their ICBM's would fire, their AA got high enough to intercept...etc.....) , something which they're still making bacon from up to this day.

Here in Holland the laws regarding fencing apply to stolen data. YMMV for other parts of Europe, but this kind of case is generally regarded as "theft/burglary" of non-physical property afaik.

bait...

If she'd walk into a datacenter ( or any security-sensitive outfit for that matter) like that, she'd immedeately be tagged as highly suspicious, and I'd, for one, start looking for what she's supposed to divert attention from, including the shoes. The MaleBait is too obvious, especially if she's unaccompanied, and not acting like Adornment/Secretary (yes... Asia.. different culture.. unknot your panties..).

Call me a suspicious bastard, but if it's Too Good To Be True, etc. And any fool that falls for it would reap the fruits of the shortsightedness of his Other Brain.

Because "you need a .com to be taken seriously as a business" is as yet a valid statement. The fact that .com will be losing its effective business monopoly in the near future does not change the facts as they are here-and-now. And Alphabet, despite its pedigree, still has to play the Game in that respect.

Re: Not Kaspersky

He's Russian.. That means Serious Business is done with Serious Alcohol. It's Tradition.

on: "With over a billion active handsets and more prevalent than windows, don't you think we would be seeing android malware infestations daily, like you do with windows??? Yet I have never ever seen any problem..." @ Planty

Not been paying attention to the world much, have you? There's more than one Dodgy App released per day, and the problems with security/privacy they create feature with distressing regularity in El Reg, and that's only the really serious ones that make the grade here.

The fact that you haven't had a problem with those apps, so far, is irrelevant. Plenty of evidence that there's some serious security problems in Android, as with any OS of sufficient complexity, and plenty of people who have ran across them.

As far as the allegations towards Kasperski are concerned: They simply don't make sense from a business perspective, and however eccentric the Boss himself may be, not from a personal perspective as far as I can see.

Above all: Why were those lads fired to begin with? While it's pretty far out there that Kaspersky himself ordered feeding dead ducks into the system, Russia and Ukraine are nonetheless hotbeds of malware activity, and corruption/organised crime is a serious problem in those countries. It is most definitely not inconceivable that the department the lads were working in was compromised and did send out those dead ducks. And Kaspersky does strike me as the type of guy who will apply the knife liberally , possibly followed by cauterising with red hot iron, in dealing with things like that, regardless of the toes he may be stepping on.

Re: How many "second" Jupiters are there?

Jupiter is a "gas giant", Saturn has Rings. Uranus is good for jokes, and Neptune is just inconvenient because we're running out of monnikers.

Never mind that the planets are of the same type, having more or less the same basic characteristics. In PopScience speak any gas giant is a "Jupiter". If they could spot rings, some of them would be suddenly called "Saturns".

Re: Oh come on..

You're talking banks, right? The sector most likely to have $Stuff running that requires an OS that still talks to the applications running on them, given that a modern OS doesn't support them if they can run them at all.

Re: Facial Recognition?

"Bacon okay, but can the battery stand the strain?"

The slow-burning EE packs do a good job for you there. Any left-over heat can be used to brew a cuppa.

As nasty as the crapware/spyware stuff is, it wouldn't reach the ears of Joe Public, who just goes "cheap laptop, I'll take that one."

And it's not as if Lenovo are the only one including "User Experience Improving" junk on factory installs or driver suites. Compaq , HP and Dell, to name three big players, are just as bad, and put stuff in there that can be just as ...tenacious..

Lenovo has simply taken the game to the next level.

Re: More stuff in LEO, great idea.

Hmyeah... imagine a fair number of string-of-pearls orbits , which, the Earth being a globe and all, would all be intersecting at various points if you want to guarantee coverage.

Something tells me this would go wrong sooner than later.

Re: Sensational historical revelation!

"Plutarch's Lives states: "The first messenger, that gave notice of Lucullus' coming was so far from pleasing Tigranes that, he had his head cut off for his pains; and no man dared to bring further information. Without any intelligence at all, Tigranes sat while war was already blazing around him, giving ear only to those who flattered him." "

Don't lose your head? ;)

Re: Hundreds of people who've never delivered anything.

"that is a bit like saying real Architects, the ones that spent years at uni, should have layed bricks and mixed concrete."

Dunno about outside of the borders of our sub-sealevel estuary, or even the current state of affairs here, but used to be that even Uni-level aspirant-techies used to have mandatory hands-on courses in basic technology, usually in Workshop format, in the hope that at least some of the principles of [technology involved] would stick.

I know for a fact that University of Delft still practises and encourages this, given the stuff they regularly show to the world. ( Solar Challenge, for instance.)

Re: Speaking of Physics at school... @D.A.M.

What's wrong with the European kind?

A slashing blade like a katana ( or officers' sabre for that matter) would do you little good against modern combat armor ( and preciously little against even 13th C european armor, let alone the later periods..).. A Langmesser or backsword would both give you impact and stabbing options, and the styles associated with those weapons would simply be an extension of the current training in knife/bajonet fighting.

Re: Degaussing isn't as instantly effective as you might think..

not really surprising.. the platters sit, as you say, in a thick-walled aluminium Faraday cage...

Re: Japanese banks are going to be so happy !

well yeah.. This is exactly what happens when a bank fails...

Re: Moronic Time cover sets back virtual reality another 12 months @ Boltar

Yeeeess.... now go pull the other one, it's got bells on..

"VR" solutions up until now were either Too Bloody Expensive, took up an entire dedicated room, had terrible resolition/ immersion, or all of the above, and then some.

Even now, taking a set like the Oculus past demo stage and be truly "interactive" in a live environment still takes some pretty high-end hardware that's not within the usual budget of your average Joe.

Re: Email invitation?

For a given value of "13", and what kids are and are not supposed to be up to by then.

On which the general attitude towards "porn" of most parents, but especially the Nanny Brigade may have quite different views than the young people in question you're dealing with.

sort of... I still wonder why the hell the "infotainment system" is connected to the bits that operate the car, other than read-only for display purposes ( if at all..).

I also wonder about that handbrake.. I'm not an expert, but shouldn't that particular bit be entirely mechanical?

Re: Easily solved.

Or, if you're going to spend €€ on a big-ass screen, and you got your media stuff running over "boxes and devices" anyway, you're probably better off shelling out for a [example] 55" monitor instead of a same-size smart TV.

A quick look at the prices tells me that at the median price of a smart-tv in that size, you can have a decent monitor and have enough dosh left over to build a decent gaming rig/media center/[musthave].

Most peeps here are tech-savvy enough to DIY in that respect, innit?

Re: Albedo

Around full moon the light is already strong enough to throw shadows that can be seen. Atleast by those who are not visually impaired and "night-blind".

Re: It's not that bad...

And this, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the best use-case of this product.

If your life is determined by 15 bleedin' minutes of effort and you're still not questioning you're actually Doing Something Wrong, then there's no hope. At all.

Re: TED talk

There's many reasons Monica Lewinsky was vilified, for many different angles. Ultimately, she (and Clinton) commited the ultimate sin in breaking the 13th Commandment.

In the end.. As the saying goes: If you got a man by the balls.. And she, by all accounts, had the President of the United States by his nibbly bits. Incidentally making her, at least for a short while, putatively the most powerful woman on earth.

Re: Nice article... @theOtherJT

It depends, really. When it comes to 9-11 , enough relatively non-biased information is out there to put the blame for that one squarely at interdepartmental infighting and Hubris.

The individual pieces of information about what was going on were there. Them being gathered by old-fashioned legwork, and part coming from non-UK Europe made important people either dismmiss the info, or the bits were, at the moment of "impact", still circulating in the System, waiting for Assessment. So when it comes to the human drama of what happened on that day, you're actually looking at human incompetence. The System has become more important than the Job. That that System (still) incorporates the Fossils from the Cold War era well entrenched into the upper echelons who seem to be unable to live with the fact that the damned thing is over does not help, but those peeps would not allow anything To Touch Sacred US Soil. Too much of their reputation depends on it. In that sense they're the US version of the Brit Nobby Circuit.

And really, if you look carefully at the article, the dissatisfaction about the Rot in the System that caused Snowden to go public is nothing new. The article spans decades of like-frustrated people willing to address the same issue publicly. It's simply that they could not get the exposure the modern internet allows these things since, ultimately, just the past decade. They were limited to print. Snowden had the Internet.

@ AC

That's not a problem unique to the FBI.

You know how it works... Department-in-need states specific qualifications, then it goes up through Management and finally HR, where the need to pee in the pot becomes greater in inverse relation to actual understanding of the subject at hand.

By the time the actual job posting gets out, it's unrecogniseable to the department that's actually requested it.

Re: A page from the USA playbook then?

Aaaaah Simon and Amanfrommars....

Only at El Reg.. ;)

Re: IQotW: "Renewables simply don't cut it for power generation..." @ jeffypoooh

"If Canada didn't export much of the hydro power to the USA, I suspect that Canada could be 100+% hydro."

I doubt that much of the energy exported to the US would be from "Hydro", unless, of course there's some dedicated lines running from where the things mostly are to where they connect to the US grid. A map of where exactly the plants are is most edifying in that respect. The losses in transport would be... significant. I've a feeling most of the actual speedy electrons generated are produced in the set of nuclear stations in the southeast much nearer the US border.

"The post was aimed at the quoted "don't cut it" which is obviously a false claim."

It isn't. It's nice to quote Canada for Hydro, but it would be the same as taking Iceland stating "why don't you use Geothermal then?" : The conditions for building a plant simply aren't met in most places.

And the thing is, to tackle the problem of energy generation and distribution, especially if you want to shift a major amount of required energy to the electrical grid, as you'd need to do if most transportation would switch to electricity, you have to look further than just the places where [renewable energy X] happens to be feasible on a large scale. Because in most other places it simply is not, and as such Does Not Cut It.

Re: pulling it apart.

And not knowing which design decisions were made to get to the actual object(s) of interest, you'd still be none the wiser, other than being able to copy any mistakes they'd have made....

Apple aren't exactly known for automotive and motive power solutions, so they'd have to hire quite a team to be able to pull that one off, and avoid immedeate litigation.