Posts by PC Paul
107 posts • joined Monday 13th August 2007 11:58 GMT
Re: Reboot required
I'm sure I remember my Solaris and HP Unix machines reopening my windows when I restarted back in the 1990s. When did they all stop doing it? Was it just because Windows didn't do it, so everyone else stopped bothering?
Or has my failing memory failed again?
I like Waze
Interesting...
I like Waze, it has worked better than most other satnavs I've tried, with the added bonus of being able to fix any local errors yourself.
They've gone to considerable lengths to avoid problems with people copying in details from any other mapping suppliers, so having free and official access to the Google maps and aerial photos should help quite a lot. Searching for places should hopefully improve as well - at the moment I believe it uses Bing and it's a bit hit and miss!
I hope they use a light touch to keep the social aspects going, which are a major differentiator for Waze - although the recent Facebook integration stuff (e.g. 'take me to <facebook event>') will presumably slow down a bit now ;-)
Re: Wonder where
Err.. doesn't this just show that Virgin have so much capacity they can sell Sky several 10's of GBs while still carrying on business as usual?
Virgin is still Virgin - it's anti-Virgin Sky-ites who are now going to be using Virgin wires whether they like it or not.
Re: Kaaaarrrlllll!!
> Why not NUKE those derelicts to smithereens? There are tons of as-yet-unused Pu lying around!!
...because that as-yet unused weapons grade Pu is perfect to feed the next generation of long-life maintenance-free Thorium cycle reactors - which over their thirty year life will also turn it into much nicer stuff to handle, and also reduce the need to actually handle it at all!
On the other hand, really big bangs are awesome!
Re: Oh no!
> I love getting regular updates via the "exoplanet" iPhone app:
Well, if it just started sending out fake updates every so often, would it really make any _practical_ difference?
Nobody who is alive now or for the foreseeable future has any chance of ever getting there, and the only proof we have that these planets even exist is readings from Kepler.
Cold start time setting?
So after the lithium battery runs down and it loses the current time/date, how does it get reset to sufficient accuracy?
NTP over Bluetooth wouldn't cut it to get sub-microsecond precision so presumably you need a calibrated, rack mounted and UPS protected atomic clock it can connect up to and resync?
Re: An alternative is to tell fishermen to ...
"the fishermen being fishermen and not technicians, could tell the differnce btween old-style copper cables and the new fibre-optics"
COULDN'T tell the difference. COULD NOT.
The NOT is important. It changes what you're saying from being "right" to being "wrong".
It all started with 'couldn't care less' being replaced with 'could care less' which at least has a slight justification, but has spread to many places where it's just WRONG. Stop it.
#maybeALittleLessCoffeeWouldHelp
Posted in Review: Sony Xperia Z
Re: Should be nice and hackable...
Samsung have generally not been all that helpful to the community, except for specific PR friendly moments making promises that then turn out not to be fulfilled.
It's got to the point where, for instance, the primary maintainers of things like Cyanogenmod have abandoned Samsung devices altogether: http://codeworkx.de/wordpress
I have an i9300 (International S3) myself and run Slimbean on it which works pretty well, but there isn't a stable CyanogenMod 10 (Jellybean) release for it and it doesn't look like there ever will be.
Re: The fault is that caller ID is useless
To all those companies who withhold caller ID - why not set it instead to a central number which has at the very least a recorded message stating who the call was from? Ideally it would be a switchboard staffed by clueful people, but you can't have everything.
Not to mention people like 3 who text you a voicemail notification where the caller ID isn't the right number to call to collect the said voicemail, but is in fact unobtainable? - what idiot thought of that one!
Posted in Review: Sony Xperia Z
Should be nice and hackable...
It look like this will be a very good choice for those of us who like to root their phones...
Sony (yes, Sony!) are actually pretty good to the Android community, making it easy to get into and hack the phones, and supplying lots of good information. Unlike certain others, including Samsung who are really missing a trick.
Having a Qualcomm CPU goes along with that, Qualcomm are also very pro-hacking, whereas the International version of the S3 has an Exynos CPU which is not well documented.
After Sonys chequered (solid black?) past in these things it's very good to see them being more open.
Re: Faraday cage
"All that are caught become instantly PNG in the UK"
i.e. images of them were all that were left...
Re: Setting default apps
"Is there any way to set a 'default action' in Android?"
I was confused by this for a while. Every time I clicked the 'Always use' choice I got a popup telling me to clear default associations in some other menu. And next time I needed a browser it would give me the same choice, so it didn't seem to be working.
I think (ICBW) that you get the choice for every new file type - so .htm, .html, .php etc. all get the choice popup the first time you see them, although because it doesn't say what it's asking about you don't see that, it just seems to be asking every time.
I've taken to picking the same browser always and over a week or so it does seem to be setting them for most variants and I'm getting asked less.
It's a pity browsers don't come with a decent set already configured, or offer to take over a group of associations like IrfanView does for images instead of having to pick them one at a time...
I've known quite a few rocket scientists. It's not that hard...
Research mathematicians, on the other hand! Wow! Brilliant, brilliant minds, able to leap huge gaps of intuition in a single bound.
Couldn't tie a shoelace and had less than zero common sense, though.
I also got told off for speeding up his hacked about Matlab so it took three seconds instead of twenty minutes per run. Apparently that was his 'thinking time' and he missed it...
Re: Fixing the wrong problem
ISTR Mercedes started using thumbprint recognition security on their high end cars. In the first attempted carjacking it saved the car but did lead to the owner having his thumb macheted off.
Didn't really catch on after that... there's a limit to how far you should go to protect 'stuff'.
Re: microwave down a tube
Yes - it's called a waveguide.
But they don't like bending, or being strung across everybodies heads like a microwave beam would be.
Also, in a tube the EM wave only travels at what's called the Group Velocity which might only be 60% of the free-air velocity, making it all pointless anyway.
Posted in Review: Britain's 4G smartphones
4G scanning
Surely these days it wouldn't be hard for the operators to keep an occasionally updated database of 4G locations/cell towers on the device, so they don't waste battery power scanning for non-existent 4G signals?
Re: The best cup
"I have still to track down the exact method to make this infrequently occurring cup of awesome."
Exactly the same here. On the first day at a new job I dutifully took my place on the office Tea Roster and made a cup for everyone. Every cup was universally acclaimed as 'awesome' (including by me) and they tried to get me to make it every time.
But it was never like that again. Never.
I have no idea what changed.
Re: My hairs stand on end
"almost budget-neutral in the long run"
Surprisingly for super-cynical (realistic?) me, I read that more as that the projected growth due to better connectivity was projected to make up for the costs of doing it in the first place.
Re: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
When some yobbo decided to slash the tyres on a number of cars including mine on a city centre street at 9pm, the CCTV spotted him and his mates and they were being arrested as I returned to the car a few minutes later. So CCTV worked well there.
Not so much the 'Justice System' where he got sentenced to a couple of weeks doing "hard time with TV and burgers". I was told it wan't worth trying to get any recompense for my nearly-new tyres as he would at best be told to pay it back at 20p a week forever and in the process would probably be told my name and address...
Re: Whatever.
Some people seem to get upset about _other _people_ using their own gadgets anywhere near them. This seems more like a 'come and hide from them with us' rather than a 'you're hopelessly addicted, let us remove the choice from you'.
Now if they wanted to put up jammers in cinemas, that would be just fine with me... or snipers for particularly annoying cases.
Re: someone please tell me
IIRC in the US a 'Design Patent' is what most of the rest of the world calls a 'trademark'.
Doesn't make all the other patentfoolery that goes on over there any better, but 'Design Patents' aren't really part of the Patent problem.
No, it's all about reputation and expectation.
What I think the general public have got from prress coverage of all this is that Apple are spending all their time trying to block other people by 'patenting rectangles' rather than developing new shiny stuff, and that Samsung stuff is pretty much as good as Apple but a lot cheaper.
Neither of which bodes well for Apple.
"Didn't the Hodge family's company pay 0.01% tax last year on £2bn revenue?"
Did you read that in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph? Either way it's wrong and the Telegraph admitted it.
http://www.taxjournal.com/tj/articles/telegraph-apologises-margaret-hodge-over-stemcor%E2%80%99s-tax-affairs-13122012
Posted in Belkin buys Linksys from Cisco
Re: I avoid Belkin like the plague
In my experience over many years and many products, Belkin cables are good, but anything electronic is not so good.
I'd buy the cables any day (if I can find a good price...) but the routers/APs/kvms? Never.
So the question is will mixing in Linksys bring Belkin up or drag Linksys down (more)?
Re: Psychologists as a measure of normal?
"Explain how you will use your knowledge of integration by parts to get the GCSE results up."
I can prove by induction that if the results were bad last year, and the results are bad this year, then the results are unlikely to be any better next year or for many years afterwards...
Re: Get a Group going
Been there started that...
In the village I used to live I seriously looked into it - bank finance arranged, business plans sorted, publicity ready, customers waiting, then out of the blue BT decided 'oh yes, we WILL upgrade your exchange even though it's down as 'not for the foreseeable future' in all our published roadmaps'.
As I understand it they pulled the rug out from under a lot of rural providers that way, they just used them to drum up and prove the demand then jumped in and obliterated them.
Luckily I didn't get far enough to end up massively in debt.
Re: The Accusation of Theft
"You can't call someone a thief if you have no evidence that it's true."
So talking hypothetically, if you KNOW they took something but didn't happen to get video and independent witnesses, then you aren't allowed to say anything?
It's surprising so many cases ever get to court really...
Re: Tried Ubuntu some time ago, and dumped it
Well, I'd never heard of Mageia (and I don't only read The Reg) so I went and had a look...
It's what Mandriva turned into, and it seems fairly... immature? It does look interesting, but the website seems more concerned with telling you how community spirited and international it is rather than why I might want to actually use it.
As for Distrowatch, what that ranking actually means is... how many times people looked it up on DistroWatch! So to me that says a lot of people are saying 'what the hell is Mageia?', which bodes well for the future, but hardly means it has a top three in terms of installed systems.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with it, but I haven't seen any reason to switch to it rather than say Debian yet.
Re: Count me in
IIRC quantum teleportation has also been done over 140km+ of free space now. But that's a different part of the overall system, you wouldn't want to research everything at once. That's why they used the fibre - although how they can know that the entanglement effect is travelling 150m through the fibre rather than 0.5m across the desk is a tricky question.
We know how to warm things up by rubbing sticks together, but in the chemistry lab we still use Bunsen burners...
It still isn't _actual_ teleportation though. Boo.
Good old in-your-face book
Facebook have an interesting approach to business... build up (or buy) a large user base of people who use the service because it offers some useful features for free, then change things until they all leave.
One of the biggest draws for this sort of service is the fact so many other people use it. As soon as you start driving them away you're on a very slippery slope, relying on user inertia to keep you as a going concern.
It's like when a research-heavy company starts going all bureaucratic after a merger or privatisation. The brightest and best are also the first to notice and the most mobile, so they leave. The company lumbers along for a while longer, but fundamentally what made it great has gone and can't be easily regained.
No you don't. You have many hydrodynamic generators feeding The One True Grid through grid-tied inverters and other frequency locking mechanisms.
The only way you'd have different frequency variations is if those were on their own completely isolated distribution system. That might be the case on some of the islands but the mainland is all connected (as far as I know).
Re: Ummm... this is a MODELED finding?
"1) Does it also assume natural gas prices will drop by 50% by 2030? This is certainly likely due to the fracking revolution, but I would guess the study authors didn't include that assumption."
The last thing I saw for fracking said it would last 15 to maybe 60 years for the UK. What then? Is it just me that sees that as just enough time to get a decent non-fossil fuel based system in place rather than "hey, cheap fuel for everyone, let's party!"?
Re: I can claim the fist phishing then?
"If someone didn't use a password or left the console unattended we'd create the files '*' and '-rf' in the home directory."
It's always fun to create a file called 'readme.txt' containing 'readme.txt: File not found'
I've watched people puzzle over that for ages...
Isn't this very like the DMCA?
I know the reasoning behind it is different but this operates like the DMCA. The main thing to learn from that experience is to have a strong penalty for fake or malicious takedown.
Re: Wireless keyboard, trackball and a good desk-chair combination...
I tried a trackball, and loved it.
But within a few days I started to get a tingling feeling at the base of my thumb whenever I used it. I took that as a warning about RSI/Tendonitis and went back to a mouse. No problems since, but I still get the tingle whenever I try that trackball again.
I guess I'm of the generation just before texting came in, so I didn't grow up typing with my thumbs...
Re: Dark matter
>> We cannot explain it.
> We cannot "explain" basic QM either.
We can't explain magnets.
Re: Is the existing laws are so wonderful
If you read the various Police blogs, you'll see they are as frustrated with the sentences handed down, even if the CPS can be bothered to prosecute.
There's a lot of a detachment growing between what the Public expect to happen about various criminal actions and what actually happens.
Posted in LOHAN's mighty orb launch live NOW
Re: Beer From Me Too!
I've heard it said that any experiment that does exactly what you expected it to was a failure, because you learned nothing.
Sounds like an excuse to me... but you can never have enough excuses up your sleeve!
Posted in LOHAN's mighty orb launch live NOW
Re: Splash!
But they've hired a boat to try and find it...
We'll just have to wait and see if the tracker is salt water proof!
Re: Warning on Iridium...
...or maybe add a tinfoil 'hat' in suitable places?
I'm also curious whether there are similar plans to test fly the 3-D printed airframe as well, to get it trimmed out and make sure it does actually hold together structurally and fly, both rocket powered and gliding.
I saw that as the major failing of the PARIS experiment. This one is so much better organised it would be a shame not to put that bit right...
Update?
If I read it right, YouView have now been in touch to say the whole story is a load of sloblocks and never happened?
So what's the true story?
Re: Just to complicate things .... radioactive decay ?
> Isn't there an experiment somewhere, where a mass becomes lighter over time, as it decays ?
Do you mean this one?
http://smp.uq.edu.au/content/pitch-drop-experiment
Feels like a benevolent dictatorship to me...
Do people really think that's a rant? Looks like just saying what he thinks to me.
A 'benevolent dictator' doesn't mean someone who's nice to everybody. It means someone who does things for the good of the project. The Kernel has a long and complicated history with lots of debate around it, but there is still just the one kernel. Any other project of similar age and complexity has forked at least once by now.
Maybe he doesn't go out of his way to be nice to people. And maybe that's not what's needed in his position, as long as he does the rest of the job well?
"by putting up an overlay as soon as users enter the site that they can get past unless they know to (and how to) disable Javascript."
What is it with people failing to put the negative on things these days?
They CANNOT get past it unless they know...
It isn't a different way to say it, it's just WRONG.
And I missed out on the team pub lunch today as well :-(
Re: a rare sight these days...
"But does the first definition just exist because the term has been used wrongly for so long that the wrong definition has ended up being accepted?"
Yes, it's called 'language'.
...but I don't like it either.
MITM Fail
So in that situation, where does the browser look for its certificate?
That's right, it has to get it from the site it has connected to, the man-in-the-middle, the proxy server. Which doesn't have a valid certificate for the bank.
That's exactly the point of the posts before yours. To do a MITM invisibly you have to be able to generate a certificate for the target site (the bank) from one of the Certificate Authorities which the clients browser already knows about. Otherwise the browser will popup a box saying that there is something wrong with it...
...which the user will then happily click on without reading it, but that's a whole different problem!
Re: NASA - missing a trick here !
IIRC the tyre treads spell out 'JPL' in Morse code as it drives around anyway...
A nice subtle touch.
will it fly?
Any news on the plane itself? And any plans for a test glide to check out the autopilot before the big day?
Re: black silent helicopters
Why worry about the 'next' rotor blade? Just use the one... takes less power and it's quieter too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qhEsuhi1PU
Re: @deny source ip
"If you limit the lock out to the IP addresses that originated the failed login, the legitimate user can still get access."
or, you could do it the other way round: deny login attempts from any IP that has not previously successfully logged in to that account.
Either way you need to store _some_ IP addresses, the list of previously-successful IPs is likely to be much shorter than the list of DDOSing failed login sources.
