Posts by Degenerate Scumbag

You won't miss it. I did it 5 years ago and never looked back.

Re: Facebook not running IPv4 at all?

It is indeed a cinch for those worth their salt. It does tend to rile up the low-iq dead wood who have trouble picking up new skills.

For example, the types of people that don't understand the difference between the concepts of network broadcast (a scatter-gun that sometimes goes wrong) and multicast (peers subscribe, routers relay packets only to subscribed peers, perfect bandwidth efficiency and no potential to cause a storm).

Re: Atomic tank

Your comment triggered my Autistic curiosity to analyse this. I think the answer is no.

The thermocouples in an RTG generate electricity from a temperature differential, which is presumably what led you to this idea. Bigger temperature gradient = more power.

However, the radioisotope in the generator is not inherently "hot". It doesn't have a particular temperature, it just generates heat from radioactive decay at a rate that correlates with the half-life. If that heat is not transferred away somewhere, the temperature increases, but an RTG works by utilising that heat.

I would expect the temperature of the isotope in an RTG to find an equilibrium at some margin above the ambient temperature of the environment it is in, the point at which the thermocouple is removing the same amount of energy (as electricity) as the radioactive decay is generating (as heat).

Re: Intel ME

Hopefully some enterprising nerd is on the case. We already know it's based on Minix 3, so a comparison of the decompiled code with the MINIX 3 source could tell us quite a lot about Intel's customisations and how it all works.

Re: ADSL slow? Shurely not!

I enjoy the looks on people's faces when I tell them that in Budapest I get 1Gbps down / 200Mbps up for less than £12 GBP per month.

Re: Uber and London

The Beeb stopped being an impartial news source decades ago, if it ever was one.

Re: scaling up is the answer?

If solar and battery technology truly were progressing at the rate you suggest, that would be great.

Re: ...an explosive, massive black hole in their centers...

"Explosive" is certainly a poor choice of words for an object that can only consume and never repel matter.

The theory goes that the extreme gravitational and magnetic fields around a supermassive black hole may be capable of accelerating those particles with trajectories that get very close to the event horizon - without actually crossing it - to these phenomenal speeds.

Re: Helium

Where I come from, liquids aren't capable of shattering.

Re: How many of these are using Google as their address bar?

What utter bollocks, of course there is a choice. Nothing that Google have done in any way prevents or impedes anyone from getting to the information they want using alternative methods.

Google's search dominance is based on the fact that their product is the best, by a long way.

Re: The guy was an idiot...

The ones that get caught are idiots. The smart ones cover their tracks, so you're never going to hear about them...

Re: Going nowhere fast

Going right back to GSM, all the digital mobile network standards have included the function of automatically modulating the transmit power up or down to the lowest level necessary to maintain a usable signal. It's an essential feature to enable efficient use of limited spectrum bandwidth. This is why network operators are able to increase capacity by adding base-stations without having them block their neighbour's spectrum.

So an LTE implementation designed to replace Bluetooth should not transmit at any higher power when devices are in the normal Bluetooth range. It would just be able to boost up to a higher range than Bluetooth.

Sorry, but you're talking nonsense.

You appear to have no understanding of the topic at hand.

Firstly, it has no direct bearing on net neutrality. Net neutrality is about how network participants treat each other's traffic. A new technology such as this might be used as an excuse to break net neutrality, but the problem would lie with the ISPs, not the technology.

Secondly, you don't seem to understand the technology at all, and use the words multicast and broadcast interchangeably, while talking about it being "wasteful", which is totally wrong. It makes me suspect that you're talking about IP multicast over LTE. LTE broadcast is a genuine radio broadcast technology implemented on the LTE system.

DVB broadcast = one radio transmission on one frequency listened to by many receivers = efficient.

Conventional IPTV (including IP multicast) over LTE = Individual 2-way LTE frequency channels to each receiver = very inefficient.

LTE broadcast = Single 1-way LTE broadcast frequency channel listened to by all receivers on the cell = as efficient as DVB.

In fact, more efficient, because LTE is much much much better at cramming data into the available frequency spectrum, and cells are more localised and run at much lower transmission power than TV transmitters, so block frequencies from reuse at a much smaller radius. Why are there so few terrestrial HD DVB channels? because they don't have enough spectrum. DVB is a dead-end.

Re: Woah...

I don't see how the Open/Libre Office fork can be characterised as a "debacle", quite the opposite, it was a demonstration of how the ability to fork inherent in free software projects can be an advantage for the end users.

Very quickly there was no doubt as to which branch users should follow. Everyone that mattered went to LibreOffice. The major Linux distributions adopted it within a few months and the project was re-invigorated after years of stagnation. The same thing also happened in the transition from XFree86 to X.org.

Contrast this with being locked in to a proprietry product which the vendors decide to neglect or take in the wrong direction. You think you would be better off?

Re: It'll make paperless statements more popular.

More logical would be to do a pre-auth for the maximum daily charge (It's something like 15 or 20 quid) on the first bonk, then reconcile things and charge the actual amount owed at the end of the day.

Re: Cheap media streamer?

"Don't get me wrong - I love the RasPi, but if someone just wants a low-cost, plug'n'play HDMI media player: once they've invested in all the necessary add-ons and the time needed to configure the Pi, I think they'd be better off with something like a WD Live or Apple TV."

The people buying Raspberry Pis for this purpose don't want plug-and-play, we want openness and customisability. You won't get that from WD, and especially not from Apple.

Re: The good old days when a quick smak fixed 99% of the se problems.

"Would it be ok for a Policeman to administer a smack to an adult, if the adult wasn't co-opertating with him? No, it certainly would not and it's the same for kids."

Er, police are allowed to use reasonable, proportional physical force when justifiable as necessary against uncooperative individuals. Are you now proposing that police lose their enforcement powers and just have to try to talk violent criminals into calming down?

"Please stop stabbing that woman, sir, it's not very nice."

Some of us in the UK are fine too.

I manage a team in London with six Blackberries on T-Mobile and our service has been problem free throughout, despite recieving apologetic SMSs from our carrier.

Lunacy.

Only in America could people think that covering potable water reservoirs, like developed nations have been sensibly doing for the past 150 years, is some sort of big-government conspiracy.

Legally validity is what counts.

They were legally valid as travel documents. It's not surprising that so early in the program some people rejected them due to unfamiliarity, but this would obviously have changed had the full program gone ahead. Furthermore, my point is that I would have carried both - leaving my passport safely locked in the hotel safe whilst my (cheaper) ID card would have been in my pocket satisfying my legal obligation in several European countries to carry recognised ID on my person. Therefore I would be more likely to lose the ID than the passport. What's more, even if it was the other way around and my passport was lost, the ID is more likely to be recognised in Europe for the journey home since they are more familiar with national ID cards.

Your arse indeed.

As processing power increases, more becomes available for encryption as well as cryptanalysis. Longer, stronger keys become practical, so snoopers are no closer to easily breaking crypto. The only caveat is that any older data that is still sensitive needs to be re-encrypted with the newer schemes to remain safe.