* Posts by JBR

43 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jun 2007

Neuroboffins use supercomputer to partially build DIGITAL RAT BRAIN

JBR

right so average volume human brain = 1130 cubic centimetres

= 1130000 cubic milimetres

= factor of 3424242 bigger than this experiment (assuming same neuronal density)

using Moores Law 3424242 = 2^(x/2) where x is number of years to achieve this

(log(2)3424242)/2= x

So about 43 years to emulate a human brain purely in terms of neuronal interaction.

Yes I was bit bored during the enforced viewing of Strictly

YouTube turns on dormant DRM, permits official downloads

JBR

Re: Hmmm..... Good for watching cat videos on the commute....

More likely poor edge caching servers. There are a few ways of bypassing them to go to youtube direct. Look at ff plugins or iptables

Zuck on that! Instagram loses HALF its hipsters in a month

JBR

Re: Fact check?

you're about to ruin my day if there's no way someone can't edit in an opening tag for that

Korean boffins discover secret to quick-charge batteries

JBR
Pint

Re: Fast charging

standard 60-100A on 240V here in the UK = 14.4kW - 24kW max if my calculations are correct

BUT - see how the local substation gets on if everyone on the circuit starts using that at 6pm. My local friendly power distribution guru tells me they're rated to a much lower average load, hence the drive for smart meters that will help to distribute power more intelligently. (e.g. balancing a car that needs juice now against one that won't be used until 7am the following morning). Be prepared for higher unit prices for more watts!

I love the idea of all these batteries also being used to store energy- night power + wind/tide sources, and then selling back into the grid as the power is needed. Would reduce line loss too.

China begins work on world-beating MEGA power cables

JBR

Re: Power Calcs

kW=power

kWh=power used

Reg unit required?

Lesser-spotted Raspberry Pi FINALLY dished up

JBR

Might be a bit tight on memory for MythTV- there's an XBMC set up around though

HD JuiceBox HDMI over Powerline kit

JBR
Thumb Down

lossy

....mmmm right so I pay 00's for decent kit to play 1080p. It arrives in a lossy compression format, I decompress it then recompress it again in a lossy manner then decompress it again. No thanks

Much better to save source signal and then send it via [link of choice] to something capable of playing it

Regulator reckons telly advert caps are just peachy

JBR

perhaps it's...

a mean of 9 minutes per hour? So no ads at 3am but special long juicy ad breaks during Corrie and Downton Abbey?

Cellphones as carcinogenic as coffee

JBR
Happy

other sources....

On a recent trip to Dublin I saw an antenna on the back of the ship marked with its output power - 100W apparently.

Thank god for the inverse square law so we were allowed on deck!

(Reminds me of a nurse who used to turn on the extraction system after taking x-rays to "let the x-rays out"...sigh)

IP registry goes to Defcon 1 as IPv4 doomsday nears

JBR
Happy

looking?

grep .There fixed it for you ;)

Newest PS3 firmware hacked in less than 24 hours

JBR

crosswords

When I finish the cryptic crossword, like the git I am I make sure the office knows it. It's done for the challenge and the egomania. DRM is up against human nature and will fail eventually every single time as the user has both the encrypted text and the key.

Diary of a Not-spot: One man's heroic struggle for broadband

JBR

Suffolk...

We had this problem back in the early 2000s and got great results with pretty basic wireless gear + 2.4Ghz parabolic antennae:

http://www.stourvalleywireless.org.uk/

2 x wireless routers + crossover cable = perfectly acceptable repeater!

iPhone customers lay into Apple after iOS 4.0.1 update fails to install

JBR

whoops

I call ....... GODWIN'S LAW!

Vauxhall Ampera extended range e-car

JBR
Headmaster

is the infrastructure ready?

Can the local substation supply the power if everyone had a leccy car? Is this what smart metering is going to solve? I can't see the gammy cables outside my house being up to the job.

Herd of sheep, off tits on drugs, savagely Tased

JBR

not banning testing, just banning crap tests

>From a scientific viewpoint I have no problem with testing on animals, what would you suggest?

For some reason I read methamphetamine as methadone; for that apologies- obviously the red mist had descended after reading about yet another crappy study.

I'm not against testing on animals, but at least make sure the experiments are well set up and actually necessary. Tasering a bunch of sheep means f**k all when we're already generating masses of data from the regular tasering of humans.

The taser needs to be subject to the same kind of trials as a pharmaceutical. We're now at the Phase IV or Post Marketing Surveillance Trial stage. Animal models mean nothing except as media friendly way for PR companies to distribute product friendly info.

JBR
Flame

PR causing animal cruelty

This experiment is nothing more than a puff PR piece. My problems with it

- I think I'm right in saying sheep react physiologically differently to opioids, and in fact to many medications. That's why they aren't lab animals (that and they are very tasty...)

- Did any of the sheep also suffer from diseases humans sufffer from - heart disease etc.

- More to the point, were any of the sheep in the poor condition (Hep C, HIV etc.) that a significantly higher number of drug addicts suffer from

- Why do smaller ones suffer from increased cardiovascular problems when being tasered? Does this mean we can taser everyone over 16 stone, or over 8 stone?

Total crock, whoever authorised this "experiment" needs to be tasered til they mess themselves. It's the only way they'll learn!

Airport scanner staff object to vetting

JBR
Unhappy

we've lost

As Dara O'Briain pointed out on Mock the Week, if I have show pictures of my genitals to a bloke in a box to get on a plane, then we've lost the war on terror.

BBC storm cockup: Wrong day's shipping forecast read

JBR
Thumb Down

LW

yeah but no but... longwave is cheap, reliable, proven and penetrates to all areas of the British Isles. You try getting good reliable mobile internet outside built up areas!

I'd trust an established broadcaster to manage the service, and a scientific service to supply the data- I dunno BBC and met office combo maybe?

How hard can it be to read out the right bit of paper?

iPhone app grabs your mobile number

JBR
Thumb Up

telemarketer torture

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+Telemarketer+Torture

Genius!

Database containing 1.8m UK postcode locations leaks online

JBR

http://www.freethepostcode.org/

get on there! They're trying to build a copyright free version of this database

Orange UK exiles Firefox from call centres

JBR

US spelling

In the guff on the Orange website "get to your favorite pages easier"

Orange = UK website, so why are they using US spelling. Unless the copy/pasted an email for some large US firm that would be involved in marketing IE8...hmmm...

And how is it optimised for Orange? (notice the lack of the zed) Unless the Orange website ain't standards compliant FF, Safari, Chrome et al should all be perfectly good

Scientists print out super-slim battery

JBR
WTF?

gcse

>By placing several 1.5V printed batteries in series, higher voltages of 3V, 4.5V and 6V can also be achieved, the boffins claimed

Whooohoo- BREAKTHROUGH!!! Can they do 7.5 or even 9V?

Coppers prowl Sheffield's Letsby Avenue

JBR
Happy

took me a minute...

Best pronounced in a Dixon of Dock Green accent. I must be getting slow...

Carphone Warehouse buys Tiscali UK

JBR
Happy

why bother?

Zen broadband- 9/10 cats prefer it. I wouldn't touch anything else with a 10ft sterilised robot bargepole

JBR

Pirate Bay judge and pro-copyright lobbyist accused of bias

JBR
Happy

@michael

“I am playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.”

Eric Morecambe

Gears of War grind to halt

JBR

seriously?

date expiration DRM that can be circumvented by putting your hardware clock back? No really, seriously? LMAO

Steve Jobs takes medical leave from Apple to focus on health

JBR
Jobs Halo

stress?

If I remember my GCSE biology right Islet cells produce insulin; if he's had his pancreas removed he may now have an absolute lack of insulin which would cause diabetes mellitus - signs of which include weight loss. Usually easily controlled with insulin injections but stress can sometimes make this harder. This would be described accurately as a hormonal imbalance

I hope it's this and not regrowth. He's a visionary and love them or loathe them, Macs, iPods, iPhones have made the world of IT can consumer electronics a prettier place.

Get well soon.

MI5 head calls for comms data access

JBR
Stop

what's the point? NO REALLY... HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO SPELL THIS OUT??

//rant over//

A quick drive along the high st of our village (rural, approx 2000 people) and my N95 picks up 5 unencrypted wireless networks

Add in email encryption or a VPN or Tor etc etc etc and the security services are stuffed. I know they have a job to do but all this legislation would achieve is to grind the small guy a little more under the jackboot of state bureaucracy. And we know what local council are like...

"we have an email sent by yourself which expresses doubt at the point of recycling. Our compliance officer will be round tomorrow"

(say in a whiney nasal Ken Livingstone or Germaln accent for best effect)

Hats off to the people protecting us from being bombed but this pandering to the Daily Mail reading headless chickens needs to stop

all politics can be summed up by

"something must be done... this is something... we should do this" (thanks to Yes Prime Minister"

Glastonbury new-agers protest WiFi

JBR
Thumb Up

LMAO

Brilliant! The comments on this sort of story always give me a warm fuzzy glow with my coffee (although that may be from the access point on the floor next to me...)

Thank god the world has got el reg readers

ADSL - the VoIP killer

JBR

don't know what the argument is about

We're a small business needing call queueing, tranferring, voicemail, multiple lines and out of hours messaging.

VOIP wins hands down from a cost point of view

We've got a Zen 8Mb ADSL line (why use any other ISP???), QOS sorted on our router and dedicated Snom phones connected to an Asterisk server on our LAN. We use Voipfone as our provider and are dead pleased with them.

Call quality is better than POTS, way way way cheaper as we only have 1 line (we can typically have 3 calls on the go), and I've been pleased with uptime; a quick look at the logs shows that in the klast 2 weeks we have had 100% uptime.

Our router has a 3G backup link too, so even if the local BT exchange goes phut (as it did last year for 3 days) we've got comms PLUS even if everything blows up/ burns down Voipfone give us autofailover to any number we want.

For SME VOIP is the way forward- cost effective and good quality.

Sky mulls PVR software rollback

JBR
Thumb Up

why bother

with Sky? They took the footie from my sat afternoon and I'lll never forgive them

Downloaded mythtv, slapped 3x200gb hard drives in an old box with 2 digital terrestrial and one satellite tuner- hey presto your own (far superior) media server for about £200. No pay channels but, hey it's all just crap on them anyway. Get yourself down the pub or the cinema and have a life

Samsung ML-1630W wireless network mono laser printer

JBR
IT Angle

Linux?

Having had oooooooooooooooooooooodles of printer problems with Linux the million dollar question is whether this thing will work on a predominantly Ubuntu network

Ubuntu 8.10 - All Hail new Network Manager

JBR
Thumb Up

@Phil the Geek

Yup the WPA/ keychain issue is still there using NM.

Solved by removing the NM applet and installing wicd (which can then auto run a script to mount shares etc. that I have on my home network)

I LOVE ubuntu! It's got some issues but no more than any other OS and the support from forums, google etc. is brilliant.

John

Hubble fired up and ready for action

JBR

hats off

I for one commend the pants of steel approach to this. The number of times I have rendered a remote network device inaccessible through an inadvertant ifconfig eth0 down or shutdown rather than restart... And I find walking to the comms cupboard enough of a PITA

Don't do it after a couple of pints, don't do it on a Friday afternoon

Forgot your ID? You must be a terrorist

JBR
Alien

forgetful is suspicious

as in "I can't remember where I was when they was robbed guv"

The real question is whether the risk from terror outweighs the cost in terms of restrictions of civil liberties and general aggro/ privacy invasion

Personally I think no but that's because all this terror mularkey p**ses me off especially at the heel holes that are our airports, but I'm in no position to judge the terror threat.

I reckon it's a lot less than the government reckons though, and it's just a handy excuse to line their and their mates pockets with my hard earned

NASA: Mars is good habitat for Terry Pratchett dragons

JBR

@GrahamT

Fairy Liquid- would that be fairy compressee, juiced fairy, fairy milk or some other kind of fairy secretion?

Dallas kids tracked for their own good

JBR
Stop

for crying out loud

for all you septic tanks out there, this is why the rest of the world can't take you seriously (from BAAA website...)

"On our city's eastern border - Neath the Texas sky

Proudly stands our Alma Mater - As the years go by.

Forward ever be our watchword - Conquer and prevail.

Hail to thee our Alma Mater - Bryan Adams hail!"

'Boil a frog' ID card rollout to continue until 2012

JBR
Paris Hilton

buggeration

surely "embuggeration", otherwise that's definitely going to force me to get an ID card.

Paris because she probably wouldn't...

Darling admits Revenue loss of 25 million personal records

JBR
IT Angle

@Why the discs are important

...and a villain will obviously leave a post-it note on em saying they've been copied;)

Seriously, it's in the criminal's and the government's interest to make it look as though the data had never been copied- everything is hunky dory and no need to change bank account details...

And @JeffyPoo- I did a quick test cos I was bored this morning

Fired up excel and put in row with name, address, ni number, dob, telephone no, bank details

Duplicated it 250 times then saved and compressed. Came to 8959 bytes

x100,000 to get 25 million records = about 900MB

So 2xCDs seems about right unless I've got the maths totally wrong

LAPD patrol cars to get sticky-GPS-tracker cannon?

JBR

Pah!

Electromagnetic pulse should wipe out the car's engine management.

Of course it would have to be focussed and pretty powerful which would mean Judge Dredd style cruisers with parabolic dishes on the front and a LARGE capacitor to generate the pulse.

Seeing how keen they are on tasers, they might also be tempted by a low order nuke detonated above the vehicle to generate the EMP as well...

Unmanned aircraft rubbish, says senior US pilot

JBR

Reg shocker!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/22/flying_robots_r_toss_says_top_pilot/

Brilliant!

Intel and Google go Bono over power supplies

JBR

psu surely?

>>>In many cases, close to 50 per cent of the power is lost while traveling from a wall socket to the actual machine.

surely the PSU at fault here. My PSU seems to throw out a huge amount of waste heat energy as a cost of converting the 240VAC to pooter friendly leccy

Boffins demo wireless electricity

JBR

toothpaste

Cobblers. My leccy toothbrush has been recharged without wires for years on its stand.

Seriously, could they have timed their announcement any worse with the latest scare about killer mobiles and wireless routers eating babies?