* Posts by MrT

1359 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2007

Lasers to carry 622 Mbps Earth-Moon link

MrT

Overheard from an observer at the farside observatory...

..."Bummer of a birthmark, Mimas"

Boeing batteries back under spotlight as 787 burns at Heathrow

MrT

WR963...

...hope to eventually see her return to flight (though hopefully avoid deserts...). Then maybe they can bring it up to Elvington to compare with the Nimrod. And the one at Coventry is a Mk2, so it could be nice to park up next to the Halifax to compare it with the Lincoln - they did a similar thing a few years ago with Lancaster and B17.

Brit fantasy artist sues James Cameron over Avatar world

MrT

Jonathan Swift...

... is no longer around to cry "Shame on you, sir!" at Dean, hurling copies of Gulliver's Travels at him...

NASA to flip ion engine's 'OFF' switch after brilliant 5.5 year burn

MrT

Sad but true...

... but the bold move would be to send it anyway. If a later mission catches it up then pull over, clear the cans from the back seat and give it a lift. The time it's spent out there would make it useful to study, and if the faster future missions never get off the ground then it'll still serve the original purpose.

Yahoo! announces last hurrah of ancient AltaVista search

MrT
Pint

Comb the web like it's 1996?

Switch to WebCrawler and metasearch like it's 1994... missing the old happy little surfing spider logo these days though - it's gone a bit minimal. Still, probably an age thing - after nearly 30 years in IT, combing isn't what it used to be...

Planetary data merge shows three Earth-like planets in close star system

MrT

Erm...

"Fortunately, we know that this state can still support life." In theory, surely? It's not as if there is any hard evidence of life discovered on tidally-locked worlds yet. If one side resembles Riddick's Crematoria and the other side is more like Hoth at midnight it might be harder to colonise since the habitable zone might be a bit narrow...

SURPRISE! BT bags more gov broadband cash - this time in Bucks & Herts

MrT

Re: Twas just under 1.6Mb/s...

;-) I know a few - and they'll be miffed once the disk is wiped. iPlayer to the rescue!

MrT

Twas just under 1.6Mb/s...

... for me here in ruralville, Co Durham, but it didn't stop the calls to sell Vision. I played along once, to see how far it would get. Eventually they sent a letter to say sorry but my line couldn't support the service because it wasn't stable enough. Then they rang up a few weeks later to try again.

I eventually got the engineers to come out and fiddle-dee-dee it up to 3Mb/s by asking what I needed to do to join FON (not that I ever have).

I then later found out our exchange had been upgraded to Infinity, but not through BT calling - I spotted a house for sale about 4 miles away but on the same exchange that had Infinity available. I now get around 60Mb/s down and 20Mb/s up top speed.

Still, it's not all rosy - they're just about to wipe the storage on the Vision+ box in some mega-update, so I'll have to go out and buy the Zohan and roughly a million Octonauts episodes...

Our week with Soylent: Don't chuck out your vintage food quite yet

MrT

Re: Hangover cure?

Maybe 'Sodka' or 'Voylent', or whatever it ended up being called, is a self-curing tipple.

Facebook bug leaks contact info of 6 million users

MrT

Re: Facebook has a security team?

That's the real news - it's just hidden with all this "6 million users" distraction...

NASA probe will ease through Saturn's ring to grab Earth snapshot

MrT

They caught it just right...

... I can see someone reading this article ElReg on an iPad from there. Through a Tube train window. On the Victoria line, pulling into Pimlico. That CSI software is good...

Headbangers have a gas, gas, gas in mosh pits

MrT

In case of hippies...

...break glass

Slayer's Reign in Blood CD put to good use.

US spyboss: Yes, we ARE snooping on you, but think of the TERRORISTS

MrT

Menwith Hill...

...used to handle a lot of stuff, back before the www existed. I remember visiting the place back in the 70's, but it was more for the slice of American culture than anything nefarious. Having US friends who worked on the base helped get through the gates, which back then didn't have the small 'peace camp' that grew as the 80's wore on and the three big golf balls had offspring...

So, who ought to be the next Doctor Who? It's up to YOU...

MrT

Could do with...

... a "Hell no" button - I've a bag full waiting for that Grint lad ;-)

Shorteurs rejoice as Vine comes to Android

MrT
Paris Hilton

Erm...

..."giving us a brand new pair of Jordan's"?

I had no idea she'd been back in for more 'enhancement'. Or is that the correct phrase for ordering Bulgarian airbags?

El Reg gets its hands on Haswell fondle-gizmos at posh Tosh bash

MrT
Pirate

The price...

...is optimistic - the basic spec seems good (screen and video card look to be standard), but according to the press release pdf, £1499 is the starting price, not for one with all the numbers maxed. 'Up to' 32GB RAM, 'Up to' 3TB spinning rust, 'Up to' 3GB VRAM, the SSD is optional, maybe even an optional hybrid drive (that might be standard, but it reads a bit vague on that point). Guestimate another £1k for all the 'Up to' options added. They're probably pricing against Dell XPS or Alienware, and I've seen those spec up to near-£3k...

New EXPLICIT pics support notion of moist, welcoming past for Mars

MrT

Judiciary Pag...

"Freeeow," he said. He took another sip of water, then held it up to the light and frowned at it. He twisted it round.

"Hey, is there something in this water?" he said.

"Er, no, m'lud," said the Court Usher who had brought it to him, rather nervously.

"Then take it away," snapped Judiciary Pag, "and put something in it. I got an idea."

Iran fingered for attacks on US power firms

MrT
Paris Hilton

Careful now...

...Adria Richards might be nearby...

Garden fertilised by Twitter output wins Gold at Chelsea

MrT

Interesting idea...

...and by not actually show the content of the tweets it neatly avoids the snafu that Starbucks made with their attempt at the Natural History Museum.

OTOH there's always the chance to set the wall flapping away with a well-timed tweetstorm as some dignitary steps up for a close look - thinking of Total Wipeout's 'sucker punch' wall there...

IBM gives a cloudy outlook for COBOL

MrT

Social and COBOL...

Error code 23.

Google builds crowdsourcing into new Maps code stack

MrT

That 'effective lock-in'...

...also gives Google near real-time updates about situations such as the one you mention, which it can presumably use to inform other Maps users navigating in the area.

But they could get that whilst still showing more of the area, so perhaps they're trading off map tiles against images along the route. I for one would prefer the multi point routing on Android, to match the drag'n'drop rerouting on the desktop version - it's impromptu stuff like that, rather than planning a complex route on a laptop and saving it ahead of the journey, which the Android version lacks.

They're thinking of Glass users here though since some of the ideas seem to make more sense over a HUD.

Murdoch Facebook gloat: You're like my $580m, 'CRAPPY' MySpace

MrT

Yahoo may be ahead of you there...

...especially if they do buy Tumblr ;-)

Google's Native Code browser tech goes cross-platform

MrT

I first read it as...

...pinochle - Sundar Pichai is the jack of diamonds and he knows the secret identity of the queen of spades...

Nine-year-old Opportunity Mars rover sets NASA distance record

MrT

it's a GM warranty...

... and the 100,000mile limit includes the flight from earth, unfortunately.

This little rover is seriously impressive though, no doubt.

Dark blue side of the Force used to quell Star Wars nerd clash

MrT

"Furious nerds"...

... made me laugh. Am now wondering how that might look on ThinkGeek or Spreadshirt products... :-)

Alleged CIA spook cuffed by Russians: US Gmail 'spycraft' revealed

MrT

Double check...

... nope, I see no fine old Viennese etchings in the kit photos, Carstairs.

Løvefïlm signs hit beards’n’berserkers series Vikings

MrT

I liked the cross-series dig...

...in 'Once upon a time' where the florist shop is called "Game of Thorns"... It's a bit more subtle than spotting all the Firefly references in Castle, but adds a bit of fun ;-)

Adobe kills Creative Suite – all future features online only

MrT

Renting vs buying...

... after about 18 months the calculation swings in Adobe's favour, at whatever level or license model (full suite, per app, educational, etc)... I upgraded from MX2004 suite to CS6, which might be an extreme but the old Macromedia titles did what I wanted, plus the Gimp or Serif titles for the other stuff. However, I would have definitely looked elsewhere if in the pricing demanded a monthly rental fee that would have amounted to paying for the software six times over in the ten years or so between...

Quid-a-day nosh challenge hack enters the final furlong

MrT

Bill Bailey: "Three blokes go into a pub...

"... Well, I say three; could be four or five. Could be nine or ten, doesn't matter. Could have been fifteen, twenty - fifty. Round it up. Hundred. Let's go mad, eh - two-fifty. Tell you what, double it up - five hundred. Thousand! Oh, I've gone mad! Two thousand! Five thousand! (adopting auctioneer persona) Anyone? Five thousand, six thou, six thousand, ten thousand! Small town in Hertfordshire goes into a pub! Fifteen thousand blokes! Alright, let's go - population of Rotterdam. The Hague. Whole of Northern Holland. Mainland U.K. Let's go all the way to the top - Europe, alright? Whole of Europe goes - I say Europe. Could be Eurasia. Not the band, obviously, that's just two of them. Alright, continents - North America! Plus South America! Plus Antartica - that's just eight blokes in a weather station. Not a good example.

"Alright, make it a lot simpler, all the blokes on the planet go into the pub, right? And the first bloke goes up to the bar and he says "I'll get these in." What an idiot!"

How many read this site? Better find an obscure bar for that first drink back... ;-)

The UK's copyright landgrab: The FAQ

MrT

Re: Excellent summary.

Definitely - and given that Andrew's earlier article (coining the name "Instagram Act") has been referenced/quoted by many news sites, hopefully this one will be equally influential.

Tiny fly-inspired RoboBee takes flight at Harvard

MrT

Can it...

...work out which side of a window is open?

And if it loses uplink to control, does it hold station by flying around the ceiling light fitting endlessly until comms is re-established?

'Charge memory' boffins: Hungover Li-Ion batts tell fat whoppers

MrT

There was a recalibration trick...

... that HTC recommended for original Desire owners though, so it seemed the battery management software waw being fooled about what was '100%', rather than the battery chemistry itself.

IIRC the method was to charge to '100%' with the phone on, then turn it off and charge for another hour, then switch it on again for another hour's charge, then unplug and restart the handset. On mine, it used to yield around 10% more usable life, which gradually faded again over about 2 months if the phone was just charged whilst left on. I've only tried it once on my GS3, which doesn't seem to be as prone to this.

Mind you, since the software is designed to protect the battery from damage by overcharging it may have been set a little over-cautious by HTC.

Dubai splurges on 700hp, 217mph Lamborghini police cruiser

MrT

Not by much though...

...PC Mark Milton, West Mercia Police, was prosecuted and acquited of speeding in a Vectra V6 at 159mph on the M54.

MrT

Cossies...

... were offered to all forces, but at the time they cost roughly twice as much as a tuned Astra GTE variant. A friend on the West Yorkshire force said these were far more usable in urban environments. This was back in '88, and he said that the Astras were good for short, very high speed bursts, but if used to chase something very high speed over longer distances then they would need engine attention afterwards.

Both equally nickable, mind, and response times would be severely hampered by the need to unchain the Cossie from the garage floor (an extreme scurity method employed by one guy I know who has an RS500).

Cool wasn't even an option... ;-)

CIOs: Are you your CEO's business partner or their gimp?

MrT

C-I-I-I-O

Ah, that's why it's called a server farm... Helps if the CIO's name has three syllables, maybe of Scottish origin, and 'old' in this case is 'over 35'...

"a website's colour palette gets two weeks of workshops" - only if the CMO has seen or been shown CSSZenGarden... "We need it to look like the the scrolling radio tuning dial, but vertically. And make it look modern, but in a traditional sense. It's not a big job, is it, because it only took a few seconds to change the way the whole site looked on the example I've seen..."

Good stuff; keep it going!

AVG: That World of Warcraft hack? RIDDLED with malware

MrT

Mods and hacks...

...stuffed with malware, Trojans etc. is an old story - no such thing as a free lunch.

I remember back in 2000 an encounter with a nasty on a friend's PC (IIRC that had arrived as part of an unlimited cash hack on Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed) that set me off helping with Magnus Mischel and co on Trojanhunter and then on to work with Paul and Robin Laudanski at CastleCops. Even then, the idea of hidden payloads was old news - but it was the early days of the shift from ad-hoc dial-up access to always-on broadband and free stuff was flowing ever more energetically than back when 28.8kbps was fast.

Go-go Gadget watch? Apple posts job ad for 'flexible display' bod

MrT

They all need power from somewhere...

... regular manual winding, automatic winding, button cell, solar etc. Yes, it's a faff to have to plug something in and wait a while, but so long as that can happen when I sleep then it's not much inconvenience.

The aren't any truly fit'n'forget systems for powering any type of watch, but, in the absence of wrist-mounted atomic batteries, solar comes close. My own watch is a Citizen Eco-Drive Chronograph - the whole face is a solar EV collector. There's a small rechargeable cell inside to cope with darkness, but in 12 years of use it hasn't needed any attention.

Back in the 80's I used to have a Seiko UC-3000 in chrome, which often needed a hefty powercell replacing that was probably the most high-maintenance watch I ever owned, (there was another in the keyboard/dock, which used a wireless induction loop to transmit stuff to the watch). I've still got a Seiko 5 somewhere that is an automatic winder, but not very accurate.

Then again, I've a friend who swears by the Casio F-91W, which can still be bought even after all these years.

There's an interesting collection of older digital watches at http://mysbfiles.stonybrook.edu/~delton/Articles/nerd_watches.htm. No penguins or detached limbs in sight...

Google tool lets you share data from BEYOND the GRAVE

MrT

Re: Just resting...

"CC: Erwin Schrödinger" ... ?

StreetView spots possible roadside nookie down under

MrT

Not for long...

...if Google push their robot cars out soon.

Chemical-dipped TRANSPARENT BRAINS bare all for science

MrT

Food for thought...

Clearly this is the lo-calorie option for zombies on a diet, (undead cheerleaders maybe?)...

The ten SEXIEST computers of ALL TIME

MrT

Re: Wot no SGI?

I used an Indigo back in about '94 - it even looked better on screen.

It always made me wonder when this amazing system was sat in the same office as a brace of early 486 PCs that it got mostly ignored in favour of Windows 3.11, even for some of the more intense QSAR and modelling stuff for which it was bought.

Star Trek phaser sells for a STUNNING $231,000

MrT

Have it print...

...print a picture of the item and then print the price paid...

Or fit it on a flimsy shelf above the nearest office chair. Works best if it's a HP 4s and the shelf is fixed using Pritt Stick...

NASA rules out leading new human lunar expedition

MrT

It sounds disappointing...

...but is probably the right decision. Aside from all the LEO to-and-fro, which is more commercial these days, NASA always made more sense pushing boundaries. New ideas, distant goals and other stuff that extend limits.

Earth-moon Lagrange point 2 space station seems to be a more suitable near-future target for manned NASA missions, as a driver for the SLS heavy-lift rocket development. Any associated mid-point transit station could be used to assist lunar development, and the EM-L2 outpost could use lunar resources to push out to the asteroids and Mars.

Still, that means looking elsewhere for the space elevator...

Apple pulls banned content from Chinese App Store

MrT

in this case...

...it looks like the app was legal but some part of the content it provided was not (or is at best borderline).

This ruling would have implications for example for book reader software since it now implies that app scrutiny for the Chinese market has to go further into the content and examine links/metalinks before approval.

60-inch Apple iTV to be controlled by iRing remote?

MrT

Consider it..

...a badge of ownership. I'm not sure who is the owner and who is the pwned in this deal though... ;-)

Sci/Tech quango promises an end to 'events with no women'

MrT

I saw 'boards'...

... but read it at first glance as 'beards'...

Now it was just about okay with "ensuring that organisations' Beards are representative", but it then fell apart with "at Nesta we're glad that our Beard has moved closer to gender parity". Unless Nesta is picking particularly hirsute ladies...

Mars to go offline for a month as vast nuclear furnace gets in the way

MrT

One month later...

"Curiosity control: Rover reports full system functionality is restored"

"Command to move error: motors functional and responding: telemetry indicates no-go"

.

<self-portrait later shows rover on bricks with all wheels missing: chassis tagged with "Ulla, suckers..." and "Watch the skies...">

RAF graduates first class of new groundbased 'pilots'

MrT

I wonder...

...if the eyesight limit is the same? There shouldn't be the need to have any restrictions (beyond the MoD limits) except maybe that the RAF might be picky about pilots all being capable of crossover roles in the future.

Back when I went through Officer and Aircrew Selection (in the days when they ran it at Biggin Hill), none of this remote-control stuff was an issue. Tanker/transport aircrew could develop the need for glasses and still fly VC10, for example, but anyone with contacts or that new-fangled laser correction couldn't fly anything with an ejector seat fitted.

Major blow for Apple: 'Bounce back' patent bounced back by USPTO

MrT

Finality...

...is not the end.

It is not the beginning of the end.

And it is not even the end of the beginning...

.

"Oh, that was easy!" says Man, who then goes on to prove that black is white, and gets killed at the next zebra crossing.