* Posts by Marvin the Martian

1513 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Mar 2007

Wildfire shuts down Los Alamos nuke lab

Marvin the Martian
Pint

Grad students now working

for roasted peanuts.

US Supremes to hear warrantless GPS tracking case

Marvin the Martian
Stop

"3000+ Pages of data": what a useless metric.

Is a small logo on a page -- say 20kb if nicely scalar'd -- worth 1/20th of a page of data (what it actually occupied), or is it worth 10pages (what its bitcode representation would occupy)? Or is it even 17pages (as typewritten pages had about 1200 character instead of 2000ish for printed ones, and judiciary is conservative so Telex is futuristic to them)?

Facebook fever prices social network at $70bn

Marvin the Martian

Now you're just constructing conspiracies.

The difference is it's not you or your mate valueing your company, it's an outsider with real money valueing FB. And paying a price lower than what others regularly trade it for.

If this sort of manipulation was done -- not that easily, as anybody vaguely involved (see Winklevoss and others) smell big bucks and will immediately (sometimes loudly) blackmail or sue.

Even without oversight by the (sleepy) SEC, any private company can be happily sued for fraudulent business practices: they are selling shares that would be falsely priced.

So, how many rhinos does a tram weigh?

Marvin the Martian
FAIL

"sneaky"?

As sneaky as a herd of rhino I bet.

Marvin the Martian
Devil

even worse,

It's an enormous, slow, noisy vehicle STUCK ON UNMISSABLE TRACKS.

Marvin the Martian

Is that asian or european sheep?

You know, a sheep once bit my sister...

Mac OS X 10.6.8 hails from Paleolithic era

Marvin the Martian
Headmaster

Paleolithic??

You've noticed the minus in front of the number? That places it firmly in the future, not past.

Ten... festival survival gadgets

Marvin the Martian

Of course it's heat not light sensitive.

Or do you want it to go off every time someone walks past your (semi-transparent!) tent!?!

Marvin the Martian
Headmaster

"nonesense"

I think you find that is "non-essence", as in: besides the point / w*nking in the margin.

Marvin the Martian
Meh

I used an identical mosquito thingy.

It worked in sri lanka.

"We've all had stuff nicked at festivals": no.

And bringing cameras & ipads? I vaguely remember a lot of parties with a lot of weirdness happening --- and none of it would have happened if there were cameras around. I think this generation will grow up with a boring past; and definitely a boring idea of fun ("sitting stoned in a muddy field for £250").

Marvin the Martian

Clean clothes of course.

Otherwise I've dragged the solar-powered portashower for nothing! That, and the fitness machine that powers the LAN.

Pentax Q takes mini system camera crown

Marvin the Martian

What's the point?

Why have the smallest (i.e., fractionally smaller than competitors) camera body, if you anyway have to carry a large bag of lenses and thingymajigs? Its smallness makes absolutely no difference in the final carrying case.

If you have all that mess, why not a 30% larger body with a larger sensor??

Apple strangleholds worldwide battery output

Marvin the Martian

RTFA

Li-Po instead of Li-Ion.

Travelodge admits hack

Marvin the Martian
IT Angle

Just what I needed

a spammed reminder of a night in hell.

Child of Eden

Marvin the Martian

Childbirth without gravity?

So you mean like underwater births? Feasible, but messy indeed.

Man battles police siege with Facebook

Marvin the Martian
Paris Hilton

Yes, because it uses technology and stuff?

[Text is needed: so... A mobile is an evolution of the phone -- which their gramps used so its OK. Similarly a CB their dad played with. This Facebook thingy (presumably on one of these Personal Calculator things) is newfangled bad stuff so confuses.]

Man infects college PCs to steal huge database

Marvin the Martian

Seems lazy.

They install malware left, right & center, and have a detectable crime [siphoning off cash from students --- of course about half will quickly notice! They should know their balance upto the nearest pint!].

So it's a bit strange they're too stupid/lazy to at least make it look like somebody else did it. [Maybe he did that, hence the denials of the accomplice.]

Plods roll out new Police National Database

Marvin the Martian
IT Angle

"no-one claimed Huntley's murdering would have been prevented"

Not CLAIMED but it's obviously SUGGESTED or IMPLIED indeed. There's no other link.

The solution would be to vet (a) applicants to school jobs, (b) all their known associates, (c) applicants to jobs within 750 yards of schools or 250 yards of major school-home-traffic roads. And if that fails, then (d) all known associates of people applying for jobs within 750 yards of schools or close to major school traffic. There, I've also solved the looming unemployment crisis for bureaucrats.

NOTE: I did prefer the Beeb's title for this story, "Police shares database on 15million people" --- it clairvoyantly announced that one or more of them will put it all on a usbstick or laptop, unencrypted, and then lose it on the bus/train/slotmachine on the way home.

Women's gaydar (for men) improves when ovulating

Marvin the Martian
FAIL

"hot-from-the-dept-of-the-bleedin-obvious"

Rubbish.

Is it obvious that a fertile or aroused woman is more able to tell from a picture whether men are gay or straight? No.

If it's that obvious to you, please answer if primed males are similarly better able to tell apart lesbians from heterosexual women; if so explain mechanism and similarly if not. No coherent story? Thought not.

MeeGo and the Great Betrayal Myths of tech history

Marvin the Martian
Stop

MS bought the world floppy production for 6months

[reference needed]

Programmers urged to code with their tootsies

Marvin the Martian

But only the right-handed ones.

For no clear reason they've made it a right-footed-only thing?

With a little redesign (rotating the numbers and putting the extra keys more centrally etc) you'd have a left-handed version.

Apple will 'own games industry'

Marvin the Martian

Indeed.

Simple question: are these the same players? The original article doesn't care to find out.

If all iPad players were desktop/console players that have/will completely abandon those platforms, then the prediction is potentially true (but for a small nonzero probability).

If all iPad players have not played before, then it has no influence whatsoever on the established gaming market.

The reality lying somewhere in between those extremes... The vast number of players wanting immersive experiences, with 5.1 sound and giant screens, well these won't really be satisfied here.

So yes, it's like predicting air travel will die out since the invention of highways (in 30s germany): not completely accurate.

Marvin the Martian
Boffin

Extrapolation is a science

The science of the ridiculous:

at the current rate, everybody will own 4 iPads concurrently in 10 years, so logically there will be an evolutionary pressure to grow more arms and eyes. Expect mutants by 2025.

Marvin the Martian
Pint

With the same logic,

I predict all movies to become straight-to-DVD (or even straight-to-free-download) because these script-driven big budgetty ones aren't going to be worth it anymore.

The central idea of these predictions is that people's time has become worthless. Not sure that holds up for many... [Yes, it's what most parents have said of their children hanging out playing music/games/dvds, but that doesn't make it a correct.]

Apple MacBook Air reportedly back... in black

Marvin the Martian
Big Brother

You're not interested?

Why did you read the article then?! Because your time is worth nothing, I guess.

Wikipedia awash in 'frothy by-product' of US sexual politics

Marvin the Martian
Pint

To be fair though,

this futile chicken-or-egg fiddling discussion is the most interesting aspect of R. Santorum.

Sad for his namesakes tho, who may have to change their name even a few generations from now! [e.g., the French word for dustbin is the name of the official who outlawed dumping waste on the street...]

Open barbarians poised to storm Apple's gate

Marvin the Martian
Pint

Android's kicking iOS's shins

...because that's as high as it can reach.

Brits told how much they'll pay for HP TouchPad

Marvin the Martian

"Bla bla apple overpriced blah bla"

See, you can get a high-quality tool from renowned purveyor of quality HP* for the price of an apple toy.

I can see the logic in a board meeting: "it's the same size as an audi, and we want to be similarly admired, so let's price up this vauxhall accordingly".

*ink, mostly.

Spielberg flung Fox from Transformers 3

Marvin the Martian

But how does it matter either way?

It's not like she has to repair the economy or disentagle confusing evidencei in a court of law. Heck, she doesn't even need to know lines, just remember them for 30sec or read from a cue card.

She can be my pet rock any day.

"would rather see the back of her" --- me too! But then that's how I roll.

30,000 Shreks besmirch BeautifulPeople

Marvin the Martian
Alien

Yes, but,

half of them are even uglier than that average!

New malware ferrets out and steals Bitcoins

Marvin the Martian
Headmaster

"develop trojans that infect computers for the sole purpose of stealing it"

Hm... "tweak" seems more appropriate than "develop" here.

Apple iMac 27in

Marvin the Martian

Don't forget the case + a transformer

Together you'll be above £1300 for an ugly thing that eats up more deskspace and more electricity, and is harder to clean.

Kindle Store awash with auto-generated crap 'books'

Marvin the Martian
Stop

So if they succeed in marketing spam, they get the deposit back?

Not sure what your logic is here.

But along the same lines, not a deposit but a punishment system: if more than 1 in 3 customers complains that it's spam, you have to refund all of them. [.. Twice? Hm hm... or probably let it be adjudicated by a human -- if not, mass buying-and-complaining would make money regardless of the underlying book].

Wireless networking without paying The Man, man

Marvin the Martian

Alternatively,

security through obscurity.

Giving each lightbulb its own IPv6 and then having a DOS attack knock them out sounds bad though.

Can Big Blue survive another century?

Marvin the Martian
WTF?

"Time clocks"??

As opposed to what type of clocks, exactly?

BioWare latest hack victim

Marvin the Martian
Paris Hilton

... Starting with the users.

They either chose bad passwords or accepted lax security.

Snapseed

Marvin the Martian

Mwah.

Point-by-point:

1- as real-time as on your laptop, so that doesn't advance/disadvantage (given that you need net access, most ipads sold are wifi-only).

2- not owning a computer?! What minority are we now speaking about? There's probably almost more without a TV than without a PC (e.g., me)... The vast vast majority without a PC definitely don't have an ipad. So no, that's just nonsense.

3- not au-fait with GIMP / Photoshop Elements (free with your scanner or printer or wherever) --- if you understand the simple things this program does, you can do them with the same name in any editing package. You probably have it with iPhoto anyway, which you got free with MacOS, else equivalent on PC. I'm not convinced about this point.

4- If you don't own Photoshop, you get GIMP for free, so that's not an argument --- this limited thingy costs £3, remember. And if you can search through reviews to find the name of this thing, you find GIMP just as well so visibility is not an argument. So no, I don't accept this point.

Marvin the Martian
Stop

"Vintage style" horror effects aside,

If you're going to invest time optimizing your photos, you do it on your desktop with a full-strength proggy (PS, Gimp, whatever) --- not on a small greasy-prints covered pad of whatever persuasion. So what's the point?

Woman puts shout-out for hitman on Facebook

Marvin the Martian
Unhappy

It's exploitation.

Proposed pay being clearly under market rates, I'd still class it as immigrant exploitation. For that cash you can't even pay for a walk-on return ticket Scotland-Newquay [just an example --- I don't know what kind of transport cost was needed in their case].

Marvin the Martian
Thumb Up

Google? Nah.

This is called "crowdsourcing", it's what it's at.

Marvin the Martian
FAIL

Further news, illiterates read TheRegister.

Which part of "[intended victim] contacted the police" escaped you?

Rogue software consultant's vast stash of DIY explosives

Marvin the Martian
Mushroom

I'm mostly amazed Lewis didn't mention the cost and quality of the explosives.

Because it's clearly more effective and cheaper than the MoD procured kit.

MoD plans 'name and shame' crackdown on crap projects

Marvin the Martian
Unhappy

They've tried that, didn't they?

And see what it brought us: a shiny new vintage-70s-style aircraft carrier. Well, in a few years.

Profit-free Pandora floats, valued at $2.6bn

Marvin the Martian

Maybe they pay in Bitcoins?

It's anyway to feed on people's addictions. So then the stock traders can convert their divident into marching powder at no conversion loss.

'A SHARK attacked my ROBOT', gasps ex-Sun exec

Marvin the Martian
Boffin

Sharks outlive them easily, tho.

An octopus lives 2-3 almost sedentary years, where a Great White doesn't even mature the first 30 years, and reef or hammerhead sharks patrols square miles repeatedly each day (or a Blue shark migrates thousands of miles).

Especially the hammerheads would be interesting for spotting tech, as they have electrosensitive noses.

Marvin the Martian
Pirate

Easy to say afterwards...

... and what about sperm whales / frigate birds / horny sea lions / ... ?

"Those threats were assessed in the environmental impacts report, but my dog ate it."

Apple pulls app after dev publishes users' PINs

Marvin the Martian

I'm with you on layered passwords.

Just like 9-level authorisation for government secrets, you can do the same with pins:

Having a non-smartphone, anyone I'd let use my bicycle I'd let use my phone --- so they have the same 4-digit keys. Same for a raft of other not-very-exploitable, physical-access devices.

All laptops and desktops share another passwords, as they all have access to a similar collection of browser-saved passwords. All "opinion" sites, ElReg/Beeb/cavia-breeding-forum/..., share another.

Just like keying your front and back doors to the same --- less keys to duplicate or get lost, and equally important access points.

Go Daddy sued over email alerts

Marvin the Martian
Linux

Douglas Adams?!

It's actually standard 20s-onwards Communist exclamations, "... come the revolution, the [lawyers/boyars/bourgeois pastry makers/...] will be first against the wall".

Come the revolution, it will be Mac & MS against the wall.

Best Buy gives big boxes the boot

Marvin the Martian
Boffin

Alternatively, sell smaller products.

All the desktop --> all-in-ones evolution helps that? It's just that monitors keep growing.

I think the best way is to get rid of CPW shops (who just resell internet from the same companies and mobes/subscriptions from the same companies --- no reason to not have a purely virtual store).

But then I'm always wondering how CPW survives; I've had to go in twice a year to just get mobile topup and each time it took 20+ minutes in a shop with 2-4 clients and 3-4 workers.

Duke Nukem flack eats words over threat to reviewers

Marvin the Martian
Facepalm

Speaking of community,

When did they decide to retract their threat? Before or after they realized that only the Karachi Medical Gazette had written a vaguely positive piece, and so would be the only ones to receive a review copy?