Bah!
Again?
Posts by Stevie
7284 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
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Mortgage data splashed all over the net. Thanks HSBC Finance
Spotty dwarf Ceres BARES ALL in NASA's SHINY CLOSEUPS
Flying giant octopus menaces New York
DWARF PLANET Ceres beams back SUNNY north pole FROWN
Apple will cut down 36,000 acres of forest in 'conservation scheme'
Philip Glass tells all and Lovelace and Babbage get the comic novel treatment
Monday 20th April 2015 16:21 GMT
You might as well argue Brunel
...was a failure because his broad gauge was eventually reduced.
Brunel, like all engineers working at the bleeding edge, had many, many failures in his lifetime, and his vision could not only be strangely limited, but tunneled to the nth degree.
The broad gauge issue is a case in point.
Brunel's broad gauge had many advantages, chief of which was a much smoother ride than the standard gauge railways of the day, but it was more expensive to build and maintain than standard gauge railways were and could not be integrated smoothly into the national rail network, already established and growing apace and almost universally standard gauge.
For a man who understood so much, his attitude to broad gauge and the huge national public stink the "break in gauge" issue generated is a genuine puzzlement. Money was poured into the broad gauge rail system even when it was obvious to everyone that it could not survive.
Another gotcha in the GWR that should have been obvious as Bad Design from the get-go: a semaphore signal protocol that declared that horizontal means caution (or stop) and pointing downward means go. Everyone else realized that in the event of a broken actuator, gravity would be working in the cause of rail safety. Brunel's design called for counterweights to be added to make it all work the same way. More expensive, more complex, less failsafe (because there's ways the weights can fail too).
Brunel was a great man, but he was wrong a lot.
And the Broad Gauge was a gorgeous, magnificent, inspiring failure.
And I say this as a lifelong fan of God's Wonderful Railway and the people who built it.
High on bath salts, alleged Norse god attempts tree love
Monday 20th April 2015 15:48 GMT
Bah
Perhaps it the press were to apply somewhat less heroic names to the substances it would help the fight to prevent people ingesting these things?
Suppose we change the intriguing term "bath salts", no doubt the correct street term for the would be buyer, to something like "fucktard powder"? Does the product still sound as attractive as it did before?
Besides, it is more descriptive of the effects. I urge The Register to lead the way in the crusade to tell it like it is drugs-wise.
The data centre design that lets you cool down – and save electrons
Monday 20th April 2015 15:28 GMT
Bah!
Vent the hot air instead of cooling it back down. For those unobviously challenged, vent it upwards, through the roof.
Filter fresh air at ambient temperature into the cooling infrastructure. For the same crowd, don't build your inlets next to your roof vents.
And build your data centers somewhere cold to start with.
100% passive is too much to ask, but using passive techniques to lower the avoidable energy usage shouldn't be.
Scouts' downed Compass database won't be back 'til autumn
Stateside security screeners sacked for squeezing 'sexy' sacks
National Grid's new designer pylon is 'too white and boring' – Pylon Appreciation Society
Saturday 18th April 2015 00:06 GMT
Bah!
Shorter, eh? Short enough for those people who point fluorescent tubes at the wires to make some sort of treehugger point might actually touch the wires?
I would have thought the lattice design was easier to put up on England's green and rolling hills but that's just me.
No doubt the country will look spiffy with its new infestation of Bang and Olufson pylons.
RADIOACTIVE WWII aircraft carrier FOUND OFF CALIFORNIA
Friday 17th April 2015 21:48 GMT
Re: That's it...
This James Delgado's got a great job, consisting of:
1. A Government department sinks something in the Pacific, without recording where they did it.
2. A period of time later a different Government department declares that these vessels are historic.
3. James Delgado and his chums get a nice big boat with lots of toys to play with for a period of time, in order to find these self declared 'historic' relics.
What is the point?
Am I being just a wee bit too cynical.....
Well, apart from the messing about in boats thing, and the order of the step in which the government declares something valuable, this is pretty much a definition of how archeology works in general.
You could ask the time-wasters who dug up the 9th century cathedral in Coventry recently what the point is. I mean, they already had two that weren't in deep holes. One is a bit smashed up but the other is in good repair.
Friday 17th April 2015 21:43 GMT
Re: That's it...(4 Just Enough)
So to be clear here, they "found" this ship exactly where they left it. Nice bit of 3D sonar, but not exactly a stunning "find".
Spoken like a man who's never tried to find a wreck from an old pre-GPS chart position.
Also, wrecks don't sink vertically. They tend to travel around a bit before touching down if there's room.
I fear modern technology is blinding you to the achievement.
US Navy robot war-jet refuels in air: But Mav and Iceman are going down fighting
Friday 17th April 2015 21:27 GMT
Bah!
While conceding that the authors have years of experience at the pointy end of military actions and equipment, soldiers to carry out same, I can't help remembering when people speak of this or that technology making human participation unnecessary how various technologies were going to make the infantryman obsolete in almost every decade I've lived through (five point nine so far), and yet thousands of boots hit the dirt every time we go to war.
Could a remotely piloted drone really dogfight a human-in-the-cockpit opponent? It sounds a bit far-fetched. But then, so would have carrying around a roomful of transistors on my wrist when I was born.
The Internet of things is great until it blows up your house
Friday 17th April 2015 18:17 GMT
Bah!
We need a solution that provides security ...
We need something difficult to attack, ...
So remind me, why am I connecting my oven to the internet again? Because "the perfect bake" isn't going to come from doing so no matter what the wet dreams of some IT twonk think. Ask them wot does it for a living. To make baking a hands/eyes off affair, you need sensors in the food item and feedback to the oven itself and there go your cost estimates.
And as for ruining your clothes with an iron, that can only happen when you set it too hot, not when you set it "wrong". People have been Duin It Rite for decades with only a rheostat and a pair of eyes. I don't see how making the iron smarter than the person using it helps anyone. I mean, look how that worked out with phones ...
Amazon CTO destealths to throw light on AWS data centre design
It's 2015 and a RICH TEXT FILE or a HTTP request can own your Windows machine
Wednesday 15th April 2015 18:46 GMT
Bah!
Yes, I know about the Adobe update because the bloody thing flatlined my already glacially slow personal hotspotty internet connection while I was trying to kick into the latest Schlock Mercenary venture and download some things into mi'Raspberry Pi2.
Yet another chance for McAffee to attempt to smuggle their crappy anti-virus program onto my lappy and for yet another mysterious appearance of the unwanted, unasked-for Ask Toolbar.
And why does a security update necessitate re-agreeing to the ToC? Shouldn't some sort of carry-through be assumed from the fact that one has a vulnerability-riddled copy of the said software on the computer already (else why update)?
Dwarf planet Ceres has TEN bright spots, astroboffins say
Apple splats Safari flaw affecting a BEELLION iThings
Wednesday 15th April 2015 18:32 GMT
Bah!
No so much a vulnerability since all the affected iPhones are pre-now versions and by definition unused by real fans, and does anyone use Safari on windows?
I have Safari on my iPad2 and I pretty much consider the combination the best argument for never using the world wide web I've personally encountered.
Easy ... easy ... Aw CRAP! SpaceX rocket ALMOST lands on ocean hoverbase
Why are enterprises being irresistibly drawn towards SSDs?
Tuesday 14th April 2015 19:14 GMT
Bah!
Interesting overview.
My own experience with various overpriced vendor-specific spinners is that the mechanical components, the moving parts, are the most reliable part of a modern disc drive. By far the majority of failures I see are in the support electronics.
I speculate, after talking to the pater who was in the electronics biz for decades, that the problem is all-but dry joints in the circuit boards from new. Surface mounts should have made these a thing of the past, but I've had a board in my trembling hand where the failure was honest-to-gosh rust under a terminal that wasn't soldered at all, just held down by pressure maintained by the other connection that was soldered, so I don't know.
NSA: 'Back doors are a bad idea, give us a FRONT door key'
Because the server room is certainly no place for pets
Friday 10th April 2015 14:21 GMT
Remember the old motto
Or indeed the new unspoken subtext: It doesn't look like C, I'm not touching it!
The "new breed" are a bunch of scaredy cats who can only work with one OS without losing it and freak out at the sight of anything they don't recognize.
Give me an old git who just shrugs and gets on with it every day.
RELICS of the Earth's long lost TWIN planet FOUND ON MOON
Thursday 9th April 2015 21:43 GMT
Bah!
The moon was formed as the result of a planet-shattering explosion at the site of the Extremely Large Hyperhadron Collider, a device invented, owned and operated by the Sh'takell M'gafli, a race descended from a common ancestor of Velociraptor some 3 trillion years ago, who venerated mathematics and science to the degree that even the meanest intellect could do complex number manipulation in their heads in a trice (a trick made easier by rote teaching of the -1 times tables in infant's school, a couple of numbers and an arithmetic operator we haven't rediscovered yet and the popular "Lets Do Some Hard Matrix Sums" prime-time holovision show).
The accident occurred when a drunken caveman wandered into the control room and twiddled a few knobs when no-one was paying attention.
The resulting explosion pulverised the supercontinent of Zha Gathor, ejecting much of it into space where it coalesced into what we today call "The Moon". Unfortunately the shockwave squished to paste every living being on the planet, melted most of what was left of the planet itself and set fire to the atmosphere, burning it into carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and particulate soot.
It was yonks before everything grew back again.
Aluminum bendy battery is boffins' answer to exploding Li-ion menace
Tuesday 7th April 2015 15:21 GMT
Bah!
Every time I hear about this or that technology being justified against the current standard and landfill pollution I wince.
In this case, Okay, aluminium, no problem, carbon, okay, not an issue and maybe we can sequester the carbon produced by the recharging infrastructure as cathodes for these new super-batteries.
But was I the only one who read "polymer" as part of the build, and "liquid polymer" at that?
Before any science twonk waves landfill stats at me I want to see the long-term environmental impact of this liquid organic material that will undoubtedly have excellent down-toward-the-groundwater seepage qualities.
Operation Redstone: Microsoft preps double Windows update in 2016
Wednesday 8th April 2015 13:35 GMT
Re: Subscription model?
Well, sorry to rain on your parade but I'm a Windows user (and a variety of other OSes too, some of which none of you would know about) and I get the very strong read that "Windows as a service" plays into the "web as a service provider" mantra MS started singing back in the 90s when they were inventing .net and telling everyone about it in big presentations.
Given the bug-ugly tile infestation of late and the touch-screen semantics going back to Win7 (why else have that drag-to-screen-edge behavior other than because the little buttons in the top right corner might be too small to use reliably?) I'd say the push to turn the Windows experience into something better (for Microsoft) than Chrome OS and the iThing revolution is an obvious conclusion.
My problem with the rental model is that I do not have the luxury of a persistent internet coinnection when I'm being creative and cannot afford for a vital tool to lock up waiting on he OK from wherever to go ahead and let me work.
Given the Steam experience people could be forgiven for assuming the worst in such a scenario.
And the ugly fact is that for me, the operating system of MY computer is emphatically not a "service" but a bedrock necessity. Wallpaper is a service. Fancy ringtones are a service. Cruft is an unwanted service. The tools I buy are the tools I need long term. The tools I rent are the ones that I need for a weekend and then never again.
And I am, after being quite satisfied with my user experience on various versions of Windows, going to Linux for my next computer upgrade 'cos I'm done seeing my experience degraded time and again to the whims of the shiny brigade.
FBI to WordPress users: patch now before ISIL defaces you
A MILLION Chrome users' data was sent to ONE dodgy IP address
Idiot thieves walk free after stolen iPad uploads pics of them with loot
Big Blue securo-bods warn of dire Dyre Wolf AMONG WOLVES
Streaming tears of laughter as Jay-Z (Tidal) waves goodbye to $56m
Monday 6th April 2015 22:05 GMT
Re: Tidal is cheap thrills
" Mp3s are ear garbage. They're damaged sound files & they can damage your hearing. All these dopes walking around with earbuds today will be walking around with hearing aids in ten years."
You have data to back that up? mp3 music has been around for more than a decade already so one might expect to already be seeing a spike in hearing aid sales.
This is most timely news. I had thought that hearing could be damaged only by blasting music really, really loud. I had no idea the eardrum finds these "damaged music files" toxic in and of themselves.
Of course, I've been smacking my drums with loud music for yonks. I've got tinnitus, a recent addition to my portfolio of interesting diseases, but the ENT tells me that it is probably caused by inflammation in my jaw.
Maybe I should tell him about my mp3 habit and ask about this convincing "damaged music encoding format = damaged eardrums" theory.
I wonder if you can undamage mp3 files by playing them through gold earbud wires with magnets wrapped round them?
Monday 6th April 2015 16:41 GMT
Bah!
It would seem that the world has come full circle since the Stereo/Mono Compatibility panel on the back of Tubular Bells warned "This Stereophonic record cannot be played on old tin boxes no matter what they are fitted with. If in possession of such equipment, hand it in at the nearest police station."
Music-lovers today seem to be absurdly proud of getting music out of a phone with a sound quality below that delivered in 1965 by a three transistor radio knocked up from the parts in my Phillips EE20 kit.
Saturday 4th April 2015 13:40 GMT
Re: Damned if you do, damned if you don't
Agreed re: music I'd want to hear. Also, not sure I should be encouraging people who apparently forgot where their everyday clothes were and so turned up in underwear or last year's halloween drag.
Still, apparently they could all find the writey end of the pen, so there's hope.
Don't be stiffed by spies, stand up to Uncle Sam with your proud d**k pics – says Snowden
Streak life: Oz woman flashes boobs at Google Street View car
Are you sure there are servers in this cold, dark basement?
Microsoft drops Do Not Track default from Internet Explorer
Tape thrives at the margin as shipped capacity breaks record
Thursday 2nd April 2015 20:58 GMT
Re: Bah!
Indeed they were classic. Made by people who manufactured ceramic sewer pipe as they were the only ones who could make a cylinder that would spin that fast without wobbling, flying apart or shaking the frame to bits.
Also, one needed to assemble an hydraulic crane to the frame to lift 'em out in the event they needed servicing.
Does data storage get any more manly?
Sony tells hacked gamer to pay for crooks' abuse of PlayStation account
RAGING Google SLAPS naughty Chinese root cert kingpins CNNIC
Thursday 2nd April 2015 14:59 GMT
Bah!
Good. Hold the feet of anyone misusing the mechanism to the fire.
As for the Chinese losing face: 8op 8ob 8op There comes a point when acceding to another's sense of propriety has to take a back-seat in the face of mendacity, and the Chinese are past masters of the "oh you are so rude, western barbarian" GOOJF card-play.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
