Posts by Mayhem

Or the cabling gets a little loose

Unlabelled emergency cutoff was located on a false wall near the door, connections had shaken loose from vibrations from door closing over the years. Walked in, turned on the lights, turned off a room full of servers. Very good heart attack test.

Only vindication was the astonished expressions in the faces of the highly sceptical building electricians when I did it again in front of them after dragging them in to explain to me what had gone wrong with the lighting circuits.

No safe dose of radiation?

Define safe.

I mean, standing in the sun for too long gets you a nice dosage of UV radiation, and that is technically harmful. Do it often enough, and you get skin cancer. Doesn't exactly stop millions of people from lounging on beaches.

Stand in front of a fire too long and you get cooked from the infra red radiation. Of course, most people are sensible enough to move out of the way before then.

Or are you only worried about ionizing radiation? The big bad EVIL KILLER™.

Frankly the caesium plume is localised to an area fairly close to the ocean. It will rapidly start to dissipate once it hits the ocean, and dilute itself pretty quickly. As we are seeing. Put in an exclusion zone for certain types of fishing for a period of time until the concentration drops enough and problem solved. Whats the likelyhood that cancer rates go up? If you started drinking the affected groundwater, yes, your risk would increase. Slightly. If you started smoking in response to the shock of being hit by an earthquake, your risk of cancer would go up significantly. People are very bad at making comparative judgements of risks. They greatly exaggerate uncommon risks, and devalue common risks.

I also love your idea that a bit of salt can be washed away with fresh water.

Have you ever tried to deal with salt contaminated soil? It takes quite some time for deposited salts to be flushed out even with very heavy irrigation, especially if the water table has been affected in any way. I expect it will take a while to irrigate the 470km² of countryside that was underwater, and the soil won't be very productive of food until that is done.

But its all ok, as the salt isn't radioactive right?

Sheesh.

Combat the wind?

No doubt they'll just avoid bringing any baked beans along with them...

Sadly many publishers *are* pricing close to reality

Printing onto dead trees is a *very* small percentage of the total sticker price on a book, the vast majority goes into editing, typesetting, proofreading and so on - all the background stuff that turns badly misspelled fan fiction into literature.

When it comes to high street stores, 90% work on a sell or return basis, they don't pay for the title until after it is sold. If it hasn't sold in 6 weeks it gets returned to the publisher who either restocks their warehouse, flogs them off cheaply as remainders or pulps it.

The problem is the publisher's business model relies on a small quantity of runaway bestsellers to pay for the vast majority of slow sellers. What people really don't realise is just how few books are actually sold these days. In 2005, the average first print run for a mid-list author was only 5,000 copies, for the entire US market. Bear in mind the US market is roughly 1/3 of the global market for english language books. And they have trouble selling more than 5000 copies of a book to a population of 260 million...

“950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million books in print tracked by Nielsen Bookscan in 2004 sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies.”

-- Publisher’s Weekly, July 17, 2006"

http://www.parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cfm

Heat seeker != modern infrared targetting

Old school systems simply tracked the hottest target, so flares etc become suitable countermeasures, along with flying into the sun.

These days they use infrared cameras which are work just like video cameras, they caret a target and off goes the weapon looking for what matches its internal picture. Flares still work to a certain extent, but they work by blinding the camera, not by distracting it. At which point the inertial systems kick in by making the missile keep aiming for where the target *should be* until the camera comes back up. Better hope you have a few more flares.

Strafing?

Actually, they've tried it several times.

Mortal Kombat 3 was the first attempt, along with I believe the early Soul Edge games.

It didn't end well.

Unfortunately what makes for more realism in terms of combat makes for pretty crap gameplay.

Half the delight is watching someone unleash the 500 hit Mega Combo of Doom!, but if the opponent can simply sidestep and watch it explode past them, then kick them in the back, well.

Also, it tends to be really hard to do two player 3D properly. For single player, you can put the camera behind the player, so you plan attacks over the shoulder and can line things up right. For two players on one screen though, the camera has to be purely side on to keep things even, and that makes judging depth really hard, especially for joe average.

to be fair

I can't think of many reasons to get a prescription for an "uncontrolled substance", those are called over the counter medicines for a reason.

Shouldn't that be ROT-XI?

Given the Romans only had 23 letters in classical times, and K was barely used.

We could probably argue for ROT-X immediately before Julius Caesar, they only had 21 letters up til then until they got Y & Z from the Greeks after the conquest in 146BC.

Um.

The alliance invaded an independant country. Since neither Afghanistan nor Iraq were ever considered to be part of the USA or Britain, then its a little hard to describe the events as anything other than a war.

Heck, even Fox news calls it the War in Afghanistan. Insurgency is a lovely buzzword coined relatively recently that refers to an uprising within a country. Like rebellion, or guerilla uprising, but without the positive connotations. Whatever you call it though, it is clear that the US is occupying a foreign country under sufferance by the local inhabitants, and it did so under decidedly flawed provisions. If the locals start trying to drive the invaders out by force, well, it was considered virtuous when it happened to the Russians. Why is it considered bad now?

Please do not conflate the participants of state sponsored terrorism (Al Qaeda, IRA, RAF, Hezbollah etc) with the domestic guerillas fighting for their homelands.

Nice rant but..

You complain you can't do a bunch of server tasks on a home pc due to having a consumer connection to your ISP.

Well duh.

If you need a static IP because you run servers, then talk to your ISP and get one. It will cost you slightly more but there are reasons for that. If you actually read your ISP contract you would probably find that you are specifically prohibited from running servers on a standard consumer link anyway. Regardless of that, if you don't upgrade your link, the upload capacity is traditionally crap so your server wouldn't support much load either.

As for being unable to multiplayer your games, well, I suspect you're trying to do something outside the normal usage of those games, as almost every modern game has an external matchmaker service to get around the issue of changing IPs.

heehee

Yes, I have fond memories of a teen in a rice rocket pranging into my old Series III in wet conditions. Towball went right through his nose and punched clean through the radiator, then the bounce knocked it clear again. I think in total I lost about half a sq inch of paint on the bumper, but on the bright side he cleaned the rust off my towball. His car was ... not so lucky.

Poor guy was all like 'don't you want my insurance details' and was stunned when I simply asked 'why? you didn't hurt anything'.

Passive safety on those things was great, although I definitely wouldn't want to hit something solid at speed.

Higher framerates all very well

But do sod all to compensate for the latest desire of filmmakers or music video creators for making lots of rapid cuts in quick succession to increase the 'action'. See Bourne/Bond or any modern video.

I don't care how many frames you give me a second, if the image isn't sustained there long enough, I can't focus on the bloody thing.

Spiceworks

Gets a good thumbs up from me for being an ideal tool for our small shop.

It does have one fault though, the support options are crap when it doesn't have an internet connection. It doesn't seem to be particularly designed for standalone installation, like for example you cannot download addins on another machine and install them locally, they have to be downloaded and installed by spiceworks itself.

That being said, the Support desk was happy to take a copy of our database and make the additions for us, but still, not the best solution.

Well duh.

Thats because they are having problems supplying power to the eastern half of the country because half their powerplants are not operating. If they can't get roughly an additional roughly 20% of normal supply onstream in the next two months before summer kicks in, half of Japan will be back into rolling blackouts, including Tokyo. Hence the lawyers will have a field day with compensation claims.

This has nothing to do with the raidiation leaks at one plant by the way. Its the other dozen affected reactors and coal/gas plants that are causing the issue.

Simple answer - it won't

Different implementation of the same general concept.

Blizzard uses tokens made by Vasco, so they have different seeds and algorithms to RSA.

Also, the number provided by the user is compared with those generated on authentication servers within Blizzard, whereas many of the earlier RSA tokens required communication with RSA themselves, instead of a locally installed copy of the software.

Simple answer - when Blizzard gets hacked and the authentication data is released, then the sky will be falling on you. Likelyhood of this? Extremely low.

Handover?

Possibly the fact that he hasn't actually committed a crime here?

I don't particularly like the guy, but you have to admit something is fishy.

That being said, he *should* go back to Sweden and ensure everything is above board.

He will be much better off in a show trial playing the martyr than playing the fugitive in the UK.

Hmm

I wonder if that is another reason for the decline in more traditional LEGO pieces.

I mean, the older designs were made up of lots of smaller bricks, which encourage experimentation. The newer designs are heavily dependant on larger custom pieces that are useful for that model and that model only. Granted a large part of that must be cost cutting, the larger custom pieces will be cheaper to mold, but also maybe it lets them reprotect the idea for a while.

I agree completely about the racket

I signed up to one of the rating agencies to find out they had no records on me. Good I thought, then was rather unhappily surprised to see a month later that they were charging me a 'service fee' every month to keep telling me they don't know anything.

And getting off their lists is extremely difficult - several phone calls plus a message in writing, whereas there is no way to opt out on signup and the bit about the fee is in extremely small print.

Its an out and out scam and should be illegal.

Its pretty standard for the rest of the world

Hong Kong and Singapore have the same model.

It provides a lot of benefits to passengers and airport, as you can freely wander around anywhere on the airport, there is no need for duplication of shops on either side of security, and you can actually buy some decent food at a reasonable price. The have passport control near the main entrance and scanners at each gate, but the scanners only get turned on when the gate is due to be used, so staffing doesn't have to be 1:1 with the machines either.

Israel wasn't attacked by the Irish either

Think about what countries the UK has offended greatly.

Ireland - European terrorists

Afghanistan / Pakistan - Asian terrrorists

Iran / Iraq - Arabs

Argentina - theres your South Americans

About the only ethnic groups I can think of that might not be a threat is Black africans and eastern Asians, and if we include Nigeria / Kenya and Malaysia / Indonesia as historical people who may have grudges, well ...

They kind of have to screen everyone.

A better example would have been Swiss customs - they do blatant profiling there as well, but it is very efficient and much of it is automated based on cameras picking up abnormalities in behaviour.

I can't say I can recall there ever being a terrorist threat to the swiss, although that may be because even the bad guys have to bank *somewhere* and the Caymans are harder to access.

Avatar?

You forget that the world of Avatar has significantly denser air, with large amounts of foliage.

Ducted fans were used to protect rotors from the environment, and the small size of the rotors is balanced out by the density of the atmosphere. Not quite feasible in reality yet.

I saw footage of a small test craft similar to the c&c style with ducted jets, but it had major problems with stability and more importantly noise. Damn thing howled like a banshee, I can't imagine how loud a full scale prototype would be, which kind of defeats both civilian and military applications.

a title is needed

Hmm,

CW moralist boosts fog?

Maybe means something to do with spreading confusion

NCR?

Wincor Beetles are equally bombproof, but we're not exactly talking modern systems here.

Our beetles ran a highly customised install of '98, and still used BNC networking as the shielding of the cables was useful to compensate for the environment they were in.

You think getting dimms is hard, try finding new ISA BNC network cards. We had to get the damn things custom made in batches.

evidence?

Quoted from a comment to a review, by someone who didn't even state make & model of device.

Yep, that sounds like reliable evidence to me...

Actually in NZ it is 111

For the exact same reason that other countries used 999, but our phone dials went the other way around, so a 1 was 9 clicks.

Security conscious banks...

My bank in NZ offers an RSA token for free with a nominal fee as monthly rental to help secure internet payments. Alternatively you can have it txt a code to a phone number.

My bank in the UK *requires* a mobile phone number to be tied to the account so it can send a similar one off code to the phone to confirm addition of new payees.

Banks may be slow to change, but the sheer rate of fraud has at least forced some countries to adapt, and the mobile txt solution does at least cater to the wider public.

On a side note, a colleague of mine has been contacted twice by his bank to say that his card was allegedly used in <foreign country> and was it actually him making the payment? so they have certainly stepped up their internal security monitoring as well to reduce skimming losses.

indeed

I completely agree - this is what came back to bite us as I mentioned above.

Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital all failed to work with a linux boot disk & acronis, or with any OS outside of Windows XP/Vista/7/MacOS

No need for Preexisting photo id

Well you clearly haven't read the requirements for a drivers licence properly.

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Motoring/DriverLicensing/NeedANewOrUpdatedLicence/DG_4022091

If you do not have an existing passport or photo ID you can use your UK birth certificate plus corroborating documentation, from DWP or a school record or even just a pay slip.

If you don't have a UK birth certificate, tell me again how did you enter the country without a passport?

If you want a passport, you will again need your UK birth certificate

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/TravelAndTransport/Passports/Applyingforyourfirstadultpassport/DG_174100

Nowhere is a photo id a sole requirement for gaining either passport or drivers licence, assuming you are in fact legally able to obtain said credentials.

Where is the fail again?

Not a lie per se, just not the right truth

Military photo reconnaissance satellites originally used extremely high resolution stereo film, which was ejected back to earth and recovered by special teams. That film was taken by very large cameras, and the satellite was pretty much built around the camera. When they moved to electronic image capturing, the satellites became significantly larger, again, built around the idea of a suitable sized focal system.

For a better example, the space telescope Hubble is essentially a civillian version of the early 70s Keyhole satellites, which are estimated to have a resolution of around 6" from a 2.4m mirror. Not exactly something that can be easily shipped to mars, and rather lacking in other significant scientific instrumentation.

Well yes but...

Well yes, but then you can't see where you've been either, which is one of the more useful things a web browser can do.

Thats the whole point of the 'exploit' - it relies on the fact that a helpful service can equally be a risk and fixing it asks people to tradeoff between security and convenience.

dated?

His reviews were certainly honest and accurate at the time of publishing, but the changing world of the internet means half of them will have vanished ten years later.

The problem he has now is that he's trying to do the classic trick and coast on his past successes.

He started off with mostly clones of tabletop games, but did them well, and Slay was definitely addictive and entertaining, but I owned a copy for Palm Pilot in oh, 2003 I think. Looking at his website, he released a final version in 2004 and hasn't really done anything to it since.

In fact he seems to have released only one new game in the last two years, which is a dated looking populous clone for Iphone. I find myself agreeing with the original AC, it isn't piracy that is hurting his income, it is his business model. He has a good touch with writing AI, but only average skills at art. What he needs to do is contract someone to update all his art models and then he can repackage all his older games as modern reissues for whatever platform he likes - the underlying AI will hook in players, but the screenshots and art models are what will sell it to them originally. He can also offer the older version with no changes at half or quarter the price

Yep, Lib Dem all right

What he's saying is an Iphone might appear to be as popular as all heck but when it comes to the actual results they only end up with a small share of the overall market.

ie, they talk the talk but will never actually be as dominant as they claim.

legacy apps?

"And XP can be locked down - as long as you don't try and run some legacy app from 1990 developed for windows 3.1 by a graduate VB "programmer" who only go the job because they were the son of the business manager."

So you've had to support Swift too then eh?

Nautical towers are more powerful than land too

Back in NZ, it was common to make cell calls from the fishing fleet out to about 50NM offshore because the marine transmitters had directional cells instead of round ones - they threw the signal a lot further out to sea than on land. I believe the max range was around 150NM but that was on the old telecom analogue network. GSM was significantly less. Probably something to do with horizons too.