* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Fly me to the M(O2)n: Euro scientists extract oxygen from 'lunar dust' by cooking it with molten salt electrolysis

Tom 7

Re: Too valuable?

Less than 200kg has been got from the moon!

Tom 7

Re: Energy- Dyson spheres?

Mirrors are easy to produce in gravity - just spin the molten glass and you have a parabola! Also with lower moon gravity you dont have to use as much support to keep it 'in spec', You could probably build a 100m mirror on the moon and defend if from all comers until sunset!

Tom 7

Re: Energy

Cos it was really hard to make CRTs big enough without all sorts of distortion creeping in.

Tom 7

Re: I've heard rumors

And pray tell where will you get the CO2 from on the moon?

Tom 7

Re: Energy

On earth PV peaks quite noriceably around noon when the sun passes through the least amount of breathable pollution. On the moon for 1/2 the time you can get max power from your PV - from sun up to sundown. No weather problems either. So I reckon you'd get 10 times the return you get on earth,.

Not to be sneezed at.

Well not while wearing a helmet.

Tom 7

Re: Now that the O2 problem is solved ...

Witches salt - evil CaCl2.

Rugby legend Will Carling tells El Reg: Techie stats bods will love this year's Six Nations

Tom 7

Re: More blah blah blah

I dont think it will go the same way - RU fans seem to be quite conservative and powerfully vociferous. If the stats are of no interest they will be kicked off the screen fairy pronto. Its no-where near as boring as either US or UK football and watching at home or in the pub its only during stretchering off or offscreen activity that commentators are audible,

Two billion years ago, snowball Earth was defrosted in huge asteroid crash – and it's been downhill ever since

Tom 7

A recent New Scientist article ib nass extinctions

used AI to show that the mass extinction at the end of the Devonian was no such thing - it took 50 Million years! I wonder if closer examination of the data for 2.229 billion years ago may need to be looked at in similar detail. While I would not be surprised with short term (~decade) temperature rises due to the asteroid strike I'm not convinced it was sufficient to melt through the miles of ice to reduce the planets albedo enough to end the snowball earth on its own.

Otherwise brilliant work - its shit like this with big bangs and catastrophes that gets kids interested in hard science!

Alan Turing’s OBE medal, PhD cert, other missing items found in super-fan’s Colorado home by agents, says US govt

Tom 7

Re: 256 items, you say?

I always felt there was something missing from that.

EU declares it'll Make USB-C Great Again™. You hear that, Apple?

Tom 7

No it wont - unless you use toothbrush type charging its far too inefficient.

The time that Sales braved the white hot heat of the data centre to save the day

Tom 7

Re: Totally different industry...

I wonder if it crashed it would have made a deafening racklet?

Tom 7

Re: Totally different industry...

Dont mock - killed 21 people in Boston Mass; in 1919 - moves fast enough when it wants to!

Tom 7

Ah - those portable aircons where the hot air outlet is hung just outside the window so all the hot air comes back in again!

Top Euro court advised: Cops, spies yelling 'national security' isn’t enough to force ISPs to hand over massive piles of people's private data

Tom 7

Not really - you dont want the UK doing a Johnson on you and getting you hostaged to stupidity.

Tom 7

Our data will have dual citizenship - it will be in the US before you can say

Totally Subcontracted Business: TSB to outsource entire IT estate to IBM for a cool $1bn after 2019 meltdown

Tom 7

Re: Splendidly well done, IBM !

It was cloned from Lloyds was it not? That still mostly works. I'd like to know what differences were introduced.

A fine host for a Raspberry Pi: The Register rakes a talon over the NexDock 2

Tom 7

Re: Why some people keep on reinventing the ill-fated Palm Foleo?

I've got a keyboard/mouse/3m extension lead and sockets on a piece of hardboard with a slot at the back a 22" monitor fits and pulls out to velcro down on the hardboard and it makes a really useful portable that everyone laughs at for a few minutes. I've got a Pi4 on it but I dare say others devices would work.

Could do with some custom leads to make it a bit less Davros but I like it.

Squirrel away a little IT budget for likely Brexit uncertainty, CIOs warned

Tom 7

Re: "UK’s departure from the UK"

If you drive your car into a brick wall after we've warned you your bumper could come off a bit dented doesnt mean we're hoping your bumper will get dented. We were hoping you weren't going to be so stupid.

Is a bloody forlorn hope but it was never a dream.

Tom 7

Re: Conservative and Unionist party

Unions and other root vegetables will be very popular!

Tom 7

Re: But how much is a little? To do what?

Sunlit uplands? So I guess some PV would be handy. Glad I've got some and and in inverter to kick it into action if the mains fails!

US hands UK 'dossier' on Huawei: Really! Still using their kit? That's just... one... step... beyond

Tom 7

Re: Won't make a difference

You dont need to spend that kind of money. One man with an angle grinder can put it out of action for a very long time without going anywhere near it.

Geoboffins find the oldest matter on Earth: Ancient stardust created before the Solar System formed

Tom 7

Peanut Butter?

Pre Sun Pat?

World's richest bloke battles Oz catastro-fire with incredible AU$1m donation (aka load of cheap greenwashing)

Tom 7

Re: The problem with small-scale private philanthropy by the wealthiest is that it achieves little

So I pay tax which I hope would go to the NHS and someone else gives their charitable status Opera society a donation and some of my tax goes to subsidise their visit to the same opera and you think that is not immoral?

It's a no to ZFS in the Linux kernel from me, says Torvalds, points finger of blame at Oracle licensing

Tom 7

Re: APIs, header files, definitions, 1+1=2

if Oracle win the court case to get to stop others playing with the Java API then, within a year I would expect j2c to grow by a couple of orders of magnitude and open source Java development to be reserved to Oracle PDQ.

I've played with it on a couple of old Java projects and been surprised with the results - though I have to admit that could be because I know a reasonable amount of what's going on in both languages.

Tom 7

Re: Hypocritical

Well not quite - it was always difficult to remember WTF you did 3 or 4 years ago last time the server re-booted by the new IT manager.

There's something fishy going down in the computer lab

Tom 7

Re: Lucky git

Where I worked we had a Vax/VMS and the early word processing had a big dictionary to do 'spell checking' or some fangled thing. A program called crunge appeared which took a document and replaced random words with words that were somehow similar. A crunged document often made more sense than the original (we were mad boffins at the forefront of our fields and often didnt understand our own work). Better still a crunged document could be sent in 'by accident' to reveal bosses who had even less of a clue than normal. Once you've found out someone doesnt read your reports you are effectively untouchable!

Y2K quick-fix crick? 1920s come roaring back after mystery blip at UK's vehicle licensing agency

Tom 7

Re: Another 20 (18) years...

I'd imagine 2038 will be a lot quieter than 2020. Very little Unix/Linux stuff isn't compiled and is thus a lot easier to fix.

I am broot: The Reg chats to French dev about Rust tool that aims to improve directory navigation

Tom 7

Re: What do you mean "ho ho"?

It is possible to extend JavaScript to include strong typing.

JavaScript suffers from where it is in the eco-system and any language that is easy to use in the browser will suffer the same problems. I've seen lots of people writing why strong typing should not be added to JavaScript but none that really stand up to the problems not having it causes in the wild.

Tom 7

"Why Rust? 'It works and usually does what you wanted it to do,' says dev"

or:

"Because my programming skills improved to do what I wanted to do here and it just happened to be in Rust."

Sometimes its just reading the documentation and actually understanding it.

BOFH: You brought nothing to the party but a six-pack of regret

Tom 7

Re: New year

Coupla hundred grand please.

Tom 7

Re: Learnings

I thought it was a USAinism.

Tom 7

Re: Learnings

That would burn out my monitor.

There's a cling-on off the starboard bow... Small moon spotted orbiting asteroid NASA's Lucy will visit in 2027

Tom 7

pointing the veteran space telescope toward the Sun would not be a good thing to do.

Unless you have a serious space ant problem

Sometimes shining a light on a nuclear problem just makes things worse

Tom 7

Re: Of course we 'ad it tough...

Twere tho - we made some chips that worked fine when on the test bed. Packaged the buggers up and they stopped working. Had to show a demo of a repeater in a box with a light to keep it working while the cct was redesigned.

OpenAI's GPT-2 secret life as a pawn star: Boffins discover talkative machine-learning model can play chess

Tom 7

Shirley if its learned PGN

it would just strut about on the board kicking the pieces over and strutting like it had won?

Blackout Bug: Boeing 737 cockpit screens go blank if pilots land on specific runways

Tom 7

Re: How things have changed...

Hailing would be more accurate.

Tom 7

Re: Lifestyle change

I flew in one over the Southern Alps in NZ. Absolutely bloody spectacular and equally terrifying. We dropped down into the head of a fiord and I could see no-where to land so I assumed we were having a mechanical failure despite everything sounding OK. Eventually we homed in on a pile of rocks about a foot wider than the skids. I was almost as relieved as I was when I discovered I was too heavy for the tandem parachute jump I'd booked in for, Nothing worse than an active imagination and a knowledge of Newton's Laws and looking down from great heights.

Google and IBM square off in Schrodinger’s catfight over quantum supremacy

Tom 7

Square off?

Entangle shirley.

Firefox 72: Floating videos, blocking fingerprints, and defeating notification pop-ups

Tom 7

Re: I hate that Firefox is the least terrible option

That doesnt work on a huge number of sites, Twats find ways to be twatty!

Improved Java support poured into Microsoft's Visual Studio Code – will it be enough to tempt developers?

Tom 7

No Way!

See Reg article on Oracle Google fight.

I'm the queen of Gibraltar and will never get a traffic ticket... just two of the things anyone could have written into country's laws thanks to unsanitised SQL input vuln

Tom 7

Re: 'Twas ever thus

Or a Consultant who claims to know some "typically talented web development professionals".

Reusing software 'interfaces' is fine, Google tells Supreme Court, pleads: Think of the devs

Tom 7

Re: Innovation and Profit?

I havent programmed MS in a long while. MSDos used the CP/M api for system calls - does this still remain somewhere?

Tom 7

Re: What’s a ‘brexit’

Brexit is a biscuit tip with lots of pictures of nice biscuits on it. Its sealed very tight but if you pick it up you will notice its empty even before you open it.

Best viewed from afar.

Tom 7

Upvotes bbob. Has to go lie down!

Xerox grabs $24bn from banking titans to fund hostile takeover of HP Ink

Tom 7

HP are part of the dark side - or they would be if they let that last bit of ink out of the cartridge before disabling it.

From Soviet to science fiction icon, the weird life of Isaac Asimov 100 years on

Tom 7

Re: EE 'Doc' Smith

The Lensman series - what 5 books and before cut and paste every new weapon was an order of magnitude more powerful and the descriptions of the explosions were the same all the way through!

IT exec sets up fake biz, uses it to bill his bosses $6m for phantom gear, gets caught by Microsoft Word metadata

Tom 7

Re: idiot

I have noticed several times that things were missing from the ERP that you would expect to be there and yet even after mentioning the oversight that no-one ever did anything about it. I came to the conclusion this was for slush funds and chose not to investigate further in case I found out I'd been paid from it.

Tom 7

Old as the hills

A boss of mine did that but only got away with £300k or so. I think he got caught because he wanted someone to stop him as he kept mentioning the shell company over drinks in ways that never seemed to make any sense. Well enough less sense than could be expected of a Friday afternoon to make a few of us go ''WTF' in our heads so when we heard about said company after he was busted to mention it to each other. Never did find out how he got busted though. Would love to know.

It's always DNS, especially when you're on holiday with nothing but a phone on GPRS

Tom 7

Re: No Service

Until very recently the only reception we could get for mobiles here was a 10 sq ft area outside (its always raining) a barn 50 yds from the house.Found this out when lightning took out the landline and internet and my dad got very ill. I didnt find the spot - some spotty 15yr old guest did!

Always reminded me of the joke about the woman complaining she could see her neighbour naked and when asked by the police had to climb on the wardrobe.

Tom 7

Re: No Service

I had a boss who complained he could never get me on my phone at weekends. I pointed out that I wasn't being paid for being on call and even if I was the fact he insisted Friday afternoons were serious drinking sessions - he once threatened to fire me if I didnt come down the pub where he was calling from NOW - it would have been a bit pointless.