* Posts by Munkeh

19 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Feb 2012

Flat Earther and wannabe astronaut killed in homemade rocket

Munkeh
Boffin

Balloons do not, in fact, go up anywhere. They just repel the ground which itself moves away from the balloon as it serenely floats in the same position. It's not common knowledge but I suspect this is due to the elephants, propping up the ground, bending their knees in anticipation of the balloon bursting.

You can amplify this effect if you add a wicker basket containing mice to the balloon.

Astroboffins baffled as black hole at center of Milky Way suddenly a lot hungrier than before

Munkeh

Re: "hungrier than it's ever been"

The event horizon is the distance from the singularity where escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. Meaning something would need to be moving impossibly fast to get back out. It doesn't matter how fast any given mass crosses the horizon on the way in - even a reliant robin could do so if you could get it there.

Microsoft unzips Zipline, lets world+dog have a go with cloudy storage compression tech

Munkeh

Pied?

This sounds great but the real question is what's its Weissman score?

Amazon Alexa outage: Voice-activated devices are down in UK and beyond

Munkeh

AWS EU issues

There was an issue with AWS this morning in EU-West-1 (Dublin) with an availability zone and the timings match.

That also took down JIRA and Confluence for roughly the same duration as the Alexa problems.

I wonder why Alexa isn't multi-AZ...

You're alone in a room with the Windows 10 out-of-the-box apps. What do you do?

Munkeh

Blockpad as a service

Clearly they need to turn Notepad into a UWP collaborative cloud based text editor powered by blockchain as a service.

YouTuber cements head inside microwave oven

Munkeh

Re: Like me dammit!

Honestly having briefly looked through recent videos on their channel - this is the third or fourth 'stunt' of this type. Previous highlights include same guy filling a bath with gelatine and submerging in it until it set and sitting in a bath with a friend before it's filled with plaster.

Each has millions of views.

It's depressing.

How did someone hijack your Gmail? Phishing, keylogger or password reuse, we're guessing

Munkeh

Re: Local password mashing

"copy-pasting the strong password means key-loggers won't see it."

Unfortunately clipboard monitoring is a fairly common feature of keyloggers, which makes that method just as vulnerable as typing the password.

That said your approach to password selection is solid.

FCC Commissioner blasts new TV standard as a 'household tax'

Munkeh

Re: "The more you tighten your grasp, the more systems will slip through your fingers."

Yep they are definitely serious.

We are on Sky Fibre unlimited in the UK - no usage caps or traffic management. I can download at full speed 24/7 for a month with no drop in service if I needed to.

Check: http://www.sky.com/shop/terms-conditions/broadband/network-management-policy/ and scroll to the section for "Sky Broadband Unlimited, Sky Broadband Unlimited Pro, Sky Fibre Unlimited,

Sky Fibre Max, Sky Fibre Unlimited Pro, Sky Ultra Fibre Optic products*"

The only listed drop in service is for external network issues or faults.

It's not even expensive really.

Core-blimey! Intel's Core i9 18-core monster – the numbers

Munkeh

Average use case

From my point of view there's the 'bang for your buck' factor to consider as well, at least for the 'average' home user.

I have a desktop I game on, stream my rubbish gaming occasionally and do all the things gamers do while playing. Granted I don't have much time to game these days but more cores/threads makes that experience smoother and I found the recent AMD Ryzen 5 1600 (OC'd to 3.85Ghz) to be a good match, especially considering the relatively low price.

Would I like an 18 Core/36 Thread i9? Probably. Could I justify the significant extra cost for my, probably quite common, use case? No. Same goes for the Ryzen 7 1700/1800 though - the extra cores don't add up to a useful performance boost for the price, in my use case.

As always your mileage may vary - but the real winner of all this is the consumer. Actual competition between Intel and AMD is a GOOD thing. Whichever camp you prefer.

AI bots will kill us all! Or at least may seriously inconvenience humans

Munkeh

That's pretty much the tactic taken by the various AI in Neal Ashers' "Polity" series of books.

They took part in a Quiet War, taking control behind the scenes and then everything just carried on - but much better managed. Mostly.

Juno beams back first closeups of Jupiter's unsightly red acne

Munkeh

Re: Mistaken?

That's a fair point but in this case it's mostly whether or not he saw what was subsequently reported.

It seems reports of his discovery are actually second hand, complete with transcription errors missing out words such as 'small' and no mention of colour.

It's possible he was really looking at the shadow of one of the Jovian moons traversing across the planet.

See http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1987JBAA...97..215F for info.

Nintendo pulls the Switch, fires Joy-con at Microsoft and Sony

Munkeh

Too expensive, considering the level of power compared to other consoles - although I love the idea behind it.

On top of that there's limited third party support which has always been a killer for Nintendo products and the quoted battery life range is wide enough to be something BT would come up with.

Sorry but this is likely going to fail, although that might mean Nintendo will switch to just producing games that bit sooner. They really excel at that and would be a good fit on other consoles/PC.

Volkswagen used software to CHEAT on AIR POLLUTION tests, alleges US gov

Munkeh

Re: I'm guessing that...

That's a valid point and this is the same EPA that turned off the Ghostbusters containment chamber - look how that turned out.

Free Windows 10 could mean the END for Microsoft and the PC biz

Munkeh

Re: WTF.....

I think this misconception comes from people quoting the statement as "FOR the first year" instead of "IN the first year."

That small change, along with a simmering dislike of Microsoft, is enough to make people jump to a conclusion not supported by direct quotes from the company.

Munkeh

Re: COULD BE LETHAL

Except that's not quite what they said and it's been a common misconception this morning.

Upgrading to Windows 10 is free IN the first 12 months after release, after which presumably such an upgrade will have a cost.

There's no indication of a subscription model for that upgrade, indeed to quote:

"This is more than a one-time upgrade: once a Windows device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will continue to keep it current for the supported lifetime of the device – at no cost."

Quarter of Brits don't believe that cell towers improve phone reception

Munkeh
Facepalm

I'm not overly surprised.

I remember seeing a small community actively campaign against a new tower being located in their village, due to it's proximity to a school. They were successful and the tower was never built, however within a month the local paper ran a story in which they all complained about the rubbish mobile signal.

Tower and rubbish signal were the same network and yet they didn't connect the dots.

Huawei pitches 'first ever' 10in quad-core tablet

Munkeh
FAIL

First ever?

First ever 10.1 inch quad core android tablet? They need to do their research better...

I know they are hard to find in stock and have QC issues but I'm sure this transformer prime I'm typing this post with proves them wrong.