* Posts by Yobgod Ababua

23 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jan 2011

Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?

Yobgod Ababua

It haunts me still

As a computing professional of a certain age, I have been tortured for many years by “An Error occurred. Please contact your Network Administrator.”

The traditional reply being “I AM the bloody Network Admin you recalcitrant pile of expletives!”

Hi there, Hubble, glad to hear you're doing okay

Yobgod Ababua

Slightly more accurately...

It was "turning it off and on again repeatedly whilst vigorously shaking it back and forth".

Not dissimilar to the old "fix your stuck hard drive by whacking it with a mallet and spinning it on the floor" trick.

Amazon is at this point a money-printing cloud machine with a grocery store in the parking lot

Yobgod Ababua
WTF?

Indeed

"Earnings per share of $5.75 were well above analyst estimates of $3.14"

"Wall Street was disappointed with the numbers overall, as Amazon shares were down 7.7 per cent at $1,645.56 in after-hours trading."

This makes no sense. Wall street makes no sense. "Oh... you did almost twice as well as we expected... we're disappointed in you." WTF?

(No commentary on the juggernaut's progress, just how does our financial system make any sense at all?)

Y'know what? VoIP can also be free from pesky regulation – US judges

Yobgod Ababua

Gaaaaaaah

If people depend on your service to make their telephones work... it should be regulated the same way as the telephone service. Period. Full stop.

That you now get "caller id on your television" does not make the CORE COMPONENT OF THE SERVICE less important.

Your phone may be able to clean up snaps – but our AI is much better at touching up, say boffins

Yobgod Ababua

Huh

Do you notice how, at the end, they are all about removing superimposed text?

That worries me a little, because it looks like a means to remove watermarks and branding, so you can use photos you don't have rights to while pretending you do.

Or maybe I'm overthinking it.. no? yes?

The healing hands of customer support get an acronym: Do YOU have 'tallah-toe-big'?

Yobgod Ababua

Indeed

I suffer from the same blessing, which I usually ascribe to the unacknowledged sentience of all systems and devices which are capable of sensing the presence of either a Fearful User or a Trained Expert.

When only Fearful Users are present, ALL electronics, plumbing, electrical and similarly Fear-Inducing Modern Technology Magic will take any excuse and opportunity to skive off and misbehave in otherwise impossible and unexplainable ways. However, all it takes is the observing presence of a Trained Expert who knows how it Should Work to cow the unruly device into submission and return it to service.

Web inventor Sir Tim sizes up handcuffs for his creation – and world has 2 weeks to appeal

Yobgod Ababua

Makes sense...

If babies are going to be killed, then we should make sure we have a hand in it, a seat at the table, otherwise the baby-killers will just go and kill the babies on their own.

No one wants iOS 8 because it's for NERDS - dev

Yobgod Ababua
Thumb Up

Weird

Maybe I am a little on the geeky side, but this has been the most useful iOS update I've ever installed, and the reasons aren't geeky at all...

1) Family-tied Apple ID support. !!! !!! !!! We had previously shared all our communal apps and music by having the "two devices - one apple id" method, but that meant that all cloudy things needed to be carefully disabled lest our mail and texts start leaking between devices. Now we all have separate apple IDs tied to the same account and content, and EVERYTHING WORKS. It was worth installing iOS 8 (three times!) for this feature alone.

2) Better app integration. I'm already noticing this in several places, particularly photo-manglers being more easily accessible to and from the camera and LastPass working more closely with Safari. Sure trying to explain what they did for developers sounds ridiculously geeky, but the effect is that activities that seemed awkward now just work, which any user can appreciate.

3) Messaging typeahead changes. I actually like the new "suggestion" UI and have found it loads easier for both shortcutting typing when it guesses correctly and for cancelling an upcoming "correction" that I don't want. Since my wife seems to communicate almost exclusively through SMS these days, this is a godsend.

Boffinry breakthrough: First self-replicating life with 'alien' DNA

Yobgod Ababua

Re: "I don't think there's any limit," versus "That's just not going to happen,"

"I think all scientists should have a minimum of four semesters studying science fiction literature before they get their microscope and lab coat."

All the proper boffins I know were weaned on blue milk, swaddled in ridiculously long orange-brown scarves, and occassionally curse in Elvish, Klingon, future Chinese*, or all three simultaneously. I'm pretty sure they had your proposed coursework settled by the time they were out of nappies.

Any outliers will soon be obsolete, or upgraded.

*see "Firefly" or "Blade Runner" for appropriate references.

Biz bods: Tile-tastic Windows 8? NOOO. We lust after 'mature' Win 7

Yobgod Ababua
WTF?

Ah, I see.

"Employee interest in Windows 8 is “very high”, with 38 per cent preferring Windows 8 compared to 35 per cent for Windows 7. "

So, of the 73% who have no idea about technology, a full half+ went with "8 is one better than 7, innit?"

'We the People' seek to double NASA budget – at least

Yobgod Ababua
FAIL

This is pointless.

The White House (aka Executive Branch) has no authority to set budgets... only to implement them.

That power is reserved for Congress, who doesn't particularly care about petition sites unless they appear to somehow impact their local constituency or chance of getting personally reelected.

Many years of accumulated legislation and special-interest lobbying have effectively tied the hands of the executive to do anything useful. While this petition sounds like a good idea, and I'm personally interested in this particular special-interest, this ends up being more of the same thing that's causing the problem that cut NASA in the first place (special interests pushing through requirements that X% goes here and Y% goes there). The same sort of process is, IMHO, the real reason for California's current crisis... over-specification in legislation that leads to general non-liquidity. The Fed should not repeat those errors, if it can help itself.

Chip daddy Mead: 'A bunch of big egos' are strangling science

Yobgod Ababua
Thumb Up

All Hail the Electron!

I was priviledged to learn about the Boltzman distribution (among other things) from Professor Mead.

He also always has had a very specific style... highly patterened silk shirts and a proper "Devil's Beard".

When I was his student his big thing was using transistors in their sub-threshold realm as analog devices instead of just treating them as the binary logic they were designed for. It's been that ability to look beyond how something is historically utilized to what it actually does underneath and is capable of that is why he is how spectacularly awesome as he is.

Give them Hell Dr. Mead.

Boeing recipe turns cooking oil into jet fuel

Yobgod Ababua
Pint

Best. Tagline. Ever.

I may need a new keyboard.

Elon Musk's new re-usable, hovering rocket ship in first test liftoff

Yobgod Ababua
Boffin

Re: still not really sure about this

They don't land at the launchpad.

They land at a landing pad located suitably downrange (adjusting for planet rotation, etc).

If they -wer-e to land at the same pad they'd make a full orbit first. Nobody is suggesting any sort of "turning around" which, as you note, is impractical, requires many tonnes of fuel, and just isn't done.

These guys know their rocket science pretty well.

I'm going to have to call for your credentials before I let you keep dissing them like that without more cited science.

Scientists find safer way to store hydrogen

Yobgod Ababua
Flame

Re: "can soak up so much of the stuff ..."

What they are trying to say is that the energy density is roughly equivalent, which is a big, big deal.

Spy Hunter

Yobgod Ababua

If an arcade had Spy Hunter, it invariably would eat all my quarters. Every time.

Loved this game so much.

DumDumDumDumDumDumDumDum

DumDumDumDumDumDumDumDum

WeeeeeeeeeeeeWah

WeeeeeeWahWah

El Reg official units of measurement: Linguine, Jubs, Hiltons and all

Yobgod Ababua
FAIL

Dear Register (Re: Standards Video)

Please have your sound tech/intern soundly flogged with the archaic implement of your choosing.

While the content in this broadcast seemed fine, the balance between speech (both narrator and host) and sound effects was glaringly off-kilter. I had to either struggle to hear the barely audible (YET EXTREMELY IMPORTANT) definitions of standard measurements or have my eardrums violently pierced by sound effects. I do applaud the choice of sound effects (the radio "breaking news" in particular) but the sound balance renders them all totally useless and, frankly, a menace to society.

In the interests of our future survival as a species, please take the following actions:

1) Rebalance the bloody video so that it is headphone-watchable.

2) Chastize those resonsible as you see fit. (There were images from the "Temperature" section that suggest a reasonable course of action... and I am referring to those more "bent over" rather than the "by the pool".

Thank you for your time and consideration.

China goes green with rare earth plea

Yobgod Ababua

Not quite that simple

"rare Earths not because they physically happen to be located only in China"

"rare" earth metals are -everywhere-. EVERYWHERE.

The interesting thing is where they are sufficiently concentrated to make extracting them at current prices worthwhile. China has quite a few of those deposits, but (since the stuff is EVERYWHERE) they aren't remotely the only ones. This has been the classic business tactic where China undersold everyone else until they all went out of business, then restricted supply and pumped up the price. Mid-long term investors are looking to re-start rare earth extraction elsewhere, but in today's fast-paced market the delays to roll up the infrastructure are relatively substantial.

Ten... new games you may have missed

Yobgod Ababua
Thumb Down

Yeah...

...totally didn't miss them because I don't have a PS3 or XBox.

Only one PC game, and no handhelds? Really? I spit on your consoles. *Ptui*

World's first bamboo smartphone to enter production

Yobgod Ababua
Thumb Up

It's just better

I'm not sure what exactly it is (probably related to porousness), but wood and leather just *FEEL* nice to hold and use.

New ATLAS particle part of 'everyday mass'

Yobgod Ababua
Trollface

Re: DD

Squeak Squeak Squeak Squeak!

Er, I mean, of course! Made of mice... ridiculous!

Squeak!

HP unveils stylin' new desktop line

Yobgod Ababua

Cannot??? Perhaps you lack the will...

"the light can't be turned off."

Apply favourite diagonal cutters to the ground lead emanating from the light bar. Problem solved!

Custom ICs in small numbers to be cheap as (normal) chips

Yobgod Ababua
Boffin

Graham:

While I appreciate your enthusiastic tinfoil-hattery as an amusing diversion, I really must take issue with your chain of reasoning and conclusions.

My understanding is that this device is to the current wafer process what waterjet CNC systems and 3D printers have been to physical manufacturing. It makes small-batch runs affordable. This would be an incredible boon to small manufacturers and hobbyists, as it would enable them to do things on silicon on a smaller scale than is currently possible, which means more designs and experiments will be made and tested.

It has nothing to do with "slipstreaming" malicious changes into a normal production run. For one thing, normal production runs will almost certainly continue to use the current wafer process, as the economy of scale catches up quickly there once the masks are made. For another thing, making any changes to the layout of an ASIC requires at the very least that the entire chip be re-floorplanned, timing checked, etc., which is neither trivial nor guaranteed to actually work. It's actually much easier for entities to get your malicious routines inserted in the current model, by working together with the proprietary mega-chip designers behind the scenes in the first place.

Besides, if this device fufills it's promise, I'd look forward to a growing community of open-source ASIC plans that you could have chipped out by the reputable company of your choice, after you review them for malicious government transistors. And, when it's discovered that Motorola backdoored your cellphone for the government for you, it's at least possible that a company or group could get together and spin out a compatible yet safe version of the chip in question (something that the high costs of masks prohibits currently).