Posts by Chris Hobbs

Elon Musk unmasks Tesla's Model X – the $132k anti-bioweapon SUV for the 1%

Purpose of the bioweapon mode

It's in case you get stuck behind a diesel Volkswagen.

Snowden journalist's partner gave Brit spooks passwords to seized files

New Security Application

For situations such as this, an application is needed to lock (and possibly encrypt) the data on a hard drive and protect it with two passwords. Password 1 simply unlocks the drive. Password 2 wipes the drive clean securely. If detained and forced to give "the" password, then one obviously gives Password 2.

Does such an application exist? If so, where do I get it? If not, why not?

Think your CV is crap? Your interview skills are worse

And commenting on the interviewer's grammar?

"Their principle weapon is inconsistency." for example.

I have even known Principal Engineers who call themselves Principle Engineers.

Chris

Dead Pink phone fallout hits Microsoft's top brass

Tracing the author

The article says that the blog in anonymous. But the posting quoted contains "....we were not going to have any real affect on the product..." which must be a give-away if there ever was one. I can't imagine that there's more than one person at Microsoft who doesn't know the difference between "affect" and "effect" so tracing the author would be trivial: just give everyone a spelling test.

Wireless wonks face shrinking economy, vanishing porn

Elicit the illicit sympathy

"Microsoft is being dismissed by almost everyone and is starting to illicit the kind of sympathy not seen since IBM were the big bad guys back in the early 80s"

Although most of the things that Microsoft does are illicit, I wonder whether you meant "elicit"?

What if computers went back to the '70s too?

International Computers Limited

I'm really surprised that only one comment has mentioned ICL. The article talks of "...companies like Univac, Burroughs, NCR, Control Data Corporation, General Electric, RCA and Honeywell". And that, presumably, means ICL.

Perhaps I'm the only person reading this who named his son after an operating system. I suppose he could have been called TOS (Tape Operating System) or DOS (Disc Operating System) or Pick or CP/M but wasn't. He's called George after the best operating system of the lot---from ICL.

Olympic Committee wins gold for foot shooting

Superceded?

Yes, it's interesting how few people can spell superseded, isn't it?

US government forces military secrets on Brit webmaster

Video Compression at its best

"...to videos up to 15mb in size..." That shews the sophistication of the USA security forces: when you can compress an entire video into 15 millibits (say 1/67th of a bit) then you can claim to have done something really useful. This is presumably a new sort of video encoding that hasn't been made public yet---still a military secret. It'll make my video iPod look enormous when it is finally released.

US Patent Office decimates Amazon's 1-Click Patent

That Headline

It appears from the comments that have already appeared that I was not alone in being confused by the "decimation" headline. I had seen the story on Groklaw where I had learned that nearly all of Amazon's claims had been gutted. Then I came over here and got a shock when I saw the headline: perhaps Groklaw had got it wrong. But no, your subhead speaks of only 5 out of 26 claims surviving---way away from a decimation.