Posts by Carl

I'M SO SORRY, sobs Rosetta Brit boffin in 'sexist' sexy shirt storm

Its not about the shirt

People wear, say and do things every day that _someone_ is going to find offensive.

Sometimes that "someone" is going to make a fuss.

The question is what happens then.

What's happened here is ESA's seen a PR shitstorm coming, crapped its pants and sent Matt Taylor out to deal with it. Something which, as a rocket scientist rather than a PR drone, he is not equipped to do.

Here's what should have happened. One of those glossy talking head types up top at ESA should have got out in front of this and made the following statement.

"Good morning. Welcome to the press conference. We have some exciting new about the mission. Before I start I just want to touch on some stories that have been floating around concerning an item of clothing worn by one of the team last week. I have talked to that member of the team and am satisfied that the incident was a mistake and that the mistake will not be repeated. As project director I take personal responsibility for such matters and as such all questions about it should be directed to me personally. I regret in advance that since this is an ongoing HR matter I cannot due to privacy rules discuss the specifics of the incident nor the identity of those involved.

Now then. On with the press conference. Here is Matt Taylor."

And that would have been it. Done. This isn't rocket science.

Tor is '90 per cent of the net' claims City of London Police Commish – and he's dead wrong

Cognitive Bias

The commish says it's 90% because thats how much of his brain is obsessed with consipiracies.

As well it should what with the Hillsborough cover-up. Oh wait.

Feds: Amazon cloud can be used for healthcare data

How lovely

This is the same Amazon cloud that my server perimeter gets all these port probes from, yes?

Feds crack down harder on 'lasing'. Yep, aircraft laser zapping... Really

Smartbombs

Know how to fly down a laserlight cone.

Just saying.

Oracle vs Google redux: Appeals court says APIs CAN TOO be copyrighted

Hang about

This is an opinion, not a ruling.

Oracle will have applied for the opinion ahead of an appeal. The opinion just indicates a belief that the appeal has merit. When the appeal begins (as everyone knew it would) the bar will be much higher and Oracle will need to prove copyright all over again with Google ready to defend itself accordingly.

Bah where's Groklaw when you need it.

Basically Oracle haven't "won" shit.

Vinyl-fetish hipsters might just have a point

This is the same Jack White

...that espouses minimalism, right?

at last

Some proper engineers putting this "vinyl is awesome" BS out to pasture.

Im no audio or electronic engineer but I remember buying my first CD player and CD ("Swagger" by the Blue Aeroplanes, since you didn't ask) and thinking to myself: "Fuck me. That tone is fucking brilliant".

I don't think I've listened to a bumpy, crackly, hummy piece of shit lump of vinyl since.

EU: Let's cost financial traders $400m a day, because EVIL BANKERS. Right?

ha ha what pension fund

You put in your hard earned $ and when its time to cash in its "Oh dear, its all gone. Of course the market's not done well and then there were all those fees. The value of your investments can go down as well as up. Anyway, old boy it's been splendid talking but I really must chip along to the Lambo showroom. Nigel and I are buying matching Gallardos. Toodle pip."

Fucking "money men". Best thing we can collectively do is yank our pensions and starve the fucking lot of them. And yes I am bitter. With good reason.

Friends don't do tech support for friends running Windows XP

me neither

I only support friends and family's computers if they run Linux.

Which basically means I don't have to do anything other than "sudo apt-get update" every 6 months.

8 converted from Windows and counting.

Yes, Google can afford to lose $9bn in Motorola sale. But did it really?

No idea

What that article was on about.

However, while reading this accountancy gobbledegook, I became sure of one thing:

The sooner the B-ark is ready for launch the better.

Eight EXCELLENT languages for the fondleslab-friendly Intranet of Thingies

The answer is "JavaScript"...

now whats the question?

Just like how 10 years ago the "answer" was Java

And 10 years before that the "answer" was C++

And 10 years before that the "answer" was COBOL

Just another case of history repeating.

Ex-Oracle manager claims he was fired for asking to give Indian staff equal pay

3 cheers for Me.Spandow

And 3 boos for Oracle.

I hope anyone looking to them for a job takes note.

Amazon, Hollywood, Samsung: PLEASE get excited about 4K telly

I'll buy one when...

They figure out how to make regular LCDs LEDS and Plasmas that don't die after 3 - 5 years.

And when I get HD digital cable that isnt shit for less than 150$ a month in Canada :(

Oracle showers gold on OpenStack, dreams of open-source splashback

oh goody

I get to wrestle with Oracle's arcane, fidgety stealthily-proprietary-extension-ridden sh1te on another compute platform. How very perfect. I can't wait. Let the champagne corks fly.

Barnes & Noble's Nook sales take a long walk off a very short pier

Is it me..

Or does _everything_ Microsoft touch turn to sh!t

'MacGyver' geezer makes 'SHOTGUN, GRENADE' from airport shop tat

Re: why this obsession with aeroplanes?

Nobody takes trains in New York or buses in LA?

I must have been in the wrong cities.

Microsoft touts SCROOGLE merch: Hopes YOU'LL PAY to dump on rival

You know, whenever I see Microsoft marketing, ads etc it kind of reminds of political party ads (specifically Tory ones Im afraid). The reason is because it is an attempt to seem clever and/or funny that just ends up being a bit of a comedic train wreck.

I genuinely get a really uneasy feeling about stuff like this in the same way that I get uneasy if I end up speaking to someone at a party who's just a little bit too enthusiastic about his gun/porn/sword/knife collection or neighbour's teenagers.

This ickiness is more or less standard whenever The Establishment tries to have a go at being Edgy, New or Interesting. They always almost exactly manage to not pull it off.

Of course, the chutzpah of MS slagging Google off for being unethical lurks vaguely off camera like an enormous, flatulent elephant. I can't help the suspicion that at any second its ready to enter the frame and start shitting everywhere.

ETERNAL PATENT WAR: Apple and Samsung locked in battle again

Re: Sigh

I agree.

PJ packed it in far too hastily and far easily in my opinion.

I know that's easy for me to say but I erally think the baby has been thrown out with the bath water.

It's a real shame. Groklaw was great for a morning coffee de-FUD.

The Oracle/Apple/MS lawyers and shills must be delighted.

Will small biz get a bite of mega UK.gov IT pie? Yes: if it can pass the bulls**t sniff test

Not so fast.

"As everyone who has ever run a successful project knows, the first thing to do is to get the specifications right. Only once you've have, written in stone, what the system is going to do and how it is going to do it, can you possibly start to bring in anyone to start building it for you."

IMHO (which to be fair smart people pay good $ for)

The reason why projects fail is the over-emphasis on knowing every tiny detail up front because details change. Worse still pedants and people with agendas use the details to score points, devouring productivity. Concentrate on the big picture first. Get into the detail at the right time.

See wikipedia under "Agile".

Here's what YOU WON'T be able to do with your PlayStation 4

Re: ***I Know It's Long But Just Give It A Read

Gah my eyes.

For the love of god man.

Whitespace... WHITESPACE.

Have PS3, wont be getting PS4

PS4 will be too restrictive so I will have to decline.

Hell, if I had known they were going to pull Linux support I wouldn't have gotten a PS3.

I sure hope Sony know what they are doing. Im hard pressed to think of a long-run successful technology that started out open and which subsequently got more restrictive.

IT'S patent WAR: Apple, Microsoft vs Google, Samsung, Huawei

Re: This could all have been avoided if...

And you know the details of that deal how?

MS never does anything in the name of teamwork, much less largesse.

My idea is the terms of the deal contained an anti-open-source poison pill that had Google's lawyers reaching for their defibrillators.

Re: WTF?

I don't think the change in holder much matters.

The new holder would be a successor in interest and would not only inherit the original owners' IP but also the consequence of their laziness. Of course such common sense doesn't make much difference to MS, Oracle, Apple et al - as you can see by their eagerness to return to the courtroom even though all of their previous visits have ended up getting them absolutely nowhere.

It comes down to the psychopathy of corporations. MS,Ora,Apple have psycho shareholders and to keep the psycho shareholders happy the executive have to do psycho things even though they are fully aware the chances of prevailing with Nortel's bag-o-shite is roughly the square root of fuck all.

Re: WTF?

Quote:

There was a case ten years ago about a compression algorithm that was patented in the US (wouldn't be allowed in the UK) loads of people had been using it for many years and IP owner then decided to extract the money once everyone was using it :o

Details?

IANAL but I have a couple of patents so I generally know the ropes.

Waiting without acting until your tech is prevalent and then suing for infringement is unlikely to receive much sympathy from a judge. If you have any IP you are obliged to be diligent in defending it. I think the legal term would be "laches".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity)

Number-crunching quant cooks up gambling machine, promises untold RICHES

Re: hhhmmmm

"I smell BS too"

Yep, see my post above about lifting the skirts for investment or an acquisition.

The BS usually flows pretty thick and fast when looking for $.

Re: hhhmmmm

Because:

a. if you put large bets on, somebody notices and you wake up next to a horses head.

and, more likely

b. they are looking to be acquired by a bookie

Cash-strapped students hungrily eye up old, unloved racks

Dont forget the OS licensing costs

ha ha ha.

Only joking.

Techies with Asperger's? Yes, we are a little different...

Sufferer?

Jes*s H Chr**t.

Why does everyone need to "suffer" from something.

The problem here is lack of empathy, ineffective relationship maintenance and out-and-out bullying.

The boss you had in the first job? Moving goalposts, short deadlines? That's bullying, incompetent BS.

20 years ago (maybe 40, I lost count) this behaviour was widely tolerated and "different" people then were black, gay, female, welsh, or any number of things that a bully would pick up on and use as a weapon to justify their crappy existence at the expense of ours.

These days they can't do any of that because its verboten so they pick on the next level of "differences" - Aspergers, people with funny coloured hair, accents, weight etc. And if that ever gets barred it'll be the next level down: the "Golf Club" class of bullying based on what kind of car you have or what school you went to.

Bottom line is the world's full of bullying pricks. Best bet is to knee them (and their f**king HR dept) square in the bollocks and let the chips fall where they fall.

London plod plonks, er, pull request on EasyDNS

Re: WTF?

Sometimes its hard to tell.

See the Hillsborough Inquiry.

In defence of defenestration: Microsoft MUST hurl Gates from the Windows

Re: Always a PC

"they are still making a shitpot full of money every 5 seconds."

That is true my friend.

The thing is, for the capitalist psychopaths that run Microsoft, it's not enough.

Greed always ends up eating itself. Its fun to watch, too.

Steve Jobs AIRBRUSHED from history by APPLE months before his death

Folly

In the 19th century, industrial revolution era entrepreneurs would regularly build things like this.

They became known later as "follies": a reference to the ultimate uselessness and waste of money of this immense ego-fuelled money-wank.

Now I detest Bill Gates as much as the next Open Sourcerer but at least some of his money-wanks are vaguely altruistic if you look at them "just so".

But a patent on a door? Seriously?

500 MEELLION PCs still run Windows XP. How did we get here?

Re: XP is good enough

@Vector who quoth:

'The real problem is that when IT goes to the business, the first question they face is "What is this upgrade going to get me?" Security is a poor answer in that situation because only IT cares about security.'

Which is correct and also the reason why, these days, my conversation goes like this:

Q: "What is this upgrade going to get me?"

A: "Immunity from ${AMOUNT} in criminal negligence lawsuits when security lapses that you knew were likely resulted in material losses to ${NUMBER} of ${ANGRY&POWERFUL} users."

Re: But slowly – over time - and maybe not...........

@BobChip

That's sound advice my friend.

The only problem is only 10% of windows users know how to follow it.

And I include a large of CIOs and CTOs in that number. Sigh.

NSA's Project Marina stores EVERYONE'S metadata for A YEAR

Love the use of the word "Lawful"

Lots of things are or have been considered "lawful" in various places and at various times.

The systematic discrimination of people based on their gender, or the colour of their skin for example.

So with all due respect the NSA can stick "lawful" where the sun don't shine.

Thorium and inefficient solar power? That's good enough for me

Re: Slightly fruity comparison

Faith != Confidence

If I drop a coin 1000 times I can be "confident" it will be heads 500 times. Ish.

This is not the same as "Faith", which, when applied in some circumstances would appear to ask the coin to turn into a piece of cheese. Or a toaster. Some people (lets call them "The Cheesists") may have "faith" that that will one day happen. I do not. Rather I have "confidence" that the coin will continue to be a coin and that the only outcomes will be heads or tails.

Bill Gates: Yes, Ctrl-Alt-Del salute was a MISTAKE

Re: WAT

I've seen many UNIX/Linux machines over my career with uptimes of 1000+ days.

I even ran a mailserver on an old 386/FreeBSD that had 200+ days of uptime until a power snafu happened.

But my favourite "uptime" story is the (possibly apocryphal) one about the Novell Netware box that nobody could find. It worked, responded to pings etc, but nobody had any clue where exactly it was. It was finally discovered, amongst other "old" kit behind a wall that contractors had put in about 5 years earlier.

China's corruption crackdown killing off Unix

Re: Switching from big iron to x86 virtualisation

My guess - *guess* - is Yip means Unix on proprietary hardware eg Solaris on SPARC.

My other guess is he doesn't quite know what he's talking about.

Microsoft's $7.1bn Nokia gobble: Why you should expect the unexpected

Bye bye Nokia

The MS embrace of death begins.

Stand by for the exodus.

Like all things Microsoft this will die on its arse, the only thing left "of value" being patents that MS will use to extort and bully companies that actually innovate.

Its a road we've all been down before and we'll all go down again.

Can't wait for Google to finally call them on their BS patents shakedown.

Legal bible Groklaw pulls plug in wake of Lavabit shutdown, NSA firestorm

Re: @Roo - There are some brilliant technical minds out there

Quantum entanglement lol

Guardian lets UK spooks trash 'Snowden files' PCs to make them feel better

Groklaw shutdown

Pam's put a bullet in groklaw because she has no idea how to continue with Big Brother over her shoulder.

Not sure if she's just curtailing her own involvement or shuttering it. Sad day either way.

www.groklaw.net

Bradley Manning: 'I'm sorry my actions hurt the United States'

ah yes the obligatory "apology"

As seen in noted bastions of human rights Iran and also N.Korea.

*round of applause*

'Hand of Thief' banking Trojan reaches for Linux – for only $2K

Re: will the Linux Trojan have the same value as its Windows counterparts?

"Linux has always been horrifically insecure."

Please explain how.

Thanks ;)

NSA gets burned by a sysadmin, decides to burn 90% of its sysadmins

Re: Hmm..

I've just has a mental image of the American Airlines noon flight to Moscow full of guys with long hair and glasses clutching "spiderman" themed thermos flasks and encrypted thumb drives.

Did Linux drive supers, and can it drive corporate data centers?

Re: FreeDOS server market share

Source?

In my nearly 20 years of Linux experience I have yet to hear of one solitary instance of this among my peers.

Not one.

PEAK APPLE: iPad market share hits the skids

The problem with ThermoNuclear War

The resulting cloud of toxic radioactive shit is just as likely to waft back into your back yard.

Rotten hackers feast on mouldy Java flaws

sigh

I started using java in 1996.

It was kinda cool. Nice and tight, not too much to learn.

You could do guis, listen on sockets, compute stuff. It was OK, and with 1.1 I could talk to DB and my world was complete.

And then... oh dear.

So I sit here today at my desk and Java (or rather JEE) is a bloated mess of a language with all kinds of crap I dont need, buzzwords, frameworks, annotations, black boxes, conventions, wierd gotchas and general broken-ness. And to cap it all the black hats are now a step or two ahead at all times.

Utter, utter garbage. It's turned into C++. The only people in love with it are up-their-own-arse propellorheads. And this is coming from a guy who, compared to the general population IS an up-his-own-arse propellorhead.

Kinky? You're mentally healthier than 'vanilla' bonkers

Re: @ribosome

And yet quantum mechanics is all about stats isnt it, Dr.Rutherford?

In space, no one can hear your laptop Blue Screen

is this even funny?

It's not is it?

Game designer spills beans on chubby-fancying chap with his stolen Mac

Re: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

"In the UK the police have never been and are not at present involved in any cases of "copyright theft" or "piracy" because copyright is a civil matter"

Not if it's with intent to resell the copyrighted materials.

Meanwhile, the pr0n screen captures are clearly fair use.

Cops? Ha! I had an entire CAR stolen

...and they did nothing.

The thief parked it illegally in his street and I got the ticket.

So I told police where it was.

They didn't do anything as at this point it was a civil matter, apparently.

I was also warned that I'd be arrested if I went and stole it back.

The most helpful thing the police did was to ensure the car go re-registered in his name so police would know who to nick if the car was cammed speeding or parked illegally.