Posts by Caff

UK, US ink boffinry pact on laser fusion 'star power'

I await the pic of an eager politician posing beside it hoping some "star power" will rub off on them

Here lies /^v.+b$/i

JCL just looks silly.........

//LIFE JOB (1111,GOD,01),

// CLASS=A,

// MSGCLASS=1,

// REGION=0M,

/*LOGONID GOD

//***********************************************

//CREATE EXEC PGM=BIRTH,PARM='/STA PGM VERITY'

//SYSOUT DD FREE=CLOSE,SYSOUT=*

//**********************************************

//*************************************

//WAITABIT EXEC PGM=ILACWAIT,COND=(0,NE),PARM=&LIFE

//SYSOUT DD FREE=CLOSE,SYSOUT=*

//*

//****************************************************

//DEATH EXEC IPJCLCMD,PRM='/CANCEL VERITY

//**********************************************************'

Sony preps Luke Skywalker-style digital binoculars

dune style?

But when will we get Dune style oil lens ones?

BBC explains 'All your Twitter pics are belong to us' gaffe

education

Any feel like setting up a copyright FAQ site or know of one that exists?

Might be useful to educate the masses who are quite happy to steal mp3's that their own pictures and other works they may have posted online are liable to be used without their permission when they could be making money off it, might change their views.

Bloody Moon stuffs the Perseids

style guide

When will thereg follow in the footsteps of other great publications such as the economist and publish its style guide to allow mere mortals to emulate its literary prowess?

Amazon web services customers vent spleen

rep - -

sounds like amazon will take quite a reputation hit for this

LOHAN team buried under ballockets

crowdsourcing

... does anyone else feel a bit dirty after realising we've all jumped on a very web 2.0 style crowdsourced project?

Adaptive Computing spins up Moab 6.1 control freak

only a month?

Is there something I'm missing here but scheduling only a month in advance seems quite short term compared to other schedulers out there? ( though I'm more used to mainframe/distributed schedulers rather than HPC ones )

Do you keep your job when your IT is in the cloud?

video blocked

Any chance of transcripts for those of us who are behind quite strict firewalls that block video?

Dinner Spinner

wp7

Works on wp7 too, just downloaded it.

El Reg to unleash rocket-powered spaceplane

LOHAN

Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigation

Long Overdue Half Assed Notion

Apple iMac 27in

status item

Its a shame that most of these will be bought as status items and never do much "real" work other than amuse people with youtube videos and viewing twitter and facebook udpates

Nokia and Apple bury patent beef

good news for nokia

Must be the only positive Nokia news all year

Living, biological raygun produced in lab

laser sharks

No need for would be evil doers to fiddle about attempting to strap lasers on the sharks backs, now they can just grow them.

Reg hack cast adrift as Illuminati Online goes off-line

fusion

Maybe fusion-io bought the domain?

Boris-Bike firm penalised by £5m over system hiccups

more bikes wont help

As evidenced by other cycle hire scheme, Dublin, Barcelona etc... upping the number of bikes at stations just means more people use them. The extra capacity gets abosorbed by more people using them. Due to the commuting patterns of people the bikes get distrbuted in a way that means you will have empty stations near mass transit points pretty quick. In Dublin here they have vans redistributing the bikes during peak hours.

In the end the bikes are a convienience and possibly an incentive to get people cycling their own bikes, they are not by any means a mass public transport solution and should not be treated as such.

What is UltraViolet™ and why should you care?

sounds promising

Now which publisher/label/tech company will be the first to throw a strop and ruin the whole thing?

X-Prize offers $10m for working Trek tricorder

patents

Could be tough to do something like that due to possible licensing difficulites. There have being a lot of recent developements around portable diagnoises aids but bringing them all together I think would be less of a engineering challenge and more of a licensing one.

Royal Weddings, PCs and Cameron's brass balls

public private health

One thing noticed here in Ireland about having both public and private healthcare is that the private health suppliers are quite happy to pick up profitable cheap minor care provisions while leaving the more expensive ones to the public system. This have the effect of numerically making the private care suppliers seem superfically more effeicient. Great ammo for those for claim that public healthcare is costly and wasteful. The tough thing about healthcare is that the cost will for the most part increase and the technology gets more advanced. True technology over time becomes cheaper and better, however this gives everyone more access to better healthcare leading them to live longer. Thus more older people who require more exspensive speicalised care. This gets dumped on the state while the private suppliers pick up the cheap low cost high margin bits. All fair and well as long as people are okay with it and its laid out when those with agendas to rip apart the healthcare system decide to spout statistics

Sky to show FA Cup match in 3D

3d commentators?

Does that mean 3d talking heads during half time?

US Army to issue Droid dev kit in July

Droids

So can we expect these in future to sport wheels and 3d projectors....

Death threats against 'worst song ever' YouTube teen

Christopher walken cover is better

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzfQwXEqYaI

The song may be rubbish but the cover versions are gold

UK is fifth free-est nation on the internet

Ireland

No listing for Ireland on the site.... though maybe we come under Germany now??

Gmail mystery solved: Google went to Sun for backup

software

Knowing the robot and drives is all well and good but what software do they use?

We have comvault + sl8500 + lto3's in our place

Intel re-invents its mainstream SSD

increased uptake

The pricing is not likely to fall in the short term untill market penetration increases. At the moment due to the rise in consumer uptake of flash based goods, smartphones/ipads etc.. any increase in fab capacity is absorbed by consumer demand rather than helping to lower prices. So all those flash chips go into gagets rather than ssd's keeping their costs stable.

Open source to bust up Cisco Borg collective?

investors

Looks like Citrix is one of the main investors, they could start to drive a lot of business together.

Osborne bids nation fill his Budget portal

low taxes

@John Square Looking at Norway it would not seem that low taxes affect growth much at all. http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/in-norway-start-ups-say-ja-to-socialism_Printer_Friendly.html

Videogame TRAINS TERRORISTS, yells pundit

radicalised already

The key phrase quoted ""I think those who have been radicalised already" ... he's right!! But why stop at games, the obvious manual of choice for would be terrorists is surely Tom Clancy novels? Or even Die Hard 1-3... they could even be planning cyber terror attacks by watching Die Hard 4.0!!!

We must band together to end this maddness

Palm Pre 2 WebOS 2.0 smartphone

battery

If the battery could last 4 days I would be sold... though in any smartphone that would be a feat.

Santander mixes up 35,000 bank statements

printers. doubt it

They blame the printers, but it sounds more like a coding error. 35,000 statements.. if it was a printer mixup it would have been caught before it was sent out. I'm guessing that someone made a change to the template for the statements and when they were sent to print the duplexing went out of synch resulting in the wrong adress sheet being added to each statement.

US Navy achieves '100 mile' hypersonic railgun test shot

buckshot

Surely a shotgun type blast from one of those at mach five would pretty much litter the sky with enough junk to take down almost anything

LG kicks off work on quantum dot TV

phones

Great! better battery life and sharper images on smartphones

Why Microsoft is Acorn and Symbian is the new CP/M

palm?

No mention of webos...........

might not be as stillborn if hp can make something of it.

Why you can't move a mainframe with a cloud

ageing

They should be more proactive if they are worried about an ageing workforce. Half of the team I work with in our mainframe shop are under 30. The company has made an effort to train in new staff and retain skills. Any company with a problem that comes down to an ageing skillbase has only themsevles to blame

Coalition promises to kill three-quarters of its websites

cloudy

They'll just end up jumping on the buzzword bandwagon and decide they need a cloud. Then end up hiring some consultants and eventually throw some money at EDS to set it up... 10 years from now it'll fall apart with nothing productive been done.

Guardian super-blogger flames Reg boffinry desk

more please?

Can we have a flame war section... maybe set up some journalist vs blogger boxing matches?

Dell gets busy with GPUs

text

Glad to be able to read a description of the video for those of us in work with videos blocked.

Mobile phones for minimalists

backup phone

That would actually work pretty well as a backup phone if you ended up away from somewhere to charge your main one.

Big Blue bets on risk

BP?

Recent history suggests that risk management at BP was exactly up to scratch, suprising then that these guys would list them as a customer?

EC consults on low take-up of e-commerce

ROI UK

I think a big part is language and insecurity about each countries laws. I know here in Ireland people tend to buy a lot of stuff online from the UK when the VAT and currency levels make it worthwhile or if you can't find it in Ireland. Its pretty easy to do and there is no language barrier or hassle returning goods if there is a problem.

Possibly the world's most pointless review

chair war

That chair war is astonishing is its absurdity but to be expected I suppose.

Wannabe Jedi drool over potent laser 'lightsabre'

cameras

I wonder if the laser would be able to knock out the sensors on cctv cameras? If so I can imagine more "productive" uses for this other than crashing cars and making a nusince.

Ireland publishes proposed data breach notification rules

less than 100

@sooty

Read the full article, they only get away with not reporting less than 100 when the information lost is trivial.

"Even when an organisation loses the data of fewer than 100 people they must report an incident if that information includes sensitive personal data or financial information which could be used to impersonate them."

Ten free apps to install on every new PC

avg - no way

AVG was pretty good two years ago but ditched it recently for MS security.. suprisingly good. AVG free seems to have become worse and worse recently. My main problem was that its plugins for FF and IE kept crashing win7pro64.. Had a look at AVG forums and there was plenty of people with similar issues so I promptly ditched it. No issues since.

Slovakian police chief quits over Dublin explosives run

Noone checks incoming passengers

He was coming from an EU country, why would anyone check him

Korean bank dumps Unix boxen for mainframes

@Gordon Ross

It happens by accident, got a job in a bank as an IT grunt and started on mainframes that way. One day normal server techy next you find this whole new world of green screens and no GUI's.... its a strange old place.

Novell stacks Linux and Mono for mainframes

i/o

We wad a z10 teest box running on this, the i/0 to san was pretty terrible. The IBM guys we had running it in house couldn't explain is but offered to try again in the new year, not really inspiring stuff

EDS mainframe goes titsup, crashes RBS cheque system

microcode upates

They must have really went to town on cutting staff to the extent noone knew how to do it, just click a few buttons and IPL.

Giant iPhones invade Florida

exploding iphone

So acid batteries?

Iphone costumes that can burn just like the real thing?

Web GUI hides number-crunching open source elephant

no scheduler

job submission and managment but no scheduler.. bit strange that