Posts by Denarius

The perfect fantasy flick for the online Valentine you've never met: Her

have to agree

With a relative addicted to being a romantic victim, who nearly lives inside her fondle slab this film is not really fiction, hence of no interest. Note to reviewer. One of the marks of the temporary insanity known as infatuation is deliberate anachronism. Horse drawn vehicles, medieval lighting, white dresses. In an age of rising illiteracy, formal letter writing is due for a comeback. ITIRC an article in major newspaper 5 years ago about the return of the "village scribe" doing exactly as male protagonist in She does.

@Arnaut. Not necessarily. Some of the best story telling is being very realistic. Saving Private Ryan is an excellent example

Home lab operators: Ditch your servers ... now!

not a bad idea except

we who like older OS and hardware cant' use it. Sounds great for those using MS stuff, or only X86/64. My SPARC Solaris, HPUX and AIX boxes will remain. At least until I can get my paws on a reasonable Itanic running 11.3 so I can virtualise 10.20/11.0. Power 7 hardware which has great virtualisation capabilities is still beyond my hobbyself-training cash flow. Wish the concept behind Taligent of virtualising all main unices so only one chip was needed was done. So there is a market for VMWARE to investigate. Using Intel chippery, make a virtualisation for IBM Power. As IBM are thinking of selling off their chip baking, they might play with licensing. As for Larry and Co, not sure reverse engineering is worth it.

OK, I can dream. Snowflake, meet Hell.

New mailing list for AU sysadmins

re-inventing USENET?

As a text loving reactionary I like the idea.

With $100m+ buyout deal, Klout is suddenly popular again

Even spin doctors

are being automated. crap, the BS level will probably rise further than the Thames.

Inside Microsoft's Autopilot: Nadella's secret cloud weapon

Re: Seriously?

@AC Powershell; Seriously, more powerful ? If using a 1974 Bourne Shell might be. If using ksh93 using builtins no way in a MVS system. (unix hell) And as soon as the word object appears, quadruple memory and CPU requirements, drop to 20% of the speed and gain absolutely SFA in any language. Ironically MS licenced MKS tools which were a tolerable subset of unix shell tools, then did little with them. Pity, as they made coding in mixed environments much easier than fudging around with Cygwin. UWIN tools were better, but never seemed to get mind share.

Usable Powershell scripts, IMHO, is a testament to the persistence and skill of sysadmins who do the best with what they have.

UK claims 'significant lead' in drones after Taranis test flight

you forget British development process

If it seems to work and is worlds best or better, then development must stop, now. Just ask Duncan Sandys how its done. If its a fail, keep trying with massed attacks of money in standard process.

Intel Labs demos crazy-efficient, crazy-fast 'network on chip'

more significantly

@AC. Now IBM are thinking of selling their chippery labs, Intel has a better market postion. It also now has a possible solution for speeding up the big multi-core CPUs probably in pipe line. More importantly, this concept chip allows different types of core on one die. See where this is heading along with industry trends ? FGAs, FPAs and "simple" CPUs able to be built on one silicon die where jobs can shuffle around to optimum type of processor core. As a proof of concept this is good work. What happens next is a business decision.

Architecture decisions are so last century. the RISC/CISC wars are over, let alone instruction sets arguments. Regardless, the Chinese have licensed MIPS technology so there may still alternatives after Larry and SPARC crash and burn. Not that I dislike SPARC, it is just losing market and mind share. Also ARM seems to be doing well

Well put Charles, have an upvote.

Apple in patent cross-hairs AGAIN

Re: Patently Insane Insanity

well dssf, do you assume laws are made to allow societies to run in a controllable (to a point) manner. Perhaps orderly is a better term. However, laws are written up by lawyers. A monopoly in short. And what do monopolies/oligopolies do ? Charge maximum price and try to increase work for more of their kind. After all, like petty bureaucrats, most lawyers assume everyone else has infinite time and resources to play silly court theater. How many parliaments are not mostly led or infested by lawyers in the west or advised by packs of them ? BTW, what is the collective for a pack of lawyers ? Another chance of creating a another tedious conspiracy theory.

Mars Orbiter spots FRESH IMPACT CRATER

nice lump in middle too

A small crater, but it seems to have a small rebound lump in middle. Or is that the end of a Star Seed ?

The job-eating predator VMware users fear is ... VMware

probably all true

right up until "Big Disaster" happens and the peons are not there to fix the hardware the multitude of hypervisors and VMs lurk on. Out of interest and a morbid sense of impending doom, just how many techies can survive the transition from a useful member of society into a parasite ? Me, cynical ?

HP execs Bradley and Donatelli ready to walk: reports

except for the money it's

managerial class members discovering what the peons have known for a long time around HP. New opportunities such as unemployment. One wonders how they will cope with being unpaid and unloved.

Why IBM's server sell-off is a lightbulb moment

Re: Avoid the commodity

@Getriebe: And what has IBM got to do with the attributes you claim will be needed since the Greeks ?

Apple seeks patent for mood-sensing technology

Oh great, re-inforcement

so if one is feeling down, or worse, cheerful, the adds reinforce that ? Much worse when adds for things/services get served that reinforce a bad mood because some sales weasel feels one is susceptible to buying ? I have observed that the worst response to feeling blue is have some one or thing try to cheer one up. The consequent rage might backfire. Always hope, admittedly feeble, that even the USSA IP mob might knock this idea back.

Eurocops want to build remote car-stopper, shared sensor network

Mission creep

@Lars More like an interest in vintage performance cars

El Reg BuzzFelch: 10 Electrical Connectors You CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT!

actually ICAN

Have you guys been pestered by some semi-literate commentards lately ? Hang on, let me rephrase that. Have you been contacted by the products of the modern education system lately ? Bring on more teleportation workaround stories with some quantum mechanics. At least the comments can be fun. Also, the beginning of the year shutdown is ending. Should be some real news real soon now. Super X class flares, spooks admit they cant catch a cold, Windows 8 admitted to be a design mistake...oh, too late

has anyone else noted

has anyone else noted

that our PM and lackeys have really been putting boot into Snowden lately ? Does this mean more "security vetting" in future for those afflicted by management ? How about we just outsource our government to a small consultancy firm from overseas. Think of the savings !

Also, is job market still as bad as it looks to other local commentards ? I feel unloved now the pimps don't call.

Google patents ROBO-TAXIS to ferry punters into advertiser's shops, restaurants, etc for free

this could be fun...

just live more than 20 KM out of any large town/city/mega-hellhole and see what ridiculous offers one gets. I love it when the big G and other "services" think I live somewhere near the NAT+proxy exit to a network backbone. Usually over 3 digits distance away. No details, the spooks can work it out for them selves :-) Oh, and all my devices have no GPS or it is off except when I need it.

Australia floats plan for national social media regulator

Re: Don't underestimate the power of lobby groups

And here I was concerned about the dominant left wing (meaning rabid materialist ) pressure groups wanting to put up cost of living with meaningless climate saving scams, create quangoes designed to find and take offense to prevent dissent and other intrusions into normal life because of some social utopian.

Re: Fucking Nanny State

if only some parents gave a stuff. Most of the worst defend their little psychopaths in training. The helpless victim syndrome is also endemic driving the "Do something" pandemic. However, there is the irony referred to in the article that bullies in suits can do their thing without regulation, but little Joe and Jess are regulated.

Prof Stephen Hawking: 'There are NO black holes' – they're GREY!

Re: "I know absolutely nothing about the black holes..."

@ AC number ???

If one read much of what passes for science in popular media, the issue of programmed determanism would be obvious. Shadows of the Mind was a more detailed argument following on from the Emperors New Mind. As for brain doing somethings that von Neumann architectures cannot, I think this is analagous to Newtonian and General Relativity. in understanding of motion. You assume the electrical activity is all that is going on.. Penrose makes no claim that he knows either. He speculates quantum activity may be involved.

BTW, this laptop is dying so my spelilng is not all my own fault for once. Keyboard is as bad as every autocorrect on any mobile device used.

Re: "I know absolutely nothing about the black holes..."

Dr Penrose wrote two books on the fallacy of equating Von Nueman computers and human thinking. Probably not popular in some parts of MIT as a result :-) The Emperors New Mind and Shadows of the Mind. Using the work of Godel, Turing and set theory, Penrose does an excellent job of explaining that human thought at high levels is not a Von Nueman architecture at work. I believe his world view model is neoPlatonist from his description of getting insight while solving the Tiling problem with 5 sided tiles. Open to correction on that. Heard him lecture once. An excellent concise speaker.

As for Hawking, his longevity after the ALS diagnosis has puzzled me. The 24 hour care must account for much of it. But we digress. Regardless of black hole "colour" what difference does the event horizon colour make ? If black and radiating or grey and radiating, what is the difference ? Being pulled into spaghetti or baked while being ripped apart makes little difference. Is it that the quantum foam forming the event horizon of a singularity radiate the source of Hawking radiation rather than a vague quantum uncertainty ? Much as Hawking is an amateur like everyone else in theology, just less coherent, when he sticks to cosmology it is great to see him at work still.

Snowden speaks: NSA spies create 'databases of ruin' on innocent folks

Re: Whatever

@Tank boy, Is that really you, Jewelery Bishop ? Your apparent ability to miss _data_ in the article suggests learning difficulties or agent provocatuer activities.

CERN boffins fire ANTI-HYDROGEN BEAM

Re: Antimatter information that is newsworthy:

Dear Sir, what are you smoking ? Give it up, bad for lungs you know. As for particles and energy, yeah, we know. Gamma rays and electrons/positrons or if big enough energy protons and antiprotons pairs. See starship antimatter drives for best antimatter drives. As for energy in particles, whisky tango foxtrot ? Holds true for matter and antimatter. Now, back to the question, is there a behavioural difference ? Given that the quarks in protons and anti-protons are different, why not ?

hats off to CERN

seriously good research. Actual handling of antimatter atoms is a serious bit of engineering. AFAIK, magnetic fields can alter electromagnetic energy polarisation which is disruptive if one is looking for extremely small changes.

Boffins measure 27 quantum states of light

27 rings a bell

irrelevant ? dunno. One theory of everything starts with 27 dimensions. Any connection ? At least it was not 42

Startup-land finds a sympathetic ear in Canberra

Nice try but

sounds like another way the gold rush/get rich quick/rip off mug punters mentality among the managerial (lack of) class will try to avoid taxes, decent wages and other impediments to unearned riches. Performance pay and CEO bonuses here are, as elsewhere, subsidies to those who do need it. Otherwise if the rules were altered to allow those who did the work there might be something in it. A few firms would offer more benefits to staff if the fringe benefits tax made it less costly.

Antarctic ice shelf melt 'lowest ever recorded, global warming is not eroding it'

Re: *cough*

@kraut. Dear Sir, they did get those temps at the time of the First Fleet. A well calibrated thermometer placed where the Sydney Harbour Bridge is now. See Watkins Tench. Oh, and ElReg last year. As hot as last year before the dreadful industrialisation really got going. And as someone whose residence was in sight of and downwind from last years local big bushfires, I am most interested in climate, changing or not.

I recall that Tench observed birds dropping dead from the sky. Only fruit bats have dropped dead so far this year. A few more horses might not get Hendra then, so thats alright.

As for mad Poms and wool suits, they did it at Port Essington on Coburg Peninsular Northern Territory in real serious tropics mid 19th century. Flown low over abandoned site. How they lasted 15 minutes in a hot humid swamp on hot rocks, let alone years, has me stumped. Must be something in Yorkshire pud and not in pickled cabbage :-)

Re: Point 3

Ah Mystic, missed the cost analysis bus did we ? Island: hmm, not close to convenient centralised power sources then. Yes, locally generated power from a windmill in some remote windy place would be cost effective. Has anyone ever disagreed ? As for being beggered, agree the banks and most governments are doing an excellent job of demonstrating Greshams Law.

Current nukes, my son, are big things with scale being necessary to amortise the costs. Big costs. No need to invoke conspiracies, just economics 101. Same goes for hot nuclear fusion if it ever comes. Businesses will sell what sells, useful or not.

Solar panels have made a difference to peak electricity costs in Oz because they produce most energy when demand is high here. Unlike cold damp places like Germany or pommie land where they destabilise the grid. None the less, tax subsidies are being paid to the mostly wealthy to produce little useful power. Now that looks like conspiracy. If you think decentralised power generation is a community good, then I suggest you have not gone thru the tedium of NIMBYs, councils, hysterics over noise and greenies worried about battered birds and bats to get permission to install one in a medium or even low density location.

Re: *cough*

Ironically, how many icebreakers are now stuck in sea ice in _summer_ south of Oz ? A little reading indicates hottest since 1910 in places around South Oz. Anyone who has been to the Alice or west Qld in the preWet, will know adding another degree or two makes little difference. Still nice to see some serious research that looks like answers, not slogans.

Blame Silicon Valley for the NSA's data slurp... and what to do about it

step back a bit here

@Andrew,

article is a good start, except IMHO, you assigned cause a step too late in process from citizen to data point. The Si valley mob, then the spookeries had the concept of the person as mere data sources or less from the economic reductionists who trained the puppet masters of the Shrubs and Raygun. The idea of the citizen and a common welfare was lost in the false economic emergencies of the 1980s that saw massive outsourcing and sell off of public assets cheaply. By then the simplistic idea that nations and societies are _only_ markets had a strong hold. The marxists are more at fault here because ownership of society's markets is their main focus at heart. With the loss of the general concept of citizen being replaced by consumer, it was a small step to economic unit, then mere data unit. After that, the rest was easy.

Snowden leak journo leaks next leak: NSA, GCHQ dying to snoop on your gadgets mid-flight

Re: There's A Hint In The Name

that's what they want you to think :-) Ignore the Parkinsons and probable syphylus, El Schekelgruber (1) is still advising military strategy. I mean, how many wars have the yanks won since end of WW2 ?

(1) look it up, Barvarian Customs official

Godwins Law, the second last refuge of the brainless catchphrase slinger. For use only in USENET flame wars

Re: Out of curiosity@ Denarius

in reply to AC, you almost had one. I suggest YAPS aka Yanks, Australians, Poms Spying.

Like those horrible little toy dog things that sadistic women keep to annoy everyone around them. yap yap yap yaps.

To earlier AC if different, informative. Thanks

Out of curiosity

last time a German state crumbled, its technical elites were grabbed by the invaders. One cant help but wonder if Stasi have been recruited by poms and yank security because they have experience in mass intrusive domestic surveillance.

Cynical minds want to know, but don't believe anything they hear, even if officially denied.

Why UK.gov's £1.2bn fibre broadband rollout is a bumbling FLOP

thanks UK

you have given us in Oz a preview of our next NBN screwup. We never create our disasters, just import the failures from USSA or UK.

Suffering SPITZER! Boffins discover Milky Way's MISSING ARMS

size, value

so you feel your value is affected by the existence of large objects ? Since when was a ruler of some kind a measure of intrinsic value ? Logic please, there is enough category confusion in the grey slop of western thought.

As for said researchers, nice work explaining the discrepancy between observations. Better galactic maps will help when negative energy warp drives get built by the next but one civilisation.

Australia puts Digital Technologies curriculum in limbo pending review

not unexpected

Quite in keeping with the colonial cringe of the local excuse for a ruling un-elite, to coin a crap phrase. How else can Oz remain a mere quarry and source of cheap cannon fodder for our foreign lords and masters if the population get an education? Now if the rubble of government would stop funding the creation of lawyers, economists and arts practitioners instead of trades education there may still be a future here.

Next move must be to implement the latest educational recommendations by pommie experts from mid 1950s and make secondary schools only accept elite students from the right addresses. Seriously, in one state at least this was policy. Strangely enough, that state is now very much an economic blackhole, despite a greenie infestation.

Australia rebukes Apple for 'false or misleading representations'

not a problem

TPP will fix consumer protection issues. Was TPP copied from the Rules of Acquistion perchance ?

Snowden: I'll swap you my anti-NSA knowhow for asylum ... Brazil says: Não

Is Siberia still an option?

Given Russian history, just asking. Must be some old forgotten Soviet era city he can vanish into, so long as there are no tigers around. Closer to Snowdons home too.

HP multiplies Meg Whitman's salary by 1.5 MEELLION

at least some-one in HP gets a raise

without leaving...

'Mixed tech' NBN needs a super-sized HFC net

Re: What a mess

indeed, I miss my old residences' 1MB/sec cable. Currently getting email and text internet using 3G at 4kb/sec that can briefly hit 800Kb/sec for a day before reverting to crawl unworthy of 14Kb modem.. To get even a reliable copper line that can support a 56K modem would be great. And no, I do not expect anything to change. Country seems to vote in selloff obsessed governments which appoint old telco suits fixated on making sure that CBDs have more bandwidth that required for decades.

yeah right, test every cabinet

with whom may I ask? How many qualified technicians are left ? How many cabinets to be checked ? And where are these cabinets ? Local Telstra guys have been downsized for years and contractors used on a "oh crap this needs to be fixed a bit" case by case basis. I am informed by mumble mumble that Telstra knows its plans are incomplete or out of date in my area at least. No reason, but realistic pessimism suggest this is not unusual. And the contractors who laid that cable/wire 20+ years ago did not necessarily put it where they said or at the required depth.

Hang on, if one lives more than 5 NM from GPO, you don't count, problem solved, especially if the freemarket obsessives complete their sell off and opening of country to wholesale looting

Snowden latest: NSA stalks the human race using Google, ad cookies

google Analytics ?

I see google pages and multiple other web stats companies when ElReg pages load ? I know the site needs to make money, but always assumed that google was in there somewhere. Cold booting from linux live DVDs is beginning to look better all the time, if I had to hide something.

Re: At this point, Snowden could reveal that the NSA is run by alien lizards..

Backup from NSA ? You missed that BOFH story perhaps ?

We'll predict your EVERY MOVE! Facebook's new AI brain talks to El Reg

A minor flaw in all this

Facebook and Googles weak AI ? (I thought all AI so far was a flop so far) all are built on the assumption that humans can be modelled in reductionist materialist terms. No doubt for much of human behaviour this is true enough for the data miners to have some effectiveness. What happens when the spooks add this technology, sorry, enhance their existing snooping and spooking with the developments made by Google et al ? Will great plans be made by the oligarchy, just in time for the targets to do something unexpected ?

Black helicopter because one just flew over head. Too small for Arnie to get into though.

'Climate change is like Y2k!' - Oz senator

Re: The denigration of CO2

well put AC. Lowering my cynicism a tad, the wikipedia article on the famine beginning in 1315 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315-1317 is suggestive that cold is a problem, not a warmer world, unless one is of the Erlich school of pessimism.

I am still dumbfounded at the charge energy companies want business as usual. Companies, understandably, love the idea of guaranteed profits without having to deliver something reliably in return. Having rent seeking made out to be a public good is astonishing.

Re: oh there are differences

not quite, but in a fire and drought prone area, so climate matters to me. Also lived in a low lying island area where I know still know some of the people who would be made homeless if the AGW turns out to be true, if the erosion from mangrove loss does not get the island first. However, for your edification, please read that misread/non-read tome by Charlie Darwin with testable hypothesis on atoll formation. Then explain why a hypothesis that has failed to predict anything in advance has anything to do with subsidence. Also, apply the first rule of inquiring minds. "How do you _know_ that ?"

lets try one more time

@AC. Analogy is not proof. Not even an argument. Aside from that, the toxicity of trace amounts in humans can be tested, unlike oh I dunno, AGW prostignations. BTW, I am surprised you did not use selenium as an example. The required dose, about 100 atoms, is about the level at which it becomes toxic. Would be a much better non-argument.

rent seekers

Amazing how something marxists are supposed to hate is now part of the ex-marxist/now greenie salvation plan. As for CO2, yep, dihydrogen monoxide has twice the concentration in atmosphere and contributes much more the the real green house effect. Yet a lack of same is one scare the AGW lovers use to threaten the unbelievers and children. Wheres the irony icon ?

Re: Y2K nearly destroyed my marriage

lucky sod. All I got was a little overtime and the joy of watching nothing happen multiple times as I logged into servers around the world at 23:55 local time. Nothing like staggering home in the middle of the first day of a new millenium reeling sober with fatigue. At least some old servers got needed upgrades, which I suspect covered much of the reason for new hardware. Just happened to be Y2K compliant also.

oh there are differences

Y2K, one could do real repeatable tests to demonstrate that some machines _would_ have problems.

So far, AGW, climate change/whatever has had proponents make sellable scare stories but never been able to demonstrate accurate predictions. yes, sure models adjusted after the events to explain them. Always after the events. So far, Oz head panic merchant predicted the end of big rains, 3 months before the sky fell i for two years. The current back pedalling on warming real soon now, its just delayed , smells of a hope that sooner or later AGW disaster predictions will come true, as all disasters do if one waits long enough. Finally, if there really was the threat AGW proponents claim, they would be actively pushing for workable alternatives. So far, the result has been the shutdown of nuclear power stations in Germany and Japan with payments to keep gas and coal plants working, years of delays in other ex-western countries for updating nuclear plants and lobbying for massive taxpayer funded green power generation that do not provide affordable base load power. This puts the cost of energy up,making it harder to keep an economy growing so there is money for when the carbon fuels of all kinds do run out, which is not contested.

The exception is a command economy where there still seems to be some grasp of the need for affordable energy to maintain tolerable living standards. Anyone who thinks life on a subsistence level is enjoyable is in need of help to heal their self hatred. Might sound great, until you break something or your children get sick.

We cynics who distrust everybody without a testable hypothesis find being labelled as idiots or worse because we don't go along with the stranglehold panic pressure groups have on the bureaucracies of governments more than irritating, There used to be something called the spirit of the age. Group think is the closest phrase left in the shrivelled newspeak that passes for sound encoded dialogue in this dark age Mk2. No need for conspiracies, simple group pressure and stupidity explain enough disasters, especially those committed by the clever and trained. Read up on human factors in aviation accidents or that marvelous book The Hinge Factor. As for the current crop of oz pollies, dunno how we did it, but worst ever of all colours.