RE: "Osamba"
Yeah... I quit that '$' shit 'cause I can't find a lower case $ sign...
Posts by croc
208 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Nov 2009
Snowden's secure email provider Lavabit shuts down under gag order
The hammer falls: Feds propose drastic controls on Apple's iTunes Store
Geneticists resolve human dilemma of Adam's boy-toy status
Saturday 3rd August 2013 13:09 GMT
Archeologically established point???
"Y chromosomes change relatively little over the millennia, and the team was able to used an archeologically established point – humanity reaching the Americas around 15,000 years ago – by comparing the genetic data from the two populations. This was used to establish a "molecular clock" of genetic change in the Y chromosome."
Given that there are many sites in the americas that make this date somewhat controversial, how can this population be used as the basis for any kind of clock? (And what do molecules have to do with gene sequences?)
Maybe they should have used the aboriginal population of Australia as their stable sample. I mean, there at least you have a relatively unchanged set of gene sequences going back some 50k years.
Burger-rage horse dumps on McDonald's: Rider saddled with fat fine
SkyDrive on par with C: Drive in Windows 8.1
Tuesday 23rd July 2013 07:02 GMT
These are all very good features... IFF you have very fast, cheap internet and IFF what you are storing is something that you'd not mind your mother seeing.
For all the others, these are TERRIBLE features... I DO have to pay for bandwidth, and quite a bit of what I 'store' is commercial-in-confidence type of stuff. I'd not like it if some bloke at the NSA thought that some 'Merkan company needed my ideas more than I did. So Thanks, Microsoft, but No Thanks from me. I'll use an OS that lets me store my stuff locally, on an encrypted drive...
Snowden: US and Israel did create Stuxnet attack code
Wednesday 10th July 2013 04:28 GMT
Re: "most trusted services in the world if they actually desire to do so."
Your numbers seem a bit off.... Lightning strike death odds in US, about 500,000 to 700,000 to 1. Odds of terrorism death in US, about 20,000,000 to 1.
Cost to US of POSSIBLY saving all lives if all plots intercepted had succeeded, about $200,000,000 per life saved.
http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/06/how-scared-of-terrorism-should.
Cost of freedoms lost? Priceless....
The perfect gift for the pistol-packing 'Merkin: a handgun iPhone case
Former Microsoft Windows chief: I was right to kill the Start button
Google gives vendors seven-day bug disclosure deadline
Friday 31st May 2013 11:14 GMT
Re: Protect users
"snip> If your mission-critical in-house app requires some plug-in that has only ever been released for Firefox jumping ship to IE for a week or two simply isn't on the radar. Nor is it if you have the simple issue of managing a roll out across an entire estate of thousands of users and machines.
Seriously, I'm beginning to wonder how many commentards here have real world commercial experience."
Seriously? You'd build a business-critical application based on some rather untested features on a browser that might change versions without warning, and leave it connected to the internet knowing that it had been exploited... and you wonder how many of US have real-world commercial experience?
Forget tax bills, here's how Google is really taking us all for a ride
Tuesday 28th May 2013 14:04 GMT
"Imagine two Gmails. One remains free and advertising-supported, the other is available to you for 25p a year via your ISP. The designers of the latter system, let's call it "RealMoneyMail", wouldn't need to show advertisements, obviously. They would need to invest in carrying your emails efficiently rather than in a vast behaviour-processing server farm. They wouldn't need to pry. 25p isn't a lot per person, but spread over millions of users, it would be enough to run a business. And the "RealMoneyMail" team would be acutely aware that if they did a lousy job, consumers would walk: the market would shun their product. So their incentive is to make it a great one."
HHHHhhaaaahhhhhhaaaaaahhhhhaaaaaaa..... Oh Boy! That was a REAL good 'un. Now, I have to go pay my cable TV bill, BRB.
Last time CO2 was this high, the world was underwater? No actually
Acorn founder: SIXTH WAVE of tech will wash away Apple, Intel
Friday 17th May 2013 07:19 GMT
It's all about the Genes,,,
I mean, those selfish genome type of Genes, not the other things that happen to get called Gene, like Gene Kelly.... But I digress. The Selfish Genes will win, no matter the wave. And the humans had better, by Gene, let them win, help them win, cheat for them to win even, if those poor lowly humans hope to have any chance of surviving. Because if the Selfish Genes DON"T win, they'll just take their balls and go home.
Where's the Icon with the slobbery tongue-thingy when you need it?
All aboard the patch wagon! Next stop: Microsoft, Adobe, Mozilla
United Nations: 'Overpopulated Earth? Time to EAT BUGS'
The IT Crowd returns to Channel 4 for a final episode
Coke? Windows 8 is Microsoft's 'Vista moment'. Again
Thursday 9th May 2013 06:29 GMT
An interesting use of 'telemetrics' that I am sure will someday be included in some textbook as an example of how NOT to gather statistics. Sinofsky's FIRST error was only using a data set derived from telemetric data, instead of actual observation. (A sort of self-selecting data set of rather strange people...) His SECOND error was assuming that the set of data derived from people using searches was somehow meaningful.
CURSE you, EINSTEIN! Humanity still chained in relativistic PRISON
Sunday 28th April 2013 07:44 GMT
Re: Stupid question
"
Stupid question
I'm posting this anonymously as I'm sure there's a really, really, really easy answer to this thought experiment but I'm too thick to know it.
If I had a metal rod 100 million miles long sitting in a frictionless universe, and I push one end of the rod, surely the other end moves immediately, rather than taking however long light takes to travel 100 million miles. Which means that this violates the speed of light as nowt can travel faster than that, even information. I have heard about Quantum Entanglements and homeopathic medicine but assume this is not at all related as I have no idea what a quantum is except it's probably smaller than a peanut and am not sure what memory water really has.
Now I'm 100% positive that Einstein was brighter than me, indeed suspect the vast proportion of the world will fit that large set, but nobody has explained to me why my thought experiment is wrong.
Any takers who can write in crayon and use very, very small words? Please?"
You really need to substitute in a hydraulic cylinder for your rod...
Star Trek phaser sells for a STUNNING $231,000
Are the PCs all getting a bit old at your office? You're not alone
Thursday 28th March 2013 01:59 GMT
Tablet-Top Publishing?
Would someone please ask IDC how many of its reports detailing the demise of the desktop PC were written on a tablet? Or how much of the data that was crunched to make these reports was crunched on a smartphone?
My bold prediction: Businesses will like BYOD, flexi-scheduling, work-from-home right up to the point in time when they don't like it. Business tends to not be really innovative in
Japan's rare earth discovery bad news for China's monopoly plans
Researcher sets up illegal 420,000 node botnet for IPv4 internet map
Thursday 21st March 2013 02:19 GMT
Re: Prosecution would be proof of idiocy..
There are 'white hats', 'gray hats' 'black hats' and ass hats... An ass hat is someone so naive as to believe that they are breaking no laws in their squeaky-clean lives. This gives them the moral authority to proclaim from behind their anonymous coward masks that indeed THE REASON FOR WHICH YOU BROKE THE LAW MATTER ONLY INSOFAR THAT THEY CAN AFFECT THE FINE WHEN CAUGHT - THEY DO NOT CHANGE THE FACT THAT YOU COMMITTED A CRIME.
Well, let me tell you, ass hat... that laundry you are wearing isn't as clean as you think it is...
We're not making this up: Apple trademarks the SHOP
Samsung mocks Apple lawsuit in SuperBowl teaser ad
Saturday 2nd February 2013 04:01 GMT 
Apple owner? Sucks to be you....
Having all your friends laugh at you for your screwed-up maps, your lack-of-bonkiness... Even worse, you'll have to spend big time bikkies to once again be part of the new hipster group.
But you had your day in the sun, eh? Struttin' your stuff, waving that fruit bar all over everyone's face. Maybe you should grow a mullet... Yeah, that's the ticket!
<-- 'Cause she knows the price of becoming outmoded...
Zuck on it, Google: 'Public' Facebook events are dead to you
Kim Dotcom's locker may be full, but the cupboard is bare
Tuesday 22nd January 2013 09:35 GMT
Mega is providing a product, called 'Security'...
...And as an added bonus, you get storage for your 'security' absolutely free! And you can access your 'security' from anywhere in the world that doesn't totally firewall off your 'security' just because you won't give them a look-see. It's your 'security'. Not theirs, and they are going to be hopping pissed off mad about that, let me be the first to tell you!
Now, what are 'they' going to do about it? That's where this whole saga gets interesting, and I don't think a box of popcorn will last long enough to see the end of this tale.
<--- Paris wishes she had some 'security'.
Engineers are cold and dead inside, research shows
Anger grows over the death of Aaron Swartz
Craptastic analysis turns 2.8 zettabytes of Big Data into 2.8 ZB of FAIL
Little spider makes big-spider-puppet CLONE of itself out of dirt
Friday 21st December 2012 05:40 GMT
I just don't understand... I thought that the purpose of a spider web was to catch prey, not to scare it off. Or maybe the spider knows that flies really don't know what a spider looks like (having always been eaten before they could talk...) and also knowing that big, lumbering humans will just blindly walk through their webs, (given several hundred thousand years of observation) causing them hours of hungry painful labour-intensive rebuilding of said web, and also knowing that said humans are 50 / 50 afraid of spiders, so build an image that will alert the big-lumbering lummox to the fact that he (or she) is about to have a close encounter of a spidery kind. In short, a true genius of an inventor, worthy of even more praise than its lowly engineering bretheren, for inventing a device that will save spider-dom countless hours of frustrating, painstaking, labourious web-building.
On another note, wonder what a spider looks like seen through a spider's eight eyes?
< the .50 referred to above...
Apple loses iPhone patent lawsuit
Goldman Sachs: Windows' true market share is just 20%
Australian Police say don't use Apple's iOS 6 Maps
'Mount Doom' rumbling ominously
Monday 19th November 2012 12:29 GMT
Re: Theories about why this is happening
And, he saw all that beautiful scenery while running... On unmarked trails... In foliage so dense in spots that even on marked trails, if one leaves the trail for more than a meter one can get very lost. Hope his trip goes well, just also hope that he doesn't repeat that story to the locals.
<------- Paris, because she's gullible. In fact, she's been on Gullible's Travels. Just ask her.
Lawyer sues Microsoft rather than slot an SD card into his Surface
Thursday 15th November 2012 23:54 GMT
I did a quick check on MS website selling Surface. Nowhere that I could find was any mention made of how much 'usable' space was left to the consumer, leaving me with the impression that storage meant just that - space available to the user. They did go to some pains to explain that a GB was one billion bytes, but no where was there any information about how many billion bytes were left over for the consumer. Guy has a point. Shirley there's enough room on a 32 GB storage media for my 24 GB photo / music collection, right?
Paris, because, well, she's always a bit confused...
Bond's Walther PPK goes digital: A civilized gun updated
Office for Android, Apple iOS: 'REALLY REAL this time' - report
Samsung adds iPhone 5 to patent battle v Apple
Apple weighs in on AntiSec's alleged FBI hack
Qubes OS bakes in virty system-level security
Wednesday 5th September 2012 03:50 GMT
Re: This existed in 2001
Not quite, that was only oriented towards browsers, where this is more like an OS that is a collection of VM's, some of which may or may not include browsers.
Were I to want something like GreenBorder today, I'd go with BitBox.
I might configure up a Qubes OS on a micro-drive for use at internet cafe's, that could be interesting.
Cook's 'values' memo shows Apple has lost its soul
US will fight ITU members for internet domination
Apple demands Samsung flogged for 'unethical' court doc leak
Techie accused of snooping wife's email cleared of wrongdoing
Dutch payment-by-bonkers bonk payments on the head
'Sacrifice another goat!: iCloud is Apple's biggest failure before Google
Sunday 22nd July 2012 04:28 GMT
Let's talk 'cloud' stuff when all and sundry have FTTN / uncapped data. At reasonable prices, please... Until then it is just too costly to use a 'free' cloud service.
Then there is the 'megaupload' aspect of cloud services. What happens when the MPAA decides that what you've stored might infringe something of theirs? Who cares where you live, mate... Or maybe you've got stuff stored there, and 'there' disappears due to an FBI takedown notice? Fat chance of recovery, mate. Others see clouds, all I see is ISP's and lawyers chasing the silver linings.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
