Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Canadian utility makes blockchain upstarts bid for their ravenous rigs' electricity supply

Re: Opportunity

If you are the one selling shovel s you don't care about the value of the gold the prospectors find

Opportunity

Quebec has ridiculously cheap power - it's all hydro

So Quebec has lots of Aluminium smelters

The market for shiny metal south of the border is problematic

You find a new customer for huge amounts of electricity and one that is willing to scale demand to meet your spot market price

And you make it hard for them to buy it from you ...

How a tax form kludge gifted the world 25 joyous years of PDF

Re: PDF is clunky.

pdftotext - available on a unix machine near you.

PDF isn't designed to convert back into text, in the same way that gcode isn't easy to turn back into a Solidworks model

Re: I find PDF highly useful

I sent a PDF version of a resume to one software company and was asked to send a word doc instead.

Because they have a virus scanner for word docs ......

Re: Not a great PDF user or expert....

sumatra pdf reader perhaps ?

Re: Jobs Didn't Introduce Typography to Computers

The pdf format has replaced the dvi format used by Stone Age Latex

So PDF can seamlessly render to any output at any resolution now?

Arguably ps could replace dvi

MSDN unleashes a fresh round of unintentional innuendo bingo

Re: The Bona World of Julian and Sandy

Supposedly the boss of the BBC dept at the time (Bill Cotton?) loved the idea of the broadcasting rude things to little old ladies who wouldn't understand them.

So whenever some earnest young producer came to him to say "that line in Julian and Sandy it means this thing homosexuals do ....." he would archly ask them "Really - how do you know ?"

Re: Does knob really have two meanings any more?

NASA renamed the experimental crew rescue vehicle because the acronym would be CRV-X and that sounded like a lady part.

Re: I've tried giving up using innuendo several times...

And thrash it out together - some sort of mass debate

Shared, not stirred: GCHQ chief says Europe needs British spies

Re: EU Partnership - Fleming needs a history lesson

Without enemies, they have no job.

That's why they're trying hard to create some....

That's why they invented North Korea

An imaginary land with a brutal repressive dictatorship keeping their people in ignorance and starving poverty - but somehow able to be an existential technological threat to superpowers everywhere.

Re: EU Partnership - Fleming needs a history lesson

To be fair it was dependent on our Belgian "partners" not having very good security

Re: Story

GCHQ really isn't a SPY shop

n:

1. To watch or observe secretly: was sent to spy out the enemy camp.

2. To discover by close observation: "[They] are continually prowling about on all three decks, eager to spy out iniquities" (Herman Melville).

3. To catch sight of; see: spied the ship on the horizon.

v:

1. To engage in espionage.

2. To investigate or observe something, especially in secret: spying into the neighbor's activities.

Of course spying is what dirty foreigners do, we just gather intelligence on people for their own safety.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich quits biz after fling with coworker rumbled

Over here in left-pondian land non-managers who want to leave normally ask to be fired.

That way you get to claim medical benefits sooner

Re: Similar thing at HP

Who can say if relationship is consensual because the underling feared being fired?

I think Mrs Bezos and Mrs Gates appear content

Cryptography is the Bombe: Britain's Enigma-cracker on display in new home

Re: A conspiracy theory is born

That would be ridiculous - Stalin had so many agents in British intelligence that he would have known instantly.

Instead we sold them to all our Commonwealth friends and Non-US Nato allies, with a big sigh that it was such excellent German kit that we had never been able to break it.

I'm betting the Poles aren't mentioned much either - coming over here taking our jobs, defeating our enemies....

Re: State Secret.

I believe we did refurbish & sell on Enigma systems after the war.

So having fought off the Nazis they risked the wrath of the BSA for selling on used equipment with an embedded software license.

Thank $Deity$ they weren't made by Oracle

Google-free Android kit tipped to sell buckets

Re: Root & reflash

With microg.org you can even avoid Google and the Play store for apps.

But even with Google services, Lineageos is still worth it for the absence of manufacturer crap, the ability to minimise the amount of Google stuff on the home screen and to get weekly updates for 5 year old devices

Re: someone can tell me

Which doesn't help unless you can also audit the binary blob inside the cellular modem (hint you can't) and the CPU - at the mask level.

But you can stop every key stroke and every web site being automatically sent to Google - "to serve you better"

Um, excuse me. Do you have clearance to patch that MRI scanner?

Re: "but when it comes to human life..."

Every time windows issues an update we have to do software testing before we can allow that update onto machines in a doctor's office

Perhaps we should also repeat all the EMC testing .

And we could repeat the usability testing, with 10-20 consultant surgeons, in case it has the frame rate and perceived latency.

Can't be too careful - it does mean that the PC in the doctors office for viewing your X-rays is now going to cost as much as an MRI machine - but you do have an extra 350M/week to pay for this from next year.

Re: Um, excuse me. Do you have clearance to patch that CT-scanner?

Although with the glowing red light behind it - it may be a portal to a nether world

(can you get a 510K on a portal to the netherworld, based on a predicate device?)

National ID cards might not mean much when up against incompetence of the UK Home Office

Re: Some things the government should know..

should have an ID number which should mean absolutely nothing - it should just be an external key into a database,

Which should contain everything GCHQ know, or think they know through 6levels of separation, about you. And the police and any other official from benefits office to county dog warden should be able to see it when they stop you and demand your card - err because of terrorism

Pwned with '4 lines of code': Researchers warn SCADA systems are still hopelessly insecure

Re: SCADA systems running windows

How long before someone starts talking about PDP-11's

Was it the Eurofighter's engine management system that has a VMS backend ?

Wires, chips, and LEDs: US trade bigwigs detail Chinese kit that's going to cost a lot more

Re: My precious....

China cheats. It is destroying UK manufacturing at a rate of knots

Have you thought of joining some sort of unified trading block with some of your other European allies?

Then you could present a single market to China and get much better trade protection and negotiating power.

Just a thought

It's going to hit the farm/bible belt once China put their tariffs on which is Trumps core support group.

Foreigners are attacking outr farmers , so anybody who doesn't vote for us is a pro-China traitor

(ps please ignore Russia)

Re: Every one

The most famous is don't fight a land war in Asia

But second to that is - don't start a trade war in an election year against a centrally planned economy that can pick and choose its targets

US-CERT warns of more North Korean malware

Didn't get the memo?

We are now friends with North Korea, the enemy is Canada. We have always been at war with Canada.

For as long as Winston can recall, Oceania has been in a constant state of war – with whom it was at war is of neither importance nor consequence.

Unbreakable smart lock devastated to discover screwdrivers exist

Re: Oneway screws

Is the lock made by apple?

It does have rounded corners, but on the other hand it is only $100

Re: tamper-proof screws aren't

AvE A Canadian engineer on You Tube

Especially the calibrated 'CH' ruler

Former FBI boss Comey used private email for official business – DoJ

Lock them all up?

Just a thought.....

Meet the Frenchman masterminding a Google-free Android

Re: Good luck

Which is precisely the thing that got the DoJ interested in Microsoft all those years ago

Even if the current US administration don't want to go after $Bn companies, their equivalents in the Eu do.

And these days the phone market isn't as USA centric as the desktop market was in the 90s

AI is cool and all – but doctors and patients don't really need it

Re: I thought we were already there in some areas

Not in America.

In Europe your smear test will be scanned at a dozen visible and non-visible wavelengths with sub-micron resolution with optics that even follows the non-flatness of the glass slide.

The images may be compared with a training set of millions of cases to check for abnormal cells.

In the USA (and to an extent in Canada) your data can only be examined by a doctor using a Mk1 eyeball under a 30 year old microscope that was last cleaned in the C20, he (it's always a he) will glance at a few areas at random for 20-30 seconds before making a report which is statistically little better than a coin toss.

But he does drive a very nice car.

(In Canada they can at least look at the image from the microscope on a monitor)

Tech firms, come to Blighty! Everything is brill! Brexit schmexit, Galileo schmalileo

Re: The Enigma to Embrace, Expand Upon and Enjoy .....

A breakthrough in AI ?

Re: Its the Will of the People!!

Going slightly OT could the numbers of media studies/arts students reflect the numbers of places available

No it's simple economics.

Any indoor job with no heavy lifting now requires a degree.

The employer doesn't care what degree you have - just the grade.

Why work hard at school and risk not getting the required 17 straight As in whatever A Levels are called today.

Then put in 9-5 lectures and labs for a science degree when you can do history of Art, get in with a couple of Cs, pay the same fees and get the same office job

Actually you get a better job, with your nice shiny management studies degree you get to be the boss of those specialists that did physics.

Ex-Rolls-Royce engineer nicked on suspicion of giving F-35 info to China

the RR share price has shot up after the news came out

Obviously it has lowered costs - engine sales will be far more profitable if you don't have to pay workers to build it.

... Aaaand that's a fifth Brit Army Watchkeeper drone to crash in Wales

Thinking outside the box here...

Suppose they were to operate them in an actual war zone (as opposed to Wales) and filled them with some sort of explosive - then when they crash into the landscape it would be a good thing.

Thought the AT&T Time-Warner tie-up was scary? Comcast says 'hold my beer'

End of an era?

Does this mean that brave little avant-garde Fox will come under the jackboot of an oppressive corporate master?

Citation needed: Europe claims Kaspersky wares 'confirmed as malicious'

Re: And remove USA software?

Actually EU should not trust US software - it was already bad before Trump, now it can only get worse.

At the moment would you rather have the Russians reading your tariff response discussions or the Americans?

Intel confirms it’ll release GPUs in 2020

Re: Hopefully not just the high end..

For real work you need CUDA, or at least OpenCL support that is as good as CUDA

For games you need Intel to stay in a market for more than 5mins so games support the card, so gamers buy the card, so games support the card

For home/office use the builtin Intel GPU is good enough

Good luck Intel

So net neutrality has officially expired. Now what do we do?

Re: Net Neutrality is a red herring

Could that be because Zuckerberg, Brin, Page and Dorsey are all of the progressive persuasion?

I thought they were all part of a Muslim Illuminati conspiracy? You really can't trust these progessives

Re: You could always hope

Also his voters are only going to be able to get Fox approved websites over their Fox subsidiary cable by next election anyway

Re: Competition

I wonder if the websites will start playing the same game?

Hey Comcast, how many subscribers will you lose if they can no longer access Google / youtube / facebook / Amazon? Perhaps you should be paying Facebook the same as you currently pay for ESPN or HBO ?

Youth crime falls as kids stay inside to play Grand Theft Auto instead of going out to steal cars

But when the apocalypse comes how will Australian youth gain the skills to drive armoured V8s across the outback in pursuit of oil and/or Mel Gibson ?

UK digital secretary throws cold water over bid for laws on kids' use of social media

Re: Molehills and mountains

That's what they said about Rock'n'Roll, Violent movies, VHS, Cartoons and cannabis.

Look at what happened to the generation that were brought up on those things ......

What will this do to standards at el'reg?

If mature sensible and reasonable 13 year olds are no longer allowed to vote?

It is going to screw up the Raspberrypi stackoverflow site - but kids can always learn about computers once they turn 18

Why would anyone do that? for any subject?

Whatever they don't do - that's best practice

Nominet throws out US corp's attempt to seize Brit domain names

Re: Torn...

An Israeli guy just lost Nissan.com to the car company formerly known as Datsun.

His argument that he had registered it in 1994, that it was his family surname (and probably had been since the C6 BCE) and was the name of a Hebrew month - didn't work with the court.

England's top judge lashes out at 'Science Museum' grade court IT

Re: On the up-side

You can deliver a bloc of concrete in the form of a mainframe. Pretty hard to hack into.

Especially if it uses Sygnetics famous write only memory chips