Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Microsoft commits: We're buying GitHub for $7.5 beeeeeeellion

Re: RIP Github

Didn't the new owners stop doing that?

Yes but, "come to S. Todd's pie shop - now under new management" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement/.

Re: Shite

Who cares. It literally takes 6 minutes to pull, change the remote, push to BitBucket and delete your Github account.

And how long to tell everybody else searching for your project that you are now on BitBucket and not just gone?

How many of your contributors are going to switch, or do they just abandon it?

How do you really delete all your existing data now that it is owned by MSFT?

Re: Shite

Split it into Github and Github-for-Business but not allow you to use both at the same time

Github for Business only supported on Windows

Only allow Office365 subscribers to reset their passwords, or sometimes only outlook.com emails or occasionally only live.com - which depends on the phase of the moon.

Remove the code checkin/out feature but add new options to post photos to your project timeline

Foolish foodies duped into thinking Greggs salads are posh nosh

Re: Food resembleing other food...Veal's fine, ethics-wise, in the UK

You're confusing vegetarian and vegan.

Vegetarian veal is OK, veal made from vegans is a bit tasteless

NEVER ask for the salad

My lifelong philosophy

It was a small hotel with perhaps delusions of grandeur (or in this case delusions of adequacy) - but it was the only place to eat in town.

I ordered "beef en croute" in a small town in Scotland once - and got a Findus crispy pancake

MH370 search ends – probably – without finding missing 777

Re: Silver lining

More a question of fitting satelite beacons puts up airline tickets by X% causing Y% more people to drive cause Z% more road accidents.

I think somebody worked out that wishing to avoid TSA "security" and a new fear of flying led to an increase in driving which would have killed more people than 9/11 if it continued for a decade.

The reduction in rail services following Hatfield (in the UK) probably killed more people than the incident.

Re: The Galileo defence

They didn't even laugh at him for the heliocentric theory.

They laughed at him because he was funded by political faction X and faction Y managed to convince the pope that the book was a personal attack on the pope.

It was like Richard Dawkins writing a book about evolution where a wise black man tries to explain it to an orange haired idiot who thinks dinosaurs live in Canada - and then being surprised when it isn't on the White House christmas present list.

Re: Silver lining

The question is whether this is a good spend on a "plane missing over the ocean" event that happens once in a generation. Could you spend 1% of that on say improving road safety and save a lot more lives?

Headless man found in lava’s embrace

Re: Yes, we know that Pompeii was smothered in ash, not lava.

FAKE OLDS!!!! - surely ?

'Incomprehensible failure' – Canada's $1bn Phoenix payroll IT fiasco torched by auditors

Re: top 5 causes for major IT project failure *still* top 5 causes cause of major IT failure

Although for political reasons part of the plan was to shut down the previous dept on mass just before the new system was rolled out - so that no long term employees would be carried forward.

Can any 5 year olds see a flaw in this plan ?

Re: Ouch

So what is the procedure for paying time in lieu to a federal employee of union A required to be on standby on a provincial holiday to supervise an employee of Union B completing a task at a site that qualifies for remote living allowance?

There are literally 1000s of these - miss one out and IBM will happily charge you $10,000 a day to document, specify and implement the fix.

Re: Ouch

is that no one really knows what the current system does

And the supplier knows this.

In spite of 6000 page specifications in this case - there will be things missed.

The suppliers bid to lose money on the original contract and then make the real profit on billing vast amounts for any inevitable changes. For extra bonuses you implement things in the original spec wrongly - but legally in keeping with the spec - and hope for big $$$$$ to fix it

Buggy software could lock a Jeep's cruise control

Re: This Jeep is goin overdrive

Is that a US quart or an Imperial quart ?

Re: This Jeep is goin overdrive

Rather amazed that they have finally made a jeep that runs for long enough to get off the lot.

Perhaps it's all that quality engineering heritage that Fiat bring to the partnership

Leaked pics: Motorola to add 'unpatriotic' 5G to 4G phones with magnets

Re: Silly idea

Nobody is going to buy these add-ons, because Moto are never going to sell them.

Anybody who has ever done any consumer design knows that they are a non-starter on something like a flagship mobile.

Its purpose is to get Moto a cover story on Wired and some free advertising in the Gaurdian with a claim that it will reduce landfill

Re: Boffinry

Internet of Trolleys (IoT) could be the great new British Invention

ISP popped router ports, saving customers the trouble of making themselves hackable

Re: Only an id10t...

But since this is Singapore the resolution is to post a notice saying "It is forbidden to hack routers with open port 10,000"

Softbank's 'Pepper' robot is a security joke

So in the last year there have been no massed attacks of cyber controlled killer robots?

So obviously not a problem then - resolved

Brought to you by the Space Shuttle safety management protocol

FBI to World+Dog: Please, try turning it off and turning it back on

Re: Good luck

Most Linksys personal network device are among the most secure.

Simply install dd-wrt on them and keep it updated

Yes, they are asking infected people to reboot to see if the infected machines go to any new C&C server.

In other words the government agency that protects us from international-ninja-secret-cyber-attack is more interested in seeing who did it than actually stopping it

Re: Ahem.

But will you be taking the rubber truncheon to yourself?

Use any method you see fit.

Personally, I’d recommend you get hold of a cocker spaniel, tie your suspect down on a chair, with a potty on his head, then pop his todger between two floury baps and shout, “Dinnertime, Fido!”

Re: Ahem.

The first rule of counter-espionage is to suspect everyone, Darling. Believe me, I shall be asking myself some pretty searching questions later on.

IBM's Watson Health wing left looking poorly after 'massive' layoffs

Re: Merge?

in the face of f*cked up exec 'leadership'

So I should bet my company on them to support the solution they sell me ?

Being a non-executive IBMer is probably one of the toughest places you can be right now.

And these are the people I will be relying on to be around and motivated in 10years to fix the critical system I'm considering buying

America's comms watchdog takes on the internet era's real criminals: Pirate pastors

So shut down their equipment - the 'true' ones will keep broadcasting.

(Or at least people will claim to hear the voices)

Is your smart device a bit thick? It's about to get a lot worse

Re: >> burger flipping

Because the one thing that robots are worse than humans at is doing a bunch of sequenced tasks in parallel so that they all complete at the same time, while calculating ratios of masses?

Re: IT training in Primary Schools?

I find it's people with crappy Computer 'science' qualifications but no maths PhD that cause all my problems

Ongoing game of Galileo chicken goes up a notch as the UK talks refunds

One of the selling points of Galileo was to have better coverage in northern latitudes than GPS. In practice this means some ground based augmentation stations in Norway (another non-Eu member) which could equally well augment GPS.

Re: Seems to me

India already has it's own system and not having any obvious plans for an empire it doesn't need to be global. Since India is near the equator it's easy to cover the whole sub-continent and any surrounding oceans with just a few geostationary satelites

Re: So sad we are leaving

Although in this particular case the sensible position is to walk away from Galileo with a sigh of relief.

The use case is to retain access to the encrypted military channel in the circumstance in which the USA blocked access to GPS for it's UK NATO ally for the entire theatre of war (remember no selective availability - it's GPS or nothing) and yet the 27 Eu members would all have approved the UK's actions.

Bearing in mind that the USA has a kill switch for Galileo if it ever needed to block GPS from an area

Re: It'll be worth it

We send far more than £350m a week to Westminister - so if England leaves the UK we can spend £Bn on the NHS - simple really

International Maritime Organisation turns salty gaze on regulating robotic shipping

Re: Tortuga bound

Once it's adrift it's relatively easy to board and loot

You just need a way of offloading 20,000 TEU of containers into your Zodiac and landing them in Somalia or transferring 100K m^3 of natural gas in mid-ocean

Most piracy is to rob the crew + petty cash, or to take rich tourists hostage, nobody is robbing a bulk ore carrier for the cargo

Re: It'll Never Happen

For older ships that need lots of maintenance - no. But then again you aren't going to retrofit them with robots.

For modern mega containerships and tankers, they already have the crew at bare minimum and it's mostly to check on the cargo. They already have all the auto aids to reduce crew so no real saving in cutting 10 people.

The real win for robot ships is small boats doing routine tasks that need lots of crew crew to cover 24x7 shifts. Harbour tugs, survey boats, cable laying, crew transfer, crane barges - anything with short range and relatively low trip lengths.

Then there are tasks that you can't have a simple bouy because you can't anchor it, but a manned ship would need a large enough crew to have 3 watches + accomodation + food + water + power + lifeboats, making a simple Arduino app suddenly a 300ton vessel.

Max Schrems is back: Facebook, Google hit with GDPR complaint

Re: How can just a new privacy policy be compliant

Anyone else feel this plays straight into Facebook / google's hands ?

Like big car companies demanding every stricter safety regs that only their newest cars meet.

Like everyone else I have got a bunch of emails from everyone I have dealt with asking for permission to keep contacting me. Like everyone else I ignored them.

But vital social media services I use everyday (ie el'reg) I am going to agree to their terms - so soon only those must-use-everyday services are going to have permission to contact me and so will control 100% of online advertising.

US newspapers are doing this today - to try and force an exemption for "quality journalism"

MPs slam UK.gov's 'unacceptable' hoarding of custody images

Re: DNA

When the European Court of Human Rights ruled it was illegal.

Strangely the home secretary at the time then became slightly obsessed with the desire to get the UK out from under the court (or anything involving Human Rights) - so next spring you should have the DNA database back.

Re: And one can only imagine...

The are allowed to keep images of people who haven't been charged - if they declare them to be "a person of interest". So just decide that anyone requesting their images are removed is obviously a wrong-un and so "a person of interest" and they have a right to keep the image = simple

UK's Royal Navy accepts missile-blasting missile as Gulf clouds gather

Re: South China Sea? What?

There are lots of Gulfs, you never know which one you might want to use as an excuse for a war.

Re: South China Sea? What?

Britain is sending warships to Asia to protect it from Chinese imperialist aggregation?

Presumably by forcing them to die laughing

Re: Judging by the volcanic cloud on the horizon

Fortunately since Russia "is vitally important to keeping the lights on at home thanks to its gas exports to Britain" the Royal Navy will deploy its new warships to protect the aged Russian carriers

UK's spy auditor: What should we ask when reviewing super-slurp warrants?

Re: Only one question needed:

these aren't bulk warrants, these are carefully and specifically targeted warrants.

eg. All mobile with numbers ending 0-9 in London on a day with a 'y' in it

London's Met Police: We won't use facial recognition at Notting Hill Carnival

Re: So let me guess, it's going to deployed at all the tube stations that lead to the event?

The false positive rate at the CFS would be much lower, I would guess only a few %

On the assumption that the "facial recognition technology" is just Constable Savage looking at a monitor

Brit Attorney General: Nation state cyber attack is an act of war

Re: Some more mindless and not thought through posturing

Hostile states targeting essential infrastructure and services in Britain should be dealt with in the same way as any other attack against the nation,

Richard Branson in a bunker chewing on his cyanide capsule?

Re: A question of attribution

Britain certainly cyber-attacked our NATO ally Belgium

Britain must now come to plucky little Belgium's aid and attack Britain

EmDrive? More like BS drive: Physics-defying space engine flunks out

Re: N-Waves Again

No they were totally made up by the 'discoverer' (either deliberate fraud or self-delusion) and everybody else saw them by the emperors-new-clothes effect. The experimental test was to surreptitiously steal the bit of kit that was steering them when the experimenter wasn't looking

Hitler 'is dead' declares French prof who gazed at dictator's nashers

The dictator is generally accepted to have swallowed cyanide and then shot himself

It's very important to get that ordering correct

Re: Conspiracy Theories?

So if Hitler died in 1945 who DID shoot Kennedy then ?

Braking news: Tesla preps firmware fling to 'fix' Model 3's inability to stop in time

But since nobody can estimate the distance to within a factor of 2x anyway....