Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Worker drones don't need PCs says Microsoft, give 'em phones instead

Windows

"The handsets can also run 32-bit applications via remote desktop,"

Then my Psion2 can run Cray CFD simulations via a serial cable

White House 'deeply disappointed' by Europe outlawing Silicon Valley

Re: Tantrum coming in 3, 2, 1...

Sending a gunboat usually worked if the natives were being difficult

Re: Tantrum coming in 3, 2, 1...

>How about abiding by the laws of the countries that you do business in?

Then what do you have a navy for ?

Startup promises to cancel your hated Comcast subscription for you for just $5

Re: I've never had problems cancelling...

And at my hourly rate this would cost me more than they are charging

Scary Trans-Pacific Partnership trade treaty signed off

The people who paid for it ( or at least the politicians signing it) have read it

The pharma and agro companies, the RIAA , the MPAA etc

What is money? A rabid free marketeer puts his foot in lots of notes

Re: The British economy is not an island

It isn't. It was a textbook example of a tabloid blowing up a story from an incorrect statistic - "more or less" did an entire episode on it.

Re: The British economy is not an island

Yes Britain would be free to negotiate with each european country separately

But it would be up to France to allow the free movement of goods and people through its country on the way to the UK.

Fortunately we can rely on the historical mutual love and respect between France and the UK, to prevent France deciding on Visas for English truck drivers using the tunnel or a duty on Dutchy Oatcakes passing through France on their way to the Anglophile cookie eaters of Europe

Re: ...the right to call upon the resources...

Lots of science fiction writers, but very few economists, have written about what happens to money if you have essentially unlimited free energy

Re: cash is not the only money

A nation's currency is linked to the demand for the nation's exports, The Canadian $ is down 25% in the last 2years because China doesn't want coal, copper, iron ore or oil.

If Google charge 1/millionth of a bitcoin for viewing pages and people start using bitcoin for micro-payments then bitcoin will rise. If they make their own currency or find a way of charging 0.01c without any fees then bitcoin will drop

Why are government in the money business?

Blessed St Margaret and Holy Tony both believed that government shouldn't be in the coal, steel, car making or telecoms business because that was the job of capitalism. So why are governments trying to make, buy and sell money?

Why not let the banks handle the whole fiat currency bit?

In theory I get paid in $ but I really get paid in numbers at HSBC. I spend in $ but really I spend in "Visa". Both HSBC and Visa could have their own currency - and effectively do.

There could be bargain banks that would have to offer better rates to make up for the fact that few stores would accept their notes - in the same way that discount stores don't take Visa.

And there could be highly insured, low leveraged, prestige banks that could charge me higher fees because a RoyalBankofXYZ note is accepted everywhere.

The government could demand that my taxes are paid in their official notes and there woudl be a free market rate for these in all the other day-day currency

Re: cash is not the only money

Having a fixed maximum number of bitcoins isn't deflationary precisely because they are divisible.

It's like regarding the unit of the US$ as simply a fraction of the US GDP.

The GDP goes up and US minimum wage is now now 1.2x10-12 GDP units rather than 1.1x10-12 units

Re: So what will you do about it?

Somebody already thought about it and came up with a solution.

You take all the money, and factories and farms away from the rich people.

You then put the people who scored highest marks in debating class in charge of the farms and move all the people from the cities out to work on them.

Then if you are a bad guy - you kill the majority of the people for being the wrong tribe, singing the party song wrong or looking like they might be better at debating class than you.

Or if you are a good guy - create a famine by putting the person who produces the best revolutionary poetry in charge of the irrigation system, wait for the majority to starve and survive on aid.

Re: @Arnaut

Is Britain going to be in a position to impose tarrifs?

Helo mr car worker, you are now unemployed because Nissan shut down their factory now that we can't export to europe - but we have made it up to you by making that new VW cost 30k by adding our own 50% duty

Rise of der Maschinen: Daimler trials ROBOT LORRY in Germany

And eat the Yorkies

Only a CNUT would hold back the waves of the sharing economy

Re: There's a little more at stake here

Why not add some more arbitrary rules

You can comment on an article but can only write a blog post if your are an NUJ member

You can use a web browser if you are a cab driver but can only install Windows if you are a member of the BCS and only connect a new computer if your a member of the ACM or IEEE

Siege of Shoreditch was like Stalingrad, but with Froot Loops Bloopers

Re: Rejected? Really?

Unless you then leave with Samantha (and or Sven)

I was GOOGLE for a MINUTE, claims quick-witted dude

Or spam from it and get Google.com blacklisted ;-)

http://mailinator.blogspot.ca/2011/05/how-to-get-gmailcom-banned-not-that-i.html

CIOs: Tell us about your biggest disaster and how you survived it

Re: CIO response in a nutshell.

Then I joined the government as digital-cyber-iCzar

Is the world ready for a Raspberry Pi-powered Lego Babbage Engine?

Re: Adder

You can make the not-quite-a-computer difference engine from lego

http://acarol.woz.org/

Or with rather more Victorian meccano

http://www.meccano.us/difference_engines/rde_1/

Sorry but..

This is an example of everything that is wrong with Lego, computers today and the modern world (bah humbug)

A kit of the technical Lego with shafts and gears to make even a single 1/2 adder would be worth supporting but this is the equivalent of "today in IT lesson we are going to learn to draw a logo of what a web site about women in computers would be like"

Mars water discovery is a liberal-muslim plot, cry moist conspiracy theorists

Re: not rushing to judgement

That Rush is really a Democrat plot developed in a secret (gay, commie, organic) lab to make people think of right wing nutter whack jobs whenever they hear a Republican presidential candidate.

.... and the result was Trump

Bezos' BAN-HAMMER batters Chromecast, Apple TV

And strangely

amazon.com no longer works in chrome and safari

Hash-tag CompSci: FBI grooms pre-weed teens

Re: High school?

The FBI does everything the CIA does but on US soil. But don't worry, anything that might be illegal is approved by a secret court

Give me a child to the age of 7

Need to get them before they start doing all this thinking/questioning authority stuff

Perhaps if we could get them to all wear matching uniforms and swear allegiance to the leader in school every day.

Tear teardown down, roars Apple: iFixit app yanked from store

Re: Bigger picture

>If you are creating enterprise apps you use an enterprise license.

For internal use but the rules on an enterprise license are pretty strict.

If I was IBM/SAP/Salesforce/SAS/etc I would be very nervous about developing anything for this new enterprise iPad

Bigger picture

This is a real issue for anyone wanting to do enterprise apps for Apple.

I can spend serious person-years-$$ of development effort on a serious iPhone app if it can be rejected/pulled from the app store on a whim or for some anti-competition reason.

Elon Musk unmasks Tesla's Model X – the $132k anti-bioweapon SUV for the 1%

Re: Nice car

>What is the message here?

Same message that caused Porsche to grit their teeth and build the Cayenne

I want a Telsa, we have kids, make me a car, take my money

I can only afford 1 Tesla, it has to take the kids and I want something that doesn't look like a minivan

Re: Nice car

Only the price of a top end Range Rover and a bargain compare to a Cayenne

And even for a non-car nut that is one cool looking car!

Lies from VW: 'Our staff acted criminally but board didn't know'

Re: Re:The jeep isn't diesel

According to the NHTSA it is a van and so doesn't need to pass the impact tests of a passenger car

Re: Implications

More likely - running the smaller engines in test mode allowed them to pass the tests without needing the urea system (adblue on mercs) they have on their bigger engines.

Not needing to fit the injection system saves money but drivers not needing to buy the fluid and refill the tank is a big selling point if you are trying to push diesels in the market (a former 2stroke 125cc owner)

Re: Dieselgate

Although it does make you want to become a US politician just so you can commit some naughty act - but do it at the Watergate hotel so the journalists will have work to think up a name for it.

Re: Doesn't pass the smell test

The jeep isn't diesel. The regs for diesel are crap, engine has to work with crappy diesel in some places as well as ultra low sulfur in others

The US car regs are full of loopholes, eg. a PT cruiser is a truck and so doesn't have to pass any emissions.

The emissions are based on % of nasty, not total amount. So your typical commuter pickup with a 4.8L V8 engine will pass emissions tests but a 700cc Smart car wouldn't (at least back when I lived there)

Re: Is he blaming 'hookey' staff for all 1.2 Million?

The good old days of "adjusting points". My first summer job involved taking the site vehicles to the fitters to be "tuned" so that they would pass MOT and then taking them back to be re-tuned so they would actually start on a cold morning.

Arabic-speaking cyberspies targeting BOFHs with crude but effective attacks

Re: Really?

Or at least doing it in a slightly more nuanced level.

The wonderful default out-of-the-box Microsoft office365 system here won't let me share exe/zip/dll or even xml with other people in my development team - everything has to be renamed to ".not_an_exe"

Who to blame ?

Extensive analysis by the Bletchley dept of chaps smoking pipes, has decoded that the common part of these messages is the use of ".exe". From the French "exécuter" which suggests that an immediately retaliatory strike on Johnny Frenchman is the only rational course of action

Tesla X unfolds its Falcon wings, stumbles belatedly into the light

Re: Battery capacities...

What's wrong with Joules ?

Re: "Self-driving Teslas are not that far away"

The first 0.5% is negotiating a temporary unsurfaced steep winding road in an open cast mine in a 100ton haul truck, in the snow, in Northern Canada, in winter at night. I have built them and they work really well. Especially since they can do 80kmh in an area that would be restricted to 20kmh if we had squishies present.

Re: Door mirrors...

You have no stereo vision at the range of a car behind you. The vision system can have distance measuring (Radar, lidar image processing) and can highlight cars in your blind spot

If you have the screen anyway then the cost of the camera is negligble and less than the lifetime cost of fuel used by the extra drag. Wing mirrors also get broken and aren't replaced until the next MOT (or never over here) they are probably less reliable than cameras.

Big advantage on no wing mirrors is reduced noise in the back,

> Clarkson got blocked in driving a gullwing vehicle and was literally unable to get out of the car

Devices to prevent Clarkson leaving a car are now a requirement in most countries

It's the white heat of the tech revolution, again!

Re: The "white heat" speech

>Who'd have thought there was a time when politicians explained grown-up concepts with the assumption that their audience weren't morons

Further proof, if it were needed, that Harold Wilson was a KGB agent

Re: I still can't work it out...

Companies all operate optimally for themselves but governments are supposed to optomise for everyone.

So the National Enterprise Board funded the development of the Transputer to try and develop a new type of CPU that would be useful and break the monopoly of a certain US chip maker.

Thatcher then closed down the NEB and sold the chip to a French company who operated optomally by closing it down. In the same way that the same US chip maker would do if it were allowed to buy ARM - another result of the socialist BBC interference in the IT industry.

Has the UK Uber crackdown begun? TfL opens consultation on private car biz

>than some untrained bloke totally reliant on gimcrack software and cheap IT hardware

Which is why using computers in the city of London should be restricted to members of the BCS

Google and NASA hop into bed with quantum computing biz

The first one - almost certainly not.

The new one - more than likely

For Nasa - it's worth it to learn how to test future quantum computers.

For Google - it's worth a punt spending 0.0001% of the tea money on something that might be able to do very big sums.

Here are the God-mode holes that gave TrueCrypt audit the slip

Re: WTH?

>So if this isn't a backdoor, what the heck is it defined as? Enlighten me.

A backdoor would be that the password "ImFromTheNSA" would decrypt truecrypt volumes, or that part of the algorithm is deliberately weakened so that encrypted drives can be cracked.

This is a (possible) way of injecting a virus into Truecrypt, if they wanted to key log you the weakness doesn't have to be in truecrypt it can be in anything in Windows - or they can just ask the nice people in Redmond for a general keylogger to be built into a windows update.

Find shaving a chore? Why not BLAST your BEARD off with a RAYGUN

Re: Companies making money of blades

So to preserve the business model they will need to use DRM to prevent you re-filling with cheap off-brand photons.

Fiorina: I rushed out HP servers to power NSA snooping. Mwahahaha!

Re: More military spending?

All government spending should be on the military - anything else means you are a communist.

Except for Agriculture subsidies, and subsidies to car makers, and oil companies, and bailing out banks - but anything else is definitely commie.

Saudi Arabia: They liked Hacking Team so much they tried to buy the company

The clue is "a British government institution" - they presumably thought that "hacking team" was a British manufacture of tweed jackets for a weekend's rough shooting

Bletchley Park remembers 'forgotten genius' Gordon Welchman

Re: Keeping 'Mum' was just SOP for those involved in WW2

Because keeping the holocaust secret is important to the national security of ..... ?

BOFH: I'm not doing this for the benefit of your health, you know

Re: Thank god for the BOFH

>. Because just understanding how a bolt works is apparently not bleeding obvious

But you have to learn to see it from the bolt's point of view - that's "bolt awareness"