Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who

That's the problem with Greece - there is no Greek word for Economics ?

Microsoft: Stop using Microsoft Silverlight. (Everyone else has)

You to Netflix: I want to pay $8 a month but I want to be able to keep any movie for as long as I want and share it with all my friends - so no protection please.

Netflix to studio: We want to pay for the rights to show a certain movie in a certain market for a certain time. But we are going to let all our customers download and keep it and share it with everyone else on the net - that won't cost us any more will it ?

Re: Tell that to Amazon

>I wouldn't subscribe to any video service which didn't let me use my own player

And I won't visit any cafe that doesn't let me take a bite out of every piece of cake while only buying one per month.

Adam Smith was right about that invisible hand, you know

Re: I'm sure Tim knows this anyhows...

I though similes were the little sideways faces made with "; - )" before we had emoticons ?

Re: Congratulations

> predictions are looney tunes ....like, say, the idea that monopoly capitalism is inevitable,

Ironically since most capitalists regard the idea that they themselves can't, or shouldn't, be a monopoly as looney tunes .

Re: Algorithmic trading

Nobody picks the stocks.

HFT is mostly either arbitrage (this stock in London is 0.1% cheaper in New York if the exchange rate from GBP->Euro->USD is slightly less than X.)

Or front running; people are buying stock X so if I am 0.1km closer to the exchange I can buy it 100us before them and resell it for 0.1% more.

Or market watching; a big pension fund has to hold 30% of a certain class of bonds. On the last payday of the month it will get a huge chunk of new money which it has to buy these bonds with, so just before this the price goes up.

HFT can be a good thing in that it makes the market more efficient, everybody gets to buy Apple for the same price, anybody attempting to sell apple for 0.1c more is going to get zero business. That's why some IPOs and those little "only certain customers can buy these stocks" deals that a bunch of (now bankrupt) merchant banks did - are so bad.

Re: Too true

So what they need is the wise leadership of some western power to go in, remove the local warlords, manage their resources and tell the natives to stop doing the silly local religion stuff and attend church fetes ?

Re: biting the invisible hand that feeds it

It can't be for spurious reasons - that would be sexist.

It has to be to accompany a vital public interest story about fashion, skin care or the beach holiday of some minor royal.

Intel 80386 queen Renée James quits as chipmaker's president

Re: So long and thanks for all the fish

The 386 (and pentium that was based on it) were transformative but they were designed and the engineering led by John Crawford.

If she started in 1987, that was 2 years after the chip was first sold, and she would have had the job of sales and marketing for an almost monopoly (except for Sun) supplier of 32bit chips

Although surviving as a senior exec at intel for 25 years is pretty impressive for anybody

Congratulations! You survived the leap secondocalypse

Alternatively

Couldn't we just move Greenwich down the road a bit?

FBI probe physical intrusions into Californian internet cables

Some american was explaining how "Ok, not all muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are muslims" he didn't seem to understand my "thanks for NORAID" comment.

Still it's nearly the anniversary of their own terrorist overthrowing of legitimate government.

Giant FLYING SPACE ROCKS could KILL US ALL, warns Brian May

Re: A mercy killing

If the alternative is an opera by Ben Elton about how the music of Queen will save us - I'm cheering for the rock

Why SpaceX will sort out Sunday's snafu faster than NASA ever could

Depending on how much extra you need to add.

In the case of the Falcon it is an extra thruster at the nose, a few fins, some carbon fiber legs and keep a few % of fuel. With the shuttle it was a 100tons of aircraft, wings, landing gear, tiles, crew etc etc

Re: Well, I guess we'll never... What? You've figured it out ALREADY?

It is if anything even worse in european projects. Exactly the same pork barreling but you also have countries that spent the last 1000years at war with each other, and some countries who think that only they can build some things because certain other countries are a bunch of neanderthals who can barely bang rocks together. Then you have a bunch of small countries who decide that their post office/civil aviation authority/milk marketing board has to be in charge of approving the specs for a space project.

And then you have to translate everything into a dozen languages even though everybody working on the project is speaking English.

Mind you - you do get to go for some very nice lunches when the meetings aren't being held in the UK or Germany.

Crowdfunded beg-a-thon to bail out Greece raises 0.003% of target

Scottish solution

If your country goes bust after some crazy stock market adventure - just merge with the big country next door, get them to pay the debt and then when it looks like working out, go independant again.

The only difficulty would be inventing a flag for a united Germany-Greece

OPM data breach: Looking at you, China! National Intelligence head stares out Beijing

Re: China has been hacking the US federal government since 1998...

It's only a crisis if the public both know about it and care about it

Gates: Renewable energy can't do the job. Gov should switch green subsidies into R&D

Re: Stop proposing....

>Realize that IT GETS DARK AT NIGHT! No sun, no solar power.

>80% of civilization lives where there is a WINTER season!

80% of the US population lives somewhere that needs AC.

Re: The richest pragmatist in the world.

Green subsidies have nothing to do with the environment - they are a way of taxing poor people to give rich homeowners a tax break.

If you introduced a campaign for road safety, gave a tax rebate on Chelsea tractors paid for by a hike in bus fares people would object, do the same with solar feed-in tarrifs for Teslas and it's a green revolution.

Layoff-happy Capita charges staff to use cutlery in canteens

>To me this signals that they are in financial distress.

Or that they simply hate their employees and spend time and money dreaming up new ways of annoying them - it is capita

Pirate MEP pranks Telegraph with holiday snap scaremongering

Re: I love France's wacky public/private photography laws!

Actually it's USA cack.

The US recognises the architect's copyright in buildings. Take a photo of the Statue of Liberty and you are OK because France doesn't have this law - except for when buildings are modified to be an art work, such as projecting pictures on them or wrapping them in plastic - but take a picture of the Empire state building and you are naughty.

10 things you need to avoid SNAFUs in your data centre

That's the nice thing about thick ethernet.

Just pull the cable (a tractor is helpful here) and the tiles and desks/chairs/any server not made by DEC will lift along with it.

Wake up, sheeple! If you ask Siri about 9/11 it will rat you out to the police!

Re: 9/11?

The advantage of Windows phone is that if you said "emergency dial 911"

it would dial 9 then start downloading updates, then restart then ask you a bunch of questions about if you want to make 9/11 the default emergency service

Pint-sized PCIe powerhouse: Intel NUC5i5RYK

Re: TCO....

PSU is rated at 3.2A but since the PSU doesn't even get slightly warm and the system fan barely runs I doubt if it it is pulling 30W even under load.

Re: So for the price

Real estate in this city costs more than the cost of the PC you are putting on the floor.

So we use a lot of these for signage, reception desks, displays in doctor's offices etc

They mount on the back of a screen and work out a lot cheaper than an All-in-One PP and are a lot more reliable than most cheap PCs. Intel also guarantee to make a specific model for X years which is important if you are selling them into certain markets.

Compared to the price of most industrial embedded small PCs they are a bargain.

RBS sticks it to customers once again as IT woes continue

Re: Regulator??

Why does the regulator have to be involved - that's what the market is for.

RBS has crap service, it will lose customers and so will have to drop prices until it reaches a point where it attracts customers.

Ready to help - yes

Willing to help - maybe

Able to help - no

Germany says no steamy ebooks until die Kinder have gone to bed

Thats why we need to burn books

GCHQ didn't illegally spy on Brit NGOs, tribunal rules

Re: Or 3rd option

>Spies keeping their spying secret from our elected representatives

Traditionally that's the only people that spies have managed to keep secrets from.

They certainly can't keep the secrets from the enemy. But fortunately that rarely matters - even when MI5 was being run by the KGB it wasn't a problem until the papers found out.

Or 3rd option

Spying did take place but the IPT wasn't told about it.

Spies keeping their spying secret - who would have thunk it

Virtual reality below the prehistoric waves: David Attenborough's First Life

Re: Send it to the U.S. too

Coming soon to Discovery and History channel, a major new wildlife series - "Sharks: Nazis of the Sea"

Well it is a virtual reality exhibition - not the sort of thing you can just run anywhere

Re: Why no under 13?

Headset won't fit 5year olds and they don't want to deal with complaints / refunds.

Too many broken, drooled on headsets if you give them to ankle bitters

Somebody on mumsnet posts about how they heard that VR screens (although obviously not phones because all 5year olds need an iPhone) can damage the eyes of their precious little offspring and the entire museum is burned to the ground by an enraged populace.

Two foreigners, a desert and a jeep full of bank statements

Re: So, did they fix anything?

That's why the cloud is so great.

Where are the statements?

boss: We have switched to cloud printing to save money

Where are the printers ?

boss: We don't know they are in the cloud

OK what do you need me to do ?

boss: Find the printers, go there, pick up the printouts and bring them back here for posting.

UK.gov loses crucial battle in home-taping war with musicians

Re: So where do I apply for my free "Greatist Hits" albums?

Which band was claiming that the order of tracks on a greatest hits album was copyright and making your own playlist of the same tracks was stealing?

I want to say U2 because they deserve it - but I think it was some DJ "artiste'

Re: Hang on a mo

There is a 30c levy on each blank CD here to repay the artists.

However none actually goes to the artists because it doesn't (allegedly) cover the music industry's costs of administering the scheme. It does mean that small local bands have to pay a levy to print their own CDs to sell.

They were proposing applying the same rate to MP3 players, which meant an iPod would cost about $5K but some gentlemen in blak polo necks went and had a word with them....

Cambridge’s HPC-as-a-service for boffins, big and small

>" "throwing away" data pre-determined as "uninteresting" for a long while yet. Probably forever"

The detectors have layers of processing just because it's impossible to get the raw data out of the experiment fast enough (there isn't enough space for the cables)

So each layer tries to throw away as much as possible and only passes interesting events up the chain. When they were first designing ATLAS I know they were planning on only sampling a fraction of even the final data stream because they couldn't keep up.

The big problem of archiving all the results is the associated knowledge/context.

You can keep all the configuration/calibration info linked to the data and design the data formats to be future proof - but it's harder to capture the institutional knowledge of "those results were taken when we were having problems with the flux capacitor so anything above 1.21GW is probably a bit dodgy, Fred knows about it but he left".

In HEP it rapidly becomes cheaper/easier to re-run the experiment with the newer kit rather than try and wade through old stuff.

In astronomy it's different, we can't rerun the universe so we religiously save every scrap of imagery.

>"commoditised" prices

As a grad student in the 90s, when the price of an external 1Gb SCSI drive for a SUN dropped to 1000quid we got one for every machine. No more booking scratch disk space in advance and reading from tapes, processing data them and writing back to tape, we would have all the disk space we needed.

FBI says in secret that secret spy Cessnas aren't secret

What's the thing called when you aren't in prison but have to inform the authorities where you are going and who you are associating with?

America on Parole.....

Re: Open air prison

Well the last time we let the Americans have freedom they all turned terrorists and attacked the legitimate government - so we need to be more careful in future.

'No evidence' Snowden was working for foreign power says ex-NSA boss

Re: Blackmail?

The form contains details of anything blackmail-able.

Next year is an election year.

Most of those running have held government jobs and filled in this form.

People still think this "leak" was the Chinese?

BOOM! Stephen Elop shuffled out of Microsoft door

Re: "However this strategy has completely failed

> For Microsoft to succeed, it has to compete with iOS not Android,

It tried its best, it made iOS and Android as difficult as possible to use with any MS based office.

But people still preferred a nice phone to having their calender work

Re: Indeed.

Real techies only wear T shirts they got for free at a conference or on a course.

And they don't under any circumstances expose more of their lower body than is necessary at work

Foxconn's going to 'exploit' Indian labour? SCORE! Bye, poverty

Re: It;s almost like they do it on purpose...

Wasn't that the basis of thatcherism ?

Re: New plutocracy

So, just like the UK and USA the profits will all be spread democratically among the workers ?

Re: OK, then...

Two economists see a pile of horse shit, one says to the other "I bet you a $1M you wouldn't eat that."

He agrees and eats the horse shit, then says to the 1st one, I bet you $1M you wouldn't do the same.

1st later says, we have both eaten horse shit but we are each no better off.

Yes says the 2nd one, but we added $2M to the economy.

'It’s irrelevant whether Elon Musk is a dick or not. At least he’s trying to make things'

Re: Pretty laughable to think...

>They are based on free government money

Like Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, GM, Thales, BAE, every US airline, every bank then.

>Electric cars are nothing new,

Talking to people while moving is nothing new. Police cars had radios 90years ago so Apple Samsung and Nokia have done nothing.

The NHS pays up to NINE TIMES over trade price for commodity kit

Re: Bureaucratic procurement

>We are approved to supply, and it's a bloody hard struggle to get approved

And so naturally have to make back those costs - that's the whole problem,