Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Silicon daddy: Moore's Law about to be repealed, but don't blame physics

Re: Been hearing this...

There are such things as atoms you know - making a Silicon transistor smaller than an atom is tricky.

There are also a few other limits, like the speed of light, the uncertainty principle and the 2nd law of thermo-dynamics. It might be very cool and thinking outside the box to ignore them - but the universe isn't that easily fooled.

Arguably Moore's law has already ended. The original phrasing was that the most economic number of gates to put on a single chip increases exponentially. That is no longer true, the fab needed to make 14nm parts is so mind bogglingly expensive it is cheaper to make 22nm wafers with fewer gates.

Acorn’s would-be ZX Spectrum killer, the Electron, is 30

Re: Wrong market?

True - ir was part of a Soviet (or French) plot to destroy the US aviation industry.

30 years later they are so busy producing stunning Powerpoint presentations that their planes burst into flames and fall out of the sky

Why Teflon Ballmer had to go: He couldn't shift crud from Windows 8, Surface

Re: 'the crud'

Rather like Ubuntu then !

Re: Surface fans

If you are a total MSFT shop and you are just a manager who lives in Outlook then the surface is quite nice as basically an Outlook dashboard.

If you need to do any work - a surface pro with a second monitor running word/excel/VS is great.

But the chances of your big corporate customers rolling out 100,000 seats of a $2000 touch screen laptop just to use your pretty new OS = 0%

Re: Bad bosses adn failures

They had to do something, waiting for every business seat in the world to slavishly upgrade to the latest version of Windows NT like good little corporates wasn't going to work any more.

Re: Pretty much says it all

Except they have Lync for that and Skype still doesn't play nicely with Outlook or Exchange

Re: I'm a MSFT Fan But.....

>MS should release a windows 7.1 upgrade with all the OS improvements

People don't pay for updates.

MSFT's business model relies on people updating their machine every 3years and getting the new shiny OEMed OS with it and then having to upgrade Office to keep up.

When people discovered that their 2010 3GHz CPUs are quite as capable or writing a memo or adding up an expenses spreadsheet as they were in 2010 they didn't upgrade and so didn't get the new OS

Star Wars revival secret: This isn't the celluloid you're looking for

Re: Ahh, the "warmth" of analogue.

Especially since the whole film is going to be scanned, digitised, colour graded and then printed digitally or sent out digitally to most theatres.

Re: Ranking Alien/Aliens/Alien 3/ Alien Comicbook Edition

The problem with Alien shot now wouldn't be the CGI.

It would be the need to have a PG13 rating, a McD lunch menu tie-in, a car chase for the video game and a spin-off range of cuddly toys.

Re: Hold on a second

Crappy 1970s lenses have flare - modern multi-coated Arriflex digital lenses don't

United Nations to grill US over alleged NSA bugging of its HQ – report

Re: Move out?

So that's ideal then.

Anywhere with total law enforcement would presumably have no retired Nazis, drug lords and Phil Collins remaining at large

Silicon Valley slurped millions of NSA cash for PRISM participation

Re: Why shouldn't they charge?

Surely it's the patriotic duty of true Americans like Zuckerberg, Bezos and Larry&Mo to protect America and their customers from terrorists ?

'Symbolic' Grauniad drive-smash was not just a storage fail

Re: The Guardian is so "anti-government"

Still perhaps the nearest thing there is to an official opposition !

Re: It wasn't about putting the data beyond use

We are going to walk into the offices of the major anti-government newspaper and give it a story that makes the government look bad and puts the Guardian onto front page news everywhere in the world - at the cost of a couple of bits of old hardware.

There are only two possible explanations:

1, The government and the intelligence agencies REALLY ARE that stupid

2, The secret intelligence service is still being run by KGB agents. But being British Intelligence they don't know they cold war is over and think the Guardian is still a hot bed of lefty radicalism - and are trying to help their fellow Trotsky-ites stick it to the Tory government.

Re: Don't forget the lying bit.

Never believe anything until it's been officially denied

Re: Even better

Email back the copy when you have finished reading it?

Government intervention unlikely for beleaguered BlackBerry

Those Rolls Royce chaps making aeroplane engines seem to be doing quite well

Ottawa could rule that only Canadian smartphones were allowed in Canada.

In the same way that they only allow Canadian owned cell phone companies - thus protecting the true north strong and free from having Verizon.

Workers at world's largest – and most remote – telescope go on strike

Ok but please don't use Boolean logic, electronic computers, stored programs, or indeed the very idea of a computing machine.

And can you please invent you own language instead of misspelling ours?

Re: 200 Employees?

No direct experience of ALMA but from other projects.

Take a reasonable number of admin for a government project and multiply by the number of different governments involved.

Then add the same number again of local staff to keep the host country/province/town/tribe sweet

I'm guessing ALMA is mostly remote operation and this type of astronomy is all scheduled/survey rather than visiting scientist so you don't need as many baby-sitting and hotel staff as something like the VLT

BILLION DOLLAR BALLMER: Microsoft chief makes $1bn simply by quitting

Re: What a kick in the teeth!

Makes for one hell of an exit interview though !!!

Report: Secret British spy base in Middle East taps region's internet

Re: Why the diificulty?

> rent a cable ship and have it check out all the cables

The only way to check a cable is to cut it and drag the two halves to the surface and then splice in an extension to get it back down.

Anyway the taps on the cables are probably at the endpoints in whichever country is currently a beacon of freedom and order in the region (ie a freindly dictatorship) rather than on the seabed

India's subidised student tablet lands in US schools

Re: Give them pencils you Idiots.

We had BBC micros in school and look at what we achieved.

Now with 64bit CPUs in schools the kids should be 8times smarter than we were

Delta Air Lines makes mass Windows Phone 8, Lumia 820 buy

Figure 2 carts selling junk on a 2 aisle aircraft, 2 hosties/in-flight-retail-consultants per cart and you have 4phones per big aircraft.

Delta's fleet also includes an awful lot of Delta-connect services on small business jets/turbo-props that aren't going to be selling you scratch cards (these get counted as Delta when you are buying a ticket but are Acme Air when they crash or are late)

Snowden journo's partner wins partial injunction on seized data

Re: Just trash it all

Interesting - try and sell it on ebay and get refused an export licence because it contains classified bugging gear?

There is a precedent: Back in the 60/70s the secret services bugged the Communist Party Great Britain. They found the bug and destroyed it. They were then charged with destroying government property even though the police didn't admit the bug was SIS or that SIS existed. The case was that the CPGB believed the bug was government property and so intended to destroy government property even though of course it wasn't because the government obviously wouldn't bug a legal political party.

Re: So what's changed?

They can't leak bits of the info to the Daily Fail/Faux News in order to scoop the Guardian and reduce the impact of any story.

Same technique as publishing the results of an FOI request. It scoops the original journalist who was researching the story, allows all your friendly news outlets to print edited highlights and means it's less likely that real investigative journalists will bother.

NSA admits slurping thousands of domestic emails with no terror connection

Re: How about 20 million quaries a month

Remember these are high security government systems.

So each query is "select * from ..." and the resulting data is put on a thumb drive, copied to a laptop to be analysed in Excel and then left in a cab

Re: EFF or CYA?

Remember the good old days when the president told the CIA/FBI/NSA what to do

Re: sooo...

But it was only a few 1000 out of millions (which we also collect) , and we didn't launch a drone at any of the people (yet) and it's an abandoned program (to be replaced by a bigger one) - so nothing to worry about and aren't we good for reporting it.

Mistakes were made (although not by identifiable people) and improvements will be made (which we can't tell you about)

= Standard govt excuse template for everything from late buses to genocide

No signal in Seascale? Countryside Alliance wants to hook you up

Re: So would this be the same Greenie arseholes?

Weren't CPRE are the ones who oppose wind farms and in a totally unrelated matter received funding from GE's nuclear energy division ?

Re: Veggie

It's political correctness gone mad.

I mean the peasants have to die sometime - but when I run over a flock of them in my Range Rover there is all sorts of nastiness. I had to call the Chief Constable to get it all sorted out.

Four ways the Guardian could have protected Snowden – by THE NSA

Re: A wrong assumption

You presumably use a Trojan on a rubber-hose for extra protection ?

This was done by activists when the law was introduced - they email a block of random numbers to the home secretary and demanded that the police arrest him.

We had a lecture from the police when this was introduced and asked how we could prove that the random background noise recorded by our detectors at CERN wasn't an encrypted message. Apparently we didn't have to worry because the laws were only for use against terrorists not nuclear physicists.

Re: We need Plausible Deniability (i.e. What No TrueCrypt?)

The outer container reports the full size of the volume, the inner container is written to the unused blocks. You can fill the outer container in which case the hidden area will simply be overwritten and lost.

You can set the outer container not to overwrite the "unused" blocks but then this will reveal that there is hidden data.

You can also have an unlimited number of containers within containers - there is no way to prove there isn't another hidden one inside the keys they have beaten out of you

Oh noes! New 'CRISIS DISASTER' at Fukushima! Oh wait, it's nothing. Again

Re: How many people do you think were killed at Chernobyl?

The costs are largely due to an over reaction to the danger

Suppose the reaction to Aberfan (slag heap slipped onto a school killed 150) had been to build a concrete box to contain every slag heap in Britain and the shutting down of every coal mine in wales - the cost would have been a fair % of GDP.

Re: "They always have a back-up"

Including 2500 people who were killed when their train was hit by a Tsunami.

I hope the UK government learns from this and cancels HS2.

Beta?

I think you might be getting Alpha and Beta confused.

Alpha doesn't go through skin and can be stopped by a piece of paper. Beta although much lower mass and therefore lower 'energy' (for some definitions of energy) can burn skin directly.

The bigger concern is that the beta emitters in question from a reactor are probably Strontium and Iodine which are biologically a bit unpleasant because they accumulate in bits of your body which you would prefer not to be spewing out radiation. Ingesting water full of radioactive Sr or I is rather worse than standing next to a much more active lump of an alpha emitter like Uranium or Plutonium.

Probably best not to drink large amounts of water from a waste pond at any large industrial facility then.

Bradley Manning* sentenced to 35 years in prison

Re: AC aware of world beyond their borders

Also, until very recently, USAsians didn't need a passport to go to Mexico, Canada or most of the Caribbean.

Suppose Brits didn't need passports to go to Europe or the USA - how many would have them ?

Japan's unwanted IT workers dumped in 'forcing-out rooms'

The university removed all the admin staff to leave the profs to do their own grant applications, travel, equipement ordering etc.

Saved a moderate amount of money in salaries. Cost a fortune in lost grants, wasted time, unpaid and multiply paid invoices, overpriced and wrong equipement bought etc - but nobody noticed that

Brazilians tear strip off NSA in wake of Snowden, mull anti-US-spook law

Re: mirrored

At which point Microsoft/Apple/Google/Facebook/etc Brazil inc is charged under local laws, its executives are imprisoned and it's banned from operating in that country.

Keeping in with the NSA is fine with Apple - right upto the point where it is banned in the BRIC economies. Remember the US had no political power over most of these countries, unlike Britain or Ireland. It can hardly threaten a boycott of China or to invade Russia !

Mystery of Guardian mobos and graphics cards which 'held Snowden files'

Re: Colour me old fashioned, but...

And in your world a bobby still tells people the time, crimes are solved by little old ladies and the government doesn't kidnap political opponents fly them to secret prisons and torture them

Re: Clever or stupid?

There are also long and involved procedures for disposing of partially detonated, degraded or suspect explosives.

Yet every airport in the world confiscates millions of suspect explosives from passengers and throw them into a big plastic bin.

Mighty multi-scope snaps stunning STARBIRTH image

Re: Supersonic speeds

"euro" news - surely not.?

The BBC covered it under "foreign"

Greenland - isn't

It's rather white - on account of all the snow falling, from clouds

US highway agency awards Tesla Model S record safety score

Re: Plus this was an American "test"

>Testing methodology used by the NHTSA is no secret,

Stereo loud enough for other cars to hear it at freeway speeds - check

Ability to drift across 4 lanes of a freeway without indicating - check

Can fit into McDs drive thru - check

At least 4x 196oz super-duper-slurp compatible cupholders per person - check

Equivalent turning circle to a super tanker - check

Oh wonderfull

A silent car owned by rich people who think they are invulnerable

Time to fit that RPG to my bike

Windows NT: Remember Microsoft's almost perfect 20-year-old?

Re: "they got rid of that login method later on"

The fake login prompt was the first thing we did on Unix machines when we learned to put the terminal into no-echo mode

Guardian lets UK spooks trash 'Snowden files' PCs to make them feel better

re: if I were the Queen

I would certainly be worried about my security - what with Brazillian terrorists being released into the country and such.

At my next weekly meeting with the PM I would make sure I had a couple of beefy members of the Scots and Irish guards standing behind him with their sabres drawn.

Re: Are we sure they were UK spooks?

Half the journalists had been at Eton and Cambridge with them?

Re: Just when I thought....

Remember for 40 years while we faced imminent thermonuclear annihilation from the USSR - MI5 was mostly being run by KGB agents.

So we can only assume that GCHQ is now being run by 4chan, Kevin Mitnick and lolcats