Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

CERN re-opens 'Animal Shelter for Computer Mice'

Re: cute

There is nothing like the IT dept for preventing doing any work in universities

Our computer use policy prohibits reading any file outside your home directory! Quote = "Having read permission on any file DOES not imply permission to read it"

So how do I log in then?

>blank stares

What about the compiler, does it have permission to read /usr/include?

>"any other use of the computer is only allowed as specified by your course tutor"

I'm the head of the fscking research group !

This attitude almost made sense when we had a mainframe, so we bought Sun workstations, then Linux boxes to escape from them. Now we all use Windows they are back in control

Japan's rare earth discovery bad news for China's monopoly plans

Re: Chinese mineral resources aren't the issue

Western workers don't have to compete against the Chinese.

Western customers just need to persuade Mongolian or Somali or some other TPLAC to lower their standards below China, or wait for China's to rise.

Re: China is a problem

If past experience in the region is any guide - it will certainly increase the quality of their cars, video games, cameras, portable hifi, and tentacle based porn.

Branson, Berners-Lee, Google, £2m: LET'S SAVE THE WORLD

Re: Charities?

No, you are thinking of "companies"

Furious Stephen Fry blasts 'evil' Reg and 'TW*T' Orlowski

Re: Oh bollocks !

That explains NTSC then = drunk imps

Review: Renault Zoe electric car

Re: If EVs get popular...

Nope - you can't turn down coal plants. So leccy is cheaper at night because you have all those coal plants running flat out and nowhere for the power to go.

What will make a huge difference is when these car chargers are smart. So instead of having to have a gas turbine plant starting up at 8:50 for the end of "strictly come pop idol in the attic" you can have all the cars stop charging for 15mins or even put power back into the grid.

Universe gains an extra hundred million years

Re: big bang is nonsense

Same here at work, the boss wanted one of the servers "plugged in" so called experts were going on about invisible little electron things wiggling about in invisible atoms being needed to make the machine work.

So I just just sacrificed a goat to ti and it immediately started. Although it does now say "Novell Netware"

Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

Re: I don't understand

Nope the US instead has a; use as many resources as you can policy.

Anybody that allows a 100% tax write off for your car if it's more than 8000 lbs and then invades middle eastern oil producers

Reliant on Dell for PCs? Start looking around, says Gartner ball-gazer

Re: Dell gone? There's always...

That the same two letter printer-ink seller that announced it was getting rid of it's PC business before suddenly changing it's mind when the all its customers said WTF?

Re: <Yawn>

IBM exit the PC market, that they invented?

Inconceivable!

Sell the famous ThinkPad line to some chinese OEM ?

Inconceivable!

- this word, I do not think it means what you think it means !

Hoboken CTO admits bugging boss for political leverage

Re: Underrated?

As the classic movie says:

Why is New Jersey called "The Garden State"?

Because "Oil and Petrochemical Refinery State" wouldn't fit on a license plate?

Movie, TV ads annoying? You ain't seen nothin' yet

Because by inserting the ads at runtime - they can then make the DVDs ad freeso you are more likely to buy them

ARM's new CEO: You'll get no 'glorious new strategy' from me

Re: Whats all this Intel vs ARM rubbish I've been hearing about recently?

I'm typing this on an ARM pc. It's a chrome book - looks like a macbook air for 15% of the price.

Intel's real concern is ARM servers. Why do I need to buy a $1000 Itanium to run WIndows-server and then pay another $1000 in HVAC just to send a few files down a 5Mb/s connection?

Re: Some folk just know what to do with IT, and just do it quite quietly with the minimum of fuss.

And just like Linux - if you have an idea you can try it.

If you decided that the world needed a cheap low power sata-gige adapter that spoke SMB you could just build one. If you went to intel and ask if they would licence you a chip design that would destroy their server business you might not do as well

Cop an eyeful of that: Moto bungs 5-megapixel cam into plod radio

Streaming data

2kb/s seems a bit poor.

If we had some sort of hardwired link (say a closed circuit) it would be possible to transmit much more data - potentially even live images (or television as I believe it's called)

It would even be possible to fix these units place you wouldn't have to have a policeman present.

I forsee a total end to crime if these CCTV idea was implemented.

Vietnamese high school kids can pass Google interview

Most teachers, school executives and local education authorities - "just want a cruisy ICT course to get easy credits"

World's largest solar collection plant opened in Abu Dhabi

Re: Where in the world is there lots of sunshine?

You are allowed to develop technology that isn't used domestically.

In many countries making things that you can sell to other countries is considered a good thing (tm)

If you had a high tech manufacturing base you might be looking for new things to do with it - rather than just slush-funding it a new defence contract.

Re: Follow the money

It's a pilot plant - it's not supposed to be profitable.

It's use it to avoid having to run gas turbine peak plants during the hot weather when everyone turns on their AC.

Now, imagine other places with lots of hot weather, desert and masses of AC - like Texas, California, Australia.

When they run out of places with oil to invade - who are they going to buy solar power stations from?

Who has made the investment in developing these plants - hint it isn't Britain

Re: Not the usual suspects!

It's got nothing to do with Mazda (the car company) it's masdar (the UAE's venture capital arm)

Remember the author is american so they often get things confused, especially in the middle east

Weev gets 41 months in prison for exposing iPad strokers' privates

Re: Its a fair sentence.

No he didn't break anything, he didn't damage anything, he didn't deprive the owners of anything and didn't cost any of the owners of the data anything in lost sales.

What he did was the equivalent of the USPS selling an envelope that was transparent if you held it upto the light - he held some envelopes of senior US govt figures upto the light, pointing out that the Russians/Chinese/n Koreans/Iranians/Milk marketing board - could do the same, and was slapped for it.

Britain's passport and ID service seeks facial recog tech suppliers

Re: Well that might work.

>search against thousands of blacklisted faces

I think that's a bit old fashioned

Today, wouldn't it be comparing them against 1000s of brown listed faces before deciding they are all automatically terrrorists and excluding them

Crack Bombe squad dismantles Reg encryption in an hour

Re: tech apprenticeships are quite a brilliant way to learn and contribute to society

Since when were we against terror?

Terror is great, if it wasn't for terror we wouldn't get all these laws through so easily, or all this funding, or all these cool toys.

Terrorism - if it didn't exist you would have to create it.

Reg readers reveal MIGHTY DOMESTIC DATA CENTRES

Re: Bad photos

>With cloud services readily available, this sort of thing may be fun but in terms of usefulness is actually just a waste of money,

That was my attitude to driving lessons. It was cheaper to just buy a train ticket and the train was much faster than a car - so I would be much better trained for my test than all those people who had driven at 20mph in an old donated car.

Re: What, no photo?

It's exactly half as thick as the typical new graduate

National Security Letters ruled unconstitutional

Re: Guilty, until proven dead.

Can't they just put the fraternity on "double-secret probation"?

Damn constituion

See that's the problem with having a constitution.

Here in the mother of the land of the free you simply introduce an administrative order without requiring a vote in parliament for our own RIP act and make the provisions secret.

Of course if you don't like it you can always complain to the same police that enforce it - it's a pity we don't have any judges that are independant

Re: NSL's Hells's Bells?

That was tried and lost 50years by the AA

When speed traps were first introduced it was illegal to warn people about them (we didn't need anti-terrorist rules then) . So the AA came up with the idea that they would not salute if there a trap ahead - it was ruled that a passive signal was signalling the presence of a speed trap

Boeing outlines fix for 787 batteries

Re: Seems plausible

Yes, we no longer have to worry about them exploding

Now that we know they only ever safely vent the corrosive contents into your face - for their own safety

Hindenberg

Not an explosion - just a "prompt exothermic disassembly"

CCTV hack takes casino for $33 MILLION in poker losses

Re: Brings a new consideration to the phrase

I would imagine the other players are now suing the casino and in a reasonable country it would have lost its licence

Infinite loop: the Sinclair ZX Microdrive story

Re: Ah, the Microdrive...

My first proper job in the late 80s was on OPDs - they were used in bingo halls to run a national synced bingo game

Freeview telly channels face £240m-A-YEAR shakedown by Ofcom

re: 98% of the population on 3Mb+

That's easy, just check the other reg story - Offcom can double the speed of ADSL overnight with just a minor edit to a report. All it needs to do is repeat this a few times and we have all the bandwidth we need.

Re: IPTV is complementary.

If Amount BBC prepared to pay for xMHz bandwidth < Amount cell phone company prepared to pay:

Bandwidth will be given (sold) to cell phone company

/* screw the listeners/viewers */

Attention, CIOs: Stop outsourcing or YOU will never retire

Re: Quality versus Quantity

>s it more the quality of what is taught in the academic route?

The good places teach "computer science", the graduates wonder why they aren't earning the same as all the people who did other technical degrees (never mind the ones that did PPE or law)

The employers want to know why their new Oxbridge First doesn't know the install procedure for Exchange-Server 2013 off by heart - and blame the universities.

The crap universities who are "sympathetic to the needs of industry" churn out people who can just about manage to click on the right button in whatever Microsoft where pushing that year.

The employers complain that they aren't able to independently master new skills on their own - and blame the universities.

Re: Why bother

Funnily enough surveyor is suffering the opposite problem.

With fancy GPS and robotic theodolites many jobs are done either completely automatically by the plant or can be done by an unskilled worker. So except in a few high end projects you only need a surveyor in to sign off on something - rather than needing teams of them following every machine.

Re: UK Companies are getting exactly what they desrerve

The problem is that cheap overseas contractors are being brought in too late in the project.

If we have a generation of youngsters un-interested in computer science, as the falling A-Level results suggest, then we should outsource them.

In today's highly dynamic, cloud, mobile parenting environment 0 having permanent children on the payroll for 18years or so just doesn't offer the sort of flexibility that modern parental managers demand.

We should follow the role model of people like Madonna + that actress with the tits and the lips, and outsource the children. Many SE asian economies can supply well qualified suitably cute children at a fraction of UK rates.

Unfortunately government regulation and red tape has limited the international transfer market in this sector but we are sure people like the current leadership can look back to the example shown by their C18 ancestors and Britain will once more be a leader in the global human cargo supply business.

HOT SWEATY RACKS blamed for Outlook.com, Hotmail MELTDOWN

Re: Ummm Isn't there supposed to be another data centre

They said there was a manual intervention required.

In this case that was sending somebody down to bestbuy to buy a new Packard Bell, install windows and hope they could pull the drives out of the original servers

Re: Failover

A big pool of fail - all over the floor

Re: What a good design

One of the PSU for a camera on the Hubble space telescope had a fuse.

The fuse was required by aerospace regs to safegaurd the instrument and so prevent loss of service. It was pointed out at the design review that manual intervention to reset the fuse probably wasn't an optimal solution.

Elon Musk's 'Grasshopper' hover rocket scores another test success

Re: Interesting? Well, yeah but 'cheap' is a better word for what SpaceX is doing...

>Make it cheap enough, and everyone'll do it...

One question is how elastic is the space market?

Apart from dreams of asteroid mining or exploration how many satelite launches does the world need?

Telecoms satelites haven't been competitive with fibre for nearly 2 decades, we have 4 separate sat-nav systems and geostationary is pretty much full - and becoming irrelevant in the Netflix era.

Re: Strange comment

No - a plane with the engines off still lands, rather than crashes, even with a thrust to weight ratio of 0.

This was actively hovering - not just a slowed descent.

Fuel is cheap, but it's heavy. Then you need extra fuel to lift that extra bit of fuel, then you need more fuel to lift that fuel ......

The real trick here isn't the balancing, that's just having a computer faster than a zx81 and engines that can tilt faster than the pendulum frequency of the stack. The trick is managing the fuel down to the last drop especially tricky when one of the fuels is cryogenic.

On Amazon, cloud service companies put themselves at risk

Re: And this shit

Can you patent something that you have revealed to Amazon by running on AWS?

Do you have an NDA with them, what's the contract with all their partners?

Do you feel like going up against Amazon's lawyers in East Texas court to be the test case?

France demands Skype register as telco

Ridiculous parochial attitude

France should ban Skype from being used by anybody outside France, and arrest anybody who works for Skype if they fly over France and sue banks that sell Skype minutes

Or do they not do gambling?

Re: Follow the money?

Suppose you got rid of your home phone because you had skype

You dial 999/211/911 and get told "tough - it looks like a phone, works like a phone but we can't be bothered providing non-revenue services".

How UK gov's 'growth' measures are ALREADY killing the web

Re: @Dodgy Geezer

Isn't this the same rule as cars?

If you steal a car and remove the number plates - in theory that's illegal

If you find a car that somebody else has already removed the number plate, or if the plates fell off - then you can take it for free

Seems reasonable, now wheres that screwdriver

Re: Indeed

That's the nice thing about Barnsley - the chance that you are going to be stuck behind some poser taking photos of the latte art on his iPhone while waiting in the bus station is still pretty low.

Re: Conversely

What if you are a user on the web?

Do you have to obtain permission before downloading them from a website?

It's going to make the http a bit complex if every image tag has to go and negotiate permission before displaying it