Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Google sinks millions into plush new £1bn London HQ

Re: "a building that will "range in height" from 7 to 11 storeys tall."

>Will a big cover retract from the top floors when it reaches its full erect height?

Depends what sites they are Googling !

Re: The going rate

>Can you tell us more about why they'd be paying less in business rates?

Because they will get a huge community catalyst innovation injection to bring the wonder of online icloudy goodness to the poor depressed capital

You can bet they are getting a bigger back hander than any Japanese car plant in a marginal constituency

Top Gear isn't TV, not when it's on YouTube

re: @VIglooDude

To be fair, top gear only has 2 1/2 tits

US general: Beware of Iran's Revolutionary Cyber-Guard

Re: Ahh, but...

But remember these are the elite republican guards so we must attack first

... certain sense of deja vu ?

Former CEO John Sculley: Apple must adapt or die

Re: Try comparing like with like

Then add in support.

For an extra $300 Dell will add next day support where they will send a 3rd party technician out to replace some random part of your laptop (often even the correct part). If anything else doesn't work they will just blame MSFT.

Included in the price of the Mac is walk into a Mac store anywhere in the world and people who, even if they aren't actually geniuses, do at least know about Macs - will fix it or swap it.

Re: Why does everyone assume there are only two smartphone price points?

>. Fashion accessories are only worth buying when everyone else can see that they're expensive

But these are only going to be sold in India and China. Do you want to sell a couple of $1000 phones to a few expats and millionaires kids, or do you want to sell 100million $250 phones to the new middle class?

The nice thing about cell phones is that you can ensure that they aren't imported back to the home market to devalue the brand

There is such a thing as being too high-end, people buy BMW and Armani because they can't afford Bentley and Saville row

FAA grounds Boeing's 787 after battery fires on plastic planes

Re: Not for flight

>battery pack might burst into flames while the plane is flying

Unused, sealed, disconnected, in their shipping boxes Li batteries have caught fire and destroyed aircraft

it's not unreasonable that one connected to a complex set of aircraft systems, even if nominally not in use , could catch fire

>Anything of an electronic nature must be certified if it's to go on an aircraft

Certified yes, - tested, well err .......

A lot of avition safety comes from the methodology of; we have always done it like this and it worked. That is coupled with a lot of certification to show that you are doing it exactly like you have always done it, and that nobody in the supply chain has changed anything without telling you. That's why an aircraft coffee machine costs $5000.

The 787, like a lot of modern planes and most modern military kit, uses a lot of COTS systems with the assumption that if they have been used for years in an office they are well known. This hasn't always proved the case when they are put in more challenging applications

The problem here is that the system design was outsourced by Boeing (who know lots about planes) to Thales (who know about electronics) to Yusa (who know about batteries) to god-knows-who subcontractor

And as long as everybody filled in the paperwork it was assumed this was as good as Boeing designing it themselves.

Re: Aircraft + fire

>Boeing ... kicked off the triple 7 program & I was highly impressed at what I saw.

With their plan to outsource not only manufacture but design of each part to the lowest bidder, and then have each of those suppliers contract it out to their lowest bidder and so on with no oversight?

I have to buy fscking USB cables for $$$ from an ISO certified supplier and have a formal process of validating and inspecting that supplier and yet the design of bits of 787 get outsourced so far down the tree that Boeing have to formally admit they have no idea who DESIGNED some parts.

The FAA actual statement

"Boeing 787 aircraft must demonstrate to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that the batteries are safe."

There is a range of FAA language with subtle meanings, but "MUST DEMONSTRATE ... SAFE" is big-stick stuff

Basically it means rip them out if you want a hope of the plane flying this year.

Glad I'm flying a Dreamliner(tm) instead

They were so safely designed that they were granted a new extended 330minute ETOPS on launch without any in-service qualifying period.

VIA bakes a fruitier Rock cake to rival the Brit Raspberry Pi

Re: Where's the market?

>So the RPi is a base model Android phone? Hmm, let's see.

No the RPi is a very cheap Linux PC

This is just an Android phone without the screen/phone

If I want a cheap Linux PC to play with I get an RPi

If I want the identical hardware that a million other people have and are hacking on - I get an RPi

If I want a cheap Android to play with I get a $50 tablet or a $50 Android-on-a-stick

I can't see why I would buy this

Phone hacking saga: 3 men cuffed over alleged plod bungs

Re: Mis-read

Couldn't we just make it official, like the DVLC?

If you want to pay the government for some private information on somebody - shouldn't there be an ecommerce site where you can just pay (+VAT) and the taxpayer benefits?

conspiracy to cause misconduct in a public office

CAUSE misconduct in a public office?

I thought being elected/hired did that.

What ereader decline? Kobo pumps up the volumes despite grim forecasts

Re: Just a consumer.

>I really can't understand why anyone who wants to read books would use a tablet.

If they are already carrying a tablet why would they also carry an ereader?

I swapped reading on the tablet for an ereader but now I just read on my phone - it's always with me, why would I carry another brick onto the train?

Might change my mind again if we ever see the sun - ereaders are great in the summer.

Big spike in Euro patents - but 63% were filed from outside Europe

Re: > Using the NUMBER of Patents as a guide to anything ... anything whatsoever ... is DUMB.

But where you file is an interesting measure.

You file where you want to stop somebody else SELLING a copy of your idea

So you don't bother filing in the Isle of Man or Luxembourg. If somebody wants to set up a factory to clone your idea so they can sell 3 a year, go ahead.

You file in Germany because there are 80Million rich potential customers

Re: Make it easier

Your wish is granted http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/12/new_european_patent_system/

Swartz prosecutor: We only pushed for 'six months' in the cooler

Re: @Turtle - @austerusz

There was a conviction for computer hacking in the UK

The person made a charity donation on a website, he didn't get a confirmation page so manually added "/.." to the address just to check that it wasn't a dodgy link.

He was found guilty and got a minor fine. Except he can't get a job now with a criminal record, can't travel to the US, gets his DNA in lots of police databases .....

Re: @Chris 'We were big softies all the way' - Yeah, right

The prosecutor effectively decides the sentence.

Almost all crimes in the US (and certainly all white-collar crimes) are decided by plea bargain.

The prosecutor offers 6months if you plead guilty, or threatens 30years if you don't

It saves court time and money and leads to the prosecutor getting a very politically advantages 100% conviction rate

Obama calls for study into games ‘n’ guns link

Re: Plan B? Plan C?

>"Produce explosive device that goes off at the right time" (the last bit's really important).

There's an app for that

I'm sure Walmart could sell ready-bang (tm) ready to use explosive devices for the domestic terrorist in a hurry

Re: Guns don't kill people

And kids who grew up in the 70s would be playing squash, very slowly, in black and white

Guns don't kill people

Animated sprites of guns kill people

And the cup-cakes in Pacman caused obesity

US taxman joins UK politicoes on hunt for Amazon cash

Re: Ninja Accountants

>Shock, horror, Amazon gets to deduct the cost of something it bought when working out its tax bill!

Or in this case, Amazon-Caymens owns the one-click patent and amazon UK and USA get to pay it $1 everytime somebody orders something.

eBay's festive sales soar, but what's this? Profit DOWN 62%?

re: the high st

And the high street killed the person selling things door -door

The reality of the web is that:

Past = manufacturer , importer,distributor, store chain, high street store - you

Today = manufacturer - you

If efficency savings are good for the city why aren't they good for the consumer?

Viruses infect vital control systems at TWO US power stations

Re: @Destroy All Monsters

I suspect the USB key was to copy some log files from a non-networked controller back to some central machine where they could be backed up properly.

Probably becuase the last security review demanded that all critical machines were disconnected from the network to protect them from viruses.

Empire says ‘primitive’ Earth not ready for Death Star

>Step forward Newt Gingrich

That's no moon - that's a Newt Gingrich

>Maybe dialogue meister Lucas wrote it himself...

Me-saa no think so-saa

China shoves Beidou intro tractors, trucks and buses

The initial version of Baidu did precisely that. It used a single sat in GSO combined with a base station, you broadcast your id and the basestation did the position calc and sent it back to you via the sat

This saved on satelites, didn't need so many atomic clocks and meant the handsets were simpler - but did have the unfortunate side effect of requiring you to tell the government where you where all the time.

Wanna really insult someone? Log off and yell it in the street - gov

But surely the sole purpose of the police is to be asked the time at all opportunities?

Re: Gay horse

Presumably you would have to show the horse felt insulted

Re: Investment opportunity....

>Except that would be abusive, and therefore still illegal.

Never understood why that's abusive

Half the population spend most of their life doing everything they can to get close to one

Myanmar to open telecoms to foreigners

Now if only

Canada would do the same.

Are there any celebs willing to campaign for decent telecoms in the frozen north?

Security audit finds dev outsourced his job to China to goof off at work

Urban legend

Wasn't there a story of somebody at HP/IBM/etc that interviewed with two different divisions on different floors of the same building - got offered both jobs - and took them

By leaving his jacket on the back of the chair and always attending meetings - he got away with it for a long time!

Latest Java patch is not enough, warns US gov: Axe plugins NOW

My new invention

My bank has Windows PCs running IE displaying an internal app with lots of text boxes that the user tabs between to enter the numbers.

I suggest replacing the virus prone PC and the malware prone browser with some sort of custom hardware which sends tab characters directly down a wire to the big computer and receives the text to print in the box directly from the same wire. The custom box wouldn't have an OS or be able to access facebook

Can anyone suggest a name for this technology?

NASA snaps pics of China's 'Airpocalypse' pollution disaster

Re: natural sources would be classified as polluting

Surprisingly there is a certain amount of terminological-inexactitude on both sides.

The EPA has gone over the top in some areas of natural sources. any quarrying removing overburden (the natural rock on top of the minerals they want) have to treat that as contaminated waste if it naturally contains above limits of certain elements. So it would have to be buried in a special waste site, which would mean digging up the overburden there, which would then be contaminated waste which would have to buried in a waste site ......

But the farmers want an exemption from the EPA for any "natural" waste. So an intensive feedlot could dump a 1000 tons of cow slurry in a stream killing everything downstream and that would be "natural"

Amazon-bashed HMV calls in administrators, seeks buyer

Re: Their market just isn't there...

But have you re-bought all your old albums again on SACD, Minidisc, blu-Ray, UMD, and MP3?

If you don't keep paying 20quid again for DarkSide every 5 years how is the music business going to stay in business

Brit robojet ‘Taranis’ set for Oz test flight

Re: Just wondering...

>Indonesian air force?......

All sounds rather familiar. Perhaps we could outsource to them?

Anger grows over the death of Aaron Swartz

Re: How do we really know it was suicide?

Because if it wasn't - somebody would have left a CIA branded jacket at the scene, they would have parked half-a-dozen Ford Escalades with backed out windows and flashing lights outside while they did it.

And the agents would now all be on Oprah plugging their book of the operation and signing-up the movie rights

>Or setting up an automatic scraper to make the entire Guardian website available sans advertising

A better example would be scrapping Hansard to make the discussion in parliament free to the voters

Re: Misconceptions

JSTOR is a sop to the universities by the publishers to keep the status-quo

Academics argue that since the tax payer funds the research and their salaries, the journals charge them for publishing (hey Springer why am I paying for color plates in an online journal? Are colored pixels more expensive?) and they edit and peer-review the papers for free - then access to the papers should be free.

JSTOR is a consortium of publishers saying to universities - OK we will let you have access for free as long as you all pay to join the club.

Re: Don't break the law and you wont be pressured surely?

He broke the law by publishing the results of taxpayer funded research - written, edited and peer-reviewed by taxpayer paid researchers to the taxpayer.

Re: Can someone explain?

He released the published results of 1000s of government funded researchers to the general public

imagine what would happen if the ordinary man in the street started learning about evolution and the universe being older than 4000 years and things being made of atoms. Why - they might write to their congressman !

re:I wonder if Anonymous will feel the need to somehow punish those responsible

Since mit.edu just dissapeared I think somebody already did

Hey, open sourcers: Who's your code's daddy?

That's not open source

"Under an open-source license,code ceases to be solely owned by the author of that code"

Round-objects: I wrote the code, I own the code (unless my employer says otherwise) - I choose to distribute the code to other people under the GPL but I still own it and I may choose to sell commercial versions to certain customers

CIOs: Don't listen to tech vendors on ICT skills, listen to US

Re: the way ICT is taught

T'was ever thus.

30years ago we were taught - this is how you load the Basic interpreter on an RML380Z

- this is how you write a program in BASIC to print "Baz is a wanker" up the screen.

Why mergers LOSE money, but are GOOD for the economy

Re: If only left and right winger politicians had a clearer understanding of this...

The Govt support to Rover was a conservative govt backhander to BAe while they owned it.

It was an attempt not to look like an illegal subsidy so the Americans wouldn't object - or so they could pretend not to have a reason to object while US defense companies were courting BAe

Re: What's a merger?

Most mergers are so the CEO has "done something".

CEO at companyA - slow and steady, grows market a bit, money in the bank, happy workforce = laughing stock.

CEO at companyH - 'invests' $8bn in iBuzzword-cloudy thing that they eventually shut down = a Big Swinging Dick for heading up a multi-billion $ merger and being a forward thinking visionary in the iBuzzword technology. Gets hired by companyA whose current CEO hasn't made any $Bn investments.

The other alternative is either to split the company into competing business units to enhance competitiveness - or (if the last CEO did this) merge the competing business units into one giant company to enhance efficency.

Bad news: PC slump worse than feared. Good news: It's Friday

Re: Should build what people want

I was tempted by Lenovo's new ultrabook, right upto the point where it said 1376x768 display

2000 called they want their definition of 'ultra' back

Re: 352 million PCs

Have you found that the 2.8Ghz CPU you had back then is still capable of viewing today's YouTube cat videos or will you have to upgrade to the new 3.2Ghz version?

Potty-mouthed Watson supercomputer needed filth filter

Re: Nothing new.....

These days it would get you arrested under the Communications Decency Act