Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Online mutterings foretell iPad Mini on October 23

Re: Yes, but was this reported by inside sources that have been reliable in the past??

It was a man that works down the chip shop.

He also swears he's Elvis

HP's PC boss caught napping by Lenovo raid

Re: They know how to fix it.

And then sack the CEO but give them a $100M payoff .

And the latest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is ... the EU?

Re: Seriously though...

But it has removed the "we haven't had a war with Spain/France/Germany for 20years - it's about time we did" from the last 1000 years of history.

Although whether this is down to the Eu or Oppenheimer is a bit more debatable.

Facebook says it's LOSING money in the UK ... pays hardly any tax

Time for a subsidy?

Since Facebook is on it's uppers and so many people rely on it as a vital part of the local community shouldn't it receive the same sort of subsidy as other local services in rural areas ?

ISS crew fling out arm, grab SpaceX Dragon capsule

Re: Or get the ESA to do it...

And all the commercial partner would have to do is ensure that an equal proportion of each component was built in all contributing countries and that the first crew were French.

If you think Nasa is a bureaucratic bunch of pork-barrelled politicians you haven't worked on anything with ESA

Canada: We'll boot 'security risk' firms from gov network bid race

Re: So instead

>200TH

Only the 100th in Canada, things move a little more slowly there

Re: Racism? Really?

And yet they are happy for Canadian government emails about NAFTA negotiations to be passing through a US server

So instead

The systems and their software will be made in America

Remember this is the 100th anniversary of the War of 1812 when the US attempted to burn down Toronto (a laudable aim) and then got their butts whipped

Supreme Court confirms telco immunity on spying charges

Re: EFF = Energetic Frivolous Fools

Indeed, requiring a warrant before you spy on your own citizens. Ridiculous, they'll be wanting trials before the sentence next.

The whole point of having the right to bear arms is so that the government can have the right to enter your property whenever it wants.

Want to know what 5G mobile is? Ask this British university

It's simple

1G used analogue variation in power to transmit calls

2G used digital signals to transmit calls

3G used IP packets to transmit data

4G used vague handwaving to transmit marketing bullshit

5G will use nuclear physics to actually manipulate inter-atomic bonds to send data at almost the speed of light between copper atoms. Billions of these copper atoms will be contained in a new atomic metalic fibre only slightly thicker than an optical fibre and be connected directly to each handset in what the makers a re calling cord-to-handset technology.

Google AND Yahoo! hijacked in Ireland after domain namespace grab

[x] something more sinister

A secret sinister plot by the Irish intelligence agency to take over Google and !Yahoo! ?

But if you are an American company who only pays tax in Ireland on their earnings in the UK you can expect a bit more red-carpet treatment.

Copper-obsessed BT means UK misses out on ultrafast fibre gold

Re: FTTH is a waste of time

Out here in the colonies, I'm 10km from the center of a city of 2M people that is allegedly the high tech hub of the country.

I pay $35 for ADSL 5Mb down / 0.5Mb Up and achieve exactly half that.

I could pay $70 for cable and get 15 Mb down / 0.5Mb up

For "cultural and security reasons" we are limited to a choice of one telco and one cable company.

Re: Errm...

So having fibre to the cabinet and then copper into your house limits you to what Gig-E?

I can see why Silicon roundabout has failed if I can't have 100Tb/s to my netbook

If only BT had delivered ATM to the house in the 90s Facebook would have been British.

US boffins get Nobel for work on cell receptors

Authenitcation program

How did they know the Swedish accents were authentic?

Because they sounded like the chef in the muppets or because they sounded like the plumber in the movie they watched in the 70s?

I think the Swedish academy of science might need to look at a more secure authentication program.

Although First Direct having it's call centre in Leeds was a good test. Unless nigerian scammers have learn't t'tak proper like wot ar do sithee.

SpaceX Falcon 9 flameout leaves commercial satellite in wrong orbit

Re: Manned spaceflight

So the whole purpose of the ISS and Nasa was to provide an incentive for commercial airliens to offer free-fall fun trips?

And WWII was justified as a publicity stunt to promote Vera Lynn's latest single

Manned spaceflight

So apart from wasting $billions subsidizing Boeing to make up for the end of the cold war, being used as an excuse to spend more $billions keeping the Shuttle flying to keep a few senators with Nasa facilities happy - the ISS serves no useful purpose.

And we now have the problem that having the ISS there, restricts the flight paths of commercial sat launches.

UN locks Apple, Google, Microsoft in a room for patent peace summit

Re: Standards should be open and free.

Certainly if you submit it to a standards body.

Pretty much all the companies on the list have been guilty of promoting some format to ISO and then once it's official announcing that they own some patent on it.

Why will UK web supersnoop plan cost £1.8bn? That's a secret

Opportunity to tender

What data will you collect = that's classified.

How will data be stored = that's classified.

How will data be retrieved = that's classified.

How ill data be backed up = that's classified.

I would do this for £1.5bn - leave the cash behind the tree in the usual place and never contact me again

Quantum computer boffin 'had to sit down' on getting Nobel Prize call

>obvious we need a benchmark for Quantum Computing now.

As long as you promise not to measure it while I'm working

Iran X.25 terrorists actually BANKERS

Re: "Ansar Al-Mujahideen" vs "Ansar al-Mojahedin"?

Iran/Iraq - only one letter different, does it matter which one we bomb?

Meanwhile in London

The International Reading Association is regretting it's new logo design

USAF declassifies ‘flying saucer’ design

Re: Recently declassified?

Actually the whole of Canada is a disinformation campaign run by the NSA

A whole country like America; where everyone is thin, polite, have guns but don't kill people, grow their own drugs and have free healthcare? How can anyone possibly fall for that.

Lancashire man JAILED over April Jones Facebook posts

Re: Fast track

People only see the down side of facism, but it does make the criminal justice system very efficient.

Now if only the Daily Mail was in charge of making the trains run on time.

Re: I'm going to be controversial

Had he said it in public it would have been perfectly legal and protected by the Human Rights Act

This is the sneaky trick of using some technical legislation to make it a crime because it was on a computer system.

He was unlikely to vote, Daily Mail readers do - enough said

I thought it meant:

Article 10: Freedom of Expression

(1) Everyone has the right of freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without inference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

I thought it was a new labour trick to use technical legislation to get around the human rights act, looks like this lot have learned from them.

This supercomputing board can be yours for $99. Here's how

Re: Missed point.

There are a lot of clever engineers inventing clever CPUs that ended up doing nothing in the market - the Transputer, the Transmeta, Intel i860. We spend most of the 90s fending off salesmen from the latest "direct compile into hardware will solve all your problems" outfit.

If you want to encourage hobbyist programmers into parralel computing then an Amazon account on a Tesla is better than a $99 homebrew board

So the market is

HPC but where power consumption matters more than performance and you don't need to transfer much data on-off the parralel processor. Can't immediately think of anything.

As for the $99 price point, if you want to play -you can rent a Tesla GPU on Amazon for $bugger_all

Wikipedia boss Jimmy Wales marries Kate Garvey

Re: Nothing can make a wedding nicer than...

While playing the bagpipes is widely regarded as a crime against humanity I think war criminal is a bit strong.

LASER STRIKES against US planes on the rise

> There are up to hundreds of people on these planes.

There are 1000s of people on cruise ships.

The titanic was sunk by an iceberg

An iceberg is like an icecube (*)

So we must ban ice cubes - won't somebody think of the children - you can't be too careful

( - well more like an ice cube than a 1mW laser pointer is like a megawatt airborne laser)

A cost saving opportunity

Instead of $350M each for the F22 we could just issue everyone with a $5 laser pointer and they could defend us against the armadas of terrorist bombers

Feds charge US firm with smuggling illegal military tech to Russia

Re: I thought the cold war was over? Like, 20 years ago??

It stopped the Canadian Radarsat-2 being launched from the US - so it was launched form Kazakstan (no I don't understand that either)

There was also a european communications satelite that was banned from being launched in China because it contained US tech. Instead the makers helped the chinese set up their own satelite building business using their own technology.

Re: China exporting tech to the US

And how long does the expertise last if you stop doing the manufacturing?

Then you stop doing the R+D, then you stop doing the basic research.

So the UK stops making TV/computers/etc , but that doesn't matter because the inventors are still British - it doesn't matter where they are made.

Then a few years later how many TV/computer/etc designers do you have?

How long would British expertise in jet engines/radar, last if BAe moved all manufacturing abroad?

In other news

China announced a ban on exporting technology to the USA

The USA now believed to be living in caves trying to discover fire

Archaeologists resume Antikythera Mechanism hunt

Re: New Scientist

I've been reading it since I was at school, then I moved abroad and haven't read it for a few years

I got an online subscription - I couldn't believe how bad it is

There aren't any

The makers of the Antikythera successfully sued everyone else for using their patented round circles - and computer development stalled for 2000 years.

Happy 20th Birthday, IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad

Novell?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/

Liquefied-air silos touted as enormo green 'leccy batteries

Re: @Dodgy Geezer

But at least we can rely on that nice Mr Putin for an eternal, cheap, and reliable supply with no strings attached.

Drinking too much coffee can MAKE YOU BLIND

correlation is not causation

"correlation is not causation, as we all know from our college classes "

So you believe that knowing that is correlated with having attended college classes ?

Hey, Third World! We know what you need: Mmm, patent wars

Re: Well, it might be beneficial....

> no software patents (copyright covers these adequately)

Not always, it's a little more complicated than; software patent = evil

If you build a mechanical analogue computer for predicting tides you can patent that (well you could in 1872)

Now if you implement the same thing in analogue electronics you can patent that (in the 1930s)

Convert it to a single IC - still your invention and protected

What if you implemented the circuit on an FPGA - is that software?

Copyright only protects your specific FPGA code

If I took your analogue circuit and implemented it in my own FPGA in a clean room I haven't violated copyright - although I would have violated a software patent on your implementation.

So why should patents protect an idea implemented in brass gear wheels but not one implemented on a computer?

Re: face palm fail

It's not just patents it's copyright and trademark.

Do you think it's fair that the stick thin supermodel look so carefully developed by womens magazines can be ripped off by millions of starving Ethopians ?

Experts mull 'kill switch' for stock-wrecking techno-blunders

Re: A Turing Test maybe

A fault in a complex computer system generally gets identified and blamed on somebody - who is then either fired or promoted.

Basic human stupidity and greed is rarely identified and always promoted.

Re: Why?

The kill switch is there to protect the market from it's user.

If an algorithm war between two faulty bits of software drove the price of Apple down to zero then Apple might respond by moving it's listing to a different stock exchange - the exchange would like to avoid that.

Remember the market doesn't care about the traders or the listed companies as such - it just wants things to work so people keep using it.

Whopping supersonic-car rocket rattles idyllic Cornwall

Re: Not really a ‘car’, is it?

>As it is, Noble and Green are ambassadors for British engineering

So following on from strapping a scrap jet engine from a 1950s fighter into a car, they are now strapping a scrap rocket engine from a 1960s SAM into a car.

And this is supposed to how there is a future in engineer? Or just that we have a lot of scrap lying around from we actually did engineering?

From Dr No to Skyfall: The Reg's one month of Bond

Re: MIssing article

If you were Musk could you resist hiring Richard Keil (?) to accompany you to some event ?

Turkish officials reach for YouTube's joystick

Re: That Is Why The Muslim World Is Still In The Medival Age

G20 is based on SIZE of your economy (and politics) not quality of life

Lichtenstein and Switzerland aren't in it - India and South Africa are.

US data show slump in Apple tablet share

Re: Percentages are irrelevant

Market saturation - perhaps?

There is a limited number of people who can shell out $699 for a tablet.

Assuming all those who can, already have an iPad then all the future sales will go to Android.

Of course this doesn't really matter for Apple - Porsche do very nicely with a tiny market share compared to VW