Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Whisper open-sources Android text-encryption app

RIM stuffed

Want secure messaging - you have to buy Blackberry and hope that RIM aren't crooks.

Or you can buy any phone you want and install software that you (or your consultants) can check the source of.

Not hard to see why Twitter might want it

Iran spy drone GPS hijack boasts: Rubbish, say experts

Counter rotating spin machines

The quoted document is correct in that it's very hard to spoof GPS in such a manner that you can undetectably take over a genuine GPS signal and shift it without anyone being able to tell - as in a Bond movie plot.

Simply sending a fake GPS position is trivial - we rent a test range to test our equipment that can generate a GPS position to be anywhere on earth (they tend to be very careful about not having the signal leak out!)

The drones do have an IMU in addition to the GPS - it's very difficult to land if you don't know pitch/roll/yaw - but they drift and so you update them from the GPS. You can put a super duper accurate IMU but it's expensive and is exactly the sort of tech you don't want the otherside to get their hands on when you do inevitably lose one. For the same reason this only has fisher-price levels of stealth.

There are a couple of reasons for not putting a massive self-destruct charge onboard triggered whenever it loses GPS. One is that effect on the life expectancy of USAF squaddies servicing it, the other is that it does tend to look a wee bit threatening. If a 'peacefull' Iranian drone exploded over the London olympics because it lost GPS that might result in slightly more than a letter to the Telegraph.

Ofcom maps out what 'psychics' are allowed to do on TV

Ganesh would probably stand out on the high street.

Seagate sucks hard disk biz from Samsung

Cloud

No - I think it runs on large enterprise drives, this deal is for Samsung's 2.5in drives

Doubt support is going to be an issue

They bought a maker of laptop spinning rust?

In other news: GM have agreed to buy Volkswagon's horse drawn carriage business

Tempt tech talent without Googlesque mega perks

HR box ticking

Assume those smart programmers you are hiring can learn.

We have decided to use Hardoop for our next product cos it's Kewl. So we need to only hire Hardoop programmers. We need good ones so we want senior programmers with 10years of Hardoop, intermediate programmers with 5years and junior programmers with 1 year - well those are the numbers we used to use with SQL so it should be OK.

Of course we wouldn't consider hiring a 10year SQL/Java veteran in the hope they can learn - cos they wont be adding value while they are learning.

Oh dear we couldn't hire any 10-year Hardoop programmers we better stick to doing the next app in Foxpro as usual - we have lots of 20years experience Foxpro programmers.

Samsung hauls Apple into court over emoticon patent :-(

@My company invents things

We don't troll, nobody outside an East Texas law firm can afford to threaten a $Bn company.

We invent a new magnet designs for an MRI machine, we need to be able to show and explain these to the makers of the machines and offer a licence with some legal protection. A patent on "using the colour green in an MRI machine" doesn't help anyone.

Software patents are a bit trickier - in theory I'm against them. In practice we sometimes develop processing algorithms aswell.

Ideally we would write the code and give them a copyright app - but in practice these machines are so locked down to meet FDA that all we can do is describe the algorithm for their own people to implement - often in an FPGA or some custom machine.

The same problem - once we describe the algorithm it's "out there" unless we have a patent.

The real problem

Is that it's making patents useless for those of us that actually rely on them.

My company invents things, we invent things that get used in very big expensive machines that we couldn't possibly manufacture - so we have to licence them to big companies.

Without patents the company could just look at our ideas and copy them for free - instead of now where they licence our ideas and manufacture them in China who then copy them for free.

But getting patents is becoming increasingly expensive since we have to have expensive lawyers go through all these patents to make sure we don't violate any of them. Because when we do agree a deal with Random Giant Corp - they expect us to show that we haven't violated any of Other Giant Corp's patents.

Even then we get letters from Different Giant Corp saying basically "we have a million patents in this area - you must have violated something, admit it". And of course the cost of the lawyers saying no is a lot higher than hiring engineers to actually invent things.

Sometimes I think it would be better if we just gave and built a factory ourselves making knock off iPads.

\

Ailing HMV sees tech sales' bright spot among dire music biz

@CD burner

Picture the scene at Philips in the 70s.

Hey boss I've got a brilliant idea - a form of music that offers pretty much all the sound quality that anyone would ever want in a digital form that can be converted into any new format, and what's even better - it never wears out.

Then every record company and shop went - wow we can sell everybody the same albums again at 4x the price on this shiny new format. That should keep us going for 10 years

Parody is illegal, say barmy bureaucrats

@Barry Trotter

Yes in theory they are - but no publisher want's to be attacked on Radio4, in the sunday comics and the Times Lit Sup as trying to crush free speech - and since these books sell about 3 copies each, nobody gives a *****

If however you try and write your own sequel to the Harry Potter series featuring all the characters you will be dumped on from a great height - whether you call it parody or not. Even people creating encyclopedias of the HP or Tolkien universe have found this.

ps. Weid Al songs are NOT allowed as parody - they are not parodies of the original work in that they do not parody it. They reuse the tune and lyrics to create a new (generally much better) artistic work which does parody some aspect of real life. That's why he has to obtain permission and pay royalties on the tune just like any covers band.

The only song which arguably COULD be protected by parody is the "Smells like Nirvana" - which does rip the piss out of Nirvana - although Nirvana loved it so much they played on it !

Parody isn't protectedin the UK

It never has been.

Parody is different from satire, I can say that the prime minister is an upper class toff who might be slightly out of touch with being unemployed in Barnsley - that's satire (crap satire but it should get me on channel 4)

Parody is a Weird Al Yankovic song or a lego reproduction of star wars. This is more protected in the US, but even then re-using an entire song with new lyrics or remaking a fan version of entire movie isn't protected.

Otherwise there would be no point in being a song writer - since everybody else's version of a Beatles song would be "a parody" and I wouldn't have to pay Lennon+McCartney anything when I got to number one.

What I can do in the US is print a picture of Rumsfeld as the Emperor from Star wars - that's both parody and satire and is protected.

Homeland Sec., RIAA Torrent lists published

@Site's full of it

Are you by any chance connected to the internet by an ISP rather than your own personal backbone link? in that case all the users in your town/area/cave have the same IP, otherwise the world would have run out of IP addresses by now.

If however you are a giant organisation of pure evil, or Sony, or the DHS you have your own private connection and your own static IP address.

Her Majesty's £444m court IT system can't even add up fines

Alternate procedure

Download the data to a USB key

Copy to a PC and do the totals in Excel

Leave USB key on train

Dell flees netbook market, dumps Minis

Netbooks didn't fail

From a customer's point of view - they just didn't make enough profit margin.

Here $200 Acer Aspire's were flying off the shelfs all year, I have one and my company bought HP's netbook for everyone that travels.

I'm sure makers would rather sell you their version of a Mac air - but it's nothing to do with customers rejecting net books.

Somebody has just gone through Ford and GM's reasons why customers demand pickups and SUVs rather than sub compacts and changed the words.

Jedi light-sabre beats Taser in Oregon parking-lot fracas

@nickr

On the new youtube video the bad guy shot first

Woz's key to success: Burn the tie, wear T-shirts to work

college dropouts

For every crazy college drop out in designer glasses and a polo neck you need an awful lot of stay-in electronics engineers, production engineers, at ARM, Samsung, Hyundai etc to actually make the product happen

Great quote heard on the BBC yesterday - "we need to encourage more people to get jobs working with their hands rather than going to university; we need more plumbers, carpenters, ENGINEERS "

ARGHHH!!!!

Ebooks must stay fat with VAT, blame the EU, MPs told

@Am I the only one

To create a level playing field - or perhaps you wouldn't have a problem with Germany deciding that there should be 0% tax on luxury cars but a 200% tax on say, Rolls Royce aircraft engines.

If sovereign nations can set their own tax levels then Scotland should be allowed to zero rate deep fried mars bars while putting a 200% duty on Dutchy original shortbread

essential

@lee - By that argument any raw food that needed cooking should either by charged vat or come with a free oven.

Hard to see how an ebook of a medical textbook is a taxed luxury item while a hardback Daniel Steele or Jeffery Archer is a tax-free luxury.

Feds propose 50-state ban on mobile use while driving

A suggestion

I know it goes against the principles of liberty and the frontier spirit but I really do think that there needs to be some sort of mandatory training for operators of vehicles on the road, and perhaps some sort of licencing to prove that they have been trained.

Disk fab floods rinse $1bn off Intel's Q4 revenue

From the excuse-o-meter

So sales of PCs and laptops have tanked because of a hard drive shortage?

Nothing to do with tablets and smartphones then?

Beeb rescues old Who episodes

Silly old BBC

That sort of thing couldn't happen now.

Instead all the TV episodes locked with DRM will be lost when the distribution company with the key server goes bust.

Or you wont be able to broadcast them anyway because of some background music that a competing corporation owns the rights for.

RIM execs chewed through restraints after in-flight fracas

And they fired them ?

sounds exactly like the sort of fight RIM needs in it's execs right now

Is Bill Gates mulling a return to Microsoft throne?

Ahead of Apple

Yes, everybody did everything Apple did first.

Apple secret was making it into a product that people actually wanted.

They also have a single focus on what they want and the different parts support that ie. iPhone needs iTunes.

In MSFT different divisions protect their turf - which is why their tablet died, because it couldn't do exchange server, their cloud offering died because it cost MS-Office sales, flight simulator died because it threatened X-box

Six cuffed in £1m student readies phishing probe

University = YTS 2

@yoinkster - I suspect the politico that came up with the idea of getting the unemployed to fork out 50 grand to keep themselves off the unemployment figures is one of the 10% who deserved to go !

Chrome is the most secured browser - new study

Enough with the opera comments

It's obvious why Opera wasn't included

There was a Gartner report that cited a man in the pub that knew someone whose brother-in-law said Opera makes you ghey.

New account of Flight 447 disaster published

Not co-pilots

The copilots are NOT learning the ropes.

They are exactly as trained as the pilot in command, typically the captain and first officer will swap piloting - one doing the take off and one the landing for example.

At almost all airlines the captain gets to be in the left hand seat simply because he has worked for that airline for longer. Quite often in the US the first officer is older or has more hours on the type than the captain - but happened to be laid off by another airline and has to start at the bottom again with the new one.

ps They hate being called co-pilots.

@This is why...

That would be the pilot of the airbus whose computers automatically kept the aircraft on course at a proper descent rate and speed - even when the pilot let the speed fall below the limit which would have caused a stall.

The NTSB report details the role of the avionics system and credits the captain with starting the APU which allowed more of the system to continue functioning that minimum manual controls available from the RAT.

Fusion-io: SSDs are useless ... Let's build one

Missed the boat

I thought the enterprisey solution to databases these days was just to put it all in RAM?

WIth RAM prices dropping like a brick at some point it's cheaper than fancy enterprise grade PCIe bussed SSD

TomTom axes 10% of workforce

Foresight

Perhaps somebody in R&D might have forseen smart phones - or even back-seen smart phones after they were launched.

I think the market for portable fax machines might also see major restructuring soon

Taxpayers to cough more for multi-billion pound failed NHS IT project

Up front costs

The US termination clause is the reason you hear about $300 hammers and $30,000 toilet seats. They also don't allow contracts to claim NRE (upfront engineering costs).

So if you need to design a new product to meet their needs, invest in tooling, do all sorts of testing and certification but with no guarantee that they will buy any more of them in future - even if you have a contract - then you load all the costs onto the first few items you sell.

Of course if then nobody else wants to try and compete, and they need the product, you can continue charging $300/hammer for life!

Oz rail company sold USB keys from lost property in auction

Not their keys or data

So it has to wipe USB keys that it never owned before selling them.

Does it also have to shred any lost paperwork ?

Or should the person handing the lost key in be responsible for wiping it first?

What if it decided that this was all too much trouble and just throws any lost property int he rubbish - would it be fined then?

Crack GCHQ's code and become the next James Bond

Moral courage

I must say I'm impressed. I thought the security services were immoral opportunists who would do and say anything to protect the country and supply suitably sexy dossiers to their masters

But that they would have the moral courage to risk the lives of British troops in foreign wars and allow Britain to come under attack from totalitarian regimes - rather than employ somebody who sneaked a look at their exam marks in school - shows really moral fibre

Pointless publicity stunt

Either modern encryption schemes like AES are broken (or even breakable) - in which case why don't we own the world? Or they aren't - in which case you can have all the crossword fiends in the world but there's no point.

So if all GCHQ does is listen in on SMS messages and arrest people for texting clash lyrics - I can see why they might have issues luring the best and brightest mathematicians away from the city.

Kindle Fire to consume half of Android tablet biz

A generation behind

Yes - because so many web sites are Android 3.0 only

‘Blogger not a journalist’ says Oregon court

Not a journalist

I think that's the problem - if she had been a journalist the nobody would have believed anything she wrote and so the comments would have done no harm.

But by not being associated with any of Murdoch's mighty organs - she automatically achieved a higher level of trust and so the comments had so much more potential to inflict damage,

Former RIM Indonesia chief faces negligence charge over stampede

Not managements fault

This at least is one company where you can't claim that it was corporate culture at fault.

RIM's senior management have gone out of their way to prevent any sort of crowds at the announcement of a new RIM product.

Canonical releases first alpha of Ubuntu 12.04

@Can someone explain

This one goes upto 12 - that 5 better !

Groupon grotty grotto rage forces Santa's chief elf to quit

@Good Lord

Groupon take the money direct from the customer remember.

You generally buy the discount coupon on groupon's site - and they pass on a cut to the retailer.

So unless the York grotto felt like turning away all the groupon tickets and refunding the money to groupon - and causing a riot - they are a bit stuck.

Hasselblad H4D-200MS medium format multishot camera

Impressive tripod

You can hold a commercial camera steady enough that over 6 shots it doesn't move by a 1/10 of a pixel - and you are shooting a scene where nothing in the set moves by the same amount between the shots.

Still for magazine shots of lumps of granite it will be very very nice indeed.

Stonehenge finds hint at rituals far more ancient than the stones

Costly != useful

In fact the more "technical skill, societal organisation, deferred usefulness and opportunity cost required" the more likely it is that it was built by some big shot purely to prove what a big shot he was.

Again totally unlike the millenium dome.

Give Osborne a shovel: UK economy stuck in deep hole

Revenge of the return of son of PPI

I have a great scheme, I buy people's houses form them for half their value and then rent them back to them for 99 years at twice their mortgage payment - in a stroke reducing UK indebtedness by billions

@Cameron wants a British Apple.

They already do - it has a few side effects.

In theory it was illegal for me to work on open source software - since my contributions belong to the university and can't be distributed.

The university doesn't have the money to develop the research so sells the IP to an east-texas patent troll. So I can't start a startup working in the area I did research in because they will come after me - after all I don't own the ideas in my head.

And soon employers will stop hiring UK researchers with the same worry.

So you will have UK apples - because only companies formed by people who never went to university will be possible

and it's called debt

Pension funds invest their money for a positive return.

They do this by buying government bonds and the government then owes them the money + interest back - this is called government debt.

Hiding government debt by calling it something else, so that your country looks better off and other people are willing to lend to you at lower rates, is what Greece was doing - remember?

Not borrowing

"had an agreement with two pension funds to unlock £20bn of investment for the National Infrastructure Plan"

So that's unlocking not borrowing

MPs: This plan for proper navy carriers and jets is crazy!

@not nuclear?

BAe and WVICT (Whatever Vickers Is Called Today) make their money from selling copies of the kit to foreign governments after the UK has paid all the R+D and tooling costs (and usually subsidised the sales to the foreigners).

If you make the carriers nuke then everybody else that can reasonably (or legally) operate nukes already have bigger fleets than us - with their own carriers.

And even BAe think it might be a little tricky to persuade the govt to give an export license for nukes to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Saudi and all the other peaceful 3rd world countries that normally buy our kit.

Second US Navy robot stealth bomber takes flight

@No nerds required

That's even worse. If it's preprogrammed then it's field circus engineers and BOFHS that configure it = were DOOMED

Russia successfully launches Glonass-M

Not quite polar

Glonas is about 68deg inclination, GPS is 55 deg.

So apparently America hasn't considered invading anywhere north of Newcastle - can't say I blame them.